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

by Buck, Pearl S.

  Ying came into the room, looking alarmed. “The front court is full of the beggar children,” she said fretfully. “And the prostitute is sitting in the entrance hall again. She says you sent for her.”

  Madame Wu laughed. “I feel I could eat a roll of wheat bread, this morning,” she remarked.

  Ying stared at her. “You look changed, Lady. Your skin is rosy as a child’s. You are not feverish?”

  She came to the side of the huge bed and took Madame Wu’s little hand and held it to her cheek.

  “No fever,” Madame Wu said. “Nothing but health.”

  She withdrew her hand gently and threw back the silken quilt. Then, rising, she allowed Ying to wash and dress her. But she refused the gray silk robe Ying had put out for her. Instead she chose one of an old-rose color which the day before her fortieth birthday she had laid aside, thinking she would never wear such hues again.

  Today it was becoming to her as it had never been. The last time she had worn it she had thought it made her paleness sallow. But this morning it lent her color.

  “It was wrong of me to have put it away,” she thought as she looked at herself in the mirror. Her natural vanity stirred. “A pity he never saw me in this,” she thought. She smiled at herself in the glass. She glanced at Ying, to see whether any of this had been seen. But Ying was folding the gray robe, sleeve to sleeve.

  Madame Wu walked into the library. In common sense today she should have felt her life tangled with unsolved problems. Twenty children waited in the court, the young prostitute sat in the entrance hall, and Mr. Wu was more than ever a responsibility. There were the newborn girl and her mother, Ch’iuming, and her own sons and their wives. But she had none of her usual shrinking from human beings. She now realized that for the first time in her life she disliked no one. All her life she had struggled again her dislike of human beings. None had been wholly to her taste. Thus her mother she had disliked because of her ignorance and superstitions. Her father she had loved, or would have said she had, but she had disliked him, too, because his heart was far away and she could never come near him. And though Mr. Wu had been a handsome young man when she married him there were secrets of his person which she disliked. Even when she had shared his passion, she had been aware of shapes and odors, and she had felt violation in his touch even while she allowed it. Old Gentleman had been dear to her, but she was so delicately made that she could not forget what she disliked while she found what she liked. His heart was good, his intelligence clear, but his teeth were broken and his breath came foul.

  “If André had been alive when I found I loved him, I wonder if I could have—”

  Before she could frame the thought, another came to answer. “You see how wise is death! It removes the body of a man and lets free his spirit.”

  “But if I were younger,” she reminded him, “could I have been satisfied only with your spirit?”

  She looked down at the smooth gray tiles of the floor. Would it have been possible, when she was young, to have loved a foreign man? For of course André was a foreign man, a man from another country and of another blood. She tried to imagine him young and ardent as a man is ardent, and all her blood rose in strange anger.

  “Don’t!” This cry burst into her mind.

  “No, I will not,” she promised.

  Ying came in with her breakfast and placed it upon the table in neat rows of dishes. Madame Wu took up her chopsticks.

  “Have the children in the court been fed?” she asked.

  “Certainly not, Lady,” Ying said sternly. “No orders have been given for so much food.”

  “Then I give orders now,” Madame Wu said gently. “Let rice be cooked at once, and bread bought and tea made for their noon meal.”

  “It is lucky it is not raining,” Ying said. “We should be put to it if we had to take such people under our roof.”

  “There is room here for all,” Madame Wu said.

  She was amazed to see Ying begin to cry and, with her blue coat to her eyes, run sobbing out of the room. “You are changed—you are changed,” she cried.

  But at noon she had great buckets of rice set in the court, and when Madame Wu went there it was to see the little girls eating happily and feeding the younger ones by pushing rice into their open mouths. The old woman who had been their caretaker rose, her cheeks full of rice, and cried out to the children that they must greet Madame Wu as their mother.

  “Now that your father has gone, I am your mother,” Madame Wu said, smiling. The orphan children looked at her with love, and suddenly for the first time in her life Madame Wu felt the true pangs of birth in her being. She felt her being divided and merge again with another nature far larger than her own. These children were André’s and hers.

  “All are my children,” she said, wondering that the words could be hers. At the sound of her voice the children rushed to her to embrace her, to touch her, to lean against her. She looked down at them and saw their small lacks and defects as well as their beauty. But she felt no dislike.

  “Your father did the best he could for you,” she said, smiling, “but you need a mother, too.” She touched a sore red scar on a child’s cheek. “Does it still hurt?” she asked.

  “A little,” the child replied.

  “And how did you come by it?” Madame Wu asked.

  The child hung her head. “My mistress held the end of her cigarette against me there—”

  “Oh, why?” Madame Wu asked.

  “I was her slave—and I couldn’t move fast enough—” the child replied.

  She put her hand into Madame Wu’s. “Will you give me a name?” she begged. “He was going to give me a name and then died too soon. All the others have names.”

  “They shall tell me their names, and then I shall know what to name you,” Madame Wu replied.

  One by one they repeated their names, and each name was a word spoken from André.

