“Had he lived,” she said to Fengmo, “I think he would have approved all that you do.”
“Do you think so?” Fengmo exclaimed. He sat up, and his pleasure in what she had said gave him new energy. “Mother, I am thinking of a new thing. What would you say if I persuaded the foreign hospital doctors to begin the teaching of country doctors, not too learned but able to cure the many usual diseases? Our people die so needlessly.”
He went on, his voice bright and eager and full of life, but she scarcely heard him. She was thinking of André. She saw his great beautiful hands. One of them, as so often it had been, was at the crucifix upon his breast. When his rosary broke, he had tied it to a cord. The crucifix now was broken too. When the ruffians had killed him, the crucifix had struck the stones where he fell. She had seen it so when she looked at him in his coffin.
“Good, my son, good,” she murmured. “Good—good—”
Only when he rose to hasten away, full of his new plans, did she remember what she had promised Liangmo. She put out her hand and laid hold of Fengmo’s arm. “Only remember this, my son—compel no one—not Liangmo, not Meng—”
“Oh, those two!” Fengmo cried. “I have given them up—”
He was gone and André was gone, too. She sat alone, smiling to herself.
The years have passed over Madame Wu. She never leaves her own gates. Yet somehow she knows enough and all of that which goes on. She is famed for her patient listening and her cool judgments, and many come to her for enlightenment. It is she who decides all great matters in city and country. It was she who decided, for example, what to do with the body of Little Sister Hsia when she died, one winter’s night, in her solitary house. The poor thin body of that one was brought to the Wu temple, and Madame Wu herself saw to the coffin and the burial. For Little Sister Hsia had separated herself even from her own kind. She had long quarreled with the other foreigners in the city, who were from another country, and when she died it was with no one in the house except her old cook, and he alone mourned her. It was he who came and told Madame Wu that he had found his mistress sitting upright in her chair, wrapped in her ragged quilt, her holy book open on her knee.
There beneath the gods of clay, and beneath the picture of André painted upon alabaster, Little Sister Hsia lay in her coffin. The temple children were gone except for the young girl named Love and she lit the candles. The old priest, now so old that he could scarcely totter, often let her help him with his duties, and the old nurse had a helper, for she could not walk easily any more.
Madame Wu had looked down at the bone-thin face of the woman who had left her own kind and kin, and tried to remember the prayer that Little Sister Hsia had used to say very often. But she could not remember it. She had forgotten it with all else she did not wish to remember. So she could only light a stick of incense in the pewter urn before the gods and ask Heaven to receive also this foreign soul. And Little Sister Hsia’s coffin was sealed and set in a niche in the temple until a lucky day, and then it was buried upon a hillside outside the city, and Madame Wu commanded that a stone be set up giving such few facts as she knew about her, so that if any kinfolk ever came to seek her, they could find her.
She would have held this very unlikely except that a strange thing happened.
After the end of the war, the whole countryside was in confusion and many men came from over the seas to mend and to meddle in this confusion. It did not touch the house of the Wu family. Their city remained remote as ever it had been from the troubled regions. But foreigners continued passing through for one reason or another, and one of the reasons was that Fengmo invited them. Whenever he heard the name of a man from the West, Fengmo invited him to come and advise him about the work he did, and the men came, for the work was becoming known everywhere with not a little praise for Fengmo.
These foreigners, of course, Madame Wu did not receive, for she did not know their language, and it was too difficult to converse with them. Moreover, she declared, “My life is complete. I do not need to add another to it.”
But one day Fengmo sent her special word that a man from across the ocean was come, and there was a reason why he wished to bring him to see her. She gave her consent to this, and a few hours afterward Fengmo came and with him was a tall foreign man, young and dark. Indeed, he was so dark that, after greetings, Madame Wu looked at him and then turned to Fengmo.
“Is this man a foreigner? His skin is so brown.”
“He is foreign,” Fengmo said, “but his ancestors, indeed his parents, came from Italy, which was the birthplace, Mother, of Brother André.”
How Madame Wu’s heart now stirred! She forgot that she could speak no language but her own, and she leaned forward, her hands on the silver head of her cane, and she asked the young man, “Did you know the foreign priest?”
Fengmo stepped in quickly to translate, and then Madame Wu and the young man spoke through him thus:
“I did not know him,” the young man said, “but my father and mother have told me of him, Madame. He was my uncle.”
“Your uncle!” Madame Wu repeated. “You are his flesh and blood!”
She gazed at the dark young man and found one resemblance and then another. Yes, here were the dark eyes of André, but not so wide. Yes, here was André’s shape of skull, and the hands. She looked at the young man’s hands, more slender than André’s but with the shape she knew. All was more slender and smaller than André, and the look in the eyes was not at all André’s. The soul was not the same.
