“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.