Letters From Peking

  I make this statement, this affirmation, because I swear that last night, at a quarter past two, I saw Gerald here in my room. It is true that I am alone in the house and have been alone now for five weeks, ever since Rennie and Mary left me the morning after Baba’s funeral. I have had, however, an unusual number of valley visitors. Matt comes early and stays late, and Mrs. Matt makes the pretext of bringing his lunch the occasion for “running in,” as she calls it, to see how I am doing. She always stays and always talks, mainly about Matt and his cantankerous ways. Mrs. Matt is an ignorant woman who will not learn that life and man do not change, and that it is the woman who must bend if she is not to break. I know all of Matt’s faults by now, even to the obnoxious wheeze of his snores and that he will not put his false teeth properly in a glass of water at night but leaves them to grin at her from the bedside table.

  The minister, too, comes to see me, and so does Mrs. Monroe, the teacher in our valley’s one-room school. And Bruce Spaulden has been here twice, never to stay, merely to drop in at breakfast time before he makes his calls, to observe me, he says, and make sure that I am not what he describes as “moping.”

  “Are you happy?” he asked me only yesterday. I was weeding the strawberry beds in the warm corner between the main house and the ell, the only place where strawberry plants do not frost-kill, although even here they must be mulched with manure and straw over the winter.

  “I am neither happy nor unhappy,” I told him. “I am in a state of blessed calm.”

  “Permanently so?” he asked, tilting his black eyebrows at me.

  “Probably not,” I said. “Probably it is a transition state between past and future. I don’t know. I merely enjoy my ignorance.”

  “Not too lonely?”

  “How can I be with a wedding in the house in June?”

  There was nothing unusual in yesterday. I did such work in the house as was needful and it is very little. One person cannot dirty floors and tables and what I eat scarcely disturbs the kitchen. Even my bed is quickly made, for I am a quiet sleeper. Gerald turned and tossed, but I on my side of the wide Chinese bed with the American mattress lay, he said, like a sleeping doll. Nevertheless I wake easily.

  Last night I woke, as I usually do in the night. I like to know the time, and it is usually the same, almost to the minute. The radiant face of the bedside clock showed quarter past two. Ever since I was parted from Gerald I resolutely turn on the light and take up my book, whatever it is, and of late I have no taste for stories or for poetry. When I put Rennie’s room in order after he left, I looked through his bookcase and found a thin small book whose title proclaimed it a simple and shortened exposition of the meaning of Einstein’s theory of relativity, “for Simple Readers,” the subtitle said. That surely am I, and I brought the book back to my own room. Simple as it declared itself, the book has so far confounded me. I am even more simple. I do not easily comprehend large abstract matters. I read the book faithfully, nevertheless, all but spelling the sentences over and over in my nightly efforts to understand them. I say this to prove that I am really not in the least psychic nor even very imaginative. I have a good practical brain and an excellent memory and this is as far as I go.

  After the fourth reading of the book, however, I suddenly understood the fundamental relationship between matter and energy. Oh, I muttered aloud—for I am ashamed to say that I am beginning to talk to myself sometimes, but only in the night when the house is altogether silent, except for creaking beams and crying wind—oh, but this is fascinating, this is exciting. The essence of matter is transmutable into energy. I can see that.

  The comprehension came to me suddenly only night before last, and immediately I felt myself possessed by a strange soft peace. Mind and body relaxed and fell into sleep. When I wakened it was late morning, and the sun was streaming across the room. I rose quickly, and as I have said, the day was busy with small affairs. Mrs. Matt stayed too long, and night fell before I had finished the plans I had made for the day. For I have learned that if my life is to have meaning as a whole, now that Gerald and I are apart and Rennie is a man, then each day must have its individual order, so that when night falls I can say that I have done what I planned for the day, and the sum total of days makes a year and years make a life.

