“Well, we have got her safely away from India,” he said. The strip of water between ship and shore was widening. Twenty feet, twenty-five and soon fifty, and then the miles would mount.
“I suppose so,” Ruth said.
He would not inquire what her doubt might be. He felt tired and dislocated, and perhaps he had lived in Vhai too long. For years he had poured himself out, and now he felt empty and weak. It occurred to him that he had not eaten much in the past weeks, worried and pressed as he had been by his distress about Livy and the hurried leave-taking. It would be good to sink back into the comfortable life in the old mansion, where his father and Agnes were expecting them. He needed rest.
The dinner gong rang through the corridors of the ship and upon the decks.
“I believe I am hungry,” he said.
“Then let’s go down to the dining saloon now,” Ruth said. But they lingered a moment. The sun was slipping behind the horizon of Bombay and the shadow of night stole swiftly over the city and the sea.
“I hope Livy will not wear her saris,” Ted said suddenly.
“I told her not to wear them any more,” Ruth replied quietly.
“Did she mind?”
“No, she said she had already decided that she would not.”
So often, he thought, his conversations with his wife were commonplace, the merest question and answer, and yet he knew again that she had thoughts which she did not speak, and so there were overtones to her words. He seldom inquired what these were, and he did not do so now. A sudden breeze had arisen damp and chill.
“Come,” he said. “There is nothing more here. Let us go below.”
Livy, on the high upper deck, continued to gaze alone into the night. The lights of the ship fell upon the smooth and oily water of the bay and upon the long lines of the prow of the ship. But Livy did not see the near waters, nor even the sparkling lights of Bombay in the receding distance. Her mind’s eye drove its straight beam northward upon Vhai, and she saw Jatin in his little house alone. She knew that he would be busy as he always was, reading his books, eating his plain evening meal, and then reading again. In an hour from now he would be at the hospital making his last rounds of the sick as they lay upon their pallets on the floor, or on low wooden beds, rope-bottomed, just as they would have lain had they been in their own homes. Her father had always insisted that everything was to be Indian, he would not have anything in Vhai that was like the beautiful colleges and the hospital at MacArd in Poona, and yet she was no longer deceived. She had thought, oh, she had truly believed, that her father had meant what he said when he taught them to behave courteously toward the people of Vhai and of all India, and she had believed that he meant what he said when he bade them learn the language of Vhai, and when he encouraged her to wear a sari as easily as she did a frock, until a sari now seemed more natural to her and certainly more comfortable than a buttoned frock, for to tuck the pleated material into the folds at her waist so that it hung a graceful skirt and then to throw the other end about her shoulders was much easier than getting into sleeves and belts and buttons down the back. He had encouraged them to play with the children of Vhai and to look upon them as brothers and sisters, telling them that God was their Father in Heaven, and they were one great family. She had believed he meant all that and now she knew he did not. For if he had truly believed what he preached, then he would have been willing and even glad for her to marry Jatin, for that was the whole acceptance, wasn’t it, and if one could not accept the ultimate, then there was no real acceptance. Perhaps there was no truth in God, either.
She shivered, unutterably sad as her mind fixed itself upon Jatin. It was not his fault, surely, for he had never been deceived by her father, and that had been their first great argument.
“Jatin, I tell you, my father will be happy. He likes you, and he will welcome you as his son.”
This she had insisted upon, and Jatin had only smiled his dark sad smile.
“Then you don’t believe in my father!” She had accused him thus.
“I do believe in him,” Jatin had replied. “Yet I know his soul reaches beyond the rest of him. His faith is far up yonder—” he pointed to the zenith. “But his flesh is more prudent than his soul and it remains upon the earth. And his mind is uncertain between the two. He believes in his ideals, and he considers them necessary, but he says that it will take time to fulfill them, much time. What he does not know, is that if one does not immediately practice ideals, they are lost. They die unless they come quickly to reality.”
So much that Jatin had said she had not understood when he spoke because his presence agitated her. She had not often been able to fix her mind upon his words because her eyes were fastened upon his lips. Remembering those lips, her heart hung in her bosom, a weight of hot and leaden pain. She would never see his face again, of that she was now sure. Her father could not have kept them apart, she thought rebelliously, but Jatin himself had sent her away. If Jatin had been in the least willing to defy her father, it could have been done, but he was not willing, not through fear, but through his belief that to part was their fate, the world being what it was.
“You must go back to your own country,” he had told her, “and after you have finished school, then you must marry a good man.”
“I will not,” she had cried passionately, the tears streaming down her cheeks.
“But I say you must,” he had insisted in his grave voice. “And Livy, one more command I give you. Do not tell him about me. This is for your own protection, for if your father, who is so good a man, cannot bear the thought of our love, then that one who is to be your husband cannot bear it, either. He will draw away from you because once you loved me.”
“I shall love you forever,” she had declared, “and I shall never marry.”
