Pavilion of Women

X

BUT MR. WU WENT direct from Madame Wu to the flower house to which she had objected. He had first followed Mr. Kang there somewhat against his will and certainly against his conscience. Then he had dealt with both and had come off the victor. His will had yielded entirely so that now he looked forward to his innocent visits there, and his conscience was reduced to confusion and temporary silence.

Ch’iuming he did not understand. She was not as wise as Madame Wu, whom he steadfastly adored as a priest might adore the Kwanyin whom he daily served. Ch’iuming was neither goddess nor woman. When he treated her as a goddess, she was bewildered. Besides, she was not quite a goddess. When he treated her as a woman, he felt he shocked her, and then he was confused and could proceed no further. Matters had come to such a pass between them that he did not know how to treat her, and so he left her alone.

The experience had made him more than ever adore Madame Wu, who had been able, as he now perceived, to be alternately goddess and woman, but never the two at the same time. But, since she resolutely refused to return to being a woman, and was apparently to be continually a goddess, he had been reduced to finding a woman elsewhere.

This he had found in the person of a small round rollicking girl in the House of Peony Flowers on the Street of the Blind Lute Player. The house was an old one, outwardly a teahouse, but also a gambling place and a brothel. The girls were always clean and young and cheerful. Mr. Kang assured him that he had for years been a client there and had never found any other sort of girl in it. Moreover, the place made a policy of not being grasping. If a man wished only to look at a girl while he ate and drank, it was possible not to be committed further. If he wished her only as a companion for a guest, that too could be. Indeed, to purchase more took some arrangement, for there was always a waiting list of clients. But it had not been hard for Mr. Wu to ascend this list at once, thanks to his position as the head of a great family.

Now he entered the gaily decorated hall with an air of a familiar and was greeted on all sides. The proprietor called to his assistant in a loud voice.

“Tell Jasmine that Mr. Wu is here.”

Mr. Wu proceeded amiably to an inner room and was at once served with tea and then in a few minutes with wine and a bowl of small dumplings by way of light refreshments. He ate these, and before he was half through Jasmine came into the room.

She had been perfuming her long black hair when she was called, and now she came in with it in two coils over her ears. Since she was named Jasmine, she used the same flower scent and made the most of it, so that the scent became her own, and she had usually one or two of those flowers tucked into the coils of her hair. Her face was powdered almost a pure white, and her lips were red and her eyes round and very dark. She was plump and her lips were always smiling. She came running in on her little feet and perched on the arm of Mr. Wu’s chair and rubbed her scented cheek against his.

He pretended not to notice her, and she pouted. “I am hungry,” she whimpered. He dipped his porcelain spoon into the dumpling soup and fed it to her gravely, and she leaned forward like a child to receive it. Between them in silence they finished the food, and he pushed his chair from the table and she slipped to his knee.

“What have you been doing today?” Mr. Wu inquired.

She examined her scarlet fingernails. “Oh — waiting for you — that is all I do.”

“I cannot be here all the time,” Mr. Wu said. “I have business. I am a man of affairs. I have the shops and the markets and the lands all to superintend. They can do nothing without me.”

“You work too hard,” she complained. “It seems to me your sons ought to help you.”

“Oh, my sons,” he grumbled, “they think only of themselves and their own families. Two of them have actually gone away, and the eldest one— Well, he tries, but I cannot trust everything to him.”

He enjoyed the pressure of her round little body against his shoulder. He liked the jasmine scent of her hair. Even her breath was scented. He remembered Madame Wu’s question. Did he want to bring her into the house? Left to himself, certainly it would be a pleasure, but he could not persuade himself to add to the house of his ancestors a flower girl. The shade of his father forbade it.

As though she knew his thoughts, Jasmine nestled closer and slipped her arm about his neck. “I wish I could come and live with you,” she said. “I would be very good. I would not trouble any of the great ladies. I would stay by myself all the time until you came.”

“No, no,” he said hastily. “I don’t want you there. I like to come out of the house and visit you here. If you were to come to the house, you would become a part of it, and I would have nowhere to go for my own pleasure. A man must be himself somewhere.”

She was quite ready for this. She had an old mother who had been a flower girl in her youth, and had taught her to take care of herself. “A concubine, if possible,” old Lotus had said, “but if not that, then a house of your own.”

“Couldn’t you buy a little house for me, Mr. Wu?” she asked. “I would never let any man come in but you, and I would wait for you all day and all night. Then you could be yourself whenever you liked.”

Mr. Wu had already considered this possibility. He did not like the assurance with which his name was now called out when he came to this house of flowers. He was, after all, the head of the house of Wu and a man higher than any among the gentry of the city.

