Letters From Peking

by Pearl S. Buck

  …Rennie has come home. When I had ceased to rebel, when my heart grew quiet and when I was resigned and I no longer prayed, then the divine perversity of the universe granted me favor. He came last night, late. I was asleep but I wake at the slightest sound in the house. I heard a door open, the kitchen door. I had locked it as usual, since I am alone, and no one except Rennie has a key. So I knew it was he. The next sound then would be the refrigerator, opened and shut…Yes, that sound, too, I heard. What should I do? I longed to spring from my bed and run downstairs and enfold him. But in my loneliness I had grown cautious. It was no longer what I wished to give but what he would accept. He had gone away once and so, now and forever, it would be easy to go again. He had learned to live without me and without his home. I would not go downstairs. Let him think me asleep. In the morning he could surprise me, and I would pretend surprise. The days of childhood communion were over.

  I did not move, I did not stir. I did not set foot upon the floor. In my bed I lay, the faint moonlight streaming across the counterpane, and I listened. He ate at the kitchen table. I heard the clink of a dish and the scrape of a chair. He ate well, for it was a full half hour, perhaps more, before I heard the door to the stair open, the little winding back stair that goes only to his room. I heard the sound of water running into the bathtub cautiously and at half cock, so as not to wake me. Then he did not want me to wake. I had decided wisely. I would not go to his room, not even to gaze at him asleep. But oh, how thankful was I that he had come home! My heart climbed out of my bosom toward heaven in thankfulness. Thank God, thank God!

  When all was quiet I would sleep. So I told myself, yet how could I sleep until I knew how he was? Yet I would not go to see. Though he lay there in his bed, only a room beyond mine, he was as far from me at this moment, or nearly, as Gerald was in Peking. A wall was between my son and me. He had become a man, and I knew it. I must wait for him to tell me what he wanted to be to me. Perhaps he does not need a mother, perhaps he wants only a friend, an older woman friend, one who merely happened once to be his mother.

  I waited, the hour creeping slowly by and I imagined hours until I looked at the bedside clock. Only an hour and ten minutes had passed. Then I heard the door handle turn softly. I lay motionless and did not light the lamp. When I saw him standing there in the doorway, wrapped in his old red wool bathrobe, I spoke as easily as if he had never been away.

  “Is that you, Rennie?”

  Though who else could it be? But in such foolish words great moments are encompassed. And he answered as easily.

  “How are you, Mother?”

  “I am well. Did you just get back?”

  “I had something to eat downstairs.”

  He came toward the bed and sat down on the edge of it, and we gazed at each other in the moonlight.

  “Shall I put on the light?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “Let’s just sit like this. Unless you want to sleep. Did I wake you?”

  “Perhaps you did,” I said, pretending to be sleepy. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t get up as early as I used to. Matt milks the cows.”

  “Is everything all right?” he asked.

  I strove for indifference. “I’ve bought a black ewe and twin white lambs so that I need not cut the grass.”

  “I saw them in the moonlight.”

  Then it seemed we had nothing more to say. I would not let a question escape from the prison of my heart. Whatever he wished to tell me I must accept as answer. But nothing prepared me for what he said next.

  “You haven’t asked me where I have been, Mother.”

  “You might have written me,” I said.

  “I couldn’t,” he said. “And it doesn’t matter where I’ve been….Mother, why did you let me be born? I asked you before.”

  “You didn’t wait for my answer,” I reminded him.

  “I will wait, now,” he said.

  He is the one to ask the questions, not I. I can only answer as honestly as possible.

  “Your father and I love each other with all our hearts and when there is such love between two young and healthy human beings, one a man, the other a woman, a child is their hope.”

  “You might have thought what it would mean to me.”

  Oh what a bitter cry this was!

  “It is only fair to your father to tell you that he thought of it and that I denied the need. I said that our child would be so strong, so beautiful, so self-sufficient, that he would meet any situation and be the conqueror.”

