Pavilion of Women: A Novel of Life in the Women's Quarters (25 page)

Brother André inclined his great head.

“Bring tea, Ying,” Madame Wu told her, “and stay to mend the coals.” She remembered that Brother André was a priest, and she wished to spare him uneasiness at being alone with a woman.

If he was uneasy, he did not show it. He sat down when she motioned him to a chair and waited. His deep eyes were fixed on her face, but she knew that he did not think of her. The eyes might have been looking down out of heaven upon her.

“Why is Fengmo unhappy?” she asked him directly.

“He is too idle,” Brother André replied simply.

“Idle?” Madame Wu repeated. “But he has his duties. Every New Year’s Day I assign duties to each son and to each daughter-in-law. This year my eldest son is responsible for the oversight, under me, of the lands. And Tsemo must look to the buying and selling, and Fengmo is learning about the grainshops where we market our grains in the city. Since he has left school, he is busy at this for several hours every day.”

“Still he is idle,” Brother André said. “Fengmo has an unusual mind and a searching spirit. He learns quickly. You bade me teach him English. But with all he learns of the English, he takes in something more. Today, I found he had forgotten nothing. The knowledge I gave him months ago has rooted in him and has sent up tendrils like a vine, searching into the air for something upon which to climb and flower and fruit. Fengmo will always be idle, although you fill every hour of the day, until he has found the thing which uses his mind and his spirit.”

Madame Wu listened to this. “You are trying to persuade me to let you teach him your religion,” she said shrewdly.

“You do not know what my religion is,” Brother André answered.

“I do know,” she said. “Little Sister Hsia has read me often out of your sacred books, and she has explained to me your foreign ways of praying and all such things.”

“My religion is not hers, nor hers mine,” this strange man replied.

“Explain me yours,” she commanded him.

“I will not explain it, for I cannot,” he said. “Little Sister Hsia can read you out of a book and speak to you a way of praying, but these are not my ways. I read many books, I have no set ways of prayer.”

“Then where is your way of religion?” she demanded.

“In bread and in water,” he replied, “in sleeping and in walking, in cleaning my house and making my garden, in feeding the lost children I find and take under my roof, in coming to teach your son, in sitting by those who are ill, and in helping those who must die, that they may die in peace.”

“I wish I had called you when our Old Lady died,” she said suddenly. “I had a strange wish to call you. But I was afraid the family would still want the temple priests.”

“I would not have kept your priests away,” Brother André said. “I never forbid anyone who can bring comfort anywhere. We all need comfort.”

“Do you also?” she asked curiously.

“Certainly I also,” he said.

“But you are so solitary,” she exclaimed. “You have no one of your blood.”

“Everyone is of my blood,” Brother André said, “and there is no difference between one blood and another.”

“Is your blood like mine?” Madame Wu exclaimed.

“There is no difference,” he replied. “All human blood is of the same stuff.”

“Why are you only a priest?” she asked. This she knew to be rude, and so she made haste to be pardoned. “You must forgive me. I am too curious. I know that a priest is never to be asked why he became a priest. But I feel that, you have committed no crime and that you need no sanctuary.”

“Do not ask my pardon,” Brother André replied. “Indeed, I scarcely know how I became a priest, unless it is because I was first an astronomer.”

“You know the stars?” she asked in great surprise.

“Madame, no one knows the stars,” he replied. “But I study their rise and fall, their coming and their going across the heavens.”

“Do you still do this?” she inquired. She was ashamed of her curiosity concerning him, and yet she could not keep herself from it.

“Madame, when my day’s work is done, unless the night is cloudy, I do so,” he replied. His manner was so frank, so calm, that it piqued her. He answered her questions because she put them and because he had nothing to hide, but also as if he had no concern with her.

“You are very lonely,” she said abruptly. “All day you work among the poor and at night among the stars.”

“It is true,” he agreed calmly.

“Have you never wanted a home and wife and children?” she asked.

“Madame, I once did love a woman,” he replied, “and we were to be married. Then I entered into loneliness, and I no longer loved her nor needed her.”

“This was very unjust to her, I think,” Madame Wu said with dignity.

