Pavilion of Women: A Novel of Life in the Women's Quarters (50 page)

“Well, well—” she said in her mildest voice.

Liangmo understood that she meant for him to be silent and so he quenched his anger in a long drink of tea and sat with his face very solemn.

Madame Wu did not speak for a long time. She knew the value of silence. It was a soft gray day, the skies gray, the walls gray, and from the pool in the court a delicate mist rose from the cold water into air unduly warm for the season. The smell of earth hung about the courts.

“You are well pleased in your own courts, my son?” Madame Wu said at last.

“Certainly I am,” Liangmo said. He put down his tea bowl. “I am obeyed there. My children are healthy and intelligent. Do you know, Our Mother, that the eldest has finished the lower school already?”

“Can it be so?” Madame Wu replied amiably. “And in the city, is all well?”

“Well enough,” Liangmo said. “Markets are somewhat poor, perhaps, but not too poor for the season. Some foreign goods come in, now that the war is ended. The foreign hospital is raising a new building, and I hear new foreigners are coming.”

“Is this a good thing?” Madame Wu inquired.

“Fengmo is pleased,” Liangmo said dryly. “For myself, I can only say we are fortunate. Meng needs no foreign doctors and the children are never ill.”

“I remember I cured a grandson in the Kang house with our grandmother’s herb brew,” Madame Wu murmured. “I suppose he is a great lad now—”

The year before this Madame Kang had died. At this moment Madame Wu thought of her as she had seen her in her coffin. The coffin had been made twice as broad as usual, and there Madame Kang had lain, dressed in her satin robes, her plump hands by her sides. After she was dead Madame Wu thought of her sometimes with old love still faintly sweet, and their friendship returned to its early days. Madame Kang had been a rosy, cheerful, hearty girl, sad only for such small things as that her nostrils were wide and her nose too flat between the brows. Mr. Kang had soon married a second wife, a young woman whose willfulness stirred the great unwieldy household continually like a ladle in a pot of stew. But this was no matter of concern for Madame Wu, and no more than gossip for Ying, to which Madame Wu listened or did not, while Ying was brushing her hair.

Liangmo waited for his mother to speak. She drew back her thoughts at last and smiled at him her small sweet smile. “Well, my son,” she said. “The soul of every creature must take its own shape, and none can compel another without hurting himself. Live in your house, my son, and let Fengmo live in his.”

“Teach Fengmo one thing, if you please, Our Mother,” Liangmo said in anger. “Bid him keep his long arm out of my house.”

“I will,” Madame Wu promised.

So Liangmo went away and when Madame Wu next saw Fengmo she taught him thus:

“Do you remember, my son, that once your tutor said to you that to teach is to invite the soul to Heaven but never to compel it?”

She saw by Fengmo’s look that he did remember these words which André had spoken. The wonder of André had always been that his whole life was invitation toward Heaven.

Fengmo bent his head into his hands. “I know why you remind me,” he said. “I know why I need to be told. The banked fires in me break out sometimes and I am driven by my own flames, and when I am driven I drive others.”

She let him speak on, knowing that to someone he must confess himself, and to whom if not to her? Again she felt the strange impulse to talk to this son about André. They were very close, she and this son who alone had shared the wisdom that André had brought into the house. Again she refused herself. But she allowed herself this much comfort. She said:

“I often consider and ponder what it was that tall priest brought into our house. We are a family so old it cannot be said we needed wisdom to live. We have continued as a family for hundreds of years, and our life goes on. He did not change us, and yet we are changed, you and I, and it is we who have brought change into the house. But what is this change?”

“We learned from him the right of the self to be,” Fengmo said.

“How well and easily you have put it,” she said. No one could have told from her voice at this moment that she felt André was here in this room, standing beside her son and looking at them both with ineffable love. She sat basking in his presence. He came so often to her alone, but never before had he come with another in the room.

“Had he lived,” she said to Fengmo, “I think he would have approved all that you do.”

