She sent a message by a manservant to the few foreigners in the city, and the man came back saying that he was told that Brother André was a stranger to them, not being of their religion, and they would not come.
The end of it was that the funeral was as Madame Wu planned it. It took place not the next day as she had first thought, because no coffin was found big enough and one had to be made. Working night and day, the coffin maker finished it in two nights and the day between; and then early in the morning before the city was astir, Madame Wu in her sedan chair headed the procession, which came on foot behind her and Andre in his coffin. She herself had seen to the lifting of his great body into the coffin.
She stood while men lifted André into the coffin and herself put in the voice box and the instrument for stars before the lid was nailed down. She had carried the instrument here again to his house that it might be buried with him. Thus she stood, and she did not delay by sign or word the fitting of the heavy lid. She saw him sleeping, and she yearned over him and said nothing, and then the lid went down and she saw him no more.
Neither did she weep. Why should she reveal herself through weeping? She heard the nails pounded into the wood and saw the ropes tied to great poles. Twenty men were hired to lift the mighty casket, and they carried it out into the streets and through the city gate to the western hill, and now she led the way and others followed, and under the gingko tree the hill was ready to receive him.
None spoke while the coffin was lowered into the cave made for it. The children cried and the old woman wailed, but Madame Wu stood motionless and silent, and the earth was filled into the cave and the mound made.
In her heart for a moment was a hard dry knot of pain that she would see him no more except as he lived forever in her memory.
When all was done, Madame Wu led the procession home again, and she led the children into her own gates, and from that day they were homeless no more.
XI
NEXT MORNING AS SHE looked about the familiar room she knew that the world was exactly as it had been every other morning. Yet, instead of waking to weariness and a longing not to begin the day, she was aware of fresh energy in herself. The energy flowed from a source in her which she had never had before. What she had felt for her husband in her youth had certainly been a kind of love. It was impossible not to have loved Mr. Wu when he was young. He had been too handsome, too healthy, too good-natured not to have won her half-provoked affection and blood-longing. But that love had nothing to do with herself. It was as instinctive as the reflex of a muscle. The heart indeed was nothing but the central muscle in the body.
This she knew. She had once watched her old grandfather take into his hands the still-living heart of a dead tiger, in the days when to eat a tiger heart was to absorb its strength. She remembered the scene as sharply as though it were now before her eyes. She was a little girl of eight, perhaps nine. The hillmen had trapped the tiger and brought it snarling into the courtyard, caught in rope nets. They had all run out into the wintry sunshine to see the golden spotted beast, and at the sight of them it had opened its wide red mouth and had hissed at them in hopeless enmity. The women had shrieked, but she had stood still, staring into its wild yellow eyes. As though it felt its power over her, the tiger had closed its jaws and stared back at her. She had taken one blind step forward when her grandfather shouted. A hillman leaped and plunged his dagger into the tiger’s heart. The knife ripped through the fur, and the beast sank back. The hillman lifted out the heart whole and still beating, and held it before her grandfather’s eyes.
But what she felt in herself now for André had nothing to do with the beating heart. This love, quiet and strong, was sunlight at noon. She was warmed and strengthened by it, and made certain of herself. She had only to act out of the warmth and light, and what she did would be right. Love permeated her brain as well as her body. André was not dead. He was living, and he was with her because she loved him. The reticence of the body was gone. It was unnecessary. She who all her life had been skeptic to the bone, who had smiled at priests and temple mummery, who had looked up to the sky and seen no gods, to whom the spirits of nature were only childish imaginations, she now was sure that André was alive and with her.
“I loved him when he came and went in these courts, but I did not know it,” she thought. “I had to see his body dead before I knew how I love him.”
And then, being a woman, she asked herself if he had loved her. At this question of returned love she felt her first loneliness.
“Since I cannot hear his voice, I shall never know,” she thought. She turned her head toward the court and missed the tread of his feet upon the stones. Then, as she listened, hearing nothing but the twitter of small birds in the bamboos, she saw his face appear slowly against the dark curtain of her memory. His eyes were warm upon her, his bearded lips smiled, and the half-merry sagacity which was his usual look came before her so vividly that she smiled back at him. She could not hear his voice, but she felt suddenly assured that André did love her. Behind the walls of his priesthood, which kept him separated from her while he was alive, he had loved her. Now he was no longer priest, and the walls were gone. There was no reason why she should not summon him at any moment, no reason why he should not enter her mind without waiting for summons. His body was dead, and hers had become the means through which they could live together.
It occurred to her that now she might have a new wisdom which alone she had never had.
“How stupid I have been,” she reflected, gazing up into the blue curtains of her bed. “The men and women in my house, how confused they are by what I have done!”
What she had done so selfishly was to try to free herself from them all by withdrawing herself. She had wanted them to be happy, each in his own fashion, but she had not wanted to be troubled with making them happy, nor had she been able to tell them how to be happy. Food and clothing she had provided, discipline and order she had maintained, and yet the whole house was in a turmoil and nobody was happy. She had been angry with them because they were not happy. This she now saw was completely foolish.
