Slowly, slowly the learning went on, and at last the house was done, and here we are in our mountain house. Water has to be carried from the brook, lamps have to be cleaned and filled with oil, there will never be a telephone, I cook our meals on the fireplace and think it the best way of cooking in the world. Around us the forest folk come and go, squirrels and deer and sometimes bear, and we always watch for Brother Porcupine who will eat his way through anything, especially enjoying rubber tires. The house has cost us a third of what the new metal boxes in Pennsylvania cost, and the boys now know how to build for themselves and the girls know how to keep house anywhere and still be civilized. As for me, I have this big window, the fir trees and the mountains, and blessed relief from Pennsylvania ragweed.
Next to people, I remember landscapes, and though at this moment I look at green forests in Vermont, I can remember as clearly as what I see the northern Chinese town to which I went after my marriage. The decision to marry was the result of one of those human coincidences which cannot be explained except to say in the words of the wise man of Ecclesiastes that there is “a time to marry.” When this time comes in the life of any healthy and normal creature, marriage is inevitable, whether it be arranged by parents or by the individual, and to the most likely person who happens to be in the environment. My parents did not approve my marriage and while they maintained an amazing silence on the subject, for they were an articulate pair and silence was not usual, nevertheless I discerned their disapproval because they were united in silence, and this was also unusual. Since I was on more intimate terms with my mother than with my father, I took her aside one day and asked her why they disapproved. She replied that they felt that this young man, while himself a good sort of person doubtless, would not, however, fit into our rather intellectual family. His interests were obviously not intellectual, she said, and when I reminded her that at least he was the graduate of an American college she retorted that it was an agricultural college and this was not what our family considered education.
“You two are behaving like Chinese parents,” I said. “You think whomever I marry has to suit the family first.”
“No,” she declared, “it is you we think of. We know you better than you imagine, and how can you be happy unless you live with someone who understands what you are talking about?”
I was as wilful as any other member of our wilful family, however, and so I persisted in my plans and in a few months was married, with very simple ceremony, in the garden of our mission house and soon thereafter I was settled in my own first home, a little four-room Chinese house of grey brick and black tile within the walled town of Nanhsüchou, in Anhwei province, many miles north of my childhood province of Kiangsu.
It was a complete change of scene. I had never lived in North China before, and the very landscape was strange to me. Instead of our green valleys and the lovely blue hills beside the wide Yangtse River I now looked from my windows upon a high embankment where stood the city wall, foursquare, with a brick tower at each corner, and surrounded by a moat. Huge wooden gates braced with iron were locked against bandits and wandering soldiers at night and opened in the morning. Outside the walls and beyond the moat, the countryside stretched as flat as any desert, broken only by what appeared to be heaps of mud but which were actually villages whose houses were built of the pale sand-colored earth of the region. In winter there was no green of any kind. Earth and houses were all of one color and even the people were of the same dun hue, for the fine sandy soil was dusted into their hair and skin by the incessant winds. The women seemed never to clean themselves, and this I found was purposeful, for if a woman was tidy, her hair brushed back and coiled smoothly and her garments any color but the universal sand color or faded blue cotton, then she was suspected of being a prostitute. Honest women took pride in being unkempt as a sign of not caring how they appeared to men and therefore virtuous. It was impossible to distinguish between the rich and the poor, for a rich lady wore her satin coat underneath the dull cotton one and was no better to look at than any farm woman. It took me some time to adjust to what seemed to me downright ugliness in my landscape, and I remember being discouraged by the sameness around me and complaining that there was no use in taking a walk, for one could go ten miles beyond the city gates and still everything looked exactly the same.
But it has always been my weakness or my strength, and to this day I do not know which it is, to be easily diverted by and absorbed in whatever is around me, and I soon found plenty of amusement and occupation. I discovered that I liked housekeeping and gardening, and to arrange the simple furniture about the four rooms, to hang curtains of yellow Chinese silk at the windows, to paint some pictures for the walls, to design bookshelves and grow flowers were all enjoyable activities. I was glad that I lived in a little Chinese house with a black-tiled roof instead of a foreign style mission house. It had no upstairs and the garden seemed part of the house. The climate was too dry for the many flowers in my mother’s southern garden, but chrysanthemums grew well in autumn and the golden Shantung roses in May and June.
In the spring the whole landscape suddenly grew beautiful. The bare willow trees around the villages put forth soft green leaves and the wheat turned green in the fields and the blossoms of the fruit trees were rose-colored and white. Most beautiful of all were the mirages. I had never lived in mirage country before, and when the earth was still cold but the air was warm and dry and bright, wherever I looked I could see mirages of lakes and trees and hills between me and the horizon. A fairy atmosphere surrounded me, and I felt half in a dream. The enchantment of moonlight, too, upon the city wall and the calm waters of the moat outside is still in my memory, half unreal, and it was in this little northern town that I first felt the strange beauty of Chinese streets at night. The dusty streets were wide and unpaved, the usual streets of northern Chinese towns, and they were lined with low one-story buildings of brick or earth, little shops and industries, blacksmiths and tinsmiths, bakeries and hot-water shops, dry goods and sweetmeat shops, all the life of a people confined geographically and therefore mentally and spiritually to an old and remote area. I walked the dim streets, gazing into the open doors where families gathered around their supper tables, lit only by thick candles or a bean oil lamp, and I felt closer to the Chinese people than I had since childhood.
It was in a way a solitary life, for what my parents had feared proved to be true, and my inner life was lived alone. There were only two other white people in the compound, a missionary couple much older than I, and with them no companionship was to be had, especially as they were in delicate health and for long periods of time were absent and then we were the only white people there. I remember as I say this that we did have for a short time an American doctor and his young wife, but the poor wife hated the Chinese and would never stir from her house. Though they lived next door, she never visited us or anyone, and we all took it for granted that she could not be herself so long as she remained in the alien country. It was not long before they returned to America to stay.
Now when I remember that American doctor I think of one experience we shared together. I had often to help him in one way or another, and one night, long after midnight, I heard a knocking on my door. When I opened it, there stood the doctor, a tall thin American figure with a lighted lantern in one hand and in the other his bag.
“I’ve had a call to go to a young woman who may be dying in childbirth,” he said. “I’ll have to operate and I need someone to give the anaesthetic. But especially I need someone to explain things to them.”