But Madame Wu kept the family accounts, and how was he to ask her for so large a sum as it would require to take a house for Jasmine? “You see, my small flower,” he said tenderly, “my sons’ mother is a wonderful woman. She keeps the accounts. What would I tell her if I wanted to take a house for you?”

“Couldn’t you sell a piece of your land and not tell her?” Jasmine asked. She sat up and looked at him pleadingly. She had a childish little voice that went straight into his heart.

“I have never deceived her,” Mr. Wu said, troubled.

“Does she know about me?” Jasmine asked in astonishment.

“Approximately,” Mr. Wu replied.

“What is approximately?” Jasmine asked.

“It means somewhat.”

“How can she know somewhat?” Jasmine asked again. “Either she knows or she doesn’t know.”

“Let us then say she knows,” Mr. Wu replied. “It is always safer to say that she knows than that she doesn’t.”

Jasmine tried again. She hid her face on his shoulder. “I am afraid I have happiness in me,” she whispered. “That is why I want the house. I can’t have a child here.”

Mr. Wu was alarmed. He took her from his knee and set her on her feet, and she stood there before him, her hands over her face. “Now,” he said sternly, “there were others before me. You were no virgin, young as you are.”

She took her hands from her face. The powder was undisturbed. “But my amah can prove to you that there have been none since you came, and this is within the last three months. You came before that.”

She turned away and wiped her eyes with the edges of her sleeves. “Never mind.” Her childish voice was sad. “It is my fate. Girls like me — sometimes it happens in spite of ourselves. Especially when we really love a man. That is my mistake.”

Had she insisted, had she demanded, he would have risen and gone away perhaps never to return. But his heart was soft.

“Now,” he said, “whether it is my fault or not, you know there are ways of purging yourself. Here is something to help you.”

He put his hand in his purse, but she would not take the money he held out to her. She pushed his hand away with her two little ones. “No, please,” she said. “I will bear the child. I want to bear him.”

“You must not,” Mr. Wu insisted.

They were interrupted at this moment by loud cries from the outer room. “Mr. Wu, Mr. Wu!” the proprietor was shouting. The door burst open. Mr. Wu saw his own servant, Peng Er.

“Master, Master!” Peng Er cried, “you are wanted at home. The Second Lady has hanged herself from the old pomegranate tree!”

“My mother!” Mr. Wu muttered. He leaped to his feet and strode away, leaving Jasmine in the middle of the floor looking after him and frowning with anger.

The commotion of his own house rose over the walls of the compound and met him on the street. Priests had been called, and they were beating their gongs and crying for the lost soul of Ch’iuming. He ran through the open gate where no one stood to watch and hastened into the Peony Court. There the priests were, and there the whole household had gathered to wail and to weep and to call Ch’iuming’s name. He pushed through them, and in the midst of them upon the flags of the court she lay. Madame Wu knelt beside her and held her head on her arm. But Ch’iuming’s pale face hung over Madame Wu’s arm as though she was wholly lifeless.

“Is she dead?” Mr. Wu shouted.

“We can find no life in her,” Madame Wu replied. “I have sent for the foreign priest. If we have all these priests, why not him?”

At this very moment Brother André appeared, and the crowd divided before him like a sea before a wind. The other priests were silent in jealousy. In the center of this silence, Brother André fell to his knees and thrust a needle into Ch’iuming’s arm and held it there.

“I do not ask what you do,” Madame Wu said to him. “I know whatever it is, it is wise.”

“A stimulant,” Brother André said. “But it may be too late.” He put the needle away so quickly that no one saw it except Mr. and Mrs. Wu.

But it was not too late. Ch’iuming’s lips quivered. While they watched, her eyelids fluttered. Madame Wu sighed. “Ah, she is alive. Then the child is alive.”

“But why did she hang herself?” Mr. Wu exclaimed.

“Let us not ask until she can tell us,” Madame Wu replied. “But announce to the priests her soul has returned. Pay them well, Father of my sons. Let them think they were successful so that they will go away and we can have peace.”

Mr. Wu obeyed her and called out to the priests and led them away to the outer court. The women of the family remained, the elder cousins to commend the priests, and Meng and Rulan and Linyi to gaze quietly down into the face of Ch’iuming, whom they scarcely knew even while she was here in their own house. She was of their generation and yet linked to the older ones, and they could not be free with her, and so they had forgotten her.

But by this act she had brought herself nearer to them. She was unhappy, she did not want to belong to the elders. In each young woman’s heart an interest arose in Ch’iuming, and this interest was mingled with pity in Meng’s heart, with curiosity in Linyi’s, and with revolt in Rulan’s. Each determined in her own way to know Ch’iuming and why she had done this thing.

