But under her fingers Wang Ma felt the busy stubborn brain still working. “Ah, Lady,” she murmured. “Let men have their way! What does it matter to women? To sleep—to eat—to enjoy our own lives—that is best.”
They were the wrong words and instantly she regretted them. Madame Ezra’s fiery black eyes sprang open. She sat up and turned on her serving woman. “You Chinese!” she said with bitter contempt. “You Chinese!” She rose as she spoke, and pushed aside Wang Ma’s hands and left the room with imperious speed.
Wang Ma stood watching, then she felt the teapot and found it hot. She filled the bowl from which Ezra had drunk, and taking it in both hands she went and sat down on the high doorsill. There, warmed by the hot sun, she continued to sit, drinking the tea slowly and gazing reflectively into the sunlit court.
II
PEONY FACED DAVID. “YOU!” she cried with soft ferocity. “Not to tell me!” He was fleeter of foot than she, and wile had to get her first to the gate. Once he had looked back and had seen her, and instantly she seemed to give up the chase and had slipped into a side alley of the immense compound. He looked behind him again, and not seeing her, he had smiled triumphantly and had slowed his steps. Then suddenly she was ahead of him in a passageway, and he knew he was outwitted. She stood, her hands outspread to catch him and hold him. He stopped just short of her, folded his arms, and looked down into her reproachful eyes.
“I am not bound to you!” he declared.
Her small lovely face quivered, flushed, and wilted before his gaze like a smitten flower. “No,” she said in a little voice. “It is only I who am bound to you. And—and—you are quite right. You need not tell me—anything.”
He was instantly remorseful. “Now, Peony,” he argued. “I will tell you—but only if I am not forced.”
“It is wrong of me,” she agreed. “I will never do it again. See—you are free!”
She locked her hands behind her back. He put out his arms but she evaded them and stepped aside, and then turned and ran from him. Now it was he who pursued and she who fled … How she loved to run! It was her luck to be bondmaid in this house of foreigners. Had she been in a Chinese house her feet would have been bound small as soon as it was sure she was to be pretty, so that if a son of the house were to love her and want her for a concubine, she would not shame the family by having feet like a servant’s. She ran on, laughing at the sound of him running behind her. He was laughing, too, but they muted their laughter in the secret way of their childhood. He caught her, as he always did, as she knew he would, and she pushed him and twisted herself free—almost, but not quite. His arms were strong. Then her acute ear, quick to hear footsteps and voices, warned her that they were seen.
“Young Master,” she cried loudly. “You must not take your life!”
He dropped his arms, but it was too late. Madame Ezra had seen them.
“Peony!” she said sharply. “You forget yourself!”
“I was holding him lest he throw himself into the well,” she faltered.
“Nonsense!” Madame Ezra retorted. But she wavered. Did the girl lie or was she indeed holding him against death?
David laughed “She’s lying, Mother,” he said robustly. “We were only playing a game.”
Madame Ezra was not pleased. “It is time you stopped playing games with Peony,” she said coldly. She was less pleased than usual to see how beautiful her son looked at this moment. The high color and bold bearing in which she took her secret delight now alarmed her. And Peony, too, was growing dangerously pretty.
“Make yourself ready,” she said shortly to the girl. “You must accompany me to the house of the Rabbi. And you, David, should be at your books.”
She walked firmly down the passageway toward her own rooms. David made a grimace and shrugged his shoulders, and Peony answered with lifted eyebrows and a sigh. Then her little face took on its look of sweetest coaxing. She glanced at Madame Ezra’s back and lingered to put a small hand, flower light, upon David’s arm.
“You will tell me all about her?”
He smiled gloriously, and she smiled back, a tender smile, the same smile, or so it seemed, that he had seen so often upon her face when she looked up at him.
“Everything,” he promised.
