Pearl Buck - The Goddess Abides

“Forgive me. I’m not a good guest tonight. When I have a problem on my mind—”

She interrupted him. “But I understand. I shouldn’t like you to feel as though you had to entertain me. I was thinking, myself.”

“Of what?”

Impossible to say the truth—“Of you!” She was too shy for that bold truth. She spoke lightly and rose from the chair.

“I was thinking you should go to your bed and sleep away your cold. Your room is the first door on the right, at the head of the stairs. If you find you need anything in the night, press the button, on the telephone that says W. It connects with Weston’s room.”

“What a palace,” he said. He had risen when she rose and now he stood tall above her, and looked down upon her, smiling, and she looked up at him, uncertain of what was next. It was he who decided, abruptly and frankly.

“Do you mind if I kiss you?”

She shook her head, but was speechless, helpless in absurd shyness. A kiss was meaningless, a kiss was nothing nowadays, a kiss could be no more than a casual gift to one’s hostess. Ah, but it took two, one to give; one to receive! She felt his lips on her right cheek, and then lightly, very lightly, he turned her head with his two palms, and she felt his lips upon hers, a quick brush of warmth.

“Good night,” he said. “What time is breakfast?”

“Whenever you like,” she said, as casually as though there had not been this kiss which lay upon her lips a living coal.

“When do you breakfast?” he demanded at the door.

“At nine o’clock.”

“Good heavens, what a lie-abed!”

He pretended to be shocked and she laughed.

“Good night,” she called as he mounted the stairs. “Sleep well in that room! It was mine when I was a girl.”

She was sleepless for hours that night, and when she woke it was nearly ten o’clock the next morning. Her first thought was of him and she rang the kitchen. Weston answered.

“Has Mr. Barnow breakfasted?” she asked.

“Yes, madame, at eight o’clock sharp and left immediately, begging your pardon. He wrote you a note, madame — I put it on the breakfast table for you.”

She hung up, blaming herself. How could she have slept away the last hour of his presence? She made haste to shower and dress and, taking her seat at the table in the sunny breakfast room, she found his note under her plate.

“I am sorry to leave in this discourteous fashion, but I had an early call from the man I came to see. I am to meet him at nine o’clock in his laboratory. I have barely time to make it. My plane will be ready at noon. I shall be flying back to you one of these days. Here is my telephone number — and my thanks. Wonderful to see you again! Jared.”

She studied the handwriting. It was large and firm and very black.

…Summer moved into midsummer. Or was it only she who so lazily moved? In this first summer since Arnold’s death — he had died in the autumn of last year — she found herself given over to a lassitude that was far from empty. Indeed, it seemed to her that she had never enjoyed so richly the sensuous air, the scintillating clarity of sunshine, the lush glory of the flowers and foliage. Since she had not yet fulfilled the year of traditional mourning for her husband she had excuse to decline all invitations she did not wish to accept and to accept only those she did not wish to decline. Once or twice a week she went out to dinner or luncheon with some old friend of hers or Arnold’s, and on the intervening days she cleared from the house the last of Arnold’s personal possessions, his clothes, his pipes, his papers. When this was done, she took up her music again, and seriously, so that several hours a day were occupied at the piano, and other hours were spent in reading books.

She was only beginning to realize now that Arnold had absorbed her life, not purposely but quite naturally and always gently, or perhaps she had been too yielding in allowing herself to be thus absorbed. At any rate, she found a number of small desires to be fulfilled, certain garments, certain colors she had always wanted to wear and for which Arnold had expressed distaste; certain arrangements of the furniture which he had not approved, he being constitutionally opposed to change; even certain foods to which she had been tempted and which he had declared indigestible. Each liberty she now took for herself released her further until she no longer questioned anything she chose to do, as she had done instinctively and by long habit in the first months after Arnold’s death.

“You have changed,” her son told her on one of his rare and unexpected visits. He lived in Washington with his young wife and their only child, a junior executive in some government department leading to service abroad. She was never quite used to his seemingly sudden development from a sandy-haired rather prosaic little boy to a sandy-haired rather prosaic young man. He had been a good little boy and was now a good young man, touchingly so, she felt at this moment, when his honest blue eyes were fixed affectionately upon her. He had “dropped by,” as he put it, one day in early July, on his way to New York, where he was to meet a minor dignitary from some foreign country.

“How have I changed?” she asked half playfully.

“You look rested — and interested again.”

“Interested in what, Tony?”

“How should I know? Life, I suppose.”

“I am learning to live alone, that’s all.”

He leaned over her and kissed her cheek in farewell, glancing at his watch. “Now don’t you get lonely. Fay and I and the baby can always run up for a few days. Pity that Millicent lives so far away!”

She parried Tony’s suggestion.

“Oh, no — thank you, dear. I must learn to live my own life.”

“Well, let us know—”

He was off and she relapsed into indolence. She sauntered to the terrace upon which the drawing room opened and stretched herself upon a long chair. Indolent, yes, but a productive indolence, she told herself, sorting out life and feeling — feeling as she had not explored feeling since adolescence. The sun, warm upon her skin, enlivened her blood and yet infused it with delicious languor. And why, she inquired of herself, did she continue to dream of another house, a house of her own, when here she was the heir to beauty long inherited? From where she lay, she could see, and did appreciate, the vistas of clean-cut lawn, tended shrubbery and vast old trees, culminating at a distance in a quiet pool, a fountain, the marble figure of a Grecian woman, installed by her grandfather when these acres, this house, were his inheritance.

This remembrance of Jared, which never left her, quickened into sharp longing of which she was half ashamed. Had he not come so suddenly, had he not left so abruptly, had he not been obsessed by a dream of his own, a dream that obviously had nothing to do with her, had he, in short, visited her wholeheartedly, with whatever intention she could not imagine, then would he not have lingered here, have been beside her in another chair as comfortable as this one in which she lay, warmed by the sun and made languid by beauty? She was too experienced a woman not to comprehend the danger into which she was moving, and more than anger, for it was also absurdity. She would not allow herself to fall in love with a man years younger than herself. Years? Decades—

“Madame, the telephone, please. Person to person,” Weston said at the door.

She rose at once. Of course it was Edwin.

“My love,” his kind old voice said at her ear. “I find it impossible to live any longer without a sight of you. Are you completely obligated to others or dare I suggest a little visit? If it were possible, how gladly I would come to you! Legs could do it, but my heart, an ancient valve, cries danger. I don’t want to become a sudden invalid in your house, although for me it would have pleasant aspects.”