Peony

X

THE HOUSE OF EZRA woke quietly to its new life. Outwardly the old ways went on. Madame Ezra could weep in the night, but when morning came she rose her usual self, except that she lost her temper less often and she did not speak as quickly as once she had. To her son’s wife she was scrupulously kind and courteous, and the young woman made no complaint of her mother-in-law. This was surprise and pleasure, for Kueilan was afraid of Madame Ezra. All young wives must fear the elder women who are the mothers of their husbands, but Kueilan had feared more than most. She was a lazy, ease-loving little creature, accustomed to being served and spoiled, and she had no mind to subject herself to discipline and duty. But Madame Ezra asked nothing of her, and behaved indeed almost as if Kueilan were not in the house. When they met, Madame Ezra asked Kueilan how she did, and if everything were to her liking, and Kueilan smiled and looked down and replied that she liked everything. When she saw that Madame Ezra was not inclined to command her, a weight left her heart, and as time went on she grew as saucy and careless as she had been in her own home.

At first Peony could not believe that anything could be the same in the house after the marriage. Then day by day she saw that she was wrong, and that the elders made it the same, and then that David made it the same. David, too, had resumed his own life. The talk that he had put off on his wedding night he put off forever. It had not taken many days of marriage to show him that this pretty wife of his could not talk of anything beyond her daily needs and wishes. But she was ready with laughter, and she knew many games, and their happiest hours together were spent over these games that she taught him, laughing much while she did so. When she won she was as excited as a child, and she clapped her hands and tripped about the room on her little bound feet. These feet were David’s pity. He had never seen a girl’s feet before so bound, for in this Jewish house Peony’s feet had been left free. Kueilan’s little feet in their silken shoes he could hold together in the palm of his hand, and one night he did so, exclaiming in sorrow that it could be.

“Little Thing,” he said, for so he now called his wife, “how could you let them maim you?”

To his surprise she began to cry, half in anger and half in answer to his pity, and she drew her feet away and hid them under her skirt. “You don’t like them!” she wept.

“They make me sad,” he replied gently. “How they must have pained you!”

“They don’t pain me now,” she declared.

“Why not let them free?” he asked.

“I don’t want them big,” she said petulantly. “Why should I waste all my trouble?”

“Let me see what can be done,” he begged, divining her pride and shyness.

“No — no — no!” she screamed. And then she fell to sobbing again and she cried out for Peony so loudly that Peony came running.

At the sight of her Kueilan put out her hands while the tears ran down her face. “He wants to see my feet!” she sobbed, and nothing must do but for Peony to sit down on the bed beside her and soothe her hands and cover her feet in the silken quilt.

“Hush — hush — he did not mean it.” So Peony comforted the sobbing girl.

David stood by the bed and looked at the two. “Tell her I want only to help her,” he said to Peony. “And it is true that I do not like feet so crippled.” With this he walked out of the room and Kueilan clung to Peony and wept mightily and Peony let her weep. When the sobs began to quiet she spoke gently and firmly.

“I will tell my young master how it is that our people bind the feet of women. You must not blame him that he does not know. His people leave the feet free. Indeed, even their women wear sandals on their bare feet.”

“Like farm women!” Kueilan cried through her tears.

“Sometimes their sandals are of gold and silver and set with jewels,” Peony went on. “Now stop your crying, Little Mistress. He is kind and good, and once he understands—”

“But there are too many things he doesn’t understand!” the young wife wailed.

Peony was very patient. “Each time he does not understand, then send for me, Little Mistress, and I will explain to him how you feel.”

Thus soothing and coaxing she comforted Kueilan, and when quiet was restored she said, “A wife must please her husband, Little Mistress. What other man will see you except him? Let me tend your feet then, Lady. I will loosen the bandages so little every day that you will not know it, and then he will be pleased when he sees you obedient. When he is pleased, how happy you will be!”

Kueilan looked doubtful. She lifted her wet lashes and looked at Peony. “I am quite happy now,” she declared.

“You will lose your happiness, Lady, if you do not please your husband.” So Peony persisted.

