"This is your butterfly," she said. "No one can take it from you."
A NEW SHORT STORY
BY PEARL S. BUCK
ILLUSTRATED BY JAMES BAMA
THE SILVER BUTTERFLY
The man began to speak. "I tell you of my mother, " I closed my eyes in the hot darkness of a summer's night in Hong Kong. The man had refused to enter my moor unless it was dark. He had slipped over the border of mainland China and he did not want me to see his face, only to hear his voice, his words.
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The words ceased to be the spoken words of a man; the voice ceased to be the voice of a man. They were instruments, revealing to me in the harsh new light of today, a well-remembered scene. My imagination, living through the instruments, recreated the past. A village by the Yangtze River-and how often I had seen such villages, each a cluster of the brick-walled, tile-roofed houses of central China! On the street among poorer houses there was a gate opening into a walled compound. Inside were the courtyards of the landowners, rich by village standards, possessing perhaps twenty acres of land, which was perhaps twenty times what the other men in the village owned individually. This was his father and he was rich in more than land, for he had a concubine, perhaps more than one, but at least one. "She was my mother," the voice in the darkness said. Ah, here was the story.
She was his mother. In the old days the tie between mother and son was very close among the Chinese. Young soldiers, village boys snatched from the quiet dusty streets and forced into military service, would cry out for their mothers. "Wo-tih Mal Wo-tih Mal" Thus, when they were dying in the battles of revolution they cried aloud for their mothers. Once on the streets of Peking, when students had revolted against the local warlord and had been shot down by the soldiers, I had heard them cry for their mothers.
"I had a brother," the voice in the darkness was saying. "He died when he was five years old, before I was born. My mother always loved him better than she loved me. I know that because whenever she saw a little child about that age, a boy, she coaxed him to come to her and she fed him sweets. And I was the child of her old age. She was mote than forty years old when I was born, and it was her disgrace to be so old and still giving birth. She fought for me, nevertheless. She made my father treat me well, as well as he did the children of his wife. She would not let him forget that whatever she was, I was his son. I remember that she was good to me. I owe her a debt so long as I live."
The voice was silent, a silence seeming very long, but perhaps not more than a full minute.
"Then the new people came in. My father was accused, as a landlord-and by his tenants. They could not have forgotten all that he had done for them, how he had forgiven them his share when the crop was poor, how he had helped them settle their disputes. But when the party members took control of my village, their job was to teach the people to hate. If the tenants did not demand the execution of the landlords they, too, would be punished. so, good and bad, the landlords had to die. The new order must be established, we were told. My father was hung up by his thumbs on the tall dragon tree in our main courtyard and then was flayed to death. We, his family, were compelled to watch this. Then we were separated, my half-brothers and their families dispersed. My wife and I and my mother were moved into a small mud-walled one-room house, which had formerly belonged to our gateman. I was given work to do as a bookkeeper for the co-operative, since I have some education. They were called co-operatives at first before the communes came. I had also to work many hours digging in the riverbank for the foundation of the pillars upon which the great bridge was to be built. You remember the cities facing each other there at Wu Han?"
"I remember," I said. ·"Even in those days there was the dream of a bridge connecting these cities. It remained a dream. The river there is wide and swift."
"It is wide and swift," the voice agreed.
"And the soil of the banks is clay, and in the dry season it is like rock. I had never done such work before. My wife worked with me. She also had never done such work before. We were so tired at night that we seldom even spoke. And all day long my old mother was alone in the house. She could not understand what had happened. After she saw my father die, she was never the same, you understand. Her brain was muddied, as one muddies a clear pool."
"I understand," I said. The words the voice used were "Hwen, t'ou hwen liao"- memory vague, thought confused.
The voice went on, quiet, gentle, patient. "Our problem was food. We had not enough to eat. Since my mother could not work, she had no food ration. Therefore my wife and I were compelled to share our food with her. It was not enough. We were always hungry, and my mother could not understand why she was hungry. She would say to us, 'Can you not buy me a little piece of pork?' She had been accustomed to good food, pork or fish every day and as much rice as she wished. Now we did not see these dishes, and pork we had not more than once a month and then only a fragment. We gave it to her, but she was still hungry and she thought we were to blame. We could not make her understand that we had only what food was given us. 'Why do we not buy a small pig?' she asked. 'We could feed it and then eat it ourselves when it is fat.' In the old days this was easy."
