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

by Buck, Pearl S.

  “Who are you?” she asked in a strange quiet voice.

  “We are his lambs,” they cried in a disorderly chorus.

  “Strays,” the ragged man said. “He picked the little ones up from outside the city wall where they are thrown. The big ones are runaway slaves. He took in anybody.”

  She wanted to weep alone and for herself because he was dead. But the children were flinging themselves upon him, their arms wrapping him.

  “Oh, he’s cold,” a little girl sobbed. The tears were shining on her cheeks. She held his hand to her wet cheek. “His hand is so cold.”

  Madame Wu stood immobile in the midst of this strange family. Then it occurred to her that she did not yet know all that had happened.

  “Who brought him to his bed?” she asked in a low voice.

  The ragged man beat his breast. “It was I. I saw him fall. Everyone on the street was frightened. The Green Robbers ran when they saw him dying. The moneylender put up his shutters and went into his house. But I am only a beggar, and what have I to fear? This foreign priest often gave me a little money, especially in winter. And sometimes he brought me home into this house at night and I slept here until morning, and he gave me food.”

  “You carried him here!” she said.

  “These brother beggars and I,” he said. She saw half a dozen ragged fellows. “He is too big for one or two to carry.”

  She looked down on Brother André’s peaceful face. She had come, hoping for a few words for herself. Instead he had said, “Feed my lambs.” Here were all these children. She looked at them, and they looked back at her. With the quick instinct of children they watched her, transferring their hopefulness from Brother André’s silent figure to her motionless but living frame.

  “What shall I do with you?” she said uncertainly.

  “Lady, what did our father tell you to do?” a thin little girl asked anxiously. She held a fat cheerful baby in her arms.

  Madame Wu could only answer the truth. “He said I was to feed you,” she said.

  The children looked at one another. The thin little girl shifted the baby to the other arm. “Have you enough food for us all?” she asked gravely.

  “Yes,” Madame Wu said.

  Still she continued to stand, looking at the little girls.

  “There are twenty of us,” the little thin girl said. “I am fifteen years old—at sixteen he provides for us.”

  “Provides for you?” Madame Wu repeated.

  The old woman had come in now. “At sixteen he finds them homes and good husbands,” she said.

  They were speaking as if the big quiet figure on the bed was still alive.

  Madame Wu looked at Brother André. His eyes were closed, and his hands were folded on his breast.

  “Come away from this room,” she said abruptly. “All of you! Leave him in peace.”

  They went out obediently, beggars and children and the old woman, and only she was left. At the door Ying stood stiffly. “Go away, Ying,” Madame Wu said.

  “I will stand outside the door,” Ying replied.

  Madame Wu closed the door. What she was doing would cause gossip. Why should a lady wish to be alone with a foreign priest even when he was dead? She did not care. He was neither foreign nor a priest to her now. He was the only being she had ever met whom she worshiped. Old Gentleman had taught her much. But Old Gentleman had feared many things. Brother André feared no one. He feared neither life nor death. She had never thought of him as a man when he was alive, but now that he was dead she saw him as a man lying dead. In his youth he must have been extremely beautiful. His great body lying outstretched before her had the proportions of majesty. His skin was pale and in death was growing translucently clear.

  Suddenly she recognized him. “You whom I love!” she murmured in profound astonishment.

  This recognition she made, and in the instant she accepted it she felt her whole being change. Although she did not move, her body tingled, her blood stung her heart, and her brain was clear. Her whole frame grew light and strong. She lifted her head and looked about the room. The four walls stood, but she felt free and whole. Upon his bier the body lay as it had since he died, but now looking down upon it she knew that he had escaped it. She was skeptic to the soul. Not in years had she entered a temple or burned incense before a god. Her father had cleansed her of the superstition common to women, and Old Gentleman had finished the work. She did not now believe in an unseen God, but she knew certainly that this man continued.

  “André.” She said his name to him in a low clear voice, and never again would she call him brother. “You live in me. I will do my utmost to preserve your life.”

  The moment she had said these words peace welled up in her being. It was so profound, so quieting, so contenting, that for the first time in her life she knew that never before had she known what peace was. Standing motionless in the bare room before his shell, she felt happy.

  Nor was this happiness a trance. It was an energy which began to work in her mind and in her body. There were certain things which she must do that now became perfectly plain to her. His dead body must be buried, not with priests and prayers. His few possessions must be disposed of, and this she herself would do. Then simply she would continue to do whatever he had been doing.

  She went tranquilly from the room and into the other room where Ying and the old woman, the beggars and the children were waiting. She sat down on one of the wooden chairs.

  “Now as to his funeral,” she said. “Did he leave any directions?”

  They looked at one another. The children were awed and said nothing. The old woman sobbed and wiped her eyes with her apron. “Certainly he never thought of dying,” she exclaimed, “nor did we think of such a thing as his death.”

  “Does he have relatives anywhere?” Madame Wu asked. “If so, I suppose we should send his body to them.”