“Do you think so?” Fengmo exclaimed. He sat up, and his pleasure in what she had said gave him new energy. “Mother, I am thinking of a new thing. What would you say if I persuaded the foreign hospital doctors to begin the teaching of country doctors, not too learned but able to cure the many usual diseases? Our people die so needlessly.”

He went on, his voice bright and eager and full of life, but she scarcely heard him. She was thinking of André. She saw his great beautiful hands. One of them, as so often it had been, was at the crucifix upon his breast. When his rosary broke, he had tied it to a cord. The crucifix now was broken too. When the ruffians had killed him, the crucifix had struck the stones where he fell. She had seen it so when she looked at him in his coffin.

“Good, my son, good,” she murmured. “Good—good—”

Only when he rose to hasten away, full of his new plans, did she remember what she had promised Liangmo. She put out her hand and laid hold of Fengmo’s arm. “Only remember this, my son—compel no one—not Liangmo, not Meng—”

“Oh, those two!” Fengmo cried. “I have given them up—”

He was gone and André was gone, too. She sat alone, smiling to herself.

The years have passed over Madame Wu. She never leaves her own gates. Yet somehow she knows enough and all of that which goes on. She is famed for her patient listening and her cool judgments, and many come to her for enlightenment. It is she who decides all great matters in city and country. It was she who decided, for example, what to do with the body of Little Sister Hsia when she died, one winter’s night, in her solitary house. The poor thin body of that one was brought to the Wu temple, and Madame Wu herself saw to the coffin and the burial. For Little Sister Hsia had separated herself even from her own kind. She had long quarreled with the other foreigners in the city, who were from another country, and when she died it was with no one in the house except her old cook, and he alone mourned her. It was he who came and told Madame Wu that he had found his mistress sitting upright in her chair, wrapped in her ragged quilt, her holy book open on her knee.

There beneath the gods of clay, and beneath the picture of André painted upon alabaster, Little Sister Hsia lay in her coffin. The temple children were gone except for the young girl named Love and she lit the candles. The old priest, now so old that he could scarcely totter, often let her help him with his duties, and the old nurse had a helper, for she could not walk easily any more.

Madame Wu had looked down at the bone-thin face of the woman who had left her own kind and kin, and tried to remember the prayer that Little Sister Hsia had used to say very often. But she could not remember it. She had forgotten it with all else she did not wish to remember. So she could only light a stick of incense in the pewter urn before the gods and ask Heaven to receive also this foreign soul. And Little Sister Hsia’s coffin was sealed and set in a niche in the temple until a lucky day, and then it was buried upon a hillside outside the city, and Madame Wu commanded that a stone be set up giving such few facts as she knew about her, so that if any kinfolk ever came to seek her, they could find her.

She would have held this very unlikely except that a strange thing happened.

After the end of the war, the whole countryside was in confusion and many men came from over the seas to mend and to meddle in this confusion. It did not touch the house of the Wu family. Their city remained remote as ever it had been from the troubled regions. But foreigners continued passing through for one reason or another, and one of the reasons was that Fengmo invited them. Whenever he heard the name of a man from the West, Fengmo invited him to come and advise him about the work he did, and the men came, for the work was becoming known everywhere with not a little praise for Fengmo.

These foreigners, of course, Madame Wu did not receive, for she did not know their language, and it was too difficult to converse with them. Moreover, she declared, “My life is complete. I do not need to add another to it.”

But one day Fengmo sent her special word that a man from across the ocean was come, and there was a reason why he wished to bring him to see her. She gave her consent to this, and a few hours afterward Fengmo came and with him was a tall foreign man, young and dark. Indeed, he was so dark that, after greetings, Madame Wu looked at him and then turned to Fengmo.

“Is this man a foreigner? His skin is so brown.”

“He is foreign,” Fengmo said, “but his ancestors, indeed his parents, came from Italy, which was the birthplace, Mother, of Brother André.”

How Madame Wu’s heart now stirred! She forgot that she could speak no language but her own, and she leaned forward, her hands on the silver head of her cane, and she asked the young man, “Did you know the foreign priest?”

