My Several Worlds (27 page)

To the sea I go with love and terror, for actually I am afraid of water and I know why. I crossed the Pacific too often and too young, and I am never deceived by calm under sunshine or even under the moon. The madness is there, hidden in the depths of unknown caverns. And yet I go back to the sea again and again, although I do not want to stay long and there are certain times of the year when I would not be near it for any reason.

The beach is wide and deserted today except for a few fishermen who do not turn their heads to see who passes. It is as private here as any lonely coral isle could be, white sand, blue sky and a sea more blue. The children have gone out to sail, the house is empty and quiet, and memory flows unchecked as I sit alone by the seaward window.

…I had been in Nanking only once before I went to live there and that had been as a girl when I visited a school friend. My memories of it were vague and overlaid with later experiences, and now I saw the city with fresh eyes. It lies seven miles from the Yangtse River, a vast walled area, and its city wall is one of the handsomest in China, made of large brick as strong as stone, and so wide at the top that several automobiles can travel abreast. This wall is twenty-five miles in circumference, and I was to know it later for various reasons, one of which was that during the famines which befell North China periodically the refugees flooded into Nanking and lacking other space built their matting huts on top of the city wall where the winter winds were the most bitter. One of the few angry discussions I ever had with a Chinese friend was with a young woman of Nanking who had been graduated from the University of Chicago, where she specialized in social service. We had a famine that first winter in Nanking, a very bad one, and I tried to do my share in getting food and clothing for the thousands of wretched people huddled on the city wall. Thus I went to Mrs. Yang, only that was not her name. She was a young and very pretty woman—pretty, that is, in a sort of hard smart modern fashion. Her satin dresses were Chinese, but cut tight to her slender figure, and her hair was short. Her house was a two-story, Western brick building, furnished in semi-foreign fashion. In the neat little living room with flowered carpet, curtained windows, formal modern landscapes in gilt frames on the wall, I told her of the plight of the refugees on the city wall. She would not believe that conditions were as I portrayed them for her, nor could I persuade her to climb the city wall and see for herself. The street in which she lived was the most modern in the old city and she never went far from it.

“I saw such things in Chicago slums,” she said complacently, “but I am sure that they are not here.”

Nor would she stir herself to find out the truth. In my memory she is embalmed as the typical Western-educated Chinese who is no longer Chinese. She had created a little tight nice world of her own, whose citizens were all like herself. They lived in neat little brick houses, their husbands had university jobs and their children went to an exclusive kindergarten. Beyond this they did not want to know. Perhaps they were afraid to know. China had its vast and frightening aspects.

The city wall was more than a place for refugees, however. In the spring when they had gone back to their land, it became a pleasant place to walk and I could gaze out over the countryside and the mountains. One mountain stood high and clear against the sky, Tze-ch’ing Shan or Purple Mountain, and it became a resort of delight as I came to know my city better. Temples were hidden in the mountain, beautiful shaded spots of repose, and near there, too, were the tombs of the Ming Emperors, approached by avenues of huge stone beasts and men on guard. There were many stories still told about the Mings. No one, it was said, knew where the emperors were actually buried, for at the time of an Imperial funeral, nine processions, all exactly alike, proceeded at the same time from the nine gates of the city. Stories were told also of fabulous treasures buried in the tombs but I doubted that. Too many tombs had been looted during the centuries, and probably all that was left was the human dust, and that much disturbed.

I cannot but linger on Purple Mountain, even at this distance of time and space, for many of my happiest hours were spent there. Its crest rose to a peak, and I climbed it alone one day in July and reaching the cliff I looked over it. There on the northern flank of the mountain, before my astonished eyes spread a field of royal-blue wild monkshood, all in flower. I went to the mountain top each year after that to see such beauty, and I shall never forget the sight.

Bamboos grew upon the southern side of the mountain and pines and trees of every kind, and among them were pleasant stone-flagged walks which the priests had made for pilgrims. I loved the ineffable peace of the temples, and although I did not worship the gods there or anywhere, I liked to sit in the quiet of their presence, or perhaps only in the presence of lost prayers, still lingering in the fragrance of the incense that burned unceasingly before the images, a symbol of yearning human hope.

