The Goddess Abides: A Novel

by Pearl S. Buck

  She pulled out a drawer where she kept his letters, and choosing at random, she took up one which had come to her only last week.

  “To me, about to die—perhaps before we meet again, my darling, though God forbid—it has become essential to define the problem of death before I can hope to solve it. Are those who have died ahead of me conscious of anything? For this answer I must wait. Yet I dare hope, for else why should I feel in these days a curious readiness to die, amounting almost to a welcoming of death, as though I wished to rid myself of this body of mine, which has served its final purpose, my beloved, in our love. Without love I must have believed death final; with love, my hope becomes even more than faith. It becomes belief.”

  She let the letter fall from her hands. She lifted her head, she listened. The house was silent about her but in the silence she seemed to hear music, distant, undefined.

  Part Two

  “I SUPPOSE IT BEGAN in Asia,” Jared Barnow said, “or, pinpointing further, in South Vietnam, in that beastly little war concentrated there.”

  He had simply dropped in one evening in early autumn when, she thought, she had all but forgotten him in the absorption of the new house. She had chosen the land, twenty acres on a cliff, and had even picked the site for her house, among a cluster of wind-shaped cedars. She had driven home in a mood of contentment, if not of joy—for what had she to do with joy at this stage of her life?—and had found him waiting for her in the dusk on the terrace. He was pacing back and forth, impatient.

  “No one knew where you were,” he complained. “It’s very unwise of you. Suppose something happened to you! Anything can happen these days. Where would I look for you?”

  She smiled, telling him nothing. “I’ll join you in a jiffy.”

  Half an hour later, she looked at him across the dinner table. Above the silver bowl of hothouse roses the candles flickered and Weston closed the French windows opening to the terrace and left the room.

  “You’ve never told me about that part of your life.” she said.

  “No.” He ate for a moment in silence, which she did not interrupt. Then he began again.

  “I doubt I’ll ever tell you. There are parts of one’s life that must be closed, absolutely, except as they explain the present. I’ll tell you—”

  But he did not tell her and she did not inquire, speaking instead of small present events in her own life, a new sonata she had begun, her piano lessons with a celebrated teacher. Then abruptly when they were in the library for coffee—“Let’s go to the library,” he had said. “The drawing room terrifies me, somehow”—and when the door was shut and they were alone he began again.

  “This much is necessary to tell, perhaps because it gave me my direction. There was a rocket attack on Saigon. The enemy aim was never accurate and one of the rockets fell on a village just outside the city where we were stationed. It wasn’t a severe attack, it didn’t last long, but the damned thing fell on a huddle of children who were scrambling in the dust for some chocolates one of our men had thrown down. They were laughing and shouting when”—he closed his eyes and bit his lower lip and then went on—“the man who had tossed the sweets was blown to bits. Most of the kids weren’t so lucky. They were only wounded. We gathered the ones still alive and carried them to the makeshift hospital we’d set up in the village. There weren’t enough doctors or nurses. There never were.”

  His hands trembled as he tried to light a cigarette and he gave it up. “There’s no use going into all of it. But that day I stood by at a makeshift operating table, trying to help a surgeon who was removing bits of metal from a child’s brain. I was horrified—and angry—to see the tools he was using: carpenter’s tools on gossamer! The boy died. I was glad for that. What could life be for him? But somehow all my anger at what had happened—was happening—centered on that clumsy tool. At least that could be improved! So—if you can imagine—out of fury, a dedication was born. I suppose one must call it dedication. It’s a drive, a concentration, a crystallization of purpose in my field, which, has always been science, but a practical science. I’m not purely a theorist. I like to see a theory put to use. My father was an engineer. I’ve inherited the instinct.”

  He rose abruptly from his chair and, walking to the closed window he stood, his back to her as though he were gazing at the garden, now dimly appearing in the moonlight, and he went on talking.