  His eyes were as black as dead coals set in the pale cream face.

  “When I was in China,” he said, “they called me a foreigner. I did not care then, for I thought I had a country—another country. I thought it was America.”

  “People have been kind to you here,” I said, my tongue and lips as dry as pith.

  “It is not kindness I want—it is love.”

  “You have much love,” I said. “Your father loves you and I love you. And love will come to you from others, some day from a woman.”

  “Allegra is not allowed to love me,” he said. “Her parents forbid it.”

  “Can she not be disobedient?” I inquired. “My mother forbade me to love your father, too, but I disobeyed. And I have never been sorry.”

  No, I am not sorry, though Gerald’s last letter lies upstairs in my locked box, a thing alive with sorrow. I know he will never write me again.

  “Not all women are strong,” Rennie said and he looked at me with something like distaste. “And because a woman is not strong,” he went on, “it does not mean that her love is the less valuable.”

  “What is Allegra afraid of?” I tried to hide my scorn.

  “She is not afraid of me,” he said. “She is afraid of what I carry in my veins, the genes, the ancestry, the irremovable part of me, that which I cannot change.”

  “You mean the Chinese part of you,” I said.

  He nodded, and he knotted his hands together. His hands are all American, not smooth and pale as Gerald’s are, but hard and strong at the knuckles.

  “I thought so,” I said, “the very part of you that I love most and am most proud of because I love your father, you wish you did not have. Shame on you, Rennie!”

  “You don’t understand,” he cried. “You are American, your ancestry is pure—”

  “O pure,” I cried back at him, “the rebels of half a dozen nations in Europe, the renegade young son of an English lord and an Irish girl, a crafty Dutch merchant who cheated the Indians out of their land, a strain of German—”

  “None of that matters,” he said stubbornly. “You are all white.”

  I yielded. It was not the moment for argument.

  “Say what you please,” I said.

  “I am going to Kansas,” he went on. “I’ll work on Sam’s ranch this summer, and go to college in the autumn. Sam will get me a scholarship.”

  No “if you please,” no “if you don’t mind, Mother,” no “unless you need my help here at home.” But I am proud too and I do not ask my son’s help.

  “I wonder that you came home to tell me,” I said.

  “So that you know,” he said, his jaw as hard as iron.

  There was my fate laid out before me, and I must take it with both hands and without complaint.

  “When will you go?” I asked.

  “I suppose I ought to stop long enough to see Baba,” he replied.

  “A little longer,” I protested.

  Perhaps it is time for me to tell him of Baba’s wife, his grandmother. Some of this rebel blood in him comes from her. She suffered, too, because she was not loved. Perhaps she can help him now as I cannot.

  “Stay a day, at least, Rennie. There are things I want to say to you before you go—things I have never told you.”

  He looked at me quickly with those dark, dark eyes.

  “All right,” he said, “if that’s the way you want it—”

  …Where will I find a home for my son? Where can he fin
d the country to be his own?

  When Baba woke the next morning we went upstairs. There he was, lying upon his pillows exactly as he had gone to sleep, his white hair scarcely ruffled, his dark eyes vague and only half open. I spoke to him.

  “Baba, good morning. See who has come to you.”

  He opened his eyes and stared at us. “Who is that?”

  “You know.”

  “Is it Gerald?”

  “No—no—no. It is Rennie.”

  He did not know Rennie. He has forgotten his own grandson. He moved his lips. “Should I know him?” he inquired at last.

  “Yes, you should,” I said. “He is Gerald’s son—and mine.”

  “Gerald’s son,” he mused. “Had Gerald a son?”

  I turned to implore. “Rennie, forgive him. He is so old. He has forgotten everything.”

  Oh, what a look of sadness was on the young face!

  “It doesn’t matter,” Rennie said. “Nothing matters.”

  “Go to sleep again, Baba,” I said. “I will come back soon.” We tiptoed out again, and I knew that I had lost. Baba, in innocence, has deserted me and mine. He has withdrawn from us into the distances of old age.

