Pavilion of Women

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.

Ying came into the room, looking alarmed. “The front court is full of the beggar children,” she said fretfully. “And the prostitute is sitting in the entrance hall again. She says you sent for her.”

Madame Wu laughed. “I feel I could eat a roll of wheat bread, this morning,” she remarked.

Ying stared at her. “You look changed, Lady. Your skin is rosy as a child’s. You are not feverish?”

She came to the side of the huge bed and took Madame Wu’s little hand and held it to her cheek.

“No fever,” Madame Wu said. “Nothing but health.”

She withdrew her hand gently and threw back the silken quilt. Then, rising, she allowed Ying to wash and dress her. But she refused the gray silk robe Ying had put out for her. Instead she chose one of an old-rose color which the day before her fortieth birthday she had laid aside, thinking she would never wear such hues again.

Today it was becoming to her as it had never been. The last time she had worn it she had thought it made her paleness sallow. But this morning it lent her color.

“It was wrong of me to have put it away,” she thought as she looked at herself in the mirror. Her natural vanity stirred. “A pity he never saw me in this,” she thought. She smiled at herself in the glass. She glanced at Ying, to see whether any of this had been seen. But Ying was folding the gray robe, sleeve to sleeve.

Madame Wu walked into the library. In common sense today she should have felt her life tangled with unsolved problems. Twenty children waited in the court, the young prostitute sat in the entrance hall, and Mr. Wu was more than ever a responsibility. There were the newborn girl and her mother, Ch’iuming, and her own sons and their wives. But she had none of her usual shrinking from human beings. She now realized that for the first time in her life she disliked no one. All her life she had struggled again her dislike of human beings. None had been wholly to her taste. Thus her mother she had disliked because of her ignorance and superstitions. Her father she had loved, or would have said she had, but she had disliked him, too, because his heart was far away and she could never come near him. And though Mr. Wu had been a handsome young man when she married him there were secrets of his person which she disliked. Even when she had shared his passion, she had been aware of shapes and odors, and she had felt violation in his touch even while she allowed it. Old Gentleman had been dear to her, but she was so delicately made that she could not forget what she disliked while she found what she liked. His heart was good, his intelligence clear, but his teeth were broken and his breath came foul.

“If André had been alive when I found I loved him, I wonder if I could have—”

Before she could frame the thought, another came to answer. “You see how wise is death! It removes the body of a man and lets free his spirit.”

“But if I were younger,” she reminded him, “could I have been satisfied only with your spirit?”

She looked down at the smooth gray tiles of the floor. Would it have been possible, when she was young, to have loved a foreign man? For of course André was a foreign man, a man from another country and of another blood. She tried to imagine him young and ardent as a man is ardent, and all her blood rose in strange anger.

“Don’t!” This cry burst into her mind.

“No, I will not,” she promised.

Ying came in with her breakfast and placed it upon the table in neat rows of dishes. Madame Wu took up her chopsticks.

“Have the children in the court been fed?” she asked.

“Certainly not, Lady,” Ying said sternly. “No orders have been given for so much food.”

“Then I give orders now,” Madame Wu said gently. “Let rice be cooked at once, and bread bought and tea made for their noon meal.”

“It is lucky it is not raining,” Ying said. “We should be put to it if we had to take such people under our roof.”

“There is room here for all,” Madame Wu said.

She was amazed to see Ying begin to cry and, with her blue coat to her eyes, run sobbing out of the room. “You are changed — you are changed,” she cried.

But at noon she had great buckets of rice set in the court, and when Madame Wu went there it was to see the little girls eating happily and feeding the younger ones by pushing rice into their open mouths. The old woman who had been their caretaker rose, her cheeks full of rice, and cried out to the children that they must greet Madame Wu as their mother.

“Now that your father has gone, I am your mother,” Madame Wu said, smiling. The orphan children looked at her with love, and suddenly for the first time in her life Madame Wu felt the true pangs of birth in her being. She felt her being divided and merge again with another nature far larger than her own. These children were André’s and hers.

