Pavilion of Women: A Novel of Life in the Women's Quarters (28 page)

“You must go into your husband’s house this very day,” Madame Kang declared. And as eagerly as she had once taken Linyi back, she now sent her forth again. Linyi went in silence. She was not stupid, and clearly enough she felt the change in her own mother. She knew that she had been put out of her heaven and earth. Her heart smarted, and silently she went back into Fengmo’s court. He had been exceedingly busy preparing for his going. But since he knew he was to be freed, he was gay and careless to her. It did not now matter greatly whether she were here or not since he was leaving the house.

“I have come back,” she had said to him.

He did not say he was glad, she did not ask if he were. Neither expected the other’s love. She helped him with new docility to fold his garments, and she dusted his books. At night they slept together. He took her and she yielded, partly for duty’s sake to the house, partly because they were young and hungry. In the morning they had parted still without speech. For decency’s sake she did not go outside the court.

“Until we meet!” he had said.

“Heaven give you safe journeying,” she had replied, and stood leaning against the door to watch him while he went. Some faint uncertainty shook her heart from its middle place in her breast, but she was not ready to see any fault in herself.

“I am still sleepy,” she thought, and yawned widely, and without hiding her red mouth she returned to the big bed and rolled into the silk quilts and slept like a little chrysalis.

From this sleep Madame Wu awakened her as soon as Fengmo was gone. “Come, Linyi,” she said, “you have slept long enough. Now you must wake and begin your education.”

“My education?” Linyi faltered.

“You will learn cooking and embroidery in the morning,” Madame Wu said. “Elder Cousin will teach you. Then for an hour before the noon meal you will come to me, and I will teach you the classics. In the afternoon Brother André will teach you foreign languages. In the evening you will help the maids to put the children to bed. You must learn how to care for children.”

Linyi looked up out of the quilt. Her big eyes were startled, and her soft hair was all awry. “Now?” she asked.

“Now, at once,” Madame Wu said firmly. She held a thin bamboo cane in her hand, and she tapped this on the floor. “Wash yourself,” she said. “Brush your hair. Then come to me.”

She went back to her own courts, her mouth set too grimly for its own beauty. “I do this for Fengmo,” she thought. “Then when this is done I can think again about my own freedom.”

But because she did not trust Linyi she stayed by her that afternoon when Brother André came. Linyi must not be idle. Then, too, for the sake of honor she herself must supervise the hours this foreign priest was with her own daughter-in-law in her son’s absence. She knew that Brother André was a soul, but who else but her would believe the big body was only a husk ?

In this way every day she sat in the highest seat in the library, her dragonheaded cane, which she carried now that Old Lady was dead, between her hands. She listened to everything Brother André taught Linyi. But while the girl plodded unwillingly along the hard part of learning, Madame Wu’s mind flew ahead and wandered into a hundred bypaths of wonder.

Thus she came to know how the earth and the seas are gathered into a great ball swinging among the stars and planets, and she understood the paths of sun and moon, the passage of winds and clouds. But these were as nothing to her wonder when she came to understand the tongues of man. For she liked to do this: she chose a word, such a word as life, or death, as love, hatred, food, air, water, hunger, sleep, house, flower, tree, grass, bird, and she learned this word through all the languages which Brother André knew. These languages were the voices of mankind. She learned everything with the excuse of helping Linyi to learn.

And as she learned, all the things which had occupied her life came to have meaning. In the past she had sometimes wondered why she should spend herself in the continued round of birth and death and birth again. Within these four walls, as man begot and woman conceived in order that the house of Wu might not perish, sometimes she had asked herself what it mattered if one house died. In a year when too many girls were born, in a year when an idiot was dropped too early from a womb, she had often been disheartened. Especially in the years when she had only looked forward to her fortieth birthday had she refused to answer the questioning of her own soul. Little Sister Hsia on one of those days had chanced to be there.

“May I read you from the blessed book, Madame?” Little Sister had asked.

Madame Wu had been weary to the bone that day, for in addition to all else she had known that she was pregnant again. But she was always too courteous to refuse a guest. “If it is your pleasure, read,” she had replied.

