My Several Worlds: A Personal Record

by Pearl S. Buck

  To China I returned with all that I had accumulated of knowledge and experience, and I stayed awhile, sorting over these treasures and pondering upon my own future. In Nanking again, a stone’s throw from the Nationalist government, I still saw no change for the better, no vision, no understanding of the real problems to be solved, and the people were increasingly sullen. The Communists were soon to be locked in the far Northwest, the Long March taking place in 1935, but the war lords were still not conquered, not all bought and bargained with, and Japan was ominous indeed. All this and more—bad news from my child across the sea, and in my house the deepening difference, finally made up my mind. I would leave China, if not forever, nevertheless as the country of my youthful heart and childhood life. I would go back to the land of my ancestors and make another life. The decision brought me closer than I had ever been to those ancestors. Once they, too, had left the known to go across the sea to the unknown. In my case there was a reversal—I had grown up alien and made a strange land mine, and now I was to return to the land of my ancestors. The uprooting was the same, whatever the direction.

  Before I left I went once more to Peking, simply to see it, simply to impress upon my memory the last scenes of what had been the heart of my childhood China. It was not a private return, for by that time too many people knew me and there were invitations I could not refuse. I do not remember them now—what I do remember is the blind musician I met one twilight evening in a lonely street. I was walking just for pleasure when I heard the melody of an accomplished hand upon the two-stringed Chinese violin, and there against the light of the hutung was the figure of a big man in a long grey cotton robe. His massive head was high, his dark eyes wide-open but blind, as I could see when he came near. He held his violin across his breast, and as he played upon two strings with his bow he strode along, too absorbed to feel my presence. I have never forgotten that man, nor his melody.

  And I have not forgotten the hours in the old well-known inns, the Moslem inn where roast mutton was the dish, the Peking inns where one called for duck, and chose it alive and waited for the finished dishes. I made the rounds again too of the old palaces, and stayed very long one day in the rooms where once the Old Empress had lived. And a day’s journey away from Peking, I walked upon the Great Wall of China, now so useless, although still the enemy was to come down from the North, and I spent another day near the Jade Pagoda so that I might remember it forever.

  Thus I filled my cup full, perhaps for all my life, for who could know whether it would ever be possible to return even for a visit? War was certain, war with Japan if not a world war, and by now a world war lay upon the horizon, and much larger than a man’s hand. In that war, Japan, I knew, would not be on our side but with the enemy. Yet when the last moment came, the final departure from house and garden, I took nothing with me. I could take nothing. I felt compelled to leave it all exactly as it was, as though I might be coming back when summer was gone and as in other years I had come back. And thus, in the spring of 1934, I went to my own country.

  IV

  Green Hills Farm

  FOR ME MY COUNTRY was a new one, although I was an American by birth and ancestry. The first half of my life was spent, but the better half, the longer half, since there is much waste in the childhood years, yet remained to me. I was a mature person, healthy, alive to every new sight and sound and experience. My kinsmen had fought bravely in three wars, the War of Independence of 1775, the Civil War of 1861, the First World War of 1914. In each of these wars the purpose had been the same, an idealistic one, to make and keep the United States a united and a free nation. In peacetime my kin were professional men—preachers and teachers and lawyers and landowners. Culture was our family tradition, and education was taken as a matter of course. Parents held their children’s noses to the grindstone of school, whether or no until the young ones learned to like it, and excellence was expected. All this simply meant that I came to my country without the burden of the individual in a classless society. I had no reason to worry about myself. I had always been able to do what I wanted to do, and this meant freedom from self—that is, freedom from fear of failure and also from conceit. I commend the mood, since it gives all one’s time for observation and thought, work and enjoyment.