"I know," I said. "Every farmer had his own pig in those days, and chickens and perhaps a water buffalo or an ox."
"All these have been taken from us," the voice said. "We share, you understand, but this means we have nothing. Our wages are not given to us in full. Some is kept back, on deposit we are told, but we do not know where. Even the peasants, our former tenants, who expected so much after the landlords were killed, have nothing. The commune took away what little they had and gave nothing in return."
The voice broke off abruptly to cough. "You understand I am not complaining." "I understand," I said. The voice went on. "Of what use is it to complain? We can only bend as the reed bends when the wind is strong. We can only wait for the wind to die, so that we may stand straight again."
"The wind will die," I said. "Go on and tell your story. I do not want you to be caught here."
"The time came," the voice said, "when even the house was taken from us."
The long pause came again, and when the voice spoke it was in a lower and more mournful tone. "Let me be honest. If the house had not been taken from us, I do not know what we would have done. I had to be very careful. I was suspected because I was the son of a landowner. The sons of peasants and tenant farmers are trained in Communism and put in charge. Communism is all they know. They have no other learning. For this I do not blame them. They, too, are helpless. But had I made one misstep, I would have been killed, and my wife and mother with me. I had to think, night and day, of such a misstep. And my old mother, understanding nothing, put me in danger again and again. When we were away and some young official came by to spy on us, she received him as a guest, as she would have done in the old days, and she used our few ounces of tea leaves to make tea for him, or she added water to the rice my wife had set aside for our one meal of the day, and made a bowl of gruel for the guest. I was then suspected of hoarding. We were desperate, my wife and I. It is possible that had this gone on, we might have forgotten ourselves and put my mother to death to save us all. We might have done it. It has been done by others."
"I can quite understand how it might happen," I said, "though in the days past it would have been impossible. The son would have been considered a monster and would have been stoned to death by the villagers."
"Were there such days?" the voice inquired. "I have forgotten them. We have all forgotten them. Now we have the commune. They let us stay on in the small house until the new commune building was put up, but they took away our cooking utensils. We were compelled to eat in the central mess hall, and my wife was made one of the six cooks in the communal kitchens. My work is heavier than before-in the office in the mornings and digging in the afternoon. At night we must attend commune meetings until eleven o'clock. But I speak only of food. We have meal tickets, my wife and I, and my mother was not given a meal ticket, because she was not able to work. I went to the commander, a young man of twenty-one, the son of our village barber. He had joined the party now, and our lives were in his hands. All the commanders are young and of peasant families. They are overzealous in trying to please their new superiors, whom they fear. We all fear someone.
" 'Your mother must work,' the commander said in a big voice. "I told him that her brain was muddled. He said that even such a person could be of use. She could work in the nursery where the children are kept. So I took my old mother there, and for this reason I was able to get her a meal ticket. We were better off than before, so far as food goes; for my wife, being one of the cooks, could snatch a mouthful here and there, as all the cooks do. She can even wrap a bit of rice for me in a lotus leaf and hide it in her pocket.
"Things might have been well enough for such times as ours if it had not happened that the nursery was in our own old great house, where my mother had lived her woman's life. She was too muddy in her mind to know this, and yet by half-forgotten instinct she remembered her way around this house. True, it looks very different now. The trees have been cut down, and the gardens are ruined. It has been used for many purposes: at first a headquarters for the party and after that for a basket factory, and after that barracks for soldiers. Now that it is a nursery it would be hard to remember that once it was comfortable and even beautiful in its own country way. You have seen such houes."
"Many times," I said. "They are very beautiful, as you say, in their own way. They belong to the earth upon which they stand, and they have been shaped by generations of the same family."
The voice trembled slightly. "So it was with our house. My mother, I said, did not remember and yet she had not forgotten. Her poor brain made her believe that she was now reduced to being the lowest slave in this house full of children whom she supposed somehow to be the many children of our family. She followed the directress from room to room, telling her that once she had been mistress in this great house and that now she should not be a servant.