  “It wasn’t just the one child. Thousands! Even the Vietcong didn’t use napalm. We did. But we weren’t deliberately personally cruel as some of our own Vietnamese allies were. I saw a Vietnamese officer—there was a woman in a village just frozen in terror with two children clinging to her and another in her arms—shoot the children one after the other and then shoot her in the belly. Why? He was our ally—one of them. But it wasn’t a matter of one or a thousand. The children could never run fast enough. Bombs, bullets, mines, poisoned bamboo spikes, artillery shells, napalm—the whole works. Not just children, either, but everything seemed to center in that little boy whose brain I saw as that wretched instrument—exposed it. I was about to be discharged. I’d served my time. A week later I was on my way home. But I’ve never forgotten.”

  She listened in silence as he revealed himself. He revealed himself and yet the revelation removed him infinitely far from her. She had lived her life in such safety, such peace, such remoteness from the world he had known that Edwin’s death, and even Arnold’s, dwindled now to mere incidents, inevitable and scarcely sorrowful. How could she comfort this young and stricken man? She felt a surge of helplessness, weakening in its power. She did not know what to say and so said nothing and felt the more helpless. Then suddenly he seemed to need no comfort. He turned resolutely and squared his shoulders.

  “Why have I told you all that? I’ve never mentioned it before. I came home, I went to work. Who is to say that it was all meaningless? Pour me another cup of coffee, will you?”

  He held out his cup and she filled it and he sat down again.

  “So,” she said, putting the silver coffee pot on its tray, “what are you working on now, specifically?”

  He smiled at her gratefully over the edge of his cup and, setting it down empty, he began with his usual enthusiasm. “I’m not ready yet for specifics. Basically I’m a physicist. That’s my training. I’d have proceeded in that field, remote from human lives, I suppose, and wandering further and further into nuclear physics, if I had not been thrown into Vietnam—from which I shall never extricate myself now, emotionally, at least, I have lost my interest in space. I’m earthbound. But if I’m to apply my physics, I need engineering, biomedical engineering.”

  He frowned absently as he paused. He had forgotten her, she perceived, half jealously, and she pondered in some secret recess of her mind whether she should recall him by a feminine trick, an exclamation, softly uttered, that he was getting beyond her comprehension. So might she have done had she not been the daughter of Raymond Mansfield, that eminent scientist, who had lived so entirely as a scientist that she, alone with him in this house after the too-early death of her mother, had absorbed not only understanding of his scientific jargon, but an actual comprehension of his work with cosmic rays, at least to the degree of being able to help him with measuring and testing instrumentation. The exactitude demanded by such scientific pursuits had bred exactitude in her being, expressed in honesty carried sometimes to an extreme.

  This honesty prevented her now from a feminine trick, and she merely said, rather quietly, “I understand. Of course, I haven’t followed the developments in engineering, but I remember my father’s impatience with his own imperfect instruments when he was measuring cosmic rays on mountaintops and in caves. He used to mutter to himself that goddamit why hadn’t he taken a course in ordinary engineering!”

  Jared laughed. “Exactly! Well, universities today are planning courses in biomedical engineering and I shall simply have to—”

  He broke off.

  She waited, and then asked in the quiet alm
ost indifferent voice with which she had been speaking, “And how, exactly, do you define biomedical engineering?”

  He looked at her surprised and then considering. “Well, it’s an interdisciplinary sort of thing, as I think I’ve told you—multidisciplinary, if one is to be exact. For example, if I develop nuclear instrumentation—which I may decide upon—I must have electronic engineering for making my tools. But since I want to work in the medical field I must proceed further with biology.”

  “That makes you a physico-biological engineer?”

  “Exactly.”

  He looked at her with suddenly quizzical eyes. “Strange talk, this, isn’t it? Between a young man and a beautiful woman?”

  “It brings back my talks with my father, when I was a girl,” she said.

  “You still don’t look more than a girl,” he said.

