Pavilion of Women

XIV

IN THE NEXT YEAR after this there came again an electric letter across the sea from her third son, Fengmo. Mr. Wu received it and he sent it to her by the hand of a servant, not coming to her himself. It was a strange letter. She read it in all possible ways and still she could not understand it. He announced his coming, and that was all. If winds and waves did not prevent progress, he would be home within the month at soonest and within two months at longest. But the allotted years had not passed, and he did not say why he came home early.

The more Madame Wu read the few words, the more unsettled she became. She wished very much now for the presence of André, for this one son she had shared with him. “If you could only look down, on him,” she murmured, “and then tell me why he comes home so suddenly, and whether he has done something wrong—”

But when she closed her eyes and looked for André’s face against darkness she saw him only grave. He was silent, and nothing came up out of memory to give him voice.

Neither did she wish to talk with Mr. Wu about this son, and neither did she wish to talk with Rulan, and last of all with Ch’iuming. Yet the more she considered the whole matter, the more she felt perplexed and uneasy, and at last she feared Fengmo’s return very much, lest it bring fresh trouble. It occurred to her now that of all persons she ought perhaps to speak with Madame Kang, who was the mother of Linyi.

The distance between these two had continued until now the path between their house would have grown in weeds had it been countryside. Even when Madame Wu had made up her mind to call upon Madame Kang she felt reluctance which she could not explain. She sat down with herself to discover what was still wrong. Why should she feel so far from her old friend, whose smallness she did not blame? The cause had its roots in their great difference from each other, and this difference she found upon reflection was that Madame Kang loved her husband exceedingly, even as she loved André, and these two loves, though as separate and unlike as Heaven and earth, were nevertheless of the same nature. That is, each of the two women knew what it meant to love another better than herself. But for Madame Wu the disgust for her friend lay in that Madame Kang loved her careless fat old man more than herself. To use love in this coarse way belittled high and splendid devotion. Yet in honesty she could not but discern the truth, that Madame Kang felt as she felt, and the difference was not in degree or in quality but in level. Madame Kang loved her old man as high as she could love, and was not ashamed.

“Yet old Kang ought not to live and breathe under the same Heaven with André,” Madame Wu thought with indignation.

She sat in the library, thinking these thoughts on a clear morning, and after she had thought awhile she laughed aloud softly at herself. Why should she be angry at love? It descended as the sunshine did and the rain, upon just and unjust alike, upon rich and poor, upon the ignorant and the learned, and did this make her angry?

The laughter welled up in her heart. She closed her eyes and saw André laughing with her, and she sat watching his face until she could see it no more. Then she opened her eyes, cleansed and strengthened, and Ying fetched her outer robe and made her ready, and sent a messenger ahead to announce the visit, and so she went to Madame Kang.

The house of Kang was unchanged in its disorder, and the staring children were more than ever in their number. Every son’s wife and concubine had added a child or two since Madame Wu had last entered these gates, and all were unmannerly and all as happy as ever. A cheerful bondmaid led her to the court where Madame Kang sat all day in a rattan easy chair, under a willow tree by a small pool. The easy chair had yielded itself to Madame Kang’s increasing flesh until now its woven sides had taken on the curves of her body. She sat down in the morning, and unless it rained she did not get up until night.

Around her children played and cried and drank from the breasts of their wet nurses, and the maids sewed and washed vegetables and rice in the pool, and her daughters-in-law gossiped, and neighbor women stopped by to tell the news and vendors came in to show their wares, and ladies came from other great houses to play mah jong all day. Here Madame Kang sat when Madame Wu was brought in and she shouted her welcome and her excuses for not rising to her feet.

“I put on such pounds that when night comes I swear I am heavier on my feet than I was in the morning,” she cried.

All in the court laughed at her, and a laugh from inside showed that Mr. Kang had heard her, too, but he did not come out. Being a man, he could only sit near by and listen and watch from his distance while he pretended to read or sleep.

Now Madame Wu saw that in the midst of all this company she could not say what she wished about Fengmo and Linyi. But without haste she sat down in her courteous fashion on a chair which some maid or other came and set near Madame Kang. Madame Kang knew very well that Madame Wu had come with a purpose, and so she waved her fat hands and shouted that all were to go away and leave them alone. So after much shouting and scampering and confusion, during which Madame Kang sat with her hands on her knees directing everybody loudly, the two ladies were alone.

Now Madame Wu took out Fengmo’s electric letter and showed it to her old friend. But Madame Kang laughed and waved it away. “The few characters I ever knew I have forgotten,” she said cheerfully. “I have never needed them, and why do I need them now with you here, Ailien?”

If there was any distance between them, Madame Kang’s manner ignored it, and she behaved as though she had seen her friend daily and yesterday too.

Madame Wu smiled. It was impossible not to smile at this woman, however she might feel disgust for her. So she read aloud Fengmo’s words, “I return home immediately.”

“Does he say nothing more than that?” Madame Kang asked, staring at the letter.

“Only so much,” Madame Wu replied. She folded the letter small again and put it in her bosom. She lifted the tea bowl on the table at her side, saw the cup was dirty, and put it down again.

“Clearly something has happened,” she said. “He planned to be away five years.”

“He is ill,” Madame Kang exclaimed.

“It may be,” Madame Wu said, “and yet in such case I feel he would have told us.”

“You think he has committed some sin?” Madame Kang exclaimed again.

“I cannot think that,” Madame Wu said. Indeed, after André’s long teaching she could not believe that there was grave fault in Fengmo. “It is about Linyi that I have come to see you,” she went on. “I blame myself that I have not continued her lessons since her tutor died.”

