Pavilion of Women: A Novel of Life in the Women's Quarters (47 page)

“I went to fetch my clothes, and the man brought me a letter from his home,” Fengmo went on. “Mother, he had been away from his home for twenty years, and he could not read the letters that came to him. Nor could he write. So I read and wrote his letters for him, and he told me that in his village none read or wrote, and they had to go to the city to find a scholar. I had never understood the pity of this until I came to know him. He was a good man, Mother, not stupid but very intelligent. ‘If I could only read and write for myself,’ he would say, ‘but I am like one blind.’ I went back to my room and I looked out of the window and saw the great buildings of the college and the thousands of students coming and going, learning many things, and the one poor old man could not read his letter from home. Then I remembered that this is true in our villages, too. None of our own people can read and write, who live on our land.”

“Why should they?” Madame Wu inquired. “They do not come and go. They only till the fields.”

“But Mother, Mother,” Fengmo exclaimed, “to know how to read is to light a lamp in the mind, to release the soul from prison, to open a gate to the universe.”

The words fell upon Madame Wu’s ears and lashed her heart. “Ah,” she said, “those are the words of him who taught you.”

“I have not forgotten them,” Fengmo said.

How could she forbid Fengmo after this, and how could she tell him why he must not live outside his own house?

“Rulan will be just the one to help me,” he said eagerly. “I had not thought of her before. And Linyi shall help me too, and we will forget ourselves.”

He was on his feet again. “You know, Mother, if I succeed here, in our own villages, it might be a thing that would spread everywhere. How great a good that would be—”

She saw his thin young face light with something of the light that had burned eternally in André’s eyes. She would not put it out.

“My son, do what seems good to you.” So she answered him.

Madame Wu lay awake in her bed as now she did very often. This neither displeased nor alarmed her. The young must sleep, for they have work to do and long life ahead. But the old need not sleep. The body, knowing that eternal rest is not far off, may lie awake while it can.

It seemed to her, as she lay awake, that the house was alive in the night as it was not in the day. She let her mind’s vision roam over the many courts. Elderly cousins lived in the distant and outer courts, and younger second and third cousins, here not to stay, but only because for the moment they had no other shelter, and these wide roofs could cover them, too, for a while. From the courts where Jasmine lived with Mr. Wu she turned her eyes quickly. Well, she knew what life it was. She had no judgment for it, only weariness. The old man’s body lived on, fed and solaced, and the young woman grew fat and lazy and was ready for sleep, day as well as night. Jasmine was no trouble in the courts. She was barren. No child was conceived, and Madame Wu was content to have it so. Jasmine’s was wild blood, and it was well to keep it in her own veins. She did her duty by Mr. Wu and, having had her pleasure in years before, she was glad to please the old man who now gave her jewels and silks and dainties of every kind to eat, and laughed at her and fondled her. All her life Jasmine had been a wayside flower and subject to any wind that passed. Now her happiness was to know that behind these high walls no wind could touch her. Even though the old man were to die, she would live on, her place secure in his house. There was nothing more for her to fear as long as she lived.

As for Mr. Wu, what his mother had begun in his youth, his young concubine now finished. Whatever Madame Wu had fostered in him had faded away, like a light dimmed because it fed on no fuel. He grew gross and heavy, eating too much and drinking often but always with Jasmine. He went no more to flower houses, for Jasmine gave him all her arts. Even his old need for the companionship of his friends left him, and seldom did he go to teahouses to hear the news and discuss the town’s gossip. Jasmine gave him both, and she had all from the servants. There in the court where they lived so closely together that almost they lived alone, they were ribald and gay and drunken and happy, two pieces of meat and bone, and content so to be. The name of Mr. Wu was seldom heard now even in his own house. In malice a servant whispered it to another, and that was all.

With her divining mind Madame Wu knew all of this, and she went no more to the court that had once been her home. Never once did Jasmine come to her court. The two lived as far apart as ever they had lived before Jasmine had come.

