My Several Worlds (63 page)

One cold winter’s night we sat by the living room fire in our home. The snow lay on the ground, deep and unploughed. No one could come in, none go out. It had been a wonderful day, the snow falling, the wind blowing, the children playing outside until they were half frozen, and in the evening after their supper we had popcorn before they went to bed. They were bathed and read to and tucked into their snug covers, and the father and I had settled ourselves to our books before the fire when suddenly the telephone rang. I answered unwillingly, wondering what neighbor could be calling, and acknowledging my name to the operator. Then I heard her say excitedly, “Hold on, please—Tokyo calling!”

Tokyo? But how did Tokyo have my unlisted private number?

“Wait,” I said, and I called my husband. “Will you take it for me?” I said.

I felt a strange unaccustomed fear. Could Tokyo reach across the sea like this and pluck me out of my house on a faraway hillside, in my own country, and in the darkness, too, of a winter’s night? And for what reason?

He took the receiver from my hand and listened. Then he laughed. “It’s only a newspaper—
The Mainichi
,” he said. “They want to wish you a happy New Year and ask you a few questions.”

I need not be afraid, then? But still I was, a little. Nevertheless, I took the receiver from him, and almost instantly heard my name called and a very Japanese voice wishing me a happy New Year, quite as though Japan had not attacked China, and then the questions. They were the usual ones. What do you think of Japanese literature? What is your next book? Have you some message for us, please? Ah,
sodeska!
Thank you very much. Good-bye. Exactly as though there were no war going on! I put up the receiver, feeling dazed, and went back to my chair by the fireside. No, I paused on the way and looked out of the window. The snow was still falling. I could see it by the glare of the snowplow just now turning into our lane from the road, and throwing great clouds of frothing white into the darkness. Around us were miles of white countryside, miles of plains and valleys and mountains and beyond them miles of ocean between this house and Japan and yet Tokyo had reached across them all and found me! And the voice was friendly, though nations were at war! There was a moral somewhere, but I let it lie. For me the fact simply was that I could not escape any of my several worlds.

And so the visitors have continued through the years to come and to go and to come again, faces, voices, letters. James Yen, the great simpleminded Chinese, once stayed long enough for us to write a little book together, entitled
Tell the People
, and it is made from his own words spoken to me while I listened, and it tells of his work in mass education in his own country. Many years he carried it on, and now he is exiled but his methods are being used by the Communists in their effort to make the people quickly literate. And that little book, he tells me, has gone far and wide over Asia, where other peoples want to learn to read because reading is the key to learning, and they have never had the key. And Nehru’s nieces came to us in the summers that Madame Pandit was in India and they were here at school, and we learned to love the beautiful warmhearted girls. They are married now and all but the youngest have children. I remember that youngest one because sometimes when I rested in the evening on the couch she stroked my feet with such gentle skilful movements of her palms that the weariness went out of me, and I felt rested even in my spirit. It is an Indian gift, natural in a country where the people go barefoot and walk many miles because they must. Uday Shankar, the Indian dancer, and his wife and Ananda, their little boy, have been our guests, and they, too, were so beautifully gentle and graceful that we all watched them in fascination.

Madame Pandit has come many times, and the memory of her statuesque beauty recalls itself, and I remember especially the evening of the day when her brother, Jawaharlal Nehru, left the United States after his visit here. We had talked with him alone, had dined with him, had met as best we could his long weary brooding silences and the sudden outpourings when a remark stirred some interest of his own. The deep affection between brother and sister was touching. Two lonely people, obviously, they shared their memories and each was better for the other’s presence. When he had gone, she was alone again and in our house I saw that it was a loneliness that could not be healed. Life has set them both apart, as great men and women are always set apart, and therefore lonely perhaps because they know too much, have felt too much, and can never do enough of what they see needs doing to satisfy themselves or even others.