She turned her head away while she said these words, for she knew that Madame Kang was exceedingly quick to see behind words when it came to matters between men and women.

“Linyi does not mind that,” Madame Kang said heartily. “She dared not tell you, Ailien, but she hated those lessons, and she disliked the priest. She says he was always talking his religion.”

“But he never taught her his religion,” Madame Wu said with indignation. “I forbade his teaching Fengmo, and certainly he would not have taught Linyi. He understood my feelings.”

“It was not about gods that he spoke,” Madame Kang yielded thus far. “But he kept telling her how she should think and how she ought to feel toward her husband and toward you and toward all with whom she met and with whom she lived under the roof.”

“That was not religion,” Madame Wu said.

“She was made uncomfortable just the same,” Madame Kang said. “She said it made it hard for her to eat and sleep.”

“Ah, a good teacher does stir the soul,” Madame Wu said quietly.

“If Fengmo has grown like that foreign priest,” Madame Kang said, yawning, “it will go hard between them.”

She stared about the court, and Madame Wu saw that she wanted something.

“Are you in need, Meichen?” she inquired courteously.

“At this time I usually sup a bowl of rice and beans stewed together with chicken broth,” Madame Kang said. “I feel empty.”

One by one all who had been sent away were now drifting back into the courts. First the children ran in to play and no child in Madame Kang’s house was ever forbidden for long what it wanted. Then wet nurses ran after the children, and when they picked them up the children screamed and Madame Kang called out, “Let them be, then!”

The maids came back and the gruel was brought, and Madame Wu refused to share it, and Madame Kang supped it down loudly and let this child and that one drink from the side of the bowl, after she had blown it cool for them.

Madame Wu rose to go away again. She told herself that it might be her last visit to the house and perhaps she would never see her old friend again. They had parted already, long ago.

Nevertheless she had learned something from her visit, and she was not sorry she had come. André had taught Linyi her duty, and she would discover what he taught her.

All else Madame Wu now put aside in this expected coming of Fengmo. The temple children must wait for their school, and she would let Rulan and Ch’iuming wait. Her first duty was to prepare Linyi for her husband.

This she could do easily enough, for it was within her right to ask that her daughter-in-law come and visit her. In so great a house as this it was often that Madame Wu did not speak to one certain member for many days at a time, and so it had been with Linyi. She saw the girl almost daily at the main family meal, and she saw her at festivals and on days of honoring the ancestral tablets, and on all such family occasions. But she had no reason to ask for Linyi’s presence. The girl had lived in the house, been waited upon by the servants, had visited her sister, and idled her time away, except for the few duties which Madame Wu assigned on the written scroll for the arrangement of the household at the beginning of each season. Thus Madame Wu had marked for Linyi such duties as feeding the goldfish, placing flowers in the main hall, airing and sunning Fengmo’s fur garments and satin robes, and the supervision of the court where she lived, while Fengmo was away, with an old woman servant she had brought from home. Once or twice the girl had been ill, and Meng had tended her and had sent word to Madame Wu when she was well, and that was all that Madame Wu knew.

Now she must know much more. She did not deceive herself that it was all purely for her son’s sake. She wanted herself to hear from Linyi what André had taught her. She wanted to hear his very words, as well as to know how they had taken root in this young woman’s heart.

So Linyi came in, dressed and painted and powdered, and the ends of her hair were curled. Madame Wu welcomed her with her usual smile and the gesture of her hand which invited her to sit down and be at ease. She looked at Linyi from head to foot before she spoke. The young woman was very pretty, and she knew it and did not fear Madame Wu’s gaze. Madame Wu smiled at the bold innocent eyes. Were they not innocent? Yes, but they were also mischievous and idle and careless and gay.

“I smile when I think how times change,” Madame Wu said. “When I was a young girl, I would have wept to see the ends of my hair curled. To be straight and smooth and black — that was then considered beauty for the hair. But now curls are beautiful, are they? Meng must be glad, since her hair curls itself. But I believe Meng wishes it did not.”

Linyi laughed and showed small white teeth and a red tongue. “I think Fengmo will be used to curly hair,” she said in her fresh high voice. “All foreign women have curly hair.”

“Ah,” Madame Wu said. She looked suddenly grave. “Tell me why you have always been so fond of what is foreign.”

“Not of everything foreign,” Linyi said, pouting. “I was never fond of that hairy old priest.”

“But he was not old,” Madame Wu said in a low voice.

“To me he was old,” Linyi said. “And hairy — ah, how I hate hairy men!”

Madame Wu felt this talk was unbecoming to them both. She considered how to begin otherwise. “But he taught you very well,” she suggested. “I believe what he taught you was full of goodness and I should like you to recall it for me, if you please.”

When she said these words, “if you please,” it was in such a tone of voice that Linyi knew she must obey, and it was not whether she pleased. She frowned and drew down her long narrow brows and twisted one end of her black hair about her finger.

“I haven’t tried to remember,” she said, “but he was always saying that Fengmo was born to do a great work, and that my part in it was to make him as happy as I could so that he could work better.”

“How are you to make him happy?” Madame Wu inquired.

“He said I must find out the stream of Fengmo’s life,” Linyi said unwillingly, “and he told me I must clear away the straw and the sticks and things which hinder the flow, and I must do all I can to let the water rise to its level. The priest said I mustn’t be like a rock thrown into the clear stream and dividing it. I must not divide Fengmo’s life.”

