How can there be buts if love continues? That is the question I cannot answer. And silence lies between us.
….When I came in to make supper Baba was enjoying the late sun on the kitchen terrace. He wears his Chinese gown every day, and he sits and reads his few old Chinese books and seldom speaks. I do not know what he thinks about. The doctor in our valley, Dr. Bruce Spaulden, tells me he has had a shock of some kind, a stroke, perhaps, when he was alone there in the shack in Little Springs.
“Can such a thing happen and no one know?” I asked.
Bruce Spaulden is a good man and a good doctor, very tall, an honest face, strong features. What else? I have not had time to know him well. Rennie and I are never ill, we have not been in need of him.
“Such things do happen,” he said. He is an earnest fellow. “There’s nothing to do,” he said. “Simply take care of him as you are doing.” He is never in a hurry, but not communicative. He had come to examine Baba at my request, because I do not understand this old man I have taken into my house. He is not the man I remember as Gerald’s father. In Peking Baba’s mind was keen, cultivated, witty, the mind of a scholar. I was afraid of him and charmed by him when I went to live in his house with Gerald. He knew everything and information flowed from him with pure naturalness, never with condescension. The subtle mellowing and maturing which China seems always to leave upon all who give themselves to her had reached perfection in him.
“Gerald, how can I ever please your father?” I cried on the first night we spent in the Peking house.
“My darling,” Gerald said, “you need not try to please him. He is already pleased. In the first place he likes everyone, in his own fashion. In the second place, he is delighted with you because you don’t pretend. Neither does he. You can take each other as you are.”
Baba has still that naturalness and he has his old-fashioned courtesy. Without one word to Rennie he teaches his grandson the manners he is losing since he became an American schoolboy. Baba will not sit down at the table until I am seated. He is careful to tell me when he goes for one of his short walks into the sugar bush and to find me and tell me again when he returns. He loves to walk slowly in the shade of the maples and among the ferns now unrolling their fronds beneath the trees. Matt and Rennie keep the bush cleaned of small stuff and the ferns come up in a carpet of jade green.
Baba reports to me each small beauty that he sees, and this makes our conversation, now that Rennie comes late because of baseball at school. Baba sits in the kitchen with me and we talk. Oh, but it is different talk now. He is not childish—no, not that—but something has gone from him. The old scintillating wit is silent, the mind rests. He is sweet and gentle and easy to live with, and he does not complain. He does not long for his old life. Somehow he knows it is no more. He simply accepts his daily bread. I am not sure he knows where he is. I think he forgets at times who I am. He looks at Rennie now and then with strange thoughtfulness, but he does not speak. I feel he is inquiring of himself whether this is Gerald or Gerald’s son, or even sometimes, whether he knows him….No, it would be cruel to show him Gerald’s letter. I could not explain it.
Tonight, when we had eaten our supper, Rennie was off again to go with his friends to a motion picture. It is Saturday and I allow the privilege, especially as school reports came in this week and Rennie’s is good.
So Baba and I were alone and I lit the lamp. I took up my knitting and sat down by the table and Baba remained in his armchair. And I, of course, while I knitted a red sweater for Rennie, could not but think of Gerald. Never before, in the years since we parted, had our anniversary passed without a letter from him. Somehow or other he has managed to get a letter through Hongkong to reach me in time for this night, and so to renew his love. I have the letters upstairs, in my sandalwood box. On other years I have read them all again, in full faith that some day our separation would end. I do not know whether I shall have the courage to read them tonight.
Baba does not speak unless I speak first. He sits quietly and watches me with patient eyes. Tonight I could not bear this and so I began to talk.
“Baba, tell me, can you remember when you married Gerald’s mother?”
He did not look startled. It was almost as if he had been thinking of her at that moment.
“I do remember her,” he said. “Her name was Ai-lan. Her surname was Han. She was a good woman and a good wife.”
“How did you come to marry her?”
