We were all astonished at the change in my mother’s mind. My brother was at once altogether hopeful. He exclaimed over and over again with smiles,
“I knew she could give up her determination in the end! After all, I am her only son!”
When I reminded him that in no sense had she accepted the foreigner he replied,
“Once she is within the gates everyone will love her.”
I said nothing then, since I did not wish to discourage him. But in my heart I knew that we Chinese women do not love others so easily. It is more likely that the women will remember the daughter of Li who waits for the consummation of her marriage.
I questioned secretly the messenger from my mother, and he replied that during the previous night my mother had been very ill so that they all feared that even at that moment she might pass over into the abode of the dead. But they caused prayers to be said and priests to be called, and she was better, and by the morning she had miraculously recovered sufficiently to write the letter with her own hand.
I understood at once what had happened. Seeing death approach she feared that her son would never return to his home and his duty, and at that moment she vowed that she would summon him if the gods would spare her life.
My heart ached for her humiliation, and I longed to go to her at once, but my husband said,
“Wait! She has strength but for one thing at a time. For the weak, even sympathy is too heavy to be borne.”
I restrained myself therefore, and helped my brother’s wife to pack her boxes. If I could talk to her freely in our own language I would say,
“Remember that she is aged and suffering, and that you have taken away from her all that she had.”
But I can say nothing because our speech together is broken with words not understood.
To-day my brother and his wife have removed themselves to his ancestral home. They will live in the old apartments where my brother spent his youth. She will not be allowed to sleep or eat or linger in the women’s apartments. Thus my mother still refuses to recognize her.
Now that they are gone, I am glad to be alone with my husband and my child, and yet with their going some life has departed from the house. It is as if the west wind departed at sunset and left stillness that was yet a little dead.
I think of them and picture them in the old rooms alone together. I said to my husband last night,
“What will come of all this trouble?”
He shook his head in doubt. Then he said,
“With those two under one roof, the old and the young, it is iron meeting flint. Who can tell which will crush the other?”
“And what will come of it?”
“Fire of some sort will come of it,” he replied gravely. “I pity your brother. There is no man able to stand unmoved between two proud women, one of them old and one of them young, and both loving him supremely.”
He took our son upon his knee and regarded the child thoughtfully. I do not know what was in his mind. But the child innocently lifted the lock of hair over his ear in pride to display the ring his grandmother had hung there, crying,
“See, Da-da?”
Instantly we forgot my brother and his wife. My husband looked at me with suspicion and reproach.
“Kwei-lan, what is this?” he asked. “I thought we were done with this superstitious nonsense!”
“Your mother placed it there,” I faltered, “and I had not the heart—”
“Nonsense!” he cried. “We must think of the child first! We cannot let him be given such ideas.”
And taking out from his pocket a small knife, he carefully cut the silken thread that held the ring. Then leaning he threw it all out of the window into the garden below. When the child pouted, he said laughing,
“You are a man like me! See, I do not wear a ring in my ear like a woman. We are men. We are not afraid of gods!”
And the child smiled at his gay words.
But in the darkness of the night I thought of it half-afraid. Can age be forever wrong? What if after all there are gods? I would leave nothing undone for my son. Ah, how I understand my mother!
XVII
I DID NOT VISIT my mother’s home for twenty days. I was weary and a little unwell, and when I thought of my mother and of my brother, the confusion of my mind increased. When I remembered my husband, my heart turned to my brother, and when I held my son in my arms, my heart cleaved to my mother.
Moreover, my mother did not send for me, and had I gone unbidden I should not have known how to greet her or to explain my coming. But staying much alone in the quiet house—you know how my son’s father works all day and into the night—I wondered and imagined many things.
How was the foreigner spending the long, lingering days? Had my mother seen her again and spoken to her? I knew the slaves and the concubines would be excited and would watch her from behind corners, and the servants would make excuses to fetch tea for my brother and this thing and that in order to see her, and the talk in the kitchen quarters would be about her and her ways and her looks, her bearing and her speech, ending always in reproach that she was there at all and pity for the daughter of Li.
At last my brother came to see me. I sat one morning embroidering a pair of shoes for my son—you know it is only seven days more until the festival of Clear Spring—and suddenly the door opened and my brother came in unannounced. He wore Chinese dress, and he looked more as he did in his youth than at any time since his return. Only his face was grave. He sat down and began talking without greeting, as though we continued the conversation from some previous hour.
“Will you not come, Kwei-lan? My mother is very feeble, and I think she is ill. Her will alone remains as strong as ever. She has made a decree that for a year my wife must follow the life of a Chinese woman in the courts. Since my whole inheritance depends on her obedience, we are trying to follow my mother’s wishes. But it is like caging a golden oriole! Come and bring the child.”
He rose and walked restlessly about the room, and when I saw his distraction I promised him.
