Pearl Buck - Pavilion of Women

How Madame Wu’s heart now stirred! She forgot that she could speak no language but her own, and she leaned forward, her hands on the silver head of her cane, and she asked the young man, “Did you know the foreign priest?”

Fengmo stepped in quickly to translate, and then Madame Wu and the young man spoke through him thus:

“I did not know him,” the young man said, “but my father and mother have told me of him, Madame. He was my uncle.”

“Your uncle!” Madame Wu repeated. “You are his flesh and blood!”

She gazed at the dark young man and found one resemblance and then another. Yes, here were the dark eyes of André, but not so wide. Yes, here was André’s shape of skull, and the hands. She looked at the young man’s hands, more slender than André’s but with the shape she knew. All was more slender and smaller than André, and the look in the eyes was not at all André’s. The soul was not the same.

She sighed and drew back. No, the soul was not the same.

“You came here to find your uncle?” she inquired.

“I did,” the young man answered. “My parents knew where he was, although he never wrote to any of us in his later years. When I passed near here I said I would come and see if he still lived and write home to my father.”

“He is buried in our land,” Madame Wu said. “My son will take you to his grave.”

They sat for a moment in silence. Madame Wu struggled with a strange jealousy. She closed her eyes and saw André’s face against the velvet inner dark. “You,” she said to him, “you belong only to us.”

She opened her eyes and saw his nephew sitting there before her. Ah, André had family and kin, foreign and far away!

The young man smiled. “I suppose you know, Madame, why he lived so far away from all of us and why he never wrote any letters?”

Fengmo answered for her. “We never knew.”

“He was a heretic,” the young man said solemnly. “The church cast him out as a renegade — homeless, without support. We never heard from him afterward. He sent back money we sent him — he refused to come home.”

“But he did no evil,” Fengmo exclaimed in horror.

“It was not what he did,” the young man declared. “It was what he thought. He thought it was men and women who were the divine. It seems hard to think this a sin, in our generation. But it was a great sin in his day. He felt compelled to write a letter to his Cardinal and tell him. In the last letter he wrote my father he told the whole story. We didn’t know what he meant. My mother said she guessed he was crazy from living too long alone.”

All this Fengmo translated for Madame Wu, and she listened and said not a word. They had rejected him — his own people!

She closed her eyes. “But we did not reject you,” she told him in her heart.

She sat thus for a moment silent, her eyes closed, and the two young men stared at her. Fengmo moved, anxious because she sat so long, and she opened her eyes.

“Tell this young foreigner that it is a very long way to that grave,” she said. “Tell him the road is rough and narrow. When he gets there it is only the grave, nothing more.”

The young man listened. “If it is as far as that, I had better not go,” he exclaimed. “I have to get back in time to catch the boat. After all, as you say, it is only a grave.”

They went away, after farewells, and Madame Wu was glad to see them gone. She had need to be alone that she might comprehend to the full the knowledge she now had of André. All those years he had lived here, solitary!

“But not solitary,” she thought. There were the children he had found and the beggars he had fed.

And she herself — how had she opened her gates and let him in? She would never know. He had been led to her, and she had opened her gates and he had come in, and with him he had brought to her eternal life.

Yes, she now believed that when her body died, her soul would go on. Gods she did not worship, and faith she had none, but love she had and forever. Love alone had awakened her sleeping soul and had made it deathless.

She knew she was immortal.