  She felt his eyes upon her then and, looking up, met as surprised a gaze as though he saw her for the first time. Accustomed as she was to abrupt appreciation in a man’s look, she was instantly absurdly shy. She had often been told that she was a beautiful woman, although she did not think herself beautiful, being too tall, she thought, and inclined to be too thin and perhaps too fair, not at all voluptuous looking or anything of that sort. So she had thought somewhat apologetically when she was Arnold’s wife, yet here was the “look” again, as she called it to herself, a look unwelcome until now, when to her own surprise, it was not at all unpleasant. She met his dark eyes, not boldly in the least, but with a sort of pleading.

  “I suppose it’s because I’m too thin,” she said, her voice so low as to sound breathless.

  “You’re exactly right,” he replied firmly. “I’m glad you’re tall and leggy. I like it.”

  She laughed, to evade this declaration. “What am I supposed to say now?”

  “Whatever you feel,” he directed promptly.

  “Well, then, I’m pleased, though surprised.”

  “Come now—I don’t believe you’re surprised,”

  He gazed at her, daring her, and she felt her cheeks flush. She was about to protest her age in self-protection and then did not, discovering in herself a reluctance even to think of the difference in their ages. What did it matter if really it did not? They were two human beings who by accident had been born a generation apart. So it had been with herself and Edwin, only that was different, was it not, since he was the man?

  “What are you thinking of?” Jared asked suddenly.

  She laughed in embarrassment “Has one person the right to ask that of another?”

  “Meaning you won’t tell me?”

  “Meaning I won’t tell you!”

  They exchanged half-smiling, half-challenging looks and then she rose.

  “Thank you for telling me about the child. I shan’t forget. It explains so much. Do you mind if I say good night? I’m a little tired tonight.”

  …Safely in her own room and alone, she sat down before her dressing table and stared at herself in the oval, gilt-framed mirror that hung above it. What she saw was different, or so she imagined, from the woman she had looked at, without exactly seeing her, this morning when she was brushing her hair after her shower. This woman, reflecting herself now, looked, she decided, glowing—a ridiculous word. As though she were naïve enough to glow, if one must use the word, merely because a young man seemed inclined toward falling in love with an older woman who happened to be herself! Older she was, and she had all the sophistication, she believed, that a woman should have at her age.

  Her acquaintance, if not her friendship, was wide, and she was quite accustomed to the attachments between men and women these days, old and young, young and old. For that matter, what about herself and Edwin? But could she ever have explained that relationship to Arnold? Perhaps life was merely a series of experiences that could not be explained even to one’s self. And it was true that she now looked years younger than she was, which she had not before Arnold died, or indeed, even before Edwin died. Alone, she had in fact reverted to her own natural youthfulness, the effect, perhaps, of complete freedom, in which it was not necessary to share anything of herself, her time, her thoughts, with anyone else.

  “And I shan’t give up my precious freedom to anyone now,” she said to the woman in the mirror. She smiled and the woman smiled back at her. Yes, she thought, taking the pins out of her hair, she had said goodnight to Jared Barnow at exactly the right moment. He possessed a powerful animal magnetism which she was too intelligent not to recognize. She was aware, too, of the possibility of response within herself. Beneath the fastidiousness of her taste, the restraints of her upbringing, she was strongly sexed, how strongly she did not know—did not, indeed, want to know. Such knowledge could be very upsetting, the consequences too serious to be worth the experience. She was not afraid of the judgments of other persons, for in these days of laxity and indulgence such judgments were so light as to cause little more than amusement, but she dreaded the consequences in herself. Knowing the intensity of her feelings, she knew also that if she allowed herself to consider an—attachment, call it, she might not be able to control it. Then again her new freedom would be lost.

  She began to brush her hair vigorously and the long bright stuff fell over her face like a flimsy veil.

  …“You have a strange effect on me,” Jared announced at the breakfast table.

