Pavilion of Women: A Novel of Life in the Women's Quarters (22 page)

Madame Wu did not correct herself nor did she correct Ch’iuming. She said in the same clear sharp voice, “You are very quick.”

To this Ch’iuming replied nothing. She drooped her head and sat with her hands lying apart on her lap, the palms upward, the fingers listless.

“I suppose he is pleased,” Madame Wu said in the same sharp way.

Ch’iuming looked at her with her large honest gaze. “He does not know,” she said. “I have not told him.”

“Strange,” Madame Wu retorted. She was angry with Ch’iuming and amazed at her own anger. She had brought Ch’iuming into the house for a purpose and the girl had fulfilled it. Why should she feel angry with her? But the anger lay coiled in her like a narrow green serpent, and it sprang up and its poison lay on her tongue. “Concubines,” she said, “usually hasten to tell the men. Why are you different from other women?”

Ch’iuming’s eyes filled with tears. By the light of the flowered lantern above her head Madame Wu could see the tears glisten.

“I wanted to tell you,” Ch’iuming said in a low, half-broken voice. “I thought you would be pleased, but you are only angry. Now I would like to destroy myself.”

These desperate words brought Madame Wu to her right mind. It was common enough for concubines in great houses to hang themselves or swallow their rings or eat raw opium, but this was always held a shame to the house. She was quick now, as ever she was, to guard the house. “You speak foolishly,” she said. “Why should you destroy yourself when you have only done your duty?”

“I thought if you were glad, that I could then be glad, too,” the girl continued in the same heart-broken voice. “I thought I could warm my hands at your fire. But now, at what fire shall I warm myself?”

Madame Wu began to be frightened. She had taken it for a matter of course that Ch’iuming was a common girl, country-bred, who would welcome as a beast does the signs of its own fertility. The cow does not think of the sire, but of the calf. If ever she had thought at all of Ch’iuming’s own life, she had comforted herself because, she thought, Ch’iuming would be rewarded with a child and with a child would be satisfied.

“What now?” she asked. “Are you not glad for your own sake? You will have a little toy to play with, someone to laugh at, a small thing of your own to tend. If it is a boy, you will rise in your place in the house. But I promise you that if it is a girl, you will suffer no reproaches from me. Male and female I have made welcome in my house. When my own daughter died before she could speak, I wept as though a son were gone.”

The girl did not answer this. Instead she fixed her sad eyes on Madame Wu and listened.

“You must not talk of destroying yourself,” Madame Wu went on briskly. “Go back now and climb into your bed. Tell him, if he comes, that you have good news.”

She spoke coldly to bring the girl back to her senses, but in her own heart she felt the chill of the mountain peak coming down on her again. She longed to be alone and she rose. But Ch’iuming sprang forward and clutched the hem of her robe.

“Let me stay here tonight,” she begged. “Let me sleep here as I did when I first came. And you—you tell him for me. Beg him—beg him to leave me alone!”

Now Madame Wu was truly afraid. “You are losing your mind,” she told Ch’iuming severely. “Remember who you are. You came to me without father and mother, a foundling, picked out of the street by a farmer’s wife. You were widowed without having been wed. Today you are second only to me in this family, the richest in the city, a house to which any family in the region longs to send its daughters. You are dressed in silk. Jade hangs in your ears and you wear gold rings. You may not return to my court. How could I explain it to the house? Go back at once to that court where you belong, for which you were purchased.”

Ch’iuming let go the hem of Madame Wu’s robe. She lifted herself to her feet and fell back step by step toward the gate. Madame Wu’s hardness cracked suddenly at the sight of her desperate face.

“Go back, child,” she said in her usual kind voice. “Do not be afraid. Young women are sometimes afraid and unwilling with the first child, although I had not expected it of you, who are country bred. Fall asleep early and do not wake if he comes in. I know that if he finds you unwilling to wake he will let you sleep. He is good enough, kind enough. Do I not know him? Why fear him? And I will do this for you—tomorrow I will tell him. That much I will do.”

As though restored by this kindness, Ch’iuming whispered her thanks and slipped out of the court. Madame Wu put out the lanterns one by one until the court was dark. Wearily she went to her room, and Ying came and made her ready to sleep. She dared not ask her mistress anything when this lady wore the look on her face which she had tonight, a look so sad and so cold.