He pondered this, his eyes vague. “I cannot remember,” he said. “I was advisor then to the Young Emperor. My friend, Han Yu-ren, suggested her to me. He thought I was lonely, and he had a sister younger than I. She was Ai-lan.”
“And were you lonely?” I asked.
He considered this. “I suppose so, or I would not have married.”
“Were you in love, Baba?” I asked.
Again the pause. I looked at him, and he made a picture as he sat there in my father’s old brown leather armchair, the light of the lamp falling upon his Chinese robe of crimson silk, his hands folded upon his lap, and his white hair and beard shining, his eyes dark and troubled. He was trying to think.
“Never mind, Baba,” I said. “It was all so long ago.”
“It is not that I do not wish to tell you,” he said. “I am trying to remember. I think I was in love. I feel that I was in love, but not with Ai-lan. I was in love with someone else. It is she I am trying to remember.”
“Was she a Chinese lady?” I asked, knowing she was not.
“Not Chinese,” he said.
“Then what?”
“That is what I cannot remember.”
“Her name?”
“I cannot remember her name.”
Oh, what a thing to say! My knitting fell from my hands. To be in love and then to pass beyond even the memory of the beloved’s name! Can this happen? Could Gerald one day, in Peking, years hence, forget even my name?
Baba was still remembering, his mind searching the past. He began to talk again. “I was lonely, I believe, because the one—that one whose name I cannot remember—did not return my love. Yes, I do remember loving someone who did not love me. I had proposed marriage, perhaps—well, I do not know. But certainly I was alone and when Yu-ren said to me that he had a sister, I thought it might be a good thing to be married to a Chinese lady. She could help me, I thought, in my work with Chinese.”
I took up my knitting again. “Strange, was it not, that a Chinese lady should be unmarried?”
He said quite easily now, “She had been betrothed and her fiancé had died. There was a cholera epidemic, I believe. I think Yu-ren said he had died when she was quite young—perhaps fifteen. Yes, I am sure about that. She was twenty-five when we were married and I was thirty.”
“Strange, was it not, for her to be willing to marry a foreigner?” I had somehow opened a door into Baba’s mind and I pressed my advantage for the most selfish reasons. I wanted to know Gerald’s mother. Baba had never spoken of her in the old days. There was not even a picture of her in the Peking house. And Gerald could not bear to speak of her. He loved her painfully well, and I did not know why it was with pain.
The Vermont night was quiet about us, a lovely night, moonless and soft. May can be cold in our valley, or warm. Tonight was warm. I had closed the windows not against cold but against the moths drawn to the lamp. The house was silent. The day’s work was done. I felt no barrier between Baba and me, and as though he felt none, either, he spoke with the simple words of a child, sometimes in English and sometimes in Chinese. It was strange and beautiful to hear the liquid tones of the ancient Peking language here in this room. What would my mother have thought! And how my father would have listened! And neither would have understood. But I understood. I am glad now that I learned Chinese. The hours I pored over the books with old Mr. Chen, the teacher Gerald found for me, are richly paid for tonight.
For here is the story Baba told me, sitting yonder in the brown armchair, his long pale hands
folded one upon the other, his eyes fixed on my face sometimes, and sometimes moving away to the darkening window. The story flowed from him as life came back to his memory, and he became someone else, not the scholar, all Virginian courtliness and Chinese grace, whom I had known as Gerald’s father, but an old man reliving a handful of vivid years in his youth.
They had been married, he and Gerald’s mother, according to the ancient Buddhist rites. Confucian and skeptic in her education, when death and marriage and birth took place the family returned, nevertheless, to their Buddhist traditions.
“And were her parents willing to accept an American?” I asked Baba.
Her parents were dead, it seemed, and her elder brother, Han Yu-ren, was the head of the family. At first he could not persuade his sister. She had come to look upon herself as a widow, and she thought it unchaste to marry. She had even considered becoming a Buddhist nun, as many young widows do in China, but her brilliant agnostic mind forbade this. She could not undergo a life of ritual in which she did not believe. Much as a nun might have done, however, she lived in the Han household, pursuing her studies.