At this moment Ying came into the room, looking very discontented. “Do you not get up this morning, Lady?” she asked. Her voice was querulous.
“It is a rainy day,” Madame Wu said, smiling.
“How do you know, Lady?” Ying inquired sourly. “You have not even drawn your curtains.”
“I know by your voice,” Madame Wu replied, “and there are clouds upon your face.”
“I never thought I should have to see a flower-house girl in our house,” Ying retorted, “nor the sons of the house out wandering over the earth and a concubine cast aside and still having to be fed.”
“So the girl Jasmine is come?” Madame Wu said.
“She is in the back court waiting,” Ying replied. She busied herself about her mistress’s toilet table while she went on talking. “They asked me what to do with her. I don’t know what to do with her.” Ying’s underlip thrust itself out. “The girl says she’s expected. I told her I did not expect her.”
Madame Wu got up out of bed and thrust her narrow feet into flower-embroidered slippers. “Did she come alone?” she asked.
“A snag-toothed old woman came with her and then went away in a hurry. Oh, she’s on our hands,” Ying said very sourly.
Madame Wu did not speak. She proceeded to her bath, and then she put on her silver-gray brocaded satin robe over soft white silk undergarments. Ying dressed her hair carefully, her underlip still sullen.
“Fetch my breakfast,” Madame Wu commanded. She sat down a few moments later and ate it with appetite. She felt a new hunger even for food, and was amused. Had she not heard that love destroyed the appetite? Then she remembered that it was only unrequited love that did so.
“André loves me,” she thought in triumph.
In less than half an hour she rose to go to the back court to see the girl Jasmine.
“Shall I not bring her here,
Lady?” Ying inquired. “It will give her big thoughts if you go to her.”
“No,” Madame Wu said calmly, “I will go to her.” She wished as few persons as possible now to enter her own court. Here let the spirit of André dwell undisturbed, she told herself. Then on the threshold of the moon gate she felt her feet cling, as though hands held them to the marble. A new thought came into her mind.
“But André never held himself back from anyone,” she thought. “He would have met this girl freely to discern what he could do for her. His spirit here will help me.”
She turned to Ying. “You may bring her after all,” she said.
So while Ying went she sat down. Anyone looking in through the gate would have seen her sitting, a slender silvery figure, her head bent, a smile upon her almond-pale face. But no one passed, and in a few moments Ying returned, marching ahead of a rosy plump short young girl.
Thus Madame Wu looked up and saw Jasmine. She was at the same instant aware that this was the sort of woman whom she naturally most disliked, a robust and earthy creature, coarse and passionate. She averted her eyes and felt her soul stagger between yesterday and today. Her dainty flesh shivered.
She felt her protest cut off, stilled by André. There his face was again, dark upon the curtain of her memory. Gazing at his face, she began to ask the girl questions in a soft and gentle voice. Ying fell back a few paces and stood listening and staring. This was not at all Madame Wu’s usual silvery clear voice. There was no hardness in it. Yet it was not the voice in which Madame Wu habitually spoke to children. It was something new, this voice.
“Tell me why you want to come here to live,” Madame Wu asked.
Jasmine looked down at the stones under her feet. She wished she had put on her blue cotton jacket and trousers instead of her green satin ones.
“I want to settle myself before the child is born,” she said.
“Is there to be a child?” Madame Wu asked.
Jasmine lifted her head for one quick look at her. “Yes!” she said loudly.
“There is no child,” Madame Wu replied.
Jasmine lifted her head again, opened her lips to protest, and stared into Madame Wu’s eyes. They were fixed upon her with piercing light, and she burst into tears.
“So there is no child,” Madame Wu repeated.
“Lady, we don’t have to keep her!” Ying cried.
Madame Wu put up her long narrow hand. “This is for me to decide,” she said. “Please go away, Ying.”
“And leave you with this rotten egg?” Ying demanded.
“You may stand just outside the moon gate,” Madame Wu said.
She waited for Ying to go, and then she motioned the girl to sit down on a porcelain garden seat. Jasmine sat down, rubbing her eyes with her knuckles and drawing her sobs back into her throat. Madame Wu began to speak.
“You know,” she said to Jasmine, “it is a very grave thing to enter a man’s house, especially when there is a large and honorable family such as ours. You can come into it and ruin all happiness here. Or you can come in and add happiness by your presence. All this depends on your true heart. If you come for rice and shelter, I beg you to tell me. I will promise you these. You may have them freely without having to buy them here with your body.”
Jasmine looked shrewdly at Madame Wu. “Who gives a woman something for nothing?” she asked.
Madame Wu marveled at herself. Had this happened a month ago, she would have despised the girl’s coarseness. But now she understood it.
“You have never had food or shelter freely,” she murmured. “It is hard for you to believe me.”
“I believe nobody,” Jasmine said. She pulled a bright red silk handkerchief out of her bosom. One end of it was fastened to a button, but she twisted the other about her fingers.
“Then you do come here for shelter,” Madame Wu said.