Then Little Sister Hsia had taken out her sacred book, and she had read aloud in her broken childish fashion words like these:

“What is man that thou art mindful of him and the son of man that thou rememberest him ? For the days of man are as grass—”

“Stop!” Madame Wu had cried.

Her voice had burst out of her, and so unusual was this that Little Sister Hsia had stared at her.

“Are these words to comfort a soul?” Madame Wu had demanded. “Are these the words of a god? Rather, I say, of a devil! If I should listen to these words, Little Sister, I would hang myself. Read me no more from your book, lest I cannot live.”

But she had brooded over the words, and she remembered them now. Yes, it was true. Man’s flesh was as grass. When her child had been born dead, she had remembered the words as she held the small, still body in her arms. But today, as she listened to the voices of mankind crying out in different tongues but always the same word, she felt in herself a new wonder.

“Do all men also cry out a word for God?” she asked Brother André.

“All men,” he replied gravely, and then he rolled out sonorous syllables that struck upon her ears like drums. “God—God—God—God—” in twenty tongues, and all the tongues of man.

“From all over the earth we cry out to Old Heaven,” she said musingly, and the drums echoed in her soul.

On such nights she could not sleep. In silence she allowed Ying to prepare her, and she climbed into the high redwood platform of the bed. Behind the silk curtains she gave herself up to her soul and meditated on the meaning of all she had learned. Brother André came to be for her a well, wide and deep, a well of learning and knowledge. In the night she thought of scores of questions to which she wanted answers. Sometimes when her memory grew burdened with their number she rose from her bed and lit her candle. And she took up her camel’s-hair brush and brushed down the questions upon a sheet of paper in her fine script. The next afternoon when Brother André came she read them to him one by one and listened carefully to all he said.

Now, his manner of answering questions was exceedingly simple, but this was because he was so learned. He did not need, as lesser men do, to talk over and above the pith of the matter. Instead, he knew how, as Taoists of old knew, to put into a handful of words the essence of the essence of truth. He stripped the leaves away, and he plucked the fruit and cracked the husk and peeled the inner shell and split the flesh and took out the seed and divided it, and there was the kernel, pure and clean.

And Madame Wu’s mind was so whetted at this time of her life, so bladelike and piercing, that she took this kernel and from it comprehended all. Young Linyi sat between the two, her eyes wide, as these few words were said and heard, and it was plain that for her it was all far above her and beyond her. Her mind still slept in youth.

But Brother André marveled at Madame Wu. “You have lived behind these walls all your life,” he said one day, “and yet when I speak as heretofore I have spoken only to one or two of my few brother scholars, you know what I mean.”

To this she replied, “You have told me of the magic glass which makes small things large. A fragment of dust, you told me, could be made as large as a desert, and if the fragment were comprehended, the desert was known. This house is the fragment of dust, and from it I comprehend all. Inside these four walls is the whole of life.” She caught sight of Linyi’s hostile young face.

“Are you saying we are dust, Mother?” she asked.

“No, child,” Madame Wu replied. “I am saying that you are all of life.”

Over the young head her eyes met Brother André’s. “Teach this child,” she said.

“Mother, I am not a child,” Linyi pouted.

But Madame Wu smiled. That afternoon when Brother André was putting his books together, she asked, “Dare I ask you to take me, too, as your pupil?” she asked humbly.

“I am honored by the wish,” he replied in his grave way.

“Then for an hour, perhaps, after you have taught Linyi?”

He inclined his head. Thereafter each evening for an hour he answered Madame Wu’s questions. Scrupulous in spite of her age, Madame Wu bade Ying sit on the seat nearest the door while she and Brother André talked.

“Madame, I must ask you a question. If it makes you angry I beg you to send me away,” Ying said one morning.

“Why should I be angry at you now after the years you have spoken as you liked?” Madame Wu asked.

She put down the book she was reading, but she kept her thumb in the pages, ready to read again when Ying had finished.

