Pearl Buck - Letters From Peking

“But why?” I asked her.

“Because it would make me feel naked before my own boys,” she said downrightly.

Her boys have married good valley women. Perhaps in their plain inarticulate lives, it is better not to speak. Words may be too much for the simple acts of physical union. I do not know. But I have known the fullness of love, an achievement absolute in height and depth, and I wish for my son a like joy.

“Sit down, Rennie,” I said. “It is late, but not too late for what I want to say.” He sat down on the low wall of the terrace, his back to the rising moon so that his face was in shadow and mine in the light. And I went on:

“It is not that I disapprove of Allegra for her own sake. She is like many other girls, pretty and sweet and shallow. She will make some man quite happy, a man who does not need much, a man who is like most men, requiring little from anyone, a joiner of clubs, a hail-fellow-well-met sort of man, with plenty of easy friends, not a reader of books, a man who likes a gay music, if he likes any, a man who goes to the movies on Saturday nights and enjoys cowboys. He will be happy with Allegra and she with him, and they will do very well together, for the heart of each has the measure of a cup and no more, and so they fulfill one another. But you, Rennie, will not be satisfied with no more than a cup of love. You need a fountain, living and eternal. You must find a deep woman, my son, a woman with an overflowing heart. When you find her, believe me, I shall never lie awake again, however late you come home. I shall be at rest.”

“You don’t know Allegra,” he said.

“A mother always knows the girl her son loves.”

I had never said such a thing before, nor even thought it, but it came to me now, a truth welling through me from the generations of women from whom I have sprung.

“Allegra says you are jealous,” Rennie retorted.

“That is because she knows she is not the one you should love, and she knows that I know it, too.”

We were on the edge of a great bitterness, my son and I, and I drew back from the abyss. I did not want to hear him speak words which would dash us over the precipice together. I did not want to hear him say that he had better go away because I did not understand him. I summoned Gerald to my aid and I tried to speak calmly.

“I suppose the reason I long so much for you to love one who can truly love you is because your father and I have been utterly happy together. From the moment I saw him I knew him for mine. I have never loved another man, nor had he loved a woman before me. It is old-fashioned, I know. It is quite the thing now, I hear, to say that one must experiment in love and that it does not matter how many people one experiments with before the final one is found. Perhaps that is true for the shallow-hearted. But it is not true for the deep in heart. Your father and I are among those few. It made our love complete when we knew that what we gave each to the other was new and never given before. I assure you it did.”

How glad I am now that I have never shown Rennie the letter I have locked in my desk upstairs! For whatever the letter means, I know that what I say is true. I know that Gerald still loves only me. But Rennie could not know. It will be a long time before he can know, and he will never know if he does not find his mate.

“It’s strange then that my father does not even write to you,” he said cruelly.

“Not strange,” I replied. “He knows that I know he loves me, and he knows I love him, unchangingly. There is some reason why he cannot write, a reason that has nothing to do with you and me. There are many such reasons that separate people in the world now. We must not allow them to destroy love. We must wait, still loving.”

I was teaching myself as well as Rennie, but I am not sure he knew it. One can only know a little when one is young. I do wonder that I could know, when I myself was young, that Gerald was the beloved the moment I saw him. It was not wisdom, for I had no wisdom then and not much now.

Rennie got up and came to me and kissed my cheek. “You needn’t worry, Mom,” he said. “And you’re wrong about Allegra. She’s all right. Anyway, I’m not my father and she is not you, and we have to live our own lives.”

To this there could be no reply, and he went upstairs. He reminds me twenty times a day without knowing it of these two facts, that he is not his father and that he has to live his own life. I went upstairs after his window was dark, and that night I slept fitfully. I dreamed that I searched everywhere through the house in Peking and could not find Gerald. He had gone. I woke then in terror, and knew my own house safely about me here in Vermont, but how lonely!

Tonight when Rennie came out of the shadows, I saw him stand for a long last moment with Allegra in his arms. It was so late they did not care, for who was there to see them? The people in our valley go to bed early. He stood, my tall son, with his arms clasped about the slender girl, and her face was lifted to his. They kissed the long passionate kiss of first love and then, wrapped in each other’s arms, they walked slowly up the moonlit road to her house. I lost him at the gate, for he took her to the door and it was a full quarter of an hour before he came to the gate again alone. Then he sauntered up the road, his hands in his pockets. I was on the terrace as usual when he reached the house. I was determined to let him see that I was not comforted, nor was my anxiety assuaged. Allegra tonight was to me what she had been on the other night. He saw me there on the long chair, and this time he called to me.

“Goodnight, Mom!”

“Goodnight, my son,” I said.

I heard him clatter up the backstairs from the kitchen to his room. My father put those stairs in for the hired man, so that the fellow could come and go without disturbing the family. And this summer Rennie moved from the room next to mine, where he has lived since we came home, announcing that he would take the room over the kitchen. It is a pleasant room, low-ceiled but large, and it has a separate bath, my father having been fastidious. “A man who bathes only on Saturday night needs a bathroom for himself alone,” he said.

I know of course why Rennie wants that room. It is so that he can come and go without passing my door. I know ruefully that he has the right to come and go now without telling me. And if Allegra were the girl I dream of for him, I would not care. But Allegra! Yet no mother can save her son. She can only watch and wait and wring her hands. I wonder if he understood when I spoke of deephearted love? I am sure he does not. And now I am sorry for Allegra, too, for if this goes on he will make demands on her far beyond what she is able to give. His passion will mightily exceed hers, and she will be made miserable because she knows she is not enough for him. So thinking, I perceive that it is Allegra I pity and I see that she must be protected, too, from Rennie. She is a woman, however small her heart, and it is wrong for her to be unhappy. I am for women even against my son. I had not thought of it so before. Deeper than motherhood is womanhood.

This discovery, which I have made only now as I write, is bewildering. I do not know what I shall do with it. Yet I feel suddenly eased. I am not thinking of Rennie alone. What I am thinking has to do with men and women. It is chance, beatific and blessed, that made Gerald and me well mated. Had not my father left the money in his will to send me to college, specifying Radcliffe because he had no son to send to Harvard, I might have chosen someone as Rennie has. One takes what one finds at this age. I must save Rennie as my father saved me, but Allegra must be saved, too.

It is long past midnight. I am too tired to think clearly about this new responsibility. Morning will bring light.