Pearl Buck - The Eternal Wonder

Lying there on the warm French earth, his cheek pressed against its green moss, he pondered his own question, adding to it his eternal why. Why was he as he was? What was his compound? Without vanity, he accepted the fact of his own superiority, his own self-confidence. He knew that whatever he chose to do he would do superbly well. He did not think of fame—indeed, he did not care for it. His own need to live in freedom, to learn in his own way, at his own speed, was now his supreme desire. How he would express his self-gained knowledge was as yet unknown to him. But there was a way, waiting, and he would find it.

He turned on his back, head on his clasped hands, and gazed into the leaf-flecked blue sky and waited while slowly a decision found itself invincibly in his own being. It was not only in his mind. It was a decision forming throughout his whole being. He would never again go to school—not to college—ever! Others could not teach him what he wanted now to know. Books he would always learn from, for people, great people, put the best of themselves into books. Books were a distillation of people. But people would be his teachers, and people were not in schoolrooms. People were everywhere.

Decision! He had decided. He recognized finality and a deep peace pervaded his being, as real as though he had drunk an elixir, a wine, had eaten a consecrated bread. Whatever came to him was good. It was life. It was knowledge. He sprang up from the earth. He brushed the leaves from his hair and with his handkerchief he brushed the dampness of moss from his cheek. Then he walked back into the city.

FROM THAT DAY ON, HE devoted his time to the new learning. He who had spent his life as long as he could remember with books, still read as a matter of habit and necessity. On any fair afternoon he wandered to the book stalls of the Left Bank and spent hours there, browsing, searching, tasting one book and another to take an armful of books back with him to the big attic room that in its fashion had become home to him. For he came to perceive that since people were his study, his teachers, the objects through which he could satisfy his persistent wonder about life itself, his own being among others, wherever he lived for the moment, there was his home. It was as though he had reached a place that he had been seeking all his life, a point of knowing himself first, and where he was meant to be and what he was meant to do. Now he could satisfy his hunger to know, his eternal sense of persistent wonder about life, its reason, its purpose, for now he had found his teachers, and these teachers were wherever he happened to be. A new and delicious joy filled his entire being. He had no sense of compulsion. He was entirely and truly free.

Therefore on this August morning, a hot and sunny morning, a day of quiet in the city, for this was the month of holiday and many people were away at seaside and country resorts, he lingered at the bookstalls and fell into conversation with the wizened old woman who was dusting her stall. He had seen her often, had always replied to her cheerful greetings, her chirping comments, her sly, suggestive remarks on certain books a young man might like, especially one, this morning, which she said an American might like.

“And why especially an American?” he asked.

He spoke French easily now, being long past the stage where he was compelled to translate French mentally into English before he could converse.

The old woman was only too ready to converse. He was her first customer, August being a poor business month, and she was as cheerful as a cricket.

“Ah, the Americans,” she exclaimed. “So young, so full of sex—always the sex! Me, I remember—ah yes, I remember—my husband was a real man in such matters… but Americans are so young—even white hairs don’t mean age when it comes to sex—the men—the women—I tell you—”

She shook her tousled white head and cackled laughter. Then she sighed. “Alas! We French! It is soon over with us. Is it because we are poor? Too soon we must think of how to earn a loaf of bread, a bottle of cheap red wine! From birth to death—behold me, myself, old as an ancient crab—yet rain or sun I am here, am I not? Ah, truly!”

“Have you no children?” he asked.

The question was mild, almost abstracted, for he had his eyes on a book in another stall, but it loosed her complete concern. She beat her breast.

“I have the best son on the Earth,” she declared. “He is married to a seamstress, a good young woman. They both work. There are two children. Her mother cares for them during the day. But I—I am proud to work. I have a room next to their apartment. They have two rooms—well, call it three. My son is clever. He has put up a small wall, behind which her mother sleeps. The wife leaves very early for work—also my son. He is a guard at a factory. We eat our evening meal together. But I am independent, you understand? Two evenings in the seven I buy food and cook dinner. They make me welcome, ah yes—I am still welcome!”

“Will you not always be welcome?”

She shook her head. “One does not ask too much of life. I pray the good God that when my hour comes it will be quick. If He is merciful, it will come in my sleep, after a day’s work. Ah yes, that would be happiness—to lie asleep in my bed—I have a good bed. That I saved. When we were married, my husband said, ‘At least let us have a good bed.’ So we had it. And I kept it. There, pray God, let me die in peace. The bed where I first knew love, where my children were born, where my husband died—” She wiped her rheumy eyes with ends of the black scarf that hung about her neck.

“You had more children?”

“A daughter who died at birth—”

He put his hand on her shoulder, forgetting the book.

“Don’t cry—I cannot bear it because I don’t know how to comfort you!”

She smiled up at him through her tears. “I thought I had done with weeping long ago. But no one asks me such questions now—only the price of a book and trying to buy it cheaper!”

“But to me you are a human being,” he said, and smiled at her and went away, putting the coins for the book in her dry old palm.

That night he did not go out on the streets as he usually did for his long evening walks. Instead he sat on the low windowsill and looked out over the city until the twilight faded into night and the electric globes sparkled as far as the horizon. He kept thinking of the old woman. It was a life. Poor as it was, it was a human life: birth and childhood, a woman and a man in marriage, children—one dead, one alive. Then death splitting a life in half, and now what was life for this human being except work? Except work and still life itself—waking in the morning to another day—life itself!

He rose and lit the small lamp on the table and, as though impelled, he wrote down the story of the old woman. It was only a shred of a story, a shred of a life, but writing it down as he remembered it, as he felt it, brought him a new sort of relief—not physical, as he felt after an orgasm with Lady Mary, but something deep—very deep, which was so new to him that he did not try to fathom it or explain it. Instead he laid himself upon his bed and fell quickly asleep.

IT WAS A HOT DAY in early September. People were coming back to the city. He sat down at a small round metal table under the awning outside a café. It was late morning, too early for luncheon, but he was hungry. He was growing, still growing, now well over six feet and his skeleton bare of flesh. His skin was smooth and clear, and although he had always kept his auburn red hair cut short, now that the new style was coming in that men, at least young men, were beginning to wear their hair longer, he was letting his own hair grow, washing it daily, for to be clean was a passion, yes, and there was little time for anything more. If women looked at him with more than a glance, he was not aware of it. If his eyes caught hers, he met the look with such blankness she went on and he did not notice it. He knew, or thought he knew, all about women; Lady Mary was a woman, was she not? He had not forgotten her, but she belonged to his past. But everything belonged to his past, once he had lived through it. He lived intensely in the moment, in every day as it came, without planning or preparation. He was always consumed in thinking. About what? About what he had learned today merely in living—the people who had come and gone, the people with whom he had talked or had not wanted to talk so that he could simply study their faces, their hands, their behavior. He stored them away in his memory and this he did unconsciously. They remained with him. Though they came and went, these people he collected stayed with him. He thought of them with wonder and question. He asked questions if they were willing to answer him, as usually they were, for most people he met were interested in themselves and he had a concern to know, which he himself could not yet understand. These strangers—why did he want to know where they came from and went, what they did and thought, any scrap of information they were ready to give him?