Yes, Madame Wu thought, these could be André’s words. Knowing the mind of the girl, he would use such simple words and pictures. “Go on, my child,” she said gently. “These are good words.”

Linyi went on. She dropped the curl and her eyes were pensive as she talked. “And he said I must read books about what Fengmo did, and I must understand his thoughts. He said Fengmo would be lonely all his life if I did not follow closely behind him. Fengmo needs me, he said.”

She returned her eyes to Madame Wu’s face. “But I am not sure if Fengmo knows he needs me,” she said.

Madame Wu met the childlike gaze. “Do you love him?” she asked.

It was an amazing question for a lady to ask her son’s wife. Who besides Madame Wu would have cared? Tears filled Linyi’s eyes. “I could love him,” she whispered, “if he loved me.”

“Does he not love you?” Madame Wu asked.

Linyi shook her head so hard that the tears fell out of her eyes and lay in drops on the pale blue satin of her robe.

“No,” she whispered, “Fengmo does not love me.”

With these words she bent her head on her two hands and wept. Madame Wu waited. She knew that nothing was so good for woman’s troubles as tears. How often had she not longed to weep and could not!

She waited until Linyi’s sobs grew softer and then silent, before she spoke. “Ah,” she said, “Fengmo does not love anybody. That is his lack. We must heal it. I will help you, my child.”

Her words were few enough and simple, but such was the confidence that everyone in this house felt in Madame Wu that Linyi took away her hands from her face and smiled with wet lashes.

“Thank you, Our Mother,” she said. “Thank you and thank you.”

The day of Fengmo’s return was before winter but after the last heat of autumn. The harvests were gathered and stored. The Wu house, the town which depended on them for wisdom and government, the villages where those who worked on the lands and lived as their forefathers had lived, all were roots of peace in the nation where to the east war was raging. Elsewhere houses were destroyed and families driven out and scattered and the lands laid waste. But here in the inland the house of Wu went on.

Madame Wu waited for her son’s coming, and Fengmo’s first words to her, after greeting, were of this peace. He looked about the rooms where all was the same, as though he could not believe them so.

“Nothing is changed!” he exclaimed.

“Why should we change?” Madame Wu replied.

And yet even as she spoke she knew she did not speak the truth. There was the great change in herself, the inner change which daily found expression in all she said and did and in the way she governed those who looked to her for advice and shelter and care. But she did not choose to speak of these things.

“You are changed, my son,” she said instead.

She sat in state in the library, dressed in her robe of silver-gray brocaded satin. She had made up her mind to receive Fengmo here in the great room where they had so often sat with André. She would not speak of André, but memory would speak. So after the festivities at the gate, after the firecrackers and the noise were over and the crowd gone, and only the feast was to come, that night she had sent word to Fengmo that she waited for him.

He sat down without her bidding. He had changed his foreign garments, which he wore when he arrived, and had put on his own robes. He had even taken off his foreign shoes, and he wore his own of black velvet. No one had spoken to him of Tsemo, for it is not lucky to speak of the dead to one living and just returned. But Fengmo spoke now himself of his brother.

“I miss my second brother,” he said.

Madame Wu wiped her eyes delicately. While Tsemo was alive she had not much missed him, but now she missed him very much and thought of him often. She knew that what she missed was not what she had known, but what she had never known. She reproached herself very much that she had allowed a son to grow up in her house and had never really discovered him. She had known him only as a son, hers because she had made his flesh, but not because she had become acquainted with his being.

“What graces he had I did not know, and now can never know,” she had often thought to herself.

“How is my second sister-in-law?” Fengmo asked next.

“Rulan is silent,” Madame Wu said. “When I have time I shall discover a way for her to live. She is too young to become like a nun.”

“She will not marry again, surely?” Fengmo asked.

“If she will, I will help her,” Madame Wu said.

This astonished Fengmo a good deal. He would not have imagined that his mother could put a woman above the family.

Seeing his surprise, Madame Wu continued in her soft way, “I have learned as I have grown older,” she said. “If the springs within are not clear, then life is not good. And I have learned that there is a debt due to every soul, and this is the right to its own true happiness.”

“That is what Brother André used to say,” Fengmo said suddenly. Mother and son, by these words they felt themselves drawn together, as though by some power or presence they did not see.

“Mother, do you remember Brother André?” Fengmo asked her.

Madame Wu hesitated. How much should she say, tell how much? Her old diffidence fell on her. No, the silence between the generations must not be wholly broken. Life itself had created the difference, and time had hung the veil. It was not for her to change the eternal. She and André were on one side and Fengmo was on the other.

“I do remember him.” This was all she said.

But if Fengmo felt himself separated, he did not show it. “Mother, he changed me very much,” he said in a low voice. He gazed at André’s empty chair. “He made me understand true happiness. He showed me my own soul. And that is why I have come home.”

She did not speak. She heard a quiver in her son’s voice and she knew that even her answer would be too much for him. She smiled her lovely smile, she folded her hands on her lap, she waited, inviting him by her readiness to listen.

“No one will understand why I came home suddenly,” he began. “They will ask and I cannot tell them. I do not know how to tell them. But I want to tell you, Mother. It was you who brought Brother André into this house.”

She had so profound a surety of André’s presence, though perhaps only through her memory, that she dared not speak. No, André was here not because she remembered him but because she loved him.

“Mother!” Fengmo cried her name. He lifted his head and forced himself to speak quickly, to push the words and have them said. “I came home because I learned to love a foreign woman over there, and she loved me and we parted from each other.”

