Pavilion of Women: A Novel of Life in the Women's Quarters

by Buck, Pearl S.

  “Nevertheless,” Old Lady went on, “I still feel I should blame my son.”

  “Please do not,” Madame Wu begged her. “To blame him for anything would make him feel he is at fault in some way, and indeed there is no fault in him. He must not be made to feel self-reproach merely because I am forty years old. It would be most unjust.”

  Old Lady groaned. “O Heaven, that has made man and woman of two different earths!”

  Madame Wu smiled at this. “You may blame Heaven, and I will not deny it.”

  There seemed nothing to say after that. Old Lady kept remembering the acuteness of her own like situation many years ago. She would have been angry if her son’s father had taken a younger woman, even when she had cried at him to do so. This woman, her son’s wife, was perhaps wiser.

  Her mind slipped a little, as it did often now that she was old, and she looked about her. “Are you changing everything in these rooms?” she asked.

  “I shall change nothing,” Madame Wu said, “except that I have brought in that painting from my old room. I was always fond of it.” The picture already hung opposite where she sat, for this morning immediately after she had eaten, she had bade Ying tell a manservant to bring it and hang it here. She had decided not to put it in the bedroom where it had hung before. In this bedroom she would only sleep.

  Old Lady rose and went to the scroll and stood before it, leaning on her staff. “Is that a man or woman climbing the mountain?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Madame Wu said. “It does not matter perhaps.”

  “Lonely!” Old Lady muttered. “Lonely in the midst of all those mountains! I have always hated mountains.”

  “I suppose the person wouldn’t be there if he minded loneliness,” Madame Wu said.

  But Old Lady whenever she felt sad immediately felt hunger also. The picture had made her sad.

  She turned to Madame Wu with a piteous look. “I am hungry,” she said. “I haven’t eaten anything for hours.”

  Madame Wu said to the maid, “Take her back to her own rooms and let her eat anything she wants.”

  When Old Lady had gone, she sat down again to her reckoning. For the rest of the day no one came near her. The household was unhappy and silent. She wondered whether Mr. Wu would come to see her, and was surprised to find in herself some sort of shyness at the thought of him. But he, too, did not come near her. She understood exactly what was happening in the great house. The sons and sons’ wives would have been talking half the day, arguing as to what should be done and said, and consulting with cousins and cousins’ wives. Since they had reached no agreement none had come to her, and since elders did not come, children were kept away. As for the servants, it was only natural prudence which kept them quiet and at work until the air in the house had cleared. Only Ying served her all day long, and she said little, although her eyes were freshly red every time she came in. But Madame Wu pretended to see nothing. She spent the entire day on her accounts, which she had allowed to gather in the preparation for her birthday.

  Now she studied one book after another, first the house accounts which the steward kept, then the clothing accounts, repaired and new, then the house repairs and replacements, always heavy in so large a family, and finally the land accounts. The ancestral lands of the Wu family were large and productive, and upon them and the shops the family depended. Neither Mr. Wu nor any of his sons had ever gone away to work. Some of the remoter cousins, it is true, had settled in other cities as merchants or in banks and trade, but even these, if they were temporarily out of work, came back to the land for a while to recover themselves. Madame Wu administered these lands as she did the house. It had been many years since Mr. Wu did more than read over the accounts once a year just before the old year passed into the new one. But Madame Wu studied the house accounts twice monthly and the land accounts every month. She knew exactly what the harvests of rice and wheat, eggs, vegetables, and fuel were. The land steward reported to her any change or disaster. Sometimes she talked this over with Mr. Wu and sometimes she did not. It depended on how tired she was. If she were tired she settled a matter herself.

  This day she had spent in such work from early morning until dark, pausing only to supervise the hanging of the picture and the cutting away of the trees. Around her the house was as silent as though she were the only soul in it. The silence was restful to her. She would not, of course, want it every day. That would have been to enter too soon into death. But after forty years it was pleasant to spend one day entirely alone, without a single voice raised to ask her for anything. The accounts were accurate and satisfying. Less had been spent than had been taken in. The granaries were still not empty and soon the new harvests would be reaped. The larders were full of food, both salted and fresh. Watermelons had ripened and were hanging in the deep wells to be cooled. The steward had written down in his little snakelike letters, “Nineteen watermelons, seven yellow-hearted, the rest red, hanging in the two north wells.” She might have one drawn up tonight before she slept. Watermelons were good for the kidneys.

