Letters From Peking

“I shall be back soon,” I said, and went away to do my day’s work.

…Tonight when Baba was in bed and ready for sleep he suddenly remembered very much about Sam Blaine. I had all but closed the door, I had said goodnight, when Baba spoke.

“About Sam Blaine—”

“Yes?”

“Sam Blaine is forty-two years old. He has never married. His father owned two thousand acres of good black earth. He was a cattle man, and he owned two mines in Nevada, too. His wife died when the child was only two years old. Sam was his only child.”

“Baba,” I cried, “how well you remember!” So I came back into the room and sat down and Baba said he had been taken from the train, ill and feverish, and told to wait in the railroad station, and Sam Blaine had come to fetch some freight. Instead he took Baba home with him and put him to bed.

“I had typhoid fever,” Baba said. “I was very ill. Sam stayed with me in the hut.”

And bit by bit he told me the story. When he woke in the night, not knowing where he was, Sam sat by the bed and talked about China. He spoke of Chinese villages and country roads and how the nightingales sing in the twilight of summer days. He was there during the war, but he did not speak of war or death. Instead he spoke to Baba of peaceful scenes, of families sitting in the doorways of their homes at evening, of men tilling the fields, of women at the pond washing the clothes.

When he repeated these things to me, Baba was suddenly bewildered. He looked at me with troubled eyes, his face that of a tired old child.

“Where is that land where we once lived?” he asked.

“It is where it always was,” I said. “It is across the sea. And Gerald is there.”

He was puzzled. “Then why are we here?”

Why, indeed? My heart broke and I leaned my head on his bony old breast.

“Now it is you who are weeping,” he said and he lay patient and still, waiting for me to lift up my head from his breast. There was no warmth in him, only a final patience, and my tears dried and I lifted my head.

“It is time for you to sleep,” I told him.

“And will you sleep?” he asked.

“Sooner or later I, too, will sleep,” I promised and I drew the blanket about his shoulders and went away.

…Oh, the awful silence of the valley at night! No one comes near me and I am as alone as though I lived solitary upon a planet. Here and there in the distance a light burns. It means a house, a home, two people, perhaps children. The oil lamp burns yellow in Matt’s little house, and far down at the end of the valley the bright single light is the naked electric bulb that never goes out above the office door of Bruce Spaulden. I know, too, the intermittent flares of summer folk. None of them burns for me. Sometimes I light every lamp in my empty house and a stranger passing by could believe the house is full of guests. But I have no guests.

Tonight, when loneliness became intolerable, I went upstairs, and took down the box of Gerald’s letters and I laid them out upon my desk in order of time. There are not many — only twelve in all, not including the final one. The first one was written soon after we left him in Shanghai. I wonder now if it was right to leave him. Yet he bade me go. I think he was not yet afraid. Indeed, he was even cheerful, believing that nothing could be worse than the years of war through which we had already passed. He was hopeful about the new government. Those builders of the new order spoke well. We had no presentiments, in spite of old Mr. Pilowski, the White Russian who managed the hotel where we stayed.

“Not to be trusted,” Mr. Pilowski declared, and brushed up his stiff mustaches. Black they were, but dyed, of course. Mr. Pilowski must have been well over seventy. “Never are revolutionaries to be trusted — no, not in the world. So they came into my Russia, promising all and seizing everything. So did they in France before, killing the kings and the queens and themselves behaving worsely.”

Gerald argued with him. “We can scarcely go on as we are, Mr. Pilowski. The people are wretched after the war. Inflation is crushing. Nothing is being done.”

“Some day, you will know that nothing being done is better than wickedness being done,” Mr. Pilowski declared. He grew red and angry and Gerald smiled, refusing further argument, but still believing himself right. It is the arrogance of the Chinese, and I must never forget that Gerald is half Chinese, to believe they are different from all other peoples, more reasonable, more sane, than other peoples are. In some ways it is true.

Gerald’s first letter is almost gay. “Everything goes well,” he writes. “I am beginning to think you should have stayed in China. Rennie could have taken his college work here in Peking. I do not know why we were so easily frightened. I believe that a new day is coming in this old, old country of mine.”

Not “our” old, old country, but “mine.” I see now the first hint of separation from me. He was already choosing his country, alone, if need be.

The hopefulness continues through to the fifth letter. Then I see the first hint of doubt.

“My Eve,” he writes me, “perhaps it is better that you are away for a year or so. In order to succeed the new government must clear away all obstacles. Do you remember Liu Chin, the silk merchant? It seems he is a traitor. He is so mild, so gentle — do you remember? Today he was shot at the Marco Polo Bridge with eleven others, two of them women. It is inevitable that some do not like the new order. But the new order is here. We must live with it and through it. The Minister of Education unfortunately is not a man of wide education. I am having to replace—” He scratches that out. It appears that already it is not safe to be frank. Thereafter Gerald writes no more of anything of importance. He tells me when the yellow Shantung rose in the east court blooms.

“Dear Eve, the rose is late this year. We have had bitter dust storms, the most severe I have ever known. The goldfish are dying in the pool although I have tried to keep the water fresh. The gardener went home to his parents in Shansi a month ago. I have had difficulty in finding another. People do not want to work—” The words are scratched out again. It is not to be believed. People do not want to work? Why not? Gerald does not say he has had my letters. I wrote every day and mailed the letters once a week.

The eighth letter is very short. “Dear Wife: Today is like any day now in my life. I have made the schedule, and am engaging the professors for next semester. The new dean is a clever young man with many ideas. The dean of women is a former student of mine. She was ambitious even in youth. Tell Rennie to study engineering. It will be better for him than teaching. Tonight is hot and still. I face a long lonely summer.”

The ninth letter is listless. Commencement is over and he is tired. I know the mood. We used to take a journey, make a holiday, go perhaps to the sea at Peitaiho, or travel to the Diamond Mountains in Korea. One year we went to Tai Shan and lived in a Buddhist temple for a month. I wonder if Rennie remembers. The old abbot befriended him, and taught him how to play cat’s cradle with a strip of silk.

Three months passed before the tenth letter reached me, and it is an empty letter. I wept when I read it and it makes me weep now. For I see that my beloved has resigned himself to that which he does not understand. “I wonder if I chose wisely in not going with you and our son to America. It is too late now. In case I never see you—” Here he scratches words again.

