And then she understood herself. If Jasmine really loved Mr. Wu, that love, too, must be allowed. Did Mr. Wu also love Jasmine? If so, then real happiness would be added to the house. All the unhappiness in homes came because there was not love.
“When I have rested,” she said to Ying, who came in dusting her hands, “I will go to the courts of my sons’ father.”
“Do, Lady,” Ying said. She looked more cheerful. “Perhaps you can persuade him to wisdom. We have already too many women in this house.”
“Are you to stay?” she had asked Jasmine while she led her away.
“I don’t know,” Jasmine had faltered. “She said she’d tell me tomorrow.”
“Our Lady always makes up her mind quickly,” Ying said. She did not finish what she thought, that if her mistress did not say “yes” today, it would be “no” tomorrow. She had put the girl outside the back gate and had drawn the iron bar.
“I go, Lady, and let him know,” she now said. The sparkle had come back into her impudent eyes. Madame Wu saw it, understood, and smiled.
Madame Wu woke to her usual full consciousness, her heart serene. All her life she had struggled for calmness and serenity. She had made herself a prisoner inside the confines of her will, imposed upon her body. Thus her will had commanded her body to behave in certain ways at certain times, regardless of its repulsions and desires. She felt now that she need never again compel herself to anything.
“André,” she said to herself, “it is strange, is it not, that you had to die before I knew you?”
“Not strange,” the answering thought came into her mind. “There was my big body between us. You had to look at a face and at features with which I really had nothing to do. They were simply given me haphazard by my ancestors, who actually were strangers to me. Even though I was willing to realize them as strangers and leave them, still I was held in their flesh. Now I am wholly myself.”
“André,” she said to him within her, “should I still call you brother, perhaps?”
“It is no longer necessary to qualify our relationship.” So he answered in her heart.
Madame Wu lay straight and exquisite in her bed. She was frightened by this conversation which was taking place entirely in her own mind. Skeptic that she was, she would have laughed at any supernatural appearance even of the one she loved. But there had been no appearance and no sound. The austere room was exactly as it had been when she closed her eyes to sleep. Simply within her brain she heard André’s voice answering her questions. It was perhaps no more than an obsession caused by his death and by her discovery that she loved him. To have comprehended within a handful of seconds that she loved a man who had just died was enough to shake Heaven and earth. It was not surprising that the brain doubled upon itself in its confusion. She recalled that André had told her how thought was driven along the cells which composed the brain stuff. Her recognition of him, crashing into those cells, must doubtless have disturbed all the previous thought lines of her life.
“I do not know what I shall be from now on,” she thought.
She listened for the answering voice. Instead she suddenly remembered how he looked when he smiled. She saw light welling up through the deep darkness of his eyes, and she smiled back at him.
Ying came into the room, looking alarmed. “The front court is full of the beggar children,” she said fretfully. “And the prostitute is sitting in the entrance hall again. She says you sent for her.”
Madame Wu laughed. “I feel I could eat a roll of wheat bread, this morning,” she remarked.
Ying stared at her. “You look changed, Lady. Your skin is rosy as a child’s. You are not feverish?”
She came to the side of the huge bed and took Madame Wu’s little hand and held it to her cheek.
“No fever,” Madame Wu said. “Nothing but health.”
She withdrew her hand gently and threw back the silken quilt. Then, rising, she allowed Ying to wash and dress her. But she refused the gray silk robe Ying had put out for her. Instead she chose one of an old-rose color which the day before her fortieth birthday she had laid aside, thinking she would never wear such hues again.
Today it was becoming to her as it had never been. The last time she had worn it she had thought it made her paleness sallow. But this morning it lent her color.
“It was wrong of me to have put it away,” she thought as she looked at herself in the mirror. Her natural vanity stirred. “A pity he never saw me in this,” she thought. She smiled at herself in the glass. She glanced at Ying, to see whether any of this had been seen. But Ying was folding the gray robe, sleeve to sleeve.
Madame Wu walked into the library. In common sense today she should have felt her life tangled with unsolved problems. Twenty children waited in the court, the young prostitute sat in the entrance hall, and Mr. Wu was more than ever a responsibility. There were the newborn girl and her mother, Ch’iuming, and her own sons and their wives. But she had none of her usual shrinking from human beings. She now realized that for the first time in her life she disliked no one. All her life she had struggled again her dislike of human beings. None had been wholly to her taste. Thus her mother she had disliked because of her ignorance and superstitions. Her father she had loved, or would have said she had, but she had disliked him, too, because his heart was far away and she could never come near him. And though Mr. Wu had been a handsome young man when she married him there were secrets of his person which she disliked. Even when she had shared his passion, she had been aware of shapes and odors, and she had felt violation in his touch even while she allowed it. Old Gentleman had been dear to her, but she was so delicately made that she could not forget what she disliked while she found what she liked. His heart was good, his intelligence clear, but his teeth were broken and his breath came foul.
“If André had been alive when I found I loved him, I wonder if I could have—”
Before she could frame the thought, another came to answer. “You see how wise is death! It removes the body of a man and lets free his spirit.”
“But if I were younger,” she reminded him, “could I have been satisfied only with your spirit?”
She looked down at the smooth gray tiles of the floor. Would it have been possible, when she was young, to have loved a foreign man? For of course André was a foreign man, a man from another country and of another blood. She tried to imagine him young and ardent as a man is ardent, and all her blood rose in strange anger.
“Don’t!” This cry burst into her mind.
“No, I will not,” she promised.
Ying came in with her breakfast and placed it upon the table in neat rows of dishes. Madame Wu took up her chopsticks.
“Have the children in the court been fed?” she asked.
“Certainly not, Lady,” Ying said sternly. “No orders have been given for so much food.”
“Then I give orders now,” Madame Wu said gently. “Let rice be cooked at once, and bread bought and tea made for their noon meal.”
“It is lucky it is not raining,” Ying said. “We should be put to it if we had to take such people under our roof.”
“There is room here for all,” Madame Wu said.
She was amazed to see Ying begin to cry and, with her blue coat to her eyes, run sobbing out of the room. “You are changed — you are changed,” she cried.
But at noon she had great buckets of rice set in the court, and when Madame Wu went there it was to see the little girls eating happily and feeding the younger ones by pushing rice into their open mouths. The old woman who had been their caretaker rose, her cheeks full of rice, and cried out to the children that they must greet Madame Wu as their mother.