Pavilion of Women: A Novel of Life in the Women's Quarters (38 page)

“Yes, certainly she is nothing unusual, this girl Jasmine.” Mr. Wu went on apologetically.

“If she has won your love,” Madame Wu said with her strange new gentleness, “then she is unusual.”

Mr. Wu looked startled. “Are you feeling well, Mother of my sons?” he inquired. “Your voice sounds weaker than I remembered.”

“I never felt stronger in my life,” Madame Wu replied. “Tell me more about this girl whom you love.”

Mr. Wu hesitated. “I am not sure I love her,” he said. “That is, I do not feel toward her at all as I have ever felt toward you. I have no respect for her as I have for you. I do not admire her. She has no learning. I would not ask her advice about anything.”

He felt more at ease when he saw Madame Wu’s face warmer than usual, and her eyes encouraging. She was not at all angry. “Your common sense is superb,” he said. “Shall I go on?”

“Please do, Father of my sons. Tell me how she affects you. Then perhaps I can help you to know whether you truly love her.”

“Why are you interested?” he asked.

“Put it that I feel I did you wrong in arranging for Ch’iuming’s coming,” she said.

“You meant well,” he said courteously.

“I acted selfishly,” she said, more gently still.

It was the first time she had ever acknowledged herself wrong in anything she did, and he was much moved.

“There remains no one like you,” he told her with some of his old impetuosity. “I still say that had it not been for your fortieth birthday I would not have known there was another woman in the world.”

She smiled again. “Alas, for women the choice is only between this fortieth birthday—or death.” Had she loved him, she would have chosen death rather than Jasmine in this house.

“Do not mention death,” he said, still courteously. “Well, you ask me how this girl affects me. You know—she makes me feel strong. Yes, that is the effect she has on me.”

“Strong?” Madame Wu repeated.

“She is so little, so ignorant, so weak,” Mr. Wu said. A thick soft smile crept about his lips. “No one has ever taken proper care of her. Really, she is a child. She has had no shelter. No one has ever truly understood her. She seems simple and ordinary, but there are qualities in her heart. She is not, you understand, a creature of high intelligence. But she has deep emotions. She needs constant guidance.”

Madame Wu listened to this with amazement. Never in her life had she heard Mr. Wu speak of anything except his own needs and desires.

“You really love her!” she exclaimed.

There was admiration in her voice, and Mr. Wu responded to it proudly and modestly. “If what I have told you is love, then I do love her,” he replied.

They had never been so near to each other as they now were. She had not known that he had this heart in him. He was made new, too. This perception filled her with astonishment. It was not a wonder that a man like André should have wakened love in her. But that this Jasmine, this common, rosy little street girl, this creature of ignorance and earthy innocence, should have roused in Mr. Wu something of the same energy was a miracle.

“You do not mind?” Mr. Wu said. His face, turned toward her, was tender and pleading.

“I rejoice,” she said quickly.

They rose at the same instant and met in the middle of the sunlight upon the floor. Her warmth rushed out to him, and his replied. He seized her hands, and for that swift moment they were one, his eyes looking into hers. She longed to tell him why she rejoiced, and why they were so near. She longed for him to know that she understood this miracle in him that was love, whether it came through a great man or through a girl from a brothel. Priest or prostitute, the miracle was the same. It had reached her, hidden in her secret courts, and it had reached him in a flower house and had changed them both. But she knew that she could never make him understand the miracle. She must only help to make it complete for him.

“There is no woman on earth like you,” he said.

“Perhaps there is not,” she agreed, and gently she withdrew her hands from his.

It was at this moment that Ying came upon them. According to her usual habit, she had first peeped around the corner of the door to see what they were doing. She was amazed and then delighted to see them holding hands. Surely this meant reconciliation and that the girl from the brothel would be sent away! She stepped back and coughed, and then appeared again with her urgent message.

“Lady, a man has come running at the gate to say that Madame Kang is in labor and it goes badly with her and Mr. Kang asks your immediate presence as her sister-friend.”

Madame Wu rose at once from her chair, to which she had returned at the cough. “Oh, Heaven,” she murmured, “is it so! Did the man say what the trouble is?”