Pondering upon this, Madame Wu asked herself, as she lay between her silken quilts, if she had failed in her marriage. Was there anything she should have done that she had not? She put the question to André, but for once there was no answer ready in her memory. Instead she saw the face of Old Gentleman against the velvet black of her brain. It was as clear as it had ever been, neither older nor younger. His face had always been thin, the golden skin drawn smooth over the fine bones beneath. His skull must even now be a thing of beauty as he lay in his grave, its lines cleaned and polished by time.

“I fear I have not done well by your son, my father,” she said sadly, within her own self.

She felt, as she gazed at the kind good old face, that perhaps if she had not separated herself from Mr. Wu on her fortieth birthday, he might not have sunk to what he was now. But out of her youthful memories Old Gentleman spoke to her.

She remembered well the day. They had been reading together, for he had sent for her, and she found him with his finger in a book. He had pointed to the lines when she came in and she had read:

“To lift a soul above its natural level is a dangerous act. Souls, like springs, have their natural sources, and to force them beyond is against nature and therefore a dangerous act. For when the soul is forced, it seeks its own level again and disintegrates, being torn between upper and lower levels, and this is also dangerous. True wisdom it is to weigh and judge the measure of a soul and let it live where it belongs.”

Her eyes and Old Gentleman’s had met as they met now across the many years since he had been in this house.

“Had I not separated myself,” she mused—and could imagine no further. What she had done was inevitable. Her being she had subdued to duty for how many years, and for how many years had her soul waited, growing slowly, it is true through the performance of duty, but growing in bondage and waiting to be freed.

Strange that now in the middle of the night while the house lay silent, she thought with anxiety of Liangmo, her eldest son. Why should she be anxious for him, who of all her sons was the most content? Him, too, she must discover when she could.

And in Fengmo’s court she did not pause. Fengmo was a man. He had disciplined himself as only a full-grown man could do. He had not yielded up his soul. Upon this comfort her mind drifted toward sleep, like an empty boat upon a moonlit sea.

“Now my English books,” Fengmo commanded.

Linyi ran to fetch them out of the box. There were two armfuls of them. “How many you have!” she exclaimed.

“Only my best ones,” he said carelessly. “I have boxes yet to come.”

He knelt by the bookshelves against the wall and fitted in the books as she brought them. Outwardly calm, his face constantly smiling, inwardly he was deep in turmoil and pain. He felt now that he could never sleep again, and he was feverish to settle his things, to put all his possessions into their places, to put his traveling bags out of sight, not to be used again.

“Must you put everything away tonight?” Linyi asked.

“I must,” he replied. “I want to know that I have come home to stay.”

She was happy to have these words said, and too young to dream why it was he said them without looking at her. Indeed, when he said them he saw a face very different from hers. He saw Margaret’s face, blue eyes, brown hair, and the skin so white and smooth that he would never forget the touch of it. Would he ever be sorry that he had done what he did that day in the forest across the sea? For he had forced himself to let her go as soon as he had taken her in his arms.

“I can’t go on,” he had said.

She had not spoken. She had stood, her blue eyes fixed on him. There was something strange and wonderful about blue eyes. They could not hide what was behind them. Black eyes were curtains drawn down, but blue eyes were open windows.

“I am married,” he had told her bluntly. “My wife waits for me at home.”

She knew something about Chinese marriages. “Was she your own choice or did your family arrange it?”

He had waited a long time to answer. They sat down under the pine tree. He had hugged his knees in his arms and hid his forehead on his hunched knees, thinking, feeling for the truth. It would have been easy, and partly true, to say, “I did not choose her.” But when he prepared to say these words, Brother André came into his mind.

“To lie is a sin,” Brother André had taught him simply, “but it is not a sin against God so much as a sin against yourself. Anything built upon the foundation of a lie crumbles. The lie deceives no one so much as the one who tells it.”

He had not dared to lie to her, lest some final day the structure of their love crumble between their hands, and their love be buried in reproach.

“I was not forced to marry,” he said. “Let us say—I chose.”

