The air came in through the open windows with such sweetness that she felt it upon her skin like fragrant oil.
It was midmorning when she was roused by footsteps, and she looked up and saw Yenmo, her fourth son, in the court.
He greeted her sturdily, in a half-rude fashion, but she did not correct him, knowing that he had learned his ways from peasants.
“Come in, my son,” she said kindly.
She took him by the hand and felt in her soft palm his young rough hand. He was as tall as she was now, to her amazement.
“You grow very fast,” she said in mock complaint.
He was not like any of her other sons. His words were not ready nor his smile. But she saw his eyes were calm, and that he was not shy. It was simply that he felt no necessity to please anyone. She dropped his hand, and he stood before her, dressed in a blue cotton robe, and on his feet were heavy cloth-soled shoes.
“Mother,” he said, “I want to go back to the farm. I will not live here.”
He looked so strong and fresh, his eyes were so round and black, his cropped hair so stiff, his teeth so white, that she wanted to laugh at him.
“How far have you read in books?” she asked.
“I am in fifth year of the New Readers, and I have read the Book of Changes,” he said.
It was well enough for his years. “But ought you now not to go beyond the village school?” she inquired.
“I hate books,” he said immediately.
“Hate books!” she repeated. “Ah, you are going to be like your father.”
He turned red and stared down at his feet. “No, Mother, I am not,” he declared. “I shall be like nobody. And if I am not to go back to the land, then I will run away.”
He looked up at her and down again, and in spite of sadness she laughed. “Have I ever told a son of mine he could not do what he wished?” she asked.
“These walls are so high,” the boy complained.
“They are very high,” she agreed.
“I want to go now,” Yenmo said.
“I will go with you,” she said.
He looked doubtful at this. “Where will you sleep?” he asked.
“Oh, I shall return tonight,” she declared. “But it will be well for me to go and see the land, and see for myself where you stay and talk with your teacher, and then my heart will rest about you.”
So he went to get his clothes ready, and she ordered her sedan and refused to take even Ying with her.
“In the country no one can harm me,” she said when Ying opened her eyes wide.
They set out together, she in her sedan and Yenmo on a gray pony which was his pet, and so they went through the streets, and everybody knew who they were and where they went, and fell back in respect before them as gentry.
As soon as they had passed beyond the city walls, Madame Wu felt the wide calm spirit of the countryside descend upon her, and slowly her restlessness left her. She put aside all else this day, and she watched the strong firm body of her fourth son astride his pony and cantering before her. The boy rode well, though without grace. He sat as hard in his saddle as though he were part of the beast, rising and falling with the pony’s steps. But he was fearless, and twirled his horsehair whip in his hand and sang as he went. Plainly he was happy, and she made up her mind that he should have what made him happy. She was thankful that for this son, as for Liangmo, happiness lay within the family’s boundaries.
So that day she spent in the main village, eating her noon meal in the steward’s house and listening to all those who came to call upon her. Some came with thanks and some with complaints, and she received them all. It was a good day. Her spirits were refreshed by the simplicity of the people. They were honest and shrewd and did not hide their thoughts. Mothers brought their children to see her, and she praised their health and good looks. She inspected the lands near the village and looked at the seed set aside for various crops. She peered down the well and agreed that it was too shallow and needed to be dug out again, and she counted the jars of ordure that were for the fertilizing of the cabbage fields. She went to the school and spoke to the old scholar who was the teacher and startled him and pleased him by her presence. She laughed when he tried to praise Yenmo’s faithfulness, and she told him that she knew her son did not love books. She inspected the room where Yenmo slept in the steward’s house, a comfortable earth-walled space with a wide bed and clean covers. Then before the sun sank too far she told him good-by and entered her sedan again.
Now when she was alone she did what she had long wanted to do. On the hillside she saw the great gingko tree under which André was buried. If she stopped without explanation, the news would be strange in the countryside and in the city and the house, for everyone told of her comings and goings, and nothing that went on in the Wu family could remain unknown. So she said boldly to the bearers, “Take me to the grave of the foreign priest who was teacher to my son. I will pay my respects to him, since he is here with none to mourn him, and I pass so near.”
They carried her there without wonder, for they admired this courtesy, and she came down from her sedan at some distance from the grave so that she might be alone. Alone she walked along a narrow path between the fields and mounted the low hill and came into the shadow of the gingko tree. The evening wind waved its small fanlike leaves and they dappled the shadows of the setting sun upon the grass. She knelt before the grave and bowed her head to the earth three times while at a distance the bearers watched. Then she sat down on the bank of earth encircling the grave and closed her eyes and let him come to her mind. He came in all his old swiftness, his robes flying about his feet, the winds blowing his beard. His eyes were living and alight.
“That beard,” she murmured half playfully. “It hid your face from me. I never saw your chin and your mouth for myself.”