  When the account books were closed she sat steeping herself in the sweet silent loneliness. She felt the weariness begin to seep from her like a poison breathed out of her lungs. She had been far more weary than she knew, a weariness not so much physical as spiritual. It was hard to define even where in the spirit it lay. Certainly her mind was not weary. It was hungry and alert and eager to exercise itself. It seemed to her that she had not really used her mind for a long time except in such things as reckoning accounts and settling quarrels and deciding whether a child should go to one school or another. No, her weariness was hid somewhere in her innermost being, perhaps in her belly and in her womb. She had been giving life for twenty-four years, before the children were born and after they were born, and now they would themselves give birth to other children. Mother and grandmother, she had been absorbed in giving birth. Now it was over.

  At this moment she heard a footstep. It was clear and decided, clacking on the stones lightly as it approached. She wondered for a moment—leather shoes? Who wore leather shoes among the women? For it was a woman’s footsteps. Then she knew. It was Rulan, the Shanghai wife of Tsemo, her second son. She sighed, reluctant to yield even for a moment her silence and loneliness. But she rebuked herself. No one must think she had withdrawn from the house. Rather, let them think of this as the center of the house because she was here.

  “Come hither, Rulan,” she called. Her pretty voice was cheerful. When she looked up she saw the girl’s dark eyes searching her face. The young woman stood in the doorway, tall and slender. Her straight long robe was pinched in at the waist after the half-foreign fashion of Shanghai. Her bosom was flat. She was not beautiful because of her high cheekbones. Madame Wu’s own face had the egg-shaped smoothness of classical beauty. Rulan’s face was wide at the eyes, narrow at the chin. Her mouth was square and sullen.

  Madame Wu ignored the sullenness. “Come in and sit down, child,” she said. “I have just finished our family accounts. We are fortunate—the land has been kind.”

  The girl was plain, and yet she had flashes of beauty, Madame Wu thought, watching her as she sat down squarely upon a chair. She had none of the polish and courtesy which all the other young women in the house had. Instead it seemed that this girl even took pleasure in being rude and always abrupt. Madame Wu looked at her with interest. It was the first time she had ever been alone with Rulan.

  “You must be careful of your beautiful mouth, my child,” she now said in that gentle dispassionate manner which all young persons found disconcerting, since it was neither chiding nor advising.

  “What do you mean?” Rulan stammered. Her lips quivered when they parted.

  “It is a lovely trembling mouth now,” Madame Wu said. “But women’s mouths change as they grow older. Yours will become more lovely as it grows firm, or it will become coarse and stubborn.”

  Her cool voice conveyed no interest, merely the statement of what was to b
e expected. Rulan might have declared, had there been any interest, that she did not care what her mouth became. But confused by the coolness, she merely pressed her red lips together for a moment and drew her black brows together.

  “Did you come to speak to me about something?” Madame Wu inquired. She had changed her seat to one more comfortable than the straight wooden chair by the table. This one was wooden, too, but the back was rounded. Yet she did not lean against it. She continued to sit upright while she filled her little pipe. She lit it and took her two customary dainty puffs.

  “Our Mother!” Rulan began impetuously. She was pent and disturbed, yet she did not know how to begin.

  “Yes, child?” Madame Wu said mildly.

  “Mother,” Rulan began again, “you have upset everybody.”

  “Have I?” Madame Wu asked. Her voice was full of music and wonder.

  “Yes, you have,” Rulan repeated. “Tsemo said I wasn’t to come and talk with you. He said that it was Liangmo’s duty as the oldest son. But Liangmo won’t. He said it would be no use. And Meng does nothing but cry. But I don’t cry. I said someone must come and talk with you.”