  My first summer I spent in New York, and the result of it was that I learned that I could never understand my country unless I became a part of it somewhere else and not merely a city visitor. This meant a home, and home meant a house, and where does one live when there is a vast country from which to choose? The choice may be merely geographical, and I saw many places delightful enough in which to remain, the bare beauty of Western deserts, the enchanted high plains of Kansas, the mountainous states of the Rockies, the close hills of New England. I set aside the Deep South. I could not live where the colonial atmosphere prevailed, and where I would have always to look at signs to see where I belonged in railroad stations and restaurants. Besides, I planned at last for more children, for here, I thought, was a safe country for children, and I did not want the responsibility of having them instilled with color prejudices which I knew would be dangerous to us in the world of the near future.

  After some musing and travelling, I decided on a region where the landscapes were varied, where farm and industry lived side by side, where sea was near at hand, mountains not far away, and city and countryside were not enemies, a big rich state, a slice of the nation—Pennsylvania. And where in Pennsylvania? That was decided by the sort of house I wanted. It was to be old, for I was used to old places, I liked their solidity, their soberness, their size. The houses of my Chinese friends were ancient houses, the beams enormous, the walls thick, the gardens aged. I admired the white and green houses of New England and New York, but they seemed ephemeral. Wood burns too easily. In China the houses even of the poor had thick earthen walls. Only in Japan had I lived in a wooden house, and that was because of earthquakes, averaging more than two thousand a year, if one counts the small ones. But they burned. No, stone if possible, please, for red brick I did not like after the quiet grey of the Chinese brick.

  I found the stone houses in Pennsylvania, and farms were cheap then, at the end of the depression. Country was my place, although I enjoyed a city for some reasons, but not for living in and doing my work. So a farm, then, whether I farmed the land or not, a quiet place somewhere in a moderate landscape, a house on a hillside, a brook, trees and gentle hills. Extravagant landscapes are sights to be stored in the memory and to see again and again, but not to live with, I think.

  How does one choose one’s house? It is first built in the imagination. I saw mine very clearly, rough fieldstone, brown with glints of gold and red, a big chimney. It was not a tall narrow house, but a wide one, at least a century old, low-set against the earth, a wing perhaps leaning against the main building, many windows, a mild view toward forests and hills and the brook. There it was. It remained only to be found. One day in a crowded downtown New York street I saw the sign of a Strout Farm Agency and I sauntered in.

  “Do you have any small farms in Pennsylvania for sale?” I asked, exactly as though I were buying a pair of gloves in a department store.

  A yawning clerk pointed with his thumb to a pile of little folders on a table. I took the top one and saw a picture no bigger than a postage stamp, in the lower right-hand corner, of my house, exactly as I had planned, a wide main building and then a wing, all stone, big chimneys, set pleasantly on a hillside, a brook, trees, even an old three-arched bridge over the brook, forty-eight acres of land, forty-one hundred dollars.

  “Thank you,” I said. Then, holding my breath and pointing to my house, “Is this sold?”

  The lazy clerk looked up something in a file. “No,” he said indifferently.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I went away, impatient that it was too dark to set forth that day to claim the house. But at dawn next day I started, breakfasting somewhere along the way, and in a few hours I had reached my destination, missing
the road a good many times at that. It was a summer’s day, very green and still, the sky gently overcast for coming rain. I found the local Strout agent, a Pennsylvania Dutchman, and under his guidance we turned down a country road, dusty as any Chinese path, and soon we crossed the three-arched bridge.

  “Dere it iss,” he said.

  He pointed toward the shallow hill. I looked, and there it was, exactly as it had been in the postage stamp picture. We turned to the right along a still narrower road, the old mill road, he said, that ran between the house and the enormous red barn. Then we stopped and got out. I had seen plenty of better houses and to this day I cannot tell why I insisted upon that one, although I have never regretted the choice. But I tried to be prudent, I paid the down fee, and said I would let him know in a couple of days. He grunted a Pennsylvania Dutch grunt, and said he would show me some more houses if I liked, and since I felt I should in common sense see as many houses as possible, I spent the rest of the day in looking at them, and with difficulty restrained myself from buying mine instantly. Then I went back to New York and could hardly bear to wait the necessary days until I could get back. Had it not been a weekend, I could not have waited. Three days later I owned the house.