"The directress is a young woman, herself the daughter of a peasant, and she was impatient, as well as terrified, not only because my mother had been of the landlord class but also because she feared the retribution she would suffer if the old woman did not do her work well. She was angry because such a stupid old woman as my mother was assigned to help her. Still, I cannot say she was cruel-only impatient and afraid. All young men and women are that way now. They are forced to go very fast. But everything that is done is at a cost to the people."
The long pause fell again.
"My friend," I said. "It is very late."
The voice began immediately. "Still, we might have got along, except that one day a little boy of five years, or thereabouts, was brought into the nursery, crying. He was frail and sickly, and the moment my mother saw him she thought of her son who had died young. She began to love this child, and this was her great crime. She could not hide her love, and this was her great danger. Love is forbidden us. We are taught that love is a bourgeois weakness and destroys the whole purpose of the nurseries. Children must grow up thinking only of the group, not of any individual, not even of themselves.
"By the time children have been in the nursery for about four years they have learned what is called collective living. They learn this easily, but still sometimes the little ones cry at night for their mothers. This is a problem not yet solved. If an older child cries he can be punished. The only solution so far is work. The three-year-old children pull weeds; the older ones carry stones. They learn chants which teach them how to think. If one disobeys, he must do extra work.
"The boy whom my mother loved was, of course, among the disobedient. He had never worked and he could not keep from crying. My mother tried to help him carry stones, but this was forbidden, and she was threatened with being sent away. This frightened her, for by now she loved the child very much. She stayed away from him in the daytime, but at night she crept to him in the darkness and took him in her arms. She carried him to a corner in the fuel shed and there she held him until he slept. It was, of course, a great unkindness to him, for though she comforted him and made him happy she weakened him. He tried even less than before to do his work, and she, my mother, fell into a dream of confusion. She imagined herself a concubine again, with her little son, and that all the great household hated them, so that she had no friends-not one.
"One day when she was sweeping the floor of the fuel house, which was part of her work, her cloudy brain cleared for a moment and she remembered that when she was a concubine she had been given some jewels, and once during a riot she had hastily hidden them in a moment of fear in this very shed behind a brick in the wall and had forgotten them. As though she walked in her sleep she now went to that place and found the jewels as she had left them, but covered with dust. There were three pieces. I do not know what two of them were. They were of no value or I would have heard what they were. The third piece was valuable. It was a butterfly of filigree silver set with small good pearls. The workmanship was very fine. I saw it myself when she was put on trial. She took that piece and hid it in her bosom. All this was told at the trial.
"The next day it happened that the boy cut his hand. It was a bad cut. I saw that, too, at the trial. It was slashed in the palm. He had been given a sharp tool to dig weeds. We had had no rain for many weeks and the earth was like iron. The tool slipped as he pressed upon the handle He was taken to the infirmary, of course, and raw disinfectant poured into the wound. There are many sick children, there are always many, and the attendants are harassed and busy and no one had time to comfort him. My old mother crept to him and led him away, and no one paid any heed among so many children. She led him to the fuel shed and there, behind the bundles of reeds, she showed him the silver butterfly to comfort him. 'See how pretty,' she whispered. 'This is your butterfly. I will keep it for you, so that no one can take it from you; but it is yours. We will look at it every night. Here, take it in your hand.'
“The child had never seen a beautiful thing. He stopped crying and held the butterfly. He looked at it and smiled. This my mother told quite plainly at the trial. We were surprised that she remembered so well. Every night they looked at the butterfly. She told him, of course, not to speak to anyone; but he was a child, and how could he help telling another child? The butterfly was discovered. As a matter of fact, the child persuaded my mother to let him keep it, just for a day, and having it in his possession he showed it secretly to another boy, who told the directress. Those who reported such deviations were rewarded with a bit of sugar.
The authorities were called. The little boy was compelled to tell the truth. For truth he was beaten severely. The sin was that he should want something that the others did not have and could not have. He had become a deviationist. He was then not quite six years old.
"The authorities now fell upon my mother. They demanded the truth, and she gave it quite simply. No one believed her. Five years ago she would have been killed for such deviation. Now she was only sentenced to be denounced at the next meeting of our commune. To be denounced is nevertheless very hard to bear."
