Pearl Buck - Pavilion of Women

The year before this Madame Kang had died. At this moment Madame Wu thought of her as she had seen her in her coffin. The coffin had been made twice as broad as usual, and there Madame Kang had lain, dressed in her satin robes, her plump hands by her sides. After she was dead Madame Wu thought of her sometimes with old love still faintly sweet, and their friendship returned to its early days. Madame Kang had been a rosy, cheerful, hearty girl, sad only for such small things as that her nostrils were wide and her nose too flat between the brows. Mr. Kang had soon married a second wife, a young woman whose willfulness stirred the great unwieldy household continually like a ladle in a pot of stew. But this was no matter of concern for Madame Wu, and no more than gossip for Ying, to which Madame Wu listened or did not, while Ying was brushing her hair.

Liangmo waited for his mother to speak. She drew back her thoughts at last and smiled at him her small sweet smile. “Well, my son,” she said. “The soul of every creature must take its own shape, and none can compel another without hurting himself. Live in your house, my son, and let Fengmo live in his.”

“Teach Fengmo one thing, if you please, Our Mother,” Liangmo said in anger. “Bid him keep his long arm out of my house.”

“I will,” Madame Wu promised.

So Liangmo went away and when Madame Wu next saw Fengmo she taught him thus:

“Do you remember, my son, that once your tutor said to you that to teach is to invite the soul to Heaven but never to compel it?”

She saw by Fengmo’s look that he did remember these words which André had spoken. The wonder of André had always been that his whole life was invitation toward Heaven.

Fengmo bent his head into his hands. “I know why you remind me,” he said. “I know why I need to be told. The banked fires in me break out sometimes and I am driven by my own flames, and when I am driven I drive others.”

She let him speak on, knowing that to someone he must confess himself, and to whom if not to her? Again she felt the strange impulse to talk to this son about André. They were very close, she and this son who alone had shared the wisdom that André had brought into the house. Again she refused herself. But she allowed herself this much comfort. She said:

“I often consider and ponder what it was that tall priest brought into our house. We are a family so old it cannot be said we needed wisdom to live. We have continued as a family for hundreds of years, and our life goes on. He did not change us, and yet we are changed, you and I, and it is we who have brought change into the house. But what is this change?”

“We learned from him the right of the self to be,” Fengmo said.

“How well and easily you have put it,” she said. No one could have told from her voice at this moment that she felt André was here in this room, standing beside her son and looking at them both with ineffable love. She sat basking in his presence. He came so often to her alone, but never before had he come with another in the room.

“Had he lived,” she said to Fengmo, “I think he would have approved all that you do.”

“Do you think so?” Fengmo exclaimed. He sat up, and his pleasure in what she had said gave him new energy. “Mother, I am thinking of a new thing. What would you say if I persuaded the foreign hospital doctors to begin the teaching of country doctors, not too learned but able to cure the many usual diseases? Our people die so needlessly.”

He went on, his voice bright and eager and full of life, but she scarcely heard him. She was thinking of André. She saw his great beautiful hands. One of them, as so often it had been, was at the crucifix upon his breast. When his rosary broke, he had tied it to a cord. The crucifix now was broken too. When the ruffians had killed him, the crucifix had struck the stones where he fell. She had seen it so when she looked at him in his coffin.

“Good, my son, good,” she murmured. “Good — good—”

Only when he rose to hasten away, full of his new plans, did she remember what she had promised Liangmo. She put out her hand and laid hold of Fengmo’s arm. “Only remember this, my son — compel no one — not Liangmo, not Meng—”

“Oh, those two!” Fengmo cried. “I have given them up—”

He was gone and André was gone, too. She sat alone, smiling to herself.

The years have passed over Madame Wu. She never leaves her own gates. Yet somehow she knows enough and all of that which goes on. She is famed for her patient listening and her cool judgments, and many come to her for enlightenment. It is she who decides all great matters in city and country. It was she who decided, for example, what to do with the body of Little Sister Hsia when she died, one winter’s night, in her solitary house. The poor thin body of that one was brought to the Wu temple, and Madame Wu herself saw to the coffin and the burial. For Little Sister Hsia had separated herself even from her own kind. She had long quarreled with the other foreigners in the city, who were from another country, and when she died it was with no one in the house except her old cook, and he alone mourned her. It was he who came and told Madame Wu that he had found his mistress sitting upright in her chair, wrapped in her ragged quilt, her holy book open on her knee.

There beneath the gods of clay, and beneath the picture of André painted upon alabaster, Little Sister Hsia lay in her coffin. The temple children were gone except for the young girl named Love and she lit the candles. The old priest, now so old that he could scarcely totter, often let her help him with his duties, and the old nurse had a helper, for she could not walk easily any more.

Madame Wu had looked down at the bone-thin face of the woman who had left her own kind and kin, and tried to remember the prayer that Little Sister Hsia had used to say very often. But she could not remember it. She had forgotten it with all else she did not wish to remember. So she could only light a stick of incense in the pewter urn before the gods and ask Heaven to receive also this foreign soul. And Little Sister Hsia’s coffin was sealed and set in a niche in the temple until a lucky day, and then it was buried upon a hillside outside the city, and Madame Wu commanded that a stone be set up giving such few facts as she knew about her, so that if any kinfolk ever came to seek her, they could find her.

She would have held this very unlikely except that a strange thing happened.

After the end of the war, the whole countryside was in confusion and many men came from over the seas to mend and to meddle in this confusion. It did not touch the house of the Wu family. Their city remained remote as ever it had been from the troubled regions. But foreigners continued passing through for one reason or another, and one of the reasons was that Fengmo invited them. Whenever he heard the name of a man from the West, Fengmo invited him to come and advise him about the work he did, and the men came, for the work was becoming known everywhere with not a little praise for Fengmo.

These foreigners, of course, Madame Wu did not receive, for she did not know their language, and it was too difficult to converse with them. Moreover, she declared, “My life is complete. I do not need to add another to it.”

But one day Fengmo sent her special word that a man from across the ocean was come, and there was a reason why he wished to bring him to see her. She gave her consent to this, and a few hours afterward Fengmo came and with him was a tall foreign man, young and dark. Indeed, he was so dark that, after greetings, Madame Wu looked at him and then turned to Fengmo.

“Is this man a foreigner? His skin is so brown.”

“He is foreign,” Fengmo said, “but his ancestors, indeed his parents, came from Italy, which was the birthplace, Mother, of Brother André.”