Letters From Peking

  “No, not to my husband,” I said.

  She took the letter from the box and studied it. “A foreign address. China, ain’t it?”

  “No, Singapore, a British colony.”

  “I thought they hadn’t any colony now.”

  “They returned India to the Indians, but they still hold Hongkong and Singapore.”

  “Do they now!”

  She looked unbelieving but I said no more. I had done what I must and I went home. Baba was not yet out of bed, his day beginning at noon and ending at twilight. He seemed drowsy, vague, uncomprehending, and I did not, as sometimes I do, endeavor to rouse him. But when he was dressed and sitting in his armchair, for he no longer comes downstairs, when he had eaten his bowl of oatmeal and drunk a cup of tea, he suddenly seemed awake and knowing. Perhaps Rennie had left a dart of memory in him, by which he was pricked.

  “Did someone come here yesterday?” he inquired.

  “Yes, Baba. It was Rennie.”

  He mused. “Rennie—who is Rennie?”

  “Your grandson, Baba.”

  He reflected upon this information without speaking. A half hour later, while I was straightening his room, he spoke with sudden clarity.

  “But I thought it was Ai-lan.”

  “How could it be, when she was a woman and Rennie is a man—very nearly?”

  I spoke half playfully, while I dusted his table.

  “She looked like a man,” he said. “She put on a uniform. It was of dark-blue cotton, the jacket buttoned, and trousers like a man. It startled me.”

  “It must have been startling—on a woman.”

  I listened now. So Rennie looks like his Chinese grandmother! He looks like Gerald, certainly. Then Gerald looks like his mother. In Peking they said he looked like his father. But that is the way it is. Each side insists the other side prevails and so each rejects what is not like itself.

  “Ai-lan was killed,” Baba said painfully. His old face wrinkled and tears dripped down from his eyes.

  “It was long ago, Baba.”

  “I believe it was not,” he replied. “I believe it was only last year, or at most two years ago. Her grave is still fresh.” He paused. “Where is her grave?” he asked.

  He was determined to weep for his dead wife. But why now, after all the years?

  “Did you love her, Baba?” I asked.

  He paused to consider. When he spoke it was in one of his rare moments of clarity.

  “I couldn’t love her,” he said. “I tried, for the Scriptures say a man must cleave to his wife. They do not say how it is to be done. And she knows I could not.”

  “You gave her a son,” I reminded him for comfort.

  “Ah, but she knew,” he retorted. “She knew very well. On the morning he was born, and at an unusual hour, I believe, at ten o’clock on a fine spring morning, I went into her room when the doctor told me I should do so. She lay with the child sleeping on her arm. ‘I have given you a son.’ That was what she said. And I couldn’t speak. The child had long black hair. It was a shock to think my son was Chinese. I wasn’t prepared.”

  I tried to laugh. “Baba, the mother was Chinese—your wife!”

  But he shook his head in vague, remembered distress.

  “I was not prepared,” he insisted.

  What he meant was that he had not thought of a child. He married Gerald’s mother for reasons of his own and not for a son. He did not want him. And that not being wanted had remained deep in Gerald’s being, a dagger never withdrawn, a wound never healed. It was the dagger and the wound that kept Gerald from coming with me to my country. I see it, I feel it. But Rennie carries the mark and he is here. Oh, how deep is the wound of not being loved! From generation to generation the newborn heart is wounded afresh and cannot be healed until love is found, in someone, somewhere.

  Baba had begun to weep again and I asked, to divert him,

  “Baba, do you remember Sam Blaine?”

  He was diverted. He was doubtful. “Do I know him?”

  “You lived in his little house, in Kansas.”

  “Did I?”

  “Yes, and I tell you because Rennie has gone there to live and work on the ranch. Sam Blaine was in China during the war. He liked it and he liked the people. They were kind to him. That is why he was kind to you when you were taken ill on the train and they put you off. Sam Blaine happened by somehow—

  I must ask how, someday—and became your friend. Now he is Rennie’s friend.”

  He remembered none of it, but at least he forgot to weep. I pushed his chair to the window where he likes to sit, and he gazed peacefully out upon the rising hills and the valleys. He likes the sheep, and he leaned forward now and again, to see where they were cropping the grass.

  “I shall be back soon,” I said, and went away to do my day’s work.

  …Tonight when Baba was in bed and ready for sleep he suddenly remembered very much about Sam Blaine. I had all but closed the door, I had said goodnight, when Baba spoke.

  “About Sam Blaine—”

  “Yes?”

  “Sam Blaine is forty-two years old. He has never married. His father owned two thousand acres of good black earth. He was a cattle man, and he owned two mines in Nevada, too. His wife died when the child was only two years old. Sam was his only child.”

  “Baba,” I cried, “how well you remember!” So I came back into the room and sat down and Baba said he had been taken from the train, ill and feverish, and told to wait in the railroad station, and Sam Blaine had come to fetch some freight. Instead he took Baba home with him and put him to bed.

  “I had typhoid fever,” Baba said. “I was very ill. Sam stayed with me in the hut.”

  And bit by bit he told me the story. When he woke in the night, not knowing where he was, Sam sat by the bed and talked about China. He spoke of Chinese villages and country roads and how the nightingales sing in the twilight of summer days. He was there during the war, but he did not speak of war or death. Instead he spoke to Baba of peaceful scenes, of families sitting in the doorways of their homes at evening, of men tilling the fields, of women at the pond washing the clothes.

  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 chee
rful, 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.

  “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 ma
n 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.