Pearl Buck - Pavilion of Women

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 put 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.”