Pearl Buck - Letters From Peking

“Baba — don’t tell me! Don’t think of it.”

He went on as though I had not spoken. “In the year 1930, in the city of Nanking, she was seized by order of the secret police of the Nationalist government. She was living alone. She had not accompanied her friend, Madame Sun. She had not left with the others on the Long March. For reasons I never knew she had been told to remain in the city. Perhaps she was a spy. I do not know. But she was taken from her bed one cold morning in early spring, before dawn, and she was forced to walk, just as she was, in her night robes, to the Drum Tower, and there, with her back to the wall, and her eyes not blindfolded, she was shot and killed.”

I wanted to ask no other question. But I had to ask.

“Baba — how did you know?”

“She had a servant, an old woman. That woman found her way to me. She said that her mistress had told her to find me somehow—” His voice faded to silence.

There was no more to tell. His whole frame seemed to shrink. His eyelids dropped over his staring eyes.

“Come, Baba,” I said. “Come with me. You are too weary.” And I led him to his room and stayed near until he was in bed and at last asleep….

One more question I wish I had asked. Oh, I wish I had asked Baba if Gerald was ever told the manner of his mother’s death. I think he was. Perhaps it is not necessary to ask. The Chinese tell each other everything. Who can keep a secret there? Even if the old woman never told, and if Baba never told, someone would have told. Gerald knows.

Yesterday the answer came to the question I did not ask. The postman brought a magazine under Chinese stamps. There are three of them on the magazine. I had not seen these new Communist stamps before. One is orange, one is purple and one is blue. Each carries the face of a young man. One is a soldier, one is a machinist, one is a peasant. There is no name on the wrapper. It merely says P.O.B. No. 305, Peking, China. But I know Gerald sent it. For when I opened the magazine, I found it was dedicated to a martyr of the revolution. She was shot in Nanking on May the fifteenth, 1930. Her name was Han Ai-lan. She was Gerald’s mother. There is a picture of her on the cover. I sit looking at it, here by the window where the light falls clear. The face is calm and austere, a narrow face, the eyes large and lustrous, the hair drawn back from the high forehead, the lips, tenderly cut in youth, perhaps, were stern. I can see Gerald’s face emerging from this face. The lines are the same.

So my question, unasked, is answered. Gerald knows everything. I do not doubt now that the old woman bore a message to him from his mother. The mother would have told the son how she died and for what cause.

He did know, he did remember. For it was he who set our wedding day, May the fifteenth. He set the day and did not tell me why, but I know now. He cannot write me a letter, but he has sent me his mother’s picture and the story of her life — not her life as wife and mother, but her life as a revolutionist, after he was born. There is no mention of him here. But he wants me to know. He wants me to know and to understand. Oh, beloved, I try, I try.

It grows no easier to live alone, woman without man. I feel a certain hardness in me. I am not as tenderhearted as I was. The daily exercise of love is gone and I fear an atrophy. I wonder how other women live, who have had husbands and have them no more. That I must not say of myself, for Gerald still lives. He is not dead but liveth. I do not read the Scriptures often, not regularly, but now I crave spiritual food and I find it wherever the spirit of man has written its travail. This morning, not a day of resurrection, not the cool Easter dawn, but a summer’s day in early June, full of life and burgeoning, the garden forcing itself, the late apple trees in full blossom, the grass new green, I felt my blood running through me, too swift and strong, and my soul cried out for succor. Then I took the small worn leatherbound New Testament which had been my father’s, and it opened to these words. “He is not dead but liveth.” It is enough. I closed the book and went to my work.