She drew the curtains about the silent figure and went into the noisy servants’ courts. There the men and women and children were still eating what remained of the wedding feast, and Ying loved her food. She filled her bowl with many meats and she went and sat on a doorstep and ate with pleasure, listening as she ate to all the chatter of servants in the great house. She was above them all except for Peng Er, who was servant to the master. Peng Er sat eating, too. His fat face was glistening with sweat. At his knee stood his youngest child, a small thing of some two or three years. Whenever he stopped for breath she opened her mouth and shrieked, and he held the bowl to her mouth and pushed food into it with his chopsticks.

“Peng Er!” a woman’s loud laughing voice shouted out of the dusk. “Does the master sleep in the Peony Court every night?”

“I take tea there every morning,” he shouted back.

“Ying!” The same loud mirthful voice shouted. “How is it in the Orchid Court?”

But Ying disdained to reply to this. She finished her bowl quickly and dipped cold water out of a jar, rinsed her mouth, and spat the water into the darkness whence the voice had come.

Men and women and children scattered at the sign. They were all afraid of Ying. In this house she sat too near the throne.

Madame Wu woke at dawn. She felt a load upon her, and under this load she struggled toward wakefulness. The night had not been a good one. She had slept and waked and slept again, never wholly forgetful. Living in the center of the house, there were such nights when she felt the whole family as the heart feels the body. Now she remembered. It had been Fengmo’s wedding night. Any wedding night was an anxious one. Were the two mated? Had the mating gone well or ill? She would not know until she saw them. Nor could she hasten to see them. Not until the matter took its own course and the day turned to the right hour could she know.

She sighed and then remembered the second weight. She had given a promise to Ch’iuming which she would like to have had back. Yet how could she take it back? Doubtless the girl had clung to it as a hope throughout the night. Then, as though she had not trouble enough, Ying came in when she saw her mistress awake.

“Old Lady is ill,” Ying told her. “She says she feels she has eaten a cockroach in the feast yesterday, and it is crawling around in her belly. She feels it big as a mouse, sitting on her liver, and scratching her heart with its paws. Of course it can be no cockroach. My man, whatever his faults, would never be so careless as that.”

“Heaven,” Madame Wu murmured, “as if I had not enough without this!”

But she was dutiful above all else, and she hastened and Ying hastened, and in a few minutes she went into the court next hers where Old Lady lay high on her pillows. She turned dim sockets of eyes toward her daughter-in-law. “Do something for me quickly. I am about to die,” she said in a weak voice.

Madame Wu was frightened when she saw the state in which Old Lady was this morning. Yesterday she had been as lively as a mischievous child, boasting because she had won at mah jong and eating anything at hand.

“Why was I not called earlier?” she asked Old Lady’s maid.

“It is only in the last hour that our Old Lady has turned so green,” the woman said to excuse herself.

“Has she vomited and drained?” Madame Wu inquired.

Old Lady piped up for herself, “I have vomited enough for three pregnancies, and all my bowels are in the nightpot. Fill me up again, daughter-in-law. I am all water inside—water and wind.”

“Can you eat?” Madame Wu inquired.

“I must be filled somehow,” Old Lady declared in a faint but valiant voice.

Thus encouraged, Madame Wu directed that thin rice soup be brought, and she herself grated fresh hot ginger root into it, and took up a spoon and fed the mixture to Old Lady.

Old Lady was always touching when she was ill. Her withered old mouth was as innocent and helpless as a baby’s. Madame Wu looked into it with each spoonful. Not a tooth remained, and the gums were pink and clean. How many words had come from that pink tongue, now shrunk so small! Old Lady had always had a violent temper, and when she was angry she had hurled curses on anyone she saw. That tongue was her weapon. Old Gentleman had been afraid of it. But doubtless he had heard other words from her, too, and Mr. Wu, who had always been the core of Old Lady’s life, had learned childish rhymes and laughter out of this same old mouth.

“I am better,” Old Lady sighed at last. “I need only to be kept filled. At my age the body has no staying power. Life now is like a fire of grass. It burns only when it is fed.”

