Pavilion of Women: A Novel of Life in the Women's Quarters (10 page)

“I do not care if she cannot read,” Madame Wu said.

Liu Ma’s face broke into wrinkles of pleasure. She struck both her fat knees with her palms. “Then, Lady, it is done!” she cried. “I will bring her whenever you say. She is in the country with her foster mother on a farm.”

“Who is this foster mother?” Madame Wu inquired.

“She is nothing,” Liu Ma said eagerly. “I would not even tell you who she is. She found a child, Lady, one cold night, outside the city wall. Someone had left it there—a girl not wanted. The old woman was walking home after a feast meal with her brother who that day was thirty years old. He keeps a little market at— No, I will not even tell of it. It is nothing where he is or what his market. She heard a baby cry and saw the girl. Now, she would not have taken another mouth home, for she is poor, but the truth is she had a son, and when she saw this girl she thought it might serve her one day as a wife for her son, and she would be saved the cost of finding one outside. How could she know her one son would sicken and die before they could marry? Plague took him. She has the girl now and no husband for her.”

Madame Wu listened to this without moving her eyes from Liu Ma’s face. “Will she give the girl up altogether?” she now asked.

“She would be willing,” Liu Ma said. “She is very poor, and after all the girl is not her bone and flesh.”

Madame Wu turned her back to the court. The sun had crept over the wall and shortened and thickened and blackened the shadows on the bamboos on the stones. “I had better see her,” she said musingly. She put her delicate finger to her lip as she did when she was thoughtful. “No, why should I?” she went on. “It would not be to your interest to deceive me, and as you say, one girl is like another, after we have decided on her nature.”

“How much would you pay, Lady?” Liu Ma now inquired.

“I should have to dress her, of course,” Madame Wu said thoughtfully.

“Yes, but since the old woman is not her mother, she would not care what you did for that,” Liu Ma said. “She would only want heavy silver in her hand.”

“One hundred dollars is not too little for a country girl,” Madame Wu said calmly. “But I will pay more than that. I will pay two hundred.”

“Add fifty, Lady,” Liu Ma said coaxingly. Sweat burst out of her dark skin. “Then I can give the two hundred whole to the woman. She will let the girl go today for that.”

“Let it be then,” Madame Wu said so suddenly that she saw a greedy sorrow shine in the small old eyes that were fastened on her anxiously. “You need not grieve that you did not ask more,” she said. “I know what is just and what is generous.”

“I know your wisdom, Lady,” Liu Ma said eagerly. She fumbled the pictures together. Then she paused. “Are you sure you don’t want a pretty wife for your son, too, Lady? I would take off some cash for two girls at once.”

“No,” Madame Wu said with a sort of sternness. “Fengmo can wait. He is very young.”

“That is true,” Liu Ma agreed. Now that the bargain was made she was half-tearful with joy, and she wanted to agree with everything that Madame Wu said. “Yes, yes, Lady, it is the old that cannot wait. The old men must be served first, Lady. You are right always. You know all hearts.”

She tied the picture book into the kerchief again and rose to her feet. “Shall I fetch the girl here at once?”

“Bring her this evening at twilight,” Madame Wu said.

“Good,” Liu Ma said, “good—the best of times. She will have the day in which to wash herself and her clothes and clean her hair.”

“Tell her to bring nothing,” Madame Wu said, “nothing in her hands, nothing in a box. She is to come to me empty-handed, clad only in what she wears.”

“I promise you—I promise you,” Liu Ma babbled, and bowing and babbling she hurried away on her feet that had been badly bound in her childhood and now were like thick stumps.

Almost immediately Ying came into the room with fresh tea. She did not speak, and Madame Wu did not. She watched in silence while Ying wiped the table and the chair where the old woman had sat and took up the tea bowl she had used as though it were a piece of filth. When she was about to leave with this bowl Madame Wu spoke.

“Tonight about twilight a young woman will come to the gate.”

Ying stood motionless, listening, the dirty bowl between her thumb and finger.

“Bring her straight to me,” Madame Wu directed, “and put up a little bamboo bed for her here in this room.”

