The Goddess Abides: A Novel

by Pearl S. Buck

  Through the long sunlit morning such thoughts came and went through her mind but she did not speak them. Indeed as the miles sped by neither of them spoke. He drove expertly, but he was far away in some distant space of his own, and she, recognizing such absence, for her father had habitually slipped away into similar abstraction, sat in silence and relaxed happiness. The landscape was mild and without snow, the rounded hills and shallow valleys were still tinged with green, the people were amiable and unhurried. There was little sign even of Christmas. So quiet was the day that the quietude invaded her own being until she wondered if she had dreamed her passion of the night before.

  …“I don’t understand the nature of love,” he said.

  It was such a Christmas Day as she had never had. They stopped at noon near a small town, a mere village whose name she did not know, and took their Christmas dinner in a restaurant that was the only one open. The proprietor was an old man, without family, he told them, else he would have been in his own home.

  “Buried my wife ten years ago,” he said cheerfully.

  Now, the meal over, they walked along the beach and Jared, out of unusual lightheartedness and chaffing, had suddenly become serious and declared that he did not understand the nature of love. She leaned against the twisted weather-beaten trunk of a dead pine and waited for further communication. He stood beside her, looking out to sea. The day was quiet and the sea was still, but the first ripples of the incoming tide fringed the shore with white. He continued.

  “What I really mean to say is that I don’t understand my own state of mind.”

  She waited, having learned that though he was articulate enough when he spoke of his work, he was not at all articulate about himself, not because he was shy, she perceived, but because he was not accustomed to thinking about himself.

  “For example,” he went on, “when I am with you I am in the most curious contentment. I can’t call it anything else—contentment. I feel I am somehow in my element. You make no demands on me. Do you realize, I wonder, how unusual it is for a woman to make no demands on a man? I don’t have to charm you!”

  She laughed. “I find you charming exactly as you are!”

  He did not laugh in reply. Instead he continued to speak in the same half-musing mood. “No, I’ve never felt like this toward any woman. I have a sense of homecoming, of there being no need for secrets between us.”

  “Have you secrets?”

  “Of course! A man of my age with no secrets? Impossible—in this day, anyway! I’ve played the fool as much as any man. My uncle—bless his reticences—could never bring himself to give me any advice and I stumbled along on my own, always too old for myself, always ahead of my own years. Yet I don’t understand the nature of love.” He turned to face her. “Mind you, I’m no innocent. I’m precocious in everything. A woman initiated me when I was thirteen…Well, I let myself be initiated!”

  “Don’t tell me about it,” she said quickly.

  “I will tell you,” he insisted. “I was in school—prep school—and one of the masters had an ardent wife. He was a chilly sort of fellow and she was a redhead, with all that goes with the temperament. She—well, it was a rape, I suppose, except that I was infatuated and big for my age—and once the final moment began, I couldn’t stop. There’s a point which, if a man lets it get that far, there is simply no stopping, and physically I was a man. It happened in her own house, too, on a rainy afternoon. I’d gone over to ask my professor a question in physics. I was doing advanced work and so I was a sort of favorite of his. I know now, of course, that he had a homosexual bent, which explained her, I suppose. But after she initiated me into the way of the flesh, so to speak, I simply became obsessed, to put it bluntly. I thought about nothing but sex. Are you shocked?”

  “No,” she said quietly, “only terribly sorry for that boy.”

  He did not reply to this, but continued his story, almost coldly, she thought. “It didn’t matter how many experiences I had or with whom. They all ended the same way—in a sort of disgust with the woman and with myself. I couldn’t understand why. She—whichever she happened to be—was always irresistibly attractive until I’d slept with her—maybe not at once but inevitably, and then it would be over. I’d stop seeing her then. I suppose I knew subconsciously that there was no real relationship there—a blind demand of the body, meaningless so far as communication went, like eating when you’re hungry. Anyway, slowly, I grew beyond the meaningless stage. I simply stopped. I saw that I was destroying something in myself. I was destroying the capacity to communicate on any other level than sex. As soon as I’d got to like a girl—or a woman—and that might happen instantaneously, I thought of her physically. What confuses me more is that I think of you in the same way except it is entirely different with you—it’s on every level at once.”

  She did not speak, could not speak, so confounded was she by her own feelings, a mixture of relief and quick hurt. A moment passed and she perceived that the insistent foolish hurt prevailed. Yes, she was hurt, her vanity as a woman, she told herself harshly, and she maintained steadfast silence. Not for anything would she reveal this self to him.

  “Instead,” he was saying, “I am conscious in your presence of a beautiful freedom to be myself, to think my own thoughts, plan my work, consider the future—in short, to live, and more freely even than when I am alone, because you broaden my freedom just by being the person you are, instead of making demands, limiting freedom as other women do. I’m hopelessly in love with you, I suppose, but not as I’ve been before. So I say that I don’t understand the nature of love. I only know that I love you—in a way that is entirely new to me. I don’t think I’ll ever love anyone else.” He turned to her abruptly and putting his hands on her shoulders, he looked into her eyes. “What do you say to all this?”

