Pearl Buck - Letters From Peking

“And were you lonely?” I asked.

He considered this. “I suppose so, or I would not have married.”

“Were you in love, Baba?” I asked.

Again the pause. I looked at him, and he made a picture as he sat there in my father’s old brown leather armchair, the light of the lamp falling upon his Chinese robe of crimson silk, his hands folded upon his lap, and his white hair and beard shining, his eyes dark and troubled. He was trying to think.

“Never mind, Baba,” I said. “It was all so long ago.”

“It is not that I do not wish to tell you,” he said. “I am trying to remember. I think I was in love. I feel that I was in love, but not with Ai-lan. I was in love with someone else. It is she I am trying to remember.”

“Was she a Chinese lady?” I asked, knowing she was not.

“Not Chinese,” he said.

“Then what?”

“That is what I cannot remember.”

“Her name?”

“I cannot remember her name.”

Oh, what a thing to say! My knitting fell from my hands. To be in love and then to pass beyond even the memory of the beloved’s name! Can this happen? Could Gerald one day, in Peking, years hence, forget even my name?

Baba was still remembering, his mind searching the past. He began to talk again. “I was lonely, I believe, because the one — that one whose name I cannot remember — did not return my love. Yes, I do remember loving someone who did not love me. I had proposed marriage, perhaps — well, I do not know. But certainly I was alone and when Yu-ren said to me that he had a sister, I thought it might be a good thing to be married to a Chinese lady. She could help me, I thought, in my work with Chinese.”

I took up my knitting again. “Strange, was it not, that a Chinese lady should be unmarried?”

He said quite easily now, “She had been betrothed and her fiancé had died. There was a cholera epidemic, I believe. I think Yu-ren said he had died when she was quite young — perhaps fifteen. Yes, I am sure about that. She was twenty-five when we were married and I was thirty.”

“Strange, was it not, for her to be willing to marry a foreigner?” I had somehow opened a door into Baba’s mind and I pressed my advantage for the most selfish reasons. I wanted to know Gerald’s mother. Baba had never spoken of her in the old days. There was not even a picture of her in the Peking house. And Gerald could not bear to speak of her. He loved her painfully well, and I did not know why it was with pain.

The Vermont night was quiet about us, a lovely night, moonless and soft. May can be cold in our valley, or warm. Tonight was warm. I had closed the windows not against cold but against the moths drawn to the lamp. The house was silent. The day’s work was done. I felt no barrier between Baba and me, and as though he felt none, either, he spoke with the simple words of a child, sometimes in English and sometimes in Chinese. It was strange and beautiful to hear the liquid tones of the ancient Peking language here in this room. What would my mother have thought! And how my father would have listened! And neither would have understood. But I understood. I am glad now that I learned Chinese. The hours I pored over the books with old Mr. Chen, the teacher Gerald found for me, are richly paid for tonight.

For here is the story Baba told me, sitting yonder in the brown armchair, his long pale hands folded one upon the other, his eyes fixed on my face sometimes, and sometimes moving away to the darkening window. The story flowed from him as life came back to his memory, and he became someone else, not the scholar, all Virginian courtliness and Chinese grace, whom I had known as Gerald’s father, but an old man reliving a handful of vivid years in his youth.

They had been married, he and Gerald’s mother, according to the ancient Buddhist rites. Confucian and skeptic in her education, when death and marriage and birth took place the family returned, nevertheless, to their Buddhist traditions.

“And were her parents willing to accept an American?” I asked Baba.

Her parents were dead, it seemed, and her elder brother, Han Yu-ren, was the head of the family. At first he could not persuade his sister. She had come to look upon herself as a widow, and she thought it unchaste to marry. She had even considered becoming a Buddhist nun, as many young widows do in China, but her brilliant agnostic mind forbade this. She could not undergo a life of ritual in which she did not believe. Much as a nun might have done, however, she lived in the Han household, pursuing her studies.

“Was she beautiful, Baba?”

He considered this for some time. “She was not,” he said at last, “although there were times when she very nearly approached beauty.”

“And these times?” It was impudent of me to ask the question, for might she not have been beautiful in love?

Baba was not distressed. He answered in the same tranquil manner. “She was beautiful when she read aloud to me the ancient poetry she enjoyed. This was a pleasure to her. And also she played quite well upon her lute when she sang and she had a sweet melancholy voice. When she had played in the evenings, she always wiped tears from her eyes. I do not know why she wept.”

“After Gerald was born, was she happy?”

A vague trouble passed over Baba’s face. “I do not know whether it can be called happiness. She was changed. She read no more poetry and she never again played her lute. Instead she became interested in the revolution. Until then she had paid no heed to political affairs. I do not remember that she ever read a newspaper before Gerald was born. But afterwards, I remember, she began to read new books and magazines. She became friendly, in a distant fashion, with Sun Yat-sen. I remembered we quarreled over it.”

“I cannot imagine you quarreling, Baba,” I said.

He did not hear this, or he paid it no heed. “I did not like Sun Yat-sen. I distrusted him. I was then the advisor to the Throne, you understand. I believed that the old form of government was the best. Besides, Sun was not educated in the classics. He had been only to missionary schools.”

I was astonished to hear Baba speak so well. Something of the man I had known appeared before me. I put down my knitting to watch and to listen while he went on.

“We differed, she and I. She, who had been reared in every ancient tradition, was suddenly another woman than the one I had married. As a Chinese lady she had never left our house. Now, as the child grew out of babyhood, she began to go here and there and when I asked her where she went she said she went to meetings. This was how I knew she went to hear Sun Yat-sen. He was an upstart, the son of a southern peasant, and I told her so. And then she accused me.”

His voice trembled and he could not go on.

“Of what did she accuse you, Baba?”

He looked at me piteously, his lower lip trembling. “She said that, because I was a foreigner, I did not want the revolution to come. She even said that I wished to keep the Emperor on the throne for the sake of my salary. When I declared that I would resign immediately, she said it made no difference, for then I would persist in my ways for the sake of my own people. She said our two races could never mingle. She said I was loyal to my own. She had been sweet and gentle, and now suddenly she was cruel and angry with me. She said I had never loved her.”

Ah, that was the reason for the change! I understood, for I, too, am a woman. She loved and knew she was not loved, and so she left her home and wandered where she could find shelter. I had not the heart to tell Baba what he did not know — or had forgotten.

“This was because of Gerald?”

He shook his head. “I do not know.”

But I knew. Her heart had woken when she saw her son. This child, half white, she had borne in ignorance of his fate. Where was his place? She knew that if he went to the land of his father, she would be left without love. His place must be in her country, and that she might keep him, she would make a new country for him. Oh, I do not doubt that I am putting it very crudely. She would not have said it so, and perhaps would not even have thought it so. Doubtless she imagined she did all for the sake of her people. She listened to the old arguments, that her people were insulted, the land threatened by foreigners. But I know that all arguments are specious. We do what we do for secret reasons of our own, and this is true in whatever country men and women dwell. She wanted to keep her son. Now I perceive the web she wove about Gerald.