Letters From Peking

  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 He has withdrawn from me.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.

  “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 t
he 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.

  “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.