Letters From Peking

by Pearl S. Buck

  “She who knew she was not loved by her husband gave her life instead to her country and to what she thought was her duty. And her son—your father, Rennie—ate the sour fruit and your teeth, Rennie, are set on edge.”

  “Did she love Baba?” Rennie’s voice was low.

  “I am sure she did, for if she had not she could never have given herself so utterly elsewhere. She did not expect to love him but she did love him, and was rejected by him. There is nothing so explosive in this world as love rejected.”

  “My father has rejected you,” Rennie said brutally.

  I denied this and passionately. “He has not rejected me. He cannot reject me as long as we love each other. Love still works in us its mercies.”

  He saw me now, I believe, as someone else than his mother. He saw me as a woman in love, and he could not reply. He has never seen a woman in love and his eyes fell before mine.

  “It is time for me to show you the letter,” I said. I rose and I opened the locked box and took out the sealed letter and gave it to him. He broke the seal and opened the letter and read it. I sat in my chair and waited. He read it twice, thoughtfully. Then he folded it and put it back into the envelope and placed it on the small table beside him.

  “Thank you, Mother,” he said.

  “I have given permission to the Chinese woman,” I said. “I have said that I understand. I have said that I want him to be comforted in his house….So I will also show you her letters.”

  Now I opened the drawer of my rosewood desk and gave him the letters from Mei-lan. He read them, his face impassive. He read them quickly and folded them and handed them back to me.

  “She has nothing to do with me,” he said. “And I cannot understand why he has let her come into our house.”

  His voice was so hard that I could not bear it. “We do not know how much he was compelled, once he had made his choice to stay in Peking.”

  “Ah,” Rennie said, “I still ask, why did he make that choice if he loved us? I shall keep on asking. For me there is no answer.”

  “You do not love your father enough to forgive him,” I said.

  “Perhaps that is true,” Rennie agreed.

  He got up suddenly and walked to the window and stood there looking out into the night. The light of the lamp shone through the glass upon the falling snow. The fire burned suddenly blue and a log fell into the ash.

  He turned to face me. “Mother, I have something to tell you, too. All that business of Allegra—it very nearly drove me back to Peking. If I am to be rejected because my grandmother was Chinese, I thought, I’d better go back to China. But I’ll never go back now. I’ll stay with you. This shall be my country. I will have no other.”

  I cried out, “Oh Rennie, Rennie, don’t decide so quickly. Don’t decide against your father!”

  “I am not deciding against him. I am deciding for you,” Rennie said. And he stooped and kissed my cheek and went away.

  I shall not follow him. I know my son. The decision has not come quickly. He has been tortured by indecision, he has been torn between his two countries, between his father and me. And he has chosen me and mine. Oh Gerald, forgive me! I pray that you will have other sons. Indeed I do so pray. If I have robbed you of the son that is ours, can I help myself? It is Rennie who decides his own life. And he has as much right to decide as I had when I followed you to Peking and as you had when you would not come home with me. Yes, this is home at last, this Vermont valley, these mountains, the house of my fathers.

  When Rennie left me I sat a long time before the dying fire, a weight gone from me. I am no longer alone in my own country. My son is with me. I shall be happy again, some day.

  …Even yet there has been no thought of cutting myself off from Gerald. Months have passed after that gay Christmas day. Rennie is nearing the end of his college year. Sam has been twice to see me. He urges me to divorce Gerald, and today he flew in from New York only for an hour, he said, not knowing how this day would end. For it is night and he is here. We have telegraphed for Rennie to come at once, because of what has happened. It was this morning, and Sam was arguing with me, impatient, angry, insistent.

  “You must divorce that fellow in Peking—he’s no husband to you, Elizabeth!”

  “I shall never divorce Gerald,” I said. “Indeed, I have no cause. He loves me.”

  “If you call desertion love,” Sam bellowed.

  “He has not deserted me.” I was shouting, too.

  “If it is not desertion, I do not know what to call it,” Sam roared.