To this he had not replied. He had simply stroked her cheeks with his delicate powerful palms. In the hottest weather his palms were cool and dry, and yet they were never cold. There was healing in his hands. She would never see anyone like him, never meet a man who could compare to him, but because the smooth skin that covered his handsome body was dark, they must never be man and wife, a coating so thin though dark, that it could be pierced by a pin and underneath the flesh was as pale as her own and the blood as red. Yet it was the paper thin darkness of the skin that forced them on their separate ways, on opposite sides of the world.
She did not agree, nevertheless, with all that he had decreed. There was still her hope in the child. The child, if there was a child, she would not put away as he had commanded her to do. If there was to be a child then she would go back to India somehow and insist that Jatin marry her and recognize his own son. She would not be as her father was. What she believed in she would do. Love one another, the Scriptures said, and so she had loved all that was India. She had loved Vhai and the people of Vhai and she had loved the children and the women, and her ayah’s flesh was real to her as her own mother’s. Then, finally, she had loved Jatin.
She clung to the rail and closed her eyes in profound entreaty. “Oh, God, if You are there, then please, give me what I want most! Give me a baby, so that I can go back to Jatin!”
The intensity of her prayer was so great that instantly she felt sure her prayer had been heard. A soft night wind blew over her. A moment before there was no wind, and now suddenly there came the wind, a sign and promise! She opened her eyes in an ecstasy of hope, and felt the ship rise and fall beneath her feet. They were beyond the bay and out upon the sea, but she would come back, for God had heard her and He had given her the sign. She toyed with the idea, just for a moment, of telling her mother that there would be a child and then she decided against it. No, not yet—she might be wrong about God. It would be days before she could know.
She shivered, suddenly cold with the chill of the sea wind. She must not lose Jatin in the dark. Vhai was there and it would always be there. Though she was being carried far away, she would come back—if she was right about God.
Yet she was young and while she waited, there were hours when she almost forgot. The ship’s company was gay, young men and women pressed her into their games, and when they persuaded her, she sang for them the Indian songs she knew, the sweet twisting melodies of Vhai, her voice lifted high and never dropping low, but winding in and out like a brook in a valley between the mountains.
They were charmed by her and she could not but respond, for it was pleasant to be told that she was pretty, that she had a lovely voice which should be trained, that she was a natural dancer, and had she ever thought of Hollywood? She was shy, she answered their pressing coaxing compliments in a shy little voice, her brown lashes on her cheeks and now lifted in unconscious enjoyment. No, she had not thought of Hollywood, she did not believe her father would like it, and certainly her grandfather would not. Yes, they were going straight to New York where they would stay in the house that had belonged to her great-grandfather, and yes, he was David Hardworth MacArd, and yes, she supposed he was the MacArd, though her grandfather’s name was David, too. She was so young that it pleased her to observe the slight pause that followed the speaking of this famous name, and when she got up to go away, it was with dignity added to her grace. She was the great-granddaughter of the MacArd.
Yet her heart was faithful and night and morning she said her prayers and thought of Jatin, and many times during the day his face came before her. She would glance at her little gold wrist watch which her father had given her last Christmas and then she would ask herself where he was now, and wherever it was, she would see him, at work or alone. She was still not parted from him, nor could be, so long as there was the possibility of their child.
The days passed, the ship was in midocean and one morning the certainty was there. The answer was clear, there was to be no child. Nature announced it, she saw the rose-red stain, and knew that love had borne no fruit. She had risen early that morning, and the wind was white upon the water and the sun shining over the horizon. She had waked uncontrollably gay, for she was too young for constant sadness, and now suddenly she knew and the day stopped abruptly at dawn. She went back to bed and drew the covers about her and cried silently into the blankets so that Sara might not hear from the other berth. But Sara heard, that sharp child, and she went and called their mother, upon pretense of visiting the bathroom, and Ruth came wrapped in her pink cotton dressing gown and so suddenly that Livy had no time to wipe her cheeks dry or to insist that she was not crying.
“It is just that I don’t feel well,” she murmured, trying not to turn her face toward her mother. But Ruth’s strong hand seized her daughter’s dimpled chin and pressed it toward her.
“You don’t feel well? Where?”
“It’s just the old curse—”
“Oh—” Ruth’s hand relaxed. “But why cry? It’s nothing.”
“People do cry for nothing, sometimes,” Livy said.
“Not you,” Ruth retorted.
She looked down into her daughter’s face and saw the eyes closed, the lips quivering. The girl was pale, she had gone through more than they knew, maybe. She remembered that as a child she, too, had always cried when they left India. And now there was Jatin, besides, and she did not know how far that had gone, but anyway Livy was safe. Love had not gone too far except perhaps in the heart, and that would heal.
“Cover yourself up real warm,” she said briskly. “I’ll have your breakfast brought in.”
She bent and kissed her daughter’s forehead, and was glad enough not to know what she had not been told. No use knowing, since nothing could be helped and whatever had been was ended.
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.)