Had Madame Wu been her old self, she would have cried out her indignation. Now she said gently, “What sorrow, my son!”

Yes, she knew what sorrow.

“You understand!” Fengmo exclaimed with the amazement of youth at age.

He had grown very much. He was taller by inches, thin and straight as Old Gentleman had been, Madame Wu now saw. Indeed, she perceived what she had never seen before, that Fengmo was not at all like his father, but he was very like his grandfather. The same sternness sat on his features, the same gravity shone in his eyes. He was handsome, but grave. Liangmo’s placid good looks and Tsemo’s bold beauty were not here. Fengmo looked like a young scholar.

“I learn as I grow older,” Madame Wu said.

“Ah, Mother,” Fengmo breathed in a sigh. “I wondered if there would be anyone in this house who could understand.” Now that he could trust her, the story poured out of him. “She was one of the students, like me. Men and women study together over there. She was lit with wonder and curiosity. She sought me out, not boldly, you know, Mother, but because she said she had never seen anyone like me. She asked me hundreds of questions about us, about our country and our home, and I found myself telling her everything, even about myself. And she told me of her life. We knew each other so well — so quickly.”

“And at last you had to tell her about Linyi,” Madame Wu said gently.

Shadow fell between him and the sun. His shoulders drooped, he turned his face away. “I had to tell her,” he said simply, “and then I had to come home.”

“To put the sea between you,” Madame Wu said in the same voice.

“To put everything between us,” he agreed.

She sat in the calm stillness so usual to her. André had nurtured her son’s soul and had made it exceedingly tender and quick toward good. She yearned over him, she longed for him to be happy, and yet this son was not like other men. He could not find happiness in women nor in his own body. When she had asked André to be his teacher she had asked blindly, seeing only a shallow step ahead. She had touched a lock, half turned the key, but a wide gate had opened under her hand, and her son had gone through to that new world.

Had he come home again? Had he closed the gate behind him and turned the key and made fast the lock once more?

“And now,” she said, “and now, my son, what will you do?”

“I have come home,” he said. “I shall never go away again. I shall make my life here somehow.”

They sat in silence, the long silence of two understanding each other.

“You must help Linyi, my son,” she said.

“I know that,” he said. “I have thought very much of her. I owe her very much.”

“You must find a way to need her,” Madame Wu went on. “You must ask for her help in any small thing you have to do. Ask her to care for your things and sort your books and fetch your tea. Do nothing for yourself, my son, that she can do, so that she may be busy and never know anything else.”

“I will,” he promised.

And so they sat, and would have sat another long space, so comforting were they, mother and son, to each other, except that Ch’iuming chose this moment to come and make a request of Madame Wu which had long been in her mind to make.

All these months that she had been living with Rulan Ch’iuming had listened to the young widow’s sorrowing talk about her love for her dead husband. And the more she listened to Rulan the more Ch’iuming found her thoughts turning to Fengmo, and the more she knew that she must leave the house and take her child and go away. Yet where could she go?

One night, when Rulan had not been able to sleep and when they had talked long of the things which are deepest in women’s hearts, Ch’iuming broke her own vow of silence and told Rulan of her love for Fengmo.

“I am wicked,” she told Rulan. “I allow myself to think of him.”

Rulan had listened to her with burning attention. She threw back her hair from her shoulders. “Oh, I wish you and I could get out of this house,” she cried. “Here we are all locked behind these high walls. The family preys upon itself. We love where we should not and we hate where we should not. We are all too near to one another while we hate and we love.”

“Are we not safe behind these walls?” Ch’iuming asked. She was always a little timid before Rulan, admiring while she feared her boldness.

“We are not safe from one another,” Rulan had retorted.

It was at this moment that the same thought had come to them both. Eyes stared into eyes.

“Why should we stay?” Rulan had asked.

“How dare we go?” Ch’iuming had asked.

And then they had begun to plot. Ch’iuming would ask first to be allowed to live in the ancestral village. To her old village she could not return, for it would appear that the Wu family had sent her out, and this even Madame Wu would never allow. But she would ask to go and live in a Wu village, and then when Madame Wu demurred that a young woman should not live alone in a farmer’s village, she would ask for Rulan. And when Rulan had to speak for herself, she would say that she wanted to begin a school for young children in the village as a good work for her widowhood. Everyone knew that widows should make good works. This conclusion they had reached after much talk, for Rulan wanted to go immediately and speak out for herself. But Ch’iuming pointed out the discourtesy of this, for how could Madame Wu, if she was unwilling, be put to the difficulty of refusing her daughter-in-law to her face? It was better for Ch’iuming to go first and take the brunt of refusal if it must come. Then there need be no difference between Madame Wu and her daughter-in-law.

This Rulan cried out against as being old-fashioned, but Ch’iuming declared it to be only decency, and so it was settled.

Now, Ch’iuming knew well enough where Fengmo was, but she had decided in her own mind that she would approach Madame Wu in his presence and would greet him only in Madame Wu’s presence, and never would she speak to him otherwise. So she dressed her child in a clean red dress and washed the little creature’s hands and face and painted a red spot between her brows and braided her hair and tied the ends with new red yarn, and with the child, who was now a very fair fat little girl; she appeared unannounced.

Thus Madame Wu looked to the door and saw Ch’iuming. It was late afternoon, for Fengmo had come home in the morning. The sun had left the court, but it was filled with mellow light, and in this Ch’iuming stood, her child in her arms. She looked almost beautiful, and Madame Wu saw this, to her dismay. Ch’iuming’s love, secret and unrequited though it was, had made her soft and alive. She looked quickly at her son to know what he saw. But he saw now nothing. Ch’iuming greeted Fengmo carefully.

