“Nothing,” Fengmo said doggedly.
But Madame Wu took this literally. “Nothing,” she repeated aghast. “You mean you two went into the same bed and nothing happened?”
“Oh, Mother,” Fengmo groaned. “Why do you think that is the only thing which can happen between men and women?”
“But it is the first thing,” Madame Wu insisted.
Fengmo set his lips together. “Very well, then, Mother,” he said, “It was the first thing. Then you see, Mother, I expected something more.”
“What did you expect?” she asked.
He flung out his big thin hands. “Some kind of talk, some kind of understanding, companionship—something after the introduction. I mean, after you are through with the body, what then?”
“But at your age you are never through with the body,” Madame Wu said. She began to see that she had not understood Fengmo. She had taken it for granted that all men were only males. She had once laughed at a foreign story she had read, an ancient story of Greece, of a woman who had fallen in love with a man not her husband because his breath was sweet. For this woman had known only her husband and had thought a foul breath was a part of man and that all men had such breath in them. Now she perceived she was as silly as this woman to consider that all men were alike. She herself had given birth to a man who was more than a male. This so astonished her that for some time she sat looking at her son.
But Fengmo seemed unaware of her thoughtful eyes. He sat, his body bent, his elbows on his parted knees, his hands hanging clasped between.
“I feel I cannot command you to do anything,” she said at last in a low voice. “I see now that I have violated your being.”
He looked up and she saw tears in his eyes.
“What do you call freedom?” she inquired. “Tell me and I will give it to you.”
“I should like to go away out of this house,” he said.
These words wrenched her heart. But she only asked next, “Where would you like to go?”
“Brother André said he would help me to cross the sea,” Fengmo said.
“If Brother André had never come into this house,” she said, pricked with self-reproach, “would you have thought of this?”
“I would have thought of it,” he replied, “but I would not have known how to do it. Brother André has shown me the way.”
To this she said nothing. She sat mute and thoughtful. Then she sighed, “Very well, my son,” she said at last. “Go free.”
IX
IN LESS THAN A month after this, on a day when the first light snow fell, Fengmo went away. All the household stood at the gate to see him go. The street that went past the gate ended at the river, and the menfolk, and with them only Madame Wu, walked with him to the water’s edge. Hands helped him with his baggage and hands helped him over the side of the rocking rowboat that was to carry him to a small steam launch that would take him to a river steamer. The river steamer would take him to the ocean and the great ship that lay waiting. Above the whitened ground a soft gray sky brooded. The boat pushed off, and snowflakes melted on the boatman’s oars. A score of farewells followed Fengmo. Madame Wu did not call after him. She stood, a small straight figure wrapped in fur, and watched this son of hers cast off from the shores of his home. She was frightened and sad, but she comforted herself by these words, “He is free.”
And wrapping her coat about her, she returned to her own walls.
With Fengmo’s going Brother André would have ceased to come, but Madame Wu invited him to continue his lessons, taking Linyi as pupil instead of Fengmo.
“When my son returns from foreign countries,” she said to Brother André, in her cool graceful fashion, “I would like his wife to know something of what he knows.”
Now Fengmo’s marriage had been patched together in this fashion: One day Madame Wu went to the Kang house and talked with Linyi very gently in her mother’s presence. She told Linyi that Fengmo was going away, and she herself invited her to return in order that if possible before Fengmo went away, he might leave her with child.
“I do this, not only for the sake of our house,” Madame Wu said to Linyi, “but also for your own sake, lest you be unfulfilled.”
She had studied Linyi’s face as she spoke—a selfish pretty face, she thought. Good mothers always had selfish daughters. Meichen was too good. She made her children too happy. They thought of home as heaven and their mother as earth.
“It is not well for a young woman to be left empty when her husband goes away,” she continued.
To this Madame Kang had heartily agreed. Since her quarrel with her friend she had repented her anger. Linyi had aided her in this. For, while the girl had come home with all her mother’s pity, Madame Kang began after some days to see her Linyi as a willful young woman. She was no longer a girl, but a married wife. Yet she behaved as she had when she was a girl in a rich house. She rose late and dawdled about the courts and did not so much as pick up her handkerchief when it fell from her pocket, but she called for a maid to come and hand it to her. In small ways Madame Kang now began to reproach Linyi and to think that perhaps Fengmo had had something to complain about. When she heard that Fengmo was going away she, too, was eager for Linyi to return to him.
“You do not belong to this house any more,” she told the girl more than once. “You belong to the Wu house.”
“How can I make that slender, naughty girl become a woman and a wife?” Madame Wu now asked herself secretly. “And not only for my house but for her own happiness?”
So Brother André had come into her mind again. She saw his great patient frame, his dark kind face. But could he teach a young wife?
“You must go into your husband’s house this very day,” Madame Kang declared. And as eagerly as she had once taken Linyi back, she now sent her forth again. Linyi went in silence. She was not stupid, and clearly enough she felt the change in her own mother. She knew that she had been put out of her heaven and earth. Her heart smarted, and silently she went back into Fengmo’s court. He had been exceedingly busy preparing for his going. But since he knew he was to be freed, he was gay and careless to her. It did not now matter greatly whether she were here or not since he was leaving the house.
