Pavilion of Women: A Novel of Life in the Women's Quarters (32 page)

She turned away and wiped her eyes with the edges of her sleeves. “Never mind.” Her childish voice was sad. “It is my fate. Girls like me—sometimes it happens in spite of ourselves. Especially when we really love a man. That is my mistake.”

Had she insisted, had she demanded, he would have risen and gone away perhaps never to return. But his heart was soft.

“Now,” he said, “whether it is my fault or not, you know there are ways of purging yourself. Here is something to help you.”

He put his hand in his purse, but she would not take the money he held out to her. She pushed his hand away with her two little ones. “No, please,” she said. “I will bear the child. I want to bear him.”

“You must not,” Mr. Wu insisted.

They were interrupted at this moment by loud cries from the outer room. “Mr. Wu, Mr. Wu!” the proprietor was shouting. The door burst open. Mr. Wu saw his own servant, Peng Er.

“Master, Master!” Peng Er cried, “you are wanted at home. The Second Lady has hanged herself from the old pomegranate tree!”

“My mother!” Mr. Wu muttered. He leaped to his feet and strode away, leaving Jasmine in the middle of the floor looking after him and frowning with anger.

The commotion of his own house rose over the walls of the compound and met him on the street. Priests had been called, and they were beating their gongs and crying for the lost soul of Ch’iuming. He ran through the open gate where no one stood to watch and hastened into the Peony Court. There the priests were, and there the whole household had gathered to wail and to weep and to call Ch’iuming’s name. He pushed through them, and in the midst of them upon the flags of the court she lay. Madame Wu knelt beside her and held her head on her arm. But Ch’iuming’s pale face hung over Madame Wu’s arm as though she was wholly lifeless.

“Is she dead?” Mr. Wu shouted.

“We can find no life in her,” Madame Wu replied. “I have sent for the foreign priest. If we have all these priests, why not him?”

At this very moment Brother André appeared, and the crowd divided before him like a sea before a wind. The other priests were silent in jealousy. In the center of this silence, Brother André fell to his knees and thrust a needle into Ch’iuming’s arm and held it there.

“I do not ask what you do,” Madame Wu said to him. “I know whatever it is, it is wise.”

“A stimulant,” Brother André said. “But it may be too late.” He put the needle away so quickly that no one saw it except Mr. and Mrs. Wu.

But it was not too late. Ch’iuming’s lips quivered. While they watched, her eyelids fluttered. Madame Wu sighed. “Ah, she is alive. Then the child is alive.”

“But why did she hang herself?” Mr. Wu exclaimed.

“Let us not ask until she can tell us,” Madame Wu replied. “But announce to the priests her soul has returned. Pay them well, Father of my sons. Let them think they were successful so that they will go away and we can have peace.”

Mr. Wu obeyed her and called out to the priests and led them away to the outer court. The women of the family remained, the elder cousins to commend the priests, and Meng and Rulan and Linyi to gaze quietly down into the face of Ch’iuming, whom they scarcely knew even while she was here in their own house. She was of their generation and yet linked to the older ones, and they could not be free with her, and so they had forgotten her.

But by this act she had brought herself nearer to them. She was unhappy, she did not want to belong to the elders. In each young woman’s heart an interest arose in Ch’iuming, and this interest was mingled with pity in Meng’s heart, with curiosity in Linyi’s, and with revolt in Rulan’s. Each determined in her own way to know Ch’iuming and why she had done this thing.

Yet there was no time for any of these feelings, for as Ch’iuming came to herself it became clear that her child was to be born too early. She must be carried in to her bed and the midwife sent for. These things were done, and Brother André was about to go away when Ch’iuming spoke.

“Did I see the foreign priest?” she whispered.

“He is about to go away,” Madame Wu said. She stood by the bed of fecundity while the women servants made Ch’iuming ready for the birth.

“Tell him to come here—only for a moment,” Ch’iuming begged.

Madame Wu was surprised. She did not know that Ch’iuming knew the tall foreigner. But since the girl was still so near death, she did not dare deny her. She went herself and stayed Brother André as he was about to leave. “She asks for you,” she said. “For a moment come in.”

