The color washed out of Rulan’s ruddy face. “Mother, do you know what you do?”
“I think I know what I do,” Madame Wu said.
“People will laugh at us,” Rulan said. “It’s old-fashioned to take a concubine.”
“For Shanghai people, perhaps,” Madame Wu said, and her voice conveyed to Rulan that it did not matter at all what Shanghai people thought.
Rulan stared at her in stubborn despair. This cool woman who was her husband’s mother was so beautiful, so perfect, that she was beyond the reach of all anger, all reproach. She knew long ago that against her she could never prevail with Tsemo. His mother’s hold upon him was so absolute that he did not even rebel against it. He was convinced that whatever his mother did was finally for his own good. Today when the women were storming against the idea of the new woman and Liangmo had only been silent, Tsemo had shrugged his shoulders. He was playing chess with Yenmo, his younger brother.
“If our mother wants a concubine,” he said, “it is for a reason, for she never acts without reason. Yenmo, it is your turn.”
Yenmo played without heeding the turmoil. Of all his brothers he loved Tsemo best, for he played with him every day. Without him Yenmo would have been lonely in this house full of women and children.
“Reason!” Rulan had cried with contempt.
“Guard your tongue,” Tsemo had said sternly, not lifting his eyes from the chessboard.
She had not dared disobey him. Though he was younger than she, he had something of his mother’s calm, and this gave him power over her storm and passion. But she had secretly made up her mind to come alone to Madame Wu.
She clenched her hands on her knees and gazed at her. “Mother, it is now actually against the laws for a man to take a concubine, do you know that?”
“What laws?” Madame Wu asked.
“The new laws,” Rulan cried, “the laws of the Revolutionary party!”
“These laws,” Madame Wu said, “like the new Constitution, are still entirely on paper.”
She saw that Rulan was taken aback by her use of the word Constitution. She had not expected Madame Wu to know about the Constitution.
“Many of us worked hard to abolish concubinage,” she declared. “We marched in procession in the Shanghai streets in hottest summer, and our sweat poured down our bodies. We carried banners insisting on the one-wife system of marriage as they have it in the West. I myself carried a blue banner that bore in white letters the words, ‘Down with concubines.’ Now when someone in my own family, my own husband’s mother, does a thing so old-fashioned, so — so wicked — for it is wicked, Mother, to return to the old cruel ways—”
“My child,” Madame Wu asked in her sweet reasonable voice, “what would you do if Tsemo one day should want another wife, someone, say, less full of energy and wit than you are, someone soft and comfortable?”
“I would divorce him at once,” Rulan said proudly. “I would not share him with any other woman.”
Madame Wu lit her little pipe again and took two more puffs. “A man’s life is made up of many parts,” she said. “As a woman grows older she perceives this.”
“I believe in the equality of man and woman,” Rulan insisted.
“Ah,” Madame Wu said, “two equals are nevertheless not the same two things. They are equal in importance, equally necessary to life, but not the same,”
“That is not what we think nowadays,” Rulan said. “If a woman is content with one man, a man should be content with one woman.”
Madame Wu put down her pipe. “You are so young,” she said reflectively, “that I wonder how I can explain it. You see, my child, content is the important thing — the content of a man, the content of a woman. When one reaches the measure of content, shall that one say to the other, ‘Here you must stop because I am now content?’ ”
“But Liangmo told us our father does not want another one,” Rulan said doggedly.
Madame Wu thought, “Ah, Liangmo has been talking to his father today!” She felt a moment’s pity for her husband, at the mercy of his sons for no fault of his own.
“When you have lived with a man for twenty-five years as his wife,” she said gently, “you have lived with him to the end of all knowledge.”
She sighed and suddenly wished this young woman away. And yet she liked her better than she ever had before. It took courage to come here alone, to speak these blunt, brave, foolish words.
“Child,” she said, leaning toward Rulan, “I think Heaven is kind to women, after all. One could not keep bearing children forever. So Heaven in its mercy says when a woman is forty, ‘Now, poor soul and body, the rest of your life you shall have for yourself. You have divided yourself again and again, and now take what is left and make yourself whole again, so that life may be good to you for yourself, not only for what you give but for what you get.’ I will spend the rest of my life assembling my own mind and my own soul. I will take care of my body carefully, not that it may any more please a man, but because it houses me and therefore I am dependent upon it.”
“Do you hate us all?” the girl asked. Her eyes opened wide, and Madame Wu saw for the first time that they were very handsome eyes.
“I love you all more than ever,” Madame Wu said.
“Our father, too?” the girl inquired.
“Him, too,” Madame Wu said. “Else why would I so eagerly want his happiness?”
“I do not understand you,” the girl said after a moment. “I think I do not know what you mean.”
“Ah, you are so far from my age,” Madame Wu replied. “Be patient with me, child, for knowing what I want.”
“You really are doing what you want to do?” Rulan asked doubtfully.
“Really, I am,” Madame Wu replied tenderly.
Rulan rose. “I shall have to go back and tell them,” she said. “But I do not think any one of them will understand.”
“Tell them all to be patient with me,” Madame Wu said, smiling at her.
“Well, if you are sure—” Rulan said, still hesitating.
“Quite sure,” Madame Wu said.
She was glad once more of the loneliness and the silence when Rulan had gone. She smiled a little to think of the family gathered together without her, all in consternation, all wondering what to do, because for the first time in their knowledge of her she had done something for herself alone. But as she smiled she felt full of peace. Without waiting for Ying, since she was two hours before her usual time for bed, she bathed and put on her white silk night garments and lay down in the huge dark-curtained old bed. When Ying came in an hour later she was frightened at the silence and ran to the bedroom. There behind the undrawn bed curtains she saw her mistress lying small and still upon the bed. She ran forward, terror in her heart, to gaze upon that motionless figure.
“Oh, Heaven,” Ying moaned, “Our Lady is dead!”
But Madame Wu was not dead, only sleeping, although Ying had never seen her sleep like this. Even her outcry did not wake the sleeping lady. “She whom the flutter of a bird in the eaves wakes at dawn!” Ying marveled. She stood for a moment looking down on the pure beauty of Madame Wu’s face, then she stepped back and drew the heavy curtains.
“She is tired to the heart,” Ying muttered. “She is tired because in this great house all feed on her, like suckling children.”
She paused at the door of the court and looked fiercely right and left. But no one was coming, and certainly not Mr. Wu.
In Liangmo’s court the two elder sons and their wives talked together until the water clock had passed the first half of the night. The two young husbands were silent for the most part. They felt confused and shy for their father’s sake. He, too, was a man, as they were now. When they were in their middle years, would it be so with themselves and their wives? They doubted themselves and hid their doubt.