Madame Wu did not answer. Where happiness could be found for Ch’iuming she did not know. Time must discover it.
From the central courts of the house Madame Wu considered the family as the days passed into weeks and months.
“Were I evil,” she thought one day, “I could be likened to a spider weaving my web around all these in our house.”
A bird sang in the bamboos. She heard its unfamiliar voice and knew what it was. Twice a year the brown bulbul from India passed this way. Its voice was tuneful but harsh. It marked the coming of spring, and that was all.
She mused on. “And how do I know that I am not evil? How do I know that what I consider good is truly good?”
As was her habit she put this question to her memory of André.
One day, she remembered very well, they had been sitting here in the library where she now sat, he on one side of the great carved table and she on the other, not opposite so that they had to look into each other’s faces, but with the table between and both facing the open doors into the court. It was a day as fine as this, the air exceedingly clear and the sunshine so strong that the colors in the stones that floored the court, usually gray, showed tints of blue and rose and veins of silver. Her orchids were blooming a dark purple. In the pool the goldfish darted and flung themselves against the sunbeams slanting into the water.
André had been telling her an ancient legend of the fall of man into evil. It came about, he said, by the hand of a woman, Eve, who gave man forbidden fruit.
“And how was this woman to know that the fruit was forbidden?” Madame Wu had inquired.
“An evil spirit, in the shape of a serpent, whispered it to her,” André had said.
“Why to her instead of to the man?” she had next inquired.
“Because he knew that her mind and her heart were fixed not upon the man, but upon the pursuance of life,” he had replied. “The man’s mind and heart were fixed upon himself. He was happy enough, dreaming that he possessed the woman and the garden. Why should he be tempted further? He had all. But the woman could always be tempted by the thought of a better garden, a larger space, more to possess, because she knew that out of her body would come many more beings, and for them she plotted and planned. The woman thought not of herself, but of the many whom she would create. For their sake she was tempted. For their sake she will always be tempted.”
She had looked at him. How well she remembered the profound and sad wisdom in his dark eyes! “How is it you know women so well?” she had asked.
“Because I live alone,” he had replied. “Early I freed myself.”
“And why did you free yourself?” she asked. “Why did you remove yourself from the stream of life? Do we not all belong in it? Can it be right for any to free himself from it?”
For the only time in the months she had known him she had seen him in doubt. “You have put the one question which I have never been able to answer,” he had replied. “I freed myself first out of vanity. Yes, that I know and acknowledge. When I was like other men, about to marry and beget children, I thought myself loved by a woman. But God gave me a sight into human beings too quick for my own happiness. I saw her like Eve, planning for other human beings whom she was to create — with some small help from me, of course, but which nevertheless she would make in her own body. And I saw my small part, so brief a satisfaction of the flesh, and all my life then spent in digging and delving, like Adam, in order that our garden might be bigger and the fruits more rich. So I asked myself if it was I she loved, and the answer was, perhaps — but only for the moment, because she needed to be served. So I said to myself, ‘Shall I not rather serve God, who asks nothing of me except that I do justly and walk humbly before him?’ On that day I became a priest.”
“And have you been happy?” she had asked him with a little malice.
“I have possessed myself,” he had replied. …
Now, alone in the library where nowadays she always sat because his presence was there, too, she pondered upon the man and the woman. The woman Eve, she considered, must not be blamed because into her had been put the endless desire to carry on life. The man left to himself would never go further than himself. He had made the woman a part of himself, for his own use and pleasure. But she, in all her ignorance and innocence, used him in her endless creation of more life. Both were tools, but only the woman knew she was a tool and gave herself up to life.
“Here,” she told André, “is the difference between man and woman, even between you and me.”
The air came in mild and soft as she sat alone, and no wind blew. A small blue-tailed lizard came out from the crevice between the brick wall and the stone floor, and lay basking in a bar of sunlight. She sat so still it thought her part of the room, and in its meager way it made merry, turning its flat head this way and that and frisking its bright tail. Its eyes were shining and empty. She did not move. It was good luck to have small harmless animals about a house. They felt the house eternal and made their home in it.
She mused on, motionless while the lizard played. Such, then, was the unhappiness that lay between men and women. Man believed in his own individual meaning, but woman knew that she meant nothing for herself, except as she fulfilled her place in creating more life. And because men loved women as part of themselves, and women never loved men except as part of what must be created, this was the struggle that made man forever dissatisfied. He could not possess the woman because she was already possessed by a force larger than his own desire.
Had she not created even him? Perhaps for that he never forgave her, but hated her and fought her secretly, and dominated her and oppressed her and kept her locked in houses and her feet bound and her waist tied, and forbade her wages and skills and learning, and widowed her when he was dead, and burned her sometimes to ashes, pretending that it was her faithfulness that did it.
Madame Wu laughed aloud at man and the lizard rushed into hiding.
Once, when André had sat in the chair across from hers, she had said to him, “Is man all man and is woman all woman? If so, they can never come together, since he lives for his own being and she lives for universal life, and these are opposite.”
André had answered gravely enough, “God gave us each a residue for our own; that is, a part simply human, and neither male nor female. It is called the soul. It is unchanging and unchangeable. It can comprehend also the brain and its functions.”
“But a woman’s brain is not the same as a man’s?” she had asked.
“It is the same only when it is freed from the needs of the flesh,” André had replied. “Thus a woman may use her brain only for her female duties, and a man may use his only in pursuing women for himself. But the brain is a tool, and it may be put to any use that the creature wishes. That I cut cabbages with a fine knife is not to say that I cannot use that knife to carve an image of the Son of Man. If the Son of Man is in my heart, and within the vision of my soul’s sight, then I will use my tool, the brain, to make him clear.”
“The soul, then, is a residue neither male nor female,” she had repeated.
“It is so,” André had replied.
“And what is the soul in its stuff?” she had pressed him on.
“It is that which we “do not inherit from any other creature,” he had said. “It is that which gave me my own self, which shapes me a little different from all those who came before me, however like to them I am. It is that which is given to me for my own, a gift from God.”
“And if I do not believe in God?” she had inquired.