Pearl Buck - Pavilion of Women

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 come 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?”