She had come up and was standing beside me very tall above me, but now she turned away from the second picture and went back to the chair from which she had risen, and picked up some white cloth that lay on the table near, and began to sew. I had never seen her sew before. She placed on her finger a curious metal cap, not at all like a real thimble that circles one middle finger, and she held the needle like a dagger. But I said nothing. I went to observe the face of the mother. It was very small and delicate and kind in its own way, although its decorum was marred by the manner in which the white hair was massed about it. The face of the sister was distinctly like it, although very young and laughing. I said politely,
“You long very much to see your mother?”
But to my surprise she shook her head.
“No,” she said in her abrupt fashion. “I cannot even write to her.”
“Why?” I asked in surprise.
“Because I am afraid that all she feared for me is coming true. I would not for anything have her see me as I am here! And she knows me well enough to see me clearly if I write. I have not written once since I came to this place.
“Oh, there in my home it all seemed wonderful—my little sister thought it was the most perfect romance imaginable and I—you do not know how perfect a lover he can be. He used to say things in such a way that every other man’s love-making was wearisome and stale. He made love seem new. But my mother was always afraid—always!”
“Afraid of what?” I asked, wondering.
“That I would not be happy coming so far—that his people would not—that they would do something to make it all come wrong. And I feel it is all beginning to go wrong, perhaps! I do not know—but a net seems gathering in around me. Locked in behind these high walls I imagine things—I cannot understand what they say—these people—I do not know what they mean. Their faces never tell anything. I get afraid in the night.
“And then sometimes I even think I see his face like theirs, smooth and covered and revealing nothing of what he feels. Over there in my own home, he seemed like one of us, only more charming with a new charm I had never seen before. But here he seems to slip back into strangeness—slip away from me. Oh, I do not know how to express it! I have always been used to frankness and cheerfulness and speaking straight out. And here it is all silence and bowing and sliding eyes at me. I could bear being cut off from my freedom like this if I knew what was behind it all. But—do you know, I told him over there at home that I could be a Chinese or a Hottentot or anything for him—but I cannot, I cannot! I am forever American!”
All this she poured forth, half in her own language, half in the little she knows of ours, her eyebrows twisting, her hands moving, her whole face disturbed. I never dreamed so much speech was in her. She poured it forth as water gushes suddenly from a sealed rock. I was highly embarrassed by it, since I had never seen a woman’s heart so naked, and yet some sort of vague pity stirred in me in answer to her.
But while I was thinking what to say to her, and as though he had heard it all, my brother came in from his room next to us, and ignoring me he went to her and took the hands she had dropped upon her work. He knelt beside her and pressed her hands, still clasped, against his cheek, and then placed them over his eyes and put his head down. I hesitated, not knowing whether to go or stay. Then he looked up at her with a haggard face. He whispered in a hoarse voice,
“Mary, Mary, I never heard you talk like that! You do not really doubt me? In your country you told me you would take my race and nationality upon you and share it. Well, if it is impossible at the end of this year, we will leave it all behind us, and I will become American with you. And if that is impossible, then we will found a new country and a new race somewhere—so that we can be together. You must not doubt me, indeed, O my love!”
This much I understood of what he said, for he spoke in his own tongue for greater freedom. Then he began murmuring to her in another language, and I do not know what it was he told her. But she smiled, and I saw that she could endure yet much more for his sake. She dropped her head until it rested on his shoulder, and they fell into a throbbing silence, and I was ashamed to remain longer in the uncovered presence of this love.
I slipped quietly out therefore and found relief in scolding the slaves for staring through the gate at her. I could not of course reproach my father’s concubines, but I took care to speak to the slaves in their hearing. But none had anything in them but ignorant and even impudent curiosity. The fat concubine said, chewing loudly and smacking her lips over an oily cake,
“Anyone so ridiculous and inhuman in appearance must expect to be looked at—and laughed at as well!”
“Nevertheless, she is human, and she has feelings like ours,” I answered as sternly as I could.
But the Second Lady only shrugged her thick shoulders and chewed on, wiping her fingers carefully upon her sleeve.
I came away angry and was nearly at my own home before I realized that my anger was wholly for my brother’s wife, and no longer against her!
XVIII
AND NOW, MY SISTER, what we have not desired has come to pass—she has conceived! She was already aware of it for a whole circle of days, before, with curious foreign reserve, she even told my brother, who has just told me.
It is not a thing to make us rejoice, and my mother, hearing of it, has taken to her bed, and she cannot rise for sorrow. It is what she has feared and dreaded, and her fragile body cannot stand against the strength of her disappointment. You know how she has desired the first-fruits of my brother’s flesh for the family. And now since that can never be, she thinks that virtue has gone out of him for nothing, since this child can never stand before her as a grandson.
I went to my mother then, and I found her lying straight and still upon her bed. Her eyes were closed, and she opened them only enough to recognize me before she closed them again. I sat down quietly beside her and waited in silence. Suddenly her face changed, as it had that other day; it deadened to the dreadful hue of ashes, and she began to breathe heavily.