  “And no one came except you.” Madame Wu smiled slightly.

  Rulan did not smile in reply. Her too-serious young face was agonized between shyness and determination. “Mother,” she began yet again, “I have always felt you did not like me, and so I ought to be the last one to come to you.”

  “Child, you are wrong,” Madame Wu said. “There is no one in the world whom I dislike, not even that poor foreign soul, Little Sister Hsia.”

  Rulan flinched. “You really do not like me,” she argued. “I know that. I am older than Tsemo, and you do not like me for that. And you never forgive me that we fell in love in Shanghai and decided ourselves to marry instead of letting you arrange our affairs.”

  “Of course I did not like that,” Madame Wu agreed. “But when I had thought about it, I knew that I wanted Tsemo’s happiness, and when I saw you I knew he was happy, and so I was pleased with you. That you are older than he you cannot help. It is annoying in the house, but I have managed in spite of it. One can manage anything.”

  “But if I were like Meng and the others,” Rulan said in her stormy impetuous way, “I would not feel so badly now over what you have done. Mother, you must not let Father take another woman.”

  “It is not a matter of letting him,” Madame Wu said, still mildly. “I have decided that it is the best thing for him.”

  The color washed out of Rulan’s ruddy face. “Mother, do you know what you do?”

  “I think I know what I do,” Madame Wu said.

  “People will laugh at us,” Rulan said. “It’s old-fashioned to take a concubine.”

  “For Shanghai people, perhaps,” Madame Wu said, and her voice conveyed to Rulan that it did not matter at all what Shanghai people thought.

  Rulan stared at her in stubborn despair. This cool woman who was her husband’s mother was so beautiful, so perfect, that she was beyond the reach of all anger, all reproach. She knew long ago that against her she could never prevail with Tsemo. His mother’s hold upon him was so absolute that he did not even rebel against it. He was convinced that whatever his mother did was finally for his own good. Today when the women were storming against the idea of the new woman and Liangmo had only been silent, Tsemo had shrugged his shoulders. He was playing chess with Yenmo, his younger brother.

  “If our mother wants a concubine,” he said, “it is for a reason, for she never acts without reason. Yenmo, it is your turn.”

  Yenmo played without heeding the turmoil. Of all his brothers he loved Tsemo best, for he played with him every day. Without him Yenmo would have been lonely in this house full of women and children.

  “Reason!” Rulan had cried with contempt.

  “Guard your tongue,” Tsemo had said sternly, not lifting his eyes from the chessboard.

  She had not dared disobey him. Though he was younger than she, he had something of his mother’s calm, and this gave him power over her storm and passion. But she had secretly made up her mind to come alone to Madame Wu.

  She clenched her hands on her knees and gazed at her. “Mother, it is now actually against the laws for a man to take a concubine, do you know that?”

  “What laws?” Madame Wu asked.

  “The new laws,” Rulan cried, “the laws of the Revolutionary party!”

  “These laws,” Madame Wu said, “like the new Constitution, are still entirely on paper.”

  She saw that Rulan was taken aback by her use of the word Constitution. She had not expected Madame Wu to know about the Constitution.

  “Many of us worked hard to abolish concubinage,” she declared. “We marched in procession in the Shanghai streets in hottest summer, and our sweat poured down our bodies. We carried banners insisting on the one-wife system of marriage as they have it in the West. I myself carried a blue banner that bore in white letters the words, ‘Down with concubines.’ Now when someone in my own family, my own husband’s mother, does a thing so old-fashioned, so—so wicked—for it is wicked, Mother, to return to the old cruel ways—”

  “My child,” Madame Wu asked in her sweet reasonable voice, “what would you do if Tsemo one day should want another wife, someone, say, less full of energy and wit than you are, someone soft and comfortable?”

  “I would divorce him at once,” Rulan said proudly. “I would not share him with any other woman.”

  Madame Wu lit her little pipe again and took two more puffs. “A man’s life is made up of many parts,” she said. “As a woman grows older she perceives this.”

  “I believe in the equality of man and woman,” Rulan insisted.

