Free Pavilion of Women: A Novel of Life in the Women's Quarters by Pearl S. Buck Page A

she argued. “I know that. I am older than Tsemo, and you do not like me for that. And you never forgive me that we fell in love in Shanghai and decided ourselves to marry instead of letting you arrange our affairs.”
    “Of course I did not like that,” Madame Wu agreed. “But when I had thought about it, I knew that I wanted Tsemo’s happiness, and when I saw you I knew he was happy, and so I was pleased with you. That you are older than he you cannot help. It is annoying in the house, but I have managed in spite of it. One can manage anything.”
    “But if I were like Meng and the others,” Rulan said in her stormy impetuous way, “I would not feel so badly now over what you have done. Mother, you must not let Father take another woman.”
    “It is not a matter of letting him,” Madame Wu said, still mildly. “I have decided that it is the best thing for him.”
    The color washed out of Rulan’s ruddy face. “Mother, do you know what you do?”
    “I think I know what I do,” Madame Wu said.
    “People will laugh at us,” Rulan said. “It’s old-fashioned to take a concubine.”
    “For Shanghai people, perhaps,” Madame Wu said, and her voice conveyed to Rulan that it did not matter at all what Shanghai people thought.
    Rulan stared at her in stubborn despair. This cool woman who was her husband’s mother was so beautiful, so perfect, that she was beyond the reach of all anger, all reproach. She knew long ago that against her she could never prevail with Tsemo. His mother’s hold upon him was so absolute that he did not even rebel against it. He was convinced that whatever his mother did was finally for his own good. Today when the women were storming against the idea of the new woman and Liangmo had only been silent, Tsemo had shrugged his shoulders. He was playing chess with Yenmo, his younger brother.
    “If our mother wants a concubine,” he said, “it is for a reason, for she never acts without reason. Yenmo, it is your turn.”
    Yenmo played without heeding the turmoil. Of all his brothers he loved Tsemo best, for he played with him every day. Without him Yenmo would have been lonely in this house full of women and children.
    “Reason!” Rulan had cried with contempt.
    “Guard your tongue,” Tsemo had said sternly, not lifting his eyes from the chessboard.
    She had not dared disobey him. Though he was younger than she, he had something of his mother’s calm, and this gave him power over her storm and passion. But she had secretly made up her mind to come alone to Madame Wu.
    She clenched her hands on her knees and gazed at her. “Mother, it is now actually against the laws for a man to take a concubine, do you know that?”
    “What laws?” Madame Wu asked.
    “The new laws,” Rulan cried, “the laws of the Revolutionary party!”
    “These laws,” Madame Wu said, “like the new Constitution, are still entirely on paper.”
    She saw that Rulan was taken aback by her use of the word Constitution. She had not expected Madame Wu to know about the Constitution.
    “Many of us worked hard to abolish concubinage,” she declared. “We marched in procession in the Shanghai streets in hottest summer, and our sweat poured down our bodies. We carried banners insisting on the one-wife system of marriage as they have it in the West. I myself carried a blue banner that bore in white letters the words, ‘Down with concubines.’ Now when someone in my own family, my own husband’s mother, does a thing so old-fashioned, so—so wicked—for it is wicked, Mother, to return to the old cruel ways—”
    “My child,” Madame Wu asked in her sweet reasonable voice, “what would you do if Tsemo one day should want another wife, someone, say, less full of energy and wit than you are, someone soft and comfortable?”
    “I would divorce him at once,” Rulan said proudly. “I would not share him with any other woman.”
    Madame Wu lit her little pipe again and took two more puffs. “A man’s life