“Get upstairs and dress yourself,” she ordered me.
“It won’t take fifteen minutes for that,” I said.
“Then see if the bride don’t need a pin or two,” she said. “I remember very well myself that I needed a pin to the front of my corset cover, I was breathin’ that hard.”
I went upstairs then and when I had put on my pale-grey silk frock, I knocked on Mary’s door and she called to me to come in and so I did. She was dressed and ready and was standing by the window, looking out over the hills. Her wedding gown was plain white organdy, embroidered at the hem and the neck with fine hand embroidery. She had made it herself, and it was exactly right for her. Around her neck was a little gold chain and a locket with Rennie’s picture inside.
“Your bouquet is downstairs,” I said. “Shall I fetch it now?”
The guests were already coming up the walk, and the minister was in the living room. In the morning we had cut flowers from the fields and put them into bouquets with delicate fronds of brake. But I had a few of my precious roses for Mary’s bouquet. We cannot grow roses outdoors here in our cold valley, but I lift my rose bushes in the autumn and bring them into the cellar to sleep, where it is cool and dry and dark, and in the spring I set them out. This year I forced a half dozen to make roses for Mary. They are pale pink and pale yellow, and I cut six half-opened buds this morning and made them into a cluster and set their stems into ice water to keep them from opening too wide.
“Please, Mother,” she said.
I went away at once for I heard Rennie leave his room. When I came back with the roses he was standing in front of her, holding her hands in his, and all my sorrow dropped away, never to come again. I am sure of it, for I know very well the look in my son’s eyes as he stood looking at his bride. I saw it long ago in his father’s eyes for me.
The wedding was perfect in simplicity. The valley people gathered in our living room, and all together there are only twenty or so for we invited no transient summer folk. When they were all there, Rennie and Mary, who had been moving among them, talking a little, smiling often, interchanged a look, radiant and tender. They clasped hands and went to the minister and stood before him. Then without ado he rose from his chair, and took his little book from his pocket and spoke the few words that made them husband and wife. We had no music, for among us only Mary has a sweet singing voice. After the ceremony was over, the guests surrounded the young bride and groom, and I stood aside and wept quietly because they were so beautiful, until Bruce Spaulden saw me and fetched me a cup of fruit punch.
“Occupy yourself with this, my dear,” he said, and would not leave my side.
Mrs. Matt here set forth the wedding cake she had made, a noble three-tiered confection, each layer different from the other. Mary cat the slices with Rennie’s help, and they exchanged silver goblets, each half full of the sweet wine I make every summer from wild blackberries, while the guests enjoyed the sight of them.
Then quietly, in the midst of the eating and drinking, the two went upstairs and changed to their traveling clothes and came down again, and waving goodbye they ran through the room, but waited for me at the car. There my son swept me into his arms and kissed my cheeks and Mary put her arms about us both, and so I let them go. The guests waited to make sure I was not lonely, and then one by one they, went away, and George Bowen was the very last, and he stayed to put away chairs and carry dishes to Mrs. Matt in the kitchen.
When he left he stooped to kiss my cheek.
“Goodbye,” he said.
“Goodbye, dear George,” I said, “and come back often.”
“I will,” he said and then without the slightest sentimentality and as though he were declaring a fact, he said, “Shall I call you Mother, too, since now you are Mary’s mother?”
“Do,” I said gladly.
He winked his left eye at me. “Except you’re too young to be a mother to three great gawks.”
“Nonsense,” I said.
He laughed and cantered down the front steps and stepped into his grey wreck of a car, without opening the door, and went off in a gust of smoke and gravel.
Now only Bruce was left and he stayed the evening with me. He knows that Rennie’s father is dead. Rennie told him and then told me what he had done.
“How did you say it?” I asked, half wishing he had not told.
“I said, My father is dead in Peking. My mother and I will never go back to China now. She will live here in the valley. But Mary and I cannot live here where there are no laboratories.”
“A man must go where his work is,” Bruce agreed.
“Well, your work is here,” Rennie said bluntly, “and you must be my mother’s friend.”
“I want to be that and whatever more she will accept me for,” Bruce said.
Telling me this a few days ago, Rennie looked straight into my eyes. “Mother, you will please me very much if you will decide to marry Bruce.”
“Oh Rennie, no,” I whispered. “Don’t—don’t ask it.”
“I don’t ask it,” he said. “I merely say that I shall be happy if you do.”
To this I said nothing and perhaps I shall never say anything. I do not know. It is still too soon, and perhaps it will always be too soon.