  Well, then, I was tired last night, and mildly discontented with myself because I had not completed the day. I did not open the book but went immediately to sleep. When I woke at quarter past two, as I have said, my mind was clear and I was eager to read again in the light of fresh comprehension. I had only opened the book when I knew that I was not alone. I was not frightened, only filled with involuntary wonder. For I looked up and I saw Gerald, standing just inside the closed door. He was sad and thin and much older. He had a short beard, his hair was cropped very short, and he wore Chinese clothes, not the robes of a gentleman but a uniform of the sort that students used to wear, made of dark stuff and the jacket buttoned to the throat. I could not see his form clearly, but his face was very clear. He smiled at me, his grave dark eyes suddenly bright. I think he put out his hand to me, but of this I am not sure for I leaped from my bed and I cried out to him.

  “Gerald, Gerald, oh darling—”

  I was stopped by a frightful agony in his face, but only for one instant. Then I ran to hold him in my arms, but he was gone. I stood where I had seen him stand. There was no one here and the floor was cold beneath my bare feet. I crept back into bed shivering and afraid. I have seen Gerald. I have no doubt of it. And I have seen him as he is now. It could not be a dream nor a trick of memory, else I would have seen him as he had been when we parted, his face as it looked when he stood on the dock at Shanghai, when we gazed at each other until the river mists crept between us and my ship sailed out to sea.

  “I feel as though my very flesh was torn from yours,” he had written me.

  Now he was bearded, his hair was cut short, he wore the uniform he had always hated, even when his students put it on proudly. A prisoner’s uniform, he had called it, lacking style and grace and always dingy blue or muddy grey. I had never seen him as I saw him now. Therefore it was no dream. I have seen matter transmuted into energy in his shape and form.

  It was impossible to sleep after that. I dressed and went downstairs and walked about the house until the pale dawn gleamed behind the mountains. I do not know what a vision means. Does it signify life or death? I have no way of knowing. And why was his last look an agony? How shall I ever know?

  …I am surprised that I am not in the least frightened because I have seen Gerald. I am overcome with sadness but not with fear. I cannot be afraid of Gerald in whatever form he comes to me, but I remember the stories I have always laughed at, the tales of dead people who appear to their loved ones, the ghosts and spirits in whom I have never believed. I still do not believe. I say to myself that there is some trick of sight and subconscious which betrays my common sense. Then I find myself leading to conversation on the subject of distant persons who suddenly appear before those who think of them, although I tell no one that I have seen Gerald. Mrs. Matt, for example, believes everything I doubt. She declares that she has seen three times the face of her mother, who lived and died in Ireland.

  “Three times have I seen the blessed woman,” she said today, “and each time was after she was dead.”

  I begged her to tell me what she saw.

  “I saw my mother on her knees, a-prayin’,” Mrs. Matt said solemnly. She was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a cup of stone black tea while I finished my luncheon sandwich. “On her knees she was, her hand uplifted-like, and her hair streamin’ down her back. She was cryin’ while she prayed and she wore her old black dress but with no apron. Except on a Sunday she had always her apron on, and so I know it was a Sunday I saw her. Later I had the word that it was the very Sunday my father died, and I knew she saw him goin’ down to hell. It was what he deserved but it was hard on her, bless her, and she cried.”

  “And the second time, M
rs. Matt?”

  “The second time was when I had made up my mind to leave Matt. Yes, my dear,” she said nodding her head at me. “I did so make up my mind. He’d had one of them jealous fits of his.” She leaned close to me, her eyes on the kitchen door. Outside Matt was chopping wood.

  “He wasn’t the father of my first child,” she whispered, “and he’s never let me forget. Suspicious he is of every man—he’s been my torment, that he has, these forty years.”

  I brushed aside the familiar complaint.

  “And the third time, Mrs. Matt?”

  She looked blank. “There was only the one time, dearie, and Matt married me before the blessed baby was born.”