“All are my children,” she said, wondering that the words could be hers. At the sound of her voice the children rushed to her to embrace her, to touch her, to lean against her. She looked down at them and saw their small lacks and defects as well as their beauty. But she felt no dislike.

“Your father did the best he could for you,” she said, smiling, “but you need a mother, too.” She touched a sore red scar on a child’s cheek. “Does it still hurt?” she asked.

“A little,” the child replied.

“And how did you come by it?” Madame Wu asked.

The child hung her head. “My mistress held the end of her cigarette against me there—”

“Oh, why?” Madame Wu asked.

“I was her slave — and I couldn’t move fast enough—” the child replied.

She put her hand into Madame Wu’s. “Will you give me a name?” she begged. “He was going to give me a name and then died too soon. All the others have names.”

“They shall tell me their names, and then I shall know what to name you,” Madame Wu replied.

One by one they repeated their names, and each name was a word spoken from André.

Pity; Faith; Humility; Grace; Truth; Mercy; Light; Song; Star; Moonbeam; Sunbeam; Dawn; Joy; Clarity — such were the names he had given the older ones. The younger ones he had called playful names. Kitten and Snowbird and Rosepetal and Acorn, Silver and Gold. “Because he said silver and gold had he none,” these two small creatures proclaimed, “until we came.”

They all laughed at such nonsense. “He did make us laugh every day,” Gold said. She was a round little creature, and she clutched Silver by the hand.

“Are you sisters?” Madame Wu asked, smiling.

“We are all sisters,” twenty voices cried.

“Of course,” Madame Wu agreed. “I am stupid.”

The scarred child pressed her close. “And my name?” she asked.

Madame Wu looked down into the tender face. The child was exquisite, a bud of a child, full of beauty to come. The name rose in Madame Wu’s mind. “I will call you Love,” she said.

“I am Love,” the child repeated.

By now the court was fringed with silent onlookers. The servants in the house had made one excuse and another to pass this way to stop and stare, but the children of the household and the lesser relatives made no pretense of errands. They stood gaping at this new Madame Wu. At last Jasmine, who had grown weary of waiting in the entrance hall, rose and came to the court herself, and behind her came her servant. Jasmine had braced herself to be very strong and to demand her rights as one who had within herself hope of a son for the house.

But instead of the stern proud lady whom she had expected to see, this morning she saw a gentle beautiful woman laughing in the midst of beggar children. Madame Wu looked up at the bustle behind the pillars of the veranda, and their eyes met.

“You see I have many children,” Madame Wu said, smiling, “but I have not forgotten you. When I have planned where they are to sleep and play, I will talk with you.”

She turned to the relatives. None of them were sons or sons’ wives. They were only old cousins and poor nephews who, having no shelter elsewhere, had returned to the ancestral house to find a corner here and a bed there.

“Where shall we house my children?” she asked gaily.

“Our Sister,” an old widow answered, “if you are doing good deeds, let them be housed in the family temple.”

Madame Wu had been without any anxiety whatever, but she simply had not known where to put these children. Now she accepted the widow’s words at once. “How wise you are,” she said gratefully. “No home could be better than our temple. There are courts to play in, and the pool and the fountain. The family gods will have something to do now.”

She led the way as she spoke, and the children ran after her in the sunlight, and the old woman hobbled after them. In the very back of the Wu courts there was a large old temple, built by one of the women ancestors two hundred years before. She had desired to become a nun after her husband died, and yet she did not wish to leave her home to live in a public temple. So she had built here within the shelter of the house walls a beautiful temple where she lived with the gods until she died nearly one hundred years old. Since then a priest had been appointed to care for the temple, none being allowed to serve who were under fifty years of age because of the many young women in the house.

Madame Wu, although skeptic, had nevertheless allowed the priest to continue and had maintained the temple, paying for the gilding of the gods once every ten years and once a year allowing a sum for incense. Such of the family as wished could worship here, and it was considered a benefit that women need not go to outside temples to worship and be perhaps exposed to lewd priests.

