And I have not forgotten the hours in the old well-known inns, the Moslem inn where roast mutton was the dish, the Peking inns where one called for duck, and chose it alive and waited for the finished dishes. I made the rounds again too of the old palaces, and stayed very long one day in the rooms where once the Old Empress had lived. And a day’s journey away from Peking, I walked upon the Great Wall of China, now so useless, although still the enemy was to come down from the North, and I spent another day near the Jade Pagoda so that I might remember it forever.
Thus I filled my cup full, perhaps for all my life, for who could know whether it would ever be possible to return even for a visit? War was certain, war with Japan if not a world war, and by now a world war lay upon the horizon, and much larger than a man’s hand. In that war, Japan, I knew, would not be on our side but with the enemy. Yet when the last moment came, the final departure from house and garden, I took nothing with me. I could take nothing. I felt compelled to leave it all exactly as it was, as though I might be coming back when summer was gone and as in other years I had come back. And thus, in the spring of 1934, I went to my own country.
IV
Green Hills Farm
FOR ME MY COUNTRY was a new one, although I was an American by birth and ancestry. The first half of my life was spent, but the better half, the longer half, since there is much waste in the childhood years, yet remained to me. I was a mature person, healthy, alive to every new sight and sound and experience. My kinsmen had fought bravely in three wars, the War of Independence of 1775, the Civil War of 1861, the First World War of 1914. In each of these wars the purpose had been the same, an idealistic one, to make and keep the United States a united and a free nation. In peacetime my kin were professional men — preachers and teachers and lawyers and landowners. Culture was our family tradition, and education was taken as a matter of course. Parents held their children’s noses to the grindstone of school, whether or no until the young ones learned to like it, and excellence was expected. All this simply meant that I came to my country without the burden of the individual in a classless society. I had no reason to worry about myself. I had always been able to do what I wanted to do, and this meant freedom from self — that is, freedom from fear of failure and also from conceit. I commend the mood, since it gives all one’s time for observation and thought, work and enjoyment.
My first summer I spent in New York, and the result of it was that I learned that I could never understand my country unless I became a part of it somewhere else and not merely a city visitor. This meant a home, and home meant a house, and where does one live when there is a vast country from which to choose? The choice may be merely geographical, and I saw many places delightful enough in which to remain, the bare beauty of Western deserts, the enchanted high plains of Kansas, the mountainous states of the Rockies, the close hills of New England. I set aside the Deep South. I could not live where the colonial atmosphere prevailed, and where I would have always to look at signs to see where I belonged in railroad stations and restaurants. Besides, I planned at last for more children, for here, I thought, was a safe country for children, and I did not want the responsibility of having them instilled with color prejudices which I knew would be dangerous to us in the world of the near future.
After some musing and travelling, I decided on a region where the landscapes were varied, where farm and industry lived side by side, where sea was near at hand, mountains not far away, and city and countryside were not enemies, a big rich state, a slice of the nation — Pennsylvania. And where in Pennsylvania? That was decided by the sort of house I wanted. It was to be old, for I was used to old places, I liked their solidity, their soberness, their size. The houses of my Chinese friends were ancient houses, the beams enormous, the walls thick, the gardens aged. I admired the white and green houses of New England and New York, but they seemed ephemeral. Wood burns too easily. In China the houses even of the poor had thick earthen walls. Only in Japan had I lived in a wooden house, and that was because of earthquakes, averaging more than two thousand a year, if one counts the small ones. But they burned. No, stone if possible, please, for red brick I did not like after the quiet grey of the Chinese brick.
I found the stone houses in Pennsylvania, and farms were cheap then, at the end of the depression. Country was my place, although I enjoyed a city for some reasons, but not for living in and doing my work. So a farm, then, whether I farmed the land or not, a quiet place somewhere in a moderate landscape, a house on a hillside, a brook, trees and gentle hills. Extravagant landscapes are sights to be stored in the memory and to see again and again, but not to live with, I think.
How does one choose one’s house? It is first built in the imagination. I saw mine very clearly, rough fieldstone, brown with glints of gold and red, a big chimney. It was not a tall narrow house, but a wide one, at least a century old, low-set against the earth, a wing perhaps leaning against the main building, many windows, a mild view toward forests and hills and the brook. There it was. It remained only to be found. One day in a crowded downtown New York street I saw the sign of a Strout Farm Agency and I sauntered in.
“Do you have any small farms in Pennsylvania for sale?” I asked, exactly as though I were buying a pair of gloves in a department store.
A yawning clerk pointed with his thumb to a pile of little folders on a table. I took the top one and saw a picture no bigger than a postage stamp, in the lower right-hand corner, of my house, exactly as I had planned, a wide main building and then a wing, all stone, big chimneys, set pleasantly on a hillside, a brook, trees, even an old three-arched bridge over the brook, forty-eight acres of land, forty-one hundred dollars.
“Thank you,” I said. Then, holding my breath and pointing to my house, “Is this sold?”
The lazy clerk looked up something in a file. “No,” he said indifferently.
“Thanks,” I said.
I went away, impatient that it was too dark to set forth that day to claim the house. But at dawn next day I started, breakfasting somewhere along the way, and in a few hours I had reached my destination, missing the road a good many times at that. It was a summer’s day, very green and still, the sky gently overcast for coming rain. I found the local Strout agent, a Pennsylvania Dutchman, and under his guidance we turned down a country road, dusty as any Chinese path, and soon we crossed the three-arched bridge.
“Dere it iss,” he said.
He pointed toward the shallow hill. I looked, and there it was, exactly as it had been in the postage stamp picture. We turned to the right along a still narrower road, the old mill road, he said, that ran between the house and the enormous red barn. Then we stopped and got out. I had seen plenty of better houses and to this day I cannot tell why I insisted upon that one, although I have never regretted the choice. But I tried to be prudent, I paid the down fee, and said I would let him know in a couple of days. He grunted a Pennsylvania Dutch grunt, and said he would show me some more houses if I liked, and since I felt I should in common sense see as many houses as possible, I spent the rest of the day in looking at them, and with difficulty restrained myself from buying mine instantly. Then I went back to New York and could hardly bear to wait the necessary days until I could get back. Had it not been a weekend, I could not have waited. Three days later I owned the house.
Books have been written many times in the intervening years between then and now by people who have done just what I did, and I have enjoyed all the books, reading avidly to see what others did. The only difference is that they seem to grow caustic, little or much, over the many trials of making an old house into a home for living. But I had no such trials. Everything was pure joy for me, perhaps because this house was my own first possession, or perhaps because I should have been an architect. Of course, did I build a house it would not be like the one I bought. It would be functional, shaped to the landscape I might choose, in the way that Chinese houses are built, or more truly, the Japanese houses. Frank Lloyd Wright knows exactly what I mean, for he has used the same philosophy and has often found his inspiration in Japan and Korea. The older a people grows, the more it absorbs its own landscape and builds to it.