Pearl Buck - Pavilion of Women

Madame Wu could not keep from smiling at her. “Do you think you would like to stay here?” she asked. She felt a little pity for this young creature, bought like an animal from a farmer. She discovered in her something delicate and good in spite of her sunburned cheeks and rough garments.

The girl perceived this kindness and into her dark, clear eyes there sprang a light of instant devotion. “Liu Ma told me you are good. She said you are not like other women. She told me to please you first above all, and that is what I will do.” She had an eager, fresh voice.

“Then you must tell me all you can remember about your life,” Madame Wu replied. “You must hide nothing at all. If you are honest, I shall like you very much.” She perceived the devotion and felt, to her own surprise, a pang of something like guilt.

“I will tell you everything,” the girl promised. “But first shall I not take the eggs to the kitchen?”

“No,” Madame Wu said, hiding a smile at this. How astonished would the servants be at such a visitor! “Ying will take them to the kitchen. You must sit down there in that chair across from me, and we will talk.”

The girl tied up the eggs and sat down on the edge of the chair. But she looked somehow distressed.

“Are you hungry?” Madame Wu asked.

“No, thank you,” the girl said carefully. She sat straight, looking before her, her hands folded.

Madame Wu smiled again. “Come, you are to be honest,” she said. “Are you not hungry?”

The girl laughed suddenly, a quick burst of rippling laughter. “I am a bone,” she said frankly. “I cannot lie even to be polite. But Liu Ma told me I must say, ‘No, thank you’ if you asked me if I were hungry, lest I seem greedy at the first moment.”

“Did you not eat your supper before you came?” Madame Wu inquired.

The girl flushed. “We have not much food,” she said. “My foster mother said — my foster mother thought—”

Madame Wu interrupted her. “Ying!” she commanded, “bring food.”

The girl sighed. Her body relaxed, and she turned so that she might face Madame Wu. But she did not look at her.

If she had a fault, Madame Wu thought, it was that she was a little too big in frame. This must mean that she had come of northern blood. It might be that her family had been refugees from some disaster, a flood, perhaps of the Yellow River, or a famine, and they had been compelled to put a girl child out to die.

“Liu Ma told me you were an orphan,” Madame Wu said aloud. “Do you know anything of your own family?”

The girl shook her head. “I was newborn when they left me. I know the place where they laid me down, for my foster mother has pointed it out to me many times when we have come to the city market. But she told me there was no sign on me of any kind, except that I was not wrapped in cotton, but in silk. It was only ragged silk.”

“Do you have that silk?” Madame Wu asked now.

The girl nodded again. “How did you know?” she asked with naive surprise.

“I thought you would want to bring with you the only thing that was your own,” Madame Wu said. She smiled in answer to the girl’s round eyes.

“But how do you know the heart of a stranger?” the girl persisted.

“Show me the silk,” Madame Wu replied. She had no wish to tell this girl the ways of intuitive knowledge which were hers.

Without hesitation, as though she had indeed made up her mind to obey Madame Wu in all things, the girl put her hand in her bosom and brought out a folded piece of silk. It was washed and clean, but faded from its first red to a rose color. Madame Wu took it and unfolded it. It was a woman’s garment, a short coat, slender in width but long-sleeved.

“If this was your mother’s she, too, was tall,” Madame Wu observed.

“You know that!” the girl exclaimed.

Madame Wu examined the embroidery. The garment was old-fashioned, and a band of embroidery was stitched around the collar and down the side opening. The same bands went around the wide sleeves.

“It is delicate embroidery,” Madame Wu said, “and it is done in a Peking stitch of small knots.”

“You tell me more than I have ever known,” the girl said under her breath.

“But that is all I can tell you,” Madame Wu said. She folded the garment again and held it out to the girl.

But the girl did not put out her hands to receive it. “You keep it for me,” she said. “I do not need it here.”

“I will keep it if you like,” Madame Wu said. “But if you find later that you want it again, I will return it to you.”

“If you let me stay here,” the girl replied with pleading in her voice, “I shall never want it again.”

But Madame Wu was not ready yet to give her promise. “You have not even told me your name,” she said.

The girl’s face changed as plainly as a disappointed child’s. “I have no real name,” she said humbly. “My foster parents never raised me a name. They cannot read and write, and I cannot either.”

“But they called you something,” Madame Wu said.

“They called me Little Orphan when I was small and Big Orphan when I was big,” the girl said.

“That, of course, is no name,” Madame Wu agreed gently. “When I know you better I will give you a name.”

“I thank you,” the girl said humbly.

At this moment Ying came in with two bowls of food and set them on the table. Madame Wu looked into each bowl as she put it down. If Ying had brought servant’s food, she would have sent it back. But Ying had been sensible. She had brought dishes not quite good enough for the family, but certainly too good for the kitchen. She put down a bowl of broth with chicken balls in it and a dish of pork and cabbage. A small wooden bucket of rice she had brought also, and a pot of tea and a tea bowl and chopsticks. The chopsticks were not the family ones of ivory and silver nor the common bamboo ones of the kitchens. They were of red painted wood such as the children used.

“Serve her,” Madame Wu commanded.

Ying had hesitated, but now she obeyed, her lips tight and silent.

But the girl noticed nothing. She accepted the bowl of rice from Ying with both hands, rising a little from her seat in country courtesy, and thinking everything was too much. Indeed, Madame Wu soon saw the girl was torn between honest hunger and the wish to be polite, and so she rose and made an excuse to leave her alone.

“I shall return in a little while,” she said. “Meanwhile eat heartily.”

With these words she went away into her sitting room. There stood the bamboo bed which Ying had prepared for the girl. Madame Wu looked down on it thoughtfully. She would let the girl sleep here a few nights. She ought even, perhaps, to keep her here until the girl understood her place in the family and until she, too, understood the girl. There must be some deep accord established between them before she released her from this court to enter the other, else trouble might arise in the house. She was doing a delicate and difficult thing, and it must be done skillfully. She stood, her thumb and finger at her lower lip. When she had been a girl she had liked in the spring to help with the making of silk on the family lands. After the silkworms had spun their cocoons, there came a certain moment, sure but swiftly passing, when the cocoons must be put into tubs of hot water lest they turn to moths and gnaw the cocoons. She could divine that moment. The farm wives had marveled at her discernment. She remembered now the size of her certainty, out of nothing and yet of everything.

“Now,” she would declare, and the sprays of rice straw to which the cocoons clung were plunged into the tubs. Then she, too, with her delicate, feeling fingers would find the wet fine end of the silk and unwind the cocoons. The old divination stirred again. Her delicacy must not fail her, lest Mr. Wu reproach her as long as she lived.