And in Fengmo’s court she did not pause. Fengmo was a man. He had disciplined himself as only a full-grown man could do. He had not yielded up his soul. Upon this comfort her mind drifted toward sleep, like an empty boat upon a moonlit sea.
“Now my English books,” Fengmo commanded.
Linyi ran to fetch them out of the box. There were two armfuls of them. “How many you have!” she exclaimed.
“Only my best ones,” he said carelessly. “I have boxes yet to come.”
He knelt by the bookshelves against the wall and fitted in the books as she brought them. Outwardly calm, his face constantly smiling, inwardly he was deep in turmoil and pain. He felt now that he could never sleep again, and he was feverish to settle his things, to put all his possessions into their places, to put his traveling bags out of sight, not to be used again.
“Must you put everything away tonight?” Linyi asked.
“I must,” he replied. “I want to know that I have come home to stay.”
She was happy to have these words said, and too young to dream why it was he said them without looking at her. Indeed, when he said them he saw a face very different from hers. He saw Margaret’s face, blue eyes, brown hair, and the skin so white and smooth that he would never forget the touch of it. Would he ever be sorry that he had done what he did that day in the forest across the sea? For he had forced himself to let her go as soon as he had taken her in his arms.
“I can’t go on,” he had said.
She had not spoken. She had stood, her blue eyes fixed on him. There was something strange and wonderful about blue eyes. They could not hide what was behind them. Black eyes were curtains drawn down, but blue eyes were open windows.
“I am married,” he had told her bluntly. “My wife waits for me at home.”
She knew something about Chinese marriages. “Was she your own choice or did your family arrange it?”
He had waited a long time to answer. They sat down under the pine tree. He had hugged his knees in his arms and hid his forehead on his hunched knees, thinking, feeling for the truth. It would have been easy, and partly true, to say, “I did not choose her.” But when he prepared to say these words, Brother André came into his mind.
“To lie is a sin,” Brother André had taught him simply, “but it is not a sin against God so much as a sin against yourself. Anything built upon the foundation of a lie crumbles. The lie deceives no one so much as the one who tells it.”
He had not dared to lie to her, lest some final day the structure of their love crumble between their hands, and their love be buried in reproach.
“I was not forced to marry,” he said. “Let us say — I chose.”
She had sat motionless after that, listening to him, while he tried to explain to her what marriage meant in his family.
“With us marriage is a duty not to love or to ourselves, but to our place in the generations. I know that my mother has never loved my father, but she has done her duty to the family. She has been a good wife and mother. But when she was forty years old she retired from wifehood and chose another for my father. This grieved us, and yet we all knew the justice of it. Now she is free to pursue her own happiness, still within the house, and around her we all stand to support her and do her honor. I have my duty, too, in the family.”
He knew in some strange distant fashion that he was wounding Margaret to the soul.
“I want to marry for love,” she said.
Had he been free, not only of Linyi but of all the generations of Wu in the centuries gone and all the generations of Wu yet to come, he would have said to her, “Then let us marry each other. I will send Linyi away.”
But he was not free. The hands of his ancestors were fastened on him, and the hands of his sons and grandsons not yet born beckoned to him. He owed her further honesty.
“I know myself,” he went on. He lifted his eyes not to hers but to the landscape before them, to the river, its ships and harbor, and to the span of a great bridge between the banks.
“I know that I am made, not only by Heaven, but also by my family whose roots are in legend, and I cannot live for myself alone. My body was given to me — it does not belong to me. Something in me is my own, that is true, and that something — call it soul if you wish — is my own possession and I can give it to you because I love you. But if I were to give my body, which is not mine, I should be robbing the generations.”
“You are wrong — you are wrong!” she had cried. “Love and marriage can be the same.”
“Sometimes,” he admitted, “but only by the accident of Heaven. Sometimes even among my own people a man, lifting the bridal veil from his unknown wife’s face on their wedding night, beholds the one among all whom he would have chosen, had he been free to choose. But it is the accident of Heaven.”
“Here we always marry for love,” she had insisted proudly.
He had been aware of distance growing between them. “No, you do not,” he had answered. He would tell the truth though it killed them both. “You marry as we do, to preserve your species, but you deceive yourselves and call it love. You demand the personal fulfillment, even though you deceive yourselves. You worship the idea of love. But we are the truthful ones. We believe that all must marry, men and women alike. That is our common duty to life. If love comes, it is added grace from Heaven. But love is not necessary for life.”
“It is to me,” she had said in a low voice.
He had gone on, not answering this, “Content is necessary, but content comes when duty is done and expectations fulfilled — not the personal expectations of love, but the expectations of family and children, home and one’s place in the generations.”
He was speaking out of his deepest being, and as he spoke he felt that Brother André approved. He knew that this approval was not because of what he said, but because he spoke from the truth of his being.
How long had that silence been that fell between them! He did not break it. He had allowed it to grow and swell, an ocean in depth and distance.
She broke it by putting out her hand. “Then it’s good-by for us, isn’t it?”
He had held her hand for a long moment, and put his other hand over hers. “It is good-by,” he had agreed, and had let her go.
The last book was put away, the last garment folded. He took the bags and set them into the passageway where a servant would find them in the morning. Then he went back into their bedroom. Linyi stood in the middle of the floor, uncertain and waiting. He went to her without hesitation and gripped her shoulders in his hands.
“You are going to help me,” he said. “I have a work to do here on my own earth, and I need you. It is impossible for me to do my work alone. You must promise to help me with all you have in you.”
The fierceness in his eyes half frightened her. But she found the fright delightful. She wanted to be afraid of him. She needed his command.
“I will help you,” she whispered—“I will do anything you tell me to do.”
Fengmo was like a fire in the house. Everything was fanned to feed the flame. He rose before dawn and ate by candlelight and by earliest day was riding his horse across the fields on narrow paths to the village he had chosen for his first school. Young and old must learn, he decreed. He planned schools for children and schools for men and women and old people.
Be sure there was much complaint among the old who had never troubled about books and who saw no need now to read. “When we have only a few years left us, must we trouble ourselves to know what other men have written?” Thus they complained. “Have we not our own thoughts?” they cried. “Have we not learned a little wisdom, too, after all these years? Our own wisdom is enough for us.”