The long lashes fell again, and Kueilan said in a small voice, “But I have fifty pairs of new shoes — and they are so pretty!”

Peony laughed. “Lady, if that is all your care, I will copy each pair you have and make new ones for your new feet.”

Kueilan was silent for a while and Peony stood waiting. “Shall I not tell him?” she asked, smiling as though at a child.

After a long time Kueilan nodded slowly, and her tears came fresh. But she did not complain while Peony fetched a basin of hot water and took off the tiny laced shoes and then the tight white stockings and then unwrapped the long bandages. Even Peony was sad when the narrow feet lay bare in her hands. She examined each foot carefully to see how much the damage was. Chu Ma had been zealous and eager for her charge to make a good marriage and she had bound the child’s feet early. Bones were bent and cramped but not broken. These feet could never be whole, but they could be free. Yet the task must be done carefully, a little day by day, or the pain of freedom would be as bitter as the binding had been.

“I am glad Chu Ma isn’t here,” Kueilan said suddenly. Chu Ma had not been allowed to stay with her charge, lest there be quarreling with the other servants in the house. Kung Chen had commanded her to return and care for Lili, his last child.

“And I also am glad,” Peony agreed. “Were she here it would be hard indeed for her to see her work undone. When she comes to visit you, Little Mistress, tell her your lord commanded you.”

When Peony had soaked the feet and rebound them again with the least loosening of the bandages, she played a game with her mistress, and then, seeing her yawn, she coaxed her to bed and sleep. Only then did she go and find David. He had yielded to his mother’s decree, which Peony had secretly suggested to Madame Ezra, and before the day of his marriage he had moved to these new and larger rooms. Now he sat brooding in his library, a great room, high ceiled, and all the walls shelved with narrow shelves upon which the rolls of his books lay. This was his favorite room already, and here Kueilan did not come. She could read — he had learned that — but she considered it useless. To play, to chatter, to tease Small Dog, to watch the goldfish, to make a great ado when she pretended she was about to embroider, to taste many sweetmeats and bite them half through and leave them, these were her occupations. He knew it now, and yet he yielded to the fascination of her prettiness in all she did.

His mind told him that her mind was childish, and her soul sleeping, but his eyes fed his heart, and the roundness of her smooth flesh, her little bones covered with such tenderness, her tiny waist and narrow wrist, the delight that lay in the nape of her neck and the purity of her throat and breast, the scent of her skin and the fragrance of her breath, the endless grace of every movement that she made — all this was precious to him in its fashion. She held him by the pathos of her little hands and crippled feet as surely as she charmed him by her eyes and laughter and her yielding body. It was not love — how soon he knew it was not love! But it was something, for all that, and it was sweet and full of pleasure.

Thus he brooded upon her when Peony came in. She saw his mood and she pretended she had come to fill the teapot and know its heat. “I must bring you fresh tea — this is cold,” she said as she had said on every night of his life. He scarcely heard her and he did not answer.

She looked at him and went on. “My little mistress asks me to tell you how it is her feet are bound,” she said.

“I know it is Chinese custom,” he replied and did not look up.

“A foolish custom,” she conceded. “How it came about I do not know. I read once that an emperor was charmed by the small feet of one he loved and other women hearing of it everywhere began to make their feet small. And I have heard that it began long ago when men wished to keep their wives at home. Who knows? But it is a custom now, and small feet bring a price in marriages. We cannot blame my little mistress that she yielded to her elders.”

“I do not blame her,” he replied.

Peony went on, “She asks me to tell you that she is sorry she cried, and that she will let me free her feet a little every day until they are as free as can be.”

He looked up now. “Peony, this is your doing, not hers.”

“She was willing,” Peony replied and looked away.

“Ah, Peony!” David said, “Ah, Peony!” He felt strangely lonely and he put out his hand and he took Peony’s hand and held it. She let it lie for a moment. Then she turned her head and she caught the full warm look of his eyes. Seeing that look, she drew her hand away gently, and with her other hand she lifted the teapot.

“I will fetch hot tea, Young Master,” she said in her sweet cool voice, and went away.