“Ah, our Third Sir, you have come home,” she said.

Fengmo answered as simply, “Yes, yes. Are you well?”

“I am well,” Ch’iuming replied.

She looked at him once and then did not look at him again. Instead she said to Madame Wu, “Our Lady, may I ask a favor even now, and not be held too coarse for disturbing you?”

Madame Wu knew that Ch’iuming must have a purpose in coming at this time, and so she inclined her head. “Sit down and let the heavy child stand on her own feet,” she said.

So Ch’iuming, blushing very much, did as she was told. She asked for the favor, and Madame Wu listened.

“Very good,” she said, “very good.”

She comprehended at once the purpose that Ch’iuming had in coming here at this time. Ch’iuming wished to make clear to Madame Wu that she wanted to retire from this house now that Fengmo had come home, and to disturb nothing in the family. Madame Wu was grateful for such goodness.

When Madame Wu’s permission was given, Ch’iuming then asked for Rulan also. “Since the family mourning is over, and since her own mourning can never cease, she wishes to ease her sorrow by good works,” Ch’iuming said. “She wishes to make a school for the children of the farmers.”

At this Fengmo, who had been staring down at the floor, looked up astonished. “That,” he declared, “is what I have come home to do.”

Here was confusion! Ch’iuming was aghast and Madame Wu confounded.

“You said nothing of this, my son,” she exclaimed with silvery sharpness.

“I had not reached the point,” Fengmo declared. “After what happened, it became necessary to consider what work I could do.”

Madame Wu held up one narrow hand. “Wait,” she commanded him. She turned to Ch’iuming. “Have you any other request?” she asked kindly.

“None,” Ch’iuming replied.

“Then you have my permission to go, you and Rulan also,” Madame Wu said. “I will call the steward in a few days and bid him find suitable houses for living and school, and you shall go when you like after that. But you will need special furniture, better than what is usually in a farmhouse, as well as other goods. Decide what you need, and I will tell Ying to prepare it. You will need, two maids with you and a cook. The head cook can send one of the undercooks with you.”

At this Fengmo spoke again. “If they live in the village they should not live too far above the others there, or they will be lonely.”

Ch’iuming threw him a soft quick look and did not speak. She was surprised that he could know this, who all his life had lived in a rich house. How did he know what common people felt? Then she put the question away. It was not for her ever to ask a question about him.

She rose and lifted up her child and thanked Madame Wu and went away. Rulan waited for her, and as soon as she heard the permission she and Ch’iuming began to plan their new lives with more joy than could have been possible to them even yesterday.

In the room which Ch’iuming had left, Madame Wu spoke to her son. “Explain your heart to me,” she commanded him.

He rose and walked restlessly to the open door and stood looking out. The quietness of coming night was in the walled space. Here the seasons came, even as they did over the whole world.

“It is necessary for me to devote myself,” he said. “So much Brother André taught me. If I am not to devote myself to one thing, it must be to another. After I left here I cast about for devotion. Religion is not for me, Mother. I am no priest. As far as a man can go, Brother André taught me, but not beyond.”

“Good, my son,” Madame Wu said, and waited.

He sat down again. “The way was shown me entirely by accident,” Fengmo went on. He drew out of his pockets some foreign tobacco and a short foreign pipe and filled it and began to smoke. Madame Wu had not seen these before, but she would not allow her curiosity to interrupt him.

“There was in the city where I lived over there a laundry man of our own race,” Fengmo told her. “I took my clothes to him every few days to be washed.”

Madame Wu looked surprised. “Did he wash clothes for others?” she asked.

“For many,” Fengmo replied. “It was his trade.”

“Do you tell me he even washed the clothes of the foreigners?” Madame Wu inquired next with some indignation.

Fengmo laughed. “Somebody has to wash clothes,” he said.

But Madame Wu did not laugh. “Certainly our people ought not to wash the soiled garments of foreigners,” she said. She was displeased and forgot what Fengmo was about to say.

He tried to soothe her. “Well, well—” he said. Then he went on, “The man was not from our province but from the south. One day when I went to fetch my clothes—”

“You fetched your own clothes!” Madame Wu repeated. “Had you no servant?”

“No, Mother, over there none of us had servants.”

She restrained her curiosity again. “I see it is a very strange country and you must tell me more of it later. Go on, my son,” she commanded him.

“I went to fetch my clothes, and the man brought me a letter from his home,” Fengmo went on. “Mother, he had been away from his home for twenty years, and he could not read the letters that came to him. Nor could he write. So I read and wrote his letters for him, and he told me that in his village none read or wrote, and they had to go to the city to find a scholar. I had never understood the pity of this until I came to know him. He was a good man, Mother, not stupid but very intelligent. ‘If I could only read and write for myself,’ he would say, ‘but I am like one blind.’ I went back to my room and I looked out of the window and saw the great buildings of the college and the thousands of students coming and going, learning many things, and the one poor old man could not read his letter from home. Then I remembered that this is true in our villages, too. None of our own people can read and write, who live on our land.”

“Why should they?” Madame Wu inquired. “They do not come and go. They only till the fields.”

“But Mother, Mother,” Fengmo exclaimed, “to know how to read is to light a lamp in the mind, to release the soul from prison, to open a gate to the universe.”

The words fell upon Madame Wu’s ears and lashed her heart. “Ah,” she said, “those are the words of him who taught you.”

