My Several Worlds (11 page)

“I cannot save them both,” the doctor had said.

He chose his wife, but sometimes I wonder if my mother forgave him for it. It would have been like her to have insisted on saving both and somehow getting it done, but she was unconscious and had no say. She always felt, I think, that my father accepted too easily the will of God.

Well, there were six or seven families not too far away where I was welcome and where I learned the other side of the victory the white men had won and I knew then what my life has taught me since, that in any war a victory means another war, and yet another, until some day inevitably the tides turn, and the victor is the vanquished, and the circle reverses itself, but remains nevertheless a circle.

From those long and happy hours of visiting I came home more torn in heart than any child should be, for I saw that each side was right as well as wrong, and I yearned over both in a helpless fashion, unable to see how, history being what it was, anything now could be done. I used to look at my parents, wondering how to tell them what I felt and feared, not wanting to betray my Chinese friends, either, for who knew what use my parents might make of what I told, reporting it in duty to the Consul, perhaps, or forbidding me to go again to my friends’ courtyards.

And yet I knew my parents were so wholly good, so utterly innocent, that surely I ought to tell them that Mr. Lu said there were wars ahead and more wars.

I never told them, and I comforted myself that if I had they would have said merely that what would be was in the hands of God. This I did not wholly believe, knowing very well that much can be done by men’s hands if they have the wit and will.

Looking back, I see my life in parts, each part fitting into the age in which I lived. If my childhood was different from that of other children of my time, and it was very different, then the deepest difference was that I always knew that I was a mere leaf in the gathering storm to come. Yet day by day I had plenty of love and kindness and I knew no personal unhappiness. There were no pressures on me, I had hours for myself and blessed freedom, for my parents were lenient and undemanding. And I had the fortune to be born with a nature easily diverted and amused, with a gift, if I had any gift, for enjoying what was around me, both landscape and people. I was healthy and full of good spirits and never idle or bored, a curious child plaguing everyone with questions sometimes too intimate and personal, and yet I will forgive myself to this extent: I had no interest in gossip, but only in story. I was entangled in every human story going on about me, and could and did spend hours listening to anyone who would talk to me, and there were always those ready or needing to talk. Of course I absorbed much useless information, and yet I wonder if any of it was really useless. I took deep interest, for example, in the farming problems of our neighbors, the difficulties of raising crops on five acres or so of land, and yet learned the miracle of how it was done, by hand actually, so that every rice plant was thrust into the paddy field by hand, and not by hired hand at that, but by farmers and their wives and daughters and sons and sons’ wives and their children. I watched the turn of seasons and was anxious with the farmers when there was no rain and yearned with them in their prayer processions and was grateful when sometimes the rain did fall. All knowledge was useful to me later when I began to write.

My own growth, perhaps, was from outside in, or to put it otherwise, I lived outside myself and lived richly. There was another life, however, and it was still imagined and dreamed much more than real. I never quite forgot the months I had spent in America, though my memories dimmed as time went on. I remembered certain hours, such and such an event, rather than consecutive time, and in an effort to hold what I had, I read incessantly. I had always read but now I read to search for and find my own world, the Western world, to which some day I would return, and must return, when the gates of Asia closed against me and my kind.

And yet I found few American books. Literature, it seemed, was English rather than American. Mark Twain my mother considered slightly coarse and though we had
Tom Sawyer
and
Huckleberry Finn
, and I read them, they were unreal to me. I had not seen such persons for myself. Now, decades later, I can see well enough that Mark Twain caught something American and true that none other has, or so I think. Indeed, I have a son whose ways are so foreign to my ways that I would never have known what to make of him, I think, did I not have Mark Twain on my shelves. I read
Tom Sawyer
once a year or so, to help me understand this American boy who is my own.

The truth is that very few American books reached our part of the world in my youthful days, but Kelly and Walsh, the excellent English bookshop in Shanghai, carried a good stock of the new English novels and secondhand editions of the old ones and their lists reached us upcountry and I spent every penny given me, or earned, on books. My parents had already as part of the furnishing of our home the sets of Dickens and Thackeray and George Eliot and Walter Scott and their company, and we had the English poets and a fine edition of Shakespeare, and all these were a solid part of my childhood. My mother took
The Delineator
as her choice in American magazines and my father took
The Century
magazine and we had
St. Nicholas
and
The Youth’s Companion
to keep us in touch with the young of our own country. I doubt the validity of the touch, however, for I somehow got the notion of incredible perfection in America, and I grew up misinformed and ripe for some disillusionment later, though not severe, at that, for common sense came to the rescue.