The eleventh letter is all but final. “Dearly Loved, it is better for us not to plan the day of meeting. It is better to live life as we find it, you on your side of the world, I on mine. Let Rennie become an American citizen. Help him to find a country of his own. If he forgets me let it be so.”

It is easy to see the story now. He is a prisoner. The city he chose has become his cell. He is no longer free. And I am not free because I love him. As long as he lives I shall not be free….Let me be glad that at least a woman is at his side. Though she be not I, he has someone with him. So why do I weep? And I continue to weep.

…This morning Baba frightened me by a fainting fit. He got up as usual and ate his slight breakfast, now only orange juice, a spoonful of porridge and hot milk. Then, in the midst of thanking me as he is careful to do, he crumpled in his chair. I sent Matt in a hurry for Bruce Spaulden, and lucky it was that Matt was near by, trimming the hemlock hedge. Meanwhile I stood beside Baba’s chair, not daring to move him, and frightened lest Bruce be already started on his rounds and therefore inaccessible.

Lucky again he was not. He came running up the gravel walk from the gate, hatless and without his coat, his bag swinging from his hand. The door was open and he entered, and leaped upstairs and into the room, his thin Vermont face without a smile, and his eyes seeing nothing but his patient. I knew better than to speak if I were not spoken to, and I stood silent, waiting his command.

“Pull up his sleeve.”

I pulled up Baba’s sleeve. Into the slack old flesh of his upper arm Bruce drove the needle quickly and with skill. Then he lifted Baba in his arms and laid him on his bed.

“Cover him and keep him warm,” he told me. “There is nothing I can do. He will pull out of it, likely, but one of these days he won’t. You aren’t to be scared. Even if I were sitting right beside him when it happens I couldn’t do anything. I’d give him a shot, of course, as I did today, but it’d be no more than a gesture.”

“I’ll stay by him until he wakes,” I said.

“Not necessary,” Bruce said. “Go about your business. Come in every now and then and see how he is.”

He was packing his bag while I covered Baba and tucked the quilt about him. The morning was warm for our mountains, but Baba’s flesh was cool as the flesh of one newly dead. Yet he breathed.

I looked up to see Bruce watching me.

“Come downstairs,” he said.

I followed him down. I thought he was going to the door, but no, he sat down in the hall on the ladderback chair near the big clock.

“This is no time to ask,” he said in his abrupt way. “But I don’t know as one time is better than another when a man has something on his mind…Elizabeth, will you marry me?”

He was not joking. For a second I thought he was, but his intense eyes told me better.

“I am married already,” I said. “My husband is not dead.”

“I didn’t know,” he muttered. “He never shows up.”

“He can’t,” I said. “He’s in Peking, China.”

“Might as well be dead,” he muttered.

I said, “For me he lives.”

Bruce got up and snatched his bag from the floor where he had set it down, and made for the door. There he paused, he turned to look at me. I was at the foot of the stair, holding to the newel post.

“All the same, Elizabeth,” he said, his eyes grey under his black brows, “things being what they are in this uncertain world, and in a most uncertain age, my offer holds.”

“I wish you hadn’t made it,” I said. “Now I’ll think of it every time I see you.”

“Which is exactly as I wish it,” he said.

He grinned suddenly, and I looked into a different face, a face almost gay in a sober sort of way. Then he was gone. And I stood there with an odd sort of feeling — not love, not that at all, only a strange pleasant sort of female warmth. For the second time in my life a man had proposed to me. To be honest, I suppose I ought to say that it is the first time, for when Gerald asked me to marry him he was so hesitant, so doubtful, so fearful lest he was not being fair to me — he an anonymous sort of human being, as he said, whose origins were double and from both sides of the world and so belonging nowhere in particular — that it was I who coaxed it out of him. I have nothing whatever to do with this proposal that has just been given to me now. I have never suspected the possibility that Bruce could love any woman, much less me. He loves children, that I know, and only with children have I seen that changeless exterior of his break into something like tenderness. He is almost totally silent. I can live alone, I am learning to live alone. But I am not sure that I could live with a silent man.

Stupefied, I left the door open and went back to Baba. He was still unconscious.

…Today the postman brought me a letter bearing the stamp of the People’s Republic of China.

“It must be from your husband,” he said, and handed me the letter as proudly as though he had fetched it himself from across the westward sea.

“Thank you,” I said, and did not tell him that I knew the moment that I looked at the handwriting that it was not from Gerald. It was from — what shall I call her? For I am Gerald’s wife. And I cannot use the word concubine. Yet I suppose that is what she is. I suppose the Chinese on our street in Peking call her his Chinese wife and me his American wife. But the dagger piercing me is this question — if she can write, why cannot he? Is there some loyalty, or fear, that prevents him? Is the loyalty to me, that, knowing how we have loved, he cannot bring himself to acknowledge that he desecrates our love?

I opened the letter and there was the simple handwriting.

DEAR ELDER SISTER:

Your letter has come. I thank you for such answer. Now it is my duty to tell you of our husband. I am not sure that this letter will ever come before your eyes, but I do my duty. I send it in the secret way. If it is found by the wrong person, then you will never see it. But I try. Now I tell you our husband is well but he is sad. He does not talk to me. He goes every day to his office, and at night he comes home. The house is as you left it. I do not change anything. Only I cannot keep it so clean. Sometimes he complains because it is not so clean. I tell him I cannot do all as well as you do. But I cook what he likes to eat. He does not mention your name but he keeps you in his mind as secret joy. In the night when the moon shines he walks into the courts and stares at the moon. Is it the same moon in your country? I have heard it is the same moon. To the moon then he gives his thinking of you.

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 the 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.

“Hello, Mrs. MacLeod! I thought I’d come along with Rennie and see how my old gentleman is. You can throw me out if you don’t want me for Christmas.”

He shakes my hand enough to break my wrist, and his blue eyes twinkle and glow. He throws his arms across my shoulders and kisses me soundly on my cheek. And all this time, while I am stammering some sort of a welcome, I see only Rennie, standing there waiting, a slight tall dark young man, smiling, and saying not a word. It occurs to Sam that he has been boisterous, for he steps back.

