Pavilion of Women: A Novel of Life in the Women's Quarters

by Buck, Pearl S.

  “What do you mean by freedom?” he inquired.

  “Very little,” she said humbly. “Simply to be mistress of my own person and my own time.”

  “You ask a great deal for yourself,” he replied. “You ask everything.”

  She felt nearer to tears than she had felt in many years. He had shattered the calm core of her being, her sense of rightness in herself, and she was frightened. If in this house she, upon whom all had so long depended, had been wrong and was wrong, then what would happen to them all?

  “What shall I do?” she asked in a small voice.

  “Forget your own self,” he said.

  “But all these years,” she urged, “I have so carefully fulfilled my duty.”

  “Always with the thought of your own freedom in your mind,” he said.

  She could not deny it. She sat motionless, her hands folded on the pearl-gray satin of her robe. “Direct me,” she said at last.

  “Instead of your own freedom, think how you can free others,” he said gently.

  She lifted her head.

  “From yourself,” he said still gently.

  She had never been a religious woman, and now she looked at him in some doubt. “Are you speaking out of your foreign religion? If so, I cannot understand it.”

  “I am not speaking out of a foreign religion,” he said.

  “Do you want me to be a nun?” she exclaimed.

  “I do not want you to be anything,” he replied tranquilly.

  He rose to his great height, smiled down at her according to his habit, and went away without farewell. This, which in another would have seemed rudeness, simply gave to Madame Wu the feeling that there was no break between this time they had spent together and the next time, whenever that would be.

  She did not move for a long moment. Upon the gray tiled floor the pattern of the latticed windows was fixed in a lacework of shadows and sunshine. The air was still and cool, but the room was not cold. A great brazier of coals stood in front of the table set against the center of the inner wall, and out of the coals, smothered with ashes, colorless quivering rays of heat shone in the air. Nothing, she reflected, was as easy as she had thought. Freedom was not a matter of arrangement. She had seen freedom hanging like a peach upon a tree. She had nurtured the tree, and when it bore she had seized upon the fruit and found it green.

  She sighed, and then she heard Ch’iuming’s little child cry in the next room, and she went to it and took it into her arms and carried it into the room and sat down by the brazier. Whether it was the warmth or whether it was the feeling of support of her arms, some comfort came into the child, and she ceased crying and lay looking up into Madame Wu’s face.

  “I do not love this child,” Madame Wu thought. “Perhaps I have never loved any child. Perhaps that is my trouble, that I have never been able to love anyone.”

  But it was like her that without love she held the child carefully, and when Ying came in and took her she superintended her feeding again and was even pleased that the child ate her food heartily.

  Watching this, she said to Ying, “Give me back the child and I will take her to her mother. She will live, this small woman, and she will hold her mother to life.”

  So a little later she carried the child in her own arms through the sunshine and into her old courts and into the room where Ch’iuming lay on the big bed whose curtains were still hung with the symbols of fecundity. Ch’iuming lay with her eyes closed and her lips pressed together. She was intensely pale. Upon the silk coverlet, her hands lay open and relaxed. These hands had changed in the past months. When she came they had been rough and strong with work, but now they were thin and white.

  “Here is your child,” Madame Wu said gently. “She has eaten so well that she is strong enough to come and lie on your arm.”

  When Ch’iuming did not move, Madame Wu lifted her arm and put the child into its circle and covered it with the quilt. Ch’iuming’s arm tightened. She opened her eyes. “You must forgive me that I did not repay you with a son,” she said humbly.

  “Do I not know that sons and daughters alike come from Heaven?” Madame Wu replied. “Besides, in these days daughters, too, are good.”

  Then she remembered what Brother André said, and she went on quickly, “You must not feel that you have a duty to me. You have none.”

  Ch’iuming looked surprised at this. “But why else am I here?” she asked.

