We gathered speed under the dark northern skies of Sweden and the haunting melody caught my heart, homeward turned.
The home-coming was the best of all. The sight of the beloved house upon the hill as we drove across the bridge and up the lane, made the heart beat fast. Why did I ever think I had no roots in my own country? I had already put down deeper roots here than anywhere in the world, and never would they be pulled up again for any reason. We were at the end of the lane now, and there were the great red barn and the sturdy stone house. Christmas wreaths were hanging on the doors and at the windows. Four small figures in red coats and leggings came running over the snowy fields to meet us, and here the heart stopped! What embracings and kisses and cries of surprise and how big the four had grown even in a month and how rosy were the cheeks and bright the eyes! Yes, coming home was best of all, the happy end of every journey.
Yet underneath all the joy and peace of home and family at that Christmastime of a memorable year I was acutely mindful, as I shall always be, of what was happening on the other side of my world in Asia. War had begun in deadly earnest, and previous engagements were only skirmishes in contrast. The Japanese armies attacked at Marco Polo Bridge, near Peking. The Nationalist forces, centering their strength around Shanghai and the Japanese aggression there, resisted with more strength than expected, while still the Communists did almost nothing. Alone the Nationalists were to continue resistance through 1939, but failing all along the way to hold their ground. Nanking had been lost in 1937, and the government had retreated up the Yangtse to Hankow, only to lose that city, too, in 1938. The whole coast was indeed too quickly lost, proving what we had sadly feared, that Chiang Kai-shek’s hold upon the people was rootless. Thus the richest and most important part of the country fell into enemy control, the industrial areas of the great cities and the fertile plains of the riverland, and Nationalists retreated into the ancient regions of that mountainous West so untouched by modern life. Universities followed the government, which finally settled in Chungking, there to remain for the duration of the war. The Nationalist party was by now divided into two groups, one favoring continued resistance to the Japanese even if only by the guerrilla tactics the Chinese Communists were beginning to use in the North as Japan came close, and the other favoring compromise. It is to Chiang Kai-shek’s honor that he refused all compromise with the foreign enemy, as he had with Communism. He continued his waiting position, still hoping that a world war would demand that the United States become deeply involved, this time against Japan, and that in the universal conflict China would emerge on the side of the victorious nations. He did not doubt that the combination of the United States and Britain would be invincible.
How well I remember the day war began in Europe! We had taken a house in Martha’s Vineyard that summer, a comfortable place next door to Katharine Cornell’s beautiful house on the bay. The water was perfect for our children, shallow, warm and clear, and they tumbled in and out all day, fat and brown and merry. We ourselves spent the day between work and play, my husband devoting himself to the delightful but difficult task of editing Lin Yutang’s monumental novel, Moment in Peking, and I at work upon my own novel, Other Gods. One morning, however, unable to work, and oppressed unreasonably, I hoped, by premonitions of war, I joined the children on the beach earlier than usual. A few minutes later I saw my husband hurrying down the dunes. It was to tell me the fearful news from the radio, that war had been declared in Europe.
It seemed impossible, in spite of certainty. The sun shone upon the calm sea and upon the smooth white sands. Our two babies, hand in hand, were running up and down the beach in the shallow water, while the two little boys dug for sand crabs. Farther up the coast where the sea swept in a great curve, people were swimming in front of Katharine Cornell’s house. She had been to visit us, handsome and brown with sun and wind, her dachshunds trailing after her. We had met a few times in New York, without quite becoming well acquainted, each shy, I think of the other. I have always kept my Chinese trait of reverence for great people — a trait not suited to my American world, where no one is embalmed in reverence. We had talked but not easily, and she said that it was difficult for her to make speeches, I remember, or even to converse easily, because actors use the words of others to express themselves. But she had told me a little of her early life in the city of Buffalo, an incongruous name for the home town of such an elegant and sophisticated woman.
Upon this scene in spite of all its grace and calm, the war broke that day and we knew, my husband and I, that our life would never be the same again, for war would change our country and our people. It would change, indeed, the whole world.
Why, on the other side of that world, did not Chiang Kai-shek do what the Communists did, arm the peasants and bid them fight the invaders? The answer is that he feared the peasants armed. He knew they were not for him, that his government had failed them, and he dared not trust them. He preferred to leave them as they were, defenseless, rather than to give them arms which someday they might use in rebellion against him. He waited, hoping and longing, while Americans remained neutral and unwilling.
And would we remain neutral? Could we? I hoped so. I had seen too much of war to believe in it as a means of permanent victory. And this war would be the worst, I knew, for it would unleash in Asia all the angry forces of the peoples. Each Asian people would use world war to further its own passionate determination for freedom and independence. And after the war, what? Certainly no victory!
I remember a hot day in 1940. My husband and I were driving across the high plains of Kansas. It is one of my favorite states, and I return to it again and again as the heart of our country, its people honest and excellent, intelligent and civilized, while living in simple houses. We were vaguely anxious that day, for President Roosevelt was to make an important speech. At the hour we drew up in the scanty shade of an angular tree so that we might listen with whole attention. We turned on the radio and the rich eloquent voice came rolling over the air. It brought no declaration of war — not yet. It was the famous “quarantine” speech. But I knew, as I heard it, that war was inevitable, and over the sunny golden landscape the shadows fell.
We continued our journey, sober and silent, we shortened it not at all, turning northward to the Dakotas to visit my sister and her family then living in Pierre, South Dakota—“Peer,” as everyone called it. And when we arrived, I remember, I found my small nephews excited with all the other small boys, because on a dry hilltop near the town a huge petrified fish had been found that very day, a creature the size of a whale, and I went with them and there it was, complete in soft stone. It was lifted and taken to the museum, but bits fell off and I brought one home with me and put it beside our pool. It turned quickly to dust, however, as all flesh does, when subject to sun and wind and time.
That was a good journey to make in such a year as 1940 for we wandered through the stupendous Badlands, the Needles and the Black Hills, and again the variety and the beauty of our country were impressed upon me, and not only of landscape, but more than that, of people. In Pierre I wished to find the artist who had made a favorite painting then hanging on our living room wall, a dark red sun setting over the desert and a ruined empty cabin. I found her in a tiny restaurant making potato chips for a living. The reason? People here were too poor to buy paintings, she told us, but she could not leave the magnificent landscapes. She had learned painting in Paris and had thought that she would always live there until she had found South Dakota.