“Yes, it was,” he agreed, “and I felt it so, but I could only tell her the truth. Then I became a priest in order to follow my loneliness.”

“But your faith?” she inquired.

He looked at her with his full dark gaze. “My faith? It is in space and in emptiness, in sun and stars, clouds and wind.”

“Is there no god there?” she inquired.

“There is,” he said. “But I have not seen His face.”

“Then how can you believe in Him?” she asked.

“He is also in that which is around me,” Brother André replied. His grave voice spoke the large, simple words. “He is in the air and the water, in life and death, in mankind.”

“But your foundlings,” she urged. “If you love your loneliness and need no one, why have you taken these chance children?”

He looked down at his huge workworn hands. “These hands, too, must live and be happy,” he said, as though they were separate creatures and did not belong to him. “The flesh, too, must be employed if it is to let the soul be free.”

Madame Wu stared at him with ever-rising curiosity. “Are there other men like you?” she asked.

“No man is quite like any other one,” Brother André said. His sun-browned face took on a warm, almost smiling look, as though a light came on within him. “But your son, Madame, young Fengmo, I think he could become like me. Perhaps he will become like me.”

“I forbid it!” Madame Wu said imperiously.

“Ah!” Brother André said, and now he smiled. His lit, mysterious eyes glowed on her for an instant and then he said good-by.

And she sat gazing up into the handful of stars above her court. Twice Ying came out to scold her.

“Leave me,” Madame Wu told her. “I have things to think about.”

“Can you not think in your bed instead of in this chill night air?” Ying complained.

When Madame Wu did not reply, she went and fetched a fur robe and wrapped it about her knees. Still Madame Wu did not move. She leaned back in her chair, gazing at the stars. The walls of the court cut a square out of heaven as they did out of the earth, but up and down, beneath and above, her thoughts went deep and rose high.

In the earth beneath this house human roots ran down—the unseen, the unknown roots of all who had lived here of the Wu family. Here they had been born and here they died. The foundations were unshaken. And yet even before them there had been others. Old Gentleman had told her what he had heard from his own father, who had been told it by his father, that when the Wu house was founded, the hands that dug the earth out had placed the stones not upon earth but upon rubble and cracked porcelains and potsherds and fragments of tile. “No house can reach to the bottom of our earth,” Old Gentleman had told her. “City upon city, our ancestors have built five cities one upon another. Man has built upon man, and others will build upon us.”

In the thousands of years to come the Wu house would take its place to make the foundations for still other houses, and other eyes would look upon these stars. She comprehended the loneliness of Brother André, and yet she understood why he was content in it. She trembled upon the edge of this loneliness herself as she gazed up at the stars.

“Madame!” Ying cried out from the house in despair.

But Madame Wu did not hear her voice.

Ying grew frightened at last. She tiptoed near and looked down into Madame Wu’s face. It was pure and cold and fixed. Her great dark eyes continued to gaze into the sky. In the dimness of the court, lit only by the shaft of candlelight from the library, her face looked almost translucent in its creamy whiteness.

“Alas, her soul is fled!” Ying murmured and then clapped her hands to her mouth. She backed away in terror at what she saw and tiptoed across the court.

Madame Wu heard her dimly, without caring or knowing why Ying was afraid. She was free from these walls. They did not, as she had thought, reach up to the sky and cut out a square among the stars. Instead, when she had surmounted them she saw the whole earth lying before her, the seven seas and the countries and the peoples of whom she had heard only in books, the two poles of the earth and their unmelting ice and snow, the tropics and their earthy life.

“From the stars,” she thought, “doubtless all things are seen.”

For the first time in her life she longed to rise out of these four walls and travel everywhere upon the earth to see everything and to know all.

“But there would still be the stars,” she thought. “How can one reach the stars?”

She thought of Old Lady, now dissolved into free soul and coffin-bound dust. But Old Lady’s soul was hovering about this house.

“As soon as I am free,” Madame Wu thought, “I shall leave this house. I shall go straight up until I know what stuff the stars are.”

Thus dreaming, Madame Wu forgot that Ying had crossed the court and gone away, and now she did not see her come back with all three sons. Liangmo and Tsemo and Fengmo came together and stood gazing at their mother. Liangmo spoke first.

