Pavilion of Women: A Novel of Life in the Women's Quarters (11 page)

“What all men know,” Madame Wu now asked herself, “ought not a woman to know?”

She chose a book at random. It was a long book. Many thin volumes lay in the clothbound box. The name of the book she had heard. Among the many women in a house as large as her mother’s and as large as the Wu house, there were always some who were coarse in their talk. The story of Hsi Men Ch’ing and his six wives all had heard in one way or another.
Plum Flower in a Vase of Gold
—the letters were here delicately brushed on the satin cover of this first volume.

“The books look often read,” she thought and smiled with a fleeting bitter mirth. Generations of men of the Wu house had read them, doubtless, but perhaps she was the first woman who had ever held them in her hand.

She took them to the table and looked first at the pictures. An artist had drawn them. There was profound art in the sensuous lines. She studied especially the face of Hsi Men Ch’ing himself. The artist had outdone himself in describing through pictures the decay of man. The young handsome joyous face of Hsi Men Ch’ing, who had found the expression of his youth in love of women’s flesh, had grown loathsome as the face of a man dead by drowning and bloated with decay. Madame Wu gazed thoughtfully at each picture and perceived the deep meaning of the story. It was the story of a man who lived without his mind or spirit. It was the story of a man’s body, in which his soul struggled, starved, and died.

She began to read. The hours passed. She heard Ying stirring about in the other room, but she did not know that Ying looked in at the door and stared at her and went away again. She became aware of the time only when darkness stole into the room and she could no longer see. Then she looked about as though she did not know where she was.

“I ought not to have obeyed Old Gentleman,” she murmured half-aloud. “I should have read this book long ago.” But now she had stopped reading she did not want to begin it again. She was surfeited and sick. She bound the volumes together into the box and slipped the small ivory catch into its loop and set it on the shelves again. Then she put her hands to her cheeks, and thus she walked back and forth the length of the room. No, it was better, she thought, that she had not read this book when she was young. Now that she had put it into its cover again she saw that it was a very evil book. For such was the genius of the writer that the reader could find in this book whatever he wanted. For those who wanted evil, it was all evil. For those who were wise, it was a book of most sorrowful wisdom. But Old Gentleman was right. Such a book ought not to be put into the hands of the young. Even she, had she read it twenty years ago, could she have understood the wisdom? Would she not rather have been so sickened that she could not have gone willingly to bed at night? Old Gentleman was still the wisest soul. The very young are not ready for much knowledge. It must be given to them slowly, in proportion to their years of life. One must first live before he can safely know.

It was at this moment of her musing that Ying stood at the door again. Her solid shadow was black against the gray of the twilight. In the court behind her was another shadow.

Ying spoke. “Lady, the old woman Liu has come—the girl is here.”

Madame Wu’s hands flew to her cheeks again. For an instant she did not answer. Then she took her hands away. She moved to the chair and sat down.

“Light the candle,” she commanded Ying, “and bring her here alone. I will not see the old woman.”

Ying moved aside in silence, and at the door Madame Wu saw the girl. The candlelight fell on her full but gently. Madame Wu saw almost exactly the face she had imagined and almost exactly the figure. A healthy, red-cheeked girl gazed back at her with round childlike eyes, large and very black. Her black hair was coiled at her neck and fell over her forehead in a fringe, in the fashion of a countrywoman. She held a knotted kerchief in her hand.

“What is that in your hand?” Madame Wu asked. “I told them you were to bring nothing.” The girl looked so innocent, so childlike, that she could only speak these simple words.

“I brought you some eggs,” the girl answered. “I thought you might like them, and I had nothing else. They are very fresh.” She had a pleasant voice, hearty but a little shy.

“Come here, let me see the eggs,” Madame Wu said.

The girl came forward somewhat timidly, tiptoeing as though she feared she might make a noise in the intense quiet of the room. Madame Wu looked down at her feet. “I see your feet have not been bound,” she said.

The girl looked abashed. “There was no one to bind them,” she replied. “Besides, I have always had to work in the fields.”

Ying spoke. “She has very big feet, Lady. Doubtless she has gone barefoot as country children do, and her feet have grown coarse.”

