Pavilion of Women: A Novel of Life in the Women's Quarters (36 page)

“You have never had food or shelter freely,” she murmured. “It is hard for you to believe me.”

“I believe nobody,” Jasmine said. She pulled a bright red silk handkerchief out of her bosom. One end of it was fastened to a button, but she twisted the other about her fingers.

“Then you do come here for shelter,” Madame Wu said.

Jasmine shook her head. “I don’t say so,” she declared. She lifted her thick eyelids, and a sly look came into her round black eyes. “Other men have promised me shelter,” she said.

“But you come here for something,” Madame Wu persisted. “Is it because there is honor in belonging to our family, even though you live in our back court?”

Jasmine’s face was suddenly scarlet under its powder. “I like the old head—” she muttered in the jargon of the street.

Madame Wu knew she spoke of Mr. Wu, but she did not reprove her. Truth was stealing newborn out of the girl’s heart.

“He is much older than you, child,” Madame Wu said.

“I like old men,” the girl said, trembling.

“Why do you tremble?” Madame Wu asked. “You need not tremble before me.”

“I have never known anyone who was noble,” the girl said, frightened. “He is very noble.”

“What do you mean by noble?” Madame Wu asked. She would never have used the word noble for Mr. Wu. Impetuous, impatient, willful, stupid, good-natured sometimes, selfish always—these were all possible words for him, but not noble.

“I mean—noble,” Jasmine said. She lifted her arm. “This bracelet,” she said. “It is solid gold. A young man would have given me a brass one with a coat of gold and sworn it was true. It would have lasted until he left me. But no, the old one gave me solid gold.” She bit it and showed the toothmarks to Madame Wu. “See?”

“Yes, it is gold,” Madame Wu agreed.

“He is so patient,” the girl went on eagerly. “When I don’t feel well, he notices it—he doesn’t press me. Young men don’t care. They take what they want. But this old one always asks me how I feel.”

“Does he indeed,” Madame Wu replied. This was not the Mr. Wu she had known.

The girl sat down again and twisted the bracelet about her arm. “If I have no child—” she began.

“A child is not important,” Madame Wu said.

Jasmine looked at her cornerwise while Madame Wu went on. “The important thing is, will you add happiness to this house or take it away?”

Jasmine lifted her head eagerly. “I will bring happiness, I promise you, Lady—”

“Tomorrow I will decide,” Madame Wu said. She rose as she spoke, and Ying hurried into the court and led the girl away.

When she was gone Madame Wu walked straight along a path of new sunlight that now fell across the stones into the doorway. The light dazed her, but her feet were warmed by it. “I did well,” she thought in some wonder at herself. “How did I know to do so well?”

And then she understood herself. If Jasmine really loved Mr. Wu, that love, too, must be allowed. Did Mr. Wu also love Jasmine? If so, then real happiness would be added to the house. All the unhappiness in homes came because there was not love.

“When I have rested,” she said to Ying, who came in dusting her hands, “I will go to the courts of my sons’ father.”

“Do, Lady,” Ying said. She looked more cheerful. “Perhaps you can persuade him to wisdom. We have already too many women in this house.”

“Are you to stay?” she had asked Jasmine while she led her away.

“I don’t know,” Jasmine had faltered. “She said she’d tell me tomorrow.”

“Our Lady always makes up her mind quickly,” Ying said. She did not finish what she thought, that if her mistress did not say “yes” today, it would be “no” tomorrow. She had put the girl outside the back gate and had drawn the iron bar.

“I go, Lady, and let him know,” she now said. The sparkle had come back into her impudent eyes. Madame Wu saw it, understood, and smiled.

Madame Wu woke to her usual full consciousness, her heart serene. All her life she had struggled for calmness and serenity. She had made herself a prisoner inside the confines of her will, imposed upon her body. Thus her will had commanded her body to behave in certain ways at certain times, regardless of its repulsions and desires. She felt now that she need never again compel herself to anything.

“André,” she said to herself, “it is strange, is it not, that you had to die before I knew you?”