“The child refuses to be born,” Ying said dolefully. “It will not leave the womb.”

“I must go at once,” Madame Wu exclaimed. She made haste to the door and there stopped for an instant to speak again to Mr. Wu. “And you, Father of my sons, let down your heart and be at ease. The young girl shall come quietly into your court. I will myself silence all tongues. I ask only one thing—that Ch’iuming be allowed to leave.”

“Indeed, I am quite willing for her to remain,” Mr. Wu said kindly. “She is very good, and where would she now go if you send her away?”

“I shall not send her away,” Madame Wu replied. “When I return I will decide her life. For the present, let her move into my own court.” She turned to Ying. “You hear what I say, Ying. Let it be so.”

Ying by now was standing flat against the wall, clinging with her nails to the bricks. “Is the whore to stay?” she wailed.

“She is now not that,” Madame Wu replied with sternness. “She is the choice of my lord.”

With these words she made haste away and within a very few minutes she was seated in her sedan chair, lifted upon the shoulders of the bearers, and carried through the streets.

“We borrow your light—we borrow your light—” the bearers chanted while they strode along and the crowd parted before the urgency of their cry.

T
HE HOUSE OF KANG
was all in turmoil. This Madame Wu heard and saw the moment her sedan was lowered in the outer court. The young slave girls and the bondmaids were running everywhere, crying and reproving one another, and men servants stood silent and distraught. When the head steward saw Madame Wu he ran forward and, bowing, he begged her to come at once to the inner court. She followed him, and at the sight of her the confusion grew quiet. All eyes were fixed on her with fresh hope. Her wisdom was known, and her deep affection for the mistress of the house was trusted.

“She reads many books,” one woman whispered to another. Out of these books, they hoped, she might know what to do.

In the main room of the inner court Mr. Kang sat weeping. Madame Wu had seen him often through many years, but never had she spoken a word to him nor heard his voice directed to her. They had bowed across rooms to each other, and at the weddings of Meng and Linyi they had bowed as outer relatives do. But she knew him only through her friend, his wife.

Yet this meant she knew him very well. She knew what he liked to eat, how he liked duck seasoned with wine and garlic, and that he did not like limed eggs, and that he could eat seven pork-stuffed rolls at a meal, and that it took two catties of wine to make him drunk, and that when he was drunk he only went to sleep and was never fierce. She knew that he was proud of the number of his children, but that if any of them cried in his presence he sent it away. She knew that he left his slippers at his wife’s bedside every night, and when he did not it meant he was at a flower house and so his wife cried half the night through, and this made him angry. She knew that he had a black mole over his heart, which was a sign of long life, and she knew he suffered from wind in his bowels, and she knew that when storms blew from the north bringing sand from the deserts, his eyelids itched, and she knew that his cheeks broke into a red rash when he ate crabs but still he ate crabs. That is, Madame Wu knew everything about this man who sat with his fat hands on his knees weeping because his wife was dying. But of her he knew nothing except what all the town knew, that she had chosen a concubine for her husband when she was forty years old.

He rose when he saw her come in, and the yellow tears ran down his round cheeks. “She is—is—” he began.

“I know,” Madame Wu said, looking away from him. Again she would have marveled at her friend, that she could love this man, except now she knew how strange love could be. She moved quickly to the satin curtains that hung between this room and the bedroom. “I will go in at once, if you will allow me,” she said.

“Go in—go in—save her life,” he blubbered.

She went in quickly to Madame Kang’s bedroom. The smell of wasted blood was hot in the air. A lighted oil lamp flickered in the cavern of the great bed where she lay, and over her body an old woman bent. Two servant women hovered near, one at her foot and one at her head. Madame Wu brushed away the one at her head and looked down into the deathlike face of her friend.

“Meichen,” she said softly.

Slowly Madame Kang opened her eyes. “You,” she whispered, “you’ve come—” Her face wrinkled piteously. “I’m dying—”

Madame Wu had her friend’s wrist between her fingers. The pulse was very faint indeed, and she did not answer this.

“Stop pulling at the child,” she commanded the midwife.

The old woman looked up. “But it is a boy!” she cried.

“Leave us alone,” Madame Wu commanded. “Go out, all of you.” She straightened her slender figure.