“Was she beautiful, Baba?”
He considered this for some time. “She was not,” he said at last, “although there were times when she very nearly approached beauty.”
“And these times?” It was impudent of me to ask the question, for might she not have been beautiful in love?
Baba was not distressed. He answered in the same tranquil manner. “She was beautiful when she read aloud to me the ancient poetry she enjoyed. This was a pleasure to her. And also she played quite well upon her lute when she sang and she had a sweet melancholy voice. When she had played in the evenings, she always wiped tears from her eyes. I do not know why she wept.”
“After Gerald was born, was she happy?”
A vague trouble passed over Baba’s face. “I do not know whether it can be called happiness. She was changed. She read no more poetry and she never again played her lute. Instead she became interested in the revolution. Until then she had paid no heed to political affairs. I do not remember that she ever read a newspaper before Gerald was born. But afterwards, I remember, she began to read new books and magazines. She became friendly, in a distant fashion, with Sun Yat-sen. I remembered we quarreled over it.”
“I cannot imagine you quarreling, Baba,” I said.
He did not hear this, or he paid it no heed. “I did not like Sun Yat-sen. I distrusted him. I was then the advisor to the Throne, you understand. I believed that the old form of government was the best. Besides, Sun was not educated in the classics. He had been only to missionary schools.”
I was astonished to hear Baba speak so well. Something of the man I had known appeared before me. I put down my knitting to watch and to listen while he went on.
“We differed, she and I. She, who had been reared in every ancient tradition, was suddenly another woman than the one I had married. As a Chinese lady she had never left our house. Now, as the child grew out of babyhood, she began to go here and there and when I asked her where she went she said she went to meetings. This was how I knew she went to hear Sun Yat-sen. He was an upstart, the son of a southern peasant, and I told her so. And then she accused me.”
His voice trembled and he could not go on.
“Of what did she accuse you, Baba?”
He looked at me piteously, his lower lip trembling. “She said that, because I was a foreigner, I did not want the revolution to come. She even said that I wished to keep the Emperor on the throne for the sake of my salary. When I declared that I would resign immediately, she said it made no difference, for then I would persist in my ways for the sake of my own people. She said our two races could never mingle. She said I was loyal to my own. She had been sweet and gentle, and now suddenly she was cruel and angry with me. She said I had never loved her.”
Ah, that was the reason for the change! I understood, for I, too, am a woman. She loved and knew she was not loved, and so she left her home and wandered where she could find shelter. I had not the heart to tell Baba what he did not know—or had forgotten.
“This was because of Gerald?”
He shook his head. “I do not know.”
But I knew. Her heart had woken when she saw her son. This child, half white, she had borne in ignorance of his fate. Where was his place? She knew that if he went to the land of his father, she would be left without love. His place must be in her country, and that she might keep him, she would make a new country for him. Oh, I do not doubt that I am putting it very crudely. She would not have said it so, and perhaps would not even have thought it so. Doubtless she imagined she did all for the sake of her people. She listened to the old arguments, that her people were insulted, the land threatened by foreigners. But I know that all arguments are specious. We do what we do for secret reasons of our own, and this is true in whatever country men and women dwell. She wanted to keep her son. Now I perceive the web she wove about Gerald.
Baba had stopped talking.
“What then, Baba?” I asked.
He sighed and I took up my knitting. He had slipped away. His mind subsided. Yet I could not bear to hear no more. I tried again, as gently as I could.
“How old was Gerald when his mother died?”
Baba spoke with sudden promptness, surprising me so that I dropped my knitting.
“She did not die. She was killed.”
“What!”
We sat staring at each other. I saw something terrible now in Baba’s eyes, not sorrow, not vagueness. No, I saw fright.
