A House Divided by Pearl S. Buck Page A

them what one might tell to Yuan alone.
    And now this school began to be the great pastime of Yuan’s days, for he truly did love learning. He bought his great heap of new books and held them piled beneath his arms, and he bought pencils and at last he proudly bought a foreign pen such as all the other students had, and fastened it upon his coat’s edge, and he laid aside forever his old brush, except when he wrote to his father once a month.
    All the books were magic to Yuan. He turned their clean, unknown pages eagerly, and he longed to print each word upon his mind, and learn and learn for very love of learning. He rose at dawn if he could wake and read his books, and he memorized the things he did not understand; whole pages he put to his memory like this. And when he had eaten his early breakfast—solitary, because neither Ai-lan nor his mother rose as soon as he did on school days, he rushed off, walking through the still half-empty streets and was the first to reach his classrooms always. And if a teacher came a little early, too, then Yuan took it as a chance for learning and he overcame his shyness and put what questions that he could. If sometimes a teacher did not come at all, then Yuan did not, as the common students did, rejoice in an hour for holiday. No, rather he took it as a loss he could not happily bear, and spent the hour in studying what the teacher might have taught.
    This learning was the sweetest pastime therefore to Yuan. He could not learn enough of history of all the countries of the world, of foreign stories and of verses, of studies of the flesh of beasts; most of all he loved to study the inner shapes of leaves and seeds and roots of plants, to know how the rain and sun can mold the soil, to learn when to plant a certain crop, and how select its seeds, and how increase its harvest. All this and much more did Yuan learn. He begrudged himself the time for food and sleep except that his great lad’s body was always hungry, too, and needing food and sleep. But this the lady mother watched, and while she said nothing, yet she watched him, although he scarcely knew it, and she saw to it that certain dishes which he loved were often set before him.
    He saw his cousins often, too, and they were daily more a part of Yuan’s life, for Sheng was in a classroom with him, and often had his verses or his writing read aloud and praised. At such times Yuan looked with humble envy at him, and wished his verses were as smoothly rhymed, although Sheng looked down most modestly and pretended it was nothing to him to be praised. And he might have been believed, except that on his pretty mouth a little smile of pride sat very often and betrayed him when he did not know it. As for Yuan, at this time he wrote very little verse, because he lived too occupied for any dreaming, and if he did write, the words came roughly and he could not make them grouped and as they used to be. It seemed to him that his thoughts were too big for him, unshaped, not easily to be grasped and caught into a form of words. Even when he smoothed and polished and wrote them over many times, his old scholar teacher often said, “It interests me, it is fair enough, but I do not catch just what you mean.”
    Thus he paused one day when Yuan had written a poem about a seed, and Yuan could not say what his meaning was exactly, either, and he stammered out, “I meant—I think I meant to say that in the seed, in that last atom of the seed, when it is cast into the ground, there is an instant, a place perhaps, when seed becomes no longer matter, but a sort of spirit, an energy, a kind of life, a moment between spirit and material, and if we could catch that transmuting instant, when the seed begins to grow, understand the change—”
    “Ah, yes,” the teacher said, doubtfully. A kindly, aged man he was who kept his spectacles low on his nose and stared across them now at Yuan. He had taught so many years he knew exactly what he wanted and so