Fengmo stepped in quickly to translate, and then Madame Wu and the young man spoke through him thus:

“I did not know him,” the young man said, “but my father and mother have told me of him, Madame. He was my uncle.”

“Your uncle!” Madame Wu repeated. “You are his flesh and blood!”

She gazed at the dark young man and found one resemblance and then another. Yes, here were the dark eyes of André, but not so wide. Yes, here was André’s shape of skull, and the hands. She looked at the young man’s hands, more slender than André’s but with the shape she knew. All was more slender and smaller than André, and the look in the eyes was not at all André’s. The soul was not the same.

She sighed and drew back. No, the soul was not the same.

“You came here to find your uncle?” she inquired.

“I did,” the young man answered. “My parents knew where he was, although he never wrote to any of us in his later years. When I passed near here I said I would come and see if he still lived and write home to my father.”

“He is buried in our land,” Madame Wu said. “My son will take you to his grave.”

They sat for a moment in silence. Madame Wu struggled with a strange jealousy. She closed her eyes and saw André’s face against the velvet inner dark. “You,” she said to him, “you belong only to us.”

She opened her eyes and saw his nephew sitting there before her. Ah, André had family and kin, foreign and far away!

The young man smiled. “I suppose you know, Madame, why he lived so far away from all of us and why he never wrote any letters?”

Fengmo answered for her. “We never knew.”

“He was a heretic,” the young man said solemnly. “The church cast him out as a renegade—homeless, without support. We never heard from him afterward. He sent back money we sent him—he refused to come home.”

“But he did no evil,” Fengmo exclaimed in horror.

“It was not what he did,” the young man declared. “It was what he thought. He thought it was men and women who were the divine. It seems hard to think this a sin, in our generation. But it was a great sin in his day. He felt compelled to write a letter to his Cardinal and tell him. In the last letter he wrote my father he told the whole story. We didn’t know what he meant. My mother said she guessed he was crazy from living too long alone.”

All this Fengmo translated for Madame Wu, and she listened and said not a word. They had rejected him—his own people!

She closed her eyes. “But we did not reject you,” she told him in her heart.

She sat thus for a moment silent, her eyes closed, and the two young men stared at her. Fengmo moved, anxious because she sat so long, and she opened her eyes.

“Tell this young foreigner that it is a very long way to that grave,” she said. “Tell him the road is rough and narrow. When he gets there it is only the grave, nothing more.”

The young man listened. “If it is as far as that, I had better not go,” he exclaimed. “I have to get back in time to catch the boat. After all, as you say, it is only a grave.”

They went away, after farewells, and Madame Wu was glad to see them gone. She had need to be alone that she might comprehend to the full the knowledge she now had of André. All those years he had lived here, solitary!

“But not solitary,” she thought. There were the children he had found and the beggars he had fed.

And she herself—how had she opened her gates and let him in? She would never know. He had been led to her, and she had opened her gates and he had come in, and with him he had brought to her eternal life.

Yes, she now believed that when her body died, her soul would go on. Gods she did not worship, and faith she had none, but love she had and forever. Love alone had awakened her sleeping soul and had made it deathless.

She knew she was immortal.

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) was a bestselling and Nobel Prize-winning author of fiction and nonfiction, celebrated by critics and readers alike for her groundbreaking depictions of rural life in China. Her renowned novel
The Good Earth
(1931) received the Pulitzer Prize and the William Dean Howells Medal. For her body of work, Buck was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature—the first American woman to have won this honor.

Born in 1892 in Hillsboro, West Virginia, Buck spent much of the first forty years of her life in China. The daughter of Presbyterian missionaries based in Zhenjiang, she grew up speaking both English and the local Chinese dialect, and was sometimes referred to by her Chinese name, Sai Zhenzhju. Though she moved to the United States to attend Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, she returned to China afterwards to care for her ill mother. In 1917 she married her first husband, John Lossing Buck. The couple moved to a small town in Anhui Province, later relocating to Nanking, where they lived for thirteen years.