  “The third time you saw your mother—”

  “Ah yes, that! Well, the third time was on a bright Easter mornin’. I’d had a grand fight with Matt the night before and I was in no mood for church. To church I would not go and so I put on my old clothes and scrubbed the kitchen floor. Matt yelled at me to get up and come to church with him and the children—six of them we had by then, all small, and it was against the seventh that I’d fought him in the night. But I wouldn’t go and he marched off, leaving me on my knees in a swirl of soap and water. When the house was quiet-like, I got up and put away my rag and pail and I washed myself and put on a clean nightygown and laid myself in a clean bed to sleep back my strength. It was then I saw my mother for the last time in resurrection. She was in white, like an angel, but her hair was down her back in a little grey pigtail as she always had it for the night. And she said to me, ‘Poor soul, ye’re only a woman, and ye must tak’ it as best ye can.’

  “‘True, Mother mine,’ I said, and went off to sleep like a babe and when I woke, Matt was back and he’d fed the children and himself and I got up restored.”

  A foolish story, and Mrs. Matt is an ignorant and sometimes mischievous old woman but she believes what she saw.

  In the afternoon I went to the small library in our nearest town and surprised our prim spinster librarian by finding half a dozen books on dreams and visions. I am half ashamed of wanting to read them, for I am accustomed to my own skeptic views and I have no faith in second sight. It is Einstein who unsettles me. If a strong stout log of wood, a length of pure matter, can be transmuted into energy before my eyes, into ash and flame and heat, cannot a living body, a brilliant mind, a deep and spiritual soul, be transmuted into its own likeness but a different stuff? What impels me now is not the old wives’ tales and the ghosts of the dead, for these my doubts are as valid as ever they have been. No, I am impelled by the infinite possibilities suggested to me by a gnarled little scientist whom I must respect because the world respects him. I have embarked upon a quest. I go in search of the one I love. Is Gerald living or is he dead?

  …The quest ended today in a way so simple, so tragic, that I have no need of further search. A letter from Mei-lan, posted this time from Calcutta, tells me of Gerald’s death. She is not in Calcutta. She is still in Peking, in the house there, awaiting, she tells me, the birth of her first child, Gerald’s child. By some means she smuggled the letter out of China and into India. Perhaps a visiting delegation of Indian diplomats contained one who was Gerald’s friend. To him perhaps she gave the letter to hide in his clothing until he could post it from another country.

  The letter is short and written in haste. There are blots on the paper—tears perhaps. I will not repeat its words. I want to forget them and I shall destroy the letter. Its message is simply this: Gerald was shot while trying to escape from Peking. She did not know that he planned to escape.

  “I think he longed to see you,” she writes. “I think he dreamed to go somehow to India with the Indians.”

  He was always watched, of course. They never trusted him. I do not know whether among the servants there was one who betrayed him. He was not good at packing clothes or making practical arrangements. I always did such things for him. And it is possible that he did not trust even his Chinese wife.

  “He did tell me nothing,” she writes. “I think he wished no blame to fall on me. I can always say I do not know.”

  …Gerald was shot in the back through the left shoulder and just outside his own gate. He got no further than that. It was early afternoon, the sun was shining, he appeared to be returning to his classes at the university. The gateman stood in the open gate and he saw a man in the hateful uniform step from behind the corner. When Gerald came near, the man shot him with a pistol at close range. Then he disappeared. The gateman dared not shout. He lifted Gerald in his arms and brought him inside and laid him on the stones of the main court. Then he locked the gate.

  “We buried him secretly in the small court outside his bedroom,” Mei-lan writes.

  Early afternoon in Peking would perhaps be quarter past two here in our valley, quarter past two in the night. Dare I believe?

  I do not know. I shall never know. All that I do know is that my beloved is no more. In this world, while I live, I shall not see his face again.

  …I have taken up the routine of my days. There is no way to answer the letter, and so I have destroyed it. When I could write calmly, I wrote to Rennie that his father was dead.

  “He had made up his mind, it seems, to come to us. That is what she believes, at least—his Chinese wife. He tried to live without us and he could not. Love was stronger in the end than country, stronger than history. This is our comfort. This is the message he sends us, by means of his death. It is enough for us to know. It is enough to make you forgive him, Rennie. Please forgive him! It will make life so much easier for me, so much more happy, if I know you have forgiven your father.”