“Not strange,” the answering thought came into her mind. “There was my big body between us. You had to look at a face and at features with which I really had nothing to do. They were simply given me haphazard by my ancestors, who actually were strangers to me. Even though I was willing to realize them as strangers and leave them, still I was held in their flesh. Now I am wholly myself.”

“André,” she said to him within her, “should I still call you brother, perhaps?”

“It is no longer necessary to qualify our relationship.” So he answered in her heart.

Madame Wu lay straight and exquisite in her bed. She was frightened by this conversation which was taking place entirely in her own mind. Skeptic that she was, she would have laughed at any supernatural appearance even of the one she loved. But there had been no appearance and no sound. The austere room was exactly as it had been when she closed her eyes to sleep. Simply within her brain she heard André’s voice answering her questions. It was perhaps no more than an obsession caused by his death and by her discovery that she loved him. To have comprehended within a handful of seconds that she loved a man who had just died was enough to shake Heaven and earth. It was not surprising that the brain doubled upon itself in its confusion. She recalled that André had told her how thought was driven along the cells which composed the brain stuff. Her recognition of him, crashing into those cells, must doubtless have disturbed all the previous thought lines of her life.

“I do not know what I shall be from now on,” she thought.

She listened for the answering voice. Instead she suddenly remembered how he looked when he smiled. She saw light welling up through the deep darkness of his eyes, and she smiled back at him.

Ying came into the room, looking alarmed. “The front court is full of the beggar children,” she said fretfully. “And the prostitute is sitting in the entrance hall again. She says you sent for her.”

Madame Wu laughed. “I feel I could eat a roll of wheat bread, this morning,” she remarked.

Ying stared at her. “You look changed, Lady. Your skin is rosy as a child’s. You are not feverish?”

She came to the side of the huge bed and took Madame Wu’s little hand and held it to her cheek.

“No fever,” Madame Wu said. “Nothing but health.”

She withdrew her hand gently and threw back the silken quilt. Then, rising, she allowed Ying to wash and dress her. But she refused the gray silk robe Ying had put out for her. Instead she chose one of an old-rose color which the day before her fortieth birthday she had laid aside, thinking she would never wear such hues again.

Today it was becoming to her as it had never been. The last time she had worn it she had thought it made her paleness sallow. But this morning it lent her color.

“It was wrong of me to have put it away,” she thought as she looked at herself in the mirror. Her natural vanity stirred. “A pity he never saw me in this,” she thought. She smiled at herself in the glass. She glanced at Ying, to see whether any of this had been seen. But Ying was folding the gray robe, sleeve to sleeve.

Madame Wu walked into the library. In common sense today she should have felt her life tangled with unsolved problems. Twenty children waited in the court, the young prostitute sat in the entrance hall, and Mr. Wu was more than ever a responsibility. There were the newborn girl and her mother, Ch’iuming, and her own sons and their wives. But she had none of her usual shrinking from human beings. She now realized that for the first time in her life she disliked no one. All her life she had struggled again her dislike of human beings. None had been wholly to her taste. Thus her mother she had disliked because of her ignorance and superstitions. Her father she had loved, or would have said she had, but she had disliked him, too, because his heart was far away and she could never come near him. And though Mr. Wu had been a handsome young man when she married him there were secrets of his person which she disliked. Even when she had shared his passion, she had been aware of shapes and odors, and she had felt violation in his touch even while she allowed it. Old Gentleman had been dear to her, but she was so delicately made that she could not forget what she disliked while she found what she liked. His heart was good, his intelligence clear, but his teeth were broken and his breath came foul.

“If André had been alive when I found I loved him, I wonder if I could have—”

Before she could frame the thought, another came to answer. “You see how wise is death! It removes the body of a man and lets free his spirit.”

“But if I were younger,” she reminded him, “could I have been satisfied only with your spirit?”

She looked down at the smooth gray tiles of the floor. Would it have been possible, when she was young, to have loved a foreign man? For of course André was a foreign man, a man from another country and of another blood. She tried to imagine him young and ardent as a man is ardent, and all her blood rose in strange anger.

“Don’t!” This cry burst into her mind.

“No, I will not,” she promised.