One interlude broke those tranquil years before I was sent “home,” as we were always taught to call our country, for college. There was always something tragic, though I did not know it then, in the word “home,” used by white men far from home. Wherever these lived, in whatever country of Asia, with or without their wives and children, they spoke of their native lands as “home.” In India one would meet Englishmen who at eighteen had been sent there by their parents to seek a fortune, and had never once gone back, and though they were grey-headed and surely had established homes of some sort for themselves, yet they spoke of England as “home.” And saddest of all, if they had Indian wives or merely lived with Indian women, was to hear the little half-Indian children call England “home,” although they could never be at home there, or in India, either. There were such children in Chinkiang, too, and while my mother insisted that we never speak of them as anything but English or American, as their fathers were, yet I knew they knew that for them “home” was nowhere. I felt this plight so heartily sorrowful that I almost thought it wicked for me to be so lucky as to be wholly an American, my parents insuring all my blood.

So before I went “home” to college there was the interlude. The circumstances were that I was really too young for college, a natural result of being taught only by my mother in Western subjects. The year must be spent somehow, for my father’s furlough was not until 1910 and it was still only 1909.

I think, too, my mother felt that I was not ready to be left alone at college, even in my own country, composed as I was of innocence and an Asian sophistication, a combination resulting from daily living with a people as naturalistic as the Chinese were. I had had little chance to mingle with my own kind. Two months each summer, it is true, we went up into the high Lu mountains to escape the heat of the river levels and there I met the sons and daughters of missionaries and of businessmen. But I was so charmed by the landscape of those mountains that I spent more time in walking and climbing than I did in parties and playing tennis. Besides these yearly holidays, I had met only one American family who had girls of my own age. For a few months or perhaps for a year or two, I cannot remember, for huge events that have since befallen continue to destroy my sense of time, I made friends with the three daughters of a missionary family, healthy, gay and newly come from America. They did not stay long because the malarial climate of our river province made the mother ill. Yet I had a glimpse, at least, of American girls and their delightful ways. I was quiet, not so much from shyness as from the need to discover them entire. I watched them not as individuals but as the whole of America must be, full of such girls, laughing, noisy, wilful, teasing. They went away again and suddenly I was alone as I had never been before.

That was when my mother, always sensitive and observant, decided that I must spend a year away in a boarding school. I had one other such experience, when for a few months I had stayed on at a small new American boarding school in Ruling. It made no impression on me, apparently, certainly I learned nothing, for after three months I was not sent back, and the lessons with my mother were resumed. This time, however, I was to go to Shanghai, to Miss Jewell’s School, the most fashionable and indeed the only good school, supposedly, in our part of the China coast for Western boys and girls. A year or two later the American School was started and to it went the generations of white children after me, mainly American, and they were prepared for American life quite differently and certainly far more adequately than Miss Jewell’s School could do, at least in its latter days when I was there.

When I look back on the months spent in that strange place, the memory is unreal, fantastic, separate from any other part of the times in which I have lived. There was, in the first place, Shanghai, a city altogether unlike any Chinese city. It was a city created by foreigners and for foreigners. Decades earlier Manchu emperors had assigned a living space to the intruding westerners, and in contempt had allowed them nothing better than mud flats on the Whangpoo River, where the Yangtse flows into the sea. Out of this malarial waste the foreigners had made a city. Great buildings lifted their bulk along the handsome Bund. Parks were opened, the famous parks which later provided a slogan for the simmering revolution, “No Chinese, No Dogs.” Fine English department stores did a thriving business, extending themselves from the modern cities of India and from Singapore and Hong Kong, and specialty stores for the arts, for books and for music, completed a metropolis. There were excellent hotels for tourists and local businessmen as well as apartment houses, and expensive clubs for sports and amusements as well as great private homes belonging to the wealthy of all nationalities.

My own knowledge at that time of a city already fabulous around the world was meager enough. Shanghai had been for me merely the gateway to the Pacific Ocean, through which we had to come and go when we left China. No, there was the memory, too, of the few months we had spent there as refugees from the Boxers. Now as an oversensitive and too observant young girl I was to see Shanghai from the windows of a gloomy boarding school, and it was quite a different city. I learned then that, like most great cities, Shanghai was many cities wrapped in one and my knowledge of it depended entirely upon my experiences in it.