  Of course he does not know the whole story. He surmises, because there is no talk of Gerald himself—and me. I tried to explain without telling anything.

  “Gerald has not deserted me nor I him. We are divided by history, past and present.”

  “His father is American,” Sam said stubbornly. “He could have come home with you.”

  “Ah, but you see this is not home to him!”

  “Baloney,” Sam said crossly. “He’s no fool. He could adapt himself. He could have got a job in some university here as well as in Peking.”

  “Home is a matter of the heart and the spirit. His would have died here,” I said.

  “You’re still in love with him,” Sam said, and he turned on me so fierce a stare that I could not defend myself.

  “Can’t you see that I am determined to marry you?” he cried.

  “Oh, no, Sam—no—no!”

  “Yes!”

  We were both breathless, both glaring at each other. Sam bent over me and I pushed him away.

  “Don’t—”

  “Do you hate me?”

  “No—not hate—”

  At this moment we heard Baba fall in the room above. The beams of the living room are not ceiled. We heard the clatter of Baba’s cane and then so light a fall, his old bones all but fleshless, that we might scarcely have heard except for the terrible wrenching groan. I ran upstairs, Sam following me, and there Baba lay. I do not know whether he had heard us. We never know what he hears and we were talking more loudly than we knew. Perhaps Baba had got out of his chair with some thought of coming downstairs, although he has not walked alone across the room since Christmas. He lay there. His head had struck the stone hearth of the fireplace. He was dead.

  …We have come home from Baba’s funeral. Sam stayed, he and Bruce Spaulden took care of every detail for me. Had it been possible, I would have sent Baba’s ashes to Peking and to Gerald. Well, I suppose it would have been possible. It has been done for others who have died here or in England, exiles so deeply divided from their own peoples and lands, so enamored of another culture, that they could think of no other burial place upon the globe than in Peking. Then I reflected that Baba had left Peking of his own desire, and even his ashes would not be welcome there now, for he belonged to the old China, the China of Confucius and of emperors.

  “Let us keep Baba here with us,” I told Rennie.

  “Yes,” Rennie said. “Let us keep him.”

  He arrived barely in time for the funeral, and not alone. He brought with him a tall fair girl, a calm quiet girl whose every movement is slow grace.

  “This is Mary Bowen,” Rennie said.

  “Strange, I have never heard your name,” I said, and suddenly I wanted to kiss her. I leaned forward and put my lips to her smooth young cheek.

  “You look like a Mary,” I said.

  “I’m a pretty good Martha, too,” she said and smiled.

  “Then Rennie is in luck,” I said, “for it is not every woman who is both.”

  They were in love. I could see that they were in love. I know the signs, how well, and I was comforted. I took their hands and between them I went upstairs to where Baba lay in his blue Chinese robe. He lay on top of the white counterpane, and I had put on his feet his black velvet Chinese shoes. Jim Standman, the undertaker, when he had finished his private task, let me help with the rest, for I did not want Baba taken away and so in his own room we made him ready. Under h
is hands crossed upon his breast I had put his little worn copy of The Book of Changes.

  Mary stepped forward alone as we entered the bedroom. She stood looking at him.

  “How beautiful he is,” she whispered. She turned to Rennie. “You didn’t tell me he looked like this.”

  “He is beautiful,” I said, “and somehow more beautiful now than he was alive.”

  “I wish I could have heard his voice speaking,” she said.

  And then she went to Rennie, and she lifted his hand and held it against her cheek. From that moment I loved her as my own daughter.

  …This afternoon a few neighbors gathered with us under the pine tree on the mountain behind the house and there we buried Baba. Matt helped to dig the grave this morning and we lined it with pine branches, while Mrs. Matt made the collation for the funeral feast. She boiled a ham, for she thinks a baked ham is not worth eating, and set out sandwiches and cake and tea and coffee, ready for the return from the grave. The day was quiet and the sky mildly overcast, and the minister, a retired clergyman from Manchester who tends our spiritual life here in the valley when we feel the need, read certain passages from the New Testament, which I had marked because Baba had once declared to me that they were taken originally from the wisdom of Asia and perhaps from Confucius himself, “for,” said Baba, “it is not accident that Jesus uttered the very words long ago spoken by Confucius and Buddha. He was in Nepal in his youth, if we are to believe folk rumors.”

