Pearl Buck - Letters From Peking

When he repeated these things to me, Baba was suddenly bewildered. He looked at me with troubled eyes, his face that of a tired old child.

“Where is that land where we once lived?” he asked.

“It is where it always was,” I said. “It is across the sea. And Gerald is there.”

He was puzzled. “Then why are we here?”

Why, indeed? My heart broke and I leaned my head on his bony old breast.

“Now it is you who are weeping,” he said and he lay patient and still, waiting for me to lift up my head from his breast. There was no warmth in him, only a final patience, and my tears dried and I lifted my head.

“It is time for you to sleep,” I told him.

“And will you sleep?” he asked.

“Sooner or later I, too, will sleep,” I promised and I drew the blanket about his shoulders and went away.

…Oh, the awful silence of the valley at night! No one comes near me and I am as alone as though I lived solitary upon a planet. Here and there in the distance a light burns. It means a house, a home, two people, perhaps children. The oil lamp burns yellow in Matt’s little house, and far down at the end of the valley the bright single light is the naked electric bulb that never goes out above the office door of Bruce Spaulden. I know, too, the intermittent flares of summer folk. None of them burns for me. Sometimes I light every lamp in my empty house and a stranger passing by could believe the house is full of guests. But I have no guests.

Tonight, when loneliness became intolerable, I went upstairs, and took down the box of Gerald’s letters and I laid them out upon my desk in order of time. There are not many — only twelve in all, not including the final one. The first one was written soon after we left him in Shanghai. I wonder now if it was right to leave him. Yet he bade me go. I think he was not yet afraid. Indeed, he was even cheerful, believing that nothing could be worse than the years of war through which we had already passed. He was hopeful about the new government. Those builders of the new order spoke well. We had no presentiments, in spite of old Mr. Pilowski, the White Russian who managed the hotel where we stayed.

“Not to be trusted,” Mr. Pilowski declared, and brushed up his stiff mustaches. Black they were, but dyed, of course. Mr. Pilowski must have been well over seventy. “Never are revolutionaries to be trusted — no, not in the world. So they came into my Russia, promising all and seizing everything. So did they in France before, killing the kings and the queens and themselves behaving worsely.”

Gerald argued with him. “We can scarcely go on as we are, Mr. Pilowski. The people are wretched after the war. Inflation is crushing. Nothing is being done.”

“Some day, you will know that nothing being done is better than wickedness being done,” Mr. Pilowski declared. He grew red and angry and Gerald smiled, refusing further argument, but still believing himself right. It is the arrogance of the Chinese, and I must never forget that Gerald is half Chinese, to believe they are different from all other peoples, more reasonable, more sane, than other peoples are. In some ways it is true.

Gerald’s first letter is almost gay. “Everything goes well,” he writes. “I am beginning to think you should have stayed in China. Rennie could have taken his college work here in Peking. I do not know why we were so easily frightened. I believe that a new day is coming in this old, old country of mine.”

Not “our” old, old country, but “mine.” I see now the first hint of separation from me. He was already choosing his country, alone, if need be.

The hopefulness continues through to the fifth letter. Then I see the first hint of doubt.

“My Eve,” he writes me, “perhaps it is better that you are away for a year or so. In order to succeed the new government must clear away all obstacles. Do you remember Liu Chin, the silk merchant? It seems he is a traitor. He is so mild, so gentle — do you remember? Today he was shot at the Marco Polo Bridge with eleven others, two of them women. It is inevitable that some do not like the new order. But the new order is here. We must live with it and through it. The Minister of Education unfortunately is not a man of wide education. I am having to replace—” He scratches that out. It appears that already it is not safe to be frank. Thereafter Gerald writes no more of anything of importance. He tells me when the yellow Shantung rose in the east court blooms.

“Dear Eve, the rose is late this year. We have had bitter dust storms, the most severe I have ever known. The goldfish are dying in the pool although I have tried to keep the water fresh. The gardener went home to his parents in Shansi a month ago. I have had difficulty in finding another. People do not want to work—” The words are scratched out again. It is not to be believed. People do not want to work? Why not? Gerald does not say he has had my letters. I wrote every day and mailed the letters once a week.

The eighth letter is very short. “Dear Wife: Today is like any day now in my life. I have made the schedule, and am engaging the professors for next semester. The new dean is a clever young man with many ideas. The dean of women is a former student of mine. She was ambitious even in youth. Tell Rennie to study engineering. It will be better for him than teaching. Tonight is hot and still. I face a long lonely summer.”

The ninth letter is listless. Commencement is over and he is tired. I know the mood. We used to take a journey, make a holiday, go perhaps to the sea at Peitaiho, or travel to the Diamond Mountains in Korea. One year we went to Tai Shan and lived in a Buddhist temple for a month. I wonder if Rennie remembers. The old abbot befriended him, and taught him how to play cat’s cradle with a strip of silk.

Three months passed before the tenth letter reached me, and it is an empty letter. I wept when I read it and it makes me weep now. For I see that my beloved has resigned himself to that which he does not understand. “I wonder if I chose wisely in not going with you and our son to America. It is too late now. In case I never see you—” Here he scratches words again.

The eleventh letter is all but final. “Dearly Loved, it is better for us not to plan the day of meeting. It is better to live life as we find it, you on your side of the world, I on mine. Let Rennie become an American citizen. Help him to find a country of his own. If he forgets me let it be so.”

It is easy to see the story now. He is a prisoner. The city he chose has become his cell. He is no longer free. And I am not free because I love him. As long as he lives I shall not be free….Let me be glad that at least a woman is at his side. Though she be not I, he has someone with him. So why do I weep? And I continue to weep.

…This morning Baba frightened me by a fainting fit. He got up as usual and ate his slight breakfast, now only orange juice, a spoonful of porridge and hot milk. Then, in the midst of thanking me as he is careful to do, he crumpled in his chair. I sent Matt in a hurry for Bruce Spaulden, and lucky it was that Matt was near by, trimming the hemlock hedge. Meanwhile I stood beside Baba’s chair, not daring to move him, and frightened lest Bruce be already started on his rounds and therefore inaccessible.

Lucky again he was not. He came running up the gravel walk from the gate, hatless and without his coat, his bag swinging from his hand. The door was open and he entered, and leaped upstairs and into the room, his thin Vermont face without a smile, and his eyes seeing nothing but his patient. I knew better than to speak if I were not spoken to, and I stood silent, waiting his command.

“Pull up his sleeve.”

I pulled up Baba’s sleeve. Into the slack old flesh of his upper arm Bruce drove the needle quickly and with skill. Then he lifted Baba in his arms and laid him on his bed.