The Goddess Abides: A Novel (8 page)

“He’d like you,” she said.

“And I’d have worshipped at his feet! There’s no mind alive today that equals his. Why do the great ones die young?”

“Trying to save the world,” she replied. “He was on his way to Japan, to help the Japanese rebuild the cyclotron we destroyed during the world war.”

“I know. I read about it,” he said.

There was a knock at the door and Weston appeared with a tall mug of steaming liquid.

“Toddy, sir,” he said in his high old voice.

“Thanks,” Jared said, and taking the glass he sipped its contents. “Ah, that’s good. It goes straight into my bones.”

“Yes, sir. Good night, sir. Good night, madame. Everything is in order.”

“Thank you, Weston, and good night.”

The door closed behind him and they were silent. Jared sipped the toddy, his mind absent, as she could see, and she did not try again to recall him. She sat quietly looking at him while he gazed into the fire, sipping until the mug was empty. Then he set it down and turned to her apologetically.

“Forgive me. I’m not a good guest tonight. When I have a problem on my mind—”

She interrupted him. “But I understand. I shouldn’t like you to feel as though you had to entertain me. I was thinking, myself.”

“Of what?”

Impossible to say the truth—“Of you!” She was too shy for that bold truth. She spoke lightly and rose from the chair.

“I was thinking you should go to your bed and sleep away your cold. Your room is the first door on the right, at the head of the stairs. If you find you need anything in the night, press the button, on the telephone that says W. It connects with Weston’s room.”

“What a palace,” he said. He had risen when she rose and now he stood tall above her, and looked down upon her, smiling, and she looked up at him, uncertain of what was next. It was he who decided, abruptly and frankly.

“Do you mind if I kiss you?”

She shook her head, but was speechless, helpless in absurd shyness. A kiss was meaningless, a kiss was nothing nowadays, a kiss could be no more than a casual gift to one’s hostess. Ah, but it took two, one to give; one to receive! She felt his lips on her right cheek, and then lightly, very lightly, he turned her head with his two palms, and she felt his lips upon hers, a quick brush of warmth.

“Good night,” he said. “What time is breakfast?”

“Whenever you like,” she said, as casually as though there had not been this kiss which lay upon her lips a living coal.

“When do you breakfast?” he demanded at the door.

“At nine o’clock.”

“Good heavens, what a lie-abed!”

He pretended to be shocked and she laughed.

“Good night,” she called as he mounted the stairs. “Sleep well in that room! It was mine when I was a girl.”

She was sleepless for hours that night, and when she woke it was nearly ten o’clock the next morning. Her first thought was of him and she rang the kitchen. Weston answered.

“Has Mr. Barnow breakfasted?” she asked.

“Yes, madame, at eight o’clock sharp and left immediately, begging your pardon. He wrote you a note, madame—I put it on the breakfast table for you.”

She hung up, blaming herself. How could she have slept away the last hour of his presence? She made haste to shower and dress and, taking her seat at the table in the sunny breakfast room, she found his note under her plate.

“I am sorry to leave in this discourteous fashion, but I had an early call from the man I came to see. I am to meet him at nine o’clock in his laboratory. I have barely time to make it. My plane will be ready at noon. I shall be flying back to you one of these days. Here is my telephone number—and my thanks. Wonderful to see you again! Jared.”

She studied the handwriting. It was large and firm and very black.

…Summer moved into midsummer. Or was it only she who so lazily moved? In this first summer since Arnold’s death—he had died in the autumn of last year—she found herself given over to a lassitude that was far from empty. Indeed, it seemed to her that she had never enjoyed so richly the sensuous air, the scintillating clarity of sunshine, the lush glory of the flowers and foliage. Since she had not yet fulfilled the year of traditional mourning for her husband she had excuse to decline all invitations she did not wish to accept and to accept only those she did not wish to decline. Once or twice a week she went out to dinner or luncheon with some old friend of hers or Arnold’s, and on the intervening days she cleared from the house the last of Arnold’s personal possessions, his clothes, his pipes, his papers. When this was done, she took up her music again, and seriously, so that several hours a day were occupied at the piano, and other hours were spent in reading books.

She was only beginning to realize now that Arnold had absorbed her life, not purposely but quite naturally and always gently, or perhaps she had been too yielding in allowing herself to be thus absorbed. At any rate, she found a number of small desires to be fulfilled, certain garments, certain colors she had always wanted to wear and for which Arnold had expressed distaste; certain arrangements of the furniture which he had not approved, he being constitutionally opposed to change; even certain foods to which she had been tempted and which he had declared indigestible. Each liberty she now took for herself released her further until she no longer questioned anything she chose to do, as she had done instinctively and by long habit in the first months after Arnold’s death.

“You have changed,” her son told her on one of his rare and unexpected visits. He lived in Washington with his young wife and their only child, a junior executive in some government department leading to service abroad. She was never quite used to his seemingly sudden development from a sandy-haired rather prosaic little boy to a sandy-haired rather prosaic young man. He had been a good little boy and was now a good young man, touchingly so, she felt at this moment, when his honest blue eyes were fixed affectionately upon her. He had “dropped by,” as he put it, one day in early July, on his way to New York, where he was to meet a minor dignitary from some foreign country.

“How have I changed?” she asked half playfully.

“You look rested—and interested again.”

“Interested in what, Tony?”

“How should I know? Life, I suppose.”

“I am learning to live alone, that’s all.”