They parted and Peony went to her room to prepare for the duty of going with Madame Ezra. It was a small room, set in a tiny court of its own, but opening into Wang Ma’s court, which in turn opened upon a dim mossy passage into Madame Ezra’s own rooms. This little room in which Peony lived had once belonged to a concubine, three generations back, a secret love, scarcely acknowledged, of Ezra’s own great-grandfather. Here, too, Wang Ma herself had lived before she was married to Old Wang by Ezra’s own father. The room had stood empty while Peony was a child, too young to be alone, but when she was fifteen it had been given her. It was a pretty little room, the walls whitewashed and the gray tiles of the floor scrubbed silvery clean. Upon the facing walls on either side of her bed Peony had hung two pairs of scrolls, pictured with the flowers of spring and summer, the bright leaves of autumn, and the snowy pines of winter. These she had painted herself. She had sat in the schoolroom with David and his tutor for many years, her duty to fetch them hot tea and to clean their brushes and grind ink, and she had learned to read and write. This learning, added to her own graceful talent, had made her able to turn a verse as well as David could himself. Thus on the scroll for spring she had written in two long lines of brushed tracery:
The peach flowers bloom upon the trees,
Not knowing whether the frosts will kill them.
Upon the mimosa branches of the summer scroll she wrote:
The hot sun burns, the thunder
drums across the sky.
The cicadas sing endlessly, unheeding.
Under the scarlet maple leaves she wrote:
The red leaves fall, and all the court is still.
I tread the leaves and under my feet they die.
Beneath the snow-covered pines she wrote two more lines:
Snow covers the living and the dead,
The green pine tree, the perished flowers.
These four poems she read very often, wondering how she could improve them. Whether she would ever be able to make them better she did not know. But at present they reached to the bottom of her heart and made her want to cry.
She moved now in haste to put on a plain dark coat and trousers, to take the peach blossoms from her hair, to put off her gold bracelets. She looked into the small old mirror of her dressing case and rubbed a little rice powder into her skin and touched her lips faintly with red cream. Her hair she made always in a long braid, as all bondmaids wore their hair, signifying that they were not daughters of the house, but at home she kept the braid twisted into a knot over her ear. Now she let it down and brushed the straight black fringe above her eyebrows.
This done, she made haste through the passageways until she came to Madame Ezra’s court. Wang Ma was putting the last touch upon Madame Ezra’s costume. It was rich and individual, and Madame Ezra thought it was entirely Jewish. She did not know that in the generations during which her family had lived in China touches of embroidery at sleeve and throat, folds in the skirt, the twist of buttons and braid, had crept into the costume of her grandmothers.
Peony paused at the door and gave a slight cough and prepared her smile. Madame Ezra did not turn. Usually she was voluble and kindly to her serving maids, but in the last few days, while her mind had been busy with the Passover and all her being was renewed in the faith of her ancestors, she had not been pleased with the intimacy she perceived between Peony and David. True, the girl had been bought as a companion as well as a servant for the solitary little boy he had been, but the years had passed too quickly. She reproached herself that she had not taken heed earlier that they were now grown, her son a man, and Peony a woman. She was inclined at this moment to feel aggrieved and to be harsh toward Peony, who should have understood the change by instinct
.
All of this Peony perfectly comprehended, and she stood with patient grace, silent until Madame Ezra might choose to speak. When a gold hairpin slipped from Wang Ma’s fingers she sprang forward as lithely as a kitten, picked it up, and herself put it into Madame Ezra’s hair. In so doing she caught her mistress’s eye in the mirror and smiled. Madame Ezra gazed severely into the wide black eyes of the little bondmaid, and then after a second or two she yielded her own smile.
“You are a naughty child,” she said. “I am very angry with you.”
“Ah, why, Mistress?” Peony asked sadly. Then with her quick frankness she went on, “No, do not tell me—I know! But you are quite wrong, Old Mistress. I know my place in this house. I want only to serve you, my lady. What you bid me do, I will do. What home have I except this house? Can I dare to disobey you?”
She was so pretty, so pleading, so yielding, that Madame Ezra could not but be mollified. It was true that Peony was entirely dependent upon her, and though she knew as well as ever that underneath all the gentleness and sweetness there was something hard and prudent, yet, she reasoned, Peony could scarcely destroy her own welfare. If indeed there were a youthful attachment between the bondmaid and David, Peony would not yield to it if it meant the loss of everything else—as it would, Madame Ezra said firmly to herself. If ever she saw proof that there was more between David and Peony than there should be between a young man and a serving maid, that day she would marry Peony to a farmer.