Jasmine shook her head. “I don’t say so,” she declared. She lifted her thick eyelids, and a sly look came into her round black eyes. “Other men have promised me shelter,” she said.
“But you come here for something,” Madame Wu persisted. “Is it because there is honor in belonging to our family, even though you live in our back court?”
Jasmine’s face was suddenly scarlet under its powder. “I like the old head—” she muttered in the jargon of the street.
Madame Wu knew she spoke of Mr. Wu, but she did not reprove her. Truth was stealing newborn out of the girl’s heart.
“He is much older than you, child,” Madame Wu said.
“I like old men,” the girl said, trembling.
“Why do you tremble?” Madame Wu asked. “You need not tremble before me.”
“I have never known anyone who was noble,” the girl said, frightened. “He is very noble.”
“What do you mean by noble?” Madame Wu asked. She would never have used the word noble for Mr. Wu. Impetuous, impatient, willful, stupid, good-natured sometimes, selfish always—these were all possible words for him, but not noble.
“I mean—noble,” Jasmine said. She lifted her arm. “This bracelet,” she said. “It is solid gold. A young man would have given me a brass one with a coat of gold and sworn it was true. It would have lasted until he left me. But no, the old one gave me solid gold.” She bit it and showed the toothmarks to Madame Wu. “See?”
“Yes, it is gold,” Madame Wu agreed.
“He is so patient,” the girl went on eagerly. “When I don’t feel well, he notices it—he doesn’t press me. Young men don’t care. They take what they want. But this old one always asks me how I feel.”
“Does he indeed,” Madame Wu replied. This was not the Mr. Wu she had known.
The girl sat down again and twisted the bracelet about her arm. “If I have no child—” she began.
“A child is not important,” Madame Wu said.
Jasmine looked at her cornerwise while Madame Wu went on. “The important thing is, will you add happiness to this house or take it away?”
Jasmine lifted her head eagerly. “I will bring happiness, I promise you, Lady—”
“Tomorrow I will decide,” Madame Wu said. She rose as she spoke, and Ying hurried into the court and led the girl away.
When she was gone Madame Wu walked straight along a path of new sunlight that now fell across the stones into the doorway. The light dazed her, but her feet were warmed by it. “I did well,” she thought in some wonder at herself. “How did I know to do so well?”
And then she understood herself. If Jasmine really loved Mr. Wu, that love, too, must be allowed. Did Mr. Wu also love Jasmine? If so, then real happiness would be added to the house. All the unhappiness in homes came because there was not love.
“When I have rested,” she said to Ying, who came in dusting her hands, “I will go to the courts of my sons’ father.”
“Do, Lady,” Ying said. She looked more cheerful. “Perhaps you can persuade him to wisdom. We have already too many women in this house.”
“Are you to stay?” she had asked Jasmine while she led her away.
“I don’t know,” Jasmine had faltered. “She said she’d tell me tomorrow.”
“Our Lady always makes up her mind quickly,” Ying said. She did not finish what she thought, that if her mistress did not say “yes” today, it would be “no” tomorrow. She had put the girl outside the back gate and had drawn the iron bar.
“I go, Lady, and let him know,” she now said. The sparkle had come back into her impudent eyes. Madame Wu saw it, understood, and smiled.
Madame Wu woke to her usual full consciousness, her heart serene. All her life she had struggled for calmness and serenity. She had made herself a prisoner inside the confines of her will, imposed upon her body. Thus her will had commanded her body to behave in certain ways at certain times, regardless of its repulsions and desires. She felt now that she need never again compel herself to anything.
“André,” she said to herself, “it is strange, is it not, that you had to die
before I knew you?”
“Not strange,” the answering thought came into her mind. “There was my big body between us. You had to look at a face and at features with which I really had nothing to do. They were simply given me haphazard by my ancestors, who actually were strangers to me. Even though I was willing to realize them as strangers and leave them, still I was held in their flesh. Now I am wholly myself.”
“André,” she said to him within her, “should I still call you brother, perhaps?”
“It is no longer necessary to qualify our relationship.” So he answered in her heart.
Madame Wu lay straight and exquisite in her bed. She was frightened by this conversation which was taking place entirely in her own mind. Skeptic that she was, she would have laughed at any supernatural appearance even of the one she loved. But there had been no appearance and no sound. The austere room was exactly as it had been when she closed her eyes to sleep. Simply within her brain she heard André’s voice answering her questions. It was perhaps no more than an obsession caused by his death and by her discovery that she loved him. To have comprehended within a handful of seconds that she loved a man who had just died was enough to shake Heaven and earth. It was not surprising that the brain doubled upon itself in its confusion. She recalled that André had told her how thought was driven along the cells which composed the brain stuff. Her recognition of him, crashing into those cells, must doubtless have disturbed all the previous thought lines of her life.
“I do not know what I shall be from now on,” she thought.
She listened for the answering voice. Instead she suddenly remembered how he looked when he smiled. She saw light welling up through the deep darkness of his eyes, and she smiled back at him.
Pavilion of Women: A Novel of Life in the Women's Quarters Page 28