It was comforting, nevertheless, to have Bruce spend the evening with me, when everyone else was gone. I lay on the long chair, and he sat near me, only the small table between us, and he smoked his old briar pipe and said nothing or very little. The silence was comforting, too. I was very near telling him about Gerald, and the house there in Peking, and all that has happened to me. I thought of it while the evening wind made gentle music in the pines and the mountains subsided into shadows. I thought of Rennie, too, and of how he had been born, and this led me to Mei-lan, whose child was being born perhaps upon this very day. But in the end I said nothing and silence remained sweeter than speech. When Bruce rose to say goodnight, my life and love were still hidden within me.
“Thank you, dear Bruce,” I said. “You are my best friend now.”
He held my hand a long moment. “I’ll let it go at that, but only for the present,” he said. He put my hand to his cheek and I felt his flesh smooth-shaven and cool. It was not hateful to me, and this surprised me, too. But he said no more, and he went away. After that I was suddenly very tired, but sweetly so and without pain, and I went upstairs and to my bed.
…Days have passed again and I am already expecting Rennie and Mary to come home for the summer. I have had one more letter from Peking.
“It is my duty,” Mei-lan insists, “to tell you that I have borne a son. He is like his father. His skin is white, his hair is dark but soft and fine. His frame is large and strong. My mother says he will be tall. I am astonished to have such a child. We two women, my mother and I, we will devote ourselves to rear him well, for his father’s sake and for yours.”
Mine? Have I aught, to do with her child? A strange question, and I do not know how to answer it. Then I remember that this child is Rennie’s half-brother. It is possible that some day they will meet. How different will they be, these two? How much alike?
The ways of nature and of life are strange and deep. They are not to be understood. In the midst of angers and of wars love’s secret work goes on, and binds us all by blood, and this, whether love is denied or love is bestowed.
…For you began it, Baba, you know you did. When the young pure American girl you loved would not love you enough to come to Peking for your sake, you flouted love, you said it did not matter and you took a woman whom you could not love. But she loved you, she bore your son, and one day I saw him and loved him utterly, and I went to Peking and made his city mine, until I was sent forth again, alone and forever parted from my love. Yet here are two grandsons, both yours, a globe between them, and still they are yours. And because they are yours, they belong together somehow, and they will know it some day.
What do you say to that, Baba? What do you say to that, old Baba, you lying
up there alone on the mountain under the big pine tree?
A Biography of Pearl S. Buck
Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) was a bestselling and Nobel Prize-winning author of fiction and nonfiction, celebrated by critics and readers alike for her groundbreaking depictions of rural life in China. Her renowned novel The Good Earth (1931) received the Pulitzer Prize and the William Dean Howells Medal. For her body of work, Buck was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature—the first American woman to have won this honor.
Born in 1892 in Hillsboro, West Virginia, Buck spent much of the first forty years of her life in China. The daughter of Presbyterian missionaries based in Zhenjiang, she grew up speaking both English and the local Chinese dialect, and was sometimes referred to by her Chinese name, Sai Zhenzhju. Though she moved to the United States to attend Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, she returned to China afterwards to care for her ill mother. In 1917 she married her first husband, John Lossing Buck. The couple moved to a small town in Anhui Province, later relocating to Nanking, where they lived for thirteen years.
Buck began writing in the 1920s, and published her first novel, East Wind: West Wind in 1930. The next year she published her second book, The Good Earth, a multimillion-copy bestseller later made into a feature film. The book was the first of the Good Earth trilogy, followed by Sons (1933) and A House Divided (1935). These landmark works have been credited with arousing Western sympathies for China—and antagonism toward Japan—on the eve of World War II.
Buck published several other novels in the following years, including many that dealt with the Chinese Cultural Revolution and other aspects of the rapidly changing country. As an American who had been raised in China, and who had been affected by both the Boxer Rebellion and the 1927 Nanking Incident, she was welcomed as a sympathetic and knowledgeable voice of a culture that was much misunderstood in the West at the time. Her works did not treat China alone, however; she also set her stories in Korea (Living Reed), Burma (The Promise), and Japan (The Big Wave). Buck’s fiction explored the many differences between East and West, tradition and modernity, and frequently centered on the hardships of impoverished people during times of social upheaval.
In 1934 Buck left China for the United States in order to escape political instability and also to be near her daughter, Carol, who had been institutionalized in New Jersey with a rare and severe type of mental retardation. Buck divorced in 1935, and then married her publisher at the John Day Company, Richard Walsh. Their relationship is thought to have helped foster Buck’s volume of work, which was prodigious by any standard.
