“But we are not like them,” Rulan said with some heat.
“You are not,” Madame Wu agreed. “You wish friendship and companionship between your two individual selves. Ah, you ask very much of marriage, my child. Marriage was not designed for this extra burden.”
“What would we have done? Lived without marriage?” Rulan inquired without meaning rudeness.
“Perhaps — perhaps.” Madame Wu was surprised to hear herself say. “But that, too, is difficult, since you are man and woman and the body demands its own life.”
She paused, searching for words which were never in her before, and she found them. “You and Tsemo are very lucky. You love each other in all ways. Then love each other, my child! Life is too short for such love. Love one another and do not waste one hour in anger. Divide your love from your passion and let there be no confusion between the two. Some day, when the division is clear and established by habit, when your children are born and growing and your bodies are old, and passion gone, as, mercifully, it does go, you will know the best love of all.”
She was suddenly intensely lonely for André, and the knowledge that never again would she look upon his living face pierced her with an agony she had not yet felt. She closed her eyes and endured the pain. Then after a while she felt Rulan take her hand and press it to her cheeks. She felt one warm cheek and then the other. But still she did not open her eyes.
“And in secret the woman has to lead,” she said. “In secret the woman always has to lead, and she must, because life rests upon her, and upon her alone. I warn you, my son will be of no help to you in making your marriage happy.”
When she opened her eyes again the room was empty. Rulan had gone.
That night when Ying undressed her for bed Madame Wu spoke, after silence so long and deep that Ying had not dared to break it with her usual chatter. “Ying!”
“Yes, Mistress?” Ying looked into the mirror over Madame Wu’s head. She was brushing the long black silken hair that was only now beginning to show a few feathers of white at the temples. “I have a task for you.”
“Yes, Mistress?”
“In less than a month my second son will come home.”
“I know that, Mistress. We all know it.”
“This is the task. Every night when you have finished with me, you are to go to my second son’s wife and do for her what you used to do for me.”
Ying smiled into the mirror, but Madame Wu did not smile back. She went on, not meeting Ying’s eyes. “You are to forget nothing that I used to do — the fragrant bath, the scenting of the seven orifices, the smoothing with oil, the perfume in the hair.”
“I know, Lady.” Ying’s voice was warm and intimate. Then she stayed the brush. “What if she forbids me?” she asked. “That one cares nothing for her beauty.”
“She will not forbid you,” Madame Wu said. “She needs help, poor child, as all women need it. And she knows it now.”
“Yes, Mistress,” Ying said.
XIII
TSEMO CAME HOME ON the fifth day of the ninth moon month. The news of his coming was brought by electric letter to the city and by foot-messenger to the house of Wu, and Mr. Wu himself took the letter to Madame Wu. He did not often enter her courts now for any cause, and when she saw him she knew that it had to do with one of the sons. He held out the sheet of paper. “Our second son comes home,” he said with his wide smile. She took the letter and read it and turned it over and over in her hands. It was the first time she had ever seen an electric letter. She knew, because once André had explained it, that the paper itself was not blown over the wires as she had imagined it. Not even words were spoken. Symbols were beaten upon a machine, and by these the messages were carried.
“The drums of savages, beaten in the jungle,” she had remarked.
“Much that man does is only the refinement of savagery,” he had replied.
She recalled these words as she mused over the electric letter. “We must prepare a welcoming feast,” she said aloud.
“I shall invite all my friends,” Mr. Wu declared.
She proceeded to plan. “We ought also to give a secondary feast for the shop clerks and the farm workers.”
“Everything — everything,” he declared in his large lordly manner.
She looked at him from under her half-veiled eyes. He had returned to his old self. Jasmine had done him good. He was reassured of his own worth. His failure with herself, for in his own way he had been mortified that she had rejected him, and his failure with Ch’iuming had done him harm. He was the sort of man who had constantly to feel himself successful with his women. How well she knew, who had for so many years made his success her duty! But Ch’iuming was young and ignorant, and she had not understood these things, and Jasmine was, in the midst of all her falsity, sincere enough in this business by which she earned her rice and roof. Madame Wu felt her secret heart grow light, and also cool and scornful. She felt somewhat ashamed of such malice, although once she would have accepted it as her share of human nature.
“I am not a woman without sin,” she had once told André. “That is, if I am to accept your measure of sin — the secret thought, the hidden wish. Outer rectitude I can attain, but who can control the heart?”
“A few can also do it,” he had replied. “You are one of those few.”
She knew that if she were to continue near him she must attain the heights where he lived. He would not come down to her.
So now she spoke patiently with Mr. Wu, who was the father of her sons. “Let everything be as you wish.”
He leaned forward, his hands on his fat knees, smiling. He lowered his voice to speak to her in confidence. “It may be you do not know that Tsemo is my favorite son. For that reason I have always been disturbed that his wife is an angry woman. Tsemo should have married someone soft and reasonable.”
Madame Wu could not conceal all her barbs. “You mistake Tsemo somewhat,” she said. In her own ears she heard her voice too silvery sharp. “He is intelligent. Rulan is also intelligent. I find I think better of her as time goes on.”
Mr. Wu looked alarmed, as he always did at the mention of intelligence, and hastily he withdrew. “Well, well,” he said, in his usual voice, “I dare say you are right. Then will you arrange matters or shall I?”
“I will order what is to be within the house, and you shall invite the guests and decide the wines,” she said.
They bowed and parted, and she knew as he went away that what had been between them was only of the flesh. He was repulsive to her. Yet had they not fulfilled the very duty of which she had spoken to Rulan? They had carried on the family through their generation, they had fulfilled the instincts of their race, and they had freed themselves from each other when this was done. Now she knew that, even as André had discovered for her the residue of her individual self, Jasmine had done the same for Mr. Wu. No ties had been broken, the house continued as before, and their position in it was the same. She felt the wisdom of bringing Jasmine under the roof, this roof wide enough for all of the least of the house of Wu. The supreme sin of giving birth to a nameless and illegitimate child would not be theirs. Jasmine’s children would have their place in the human order.
She felt peace upon her as she proceeded to the day’s duty. She had no time today for herself. She sent for cook and steward and head-waiter, she sent for the cleaning maids and the seamstresses. The children’s clothes must be inspected, and those who needed new garments must have them made. Yenmo, her youngest son, must come in from the country.
“It is time,” she told the land steward, “that my fourth son return to the home. Affairs are now clear in the family.”