Pearl Buck - The Eternal Wonder

He looked, half-smiling, at Rann’s eager, listening face.

“What a beautiful boy you are,” he said softly. The sheets slipped from his hands to the floor. “I wonder what we are to be to each other, you and I! Do you ever dream of love, Rann?”

Rann shook his head, entranced, shy, suddenly almost afraid—but of what?

Sharpe stooped and collected the sheets. He put them neatly together and placed them on the table beside his chair. Then he went to the wide window at the far end of his study and looked out. A streetlamp shone dimly through the all-but-impenetrable snow. He drew down the shade. “You had better spend the night with me,” he said, returning to his chair. “Your mother will worry about your walking so far in this storm. So shall I. You may have my guest room. That’s where my younger brother stays when he comes to visit me.”

“I’ll have to telephone my mother,” Rann said.

“Of course. There’s the telephone, on my desk. Tell her my Filipino houseman will give us a good dinner.”

He took up the sheets and glanced over them one by one, seeming not to hear the conversation.

“He’s invited me to stay because of the storm. But will you be all right, Mother?”

“Oh yes,” his mother said, almost gaily. “Mary Crookes is here. She came in an hour ago—she was shopping and simply couldn’t get home through the storm. She was just breathless when she reached our house. I’d asked her to stay, anyway. It’s really not safe to be out alone in such a storm. The wind is beginning to blow a gale. I’ll feel safe about you if you’re with Dr. Sharpe. Good night, darling—see you tomorrow.”

Rann hung up the receiver. “By chance she has a friend with her—someone who lives on the edge of town and came in to shop and got caught in the snowstorm.”

“Splendid,” Sharpe said absently as though he did not hear.

“I’ve been looking over this paper again. You’ve done a brilliant job—really exciting. Ah, I hope I can be useful to you! I’m so sure you’ve a rare quality, Rann—I can’t tell exactly what direction it will take. I don’t know your center of interest. That’s what makes a creator—to have an eternal, unchanging interest in something and the capacity for dedication to it—a life interest, something you know you were born to do.”

“I want to know everything first,” Rann said.

He caught Sharpe’s look, a look yearning and strange, half-shy and half-bold.

“There is so much I don’t know,” Rann continued.

“There’s so much I don’t know about you ,” Sharpe retorted. He turned away and seemed absorbed in straightening the pages he held in both hands. “For example—your father is dead. Your mother is a shy woman. How are you to know anything about—let’s say—sex? You’re in for a great deal of temptation, my boy—women being what they are today—anything goes when they see a handsome young man. I wonder if you know how to protect yourself. It would be so disastrous to your development if you should imagine yourself in love with some girl—or woman, even, for it’s more likely that a brilliant young mind is drawn to an older woman—well, the disaster would be the same. And you’re so vulnerable , dear, with your extraordinary imagination! If I can save you from something like that, merely by being your friend—”

“I don’t know any girls,” Rann said bluntly. “As for older women—” He shook his head. This discussion was distasteful to him.

Sharpe laughed. “Well, just let me know when and if, and I’ll come to your rescue!”

HE WENT TO BED THAT NIGHT with a warm sense of comfort and of mental and spiritual stimulation. Not since his father’s death had he spent such an evening. Perhaps never had he spent such an evening, for Sharpe had a sense of humor that even his father had lacked. Moreover, Sharpe had traveled in many parts of the world, in remote parts of India and China, in Thailand and Indonesia, and he had tales to tell of experiences amusing or perilous. He had spoken again and again of love.

“Those ancient people understand the arts of love as we will not in a thousand years. We are a very crude people, dear boy. Perhaps ‘simple’ would be a kinder word. As for sex, we have only a primitive notion of its full expression as a means of communication between two persons. Boy plus girl equals sex—that’s about as far as we go. We know nothing of the subtle interplay between two minds, two personalities, the art of physical approach and caress between two persons, whatever their sex. Sex itself is nothing—the lowest animals practice it. It is ennobled only by those who understand it as the Asians do—sex refined by centuries of experience, by poets and artists.”

When they parted for the night he had withdrawn somewhat shyly, lest Sharpe kiss his cheek again. But Sharpe had not done so. He had merely put out his right hand.

“Good night, dear boy. Sleep well in that vast old bed that belonged to my great-grandfather in Boston. By the bye, you’ll find the bath salts in your bath very refreshing. I put a bottle there for you. I use them myself—something I discovered in Paris last year. Dream sweetly, dear boy. Breakfast is at eight—just right for our nine o’clock class—if we can stagger through the snow in the quadrangle!”

He had tried the bath salts in his hot tub almost with embarrassment, unaccustomed to the heretofore feminine aspects of such pleasures, and had been surprised at the strong bittersweet fragrance that made him feel clean and stimulated. The soap, too, was unfamiliar, an English soap, generous with foam so that he soaped even his hair. When he was saturated with the hot fragrant bath he rubbed himself dry with an enormous brown towel and put on, somewhat hesitatingly, the white silk pajamas laid out on the bed. The silk against his skin, the smoothness of linen sheets when he drew the soft, light blankets over him, surrounded him with a sense of luxury. A wood fire burned under the white painted mantelpiece.

“I told my houseman to light a fire for you—it’s to sleep when the wood falls into embers,” Sharpe had said. “Besides, that room is large enough to be chilly on a snowy night like this—”

There was no chill now, however, and he put out the bedside light and lay watching the fire die while the snow beat softly against the windows and piled high upon the outer sills. He wanted to lie long awake so that he might think over all that Sharpe had talked of during the evening. He had felt his world enlarging, a wonderful world that he had seen heretofore only through books. But Sharpe had been everywhere himself. He had trod the streets of Indian bazaars, had lived in small inns in Japanese villages, had climbed Fujiyama and gazed into its sleeping crater. Yet later, on the isle of Oshima, he had looked into a living volcano and had felt the crust of earth tremble beneath his feet.

“Five days later the whole edge upon which I stood cracked off and fell into the smoking abyss,” Sharpe had said.

His memory, always ready to present the total picture of whatever his thought summoned, roamed in kaleidoscope about the world. Why did he stay here in this little town, a dot upon the map, his life buried in books, when reality waited for him everywhere in the world? Time enough for books when he grew too old to wander!

“You need to know everything,” Sharpe had said. “Whatever you can find in books is all to the good. Books are a shortcut to total knowledge. You can’t learn everything by your own experience. Use experience to test what you have already learned in books—”

But why shouldn’t he write books from experience? All his life he had read books. “I don’t remember when you learned to read,” his mother loved to tell him fondly. “I think you were born knowing how to read.”