Pavilion of Women: A Novel of Life in the Women's Quarters (8 page)

“It is a lovely trembling mouth now,” Madame Wu said. “But women’s mouths change as they grow older. Yours will become more lovely as it grows firm, or it will become coarse and stubborn.”

Her cool voice conveyed no interest, merely the statement of what was to be expected. Rulan might have declared, had there been any interest, that she did not care what her mouth became. But confused by the coolness, she merely pressed her red lips together for a moment and drew her black brows together.

“Did you come to speak to me about something?” Madame Wu inquired. She had changed her seat to one more comfortable than the straight wooden chair by the table. This one was wooden, too, but the back was rounded. Yet she did not lean against it. She continued to sit upright while she filled her little pipe. She lit it and took her two customary dainty puffs.

“Our Mother!” Rulan began impetuously. She was pent and disturbed, yet she did not know how to begin.

“Yes, child?” Madame Wu said mildly.

“Mother,” Rulan began again, “you have upset everybody.”

“Have I?” Madame Wu asked. Her voice was full of music and wonder.

“Yes, you have,” Rulan repeated. “Tsemo said I wasn’t to come and talk with you. He said that it was Liangmo’s duty as the oldest son. But Liangmo won’t. He said it would be no use. And Meng does nothing but cry. But I don’t cry. I said someone must come and talk with you.”

“And no one came except you.” Madame Wu smiled slightly.

Rulan did not smile in reply. Her too-serious young face was agonized between shyness and determination. “Mother,” she began yet again, “I have always felt you did not like me, and so I ought to be the last one to come to you.”

“Child, you are wrong,” Madame Wu said. “There is no one in the world whom I dislike, not even that poor foreign soul, Little Sister Hsia.”

Rulan flinched. “You really do not like me,” she argued. “I know that. I am older than Tsemo, and you do not like me for that. And you never forgive me that we fell in love in Shanghai and decided ourselves to marry instead of letting you arrange our affairs.”

“Of course I did not like that,” Madame Wu agreed. “But when I had thought about it, I knew that I wanted Tsemo’s happiness, and when I saw you I knew he was happy, and so I was pleased with you. That you are older than he you cannot help. It is annoying in the house, but I have managed in spite of it. One can manage anything.”

“But if I were like Meng and the others,” Rulan said in her stormy impetuous way, “I would not feel so badly now over what you have done. Mother, you must not let Father take another woman.”

“It is not a matter of letting him,” Madame Wu said, still mildly. “I have decided that it is the best thing for him.”

The color washed out of Rulan’s ruddy face. “Mother, do you know what you do?”

“I think I know what I do,” Madame Wu said.

“People will laugh at us,” Rulan said. “It’s old-fashioned to take a concubine.”

“For Shanghai people, perhaps,” Madame Wu said, and her voice conveyed to Rulan that it did not matter at all what Shanghai people thought.

Rulan stared at her in stubborn despair. This cool woman who was her husband’s mother was so beautiful, so perfect, that she was beyond the reach of all anger, all reproach. She knew long ago that against her she could never prevail with Tsemo. His mother’s hold upon him was so absolute that he did not even rebel against it. He was convinced that whatever his mother did was finally for his own good. Today when the women were storming against the idea of the new woman and Liangmo had only been silent, Tsemo had shrugged his shoulders. He was playing chess with Yenmo, his younger brother.

“If our mother wants a concubine,” he said, “it is for a reason, for she never acts without reason. Yenmo, it is your turn.”

Yenmo played without heeding the turmoil. Of all his brothers he loved Tsemo best, for he played with him every day. Without him Yenmo would have been lonely in this house full of women and children.

“Reason!” Rulan had cried with contempt.

“Guard your tongue,” Tsemo had said sternly, not lifting his eyes from the chessboard.

She had not dared disobey him. Though he was younger than she, he had something of his mother’s calm, and this gave him power over her storm and passion. But she had secretly made up her mind to come alone to Madame Wu.

She clenched her hands on her knees and gazed at her. “Mother, it is now actually against the laws for a man to take a concubine, do you know that?”

“What laws?” Madame Wu asked.

“The new laws,” Rulan cried, “the laws of the Revolutionary party!”

