Pearl Buck - Letters From Peking

I must of course give permission. I do not know why I have delayed all these months to do what I knew had to be done. Now that this letter has come from the woman, and I know that she has not gone to him, I see that I must give permission at once. Perhaps I shall cable. No, that would be too startling. To receive a cable from America might make trouble for a Chinese even in a British colony. I will write and send the letter airmail. So I write. I copy my letter here that I may always know what I said. If ever Gerald and I meet again, here is the record. For I am really writing for Gerald. Yes, dear and beloved, I am writing this for you. If you cannot come to me nor I to you, then it may be possible nevertheless some day to send you the record. I wish I had said to you on that last day that you too must keep the record. Ah no, it would not be safe there, where you are. The servants may be paid by others than you. Here in this quiet Vermont valley there are no spies. I think there are no spies. I write my letter to Mei-lan. And now it occurs to me that she did not sign her family name. Mei-lan is a common name, impossible to trace. But her name does not matter.

DEAR YOUNGER SISTER:

Your letter has come to my hand. I have read it. I give my permission. You may not take my place, for each woman has her own place in a man’s life, but you may enter my house and make your own place there. I shall tell no one here in my country, for none would understand. It is true, as you say, that I understand. Nevertheless, my heart breaks. Care for him well, for I love him.

ELIZABETH

I stamped the envelope myself and took it to the post office and slipped it into the box under the window. But Miss Myra saw it. She is our postmistress, a plump friendly woman, and, being unmarried, consumed with curiosity about marriage, and especially about mine.

“Letter to your husband?” she inquired gaily. She has pink round cheeks withered in many fine lines, and a tight little pink mouth and two round blue eyes without eyebrows. Her hair is frizzed and yellow.

“No, not to my husband,” I said.

She took the letter from the box and studied it. “A foreign address. China, ain’t it?”

“No, Singapore, a British colony.”

“I thought they hadn’t any colony now.”

“They returned India to the Indians, but they still hold Hongkong and Singapore.”

“Do they now!”

She looked unbelieving but I said no more. I had done what I must and I went home. Baba was not yet out of bed, his day beginning at noon and ending at twilight. He seemed drowsy, vague, uncomprehending, and I did not, as sometimes I do, endeavor to rouse him. But when he was dressed and sitting in his armchair, for he no longer comes downstairs, when he had eaten his bowl of oatmeal and drunk a cup of tea, he suddenly seemed awake and knowing. Perhaps Rennie had left a dart of memory in him, by which he was pricked.

“Did someone come here yesterday?” he inquired.

“Yes, Baba. It was Rennie.”

He mused. “Rennie — who is Rennie?”

“Your grandson, Baba.”

He reflected upon this information without speaking. A half hour later, while I was straightening his room, he spoke with sudden clarity.

“But I thought it was Ai-lan.”

“How could it be, when she was a woman and Rennie is a man — very nearly?”

I spoke half playfully, while I dusted his table.

“She looked like a man,” he said. “She put on a uniform. It was of dark-blue cotton, the jacket buttoned, and trousers like a man. It startled me.”

“It must have been startling — on a woman.”

I listened now. So Rennie looks like his Chinese grandmother! He looks like Gerald, certainly. Then Gerald looks like his mother. In Peking they said he looked like his father. But that is the way it is. Each side insists the other side prevails and so each rejects what is not like itself.

“Ai-lan was killed,” Baba said painfully. His old face wrinkled and tears dripped down from his eyes.

“It was long ago, Baba.”

“I believe it was not,” he replied. “I believe it was only last year, or at most two years ago. Her grave is still fresh.” He paused. “Where is her grave?” he asked.

He was determined to weep for his dead wife. But why now, after all the years?

“Did you love her, Baba?” I asked.

He paused to consider. When he spoke it was in one of his rare moments of clarity.

“I couldn’t love her,” he said. “I tried, for the Scriptures say a man must cleave to his wife. They do not say how it is to be done. And she knows I could not.”

“You gave her a son,” I reminded him for comfort.

“Ah, but she knew,” he retorted. “She knew very well. On the morning he was born, and at an unusual hour, I believe, at ten o’clock on a fine spring morning, I went into her room when the doctor told me I should do so. She lay with the child sleeping on her arm. ‘I have given you a son.’ That was what she said. And I couldn’t speak. The child had long black hair. It was a shock to think my son was Chinese. I wasn’t prepared.”

I tried to laugh. “Baba, the mother was Chinese — your wife!”

But he shook his head in vague, remembered distress.

“I was not prepared,” he insisted.

What he meant was that he had not thought of a child. He married Gerald’s mother for reasons of his own and not for a son. He did not want him. And that not being wanted had remained deep in Gerald’s being, a dagger never withdrawn, a wound never healed. It was the dagger and the wound that kept Gerald from coming with me to my country. I see it, I feel it. But Rennie carries the mark and he is here. Oh, how deep is the wound of not being loved! From generation to generation the newborn heart is wounded afresh and cannot be healed until love is found, in someone, somewhere.

Baba had begun to weep again and I asked, to divert him,

“Baba, do you remember Sam Blaine?”

He was diverted. He was doubtful. “Do I know him?”

“You lived in his little house, in Kansas.”

“Did I?”

“Yes, and I tell you because Rennie has gone there to live and work on the ranch. Sam Blaine was in China during the war. He liked it and he liked the people. They were kind to him. That is why he was kind to you when you were taken ill on the train and they put you off. Sam Blaine happened by somehow—

I must ask how, someday — and became your friend. Now he is Rennie’s friend.”

He remembered none of it, but at least he forgot to weep. I pushed his chair to the window where he likes to sit, and he gazed peacefully out upon the rising hills and the valleys. He likes the sheep, and he leaned forward now and again, to see where they were cropping the grass.

“I shall be back soon,” I said, and went away to do my day’s work.

…Tonight when Baba was in bed and ready for sleep he suddenly remembered very much about Sam Blaine. I had all but closed the door, I had said goodnight, when Baba spoke.

“About Sam Blaine—”

“Yes?”

“Sam Blaine is forty-two years old. He has never married. His father owned two thousand acres of good black earth. He was a cattle man, and he owned two mines in Nevada, too. His wife died when the child was only two years old. Sam was his only child.”

“Baba,” I cried, “how well you remember!” So I came back into the room and sat down and Baba said he had been taken from the train, ill and feverish, and told to wait in the railroad station, and Sam Blaine had come to fetch some freight. Instead he took Baba home with him and put him to bed.

“I had typhoid fever,” Baba said. “I was very ill. Sam stayed with me in the hut.”

And bit by bit he told me the story. When he woke in the night, not knowing where he was, Sam sat by the bed and talked about China. He spoke of Chinese villages and country roads and how the nightingales sing in the twilight of summer days. He was there during the war, but he did not speak of war or death. Instead he spoke to Baba of peaceful scenes, of families sitting in the doorways of their homes at evening, of men tilling the fields, of women at the pond washing the clothes.