Pearl Buck - The Eternal Wonder

“Sir,” he began with resolution that was at the same time difficult. “I am honored. Indeed, sir, I don’t know a man whom I would be more honored to call my father. But sir, I am not ready to marry. I have a family too—a mother, a grandfather—”

Mr. Kung interrupted. “You will be able to care for both.”

“But sir,” he said with urgency, “I have myself. I must consider that for which I was born—my own destiny, my fate… my—my job, sir!”

“You mean—you mean—you decline ?”

“I must, sir!”

He rose, and Mr. Kung rose too. He put out his right hand but the Chinese did not take it. The Chinese face grew cold and stern.

“Don’t you understand, sir?” he pleaded.

Mr. Kung glanced at his wristwatch. “Excuse me,” he said. “I see that I have another appointment.”

He bowed and left the room.

AN HOUR LATER RANN WAS in the beautiful rooms where he had been so happy for all these months. He was packing his bag, he was gathering together the few things he had brought with him, leaving all else behind, and Stephanie was with him. The bus left for the airport in half an hour.

“I must go home,” he kept muttering. “I want to go home. I want to get back where I began. I have to be alone there.”

He heard himself and stopped. He turned to Stephanie. She stood there, pale and silent.

“Do you understand, Stephanie?”

She nodded. Suddenly he realized he was leaving her. “Shall we ever meet again?”

“If it is our fate,” she said.

“Do you believe in fate, Stephanie?”

“Of course I do. At least the Chinese part of me does.”

“And the other—the American?”

She shook her head. “You’ll miss the airport bus. The taxi is waiting.”

“Aren’t you coming with me?”

“No. I’m not coming with you. I’d only have to come home alone. Besides, I want to be here when my father comes home.”

She turned her cheek and he kissed its cool, smooth paleness.

“Good-bye, Stephanie. We’ll write?”

“Of course. Now, be on your way!”

When he reached New York, Rann was impatient to leave at once for home. Yet here was his grandfather and he had not the heart to go without inquiring of him so that he could tell his mother how the aged man did. A lifetime, it seemed, had passed during this trip. He had gone away a boy in experience and he had come back a man. But he had been compelled too quickly. Lady Mary had done him a damage. She forced a physical maturity upon him. What would it have been like, he wondered, if he had loved a girl, shy and young, someone his own age or even younger, and had made his own sexual way, leading instead of being led, hesitating instead of being hurried, wondering instead of being impelled? But there had been no young girl. Stephanie—no, Stephanie somehow belonged to the future. Yet if there had been no Lady Mary, might it have been Stephanie?

He was too tired to answer his own question. A deep weariness, a mental lethargy, overcame him. He had grown too quickly. His mind was too crowded. He needed time for the approach to manhood, time in which to study his own nature, divine his own needs. The thought of the quiet house in which he had been born and where he spent his childhood, yet that also always too quickly he now felt, nevertheless presented peace to his troubled spirit. No, he would not blame others. It was he who hurried himself, his restless mind, his instant imagination his masters. He would sleep, he would eat, he would rest in his mother’s calm presence and gradually he would know what to do. Meanwhile he must consider the matter of military service. Those years loomed ahead—shadow or opportunity? He did not know.

He traveled the crowded, litter-strewn streets of Manhattan with a sense of distaste after the immaculate streets of England and France, seeing the people anew—his people, though they seemed strange to him for the moment. How little he knew them and how much there was to know, how much to learn! He had learned something, in a fashion, about himself, but what he had learned he now did not like. He had learned in fact that body and mind were at war in his big frame and that he had conquered neither. Indeed, he had not fed or satisfied either being, for here was his clamorous body, its passions roused, its instincts alive, and here his mind, hostile against that body. He did not want to see a girl’s shapeliness or imagine her unclothed, and yet he was compelled thus to see and to imagine. He rebelled against his body, for his mind was hungry and impatient for its own satisfaction. The war was within his own members, and somewhere a third part of him hovered—his will, hesitating between body and mind. Body was tyrant and somehow it must be subdued so that he could assuage the deeper and perpetual hunger of his mind.

In this troubled state he left his modest hotel room on his first morning in New York and journeyed toward Brooklyn, intending to stay a day or two with his grandfather and then proceed westward. It was a fair morning, sunny and clear, the sky cloudless, the people walking briskly in the warm, pure air. He took a cab and watched the scene that moved slowly outside the window. Strange, strange how a people shapes its world! This could not be any other city on Earth than it was. Dropping haphazard from the sky, he would still know at once that it was American and New York. The car trundled finally over the Brooklyn Bridge and wound its way through streets until it reached his destination and stopped. He paid the driver, greeted the white-haired doorman who remembered him, and went into the elevator to the twelfth floor.

Then he pressed the doorbell and waited. Impatient, he pressed again. The door opened a few inches and he saw Sung’s frightened face peering at him.

“Sung!” he cried.

Sung put his finger on his lip. “Very sick—your grandfather.”

He pushed his way in, past Sung, and hastened to his grandfather’s room. There, stretched upon the bed his grandfather lay, his hands crossed on his bosom, his eyes closed.

“Grandfather!” Rann cried, and leaning, he put his hand on the folded old hands.

His grandfather opened his eyes. “I am waiting for Serena,” he murmured. “She is coming for me.”

He closed his eyes again, and Rann gazed at him, frightened and awed. How beautiful this aged face, the waxen skin, the white hair, the carved lips above the elegant hands! Suddenly he could not bear to lose his grandfather.

“Sung!” he called sharply. “Has a doctor seen him?”

Sung was at his elbow. “He not want doctor.”

“But he must have a doctor!”

“He talk he wishing die. He begin die last night—maybe five, six o’clock. He talk some lady only I don’t see, and he talk he too tired waiting her and must go her side somewhere—I don’t know. So no more eating, he talk me, but I make soup anyhow. He no eat. Just lying there all night talking this lady. I sit here all night too, not seeing lady, just hear him talk like she here.”

“He is wishing himself to die,” Rann declared.

“Maybe,” Sung agreed. “Man wishing die, he die, in China same.”

He shook his head, resigned and calm, but Rann went to the telephone and dialed. His mother’s voice answered.

“Yes?”

“Mother, it’s I,” he called.

“Rannie, where are you? What—I didn’t know you—”

He broke across her joyful surprise.

“I am with Grandfather—got in yesterday from Paris. Mother, he’s dying—he won’t see a doctor. He just lies here in his bed, waiting.”

“I’ll take the next flight out,” she said.