Miss Jewell’s School was established in buildings of somber and indestructible grey brick. Never have I seen, except in London, such buildings, shaped, it seemed, for eternal life. Upon the ground floor by the front door was the parlor and there on the day upon which I was to be received my mother and I sat waiting for Miss Jewell. Shades of
Nicholas Nickleby
enveloped me as I looked around that dreary parlor. The windows were partly sunken beneath the pavement of the street outside and they were heavily barred against thieves, a reasonable condition but one which added something dreadful to my impression of the room. Texts from the Bible, framed in dark oak, hung upon the pallid walls, and the furniture was nondescript and mixed. In a small English grate beneath a black wooden mantel an economical fire smoked up the chimney, a handful of coals carefully arranged to smoulder and not to burn.

There we sat, not knowing what to think, and I felt my own misgivings growing deeper as I saw my mother’s usually cheerful face gradually losing its cheer. She was not one to give up easily, however, and so we waited and presently into the room came a short, heavy-set, white-haired, black-eyed woman. It was Miss Jewell herself. She wore a dark full dress whose skirt came to the floor, and she entered silently because, as I was to discover, she always wore soft-soled shoes, partly so that no one might know when she was coming and partly because she suffered grievously from corns. I looked at this handsome sad-faced woman and did not know what she was. I felt most persons immediately, but this was someone new. She greeted us in a low voice and I noticed that although her hands were beautiful they were cold and she had a limp handshake. No warmth came from her. In fairness I must admit that she was already an aging woman and one always tired. She had been the headmistress of her own school for many years and dependent solely upon herself, and in spite of her seeming coldness, she did many good works. During the months I was to stay under her care not a few strange lost women came to her for shelter and somehow she always gave it and arranged work for them or a passage home. It took time for me to discover the hidden goodness, however, and on that first day I felt only a sort of fright.

Perhaps I never understood Miss Jewell fully, nor some of the women she gathered about her, until years later when in a New York theater I saw Eugene O’Neill’s plays about people dying of dry rot. Out of a proud but desiccated New England background Miss Jewell had brought to China a severe goodness, a passionate resignation, a will of steel. She was not like anyone I had ever seen, neither my cheerful parents nor my warmhearted Chinese friends. I kissed my mother goodbye and reminded her in a whisper that she had promised that I need not stay if I did not like it, and then when she had gone I followed Miss Jewell up a wide dark stair behind a Chinese houseboy who carried my bags.

The effect upon me of this school is not important except as it opened to me a strange subterranean world of mixed humanity. I had an attic room which I shared with two other girls, both daughters of missionaries whom I had not known before. Their lives had been wholly different from mine, and although we were soon acquainted, we remained strangers. This was because my parents were so unorthodox as to believe that the Chinese were our equals in every way, and that the Chinese civilization, including its philosophy and religions, was worthy of study and respect. My roommates came of orthodox folk, they had spent their lives in mission compounds, and as a consequence spoke only “servant” Chinese and had no Chinese friends, at least in my sense of the word. They despised me somewhat, I think, because I had been taught by Mr. Kung, and wrote letters regularly to dear Chinese friends. The nearest that we ever came to quarreling, however, was on the subject of Buddhism about which they knew nothing. I, on the other hand, knew a good deal about it in spite of my youth, because my father, always a scholar, had studied Buddhism for many years, among other religions of Asia, and he had written an interesting monograph on the similarities between Christianity and Buddhism. My parents never talked down to their children. On the contrary, they conversed upon matters of their own interest, and we listened, perforce, and joined in as we were able. Thus I knew rather clearly the general ideas my father had about Buddhism, one of these being that the likeness between that religion and Christianity was not accidental but historical since it is quite possible that Jesus may have visited the Himalayan Kingdom of Nepal when he was a young man, and during the twelve unrecorded years of his life. Such tradition is widespread in northern India and is even mentioned in
Vishnu Purana
, the ancient Hindu Scripture. Two thousand years ago all religions were a brotherhood and religious leaders and disciples communicated. My father believed that Jesus knew the teachings of Confucius as well as of Buddhism, for the almost identical expression by Confucius and by Jesus of the Golden Rule, for one example among many, could scarcely be accidental similarity of thought. In short, although my father was a conservative Christian, he had come to the conclusion that in Asia, where human civilization had long ago reached an unparalleled height of philosophical thought and religious doctrine, all religions had contributed their share to the profound and steady movement of mankind toward God.