Authors: Pearl S. Buck
These words she said with a sort of ardor streaming from her, and Yuan was stirred, but not grossly, towards her. For she seemed to see him not only as himself, one man, but as one of his whole race. It was as though through him she spoke to millions. Between them was a wall of delicacy, of mind, of a withdrawal native to them both. And he said gratefully, “I understand very well what you mean. It doesn’t, I promise you, weaken any admiration I feel for your father to know he believes a thing my mind cannot accept.”
Her eyes were turned upon the flames again. The fire had sunk into coals and ashes, and the glow was steadier now upon her face and hair, upon her hands, upon the dark red of her dress. She said thoughtfully, “Who could not admire him? It was a hard thing for me, I can tell you, to put aside my childish faith in what he had taught me. But I was honest with him—I could be—and we talked again and again. I couldn’t talk to mother at all—she always began to weep, and that made me impatient. But father met me at every point—and we could talk—he always respected my disbelief, and I always respected—more and more—his faith. We would reason very much alike up to a certain point—when the intellect must stop and one must begin to believe without understanding. There we parted. He could take that at a leap—frankly believing, in faith and hope—I couldn’t. My generation can’t.”
Suddenly and with energy she rose and taking a log flung it upon the bed of coals. A mass of sparks flew up the wide black chimney, and again a blaze burst forth, and again Yuan saw her shining in the fresh light. She turned to him, standing above him, leaning against the mantel, saying seriously, yet with a little half smile at the corners of her mouth, “I think that’s what I wanted to say—that sums it up. Don’t forget that I do not believe. When my parents try to influence you, remember their generation—it is not mine—not yours and mine.”
Yuan rose, too, very grateful, and as he stood beside her, thinking what to say, words came up unexpectedly out of him, which were not what he would have planned to say.
“I wish,” he said slowly, looking at her, “that I could speak to you in my own language. For I find your speech never wholly natural to me. You have made me forget we are not one race. Somehow, for the first time since I entered your country I have felt a mind speaking to my mind without a barrier.”
This he said honestly and simply, and she looked back at him as straight as a child, their eyes level to each other’s, and she answered quietly, but very warmly, “I believe we shall be friends—Yuan?”
And Yuan answered, half timidly and as though he put his foot out to step upon an unknown shore, not knowing where he stepped or what was there, but still he must step forth, “If this is your wish—” and then still looking at her he added, his voice very low with shyness—“Mary.”
She smiled then, a quick, brilliant, playful smile, accepting what he said and then stopping him as clearly as though she spoke the words “We have said enough for this day.” They spoke then for a while of small things in books or elsewhere until their were steps heard upon the porch and she said at once, “Here they come—my precious two. They went to prayer meeting—they go every Wednesday night.”
And she walked swiftly to the door and opened it and welcomed the old two, who came in, their faces fresh and reddened by the chilly autumn air. Soon they were all before the fire, and more than ever they made Yuan one of them, and bade him sit down again, while Mary brought fruit and the hot milk they loved to drink before they slept. And Yuan, though his soul loathed the milk, yet took it and sipped a little of it to feel more one with them, until Mary perceived how it was and laughed and said, “Why didn’t I remember?” And she brewed a pot of tea and gave it to him, and they made a little merriment about it.
But the moment which afterwards Yuan thought of most was this. In a pause of talk, the mother sighed and said, “Mary dear, I wish you had wanted to come tonight. It was a
good
meeting. I think Dr. Jones spoke so well—didn’t you, Henry ?—about having faith enough to carry us even through the greatest trials.” And then she said kindly to Yuan, “You must feel very lonely often, Mr. Wang. I often think how hard it must be to be so far from your dear parents and they, too, how hard it is for them to let you be so far. If you feel you’d like it, we’d love to have you take supper with us Wednesdays and go to church with us.”