Buck also supported various humanitarian causes throughout her life. These included women’s and civil rights, as well as the treatment of the disabled. In 1950, she published a memoir, The Child Who Never Grew, about her life with Carol; this candid account helped break the social taboo on discussing learning disabilities. In response to the practices that rendered mixed-raced children unadoptable—in particular, orphans who had already been victimized by war—she founded Welcome House in 1949, the first international, interracial adoption agency in the United States. Pearl S. Buck International, the overseeing nonprofit organization, addresses children’s issues in Asia.
Buck died of lung cancer in Vermont in 1973. Though The Good Earth was a massive success in America, the Chinese government objected to Buck’s stark portrayal of the country’s rural poverty and, in 1972, banned Buck from returning to the country. Despite this, she is still greatly considered to have been “a friend of the Chinese people,” in the words of China’s first premier, Zhou Enlai. Her former house in Zhenjiang is now a museum in honor of her legacy.
Buck’s parents, Caroline Stulting and Absalom Sydenstricker, were Southern Presbyterian missionaries.
Buck was born Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker in Hillsboro, West Virginia, on June 26, 1892. This was the family’s home when she was born, though her parents returned to China with the infant Pearl three months after her birth.
Buck lived in Zhenjiang, China, until 1911. This photograph was found in her archives with the following caption typed on the reverse: “One of the favorite locations for the street barber of China is a temple court or the open space just outside the gate. Here the swinging shop strung on a shoulder pole may be set up, and business briskly carried on. A shave costs five cents, and if you wish to have your queue combed and braided you will be out at least a dime. The implements, needless to say, are primitive. No safety razor has yet become popular in China. Old horseshoes and scrap iron form one of China’s significant importations, and these are melted up and made over into scissors and razors, and similar articles. Neither is sanitation a feature of a shave in China. But then, cleanliness is not a feature of anything in the ex-Celestial Empire.”
Buck’s writing was notable for its sensitivity to the rural farming class, which she came to know during her childhood in China. The following caption was found typed on the reverse of this photograph in Buck’s archive: “Chinese beggars are all ages of both sexes. They run after your rickshaw, clog your progress in front of every public place such as a temple or deserted palace or fair, and pester you for coppers with a beggar song—‘Do good, be merciful.’ It is the Chinese rather than the foreigners who support this vast horde of indigent people. The beggars have a guild and make it very unpleasant for the merchants. If a stipulated tax is not paid them by the merchant they infest his place and make business impossible. The only work beggars ever perform is marching in funeral and wedding processions. It is said that every family expects 1 or 2 of its children to contribute to support of family by begging.”
Buck worked continually on behalf of underprivileged children, especially in the country where she grew up. The following caption was found typed on the reverse of this photograph in Buck’s archive: “The children of China seem to thrive in spite of dirt and poverty, and represent nature’s careful selection in the hard race for the right to existence. They are peculiarly sturdy and alert, taken as a whole, and indicate something of the virility of a nation that has continued great for four thousand years.”
Johann Waldemar de Rehling Quistgaard painted Buck in 1933, when the writer was forty-one years old—a year after she won the Pulitzer Prize for The Good Earth. The portrait currently hangs at Green Hills Farm in Pennsylvania, where Buck lived from 1934 and which is today the headquarters for Pearl S. Buck International. (Image courtesy of Pearl S. Buck International, www.pearlsbuck.org.)
Richard J. Walsh—Buck’s publisher and second husband—pictured in China with an unidentified rickshaw man. Walsh’s tweed suit and pipe are typical of his signature daily attire.
Buck receiving her Nobel Prize from the King of Sweden, Gustav V, in 1938. (Image courtesy of Pearl S. Buck International, www.pearlsbuck.org.)
Buck and Walsh with their daughter, Elizabeth.
Buck in the 1930s.
Walsh—with his ever-present pipe—pictured with an unidentified child.
Buck addresses an audience in Korea in 1964, discussing the issues of poverty and discrimination faced by children in Asia. She established the Orphanage and Opportunity Center in Buchon City, Korea, in 1965.
Buck in her fifties.
This family photograph was taken on Buck’s seventieth birthday, June 26, 1962. The gathering included Buck’s children, grandchildren, and some of the children supported by Pearl S. Buck International.
Buck on her seventieth birthday.
Pearl Buck’s legacy lives on through Pearl S. Buck International, a non-profit organization dedicated to humanitarian causes around the world.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic o
r mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1957 by Pearl S. Buck
Cover design by Alexander Doolan
978-1-4804-2119-6
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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