  Pity; Faith; Humility; Grace; Truth; Mercy; Light; Song; Star; Moonbeam; Sunbeam; Dawn; Joy; Clarity—such were the names he had given the older ones. The younger ones he had called playful names. Kitten and Snowbird and Rosepetal and Acorn, Silver and Gold. “Because he said silver and gold had he none,” these two small creatures proclaimed, “until we came.”

  They all laughed at such nonsense. “He did make us laugh every day,” Gold said. She was a round little creature, and she clutched Silver by the hand.

  “Are you sisters?” Madame Wu asked, smiling.

  “We are all sisters,” twenty voices cried.

  “Of course,” Madame Wu agreed. “I am stupid.”

  The scarred child pressed her close. “And my name?” she asked.

  Madame Wu looked down into the tender face. The child was exquisite, a bud of a child, full of beauty to come. The name rose in Madame Wu’s mind. “I will call you Love,” she said.

  “I am Love,” the child repeated.

  By now the court was fringed with silent onlookers. The servants in the house had made one excuse and another to pass this way to stop and stare, but the children of the household and the lesser relatives made no pretense of errands. They stood gaping at this new Madame Wu. At last Jasmine, who had grown weary of waiting in the entrance hall, rose and came to the court herself, and behind her came her servant. Jasmine had braced herself to be very strong and to demand her rights as one who had within herself hope of a son for the house.

  But instead of the stern proud lady whom she had expected to see, this morning she saw a gentle beautiful woman laughing in the midst of beggar children. Madame Wu looked up at the bustle behind the pillars of the veranda, and their eyes met.

  “You see I have many children,” Madame Wu said, smiling, “but I have not forgotten you. When I have planned where they are to sleep and play, I will talk with you.”

  She turned to the relatives. None of them were sons or sons’ wives. They were only old cousins and poor nephews who, having no shelter elsewhere, had returned to the ancestral house to find
a corner here and a bed there.

  “Where shall we house my children?” she asked gaily.

  “Our Sister,” an old widow answered, “if you are doing good deeds, let them be housed in the family temple.”

  Madame Wu had been without any anxiety whatever, but she simply had not known where to put these children. Now she accepted the widow’s words at once. “How wise you are,” she said gratefully. “No home could be better than our temple. There are courts to play in, and the pool and the fountain. The family gods will have something to do now.”

  She led the way as she spoke, and the children ran after her in the sunlight, and the old woman hobbled after them. In the very back of the Wu courts there was a large old temple, built by one of the women ancestors two hundred years before. She had desired to become a nun after her husband died, and yet she did not wish to leave her home to live in a public temple. So she had built here within the shelter of the house walls a beautiful temple where she lived with the gods until she died nearly one hundred years old. Since then a priest had been appointed to care for the temple, none being allowed to serve who were under fifty years of age because of the many young women in the house.

  Madame Wu, although skeptic, had nevertheless allowed the priest to continue and had maintained the temple, paying for the gilding of the gods once every ten years and once a year allowing a sum for incense. Such of the family as wished could worship here, and it was considered a benefit that women need not go to outside temples to worship and be perhaps exposed to lewd priests.

  To this temple she now led the children. She paused for one moment on the wide stone threshold. Two gate gods loomed above her, one black, one white.

  “But will these gods offend André?” she asked herself. “His religion had no gods like these.”

  She seemed to hear his mighty laughter, echoing among the painted beams high above the heads of the gods.

  She smiled in reply and, holding by the hand the child she had named Love, she stepped over the high wooden doorsteps and into the temple. The air was fragrant with incense and lilies. Incense burned before the gods, and lilies bloomed in the court. The old priest, hearing footsteps, came running in from his kitchen. He had been burning grass for cooking of his meal, and his face and hands were sooty.

  He stared at the crowd of children and at Madame Wu. “I am bringing gifts,” she said. “Tell him your names, children.”

  One by one they called their names in their soft gay voices.

  “And this one,” Madame Wu ended, “is Love. They are all gifts for the temple.”

  Now, the old priest had heard of what had happened. He took it that Madame Wu wished to do good deeds before Heaven and so he could not forbid it, however difficult it might be for him. He bowed and clasped his sooty hands and fell back against one god after another as he retreated before Madame Wu, who swept on into the temple, assigning rooms where until now only gods had stood silently gazing into the courts of the Wu family.

  “This room is for the little ones,” she said, “because the Goddess of Mercy is here, and she will watch over you for me during the night. This room is for the big ones, because there is space for everybody, and you must help to keep it very clean.”

  Then she felt the child Love cling to her. “Let me come with you,” she begged Madame Wu. “I will wash your clothes and serve your food. I can do everything.”

  Madame Wu’s heart turned into warm flame. But she was just. She knew that André would not have showed favor to one above another. She shook her head. “You must stay and help the others,” she said. “That is what your father would have wished.” Then she knew it was not all justice. She wanted no one with her, to share her life with him.

  “Where shall we sleep, Our Mother?” the children asked of Madame Wu.

  “By night there will be beds,” she said. “But first you must play all day long.”

  And seeing them happy, she left them with the gods.