The countryside was surpassingly beautiful around Nanking and I reveled in it after the flat northern landscape, for I am one of those whom any city confines unbearably and am compelled to escape, although in Nanking there was much to enjoy even inside the walls. The site of the old Porcelain Pagoda, for example, which had been one of the wonders of ancient China, was a beautiful spot, and one could still find bits of the bright enameled tiles of which it had been built, many-colored, but mainly green. The Porcelain Pagoda is said to have been the most beautiful of all the pagodas in China. It was built in the early part of the fifteenth century by Yung-lo, the third Ming Emperor, as a thank offering to his Empress. Only nine of its originally planned thirteen stories were ever completed and even so the building took nineteen years. It was nearly three hundred feet high and nearly one hundred feet in diameter at its base, and it tapered gracefully as it rose. One hundred and forty lamps lit the brilliantly colored tiles by night, and when the sun fell upon it by day, it was truly a spectacle. Of course popular superstition surrounded such a fabulous building and all sorts of magic qualities were attributed to it. The lamps were said to illumine the thirty-three heavens above and to prevent disaster to all around. The pagoda had been destroyed in 1856 by the Tai-p’ing revolutionaries because they feared that its strange geomantic powers would work against them, and so all I could see of it in reality was the base and the bits of broken tile gleaming in the wild grass.

Near the site of the Porcelain Pagoda was a small but beautiful temple famous for its great bronze bell. This was the Temple of the Three Sisters, and the resonant echo of the bell was the result, an old priest told me, of the flesh and blood of the three young girls. They were the daughters of the bellmaker who, in spite of all efforts, could not persuade the metal to give forth a pure tone. The whole family was in distress, for the Emperor had commissioned the bell. One night the bellmaker’s three daughters dreamed that a goddess came down and told them that if they would leap into the molten metal the next time the father melted the bell to cast it again, the tone would come out a deep pure music. Without telling their father they determined to sacrifice themselves, and when he melted the bell, they leaped into the cauldron without his knowledge. What was his wonder, when the bell was recast, to hear it give forth a magic voice! It is a story I have heard of other temple bells and so often that there must once have been such devoted daughters somewhere, if not at the Temple of the Three Sisters in Nanking.

And I remember Lotus Lake outside the city wall, where I was to spend so many happy afternoons and evenings. There in summer at the end of a long hot day I would go with a friend or two and engage a little boat, in which we sat as long as we liked while the boatman rowed us through the watery lanes of the lotus plants. The great rosy blossoms lay open upon the surface of the lake until the sun set and they slowly closed, their fragrance lingering sweetly upon the air. In the dusk the boatman would reach under the huge heavy leaves and pluck off lotus pods for us secretly, for the concession for lotus seed was rented out, such seeds being a delicacy used for feast dishes. In the moonlight we pulled the pithy pods apart and peeled the seeds hidden in them, nuts as big as almonds. If we were really hungry the boatman’s wife would cook a dish of noodles for us, and while we ate we listened to the sounds of singing over the water, a pretty courtesan, perhaps a “flower girl,” strumming her lute for her lover.

I remember, too, The Drum Tower, a handsome and ancient edifice near to the house that had been allotted to us for a home. The Drum Tower was a vast square building, painted red, upon which stood the squat tiered tower. A wide high tunnel made the building a gateway through which the main street to the river ran, and in those shadowy depths beggars took shelter in winter, and in summer the melon vendors sat there to keep their melons cool.

But indeed the old city was full of beauty and there is much to remember, too much to tell. I was grateful when I found that my windows opened to Purple Mountain, and I chose for my own an attic room from which I could look over the compound wall upon the near view of vegetable gardens and a cluster of brick farmhouses and a large fish pond. Beyond these, on the left, were the curved roofs of the university and beyond them a pagoda and the city wall and then the mountain. The city was full of trees and gardens, and this was because it had been designed from the first, centuries ago, to contain within its walls sufficient space so that if enemies attacked, the gates could be locked and the besieged could live indefinitely upon the land inside.

