Thus the next day when Ying brought her the little girl to whom Ch’iuming had given birth, she felt a great tenderness for the child. Through this child she had knit Ch’iuming, a stranger, into the house of Wu. Whereas before she had felt this child a new burden, and the whole matter of Ch’iuming nothing but a perplexity, now she felt that there was no burden and no perplexity. She must deal with both mother and child as André would have her do.
“Where is Ch’iuming?” she asked Ying.
“She busies herself about the kitchen and the gardens,” Ying said.
“Is she happy?” Madame Wu asked.
“That one cannot be happy,” Ying replied. “We ought to send her away. It is bad luck to have a sad face everywhere. It curdles the milk in the breasts of the wet nurses and it makes the children fretful.”
“Let Ch’iuming come here to me,” Madame Wu said.
This was the next morning after she had been to Madame Kang’s. As soon as she had risen, she had sent a messenger to ask how her friend did, and good news had come back. Madame Kang had slept well through the night, the blood in her wounds had clotted without fresh flow, and this morning she had eaten a bowl of rice gruel mixed with red sugar. Now she slept again.
The day was still and gray. Yesterday’s sunshine was gone, and the smell of mist from the river was in the air. Madame Wu sniffed it delicately into her nostrils.
Near her in a basket bed the little girl lay playing with her hands. She lost them every now and again, and a look of surprise came over her tiny face. Then she saw them again as she waved them, and she stared at them and lost them again. Watching this play, Madame Wu laughed gently.
“How small are our beginnings,” she thought. “So I once lay in a cradle — and André also.” She tried to imagine André a child, a little child, and she wondered about his mother. Doubtless the mother knew from the first what her son was, a man who blessed others through his life.
Out of the gray and silent morning Ch’iuming came slipping between the great doors that were closed against the coldness. Madame Wu looked up as she came in. The girl looked a part of the morning mist, all gray and still and cold. Her pale face was closed, and her lips were pale and her eyelids pale and heavy over her dark eyes.
“Look at this child of yours,” Madame Wu said. “She is making me laugh because she loses her hands and finds them and loses them again.”
Ch’iuming came and stood beside the cradle and looked down, and Madame Wu saw she did not love the child. She was alien to her.
Had it been another day, another time, Madame Wu would have refused to speak of it, or she would have turned her head away, declaring to herself that it was not her affair whether this ignorant girl loved the child. But now she asked, “Can it be you do not love your own child?”
“I cannot feel her mine,” Ch’iuming answered.
“Yet you gave birth to her,” Madame Wu said.
“It was against my will,” Ch’iuming said.
The two women were silent, and each watched the unknowing child. In other days Madame Wu would have reproached the mother for not loving the child, but love was teaching her while she sat silent.
Once, André had told her, there had been a child born of a young mother and an unknown father, and there had been such a radiance about that child that men and women still worshiped him as a god because he was born of love.
“And why was the father unknown?” she had asked.
“Because the mother never spoke his name,” André had replied.
“Who cared for and fed them?” she had asked.
“A good man, named Joseph, who worshiped them both and asked nothing for himself.”
“And what became of the radiant child?” she had asked.
“He died a young man, but other men have never forgotten him,” André had replied.
Remembering what he had said, she felt herself illumined. Why did Ch’iuming not love this child, except that she did not love the father, Mr. Wu? And how did she know she did not love Mr. Wu except that she knew one whom she did love?
“Whom do you love?” she asked Ch’iuming suddenly.
She was not surprised to see the young woman’s face flush a bright red. Even her small ears grew red.
“I love no one,” she said and lied so plainly that Madame Wu laughed.
“Now how can I believe you?” she said. “Your cheeks and your very ears tell the truth. Are you afraid to let your lips speak it, too? You do not love this child — that means you do not love the father. Well, let that be. Love cannot be forced, love cannot be coaxed and teased. It comes out of Heaven, unasked and unsought. Shall I blame you for that? I know my wrong that I did. But when I brought you here, I myself did not understand love. I thought men and women could be mated like male and female in the beasts. Now I know that men and women hate each other when they are mated only as beasts. For we are not beasts. We can unite ourselves without a touch of the hands, or a look of the eyes. We can love even when the flesh is dead. It is not the flesh that binds us together.”
This was such strange talk, so monstrous from Madame Wu, whose words were always plain and practical, that Ch’iuming could only look at her as though she looked at a ghost. But Madame Wu assuredly was no ghost. Her eyes were bright and her whole frame vigorous in spite of its delicacy. She had a new life of some sort, Ch’iuming could see.
“Come,” Madame Wu said, “tell me the name in your heart.”
“I die of shame,” Ch’iuming said. She folded the edge of her coat between her thumb and finger.
“I will not let you die of shame,” Madame Wu said kindly.
Thus persuaded, and with much hesitating and doubtfulness, Ch’iuming spoke a few words at a time. “You gave me — as concubine to the old one — but—” Here she stopped.
“But there is someone else to whom you would rather have been given.” Madame Wu helped her so far, and Ch’iuming nodded.
“Is he in this house?” Madame Wu asked.
Ch’iuming nodded again.
“Is he one of my sons?” Madame Wu asked.
This time Ch’iuming looked up at her and began to weep. “It is Fengmo,” Madame Wu said and knew it was, and Ch’iuming went on weeping.
What a tangle was here, what a confusion between men and women, Madame Wu told herself. This was all the fruit of her own stupidity, without love!
“Do not weep any more,” she said to Ch’iuming. “This is all my sin, and I must make amends somehow. But it is not clear to me yet what must be done.”
At this Ch’iuming fell on her knees and put her head on her hands on the floor. “I said I should die of shame,” she murmured. “Let me die. There is no use for a creature like me.”
“There is use for every creature,” Madame Wu replied and lifted Ch’iuming up. “I am glad you told me,” she went on. “It is well for me to know. Now I beg you, wait patiently here in this house. Light will be given me, and I shall know what I ought to do for you. In the meantime, help me to care for the foundlings that I have taken. It will be of great use to me if you will care for them for me. They are here, and I have not enough time to look after them.”
At the mention of them Ch’iuming wiped her eyes, “I will tend the foundlings, Lady,” she said. “Why not? They are sisters of mine.” She stooped and lifted her child out of the cradle. “I will take this child with me — she is a foundling, too — orphan, I suppose, since her mother cannnot love her, poor toad.”