Pavilion of Women: A Novel of Life in the Women's Quarters (20 page)

He flushed and broke into a laugh. “Do I, truthfully?” he asked.

He caught the tenderness in her eyes and leaned toward her across the table between them. “Ailien, there is still nobody like you,” he exclaimed. “All women are tasteless after you. What I have done has been only because you insisted.”

“I know that,” she said, “and I thank you for it. All our life together you have only done what I wished. And now when I asked so much of you, you have done that too.”

His eyes watered with feeling. “I have brought you a present,” he said. He put his hand into his pocket and brought out a handful of tissue paper which he unwrapped. Inside were two hair ornaments, made in the shape of butterflies and flowers of jade and seed pearls and gold. “I saw these yesterday, and they made me think of you. But I am always thinking of you.” He wiped his bedewed forehead. “Even in the night,” he muttered, not looking at her.

She was very grave at this. “You must not think of me in the night,” she said. “It is not fair to Ch’iuming. After all, her life is now entirely in you.”

He continued to look unhappy.

“Is she not pleasant to you?” she asked in her pretty voice.

“Oh, she is pleasant,” he said grudgingly. “But you—you are so far away from me these days. Are we to spend the rest of our lives as separately as this? You who have always lived in the core of my life—” His full underlip trembled.

Madame Wu was so moved that she rose involuntarily and went over to him. He seized her in his arms and pressed his face against her body. Something trembled inside her, and she grew alarmed, not of him but of herself. Was this moment’s weakness to defeat all that she had done?

“You,” he murmured, “pearls and jade—sandalwood and incense—”

She drew herself very gently from his clasp until only her hands were in his. “You will be happier than you have ever been,” she promised him.

“Will you come back to me?” he demanded.

“In new ways,” she promised. The moment was over, now that she could see his face. The lips with their lines of slight petulance were loosened. At the sight of them she felt her body turn to a shaft of cool marble. She withdrew even her hands.

“As for Fengmo,” she said, “do not trouble yourself. As to the tutor, it seems Linyi wants him to speak English. She says he is too old-fashioned otherwise. He will be ready to marry Linyi in a month. See if he is not!”

“You plotter,” Mr. Wu said, laughing. “You planner and plotter of men’s lives!” He was restored to good humor again and he rose and, laughing and shaking his head, he went away.

A few minutes later when Ying came in she found Madame Wu in one of her silences. When she saw Ying she lifted her head.

“Ying,” she said, “take some of my own scented soap and tell Ch’iuming to use no other.”

Ying stood still, shocked.

“Do not look at me like that,” Madame Wu said. “There is still more you must do. Take her one of my sandalwood combs for her hair, and put my sandalwood dust among her undergarments.”

“Whatever you say, Lady,” Ying replied sourly.

It was at this moment that Madame Wu saw Mr. Wu’s pipe. He had put it on a side table as he went out. She perceived instantly that he had left it on purpose as a sign that he would return. It was an old signal between man and woman, this leaving of a man’s pipe.

She pointed toward it as Ying turned and her pretty voice was sharp.

“Ying!” she called. “He forgot his pipe. Take it back to him.”

Ying turned without a word and picked up the pipe and took it away.

When Madame Wu had finished matching the silks, it was too dark to see the colors. She was about to have the candles lit when Fengmo came in from the twilight. He had taken off his school uniform and put on a long gown of cream silk brocaded in a pattern of the same color. His short hair he had brushed back from his square forehead. Madame Wu when she had greeted him praised him for his looks.

“A robe looks better than those trousers,” she said. She studied his brow as she spoke. It was a handsome brow, but one could not tell from it what was the quality of the brain it hid. Fengmo was only beginning to come into his manhood.

“Can you remember the words you learned last night?” she asked him, smiling. He had lit a foreign cigarette, of which he and Tsemo smoked many. The curl of rising smoke seemed somehow to suit him. He did not sit down but walked restlessly about the library, and he stopped and repeated the foreign words clearly.

“Can you understand them yet?” she asked.

He shook his head. “No, but tonight I shall ask him what they mean,” he replied.

He paused to listen. “He comes now,” he exclaimed.

They heard the long powerful footsteps of leather shoes upon stones. Then they saw Brother André at the door, escorted by the gateman, who fell back when he saw Madame Wu rise.