“Sleep a little,” Madame Wu said soothingly.

Old Lady’s eyes opened very sharply at this. “Why do you keep telling me to sleep?” she demanded. “I shall soon sleep forever.”

Madame Wu was shocked to see tears well into Old Lady’s eyes and dim their sharpness. Old Lady was crying! “Daughter, do you think there is any life after this one?” she muttered.

She put out a claw of a hand and clutched Madame Wu’s hand. The old claw was hot and full of fever. Madame Wu, who had risen, sat down again. Old Lady all her life long had been nothing but a lusty body. She had been a woman, happy enough, dismissing from herself anything she could not understand. Rich, well-clothed, powerful in this great house, what had she lacked? But since she had lived entirely in her flesh, now she was frightened when she saw the flesh wither. Where would she go when the body failed her?

“I hope there is a life beyond this one,” Madame Wu said carefully. She might have deceived Old Lady as one deceives a child, but she could not do it. Old Lady was not a child. She was an old woman, about to die.

“Do you believe that I shall be born again in another body as the priests tell us in the temple?” Old Lady demanded.

Never had Old Lady talked of such things before. Madame Wu searched herself for honest answer. But who could penetrate the shades ahead? “I cannot tell, Mother,” she said at last. “But I believe that life is never lost.”

She did not say more. She did not say what she believed, that those who had lived entirely in the body would die with the body. She could imagine Brother André alive with no body, but not Old Lady.

Old Lady was already falling asleep in spite of all her will to stay awake. Her eyelids, wrinkled as an old bird’s, fell over her eyes, and she began to breathe deeply. Her bony hand fell out of Madame Wu’s soft one. Madame Wu went away, staying only to whisper to the servant, “She will recover this time. But try to keep rich foods out of her sight so that she will not crave them.”

“Our Old Lady is willful,” the servant murmured to defend herself, “and I do not like to make her angry.”

“Obey me,” Madame Wu said sternly.

But as she approached Mr. Wu’s court, she was pleased with this one good thing out of evil, that Old Lady’s illness gave her a reason to come here beyond the real one. She had sent Ying ahead to announce her. When she came to the gate of the court she found Ying waiting for her to tell her that Mr. Wu had gone out on some business and had only just returned. He sent word by Ying to beg her to sit down while he changed his outer garments.

So to wait she went into the familiar court where she had spent so many years of her life. The transplanted peonies were growing there most heartily. The blooms were over, the petals dropped, but the leaves were dark and thick. In the pool someone had planted lotus roots, and the great coral flowers lay open on the surface of the water. In the center of each flower ripe stamens quivered, ready and covered with golden dust. Their fragrance drenched the air of the court, and Madame Wu took out her handkerchief and held it before her face. The scent was too heavy.

She passed through the court into the main room. The furniture was as she had left it, but certain things had been added. There were too many potted trees. Some framed foreign pictures were on the wall. Nothing was quite as clean as it used to be. She was displeased to see dust swept under chairs and into corners. She rose and went to the heavy carved doors, set with lattices, and now wide open. She looked behind one of these doors.

Mr. Wu came in, buttoning his gray silk jacket. “Is there something behind the door, Mother of my sons?” he asked in his hearty voice.

She looked at him and flushed faintly. “Dust,” she said. “I must speak to the steward. This whole room needs cleaning.”

Mr. Wu looked about it as though he saw the room for the first time. “Perhaps it does,” he said. “It needs you,” he said, after another moment. But he said it gaily and with a sort of teasing laughter. She grew grave and did not answer.

They seated themselves. She examined his face without seeming to do so. He looked well fed, and the curves of his mouth were cheerful again. This was what she wanted and what she had planned. Then why did she feel in herself a cruel desire to hurt him?

“Your mother is ill,” she said abruptly. “Have you been to see her?”

He dropped his smile. “Alas, no,” he said. “I should have gone the first thing this morning, but what with one thing and another—”

“She is very ill,” she repeated.

“You don’t mean—” he said.

“No, not this time,” she said. “But the end is not too far off. Her soul is beginning to wonder what is to come next, and she asked me if I believed in another life after this one. Such questions mean that the body is beginning to die and the soul is afraid.”