“Yes, Lady,” Ying muttered. Her voice choked in her throat and she hurried away.

The day moved on toward the night. It was Madame Wu’s habit to retire to her bedroom after her noon meal and rest for an hour. But on this day when she went into the big shadowy bedroom she found that she could neither sleep nor rest. It was not that the room was still strange to her. Indeed, she had already come to feel so at home in the rooms that she wondered at her own comfort in them. Her restlessness was not a matter of the room but of her inner self.

“I will not lie down today,” she said to Ying.

Ying stared at her with foreboding in her faithful eyes. “You had better sleep this afternoon, Lady,” she said. “I doubt you sleep well tonight with a stranger here in our house.”

“I seem to need no sleep,” Madame Wu said. At the sight of Ying’s foreboding her mood changed. She felt mischievous and willful. She put out her hand and gave Ying a soft touch on the arm that was half a push. “Go—leave me, Ying,” she commanded. “I will find a book—I will amuse myself.”

“As you choose,” Ying replied, and with unusual abruptness she turned and left Madame Wu standing in the middle of the room. But Madame Wu did not notice her. She stood, her finger on her delicate lip, half smiling. Then she gave a quick nod and moved across the room toward the library. Her footfall fitted into the hollowed stone before the door where before her scores of feet now dead had fitted too.

“But they were all men,” she thought, still half smiling, feeling that hollow under her foot.

She felt free and bold as she had never felt in her life before. Not a soul was here to see what she did. She belonged wholly to herself for this hour. Well, then, the time had come for her to read one of the forbidden books.

Old Gentleman had never made it a secret from her where these books were on the shelves. Indeed, after he had discovered that she could read and write, he had led her one day into the library and himself had showed her the shelf where they lay, packet by packet, in their blue cotton covers. “These books, my child,” he had said to her in his grave way, “these books are not for you.”

“Because I am a woman?” she had asked.

He had nodded. Then he had added, “But also I did not allow my son to read them until he was fifteen and past childhood.”

“Has my lord read them all?” she had then inquired.

Old Gentleman had looked embarrassed. “I suppose he has,” he said. “I have never asked, but I suppose all young men read them. That is why I have them here. I told my son, ‘If you must read these books, wait until you are fifteen and read them here in my own library and not slyly hidden in your schoolbooks.’ ”

She had then put another of her clear questions to him. “Our Father, do you think my mind will never be beyond that of my lord’s at fifteen?”

He had been further embarrassed at this question. But he was an honest old man, although a scholar, and he wrinkled his high pale yellow brow.

“Your mind is an excellent one for a woman,” he had said at last. “I would even say, my daughter, that had your brains been inside the skull of a man, you could have sat for the Imperial Examinations and passed them with honor and become thereby an official in the land. But your brain is not in a man’s skull. It is in a woman’s skull. A woman’s blood infuses it, a woman’s heart beats through it, and it is circumscribed by what must be a woman’s life. In a woman it is not well for the brain to grow beyond the body.”

Had she not been so dainty a creature her next question might have seemed indelicate. But she knew Old Gentleman loved her and comprehended what she was. Therefore she asked again, “Is this to say, Our Father, that a woman’s body is more important than her brain?”

Old Gentleman had sighed at this. He had sat down in the big redwood chair by the long library table. Thinking of him, she now sat down there, too, while her memory mused over that day so long gone. He had stroked his small white beard, and something like sorrow had come into his eyes. “As life has proved,” he said, “it is true that a woman’s body is more important than her mind. She alone can create new human creatures. Were it not for her, the race of man would cease to exist. Into her body, as into a chalice, Heaven has put this gift. Her body therefore is inexpressibly precious to man. He is not fulfilled if she does not create. His is the seed, but she alone can bring it to flower and fruit in another being like himself.”

She had listened carefully. She could see herself now as she had looked that day when she was sixteen, standing before the wise old man. She had put another question.

“Then why have I a brain, being only a woman?”

Old Gentleman had shaken his head slowly while he looked at her. A rare twinkle came into his eyes. “I do not know,” he had answered. “You are so beautiful that certainly you do not need a brain also.”