Then Yuan, perceiving how kindly she was, said only “Thank you,” and as he said it his eyes fell on Mary, who sat again upon the stool, so now her eyes were beneath the level of his own, and very near. And there in her eyes and upon her face he saw a lovely tender half-merry meaning, tender towards the mother, but very comprehending too toward Yuan, so that this look bound them together in a sort of mutual understanding, wherein they two were quite alone.
Thereafter Yuan lived with a sense of secret, hidden richness. No longer was this people alien to him wholly nor its ways altogether strange and often he forgot he hated them, and he thought he had not so many slights put on him as before, either. He had now two gateways whereby to enter. The one was the outer gateway, and it was this one house into which he could come and go always with freedom and welcome. The worn brown room became home to him in this foreign place. He had thought his loneliness very sweet and the thing he wanted most, yet now he came to this further knowledge, and it was that loneliness is only sweet to a man if it rids him of presences irksome and unwanted, and it is no longer sweet when the beloved presences are discovered. Here in this room did Yuan discover such beloved presences.
There were the little presences of used books, seeming so small and silent, and yet when sometimes he came alone into this room, and sat alone, the house being empty for the time, he took up a book and he found himself spoken to most mightily. For here books spoke more nearly to him than they did anywhere, because the room enfolded him in learned quiet and in friendliness.
And there was here often the beloved presence of his old teacher. Here more than in any classroom or even in the fields Yuan came to know the full beauty of this man. The old man had lived a very simple childlike life, a farmer’s son, a student, then a teacher, many years, and he knew so little of the world that one would say he had not lived in it. Yet did he live in two worlds of mind and spirit, and Yuan, exploring into those two worlds with many questions and long listening silences when he sat and heard the old man speak out his knowledge and beliefs, felt no narrowness here, but the wide ranging simple vastness of a mind unlimited by time or space, to which all things were possible in man and god. It was the vastness of a wise child’s mind, to which there are no boundaries between the true and magical. Yet this simplicity was so informed with wisdom that Yuan could not but love it, and ponder, troubled, on his own narrowness of understanding. One day, in such trouble, he said to Mary, when she came in and found him alone and troubled, “Almost your father persuades me to be a Christian!”
And she answered, “Does he not almost so persuade us all? But you will find, as I did, the barrier is the—almost. Our two minds are different, Yuan—less simple, less sure, more exploring.”
So she spoke, definitely and calmly, and linked thus with her Yuan felt himself pulled back from some brink towards which he had been drawn against his will, and yet somehow with his will, too, because he loved the old man. But she drew him back each time.
If this house was the outer gateway, the woman was the gateway to its inner heart. For through her he learned of many things. For him she told the story of her people and how they came to the shores of the land upon which they lived, gathered out of every nation and tribe nearly upon the earth, and how by force and by guile and by every measure of war they wrested the land from those who possessed it and took it for themselves, and Yuan listened as he had been used to listen to tales of the Three Kingdoms in his childhood. Then she told how her forefathers forced their way always to the farthest coasts, boldly and desperately, and while she talked, sometimes in the room by the fire, sometimes walking in woods when the leaves fell now before winter, Yuan seemed to feel in this woman for all her outward gentleness the inner hardness which was in her blood. Her eyes could grow brilliant and daring and cold, and her chin set beneath her straight lips, and she would kindle as she talked, very proud of the past of her race, and Yuan was half afraid of her.
And here was the strangest thing, that at these times he felt in her a power that was man, almost, and in himself a lesser, leaning quality which was less than man, as though they two together might make man and woman, but interfused, and not clearly he the man and she the woman. And there was sometimes in her eyes a look so possessive towards him, as though she felt herself stronger than he, that his flesh drew back until she changed her look. So while he often saw her beautiful, her body arrowy and light with all her energy, and while he could not but be moved by her darting mind, yet he never could feel her quite flesh to his flesh, or as a woman to be touched or loved, for there was that in her which made him a little afraid of her, and so held back growing love.
He was glad of this, for he still did not wish to think of love or woman, and while he could not keep away from this woman, since there was much in her which drew him, yet he was glad he did not want to touch her. If any had asked him even now he would have said, “It is not wise nor well for two of different flesh to wed each other. There is the outer difficulty of the two races, neither of which likes such union. But there is also the inner struggle against each other, and this pull away from each other goes as deep as blood does—there is no end to that war between two different bloods.”