  Jasmine pursed her red mouth and looked hard at the corner of her brightly flowered silk kerchief. One corner of it was fastened to the glass button on her left shoulder, and it hung from this like a scarf. With the kerchief she concealed her face, or she played with it when she wished not to look at the one to whom she was talking.

  “It is hard for me to speak,” she said to Madame Wu.

  “Surely there is not much to say,” Madame Wu replied.

  “There is a great deal to say,” Jasmine said pertly. “If I have no child now, I will have.” She placed her hands on her belly.

  Madame Wu looked at her with interest. “You ought to be able to bear a very fat fine child,” she said. “You look strong.”

  Jasmine was taken back. “But what will my position be in the house?” she demanded.

  “What position do you want?” Madame Wu asked.

  “I ought to be the third wife,” Jasmine said sharply. It was strange that so young and pretty a creature could be so sharp. But her round bright eyes, her straight small nose, her pink cheeks and little full mouth all grew sharp and bright together.

  “Why not?” Madame Wu said amiably.

  “You don’t mind?” Jasmine asked these words in a whisper. The sharpness went out of her face, and the lines of it softened.

  “Why should I mind?” Madame Wu asked simply.

  “You mean I can live here—in this great house—and be called Third Lady—and when my child—”

  “I would not want any child of our house to be illegitimate,” Madame Wu said. “That would be unworthy of our name. You are the vessel that receives the seed. You are to be honored.”

  Jasmine stared at her with rounding black eyes and then began to cry in loud coarse sobs. “I thought you would hate me,” she gasped. “I made myself ready for your anger. Now I don’t know what to do.”

  “There is nothing you need to do,” Madame Wu said calmly. “I will have a maid lead you to your rooms. They are small, you know, only two, and they are to the left of my lord’s court. His Second Lady lives to the right. You need not meet. I will myself go now and tell my lord you are coming.”

  She hesitated, and then said with a delicate frankness, “You will find him very just. If he leaves his silver pipe upon your table it is his message. If he goes away with it in his hand, do not be angry. That is my own request in return for shelter. Bring no anger into our house.”

  She looked at the stolid old woman who had sat beside Jasmine all this time without a word. “And this one, is she your mother?”

  The woman opened her mouth to speak, but Jasmine spoke first. “She belongs to the house from where I come.”

  “Let her go back to it, then,” Madame Wu said. She put her hand into her bosom and took out silver and put it on the table. It shone there so largely that the woman could only get up and bow again and again.

  But all was interrupted by Jasmine, who fell on her knees before Madame Wu and knocked her head on the floor. “They told me you were just, but now I know you are kind!”

  Madame Wu’s cheeks flushed upward from her neck. “Had you come another day I might have been only angry,” she said honestly. “But today is different from all days before it.”

  She rose, not lifting the girl to her feet, and walked quickly out of the room.

  “I am a wicked woman,” she told herself. “I do not care how many women come into these courts. My own heart is full.”

  She paused, waiting for some answer to this. But there was no answer, unless the complete peace within her heart was answer. “Had I discovered you while you lived,” she said, “would there have been silence between us?”

  Still he did not answer, and she smiled at his silence. Even as a spirit he was shy of love. The habits of his life held. The silence broke a moment later. As she stepped into the main court she saw three men standing there. They were decent-looking, well-dressed men, and they turned their backs as she came in and pretended not to see her, as though she were a young woman. It was a pleasant compliment, but s
he put it aside.

  “I am Madame Wu,” she said. “Is there anything you want here?”

  They turned sidewise at this, and the eldest man, in great courtesy, answered still without looking at her.

  “It is Madame Wu whom we seek,” he said. “We are come to ask if the dead should not be somehow avenged. That Green Band is a danger to our whole town, but never before have they killed a man. It is true he was only a foreigner and a priest, but if they begin killing foreigners and priests today, they will be killing us tomorrow. Ought not the town to demand justice on behalf of the stranger? If so, will Madame Wu make the accusation?”

  There was a stir of protest in her mind. She saw André’s eyes, fiercely refusing vengeance, and she spoke instantly. “Certainly he would want no vengeance done for him,” she said. “He talked often of forgiving those who do not know what they do. But who are these robbers?”

  “The worthless young men of the town, the adventurers, the ones who want to rise not through honest work, but through making others afraid of them,” the elder replied indignantly.

  “Are there many such men?” she asked with wonder.

  The men laughed but without noise, in respect to her. “There are many in these days,” one said.

  “And why should there be?” she asked.

  “The times are bad.” One of the other men spoke. He was a small withered man whose face was wrinkled but whose hair was still black. She stood there in the strong sunlight in her rose-colored robe, and there was admiration in the man’s eyes. But she was far beyond seeing it. She was wholly safe from any man’s admiration.

  “What makes the times bad?” she asked. She knew well enough the times, but she asked.

  “Lady, you have lived behind these high walls,” the eldest man spoke again. “You cannot know in what a turmoil the world is. The turmoil begins in the wickedness of foreign countries, where war continually threatens. None of us can escape. This turmoil makes the young everywhere restless. They ask themselves why they should submit to ancient ways which must soon change. They have no new ways to offer, and so, rejecting the old and delaying the new, they live without law.”