But then he had always hidden his body. The brown cassock hid the broad lines of his huge frame, and his big shapeless cloth shoes hid his feet.
“Those feet of yours,” she murmured, smiling. “How the children laugh at them!”
It was true. Sometimes when she went to visit the foundlings in the evening, for she tried to go very often, they would tell her how huge the soles had to be made for his shoes. They measured off space with their little hands.
“Like this—like this,” they told her, laughing.
The old woman had cut the soles and the sides from scraps and rags and found the whole cloth to cover them. “The hard stitching I did,” she had told Madame Wu.
“But we all helped,” the children reminded her.
“All put in stitches,” the old woman had agreed. “Even the very small ones pushed the needle through once or twice while I held the cloth.”
So she sat awhile and thought of him and then she went home again, and she felt her heart big with thankfulness. In her lifetime it had been granted to her to know, and even to love, one creature wholly good.
A few days later a craftsman came from a shop in the town and brought something which he had made. Upon a small piece of alabaster he had painted a portrait of André.
Madame Wu gazed upon it, half frightened. “Why have you brought it to me?” she demanded. She could not believe that her innermost life was known to others, and yet she knew the strange wisdom of the unlettered.
“I made it out of good will for that man,” the craftsman said innocently. “Once when we had trouble in the house and I lost my business, he fed us and cared for us until we were able to care for ourselves. I made this picture of him then, so that I might never forget his face. But yesterday my children’s mother said, ‘Ought we not to put this in the temple of the Wu House, where the foundlings now live, so that they may remember him as their father?’ For this reason I bring it.”
She let her heart down. It was not to her he brought the gift. She set the alabaster on the table. The man had made a carved wooden stand to hold it, and there the picture of André was. The man had caught his look, even though he had pu
t in something not quite his, the eyes turned up a little at the corners, the hands were a trifle too fine, and the frame was too slender. But it was André, nevertheless.
“What shall I pay you for it?” Madame Wu asked.
“It is a gift,” the man said. “I cannot sell it.”
“I will receive it, then, for the children,” she said.
So she did, and the man went away. She kept the painting for a day with her, and then she took it at evening to the temple. The children were eating their night meal, and their table was set before the gods who guarded the gates. She paused at the door and admired the sight. High red candles flamed in the candlesticks beneath the gods, and the incense on the altar curled its length upward in a scented cloud. Out of the light and the smoke among the rafters the great gods of painted clay looked down upon the children at their feet.
By now the children were used to their home. At first they had feared the gods, but now they forgot them. They ate and chattered, and the old woman and the old priest served them, and the older ones helped the younger ones. When they saw Madame Wu they made a clamor, and she stood smiling and receiving their welcome. Here was a strange thing, that she had often shrunk from the touch of her own children when they were small, and she had sometimes disliked even their hands upon her. But these children she never put away from her. They were not of her flesh nor of André’s, but they were his by the choice of his spirit, and when she was with them she was with him. Whether she would ever add one to their number, she did not know. Perhaps she would, but perhaps she never would.
Now she held the portrait high so they could see it. “I have a gift for you,” she told them. They parted for her to walk, and she went and set the alabaster picture on the table below the gods and in front of the great pewter incense urn. So André stood, and he looked out at them, and the children looked at him. At first all was silence, for they wanted only to see him. Then they began to speak in sighs and murmurs and ripples of laughter. “Ah, it is our father. Ah, it is he—”
So they stood, gazing and longing, and she said gently, “There he will be always with you, and you can look at his face every day and at night before you sleep.”
Then she showed them what was on the other side. The craftsman had carved four words into the stone and had painted the lines black. These were the words: “One Honorable Foreign Heart.”
When she had showed them she set the picture in place again, and from that day on it stood in that place.
Now after she had gone back to her own courts it occurred to her that she had not seen Ch’iuming in the temple. She mentioned this to Ying that night. “I gave our Second Lady permission to live in the temple with her child, and yet I did not see her.”
To which Ying replied, “She does live there, Lady, but she goes often to sit with your second daughter-in-law. They have become friends and are like sisters, and they comfort each other, for since the coming of that third prostitute our Second Lady is as good as a widow. Our lord never leaves his pipe on her table.”
To this Madame Wu did not reply. She held her peace and pondered while Ying rubbed oils into her flesh after her bath. In a great house it was always true that those whose hearts were alike found one another and knit themselves together in a bond of their own making. If Ch’iuming could comfort Rulan, let it be so. It might be that Rulan, too, would be led to work for the temple children and find comfort in them. True it was the children should be educated somehow. André would want them taught to read and write, and they must learn sewing and cooking and be made ready for the ordinary life of men and women anywhere in the world. Madame Wu went to sleep that night making plans for these children and ready to set up a school for them under her own roof. But she was one who did nothing in haste. Whatever she did was planned and clear, and she let days pass.
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 fo
r 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.