Pavilion of Women: A Novel of Life in the Women's Quarters (46 page)

“What graces he had I did not know, and now can never know,” she had often thought to herself.

“How is my second sister-in-law?” Fengmo asked next.

“Rulan is silent,” Madame Wu said. “When I have time I shall discover a way for her to live. She is too young to become like a nun.”

“She will not marry again, surely?” Fengmo asked.

“If she will, I will help her,” Madame Wu said.

This astonished Fengmo a good deal. He would not have imagined that his mother could put a woman above the family.

Seeing his surprise, Madame Wu continued in her soft way, “I have learned as I have grown older,” she said. “If the springs within are not clear, then life is not good. And I have learned that there is a debt due to every soul, and this is the right to its own true happiness.”

“That is what Brother André used to say,” Fengmo said suddenly. Mother and son, by these words they felt themselves drawn together, as though by some power or presence they did not see.

“Mother, do you remember Brother André?” Fengmo asked her.

Madame Wu hesitated. How much should she say, tell how much? Her old diffidence fell on her. No, the silence between the generations must not be wholly broken. Life itself had created the difference, and time had hung the veil. It was not for her to change the eternal. She and André were on one side and Fengmo was on the other.

“I do remember him.” This was all she said.

But if Fengmo felt himself separated, he did not show it. “Mother, he changed me very much,” he said in a low voice. He gazed at André’s empty chair. “He made me understand true happiness. He showed me my own soul. And that is why I have come home.”

She did not speak. She heard a quiver in her son’s voice and she knew that even her answer would be too much for him. She smiled her lovely smile, she folded her hands on her lap, she waited, inviting him by her readiness to listen.

“No one will understand why I came home suddenly,” he began. “They will ask and I cannot tell them. I do not know how to tell them. But I want to tell you, Mother. It was you who brought Brother André into this house.”

She had so profound a surety of André’s presence, though perhaps only through her memory, that she dared not speak. No, André was here not because she remembered him but because she loved him.

“Mother!” Fengmo cried her name. He lifted his head and forced himself to speak quickly, to push the words and have them said. “I came home because I learned to love a foreign woman over there, and she loved me and we parted from each other.”

Had Madame Wu been her old self, she would have cried out her indignation. Now she said gently, “What sorrow, my son!”

Yes, she knew what sorrow.

“You understand!” Fengmo exclaimed with the amazement of youth at age.

He had grown very much. He was taller by inches, thin and straight as Old Gentleman had been, Madame Wu now saw. Indeed, she perceived what she had never seen before, that Fengmo was not at all like his father, but he was very like his grandfather. The same sternness sat on his features, the same gravity shone in his eyes. He was handsome, but grave. Liangmo’s placid good looks and Tsemo’s bold beauty were not here. Fengmo looked like a young scholar.

“I learn as I grow older,” Madame Wu said.

“Ah, Mother,” Fengmo breathed in a sigh. “I wondered if there would be anyone in this house who could understand.” Now that he could trust her, the story poured out of him. “She was one of the students, like me. Men and women study together over there. She was lit with wonder and curiosity. She sought me out, not boldly, you know, Mother, but because she said she had never seen anyone like me. She asked me hundreds of questions about us, about our country and our home, and I found myself telling her everything, even about myself. And she told me of her life. We knew each other so well—so quickly.”

“And at last you had to tell her about Linyi,” Madame Wu said gently.

Shadow fell between him and the sun. His shoulders drooped, he turned his face away. “I had to tell her,” he said simply, “and then I had to come home.”

“To put the sea between you,” Madame Wu said in the same voice.

“To put everything between us,” he agreed.

She sat in the calm stillness so usual to her. André had nurtured her son’s soul and had made it exceedingly tender and quick toward good. She yearned over him, she longed for him to be happy, and yet this son was not like other men. He could not find happiness in women nor in his own body. When she had asked André to be his teacher she had asked blindly, seeing only a shallow step ahead. She had touched a lock, half turned the key, but a wide gate had opened under her hand, and her son had gone through to that new world.

