Pearl Buck - The Goddess Abides

Immediately Edwin dies, she thought, but said nothing, her voice choked with tears. She put up the receiver, and sat with her head between her hands, her elbows on the desk. She had known, of course, had always known, that this moment must come. But now it had come and she must be ready to hear that he was no more. Should she go to him? How could she decide? Would not her presence sharpen for him the agony of separation? Better to leave him with his children; better to let him slip away into the unknown with his children about his bed.

She rose, undecided, and finding house and gardens intolerable she got into her small convertible, which she always drove herself, leaving her larger car to her chauffeur, and alone she drove toward the sea. The coastline of Jersey was impossibly crowded and she drove northward toward Southampton. Somewhere beyond Red Hills she would, perhaps, find a lonely cliff by the sea and there imagine a spot where her house could stand apart. By midnight she could be back. Yet what was the haste? Death would not wait and she knew she could not go to Edwin to see him die.

…At sunset she found the spot for which she searched. Between two towns she found a cliff and upon the cliff an emptiness. Doubtless it belonged to the owner of some great estate, but she would persuade him to sell. It belonged to such a person for at one side of the cliff, almost hidden by overhanging trees, dwarfed by sea winds, she discovered a narrow stairway leading to a small white beach between rocks. The steps were not often used, for they were covered with fallen leaves and moss, but they could be used, although she resisted the idea of using them now, because she was alone and if she slipped there would be no one to discover her plight, and darkness was falling fast, for the days were growing shorter. She must go back.

…It was midnight before she reached home and Weston was waiting for her.

“The telephone, madame. You’re to call, if you please, this number. And you had me worried, madame, if I may say so, you being alone like that and the night being black and no moon.”

“Thank you, Weston,” she said, moving to the telephone.

He bowed and went away and she rang and waited. In a moment the same voice answered, which this morning she had heard.

“Mrs. Chardman?”

“It is I.”

“I’ve been waiting. My father died at six o’clock. His last moments were very painful. We were all about his bed. But the strangest change is taking place, a transfiguration. All the lines of pain are fading away. A beautiful peace—”

The voice broke.

“He was very beautiful,” she said softly.

The voice began bravely. “Yes — much more beautiful than any of his children. The funeral will be on Thursday. Will you come?”

“No,” she said quickly. “I don’t want to think of him as dead. For me he lives — forever.”

“Thank you,” he said.

Silence then and she put up the receiver. That part of her life, that strange interlude which she could never explain to anyone, and would never, that, too, was over. She sat for minutes in remembering thought. Somehow she felt no bereavement. She would be forever grateful for what Edwin had given her. Into the void of her loneliness he had poured love, generous unselfish love, asking no return except her occasional presence. She was glad the love had been fruitful for him, too, inspiring nun to a philosophical search which he might not otherwise have undertaken. She had brought him comfort.

She pulled out a drawer where she kept his letters, and choosing at random, she took up one which had come to her only last week.

“To me, about to die — perhaps before we meet again, my darling, though God forbid — it has become essential to define the problem of death before I can hope to solve it. Are those who have died ahead of me conscious of anything? For this answer I must wait. Yet I dare hope, for else why should I feel in these days a curious readiness to die, amounting almost to a welcoming of death, as though I wished to rid myself of this body of mine, which has served its final purpose, my beloved, in our love. Without love I must have believed death final; with love, my hope becomes even more than faith. It becomes belief.”

She let the letter fall from her hands. She lifted her head, she listened. The house was silent about her but in the silence she seemed to hear music, distant, undefined.

“I SUPPOSE IT BEGAN in Asia,” Jared Barnow said, “or, pinpointing further, in South Vietnam, in that beastly little war concentrated there.”

He had simply dropped in one evening in early autumn when, she thought, she had all but forgotten him in the absorption of the new house. She had chosen the land, twenty acres on a cliff, and had even picked the site for her house, among a cluster of wind-shaped cedars. She had driven home in a mood of contentment, if not of joy — for what had she to do with joy at this stage of her life? — and had found him waiting for her in the dusk on the terrace. He was pacing back and forth, impatient.

“No one knew where you were,” he complained. “It’s very unwise of you. Suppose something happened to you! Anything can happen these days. Where would I look for you?”

She smiled, telling him nothing. “I’ll join you in a jiffy.”

Half an hour later, she looked at him across the dinner table. Above the silver bowl of hothouse roses the candles flickered and Weston closed the French windows opening to the terrace and left the room.

“You’ve never told me about that part of your life.” she said.

“No.” He ate for a moment in silence, which she did not interrupt. Then he began again.

“I doubt I’ll ever tell you. There are parts of one’s life that must be closed, absolutely, except as they explain the present. I’ll tell you—”

But he did not tell her and she did not inquire, speaking instead of small present events in her own life, a new sonata she had begun, her piano lessons with a celebrated teacher. Then abruptly when they were in the library for coffee—“Let’s go to the library,” he had said. “The drawing room terrifies me, somehow”—and when the door was shut and they were alone he began again.

“This much is necessary to tell, perhaps because it gave me my direction. There was a rocket attack on Saigon. The enemy aim was never accurate and one of the rockets fell on a village just outside the city where we were stationed. It wasn’t a severe attack, it didn’t last long, but the damned thing fell on a huddle of children who were scrambling in the dust for some chocolates one of our men had thrown down. They were laughing and shouting when”—he closed his eyes and bit his lower lip and then went on—“the man who had tossed the sweets was blown to bits. Most of the kids weren’t so lucky. They were only wounded. We gathered the ones still alive and carried them to the makeshift hospital we’d set up in the village. There weren’t enough doctors or nurses. There never were.”

His hands trembled as he tried to light a cigarette and he gave it up. “There’s no use going into all of it. But that day I stood by at a makeshift operating table, trying to help a surgeon who was removing bits of metal from a child’s brain. I was horrified — and angry — to see the tools he was using: carpenter’s tools on gossamer! The boy died. I was glad for that. What could life be for him? But somehow all my anger at what had happened — was happening — centered on that clumsy tool. At least that could be improved! So — if you can imagine — out of fury, a dedication was born. I suppose one must call it dedication. It’s a drive, a concentration, a crystallization of purpose in my field, which, has always been science, but a practical science. I’m not purely a theorist. I like to see a theory put to use. My father was an engineer. I’ve inherited the instinct.”