The girl stood looking anxiously from Ying’s face to Madame Wu.

“Come, show me the eggs,” Madame Wu commanded her again.

The girl came forward then and put the bundle on the table carefully. Then she untied the kerchief and picked up each egg and examined it. “Not one is broken,” she exclaimed. “I was afraid that I might stumble in the darkness and crush them. There are fifteen—”

She paused, and Madame Wu understood that she did not know what or how to address her.

“You may call me Elder Sister,” she said.

But the girl was too shy for this. She repeated, “Fifteen eggs and not one is older than seven days. They are for you to eat.”

“Thank you,” Madame Wu said. “They do look very fresh.”

She had already perceived several things about this girl as she stood near her. Her breath was sweet and clean, and from her flesh there came only the odors of health. Her teeth were sound and white. The hands that had untied the kerchief were brown and rough but well-shaped. Under the washed blue cotton coat and trousers, the girl’s body was rounded without fat. Her neck was smooth, and her face was innocently pretty.

Madame Wu could not keep from smiling at her. “Do you think you would like to stay here?” she asked. She felt a little pity for this young creature, bought like an animal from a farmer. She discovered in her something delicate and good in spite of her sunburned cheeks and rough garments.

The girl perceived this kindness and into her dark, clear eyes there sprang a light of instant devotion. “Liu Ma told me you are good. She said you are not like other women. She told me to please you first above all, and that is what I will do.” She had an eager, fresh voice.

“Then you must tell me all you can remember about your life,” Madame Wu replied. “You must hide nothing at all. If you are honest, I shall like you very much.” She perceived the devotion and felt, to her own surprise, a pang of something like guilt.

“I will tell you everything,” the girl promised. “But first shall I not take the eggs to the kitchen?”

“No,” Madame Wu said, hiding a smile at this. How astonished would the servants be at such a visitor! “Ying will take them to the kitchen. You must sit down there in that chair across from me, and we will talk.”

The girl tied up the eggs and sat down on the edge of the chair. But she looked somehow distressed.

“Are you hungry?” Madame Wu asked.

“No, thank you,” the girl said carefully. She sat straight, looking before her, her hands folded.

Madame Wu smiled again. “Come, you are to be honest,” she said. “Are you not hungry?”

The girl laughed suddenly, a quick burst of rippling laughter. “I am a bone,” she said frankly. “I cannot lie even to be polite. But Liu Ma told me I must say, ‘No, thank you’ if you asked me if I were hungry, lest I seem greedy at the first moment.”

“Did you not eat your supper before you came?” Madame Wu inquired.

The girl flushed. “We have not much food,” she said. “My foster mother said—my foster mother thought—”

Madame Wu interrupted her. “Ying!” she commanded, “bring food.”

The girl sighed. Her body relaxed, and she turned so that she might face Madame Wu. But she did not look at her.

If she had a fault, Madame Wu thought, it was that she was a little too big in frame. This must mean that she had come of northern blood. It might be that her family had been refugees from some disaster, a flood, perhaps of the Yellow River, or a famine, and they had been compelled to put a girl child out to die.

“Liu Ma told me you were an orphan,” Madame Wu said aloud. “Do you know anything of your own family?”

The girl shook her head. “I was newborn when they left me. I know the place where they laid me down, for my foster mother has pointed it out to me many times when we have come to the city market. But she told me there was no sign on me of any kind, except that I was not wrapped in cotton, but in silk. It was only ragged silk.”

“Do you have that silk?” Madame Wu asked now.

The girl nodded again. “How did you know?” she asked with naive surprise.

“I thought you would want to bring with you the only thing that was your own,” Madame Wu said. She smiled in answer to the girl’s round eyes.

“But how do you know the heart of a stranger?” the girl persisted.

“Show me the silk,” Madame Wu replied. She had no wish to tell this girl the ways of intuitive knowledge which were hers.

Without hesitation, as though she had indeed made up her mind to obey Madame Wu in all things, the girl put her hand in her bosom and brought out a folded piece of silk. It was washed and clean, but faded from its first red to a rose color. Madame Wu took it and unfolded it. It was a woman’s garment, a short coat, slender in width but long-sleeved.

“If this was your mother’s she, too, was tall,” Madame Wu observed.