  Here I paused to consider whether I should tell. Rennie that I had seen Gerald clearly at the moment after he had died. His spirit escaping his body came home to me, to be visible for a moment, to be remembered forever. Then I decided that I would not tell Rennie. He would not believe, and perhaps I do not wish to test my own faith. It is not necessary. I can wait until it is time for me to know.

  Rennie’s reply was swift. “I do forgive him, Mother. I forgive my father freely and with love, and of my own accord. I do this for my own sake. If it makes you happy, so much the better. And I have told Mary.”

  …There is no need for me to write any more upon these blank pages. What I have had to say has been said. The spring has slipped past and it is summer. I have busied myself in everyday matters, always planning toward Rennie’s marriage. Tonight is the eve before the wedding day. It occurs to me that this small book will not be complete unless I tell the story of the wedding, the story which really began that day, long past, upon which I, a gay and heedless girl brimming with ready love, let my heart concentrate in a glance upon a tall slender young man intent upon his books, a studious reserved young man, in whom I divined a profound and faithful lover. I suppose, to be honest, that what I saw first in Gerald was a man so beautiful to look at that I was startled into love.

  I said to Mary this evening when we were washing the supper dishes together and Rennie was smoking his pipe on the terrace, for he has taken on manly airs nowadays,

  “Mary, my dear,” I said, “I hope that Rennie will be a good lover and husband to you. I had such a good lover and husband in his father, and I hope the capacities are inherited, but I am not sure they are.”

  The tall lovely girl smiled her calm smile. “I am sure Rennie has inherited his father’s graces,” she said.

  “I had sometimes just to suggest a thing or two to his father,” I said.

  “I will remember that, Mother,” she said.

  It was the first time she had called me “mother,” and I was overcome with a new joy and stood, dish in one hand and towel in the other. She laughed then and put her arms around me and kissed the top of my head. She is that much taller than I. And I smelled the sweet scent of her bosom and was glad for my son’s sake that she is a sweet-smelling woman, her breath as fresh as flowers without perfume.

  …The wedding day has dawned mild and brig
ht. We do not have hot days in June, not usually, and this one was cool and very clear. Early in the morning George Bowen drove up to the gate in a small grey convertible car, a vehicle old and dusty, and I saw him for the first time, a tall fair young man, with the same air of calm that Mary has. He stepped over the door of the car and sauntered into the house, his wrinkled leather bag in his hand, and he was as much at home as if he had come before. I liked him at first sight. He cuffed Rennie amiably, pulled his sister’s ear affectionately, and spoke to me as though he loved me.

  “I know you very well,” he said. “I’ve wanted to meet you ever since I first saw Rennie.”

  “Put down your bag and sit down to breakfast with us, George,” I said.

  “I’ll just wash my hands here at the kitchen sink,” he said.

  I liked the way he washed his hands, carefully and clean, as a surgeon does. George is a scientist, nuclear, one of the new young men. I had been a little afraid of him when Rennie talked about him. I saw a young man, brilliant, hard, perhaps unloving, as I suppose scientists must be nowadays. Instead here was this young man, kindly, affectionate, a fine friend for any lonely woman’s son. Between these two for wife and brother, Rennie has his world to grow in.

  “Eggs, George?” I asked.

  “Please, fried on one side, thanks,” he said, and folded his legs under the table in the breakfast alcove in the kitchen. I try not to be the sentimental motherly female we women are supposed to be, but I confess my heart was won when I saw how George Bowen enjoyed his food.

  And all through this preliminary day he has made himself useful in a literal, practical sort of way. He persuaded the vacuum cleaner to work again, he carried chairs and cleaned the garage and was approved by Matt. And best of all was his tender understanding of Rennie and Mary. These two wanted no big wedding, and so about four o’clock in the afternoon they came into the house from wandering in the forest, and they went to their rooms to bathe and change to their wedding garments. Mrs. Matt was in the kitchen with a couple of neighbor women to help with the simple refreshments and she gave me a push.