I said, “But you left your home when your father did not want you to do it. Grandfather even forbade your marriage.”
Her dark eyes were tragic. “I know it,” she said, “and I did wrong. I wish I had obeyed him.”
This was a terrifying revelation, and I was struck speechless. I neither promised to stay nor insisted upon going. I was simply silent, and a few days later she fell seriously ill again and the doctor said that someone must take her up the mountains of Lu, to Kuling. There was no one to do that except me, for my father would not have thought of leaving his work. I asked for leave of absence from my school and my mother and I boarded one of the clean little English river steamers and set sail for Kiukiang, where we would take sedan chairs for the climb up the mountains. My fate, at least for the time being, was settled.
The importance of Kuling in the lives of the white people in the central provinces of China must now be explained. There were other summer resorts, but none of them, we felt, compared with Kuling. It was much more than a summer resort, it was a lifesaving station, especially in the early years of my childhood before it was known how some of the worst of the tropical diseases, against which white people seemed to have no immunity whatever, were carried. I can remember the devastation of malaria, for example, from which the Chinese suffered and grew thin and yellow but from which they recovered far more often than the white people did. At the first rumor that mosquitoes were the carriers my father had promptly nailed cheesecloth over all the windows of our house, and people thought he had gone insane. As soon as he could buy wire screening from Montgomery Ward ours was the first house to have it. Cholera, the autumn menace, we knew was somehow carried by flies, and certainly conveyed by mouth, and I can remember how terrified my mother was lest we eat any raw fruit or anything indeed which had come from the Chinese markets until it was cooked, and how when an epidemic was raging, which was every autumn during my childhood, we never used even eating utensils until they had first been placed in briskly boiling water, and this at the table where my mother could supervise the process, and dishes and silverware were wiped with boiled dish towels kept by my mother. Yet none of us was easy from the middle of August until the first of October, and we children learned, on pain of death, not to put anything in our mouths, not even fingers, until boiling water or soap and water and disinfectant had been applied.
The death of children had really compelled white parents to find some place where families could go for the worst months of our tropically hot summers, and my father had been one of the little group of white men who explored the famous Lu mountains, where old temples had existed for centuries in a climate so salubrious that it was said the priests lived forever. I can still remember the day when I was a small child that my father came home from the expedition and reported that high in those mountains, six thousand feet above sea level, he had found the air as cold as early winter, though the season was midsummer. There was a rough stone road up the mountainside, carved no one knew how long ago by priests and pilgrims, and bamboo mountain chairs were available and the bearers were the neighboring farmers.
“The air up there is like the Alleghenies,” my father said, “and the brooks run clear.”
This was enough for my mother. Her joy in the thought of escaping the torrid months of summer and particularly the hot rainy season, when the rice fields were flooded and the mosquitoes swarmed, was something I can still see. We were among the first, then, to buy a plot of ground after negotiations had been made with the Chinese for us to do so — a long lease it was, actually, for foreigners could not own the soil of China. I remember our first little house, made of stone, for stone was the building material on those mountaintops where only low trees grew. The temples, too, were of stone and the pagoda on a neighboring peak was of stone.
As a child I took Ruling for granted, and every summer I gave up my birthday party in order that we might go there. My mother disliked leaving my father alone to cope with housekeeping in addition to his work, but her struggle always ended in favor of the children. I knew, each June, when the rice seedlings were transplanted from the dry beds to the flooded fields, that the time had come for Kuling. It was a time I loved at home, too, for the valleys were beautiful, green lakes in the sunshine and mysterious by night under the moon. It was heaven for the frogs and the chorus of their croakings and pipings could be heard clearly even at our house.
The whole process of the growing of rice is a cycle of beauty, from the seedbeds, greener than any green on earth, to the last harvested golden sheaf. I was charmed always by every change, and especially by the transplanting, when the dry fields were filled with water and the farm family rolled up the legs of their blue cotton trousers and waded into the water and planted the seedlings neatly and exactly spaced over the fields. The rice grew swiftly while we were gone during the summer and when we came back in late September the fields were dry again and the grain stood high and yellow. Then came the harvesting when once more the farm family sallied forth and with hand sickles cut the sheaves, and tied them and stacked them and carried them to the threshing floors in front of the farmhouses. There the sheaves were spread and men and women lifted the swinging bamboo flails and beat out the grain. Women swept up the grain and spread it in winnowing baskets and men tossed it up for the wind to clean. When at last the rice was harvested it was piled into vats made of clean rice straw woven into matting and shaped and tied into containers. There was poetry in every movement of the blue-clad peasants, and I see it all clear in my mind today, a series of exquisite and symbolic pictures, memorized through half my lifetime.
Only in Java, years later, did I see the process whole and simultaneous, for there upon the richest soil and with the finest rice climate in the world, planting and harvesting went on in adjacent fields, the earth in continual production so that while some farmers transplanted seedlings into the water others bore home the sheaves. When I think of Java, I see handsome brown men carrying on their shoulders sheaves of rice, heavy-headed and cut as exactly even as strands of yellow silk.
Between planting and harvesting we stayed in our little stone house in the mountains. Other white people, missionaries and tradesmen and their families, joined those of us who had pioneered and gradually, as years went on, a beautiful little town developed there in the top of the mountains. A church was built and at one end of the property shrewd Chinese merchants opened shops. Farmers from the plains below carried up the mountains baskets of eggs and fruits, fowls and vegetables, and we had an abundance of food. Near our house was a clear spring bubbling up from under the top of the mountain and this water we drank without boiling and considered it pure luxury.