I was frightened, and I clapped my hands for a slave, and Wang Da Ma herself came running with an opium pipe lit and smoking. My mother grasped it and sucked at it desperately, and the pain was relieved.
But when I saw this my spirit was ill at ease. Evidently the pain was habitual, since the opium pipe was kept prepared and the lamp burning. When I sought to speak of it, however, my mother forbade me, saying sharply,
“It is nothing. Do not annoy me.”
She would say nothing more than that, and after remaining a little while beside her, I bowed and came away. When I passed through the servants’ court I asked Wang Da Ma concerning my mother, and she shook her head.
“The First Lady suffers this way each day more times in number than the fingers on both my hands. The pain has been occasional for many years, yet you know she will never speak of her own affairs. But under the sorrows of this year the pain has become constant. I am always about her person, and I see the grayness pass over her face. I see her face broken with pain at early dawn when I take in the tea. But some hope has sustained her of late until the last few days. Now she has dropped like a tree whose last root has been chopped away.”
She took up the corner of her blue apron and wiped each eye in turn and sighed.
Ah, I know the hope which has sustained my mother! I said nothing, but I returned to my home, and I wept, and I told my husband. I begged him to go with me to see her, but he counsels me to wait. He says,
“If she is forced or angered, she will be worse. When the opportune time comes, implore her to see a physician. Further than this you have no responsibility with an elder.”
I know he is always right. But I cannot cast aside my sense of portending evil.
It seems my father is pleased that the foreign one is to bear a child. He cried when he heard of it,
“Ah ha! Now we will have a little foreigner to play with! Hai-ya! A new toy, indeed! We will call him Little Clown, and
he shall amuse us!”
My brother muttered at these words. He begins to hate our father in his heart. I can see it.
As for the foreign one, she has given up her mournfulness. When I went to see her to congratulate her she was singing a weird, harsh, foreign tune. When I inquired its meaning, she said it was a song of sleep for a child. I marvel that any child could rest, hearing it. She seems to have forgotten that she ever uncovered her unhappiness to me that day. She and my brother have renewed their love, and she has room for nothing else in her mind, now that the child is coming.
In my heart I am anxious to see this foreign child. He cannot be beautiful as my son is beautiful. It may even be a girl, and perhaps she will have the fire-yellow hair of her mother. Ah, my poor brother!
He is unhappy, my brother! Now that a child is to be born, he is more than ever anxious to establish his wife’s legal position. He hints of the matter daily to our father, but our father puts him off with smiling, leisurely talk of other things.
At the next feast day my brother says he will press the matter before the clan, even in the ancestral hall before the sacred tablets of the ancestors, so that the child may be born legally as his eldest son. Of course if it is a girl, it will not matter. But we can discern nothing of the future.
It is now the eleventh moon of the year. Snow lies upon the ground, and the bamboos are heavy with it in the garden, so that they are a frothing sea of white waves when the wind stirs them gently. My brother’s wife grows great with child. At my mother’s house there is a heavy sense of waiting. For what? I ask myself daily.
This day when I rose from my bed I saw the trees bare and blackened against a gray and wintry sky. I waked suddenly and in fear, as from an evil dream; yet when I examined my memory, I had dreamed of nothing. What is the meaning of our life? It is in the hands of the gods, and we know nothing except fear.
I have tried to discover why I am afraid. Is it for my son? But he is a young lion for strength. He talks now like a king, commanding the world. Only his father dares to disobey him with laughter. As for me, I am his slave, and he knows it. He knows everything, the rogue! No, it is not my son.
But however I reason of the matter, I cannot cast aside my restlessness, my instinct of future evil about to descend on us from heaven. I am waiting for the gods to make it known. I am certain of their malevolent purpose. Can it be after all for my son? I am half-fearful still about the casting away of the ring.
His father laughs. It is true that the child is sound from head to foot. His appetite is enough to astonish me. He thrusts aside my breast now, and he demands rice and chopsticks thrice daily. I have weaned him, and he is a man. Ah, no, it is never anyone so strong as my son!
My mother grows more feeble. I wish that my father had not gone away. When my brother became importunate concerning his wife, my father found business in Tientsin, and he has been absent for many moons. But now when evil hangs over his house he should return. Careful as he ever has been of his own pleasure only, still he should remember that he is the representative of his family before Heaven.
Yet I dare not write him, I, a mere woman and ridden by a woman’s fears. It may all be nothing. But if it is nothing, then why does day follow day, in this rigid expectancy?
I have taken incense and burned it before Kwan-yin secretly, dreading my husband’s laughter. It is all very well not to believe in the gods when there is no trouble approaching. But when sorrow hangs over a house, to whom shall we appeal? I prayed to her before my son was born and she heard me.
This day ushers in the twelfth moon. My mother lies motionless upon her bed and I begin to fear that she will never rise from it. I have besought her to call physicians, and at last she was willing, being, I fear, weary of me. She has invited Chang, that famous doctor and astrologer, to attend her. She has paid him forty ounces of silver, and he promises her recovery. I have been comforted since he says this, for everyone knows he is wise.