“Mother!” He made his voice gentle, for he feared that her soul had left her body, and when this happens the soul must be wooed and coaxed and not frightened, lest it never return. For the body is the cage and the soul is the bird, and once the door is left open and the bird goes forth free, why should it return to the cage? It must be tempted and deceived.

“Dear Mother,” Liangmo said gently, “your children are here—your children wait for you—”

But Madame Wu was in a trance. She heard no voice.

Her sons looked at one another in terror.

“Call our father,” Liangmo commanded Tsemo.

Tsemo made haste to obey, and in a few minutes, while the others waited in silence lest the runaway soul escape yet farther, Mr. Wu hurried into the court. Behind him, unnoticed, came Ch’iuming.

“How did this come about?” he demanded of Ying.

“The foreign priest left her so,” Ying replied.

They looked at one another in renewed fear.

“Mother of my sons!” Mr. Wu called gently. His large face was paper-colored.

Madame Wu did not answer.

“Ailien!” he called. He did not dare to touch her. Her hands hung from her wrists like limp white flowers.

But Ch’iuming said not a word. She knelt at Madame Wu’s feet and slipped off the narrow satin shoes and the white silk stockings and began to chafe the bare feet. They were cold, and she put them against her bosom. “You will wake her too quickly,” Mr. Wu urged.

“No, for she is not afraid of me,” Ch’iuming said. She knelt looking up at them, father and sons, in this house where Heaven had thrust her.

“She is afraid of no one,” Mr. Wu said with dignity.

“She is not afraid of me because she does not care for me,” Ch’iuming said strangely and looked down on the narrow bare feet she held.

At this moment Madame Wu brought down her eyes from the stars and saw her three sons. “You three?” she said. “What do you want?”

Ch’iuming quickly put on her stockings and shoes again. Madame Wu seemed not to see her. But she saw Mr. Wu.

“Why are you here?” she asked in a cold and distant voice.

All could see that her soul was unwilling to return to them.

“Mother, I think Meng is about to bear her child,” Liangmo said quickly.

“Mother,” Tsemo called, “I wish you would teach Rulan how to make honey cakes.”

“Mother,” Fengmo said in a low voice, “today I told you a lie.”

One by one, they called her back. Mr. Wu took his turn.

“Mother of my sons, the house needs you. And have you forgotten that it is time to allot the seed wheat for the land?”

So at last she returned. “You,” she murmured, “will you never be done with your troubles?”

“No,” Liangmo said, “never!”

She was fumbling with the robe about her knees, and now she rose and let it drop. She had come down from the stars and was here in the house again. She looked about her, dazed.

“Where is Ying? I am tired—I must sleep. Tomorrow—tomorrow.”

The men fell back and let Ying lead her into her room. Only Chi’uming slipped off into the darkness. But the men stayed in Madame Wu’s sitting room in silence, looking at one another, listening until Ying came out and told them, “She is safe now—she has fallen asleep.”

They went away then. “Can you explain this, Father?” Liangmo asked Mr. Wu as they went out of the court. “Her soul has never left this house before, has it?”

“I do not know what has come over her,” Mr. Wu grumbled. “Ever since her fortieth birthday she has been too strange.”

But Fengmo shook his head. “Not one of you understands our mother as I do. I know how she feels. She feels that she has wings and has never been allowed to fly—that is how she feels.”

His father and Liangmo and Tsemo only looked at him as though he were out of his mind, and the next moment they bade one another a grave good night.

Madame Wu woke the next morning with great dread of what had happened to her the night before. Nothing in her life had been as sweet as those moments of whole freedom when her soul had left her body behind. She knew that this freedom could become drink to the soul, a liquor which it could no more resist than a drunkard his wine. For while her soul had been wandering among the stars she had neglected all else, and the burdens of this great house had dropped from her. She had cast them off and left them behind her as surely as a nun escapes the travail of womanhood, as surely as a priest escapes the burden of manhood. She felt angry with Brother André this morning because he had tempted her to such freedom, and she was afraid of herself because she had yielded. When she woke guilt was as heavy on her as though she had given herself to a secret lover.