Ying came in with her breakfast and placed it upon the table in neat rows of dishes. Madame Wu took up her chopsticks.

“Have the children in the court been fed?” she asked.

“Certainly not, Lady,” Ying said sternly. “No orders have been given for so much food.”

“Then I give orders now,” Madame Wu said gently. “Let rice be cooked at once, and bread bought and tea made for their noon meal.”

“It is lucky it is not raining,” Ying said. “We should be put to it if we had to take such people under our roof.”

“There is room here for all,” Madame Wu said.

She was amazed to see Ying begin to cry and, with her blue coat to her eyes, run sobbing out of the room. “You are changed—you are changed,” she cried.

But at noon she had great buckets of rice set in the court, and when Madame Wu went there it was to see the little girls eating happily and feeding the younger ones by pushing rice into their open mouths. The old woman who had been their caretaker rose, her cheeks full of rice, and cried out to the children that they must greet Madame Wu as their mother.

“Now that your father has gone, I am your mother,” Madame Wu said, smiling. The orphan children looked at her with love, and suddenly for the first time in her life Madame Wu felt the true pangs of birth in her being. She felt her being divided and merge again with another nature far larger than her own. These children were André’s and hers.

“All are my children,” she said, wondering that the words could be hers. At the sound of her voice the children rushed to her to embrace her, to touch her, to lean against her. She looked down at them and saw their small lacks and defects as well as their beauty. But she felt no dislike.

“Your father did the best he could for you,” she said, smiling, “but you need a mother, too.” She touched a sore red scar on a child’s cheek. “Does it still hurt?” she asked.

“A little,” the child replied.

“And how did you come by it?” Madame Wu asked.

The child hung her head. “My mistress held the end of her cigarette against me there—”

“Oh, why?” Madame Wu asked.

“I was her slave—and I couldn’t move fast enough—” the child replied.

She put her hand into Madame Wu’s. “Will you give me a name?” she begged. “He was going to give me a name and then died too soon. All the others have names.”

“They shall tell me their names, and then I shall know what to name you,” Madame Wu replied.

One by one they repeated their names, and each name was a word spoken from André.

Pity; Faith; Humility; Grace; Truth; Mercy; Light; Song; Star; Moonbeam; Sunbeam; Dawn; Joy; Clarity—such were the names he had given the older ones. The younger ones he had called playful names. Kitten and Snowbird and Rosepetal and Acorn, Silver and Gold. “Because he said silver and gold had he none,” these two small creatures proclaimed, “until we came.”

They all laughed at such nonsense. “He did make us laugh every day,” Gold said. She was a round little creature, and she clutched Silver by the hand.

“Are you sisters?” Madame Wu asked, smiling.

“We are all sisters,” twenty voices cried.

“Of course,” Madame Wu agreed. “I am stupid.”

The scarred child pressed her close. “And my name?” she asked.

Madame Wu looked down into the tender face. The child was exquisite, a bud of a child, full of beauty to come. The name rose in Madame Wu’s mind. “I will call you Love,” she said.

“I am Love,” the child repeated.

By now the court was fringed with silent onlookers. The servants in the house had made one excuse and another to pass this way to stop and stare, but the children of the household and the lesser relatives made no pretense of errands. They stood gaping at this new Madame Wu. At last Jasmine, who had grown weary of waiting in the entrance hall, rose and came to the court herself, and behind her came her servant. Jasmine had braced herself to be very strong and to demand her rights as one who had within herself hope of a son for the house.

But instead of the stern proud lady whom she had expected to see, this morning she saw a gentle beautiful woman laughing in the midst of beggar children. Madame Wu looked up at the bustle behind the pillars of the veranda, and their eyes met.

“You see I have many children,” Madame Wu said, smiling, “but I have not forgotten you. When I have planned where they are to sleep and play, I will talk with you.”

She turned to the relatives. None of them were sons or sons’ wives. They were only old cousins and poor nephews who, having no shelter elsewhere, had returned to the ancestral house to find a corner here and a bed there.

“Where shall we house my children?” she asked gaily.

“Our Sister,” an old widow answered, “if you are doing good deeds, let them be housed in the family temple.”