Pearl Buck - The Goddess Abides

“Springs from an idea?” she suggested.

He repudiated this. “No, the idea is the first reality.”

“The possibility of reality,” she amended.

“Aha, I’ve got you!” he cried in triumph. “Then the possibility is in itself a reality, isn’t it?”

She pondered and made reply. “But possibility is not continuance!”

“No, but continuance is not entirely negated, so long as there is the possibility of continuance.”

She laughed. “So how to get out of this tangle?”

He did not laugh or even smile. Indeed he became intensely serious. Releasing her hand, which all this time he had continued to hold, he seemed to forget her presence.

“By the intuitions,” he mused. “If perpetuity is the reality of space, of energy, of atoms themselves, shall it be denied to us, who know our being? I reject the absurdity!”

She listened, enthralled, caught and held in the brilliant outpouring of words and logic and so continued for hours. When at last the clock struck twelve he stopped abruptly. “Good heavens, how I go on! And your angelic patience! Come to bed, my love.”

And in her bedazzlement, quite forgetting that she had planned otherwise, she let herself be led away.

…In the night she felt herself enfolded and, waking, she found him at her side. In the moonlight she saw his face above her, amazing in its strong beauty. Age revealed the outlines of perfect bone structure, the eyes, still burning bright, were steel blue beneath silvered brows. He had a tender mouth, not small, not large, the lips delicately sculptured, and suddenly she felt them on her own, passionately tender.

“I have been watching my love asleep,” he murmured, “so beautiful in sleep, my darling!”

“Have you not slept?” she asked.

“I will not,” he replied. “I want to know you are here — every moment I want to know. You give me certainty. I shall survive. I know, because I live! There is that substance in life which cannot yield to death. Plato was convinced of it, long ago. I have the right to live, my beloved. It would be too great an injustice, too irrational a waste, were I to die — I or any other who demands life. Survival will be because it ought to be. This is the great moral imperative.”

Enfolded, uplifted and encouraged, she felt her love for him rise upward as though on wings. She adored him with a sense of worship. His spirit, bold and brave, the ardor of his nature, the brilliance of his mind, piercing beyond knowledge, awed her and gave her protection. If there were one in whom she could put her trust, this was he. She drew him to her, she for the first time the aggressor, and kissed him full upon the mouth, feeling meanwhile delight and pain — delight because she loved him in a way she had not known before, with a pure pleasure, and pain because she must live in this body of hers years beyond him. But now, at this brief moment, brief because it could not be shared beyond the span of years, she felt herself swept clean of every other love. She had loved Arnold but without worship. Indeed, he would have been shy of worship, protested against it, rejected it because it made him uncomfortable. But Edwin had the greatness of simplicity.

“I love you,” she told him. “You speak of reality. Well, this is reality. I love you. True, I love you in a way I don’t understand, but I love you.”

He received this assurance with large calm. “Then we shall meet beyond the grave. The power to love — I to love you is easy enough, my darling, but you to love me, this gives me guarantee. Love pierces through all that is false, all that is ephemeral. Love finds reality, love creates the longing to live forever, and the longing is the promise of immortality. ‘He that loveth aright,’ Plato tells us, ‘is born of the immortal One.’ O my darling, thank you!”

He released her, he fell back on his pillow and, breathing a deep sigh of peace, was instantly asleep.

…She returned home the next morning and a few weeks passed, three or four, even five, possibly, for she scarcely marked the days. They were peaceful weeks, vaguely happy, vague because she made no effort. Amelia was in Europe for three months, and she had no word from Jared. She was almost grateful for his silence, for it gave her space in which to live with herself alone, to sort herself out, to discover her needs, if she had them, her hopes, if hope was necessary. Friends came to call, to tell her how well she looked, how glad they were that she was recovering sensibly from Arnold’s death. She listened, she smiled, she was silent. What she was beginning to understand was that a new self was appearing within her. With the passing of Arnold, a life had passed, her previous life, childhood and girlhood, her young womanhood, her wifehood. All things now were to be made new, what and how she did not know, but the cause was in herself, the cause and the source. She must wait for the self to unfold.

Meanwhile she worked on the plans for her house. In the mornings after her late breakfast, she worked, planning every detail, every color, every device. She was a good mathematician, and she used a slide rule skillfully. She would be her own architect, and soon she would go in search of a site. Then she would find a contractor. And this old house in which she still lived, what would become of it? Give it away? Sell it? With it she would be selling a lifetime of memories. That decision, too, must wait. She was not sure yet of her own destiny, She brooded often and long upon her new self, and this brooding separated her from the past. More than a house must be planned. A woman must live in the new house. Would she live alone?

She was in the library one morning, thus meditating, while she glanced over her mail. Still no word from Jared, but then he never wrote letters. If he wanted communication it would be by telegram or telephone. There was, however, a letter from Edwin. She was not quite sure from the handwriting on the envelope. It was sprawling and uncertain, not like Edwin’s surprisingly firm, black writing. But it was from him, as she perceived when she opened it, a few lines straggling off into nothingness.

“O my darling, the change has come! I am stricken. ‘Te morituri salutamus.’ It is I who am about to die — I alone. I die, as I have lived, in the faith that we shall meet again—”

That was all — no explanation, no description, simply he was dying. She started to her feet, but the telephone, ringing suddenly and sharply, stayed her. She took the receiver and heard a man’s voice.

“Mrs. Chardman?”

“I am she.”

“This is Stephen Steadley. You are a friend of my father. He has asked me to tell you. He is dying. It is a matter of a few days, perhaps hours.”

“I opened his letter just a few minutes ago and I was afraid—”

“Everything is being done. It’s his heart, of course. We are all here, my brothers, my sister and I — the doctors.”

“Is he conscious?”

“Very much so. Very interested in the process of dying, in spite of — difficulties.”

“Pain?”

“Yes, but he refused sedation. He wants to know, he says—”

His voice broke and she liked him for it. “You know we have been very close — friends,” she said.

“He adores you. We’ve all been so grateful that you broke through his profound loneliness. None of us could do it.”

“He broke through mine, too.”

It was all she could say. She could not ask the question, Shall I come? She could not ask it of herself. She saw him lying on the bed, that beautiful dying body, stretched in death.

“Good-bye,” she said softly.

“Good-bye?” his son repeated, surprised. “Oh, yes, well, I’ll let you know immediately.”