Pearl Buck - Letters From Peking

Baba had stopped talking.

“What then, Baba?” I asked.

He sighed and I took up my knitting. He had slipped away. His mind subsided. Yet I could not bear to hear no more. I tried again, as gently as I could.

“How old was Gerald when his mother died?”

Baba spoke with sudden promptness, surprising me so that I dropped my knitting.

“She did not die. She was killed.”

“What!”

We sat staring at each other. I saw something terrible now in Baba’s eyes, not sorrow, not vagueness. No, I saw fright.

“I warned her,” he said. He was trembling, his knees shaking under the thin silk of his robe. “I told her that I could not save her if she persisted. For she became a revolutionist, she became a violent revolutionist — you understand? Not merely a patriot, you understand. She became one of Them.”

“Baba — no!”

“Yes, yes! First she became a friend of the wife of Sun Yat-sen. The two women spent hours together, sometimes in my house. I forbade it at last. I was afraid for myself and for Gerald. I told her that if she must meet with those — traitors — yes, that was the word I used — I said, ‘If you must meet with those traitors, Ai-lan, it shall not be in my house, or in the presence of my son.’ And she took those two words and threw them back at me as one flings a dagger.

“‘Your son!’”

I heard the Chinese voice as clearly as though she stood in this room. Thousands of miles and years away I heard the words.

“Oh Baba, go on!”

“She went out of my house and I never saw her again.”

“She was not dead?”

“No — not then. I went to her brother, my friend, and we searched for her. He was entirely with me, you understand. He begged my forgiveness for having given his sister to me for my wife. He denounced her and disowned her, and he said he would erase her name from the book of family history. It was he who found her at last. But he would not tell me where she was. He said, ‘It is better for you not to know.’ I knew what he meant. She had joined herself to Them. She was with Them in the South, where they were making the revolution. She and the wife of Sun Yat-sen, they were like sisters.”

“Did Gerald never see her again either?”

For all the time Baba was talking, it was of Gerald that I was thinking. I saw him growing up in that great house, alone with his father, but dreaming, I suppose, of his mother. What child does not dream of his mother? When I had first finished college I taught for a year in an orphanage in New York, a foundling home for girls. Bed and crib lay side by side, rooms full of children who had been deserted and betrayed. By day they played and sometimes even laughed, but at night I was often waked by the dreadful sound of their weeping. My room was in another wing, I had no duty toward them at night, a nurse was near them. But again and again I was waked. For when a child moaned in her sleep she murmured “mother,” and the word waked every child of the twenty or thirty in the room, one and then another, and they wailed the word aloud. “Mother — mother—” Their crying pervaded the night air and woke other rooms of lonely children until the whole building trembled with the voices of sorrowful children, weeping for mothers they could not remember or had never known. Who can assuage such grief? I gave up my job and went away, but I have never forgotten the weeping children, dreaming of their unknown mothers. The child Gerald, lonely in the house with his foreign father, takes his place with the weeping children.

“He did see his mother,” Baba said, his answer to my question. “She was very correct about that. She would not see him secretly, since she had left my house, but she asked, through her brother, whether Gerald might come to her.”

“And were you willing?”

“Not at first. I did not wish his mind to be contaminated. I told Han Yu-ren so. I said she must not contaminate the child’s mind. She continued to be correct. She said that she would not teach him anything and I should be his teacher. I allowed him therefore to meet her. She came to Peking in order that she might see him. They met in her ancestral home.”

“Was it for hours or days?” I asked.

“Sometimes for hours, sometimes for days, depending upon what she considered her duties to Them. They always came first.”

Ah, the child must have felt that. Gerald is oversensitive to people. Even as he could not believe before we were married that I loved him, time and again after our marriage I had to prove to him not only that he was the beloved, but that he was lovable. I resorted to pretended jealousy, as for example when we were invited to the Legation Ball, the last winter we were together. I said,

“Gerald, don’t dance more than once with anyone but me, will you?”

He could still blush. “Don’t be silly,” he said.

What he did not know was that I was never jealous. I was sure of him because I was sure of myself. It did not matter how many beautiful foreign girls might be at a diplomatic ball, I was not jealous. Gerald is handsome enough for jealousy, that I acknowledge. But he is mine. I was not afraid even of the lovely modern Chinese girls, slim in their straight long robes. I am glad now to remember that I was not afraid, though it was touching that he was pleased at the suggestion. Beloved that he is, I can see that with all his brilliance and wisdom, he is also sometimes naïve.

“What I did not like,” Baba was saying, “was that the child longed to live in his mother’s ancestral house. He did not return willingly to me. I suppose that he was given sweets and made much of by servants and lesser relatives. You know how it is.”

I did know. Those great old ancestral Chinese families adore their men children. In the men children is their hope of eternal life. The boys are guarded and pampered and loved. They are absorbed into the mighty ocean of love, centuries old. Only the strongest and the most self-sufficient can emerge from such love into independent beings. I think my dead child could have been such a one had she been a boy. But she was a girl. Her name was Ruan. I try not to think of her. I have seen many children but never one like her. My firstborn she was, and Gerald was Chinese enough so that I saw disappointment in his eyes when he came into the hospital room. She lay in the crook of my arm, my right arm. How strangely one remembers the small useless details!

“Your daughter, sir,” I said to Gerald. I was very gay and happy in those days, in love with my whole life, with my husband, my house, the city of Peking, the country of China.

He sat down beside the bed and he gravely inspected the child. I saw he was doing his best to hide his disappointment.

“She is quite small,” he said.

I was angry. “On the contrary, Gerald. She weighs eight pounds. Also she is intelligent.”

“Intelligent,” he murmured, staring at the round sleeping face.

“Yes.” I yielded to him nearly always but suddenly I knew I would never yield to him about my daughter. She was to be beautiful, strong and intelligent. And so she was and so she continued to be, until at the age of five she died.

Oh, let me not think of her death, not upon the anniversary of my wedding night.

“Baba, you are tired,” I said and I rolled up my knitting. “You must go to bed. We will talk another time.”

“I have not finished,” he said and did not move. So I waited.

“I have not told you how Gerald’s mother was killed,” he said.

No, he had not told me. It was a dread death, that I could see. I saw it in his widened eyes staring at the dark window, the pinched whiteness about his nostrils, his tightened lips.

“She was shot,” he said. He was trembling again and I could not bear it.