Josuè de Castro of Brazil came here after writing his brilliant book,
The Geography of Hunger
, and what power there was in his strong and flashing mind! Shizue Masugi, the woman novelist of Japan, was another guest, and Sumie Mishima, and Lin Yutang and his family many times through the years, and Wang Yung and her husband, Hsieh, and Toro Matsumoto, now master in a famous school in Japan, and with him, too, his family. I must not forget Mbono Ojike, now an official in Nigeria. Ojike, a tall, merry fellow, told us many tales and made us laugh very often. His father was an African chieftain who had ten wives, and the old man, deciding to become a Christian, went to church one Sunday, with all his wives behind him in procession. At the door he was met by the Christian missionary who in consternation cried, “But you cannot come to church with ten wives!”

“Why not?” Ojike’s father asked. “They are all good women!”

“It is not Christian to have ten wives,” the missionary objected. “You must choose one and send the others away.”

The chieftain retired to the shade of a tree to consider the matter, his ten wives waiting in a circle about him. How could he dismiss nine good women? He could not be so cruel. Beckoning to them to follow him he went home again and gave up church and Christianity.

Ojike, by the way, went travelling for The East and West Association, creating mirth and joy wherever he went, a proud gay creature, tall and black. In some Midwestern city where he was scheduled to speak, he arrived by train and seeing a large hotel whose sign was “The Chieftain,” he decided it was appropriate for his stay, and so he strode into the lobby—with that graceful jungle panther stride of his—and asked for a room.

The clerk looked at him sidewise. “We don’t have a room for you,” he said at last.

“Why not, sir?” Ojike demanded.

“We don’t take colored people,” the clerk said.

Ojike’s great eyes flashed. He drew himself up to his most tall, haughty as the prince he was. “Sir,” he said majestically, “I am not colored. I am black!”

“Colored,” in his country was an insult. “Colored” were people mixed with white blood, and he had no white blood in him. He would not budge and demanded that the leading citizen who had arranged his visit with our office be called for. Much telephone conversation followed and at last the clerk, dazed and stammering, found a room and Ojike went upstairs in majesty, his bags carried by a bellboy. Next morning so he told us, when he came out of his room to go to the dining room for breakfast, a Negro maid in the corridor fell on her knees at the sight of him.

“Oh Jesus,” she babbled, “Lord Jesus Christ done come!”

“Get up, woman,” Ojike said with dignity. “I am not Jesus. I am Ojike.”

“Jesus,” she insisted, “you must be Jesus! They wouldn’t let no black man sleep in this hotel unless he was Jesus come again.”

Pages I need to write down the names of the men and women and the children who have come to bless our house and bring the world to us here, so that our children, wherever they go, will see no face which seems strange to them, for such faces are their lively childhood memories and among the happiest they have. This also has been their education.

And if I have shared my friends from other worlds with family and neighbors, others have drawn me deep into my American world. My first friend was Gertrude Lane, then editor of
The Woman’s Home Companion
, and she was the first American woman that I knew well. Gertrude Battle Lane—I write her full name because it suited her. She had come as a girl from a little New England town, and with a single ambition, she told me, which was to work for that magazine. Her first job was errand girl, office girl, the lowest possible, she said, and at the beck and call of everyone. And from that place she rose by sheer ability to be the editor and the highest paid woman in the United States. She loved to tell the story of it, not only because it was her story but because it was an American story, for where could it have happened except in our country? She was not young when I first knew her, her hair was grey, her face and figure no longer youthful, but her spirit was dauntless. She loved good talk and good food and she had a shrewd wisdom, not intellectual but practical and sound. We met often for luncheon and it was characteristic that she chose quiet expensive places and pondered over the menu. And I had pleasant visits in her country house and with her friends.

I came to know Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and visited her, too, and through her another American life revealed itself to me, and in as American a home as was ever built, founded nearly two centuries ago, and still maintained in the same Vermont town. In a strange sorrowful way my worlds met again through Dorothy Canfield, for she lost her son in the Philippines during the war, a brave young doctor who gave his life for his fellow Americans when he went to rescue American troops. For a monument to him, his parents brought to this country the young Filipino doctor and his wife, also a doctor, who had been the son’s best friends while he was with them, and the parents gave these two the opportunity for postgraduate study which enabled them to return to their homeland and set up their own hospital.