  No one knew of relatives. He had simply come here an unknown number of years ago and had never gone away again.

  “Did he get letters?” Madame Wu asked.

  “When he did, he never read them,” the old woman said. “He let them lie about unopened, and I took them after a while and sewed them into the children’s shoe soles.”

  “And did he never write letters?” Madame Wu went on.

  “Never,” the old woman said.

  “And you,” she said to the beggar, “did he never speak to you?”

  “Never of any who belonged to him,” the leader replied. “We spoke only of people in the city and the country round about who needed help in some fashion.”

  Madame Wu considered this. André belonged wholly to her. There was no other. She would buy a plain black coffin. As for the land, she would bury him in her own land. She thought of a favorite spot upon a certain hillside that circled some of the rice fields. There a gingko tree grew, very old, and she always rested in its shade when she went out to watch the spring planting.

  She rose. “I will go this afternoon and see that the grave is dug.”

  The children and the old woman looked at her anxiously as she rose, and she understood their anxiety. What, they were all thinking, was to become of them?

  “This house,” she said, looking about the bare rooms, “does it belong to him?”

  The old woman shook her head. “It is a rented house,” she said, “and we got it very cheap because it is haunted. Nobody else wants to live in it because it is inhabited by weasels, who carry the spirit of evil ones. But evil spirits feared him, and here we have lived safely for very little cost.”

  “He owns nothing?” she asked.

  “Nothing except two changes of garments. One he wore and one I washed. He has a few books and his cross. Once he had a very pretty image nailed to a wooden cross, and he hung it on the wall of his room above his bed. But it fell down one night and broke, and he never got another. He had a rosary, but one of the children played with it and the string broke, and he never put it together again. Some of the beads rolled
away and were lost, and he said that he did not need it any more.”

  Madame Wu was looking about the room as the old woman talked.

  “What is in that black box?” she asked, and pointed her middle finger.

  The old woman looked. “That is a magic voice box,” she said. “He used to listen to the voices in the night.”

  Madame Wu remembered that he had told her of it. She approached the box and put her ear against it and heard nothing.

  “It speaks for no one else,” the old woman explained.

  “Ah, then we will bury it with him,” Madame Wu said.

  “There is one more thing he possesses, and it is magic, too,” the old woman said hesitatingly. “He told us never to touch it.”

  “Where is it?” Madame Wu asked.

  The old woman crawled under the bed and drew out a long wooden box. She opened it, and there lay an instrument like a pipe.

  “He held it to his right eye whenever the night was clear and he looked into Heaven,” she said.

  Madame Wu knew at once that this was his means of gazing at stars. “I will take that with me,” she decided. “And now bring his books to me,” she said, “and let his garments and the cross be buried with him. As for this house, let it be returned to the owner. Tell him I say it is exorcised and clear now of evil. He can rent it again at a good price.”

  All the children clustered about the old woman and listened in breathless silence and fear. Their home was gone. They had nothing left.

  Madame Wu smiled down on them. She understood with a tenderness wholly new to her what they were thinking.

  “As for you, all of you, and you too, Old Sister, you are to come to my own house and live.”

  A great sigh went over the children. They were safe. With the ease and confidence of childhood they accepted their new safety and immediately became excited.

  “When—when—” they began to clamor.

  “I think you should stay here with him until tomorrow,” she said. “Then we will all go to the grave together. But you will not come back here. You will come home with me.”

  “Good heart,” the old woman sobbed, “kind good heart! He knows—be sure he knows!”

  Madame Wu smiled without answering this. “Have you rice enough for their meals?” she asked. “They will need food today and tomorrow morning. Their noon meal they will have in my house.”

  “He always kept a day’s food in the house,” the old woman sobbed. “At least one day’s food we always have.”

  “Then tomorrow I will come back,” Madame Wu said.

  She let the children press against her for a moment, knowing that they were accustomed to cluster about him and feel his bodily presence, and so they needed the same reassurance from her. Then she said gently, “Until tomorrow, my little ones,” and she left the house where his body lay dead and went out, a different creature from the woman she had been when she came in.

  She went back to her own court and sat long alone with her changed self. She accepted André’s death. If he had lived there would most certainly have come the moment when she would have discovered that she loved him. There could then have been only one of two choices for her. She must have made excuses never to see him again, or she must have yielded up her soul to him and told him her love. This she knew would have parted them.

  She sat awake and alone for hours that night, refusing to allow Ying to come in and put her to bed. She did not want to lie in a bed. She wanted to sit, alive, alert, alone, searching out the whole of her new knowledge. She loved a man, a foreigner, a stranger, a man who had never once put out his hand to touch hers, whose touch would have been unthinkable. She smiled into the darkness after a long time. The house was dark and silent about her, but beside her a candle burned, and her heart was speaking aloud.

  “Had I put out my hand to you,” she said, “would you have been afraid of me?”

  But she knew André was afraid of no one. There was that God of his. It occurred to Madame Wu that men’s gods were enemies to women. She felt jealousy for the first time in her life.