To this temple she now led the children. She paused for one moment on the wide stone threshold. Two gate gods loomed above her, one black, one white.

“But will these gods offend André?” she asked herself. “His religion had no gods like these.”

She seemed to hear his mighty laughter, echoing among the painted beams high above the heads of the gods.

She smiled in reply and, holding by the hand the child she had named Love, she stepped over the high wooden doorsteps and into the temple. The air was fragrant with incense and lilies. Incense burned before the gods, and lilies bloomed in the court. The old priest, hearing footsteps, came running in from his kitchen. He had been burning grass for cooking of his meal, and his face and hands were sooty.

He stared at the crowd of children and at Madame Wu. “I am bringing gifts,” she said. “Tell him your names, children.”

One by one they called their names in their soft gay voices.

“And this one,” Madame Wu ended, “is Love. They are all gifts for the temple.”

Now, the old priest had heard of what had happened. He took it that Madame Wu wished to do good deeds before Heaven and so he could not forbid it, however difficult it might be for him. He bowed and clasped his sooty hands and fell back against one god after another as he retreated before Madame Wu, who swept on into the temple, assigning rooms where until now only gods had stood silently gazing into the courts of the Wu family.

“This room is for the little ones,” she said, “because the Goddess of Mercy is here, and she will watch over you for me during the night. This room is for the big ones, because there is space for everybody, and you must help to keep it very clean.”

Then she felt the child Love cling to her. “Let me come with you,” she begged Madame Wu. “I will wash your clothes and serve your food. I can do everything.”

Madame Wu’s heart turned into warm flame. But she was just. She knew that André would not have showed favor to one above another. She shook her head. “You must stay and help the others,” she said. “That is what your father would have wished.” Then she knew it was not all justice. She wanted no one with her, to share her life with him.

“Where shall we sleep, Our Mother?” the children asked of Madame Wu.

“By night there will be beds,” she said. “But first you must play all day long.”

And seeing them happy, she left them with the gods.

Jasmine pursed her red mouth and looked hard at the corner of her brightly flowered silk kerchief. One corner of it was fastened to the glass button on her left shoulder, and it hung from this like a scarf. With the kerchief she concealed her face, or she played with it when she wished not to look at the one to whom she was talking.

“It is hard for me to speak,” she said to Madame Wu.

“Surely there is not much to say,” Madame Wu replied.

“There is a great deal to say,” Jasmine said pertly. “If I have no child now, I will have.” She placed her hands on her belly.

Madame Wu looked at her with interest. “You ought to be able to bear a very fat fine child,” she said. “You look strong.”

Jasmine was taken back. “But what will my position be in the house?” she demanded.

“What position do you want?” Madame Wu asked.

“I ought to be the third wife,” Jasmine said sharply. It was strange that so young and pretty a creature could be so sharp. But her round bright eyes, her straight small nose, her pink cheeks and little full mouth all grew sharp and bright together.

“Why not?” Madame Wu said amiably.

“You don’t mind?” Jasmine asked these words in a whisper. The sharpness went out of her face, and the lines of it softened.

“Why should I mind?” Madame Wu asked simply.

“You mean I can live here — in this great house — and be called Third Lady — and when my child—”

“I would not want any child of our house to be illegitimate,” Madame Wu said. “That would be unworthy of our name. You are the vessel that receives the seed. You are to be honored.”

Jasmine stared at her with rounding black eyes and then began to cry in loud coarse sobs. “I thought you would hate me,” she gasped. “I made myself ready for your anger. Now I don’t know what to do.”

“There is nothing you need to do,” Madame Wu said calmly. “I will have a maid lead you to your rooms. They are small, you know, only two, and they are to the left of my lord’s court. His Second Lady lives to the right. You need not meet. I will myself go now and tell my lord you are coming.”

She hesitated, and then said with a delicate frankness, “You will find him very just. If he leaves his silver pipe upon your table it is his message. If he goes away with it in his hand, do not be angry. That is my own request in return for shelter. Bring no anger into our house.”