He sat there, expecting her return, and wondering why he was not as happy as he wished he were. Peony could help him somehow, as she had always helped him, and yet he did not know what he wanted of her. How could he put into words for her the sadness that he felt, and yet make her know that his little wife was somehow a treasure, too? While he pondered this Old Wang came in with the teapot.

“Peony bade me bring the tea, Young Master,” he said. He set it down on the table. “Shall I pour a bowl?” he asked.

“Leave it,” David said. “I will pour it for myself when I am thirsty.” He watched the old man go, and sat puzzling for a while. Now why had Peony not come back herself? It was not that he had seized her hand. He had often held her hand. He sat a while longer, and feeling neither his sadness lift nor his vague loneliness dispel itself, he sighed and rose and went into the bedroom where his little treasure was.

The house of Ezra shaped itself to its new life. It would have been said that one small woman in the house could not change the laws of generations, but there was this change: Madame Ezra, determined to find no fault with her son’s wife, found no fault with her son. But David knew that his mother kept all the old ways. When the feast days rolled around, the house retreated subtly into the past. The ancient rites were performed, the foods of tradition prepared and eaten. But there was no more going to the synagogue. No rabbi stood now before the Chair of Moses to read the sacred Torah. The great red satin umbrella over the platform where the chair stood was folded and laid away. On the western walls still hung the tablets upon which were carved in letters of pure gold the Ten Commandments, but none came there to hear them read. The gates of the synagogue were locked and no one went to them. Madame Ezra could not bear to go alone, and Ezra was busy. His contracts with Kung Chen were signed, and their names stood together in huge letters of black velvet upon the red silk banners that hung outside the shop doors.

A second caravan had been added to the one that each year Kao Lien led toward the west, and besides these, Ezra bought the produce of ships from India, cottons and ivory, silver and jewels, and brought it overland from the south. In return he sent to India Chinese silk from Kung Chen’s shops, and there it was rewoven into the gauzes that Indian ladies loved, and that no Chinese looms could weave.

There was no one even to watch at the synagogue gates. Eli the gatekeeper took care of the smiling mad old rabbi, who would listen to no one else. Eli stayed night and day, for the Rabbi could not be allowed to wander about the house lest he frighten the servants.

In the city the remnant of the Jews, less now than two hundred souls, went about their business and forgot who they were. But Madame Ezra in her own house kept the feast days of her people. It was lonely keeping, for only she and Ezra and David ate the unleavened bread at Passover.

On the first Passover after her son’s marriage she had commanded a place set for his wife. When David came alone his mother looked at him with some of her old impetuous temper.

“Is my daughter-in-law not coming?” she demanded.

David took his place in great quiet. “She says she is afraid to come,” he replied.

“Afraid?” Madame Ezra exclaimed. “What nonsense is this?”

“She fears that our sacred foods will bewitch her soul,” David replied. Then he said strangely. “I will not compel her, Mother. Perhaps she is right.”

Something in his stern still look chilled Madame Ezra’s heart and she said no more. Her proud head drooped, she wiped tears from her eyes, but she did not wail aloud. To what low estate had her people fallen! she told herself. Perhaps in a few other houses families worshiped Jehovah in solitary fashion and would for a few years more, but in most of them, and well she knew it, even the pretense of worship had been forgotten and the sacred days passed like any other in business and in pleasure.

So long as his mother lived, David showed no outward discontent with his life. His first son was born a year after his marriage day, and Kueilan, who was pettish before the child was born, delivered him easily although with much wailing and screaming. When she saw he was a boy she gave over her noise, and demanded all her favorite foods. But she refused to nurse the child, and a wet nurse had to be found. This roused Madame Ezra for a moment.

“Must this grandchild drink Chinese milk?” she asked Ezra.

Ezra smiled ruefully. “His mother’s milk would be Chinese, too, my dear,” he said.

Madame Ezra was struck by her own folly and fell silent, and Ezra had not the heart to remind her that he himself had drunk his Chinese mother’s milk. But thereafter he saw that Madame Ezra did not love even her grandchild, and next year when Kueilan had another son, she merely nodded her head when Wang Ma told her of the second birth.