“I have not forgotten them,” Fengmo said.

How could she forbid Fengmo after this, and how could she tell him why he must not live outside his own house?

“Rulan will be just the one to help me,” he said eagerly. “I had not thought of her before. And Linyi shall help me too, and we will forget ourselves.”

He was on his feet again. “You know, Mother, if I succeed here, in our own villages, it might be a thing that would spread everywhere. How great a good that would be—”

She saw his thin young face light with something of the light that had burned eternally in André’s eyes. She would not put it out.

“My son, do what seems good to you.” So she answered him.

Madame Wu lay awake in her bed as now she did very often. This neither displeased nor alarmed her. The young must sleep, for they have work to do and long life ahead. But the old need not sleep. The body, knowing that eternal rest is not far off, may lie awake while it can.

It seemed to her, as she lay awake, that the house was alive in the night as it was not in the day. She let her mind’s vision roam over the many courts. Elderly cousins lived in the distant and outer courts, and younger second and third cousins, here not to stay, but only because for the moment they had no other shelter, and these wide roofs could cover them, too, for a while. From the courts where Jasmine lived with Mr. Wu she turned her eyes quickly. Well, she knew what life it was. She had no judgment for it, only weariness. The old man’s body lived on, fed and solaced, and the young woman grew fat and lazy and was ready for sleep, day as well as night. Jasmine was no trouble in the courts. She was barren. No child was conceived, and Madame Wu was content to have it so. Jasmine’s was wild blood, and it was well to keep it in her own veins. She did her duty by Mr. Wu and, having had her pleasure in years before, she was glad to please the old man who now gave her jewels and silks and dainties of every kind to eat, and laughed at her and fondled her. All her life Jasmine had been a wayside flower and subject to any wind that passed. Now her happiness was to know that behind these high walls no wind could touch her. Even though the old man were to die, she would live on, her place secure in his house. There was nothing more for her to fear as long as she lived.

As for Mr. Wu, what his mother had begun in his youth, his young concubine now finished. Whatever Madame Wu had fostered in him had faded away, like a light dimmed because it fed on no fuel. He grew gross and heavy, eating too much and drinking often but always with Jasmine. He went no more to flower houses, for Jasmine gave him all her arts. Even his old need for the companionship of his friends left him, and seldom did he go to teahouses to hear the news and discuss the town’s gossip. Jasmine gave him both, and she had all from the servants. There in the court where they lived so closely together that almost they lived alone, they were ribald and gay and drunken and happy, two pieces of meat and bone, and content so to be. The name of Mr. Wu was seldom heard now even in his own house. In malice a servant whispered it to another, and that was all.

With her divining mind Madame Wu knew all of this, and she went no more to the court that had once been her home. Never once did Jasmine come to her court. The two lived as far apart as ever they had lived before Jasmine had come.

Pondering upon this, Madame Wu asked herself, as she lay between her silken quilts, if she had failed in her marriage. Was there anything she should have done that she had not? She put the question to André, but for once there was no answer ready in her memory. Instead she saw the face of Old Gentleman against the velvet black of her brain. It was as clear as it had ever been, neither older nor younger. His face had always been thin, the golden skin drawn smooth over the fine bones beneath. His skull must even now be a thing of beauty as he lay in his grave, its lines cleaned and polished by time.

“I fear I have not done well by your son, my father,” she said sadly, within her own self.

She felt, as she gazed at the kind good old face, that perhaps if she had not separated herself from Mr. Wu on her fortieth birthday, he might not have sunk to what he was now. But out of her youthful memories Old Gentleman spoke to her.

She remembered well the day. They had been reading together, for he had sent for her, and she found him with his finger in a book. He had pointed to the lines when she came in and she had read:

“To lift a soul above its natural level is a dangerous act. Souls, like springs, have their natural sources, and to force them beyond is against nature and therefore a dangerous act. For when the soul is forced, it seeks its own level again and disintegrates, being torn between upper and lower levels, and this is also dangerous. True wisdom it is to weigh and judge the measure of a soul and let it live where it belongs.”

Her eyes and Old Gentleman’s had met as they met now across the many years since he had been in this house.

“Had I not separated myself,” she mused — and could imagine no further. What she had done was inevitable. Her being she had subdued to duty for how many years, and for how many years had her soul waited, growing slowly, it is true through the performance of duty, but growing in bondage and waiting to be freed.

Strange that now in the middle of the night while the house lay silent, she thought with anxiety of Liangmo, her eldest son. Why should she be anxious for him, who of all her sons was the most content? Him, too, she must discover when she could.

And in Fengmo’s court she did not pause. Fengmo was a man. He had disciplined himself as only a full-grown man could do. He had not yielded up his soul. Upon this comfort her mind drifted toward sleep, like an empty boat upon a moonlit sea.

“Now my English books,” Fengmo commanded.

Linyi ran to fetch them out of the box. There were two armfuls of them. “How many you have!” she exclaimed.

“Only my best ones,” he said carelessly. “I have boxes yet to come.”

He knelt by the bookshelves against the wall and fitted in the books as she brought them. Outwardly calm, his face constantly smiling, inwardly he was deep in turmoil and pain. He felt now that he could never sleep again, and he was feverish to settle his things, to put all his possessions into their places, to put his traveling bags out of sight, not to be used again.

“Must you put everything away tonight?” Linyi asked.

“I must,” he replied. “I want to know that I have come home to stay.”