They had both laughed, her laughter young and rippling and his dry and old. Then he was grave again.

“But what you have asked me,” he went on, “is a thing about which I have thought much and especially since you came into my house. We chose you for our son because you were beautiful and good and because your grandfather was the former viceroy of this province. Now I find that you are also intelligent. To a pot of gold have been added jewels. Yet I know that in my house you do not need so much intelligence—yes, a little is good so that you can keep accounts and watch servants and control your inferiors. But you have reasoning and wonder. What will you do with them? I cannot tell. In a lesser woman I should be alarmed, because you might be a trouble inside these four walls which must be your world. But you will not make trouble because you also have wisdom, a most unusual wisdom for one so young. You can control yourself.”

She had stood before him motionless. He had remembered this. “Sit down, child,” he had said. “You will be weary. Besides, you need no more stand in my presence.”

But she had scarcely heard him, so absorbed was she in what they were saying to each other. She continued standing before him, her hands clasped loosely in front of her. Her next question was formed and ready.

“Will my lord love me less because I am what you say?”

Old Gentleman had looked very grave at this. His hand wandered back to his white beard. She could see that old hand now, narrow and thin, the skin stretched like gold leaf over the fine bones.

“Ah, that is what I, too, have asked myself!” he had replied. He had sighed deeply. “This matter of intelligence—it is so great a gift, so heavy a burden. Intelligence, more than poverty and riches, divides human beings and makes them friends or enemies. The stupid person fears and hates the intelligent person. Whatever the goodness of the intelligent man, he must also know that it will not win him love from one whose mind is less than his.”

“Why?” she had asked. A strange fright had fallen upon her. She was at that time a little arrogant in herself. She knew the quality of her own mind and trusted to it. Now Old Gentleman was saying she would be hated for it.

“Because,” Old Gentleman said without sign of emotion in his face or voice, “the first love in a man’s heart is love of self. Heaven put that love first in order that man would want to live, whatever his sorrows. Now, when self-love is wounded, no other love can survive, because when self-love is too much wounded, the self is willing to die, and that is against Heaven.”

“Will my lord hate me, then?” she had asked again.

Without his putting it into words, it was clear to her that Old Gentleman knew that she was more intelligent than his son, and he was warning her.

“My child,” Old Gentleman said, “there is no man who can endure woman’s greater wisdom if she lives in his house and sleeps in his bed. He may say he worships at her shrine, but worship is dry fare for daily life. A man cannot make of his house a temple, nor take a goddess for his wife. He is not strong enough.”

“Our Father, had I not better read the wicked books?” she had asked so suddenly that Old Gentleman had started. She was surprised and then even a little shocked to see a certain diffidence in his eyes. He had been looking at her with his usual mild directness. Now to evade her he turned to the teapot on the table.

She had stepped forward. “Let me pour it for you,” she had said and did so. He sipped his tea for a moment before he answered. Then he said, still not looking at her, “Child, you will not understand me, perhaps. But believe me without understanding. It is better that you do not read these books. Men love women when they are not too knowing. You are so wise already, so very wise for your youth. You do not need these books. Apply your own mind, now fresh and pure, to the task of making my son happy. Learn love at the source, my child, not out of books.”

For a moment it had seemed to her that this was no answer at all. Then, standing there by the table, leaning on her hands as she looked at him, she perceived that he was the wisest soul in all the world, and that until her wisdom matched his she had better believe him.

“I will obey you, my father,” she had said, and so she had obeyed him for twenty years and more.

But today, alone in this room where they had once been, sitting in the chair which had once been only his, it seemed to her that now her wisdom did match his and her obedience had been fulfilled. She was free of Old Gentleman, too, at last.

So she rose and went, her heart beating strangely, toward the forbidden books. She knew the names of some of them, the names of novels and stories which she had always been taught the true scholar never reads because they are beneath him. Only the low and the coarse, who cannot bear the high ether of spirit and thought, can be allowed the diversion of such books. Yet all men read them, yes, even the scholars, too! Old Gentleman himself had read them and he had allowed his son to read them, knowing that if he did not, his son would read them anyway.