  I had listened when he said this, paying little heed, for Baba believed wholeheartedly that man and his wisdom began in the East, and I was used to such talk. Now the good words fell gently and with deep mercy upon the quiet air, and to the ears of the listening Christians they brought no doubts, though Baba and I had our secret. The voice was the voice of Jesus whom the Vermonters call God, but the words are the words of older gods. Oh, I am full of such secrets, but I shall not tell them. I will carry them into my grave with me, too, for to speak them here would be to raise only doubts and controversy. I live in a narrow valley but it is my home.

  After the ceremony was over, and we did not weep, neither Rennie nor I, for death is not sad at the end of a long life, we came home again. Mrs. Matt was bustling about in a black silk dress and a huge white apron and we sat in the living room with the guests. We ate and drank and spoke quietly, not of Baba, for indeed few of the neighbors knew him except as a frail and exquisite ghost. No, we talked of the valley gossip, of whether the summer would be late, of how scanty the sugar crop was this year, the winter lingering too long and then spring breaking too quickly. In a little while they were all gone. Bruce stopped a moment with me to search my face and tell me that I looked pale and must rest.

  “You won’t mourn?” he said.

  “Not for Baba,” I said.

  “You must not mourn for anyone,” he said urgently.

  I could not tell him, not yet, that with Baba’s death died also the symbol of the past. Baba was a link with other years and with a beloved city, with a house which I had believed my home. But Brace’s concern was comforting and when I smiled, I saw that he longed to kiss me. Longing smoldered in his grey eyes and yearning in his controlled Vermont face. I was not ready. I could not bear the touch of another man’s lips—not yet.

  So the day ended, and Sam went away, too. I think he saw Bruce’s face. He was standing there in the hall behind us, and I heard his footstep, abrupt and unconcealed, when he turned and went into the living room. He left soon after that, saying that he must get to New York by morning to see about a contract with some dealer there, a horse trainer for a circus, he said, who wanted six young palomino colts, exactly matched, which he had been collecting on the ranch, though it was the first time I have ever heard of circuses and matched palomino colts. He shook my hand hard and stared at me. “Let me know if you want anything,” he said. “I’m on call.”

  Suddenly, without permission, he bent and kissed me on the lips and I stepped back and nearly fell.

  “You don’t like it,” he muttered.

  “No,” I said honestly.

  “I won’t do it again,” he said and went away. I am sorry he was hurt but I do not like to be kissed when I am not ready. The days of my youth are past and to a woman full grown a kiss means everything—or nothing.

  All this took place on the very day of Baba’s funeral and I was glad for that day’s end. In the evening Rennie and Mary and I were quietly together on the terrace, for I wanted to be out of the house and the air was unusually mild even for May. These two must go away again tomorrow, and then I shall be alone. It worried them both that I was to be alone, and I did not know how to make them believe that I did not mind, for indeed I do not know whether I shall mind being alone in this great old house. I have no near neighbors and the forest in the valley changes strangely with the night. When the afternoon sun slants through the near trees to lie upon the beds of fern and brake, the forest is lively with light and color, harmless enough, surely, and not to be feared. But when the mountain intervenes between house and sky then darkness falls swiftly, and the forest loses its kindliness. Staring into shadows growing sinister with night, I remember that for thirty miles and more forest mingles with swamp and quicksands, wherein hunters have been lost and never found. Once a woman, a botanist, was lost in the forest that surrounds my home. Therefore I do not know whether I can live here alone. It may be that the darkness of the nights will encircle me too deeply.

  “I wish I were finished with college,” Rennie said. “I wish that Mary and I were married and living here with you.”