  “We have no gods of our own,” she reflected.

  But for women true gods were impossible. She pondered on the women she knew who worshiped gods. Little Sister Hsia was continually talking of her god. But then, Little Sister Hsia had nothing else to talk about, neither husband nor children, neither friends nor family. In this emptiness she had gone out and found for herself God. No, the only true test of woman was whether, having all else, as men did, they rejected all and went and found a god. The women whom she knew best and had known best in her whole life, not one of them had truly sought God. Not one, that is, in the way that André had done, when as a young man he had put aside the woman he loved and the wealth he might have had and the fame from his learning, and had simply given his life to God.

  She paused in her musing to consider for a moment the woman whom André had loved in his youth and had put aside, loving loneliness better. Young she must have been and beautiful doubtless. She felt more jealousy, not that André had loved the woman, but because this unknown and long forgotten woman should have looked upon André when he was young and not yet a priest.

  “I should like to have seen him when he was a young giant,” Madame Wu thought. She sat at perfect peace, in complete stillness, her hands folded one upon the other, and her rings gleaming softly on her fingers. Yes, André as a young man must have been a good sight for a woman. He was handsome even in his middle age, but young he must have been himself a god. Then she felt sorry for that woman whom he had rejected. Now she was married doubtless and perhaps she had many children, for women do not die because a man will not have them, but somewhere in her heart she still thought of André, with love or with hate. If she were a woman of little heart she would hate him, and if she were of great heart she had not blamed him and so she loved him still. Or perhaps she thought of him no more. It might be perhaps she was simply tired and past any feeling, as women can grow to be when their hearts and bodies have been too much used. It was the weakness of a woman that heart and body were knit together, warp and woof, and when the body was too much used the heart, too, became worn, unless it had love, such as she now felt toward André. Death had relieved her of his body. Had he lived they might have lost their souls in the snare of the flesh. She was surprised to feel at this moment a sudden rich flush of the blood into her vitals.

  “I am a woman in spite of everything,” she thought with some amusement. Even the thought of André’s great body could cause this enrichment in her being. How dangerous to peace had he been before her in the flesh! She felt an impulse of gratitude toward those robbers of the Green Band who had removed such danger. Then, noticing through the door how exquisite the moonlight was upon her orchids, under the bamboos, she was contrite. It was cruel to be glad that André’s eyes were closed.

  “It is not that I am glad you are dead,” she explained to him. “It is simply that you and I are both spared a great misery and so we can keep our great joy. Doubtless you know I love you.”

  As she murmured these words she was conscious of his perfect understanding. Nothing less could have given her so instant a sense of complete comfort and cheerfulness. She knew that for André to have violated his priesthood would have caused him as much pain as her own were she to violate the duty she had to her family. They would have preached renunciation to each other, but in order to practice this, it would have been necessary for them never to meet. Now no renunciation was necessary. She could think of him as much as she liked and without danger.

  “But of course I am changed,” she thought. She sat, still outwardly motionless, but wondering how she was changed. She did not know. She would have to discover herself. Her heart was changed. “I am a stranger now to myself,” she thought with some astonishment. “I do not know how I shall act or how I shall feel.”

  For an hour after this discovery she sat in the same motionless pose. “I have no knowledge of how I shall act,” she thought.
“The springs of my being are different. I shall no longer live out of duty but out of love.” This was her discovery of herself through love.

  Again she felt the strange enrichment flow through her whole being, followed by serene content.

  It was at this moment she thought of the instrument for stars. She had ordered it brought home with her, and now it was in the library. She went and lifted it out of its box with difficulty, for it was heavy, and she set it up on three folding legs she found also in the box. Then she peered through it at Heaven outside the door.

  She expected instantly to see the shapes of stars and the moon in its path. To her disappointment, although the night was clear, she saw nothing. This way and that she tried, but Heaven was sealed to her, and with a sigh she put the instrument away again. She had not the knowledge for it. “It belongs only to him,” she thought. “I will bury it with him, together with the box of voices from the night.”

  Upon this decision she went to her bed and slept.

  The funeral was like none that had ever taken place before in this city. Madame Wu could not let it be like a family burial. But she gave it honor as the funeral of her son’s tutor. The children were dressed in white cloth, unhemmed, and the beggars who had carried Brother André into his house demanded mourning for themselves. Madame Wu wore no outer mourning.

  Now, after some thought, before the funeral she had asked whether the few other foreigners in the city should not be told of the death. Little Sister Hsia should know, perhaps, and certainly the foreign doctor should know.

  Madame Wu had never seen this foreign doctor and did not want to see him now. She had heard that such doctors went always with knives in their hands, ready to cut any who were ill. Sometimes they were clever in cutting off tumors and excrescences, but often they killed people, and there was no redress against a foreign doctor as there was against one of their own who killed instead of healing. For this reason few of the people in the city went near the foreign doctor unless they were already sure of death.