Pearl Buck - Come, My Beloved

That was what she used to say, and so he had learned to be quiet in the house, not to ask questions, not even to insist on saying good-night when he went to bed and good-by in the morning when his father went to the office — not for a while, at least, until his father’s fearful energy was fulfilled in some new explosion of creation. Thus the MacArd railroads had drawn into their iron grasp vast industries of oil and steel, coal and ore mines, ships and bridges, and these in time produced immense industrial plants and business buildings.

Was it over? He wondered where his father’s powerful imagination would lead him now. He sighed, helpless before the dynamo, and then he drew from the bookshelf near his chair a small leather-bound book. It was the New Testament his mother had kept on her table. When he left her for the last time, she was lying dead upon her bed. He had not been allowed to stay. Strangers tiptoed in and waited for him to be gone so that they could begin their work. He had turned away, distracted, and at that moment he saw the little book and took it and alone in his room he had tried to read it and could not and so had thrust it into this shelf.

Now he could take it again, no longer fresh from her hand, and yet her touch was upon it and upon him. He let the pages fall open and his eyes fell upon a passage she had marked. She was given to marking lines in books and especially here: “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.”

He read the words slowly. Rebirth, the words that Darya had used, but what did they mean, not in India, but here and now, for him?

MacArd was back in his office. Here he was used to being without Leila, and he plunged into the affairs which had accumulated during his absence, the large affairs which no one but himself could settle. He had trained his men to bring to him nothing except the crucial and the fundamental, and MacArd men knew better than to bring a problem to him unsolved. He expected them to present their problems with their own solutions for his approval or disapproval.

“I pay a man to solve problems, not to bring them to me,” was his favorite retort.

Everywhere through the immense MacArd Building one came upon placards whereon was printed a sentence in capital letters, EVERY PROBLEM HAS A SOLUTION — FIND IT, and MacArd men were hired and fired upon the basis of whether they took the slogan seriously. He allowed no ribaldry, no mockery, not even mild joking about it. A young man had once been making merry with a parody and MacArd had come stalking in to dismiss him as he stood.

“There is a time to laugh and a time not to laugh,” he had thundered.

He knew his Bible and he was fond of speaking in Biblical language. He liked to think, and sometimes to say, that he had been blessed with gold and possessions; with thousands of acres of land in the west, wherein sat mines of iron and silver; with networks of steel in railroads; with merchant ships upon all the oceans of the globe; with vaults in many banks, hiding their treasure of stocks and bonds in a score of vast interlocking industries. The numbers of men who served MacArd were thousands, men whose faces he never saw, men who spent their lives in mines under the earth, who drove his great engines, who manned his machines in factories, who captained his ships, and busied themselves upon the intricate matters of accounting and accumulating the figures which presented to him daily exactly what he was worth. He spent his days in this big office overlooking the harbor and the Statue of Liberty, a room as big as a house, furnished in velvet carpets and hangings and great mahogany tables and chairs, and his desk was his fortress.

While his wife lived, she had made his sole alternative to this life. When he came home at night she was there, a figure of sweet gaiety and mild ironic humor, a woman who loved him and who was never afraid of him. He knew she was not afraid, and it was good for him to know that there was one person who did not walk softly before him, and before whom indeed he must not assume even his rightful air of conquest. For he had never wholly conquered her, she had remained her wilful independent self, taking refuge in wilfulness and refusing logic if she chose emotion.

“But why—” how many of his sentences to her had begun thus while they talked.

She never allowed him to go on. “Oh why, why, and I don’t care why, that’s why!” Thus she had chanted until at last after years of stubborn persistence he had given up and then somehow when he had given up and she knew that he had, their relationship became sweeter and deeper than ever, and he had fallen in love with her again. He was a man passionate and faithful, a righteous man, secretly romantic at the core, and she knew it. She held him by the heart.

There were times now, since he came home from India, when he starved for her, when, in the midst of his day’s work, absorbed as he was with the space and the speed of all he did, he stopped for a moment, for ten minutes or for an hour, to battle with desperate loneliness. While she was alive he could forget her all day, but now that she was dead her spirit came dancing into this room where actually she had been but a few times while she was alive.

“I dislike that castle of yours,” she had said. “You sit there like a king on a throne. King David, King David, but I am not your subject, just the same!”

He could almost hear her laugh. This morning near midday, here in his office he could have sworn that he heard the echo of her laughter, and he lifted his head sharply. He was alone, studying the pages of a proposal for the purchase of new mines in South America, and he heard in the silence of the great room her distant laughter. She was not here, of course, not even the presence of her spirit was here, yet who could tell? He had always rejected the dreamful wishing of men who sought mediums and tried to raise the spirits of their dead, and yet he believed at last that somewhere she lived, cut off from him by an impenetrable wall. Who knew the thickness of the wall?

Since that day in the hotel in Bombay when he had been reminded, or had reminded himself, he was not prepared to say which, but at any rate, when inexplicably he had remembered the words concerning the narrow Judean gate called The Eye of the Needle, through which a camel could hardly pass, as hardly as the rich man could pass into the Kingdom of Heaven, since that day he had not once felt near to Leila. He had tried to imagine what she might want him to do, but she was afar off, and he had rushed, away abruptly from India without finishing the journey. Now here in the midst of his day’s work, he felt her near again.

He sat tense, his fists clenched upon the desk, concentrating upon the thought that she might actually be nearer than he knew, and sweat burst from his skin. He all but saw her, he felt her presence surely for an instant. Then he could not persuade himself that it was anything beyond the longing of his own heart and he turned cold, his sweat chilled, and he collapsed and bent his head upon his folded arms. In the depths of his disappointment he felt impelled to prayer.

“God,” he groaned aloud, “God, show me what she means. What is it I am meant to do?”

He waited in the silence and no voice spoke, until he heard his own voice lifted up, continuing, or so it seemed, in prayer.

“Thou knowest that all I have is Thine.”

These were the words he stammered, they came from within him, they spoke themselves, as though someone else spoke through his lips, someone voiceless using his voice.

It was a strange experience quickly over, he was himself again almost immediately and yet he felt changed. He was bewildered, he was almost sure that more than his imagination had been here, yet he would have been ashamed to confess it, and had the door opened and one of his employees come in he would have been more brusque than usual. Had Leila somehow managed, not quite to break through the wall, but still to touch his memory again and so impel him to the words he had just spoken? Did she want him to know that if they were to be united beyond the wall there were things that he must do which he had not yet done, a consecration of his wealth which he never made? There was the chance. He was a practical man, but like all incredibly successful men who made their own miracles, he had regions past belief, imaginations which were possible realities. Much that had once been only imagination had indeed become real, and so why not anything?