Indeed, Madame Ezra cared no more to live. They all saw it, and each in his way was sorrowful. This strong good woman was the central pillar in the house, and now the pillar was crumbling. She began to lose her taste for food, and she complained that she did not sleep well. When she was alone with Ezra she asked him often what it was that she had done amiss in her life, that it was not to end as she had hoped.

“It is not that you have done amiss, my dear Naomi,” Ezra told her. “Perhaps you have only dreamed amiss.”

“I have always obeyed the will of God,” she replied to this in some distress.

Ezra had not heart to say how often her will was God’s will, and so he only said, “Ah, who can tell what is the will of God?”

In the midst of Madame Ezra’s own decline, the Rabbi died suddenly in a childish way. As his mind decayed, he had passed from being man to child and then from child to being less than human, and if Old Eli did not watch him constantly, he took up and ate anything he saw upon the ground. So one day he ate some filth, not in hunger, for Ezra kept him well fed and warm in winter and cool in summer, but from some old memory of past hunger. The filth poisoned him and he was racked with cholera and died within a day, bewildered by his pains and begging for mercy from Madame Ezra, whom he now feared as the most powerful being that he knew.

Madame Ezra mourned to see him thus, and she would have stayed beside him to comfort him, but Ezra dreaded the disease and forbade her. The old rabbi died with only Eli beside him, and he was buried in the graveyard beside his wife, who was Leah’s mother. The remnant of his people in the city mourned his death and they followed his coffin, wailing and weeping, and wearing garments of sackcloth, and they stooped and took dust from the road as they walked and poured it upon their heads. All knew that with the Rabbi’s death something of their own death had come upon them, too, and they remembered him as he had been in the days when he was young, how good he had been, how strong, and how he had adjured them to remember their God, who was the One True God. Now that he was gone, who would remind them? There was no one even to read the Torah at his grave. His son, that Aaron, was still lost, and the Rabbi was buried with no kin to mourn him or to do his work for him now. David stood there, aloof and silent. His heart was dark, but he did not weep. Neither had he stooped to take the dust nor did he wear sackcloth.

One day after the funeral Madame Ezra felt lonely and sad and she took the fancy that she would go alone to visit the synagogue. Eli had returned to watch the gates, and she went in her sedan chair, with only Wang Ma with her. When Eli saw Madame Ezra he was confused and he begged her not to go into the synagogue.

“Wait until I have time to sweep the floors, Lady,” he begged. “The dust lies thick on the Chair of Moses, and I am ashamed for you to see it.”

But Madame Ezra would not yield. She had come so far and she would have her way. Reluctantly then he fitted the key to the great lock, and he held the gate closed for a moment.

“Do not blame me, Lady,” he begged. “It was like this when I came back.”

He opened the door unwillingly indeed, and Madame Ezra stepped into the court and behind came Eli. At first she saw nothing changed except the dust the winds had blown there, and the leaves fallen and rotting under the trees. But when she had crossed the last court and had mounted the terrace and come to the synagogue, she saw change. The two stone lions that had guarded the great doorway were gone, and the iron urns were gone; the curtains over the doors were gone, and when she went inside the candlesticks were not upon the great table, or the silver laver for washing the hands. The separate tables that had held the twelve rolls of the law were gone and the fine silken curtains that had hung over the roll of the law of Moses were torn away.

Madame Ezra stared at loss after loss. She could not speak. She stood in the middle of the synagogue, looking for one well-known object and then another. Then her eyes fell upon the western wall, and there she saw the most vile robbery of all. The very gold had been dug out of the deeply carved letters of the Ten Commandments, which Jehovah Himself had given to Moses. Upon this she turned to Eli and her voice came in a loud cry.

“Who has done this?”

Eli hung his head. “Lady, I fear to tell you all,” he muttered.

“Is there more?” she demanded.