  Madame Wu sat down on the edge of the bed. “It has been shown me that I did you a great wrong, my sister. It is true that you were brought here as I might have bought a pound of pork. How could I dare so to behave toward a human being? I see now that I had no thought for your soul. What can I do to make amends?”

  She said this in her pretty voice, neither lifting nor deepening it, and Ch’iuming’s face grew frightened. “But where shall I go?” she stammered.

  Madame Wu saw that Ch’iuming had altogether failed to understand her, and that she thought that she was being told courteously, in the way of the rich and the great, that she was useless and not wanted.

  “I do not want you to go anywhere,” Madame Wu said. “I am only saying that I have done wrong to you. Let me put it thus: If you had your own way, if there were no one to consider, what would you do with yourself?”

  “How can there be no one to consider?” Ch’iuming asked, perplexed. “There is our lord and there is you. And beyond you two honorable ones, there is the whole family.”

  “Why did you ask the foreign priest to take your child if you died?” Madame Wu asked.

  “I did not want to trouble you with a girl,” Ch’iuming said.

  “Why did you try to die before your destiny day?” Madame Wu asked again.

  “Because Ying told me she saw from my shape that I would give birth to a girl, and so I said, in my heart, we will both go together and be no trouble to anybody.”

  “Death can be a trouble as well as life,” Madame Wu said.

  “Not mine,” Ch’iuming replied innocently, “for I am of no worth to anyone.”

  To this Madame Wu had no answer. She rose, feeling for the moment entirely helpless. “Give up these thoughts,” she exclaimed. “Should you die, it would be a great trouble to bring up this child, and you know that I have never been one of those who think a female child can be allowed to die.”

  “You are good,” Ch’iuming said, and she closed her eyes again. The tears crept out from under her eyelids. This Madame Wu saw, but she saw also that Ch’iuming’s arm now held the child very tightly, and so she took it for a good sign and went away.

  When she was crossing the courtyard she met Mr. Wu coming in from the street. They came face to face without expecting it, and she perceived instantly that he had been doing something which she would not approve, for his face flushed and a light sweat broke out on his forehead.

  “Mother of my sons!” he exclaimed.

  “I have just been in to see our Second Lady,” she said amiably. “We must think about her case. She tried to die because she feared the child would be a girl, and that the two of them would be a burden in the house.”

  “How foolish!” he exclaimed. “As if we were common people, who consider one mouth more or less!”

  “I will turn back with you,” Madame Wu said. “I have need of your wisdom.” They went back together and came into the large square room where they had spent so many hours in their common life. Beyond them was the bedroom where Ch’iuming lay with her child on her arm, but there was no danger of their being overheard. Above them the roof rose into high beamed spaces and swallowed any human voice.

  “Now we have this life in our house,” Madame Wu said, “what shall we do with her, and the one she has brought? For I see that she is not to your heart. Yet here she is. I must apologize to you.”

  Mr. Wu looked uncomfortable. He had put on one fur robe too many this morning, and the day had turned milder than the morning, and he went easily hot in any discomfort, even in winter.


  “I feel ashamed that I—after your thoughtfulness—” he stammered. “Well, she is good enough. But you know how it is. Goodness is excellent in a woman. But—”

  “I was very selfish,” she said simply. She sat in her usual pose with her hands folded on her lap. She did not look at him. Instead she gazed thoughtfully at the shadows on the floor. They were now of the winter bamboo which stood about the sunlit open door, and the arrowy leaves danced in the wind. She thought of Brother André, and suddenly she understood what he had meant. She could never be free until she had offered herself up utterly, and this she could only do by taking upon herself the thing which she most hated.

  “I see my wrong,” she said, without lifting her eyes. “Let it all be as you wish. We will send Ch’iuming away if you like. And I will return. We will forget, you and I, these last months.”

  She waited for his welcoming cry, but it did not come. When the silence grew sharp she looked up and saw his ruddy face now streaming with sweat. He laughed with misery when he saw her looking at him and snatched open his collar, and pulled out his silk handkerchief and wiped his face.