Within my own wall was a grey brick house surrounded by plenty of lawn, a bamboo grove and a vegetable garden, while the servants’ quarters were in one corner at the back of the house. I set myself joyfully to make a flower garden and especially a rose garden, for the lovely Chinese tea roses had refused to grow in the dry northern climate. The gardener, who had been on the place before, begged to be kept on, which I was willing to do, and he led me about the place explaining its difficulties. When we came to the bamboo grove he gave me grave looks and sighed.

“There is something very strange about these bamboos, Learned Mother,” he said.

“Indeed,” I replied with interest. “What is peculiar?”

“They never have sprouts,” he replied sadly. “Each spring I look for the sprouts and, alas, there are none.”

“That is strange,” I agreed. “I have lived in China since I was very small and never did I hear of bamboos with no sprouts in the spring. We must get up early in the morning when the season comes again and perhaps we shall find them. I like to eat bamboo sprouts in the spring.”

He gave me the flicker of an eye and nodded, and thereafter we had no trouble at all about sprouts. Each spring they came up thickly and inevitably, and the cook made delicious dishes from them. As for the gardener, he stayed with me faithfully for the next years until a revolutionary army drove all white people from the city and then he disappeared and I never saw him again. With him, I was told, disappeared various valuables, and I suppose that he paid himself back for the bamboo sprouts he no longer ate. But I was fond of him for he made me laugh very often, rascal and wild-witted fellow that he was, and his wife, a small harassed woman, was my devoted friend. She was older than he, and nothing that either of us could do could prevent him from gambling his wages away, so that I often gave her secret money to keep her children from starving. They lived in a hut outside the wall, for he did not want the trouble of his many children trampling the flower beds, and much to his own and his wife’s misery, they averaged more than a child a year. Indeed, as the poor little bedraggled mother said to me once, “It is mercy that we women must have nine months to make a child, for if it were only a day, I should have a new one every day, that man being what he is.”

During the long hot summers there was always a new and ailing baby to keep alive somehow, and the mother’s milk never was enough and each morning I made up bottles of formula and the mother came for them. Each year I remonstrated with the gardener and urged self-control, and he agreed with all that I said, but the new baby arrived as promptly as ever. At last I could only look my reproach, for words were useless, and one day he came in and said he had a favor to ask of me.

“Please, Learned Mother,” he said plaintively, “find me a job on the opposite side of the city so that I cannot come home.”

I knew too well what this meant.

“Which is it this time?” I inquired. “Boy or girl?”

“Both,” he said in a whisper.

“Twins!” I gasped.

He nodded his miserable head, speechless.

It was another world, familiar and yet new. My parents were not too far away, only two hours by rail, and I went home as often as I could to see them. My mother was plainly fading, though she came of a long-lived family and was not yet old, and I was increasingly anxious about her.

My child was born that first year in Nanking, too, and after that I was not so free to come and go as I had been. I did not mind, for to have a child was a miracle to me and I did not dream of the dark future in store for us both. Mercifully I was to have nearly four years of happy ignorance about her. During that same year my mother died, not suddenly, but slowly and unwillingly, and I am glad that she never knew what lay ahead for me. But let me tell of the year of birth and death.

It was 1921 and I was in full touch again with what was going on in China. Japanese militarists had made great profit from the World War, for in 1915 Japan began the conquest of China in earnest. While the Western Powers were busy with the war, she made the infamous demands which would have reduced China almost to a colony, until the nine-power Washington conference, in 1922, was to return the province of Shantung to China and restored a measure of her independence. It soon became evident, however, that unless China could organize herself somehow and establish a unified government, she would eventually be swallowed up by Japan. Responsible Chinese were anxious, as one irresponsible war lord after another continued to borrow money from Japan and to give national resources as surety.