She sighed and drew back. No, the soul was not the same.
“You came here to find your uncle?” she inquired.
“I did,” the young man answered. “My parents knew where he was, although he never wrote to any of us in his later years. When I passed near here I said I would come and see if he still lived and write home to my father.”
“He is buried in our land,” Madame Wu said. “My son will take you to his grave.”
They sat for a moment in silence. Madame Wu struggled with a strange jealousy. She closed her eyes and saw André’s face against the velvet inner dark. “You,” she said to him, “you belong only to us.”
She opened her eyes and saw his nephew sitting there before her. Ah, André had family and kin, foreign and far away!
The young man smiled. “I suppose you know, Madame, why he lived so far away from all of us and why he never wrote any letters?”
Fengmo answered for her. “We never knew.”
“He was a heretic,” the young man said solemnly. “The church cast him out as a renegade—homeless, without support. We never heard from him afterward. He sent back money we sent him—he refused to come home.”
“But he did no evil,” Fengmo exclaimed in horror.
“It was not what he did,” the young man declared. “It was what he thought. He thought it was men and women who were the divine. It seems hard to think this a sin, in our generation. But it was a great sin in his day. He felt compelled to write a letter to his Cardinal and tell him. In the last letter he wrote my father he told the whole story. We didn’t know what he meant. My mother said she guessed he was crazy from living too long alone.”
All this Fengmo translated for Madame Wu, and she listened and said not a word. They had rejected him—his own people!
She closed her eyes. “But we did not reject you,” she told him in her heart.
She sat thus for a moment silent, her eyes closed, and the two young men stared at her. Fengmo moved, anxious because she sat so long, and she opened her eyes.
“Tell this young foreigner that it is a very long way to that grave,” she said. “Tell him the road is rough and narrow. When he gets there it is only the grave, nothing more.”
The young man listened. “If it is as far as that, I had better not go,” he exclaimed. “I have to get back in time to catch the boat. After all, as you say, it is only a grave.”
They went away, after farewells, and Madame Wu was glad to see them gone. Sh
e had need to be alone that she might comprehend to the full the knowledge she now had of André. All those years he had lived here, solitary!
“But not solitary,” she thought. There were the children he had found and the beggars he had fed.
And she herself—how had she opened her gates and let him in? She would never know. He had been led to her, and she had opened her gates and he had come in, and with him he had brought to her eternal life.
Yes, she now believed that when her body died, her soul would go on. Gods she did not worship, and faith she had none, but love she had and forever. Love alone had awakened her sleeping soul and had made it deathless.
She knew she was immortal.
A Biography of Pearl S. Buck
Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) was a bestselling and Nobel Prize-winning author of fiction and nonfiction, celebrated by critics and readers alike for her groundbreaking depictions of rural life in China. Her renowned novel The Good Earth (1931) received the Pulitzer Prize and the William Dean Howells Medal. For her body of work, Buck was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature—the first American woman to have won this honor.
Born in 1892 in Hillsboro, West Virginia, Buck spent much of the first forty years of her life in China. The daughter of Presbyterian missionaries based in Zhenjiang, she grew up speaking both English and the local Chinese dialect, and was sometimes referred to by her Chinese name, Sai Zhenzhju. Though she moved to the United States to attend Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, she returned to China afterwards to care for her ill mother. In 1917 she married her first husband, John Lossing Buck. The couple moved to a small town in Anhui Province, later relocating to Nanking, where they lived for thirteen years.
Buck began writing in the 1920s, and published her first novel, East Wind: West Wind in 1930. The next year she published her second book, The Good Earth, a multimillion-copy bestseller later made into a feature film. The book was the first of the Good Earth trilogy, followed by Sons (1933) and A House Divided (1935). These landmark works have been credited with arousing Western sympathies for China—and antagonism toward Japan—on the eve of World War II.
Buck published several other novels in the following years, including many that dealt with the Chinese Cultural Revolution and other aspects of the rapidly changing country. As an American who had been raised in China, and who had been affected by both the Boxer Rebellion and the 1927 Nanking Incident, she was welcomed as a sympathetic and knowledgeable voice of a culture that was much misunderstood in the West at the time. Her works did not treat China alone, however; she also set her stories in Korea (Living Reed), Burma (The Promise), and Japan (The Big Wave). Buck’s fiction explored the many differences between East and West, tradition and modernity, and frequently centered on the hardships of impoverished people during times of social upheaval.
In 1934 Buck left China for the United States in order to escape political instability and also to be near her daughter, Carol, who had been institutionalized in New Jersey with a rare and severe type of mental retardation. Buck divorced in 1935, and then married her publisher at the John Day Company, Richard Walsh. Their relationship is thought to have helped foster Buck’s volume of work, which was prodigious by any standard.