Yet there was no time for any of these feelings, for as Ch’iuming came to herself it became clear that her child was to be born too early. She must be carried in to her bed and the midwife sent for. These things were done, and Brother André was about to go away when Ch’iuming spoke.

“Did I see the foreign priest?” she whispered.

“He is about to go away,” Madame Wu said. She stood by the bed of fecundity while the women servants made Ch’iuming ready for the birth.

“Tell him to come here — only for a moment,” Ch’iuming begged.

Madame Wu was surprised. She did not know that Ch’iuming knew the tall foreigner. But since the girl was still so near death, she did not dare deny her. She went herself and stayed Brother André as he was about to leave. “She asks for you,” she said. “For a moment come in.”

So Brother André turned, and he stooped his head and went in through the low doorway into the room where Ch’iuming lay in the huge bed. Mr. Wu stayed behind. He was suddenly stiff with embarrassment. To what a pass had he brought the household! He did not doubt that Ch’iuming had hung herself because of Jasmine. In her silent way she had protested with her life.

When Brother André leaned over the bedside Ch’iuming spoke, but in so faint a voice he could not hear her. He leaned closer over her, and these were the words he then heard:

“If a girl is born, I give it to you when I die— It is only a foundling.”

“How can a foundling be born in this house?” he inquired gently.

“But I am only a foundling,” she said, “and this is the child of a foundling.”

With that she closed her eyes and gave herself up to pain. He went away with a grave face and told no one what she had said, and so low was her voice that no one else had heard her words.

Late that night a girl was born to Ch’iuming, a creature so small that Madame Wu took her and wrapped her in a cotton fleece and put her into her bosom to keep her alive. Then she went quickly into her own courts, leaving Ch’iuming to the midwife and to Ying, and in her own room she put the child into her bed and lay down beside her to keep her warmed. A woman servant came in to see what was needed.

“Heat bricks and bring them here,” Madame Kang said. “This child is a bud that must be carefully opened.”

“Oh, Mistress,” the woman said, “why not let her die? A girl — and what can she grow into but a sickly thing to make trouble in the house?”

“Obey me,” Madame Wu said.

The woman went muttering away and Madame Wu looked at the little creature. She was still breathing.

Two days later Brother André told Madame Wu of Ch’iuming’s strange request. The child had not died. She could not suckle, being too young, but she had swallowed a few drops of mother’s milk put into her mouth with a spoon. Ch’iuming’s milk had come, although she was too weak to speak. Even when Madame Wu told her that the child was alive, she had not answered.

“Certainly the child is not a foundling,” Madame Wu said to Brother André, with dignity. “She has been born into our house.”

“I knew you would say that,” he replied, “and you are right. But why does this young mother say she is a foundling?”

“She was, until she came here,” Madame Wu replied. She hesitated, and then to her own wonder she found herself telling Brother André what she had never told him, how it was she who had brought Ch’iuming into this house.

Brother André listened, his eyes downcast, his great hands clasped on his knees. She never saw those hands without wondering why they were so calloused. Now she asked suddenly, “Why are your hands so calloused?”

He was accustomed to her changes. “Because I till the land for the children’s food,” he said. He did not move his hands from under her gaze.

She went on with her story, her eyes on his hands.

“I suppose since you are a priest, you cannot understand either man or woman,” she said when her whole story was told.

“Being priest, I can understand both man and woman,” he said.

“Then tell me what I have done that is wrong.” She lifted her eyes from his hands to his face and wondered that out of all the world she had chosen to open her entire heart to a foreigner who had been born in some country across the sea whose waters and winds she would never know.

He answered her: “You have not considered that man is not entirely flesh, and that even such a man as your husband must be in communion with God. You have treated him with contempt.”

“I?” she exclaimed. “But I have thought of nothing but his welfare.”

“You have considered only the filling of his stomach and the softness of his bed,” Brother André said plainly. “And even worse than this, you have bought a young woman as you would buy a pound of pork. But a woman, any woman, is more than that, and of all women you should know it; You have been guilty of three sins.”

“Guilty?” she repeated.

“You have despised your husband, you have held in contempt a sister woman, and you have considered yourself unique and above all women. These sins have disturbed your house. Without knowing why, your sons have been restless and their wives unhappy, and in spite of your plans no one is happy. What has been your purpose, Madame?”

Confronted by his clear calm eyes, she trembled. “Only to be free,” she faltered. “I thought, if I did my duty to everyone, I could be free.”

“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 ricksha 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.

“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.

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.