I went therefore that same afternoon to visit my mother, thinking that I might on the way through the courtyards stop to see that other one, my brother’s wife. I dared not allow my mother to know that I came to see anyone else except her alone, and indeed I was determined that I would not even mention the foreigner to my mother unless she gave me opportunity.
I went straight into my mother’s presence without lingering in the courts, although as soon as I came into the women’s quarters the Second Lady came to the threshold of the moon-gate and beckoned to me from behind an oleander tree. But I merely bowed and passed on into my mother’s presence.
After my greetings were over we spoke first of my son, and then I took courage to examine my mother’s face. I thought her looking a little better, in spite of my brother’s words, or at least not as ill as I had feared. I did not question her therefore of her health, knowing that such inquiries always irritated her, although she never failed to answer courteously. I asked instead,
“How do you find your son, my brother, changed by his years away?”
She lifted her pointed eyebrows slightly.
“I have scarcely spoken to him of anything of importance. The question of his marriage to the daughter of Li of course awaits his father’s coming. But he seems more like himself, at least, since I sent word that he was to wear his accustomed clothes when he returned home. I was not pleased to see my son’s legs in trousers like a water-carrier’s.”
Since she had spoken of his marriage I affected to ask carelessly, examining the pattern upon the silk of my robe,
“And how do you find the blue-eyed foreigner?”
I was conscious of a stiffening in my mother’s body, but she merely coughed and then answered with negligence in her voice,
“As for that one, the foreigner within the courts, I know nothing about her. I sent for her once to prepare my tea, since your brother tired me with his beseeching that she be allowe
d to come into my presence. But I found I could not endure her awkward hands and barbarous looks. She was very clumsy about my person. I perceive that she has never been trained in the proper behavior to an elder. I shall not try to see her again. I am happier when I can forget the matter and remember only that my son is again under the ancestral roofs.”
I was surprised that my brother had not told me that she had been called to make tea for our mother. It was a moment of importance. But when I considered I decided that he had purposely not told me of it, since she had been so unpleasing to our mother. But remembering my brother’s anxiety I asked further, greatly daring,
“May I invite her to spend an hour in my poor house, since she is a stranger here?”
She answered coldly,
“No, you have done enough. I shall not allow her to go outside the great gate again so long as she remains here. She must learn the seclusion proper to ladies if she is to live here. I do not care to have the whole city talking of the matter. I perceive she is lawless and unrestrained, and she must be controlled. Speak no further of her.”
The rest of our talk was carefully of nothing. I saw that she would not speak of anything below the surface of each day’s casual happenings—the salting of the vegetables for the servants, the rise in the price of cloth for the children’s clothes, the promise of the chrysanthemum slips now being planted for the autumn’s flowering. I said farewell, therefore, and went away.
But as I passed outward through the small gates, I met my brother. He was going to the great gatehouse, outwardly to ask some question of the gate-man, but I knew at once that he meant to wait there for me. When I drew near to him I scanned his face and saw that the vigor and determination which had made him foreign-looking in my eyes had given way to bewilderment and anxiety, which with his Chinese robes and his drooping head, made him look again like the schoolboy, half-sullen, that he had been before he went away.
“How is she, your wife?” I asked before he spoke.
His lips trembled; he passed his tongue over them.
“Not well. O my sister! We cannot long endure this life. I shall have to do something—go away and find work—”
He stopped, and I urged him then to have patience before he decided to break away. It was much that our mother allowed the foreigner to come into the court, and a year was not long. But he shook his head.
“My wife herself has begun to despair,” he said heavily. “Until we came here she did not lose heart. But now she droops from day to day. Our food is distasteful to her—and I cannot procure foreign food for her. She eats nothing. In her own land she has been accustomed to freedom and homage. She is accounted beautiful, and many men have loved her. I was proud to win her from them all. I thought it proved the superiority of our race.
“But now she is like a flower plucked and placed in a silver vase, but without water. Day after day she sits silent, and her eyes burn in her white and whiter face.”
I marveled to hear my brother hold it a virtue in a woman to have been loved by many men. Here it would be considered praise for none but a harlot. How could she indeed ever hope to become one of us! But as he spoke a new thought had come into my mind.
“Does she desire to return to her own people?” I asked eagerly.
Here I saw a solution. If she would go away and the seas stretch again between them, my brother who is, after all, but a man, would cease to think of her, and he would return to his duty. But I shall not soon forget his look when I said this. His eyes seemed to fly at me with anger.
“If she goes, I will go with her,” he said with sudden violence. “If she dies in this my home I am no more the son of my parents, forever!”
I chided him gently for such unfilial words, when, to my great astonishment, he burst into a harsh sob and turning, he walked quickly away.
I stood there, scarcely knowing what to do, watching his bowed figure recede into the other court where he lived, and then irresolutely, and indeed, half fearing my mother, I followed him.
I went in then to see the foreigner. She was walking restlessly about the inner court of my brother’s apartment. She wore her foreign garb again, a straight robe of a dark blue color, cut away to leave bare her white throat. In her hand was a foreign book, open, and covered with short lines of letters running across the middle of each page in little groups.
