Pearl Buck - Letters From Peking

“My knees are cold,” he says to me in Chinese.

“You have let the rug slip to the floor, careless Baba!”

I pretend to scold him, also in Chinese. When he speaks in Chinese he forgets his English. I tell him the heavenly news but in English.

“Rennie is coming home for Christmas, Baba, Can you hear me? Do you understand? Say it after me, ‘Rennie is my grandson.’”

He lifts patient old eyes to my face. He repeats in a quavering half-frightened voice, “Rennie is my grandson.”

“He is coming home for Christmas.”

“Coming home for Christmas,” Baba repeats.

I doubt he knows what it means, but he will know when Rennie himself comes in. Oh, he will know, then!

I kiss the top of Baba’s head and fly off to inspect Rennie’s room. I wonder if Matt can help me paint the walls? A pale yellow, I think—

…The days have flown by. It is four days before Christmas and Rennie comes home tonight. Meanwhile I have had two letters written in the Peking house but mailed elsewhere, one in Manila, one in Bangkok. This little Chinese woman is resourceful. I begin to be interested in her. It seems she has friends who mail her letters in widely separate places. She does this, I am sure, so that Gerald may be safe. His letters are watched and read, doubtless, but hers she can slip into her sleeve and take with her to some family where she visits and she is not suspected. I wonder what she looks like. I have wanted, and not wanted, to ask her for a small photograph. But she would send it if she could. She is that sort of a woman, a chatterbox of a woman, cheerful and loving, one who sets store by photographs and keepsakes and such things. She writes of Gerald and the house and what they do. She does not mention his name but we both know who this “He” is.

“He has a cold today. It is the sand that settles in his throat while he talks in the classroom. I have made hot ginger tea and mixed it with honey. He sips it and is better.”

Yes, the sands of autumn storms used to make Gerald cough, and then he could not sleep well. We used to think of going to some other part of China far from the distant desert of the northwest, perhaps to one of the great cities on the Yangtse River, but Gerald, when it came to the point of decision, could never leave Peking.

“One belongs to this city as to a country,” he said. “There is no other like it. I should be an alien anywhere else.”

So we stayed….And why did I never think of hot ginger tea mixed with honey? She takes better care of him than I did. But does she love him as much? I believe she loves him to the fullness of her heart, but it is a little heart — a cupful of love fills it to the brim. Is it enough for him? Perhaps it is. I have no way of knowing. She prattles on;

“The chrysanthemums are bright and healthy this autumn. They bloom against the northern wall of the big courtyard.”

That is where they always bloomed. And I planted pink ones and white ones against the wall of the small courtyard outside our bedroom, but she does not mention those.

“He is working very hard just now. There are new classes and many new students. He works too hard. At night He cannot sleep. If He sleeps He mutters words I cannot understand.”

Does he ever speak my name? If he does perhaps it would be too much to think that she would tell me. He is far away from me now. If we met I think he would still be far away. There are all these days between us in which I have no share. He would not be able to speak of them. I could not ask him about them and all the more because there was never reticence between us when we were together.

I fold the letters away. There is no time for all this thinking. Rennie comes home tonight. I have his room ready, the walls are pale yellow, the furniture is polished and dustless, his bed is made fresh, there are red berries in a bowl on the chimneyplace and wood is piled in the wide old-fashioned fireplace. Snow fell again in the night and he will want to ski and so I have waxed his skis and put them in the kitchen entry, waiting. Of course I finished everything too early and time plodded, the clock did not move. I toyed with the thought of putting up the Christmas tree and then knew I must not, for he and I have kept to the custom of my childhood when my father and I went up the hill beyond the sugar bush and cut the tree on Christmas Eve. It is important now to cling to family customs. They link the present with the past and reach into the future. If Gerald’s mother had been able to draw her family into Baba’s house and so have given Gerald a place in the history of the clan he would not have grown up solitary. But Baba perhaps would not allow it, or she perhaps felt herself cut off by her strange marriage and so she became a revolutionist. Revolutions are made only by those who are desolate and desperate. Now that is what I must somehow prevent Rennie from becoming. He must find his place here in the valley where my forebears lie buried. He must somehow belong to my country, or he will become a rebel wherever he goes.

I am growing too intense again. It is the strength and weakness of being mother to a son. A daughter, I think, would be always near me, within the reach of my words. But Rennie has already made his distance from me. He comes back a stranger. I must acquaint myself anew, as though we had not met before. I hope I have that wisdom.

So the anticipated evening draws near. The mountains cut off the final sunset but the sky is red above the snow. Baba feels the excitement in the house and tonight he refused to go to bed early. He asked for his best Chinese gown, a dark maroon satin with gold buttons, and he sits there in his chair by the window of his bedroom, his dragon-headed cane in his hand. The cane is not really comfortable for him to hold, and he uses a smooth malacca every day, but tonight he remembered the dragon-headed one and I had to search for it in the closet. His white hair and long white beard make him look like an ancient Chinese patriarch, for his skin, always dark, is now leather-hued and wrinkled. Only his proud old aquiline profile declares him Scotch and not Chinese in his ancestry.

As for me, I made the pretense of last things to be done to the supper table and I came downstairs to be near the front door. I have tied a branch of mountain pine and a clump of scarlet wintergreen berries to the brass knocker. I want Rennie to come in by the front door, and I station myself here.

Through the twilight I see at last the twin glow of automobile lights. It is he. I suppose he has hired a car at the station in Manchester. He did not tell me when he was coming and so I could not meet him. The car is here. I am suddenly faint and must lean my head against the door. Then I hear the knocker thunder against the brass plate beneath it. Perhaps it is not Rennie after all. Perhaps it is one of our rare passers-by. The door is unlocked and I tug at it, and then suddenly it is pushed in and there stand two tall men. One of them is Rennie, and the other is Sam, and it is Sam who speaks first.

“Hello, Mrs. MacLeod! I thought I’d come along with Rennie and see how my old gentleman is. You can throw me out if you don’t want me for Christmas.”

He shakes my hand enough to break my wrist, and his blue eyes twinkle and glow. He throws his arms across my shoulders and kisses me soundly on my cheek. And all this time, while I am stammering some sort of a welcome, I see only Rennie, standing there waiting, a slight tall dark young man, smiling, and saying not a word. It occurs to Sam that he has been boisterous, for he steps back.

“Excuse me, ma’am.”

And Rennie comes forward and takes my hand in both his, and he stoops and kisses me on the other cheek, so lightly that I scarcely feel the touch of his fresh cool lips.