Pearl Buck - The Eternal Wonder

Thus reminded, he immediately left his dog and ran into the house to find his father with his question. His father was upstairs, getting into sweater and slacks. Spring was at hand and the garden had been ploughed.

“Virgin?” his father repeated. He hung up his professional suit in the closet and looked out the window.

“See the garden?” he asked.

Rannie came to his side. “Mr. Bates ploughed it this morning.”

“Now we have to plant seeds in it,” his father said. “But—”

He sat down and drew Rannie between his knees, his hands on the boy’s shoulders. “Until we plant seeds there in that ploughed earth, we won’t have a garden. Right?”

Rannie nodded, his eyes upon his father’s keenly handsome face.

“So,” his father went on, “it’s virgin soil—virgin earth. All by itself it can’t grow the things we want. Everything begins with a seed—fruits and vegetables, trees and weeds—even people.”

“People?” Rannie asked, astonished. “Was I a seed?”

“No,” his father said. “But a seed was your beginning. I planted the seed. That’s why I am your father.”

“What kind of seed?” he asked, astonished.

“My kind,” his father said simply.

“But—but—where did you plant it?”

Questions rushed to his lips. He could not ask them fast enough.

“In your mother,” his father said. “Until then she was a virgin.”

“Immaculate conception?”

“I think so.”

“Conception—”

His father interrupted. “Comes from the Latin word meaning an idea—an abstract idea—something that is at first just a thought. Then it becomes more—it’s a concept—then a—”

“I was a concept?”

“In a way—yes. I saw your mother, I fell in love with her, I wanted her to be my wife and your mother. That was my idea, my concept. When you began, it was a conception.”

“When Jesus—”

His father interrupted again. “Ah, we know he was born of love. That’s why we call it the Immaculate Conception. It wasn’t Joseph who planted that seed. He was getting rather old for seed-planting. Mary was young—still a virgin, perhaps. But someone who loved her planted the seed. We know that—someone very extraordinary, or there wouldn’t have been the extraordinary child.”

“Where did he plant it? Where did you—”

“Ah, that’s the next question! Inside the mother person, the woman, there’s a garden, a little enclosed spot, where the seed falls—and starts to grow. We call it the womb. It’s the growing place for children.”

“Do I have one?”

“No, you’re a seed-planter, like me.”

“How do we—”

“The instrument is the penis, and there’s a passageway to the womb called the vagina. Look up both those words in the dictionary.”

“Can I plant seed now?”

“No. You have to grow up first. You have to be a man.”

“Can you do it whenever you like?”

“Yes—but I like to do it only when your mother is ready. After all, she has the work of growing the seed—taking care of it, and so on. The garden has to be made ready, remember.”

“Can Brisk plant dog seed?”

“He can.”

“And we’ll have puppies? I’d like some puppies.”

“We’ll find a mother sort of dog.”

“How will we know?”

“Well, she won’t have a penis as Brisk does. A penis is a planter, you know.”

“Does Mother—”

“No. I told you to look it up in the dictionary. Now, come out and help me hoe up the garden. That’s your job just now.”

He never ceased to think of the seed, nevertheless. Everything in the world, all that lived, began with a seed! But what made the seed? “In the Beginning,” the minister intoned one Sunday morning in the church. “In the Beginning was the Word and the Word was God.”

“Is God the same as the seed?” he asked his father on the way home.

“No,” his father replied, “and don’t ask me what God is, because I don’t know. I doubt anyone knows, but everyone with any intelligence wonders, each in his own way. It seems as though there ought to be, or even must be, a beginning, but then again perhaps there wasn’t. Perhaps we live in eternity.”

“How you talk!” his mother said. “The boy can’t understand.”

“He understands,” his father said.

The boy looked from one to the other of these, his parents, and he loved his father the better.

“I do understand,” he said.

WHEN HE WAS SIX YEARS OLD, he started school. It was on a crisp autumn morning that the new life began. His mother had bought him a suit of clothes the week before, a dark blue suit, and his father had taken him to the barber for a haircut.

“Am I handsome?” he asked his mother as he stood in the doorway.

She laughed. “What a funny little boy you are!”

“Why do you say I am funny?” he inquired, wondering and even inclined to be hurt.

“Because you ask such questions,” she retorted.

“As a matter of fact, you are quite handsome,” his father said, “and you should be grateful, for it is an advantage to a man, as I have discovered.”

His mother laughed even more. “O vanity—vanity, thy name is Man!”

“What is vanity—?” he began, but his mother gave him an affectionate push.

“Go ask your questions in school,” she told him.

On the way to the school, which was only three blocks away in this quiet college town, so that he could walk, he pondered the gravity of the day.

I shall learn everything, he thought. They will teach me how to make engines. They will tell me why seeds grow. They will let me know what is God.

The peace of the morning pervaded him with joy and content. School was where he could learn everything. All his questions would be answered. He would have a teacher. When he reached the schoolyard, children were playing there, boys and girls of his own age. Some of them had mothers with them because it was their first day at school. His own mother had said, “Perhaps I had better come with you this first day, Rannie.”

“Why?” he had asked.

His father had laughed. “Why indeed! He’s right—and quite self-sufficient.”

Now he did not pause in the schoolyard with the other children. Some of them he knew, but he had no playmates. He tired of them quickly when they came into his home yard and he preferred a book to games. Now and then his mother protested.

“Rannie, you ought to play with the other children.”

“Why?” he asked.

“It would be fun,” she said.

“I have fun by myself,” he said. “Besides, what they think is fun isn’t fun for me.”

So now he walked straight into the schoolhouse and asked a man where the first-grade room was. The man looked at him, a gray-haired man—with a young face.

“You’re Professor Colfax’s son, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” Rannie said.

“I’ve heard about you. I was a classmate of his once—before you were born. I’m Jonathan Parker, your principal. Come with me. I’ll introduce you.”

He put a hand on Rannie’s shoulder and led him down the hall and around a corner and stopped at the first door to the right.

“Here we are. This is your room. Your teacher is Martha Downes—Miss Downes. She’s a good teacher. Miss Downes, this is Randolph Colfax—Rannie for short.”

“How do you do, Miss Downes?” Rannie said.

He looked into a lined, spectacled face, kind but unsmiling.

“I’ve been expecting you, Rannie,” she said. They shook hands.

“Your seat is there by the window. Jackie Blaine is on one side of you, Ruthie Greene on the other. Do you know them?”

“Not yet,” Rannie said.

The bell rang at this moment and children came tumbling into the halls. Most of the first graders had mothers with them, and some of the little girls cried when their mothers left them. Ruthie was one of these. He leaned toward her.