Buck also supported various humanitarian causes throughout her life. These included women’s and civil rights, as well as the treatment of the disabled. In 1950, she published a memoir, The Child Who Never Grew, about her life with Carol; this candid account helped break the social taboo on discussing learning disabilities. In response to the practices that rendered mixed-raced children unadoptable—in particular, orphans who had already been victimized by war—she founded Welcome House in 1949, the first international, interracial adoption agency in the United States. Pearl S. Buck International, the overseeing nonprofit organization, addresses children’s issues in Asia.
Buck died of lung cancer in Vermont in 1973. Though The Good Earth was a massive success in America, the Chinese government objected to Buck’s stark portrayal of the country’s rural poverty and, in 1972, banned Buck from returning to the country. Despite this, she is still greatly considered to have been “a friend of the Chinese people,” in the words of China’s first premier, Zhou Enlai. Her former house in Zhenjiang is now a museum in honor of her legacy.
Buck’s parents, Caroline Stulting and Absalom Sydenstricker, were Southern Presbyterian missionaries.
Buck was born Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker in Hillsboro, West Virginia, on June 26, 1892. This was the family’s home when she was born, though her parents returned to China with the infant Pearl three months after her birth.
Buck lived in Zhenjiang, China, until 1911. This photograph was found in her archives with the following caption typed on the reverse: “One of the favorite locations for the street barber of China is a temple court or the open space just outside the gate. Here the swinging shop strung on a shoulder pole may be set up, and business briskly carried on. A shave costs five cents, and if you wish to have your queue combed and braided you will be out at least a dime. The implements, needless to say, are primitive. No safety razor has yet become popular in China. Old horseshoes and scrap iron form one of China’s significant importations, and these are melted up and made over into scissors and razors, and similar articles. Neither is sanitation a feature of a shave in China. But then, cleanliness is not a feature of anything in the ex-Celestial Empire.”
Buck’s writing was notable for its sensitivity to the rural farming class, which she came to know during her childhood in China. The following caption was found typed on the reverse of this photograph in Buck’s archive: “Chinese beggars are all ages of both sexes. They run after your rickshaw, clog your progress in front of every public place such as a temple or deserted palace or fair, and pester you for coppers with a beggar song—‘Do good, be merciful.’ It is the Chinese rather than the foreigners who support this vast horde of indigent people. The beggars have a guild and make it very unpleasant for the merchants. If a stipulated tax is not paid them by the merchant they infest his place and make business impossible. The only work beggars ever perform is marching in funeral and wedding processions. It is said that every family expects 1 or 2 of its children to contribute to support of family by begging.”
Buck worked continually on behalf of underprivileged children, especially in the country where she grew up. The following caption was found typed on the reverse of this photograph in Buck’s archive: “The children of China seem to thrive in spite of dirt and poverty, and represent nature’s careful selection in the hard race for the right to existence. They are peculiarly sturdy and alert, taken as a whole, and indicate something of the virility of a nation that has continued great for four thousand years.”
Johann Waldemar de Rehling Quistgaard painted Buck in 1933, when the writer was forty-one years old—a year after she won the Pulitzer Prize for The Good Earth. The portrait currently hangs at Green Hills Farm in Pennsylvania, where Buck lived from 1934 and which is today the headquarters for Pearl S. Buck International. (Image courtesy of Pearl S. Buck International, www.pearlsbuck.org.)
Richard J. Walsh—Buck’s publisher and second husband—pictured in China with an unidentified rickshaw man. Walsh’s tweed suit and pipe are typical of his signature daily attire.
Buck receiving her Nobel Prize from the King of Sweden, Gustav V, in 1938. (Image courtesy of Pearl S. Buck International, www.pearlsbuck.org.)
Buck and Walsh with their daughter, Elizabeth.
Buck in the 1930s.
Walsh—with his ever-present pipe—pictured with an unidentified child.
Buck addresses an audience in Korea in 1964, discussing the issues of poverty and discrimination faced by children in Asia. She established the Orphanage and Opportunity Center in Buchon City, Korea, in 1965.
Buck in her fifties.
This family photograph was taken on Buck’s seventieth birthday, June 26, 1962. The gathering included Buck’s children, grandchildren, and some of the children supported by P
earl S. Buck International.
Buck on her seventieth birthday.
Pearl Buck’s legacy lives on through Pearl S. Buck International, a non-profit organization dedicated to humanitarian causes around the world.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © renewed 1974 by Janice C. Walsh, Richard S. Walsh, John S. Walsh, Mrs. Henrietta C. Walsh, Mrs. Chico C. Singer, Edgar S. Walsh, Mrs. Jean C. Lippincott, and Carol Buck
cover design by Kathleen Lynch
978-1-4532-6742-4
Published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
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