Peace, p.13
Peace, page 13
“You’re telling me that I would be better off disliking what I do.”
“Work was meant to be work, Mr. Weer. Toil. Now I’d like you to cooperate with me. Look at this card. Will you describe it for me?”
“There’s a woman—at least I think it’s a woman, it might be a boy, an adolescent. She’s handing that other one something.”
“Very good. Now you are to make up a little story for me— a story for which this picture is to be one of the illustrations.”
In the days of Ch’in a certain young man of military family was summoned to Peking on a matter having to do with a heavy fine that had been levied against his dead father. You are to think of him as tall, handsome, and strong, riding a dappled stallion in the rain. His clothing is quilted and rough; his saddlebag holds only a ball of boiled rice, and a few cash. Very well, then.
When he had ridden all day and his horse stumbled with every second step, he stopped at a certain hostel to sleep; and there he found that because of the bad weather there were few travelers—indeed, only one beside himself, and that one a venerable old man of long white beard and piercing eyes. “Welcome,” the old man said. “For a time I feared I would have to stay the night alone in this deserted place. But see, I have built a fire for us, and I have some tea. Will you be my guest?”
The young man was pleased by this friendly reception and, though he had nothing to share with the old man but his rice, made himself as useful as he could, tending the fire and spreading their garments before it to dry; and in time he came to tell the old man the story of his plight. When he was finished, the old man said, “You do not know how fortunate you are. You possess a healthy body, warm clothing, and a valuable horse. The reputation of your family assures you of a commission in the imperial army for so long as you consent to wear a sword. Your only difficulty is this debt, which is but a matter of money and need worry you no more than you allow it.”
“Everything that you have said is true,” replied the youth after a moment’s thought. “But another, equally truthful, might state the matter otherwise, saying, ‘This young man is without friends or family or funds, and bears so heavy a debt that should he win a fortune it would all be forfeit. If things go ill for him in the capital, he will find himself in the hands of the torturers; if they go well, the best he can hope for is a life of drill and skirmishes spent at the frontiers of the empire, and in the company of men not much more civilized than the barbarians from whom they defend it.’ ”
When he heard this, the old man rose stiffly from his mat and, hobbling to the doorway, stood there for a long time looking out into the darkness and the rain, and the young man was bruised in heart with fear that he had offended him, for he was of that antique cast of mind that fears most displeasing those who are powerless. And at length he said, “Grandfather, if I have disturbed the tranquillity of your wisdom with my thoughtless remarks I beg ten thousand pardons. Sit once more before this fire and drink this excellent tea, and I pledge upon my honor as a soldier that you will hear no more foolish complaints from my lips.”
“Do not think you have cast this poor one into confusion,” the old man said, turning to face him. “I was but meditating. The road outside this hut is empty, but if all those who would change their place for yours were to pass by tonight the clamor of their feet should allow us no rest.”
“There are many who are poor and miserable—” the young man began.
“Many also,” the old man said, “of wealth and fame. Rich palanquins would enliven the concourse of beggars, like bits of fish in a bowl of poor rice. Young man, you doubtless think me a person of no consequence, and in that you are correct. But I have one precious possession.” And with that he unrolled the bundle of rags that served him for luggage and showed the young man an elegant night-rest for the head, of green ceramic.
“A china pillow, Vi? Come, now.”
My aunt regarded Stewart Blaine with assumed hauteur. “Certainly. They are curved to fit the contours of the head, and are much cooler than the feather things we sleep on.”
Professor Peacock’s friend Julius Smart (whom my aunt had insisted on inviting to the party) said, “I’ve seen them in curio shops. There’s a wide foot, then a sort of stubby little pedestal, and on top a thing for your head shaped like a banana.”
“That’s one kind. This one—remember this, all of you, it’s important—was the older sort, like a dented tube. If you’ll think of the potter rolling his clay out flat like pie dough, and then rolling it up like a carpet, and then laying his head on the middle while it’s still soft to get the right shape, and then firing it, you’ll have the right idea.”
The young man said, “That looks very comfortable, Grandfather.”
“It is more than that,” the old man told him, “it is magical, for it possesses the peculiar property of fulfilling the wishes of anyone who sleeps upon it. Each night for fifty years I have slept there, but for tonight I will lend it to you.”
Now, the young man did not in the least believe what the old man had told him, but he was much too polite to say so, and laid himself down with his head on the green rest as the old man had directed. There was no sound but the dancing of the raindrops on the rice straw overhead, and the snapping of the fire, and soon he went to sleep.
When he woke, day had already broken. His head lay not on the green china pillow but upon his own rolled-up coat, and the old man was gone. The rain had stopped, so after eating what remained of his rice he mounted his horse and continued his journey to Peking.
“Aunt Vi, did anything else happen before he got there?”
My aunt Olivia shook her head.
When he reached the city, he laid his case before one of the leading mandarins, casting himself upon his mercy.
“Who said, ‘Take my lovely daughter and my fortune as well’ —right, Vi?”
“Shut up, Jimmy. Just because it’s your birthday you don’t have the right to interrupt.”
