Pearl Buck - The Eternal Wonder

And to his astonishment he found himself running across the lawn, her hand in his, and they were laughing—laughing—as they ran.

HE WAS LINGERING FAR TOO LONG in England and he knew it. After a week—or was it two?—when he spoke of going on to France, she had protested.

“But you haven’t seen anything! You sit here in this old library, reading these old books. You don’t even go upstairs to Morey’s library.”

It was true. He had gone upstairs once, her leading the way, to a suite of rooms quite modern in their decor, and then in her abrupt fashion she had left him. He had stayed to read the titles of shelves of books about ships and guns and the history of wars and travels, and then had stood for a while before the portrait of a young man. It was life-size, painted by a modern artist as he could see from the technique, and it was set in a flat frame of gold—Sir Moresby Seaton, a man still young, very powerful in build, dark and strong and smiling, the cheeks ruddy, the eyes alive. Indeed, the portrait was so vivid that, gazing at it, he felt a presence in the room and was made uncomfortable by it. The eyes were insistent, demanding. “Why are you here?” He seemed almost to hear the question hanging in the air. Why, indeed? He had left the room without answer and, going down the great curving stairway, he returned to the old library, where there was no presence except his own and there he evoked life from the books.

“You can’t see England just from books,” Lady Mary was saying, “and so I shall drag you right away. We’ll go to Scotland before it snows, and to the Cotswolds—such charming stone houses in the Cotswolds—and perhaps get into Ireland for a day or two… green Ireland, where I’m always more myself than anywhere else in the world. I’ve a bit of Ireland in me through my grandmother. The O’Hares have a castle or two of their own in Ireland.”

And obedient always to her demanding, willful, pretty ways, they had made their journey, Coates driving them, and he drank in the scenery and the change, marveling at so much variety in so small a space, always engirdled by the sea. But for him there was wonder everywhere, and he spent hours engrossed in accumulating impressions of faces and places, villages and towns and the rare city of Dublin, and she accused him of forgetting that she was even with him.

“I might as well have stayed home,” she cried one day, petulant and laughing.

“Oh, no indeed, Lady Mary,” he had protested. They were in some ancient cathedral, and he had been absorbed in a small book the vendor handed him, giving the story of a knight encased in a coffin of brass, in a crypt there, his image also of brass lying upon the coffin. He put the book down on the image.

“No, indeed, Lady Mary,” he had protested again, and had been about to explain when she broke in.

“And don’t you think you might call me Mary, after all this time of knowing me?”

“I always think of you as Lady Mary,” he replied in all innocence, in such innocence indeed that she had gone into a fit of laughter.

“Why are you laughing?” he inquired gravely.

She had only laughed the more and he was puzzled, but he wanted to know the end of the dead knight’s story too, and so he had taken up the book again and she wandered away.

So had passed one lovely day after another until they came back to the castle, just escaping the first snowstorm. And still he marveled how much green there was in the gardens, the late chrysanthemums still blooming, too, though near their end, and sank back into the old life easily and yet uneasily, because he knew he should be moving on his way, for there was a dangerous charm in the ancient and idyllic setting.

Now here she stood before him in the old library on this day in early December. It was twilight and a coal fire was burning in the grate. She had changed for the evening and wore a long skirt of black velvet with a scarlet bodice and pearls about her neck.

“And still you are reading,” she scolded, “and even without turning on the lights! What is the book now?”

“Darwin—his voyages—”

He had been far away, so far away that she saw how far, and slowly she came and stood before him and gently she put her two palms on his cheeks.

“Do you ever see me?” she demanded, and moving away she turned on the lights, all the lights, so that suddenly all was dark outside and bright within.

“Yes, of course,” he said. “You’re beautiful.”

He looked up at her, smiling, and suddenly she stooped, and he felt on his mouth the pressure of her lips, light at first and then with a quick pressure.

“Now do you see me better?” she demanded, and drew back.

He could not speak. He felt his cheeks get hot, his heart begin beating in his breast, hard and quick.

“Have you never had a woman kiss you?” she asked softly.

“No,” he said in a half whisper.

“Well, now you have,” she said. “You’ll have learned something new in England—something to wonder about—you who are always wondering! So—how do you like it?”

She spoke in so downright a way, her voice half-laughing, almost scornful, that he could only shake his head.

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t know or don’t want to know?”

He did not reply, indeed he could not. He was in a tangle of feeling, repelled and yet enchanted. But the enchantment was in himself. He was not enchanted by her. In a strange way he wanted her to kiss him again.

“You are shocked,” she said. “It was nothing—just fun. Come along to dinner.”

She drew him to his feet by her hand on his and then walked with him into the dining room, her hand now in the crook of his elbow.

HE COULD NOT FOREGET. THAT night, when they sat late side by side on a small curved couch before the dying embers, the servants gone to bed, he could not forget that warm sweet pressure on his mouth. They had been talking, not steadily but in a desultory, half conversation, her head leaning against the high back of the couch as she talked now of her childhood, of Berlin and Paris, of the rounded hills of Italy, crowned by small old cities, and he sat turned toward her, listening and not listening, remembering the kiss. Suddenly in a long moment of silence he felt impelled by that deepening enchantment in himself, by his quickening heart impelled, and he leaned toward her and to his own surprise he kissed her mouth. Immediately her arms went about his neck. He felt her hand pressing his head down—down, so that his lips clung to hers, clung until he could not breathe. Then slowly she drew back her hands on his shoulders.

“How quickly you learn! Oh, darling—is this wicked of me? But some woman must teach you, darling—and why not I? Eh, Rann? Why not I? You’re a man—your body a man’s body—so tall, so strong. Haven’t you—known it? Or has your head been so full of your books—”

He did not answer. He scarcely heard her. Instead he was kissing her again, madly, wildly, her cheeks, her neck, the cleft of her bosom where her low-cut gown revealed the shape of her breasts. And when he kissed her there, she loosened a button and another, and in a foam of fragrant lace he saw her breasts, rounded and firm, her two little breasts, pink-tipped. He gazed at them, fascinated, shy, his blood rising to tempest pitch and concentrating in his rising center.

“Poor darling,” she whispered. “Why not? Of course—of course—”

And under her guiding touch, he sought her and found her and with great gusts in that warm receiving place he was released and knew himself.

When they parted at last, her good night kiss as light as a child’s now, when he had bathed and put on clean garments, his body sanctified, when he lay alone in the great bed, his exultation was for himself. He did not think of her, he did not think even of love.