  She shook her head. What could she say? Something banal, perhaps. I’m old enough to be your mother, you know. No, she could not. Her own heart refused the words. She had no feeling of a mother toward him. She had no wish, no will, to play the mother to him and she would not use a lie to cover the truth, that she loved him passionately.

  “Well?” he demanded.

  “I don’t understand our relationship, either,” she said at last.

  He turned his eyes from her then, but he did not move away from her. Instead he put his arm about her shoulders and they stood thus, side by side and facing the sea until she was able no longer to endure the pressure of his body against hers. She moved from him.

  “Let’s get on our way, shall we?” she said.

  “Where to?” he asked.

  “Anywhere,” she said.

  …“And so,” Jared was saying, “I want to devise an instrument that a cineplastic surgeon can use to create two fingers out of a forearm to substitute for the lost hand. I know how to do it, I think and, with training, the amputee will be able even to feel in those fingers. That’s always my purpose, to restore the sense of feeling. But it’s still the brain that interests me most. No one really understands the structure of the human brain. There the source of feeling is lodged—feeling and emotion and thought, of course. I’m studying the biology of the brain, dissecting a brain, actually, in my laboratory, so that I can devise certain instruments—ah, there’s so much to do!

  “The ordinary stethoscope, for instance, needs radical improvement. I want to study it, too, in depth; in spite of its general use and acceptance, I’ve an idea it needs a thorough revaluation, though new models keep appearing. There’s been no basic acoustical study of it for years. There must be something wrong, or lacking, in it or there wouldn’t be such an evidence of need for improvement. There ought to be a total soundway, for example, from the patient’s chest to the listener’s ear, excluding thereby all environmental noises. The three different wave forms—but why do I bore you with all this? You see what I mean—when I am with you my mind runs on its own way, only with more than normal creative energy, as though your presence provides an environment of condu
cive waves. Why not? There’s physiological evidence of that sort of thing. We don’t half understand the electrical effect of one personality on another.”

  She listened to this monologue and at the pause she replied with literal understanding. “Entirely possible, of course—and probable. And I love the way your mind ferrets here and there and everywhere, like an inquisitive animal quite apart from the rest of you. Sometime, of course, you’ll have to exert the disciplines of the artist as well as of the scientist, both of which you are, and then you’ll have to choose where to concentrate your direction. Oh, yes, you are an artist”—for he was shaking his head—“I’ve seen what you draw on bits of paper when you’re thinking out one of your inventions!”

  It was quite true. In the room in the Vermont house she had found scraps of paper on the desk whereon he had drawn sketches of animals, of human faces—one of these her own—and of intricate geometric designs. In the guest room in the huge old Philadelphia house she had discovered other such drawings and had carefully preserved them all.

  “Not that I belittle inventions,” she went on, “but inventions are never permanent. Someone else always thinks of an improvement and the invention on which a man has spent, perhaps, his life, is outdated. But art is eternal, ageless, complete in itself.”

  He cried out his admiration. “God, how accurately you put it! Entirely true, of course, and I shan’t forget. But you know what you’ve done? Suddenly what I thought was to be my lifework, you’ve made into an avocation. I shall have to reconsider.”

  His handsome face fell into grim lines, his mouth grew stern, he muttered to himself unintelligible sounds. She perceived that she was forgotten and was well content.

  …That night, on the way home and stopping at the same inn, he took her in his arms before they parted, and holding her against him, he kissed her, drew back to gaze intensely into her eyes, then kissed her again and yet again before he let her go and turned toward his room. She closed the door between them, giving him a last smile as she did so, but he opened it again to thrust head and shoulders through the opening. “That smile—” he began abruptly and stopped. She was already standing before the mirror, taking the hairpins out of her hair and she looked over her shoulder at him.

  “Did I smile?” she asked.

  “You did—a damned Mona Lisa sort of smile it was, too,” he retorted, and closed the door without further comment.

  She stood motionless before the mirror, and saw herself reflected there, not smiling at all but serious, her face flushing, her eyes too bright. A moment had arrived, a moment of decision. If she should open the door and simply enter his room without a word the moment would be hers, the wound would be healed, her own demand satisfied. For in truth how little he understood her! She made immense demand upon him, the final demand. “With my body I thee worship!” Was she afraid of refusal? Not at all—not at all! Alone with him in unknown country, in a half-empty inn, the night concealing all, he could not resist her. That he was not virgin, that he had spoken so freely of himself, only deepened her own desire. She would not be violating a boy. She would be offering her love to a man. For now she had rejected utterly the word infatuation. She loved him. Unwise, incredible, indeed reluctant, she was now irretrievably in love—not with a girl’s shallow emotion, but with a woman’s depth and power.

  She took two steps toward the door and paused. Then resolutely she turned back again to the mirror and continued to take the pins out of her hair until it fell about her shoulders, a shimmering mass, out of which her face appeared, pale and of a startling beauty.

  …“I have a bone to pick with you, in fact, several bones.”

  Thus he began the next day as soon as they met face to face at the breakfast table in the nearly empty dining room of the inn.

  “Bone by bone, one at a time, please,” she begged, as he pushed in her chair.