“I cannot please you in what I am about to say,” Ying began. “But while you have been wandering around the earth with this big priest, the household has been at sevens and eights with disorder. The wet nurse to your eldest son’s wife’s second son is losing her milk. The child grows thin. At night there is quarreling in your second son’s court. His wife’s maid says there is no pregnancy there yet. And the Second Lady and our master—well, Madame, I will not presume. But I say it is wrong for a lady like you to withdraw herself into books as you do. It is not all evil that our ancestors taught us that women ought not to read and write.”

This Ying said as though she had committed it to heart. Madame Wu listened, the old half-smile on her face. But her thumb slipped out of the book, and she closed it and put it on the table. “Thank you, good soul,” she said.

She rose and went into her bedroom. The morning was cool, and she put on a fur coat before she went out. In the court the orchids were drying with frost and the leaves were sinking into the loam of the earth. But the sprays of berries on the Indian bamboo were growing scarlet and heavy. A blackbird sat perched on a rock, eating them, and Ying ran at him to frighten him away as she followed. Now that her mistress had been so patient under rebuke, Ying felt guilty of impudence, and she tried to make amends with her usual chatter. Madame Wu listened to it without answering. It occurred to her as she went through Old Lady’s empty court that it would be well if Liangmo brought his family here to live, near her, so that she could more easily watch over the children. Then she could move Tsemo and Rulan into Liangmo’s present court, and the larger space might add peace to them.

The day was fair. She moved through the clear sunshine in a well-being which she herself did not understand. These four walls around this piece of earth were full of human troubles, but she felt herself able to meet them and even to cure them because she was no longer a part of them. By her separation from Mr. Wu, in the flesh, she had cut all cords that had entangled her. She mused on this strong secret bond of body to body, which when it was cut, freed not only body but soul. And her soul followed the paths that were now opened over all the earth. Thus she stepped into Liangmo’s court as a goddess might have come, to minister and not to share.

But the wail of the child crying struck her ear with painful sharpness. She forgot everything and hurried into the house. There Meng sat, and there, too, sat the young wet nurse holding the hungry child to her empty breast. Tears ran down her pale cheeks. The child sucked and turned his head away again to scream with anger when no milk came.

“What now?” Madame Wu asked. “How has your milk dried?”

The young woman laid the little boy in Meng’s arms while she wept.

“Have you given her crab soup with poached eggs?” Madame Wu inquired of Meng.

“We have tried everything,” Meng replied. “I thought it was nothing at first, a cold she had, or that she had overeaten, and we mixed rice flour into gruel for the child for a meal or two. But this has gone on for two days, and the child is not fed. His flesh is slipping from his bones.”

The older child’s wet nurse now came in. “I have offered my milk,” she said, “but it is too old for this child. He vomits it up.” She looked pleased with herself as she spoke. “I have never lost my milk, Elder Lady, so how can I know what should be done?”

“Go away,” Madame Wu ordered her, seeing her vanity and knowing that she was a woman greedy for gifts.

The young wet nurse went on crying, and Madame Wu sat down and folded her hands on her dragonheaded cane and looked at her.

“Your milk has dried because you are sad,” she said. “What is your trouble?”

At first the young woman would not answer. She wiped her eyes on her sleeves and looked down, and when the tears came welling out she wiped them away again.

“It is strange you have water enough for your own tears and not for milk for my son,” Meng said distractedly.

“Hush,” Madame Wu said. “She is a human being. Speak, good soul.”

Thus encouraged, the young woman faltered in a voice so small as scarcely could be heard, “I have not seen my own child. I do not know how she does—I have been here nearly a month. Next week is the full month birthday of this child, and I do not know how my own little one does.”

At this Meng looked exceedingly angry. She pursed her red mouth and opened her black eyes wide. “How can you think of your child and let your milk dry up?” she exclaimed.

“Hush,” Madame Wu said again. “Let her child be brought here.”

“To be nursed with mine?” Meng cried.

“To save your son,” Madame Wu replied.

The young nurse fell on her knees before Madame Wu. “Oh, Elder Lady,” she gasped, “you are not cruel—they told me you were cruel—”