Naturally the mandarin did nothing of the kind—he had a heart as hard as jade. But he cared a great deal about the emperor’s treasury, which was his responsibility. So, seeing that the young man had no money, and no relatives who might pay the debt if he was subjected to the position of “monkey with a peach,” but had the training and temperament of a soldier, he told him that in the future nine-tenths of his pay would be withheld until the debt was discharged, and ordered him to report to a certain garrison town in the north. Then (reckoning that as the army required a certain number of high officers in any case, it was best to have at least one whose costly salary did not desert the imperial coffers) he sent an order to the military commander of the district, stating that the young man was to be appointed colonel of that town.
Thus the young man had no sooner arrived at his new post than he found himself the chief officer there, and as he was still penniless and could afford neither the comforts of domesticity nor such debaucheries as the town offered, he amused himself by drilling his men and hunting boars, wolves, and even the huge Siberian tigers with the bow and the spear, and in that way gained a great reputation for courage, and the admiration of the soldiers he commanded.
He had hardly been in his new position a year when a rebellion against the emperor was fomented by the secret society called Seven Bamboo. Immediately sending a pledge of his loyalty to the imperial palace, the young officer led his troops south and, during the three years that followed, fought in a thousand and ninety-six battles and skirmishes, always with distinction and success.
When the war was over, he was placed in charge of the entire northern military district, which included the city of Peking, and was the most important in the empire. He married four wives, all of whom were beautiful and the daughters of important mandarins. The fine was forgiven, and the emperor made him a gift of three palaces; and in this style of life he passed forty years in happiness and tranquillity, a period during which the Celestial Kingdom was untroubled by treason, treachery, or barbarian invasion. At the end of this time he begged the Dragon Throne that he be permitted to retire from its service, though his beard was not yet white and his carriage and strength were those of a young man. This was granted, and he celebrated his retirement by leading a hunting party of seventeen sons and grandsons into the northern mountains.
“To me,” Eleanor Bold said, “your young officer sounds a lot like your brother John, Vi.”
“Don’t be silly. Actually, I don’t care for hunting or the men who do it, but this is the story.”
Spurring his horse in the pursuit of a savage wolf, he lost his way in fog and rain, and had reconciled himself to spending the night in the saddle when he saw a glimmer of light far off on the sheerest face of one of the most forbidding mountains. Then, after tying his mount to a bush when the beast could scale the rocky slope no farther, he climbed until he found himself in the shelter of a small cave, at the back of which sat an old man brewing tea over a fire of twigs. Politely the soldier asked if he might spend the night. The old man agreed, offered him tea, and then, when he saw how silently he stared into the fire, asked if he were troubled. The retired officer recounted his story, and ended by saying, “As I sat here, I was thinking of that night on the road to Peking; how I woke and found the rain gone and all of my life before me. If I could live only that one day again—”
“Fool!” the old man exclaimed. “Do you not recognize me? I have granted your heart’s desire, and for it I receive your ingratitude!“ And with that he picked up the teakettle and dashed the boiling contents into the face of the young man, who leaped up and ran out of the cave.
But as he left the cave he discovered that in place of the steep slope of the mountainside he stood upon a level plain of brownish gray, seemingly of infinite extent. He turned and looked behind him, and there, instead of the hermit’s cave, he beheld a circular opening in a wall of glassy green. Even as he watched, it dwindled, and after a moment he realized that he himself was expanding; in the winking of an eye he was standing on the floor of the hostel, and the hermit’s cave was only the hole in the end of the green headrest. He washed his face, saddled his horse, made his farewell to the elderly philosopher, and set off for Peking.
“That was very good, Vi,” Stewart Blaine said, “but I hope you’re not expecting the rest of us to do that sort of thing,”
My aunt Olivia laughed. “Not Den, because he’s too young. But everybody else ought to have at least one good story in them. I’m going to spin this bottle, and the one it points to has to tell the next one.”
Julius Smart, as I have said, was a friend of Professor Peacock’s. He was not—officially, as it were—a cripple, and did not seem to be in any way handicapped, but there was something wrong with his shoulders, one of which was noticeably larger than the other. Beyond that there was nothing remarkable in his appearance: he was of just under average height, and had a long nose, a pale complexion, and pale hair.
I remember quite clearly what Bledsoe’s was like before he bought it: a dark, cluttered shop filled with everything imaginable to suggest sickness—not only medicines, but crutches and bedpans and those hideous walking sticks that seem to be made by the same factories that make handles for mops, and obscene contrivances of red rubber. Mr. Bledsoe (who was, of course, called “Doc” by my elders, as druggists always were in Cassionsville until much later) was an aging man who had early— doubtless in the expectation, justified later by the event, of a long life—adopted the principle of selling whatever no one else in town sold, but at a high price. Sooner or later (you could almost hear him muttering it as he worked behind his counter), somebody would want it badly enough to pay for it. Double trusses are not needed often, nor are catheters with genuine Bakelite tips, but when they are needed they are needed very badly indeed. When Julius Smart bought the store, he threw a great deal out, moved a great deal more into a back room Mr. Bledsoe had fitted up as a sitting room, and moved more still (so I learned when Smart married my aunt) into a building south of town—that is, on the other bank of the Kanakessee— only a few miles from the spot where, a long time afterward, Lois Arbuthnot and I searched for buried treasure.
