“Can you bear it,” I once asked him, “if you see yourself in a novel? Not just as you are, of course — I always create my own people, but I steal whatever I need — the ways in which you asked me to marry you, for example, which I am sure no man ever used before. I might need a few of them sometime for other men and women.”
He smiled. He had a wonderful smile, beginning in his deep blue eyes — eyes wasted on a man, for they were pure violet with long black lashes, but I liked them, and so perhaps they were not wasted. “Take it,” he said. “It’s yours anyway. Take anything I have to give—”
The unique attribute he had was that he understood an artist. I doubt he understood women or cared to understand them. He had a low opinion of women in general. He did not dislike them but his attitude was impersonal and somewhat condescending. When I complained that he was unjust he replied calmly,
“I don’t look down on women at all. On the contrary, I think they could be much more than they are. They rate themselves too low if they are content to be cooks, cleaning women, and nursemaids when they can be anything they wish to be and do whatever they like. Nobody stops them except themselves.”
Since he himself had an English gentleman’s attitude toward housework — he was English on both sides and his mother was born in England — I felt a pervading injustice in these remarks, but I am not one to carry on an argument and certainly he was no puritan, so far as women were concerned. He began life early, graduating from Harvard as an honors man when he was only twenty and marrying at once. He was attractive to women and knew it, with blue eyes and black hair and brown skin. His manners were charming, deceptively so sometimes when he was talking with a woman. Yet he had his own invincible code. He would not, for example, call a woman in his employ by her first name or invite her to luncheon or arrange a meeting with her outside of office hours. He felt that any demand of a personal nature made upon an employee was unfair use of employer’s power. I remember that he had at one time a secretary who was an unusually young and pretty girl. When a male friend or business caller made teasingly envious remarks he was cold as only an Englishman can be.
“Miss Kirke is an efficient secretary or I would not employ her,” was his invariable reply.
The result of such an attitude was, of course, the total devotion of his secretaries. Even today, when Miss Kirke is married and has grown children, she and the others like her say to me in loving remembrance,
“He was so much fun to work for — and you could trust him. He never made passes at you. You could be yourself.”
A humble tribute, but how significant! And yet he could make me happily furious sometimes. For example, he liked to say that I was unlike any other woman he had ever known because, he said, I had the brain of a man in the body of a woman. I flew out at him, invariably, at such a notion. Why should a woman, I demanded, be said to have the brain of a man merely because she had a good mind? Did Nature give the supreme gift only to men? Was there a law of inheritance which denied brains to women? He laughed, pretended to seek shelter, and then said gravely that I was right.
“I apologize,” he said, his eyes twinkling, but of course he never apologized for what he believed.
What was precious beyond diamonds to me was the fact, indisputable, that he enjoyed my mind. He liked profound conversation on abstruse subjects. He enjoyed repartee. And far beyond diamonds and life itself was the fact that he understood I had to be alone when I was writing. He never asked what I was writing or even what the book was about. When a novel was finished and typed and ready to be given to the publisher I took it to him myself and presented it formally, Chinese fashion, with both hands. His office was next to mine, but there were two doors between. His was the older building, and the short passageway was once the smoke house, where farmers for a hundred years smoked ham and bacon. The two doors were always closed when I was writing and he never opened them, but he rose when I came in with the finished work and received it gravely.
“This is a big day,” he always said.
A big day it always was, and he put aside everything else and sat down to the task he loved, he told me, above all others, the reading of a manuscript I had written. He edited carefully but sparely. I do not remember that he ever made a change involving anything more serious than a misplaced preposition or a time confusion. The Chinese language has few prepositions and I have never quite learned to manage these refractory and precise little English words. As for time confusion, it was something from which I had always to be saved. I have no sense of time. I do not mean that I am unpunctual. On the contrary, I learned early to be punctual to a fault — I say to a fault for I am too punctual and waste my own time waiting for other people. My parents were two separately busy persons who lived on separate schedules into which I as a child had to fit. I live on schedule, too, as a separately busy person and so did he. No, I mean that I pay no heed to what year it is, what month, or what day. I cannot remember birthdays, anniversaries, or any of the important dates women are supposed to remember. A secretary has to remember for me and warn me in advance. He, on the other hand, had the disconcerting habit of perfect time recall. On any morning at the breakfast table, or at any time during the day, he could look at his watch and ask,
“Do you remember what we were doing ten — twenty — (etc.) years ago at this moment?”
At first, wanting to be perfect, I tried to remember. Later, resigned to myself, I said boldly that I did not remember. Then he would tell me.
“It was the first time I kissed you — or proposed to you — or you said you wouldn’t have me — or I took you by surprise in Yokohama, etc., etc.”
The chase had indeed been a long one. We were past our first youth when we first met, each resigned, we thought, to unsatisfactory marriages, and each well-known in our own fields. I had firmly refused him in New York, Stockholm, London, Paris, and Venice, and then had sailed by way of India for home in Nanking, China.
In six months he cabled me to meet him in Shanghai in order to hear “no” again and this time forever. I went alone after that to Peking for some months of research necessary for the completion of my translation of Shui Hu Chuan or All Men Are Brothers, and had been there less than a week when he appeared unexpectedly in the midst of a violent dust storm out of the Gobi desert. We parted again eternally and he went to Manchuria and I home again to Nanking to pack my bags for a summer visit to the United States to see that all was well there with my retarded child. I had my younger daughter and my secretary with me, and was in a resigned state of mind when I left, so far as he was concerned. I had, I thought, made the wise decision. I did not want turmoil in my life.
It was a fine July morning, I remember, and we were docking at the pier in Yokohama. I had planned not to go ashore, for I had been many times in the city. Instead I would work on my translation and my secretary would take my little girl to the park. I had no sooner settled myself to my lonely task when I heard the voice which was now the one I knew best in all the world.
“I’ve turned up again — I shall keep on turning up, you know — everywhere in the world. You can’t escape me.”
There he was, lean, brown, and handsome, and smoking his old briar pipe. … In spite of that, I said “no” every day on board ship and again in Vancouver and all winter in New York. But spring in that magic city was my undoing and we were married on the eleventh of June and lived happily ever after, together as man and wife, separately in our professional work.