In silence he pointed to the door. He led her outside again, and along the walls, and she saw that not only the inside of the synagogue had been despoiled, but thieves had taken the bricks from the walls. These were bricks of a special sort, made new after the great flood that had covered the city two hundred years before. They were finer than any brick made nowadays, for the ancients had the secret of making bricks even from the days when their ancestors had been slaves in Egypt.

“Soon only the shell of the synagogue will be left,” Eli said mournfully, “and one day when a storm blows from the south it will fall into ruins and rubble.”

Madame Ezra could not speak one word for a long time. She went from one sight to another, and Wang Ma, waiting outside, grew frightened and came to find her.

“Lady, rest yourself!” she exclaimed. “There are thieves in every temple.”

Madame Ezra turned on Eli. “How was it that you did not come and tell me this long ago?”

“Lady, I did not know,” the old man pleaded. “I could not leave my master night or day, and none of our people came to tell what was happening.”

“I cannot think they would have dared to steal from Jehovah’s house, unless one led them on!” she exclaimed.

A strange thought came to her mind, but she would not speak it before these two who were not her equals. “I will go home,” she said, “and do you watch, Eli. Let it be known that I will demand of the Chinese magistrate that he flog the thieves and set them in racks before the populace to starve.”

So saying she went home again, her heart all grief, and she could not wait until Ezra and David came home. She sent Old Wang to fetch them and Wang Ma added her own message that they must come because she feared her mistress was ill. Hearing this, Ezra called David from his own room, which he now had in the shop, and they went home. There they found Madame Ezra waiting and she broke into sobs when she saw them, and they had much trouble amid her sobbing to hear what was wrong, and had it not been for Wang Ma, who stood there with hot tea in a bowl to hold to her mistress’s lips, nothing would have been clear.

When all was told, Madame Ezra suddenly stopped crying. Now was the time for her surmise. “I well know the paltry folk our people have become could not have dared to steal from Jehovah Himself,” she declared.

Both men waited to hear what came next.

“I tell you,” Madame Ezra went on, “there is only one who would do what has been done, and he is that Aaron. He must be found, Ezra. He hides somewhere in the city, and he directs the thieves. Let the curse of God fall on him!”

“How can I find him?” Ezra groaned.

“The Chinese can find thieves,” Madame Ezra urged.

“There is a king of thieves in the city,” David said. “His name is known at the magistrate’s court, where he pays yearly tribute, and through him Aaron can be found.”

“Can you do this, my son?” Ezra asked.

David bowed his head. “A sad task,” he said shortly, “but I can do it.”

So David called upon the magistrate, and paid the money down to meet the king of thieves in that city. On a certain day the man would come to a distant teahouse on the edge of the city, and he was to be known by a red cord twisted in his buttonhole, and he was to sit far inside the house, out of easy sight. David, he decreed, must come alone. When Madame Ezra heard this she was frightened and she insisted that Eli go and stand near the door, unseen. None among the Chinese in the house knew what went on, for Ezra was ashamed, and so indeed were David and his mother.

On the day David went to the appointed place the man was waiting, a thin long smooth-faced man, dressed in a black silk robe, and he sat with a bowl of tea in his hand. This hand David saw as soon as he sat down and greeting had been given. The hand was like a ferret, so narrow and thin and long it was. Seeing it, David loathed the whole man, and he came at once to his business.

“I act for my father,” David said. “We would find the thieves who take the bricks from our temple and the sacred vessels and the silk curtains, and all that is gone. If these can be restored, we will pay well. But we will even pay something only to know what has become of them and who the one is that dares to steal from our people.”

The man smiled an evil cold smile. “He is one of your own,” he said.

Then David knew his mother was right. “His name is Aaron,” he said.

“What his name is I do not know,” the man replied. “We call him Li the Foreigner.”

“But that one could never lift the heavy bricks or the great vases,” David exclaimed.

“No, but he puts courage into the ones who help him,” the man replied, sneering. “They fear lest the foreign god take revenge on them, but this fellow promises them that no punishment will fall upon them. He is the son of the priest, he says, and he knows all the prayers.”

“Where is this one?” David asked.