“These laws,” Madame Wu said, “like the new Constitution, are still entirely on paper.”

She saw that Rulan was taken aback by her use of the word Constitution. She had not expected Madame Wu to know about the Constitution.

“Many of us worked hard to abolish concubinage,” she declared. “We marched in procession in the Shanghai streets in hottest summer, and our sweat poured down our bodies. We carried banners insisting on the one-wife system of marriage as they have it in the West. I myself carried a blue banner that bore in white letters the words, ‘Down with concubines.’ Now when someone in my own family, my own husband’s mother, does a thing so old-fashioned, so—so wicked—for it is wicked, Mother, to return to the old cruel ways—”

“My child,” Madame Wu asked in her sweet reasonable voice, “what would you do if Tsemo one day should want another wife, someone, say, less full of energy and wit than you are, someone soft and comfortable?”

“I would divorce him at once,” Rulan said proudly. “I would not share him with any other woman.”

Madame Wu lit her little pipe again and took two more puffs. “A man’s life is made up of many parts,” she said. “As a woman grows older she perceives this.”

“I believe in the equality of man and woman,” Rulan insisted.

“Ah,” Madame Wu said, “two equals are nevertheless not the same two things. They are equal in importance, equally necessary to life, but not the same,”

“That is not what we think nowadays,” Rulan said. “If a woman is content with one man, a man should be content with one woman.”

Madame Wu put down her pipe. “You are so young,” she said reflectively, “that I wonder how I can explain it. You see, my child, content is the important thing—the content of a man, the content of a woman. When one reaches the measure of content, shall that one say to the other, ‘Here you must stop because I am now content?’ ”

“But Liangmo told us our father does not want another one,” Rulan said doggedly.

Madame Wu thought, “Ah, Liangmo has been talking to his father today!” She felt a moment’s pity for her husband, at the mercy of his sons for no fault of his own.

“When you have lived with a man for twenty-five years as his wife,” she said gently, “you have lived with him to the end of all knowledge.”

She sighed and suddenly wished this young woman away. And yet she liked her better than she ever had before. It took courage to come here alone, to speak these blunt, brave, foolish words.

“Child,” she said, leaning toward Rulan, “I think Heaven is kind to women, after all. One could not keep bearing children forever. So Heaven in its mercy says when a woman is forty, ‘Now, poor soul and body, the rest of your life you shall have for yourself. You have divided yourself again and again, and now take what is left and make yourself whole again, so that life may be good to you for yourself, not only for what you give but for what you get.’ I will spend the rest of my life assembling my own mind and my own soul. I will take care of my body carefully, not that it may any more please a man, but because it houses me and therefore I am dependent upon it.”

“Do you hate us all?” the girl asked. Her eyes opened wide, and Madame Wu saw for the first time that they were very handsome eyes.

“I love you all more than ever,” Madame Wu said.

“Our father, too?” the girl inquired.

“Him, too,” Madame Wu said. “Else why would I so eagerly want his happiness?”

“I do not understand you,” the girl said after a moment. “I think I do not know what you mean.”

“Ah, you are so far from my age,” Madame Wu replied. “Be patient with me, child, for knowing what I want.”

“You really are doing what you want to do?” Rulan asked doubtfully.

“Really, I am,” Madame Wu replied tenderly.

Rulan rose. “I shall have to go back and tell them,” she said. “But I do not think any one of them will understand.”

“Tell them all to be patient with me,” Madame Wu said, smiling at her.

“Well, if you are sure—” Rulan said, still hesitating.

“Quite sure,” Madame Wu said.

She was glad once more of the loneliness and the silence when Rulan had gone. She smiled a little to think of the family gathered together without her, all in consternation, all wondering what to do, because for the first time in their knowledge of her she had done something for herself alone. But as she smiled she felt full of peace. Without waiting for Ying, since she was two hours before her usual time for bed, she bathed and put on her white silk night garments and lay down in the huge dark-curtained old bed. When Ying came in an hour later she was frightened at the silence and ran to the bedroom. There behind the undrawn bed curtains she saw her mistress lying small and still upon the bed. She ran forward, terror in her heart, to gaze upon that motionless figure.

“Oh, Heaven,” Ying moaned, “Our Lady is dead!”