Like the other changes Julius made, this clearing and rearranging was not done all at once, but bit by bit as he found time. The window displays of sickroom supplies, which had stood untouched and even undusted for years, gave way to fancifully shaped jars of colored water, and these were kept scrupulously clean. A showcase that had formerly held no one could remember what was one day discovered filled with Fatimahs, Camels, Chesterfields, Sweet Caporals, Prince Albert Smoking Tobacco, and Muriel Cigars.
Later, when he had become my Uncle Julius, I used to try (mostly, I think, while lying on my back in the little bedroom overlooking my aunt’s front walk, for I was still living with her, my parents still in Europe, and cruising, at about that time, among the Greek Isles in a rented yacht) to remember the drugstore and Cassionsville itself as they were before he came. He was the first major change to take place within my memory, equivalent for me to the building of the new bridge at Oak Street. Julius Smart was an improvement, but I sometimes felt even then that he had improved my home out of existence. The first time I saw him, sitting in my aunt Olivia’s parlor with a saucer of crumbs from Mr. Macafee’s birthday cake at his feet and a teacup balanced on one knee, he did not strike me as a powerful —much less a symbolic—figure. Just a man rather smaller than most, with an amusing, mock-sincere way of speaking.
“This is a true story, but I don’t expect you to believe it. It happened to me the year I graduated. Right in the middle of summer after graduation, as a matter of fact.
“I suppose everyone here realizes that when a young man comes out of college with a pharmacy degree it’s not as though he was given a key to the bank. If he’s lucky, his father already has his own business and he can go in with him; or his family has enough money to set him up in a place of his own. If he’s not lucky—and I was one of the unlucky ones—he has to find a place that will take on another man, and since a drug business can be run pretty handily by one, those are few and far between.
“I had been looking for a place for about a year before I graduated and had all my relations looking for me in the usual way, but none of us had come up with anything, and I was just about ready to accept a position in a medicine show if one should be offered. I’d collect newspapers from every place that had them and sit around home a lot, reading them over and looking for something that might be in my line. And then I kept writing, of course, to all my teachers at school, reminding them to let me know if they should hear of anything—I figured that was my best bet. And my various aunts, you know, and cousins and in-laws and whatnot would, come around to tell me about something they’d heard of two or three counties away. I’d always go, but it wouldn’t be anything. At least it gave me a chance to get out of the house and buy more papers.
“This had been going on for quite a time when I finally decided that if I kept on the way I was, I wasn’t going to get anything until the next class was graduated, and then there’d be more after the same jobs. So I made up a plan for a trip that would take me nearly all over the country except for the East and way out West. I used the cheapest way I could figure out to get everywhere; and that was mostly milk trains.”
“You mean you just took those little trains from town to town looking for work?” my aunt asked.
“Not just for any kind of work—for a job in a pharmacy. But I told my mother and father—both of them were alive then, though they’ve gone to their reward now—that if I didn’t get anything on that trip, when I came back I’d take any kind of work I could get. But what I was really thinking was that if I didn’t get anything I wouldn’t come back; I’d just stop off somewhere.
“Well, I won’t tell you where it was I ended up, because everybody around here has the wrong ideas about that place. Let me just say that it was pretty far down South—south enough that there was palm trees and magnolias growing alongside the streets, and the house I stayed at—which was with the man I was working for, as I’ll tell you in a minute—had two trees in the front yard and one of them was an orange tree and the other was a lemon. It was hot there most all the time, and the ground so sandy it seemed like it was almost ready to move around, and all the houses were wood or stucco—no brick at all.
“I got off the train there, like I did everywhere I went to, without expecting anything much of it. To tell the truth, I’d already been to a couple big places without getting anything, and this didn’t look like it could have more than one drugstore in it—and as a matter of fact it didn’t. I got a newspaper like I always did, and walked down the main street thinking to get breakfast there and then to try at whatever drugstore there was, and then to ask around of people before moving on.
“There was a drugstore all right, and the thing that surprised me was that it was already open, though it wasn’t much after seven o’clock. I thought most likely someone had to have medicine in a hurry for a sick relative and had gone and got the pharmacist and made him open the shop; then maybe he’d figured since it was already light out and he was up and dressed, he’d just keep the place open. Well, you can believe I didn’t wait to get any breakfast. I just went right direct in after I straightened my tie and brushed my suit a little.
“I guess probably most of us would say this room here of Miss Weer’s has got a high ceiling, and I have to admit it looks mighty pretty with that fancy woodwork going around the corner of it, and then not flat but curved up like a courthouse, as you might say. But that place had a ceiling must have been close to twice as high as this—just up and up, with shelves, you know, all along the walls, and a ladder that you had to carry around to reach them. At the top was a good big electric fan, a six-blader, and he had it going already. All the lights were on— they were converted gas; you know the kind—and I could hear somebody moving around in back, but there was no one in front to be seen.