So Brother André turned, and he stooped his head and went in through the low doorway into the room where Ch’iuming lay in the huge bed. Mr. Wu stayed behind. He was suddenly stiff with embarrassment. To what a pass had he brought the household! He did not doubt that Ch’iuming had hung herself because of Jasmine. In her silent way she had protested with her life.

When Brother André leaned over the bedside Ch’iuming spoke, but in so faint a voice he could not hear her. He leaned closer over her, and these were the words he then heard:

“If a girl is born, I give it to you when I die— It is only a foundling.”

“How can a foundling be born in this house?” he inquired gently.

“But I am only a foundling,” she said, “and this is the child of a foundling.”

With that she closed her eyes and gave herself up to pain. He went away with a grave face and told no one what she had said, and so low was her voice that no one else had heard her words.

Late that night a girl was born to Ch’iuming, a creature so small that Madame Wu took her and wrapped her in a cotton fleece and put her into her bosom to keep her alive. Then she went quickly into her own courts, leaving Ch’iuming to the midwife and to Ying, and in her own room she put the child into her bed and lay down beside her to keep her warmed. A woman servant came in to see what was needed.

“Heat bricks and bring them here,” Madame Kang said. “This child is a bud that must be carefully opened.”

“Oh, Mistress,” the woman said, “why not let her die? A girl—and what can she grow into but a sickly thing to make trouble in the house?”

“Obey me,” Madame Wu said.

The woman went muttering away and Madame Wu looked at the little creature. She was still breathing.

Two days later Brother André told Madame Wu of Ch’iuming’s strange request. The child had not died. She could not suckle, being too young, but she had swallowed a few drops of mother’s milk put into her mouth with a spoon. Ch’iuming’s milk had come, although she was too weak to speak. Even when Madame Wu told her that the child was alive, she had not answered.

“Certainly the child is not a foundling,” Madame Wu said to Brother André, with dignity. “She has been born into our house.”

“I knew you would say that,” he replied, “and you are right. But why does this young mother say she is a foundling?”

“She was, until she came here,” Madame Wu replied. She hesitated, and then to her own wonder she found herself telling Brother André what she had never told him, how it was she who had brought Ch’iuming into this house.

Brother André listened, his eyes downcast, his great hands clasped on his knees. She never saw those hands without wondering why they were so calloused. Now she asked suddenly, “Why are your hands so calloused?”

He was accustomed to her changes. “Because I till the land for the children’s food,” he said. He did not move his hands from under her gaze.

She went on with her story, her eyes on his hands.

“I suppose since you are a priest, you cannot understand either man or woman,” she said when her whole story was told.

“Being priest, I can understand both man and woman,” he said.

“Then tell me what I have done that is wrong.” She lifted her eyes from his hands to his face and wondered that out of all the world she had chosen to open her entire heart to a foreigner who had been born in some country across the sea whose waters and winds she would never know.

He answered her: “You have not considered that man is not entirely flesh, and that even such a man as your husband must be in communion with God. You have treated him with contempt.”

“I?” she exclaimed. “But I have thought of nothing but his welfare.”

“You have considered only the filling of his stomach and the softness of his bed,” Brother André said plainly. “And even worse than this, you have bought a young woman as you would buy a pound of pork. But a woman, any woman, is more than that, and of all women you should know it; You have been guilty of three sins.”

“Guilty?” she repeated.

“You have despised your husband, you have held in contempt a sister woman, and you have considered yourself unique and above all women. These sins have disturbed your house. Without knowing why, your sons have been restless and their wives unhappy, and in spite of your plans no one is happy. What has been your purpose, Madame?”

Confronted by his clear calm eyes, she trembled. “Only to be free,” she faltered. “I thought, if I did my duty to everyone, I could be free.”

“What do you mean by freedom?” he inquired.

“Very little,” she said humbly. “Simply to be mistress of my own person and my own time.”

“You ask a great deal for yourself,” he replied. “You ask everything.”