“Excuse me, ma’am.”

And Rennie comes forward and takes my hand in both his, and he stoops and kisses me on the other cheek, so lightly that I scarcely feel the touch of his fresh cool lips.

“Hello, Mother—”

He looks down at me, I look up at him. He is not saying anything more now. I hasten to speak.

“Come in — come in. It’s cold tonight. Come in where it’s warm. Good skiing weather tomorrow, Rennie!”

They come in and Rennie stands looking around the hall and into the living room. I have lit all the lamps and I have lit the candles on the dining-room table. The table is set with my best linen and my mother’s old silver. I have put a bowl of holly on the table. We cannot grow holly here, and I bought it at a dear price at the florist’s shop in town.

“Does it look the same to you?” I ask Rennie.

He shakes his head and does not reply. No, it does not look the same to him because he is not the same. He is changed. And I discern in him a heartbreaking fear of me, his mother. He is afraid that I will try to make him what he was before, a boy and not a man. He is not willing even to be my son if he has to be a boy again. I understand this in a flash of pain.

“Would you like to go to your rooms?” I asked very formally. “Rennie, your room is ready, and I have only to put some towels in the guestroom for you, Sam. I’m glad you came.”

Yes, I am glad. When I first saw him I was almost angry that a stranger had come with my son. But I know why he came. Rennie wanted him to come so that he would not be alone with me, his mother. He needs a man to keep him safe from me. I must be very cool and calm. I must make no demands on this tall silent young man. So I am glad that Sam has come. It will be easier to treat them both as strangers.

“You know your room, Rennie,” I said cheerfully. “And, Sam, if you will turn here to the right—”

“How is the old gentleman?” Sam asked briskly.

“He’ll be delighted to see you,” I said, and hoped that Baba would remember him.

“Where is he?”

“Here.” I opened the door of Baba’s room, and Sam went in but I saw Rennie pass by and go into his own room and shut the door.

“Well, well,” Sam shouted. He descended upon Baba and shook his hand while Baba stared at him helplessly.

“Sitting here looking like an old Emperor of China,” Sam bellowed amiably. “How are you, Doctor MacLeod?”

He drew up a wooden chair in front of Baba and sat on it facing the back, his sandy hair on end and every tooth showing in his grin.

“I am well,” Baba said cautiously. He looked at me, appealing, and then at Sam. “Are you my grandson?” he inquired gently.

Sam roared. “Not quite — not quite! Rennie hasn’t changed that much. Don’t you remember me, sir? I fetched you to the shack on my ranch. Don’t you remember? Why, you and me were wonderful friends!”

Baba remembered slowly. He nodded his head. He tapped his dragon-headed cane softly two or three times on the carpet.

“Sam,” he said cautiously. “It’s Sam.”

“Right,” Sam cried with delight. “Why, you’re in fine shape. You’ve been taken real good care of—”

I longed to leave them and slip away to Rennie’s room. If I were alone with my son surely there would be one good moment of embrace, just one, and I would ask no more. But Sam was watching me. When I stole toward the door he stopped me.

“Ma’am,” he said, “you won’t misunderstand me when I say it’s better to leave Rennie to himself for a while. He’ll come back to you in good time but it’ll have to be his time.”

“I feel it,” I said, and sat down and waited.

And Rennie’s door opened at last and he came in. He had changed his clothes to brown slacks and a tweed jacket that I had never seen before. His black hair was brushed smooth and he wore a red tie. I saw him as a man, a very handsome man….Though young, he has reserves of power somewhere. Shall I ever know him again and if so, then how?

“How are you, Grandfather?” he said and he came to Baba and knelt at his side as a Chinese grandson might have done and took Baba’s hand.

Baba stared at him reflectively.

“Are you my son Gerald?” he asked.

“Only your grandson,” Rennie said.

They looked at each other and, face to face, I saw the resemblance between them for the first time. Rennie’s profile, changing with manhood, takes on the Scotch lines and not the Chinese.

“My grandson,” Baba repeated, and suddenly he leaned forward and kissed Rennie on the forehead. I had never seen him kiss anyone before. Rennie was moved, and put Baba’s hand to his cheek.

“I’m glad I came home,” he said. He turned to me and I saw tears in his eyes.

We had a merry evening after that. Those two young men made a chair of their crossed hands and they carried Baba downstairs and he sat at the table with us. Then, for gaiety, I ran upstairs and put on my wine velvet dinner gown, which I had not worn since Gerald and I parted. The last night in Shanghai we went alone to dine at the Astor Hotel and afterwards to dance, and I put on this one festive gown that I had saved through all the war. We danced cheek to cheek, forgetting the crowded streets outside, and determined for a few hours to mingle with the European guests gathered in the hotel, most of them ready to sail away forever from the country they loved but to which they could never belong. And we knew, Gerald and I, without ever saying it, that he would stay and I must go. I am sure he knew.

For a moment tonight I was about to take the gown off again, and then I would not. Everything I was and owned must become a part of this house, this valley, and I have no other country than my own. So I went downstairs, and the two young men stood up when I came in and each of them looked at me with surprise. I was suddenly a woman, and they had not realized it before. Well, I was glad that Rennie saw me as someone else than mother, for perhaps he will not fear me so much. As for Sam, it does not matter what he saw.

I put Rennie at the head of the table, and I sat at the foot, with Baba at my right so that I could cut his meat for him. The soup was hot in the Chinese bowls I had once bought in New York because they were like the ones I had in Peking, only the ware is not so fine, and so we began our evening meal. And Rennie was suddenly quite gay, too, and he began to talk, and Sam was as suddenly silent and almost shy.

“I’m going to teach Sam to ski,” Rennie said. “He’s lived in such flat country that he doesn’t know what it is to ski down a mountainside.”

“There are extra skis in the attic,” I said.

“I don’t know as I want to come down a mountain,” Sam said. “It takes nerve, the kind I haven’t.”

“Of all the kinds of nerve you have,” Rennie said, “you should be able to summon another. I’ve seen you come down out of the sky in that single-engine plane of yours at a speed that ought to make you ready to ski down Everest itself.”

“I don’t carry the engine on my feet,” Sam said.