Thus my worlds meet again and again, until the several are fused in one. Oscar Hammerstein and his wife Dorothy, world citizens, our friends and neighbors, have stood beside me in the work for Welcome House, and not only they, but others as steadfast here in our own community. James Michener, friend and neighbor, too, world citizen again in spirit and in act, and others who have never left this American world and yet have had hearts as wide as the globe, and minds as free, these who have stood with me in the work for Welcome House are my friends. And now, I suppose, it is time to tell of Welcome House, for the children of Welcome House do indeed unite my worlds in one.

It all began one Christmastime and I have already told that story under the title “No Room at the Inn,” and here I shall compress the years into a few pages.

I have never, I believe, willingly undertaken a job outside of my home and my work, which is writing novels. I have inherited no crusading blood and I dislike publicity with a fervor which may as well be called hatred, for that is what it is. When I have undertaken a task which has nothing to do with home or my writing, it has always been with reluctance and only after a period of desperate search for someone else, anyone else, to do it. Certainly I had no thought of opening a child adoption agency in the United States and this after I was fifty years old. Yet that is exactly what I did.

I had long since ceased to think of adoption agencies. My own children were all but grown up, and my interests were in their age group. Then suddenly one cold December day, when our house was all in ferment with approaching Christmas and long-legged boys and girls with their skis and their dances and glorious hodgepodge of Christmas presents and holly wreaths, the postman brought me a special-delivery letter from a distant child adoption agency, asking if I could help them place for adoption a little baby, the son of an American white mother and an East Indian father, but rejected by both families on both sides of the globe. Do not ask why a child is rejected, for I cannot understand it, whatever the reason. The agency workers had exhausted every possibility in the whole of the United States, they told me, and they had even tried to place him in India, but no one wanted him. They enclosed his picture. I looked into the sad little face of a lonely child, and the happy world in which I lived dropped away. What I saw was hundreds of little faces like his in India, hundreds and thousands of young men and women, born of the white man and the Indian woman, not wanted by either and therefore lost, for the unwanted child is always the lost child. But this little boy was American, born here in my own country, and for me it was unendurable that he should be lost here as he would have been lost in India. I hastened to the telephone and called every friend I had who was Indian, or partly Indian, everyone, too, whom I knew who had been to India and might know other Indians, and over and over again I told the baby’s story. Still nobody wanted him. The agency letter said, “If we cannot place him by the first of January, then regretfully we shall have to put him permanently in a Negro orphanage where he does not belong because of course he is Caucasian on both sides. We have no prejudice against the Negro but we are reluctant to put upon any child’s shoulders the burden of prejudice which they bear and which he might be spared.”

Yes, I understood that. Hastily I gathered my family around me and told them the story. What should we do? There was not one dissenting voice, from the father to the youngest daughter. All of them said, “Bring him here. If we can’t find a better place for him, we will keep him.”

Thus authorized, I telephoned the agency. Soon after Christmas in the darkness of a winter’s night, a small dark boy was deposited in my arms, his enormous brown eyes quietly terrified and he utterly silent because his thumb was buried permanently in his mouth. The people who brought him went away again, and I took him upstairs to the crib we had prepared and I put him to bed. He did not sleep much that night and neither did I. He did not cry aloud but now and then he cried in a small voice subdued by fear, and then I held him until he slept.

Astounding as this advent was, yet another came and in the same month. A friend wrote me that a little half-Chinese child was to be born in a certain city hospital. The child had nowhere to go, for the Chinese father, already married, could not acknowledge him and had returned to China, and the American mother had no way to keep him. Could the child be sheltered with me until I could find some family for him? The local adoption agency could not accept him. By now I felt that I was under some guidance I did not understand. My family said, “We may as well have another,” and so, on a cold January day, we brought home from the big city hospital a little baby boy, nine days old, literally naked, for we took clothes with us to put upon him. And he, too, began to live with us.