“Have you eaten?” Madame Wu asked in common greeting.

“I eat in the middle of the day only,” Brother André said. He was smiling in a pleasant, almost shy fashion. Again as he stood there Madame Wu felt the whole room, Fengmo, even herself, shrink small in the presence of this huge man. But he seemed unconscious of his own size or of himself.

“Fengmo was repeating the foreign words you taught him last night, but we do not know what they mean,” Madame Wu said as they sat down.

“I gave you words once spoken by a man of England,” Brother André said. “That is, he was born in England, and he lived and died there. But his soul wandered everywhere.”

He paused as though he were thinking, then he translated the words in a sort of chant.

“And not by eastern windows only When daylight comes, comes in the light.

In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!

But westward, look, the land is bright !”

To this Madame Wu and Fengmo listened, drinking in each word as though it were pure water.

“This is not religion?” Madame Wu asked doubtfully.

“It is poetry,” Fengmo said.

“I teach you the first English words that were taught me,” Brother André said, smiling at him. “And I did not understand them either at first, when I was a little boy in Italy.”

“So this same sun lights the whole world,” Madame Wu said musingly. She laughed. “You will smile at me, Brother André, but though I know better, my feeling has always been that the sun has belonged only to us.”

“The sun belongs to us all,” Brother André said, “and we reflect its light, one to another, east and West, rising and setting.”

The four walls of the room seemed to fade; the walls of the courts where she had spent her whole life receded. She had a moment’s clear vision. The world was full of lands and peoples under the same Heaven, and in the seven seas the same tides rose and fell.

She longed to stay and hear the next lesson which Brother André would give, but she knew that Fengmo, would not feel at ease if she stayed. She rose. “Teach my son,” she said, and went away.

“How does Linyi feel now that Fengmo is learning English?” Madame Wu asked Madame Kang. Her friend had come to see her late one evening, after the day’s turmoil was past. Here was a symbol of the friendship between the two women, that a few times a year Madame Wu went to Madame Kang, but twice and thrice in seven days Madame Kang came to Madame Wu. To both this appeared only natural.

“I am surprised at my child,” Madame Kang replied. “She says she will marry Fengmo if she likes him after she has talked with him several times, and after he has learned enough English to speak it. How shameless she is to want to see him! Yet I remember when I was a young girl, I yielded to a mischievous maidservant who enticed me one New Year’s Day when Mr. Kang came with his father to call at our house. I peeped through a latticed window and saw him. I was married and our first son born before I dared to tell him. And all that time the shame of it weighed on me like a sin.”

Madame Wu laughed her little ripple of mirth. “Doubtless the damage was done, too, by that one look.”

“I loved him all in one moment,” Madame Kang said without any shame now.

“Ah, those moments,” Madame Wu went on. “You see why it is wise to be ready for them. The hearts of the young are like fires ready to burn. Kindling and fuel are ready. Yet how can we arrange a meeting between our two, or several meetings?”

The two friends were sitting in the cool of the evening. On a table near them Ying had put a split watermelon. The yellow heart, dotted with glistening black seeds, was dewy and sweet. Madame Wu motioned to the portion at her friend’s side.

“Eat a little melon,” she said gently. “It will refresh you. You look tired tonight.”

Madame Kang’s plump face was embarrassed as she heard these kindly words. She took out a flowered silk handkerchief from her bosom and covered her face with it and began to sob behind it, not hiding her weeping, since they were alone.

“Now, Meichen,” Madame Wu said in much astonishment, “tell me why you weep.”

She put out her hand and pulled the handkerchief from her friend’s face. Madame Kang was now laughing and crying together. “I am so ashamed,” she faltered, “I cannot tell you, Ailien. You must guess for yourself.”

“You are not—” Madame Wu said severely.

“Yes, I am,” Madame Kang said. Her little bright eyes, so merry, were now tragic, too.

“You, at your age, and already with so many children!” Madame Wu exclaimed.

“I am one of those women who conceive when my man puts even his shoes by my bed,” Madame Kang said.

Madame Wu could not reply. She was too kind to tell her friend what she thought or to blame her for not following her own example.