“You know that!” the girl exclaimed.

Madame Wu examined the embroidery. The garment was old-fashioned, and a band of embroidery was stitched around the collar and down the side opening. The same bands went around the wide sleeves.

“It is delicate embroidery,” Madame Wu said, “and it is done in a Peking stitch of small knots.”

“You tell me more than I have ever known,” the girl said under her breath.

“But that is all I can tell you,” Madame Wu said. She folded the garment again and held it out to the girl.

But the girl did not put out her hands to receive it. “You keep it for me,” she said. “I do not need it here.”

“I will keep it if you like,” Madame Wu said. “But if you find later that you want it again, I will return it to you.”

“If you let me stay here,” the girl replied with pleading in her voice, “I shall never want it again.”

But Madame Wu was not ready yet to give her promise. “You have not even told me your name,” she said.

The girl’s face changed as plainly as a disappointed child’s. “I have no real name,” she said humbly. “My foster parents never raised me a name. They cannot read and write, and I cannot either.”

“But they called you something,” Madame Wu said.

“They called me Little Orphan when I was small and Big Orphan when I was big,” the girl said.

“That, of course, is no name,” Madame Wu agreed gently. “When I know you better I will give you a name.”

“I thank you,” the girl said humbly.

At this moment Ying came in with two bowls of food and set them on the table. Madame Wu looked into each bowl as she put it down. If Ying had brought servant’s food, she would have sent it back. But Ying had been sensible. She had brought dishes not quite good enough for the family, but certainly too good for the kitchen. She put down a bowl of broth with chicken balls in it and a dish of pork and cabbage. A small wooden bucket of rice she had brought also, and a pot of tea and a tea bowl and chopsticks. The chopsticks were not the family ones of ivory and silver nor the common bamboo ones of the kitchens. They were of red painted wood such as the children used.

“Serve her,” Madame Wu commanded.

Ying had hesitated, but now she obeyed, her lips tight and silent.

But the girl noticed nothing. She accepted the bowl of rice from Ying with both hands, rising a little from her seat in country courtesy, and thinking everything was too much. Indeed, Madame Wu soon saw the girl was torn between honest hunger and the wish to be polite, and so she rose and made an excuse to leave her alone.

“I shall return in a little while,” she said. “Meanwhile eat heartily.”

With these words she went away into her sitting room. There stood the bamboo bed which Ying had prepared for the girl. Madame Wu looked down on it thoughtfully. She would let the girl sleep here a few nights. She ought even, perhaps, to keep her here until the girl understood her place in the family and until she, too, understood the girl. There must be some deep accord established between them before she released her from this court to enter the other, else trouble might arise in the house. She was doing a delicate and difficult thing, and it must be done skillfully. She stood, her thumb and finger at her lower lip. When she had been a girl she had liked in the spring to help with the making of silk on the family lands. After the silkworms had spun their cocoons, there came a certain moment, sure but swiftly passing, when the cocoons must be put into tubs of hot water lest they turn to moths and gnaw the cocoons. She could divine that moment. The farm wives had marveled at her discernment. She remembered now the size of her certainty, out of nothing and yet of everything.

“Now,” she would declare, and the sprays of rice straw to which the cocoons clung were plunged into the tubs. Then she, too, with her delicate, feeling fingers would find the wet fine end of the silk and unwind the cocoons. The old divination stirred again. Her delicacy must not fail her, lest Mr. Wu reproach her as long as she lived.

She moved from this room into her own bedroom and walked slowly back and forth, her satin-shod feet noiseless on the smooth tiles.

The girl seemed as open as a child. All her heart and nature lay revealed to anyone. But this meant she was undeveloped, and how would she develop? She was not a fool. Her eyes were quick with intelligence. Her lips were tender in their fullness. Was she perhaps too intelligent? There was also the silk garment and the fine embroidery. Her blood was not common, unless perhaps the mother had been a maidservant in a rich family. Yes, there was a possibility that this girl was the child of a maidservant in such a family, gotten with child by one of the sons, perhaps, and this garment had been given out of the discard of her mistress. Or it might be that some teahouse girl had worn such a garment and had given it to a child, unwanted.