  Then I was frantic to reclaim my son. “Rennie, come into my room now. I have pictures to show you. I must show them to you before you go.”

  He followed me quietly, and in my room he sat down as formally as a guest and waited. And I took out my box of pictures and found the one of Gerald’s mother.

  “This is the Chinese lady Baba married,” I told him. “This is your grandmother, your father’s mother. She is quite beautiful, in her own dignified way. She is someone to be proud of, the daughter of an ancient family rooted in Peking. You remember your great-uncle, Han Yu-ren, surely.”

  Rennie took the picture and gazed at the calm Chinese face. “Why did Baba marry her?”

  “He wanted to—to become part of the country to which he had dedicated his life. He thought he could get near to the people he loved. He wanted to—to cease to be foreign.”

  “Now he has forgotten everything,” Rennie said. “He does not know even me. I suppose he never loved her.”

  “Why do you say so? You don’t know.”

  “If he loved her he would have remembered me.”

  I could not deny it. However old I grow, whatever the change in body and mind, while I draw breath I shall not forget Gerald, nor Gerald’s son.

  “Baba did what he thought was right,” I said.

  “It is not enough,” Rennie said. “There has to be love.”

  And he gave me back the picture. Now he got to his feet and leaned down from his height and kissed my cheek.

  “Goodbye, Mother,” he said. He went away immediately. I heard his old car whirl down the road in a cloud of summer dust. This time he may never come back. I do not know. What I remember is that he spoke again as his father taught him, his English classic and pure. The slang, the American boy talk, he had wiped from tongue and lips. What this means also I do not know.

  I cannot go away, I cannot follow Rennie even if I would, for here is Baba, who has no one but me. I am held on this quiet farm, remote from everyone except Matt and his wife, and they have lived so long together in the valley that they know only the language of a hate-filled love. They quarrel and enjoy themselves in combat by day and I do not doubt also by night. Indeed I am sure that their chief conflict is by night in the great old double bed that fills the small bedroom on the north side of the kitchen. Seven children they have bred together, and each of them the fruit of a quarrel. They have needed no other companionship, no other excitement, I do believe. Matt is insanely jealous and Mrs. Matt is proud of his jealousy, boasting of its oppression.

  “If Matt so much as sees a man’s hat in the house, he takes conniptions,” so she boasts. “Oh, I pay for it, I do,” she declares, and her little round wrinkled face glows with pleasure.

  She said that this morning when in a stupor of loneliness I crossed the dusty road to praise her flower beds. Before I could reply as I always do, that she is lucky Matt still cares enough about her to be jealous, the postman passed and I cried goodbye and ran after him. There in the shade of the big maple at the gate he paused and handed me a few letters, none of any importance except a thin grey envelope. It was sent from Singapore, I knew the stamp, but the handwriting was strange.

  “Your husband?” the postman asked.

  “No,” I said, and then was afraid of what might be written within and so I left him and went to the rock beside the spring, and sat there in the shade of a leaning apple tree and tore open the envelope.

  “Dear Elder Sister,” the letter began.

  It was from her.

  All these months I have not answered Gerald’s letter. He asked my permission and I have not given it. Underneath all that I do has been the knowledge of this delay, a secret as hidden as a sin. Now I cannot hide it any longer.

  She writes in English, but not well. She is trying to convey something to me. She wants me to understand that she will not enter my house to take my place until I give permission.

  You have lived in Peking very long [she writes]. I think you understand something very much about us Chinese people. Here now it is hard for living, nevertheless. It is also hard for MacLeod, your husband, and he is wishing so much for some woman to take care of house and mending and cooking, and so forth. At my former request, he wrote to you asking your agreement to my coming to his house as wife-in-absence. You know this is quite common, no more second wife or concubine, as before, which is too old-fashioned, but wife-in-absence. Of course if you come back some other time, I will go away if you wish. To you I have respect as younger to elder. Please permit me, and tell me how everything should be in caring for our husband. I wish to do what you tell me and make him so happy. This is my duty. But first your permission, please, to save his life. I send this letter to a secret friend in Singapore and please return to same.