  She was conscious of a deep weariness this morning, for she had not slept well. Broken dreams, always ending in frustration of some sort, a wandering road she walked alone, which ended suddenly without reason, a river in which she swam, unable to reach a shore, a crying child whom she searched for and could not find—from such dreams she had waked this morning, listless and without her usual morning energy.

  “First, an exception to your saying that the inventions of science outdate themselves. Mathematics never does! All mathematics, if correctly done, are true. New discoveries may demand new equations, but the mathematics remain true, if correct. There’s something eternal about mathematics. Who was it—someone—said that mathematics is the music of logical thinking and of course music is the mathematics of art?”

  He sat down as he poured this forth, and she put up her hands in laughing protest.

  “Wait—wait! It’s so early in the morning—”

  Was this what he had been thinking about in the night while she was weaving her futile dreams?

  “I’m sorry,” he said penitently. “But you’ve spoiled me, you know. I’ve grown used to simply beginning where I am, when I’m with you. I couldn’t sleep last night for some reason. I’d half a mind to wake you up, too, but it would have been too selfish of me, though I’m selfish enough, God knows, so I lay thinking about what you’d said and trying to justify myself in my choice of work by reasoning out the relationship between science and art—which this morning seems to me to be that art concerns itself with beauty and science concerns itself with reality. Perhaps we couldn’t face the harsh reality without seeing the beauty, too. We need both science and art.”

  “In the same person?” she asked.

  “If the person is big enough,” he said firmly. “And do you want your eggs scrambled this morning?”

  “Yes, please,” she said.

  …The verbal duet continued later in the day, in the unplanned give and take which she was beginning to enjoy so keenly. This slipping in and out between the ephemeral of everyday incident and eternal verities was something she had not known before. She had listened to her father and to Edwin, obedient to their age and wisdom, but keeping her thoughts and arguments to herself. Now and again during her life as a student and then a wife, she had met brilliant men at a dinner table, at an evening’s entertainment, and had even become absorbed for a time thereafter in their dominating brilliance, but she had not met a man, a young man, fearless as Jared was fearless, in his instinctive recognition of her as a woman but his equal, indeed at times his superior, which instead of an invitation he seemed to consider a delight. Such acceptance was new to her.

  The morning passed in amiable conversation between long pauses of silence as he drove and she contemplated the changing landscape. It was noon, after an unusually long silence, that he suddenly spoke and the duet began again.

  “I don’t understand the creative process, whether in science or art. I know the process, of course—a long time, hours or days or weeks, when I simply muddle along in a morass of confusion. My mind is like a frantic animal locked in a cage, racing this way and that, searching for a door. Then suddenly the door is there. But it wasn’t there all along. It appears without cause and without reason, and I am inspired.”

  “Because you’ve been searching,” she said. “You’ve created your own inspiration because of your own demand—I suppose upon your subconscious. That’s where the mind goes for its sources. It’s the reservoir each of us has, perhaps the only one. That’s what makes great art—the artist draws upon the reservoir. Otherwise how understand abstract art? It’s successful only when it truly expresses that in the subconscious which is common to us all.”

  “How is it you know so much?” he demanded.

  She still refused to allow herself to speak of her age. Call it vanity, but there were ways in which she was indeed vain! She equivocated.

  “I had intelligent parents,” she said.

  “It’s odd, but I don’t want to know anything about your husband—or your children.”

  “They wouldn’t understand you,” she said quietly.
r />   “Then I don’t have to understand them, do I?”

  “No.”

  Her answer was literal. She would never try to explain the inexplicable fact of her relationship to him. She owed no one such explanation. She was alone, she was free.

  …“I have been hearing the oddest gossip about you,” Amelia said the next day.

  Amelia had come for one of her infrequent visits, a morning call, made usually on her way from the hairdresser in the center of the city.

  “Have you indeed,” she murmured in pretended indifference.

  She had reached home the night after Christmas and Jared had left her at once, as soon as he had seen her safely into the house.

  “The best, the happiest Christmas I’ve ever had,” he told her.

  To take her in his arms when he parted from her was now his habit, so much so indeed that she wondered if it meant anything to him, after all. Certainly it meant too much to her, for her own peace.

  “I’ll be back on New Year’s Eve,” he said at the door.

  She had closed it behind him and felt the house empty about her, a shell without life. She was glad to see Weston appear at the end of the hall, obviously waked out of sleep.

  “If you’d told me you was coming, madame,” he murmured reproachfully, taking her bags.

  “I didn’t know myself,” she said and went upstairs.

  Alone in her sitting room she had not gone immediately to bed. Instead she had lit the fire, always laid ready, had sat in the easy chair before it, reliving the past days and facing herself. I shall have to come to some sort of conclusion, she thought. I cannot go on as I am. It is too difficult. I must part from him or—she could not finish. Instead, a thousand memories of him flowed over her, the changeful expressions of his vivid face, his dark eyes now musing, now questioning, his mouth, his voice, the way his hair grew upon the back of his neck, his strong firm hands. She went to bed distraught with longing and waked this morning unassuaged, to face Amelia.