They were hungry and they ate heartily and I sat and watched them. It was good to have guests at the table. I had sat alone so long. I took pride in the roast lamb and the peas and the small browned potatoes and lettuce salad. And I had remembered the apple pies that Rennie loves, served with cheese slices and hot coffee.

“I don’t remember your being such a good cook,” Rennie said, throwing me a smile.

“This is a special effort,” I said.

“I wouldn’t like to have to eat as good a dinner every day,” Rennie declared. He had recovered from whatever shyness he had and was himself again. I saw him let out his belt a notch or two, hiding this from me politely. Rennie’s good manners are as natural to him as breathing. He absorbed them in Peking from the most mannerly people in the world, and though he tried to be rough and rude when he left China, he was old enough now to dare to be himself, or very nearly. He was still cautious with me.

When dinner was over the knocker clanged again. We had left the table, I forbidding any help with clearing. Time enough for that later, I told Sam, who began at once to stack dishes. Baba was lifted into the living room and put in a chair by the fire, and I had sat opposite him, and Rennie and Sam had pulled up the yellow satin sofa facing the chimneypiece when we heard the clangor.

Rennie turned to me. “Do you expect someone?”

“No,” I said. “I cannot imagine who would come at this hour.”

He went into the hall and opened the door and Bruce Spaulden stood there, holding in his hand a bunch of pink roses wrapped in cellophane. Rennie stared at him. They knew each other, for Bruce had brought Rennie through tonsillitis, but they stared as though at strangers.

“No one is ill here,” Rennie said.

“Rennie!” I cried. “For heaven’s sake—”

I went to the door myself and Bruce held out the roses and I took them.

“Come in,” I said. “We are sitting around the fire.”

He came in and Rennie stood watchful and silent. I put the roses in an old gray pottery bowl that had stood on the table since I was a child. Before I sat down I saw that Baba had fallen peacefully asleep, his head thrown back and his eyes closed.

“Ought we to take him upstairs?” I asked Bruce.

“He looks comfortable,” Bruce said, “and he couldn’t be more soundly asleep.”

We sat down and Rennie was silent between the two men and I caught him looking at me strangely now and again. I felt suddenly happy as I had not been for a long time and soon we were all talking, and Bruce got up and went to the pantry and made some hot coffee, for he will not drink anything else, but Rennie fetched the wine that I keep in the house and poured out glasses for himself and Sam, and I wanted nothing and so we sat down again and the talk flowed triangularly between the two men and me. Rennie sat silent and watching.

I really belong here, I kept thinking. It is here I was born, and if I were not so lonely, I could forget Peking and at last perhaps I could even forget Gerald. I have not laughed for a long time but I found myself laughing, laughing at the three men. Each in his way was playing for my attention, Sam very brusque and western and masculine and Bruce dark and caustic and wary, and Rennie the young man standing aside from the fencing between the two older men, but watchful and tending the fire. The talk ranged but it was all for my ears, the fencers preening and displaying themselves before my eyes. I felt a tenderness, amused, unspecified, but valid.

“Revolution,” Sam declared, “is an inevitable process. We do not grow by accumulation, as barnacles do. We burst our skins, like snakes, we cast off the old encasements, and emerge afresh.”

I was amazed to hear him speak without a trace of his harsh western idiom. The ranchman’s drawl was a shield. I had never seen the real man before.

Bruce drew upon his pipe, slowly and deeply. Twin jets of smoke feathered from his thin nostrils. “There never was a revolution in man’s history that paid its way. The end is always lost in the conflict and confusion out of which evil men rise to power.”

“You can’t hold back revolution for all of that,” Sam insisted. “Endurance has its limit. Explosion is inevitable. Look at China—”

He turned to me and the winds of Asia rushed into the warm closed room. I was swept across the sea again. By force of will I refused to go.

“Let us not talk of China,” I said. “Let us never talk of China. Who knows what is happening there?” Rennie looked up from the fire and the iron poker dropped from his hands. His eyes met mine. I knew I should have to tell him.

The life went out of the evening. I could not listen now to the argument between the men. They continued, their eyes covertly upon me, demanding attention which I could not give….How can I tell Rennie about his father?

…“Come into my room, Rennie,” I said when the evening was over. I was casual, I made my voice cheerful. “You and I have had no chance to talk. Let’s light the fire and settle ourselves.”

We had said goodnight to Bruce at the front door and then to Sam at the head of the stairs. Bruce held my hand for a moment, and I could not be warm. “Thank you for the pink roses,” I said stupidly.

“When I think of roses I think of you,” he said under his breath. That was much for him to say but I could not muster a smile in reply. My heart was already hammering in my breast. How can I tell Rennie so that he will not hate his father?

“Sit down, Rennie,” I said.

I sat in the old red velvet armchair that had once belonged to my Boston grandmother. He sat down in the wooden Windsor opposite me. He had lit the fire in my room and the logs were dry and already blazing.

“I can’t get used to the way you look,” I said. Indeed I cannot. His face has lost its boyish roundness. The cheekbones are defined, the jaw is firm. I should be hard put to it to say where Rennie came from, were he a stranger to me. Spain? Italy? Brazil? North India? Yet he is my own son.

“Tell me what you like best at college,” I said.

“Math. Math and music.”

I have forgotten to say that Rennie has always loved music. This perhaps is my gift to him. Many hours of my own youth I spent at the old square piano downstairs in the parlor, but since I came home I have not been able to play. I have not even given Rennie lessons as I might have. Living on the brink of final separation from Gerald I have not been able to endure music. Yet I have never forbidden it to Rennie and he has played when he wished.

“It’s a good combination, Rennie — the combination Confucius required for the civilized man. The superior man, the gentleman, must know the disciplines of mathematics and music.”

“They are allied,” Rennie said. “They demand the same precision and abstraction.”

I am awed by his growth in mind as well as in body. “Shall you go into music for livelihood?” I inquired.

“I want to be a scientist. Science combines the abstract and the precise.”

“Your father will be pleased.”

To this Rennie did not reply. He never replies when I mention his father.

“And what about George Bowen’s sister?” I inquired, half playfully. Now this would never do. I was avoiding the opportunity of his silence. I did not care about George Bowen’s sister.