She looked at the stolid old woman who had sat beside Jasmine all this time without a word. “And this one, is she your mother?”

The woman opened her mouth to speak, but Jasmine spoke first. “She belongs to the house from where I come.”

“Let her go back to it, then,” Madame Wu said. She put her hand into her bosom and took out silver and put it on the table. It shone there so largely that the woman could only get up and bow again and again.

But all was interrupted by Jasmine, who fell on her knees before Madame Wu and knocked her head on the floor. “They told me you were just, but now I know you are kind!”

Madame Wu’s cheeks flushed upward from her neck. “Had you come another day I might have been only angry,” she said honestly. “But today is different from all days before it.”

She rose, not lifting the girl to her feet, and walked quickly out of the room.

“I am a wicked woman,” she told herself. “I do not care how many women come into these courts. My own heart is full.”

She paused, waiting for some answer to this. But there was no answer, unless the complete peace within her heart was answer. “Had I discovered you while you lived,” she said, “would there have been silence between us?”

Still he did not answer, and she smiled at his silence. Even as a spirit he was shy of love. The habits of his life held. The silence broke a moment later. As she stepped into the main court she saw three men standing there. They were decent-looking, well-dressed men, and they turned their backs as she came in and pretended not to see her, as though she were a young woman. It was a pleasant compliment, but she put it aside.

“I am Madame Wu,” she said. “Is there anything you want here?”

They turned sidewise at this, and the eldest man, in great courtesy, answered still without looking at her.

“It is Madame Wu whom we seek,” he said. “We are come to ask if the dead should not be somehow avenged. That Green Band is a danger to our whole town, but never before have they killed a man. It is true he was only a foreigner and a priest, but if they begin killing foreigners and priests today, they will be killing us tomorrow. Ought not the town to demand justice on behalf of the stranger? If so, will Madame Wu make the accusation?”

There was a stir of protest in her mind. She saw André’s eyes, fiercely refusing vengeance, and she spoke instantly. “Certainly he would want no vengeance done for him,” she said. “He talked often of forgiving those who do not know what they do. But who are these robbers?”

“The worthless young men of the town, the adventurers, the ones who want to rise not through honest work, but through making others afraid of them,” the elder replied indignantly.

“Are there many such men?” she asked with wonder.

The men laughed but without noise, in respect to her. “There are many in these days,” one said.

“And why should there be?” she asked.

“The times are bad.” One of the other men spoke. He was a small withered man whose face was wrinkled but whose hair was still black. She stood there in the strong sunlight in her rose-colored robe, and there was admiration in the man’s eyes. But she was far beyond seeing it. She was wholly safe from any man’s admiration.

“What makes the times bad?” she asked. She knew well enough the times, but she asked.

“Lady, you have lived behind these high walls,” the eldest man spoke again. “You cannot know in what a turmoil the world is. The turmoil begins in the wickedness of foreign countries, where war continually threatens. None of us can escape. This turmoil makes the young everywhere restless. They ask themselves why they should submit to ancient ways which must soon change. They have no new ways to offer, and so, rejecting the old and delaying the new, they live without law.”

She looked at the men. Doubtful though she might be of all else, of André’s mind she was sure.

“He will take no vengeance,” she said.

They bowed and went away. But she was troubled after they were gone. She walked on to find Mr. Wu, that she might see how his spirits were this day, and as she went she pondered what the men had said. Should she have sent her sons forth into these troubled times?

“Were I alone,” she thought, “I might be afraid.”

But she was not alone. With this comfort she remembered that she had said she would announce Jasmine’s coming to Mr. Wu, and she went at once.

She entered the moon gate and saw Mr. Wu poking into the earth of the peony terrace with the brass end of his long bamboo pipe. He wore a lined robe of dark-blue satin, and he had put on his velvet shoes padded with silk. He was thinner than he had been. In his youth he had been full fleshed, and in his middle age nothing less than fat. Now, without his being slender, the inner fat was beginning to melt away, and his smooth brown skin was loosening.

“Are you well, Father of my sons?” she asked courteously.