The man looked very cunning. “If I deliver him to you, how much money will you put in my hand? It is loss for me, you understand.”

With loathing in all his blood David contrived to match this cunning. “We do not care whether we see his evil face or not,” he said. “Keep him if you wish. But from now on the synagogue is guarded, and your loss is the same.”

So bargaining, David promised thirty pieces of silver, and with these he bought the traitor back.

“He lives hidden in a hut inside the gate of a house that stands six doors from here,” the man told him. “If you follow me, I will show you. But first I must see the silver.”

“I brought no silver,” David said. “You know my father’s house and that we are in contract with the merchant Kung Chen. You can trust me.”

After some demur the man agreed and he rose and they went down the street, and he pointed to the door. “He is always there by day,” he said.

“The silver will reach your hand tonight,” David said, and then he crossed the street and without fear he entered the gate and suddenly opened the door of a hut and there inside a mean small room Aaron lay huddled on a bed made of boards.

David went to him and shook him, and when he saw David he woke out of sleep and stirred himself sullenly. “What do you want?” he asked.

David stared down at him, and despised him utterly, and yet he could not strike him or curse him.

“I ought to give you to the magistrate to be flogged,” he muttered. “And yet you are one of our people! Aaron, how could you do what you have done?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” the cur replied.

“Ah, you know,” David sighed. He sat down on a stool and leaned his head on his hands. “I am glad your father never knew,” he said. “I am glad Leah is dead.”

Aaron scratched himself and yawned and said nothing.

David stood up again. “Come, I give you a choice! You shall have a place somewhere in the shops — some work where eyes are always on you. If you do not choose this, then I turn you over to the city prison.”

The end of this was that after a few minutes more Aaron chose to come with him. With loathing on all sides against him, from that day he ate Ezra’s food and wore his castoff clothing, and carried messages from one shop to another between Ezra and Kung Chen. None trusted him alone with goods or cash, and his life sank to less than any in Ezra’s house.

As for Madame Ezra, she gave up hope, knowing that never could the synagogue be rebuilt, and she took no pleasure in anything that Ezra said to comfort her.

“See, my Naomi,” he told her often. “You have everything to make a woman rejoice. Our son is among the most respected of the young merchants of the city. It was only a few days ago that Kung Chen said to me, ‘Elder Brother, your son has saved me the quarter of a year’s income.’ ‘How?’ I asked. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘for the last ten years there has been a leak somewhere in my affairs. Try as I have, and my sons, too, we have not known where. Last year I sent even my eldest son to the northern capital to make a written copy of all goods bought and sold. When it came back we found no fault, and yet there was loss. But I gave the copy to your son—’ ”

She interrupted him here half pettishly, “Tell me the story outright and not this mixture of his son and my son. What did David do?”

Ezra refused to be ill-humored. “Why, the gist of it is, Naomi, David could tell from the figures alone where the dealer had changed the prices of the goods!”

Madame Ezra smiled only dimly at this, and Ezra grew anxious indeed. “Tell me where you feel ill, my dear,” he said.

She shook her head. Then she opened her sad dark eyes at him and put her hands on her breast. “I feel heavy here, night and day.”

Ezra sat silent a while and then he offered great sacrifice. “Shall I take you westward, Naomi — where you have always wanted to go?” He could not bring himself to say “the promised land,” for he did not want to go.

Well she knew his heart, and she shook her head again. “It is too late now,” she said, and this was all she would say, and Ezra left her at last with his own heart very heavy.

He made occasion to see David alone that day and he said, “Help me to cheer your mother’s heart, my son.”

David looked up from his ledgers. “Father, you know she cannot be cheered,” he declared. He took up his pen again and worked on. Then he said slowly, his eyes still on his book, “If you wish, I will take her to Palestine and let her see the land. Then perhaps she will be content — either to stay or to come back with me.”

Ezra heard this and his jaw fell. “Leave me here?” he exclaimed.

“You can come if you like, Father,” David said with a small smile.

“But the business!” Ezra cried.