  “Had I known,” he gasped, “had I dreamed—”

  An ice-cold pressure crept into her heart. He did not want her. What she had heard was true. He had found someone else for himself.

  “Tell me about her,” she said gently.

  Halting and stammering, with grunts of embarrassed laughter, he told her that he wondered if he should not now put Jasmine into a separate house. She was young, she was childish.

  “I do not want to add to your cares under this roof,” he said.

  She opened her long and lovely eyes. “Can it add to my cares if you are happy?” she asked in her most silvery voice. “Let her come and live under your own roof. Why should your house be divided?”

  He rose and went over to her and took her hand. It lay in his plump palm, cool and limp. “You are a good woman,” he said solemnly. “It is not given to every man to have what he wants and at the same time to live in peace under his own roof.”

  She smiled and took her hand away.

  But long after they had parted she was amazed at the coldness in the pleasure she had felt. For her to choose a woman to take her place was one thing. To have him choose a woman was quite another. She marveled at the tangle that life could make between a man and a woman. She had thought herself free of him because she did not love him. But she was not free of him if when she knew his love had ceased she could feel this wounded pride. Brother André had been right. She thought always and only of her self.

  “How shall I be rid of myself?” she asked Brother André.

  “Think only of others,” he replied.

  “Does that mean I am always to yield to others?” she asked.

  “If not to yield means that you are thinking of yourself, you must yield,” he said.

  “My sons’ father wants to bring another woman into the house,” she said. “Am I to yield to that?”

  “It was your sin that brought the first woman here,” he said.

  She was angry at this in her fashion. A gust of sharp temper flew like a sudden small whirlwind out of her heart.

  “Now you speak like a priest,” she said maliciously. “You can have no understanding of what it is to be compelled to yield your body to a man year after year, without your will.” She felt in herself a strange desire to make him share her unhappiness, and she went on, sparing him nothing. “To give one’s delicate body to indelicate hands, to see lust grow hot and feel one’s own flesh grow cold—to feel the heart grow faint and the mind sick, and yet to be compelled, for the sake of peace in the house.”

  His face was pure and unchanged. “There are many ways in which the body may be offered up a sacrifice for the soul,” he said.

  She sighed. “Shall I allow this second woman to come in?”

  “Is it not better to have her under this roof with your consent than under another without?” he replied.

  “I never thought a foreign priest would give me such advice,” she said with new malice.

  She opened her book without further talk, and under his direction she studied the poetry of the Hebrew Psalms. She was deeply moved as the hour went on by what she discerned they were. Here the human heart cried out after that which it could worship. And what was worship except trust and hope that life and death had meaning because they were created and planned by Heaven?

  “Is our Heaven your God, and is your God our Heaven?” she inquired.

  “They are one and the same,” he replied.

  “But Little Sister Hsia told me they are not,” she retorted. “She always told us to believe on the one true God, and not in our Heaven. She declared them not the same.”

  “In a temple there are always a few foolish ones,” he said gently. “There is only one true God. He has many names.”

  “Then anywhere upon the round earth, by whatever seas, those who believe in any God believe in the One?” she asked.

  “And so are brothers,” he said, agreeing.

  “And if I do not believe in any?” she inquired willfully.

  “God is patient,” he said. “God waits. Is there not eternity?”

  She felt a strange warm current pass through him and through her. But it did not begin in him, and it did not end in her. They seemed only to transmit it, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the earth.

  “Heaven is patient,” she repeated. “Heaven waits.”

  Upon these words they parted. Brother André tied his books into a worn black kerchief and put them under his arm. She stood at the door of the library watching him as he walked across the court. His great form was beginning to stoop, as though his grizzled head were a burden upon the vast shoulders. Or, she told herself, perhaps it was because more and more he walked with his eyes fixed upon the path just ahead of him. Seldom did he lift his head to see what lay at the end of the road.