“Very well, Mother of my sons,” he replied, and went on prodding the earth.

“You will ruin your pipe,” she remarked.

“I am testing the roots of the peonies to see if they are firm,” he replied. “There has been so much rain that I fear their rotting.”

“These terraces are well drained,” she said. “I had the tiles laid, you remember, the year Tsemo was born. We raised the height of the walls so that I could see the orchids from my bed.”

“You remember everything,” he said. “Shall we sit outdoors or inside? Better perhaps inside? The winds are insidious. They curl about the ground and chill one’s feet.”

She was amazed to perceive that she did not feel at all strange with Mr. Wu. Certainly she could not possibly have explained to him how she felt concerning André. He would have held her beside herself — a foreigner? A priest? A dead man?

She followed Mr. Wu into the main room, where the sunlight lay in a great square upon the tiles beside the open door. She felt toward him exactly as she always had. At this thought pity for Mr. Wu stirred her vitals. It was a piteous thing for him that she had not been able to love him. She had deprived this man of the fullness of life. Nothing that she had given him, neither her body nor her sons, could be reward enough for her unloving heart. Her only excuse was that she and Mr. Wu had been given to each other, without the will of either, and she had done the best she could. But had she chosen him of her own free will, she could not have forgiven herself. Nothing could recompense a man for the lack of love in the woman who was his wife.

“Therefore somehow I must now give him love,” she thought.

“I have just spoken to the girl Jasmine,” she said calmly. She seated herself to the left of the table against the center wall of the room, and he took his usual seat at the right. So they had been wont to sit together through the evenings of their marriage, while they talked of the affairs in this house which belonged to them both.

Mr. Wu busied himself with his pipe. She saw with her peculiar discernment that he was afraid of her. In other days this knowledge would have amused her. She had not disliked the fear that others had for her, accepting it as the due of her superiority. But now she was sad to see the furtive turning of his eyes and the slight tremble of his plump hands. Where there was fear, no love could be. André had never feared her, nor did she fear him. She understood, with a strange pang that held no pain, that Mr. Wu had never really loved her, either, else he would not now be afraid of her.

“Tell me how you feel toward this girl,” she said to Mr. Wu.

At the gentleness of her voice he looked at her across the table, and she caught in his eyes a sort of shyness that she had never known was in him. “I know how this girl appears to you,” he said. “Of course she is inferior in every way. I can see that also. But I feel very sorry for her. What opportunity has she had, after all? The story of her life is a sad one, poor child!”

“Tell me the story of her life,” Madame Wu said gently.

The great house was so still that only the two of them might have been in it. The walls were thick, and court led to court. In this wide room the heavy tables and chairs stood as they had stood for centuries, and they two human beings were only two in the long chain of men and women who had lived under the huge beams upholding the vast roof. But something new was here now. The order of the old life was broken.

“Yes, certainly she is nothing unusual, this girl Jasmine.” Mr. Wu went on apologetically.

“If she has won your love,” Madame Wu said with her strange new gentleness, “then she is unusual.”

Mr. Wu looked startled. “Are you feeling well, Mother of my sons?” he inquired. “Your voice sounds weaker than I remembered.”

“I never felt stronger in my life,” Madame Wu replied. “Tell me more about this girl whom you love.”

Mr. Wu hesitated. “I am not sure I love her,” he said. “That is, I do not feel toward her at all as I have ever felt toward you. I have no respect for her as I have for you. I do not admire her. She has no learning. I would not ask her advice about anything.”

He felt more at ease when he saw Madame Wu’s face warmer than usual, and her eyes encouraging. She was not at all angry. “Your common sense is superb,” he said. “Shall I go on?”

“Please do, Father of my sons. Tell me how she affects you. Then perhaps I can help you to know whether you truly love her.”

“Why are you interested?” he asked.

“Put it that I feel I did you wrong in arranging for Ch’iuming’s coming,” she said.

“You meant well,” he said courteously.

“I acted selfishly,” she said, more gently still.

It was the first time she had ever acknowledged herself wrong in anything she did, and he was much moved.

