Pearl Buck - Letters From Peking

“You must bring her to see me, if you really like her,” I said. All the warnings were quivering inside me. My son is in danger. The hour I had foreseen since the day he was laid in my arms, new born, has now come. A girl has looked at him. He has looked at the girl. What girl is this?

“It’s getting cold,” I said. “We must go inside and shut the doors.”

I hope the friendship will not move too quickly into something else. Rennie brought Allegra here today. They have been meeting every day, I think. It is so easy here in the valley. The long summer days begin early and end late. Rennie works hard with Matt, cleaning the sugar bush on fine days and packing maple sugar or bottling syrup, while I tend house and garden and the barn. Yet there are hours after sunset and before bedtime. I cannot ask him always where he goes and when he will come back. He wants now to be free.

Today, when I had cleared away our supper, he went out and I saw him striding down the road with purpose. In less than an hour he was back, bringing the girl with him.

“Mother,” he said, now very formal. “This is Allegra Woods.”

I was doing the mending in the living room and the lamp was lit, and Baba was sitting in peaceful silence in the brown leather armchair, his feet, in velvet Chinese shoes, on the hassock. Of course he was wearing his crimson silk Chinese robe. I had helped him wash his hair and his beard today and they were snow white.

“How do you do, Allegra,” I said, not getting up. But I took my spectacles off by habit, since it is not good Chinese manners to greet a stranger, or a friend, in spectacles.

The young girl made a graceful movement toward me, not quite a bow nor yet a curtsey. Then she put out a slim hand.

“How do you do, Mrs. MacLeod.”

“This is Rennie’s grandfather,” I said, looking toward Baba.

For some reason of his own Baba decided to be difficult. Instead of greeting Allegra he said in Chinese, very clearly,

“Who is this female?”

Rennie flushed. He pretends he has forgotten all his Chinese but when he wishes he remembers it perfectly. He spoke in sharp English. “Grandfather, this is my friend Allegra Woods. Mother wanted to meet her.”

Baba stared at Rennie, nodding his head like an old mandarin, and would not say a word to her. Nor would he look at Allegra.

“She should be at home with her parents,” he said in Chinese.

I laughed. “Allegra, you mustn’t mind him. He lived in China for so many years he has forgotten he is an American.”

Her blue eyes grew wide. “In China? Rennie didn’t tell me.”

Then Rennie has not told her everything. I must be careful not to tell too much.

“Yes,” I said cheerfully. “We all lived there. Rennie’s father is still there. As a matter of fact, Rennie was born in Peking.”

“Really?”

“Very really.”

“But I thought China was communist?”

“Just now, yes.”

“Then how can his father—”

“He is the president of a great college and he feels it his duty to stay with his students.”

“I see.”

But she didn’t see, that I knew. She looked thoughtfully at Rennie, her eyes big and blue.

“Get some ice cream, Rennie,” I said. “There’s plenty in the freezer.”

“Come along, Allegra.” He seized her hand.

This is the beginning. I do not know the end.

We live in a narrow valley. One word can start a forest fire of gossip — one word, for example, like Communist. Or even a word, say, like China….

“Did you have to tell her everything at once?” Rennie groaned that night when he came home.

“I did not tell her everything,” I said.

Baba had gone to bed, but I had waited, knowing that he must accuse me.

“She said now she knew why I seemed queer,” Rennie said and choked.

I longed to put my arms about him but he would have hated it. Better to speak the truth and speak it whole.

“You will have to accept yourself,” I said. “You are partly Chinese, one fourth by blood but more, perhaps, in tastes and inclinations. We shall have to see. One thing I know. You will never be happy until you are proud of all that you are — not just of a part. You have a noble inheritance, but it is on both sides of the globe.”

I did not look at him. I kissed his cheek and went away. The Allegras of this world are not for him, but he will have to find it out for himself. Then when the pain is over he will discover a woman who is his, and whose he can be. Whether she is Chinese, or American, who knows or cares?

What, I wonder, made me know Gerald was mine? I was, it seems to me now, a very ordinary girl. There had been nothing enlarging in my childhood. Even my mother was a limiting influence. She had no large emotions, no world feelings. The church to which we went taught me nothing of the much-talked-of and seldom practiced brotherhood. My father was skeptic, but he was not a preacher even of his own ideas.

I remember that spring day in my senior year at Radcliffe. I was hurrying to my class in philosophy, my arm full of books, for I was a studious girl, but in those days we were not ashamed of it. Nowadays, it seems, if I am to judge by what Rennie tells me, boys do not like studious girls. Allegra, for example, has a pretty way of seeming stupid, although I do not know whether she is. But I did not think of such pretense. I was late to class that spring day, and much distracted by the beauty of the season and the warmth of the sunshine, while I tried to keep in my head the ponderous meanings of Kant’s categorical imperative. And at that predestined moment I saw Gerald run with his striking grace down the steps of the hall I was about to enter. I shall remember forever, though my eyes, one day, be blind with age, the glint of the sun on his black hair, the lively glance of his black eyes, and the clear smoothness of his cream skin.

The Chinese have some magic in the structure of their skin and even a little of the blood seems to purify the flesh. Rennie has the same faultlessness of skin. I do not wonder that Allegra likes to dance with her cheek against his as I saw them doing last Saturday night in our small community center. So too do I love to dance, cheek to cheek, with. Gerald. We did not speak that day on the steps, but we looked full into one another’s eyes, and instantly I made up my mind forever. I would learn what his name was and tell him he was mine.

It did not happen in a day or a week but it did in a month. For I kept looking at him because he was handsome, and then because he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. Soon I was speaking to him, managing to walk out the door of a classroom when he did. And he was so shy that I had to keep on walking beside him down the corridor lest he leave me, and so to the front gate of the building and into the street. He could not shake me off. And then, making a pretext of his being foreign and perhaps without friends, I asked him one day to meet my mother, and so it all began. I was in love.

And yet when he let me know at last — oh what a long time it was before he let me know, two months, three months, four months — I thought he would never tell me. Even when he began to tell me, he hesitated, he delayed.

“Go on, go on,” I said, laughing with joy.

“I don’t know whether you can consider me as a friend—” He wet his dry lips.

“I can and I do,” I said.

After we were married, I asked him why he stammered so much that day, for it was day, high noon, and we were sitting on a bench beside the Charles River, our books piled on the ground at our feet. He said, stammering again, though by then we were in our bedroom by the east court of the Peking house, and we had been happy together that night and were about to sleep,