As well as though she had spoken, Peony knew the thoughts inside Madame Ezra’s handsome head. She had learned so thoroughly the habit of such discovery that she had only to be still, to empty her own mind, to wait, and to receive, and soon into her brain would come on little creeping mouse feet the thoughts of others. To be married to a farmer was the common fate of bondmaids who went beyond their station. She had even less hope in this house than in a Chinese home. The Jews did not take concubines, Madame Ezra had often declared—not the good Jews, at least. Their god, Jehovah, forbade it.
When Madame Ezra did not answer her, she slipped back quickly, and then followed her mistress to the gate. A few minutes later she was in her plain sedan, riding along the street behind Madame Ezra’s own satin-curtained one. She looked through the little pane set into the front curtain and saw a small square block of the street straight ahead. The street was as it had always been, through her life and through the centuries before she was born. It was a wide street, but however wide it might be, it was always crowded with people. On both sides low buildings of brick and stone stood open. They were shops of many kinds, but behind them were homes where men and women and their children lived together, happily or not, but in security. The street was shadowy and cool, for the shopkeepers had stretched mats over their thresholds woven of slit reeds over a framework of bamboo. Water carriers had slopped their wooden buckets as they went, and the wet stones of the cobbled street threw off coolness. Children ran and crawled everywhere, weaving between the people. Housewives bargained with vendors of fresh vegetables and lifted live fish from great tubs, and men went their way to teashops and business. Everywhere there was life, good common life, but she had no part in it, Peony thought sadly.
While her eyes watched the scene she knew so well, her thoughts were busy with herself. The years had passed too quickly, even for her. They had been happy years and good ones, and she had dreaded womanhood and change. She had felt almost a daughter in the house, but not quite, and in the last few days, during the strange foreign feast, she had realized she was alien to this family that had bought her. Compel her mind as she might, she could not remember her own mother’s face or her father’s voice. A castaway child, stolen perhaps from her home, or sold, she had been sold again.
“Who sold me to you, Lady?” she had once asked Madame Ezra.
“A dealer in children,” Madame Ezra had replied.
“Had he many like me?” she had asked next.
“He had twenty little girls, and two boys,” Wang Ma had put in. “I wonder, Lady, that you did not get a boy for our young master.”
“My son’s father wanted the girl,” Madame Ezra had replied. “I believe he took a fancy to Peony because she had such big eyes. You were very thin, child. I remember you ate until we were frightened.”
Riding along in the crowded street, high on men’s shoulders, Peony considered her fate. Outside the house of Ezra she knew no one, she had not a friend. All were strangers to her as were these passers on the street. Tears brimmed her eyes. Where could she ever go to find friends or family? Therefore must she stay where she was and cling to the only house she knew.
I have no one, she thought plaintively.
And then she denied this with the hard truthfulness that was her secret heart. She was lying to herself. She wanted to stay in the house of Ezra because she could never bear to leave David. “David” she called him in her heart and would always so call him, however she taught her lips to say “Master.”
I love him, she thought. I would not go, no matter what was given me in exchange for him.
Thus she declared herself to her own heart. With truth, a clear peace descended upon her. She knew now what she wanted and would have. There remained only the matter of how to get it and keep it.
The house of the Rabbi was next to the synagogue on the Street of the Plucked Sinew. Long ago the street had been so named because of the mysterious Jewish rite of plucking the sinew from flesh before it could be eaten. The Chinese called the synagogue The Temple of the Foreign God. But the Jews called it The Temple of God. Once passers-by had wondered at the sounds of weeping that came from within. The weeping had almost ceased as the years went on, and then the only sounds that came from the synagogue were the long, slow, wailing chants one day in seven. Even the sound of the chanting had grown weaker as more years passed, and now those who passed by had to stop and listen, if they were to hear the voices within the heavy closed doors. The very building was falling into slow ruin. The typhoons of each summer tore at the cornices and the eaves, and when stones fell they were not replaced.