She felt nearer to tears than she had felt in many years. He had shattered the calm core of her being, her sense of rightness in herself, and she was frightened. If in this house she, upon whom all had so long depended, had been wrong and was wrong, then what would happen to them all?

“What shall I do?” she asked in a small voice.

“Forget your own self,” he said.

“But all these years,” she urged, “I have so carefully fulfilled my duty.”

“Always with the thought of your own freedom in your mind,” he said.

She could not deny it. She sat motionless, her hands folded on the pearl-gray satin of her robe. “Direct me,” she said at last.

“Instead of your own freedom, think how you can free others,” he said gently.

She lifted her head.

“From yourself,” he said still gently.

She had never been a religious woman, and now she looked at him in some doubt. “Are you speaking out of your foreign religion? If so, I cannot understand it.”

“I am not speaking out of a foreign religion,” he said.

“Do you want me to be a nun?” she exclaimed.

“I do not want you to be anything,” he replied tranquilly.

He rose to his great height, smiled down at her according to his habit, and went away without farewell. This, which in another would have seemed rudeness, simply gave to Madame Wu the feeling that there was no break between this time they had spent together and the next time, whenever that would be.

She did not move for a long moment. Upon the gray tiled floor the pattern of the latticed windows was fixed in a lacework of shadows and sunshine. The air was still and cool, but the room was not cold. A great brazier of coals stood in front of the table set against the center of the inner wall, and out of the coals, smothered with ashes, colorless quivering rays of heat shone in the air. Nothing, she reflected, was as easy as she had thought. Freedom was not a matter of arrangement. She had seen freedom hanging like a peach upon a tree. She had nurtured the tree, and when it bore she had seized upon the fruit and found it green.

She sighed, and then she heard Ch’iuming’s little child cry in the next room, and she went to it and took it into her arms and carried it into the room and sat down by the brazier. Whether it was the warmth or whether it was the feeling of support of her arms, some comfort came into the child, and she ceased crying and lay looking up into Madame Wu’s face.

“I do not love this child,” Madame Wu thought. “Perhaps I have never loved any child. Perhaps that is my trouble, that I have never been able to love anyone.”

But it was like her that without love she held the child carefully, and when Ying came in and took her she superintended her feeding again and was even pleased that the child ate her food heartily.

Watching this, she said to Ying, “Give me back the child and I will take her to her mother. She will live, this small woman, and she will hold her mother to life.”

So a little later she carried the child in her own arms through the sunshine and into her old courts and into the room where Ch’iuming lay on the big bed whose curtains were still hung with the symbols of fecundity. Ch’iuming lay with her eyes closed and her lips pressed together. She was intensely pale. Upon the silk coverlet, her hands lay open and relaxed. These hands had changed in the past months. When she came they had been rough and strong with work, but now they were thin and white.

“Here is your child,” Madame Wu said gently. “She has eaten so well that she is strong enough to come and lie on your arm.”

When Ch’iuming did not move, Madame Wu lifted her arm and put the child into its circle and covered it with the quilt. Ch’iuming’s arm tightened. She opened her eyes. “You must forgive me that I did not repay you with a son,” she said humbly.

“Do I not know that sons and daughters alike come from Heaven?” Madame Wu replied. “Besides, in these days daughters, too, are good.”

Then she remembered what Brother André said, and she went on quickly, “You must not feel that you have a duty to me. You have none.”

Ch’iuming looked surprised at this. “But why else am I here?” she asked.

Madame Wu sat down on the edge of the bed. “It has been shown me that I did you a great wrong, my sister. It is true that you were brought here as I might have bought a pound of pork. How could I dare so to behave toward a human being? I see now that I had no thought for your soul. What can I do to make amends?”

She said this in her pretty voice, neither lifting nor deepening it, and Ch’iuming’s face grew frightened. “But where shall I go?” she stammered.

Madame Wu saw that Ch’iuming had altogether failed to understand her, and that she thought that she was being told courteously, in the way of the rich and the great, that she was useless and not wanted.

“I do not want you to go anywhere,” Madame Wu said. “I am only saying that I have done wrong to you. Let me put it thus: If you had your own way, if there were no one to consider, what would you do with yourself?”