She was happy to have these words said, and too young to dream why it was he said them without looking at her. Indeed, when he said them he saw a face very different from hers. He saw Margaret’s face, blue eyes, brown hair, and the skin so white and smooth that he would never forget the touch of it. Would he ever be sorry that he had done what he did that day in the forest across the sea? For he had forced himself to let her go as soon as he had taken her in his arms.

“I can’t go on,” he had said.

She had not spoken. She had stood, her blue eyes fixed on him. There was something strange and wonderful about blue eyes. They could not hide what was behind them. Black eyes were curtains drawn down, but blue eyes were open windows.

“I am married,” he had told her bluntly. “My wife waits for me at home.”

She knew something about Chinese marriages. “Was she your own choice or did your family arrange it?”

He had waited a long time to answer. They sat down under the pine tree. He had hugged his knees in his arms and hid his forehead on his hunched knees, thinking, feeling for the truth. It would have been easy, and partly true, to say, “I did not choose her.” But when he prepared to say these words, Brother André came into his mind.

“To lie is a sin,” Brother André had taught him simply, “but it is not a sin against God so much as a sin against yourself. Anything built upon the foundation of a lie crumbles. The lie deceives no one so much as the one who tells it.”

He had not dared to lie to her, lest some final day the structure of their love crumble between their hands, and their love be buried in reproach.

“I was not forced to marry,” he said. “Let us say — I chose.”

She had sat motionless after that, listening to him, while he tried to explain to her what marriage meant in his family.

“With us marriage is a duty not to love or to ourselves, but to our place in the generations. I know that my mother has never loved my father, but she has done her duty to the family. She has been a good wife and mother. But when she was forty years old she retired from wifehood and chose another for my father. This grieved us, and yet we all knew the justice of it. Now she is free to pursue her own happiness, still within the house, and around her we all stand to support her and do her honor. I have my duty, too, in the family.”

He knew in some strange distant fashion that he was wounding Margaret to the soul.

“I want to marry for love,” she said.

Had he been free, not only of Linyi but of all the generations of Wu in the centuries gone and all the generations of Wu yet to come, he would have said to her, “Then let us marry each other. I will send Linyi away.”

But he was not free. The hands of his ancestors were fastened on him, and the hands of his sons and grandsons not yet born beckoned to him. He owed her further honesty.

“I know myself,” he went on. He lifted his eyes not to hers but to the landscape before them, to the river, its ships and harbor, and to the span of a great bridge between the banks.

“I know that I am made, not only by Heaven, but also by my family whose roots are in legend, and I cannot live for myself alone. My body was given to me — it does not belong to me. Something in me is my own, that is true, and that something — call it soul if you wish — is my own possession and I can give it to you because I love you. But if I were to give my body, which is not mine, I should be robbing the generations.”

“You are wrong — you are wrong!” she had cried. “Love and marriage can be the same.”

“Sometimes,” he admitted, “but only by the accident of Heaven. Sometimes even among my own people a man, lifting the bridal veil from his unknown wife’s face on their wedding night, beholds the one among all whom he would have chosen, had he been free to choose. But it is the accident of Heaven.”

“Here we always marry for love,” she had insisted proudly.

He had been aware of distance growing between them. “No, you do not,” he had answered. He would tell the truth though it killed them both. “You marry as we do, to preserve your species, but you deceive yourselves and call it love. You demand the personal fulfillment, even though you deceive yourselves. You worship the idea of love. But we are the truthful ones. We believe that all must marry, men and women alike. That is our common duty to life. If love comes, it is added grace from Heaven. But love is not necessary for life.”

“It is to me,” she had said in a low voice.

He had gone on, not answering this, “Content is necessary, but content comes when duty is done and expectations fulfilled — not the personal expectations of love, but the expectations of family and children, home and one’s place in the generations.”

He was speaking out of his deepest being, and as he spoke he felt that Brother André approved. He knew that this approval was not because of what he said, but because he spoke from the truth of his being.

How long had that silence been that fell between them! He did not break it. He had allowed it to grow and swell, an ocean in depth and distance.

She broke it by putting out her hand. “Then it’s good-by for us, isn’t it?”

He had held her hand for a long moment, and put his other hand over hers. “It is good-by,” he had agreed, and had let her go.

The last book was put away, the last garment folded. He took the bags and set them into the passageway where a servant would find them in the morning. Then he went back into their bedroom. Linyi stood in the middle of the floor, uncertain and waiting. He went to her without hesitation and gripped her shoulders in his hands.

“You are going to help me,” he said. “I have a work to do here on my own earth, and I need you. It is impossible for me to do my work alone. You must promise to help me with all you have in you.”

The fierceness in his eyes half frightened her. But she found the fright delightful. She wanted to be afraid of him. She needed his command.

“I will help you,” she whispered—“I will do anything you tell me to do.”

Fengmo was like a fire in the house. Everything was fanned to feed the flame. He rose before dawn and ate by candlelight and by earliest day was riding his horse across the fields on narrow paths to the village he had chosen for his first school. Young and old must learn, he decreed. He planned schools for children and schools for men and women and old people.

Be sure there was much complaint among the old who had never troubled about books and who saw no need now to read. “When we have only a few years left us, must we trouble ourselves to know what other men have written?” Thus they complained. “Have we not our own thoughts?” they cried. “Have we not learned a little wisdom, too, after all these years? Our own wisdom is enough for us.”