  It is the first word that he had spoken to me of marriage.

  “If you two are to be married, then I shall be so happy that I shall have no time to be afraid,” I replied.

  For even in a few hours I can see that Mary is the one I would choose for Rennie. If he had returned to his father’s country, then no, I would not have thought it possible for Mary to have gone with him to Peking. Mind you, it can be done. There are other American women still there, but I do not know how they can be happy when they hear their country reviled and must be silent. Mind you again, I know that the plain people in villages and towns do not believe the evil they hear about us. The Chinese are very old and wise as a folk, and they are able to hold their peace for a hundred years and more if they must, until the times roll round again. The life of no human being is as long as they can hold their peace. I cannot therefore wish for a woman like myself to give herself away to such a country, or to such a people, for they are so easy to love that once loved they can never be forgotten, and what cannot be forgotten one day divides and then choice and decision are compelled. I believe if Gerald’s other country had not been China he could not have forsaken me. But that country and especially that city, the city of Peking, are invincible in love. Any woman could be defeated by them.

  “We shall certainly be married,” Mary said.

  “The question is when,” Rennie added.

  “Why should there be any question?” I inquired. “If you want to be married, then marry.”

  Here I remembered Allegra. “Unless Mary’s family has some reason of their own for delay—perhaps because you are so young, Mary.”

  “I have no family except my twin brother George,” Mary said. “Our parents died when we were children and we lived with my grandmother. Now she is dead, too.”

  It is interesting to discover how secretly wicked one’s self can be. For the sake of my son I rejoiced that three innocent people were in their graves. I was ashamed enough not to say I was glad and yet honest enough not to say I was sorry.

  “You may marry when you like then,” I said. “The wedding can be here in this house where I was married to Rennie’s father and that will make me happy. I shall not mind living alone if I know you are married.”

  “Thank you, Mother,” Rennie said. He was lying full length upon the long terrace chair, and he got up and went to Mary’s side, for I was between them in the round-backed log chair
, and he stood before her and took her hand.

  “Will you marry me on the eighteenth of June, when I shall be twenty years old?”

  “I will,” she said, and smiled up at him.

  The moonlight shone on her long fair hair and on Rennie’s face. I thought them the most beautiful pair in the world, and my heart yearned for Gerald who could not see them. I used once to be able to reach him with my concentrated thought, but for a long time I had not done so. Now I tried again. I gathered my whole energy and will and intention upon him, far away in Peking. At this hour he would perhaps be sitting in the court outside the living room. Were I there it is where we would be, for in the month of May the lilacs are very fine in the court, the heavy-scented deeply purple Chinese lilacs and the white lilacs which are at once more hardy, more prolific and yet more delicate than the lilacs are here. I tried to reach him and let him share what I saw, this beautiful cream-skinned man who is our son, and Mary, tall and fair and calm….I could not reach him. Again my heart, my mind, were stopped by a barrier I do not understand and beyond it I could not go….

  “On the eighteenth day of June this house will be ready for you,” I promised Rennie and Mary.

  When I went upstairs to bed an hour later, leaving them alone together on the terrace, even the ghost of Baba was gone. There was no smell of death in the house, and I could scarcely remember his funeral, or see the new-made grave under the pines. Perhaps the real Baba was never here, or Baba was only the shell that was left of the stately gentleman and scholar who had once been Dr. MacLeod. All that had been was no more. I could almost imagine now that even Gerald was gone, or that he had never been, except that he had given me my son.

  …I am not what is called psychic. I am far too earthy a woman for that. Gerald said once that I am incurably domestic, and it is true that I am. I can be absorbed in the everyday happenings in house and garden and easily diverted at any time by the talk and antics of human beings. I am not an intellectual, in spite of a Phi Beta Kappa key won in my senior year at college, at which no one was more shocked than I, for I knew even then that I did not deserve this insignia of the learned. Nor am I a dreamer of dreams’ and I have never seen visions.