“Heat bricks and bring them here,” Madame Kang said. “This child is a bud that must be carefully opened.”
“Oh, Mistress,” the woman said, “why not let her die? A girl — and what can she grow into but a sickly thing to make trouble in the house?”
“Obey me,” Madame Wu said.
The woman went muttering away and Madame Wu looked at the little creature. She was still breathing.
Two days later Brother André told Madame Wu of Ch’iuming’s strange request. The child had not died. She could not suckle, being too young, but she had swallowed a few drops of mother’s milk put into her mouth with a spoon. Ch’iuming’s milk had come, although she was too weak to speak. Even when Madame Wu told her that the child was alive, she had not answered.
“Certainly the child is not a foundling,” Madame Wu said to Brother André, with dignity. “She has been born into our house.”
“I knew you would say that,” he replied, “and you are right. But why does this young mother say she is a foundling?”
“She was, until she came here,” Madame Wu replied. She hesitated, and then to her own wonder she found herself telling Brother André what she had never told him, how it was she who had brought Ch’iuming into this house.
Brother André listened, his eyes downcast, his great hands clasped on his knees. She never saw those hands without wondering why they were so calloused. Now she asked suddenly, “Why are your hands so calloused?”
He was accustomed to her changes. “Because I till the land for the children’s food,” he said. He did not move his hands from under her gaze.
She went on with her story, her eyes on his hands.
“I suppose since you are a priest, you cannot understand either man or woman,” she said when her whole story was told.
“Being priest, I can understand both man and woman,” he said.
“Then tell me what I have done that is wrong.” She lifted her eyes from his hands to his face and wondered that out of all the world she had chosen to open her entire heart to a foreigner who had been born in some country across the sea whose waters and winds she would never know.
He answered her: “You have not considered that man is not entirely flesh, and that even such a man as your husband must be in communion with God. You have treated him with contempt.”
“I?” she exclaimed. “But I have thought of nothing but his welfare.”
“You have considered only the filling of his stomach and the softness of his bed,” Brother André said plainly. “And even worse than this, you have bought a young woman as you would buy a pound of pork. But a woman, any woman, is more than that, and of all women you should know it; You have been guilty of three sins.”
“Guilty?” she repeated.
“You have despised your husband, you have held in contempt a sister woman, and you have considered yourself unique and above all women. These sins have disturbed your house. Without knowing why, your sons have been restless and their wives unhappy, and in spite of your plans no one is happy. What has been your purpose, Madame?”
Confronted by his clear calm eyes, she trembled. “Only to be free,” she faltered. “I thought, if I did my duty to everyone, I could be free.”
“What do you mean by freedom?” he inquired.
“Very little,” she said humbly. “Simply to be mistress of my own person and my own time.”
“You ask a great deal for yourself,” he replied. “You ask everything.”
She felt nearer to tears than she had felt in many years. He had shattered the calm core of her being, her sense of rightness in herself, and she was frightened. If in this house she, upon whom all had so long depended, had been wrong and was wrong, then what would happen to them all?
“What shall I do?” she asked in a small voice.
“Forget your own self,” he said.
“But all these years,” she urged, “I have so carefully fulfilled my duty.”
“Always with the thought of your own freedom in your mind,” he said.
She could not deny it. She sat motionless, her hands folded on the pearl-gray satin of her robe. “Direct me,” she said at last.
“Instead of your own freedom, think how you can free others,” he said gently.
She lifted her head.
“From yourself,” he said still gently.
She had never been a religious woman, and now she looked at him in some doubt. “Are you speaking out of your foreign religion? If so, I cannot understand it.”
“I am not speaking out of a foreign religion,” he said.
“Do you want me to be a nun?” she exclaimed.
“I do not want you to be anything,” he replied tranquilly.
He rose to his great height, smiled down at her according to his habit, and went away without farewell. This, which in another would have seemed rudeness, simply gave to Madame Wu the feeling that there was no break between this time they had spent together and the next time, whenever that would be.
She did not move for a long moment. Upon the gray tiled floor the pattern of the latticed windows was fixed in a lacework of shadows and sunshine. The air was still and cool, but the room was not cold. A great brazier of coals stood in front of the table set against the center of the inner wall, and out of the coals, smothered with ashes, colorless quivering rays of heat shone in the air. Nothing, she reflected, was as easy as she had thought. Freedom was not a matter of arrangement. She had seen freedom hanging like a peach upon a tree. She had nurtured the tree, and when it bore she had seized upon the fruit and found it green.
She sighed, and then she heard Ch’iuming’s little child cry in the next room, and she went to it and took it into her arms and carried it into the room and sat down by the brazier. Whether it was the warmth or whether it was the feeling of support of her arms, some comfort came into the child, and she ceased crying and lay looking up into Madame Wu’s face.
“I do not love this child,” Madame Wu thought. “Perhaps I have never loved any child. Perhaps that is my trouble, that I have never been able to love anyone.”
But it was like her that without love she held the child carefully, and when Ying came in and took her she superintended her feeding again and was even pleased that the child ate her food heartily.
Watching this, she said to Ying, “Give me back the child and I will take her to her mother. She will live, this small woman, and she will hold her mother to life.”
So a little later she carried the child in her own arms through the sunshine and into her old courts and into the room where Ch’iuming lay on the big bed whose curtains were still hung with the symbols of fecundity. Ch’iuming lay with her eyes closed and her lips pressed together. She was intensely pale. Upon the silk coverlet, her hands lay open and relaxed. These hands had changed in the past months. When she came they had been rough and strong with work, but now they were thin and white.
“Here is your child,” Madame Wu said gently. “She has eaten so well that she is strong enough to come and lie on your arm.”
When Ch’iuming did not move, Madame Wu lifted her arm and put the child into its circle and covered it with the quilt. Ch’iuming’s arm tightened. She opened her eyes. “You must forgive me that I did not repay you with a son,” she said humbly.
“Do I not know that sons and daughters alike come from Heaven?” Madame Wu replied. “Besides, in these days daughters, too, are good.”
Then she remembered what Brother André said, and she went on quickly, “You must not feel that you have a duty to me. You have none.”
Ch’iuming looked surprised at this. “But why else am I here?” she asked.
Madame Wu sat down on the edge of the bed. “It has been shown me that I did you a great wrong, my sister. It is true that you were brought here as I might have bought a pound of pork. How could I dare so to behave toward a human being? I see now that I had no thought for your soul. What can I do to make amends?”