David shrugged and did not answer. Ezra looked at him. David had grown since his marriage. He was taller and stronger and somehow more hard. He wore a short, curled beard and he was no longer a youth. He was even passing beyond his early manhood.

“What if you two did not come back?” Ezra said strangely.

David did not look up. He finished his line and wiped his brush of camel’s hair and put on the brass cover. Then he sat back in his chair and faced his father full. “With you here and my sons would I not come back?” he replied, smiling into his beard.

He did not speak of his wife. Ezra noticed this and said nothing. “There is that war still dragging itself out in the south,” he grumbled. “The Englishmen are not content — they force their opium on us. It may be that you will have trouble if you go through India.”

“I will tell them we are not Chinese,” David said.

“Well, but they will ask you what you are,” Ezra went on. Then he said, “How do I know they will be better pleased to find you are Jews?”

To this David could say nothing and Ezra got up heavily, feeling for the first time that since his son was no longer young, he must himself be growing old. “Speak of it with your mother, my son,” he said. “Let it be as the two of you decide. You are alike in your stubbornness.”

David did talk with his mother and for a few weeks she seemed to revive into someone like her old self. She would not say she would go, and yet she made plans as though to go, and David held himself in readiness. Only Kao Lien opposed the plan.

“Elder Sister will never be able to take the journey,” he told Ezra. “Even though we go by India and the sea, there are typhoons upon the ocean, and long days between when the ship will be becalmed. On land it will be worse. The Muslims are wary and fierce and I cannot answer for her life.”

“Let her go, if she wishes,” Ezra said.

“If she dies there?” Kao Lien asked.

“My son can bury his mother,” Ezra replied. But his heart was very sore.

Yet the journey was never taken. Sometime, in some night, Madame Ezra, lying much awake and alone, gave up her plan. David could take her there but he must come back. That she knew. Peony had come that very day to tell her that her young mistress was expecting her third child, and that she wept very much because her husband was leaving her to go on so long a journey.

“My little mistress has had her children too quickly,” Peony told Madame Ezra. “She needs rest after this one, and for that reason I said to her that our young lord would be away no more than a year, and when he came back she would be strong and well again. Just now she is sick, Mistress, and she is fretful. But she refused to be consoled. I do not want to trouble you, Mistress, but I tell you this for the sake of your grandchildren.”

Madame Ezra waved Peony away with one gesture of her right hand and she did not answer. But in the night she knew that she must not take David away from his children, and she knew that she did not want to die outside this house. That she was soon to die she had begun to perceive. Within her right breast there grew a hard knot, and she felt tentacles from it pulling at her ribs and lungs and under her shoulder. It had been long since she first found it. Now the thing grew and consumed her flesh and she was thinner every day. In the darkness she sighed and gave up her dream. What did it matter now? The synagogue was gone, and of what use was an old woman creeping home to die? She could not bring her children with her.

Within the year she yielded to her inner enemy and with much pain and torture of the flesh she died in her own bed.

Ezra felt his heart broken, and he made a mighty funeral such as the city had never seen. In the long procession every one of the remnant of the Jews walked clothed in sackcloth, and Kung Chen persuaded wealthy Chinese to ride in mule carts twisted with white cloth, and Ezra walked, clothed in white from head to foot, and David by him clothed the same, and behind them came David’s wife and children, even to the newborn child; a third son, whom Peony carried. Behind them came all the servants, led by Wang Ma. The people of the city stood thick along the streets to see the sight, and all agreed that never had there been so fine a funeral except that there were no paper images of house and sedan and servants to be burned for the spirit world. Then some said, “These people do not believe in images. Not even in their temple is there an image.”

All agreed to this. The western wall of the temple had fallen down in a great wind that came up from the south, and curious people went to stare inside the foreign temple, which had been until now forbidden. It was true there were no images.

The procession walked slowly to the city gate and passed through it and came to the graveyard of the Jews. Then it stopped and David and Ezra stood alone beside the grave. Behind David stood his wife and by her Peony, holding his third son, who wailed without stopping until the funeral was over.

So Madame Ezra was buried, but there was no one to read a prayer beside her grave.