Rennie did not look at me. His eyes were fixed upon the fire. “What about her?”

“Well, is she pretty?”

“She is not pretty — she’s beautiful.”

“Dark or fair? Short or tall?”

“Tall, fair, and calm.”

“Not like me—”

He cast a quick glance at me, measuring, comparing, and looked again at the fire. “No.”

“Do you like her very much, Rennie?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to know, I suppose I’d rather not be hurt again.”

“There’s plenty of time,” I said.

“Yes.”

Here fell the next silence, and I would not let myself be a coward about it.

“Rennie, I want to talk about your father.”

He lifted his head at this, reluctantly interested.

“Have you had a letter?”

“Not recently — not from him. But I did have a — a special letter.”

“Why didn’t you tell me when it came?”

“You were too young,” I said. “You wouldn’t have understood. You’d have blamed him.”

“What has he done?”

“Wait,” I said. “I must explain.”

And so I began at the beginning. I told him how we met, Gerald and I. I told him how we fell in love. I couldn’t tell him of our first night together. That belongs to Gerald and to me, a treasure locked in memory. I told him of Peking and how in those, years the love we had begun here in this narrow Vermont valley deepened and widened into a life complete in companionship.

“There are a few such marriages, Rennie,” I said. “My mother told me I could never be happy with Gerald but she was wrong. I was happy and so was he. We delighted each in the other. The ancestors did not matter. Well, the truth is that perhaps they mattered very much. They added their peculiar and fascinating variety. I remember your father and I talked about them sometimes. I remember your father said once that our marriage was all the more complete because the responsibility for it rested solely on ourselves. Our ancestors would not have approved.”

Rennie is too quick for me. “What is it that you really want to say?”

“I want to tell you first that what has happened is not the fault of your father nor is it mine. If the world had not split apart under our feet, we would still be living in the house in Peking and not here.”

“And why aren’t we?” he demanded.

“You know,” I said. “You know and you needn’t ask. It is because of me. It is because I am American, and because your father is half American. And there is no fault in either of us for that. It is the split in the world that has driven us apart, exactly as though a tidal wave had rushed between us on a beach and swept us in opposite directions.”

“He could have left China,” Rennie said.

“He could not.”

“And why not?” Rennie insisted. I saw by his bitter face that he was angry with his father.

“I defend your father,” I said. “He is not here to speak for himself. And besides, if you must blame anyone, blame Baba. He married your Chinese grandmother without loving her, and that was the primary sin.”

With this I got up and I fetched the picture of his grandmother and I told him about her and how the story of Han Ai-lan was imbedded in the story of her country and in the times in which we live.

“She who knew she was not loved by her husband gave her life instead to her country and to what she thought was her duty. And her son — your father, Rennie — ate the sour fruit and your teeth, Rennie, are set on edge.”

“Did she love Baba?” Rennie’s voice was low.

“I am sure she did, for if she had not she could never have given herself so utterly elsewhere. She did not expect to love him but she did love him, and was rejected by him. There is nothing so explosive in this world as love rejected.”

“My father has rejected you,” Rennie said brutally.

I denied this and passionately. “He has not rejected me. He cannot reject me as long as we love each other. Love still works in us its mercies.”

He saw me now, I believe, as someone else than his mother. He saw me as a woman in love, and he could not reply. He has never seen a woman in love and his eyes fell before mine.

“It is time for me to show you the letter,” I said. I rose and I opened the locked box and took out the sealed letter and gave it to him. He broke the seal and opened the letter and read it. I sat in my chair and waited. He read it twice, thoughtfully. Then he folded it and put it back into the envelope and placed it on the small table beside him.

“Thank you, Mother,” he said.

“I have given permission to the Chinese woman,” I said. “I have said that I understand. I have said that I want him to be comforted in his house….So I will also show you her letters.”

Now I opened the drawer of my rosewood desk and gave him the letters from Mei-lan. He read them, his face impassive. He read them quickly and folded them and handed them back to me.

“She has nothing to do with me,” he said. “And I cannot understand why he has let her come into our house.”

His voice was so hard that I could not bear it. “We do not know how much he was compelled, once he had made his choice to stay in Peking.”

“Ah,” Rennie said, “I still ask, why did he make that choice if he loved us? I shall keep on asking. For me there is no answer.”

“You do not love your father enough to forgive him,” I said.

“Perhaps that is true,” Rennie agreed.

He got up suddenly and walked to the window and stood there looking out into the night. The light of the lamp shone through the glass upon the falling snow. The fire burned suddenly blue and a log fell into the ash.

He turned to face me. “Mother, I have something to tell you, too. All that business of Allegra — it very nearly drove me back to Peking. If I am to be rejected because my grandmother was Chinese, I thought, I’d better go back to China. But I’ll never go back now. I’ll stay with you. This shall be my country. I will have no other.”

I cried out, “Oh Rennie, Rennie, don’t decide so quickly. Don’t decide against your father!”

“I am not deciding against him. I am deciding for you,” Rennie said. And he stooped and kissed my cheek and went away.

I shall not follow him. I know my son. The decision has not come quickly. He has been tortured by indecision, he has been torn between his two countries, between his father and me. And he has chosen me and mine. Oh Gerald, forgive me! I pray that you will have other sons. Indeed I do so pray. If I have robbed you of the son that is ours, can I help myself? It is Rennie who decides his own life. And he has as much right to decide as I had when I followed you to Peking and as you had when you would not come home with me. Yes, this is home at last, this Vermont valley, these mountains, the house of my fathers.

When Rennie left me I sat a long time before the dying fire, a weight gone from me. I am no longer alone in my own country. My son is with me. I shall be happy again, some day.

…Even yet there has been no thought of cutting myself off from Gerald. Months have passed after that gay Christmas day. Rennie is nearing the end of his college year. Sam has been twice to see me. He urges me to divorce Gerald, and today he flew in from New York only for an hour, he said, not knowing how this day would end. For it is night and he is here. We have telegraphed for Rennie to come at once, because of what has happened. It was this morning, and Sam was arguing with me, impatient, angry, insistent.

“You must divorce that fellow in Peking — he’s no husband to you, Elizabeth!”

“I shall never divorce Gerald,” I said. “Indeed, I have no cause. He loves me.”