  She turned and went back into the library as her habit was when the lessons were over. She sat sometimes for as much as an hour to fix in her mind the things which Brother André had taught her, to read again what they had read together, to look at the pictures he had left, to consider the words he had spoken.

  But this day she had scarcely sat an hour when she heard loud voices shouting in the outer courtyards, and she lifted her head to listen. Whatever it was, Ying would bring her the message of it. In less than the framing of her thought she saw Ying come running into her court. She was wailing and crying and she threw her apron over her face and wept.

  Madame Wu rose at once, and the book she had been holding dropped to the floor. Something very evil had come about. She thought of Liangmo, her eldest son. But this morning he had left the house as usual. She thought of Mr. Wu. Then Ying was on the threshold. She pulled the apron from her face and cried out, “Alas—the foreign priest!”

  “What of him?” Madame Wu asked sharply. “He left here but a few moments ago.”

  “He has been struck down in the street,” Ying cried. “His skull is cracked open!”

  “Struck down?” Madame Wu’s voice was an echo.

  “It is those young men,” Ying sobbed. “The Green Band—the evil ones! They were robbing the moneylender’s shop, and the priest saw the moneylender crying and cursing Heaven, and he stopped to save him and the young men came out and beat him over the head, too.”

  Madame Wu had scarcely heard the name of the Green Band. But she knew that those were young ruffians who roamed the country roads and the city streets. The land steward had always on the bills an item, “For fee to the Green Band.”

  “Where is Brother André?” she exclaimed.

  “They have carried him into his own house and he lies on his bed, but the gatekeeper is here and says he asks for you,” Ying said.

  “I must go,” Madame Wu said. “Help me with my robe.”

  “I will order the bearers,” Ying cried.

  “No, there is no time,” Madame Wu said. “I will take a rick
sha at the gate.”

  All the house knew a few minutes later that Madame Wu had for the first time in her life gone to a place which was strange to her, the house of the foreign priest. She sat erect in the ricksha, and behind the runner’s back she said, “I will pay you double if you double your usual speed.”

  “Triple me and I will triple my speed,” he cried over his shoulder.

  Far behind her Ying came in a second ricksha, but for once Madame Wu did not think of what people might say. She had the one thing in her mind, that she must somehow reach his side in time to hear his voice speak once more and give her direction for the rest of her life.

  So she stepped out at the plain unpainted wooden gate set in the midst of a brick wall and without looking at anything she went within. An old woman waited, weeping.

  “Where is our elder brother?” she asked.

  The old woman turned and led her into a low brick house, through an open door, across a court filled with crowding, sobbing children, into a room.

  There upon a narrow bamboo bed Brother André lay. Ragged men and women from the streets were standing about him. They parted to let Madame Wu come to his bedside and, as though he felt her presence, he opened his eyes. His head was rudely bandaged in a coarse white towel, and the blood was running from under it down his cheek and soaking the pillow under his head.

  “I am here,” she said. “Tell me what I must do.”

  For a long moment he could not speak. He was dying. She could see the emptiness at the bottom of his dark eyes, and then she saw his will gather there in light. His lips parted, his breast rose in a great breath as he gazed at her.

  “Feed my lambs,” he said distinctly.

  Then she saw death come. The breath ceased, the eyelids flickered, the will withdrew. His great body shuddered, and he flung out his hands so that they hung over the sides of the bed and struck upon the cold brick floor. She stooped and picked up his right hand, and a ragged man stepped forward and took up his left, and they stood holding these two hands. She stared across the body into the man’s eyes. He was nothing, nobody, a servant, a beggar. He looked at her timidly and put down Brother André’s hand gently on the stilled breast, and she laid the right one over it. The children came running into the room and swarmed about the bed that was now a bier, all crying and calling, “Father—father!” She saw that they were all girls, the eldest not more than fifteen, and the older ones were carrying little ones who could not walk. They leaned on Brother André and felt him with their little hands, and stroked his beard, and they took the edges of their coats and wiped the blood from his face, and they kept on crying.