“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 c
ome 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.
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