“I warned her,” he said. He was trembling, his knees shaking under the thin silk of his robe. “I told her that I could not save her if she persisted. For she became a revolutionist, she became a violent revolutionist—you understand? Not merely a patriot, you understand. She became one of Them.”
“Baba—no!”
“Yes, yes! First she became a friend of the wife of Sun Yat-sen. The two women spent hours together, sometimes in my house. I forbade it at last. I was afraid for myself and for Gerald. I told her that if she must meet with those—traitors—yes, that was the word I used—I said, ‘If you must meet with those traitors, Ai-lan, it shall not be in my house, or in the presence of my son.’ And she took those two words and threw them back at me as one flings a dagger.
“‘Your son!’”
I heard the Chinese voice as clearly as though she stood in this room. Thousands of miles and years away I heard the words.
“Oh Baba, go on!”
“She went out of my house and I never saw her again.”
“She was not dead?”
“No—not then. I went to her brother, my friend, and we searched for her. He was entirely with me, you understand. He begged my forgiveness for having given his sister to me for my wife. He denounced her and disowned her, and he said he would erase her name from the book of family history. It was he who found her at last. But he would not tell me where she was. He said, ‘It is better for you not to know.’ I knew what he meant. She had joined herself to Them. She was with Them in the South, where they were making the revolution. She and the wife of Sun Yat-sen, they were like sisters.”
“Did Gerald never see her again either?”
For all the time Baba was talking, it was of Gerald that I was thinking. I saw him growing up in that great house, alone with his father, but dreaming, I suppose, of his mother. What child does not dream of his mother? When I had first finished college I taught for a year in an orphanage in New York, a foundling home for girls. Bed and crib lay side by side, rooms full of children who had been deserted and betrayed. By day they played and sometimes even laughed, but at night I was often waked by the dreadful sound of their weeping. My room was in another wing, I had no duty toward them at night, a nurse was near them. But again and again I was waked. For when a child moaned in her sleep she murmured “mother,” and the word waked every child of the twenty or thirty in the room, one and then another, and they wailed the
word aloud. “Mother—mother—” Their crying pervaded the night air and woke other rooms of lonely children until the whole building trembled with the voices of sorrowful children, weeping for mothers they could not remember or had never known. Who can assuage such grief? I gave up my job and went away, but I have never forgotten the weeping children, dreaming of their unknown mothers. The child Gerald, lonely in the house with his foreign father, takes his place with the weeping children.
“He did see his mother,” Baba said, his answer to my question. “She was very correct about that. She would not see him secretly, since she had left my house, but she asked, through her brother, whether Gerald might come to her.”
“And were you willing?”
“Not at first. I did not wish his mind to be contaminated. I told Han Yu-ren so. I said she must not contaminate the child’s mind. She continued to be correct. She said that she would not teach him anything and I should be his teacher. I allowed him therefore to meet her. She came to Peking in order that she might see him. They met in her ancestral home.”
“Was it for hours or days?” I asked.
“Sometimes for hours, sometimes for days, depending upon what she considered her duties to Them. They always came first.”
Ah, the child must have felt that. Gerald is oversensitive to people. Even as he could not believe before we were married that I loved him, time and again after our marriage I had to prove to him not only that he was the beloved, but that he was lovable. I resorted to pretended jealousy, as for example when we were invited to the Legation Ball, the last winter we were together. I said,
“Gerald, don’t dance more than once with anyone but me, will you?”
He could still blush. “Don’t be silly,” he said.
What he did not know was that I was never jealous. I was sure of him because I was sure of myself. It did not matter how many beautiful foreign girls might be at a diplomatic ball, I was not jealous. Gerald is handsome enough for jealousy, that I acknowledge. But he is mine. I was not afraid even of the lovely modern Chinese girls, slim in their straight long robes. I am glad now to remember that I was not afraid, though it was touching that he was pleased at the suggestion. Beloved that he is, I can see that with all his brilliance and wisdom, he is also sometimes naïve.
Letters From Peking Page 5