“I have come back,” she had said to him.
He did not say he was glad, she did not ask if he were. Neither expected the other’s love. She helped him with new docility to fold his garments, and she dusted his books. At night they slept together. He took her and she yielded, partly for duty’s sake to the house, partly because they were young and hungry. In the morning they had parted still without speech. For decency’s sake she did not go outside the court.
“Until we meet!” he had said.
“Heaven give you safe journeying,” she had replied, and stood leaning against the door to watch him while he went. Some faint uncertainty shook her heart from its middle place in her breast, but she was not ready to see any fault in herself.
“I am still sleepy,” she thought, and yawned widely, and without hiding her red mouth she returned to the big bed and rolled into the silk quilts and slept like a little chrysalis.
From this sleep Madame Wu awakened her as soon as Fengmo was gone. “Come, Linyi,” she said, “you have slept long enough. Now you must wake and begin your education.”
“My education?” Linyi faltered.
“You will learn cooking and embroidery in the morning,” Madame Wu said. “Elder Cousin will teach you. Then for an hour before the noon meal you will come to me, and I will teach you the classics. In the afternoon Brother André will teach you foreign languages. In the evening you will help the maids to put the children to bed. You must learn how to care for children.”
Linyi looked up out of the quilt. Her big eyes were startled, and her soft hair was all awry. “Now?” she asked.
“Now, at once,” Madame Wu said firmly. She held a thin bamboo cane in her hand, and she tapped this on the floor. “Wash yourself,” she said. “Brush yo
ur hair. Then come to me.”
She went back to her own courts, her mouth set too grimly for its own beauty. “I do this for Fengmo,” she thought. “Then when this is done I can think again about my own freedom.”
But because she did not trust Linyi she stayed by her that afternoon when Brother André came. Linyi must not be idle. Then, too, for the sake of honor she herself must supervise the hours this foreign priest was with her own daughter-in-law in her son’s absence. She knew that Brother André was a soul, but who else but her would believe the big body was only a husk ?
In this way every day she sat in the highest seat in the library, her dragonheaded cane, which she carried now that Old Lady was dead, between her hands. She listened to everything Brother André taught Linyi. But while the girl plodded unwillingly along the hard part of learning, Madame Wu’s mind flew ahead and wandered into a hundred bypaths of wonder.
Thus she came to know how the earth and the seas are gathered into a great ball swinging among the stars and planets, and she understood the paths of sun and moon, the passage of winds and clouds. But these were as nothing to her wonder when she came to understand the tongues of man. For she liked to do this: she chose a word, such a word as life, or death, as love, hatred, food, air, water, hunger, sleep, house, flower, tree, grass, bird, and she learned this word through all the languages which Brother André knew. These languages were the voices of mankind. She learned everything with the excuse of helping Linyi to learn.
And as she learned, all the things which had occupied her life came to have meaning. In the past she had sometimes wondered why she should spend herself in the continued round of birth and death and birth again. Within these four walls, as man begot and woman conceived in order that the house of Wu might not perish, sometimes she had asked herself what it mattered if one house died. In a year when too many girls were born, in a year when an idiot was dropped too early from a womb, she had often been disheartened. Especially in the years when she had only looked forward to her fortieth birthday had she refused to answer the questioning of her own soul. Little Sister Hsia on one of those days had chanced to be there.
“May I read you from the blessed book, Madame?” Little Sister had asked.
Madame Wu had been weary to the bone that day, for in addition to all else she had known that she was pregnant again. But she was always too courteous to refuse a guest. “If it is your pleasure, read,” she had replied.
Then Little Sister Hsia had taken out her sacred book, and she had read aloud in her broken childish fashion words like these:
“What is man that thou art mindful of him and the son of man that thou rememberest him ? For the days of man are as grass—”
“Stop!” Madame Wu had cried.
Her voice had burst out of her, and so unusual was this that Little Sister Hsia had stared at her.
“Are these words to comfort a soul?” Madame Wu had demanded. “Are these the words of a god? Rather, I say, of a devil! If I should listen to these words, Little Sister, I would hang myself. Read me no more from your book, lest I cannot live.”
But she had brooded over the words, and she remembered them now. Yes, it was true. Man’s flesh was as grass. When her child had been born dead, she had remembered the words as she held the small, still body in her arms. But today, as she listened to the voices of mankind crying out in different tongues but always the same word, she felt in herself a new wonder.
“Do all men also cry out a word for God?” she asked Brother André.
“All men,” he replied gravely, and then he rolled out sonorous syllables that struck upon her ears like drums. “God—God—God—God—” in twenty tongues, and all the tongues of man.
“From all over the earth we cry out to Old Heaven,” she said musingly, and the drums echoed in her soul.
On such nights she could not sleep. In silence she allowed Ying to prepare her, and she climbed into the high redwood platform of the bed. Behind the silk curtains she gave herself up to her soul and meditated on the meaning of all she had learned. Brother André came to be for her a well, wide and deep, a well of learning and knowledge. In the night she thought of scores of questions to which she wanted answers. Sometimes when her memory grew burdened with their number she rose from her bed and lit her candle. And she took up her camel’s-hair brush and brushed down the questions upon a sheet of paper in her fine script. The next afternoon when Brother André came she read them to him one by one and listened carefully to all he said.