  Books have been written many times in the intervening years between then and now by people who have done just what I did, and I have enjoyed all the books, reading avidly to see what others did. The only difference is that they seem to grow caustic, little or much, over the many trials of making an old house into a home for living. But I had no such trials. Everything was pure joy for me, perhaps because this house was my own first possession, or perhaps because I should have been an architect. Of course, did I build a house it would not be like the one I bought. It would be functional, shaped to the landscape I might choose, in the way that Chinese houses are built, or more truly, the Japanese houses. Frank Lloyd Wright knows exactly what I mean, for he has used the same philosophy and has often found his inspiration in Japan and Korea. The older a people grows, the more it absorbs its own landscape and builds to it.

  Yet there was something fit for me in the stone house I bought and have lived in ever since. I do not know what instinct led me to the part of Pennsylvania where my paternal ancestors first came, two hundred years ago. They left it, to be sure, after the War of Independence, and bought lands in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, but here my paternal family had its American beginning, nevertheless, and the knowledge was solid behind me. I believe in family, ancestors and all. The individual is a lonely creature otherwise in this changing world.

  There were more than ancestors, there were traditions that came with my Pennsylvania house, and first of all the tradition of William Penn and his fair and just treatment of the red Indians. Rascality there sometimes was—I know it, for near my house is the storied Indian Walk where, a century and more ago, it was agreed between white man and red Indian that the white man could have as much land as his legs could cover in a day. The amiable Indian thought this meant honest walking with time out to rest and eat, but the shrewd white man trained himself to walk at a fierce pace and covered such territory in the day that the Indian was hotly indignant. “White man lun—lun—lun all day—” thus history records his remonstrance.

  English Quaker and German Mennonite saw to it, however, that cheating and killing were kept at a minimum, and the tradition is still strong here that peoples are to be treated alike and with generosity, though of course generosity is always sensible rather than extravagant. Pennsylvania Dutchmen are not extravagant, and neither, I must say it, are the English-blooded Quakers. They live harmoniously together, firm in their belief in the value of money and land and good cows. Solidity is the habit in our region and Republicanism is our natural trend, yet when we like a man we can forsake all for him.

  For myself I was pleased to discover that I had bought land belonging once to Richard Penn, William’s brother. And it was interesting that twice when we pulled up a vast dead tree we found coins mingled with its earth, not of great value, but once Spanish coin, and again English. I liked the evidence that earlier people had lived here before me. It was even pleasant to discover a ghost belonging to our house. In China ghosts are nearly always women, the vapory souls of beautiful women, part fox, part fairy, who incarnate themselves again in living female bodies. Our ghost, however, is a Pennsylvania Dutchman, Old Harry, politely called, but usually Devil Harry, whose remains lie in the Lutheran churchyard of the nearest village. I have never seen our ghost, but our hired man insisted that Devil Harry walks every Christmas Eve at midnight from the barn to the bridge and back again, and that anybody who knew what he looked like can see him plainly. Our Mennonite maid believed in him, and when a dish sprang from a cupboard and broke itself, or a door slammed on her finger, she cried out, “It’s Old Devil Harry again!”

  And the mason, who built the walls of the new wing after the children came told me that Devil Harry was so obstreperous, being given at times to liquor, that one night when he came home drunk his own wife decided to make an end of him. He threw himself on the kitchen floor in a stupor, whereupon she tied the end of a rope around his neck and pushed it through the stove hole in the wooden ceiling into the bedroom above and then went upstairs and hauled him clear, as she thought, and tied the rope to the four-poster. After waiting a suitable length of time she went down again expecting to find him dead. But the mischievous old man was sitting in the rocking chair in fits of silent laughter. He had come to, and comprehending her purpose, he had tied the rope around the leg of the iron kitchen stove, which she had hauled up and which was now swinging clear of the floor. And once the very ancient man who cut the grass in the cemetery paused above our ghost’s grave to talk with me and his chief complaint against him was that in life, he had heard, Old Harry had a way on “thrashing” days of rushing to the dining table ahead of everybody and getting a start on the food. Farm wives outdid themselves to feed the “thrashers” well, and it was considered only just and decent for all hands to wait outside the door and go in together, seat themselves at the same time and then fall to without talking for the first fifteen minutes.