Had he come home again? Had he closed the gate behind him and turned the key and made fast the lock once more?

“And now,” she said, “and now, my son, what will you do?”

“I have come home,” he said. “I shall never go away again. I shall make my life here somehow.”

They sat in silence, the long silence of two understanding each other.

“You must help Linyi, my son,” she said.

“I know that,” he said. “I have thought very much of her. I owe her very much.”

“You must find a way to need her,” Madame Wu went on. “You must ask for her help in any small thing you have to do. Ask her to care for your things and sort your books and fetch your tea. Do nothing for yourself, my son, that she can do, so that she may be busy and never know anything else.”

“I will,” he promised.

And so they sat, and would have sat another long space, so comforting were they, mother and son, to each other, except that Ch’iuming chose this moment to come and make a request of Madame Wu which had long been in her mind to make.

All these months that she had been living with Rulan Ch’iuming had listened to the young widow’s sorrowing talk about her love for her dead husband. And the more she listened to Rulan the more Ch’iuming found her thoughts turning to Fengmo, and the more she knew that she must leave the house and take her child and go away. Yet where could she go?

One night, when Rulan had not been able to sleep and when they had talked long of the things which are deepest in women’s hearts, Ch’iuming broke her own vow of silence and told Rulan of her love for Fengmo.

“I am wicked,” she told Rulan. “I allow myself to think of him.”

Rulan had listened to her with burning attention. She threw back her hair from her shoulders. “Oh, I wish you and I could get out of this house,” she cried. “Here we are all locked behind these high walls. The family preys upon itself. We love where we should not and we hate where we should not. We are all too near to one another while we hate and we love.”

“Are we not safe behind these walls?” Ch’iuming asked. She was always a little timid before Rulan, admiring while she feared her boldness.

“We are not safe from one another,” Rulan had retorted.

It was at this moment that the same thought had come to them both. Eyes stared into eyes.

“Why should we stay?” Rulan had asked.

“How dare we go?” Ch’iuming had asked.

And then they had begun to plot. Ch’iuming would ask first to be allowed to live in the ancestral village. To her old village she could not return, for it would appear that the Wu family had sent her out, and this even Madame Wu would never allow. But she would ask to go and live in a Wu village, and then when Madame Wu demurred that a young woman should not live alone in a farmer’s village, she would ask for Rulan. And when Rulan had to speak for herself, she would say that she wanted to begin a school for young children in the village as a good work for her widowhood. Everyone knew that widows should make good works. This conclusion they had reached after much talk, for Rulan wanted to go immediately and speak out for herself. But Ch’iuming pointed out the discourtesy of this, for how could Madame Wu, if she was unwilling, be put to the difficulty of refusing her daughter-in-law to her face? It was better for Ch’iuming to go first and take the brunt of refusal if it must come. Then there need be no difference between Madame Wu and her daughter-in-law.

This Rulan cried out against as being old-fashioned, but Ch’iuming declared it to be only decency, and so it was settled.

Now, Ch’iuming knew well enough where Fengmo was, but she had decided in her own mind that she would approach Madame Wu in his presence and would greet him only in Madame Wu’s presence, and never would she speak to him otherwise. So she dressed her child in a clean red dress and washed the little creature’s hands and face and painted a red spot between her brows and braided her hair and tied the ends with new red yarn, and with the child, who was now a very fair fat little girl; she appeared unannounced.

Thus Madame Wu looked to the door and saw Ch’iuming. It was late afternoon, for Fengmo had come home in the morning. The sun had left the court, but it was filled with mellow light, and in this Ch’iuming stood, her child in her arms. She looked almost beautiful, and Madame Wu saw this, to her dismay. Ch’iuming’s love, secret and unrequited though it was, had made her soft and alive. She looked quickly at her son to know what he saw. But he saw now nothing. Ch’iuming greeted Fengmo carefully.

“Ah, our Third Sir, you have come home,” she said.

Fengmo answered as simply, “Yes, yes. Are you well?”

“I am well,” Ch’iuming replied.

She looked at him once and then did not look at him again. Instead she said to Madame Wu, “Our Lady, may I ask a favor even now, and not be held too coarse for disturbing you?”