Now, his manner of answering questions was exceedingly simple, but this was because he was so learned. He did not need, as lesser men do, to talk over and above the pith of the matter. Instead, he knew how, as Taoists of old knew, to put into a handful of words the essence of the essence of truth. He stripped the leaves away, and he plucked the fruit and cracked the husk and peeled the inner shell and split the flesh and took out the seed and divided it, and there was the kernel, pure and clean.
And Madame Wu’s mind was so whetted at this time of her life, so bladelike and piercing, that she took this kernel and from it comprehended all. Young Linyi sat between the two, her eyes wide, as these few words were said and heard, and it was plain that for her it was all far above her and beyond her. Her mind still slept in youth.
But Brother André marveled at Madame Wu. “You have lived behind these walls all your life,” he said one day, “and yet when I speak as heretofore I have spoken only to one or two of my few brother scholars, you know what I mean.”
To this she replied, “You have told me of the magic glass which makes small things large. A fragment of dust, you told me, could be made as large as a desert, and if the fragment were comprehended, the desert was known. This house is the fragment of dust, and from it I comprehend all. Inside these four walls is the whole of life.” She caught sight of Linyi’s hostile young face.
“Are you saying we are dust, Mother?” she asked.
“No, child,” Madame Wu replied. “I am saying that you are all of life.”
Over the young head her eyes met Brother André’s. “Teach this child,” she said.
“Mother, I am not a child,” Linyi pouted.
But Madame Wu smiled. That afternoon when Brother André was putting his books together, she asked, “Dare I ask you to take me, too, as your pupil?” she asked humbly.
“I am honored by the wish,” he replied in his grave way.
“Then for an hour, perhaps, after you have taught Linyi?”
He inclined his head. Thereafter each evening for an hour he answered Madame Wu’s questions. Scrupulous in spite of her age, Madame Wu bade Ying sit on the seat nearest the door while she and Brother André talked.
“Madame, I must ask you a question. If it makes you angry I beg you to send me away,” Ying said one morning.
“Why should I be angry at you now after the years you have spoken as you liked?” Madame Wu asked.
She put down the book she was reading, but she kept her thumb in the pages, ready to read again when Ying had finished.
“I cannot please you in what I am about to say,” Ying began. “But while you have been wandering around the earth with this big priest, the household has been at sevens and eights with disorder. The wet nurse to your eldest son’s wife’s second son is losing her milk. The child grows thin. At night there is quarreling in your second son’s court. His wife’s maid says there is no pregnancy there yet. And the Second Lady and our master—well, Madame, I will not presume. But I say it is wrong for a lady like you to withdraw herself into books as you do. It is not all evil that our ancestors taught us that women ought not to read and write.”
This Ying said as though she had committed it to heart. Madame Wu listened, the old half-smile on her face. But her thumb slipped out of the book, and she closed it and put it on the table. “Thank you, good soul,” she said.
She rose and went into her bedroom. The morning was cool, and she put on a fur coat before she went out. In the court the orchids were dryi
ng with frost and the leaves were sinking into the loam of the earth. But the sprays of berries on the Indian bamboo were growing scarlet and heavy. A blackbird sat perched on a rock, eating them, and Ying ran at him to frighten him away as she followed. Now that her mistress had been so patient under rebuke, Ying felt guilty of impudence, and she tried to make amends with her usual chatter. Madame Wu listened to it without answering. It occurred to her as she went through Old Lady’s empty court that it would be well if Liangmo brought his family here to live, near her, so that she could more easily watch over the children. Then she could move Tsemo and Rulan into Liangmo’s present court, and the larger space might add peace to them.
The day was fair. She moved through the clear sunshine in a well-being which she herself did not understand. These four walls around this piece of earth were full of human troubles, but she felt herself able to meet them and even to cure them because she was no longer a part of them. By her separation from Mr. Wu, in the flesh, she had cut all cords that had entangled her. She mused on this strong secret bond of body to body, which when it was cut, freed not only body but soul. And her soul followed the paths that were now opened over all the earth. Thus she stepped into Liangmo’s court as a goddess might have come, to minister and not to share.
But the wail of the child crying struck her ear with painful sharpness. She forgot everything and hurried into the house. There Meng sat, and there, too, sat the young wet nurse holding the hungry child to her empty breast. Tears ran down her pale cheeks. The child sucked and turned his head away again to scream with anger when no milk came.
“What now?” Madame Wu asked. “How has your milk dried?”
The young woman laid the little boy in Meng’s arms while she wept.
“Have you given her crab soup with poached eggs?” Madame Wu inquired of Meng.
“We have tried everything,” Meng replied. “I thought it was nothing at first, a cold she had, or that she had overeaten, and we mixed rice flour into gruel for the child for a meal or two. But this has gone on for two days, and the child is not fed. His flesh is slipping from his bones.”