  The ghost has never molested us, however. Man, woman and children, we have lived peacefully and happily in the house, enlarging it as the babies grew tall and independent. In one such change, we felt it necessary to take the two top panels from the old double door in the south wall of the living room and put in glass. When the panels were removed we found between the inner and outer layers these words written in soft black pencil:

  “I, Joseph Housekeeper, made and work this door. August, 1835, I married Magdaleine, my true love.”

  Thus Joseph Housekeeper, who married his true love, is our tradition, too, although we know no more of him than the hidden words he wrote with his own hand so long ago.

  Our ghost brings to my memory two other figures of our countryside, but they are not ghosts for I saw them in the flesh with my own eyes. Yet they were such strangers in a modern age that they might as well have been ghosts.

  The first was a little hunchbacked man, a traveling preacher, a small figure always dressed in black and wearing a wide black felt hat, whom I used to meet when I walked in the back roads and lanes. He had a white, thin face and when I spoke to him, he only raised his bony hand in reply and plodded on. He carried a canvas bag slung from his shoulder, and every mile or so he stopped and took from it a hammer and nails and a strip of cardboard whereon was printed in large uneven letters a Bible text, and he nailed it to a tree. This was his way of preaching his gospel, so that wherever people went they would be confronted with the solemn words he could not speak. “Ye must be born again” must have been his favorite, for I came upon it often and in the most unexpected places, even in the deep woods.

  The little preacher is dead now and it is ten years since I saw him last and then it was in a thunderstorm. He was walking slowly, against a driving rain, and in a direction opposite to my own. The texts he nailed upon the trees have rotted away.
I never knew his name nor ever met anyone who knew it.

  The other figure is a woman and I saw her only once. It was on a warm afternoon in late spring and I was going down our long lane to see if the wild strawberries were ripe by the big ash tree. Suddenly I saw her coming up the lane toward me, a woman in a black dress, very full in the skirt and so long that it swept the ground. Her sleeves were long, her collar high, and she wore a close black bonnet. When she came near I saw that she was old and that she looked frightened. Her full round face, white and softly wrinkled, was unsmiling, and her dark eyes were like a child’s in terror.

  “Can I help you?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I just did want to see the place,” she said. “I was born in the house. People say you have made it nice and have planted much shrubbage.”

  “Please go wherever you like,” I said.

  We passed, and when I returned with my bowl full of wild strawberries she was gone. I asked my neighbors about her but none knew who she could have been. Our hired man simply insisted that she was a ghost, too.

  For myself, I am indifferent to jewels and personal adornment, but I must have roses and a vegetable garden, and some years ago I indulged myself to include camellias, for these flowers, formal and exquisite, are Chinese in origin and were in China one of my favorites. Such roots I put down for myself, for roots are what one must put down, if one is to live. My roots were deep in China, and when they had to be pulled up it was necessary to put them down again as quickly as possible if life were to go on in growth. I have learned that any tree can be transplanted and live, if roots are not left long unsheltered in the drying air. Roots are meant to be in the earth, and quickly, quickly plant them there, pile the common soil around them, stamp it down and water it, and life goes on. But let a tree wait, unplanted too long, and it never roots. It makes a half-hearted attempt, a few leaves are put forth, and inexorably the top begins to die and after it the branches and then one spring there is no green. The laws of life are the same for every kingdom.