“Did the stiffness come slowly or quickly?” David asked.
“I woke up so one morning two months ago,” Ezra answered. “For a few days my tongue was thick and I could not say my words clear. Wang Ma fetched the physician and he gave me an herb drink and I was better.”
“Father, you must let me help you more,” David said.
To this Ezra replied, “I have already done so, my son. While you were away I made you the head of the business, and from now on you are the one to say yes and no and to plan everything. Kung Chen has done the same with his eldest son. You are the partners and we two old grandfathers will stay at home unless we please to give you advice.”
David was moved and proud, and yet a vague sorrow fell on him. This was the beginning of the end of his father’s life. As he himself came into his prime his father must decline. It was the inevitable march of the generations and none could stop its course, but he told himself that from now until the day his father died he would be always gentle to him and he would defer to his wish in everything.
“I miss your mother, my son,” Ezra said suddenly.
He looked at David and his eyes watered and he brushed his tears away with his fist. The hour was late, the house was still, and the great candles flickered in the summer wind blowing through doors open to the soft darkness in the court.
“We all miss her,” David said quietly. “The house has never been the same house since she went away — for any of us.”
Ezra seemed scarcely to hear him. He leaned back and his thick hands clutched the arms of his chair. “I think about our life together, hers and mine,” he went on. “It was not an easy marriage, my son. She was unyielding — until I learned to know her. I could never deal with her twice the same way. She was a woman of many changes. Sometimes I met anger with anger, and sometimes I met anger with love and again with laughter — I had to choose my weapon. I had to be new to meet her newness. Yet underneath all her change there was a purity unexcelled. The heart of her was goodness. I could trust her. God she never betrayed, and me she could not betray. She was a true wife.”
David did not speak. To him his parents had been merely parents, but now dimly he began to see them as man and woman. He was abashed to think of them thus, to contemplate these two from whom he had sprung as separate from him and leading between them the vigorous and private life of a man and a woman.
“She was never stupid,” Ezra began again. “Well, sometimes that was almost too much, for I saw in how many ways she was more clever than I! When I was young this roused my spleen sometimes, but as I grew older I saw how fortunate I was. Look at Kung Chen! A lonely man, eh, my son? He never speaks to me of his children’s mother, but the few times I have seen her — a bit stupid, eh, David? And he is a fastidious man — he cannot go out and pluck wild flowers along the road. No more could I. When a man has known a woman like your mother — body and soul—” Ezra broke off, sighed, and went on again. “While you were gone, my son, and when Kao Lien left me to go westward with the caravans, I had time to myself, and I remembered all my life with your mother. Much comfort she took away with her when she left me, but here is something strange: I have never been devout, as you well know, David, but while she was in the house I felt all was well with my house before God. She was my conscience — which pricked me sometimes and against which I kicked, but which I valued. Now I feel lost. God is far from me — if there is a God?”
He put this as a question and David did not know how to answer it. He kept his silence.
When he did not speak, Ezra began to speak again. “You and I cannot answer that question. By that much we are no longer Jews, my son. I made my choice, you made yours. Would I go back? Ah, but I am what I am, and did I go back I would make the same choice, and so would you.”
“I am not so sure as you are,” David said now. “I could have been one man — or another. Had Leah lived—” He broke off.
“Had Leah lived,” Ezra repeated. He turned this over in his mind. Then he said, “Had Leah lived, perhaps your mother would be living too. Everything would have been different. But first we would have had to be different.”
“We would not have been here,” David said.
Ezra looked across the table at him surprised. “You mean—”
“We cannot live here among these people and remain separate, Father,” David argued. “In the countries of Europe, yes, for there the peoples force us to be separate from them by persecution. We cling to our own people there because none other will accept us, and we are martyred and glorified by our martyrdom. We have no other country than sorrow. But here, where all are friends to us and receive us eagerly into their blood, what is the reward for remaining apart?”
“Indeed — indeed, it is so,” Ezra said. “All that has happened to us is inevitable.”
“Inevitable,” David agreed.
“And your sons, my grandsons, will proceed still further into this mingling,” Ezra went on.
“It will be so,” David said.
Ezra pondered. “Shall we then disappear?”
David did not reply. It was inevitable, as he himself had said, when people were kind and just to one another, that the walls between them fell and they became one humanity. Yet he could not contemplate the far future when his descendants knew him no more, when perhaps they would have forgotten the very name of Ezra, and when indeed they would be as lost as a handful of sand thrown into the desert or a cupful of water cast into the sea. He gazed down the long line of those who would come from his loins and the loins of his sons and his sons’ sons. He saw the faces turning toward him, and they were the faces of Chinese.
“We grow too mournful,” Ezra said suddenly. “What has been has been, and cannot be avoided. Tell me about your journey, my son.”
So David roused himself and he told his father everything, the beauty of the great northern capital, and how the people looked and how noble their nature was, and what he had eaten and drunk and what all the gaieties were that he had enjoyed and how he had been given an audience before the Western Empress, and he told of the rumors about her, and so telling all he came at last to the reason why they had left the city so suddenly by night, for Peony’s sake.
Ezra listened closely, laughing sometimes and his eyes shining sometimes, and shrewd and careful when David spoke of business. When he heard of Peony, he grew very grave indeed. “What misfortune!” he exclaimed. “The long arm of the Chief Steward can reach anywhere, and we must tell Kung Chen this tomorrow.”
“I could not have done otherwise, Father,” David said.
“No — no.” Ezra hesitated, then he said firmly, “No, my son, no! To be sure, had she been like other women and had she welcomed the chance to go into the palace — well — hm — then, ah, it would have been fortunate for our house. We would have had a friend in the highest quarters. But being what she is — no, certainly not. Yet we must take every opportunity to ward off evil results. It would be a great sacrifice to make only for a woman, if our business were spoiled because of spite at the court. Your mother always said we made too much of Peony.”
At this David felt some sort of heat rise in him, mingled with anger, and to defend himself he spoke coolly. “Well, my father, if I have done unwisely, I must make amends in some other way, for Peony has been like my sister, and I could not put her into that evil steward’s palm at any price. That much I know.”