“There remains no one like you,” he told her with some of his old impetuosity. “I still say that had it not been for your fortieth birthday I would not have known there was another woman in the world.”

She smiled again. “Alas, for women the choice is only between this fortieth birthday — or death.” Had she loved him, she would have chosen death rather than Jasmine in this house.

“Do not mention death,” he said, still courteously. “Well, you ask me how this girl affects me. You know — she makes me feel strong. Yes, that is the effect she has on me.”

“Strong?” Madame Wu repeated.

“She is so little, so ignorant, so weak,” Mr. Wu said. A thick soft smile crept about his lips. “No one has ever taken proper care of her. Really, she is a child. She has had no shelter. No one has ever truly understood her. She seems simple and ordinary, but there are qualities in her heart. She is not, you understand, a creature of high intelligence. But she has deep emotions. She needs constant guidance.”

Madame Wu listened to this with amazement. Never in her life had she heard Mr. Wu speak of anything except his own needs and desires.

“You really love her!” she exclaimed.

There was admiration in her voice, and Mr. Wu responded to it proudly and modestly. “If what I have told you is love, then I do love her,” he replied.

They had never been so near to each other as they now were. She had not known that he had this heart in him. He was made new, too. This perception filled her with astonishment. It was not a wonder that a man like André should have wakened love in her. But that this Jasmine, this common, rosy little street girl, this creature of ignorance and earthy innocence, should have roused in Mr. Wu something of the same energy was a miracle.

“You do not mind?” Mr. Wu said. His face, turned toward her, was tender and pleading.

“I rejoice,” she said quickly.

They rose at the same instant and met in the middle of the sunlight upon the floor. Her warmth rushed out to him, and his replied. He seized her hands, and for that swift moment they were one, his eyes looking into hers. She longed to tell him why she rejoiced, and why they were so near. She longed for him to know that she understood this miracle in him that was love, whether it came through a great man or through a girl from a brothel. Priest or prostitute, the miracle was the same. It had reached her, hidden in her secret courts, and it had reached him in a flower house and had changed them both. But she knew that she could never make him understand the miracle. She must only help to make it complete for him.

“There is no woman on earth like you,” he said.

“Perhaps there is not,” she agreed, and gently she withdrew her hands from his.

It was at this moment that Ying came upon them. According to her usual habit, she had first peeped around the corner of the door to see what they were doing. She was amazed and then delighted to see them holding hands. Surely this meant reconciliation and that the girl from the brothel would be sent away! She stepped back and coughed, and then appeared again with her urgent message.

“Lady, a man has come running at the gate to say that Madame Kang is in labor and it goes badly with her and Mr. Kang asks your immediate presence as her sister-friend.”

Madame Wu rose at once from her chair, to which she had returned at the cough. “Oh, Heaven,” she murmured, “is it so! Did the man say what the trouble is?”

“The child refuses to be born,” Ying said dolefully. “It will not leave the womb.”

“I must go at once,” Madame Wu exclaimed. She made haste to the door and there stopped for an instant to speak again to Mr. Wu. “And you, Father of my sons, let down your heart and be at ease. The young girl shall come quietly into your court. I will myself silence all tongues. I ask only one thing — that Ch’iuming be allowed to leave.”

“Indeed, I am quite willing for her to remain,” Mr. Wu said kindly. “She is very good, and where would she now go if you send her away?”

“I shall not send her away,” Madame Wu replied. “When I return I will decide her life. For the present, let her move into my own court.” She turned to Ying. “You hear what I say, Ying. Let it be so.”

Ying by now was standing flat against the wall, clinging with her nails to the bricks. “Is the whore to stay?” she wailed.

“She is now not that,” Madame Wu replied with sternness. “She is the choice of my lord.”

With these words she made haste away and within a very few minutes she was seated in her sedan chair, lifted upon the shoulders of the bearers, and carried through the streets.

“We borrow your light — we borrow your light—” the bearers chanted while they strode along and the crowd parted before the urgency of their cry.