  “Ah,” Madame Wu said, “two equals are nevertheless not the same two things. They are equal in importance, equally necessary to life, but not the same,”

  “That is not what we think nowadays,” Rulan said. “If a woman is content with one man, a man should be content with one woman.”

  Madame Wu put down her pipe. “You are so young,” she said reflectively, “that I wonder how I can explain it. You see, my child, content is the important thing—the content of a man, the content of a woman. When one reaches the measure of content, shall that one say to the other, ‘Here you must stop because I am now content?’ ”

  “But Liangmo told us our father does not want another one,” Rulan said doggedly.

  Madame Wu thought, “Ah, Liangmo has been talking to his father today!” She felt a moment’s pity for her husband, at the mercy of his sons for no fault of his own.

  “When you have lived with a man for twenty-five years as his wife,” she said gently, “you have lived with him to the end of all knowledge.”

  She sighed and suddenly wished this young woman away. And yet she liked her better than she ever had before. It took courage to come here alone, to speak these blunt, brave, foolish words.

  “Child,” she said, leaning toward Rulan, “I think Heaven is kind to women, after all. One could not keep bearing children forever. So Heaven in its mercy says when a woman is forty, ‘Now, poor soul and body, the rest of your life you shall have for yourself. You have divided yourself again and again, and now take what is left and make yourself whole again, so that life may be good to you for yourself, not only for what you give but for what you get.’ I will spend the rest of my life assembling my own mind and my own soul. I will take care of my body carefully, not that it may any more please a man, but because it houses me and therefore I am dependent upon it.”

  “Do you hate us all?” the girl asked. Her eyes opened wide, and Madame Wu saw for the first time that they were very handsome eyes.

  “I love you all more than ever,” Madame Wu said.

  “Our father, too?” the girl inquired.

  “Him, too,” Madame Wu said. “Else why would I so eagerly want his happiness?”

  “I do not understand you,” the girl said after a moment. “I think I do not know what you mean.�
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  “Ah, you are so far from my age,” Madame Wu replied. “Be patient with me, child, for knowing what I want.”

  “You really are doing what you want to do?” Rulan asked doubtfully.

  “Really, I am,” Madame Wu replied tenderly.

  Rulan rose. “I shall have to go back and tell them,” she said. “But I do not think any one of them will understand.”

  “Tell them all to be patient with me,” Madame Wu said, smiling at her.

  “Well, if you are sure—” Rulan said, still hesitating.

  “Quite sure,” Madame Wu said.

  She was glad once more of the loneliness and the silence when Rulan had gone. She smiled a little to think of the family gathered together without her, all in consternation, all wondering what to do, because for the first time in their knowledge of her she had done something for herself alone. But as she smiled she felt full of peace. Without waiting for Ying, since she was two hours before her usual time for bed, she bathed and put on her white silk night garments and lay down in the huge dark-curtained old bed. When Ying came in an hour later she was frightened at the silence and ran to the bedroom. There behind the undrawn bed curtains she saw her mistress lying small and still upon the bed. She ran forward, terror in her heart, to gaze upon that motionless figure.

  “Oh, Heaven,” Ying moaned, “Our Lady is dead!”

  But Madame Wu was not dead, only sleeping, although Ying had never seen her sleep like this. Even her outcry did not wake the sleeping lady. “She whom the flutter of a bird in the eaves wakes at dawn!” Ying marveled. She stood for a moment looking down on the pure beauty of Madame Wu’s face, then she stepped back and drew the heavy curtains.

  “She is tired to the heart,” Ying muttered. “She is tired because in this great house all feed on her, like suckling children.”

  She paused at the door of the court and looked fiercely right and left. But no one was coming, and certainly not Mr. Wu.

  In Liangmo’s court the two elder sons and their wives talked together until the water clock had passed the first half of the night. The two young husbands were silent for the most part. They felt confused and shy for their father’s sake. He, too, was a man, as they were now. When they were in their middle years, would it be so with themselves and their wives? They doubted themselves and hid their doubt.