The dining-room window looks on the road, conveniently, and from his seat at the head of the table, Rennie can see the school bus coming. At first we left the seat empty, against the time when husband and father might sit there. For when we left Gerald on the wharf at Shanghai, he said he might join us in three months. At the end of three months he said nothing of his coming, and his letters were already weeks apart. So, because he could see the road, Rennie said he would take his father’s chair for the present, and I did not say yes or no. Perhaps I knew already that the letter was on its way.
“There’s the bus,” Rennie shouted. His eggs and bacon were gone, so were three slices of brown toast and butter, and he drank down his second glass of milk and reached for his windbreaker and cap.
“Goodbye, Mother!”
“Goodbye, son,” I said.
Gerald has never allowed an abbreviation of my name. When Rennie learned from American children in Shanghai to say Mom or Ma, Gerald was stern.
“Mother is a beautiful word,” he said gravely. “You shall not corrupt it.”
He spoke in Chinese as he always does when he wishes to teach his son, and Rennie obeyed.
When I was alone, the house silent about me, I did my usual work. I washed the dishes and then went upstairs to make the beds. My room, the one my parents used, stretches across the front of the house. It has five windows and the landscape changes with every day and hour. This morning when I rose at six the golden moon, round and huge, was sinking behind the wooded mountains. The level rays were still strong enough to make black shadows from the pointed cedars upon the grey rocks beneath. I loved the safety of our compound walls in Peking, but I love this landscape better. Without Gerald, I choose my own country. With him any land serves and all are beautiful.
Facing south, my room on a fair day is lit with sunshine. I made the big fourposter bed and dusted the bureaus and chests and the white-painted chimneypiece. The air is dustless and the floor needs only a brief polishing. I wonder sometimes that I labor so easily here in this house, when in our Chinese house I needed five servants, or thought I did. Gerald said I did. He did not like to see me work with my hands. It is true that I have nice hands. It was the first thing he said to me.
“You have lovely hands.”
I held them up to look at.
“Do I?” I asked stupidly. No, not stupidly, for I wanted to hear him say it again.
“American girls do not usually have good hands,” he went on. “I notice this because my mother, being Chinese, had exquisite hands.”
“Do all Chinese women have exquisite hands?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I think he never spoke of my hands again, but I have not forgotten. Perhaps he began to love me because my hands made him think of his mother’s. How can I know now?
It has been nearly three months since I have had a letter from Gerald — until today. The letter is mailed not from Shanghai but from Hongkong, and it is inside an envelope addressed by a strange hand.
“You must not worry if my letters are far apart now,” Gerald writes. “I cannot tell you the difficulties,” he writes. “I cannot even tell you how this letter reaches you. When you answer, do not send the letter to me, but to the address on the envelope. It may be months before I can reply.”
We used, at first, to write every day when we were apart. But until the war with Japan came, we were never apart. Then, when it seemed that the northern provinces would fall easily to the enemy, Gerald said I must take Rennie to Chungking before the railroad to Hankow was cut.
“Without you?” I cried.
“I will follow when I can,” he said. “I cannot leave until the college leaves with me.”
He was the president of the university, and responsibility was heavy upon him. I knew he was right, and Rennie and I set forth alone for Chungking. It was not an easy journey. The train was crowded with refugees, who clung even upon the roofs of the cars, and the hotel in Hankow was full of the escaping rich and their retinues. I made the most of the dying prestige of the white man and found a tiny space for Rennie and me, and by urgency and bribes, I bought a passage upon the small steamer that makes the perilous journey up the Yangtse gorges to Chungking.
Thither Gerald was to follow, and he did, months later, his students and faculty with him. Meanwhile Rennie and I had found a small house in the hills above the city. Oh, the joy of reunion with the beloved! He came in, so gaunt he seemed to have added inches to his height. But he was content. His students and faculty had stayed with him, he had led them to safety. The city gentry had given him the use of several ancient ancestral halls, and all were housed. He had seen them safe and fed before he came home to me.
When I put my arms about him that day I felt him tremble and knew how tired he was.
“Here you can rest,” I told him.
He looked about the home I had made. I have a passion for big rooms. When I first found the brick farmhouse we rented near Chungking, I told the owner that I would take it only if he allowed me to tear out two partitions in the main building and make three rooms into one large room.
“Where will you sleep?” he asked, rolling his little eyes and wagging his head. He was a fat fellow, shaven-pated and dirty, an owner and not a farmer, living on his rents.
I pretended I had not heard him. It was none of his business. I had already planned to use the two storerooms on either side of the enclosed court as bedrooms. The gate-house rooms would do for kitchen and stores. Therefore the room that Gerald saw was large and comfortable. True, we had brought nothing with us from our Peking house, but I knew how to find what I needed in the small shops of any Chinese city. Chinese, craftsmen are skilled and they love beauty.
“You have the genius of a homemaker,” Gerald said. He sat down in a cushioned wicker chair and leaned his head back.
“It is heaven,” he said, and closed his eyes.
I cannot write for crying—
It is already the first day of February. For weeks our Vermont landscape has been winterbound, the mountains white and the valley silent under snow. Three days ago a warm wind and sunshine melted the snow on the hillside and the roads, a deceptive thaw, I know, for winter will come back again. We have some of our deepest snows in March, and even in April. Sometimes the spring sugaring is delayed for days because the sap freezes in the pipes on its way down to the sugar house. Today the valley is hidden in mist and the mountains have vanished. I can see no further than the gate to the dooryard. My father put up the fence for my mother who, Boston reared, could not bear the frightening distances she saw from the windows of this house, the mountains rolling away.
“I must live behind a gate,” she told my father, “else how do I know where I belong?”
He put up the fence, enclosing plenty of lawn and the clump of big white birch. My mother was a pretty woman, slender as long as she lived, and she lived years after my father died. But she was rigid in mind and body. She demanded fences and gates and she seldom went beyond them. When I told her I wanted to marry Gerald MacLeod she was not pleased. She had not enjoyed marriage, in spite of loving my father, and she did not want me to marry.
“There is much in marriage that is distasteful to a nice woman.” This she said when I asked her why she did not want me to marry. “Although MacLeod is a good name,” she added.
I considered for one moment whether I would tell her next that Gerald was half Chinese. He can pass for a dark Caucasian, for while his eyes are slightly almond-shaped, they are large and his brows are handsome. He is far more beautiful as a man than I am as a woman. I am small and fair and my eyes are grey rather than blue. I have never been sure I was pretty. Gerald has not told me I was pretty.