All the women stared at her. “Do you take responsibility?” the old midwife cried, and pursed her lips.

“I take responsibility,” Madame Wu said.

She stood waiting while they went out. Then in the stillness she leaned again over her friend. “Meichen, do you hear me?” she asked clearly.

Madame Kang’s eyes had closed, but now with great effort she opened them. She did not speak, but Madame Wu saw consciousness in their depths.

She went on: “You will lie here quietly while I go and fetch some broth for you to drink. You will drink it and you will rest. Then you will feel strong again. When you are strong I will help you give birth to the child. Between us it will be easy.”

The eyelids flickered and closed. The faintest of smiles touched Madame Kang’s lips. Madame Wu covered her warmly and went into the other room. The midwife had gone away angry, but the servant women were there, pouring tea for Mr. Kang, fanning him, begging him to rest himself. They turned as she came in, but she did not speak to them. She spoke to Mr. Kang.

“I need your help,” she told him.

“Will she live?” he cried at her.

“If you help me,” she replied.

“Anything, anything!”

“Hush.” She stopped his babbling.

Then she commanded a servant, “Bring me a bowl of the best soup you have ready.”

“Cow’s-flesh broth we have ready and chicken broth and special fish soup.”

“The fish soup,” she decided, “and put into it two spoonfuls of red sugar. Have it hot.”

She turned again to Mr. Kang.

“You are to bring it in—not one of the maids.”

“But I—” he sputtered, “I assure you I am clumsy.”

“You will bring it in,” she repeated.

She went back again into the shadowy room, and once more she took Madame Kang’s wrist between her fingers. The pulse was as it had been, but not weaker. She stood waiting, and soon she heard Mr. Kang’s heavy footsteps tiptoeing into the room. In his two hands he held the jar of hot soup.

“We will put the soup into the teapot,” she decided. Swiftly she emptied the tea into a brass spittoon and, taking the jar from him, she poured the soup into the teapot.

Then she turned again to the bed.

“Meichen,” she said, “you have only to swallow.” She tested the heat of the soup in her own mouth, and then she put the spout of the teapot to Madame Kang’s lips and allowed the soup to trickle into her mouth. Madame Kang did not open her eyes, but she swallowed again and again as many as five or six times.

“Now rest,” Madame Wu commanded.

She did not speak to Mr. Kang. No, she kept him there standing, watching. She set the teapot on the table, and she turned back her satin sleeves and tied around her waist a towel that was hanging on a chair. He watched her, his eyes staring in horror.

“I ought not to be present,” he whispered.

But she motioned to him to come nearer, and in deep horror he obeyed her. He had begotten many children, but never had he seen what his begetting did. In carelessness and pleasure had he begotten.

Madame Wu turned back the covers, and she leaned over her friend.

“Meichen,” she said clearly, “give yourself no trouble. Allow your body to rest. I will work for you.”

But in spite of her words, the moment she touched the sore flesh, Madame Kang groaned. Mr. Kang clapped his hands to his mouth and turned his head away.

“Hold her hands,” Madame Wu said to him. “Give her your strength.”

He could not disobey her. Her great eyes were fixed on him with stern power. He stepped forward and took his wife’s hands. And this, this alone, could have made Madame Kang open her eyes. She, feeling her hands in those she knew so well, opened her eyes.

“You,” she gasped, “you—Father of my sons!”

At this moment of recognition Madame Wu slipped her strong narrow hands around the child, and Madame Kang screamed.

Mr. Kang burst into sweat. He groaned and clenched his hands around his wife’s. “If you will only live now,” he muttered through his teeth, “I swear, I swear—”

“Swear—nothing,” she gasped. “I am glad—your child.”

“Children are nothing to me beside you,” he shouted. “If you die I will hang myself.” The sweat ran down his face.

“Then you do—love me?” Her voice was so faint, it came in such breaths, that for a moment Madame Wu was afraid of what she had undertaken.

“Heart of my heart,” Mr. Kang was crying. “Don’t die—don’t die—”

“I won’t die,” Madame Kang said aloud.

At this moment Madame Wu moved he child out of her body. A gush of blood flowed but Madame Wu stanched it with handfuls of cotton that the midwife had put by the bed.