The mother

by Pearl S. Buck

And the mother told the maid too and she said, “Daughter, I go to the temple to the south where there is that living goddess, and it is the selfsame one who gave the son to Li the Sixth’s wife when she had gone barren all her life long and she was nearing the end of her time to bear, and her man grew impatient and would have taken a concubine he was so angry with her barrenness, and she went and prayed and there came that fine good son she has.”

And the maid answered, “Well I remember it, mother, and she made two silken shoes for the goddess and gave them when the boy was born. Aye, mother, go quickly, for she is a true good goddess.”

So the mother set forth alone, and all day she struggled against the wind which blew unceasing through this month, blowing down the cold with it as it came out of the desert north, so that the leaves shriveled on the trees and the wayside grass turned crisp and sere and all things came to blight and death. But heavier than the wind, more bitter, was the fear of the mother now and she feared that her own sin had come upon the child. When at last she came into the temple she did not see at all how great and fine it was, its walls painted rosy red and the gods gilded and many people coming to and fro for worship. No, she went quickly in, searching out that one goddess that she knew, and she bought a bit of incense at the door where it was sold, and she said to the first gray priest she saw, “Where is the living goddess?”

Then he, supposing her from her common looks to be but one of those many women who came each day to ask for sons, pointed with his pursed mouth to a dark corner where a small old dingy goddess sat between two lesser figures who attended her. There the mother went and stood and waited while an old bent woman muttered her prayers for a son who could not move and had lain these many years, she told the goddess, on his bed, so stricken he could not even beget a son again, and the old woman prayed and said, “If there be a sin in our house for which we have not atoned, then tell me, lady goddess, if this is why he lies there, and I will atone—I will atone!”

Then the old woman rose and coughing and sighing she went her way and the mother knelt and said her wish, too. But she could not forget what the old woman had said, and to the mother it seemed the goddess looked down harshly, and that the smooth golden face stared down fixed and unmoved by the sinful soul who prayed, whose sin was not atoned.

So the mother rose at last and sighed most heavily, not knowing what her prayer was worth, and she lit her incense and went away again. When she had walked the ten miles and come to her own door once more, cold and weary, she sank upon the stool and she said sadly when the children asked her how the goddess heard her prayer, “How do I know what heaven wills? I could but say my prayer and it must be as heaven wills and we can only wait and see how it will be.”

But with all her secret heart she wished she had not sinned her sin. The more she wished the more she wondered how she could have done it, and all her gorge rose against that smooth-faced man and she loathed him for her sin’s sake and because she could not now in any way undo what had been done. At that hour of deep loathing she was healed of all her heat and youth, and she was young no more. For her there was no man left in the world for man’s own sake, and there were only these three her children, and one blind.

XIII

NOW the mother was no longer young. She was in her forty and third year, and when she counted on her fingers sometimes in the night how many years her children’s father had been gone, she used the fingers of her two hands and two more over again, and even the years that she had let the hamlet think him dead were more than all the fingers on one hand.