Yet there were times, too, when he was shaken in his sureness that he was safe against her, for sometimes she seemed not wholly foreign to him even in blood, for she could not only show him her own people, but she showed him his people, too, in such a way as he had never seen them. There was much Yuan did not know of his own kind. He had lived among them in a way, a part of his father’s life, a part of the school of war and of young men filled with ardor for a cause, a part of that earthen house, even, and a part too of the great new city, but between these parts there was no unity to make them into one world. When any asked him of his own country or his people, he spoke out of knowledge so separated and disjointed, that even while he spoke he remembered something against what he said, and at last it came about that he did not speak at all of it except to deny such things as the tall priest had shown, for pride’s sake.
But through this western woman’s eyes, who had never even seen the earth upon which his people had their life, he saw his country as he wished to see it. Now, for his sake, he knew, she read everything she could about his people, all books and sayings of travellers, the stories and the tales which had been put into her language, and the poems, too, and she pored over pictures. From all this she formed within her mind a dream, an inner knowledge, of what Yuan’s country was, and to her it seemed a place most perfectly beautiful, where men and women lived in justice and in peace, in a society framed soundly upon the wisdom of its sages.
And Yuan, listening to her, saw it so, too. When she said, “It seems to me, Yuan, that in your country you have solved all our human problems. The beautiful relationship of father to son, of friend to friend, of man to man—everything is thought of and expressed simply and well. And the hatred that your people have for violence and war, how I admire that!” And Yuan, listening, forgot his own childhood and remembered only that it was true he did hate violence and war, and since he did, he felt his people did, and he remembered the villagers, how they had besought him against any wars, and so her words seemed true to him and only true.
And sometimes when she gazed at a picture she had found and saved for him to look at with her, a picture perhaps of a slender tall pagoda, flung up against the sky from some craggy mountain top, or perhaps a country pool fringed about with drooping willows and white geese floating in the shadows, she caught her breath to cry softly, “O Yuan—beautiful—
beautiful!
Why is it when I look at these pictures I seem to feel they are of a place I have lived in and know very well? There is a strange longing in me for them. I think yours must be the most lovely country in the world.”
Yuan, staring at the pictures, seeing them through her eyes, and himself remembering the beauty he had seen those few days upon the land, where he had seen such pools, accepted what she said most simply and he answered honestly enough, “It is true; it is a very fair land.”
Then she, looking at him troubled, said on, “How crude we all must seem to you, and how crude our life—we are so new and crude!” And Yuan suddenly felt that this, too, was true. He remembered the house in which he lived, the brawling woman there, often angry at her daughter, so that in many bickering ways she filled the house with anger, and he remembered the poor in the city, but he said only very kindly, “In this house, at least, I find the peace and courtesy to which I am accustomed.”
When she was in a mood like this, Yuan almost loved her. He thought proudly, “My country has this power over her, that when she thinks and dreams upon it, she grows soft and quiet, and her hardness goes away, and she is all a woman.” And he wondered if it might be one day that he would love her in spite of his own wish. Sometimes he thought it so, and then he reasoned thus, “For if she lived in my country, which she has already so much made her own, she would always be like this, gentle and womanish and admiring, and leaning on me for what she needs.”
And Yuan at such times thought it might be sweet to have it so, and it would be sweet to teach her how to speak his tongue; sweet, too, to live in the home that she could make, a home like this one he had learned to love very well, its comforts and its homeliness.
But as surely as he let himself be drawn thus, he would come one day to find this Mary changed again, her hardness flashing out, her dominating self the uppermost, so that she could argue and condemn and judge and drive a point home with a keen word or two, even to her father, for she was gentler with Yuan than with anyone, and then he was afraid of her again, and he felt a wildness in her that he could not subdue. So did she draw him to her and so thrust him from her many times.