She was amazed to perceive that she did not feel at all strange with Mr. Wu. Certainly she could not possibly have explained to him how she felt concerning André. He would have held her beside herself — a foreigner? A priest? A dead man?
She followed Mr. Wu into the main room, where the sunlight lay in a great square upon the tiles beside the open door. She felt toward him exactly as she always had. At this thought pity for Mr. Wu stirred her vitals. It was a piteous thing for him that she had not been able to love him. She had deprived this man of the fullness of life. Nothing that she had given him, neither her body nor her sons, could be reward enough for her unloving heart. Her only excuse was that she and Mr. Wu had been given to each other, without the will of either, and she had done the best she could. But had she chosen him of her own free will, she could not have forgiven herself. Nothing could recompense a man for the lack of love in the woman who was his wife.
“Therefore somehow I must now give him love,” she thought.
“I have just spoken to the girl Jasmine,” she said calmly. She seated herself to the left of the table against the center wall of the room, and he took his usual seat at the right. So they had been wont to sit together through the evenings of their marriage, while they talked of the affairs in this house which belonged to them both.
Mr. Wu busied himself with his pipe. She saw with her peculiar discernment that he was afraid of her. In other days this knowledge would have amused her. She had not disliked the fear that others had for her, accepting it as the due of her superiority. But now she was sad to see the furtive turning of his eyes and the slight tremble of his plump hands. Where there was fear, no love could be. André had never feared her, nor did she fear him. She understood, with a strange pang that held no pain, that Mr. Wu had never really loved her, either, else he would not now be afraid of her.
“Tell me how you feel toward this girl,” she said to Mr. Wu.
At the gentleness of her voice he looked at her across the table, and she caught in his eyes a sort of shyness that she had never known was in him. “I know how this girl appears to you,” he said. “Of course she is inferior in every way. I can see that also. But I feel very sorry for her. What opportunity has she had, after all? The story of her life is a sad one, poor child!”
“Tell me the story of her life,” Madame Wu said gently.
The great house was so still that only the two of them might have been in it. The walls were thick, and court led to court. In this wide room the heavy tables and chairs stood as they had stood for centuries, and they two human beings were only two in the long chain of men and women who had lived under the huge beams upholding the vast roof. But something new was here now. The order of the old life was broken.
“Yes, certainly she is nothing unusual, this girl Jasmine.” Mr. Wu went on apologetically.
“If she has won your love,” Madame Wu said with her strange new gentleness, “then she is unusual.”
Mr. Wu looked startled. “Are you feeling well, Mother of my sons?” he inquired. “Your voice sounds weaker than I remembered.”
“I never felt stronger in my life,” Madame Wu replied. “Tell me more about this girl whom you love.”
Mr. Wu hesitated. “I am not sure I love her,” he said. “That is, I do not feel toward her at all as I have ever felt toward you. I have no respect for her as I have for you. I do not admire her. She has no learning. I would not ask her advice about anything.”
He felt more at ease when he saw Madame Wu’s face warmer than usual, and her eyes encouraging. She was not at all angry. “Your common sense is superb,” he said. “Shall I go on?”
“Please do, Father of my sons. Tell me how she affects you. Then perhaps I can help you to know whether you truly love her.”
“Why are you interested?” he asked.
“Put it that I feel I did you wrong in arranging for Ch’iuming’s coming,” she said.
“You meant well,” he said courteously.
“I acted selfishly,” she said, more gently still.
It was the first time she had ever acknowledged herself wrong in anything she did, and he was much moved.
“There remains no one like you,” he told her with some of his old impetuosity. “I still say that had it not been for your fortieth birthday I would not have known there was another woman in the world.”
She smiled again. “Alas, for women the choice is only between this fortieth birthday — or death.” Had she loved him, she would have chosen death rather than Jasmine in this house.
“Do not mention death,” he said, still courteously. “Well, you ask me how this girl affects me. You know — she makes me feel strong. Yes, that is the effect she has on me.”
“Strong?” Madame Wu repeated.
“She is so little, so ignorant, so weak,” Mr. Wu said. A thick soft smile crept about his lips. “No one has ever taken proper care of her. Really, she is a child. She has had no shelter. No one has ever truly understood her. She seems simple and ordinary, but there are qualities in her heart. She is not, you understand, a creature of high intelligence. But she has deep emotions. She needs constant guidance.”
Madame Wu listened to this with amazement. Never in her life had she heard Mr. Wu speak of anything except his own needs and desires.
“You really love her!” she exclaimed.
There was admiration in her voice, and Mr. Wu responded to it proudly and modestly. “If what I have told you is love, then I do love her,” he replied.
They had never been so near to each other as they now were. She had not known that he had this heart in him. He was made new, too. This perception filled her with astonishment. It was not a wonder that a man like André should have wakened love in her. But that this Jasmine, this common, rosy little street girl, this creature of ignorance and earthy innocence, should have roused in Mr. Wu something of the same energy was a miracle.
“You do not mind?” Mr. Wu said. His face, turned toward her, was tender and pleading.
“I rejoice,” she said quickly.
They rose at the same instant and met in the middle of the sunlight upon the floor. Her warmth rushed out to him, and his replied. He seized her hands, and for that swift moment they were one, his eyes looking into hers. She longed to tell him why she rejoiced, and why they were so near. She longed for him to know that she understood this miracle in him that was love, whether it came through a great man or through a girl from a brothel. Priest or prostitute, the miracle was the same. It had reached her, hidden in her secret courts, and it had reached him in a flower house and had changed them both. But she knew that she could never make him understand the miracle. She must only help to make it complete for him.
“There is no woman on earth like you,” he said.
“Perhaps there is not,” she agreed, and gently she withdrew her hands from his.
It was at this moment that Ying came upon them. According to her usual habit, she had first peeped around the corner of the door to see what they were doing. She was amazed and then delighted to see them holding hands. Surely this meant reconciliation and that the girl from the brothel would be sent away! She stepped back and coughed, and then appeared again with her urgent message.
“Lady, a man has come running at the gate to say that Madame Kang is in labor and it goes badly with her and Mr. Kang asks your immediate presence as her sister-friend.”
Madame Wu rose at once from her chair, to which she had returned at the cough. “Oh, Heaven,” she murmured, “is it so! Did the man say what the trouble is?”
“The child refuses to be born,” Ying said dolefully. “It will not leave the womb.”
“I must go at once,” Madame Wu exclaimed. She made haste to the door and there stopped for an instant to speak again to Mr. Wu. “And you, Father of my sons, let down your heart and be at ease. The young girl shall come quietly into your court. I will myself silence all tongues. I ask only one thing — that Ch’iuming be allowed to leave.”