Pearl Buck - The Goddess Abides

She wanted suddenly to be rid of this girl. She was angry with her — the absurdity of such a visit, the insolence of the intrusion! Young people nowadays thought only of themselves. Yes, she was too old, too old for Jared, too old for this girl.

She rose and walked toward the door. “I’m afraid I can’t help you, my dear. I really don’t know what you’re talking about. You and Jared must settle your own relationship. Now come in. and have a cup of tea with me. Or would you rather have something to drink?”

…It was dusk when the girl left. Hours had passed and she had let them pass, had helped them to pass, because she had reluctantly begun to like this girl. There had been nothing new in her story, for she told it without being asked. Divorced parents, she an only child, about to graduate from a girls’ college.

“I try to be fair to both my parents, Mrs. Chardman, but I live in my father’s house because my mother has married again and I don’t like my stepfather. He’s younger than my mother and sometimes — well, I don’t like to be where he is, because I don’t want my mother to be hurt — not by me, and certainly not by him because she’s terribly in love with him. It’s so pitiful, isn’t it?”

“Where did you meet Jared?” she had asked the girl.

“When we were skiing three years ago. I love to ski. Usually I spend Christmas holidays skiing. Now we play tennis. It was so surprising to find he lives in New York and I live in Scarsdale, you know. He comes to our place on Saturdays sometimes, unless he calls up that he wants to work. My father and he are good friends. My father says he’s the most brilliant young man he’s ever known.”

“What does your father do?”

“He’s a banker in New York. He has an apartment there and I can stay with him if I like, but we’ve kept our house in Scarsdale because we like tennis and the pool and all that.”

“He hasn't married again?”

“Oh, yes — a girl not much older than I — well, Louise is twenty-six.”

“They’re happy?”

“Oh, yes, Louise is so beautiful that I’m glad she didn’t see Jared before she married my father. But all these marriages have taught me such a lot, Mrs. Chardman. I don’t want ever to be divorced. I want to marry someone I shall always love — like Jared.”

“You must also be someone he can always love,” she said.

“Oh, yes,” the girl agreed. “That’s why I’ve come to you. He says he’ll love you forever.”

…“Your little girl spent the afternoon with me,” she told Jared that night at midnight.

“I have no little girl,” he retorted.

“Well, a little girl, then!” she laughed.

“I suppose you mean June Blaine.”

“Yes!”

“Yes, well, she’s the one I once told you about. It’s been off and on for a couple of years and now it’s off.”

“She doesn’t think so.”

“She’s strong — that I admit. But all girls are strong these days.”

“And you don’t like that?”

“Haven’t time to think about it. What are you doing this weekend?”

She hesitated, searching for an excuse, even a mild lie. “I’ve promised an old friend.”

“Man?”

“No — woman.” She could summon Amelia and they could go to the summer theater.

“Well—” He was reluctantly giving up the weekend.

“Perhaps June—” she suggested.

He broke in sharply. “Look here — don’t you go matchmaking!”

“Of course not, it’s just loyalty to one’s kind.”

“I’m your kind!”

“I know that, darling, but—”

“No buts!”

“Very well. Shall we say good night on this moment of agreement?”

“I don’t know. You seem different, as though the agreement were only skin deep.”

“Ah, no, Jared! It’s very deep. I’m for you — ever and ever. There’s no agreement deeper than that.”

She could hear him draw a deep breath.

“That’s what I wanted to hear. Now I can say good night.”

“Good night, dearest.”

Like an echo his voice came back to her—

“Dearest!”

…“I hear Edmond Hartley was at your house,” Amelia said.

They were sitting midway to the tent-like ceiling of the theater-in-the-round in a suburb of the city. Amelia had decided on the play, a revival of an old musical.

“How did you know?” she asked.

“Oh, our built-in intercom,” Amelia replied. “Your chauffeur to mine and then to my upstairs maid who brings my breakfast when I’m too lazy to get up.”

“Does Edmond Hartley interest you?”

“Once he did — very long ago — until I found out I didn’t interest him. No woman does. But he was charming in spite of that — and rich!”

“He’s still charming.”

“And not married?”

“No.”

This was in the intermission. Amelia had declared that it was absurd to climb down the steps and up again in such a crowd. Besides, there was nowhere to go. She began once more.

“Do you know, Edith, I sometimes wonder if marriage with a man like that, at our age, anyway, wouldn’t be rather pleasant. One would have companionship, someone to travel with, a friend always present — and no demands!”

“I couldn’t endure it,” she said vehemently.

“Why not?”

“I’d want all of marriage — or none.”

Amelia made shrill laughter. “You’re confessing, Edith, you’re confessing!”

“I have nothing to confess except a deep respect for love.”

“Well, I’d settle for diversion,” Amelia said. The audience was swarming up the aisles again and there was a bustle on the stage. But the conversation was background for the following week, the last of June. A letter written on heavy cream paper with embossed name and address announced that the sender was Edmond Hartley, asking if he might call upon her, “to pay my respects,” the next Tuesday, on his way to Washington to judge designs for murals to be placed in a museum there. She would have replied that she was engaged, except that she thought of Amelia.

“And an old friend of mine,” she added as postscript to her own answering letter, “will be here to greet you. I believe she knew you long ago. Do come!”

He came late on Tuesday afternoon, in a small Daimler limousine, driven by an elderly English chauffeur. She saw him arrive and pause to direct the man and then he walked in his sprightly somewhat mincing fashion to the door. Weston opened it and announced him in the music room. She rose from the piano, where she had been working on a Chopin étude, and put out her hands, which he took in his cool dry grasp.

“How beautiful the music sounds! This is my favorite étude. I must hear it all.”

His eyes were as brightly blue as ever above his white clipped beard and trim mustache. A handsome man, she thought, in his precise, delicate fashion, and she felt a mild affection for him, combined with a real respect. A complicated personality, this! But under the complexities, the result of untold experience, here was an honorable person who had dealt rigorously with himself.

“My dear,” he said, “I am dusty with travel. Let me make myself fit for your beautiful eyes.”

“Then we’ll have cocktails on the east terrace,” she said. “And my old friend, Amelia Darwent, will join us. Do you remember her? She remembers you very well indeed.”

Edmond Hartley looked blank. “I don’t remember—”

“Ah, well, she will recall herself to you. Now go upstairs — the same room and sitting room.”

He went away and she returned to the étude, the third. She had begun it after Arnold’s death, when she was learning the meaning of sorrow, and not only the sorrow of death but the deeper sorrow of knowing that what had been was not all that it could have been had there been more understanding and therefore more communication between Arnold and herself. They had both done the best they could together. If she realized there might have been, a deeper happiness, so had he. Of that she was sure, for she had sometimes felt his gaze upon her and, lifting her head, had seen sadness in his eyes, and silently had respected that sadness, comprehending in her own reserve the inexorable distance between them. Neither she nor Arnold had overcome that reserve, but the knowledge and acceptance were painful.