  Your humble younger sister,

  MEI-LAN

  The address in Singapore is to a silk shop. Someone there, I suppose, is her secret friend, someone in touch with this strange new China, by which I am rejected. I wish I had the courage to write boldly to Gerald. But what would I write? Shall I give my permission for another woman to take my place? And can she take my place? Surely no American woman has ever been in like predicament.

  This rocky farm of mine, in this distant state of Vermont, is as far from Gerald now as though he did not exist. Perhaps it is I who no longer exist. Why indeed should I exist who am no longer needed—or loved? Or am I loved? I cannot answer this letter today. I am voiceless, I cannot think. I do not know what to say, until I am in communion with him again.

  I come to my room. I take his letter from my locked box and though I have sworn that I will not look at it again, I do so, I set it down here. I copy every word, and so make his words my own. I shall never forget them now. This is the letter from Peking, Gerald’s last letter.

  MY DEAR WIFE:

  First before I say what must be said, let me tell you that I love only you. Whatever I do now, remember that it is you I love. If you never receive a letter from me again, know that in my heart I write you every day. I say this because of what I must next tell you. It is imperative for me to take into my home a Chinese woman. It is not only that I need someone to look after the house, to wash my clothes, mend and so on. You know very well how helpless I am in all these matters where you have been so useful to me. But it is necessary now for me to prove myself. It is not enough, it seems, for me to swear loyalty to those in present power. I must forswear all my past, I must curse my non-Chinese blood and declare against the foreign part of myself. I have been ordered to choose another woman. I tell you because you and I have always been honest, one with the other. If I were to be less than honest with you now, it would mean that I had indeed forgotten our life together. I shall never forget and so I tell you.

  I cannot write again. It would be too dangero
us for me and too dangerous even for our son. You think him safe in your country, but he is not safe anywhere unless I repudiate him and you. If you hear I have done so publicly, do not believe I have done so in reality. I wish to stay alive, if possible, until these days are past. If I meet death in spite of all my efforts to avoid it, remember that my only thought is of you, my Eve.

  GERALD

  I must of course give permission. I do not know why I have delayed all these months to do what I knew had to be done. Now that this letter has come from the woman, and I know that she has not gone to him, I see that I must give permission at once. Perhaps I shall cable. No, that would be too startling. To receive a cable from America might make trouble for a Chinese even in a British colony. I will write and send the letter airmail. So I write. I copy my letter here that I may always know what I said. If ever Gerald and I meet again, here is the record. For I am really writing for Gerald. Yes, dear and beloved, I am writing this for you. If you cannot come to me nor I to you, then it may be possible nevertheless some day to send you the record. I wish I had said to you on that last day that you too must keep the record. Ah no, it would not be safe there, where you are. The servants may be paid by others than you. Here in this quiet Vermont valley there are no spies. I think there are no spies. I write my letter to Mei-lan. And now it occurs to me that she did not sign her family name. Mei-lan is a common name, impossible to trace. But her name does not matter.

  DEAR YOUNGER SISTER:

  Your letter has come to my hand. I have read it. I give my permission. You may not take my place, for each woman has her own place in a man’s life, but you may enter my house and make your own place there. I shall tell no one here in my country, for none would understand. It is true, as you say, that I understand. Nevertheless, my heart breaks. Care for him well, for I love him.

  ELIZABETH

  I stamped the envelope myself and took it to the post office and slipped it into the box under the window. But Miss Myra saw it. She is our postmistress, a plump friendly woman, and, being unmarried, consumed with curiosity about marriage, and especially about mine.

  “Letter to your husband?” she inquired gaily. She has pink round cheeks withered in many fine lines, and a tight little pink mouth and two round blue eyes without eyebrows. Her hair is frizzed and yellow.