She walked about reading and frowning as she read, but when she saw me, her face changed with her smile, and she stood still until I was at her side. We spoke a few words then, casual words. She could converse quite well now if one spoke of simple matters. I refused to go in, saying I must return to the child, and she was sorry. I mentioned the ancient juniper in the court; she spoke of a toy she was making for my son from cloth stuffed with cotton. I thanked her—and there was no talk left. I waited, then I began my farewell, aching with vague pain, because the seas are between us, and I could do nothing to help my brother or my mother.
But when I turned to leave she suddenly seized my hand and held it fast. I looked at her then, and I saw her shake tears from her eyes with a quick fling of her head. Pity filled me, and I murmured to her, not knowing what to say except to promise to come again soon. Her lips trembled while she tried to smile.
Thus passed yet another moon. Then my father returned home. Strangely enough, he took a great interest in my brother’s wife and found a liking for her. Wang Da Ma said that as soon as he entered the great gate he inquired whether or not my brother had brought the foreigner home, and when he heard it, he changed his robes and sent word that he would visit my brother’s apartments as soon as he had eaten.
He entered, suave and smiling, and accepted the obeisances of my brother and demanded to see the foreigner. When she came in he laughed a great deal and examined her appearance and commented freely upon her looks.
“She is handsome enough in her way,” he announced in great good nature. “Well, well, it is a new thing in the family. And can she speak our language?”
My brother was displeased with his freedom and replied briefly that she was learning. My father laughed immoderately and cried,
“Never mind—never mind—I suppose love-words sound as sweetly in a foreign tongue—heh-heh-heh!” And he laughed until his fat body shook.
As for her, she could not understand all his words, spoken carelessly, as he always speaks, in his rich, thick voice, but his friendliness cheered her; and my brother could not well tell her that his father was lacking in respect to her.
I am told that my father visits her often now and toys with her, gazing at her freely and teaching her new words and expressions. He has sent her sweetmeats and once a Buddha’s hand lemon tree in a green glazed pot. My brother, however, takes care to be present at all these meetings.
She is like a child. She understands nothing at all.
I went to see my brother’s wife again yesterday, after I had given my mother greeting for the feast day. I do not dare to risk my mother’s displeasure by more than passing visits to the foreigner, lest I be forbidden altogether to go into my brother’s courts.
“You are happier?” I asked her.
She smiled her quick smile. It always lightens her grave face like sudden sun from behind a somber cloud.
“Yes, perhaps!” she answered. “At least things are no worse with us. I have not seen his mother except once when she wanted me to make tea. I had never made tea in my life like that before! But his father comes to see us nearly every day.”
“We will have patience,” I replied. “The day will yet come when the August Mother will relent.”
Instantly her face hardened.
“It is not as though I had done anything,” she said in a low compressed voice. “Surely it is not a fault to love and to marry? His father is the only friend I have in this house. He is kind to me, and I need kindness I can tell you! I do not think I can stand it much longer, locked up like this!”
She shook back her short yellow hair, and then suddenly her eyes grew dark and
angry. I saw she was looking out into the other courts, and my eyes followed hers.
“Look at that, again!” she cried. “There they are—I am like a play for those women! I am weary to death of their staring. Why are they always there whispering and peeping and pointing?”
She nodded as she spoke at the moon-gate. There, gathered about its entrance, were the concubines and half a dozen slaves. They were idly eating peanuts and feeding them to their children, but secretly they were peering at the foreigner and I could hear them laughing. I frowned at them but they pretended not to see me, and at last she drew me further into the room with her and slid fast the heavy wooden doors against them.
“I cannot bear them,” she said passionately. “I cannot understand what they say, but I know they talk about me from morning until night.”
I soothed her,
“You must not mind them. They are altogether ignorant.”
But she shook her head, saying,
“I cannot keep bearing it day after day.”
She frowned and was silent and seemed to be thinking, and I waited, and we sat there together in the big dim room. I looked about me at last, since there was nothing more to be said, and observed the changes she had made, to make the room, I suppose, more western in its appearance. But to my eyes it only looked very odd.
A few pictures hung without order upon the walls, and among them were some photographs framed. When she saw me looking at them her face cleared, and she said eagerly,
“Those are my parents and my sister.”
“You have no brother?” I asked.
She shook her head, and her lips curled a little.
“No, but it does not matter. We do not care only for our sons.”
I wondered a little at her tone, but I did not understand it, and I rose to examine the pictures. The first was a picture of a grave old man with a short white pointed beard. His eyes were like hers, stormy and heavy-lidded. His nose was high, and he had a bald head.
“He taught—he is a professor in the college where we first met, your brother and I,” she said, her eyes fixed fondly on the old man’s face. “It is strange to see him here in this room. He does not fit here—any more than I seem to,” she added in a low rueful voice. “But it is my mother’s face that I cannot bear to look at these days!”