But Madame Wu was not dead, only sleeping, although Ying had never seen her sleep like this. Even her outcry did not wake the sleeping lady. “She whom the flutter of a bird in the eaves wakes at dawn!” Ying marveled. She stood for a moment looking down on the pure beauty of Madame Wu’s face, then she stepped back and drew the heavy curtains.

“She is tired to the heart,” Ying muttered. “She is tired because in this great house all feed on her, like suckling children.”

She paused at the door of the court and looked fiercely right and left. But no one was coming, and certainly not Mr. Wu.

In Liangmo’s court the two elder sons and their wives talked together until the water clock had passed the first half of the night. The two young husbands were silent for the most part. They felt confused and shy for their father’s sake. He, too, was a man, as they were now. When they were in their middle years, would it be so with themselves and their wives? They doubted themselves and hid their doubt.

Of the two young wives, Meng was the more silent. She was too happy in her own life to quarrel with anyone for anything. Liangmo she held to be the handsomest and best of men, and she wondered continually that she had been so fortunate as to be given him for life. There was nothing in him which was not to her taste. His strong young body, his good temper, the sweetness of his ways, his endless kindness, his patience, his ready laughter, the way his lips met each other, the flatness of his cheeks, the heavy smoothness of his black hair, the firm softness of his hands, his dry cool palms—she knew and rejoiced in all. She found no fault in him. She was lost in him and content to be lost. She wanted no being of her own. To be his, to lie in his arms at night, to serve him by day, to fold his garments, to bring his food herself, to pour his tea and light his pipe, to listen to his every word, to busy herself with healing any slight headache, to test the flavor of a dish or the heat of the wine, these were her joys and her occupations. But above all was the bearing of his children. To bear him many children was her sole desire. She was his instrument for immortality.

Now as always when he was present she thought of him and heard the voices of others through the golden haze of her joy in him. That his father might take a concubine only made Liangmo more perfect in her eyes. There was no one like Liangmo. He was better than his father, wiser, more faithful. And Liangmo was content with her.

While Rulan talked, Meng listened, thinking of Liangmo. When Rulan demanded of her, “Meng, you are the eldest son’s wife—what do you think?” then Meng turned to Liangmo to know what she thought.

Be sure Rulan knew this and was contemptuous of Meng for having no mind of her own. She, too, loved her young husband, and she declared to Tsemo often enough when they were alone that she loved him more for not being a fool as Liangmo was. Secretly she grieved because Tsemo was not the elder son. He was stronger than Liangmo, keener, quicker, thin and sharp-tongued. Liangmo was like his father, but Tsemo was like his mother. Even while she quarreled with him she loved him well. But quarrel with him she did very often, hating herself for it while she did it. Every quarrel ended in her stormy repentance, and this repentance came from her constant secret fear, hidden even from herself, because she was older than Tsemo and because she knew that she had loved him before he loved her. Yes, this was her secret shame—that she had set her heart upon him in the school where they had met, and her heart had compelled her to seek him out with ill-concealed excuses of books she could not understand and lecture notes she had lost, and anything she could devise to bring him to her. Hers had been the first offer of friendship, and hers the hand first put out to touch his.

All this she had excused boldly to herself and to him because, she said, she was a new woman, not old-fashioned, not fearful of men, but believing, she said, that men and women were the same. But she knew, all the time, that Tsemo was the younger and that he had never known a woman before, and that he was hard-pressed by her love and had yielded to it, but not with his whole being. “You are afraid of your old-fashioned mother!” she had cried.

To this he had made answer, thoughtfully, “I am afraid of her because she is always right.”

“No one is always right,” Rulan had declared.

“You do not know my mother,” Tsemo had replied, laughing. “Even when I wish her wrong, I know she is right. She is the wisest woman in the world.”

These words he had said innocently, but with them he had thrust a dagger into Rulan’s heart, and there it stayed. She came to the Wu house ready to hate Tsemo’s mother and be jealous of her, and was angry because she could neither hate nor be jealous. For Madame Wu’s cool kindness to all alike gave no handle. If she felt Rulan’s hatred she did not show it, and the young woman soon saw that Madame Wu cared neither for love nor hate.