“The strange thing,” Madame Kang said, twisting and folding the big handkerchief now spotted with tears, “is that I do not mind any of them so much as Linyi. Linyi is so critical of me. She is always telling me I am too fat, and that I should comb my hair differently, and that it is shameful I cannot read, and that the house is dirty, and that there are too many children. If Linyi stays with me and I have to tell her—”

“Linyi must come here quickly,” Madame Wu said. In her heart she asked herself whether it was well to bring into her house a stubborn, willful young girl who judged her own mother.

“You can teach her,” Madame Kang said wistfully. “I think she is afraid of you. But she fears neither her father nor me.” She laughed suddenly through her tears at the thought of her husband. “Poor man,” she said, and wiped her eyes. “When I told him this morning he pulled his hair out in two handfuls and said, ‘I ought to go and set up a business alone in another city.’ ”

Madame Wu did not answer this, and as though her friend found her silence cool she looked at her and said, half shrewdly, half sadly, “Perhaps you are lucky, Ailien, because you do not love your husband.”

Madame Wu was pierced to the heart by these words. She was not accustomed to sharpness from this old friend. “Perhaps the difference is not in love, but in self-control,” she replied. She picked up a slice of the frosty golden melon, “Or,” she said, “perhaps only it is that I have never liked to be laughed at. You, after all, are stronger than I am, Meichen.”

“Don’t quarrel with me,” Madame Kang pleaded. She put out her plump hand, and it fell hot upon Madame Wu’s cool narrow one. “We have the same trouble, Ailien. All women have it, I think. You solve it one way, I another.”

“But is yours solution?” Madame Wu asked. She felt her true and steady love for her friend soften her heart as she spoke, and she wound her slender fingers around the thick kind hand she held.

“I could not bear—to do what you have done,” Madame Kang replied. “Perhaps you are wise, but I cannot be wise if it means somebody between—my old man and me.”

Who could have thought that at that moment Madame Wu’s heart would be wrenched by an inexplicable pain? She was suddenly so lonely, though their two hands clasped, that she was terrified. She stood on top of a peak, surrounded by ice and cold, lost and solitary. She wanted to cry out, but her voice would not come from her throat. Twilight hid her. Madame Kang could not see the whiteness of her face and, engrossed as she was, she did not see the rigidity of Madame Wu’s body through her tightening fright.

In the midst of this strange terror, Madame Wu saw Brother André. The priest’s huge straight figure appeared upon her loneliness, and it was dispelled in the necessity of speaking to him.

“Brother André,” she said gratefully, “come in. I will send for my son.”

She loosed her hold on Madame Kang’s fingers as she spoke and rose. “Meichen, this is Fengmo’s teacher,” she said. “Brother André, this is my friend, who is a sister to me.”

Brother André bowed without looking at Madame Kang, but his face was kind. He went on into the library. There in the light of a candle they saw him sit down and take a book from his bosom and begin reading.

“What a giant!” Madame Kang exclaimed in a whisper. “Do you not fear him?”

“A good giant,” Madame Wu replied. “Come, in a moment Fengmo will be here. We should not seem to be speaking of him. Shall we go inside?”

“I must go home,” Madame Kang replied. “But before I go, shall Linyi speak with Fengmo or not?”

“I will ask him,” Madame Wu said, “and if he wishes it, I will bring him to your house first, and then one day you can come here and bring her. Twice should be enough for them to know their minds.”

“You are always right,” Madame Kang said and, pressing her friend’s hands, she went away.

Madame Wu delayed Fengmo that night after his lesson. The two men had sat long over their books. Madame Wu had walked past the door, unseen in the darkness, and had looked in. Something in Fengmo’s attentive look, something in Brother André’s deep gravity, frightened her. Was this priest witching the soul out of the boy by the very power of his own large being?

She sat down suddenly faint on one of the bamboo seats and was glad of the darkness. “How one tries,” she thought, “and how one fails! How could I imagine when I invited a priest to come and teach my son that this priest would be so full of his god that he glows and shines and draws all to him?”

She knew that Fengmo’s soul was at that moment of awakening when, if a woman did not witch it, a god might. She did not want him to be a priest, and this for many reasons; but most of all because a priest’s body is barren, and Heaven is against barrenness. When a god steals the soul out of a body, the body takes revenge and twists the soul and wrecks it and mars it. Body and soul are partners, and neither must desert the other. If twenty-five years from now, having begat sons and daughters, Fengmo should wish to turn priest, as many men living in temples had done, then let him serve his soul when his body had been served. But not now!