Pearl Buck - Letters From Peking

“It is you who are not sure,” I told him.

And then I pondered how to make him sure.

“If you think I shall not love you for some hidden reason I do not now know,” I told him, “then come to my room tonight. Let us hide nothing from each other. Let us make sure before we marry.”

I felt him quiver. I knew he was shocked and yet moved.

“No,” he said, “I cannot do that.”

It was June before he was willing. He had his degree then from Harvard. My mother came to Commencement and I was singing proud to hear the honors he received. “Summa cum laude—” the words were spoken again and yet again. My mother was warmer than I had ever seen her toward him when he came striding toward us, still in his cap and gown. There was no man there to equal him in beauty. For the moment his reserve was gone. He was triumphant and happy and he caught our hands, my mother’s and mine.

“Thank you for coming,” he said. “Without you, I should have had no family. I’d have been lonely.”

“Congratulations,” my mother said. She pressed his hand in both hers, but I stood tiptoe and kissed his cheek. It was the first time I had kissed him before my mother and he blushed and glanced at her and smiled when she did not reprove me.

We had dinner together that night, the three of us, at some Chinese restaurant in Boston, where he had already ordered our meal, and my mother condescended to taste one strange dish after another. But I ate everything, liking all, and Gerald laughed at me and loved me and I knew it, in spite of his careful reserve.

He came home with us the next day, and by evening we were in the house, the three of us. It was a clear night, I remember, the air cool and sweet as only the air of the mountains can be, and my mother said she was tired, and she went early to bed. Gerald and I sat late on the stone terrace my father had built the summer before he died, and somehow I fell to talking about him, and telling Gerald about him. “I wish he could know about you,” I said.

“What about me?” Gerald asked. He held my hand now, his hand cool and firm, and mine much warmer, always, and clinging to his.

“I wish, I wish my father could know the man who is to be my husband,” I said.

A bold thing I was, but I knew what I wanted and I knew that Gerald loved me. Why he had not asked me to marry him I did not know but there would be time enough to find out, for we were in love.

He sat silent for a time, holding my hand. Then he rose from the bench where we were sitting and he drew me up to him and kissed me as never before had he kissed me.

It was I who broke away from that long and penetrating kiss. “Now we are engaged,” I whispered.

He held me against him. “If only I could be sure—”

“Then let us be sure,” I said.

The night turned suddenly grave. We were both silent. We sat down again and in the deepening darkness he talked to me of Peking and his childhood home there, and for the first time he spoke of his mother. She had not been a beautiful woman, he said. Her face was plain, but she had extraordinary grace of carriage and manner. Her hands were delicate and always fragrant. He remembered their scent when she smoothed his cheeks.

“Chinese women do not kiss their children as western women do,” he said. “They nuzzle them and smell them when they are babies. When I grew out of babyhood she smoothed my cheeks with both her hands. Her palms were soft and sweet.”

“Who was she,” I asked, “and how did she come to marry your father?”

“I think, but I do not know,” he said, “that my father was disappointed in love. The American woman he wanted to marry would not go to China with him, or was forbidden to go by her parents. She was not strong enough to disobey them, I suppose, and so she refused my father. In pride he went to China alone and he lived alone for ten years of his life. And then, you know how the Chinese are—” He caught himself. “No, how can you know how the Chinese are? Well, they think every man and woman must marry for it is what Heaven ordains, and there can be no health in a people unless there is health in the individual man and woman. So Chinese friends besought my father to marry, and his best friend, who is my foster father, my uncle Han Yu-ren, offered him his sister. Thus she became my mother. She was not young. She was, in a way, a widow. The man to whom she had been betrothed as a child, by her parents, died a week before the wedding. Had she been less independent, I suppose she would have followed tradition and never married. She might even have become a nun.”

“She was willing to marry an American?” I asked.

“That is what drew my father to her,” Gerald said. “Most young Chinese women would not have accepted a foreign man. They would have cried out that foreigners are hairy and have a smell and are altogether repulsive in — in — intimacy.” He stumbled over the word.

“Had she seen your father?” I asked. I was fascinated by the Chinese woman who was Gerald’s mother.

“Once,” he said, “when my father visited his friend’s house, she was in the main hall and though she left immediately, she saw him. He did not notice her.”

“Your father is very handsome,” I reminded him. He had once shown me his father’s picture.

“Yes.”

“Were they happy?” I persisted.

He considered the question. “They had a measured happiness. It was impossible to be altogether unhappy with my mother. She was never gay but never sad, and she created order wherever she was.”

“Is order so important?” I cried. For I am not orderly by nature. There is always something more important than putting things in place.

“There is no dignity to life except with order,” Gerald said.

We talked thus slowly and thoughtfully, our hands clasped. The moon was high and the mountains were clear against the sky. And while our minds ranged across the seas, we knew what the night held. It is Gerald’s way not to speak when he feels most deeply, but the quality of his silence, the luminous look of his eyes, the controlled gentleness of his voice, all betray the depths.

We heard the grandfather clock in the hall strike twelve and we rose together and went into the house and up the stairs. The guestroom is at the head of the stairs and we paused. The house was still, and the door to my mother’s room was closed. The night had come.

“I will leave my door open,” I said softly.

He took me in his arms and kissed me again, not passionately but gently and with deep tenderness. Then he went into the guestroom and shut the door.

And I went to my own room and closed the door behind me while I prepared myself. A calm happiness pervaded me. I understood now why marriage is a sacrament. In this mood I bathed my body and brushed my long hair and put on a fresh white nightgown. Then I opened my door. His was still closed. While I waited I sat on the deep window seat beside the window and gazed over the mountains that surrounded us. In an hour, less or more, I heard his footstep. I turned and saw him in the doorway. He stood there, wrapped in his dressing gown of blue Chinese silk. We looked at each other. Then he held out his arms and I went into them.

I read novels sometimes in the winter evenings while Rennie studies his books for school. The novels describe again and again the act of physical love between man and woman. I read these descriptions, wondering at their monotony and their dullness. The act of love can, then, be meaningless! I wonder at such degradation. And then I realize that it is degraded because the two who perform it are degraded, and I wonder if I had not married Gerald whether I, too, might have been caught in that prison of stupid repetition until what was designed as the supreme act of communion and creation becomes merely a physical function. I thank the beloved who saved me from such desecration. I understand now the desolate look in women’s eyes that often I see. For it is the man and not the woman who is the more responsible for the beauty or the horror of the moment when the two meet. When a woman receives in exaltation and is given in haste and selfishness she is desecrated. She has been used as a clay pot may be used, and she is more than clay. She is spirit.