The same decay was creeping into the house of the Rabbi, which was near the synagogue. Moss grew between the flagstones of the court through which Madame Ezra and Peony walked while their sedans waited at the gate. Old Wang had been sent ahead to announce Madame Ezra’s visit, and now he met them at the door of the guest hall.
“The Teacher was asleep, Mistress,” he explained. “The young lady, his daughter, was in the kitchen alone, and she ran to comb her hair and change her garments. She begged me to ask you to seat yourself. She will come quickly with her father.”
Madame Ezra inclined her head and stepped over the rotting doorsill and into the guest hall. It was called a hall, although actually it was only a small room set with common furniture. But it was clean and Leah had put some white scented lilies into a brown jar on the table. No tea was served in this house, for it was a Chinese fashion. Madame Ezra sat down and motioned Peony to a stool.
“Sit down, child,” she said. “You need not stand while we are alone. And you, Old Wang, may return home to your work.”
Old Wang bowed and went away, and Madame Ezra waited in the silent little room. Since she did not speak, Peony did not either. The young girl sat gracefully erect upon the wooden stool, her small hands clasped in her lap. She knew perfectly how to sit at ease, waiting, her look pleasant and yielding. There was no impatience or urgency in her bearing. When in a few minutes they heard shuffling footsteps, she rose and took her place behind the chair on which Madame Ezra sat.
Thus they were when the faded blue linen curtain in the doorway was pushed aside and Leah came in leading her father, the old Rabbi. He walked with a long staff in his right hand, his left arm leaning upon Leah’s shoulder. The Rabbi had been tall in his youth, far above the height of the average man, and he was still tall, in spite of his aged stoop. He wore the robes of his people this morning as he always did, and though they were patched, they were clean. Snow-
white, too, was his long beard, and his skin was clean and fair, in spite of his wrinkles.
“My daughter,” the Rabbi said to Madame Ezra.
“I have waked you, Father,” Madame Ezra replied. She rose and went forward to meet the old man, and he touched her hand delicately and quickly and then her head, in blessing. Leah led him to the chair opposite that in which Madame Ezra had been sitting.
“Please sit down, Aunt,” Leah said, and when Madame Ezra had sat down, she moved a high stool near to her father. Then doubtfully she looked at Peony. “You—will you sit down?” she asked.
Peony inclined her head sweetly. “Thank you, Young Lady, I must be ready to serve my mistress,” she replied softly.
Leah sat down. Nothing could have marked more clearly than this the change from her childhood, when she and Peony had been two little girls, playing children’s games with David, and now, when one was a bondmaid and the other the young mistress of her father’s house.
“I should have waked long ago,” the Rabbi said in a voice surprisingly strong for his age. “But the truth is, daughter, that our Passover feast rouses sad memories in me and I lie awake in the night, sorrowing. These poor eyes—” he touched his blind eyes, “can still weep, even though they can no longer see.”
Madame Ezra sighed. “Do we not all weep together in our exile?”
“I grow old,” the Rabbi went on, “and my son is too young to take my place. Where is Aaron, Leah?”
“He went out early this morning, Father, and he has not come back,” Leah replied.
“Did he say where he was going?” the Rabbi asked.
“No, Father.”
“But you should have asked,” the Rabbi insisted.
“He did not want to tell me, Father,” Leah said gently.
Against the spare faded figure of the old man, the beauty of Leah was startling. The pure spring sunshine fell upon the tile floor in a square of pure light, and it lit her beauty into vividness. She was slender but rounded, strong in her looks, and rich in her coloring, and yet a vague timidity lent a modesty to her bearing that was almost childlike. Her full lips were red this morning, and her eyes were nearly perfect in their shape and in their deep brown coloring, the lashes long and curling, and the brows dark. Her hair was curling, too, and today she had tied it back from her face with a strip of narrow red satin at the nape of her neck. Her dress was a simple robe of coarse white linen. It fell to her feet and was girdled about her slender waist with a wide red strip of the same satin that bound her hair. The sleeves were short and her creamy arms were bare.
Peony: A Novel of China Page 4