The voice broke off. There was the sound of a stifled sob. I waited. What was there to say? The voice went on.
"On the day of the meeting I hid myself in the crowd. There I waited. I knew what was to happen. I had seen it often before. But this was my old mother. She was led out of the inner room and she stood before us. Her hands were tied behind her. The young commander shouted her crime in a loud voice. And we who stood about her were required to shout at her, too, to accuse her, to shake our fists at her and denounce her. This must go on until finally we must demand her life. And I-I had to shout the loudest of all. They were all watching me to see whether there was any sign of love in my voice for my mother. I had to shout more loudly than any of them. She kept smiling all the time. I think she could not understand any of it. She turned her head this way and that, smiling, not understanding. She did not see me. I stayed as far from her as I could.
"The worst was when she was compelled, as all are when denounced, to walk down from the dais and through the crowd, and the crowd must strike and slap her cheeks and kick her. My mother walked through the crowd, her hands tied behind her back, and they slapped her cheeks and struck her shoulders. She fell down, for she was very thin; in her youth her feet had been bound and she could not walk well even when she was strong. Now she had no strength. When she fell, it was time to kick her. Everybody was watching me, and I was afraid. I stepped forward to do what I had to do. In that moment she looked up and saw me. She recognized me. When I saw that she knew me, I tried to look angry. She was bewildered for a moment and then she smiled. She understood -"
The voice wavered and fell.
"Is that the end?" I asked.
"No," the voice said, "but there is an end. It seems that when she was released, she went back to the child. It was evening. He was lying on his cot alone. The others were eating their night meal in the mess hall. The boy, too, had been beaten; he too had been denounced by his own age group. They are taught so. She took him in her arms and held him. She coaxed him to come with her to the shed. You may wonder how I know this. It is from my wife. She had stayed in the kitchens during the meeting to cook the evening meal, she said-a pretense, but it served. While the people of the commune ate their supper, she stole away to the nursery. She saw my mother come in and put her arms about the child.
"My mother talked to the child softly. She said something like this: 'You see, my child, I am now a burden to my son. He is obliged to strike me. I cannot help him by living. I see this. So come with me, my child, my little one. Let us go to a better place.'
"The child's lips were swollen and purple, but he spoke quite clearly. 'Where is the silver butterfly?' he asked.
"'Come with me,' my mother said. 'We will go to the river. There are many butterflies there. They gather at the water to drink, live butterflies, real ones.'
"My wife watched my mother lead the child away. She followed them through the twilight, down to the river's edge. My mother took the little boy in her arms and he clung to her neck and put his head on her shoulder. She walked with him out into the quiet water. There was no wind that evening and no waves. Prom behind a clump of willows my wife watched. My mother walked into the water until it covered her head and the child's head and she did not step back. That was the end."
"And your wife?" I asked. "She did nothing?"
The voice replied. "My wife is a kind woman. She did nothing."
The silence was long now. Who could speak ? Yet even silence must come to an end, else it cannot be borne.
"What of the bridge?" I asked.
The voice spoke again, and to my surprise it was a different voice, though surely the same man. The voice was suddenly calm.
"The bridge is finished. It is strong and very wide, like your American bridges. It has four lanes, two from north to south, two from south to north, so that vehicles and people travel both ways at once."
"Some of our bridges, have six lanes," I said.
The voice was quick to reply. "I hear that two new lanes will be added also to our bridge."
"Remarkable," I said, "especially when it spans such a river. We have no river so swift or wide. You must be very proud of the bridge."
The answer came bravely. "Oh, yes. We are proud-of the bridge, that is. But-"
The voice broke off. Silence mounted between us again, this time a barrier not to be broken. For he was gone-to hide in some secret refugee room in the city, or to return to that from which he had escaped? Who knows? THE END
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Fact or Fiction?
When we first read this story by the famous Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of THE GOOD EARTH and other novels, we did not know whether it was a report of actual events or invention. So we asked Miss Buck. She replied that THE SILVER BUTTERFLY is a work of fiction-but closely based on fact.
The Editors
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