“If you call desertion love,” Sam bellowed.

“He has not deserted me.” I was shouting, too.

“If it is not desertion, I do not know what to call it,” Sam roared.

Of course he does not know the whole story. He surmises, because there is no talk of Gerald himself — and me. I tried to explain without telling anything.

“Gerald has not deserted me nor I him. We are divided by history, past and present.”

“His father is American,” Sam said stubbornly. “He could have come home with you.”

“Ah, but you see this is not home to him!”

“Baloney,” Sam said crossly. “He’s no fool. He could adapt himself. He could have got a job in some university here as well as in Peking.”

“Home is a matter of the heart and the spirit. His would have died here,” I said.

“You’re still in love with him,” Sam said, and he turned on me so fierce a stare that I could not defend myself.

“Can’t you see that I am determined to marry you?” he cried.

“Oh, no, Sam — no — no!”

“Yes!”

We were both breathless, both glaring at each other. Sam bent over me and I pushed him away.

“Don’t—”

“Do you hate me?”

“No — not hate—”

At this moment we heard Baba fall in the room above. The beams of the living room are not ceiled. We heard the clatter of Baba’s cane and then so light a fall, his old bones all but fleshless, that we might scarcely have heard except for the terrible wrenching groan. I ran upstairs, Sam following me, and there Baba lay. I do not know whether he had heard us. We never know what he hears and we were talking more loudly than we knew. Perhaps Baba had got out of his chair with some thought of coming downstairs, although he has not walked alone across the room since Christmas. He lay there. His head had struck the stone hearth of the fireplace. He was dead.

…We have come home from Baba’s funeral. Sam stayed, he and Bruce Spaulden took care of every detail for me. Had it been possible, I would have sent Baba’s ashes to Peking and to Gerald. Well, I suppose it would have been possible. It has been done for others who have died here or in England, exiles so deeply divided from their own peoples and lands, so enamored of another culture, that they could think of no other burial place upon the globe than in Peking. Then I reflected that Baba had left Peking of his own desire, and even his ashes would not be welcome there now, for he belonged to the old China, the China of Confucius and of emperors.

“Let us keep Baba here with us,” I told Rennie.

“Yes,” Rennie said. “Let us keep him.”

He arrived barely in time for the funeral, and not alone. He brought with him a tall fair girl, a calm quiet girl whose every movement is slow grace.

“This is Mary Bowen,” Rennie said.

“Strange, I have never heard your name,” I said, and suddenly I wanted to kiss her. I leaned forward and put my lips to her smooth young cheek.

“You look like a Mary,” I said.

“I’m a pretty good Martha, too,” she said and smiled.

“Then Rennie is in luck,” I said, “for it is not every woman who is both.”

They were in love. I could see that they were in love. I know the signs, how well, and I was comforted. I took their hands and between them I went upstairs to where Baba lay in his blue Chinese robe. He lay on top of the white counterpane, and I had put on his feet his black velvet Chinese shoes. Jim Standman, the undertaker, when he had finished his private task, let me help with the rest, for I did not want Baba taken away and so in his own room we made him ready. Under his hands crossed upon his breast I had put his little worn copy of The Book of Changes.

Mary stepped forward alone as we entered the bedroom. She stood looking at him.

“How beautiful he is,” she whispered. She turned to Rennie. “You didn’t tell me he looked like this.”

“He is beautiful,” I said, “and somehow more beautiful now than he was alive.”

“I wish I could have heard his voice speaking,” she said.

And then she went to Rennie, and she lifted his hand and held it against her cheek. From that moment I loved her as my own daughter.

…This afternoon a few neighbors gathered with us under the pine tree on the mountain behind the house and there we buried Baba. Matt helped to dig the grave this morning and we lined it with pine branches, while Mrs. Matt made the collation for the funeral feast. She boiled a ham, for she thinks a baked ham is not worth eating, and set out sandwiches and cake and tea and coffee, ready for the return from the grave. The day was quiet and the sky mildly overcast, and the minister, a retired clergyman from Manchester who tends our spiritual life here in the valley when we feel the need, read certain passages from the New Testament, which I had marked because Baba had once declared to me that they were taken originally from the wisdom of Asia and perhaps from Confucius himself, “for,” said Baba, “it is not accident that Jesus uttered the very words long ago spoken by Confucius and Buddha. He was in Nepal in his youth, if we are to believe folk rumors.”

I had listened when he said this, paying little heed, for Baba believed wholeheartedly that man and his wisdom began in the East, and I was used to such talk. Now the good words fell gently and with deep mercy upon the quiet air, and to the ears of the listening Christians they brought no doubts, though Baba and I had our secret. The voice was the voice of Jesus whom the Vermonters call God, but the words are the words of older gods. Oh, I am full of such secrets, but I shall not tell them. I will carry them into my grave with me, too, for to speak them here would be to raise only doubts and controversy. I live in a narrow valley but it is my home.

After the ceremony was over, and we did not weep, neither Rennie nor I, for death is not sad at the end of a long life, we came home again. Mrs. Matt was bustling about in a black silk dress and a huge white apron and we sat in the living room with the guests. We ate and drank and spoke quietly, not of Baba, for indeed few of the neighbors knew him except as a frail and exquisite ghost. No, we talked of the valley gossip, of whether the summer would be late, of how scanty the sugar crop was this year, the winter lingering too long and then spring breaking too quickly. In a little while they were all gone. Bruce stopped a moment with me to search my face and tell me that I looked pale and must rest.

“You won’t mourn?” he said.

“Not for Baba,” I said.

“You must not mourn for anyone,” he said urgently.

I could not tell him, not yet, that with Baba’s death died also the symbol of the past. Baba was a link with other years and with a beloved city, with a house which I had believed my home. But Brace’s concern was comforting and when I smiled, I saw that he longed to kiss me. Longing smoldered in his grey eyes and yearning in his controlled Vermont face. I was not ready. I could not bear the touch of another man’s lips — not yet.