She had sat motionless after that, listening to him, while he tried to explain to her what marriage meant in his family.

“With us marriage is a duty not to love or to ourselves, but to our place in the generations. I know that my mother has never loved my father, but she has done her duty to the family. She has been a good wife and mother. But when she was forty years old she retired from wifehood and chose another for my father. This grieved us, and yet we all knew the justice of it. Now she is free to pursue her own happiness, still within the house, and around her we all stand to support her and do her honor. I have my duty, too, in the family.”

He knew in some strange distant fashion that he was wounding Margaret to the soul.

“I want to marry for love,” she said.

Had he been free, not only of Linyi but of all the generations of Wu in the centuries gone and all the generations of Wu yet to come, he would have said to her, “Then let us marry each other. I will send Linyi away.”

But he was not free. The hands of his ancestors were fastened on him, and the hands of his sons and grandsons not yet born beckoned to him. He owed her further honesty.

“I know myself,” he went on. He lifted his eyes not to hers but to the landscape before them, to the river, its ships and harbor, and to the span of a great bridge between the banks.

“I know that I am made, not only by Heaven, but also by my family whose roots are in legend, and I cannot live for myself alone. My body was given to me—it does not belong to me. Something in me is my own, that is true, and that something—call it soul if you wish—is my own possession and I can give it to you because I love you. But if I were to give my body, which is not mine, I should be robbing the generations.”

“You are wrong—you are wrong!” she had cried. “Love and marriage can be the same.”

“Sometimes,” he admitted, “but only by the accident of Heaven. Sometimes even among my own people a man, lifting the bridal veil from his unknown wife’s face on their wedding night, beholds the one among all whom he would have chosen, had he been free to choose. But it is the accident of Heaven.”

“Here we always marry for love,” she had insisted proudly.

He had been aware of distance growing between them. “No, you do not,” he had answered. He would tell the truth though it killed them both. “You marry as we do, to preserve your species, but you deceive yourselves and call it love. You demand the personal fulfillment, even though you deceive yourselves. You worship the idea of love. But we are the truthful ones. We believe that all must marry, men and women alike. That is our common duty to life. If love comes, it is added grace from Heaven. But love is not necessary for life.”

“It is to me,” she had said in a low voice.

He had gone on, not answering this, “Content is necessary, but content comes when duty is done and expectations fulfilled—not the personal expectations of love, but the expectations of family and children, home and one’s place in the generations.”

He was speaking out of his deepest being, and as he spoke he felt that Brother André approved. He knew that this approval was not because of what he said, but because he spoke from the truth of his being.

How long had that silence been that fell between them! He did not break it. He had allowed it to grow and swell, an ocean in depth and distance.

She broke it by putting out her hand. “Then it’s good-by for us, isn’t it?”

He had held her hand for a long moment, and put his other hand over hers. “It is good-by,” he had agreed, and had let her go.

The last book was put away, the last garment folded. He took the bags and set them into the passageway where a servant would find them in the morning. Then he went back into their bedroom. Linyi stood in the middle of the floor, uncertain and waiting. He went to her without hesitation and gripped her shoulders in his hands.

“You are going to help me,” he said. “I have a work to do here on my own earth, and I need you. It is impossible for me to do my work alone. You must promise to help me with all you have in you.”

The fierceness in his eyes half frightened her. But she found the fright delightful. She wanted to be afraid of him. She needed his command.

“I will help you,” she whispered—“I will do anything you tell me to do.”

Fengmo was like a fire in the house. Everything was fanned to feed the flame. He rose before dawn and ate by candlelight and by earliest day was riding his horse across the fields on narrow paths to the village he had chosen for his first school. Young and old must learn, he decreed. He planned schools for children and schools for men and women and old people.

Be sure there was much complaint among the old who had never troubled about books and who saw no need now to read. “When we have only a few years left us, must we trouble ourselves to know what other men have written?” Thus they complained. “Have we not our own thoughts?” they cried. “Have we not learned a little wisdom, too, after all these years? Our own wisdom is enough for us.”