  “Yes?” Her eyebrows lifted. She was quite herself this morning after a night’s deep sleep, her mind relaxed after decision.

  “A creative effect,” he went on. “Instead of distracting me, as I’ve known myself to be distracted by an attractive woman, you—I hate to use the word inspire, it’s so misused, but that’s what it amounts to for me. You start my ideas into ferment. I’ve not met a woman before who appeals to every side of me—mentally, emotionally—and now, physically, too.”

  He spoke simply and without embarrassment, as he might have done had he been explaining a new theory. She listened, her eyes upon his, and answered as simply.

  “That’s wonderful to hear.”

  He waited, their eyes still meeting. “Well?” he said after a moment.

  She smiled. “Well what?”

  “Is that all?”

  “What more can there be?”

  “Any more, as much as you wish.”

  Silence fell, a portentous silence, swelling into an immense possibility. He was looking at her steadfastly—daring her perhaps? A word, a sign of yielding, and they might be thrown into a moment irretrievable in its implications. She was aware of his readiness, his hand waiting there on the edge of the table, his whole being waiting and ready. She withdrew involuntarily from the challenge.

  “Let’s talk about something else,” she said.

  He was silent then and fell to his eggs and bacon, until she broke the continuing silence, her voice casual. “Must you work today or have you time for a horseback ride?”

  “You ride?”

  “I’ve taken it up again. I used to ride a great deal as a girl, but my husband didn’t care for it.”

  “He didn’t appreciate you.” His voice was accusing, his mouth sulky.

  “In his way he did—very much,” she insisted.

  “Then he didn’t understand you.”

  She laughed. “Oh, come, that’s too trite—husbands that don’t understand wives, wives that don’t understand husbands! You haven’t told me about the girl who wants to marry you. Is she interested in your work?”

  “She wouldn’t know what I was talking about.”

  “You remind me of my son, Tony. He married a charming, stupid girl. And he’s quite intelligent! I suggested that she was perhaps a little stupid—only I didn’t use the word—when he told me he wanted to marry her, and he replied that he didn’t want a damned intelligent woman to come home to at night.”

  She laughed once more but he did not laugh with her. He looked at her gravely, scrambled egg poised on his fork. “He’s a damned fool, I’d say!”

  “Oh, no, Ton
y’s not a fool. Just had enough of his mother! I felt quite pleased—an only son not attached to his mother? That’s success for the mother these days.”

  He ate the egg, reflecting. “I wish you wouldn’t talk about husbands and wives, sons and mothers,” he said peevishly.

  “Only about you and the girl—” she said.

  “Not even about her. All right, let’s go riding now. I have an appointment this afternoon.” He rose and pushed his chair in as he spoke.

  …Riding, she thought remorsefully, was not a good idea after all. He rode superbly, his slender figure erect and elegant, the reins loose in his hand and yet controlled. Then there was the weather, a warm bright day, sunlight dappled through the trees on either side of the trail, the autumn-tinted hills rolling away to the horizon. She knew she looked well in her riding clothes and at the thought was severe with herself again. Had there been some secret impulse of coquetry which she had not recognized this morning at the breakfast table? No, she had simply been happy, a bright morning, a comfortable, even beautiful house, a pleasant companion. And surely there was no danger in admiring this companion, young and handsome, oh, very young and very handsome!

  “Why are you smiling at me?” he demanded.

  “Secret thought,” she said. “Come, let’s gallop!”

  She touched her whip to her horse’s flank and led the way down the trail and into the valley. And flying along under the cloudless sky, she thought of the house on the cliff, nonexistent and yet as real to her imagination as though it stood there. Should she tell him of that house? Yield to the impulse to reveal herself to him? No! The decision cut clean across the impulse. She would not reveal herself—not yet. She slowed her horse to a canter and glanced at her wristwatch.

  “It’s noon—you have an appointment.”

  “Why do you try to escape me?” he cried.