But Fengmo was too young to grant this, and at last the older farmers came to Madame Wu to beg her to command her son to forbear, and Madame Wu received them. She was scrupulous always to receive courteously those beneath her. Superiors she had none, and her equals she could deny; but lesser folk never. So she received them in state in the main hall of the house, and she sent for Mr. Wu to come and take his usual place to the right of the central table while she sat on the left, so that the house should be honorably presented to the landfolk. Mr. Wu came in with dignity. He wore robes of wine-colored satin under a black velvet sleeveless jacket, all new because he was grown too fat for his old ones. Madame Wu was amazed at his fatness, for some time had passed since she had seen him except sitting at the table, and now less and less often did he appear even at the family table. He would die earlier than need be, she thought, looking at his jowls, and then she thought again that it was better to die happy, even though earlier, than to die less happy, even though later. She held her peace, therefore, and gave no warning.

When the two elders were seated the farmers came in dressed in their blue cotton garments and with new straw sandals on their feet. They brought small packages of cakes wrapped in heavy brown paper and tied with straw string, and under the string they had put pieces of red paper for good luck. These they presented and Mr. Wu received them, protesting properly that they need not show so much courtesy.

Then, standing humble before the gentry, the farmers made known their difficulty. Madame Wu listened and so did Mr. Wu, though with less interest. Mr. Wu agreed heartily with the farmers. “These brothers are entirely right,” he announced. “My son is behaving like a fool, and I shall command him to return at once to my house and leave you in peace.”

But Madame Wu knew all sides of the matter, and she had no intention of allowing Mr. Wu to act in ignorance. So she first agreed with him and then disagreed with him mildly. Thus she spoke:

“My sons’ father speaks very wisely and must be obeyed. You, good brothers, are all over forty years of age. Certainly you should not be compelled to do what is against your wish. But it may be there are some among you in the village who are young and who would benefit from a little learning — enough, say, so that you could cast up your accounts and see that you are not cheated in the markets.”

She turned to Mr. Wu and said in her voice, which grew only more soft with age, “How would it be if we forbade our son to teach any who are over forty years of age unless that one wishes it himself?”

This was a fair compromise, and so it was decided. From then on the older farmers had their freedom from Fengmo if they wished, and none needed to fear that he would be held in less favor for rents and seeds if he wished to remain unlettered.

But Fengmo laughed when Madame Wu told him of the visit of the old farmers. “I have a way to win!” he cried, and he welcomed the difficulties. The upshot of his work was that even some of the old farmers began to want learning when they saw how the younger ones profited by it, and be sure that Fengmo lost no chance to make it known when a young farmer gained by knowing his letters, so that he could read a bill and check an account. It became the fashion at last to know letters, and other villages asked for schools, and Fengmo was so busy that months went by without Madame Wu’s knowing how he did.

All this was very well for Fengmo, but it brought some disturbance into the house. Ch’iuming and Rulan moved into the village to live. This made Madame Wu uneasy, for Fengmo pressed them both into the service of his schools and how could Ch’iuming hide her love from Fengmo? Madame Wu grew exceedingly anxious, for, although Ch’iuming and Fengmo were of the same age, they were not of the same generation, and a very evil scandal would gather about the Wu name if there were any cloud about these two. But even while Madame Wu was anxious Fengmo came in one night to see her.

She received him willingly, for she knew by now that Fengmo had no time for anything except what he held important. She had a moment’s fear when she saw him, lest he came to tell her what she did not want to hear about Ch’iuming. It was indeed about her, but this is what he said. He sat down squarely on his chair, put his hands on his knees and began at once. His voice was steady while his eyes were rueful. She could not but admire his looks as he spoke. The fresh village air had made him red and healthy, and the success of his work had made him bold.

“Mother,” he began, “I do not know how to tell you what I must, but not knowing, I will begin anywhere.”

“Begin, my son,” she said.

He rubbed his hands over his short hair. When he had come home it was long and smoothly combed, but now he had cut it as short as any farmer’s, and it was a brush of black.

“Is it about Ch’iuming?” Madame Wu inquired.

“How do you know everything?” he asked, surprised.

“I have my ways,” she said. “Now, my son, what have you to say?”

The breach was made and he could speak. “You know, Mother, that no woman can ever move me.”

She smiled at his youth, and something in his serious young face touched her at the very center of her heart. Ah, perhaps the old ways of love and marriage were wrong — who knew? She leaned forward a little.

“I can remember—” So she began and then checked herself. She could remember a day when she was no older than Fengmo, and she had wakened early in the morning and had looked at the sleeping face of her husband, and had known that never could she love him. And yet she had done her duty and was content and her life had had its own ways of happiness.

But the very youth in Fengmo’s face stopped her. She leaned away again. No, she could not speak of herself to her son.

“What shall we do?” he asked.

“Let us consider what is most sensible,” she replied.

But he had already a plan. “I ask your permission to take Linyi with me, and we will live in the country, too.”

This he said, and while Madame Wu could not but see the wisdom of it, she was sad to think of another empty court under the roof. Then she was pleased that he thought of Linyi as a safety for himself, and the more she considered it the more she became willing to do what he asked.

“I will agree to this,” she said at last, “with one condition, and it is that when she gives birth to your children, you return here for the time of the birth and the few months after. The grandchildren should be born under our own roofs.”

To this Fengmo agreed, and within a few days after that Fengmo and Linyi closed the doors of their court and moved into an earthen-walled house in the village. And Madame Wu was content to have it so. She pondered for a while whether she should not send for Ch’iuming and give her advice and some solace of praise, but she decided that she would not. The young woman must learn by life, as all must learn, what she could have and what must be denied to her.