Pearl Buck - Letters From Peking

Oh, what a look of sadness was on the young face!

“It doesn’t matter,” Rennie said. “Nothing matters.”

“Go to sleep again, Baba,” I said. “I will come back soon.” We tiptoed out again, and I knew that I had lost. Baba, in innocence, has deserted me and mine. He has withdrawn from us into the distances of old age.

Then I was frantic to reclaim my son. “Rennie, come into my room now. I have pictures to show you. I must show them to you before you go.”

He followed me quietly, and in my room he sat down as formally as a guest and waited. And I took out my box of pictures and found the one of Gerald’s mother.

“This is the Chinese lady Baba married,” I told him. “This is your grandmother, your father’s mother. She is quite beautiful, in her own dignified way. She is someone to be proud of, the daughter of an ancient family rooted in Peking. You remember your great-uncle, Han Yu-ren, surely.”

Rennie took the picture and gazed at the calm Chinese face. “Why did Baba marry her?”

“He wanted to — to become part of the country to which he had dedicated his life. He thought he could get near to the people he loved. He wanted to — to cease to be foreign.”

“Now he has forgotten everything,” Rennie said. “He does not know even me. I suppose he never loved her.”

“Why do you say so? You don’t know.”

“If he loved her he would have remembered me.”

I could not deny it. However old I grow, whatever the change in body and mind, while I draw breath I shall not forget Gerald, nor Gerald’s son.

“Baba did what he thought was right,” I said.

“It is not enough,” Rennie said. “There has to be love.”

And he gave me back the picture. Now he got to his feet and leaned down from his height and kissed my cheek.

“Goodbye, Mother,” he said. He went away immediately. I heard his old car whirl down the road in a cloud of summer dust. This time he may never come back. I do not know. What I remember is that he spoke again as his father taught him, his English classic and pure. The slang, the American boy talk, he had wiped from tongue and lips. What this means also I do not know.

I cannot go away, I cannot follow Rennie even if I would, for here is Baba, who has no one but me. I am held on this quiet farm, remote from everyone except Matt and his wife, and they have lived so long together in the valley that they know only the language of a hate-filled love. They quarrel and enjoy themselves in combat by day and I do not doubt also by night. Indeed I am sure that their chief conflict is by night in the great old double bed that fills the small bedroom on the north side of the kitchen. Seven children they have bred together, and each of them the fruit of a quarrel. They have needed no other companionship, no other excitement, I do believe. Matt is insanely jealous and Mrs. Matt is proud of his jealousy, boasting of its oppression.

“If Matt so much as sees a man’s hat in the house, he takes conniptions,” so she boasts. “Oh, I pay for it, I do,” she declares, and her little round wrinkled face glows with pleasure.

She said that this morning when in a stupor of loneliness I crossed the dusty road to praise her flower beds. Before I could reply as I always do, that she is lucky Matt still cares enough about her to be jealous, the postman passed and I cried goodbye and ran after him. There in the shade of the big maple at the gate he paused and handed me a few letters, none of any importance except a thin grey envelope. It was sent from Singapore, I knew the stamp, but the handwriting was strange.

“Your husband?” the postman asked.

“No,” I said, and then was afraid of what might be written within and so I left him and went to the rock beside the spring, and sat there in the shade of a leaning apple tree and tore open the envelope.

“Dear Elder Sister,” the letter began.

It was from her.

All these months I have not answered Gerald’s letter. He asked my permission and I have not given it. Underneath all that I do has been the knowledge of this delay, a secret as hidden as a sin. Now I cannot hide it any longer.

She writes in English, but not well. She is trying to convey something to me. She wants me to understand that she will not enter my house to take my place until I give permission.

You have lived in Peking very long [she writes]. I think you understand something very much about us Chinese people. Here now it is hard for living, nevertheless. It is also hard for MacLeod, your husband, and he is wishing so much for some woman to take care of house and mending and cooking, and so forth. At my former request, he wrote to you asking your agreement to my coming to his house as wife-in-absence. You know this is quite common, no more second wife or concubine, as before, which is too old-fashioned, but wife-in-absence. Of course if you come back some other time, I will go away if you wish. To you I have respect as younger to elder. Please permit me, and tell me how everything should be in caring for our husband. I wish to do what you tell me and make him so happy. This is my duty. But first your permission, please, to save his life. I send this letter to a secret friend in Singapore and please return to same.

Your humble younger sister,

MEI–LAN

The address in Singapore is to a silk shop. Someone there, I suppose, is her secret friend, someone in touch with this strange new China, by which I am rejected. I wish I had the courage to write boldly to Gerald. But what would I write? Shall I give my permission for another woman to take my place? And can she take my place? Surely no American woman has ever been in like predicament.

This rocky farm of mine, in this distant state of Vermont, is as far from Gerald now as though he did not exist. Perhaps it is I who no longer exist. Why indeed should I exist who am no longer needed — or loved? Or am I loved? I cannot answer this letter today. I am voiceless, I cannot think. I do not know what to say, until I am in communion with him again.

I come to my room. I take his letter from my locked box and though I have sworn that I will not look at it again, I do so, I set it down here. I copy every word, and so make his words my own. I shall never forget them now. This is the letter from Peking, Gerald’s last letter.

MY DEAR WIFE:

First before I say what must be said, let me tell you that I love only you. Whatever I do now, remember that it is you I love. If you never receive a letter from me again, know that in my heart I write you every day. I say this because of what I must next tell you. It is imperative for me to take into my home a Chinese woman. It is not only that I need someone to look after the house, to wash my clothes, mend and so on. You know very well how helpless I am in all these matters where you have been so useful to me. But it is necessary now for me to prove myself. It is not enough, it seems, for me to swear loyalty to those in present power. I must forswear all my past, I must curse my non-Chinese blood and declare against the foreign part of myself. I have been ordered to choose another woman. I tell you because you and I have always been honest, one with the other. If I were to be less than honest with you now, it would mean that I had indeed forgotten our life together. I shall never forget and so I tell you.

I cannot write again. It would be too dangerous for me and too dangerous even for our son. You think him safe in your country, but he is not safe anywhere unless I repudiate him and you. If you hear I have done so publicly, do not believe I have done so in reality. I wish to stay alive, if possible, until these days are past. If I meet death in spite of all my efforts to avoid it, remember that my only thought is of you, my Eve.

GERALD