Pearl Buck - Letters From Peking

“Cover him and keep him warm,” he told me. “There is nothing I can do. He will pull out of it, likely, but one of these days he won’t. You aren’t to be scared. Even if I were sitting right beside him when it happens I couldn’t do anything. I’d give him a shot, of course, as I did today, but it’d be no more than a gesture.”

“I’ll stay by him until he wakes,” I said.

“Not necessary,” Bruce said. “Go about your business. Come in every now and then and see how he is.”

He was packing his bag while I covered Baba and tucked the quilt about him. The morning was warm for our mountains, but Baba’s flesh was cool as the flesh of one newly dead. Yet he breathed.

I looked up to see Bruce watching me.

“Come downstairs,” he said.

I followed him down. I thought he was going to the door, but no, he sat down in the hall on the ladderback chair near the big clock.

“This is no time to ask,” he said in his abrupt way. “But I don’t know as one time is better than another when a man has something on his mind…Elizabeth, will you marry me?”

He was not joking. For a second I thought he was, but his intense eyes told me better.

“I am married already,” I said. “My husband is not dead.”

“I didn’t know,” he muttered. “He never shows up.”

“He can’t,” I said. “He’s in Peking, China.”

“Might as well be dead,” he muttered.

I said, “For me he lives.”

Bruce got up and snatched his bag from the floor where he had set it down, and made for the door. There he paused, he turned to look at me. I was at the foot of the stair, holding to the newel post.

“All the same, Elizabeth,” he said, his eyes grey under his black brows, “things being what they are in this uncertain world, and in a most uncertain age, my offer holds.”

“I wish you hadn’t made it,” I said. “Now I’ll think of it every time I see you.”

“Which is exactly as I wish it,” he said.

He grinned suddenly, and I looked into a different face, a face almost gay in a sober sort of way. Then he was gone. And I stood there with an odd sort of feeling — not love, not that at all, only a strange pleasant sort of female warmth. For the second time in my life a man had proposed to me. To be honest, I suppose I ought to say that it is the first time, for when Gerald asked me to marry him he was so hesitant, so doubtful, so fearful lest he was not being fair to me — he an anonymous sort of human being, as he said, whose origins were double and from both sides of the world and so belonging nowhere in particular — that it was I who coaxed it out of him. I have nothing whatever to do with this proposal that has just been given to me now. I have never suspected the possibility that Bruce could love any woman, much less me. He loves children, that I know, and only with children have I seen that changeless exterior of his break into something like tenderness. He is almost totally silent. I can live alone, I am learning to live alone. But I am not sure that I could live with a silent man.

Stupefied, I left the door open and went back to Baba. He was still unconscious.

…Today the postman brought me a letter bearing the stamp of the People’s Republic of China.

“It must be from your husband,” he said, and handed me the letter as proudly as though he had fetched it himself from across the westward sea.

“Thank you,” I said, and did not tell him that I knew the moment that I looked at the handwriting that it was not from Gerald. It was from — what shall I call her? For I am Gerald’s wife. And I cannot use the word concubine. Yet I suppose that is what she is. I suppose the Chinese on our street in Peking call her his Chinese wife and me his American wife. But the dagger piercing me is this question — if she can write, why cannot he? Is there some loyalty, or fear, that prevents him? Is the loyalty to me, that, knowing how we have loved, he cannot bring himself to acknowledge that he desecrates our love?

I opened the letter and there was the simple handwriting.

DEAR ELDER SISTER:

Your letter has come. I thank you for such answer. Now it is my duty to tell you of our husband. I am not sure that this letter will ever come before your eyes, but I do my duty. I send it in the secret way. If it is found by the wrong person, then you will never see it. But I try. Now I tell you our husband is well but he is sad. He does not talk to me. He goes every day to his office, and at night he comes home. The house is as you left it. I do not change anything. Only I cannot keep it so clean. Sometimes he complains because it is not so clean. I tell him I cannot do all as well as you do. But I cook what he likes to eat. He does not mention your name but he keeps you in his mind as secret joy. In the night when the moon shines he walks into the courts and stares at the moon. Is it the same moon in your country? I have heard it is the same moon. To the moon then he gives his thinking of you.

As to his health, it is good except that he does not sleep much. We have no children. He told me he does not want a child. I said what of me? He said, it is better for you not to have my child because the blood is mixed. But I hope for a child. I go to temple and pray before the Goddess of Childbirth. I go in secret because they tell us not to believe in gods now. Please take care of yourself. If you were here the house would not be lonely as now. We could be friends.

YOUR YOUNGER SISTER

She does not sign her name this time, for safety. And the envelope was not mailed in Singapore but in Hongkong. I feel strangely better for the letter. It is sweet and simple and I am surprised that I am not jealous. When the moon rises over these mountains in Vermont, I shall go out and stand in its light, knowing that a few hours before he has so stood. Thank you, my younger sister.

I live this strange inner life. No one in the valley could possibly understand it even if I could speak of it. And I cannot speak. But now I do most earnestly wish to leave that world in which I lived with Gerald and enter this world to which I am compelled by circumstances as far beyond my power to control as the setting of the sun and the rising of the new moon, at this moment poised above the cedars of the mountain. Yet I cannot leave that world, which actually does not exist for me any more as a practical reality, and so I cannot enter the world in which I am forced to live. Here I exist, in space.

…If only I could stop remembering! I long not to remember, for I can feel Gerald cutting one cord after another between us. It is not only that he no longer writes me. He is also denying himself the thought of me. In other times, when there was certainty, or even hope of our meeting again, I could feel his communion with me. On those rough hills of Szechuan, when I was at Chungking and he struggling somewhere across country, on foot, leading his students and professors westward, I could feel, especially at evening, at sunset and at moonrise, the out-reaching of his heart and conscious mind, and we were united. But now, though I send myself across land and sea in search of him, I do not find him. He hides himself. He has withdrawn from me. This means but one thing — he has no hope of ever seeing me again. I do not believe he has ceased to love me. That is not possible. It is simply that for us the earthly life is ended. And yet, I continue in space. I am not freed of the past, and present and future do not exist.

When Bruce asked me to marry him, the words reached my ears but not my heart. They echoed in me. I hear them reverberating and empty. It is only when I enter Baba’s room that meaning comes back to me, not strong and alive as it was in the house in Peking, but quiescent and yet there. I feel as one feels in the presence of ruined palaces and silent gardens, existing but no longer used and alive. I realize that I return to Baba’s room often for no other purpose than to see his ancient figure, wrapped in the Chinese robe of blue brocaded silk, sitting by the window. The few things brought with me from China, a pair of scrolls, a small jade vase, some porcelain bowls from Kiangsi, a rug as blue as the northern Chinese sky, have somehow sorted themselves out of the house and into Baba’s room. When I step through that door I close it behind me.