So the day ended, and Sam went away, too. I think he saw Bruce’s face. He was standing there in the hall behind us, and I heard his footstep, abrupt and unconcealed, when he turned and went into the living room. He left soon after that, saying that he must get to New York by morning to see about a contract with some dealer there, a horse trainer for a circus, he said, who wanted six young palomino colts, exactly matched, which he had been collecting on the ranch, though it was the first time I have ever heard of circuses and matched palomino colts. He shook my hand hard and stared at me. “Let me know if you want anything,” he said. “I’m on call.”

Suddenly, without permission, he bent and kissed me on the lips and I stepped back and nearly fell.

“You don’t like it,” he muttered.

“No,” I said honestly.

“I won’t do it again,” he said and went away. I am sorry he was hurt but I do not like to be kissed when I am not ready. The days of my youth are past and to a woman full grown a kiss means everything — or nothing.

All this took place on the very day of Baba’s funeral and I was glad for that day’s end. In the evening Rennie and Mary and I were quietly together on the terrace, for I wanted to be out of the house and the air was unusually mild even for May. These two must go away again tomorrow, and then I shall be alone. It worried them both that I was to be alone, and I did not know how to make them believe that I did not mind, for indeed I do not know whether I shall mind being alone in this great old house. I have no near neighbors and the forest in the valley changes strangely with the night. When the afternoon sun slants through the near trees to lie upon the beds of fern and brake, the forest is lively with light and color, harmless enough, surely, and not to be feared. But when the mountain intervenes between house and sky then darkness falls swiftly, and the forest loses its kindliness. Staring into shadows growing sinister with night, I remember that for thirty miles and more forest mingles with swamp and quicksands, wherein hunters have been lost and never found. Once a woman, a botanist, was lost in the forest that surrounds my home. Therefore I do not know whether I can live here alone. It may be that the darkness of the nights will encircle me too deeply.

“I wish I were finished with college,” Rennie said. “I wish that Mary and I were married and living here with you.”

It is the first word that he had spoken to me of marriage.

“If you two are to be married, then I shall be so happy that I shall have no time to be afraid,” I replied.

For even in a few hours I can see that Mary is the one I would choose for Rennie. If he had returned to his father’s country, then no, I would not have thought it possible for Mary to have gone with him to Peking. Mind you, it can be done. There are other American women still there, but I do not know how they can be happy when they hear their country reviled and must be silent. Mind you again, I know that the plain people in villages and towns do not believe the evil they hear about us. The Chinese are very old and wise as a folk, and they are able to hold their peace for a hundred years and more if they must, until the times roll round again. The life of no human being is as long as they can hold their peace. I cannot therefore wish for a woman like myself to give herself away to such a country, or to such a people, for they are so easy to love that once loved they can never be forgotten, and what cannot be forgotten one day divides and then choice and decision are compelled. I believe if Gerald’s other country had not been China he could not have forsaken me. But that country and especially that city, the city of Peking, are invincible in love. Any woman could be defeated by them.

“We shall certainly be married,” Mary said.

“The question is when,” Rennie added.

“Why should there be any question?” I inquired. “If you want to be married, then marry.”

Here I remembered Allegra. “Unless Mary’s family has some reason of their own for delay — perhaps because you are so young, Mary.”

“I have no family except my twin brother George,” Mary said. “Our parents died when we were children and we lived with my grandmother. Now she is dead, too.”

It is interesting to discover how secretly wicked one’s self can be. For the sake of my son I rejoiced that three innocent people were in their graves. I was ashamed enough not to say I was glad and yet honest enough not to say I was sorry.

“You may marry when you like then,” I said. “The wedding can be here in this house where I was married to Rennie’s father and that will make me happy. I shall not mind living alone if I know you are married.”

“Thank you, Mother,” Rennie said. He was lying full length upon the long terrace chair, and he got up and went to Mary’s side, for I was between them in the round-backed log chair, and he stood before her and took her hand.

“Will you marry me on the eighteenth of June, when I shall be twenty years old?”

“I will,” she said, and smiled up at him.

The moonlight shone on her long fair hair and on Rennie’s face. I thought them the most beautiful pair in the world, and my heart yearned for Gerald who could not see them. I used once to be able to reach him with my concentrated thought, but for a long time I had not done so. Now I tried again. I gathered my whole energy and will and intention upon him, far away in Peking. At this hour he would perhaps be sitting in the court outside the living room. Were I there it is where we would be, for in the month of May the lilacs are very fine in the court, the heavy-scented deeply purple Chinese lilacs and the white lilacs which are at once more hardy, more prolific and yet more delicate than the lilacs are here. I tried to reach him and let him share what I saw, this beautiful cream-skinned man who is our son, and Mary, tall and fair and calm….I could not reach him. Again my heart, my mind, were stopped by a barrier I do not understand and beyond it I could not go….

“On the eighteenth day of June this house will be ready for you,” I promised Rennie and Mary.

When I went upstairs to bed an hour later, leaving them alone together on the terrace, even the ghost of Baba was gone. There was no smell of death in the house, and I could scarcely remember his funeral, or see the new-made grave under the pines. Perhaps the real Baba was never here, or Baba was only the shell that was left of the stately gentleman and scholar who had once been Dr. MacLeod. All that had been was no more. I could almost imagine now that even Gerald was gone, or that he had never been, except that he had given me my son.

…I am not what is called psychic. I am far too earthy a woman for that. Gerald said once that I am incurably domestic, and it is true that I am. I can be absorbed in the everyday happenings in house and garden and easily diverted at any time by the talk and antics of human beings. I am not an intellectual, in spite of a Phi Beta Kappa key won in my senior year at college, at which no one was more shocked than I, for I knew even then that I did not deserve this insignia of the learned. Nor am I a dreamer of dreams’ and I have never seen visions.

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, Mrs. 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 bright. 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.

“Get upstairs and dress yourself,” she ordered me.

“It won’t take fifteen minutes for that,” I said.

“Then see if the bride don’t need a pin or two,” she said. “I remember very well myself that I needed a pin to the front of my corset cover, I was breathin’ that hard.”

I went upstairs then and when I had put on my pale-grey silk frock, I knocked on Mary’s door and she called to me to come in and so I did. She was dressed and ready and was standing by the window, looking out over the hills. Her wedding gown was plain white organdy, embroidered at the hem and the neck with fine hand embroidery. She had made it herself, and it was exactly right for her. Around her neck was a little gold chain and a locket with Rennie’s picture inside.

