Pearl Buck - Letters From Peking

“The — the fact is, I never thought I’d be — be in love, you know — with an American girl.”

“Didn’t you, now,” I teased. “And whom would you be marrying please, if not me?”

And he said soberly, “I had always supposed I would marry a Chinese. My uncle told me it was my mother’s wish.”

That is what he said, long ago, when his mother was nothing to me except a dead woman, and what she said meant nothing, either. I had even forgotten that midnight, until now, when Allegra brings it out of my memory.

I keep looking at the picture of Gerald’s mother. I have put it away again and again. Each time I say forever, until or unless some day I must show it to Rennie, and then her face appears in my mind and I am restless until I see her with my eyes. So tonight I have taken her picture out of the locked drawer of my desk, and it lies here before me, the same calm unchanging face. It is not cold. The surface only is cold. Behind the calm steadfast eyes of a Chinese woman I feel a powerful warmth. We might have been friends, she and I, unless she had decided first that I was her enemy. She would have decided, not I. I was never deceived by Chinese women, not even by the flowerlike lovely girls. They are the strongest women in the world. Seeming always to yield, they never yield. Their men are weak beside them. Whence comes this female strength? It is the strength that centuries have given them, the strength of the unwanted. It was always the sons who were welcomed at birth. It was always the sons who were given privilege and protection and pampering love. And the daughter had to accept this, generation after generation, and to bear it in silence. She learned to think first of herself — to protect herself in secret, to steal what she was not given, to lie lest the truth bring her harm, to use deceit as a shield and a cover for her own ends, those ends her own safety and her own pleasure when she was only a female, but how magnificent in sacrifice if she were a great woman, as Gerald’s mother was.

I have put the picture into the drawer again and locked it fast. But it haunts me. Today, which is Saturday, Baba and I being at lunch together alone, since Rennie is off fishing, or so he told me, I could not refrain from speaking again of her.

“Baba, you remember we were speaking of Gerald’s mother?”

“Were we?”

He was eating neatly with chopsticks, a habit which he assumes whenever I cook rice, which is often, because he accepts it with appetite when he will take nothing else.

“Yes, we were,” I said, “and I want to talk more about her.”

He put down his chopsticks. “What is it you wish to know?”

“I have a picture of her upstairs.”

He turned quite pale. “How is it you have it?”

“It is in a magazine.”

I could not tell him Gerald had sent it.

“Fetch it,” he said.

I ran upstairs and brought it down and placed it before him. He put on his spectacles and looked at it carefully. “Ye-es,” he said slowly, “ye-es, I can recognize her. But it is not as she used to look.”

“How did she look?”

He knitted his white eyebrows, thinking. “When I lifted her wedding veil, I thought her nearly beautiful.”

“Yes, Baba?” This was because he paused so long.

“Afterwards I was not sure. She could make her face quite strange to me.”

“Why did she?”

“I did not ask. We were never close enough for questions.”

I could not deny my impulse. “But you had a child together.”

A faded pink crept into his cheeks. “Well, yes.”

“You won’t deny Gerald, I hope?” I had to laugh at him a little.

“No — oh no. But you see—”

“I don’t, Baba.”

“A child doesn’t have much to do with one — you know. I mean — well, such things happen.”

“For men — not for women.”

“I daresay.”

He cleared his throat. “At any rate, after Gerald was born, there was no more of that sort of thing.”

“Your wish?”

“No — hers.”

“How well you remember, Baba!”

“I forget very much,” he said vaguely.

He took up his chopsticks again and began to eat. He remembers but he no longer feels. And I wonder if by some strange chance that Chinese woman did love him long ago, and because he did not love her, she took what she had, the child, and made the child her own. Who can tell me now? But the child was Gerald.

Tonight the moon is full upon the mountains and the shadows in the valley are black. Our valley is wide, and the terrace looks westward upon it. The graveled road is silvered and I see two figures walking slowly at the far end into the trees, their arms entwined. I know they are Rennie and Allegra.

It is a misfortune that these two met in the spring. It is not so easy to fall in love in winter. Winter is for married love in firelit evenings and a house enclosed in snow. The snow fell deep in Peking and the drifts against the gate were as good as any lock. The Chinese admire the beauty of snow, their painters love the white of late snow against the pink of peach blossoms or the red of berries on the Indian bamboo, but they do not like to go out in snow, their shoes being of cloth or velvet, and so Gerald and I had no visitors on snowy nights. Even the old watchman stayed prudently in his little room by the gate, and we were safely alone. We heaped the brazier with coals and we put out the candles and sat by the glow of the fire. That was the time for love, the long night stretching ahead in hours of endless happiness.

Here in Vermont, too, the snow makes me prisoner, but not of love. I sit by the fire alone and Rennie studies his books in his own room. Now it is summer and I am still alone, for Rennie is with Allegra. They have reached the end of the road. They have walked out of the moonlight into the shadows beneath the maple trees. I cannot see them. It is not the first evening. A change began with the new moon this month. I knew it because I felt it in Rennie. He was silent and hurried, not by work or necessity but because of haste and urgency in himself. He came and went without speaking and if he saw me looking at him he knew I asked why he was changed, and he turned his head away and did not answer.

Last night when he came in I could bear it no longer, for whom have I if Rennie leaves me? I had stayed until long past midnight upon the terrace, so late that the wind was cool and I wrapped my red wool scarf about me. Then I saw Rennie springing up the hill. He looked like a man in the night, so tall and strong and powerful. Something has made him a man. He came near and saw me and he did not come to the terrace, but went instead to the door of the kitchen.

“Rennie!”

At the sound of my voice he paused, his hand on the latch.

“Yes?”

“Come here, please.”

He came, not unwillingly, even quietly and calmly.

“You’re late,” he said.

“I have waited for you.”

His voice is a man’s voice now. “You mustn’t wait for me — not any more.”

“I cannot sleep when I do not know where you are,” I said.

“You will have to learn to sleep, not knowing.”

He said this coolly and I was suddenly angry because I knew he was right. And being angry I could not keep from speaking the truth.

“I know you are with Allegra every evening and I don’t like her.”

It is the first time I have spoken my growing dislike for this girl whom Rennie is beginning to love. Beginning? I do not know how deeply he has gone into love. I do not know what he thinks about love. If Gerald were here, as he should be, to help me with our son, I could talk with him and heed his advice. But would he speak to Rennie? My neighbor, Mrs. Landes, a grandmother, says that fathers cannot “speak” to their sons. She says that her own husband would never “speak” to the boys. They are grown now and married, but he did not speak, and she could not speak.