Pearl Buck - Letters From Peking

“Are you all right, Baba?” I ask.

“Quite all right,” he says peaceably.

He does not know where he is in the flesh. It is of no significance. He is somewhere in the world he knew once and which no longer exists, except for him. Now and then he asks vaguely of the servants.

“How is it you do not tell the amah to wash my clothes?”

“Amah is not here, Baba.”

“Indeed!”

He does not ask where she is. That would be to risk a knowledge he cannot face. He falls silent and forgets. There he sits, Gerald’s father, a beautiful old man, straight and tall, thin as a saint ascetic, his hair whiter than snow upon the mountain, his white beard uncut. He has forgotten even Rennie. He does not think. He simply is. And it is this elemental existence, pure and childlike and unaware of anything except itself, that compels me to remember Peking.

Oh, that dreamlike city! When I think of Gerald it is to see him in the city of emperors. Everything in life was there, the palaces under their roofs of blue and gold, containing a history, crowded with imperial men and women. In the wide streets the common folk forgot their commonness and took on princely airs because the city in which they live with their ancestors is a kingly city. Even the beggars were not craven. They came out from their corners, hands outstretched but heads held high. I do not remember the city whole. It is too rich with life for that. I see it in the glorious fragments of sunlight piercing the yellow dust of a spring storm. I see it a vast summer garden, blue porcelain roofs and golden ornaments gleaming between the dark of green cedar trees. I see it under snow heavy on the roofs and in the streets, the men and children picking their way as carefully as cats, but cheerfully, their cheeks red with cold and fur caps pulled over their ears. I see the streets at night, gay with festivals, or quiet with the good plainness of daily life, lamps burning, candles lit, families gathered about the supper table, men gossiping over waterpipes, a woman nursing her little child….How still the Vermont mountains are, how empty of human life! The forest, as night falls, grows sinister in darkness. Sometimes the sun shines through the trees upon the brakes and ferns and that underworld appears all innocence and tender beauty. But the sun sets early in the valley and the shadows descend.

It is autumn again, and the leaves are turning. What life is there in the scanty soil on these mountains that sends the sap running in the maple trees in spring and whose withdrawing in the autumn creates colors so bright and naked? The trees bleed with color now as they bleed in March with sap. Yesterday, staying to talk with our State forester, a spare young man intense with mission to the trees, he told me that no one knows why the maple sap runs upward in the spring. This force is not explained, but it is powerful enough to move engines if it were harnessed. It is a cellular force, not directly propelled from the earth through the roots, for if a maple is cut, the sap still runs upward through the trunk. There is no heart in the trees as in the human body, no pump visible and beating, but a pure force, elemental and almost spiritual in its source. It is life force expressed through matter.

The leaves drift down and the mountains emerge in great sweeping outlines against a sky of royal blue. The work on the farm is done for the year, except for the routines of the cows and their calving, the milking twice a day, the feeding and watering of the hens and gathering of eggs from the hen house. I find comfort in the daily tasks, although Matt does not really need me. I sold three cows last month to save winter feed. Matt put up the storm windows and doors yesterday and today the weather immediately turned warm with the same perversity that it used to do in China. But I cannot go out as the Chinese farmers did and shake my fist at the Old Man in the Sky. There was a friendly critical relationship between the Chinese gods and the farming folk. The people expected their gods to look after them and to send rain and sunshine in season. Warm weather after the first festival of winter made the winter wheat grow high and so risk being frozen when the bitter days came. A farmer spoke his mind thus to his gods:

“You old Head up yonder! What reason have you for sending down heat instead of cold? Are you drunk up there in Heaven? Is your brain muddled? Consider yourself! I warn you — no more incense, no more gifts to the temple!”

I am skeptic enough about gods but how can I explain that within two days a blizzard came down from the north? How we laughed, Gerald and I! Oh, we had so much good laughter in our marriage. I had to teach him to laugh, I remember. I had to release his rich Chinese humor. When he was most Chinese he was most gay. I wonder if his Chinese wife can make him laugh. It is her letters I take out now and read, not his. I find I cannot read Gerald’s letters to me. They seem old, they belong to another age. Whatever he is now, it is not what I knew. I try to see him through these letters of his Chinese wife, but I see only his shadow.

…Tonight, as I open my window to my narrow valley, a flurry of snow rushes in. I feel the flakes cold upon my face and the wind blows through my nightgown. Hurry into bed, let me draw the warm blankets about my shoulders. I will not remember how lonely I must lie. I will think of the comfort of my blankets. They are made of the wool sheared in July from my sheep. My sheep keep me warm and my cows give me milk and butter and cheese. My land gives me food and beauty to look upon. As for the blankets, when I sent in the bags of wool to the factory, I asked that they be made double, and dyed a deep pink, and they came back to me the color of crushed roses. I lie beneath them with pleasure and I comfort myself with their warmth and color. My comfort and my pleasure are in such small things. It is the small things that are eternal.

…Today, while the ground lies white under the snow and the mountains look twice their height, Rennie’s first letter has come to me. It was the only letter the postman put in the mailbox, and so I had nothing to divert me from it. I sat down where I was in the kitchen, I let my broom fall, I threw aside the dusting cloth and tore open the envelope.

“Dear Mother—”

I kissed the words and went on. He writes as if he had left home only yesterday instead of being months away.

But where are you, Rennie? The letter is sent from a mid-western college. He does not want to go to Harvard, where his father went, he says. He wants to be only himself, he says. So that is what he is, working his way as Sam said he would. It is a practical sort of letter, giving facts and no details. He is studying hard, he likes physics very much. He is rooming with a boy named George Bowen. Ah, George Bowen has a sister. Not pretty? But very intelligent and rather good-looking. Tall, it seems.

“Now, Mother, you are not to get ideas. I am through with women.”

Here I pause. At nineteen my son is through with women! Oh Allegra, you have hurt him very much. But every man and every woman is hurt by first love, except the rare ones, like Gerald and me, whose first love deepens into the only love.

“I shall be home for Christmas,” Rennie writes. Now that is blessed news. That is enough to satisfy me. The boy is coming home and so we shall have a Christmas. It would be too melancholy for Baba and me to think of Christmas. He doubtless has forgotten the day and I could not remember it alone. I know that if Rennie had not sent me this letter I would have let the day slip past, pretending that it was a day like any other. Now I shall make a plum pudding and dress a turkey and insist upon fresh oysters from the grocery store. I shall make walnut candies for Rennie and begin at once to knit him a red sweater. And his clothes not mended all these months! He must bring everything home and let me see what has happened. The house is suddenly full of light and life. I dash upstairs to Baba who is sitting placidly by the window, where I left him.