CHAPTER SEVEN

DAWN

The laugh of the wife, like her song, had departed. No longer it pealed through the rooms—nor its echo. Her laugh was gone; slowly, imperceptibly had it vanished as music stolen away and smothered by the wind. But neither she nor the Breton knew that it was no more.

The wife of Tai Lin had become silent, musing, seclusive. She no longer contradicted her husband, nor laughed at him, nor mocked nor caressed him.

“She is outgrowing her childhood,” sighed Tai Lin to himself.

This wife of his, instead of sitting on a stool at his feet as she used to do, would remain for hours by the screen when she thought that none were about her but the thrushes in their bamboo cages overhead. By noon or by night, moved by sudden impulse, she would creep through the screen’s wicket into the outer apartment and, nestling in the chair that stood beside it, bury her face in her arms and cry softly to herself with that grief that is very old.

But she was not alone with her tears, nor with the thrushes complaining overhead—she was never alone. At all hours a maidservant hovered about her, and only when the Breton came did this servant retire behind an oval doorway that led from her mistress’ room to an open court. There she concealed herself and listened to the words between them; to their silences; to the going away of the wife’s laughter and the coming of her tears. After a time she began to shake her head, perplexedly, fatefully.

One day, as the wife sat in the outer apartment sobbing to herself, this maidservant stole up to her, and kneeling down by the table, asked gently:

“Why are you crying?”

The wife sobbed but made no reply.

“Why are you crying?” asked the maid again.

“Go away, Kim! Go away!” she cried brokenly. “You cannot understand—I do not know! Go away—please go away!”

The servant left her. But that night when she came to the bishop’s door she hesitated, picked the hem of her garment; turned away; came back, then knocked ruefully on the portal.

When the Breton came to the wife’s apartments he no longer stood on the threshold waiting for her salutation or expectant of her laughter. Crossing the room, naïvely eager, he sat down in his chair and, looking up to certain crevices in the screen, remained silent with a smile in his eyes.

Day by day these silences grew longer. Without laughter, without converse, almost without movement, each sat close to the screen—so close that her red pouting finger tips were hardly over his head, and sometimes through the crevices just above them flashed a light, dark and lustrous.

In this manner it came about that Silence held them more and more beneath its velvet hand, although this stillness of theirs was not mute nor somnolent. At intervals it was broken by a question, a reprimand, a whisper; a word that caressed or a burst of scorn; only laughter came not again. Their conversations were no more than flashes; an ignition, an illumination.

Sometimes the Breton would look up as if about to say something and the wife, breathless, would demand:

“What?”

He never spoke. Yet one day in the midst of their silence he lifted his eyes to the crevice, his lips moved, but only his eyes uttered.

Hastily the wife withdrew her fingers; there was a flutter of silk; constrained stillness.

“Oh, well,” she commented, turning back to the screen, “it doesn’t matter; if a man can’t get ivory from a rat’s mouth, how can a woman expect truth from a man’s?”

He turned away toward the windows.

In a few moments her fingers were again thrust redly through the crevices.

“Are you?” she whispered.

The Breton looked up.

Again there was silence.

“Do you know what it is?” she still whispered.

Once more he raised his eyes to the crevices above the finger-tips.

“It is a rain-drop, priest, iridescent—but trembling on the eaves’ edge.”

While these silences grew longer, they at the same time were drawing to an end. No stillness can last for long in this world so full of noises, and in time a second but greater restlessness lay hold of the wife. No longer petulant, she became irritable, and often impatiently moving her chair aside, she wandered about the room. And as time passed, this unrest of the wife increased until it came about that she could not sit for long beside the screen without getting up and moving uneasily, even wearily, about the room; now by a table, then back to the screen; her hands at one moment plucking flowers from their vases, in the next tossing the folds of the silken tapestries.

One day she suddenly drew her fingers from the crevices, started to cross the room, came back, and peremptorily ordered the Breton to go away and stay away.

“Go!” she commanded, stamping her foot.

The Breton looked up wonderingly and his eyes smiled.

Presently he heard her open the shell-latticed window, then all was still. The larks and thrushes from their swaying bamboo cages fluttered and chirped questioningly. For there are silences that make birds as well as women inquisitive. They cocked their heads, chirped, and looked down unapprovingly upon the priest.

“What! I thought you had gone!”

The Breton turned his eyes expectantly to the crevices just above his head.

“Are you not going?” she demanded coldly.

The Breton rose from his chair, uncertain, but the light in his eyes untroubled.

“Sit down!”

The stillness that followed was not broken until after the feathery shadows of the bamboo had crept across the translucent shells of the latticed windows. Then the wife, very close to him, whispered:

“Priest.”

The Breton did not move.

“Is not this screen a nuisance!” she cried irritably, and her voice would have been savage had it not been for the music of its tones.

The Breton neither answered nor turned his eyes away.

“Priest, shall I come out?”

He still looked up into the crevices.

“Shall I?”

A questioning light came into his eyes.

“Would it make you happy?” she whispered.

The light deepened.

“Well, I don’t!” she exclaimed scornfully. “At its best it is nothing; in its truth it is false. Such hopes men lay to gold and rubies in their mountain caskets: to the cloudy pearl in the jade depths of the sea. Sought; found; lost; forgotten; its gold, cloud—gold and its pearl moon-mist! How ridiculous!”

“Would you truly be happy?” Again her voice was without its impatience; again it trembled with tenderness.

A light in the eyes of the Breton answered.

The birds fluttered and beat their wings against the bars of their cages.

Evening was approaching. The cawing of the white-headed crows could now be heard contending for their roosts in the banians.

The light in the room mellowed, became a rose-saffron, while the wind of sundown blew in through an open window.

Suddenly the wicket in the screen was opened and the wife, leaning against the lintel, looked down at him.

With difficulty the Breton priest rose from his chair. A flush swept across his face, then pallor. He lifted his hand to the neck of his robe; a film came over his eyes.

For a moment the wife fluttered on the screen’s threshold, then came down and sat on a stool close by but with her back to him.