But Chan-King was a clearer thinker, just then, and knew the truth of
this situation better than I did. "Which one?" he asked me
significantly, in a tone that made me see the essential hollowness of my
protest.
On the Sunday before our ship sailed, Chan-King and I bade farewell to
China. In company with our parents and many other relatives we walked to
the top of a very high hill, where an old temple, which commanded a
magnificent view for miles around, crouched contentedly among the rocks,
in the grey sunshine. It was a temple of the three religions, with huge
stone images of Confucius, Buddha and Lao-tse grouped in its outer
court. Together, Chan-King and I climbed to the crest of the terraced
rock. I looked about me, down upon the proud, bright little village,
alert and colourful on the hill-side, upon the scattered fertile
patches in the midst of the barren mountains where tigers build their
lairs. The eternal hills swept the lowering, clouded skies, rolling away
from us, silent, shadow-filled. A surging love of the very soil under my
feet, a clinging to the earth of China, overwhelmed me. I wished to
kneel down and kiss that beloved dust. "Oh, Chan-King," I said, shaking
with emotion, "This is home! I wish we were not leaving, even for a
day!"
"We will come again soon," he said, in Chinese, "and we will live here
when we are old."
That evening we sat together in the quiet garden. From Mother's
apartments came the sound of her young nephew's voice as he chanted his
morrow's lessons. We heard the subdued merriment of two little maids,
teasing each other in the hall beyond. Along the outer path a
sedan-chair passed with rhythmic sway, the bamboo supports creaking a
soft accompaniment to the pad-pad of the bearers' sandalled feet.
From varying distances came the clang of a brass gong, shuddering on the
stillness, the staccato sound of slender bamboo sticks shaken together
in a cylindrical box, the measured beat of a small drum-rattle, as the
different street venders announced their wares. Over the hills, now
purple in twilight, the round moon swung leisurely into the violet sky.
Strange breaths of incense were wafted about us. The sea-breeze stirred
the branches of a dragon's-eye tree close by, where the ripening
fruit-balls tapped gently against each other like little swaying
lanterns. For long moments we sat in silence, with clasped hands.
Out of that silence my husband spoke softly, words I had long yearned to
hear: "Absence, Margaret, teaches many things. Once it showed you your
own heart. This time it has taught me to believe with you in the
immortality of love like ours. Physically, we may be separated at
times, but mentally, spiritually, you and I are one for all eternity."
The moon rose higher, golden, perfect, even as our love.
A few days later, we sailed for America. The rest may be told in a few
words, for, after all, no words could adequately tell it. A week after
our arrival in America, Chan-King was stricken with influenza. For
several years he had been in the shadow of a slow illness, but with
stout resistance and such buoyant recurring periods of good health that
we had for a time almost forgotten that early and sinister threat. But
those years of struggle were all thrown into the balance against him
when the decisive hour came. After six days, he died. Quietly, with
terrible implacability, death closed over him. We feared a sudden end,
it is true, but were still incredulous of such a calamity. We gave each
other what assurance we could: our ultimate farewells were simple
renewals of faith, a firmer tightening of our hands for our walk in
darkness. "Of all the world, you are my love," he said, many times.
"More than anyone else you have understood, you have been unfailing--you
have been my wife." And, almost as he spoke, my arms held no longer my
living beloved, but only the clay where his spirit had been and would
come no more.
So, by the visible evidences, my history is finished. But it has begun
anew for me, not as I wished, not as I hoped, but on a level that I can
endure. For I have my children and my memories and my home in China,
which waits with the gentle healing of sight and sound and place ... and
I have learned that in love, and only in love, we can wring spiritual
victory out of this defeat of the body.