But I wonder when the hour of relief will begin. She smokes the opium pipe incessantly now, to dull the pain in her vitals, and she is too drowsy for speech. Her face is dull yellow, and the skin is stretched over the bones until it is dry and paper thin to the touch.
I have begged her to see my husband that he may try the western medicines, but she will not. She mutters that she has been young and now she is old, but she will never endure the ways of the barbarians. As for my husband, he shakes his head when I speak to him of my mother. I can see that he thinks she is about to enter upon the Terrace of Night.
O my mother—my mother!
My brother says nothing from morning until night. He broods. He sits in his own apartment, staring and frowning, and when he moves out of himself it is only to express a frenzy of tenderness towards his wife. They have gone together into an existence of their own, a world where they dwell alone with their unborn child.
He has caused a screen to be woven of bamboos and placed over the moon-gate so that the idle women can no longer peer in at her.
When I speak to him of our mother he is deaf. He says over and over like an angry child,
“I can never forgive her—I can never forgive her!”
Never in his life before has he been refused anything, and now he cannot forgive his mother!
For many weeks, one after the other, he did not go to see her. But yesterday he was moved a little at last by my fears and my beseechings, and he went with me and stood beside her bed. He stood in stubborn silence, refusing to greet her. He looked at her, and she opened her eyes and looked at him steadily without a word.
Nevertheless when we withdrew from her presence together, although he would not speak then of her even to me, yet I could see that he was shaken by her sick face. He had suspected that some bitter determination against him kept her in her own room, but now he saw that she was mortally ill. Therefore, once each day after that, Wang Da Ma said, he took a bowl of tea in his two hands and presented it himself to his mother, without words.
Sometimes she thanked him faintly, but beyond that they have had no speech together since it has been made known that his wife is with child.
My brother has sent a letter to our father, and to-morrow he comes.
My mother has not spoken now for many days. She lies in a heavy sleep which is yet not like any sleep we have ever seen. Chang the doctor has shrugged his shoulders and spread out his hands and said,
“If Heaven ordains death, who am I to stay that supreme destiny?”
He has taken his silver and thrust his hands into his sleeves and departed. When he had gone I flew to my husband and besought him to come to my mother. Now that she sees nothing that passes before her, she would not know whether he were there or not. At first he would not, but when he saw how I feared for her he came unwillingly and stood beside her bed, and for the first time he saw my mother.
I never saw him so moved. He looked at her for a long time, and then he shuddered from head to foot and came quickly away. I wondered if he were ill but when I questioned him he only said,
“It is too late—it is too late.”
And then he turned to me suddenly, crying,
“She looks so much like you that I thought of your face lying there dead!”
And we wept.
I go daily to the temple now where I have been scarcely at all since my son was born. Having him I have had nothing more to desire of the gods. They have become angry at my happiness, therefore, and have punished me through her, my beloved mother. I go to the god of long life. I have placed sacrifices before him of flesh and of wine. I have promised a hundred rounds of silver to the temple if my mother recovers.
But I have no response from the god. He sits immovably behind his curtain. I do not even know whether or not he receives my sacrifices.
Underneath all our lives, behind the veil, these gods are plotting!
O My Sister, My Sister! The gods have spoken at last and have showed us their wickedness! Look! I am robed in sackcloth! See my son—he is wra
pped from head to foot in the coarse white cloth of mourning! It is for her—for my mother! O my mother, my mother! Nay—do not stay my weeping—I must weep now—for she is dead!
I sat alone with her at midnight. She lay as she has lain these ten days, a thing of bronze—immovable. She had not spoken or eaten. Her spirit had already heard the call of the higher voices, and only her strong heart was left to beat itself out into feebleness and silence.
When the hour before dawn appeared, I saw with sudden fear that there was a change in her. I struck my hands together and sent the waiting slave for my brother. He sat in the outer room prepared for my summons. When he came in he looked at her and whispered half-afraid,
“The last change has come. Let someone go for our father.”
He motioned to Wang Da Ma who stood by the bed wiping her eyes, and she withdrew to do his bidding. We stood hand in hand waiting, weeping and in awe.
Suddenly our mother seemed to rouse herself. She turned her head and gazed at us. She lifted her arms up slowly as though they bore a heavy burden, and she sighed deeply twice. Then her arms fell, and her spirit passed over, silent in passing as in life, revealing nothing.
When our father came in, half-asleep still, with his garments thrown hastily about his body, we told him. He stood before her staring and afraid. In his heart he has always feared her. Now he began to weep easy tears, like a child, and to cry loudly,
“A good wife—a good wife!”
My brother led him gently away then, soothing him and bidding Wang Da Ma to bring wine to comfort him.
Then I, left alone with my mother, looked again on the silent, stiffening face. I was the only one who had ever seen her truly, and my heart melted itself into hot and burning tears. I drew the curtains slowly at last and shut her away, back again into the loneliness in which she had lived.
East Wind: West Wind Page 13