“Your bouquet is downstairs,” I said. “Shall I fetch it now?”

The guests were already coming up the walk, and the minister was in the living room. In the morning we had cut flowers from the fields and put them into bouquets with delicate fronds of brake. But I had a few of my precious roses for Mary’s bouquet. We cannot grow roses outdoors here in our cold valley, but I lift my rose bushes in the autumn and bring them into the cellar to sleep, where it is cool and dry and dark, and in the spring I set them out. This year I forced a half dozen to make roses for Mary. They are pale pink and pale yellow, and I cut six half-opened buds this morning and made them into a cluster and set their stems into ice water to keep them from opening too wide.

“Please, Mother,” she said.

I went away at once for I heard Rennie leave his room. When I came back with the roses he was standing in front of her, holding her hands in his, and all my sorrow dropped away, never to come again. I am sure of it, for I know very well the look in my son’s eyes as he stood looking at his bride. I saw it long ago in his father’s eyes for me.

The wedding was perfect in simplicity. The valley people gathered in our living room, and all together there are only twenty or so for we invited no transient summer folk. When they were all there, Rennie and Mary, who had been moving among them, talking a little, smiling often, interchanged a look, radiant and tender. They clasped hands and went to the minister and stood before him. Then without ado he rose from his chair, and took his little book from his pocket and spoke the few words that made them husband and wife. We had no music, for among us only Mary has a sweet singing voice. After the ceremony was over, the guests surrounded the young bride and groom, and I stood aside and wept quietly because they were so beautiful, until Bruce Spaulden saw me and fetched me a cup of fruit punch.

“Occupy yourself with this, my dear,” he said, and would not leave my side.

Mrs. Matt here set forth the wedding cake she had made, a noble three-tiered confection, each layer different from the other. Mary cat the slices with Rennie’s help, and they exchanged silver goblets, each half full of the sweet wine I make every summer from wild blackberries, while the guests enjoyed the sight of them.

Then quietly, in the midst of the eating and drinking, the two went upstairs and changed to their traveling clothes and came down again, and waving goodbye they ran through the room, but waited for me at the car. There my son swept me into his arms and kissed my cheeks and Mary put her arms about us both, and so I let them go. The guests waited to make sure I was not lonely, and then one by one they, went away, and George Bowen was the very last, and he stayed to put away chairs and carry dishes to Mrs. Matt in the kitchen.

When he left he stooped to kiss my cheek.

“Goodbye,” he said.

“Goodbye, dear George,” I said, “and come back often.”

“I will,” he said and then without the slightest sentimentality and as though he were declaring a fact, he said, “Shall I call you Mother, too, since now you are Mary’s mother?”

“Do,” I said gladly.

He winked his left eye at me. “Except you’re too young to be a mother to three great gawks.”

“Nonsense,” I said.

He laughed and cantered down the front steps and stepped into his grey wreck of a car, without opening the door, and went off in a gust of smoke and gravel.

Now only Bruce was left and he stayed the evening with me. He knows that Rennie’s father is dead. Rennie told him and then told me what he had done.

“How did you say it?” I asked, half wishing he had not told.

“I said, My father is dead in Peking. My mother and I will never go back to China now. She will live here in the valley. But Mary and I cannot live here where there are no laboratories.”

“A man must go where his work is,” Bruce agreed.

“Well, your work is here,” Rennie said bluntly, “and you must be my mother’s friend.”

“I want to be that and whatever more she will accept me for,” Bruce said.

Telling me this a few days ago, Rennie looked straight into my eyes. “Mother, you will please me very much if you will decide to marry Bruce.”

“Oh Rennie, no,” I whispered. “Don’t — don’t ask it.”

“I don’t ask it,” he said. “I merely say that I shall be happy if you do.”

To this I said nothing and perhaps I shall never say anything. I do not know. It is still too soon, and perhaps it will always be too soon.

It was comforting, nevertheless, to have Bruce spend the evening with me, when everyone else was gone. I lay on the long chair, and he sat near me, only the small table between us, and he smoked his old briar pipe and said nothing or very little. The silence was comforting, too. I was very near telling him about Gerald, and the house there in Peking, and all that has happened to me. I thought of it while the evening wind made gentle music in the pines and the mountains subsided into shadows. I thought of Rennie, too, and of how he had been born, and this led me to Mei-lan, whose child was being born perhaps upon this very day. But in the end I said nothing and silence remained sweeter than speech. When Bruce rose to say goodnight, my life and love were still hidden within me.

“Thank you, dear Bruce,” I said. “You are my best friend now.”

He held my hand a long moment. “I’ll let it go at that, but only for the present,” he said. He put my hand to his cheek and I felt his flesh smooth-shaven and cool. It was not hateful to me, and this surprised me, too. But he said no more, and he went away. After that I was suddenly very tired, but sweetly so and without pain, and I went upstairs and to my bed.

…Days have passed again and I am already expecting Rennie and Mary to come home for the summer. I have had one more letter from Peking.

“It is my duty,” Mei-lan insists, “to tell you that I have borne a son. He is like his father. His skin is white, his hair is dark but soft and fine. His frame is large and strong. My mother says he will be tall. I am astonished to have such a child. We two women, my mother and I, we will devote ourselves to rear him well, for his father’s sake and for yours.”

Mine? Have I aught, to do with her child? A strange question, and I do not know how to answer it. Then I remember that this child is Rennie’s half-brother. It is possible that some day they will meet. How different will they be, these two? How much alike?

The ways of nature and of life are strange and deep. They are not to be understood. In the midst of angers and of wars love’s secret work goes on, and binds us all by blood, and this, whether love is denied or love is bestowed.

…For you began it, Baba, you know you did. When the young pure American girl you loved would not love you enough to come to Peking for your sake, you flouted love, you said it did not matter and you took a woman whom you could not love. But she loved you, she bore your son, and one day I saw him and loved him utterly, and I went to Peking and made his city mine, until I was sent forth again, alone and forever parted from my love. Yet here are two grandsons, both yours, a globe between them, and still they are yours. And because they are yours, they belong together somehow, and they will know it some day.

What do you say to that, Baba? What do you say to that, old Baba, you lying up there alone on the mountain under the big pine tree?