Pearl Buck - The Goddess Abides

“You’ll want to go back to your servants and the big house,” he had told her.

But she was glad to be free, at least for a while, of the oppressive presence of servants and what she wanted to eat was easily made at the counter in one corner of this huge room. She peered now through the glass door. The light of the lamp over the dining table shone upon a man’s face, a young face, the eyes dark and intense, the features strong. She opened the door.

“Come in,” she said.

He stamped the snow from his boots and set his skis and poles against the stone outer wall of the house. Then he came in.

“Well?” she asked.

He hesitated, smiled, his hand outstretched.

“I’m Jared Barnow,” he said, “and I’m not brash — only desperate.”

“Yes?”

“I’m told that you have the only empty room in the township, and I have no place to lay my head! I’d no idea the area would be so crowded. I’m alone, and I thought it wouldn’t be hard to find a place for a solitary man.”

His accent was good, he was mannerly, but—

“It would be most inconvenient, I’m afraid,” she said frankly.

He stood looking at her, waiting, his dark, intelligent eyes inquiring.

“I’ve never taken strangers into my house,” she said. And then upon an impulse of loneliness she went on. “Put off your things and have something to eat. Then—”

“Thank you.”

He took off his jacket and peeled off a rough sweater and she saw that he was slender, well above medium height but a graceful, compact figure, quick moving, his hair blond above the dark eyes.

“You’ll want to wash up,” she said. “That’s my husband’s room there, and his bath — was, I mean. He’s — not living.”

He went in without reply to this, and she put two more chops in the oven and set another place at the table.

…“I don’t get many holidays,” he was saying an hour later.

If he noticed that she had changed to her dark red wool dress, sleeveless but long to her ankles and high at the neck, he gave no sign. He was eating with concentrated zeal.

“You went to prep school,” she said.

He looked up. “How did you know?”

She smiled. “You don’t look like a depressed person, but you’ve had to eat in a hurry before others got the food. That means boys.”

“Might have been the army?”

“I think not. I have a son and I know.”

He laughed. “You’re right. Prep school. Then college. I finished that when I was twenty.”

She was accustomed to taciturn young men, but he was not so much taciturn as self-absorbed. A single-minded young man, she guessed, one with a purpose. He had fine hands, she noticed, well kept without being overtended, a masculine hand, the fingers strong and the palm capable. He looked young enough to be her son — not that she wanted more sons!

“What do you do?” she inquired.

He pushed aside his empty plate. “For a living or for fun?”

“Both.”

“I’m lucky,” he said. “What I want to do for a living is also fun.”

“And that is?”

“I don’t suppose you know anything about electronics?”

“I know the word. My father was a physicist.”

He woke instantly. “No! What was his name?”

“Mansfield. Raymond Mansfield.”

“Not the—”

“Yes.”

“I say!” He threw down his napkin. “Incredible luck! I stumble into a house and find the daughter of Raymond Mansfield!”

“But you’re too young ever to have met him.”

“I’ve studied his books. God, I wish he were alive! He’d know what I want to do.”

“What?”

He looked at her shrewdly, shyly. “How do I know you’ll understand?”

“I might.”

“Well, I’m an engineer, a sort of a superengineer, I suppose. But I — my real work is inventing. I have things I’ve invented.”

“What sort of things?”

“Well—” he looked at her and stopped abruptly. “They wouldn’t interest you. They wouldn’t interest any woman.”

“I might be different.”

“Yes, I suppose—”

He got up and went to the chimney piece and stood looking into its blazing cavern.

She called to him. “Would you mind putting on a log? The woodbox is there in the corner.”

“That a woodbox? I thought it was a cabinet sort of thing.”

“You’re laughing at me. Well, I grant you, I’ve a mania for bigness.”

He was rummaging for a log, choosing the longest, the heaviest, and he threw it into the fire. A fountain of sparks flew up. “You’re not so big yourself. Who plays the piano?”

“I do.”

“So do I.”

He sat down and without effort played a movement from a Beethoven sonata. Halfway between table and sink, her hands fall of dishes, she listened and was amazed. A musician, a real one, playing as she had not heard a man play since her father died, playing with precision, elegance and depth! No one really understood music unless he was a scientist, her father had declared, and not just a scientist, either, oh, no, only the real ones, the theoreticians, whose language was mathematics. She had not understood mathematics until he had explained to her that it was the symbolic language of relationships. “And relationships,” he had told her, “contain the essential meaning of life.”

She set the dishes down softly and tiptoed to a chair. He played on until the last movement before the finale. Then he stopped abruptly and turned to face her. “I don’t play the finale. It doesn’t belong. Beethoven never knew how to stop the great music, and he just subsides or ends with a sudden bang. He had to finish somehow.”

She laughed. “You’re a blasphemer, but you’re right. It’s what I’ve often thought and never dared to say.”

He was walking around the room restlessly and went to the window. The edge of the full moon was shining over the horizon.

“Do you live here all the year round?”

“No — just since my husband’s death.”

“Alone?”

“Yes.”

“No children?”

“Both married and living their own lives — thank God!”

“You don’t like children?”

“I love them, but any self-respecting woman likes to see her children on their own. Then she knows she’s done a good job.”

“You don’t look — motherly.”

She evaded this. “Is your own mother living?”

“No, nor my father. I don’t remember them. In fact, I never knew them.” He stopped by the piano and repeated a few bars of the sonata, then stopped again and went over to the fire and stood gazing into the high flames leaping into the chimney. “I grew up with an uncle, an old bachelor who always seems surprised to see me in his house, however long I’m there.”

“What is he?”

“Retired — ever since I can remember. Kind and confused — writes books about classical French poetry that no one publishes, but it doesn’t seem to bother him. He’s been awfully good to me, especially since he’s never had the least idea of what I busy myself about. My mother was his sister.”

He murmured this abstractedly, as though he were talking about someone else.

“Are you married?” she asked.

“No, but I think about it — now and then.”

“The girl is chosen?”

“Well, she’s chosen me, you might say.”

She laughed again. Living alone, laughter was what she missed. “Is that what they do nowadays?”

“A good thing,” he said, unsmiling. “I doubt I’ll have time to choose for myself. My sort of work takes up the mind.”

“And the heart—”

He looked at his watch. “I say, do you mind — may I stay? I’ll get up early so as to have an early go at the mountain — if that doesn’t upset you? I can make my own breakfast. Shall I put on another log?”