Pearl Buck: The Goddess Abides

SHE HAD BEEN READING too long and by a light too dim. Now she closed the book and leaned back in her low chair. Through the glass wall of the house, where she lived alone, she gazed at the mountain. The sun was setting to the right, and its dying rays caught the snowy peak and suffused it in rose-red bloom. Below the peak the moving dots of color were the last skiers, gliding and twisting down the smooth white flanks until they were lost in the shadows of the dark forest at the mountain’s base. Soon they would be tramping into the lodge, they would stand before the great fireplace, their damp garments smoking in the heat, they would drink and talk and boast of their prowess, then they would go to their rooms and bathe and dress in their informal evening clothes. They would eat gargantuan dinners and sit before the fire again and sing and talk their ski talk until, already half asleep, they went at last to their beds. In the morning they would rise to repeat the day before.

And she, here in her house alone, must now prepare her own solitary dinner, a small matter of a lamb chop and a salad and some fruit, and then after an hour or so of music, she would go to bed in the long bedroom that was half study. But first she must light the evening fire.

She lingered, however, watching the white peat glow and fade into silver, then into ash and at last into the night sky, unless by grace of moonlight it appeared again as a ghost of beauty. Tonight the moon was late. She rose and drew the curtains across the glass. She lit the logs in the huge stone chimney piece — too big, too big, Arnold had said when she drew the design of their house.

“How will you ever lift the logs?” he had inquired.

“You will lift them,” she had replied with laughter and mischief.

He had not laughed. “I may not be here always,” he said.

It was his first announcement. Looking back, remembering, she realized that he knew he was doomed to the death that came ten months later, a cruel death with pain eased only by the heaviest sedatives and final unconsciousness. Yet he had not spoken to her of death for nearly six months, and then by saying that he hoped she would marry again. He was too old for her he had maintained through all the years of their marriage, and she had denied it as steadfastly.

“Young men don’t interest me,” she told him, at first lightly and then with doggedness, until he was gone.

Yes, she had insisted upon the fireplace, and it was true that the logs were too heavy. When Sam, the hired man, a Vermonter and a neighbor, did not come on Sundays, she made a blaze of sticks that she could manage. But on every other morning he came to lay the fire which she demanded summer and winter, for this huge room without a fire could at night return to a primordial cave and she become a lost animal in its shadows. Her day ended with the dying blaze of the fire but she lit another in her bedroom. She always slept before the lesser fire died.

She rose to prepare her dinner, aware of sudden hunger, for she had forgotten to eat at noon in her absorption in her book. As usual before she set the table she turned on the stereophonic music. When she knew that Arnold must die before the year was ended, she had made the house ready to live in alone.

“Bookshelves along this north wall, please, Sam,” she had ordered. “I’ll need many books.”

He had grumbled under his breath. “Dunno what you want so many books for — you only come here a couple of times a year.”

It was true. When Arnold lived they came to Vermont for a month in the summer and when the children were not yet grown, they came for Christmas and skiing. She had given up her skis when Arnold fell ill, not wanting to leave him. She had not begun to ski again — not yet. Perhaps she never would. Meanwhile she would live in the vast old house in Philadelphia, where she had been born, an only child, and where she and Arnold had lived since her parents died.

Sam had built the shelves here in the Vermont house to her specification and she had filled them with books which she had always wanted to read and had never had time for while Arnold lived. And music, of course, she revived in her life, now solitary, not only the music of the great, but her own musical talent, dormant after years of wifehood and motherhood and the daily business of being Arnold’s wife. She had opened the piano after his death and left it open always, invitation to practice and enjoy, and she found in the valley a retired German music master to give her lessons again. She had hungered, too, for languages, many languages, she wanted various tongues and so she had begun once more to study French — first French, she told herself, for her grandmother had been a Frenchwoman, and then Spanish and Italian and perhaps German. Out of the many occupations she provided for her life alone she might choose one and make it a profession, although Arnold had left her with enough money. She liked clothes and jewels, not for themselves, but as part of the woman she still wished to be. Who, she inquired of herself, was that woman and what was to be her profession?

The amplitude of music swelled and soared into the high beams.

“You’ll never get those beams hoisted to the roof,” Arnold had said.

They were cedars cut from the forest that surrounded the house on three sides. She had ordered them to be stripped of bark and left in the weather of sun and snow and rain until they had aged to silver gray.

“I’ll get them hoisted,” she had insisted, and so she had done, Sam and a contractor between them fashioning a mighty lever with rope and crane.

The house was her own design and there was no room in it for children. She had married young, had borne her children young, and she had been a good mother. She had seen her children through early babyhood, childhood and adolescence, a son, a daughter, and then into somewhat too early marriages. Now she thought of them as friends, apart from herself, man and woman with their own concerns. Indeed she drew apart from them, needing to discover whether her life had meaning beyond wifehood and motherhood. She had enjoyed both functions in her somewhat reserved fashion, but there was a time for everything, and the time had come for something more.

In spite of the music, in the midst of the Andante, she heard a strong knock on the door. She turned and through the glass door she saw the figure of a man in ski garb.

“You shouldn’t be there all alone,” her children had said. “The whole area is changing now that the mountain is being developed. All sorts of characters—”

She left the counter, which was as much as she needed of kitchen, although Arnold had prophesied that she would soon be tired of nothing but a counter.