Madame Wu knew that Ch’iuming must have a purpose in coming at this time, and so she inclined her head. “Sit down and let the heavy child stand on her own feet,” she said.

So Ch’iuming, blushing very much, did as she was told. She asked for the favor, and Madame Wu listened.

“Very good,” she said, “very good.”

She comprehended at once the purpose that Ch’iuming had in coming here at this time. Ch’iuming wished to make clear to Madame Wu that she wanted to retire from this house now that Fengmo had come home, and to disturb nothing in the family. Madame Wu was grateful for such goodness.

When Madame Wu’s permission was given, Ch’iuming then asked for Rulan also. “Since the family mourning is over, and since her own mourning can never cease, she wishes to ease her sorrow by good works,” Ch’iuming said. “She wishes to make a school for the children of the farmers.”

At this Fengmo, who had been staring down at the floor, looked up astonished. “That,” he declared, “is what I have come home to do.”

Here was confusion! Ch’iuming was aghast and Madame Wu confounded.

“You said nothing of this, my son,” she exclaimed with silvery sharpness.

“I had not reached the point,” Fengmo declared. “After what happened, it became necessary to consider what work I could do.”

Madame Wu held up one narrow hand. “Wait,” she commanded him. She turned to Ch’iuming. “Have you any other request?” she asked kindly.

“None,” Ch’iuming replied.

“Then you have my permission to go, you and Rulan also,” Madame Wu said. “I will call the steward in a few days and bid him find suitable houses for living and school, and you shall go when you like after that. But you will need special furniture, better than what is usually in a farmhouse, as well as other goods. Decide what you need, and I will tell Ying to prepare it. You will need, two maids with you and a cook. The head cook can send one of the undercooks with you.”

At this Fengmo spoke again. “If they live in the village they should not live too far above the others there, or they will be lonely.”

Ch’iuming threw him a soft quick look and did not speak. She was surprised that he could know this, who all his life had lived in a rich house. How did he know what common people felt? Then she put the question away. It was not for her ever to ask a question about him.

She rose and lifted up her child and thanked Madame Wu and went away. Rulan waited for her, and as soon as she heard the permission she and Ch’iuming began to plan their new lives with more joy than could have been possible to them even yesterday.

In the room which Ch’iuming had left, Madame Wu spoke to her son. “Explain your heart to me,” she commanded him.

He rose and walked restlessly to the open door and stood looking out. The quietness of coming night was in the walled space. Here the seasons came, even as they did over the whole world.

“It is necessary for me to devote myself,” he said. “So much Brother André taught me. If I am not to devote myself to one thing, it must be to another. After I left here I cast about for devotion. Religion is not for me, Mother. I am no priest. As far as a man can go, Brother André taught me, but not beyond.”

“Good, my son,” Madame Wu said, and waited.

He sat down again. “The way was shown me entirely by accident,” Fengmo went on. He drew out of his pockets some foreign tobacco and a short foreign pipe and filled it and began to smoke. Madame Wu had not seen these before, but she would not allow her curiosity to interrupt him.

“There was in the city where I lived over there a laundry man of our own race,” Fengmo told her. “I took my clothes to him every few days to be washed.”

Madame Wu looked surprised. “Did he wash clothes for others?” she asked.

“For many,” Fengmo replied. “It was his trade.”

“Do you tell me he even washed the clothes of the foreigners?” Madame Wu inquired next with some indignation.

Fengmo laughed. “Somebody has to wash clothes,” he said.

But Madame Wu did not laugh. “Certainly our people ought not to wash the soiled garments of foreigners,” she said. She was displeased and forgot what Fengmo was about to say.

He tried to soothe her. “Well, well—” he said. Then he went on, “The man was not from our province but from the south. One day when I went to fetch my clothes—”

“You fetched your own clothes!” Madame Wu repeated. “Had you no servant?”

“No, Mother, over there none of us had servants.”

She restrained her curiosity again. “I see it is a very strange country and you must tell me more of it later. Go on, my son,” she commanded him.