Oh, good hard work that a farm has ever ready — I bless it. I went to the barn and there discovered that my prize cow, Cecily, had in the night presented me with a fine heifer calf. Mother and child are doing well, and Cecily looked at me smugly through the bars of the maternity stall. She is a pink-nosed Guernsey and she is slightly dish-faced, which lends her a saucy air. Her figure is impeccable, by Guernsey standards. She did not rise when she saw me, excusing herself doubtless by her achievement. The calf is exquisite, a fawn, dainty head and good lines of back and rump. Since we are strangers, she stared at me with faint alarm, and her mother licked her cheek for reassurance. All traces of birth were cleaned away. Cecily is a good housekeeper in such matters, and she was complacent. In gratitude I offered her the mash that Matt concocts for such occasions, but she ate it without greed, delicately and as a favor to me.

I came away cheered, not only by the possession of another fine heifer, but by pleasure. Life flows on, whatever the need of the heart. I turned to the garden and fell upon the young weeds, though of all tasks I hate weeding. The seeds are up, however, and the race is on. I worked hard all day, stopping only to make luncheon for Baba and me at noon. Matt takes his lunch on the outdoor terrace upon such a day as this, and Rennie is in the last lap of his school year and does not come home at midday. He goes to college in the autumn and what that means I do not know. I fear my loneliness but I must not feed upon him. Baba and I will live here together, like two old folk….

Ah, but I am not old. Tonight when the young moon rose, I could not go to bed. Rennie is away this evening. He is in love, I think. He put on his best dark-blue suit, a white shirt and a crimson tie. He had even polished his Sunday shoes. I do not know who she is. I must wait.

Baba went to bed early. He likes to be under cover, as he puts it, by half past eight. But it is only the beginning of night then, and I came to the narrow terrace that faces the moon, and lay down on the long chair. The air is chill, though it is June, and I wrapped myself in my white shawl and let myself dream of the beloved. I will not let love die, not while he lives, and so I feed on dreams. If the beloved is dead, one must not dream. But I am no true widow. My beloved liveth.

Therefore my mind floats over land and sea to the city which is his, and like a ghost I creep through the streets, and into the gate where he lives. This I have done again and again in the years we have been parted. They are not many years, actually — only five — and there is nothing eternal about our separation. At any moment he may decide to come here to me. If he does, I will not ask a question. I will not ask why did you, or how could you? I will open my arms and receive him. If we live to be old together yet will I never ask him the question that broods in my heart. It is enough that he returns.

There hangs the moon! Upon a summer night in Peking we sit in the east courtyard. Our house belonged once to a Manchu prince, not a high prince, but a lowly one, a younger brother. It is not large enough for a palace, but those who lived in it loved it well enough to add beauty here and there. Thus the gates between the courts are moon-shaped, framed in tiles set in lacelike patterns. A lotus pool lies in the east court, and a cluster of bamboos hides the wall. The street is on the other side of the house, and the court is quiet. Moreover, the east court leads into our bedroom, Gerald’s and mine. The huge Chinese bed stands against the inner wall. At first, as a bride, I complained about the bed. It is too hard, I said, a wooden frame and a bottom of woven rattan to sleep upon. I liked the pink satin bed curtains caught back by silver hooks, but I did not like the mattress. Gerald laughed at me and said that I wanted the beauty and not the hardness of Chinese life. And I said why should we sleep on wood and rattan when we could have a spring mattress, and is that a sin? Not sin, he said, but inconsistency. We should be one thing or the other, he said. And this I refused to concede, for why not have the best of both, I said, and so when he went to Tientsin to order supplies for the college year, he brought back an American spring mattress. And it was a game between us that I should pretend to force him to admit its comfort while he pretended to like the old hard Chinese bed bottom. We laughed a great deal in those days, Gerald and I. I do not remember that he laughed with anyone else, not with his pupils or with Rennie or with Baba, but only with me. He was to that degree not like his Chinese friends, for Chinese laugh easily and gaily. But Gerald is grave. He can even be somber. At such times he is always silent. Nothing I could say would make him speak. Only love could bring him back to me, warm physical love, informed by heart and mind. Sitting there alone on the terrace, I stretched out my arms to him across the sea.