He leaned over her and kissed her cheek in farewell, glancing at his watch. “Now don’t you get lonely. Fay and I and the baby can always run up for a few days. Pity that Millicent lives so far away!”

She parried Tony’s suggestion.

“Oh, no—thank you, dear. I must learn to live my own life.”

“Well, let us know—”

He was off and she relapsed into indolence. She sauntered to the terrace upon which the drawing room opened and stretched herself upon a long chair. Indolent, yes, but a productive indolence, she told herself, sorting out life and feeling—feeling as she had not explored feeling since adolescence. The sun, warm upon her skin, enlivened her blood and yet infused it with delicious languor. And why, she inquired of herself, did she continue to dream of another house, a house of her own, when here she was the heir to beauty long inherited? From where she lay, she could see, and did appreciate, the vistas of clean-cut lawn, tended shrubbery and vast old trees, culminating at a distance in a quiet pool, a fountain, the marble figure of a Grecian woman, installed by her grandfather when these acres, this house, were his inheritance.

This remembrance of Jared, which never left her, quickened into sharp longing of which she was half ashamed. Had he not come so suddenly, had he not left so abruptly, had he not been obsessed by a dream of his own, a dream that obviously had nothing to do with her, had he, in short, visited her wholeheartedly, with whatever intention she could not imagine, then would he not have lingered here, have been beside her in another chair as comfortable as this one in which she lay, warmed by the sun and made languid by beauty? She was too experienced a woman not to comprehend the danger into which she was moving, and more than anger, for it was also absurdity. She would not allow herself to fall in love with a man years younger than herself. Years? Decades—

“Madame, the telephone, please. Person to person,” Weston said at the door.

She rose at once. Of course it was Edwin.

“My love,” his kind old voice said at her ear. “I find it impossible to live any longer without a sight of you. Are you completely obligated to others or dare I suggest a little visit? If it were possible, how gladly I would come to you! Legs could do it, but my heart, an ancient valve, cries danger. I don’t want to become a sudden invalid in your house, although for me it would have pleasant aspects.”

She was not quite prepared for so sudden a move. There was another presence now in her house. On the other hand, might it not be a protection against that invading presence, a reminder of age and dignity, if she visited Edwin for a few days?

“Let me think about it,” she told him. “If I can arrange things—”

He intervened with urgency. “There is no one to think of now except yourself, is there? And possibly a bit about me? The old heart ticktocks away, but it reminds me that it won’t go on forever.”

She laughed. “Shame on you! Blackmailing me!”

“Of course! All’s fair in love—”

“I’ll call you tonight.”

“I shan’t sleep until you do.”

Thus they parted and she was alone again, yet not alone, for she realized in this instant that she might never be alone again unless she could recover from the new presence in her thoughts. However she strove to think of other places, other people, the activities of her daily life, her delights of which she had many, her duties and absorptions accumulated through years of living in the same city, the same house, the new presence of Jared pervaded. In dawning panic she felt the need to escape, and how better to escape than to hasten to Edwin and, devoting herself to him, drive out that other?

Without waiting for nightfall upon decision she fled to the telephone and called. “Edwin, I have arranged everything. I will come tomorrow. I’ll drive myself and arrive in time to dine with you.”

“Blessed be tomorrow, darling—and blessed be you for answering my need!”

His voice was bright with joy and she was made hopeful. Let her be satisfied in comforting one who needed her rather than dwelling upon her own need! And what, for that matter, was her need? In reality, what was it, brutally put, but an incipient and dangerous infatuation, the consequence, in all probability, of her solitary life? For she was still unready to resume her old life of luncheons and dinners and such engagements, and uncertain indeed of ever resuming them and, in this uncertainty, inclined to new interests to be sought and defined, but assuredly not in the person of a young invader, a chance acquaintance who, if pursued or allowed to pursue, might threaten the entire structure of her reasonable and dignified life. Escape she must, therefore, and in the spirit of one seeking escape, she left the house early the next day after a restless moonlit night and was well on her way by midmorning.

It was a happy thought to drive herself in the small convertible car, concentration preventing the thoughts from which she was in flight. Speed and motion, the wind blowing back her hair, for she had put down the top of the car, gave the illusion of actual escape. A few days with Edwin would set her right, bring her back to reality. She would take shelter in the safety of his love for her and love him, as indeed she did, too, but quietly and with the respect due his age and great fame. Let her be honored by love and not roused by it—although perhaps she had made a mistake in allowing him to come to her room? Yes, it was a mistake. Tonight she would tell him so.

“Edwin, my dear,” she would begin. “We are past the age, you and I, when we need the physical expression of love. If others knew of it, they would construe it wrongly. It might even be shocking to them. Let us therefore be content with good talk and sitting side by side. Dear Edwin—” Here she would pause, here she might take his hand in hers and press it.

In reality, after arriving just in time for dinner in the shadowy dining room lit only by candles in ancient silver candlesticks, and after his rapturous greeting of her, she perceived that he looked thin and somehow pathetic in his loneliness. She put off saying anything that might dampen his joy in her coming, put it off indeed until after dinner and then put it off again because he wanted to talk about the book he was writing on the possibility and impossibility of immortality. He drew her hand through his arm when they rose from the table and directed their steps toward the drawing room, where a wood fire was burning against the chill of evening in the mountains. They seated themselves side by side on the settee facing the chimney piece, and he began at once, keeping her left hand on his arm by his covering right hand.

“One can’t test one’s own thoughts, you know, darling—and I am not at all sure of the validity of the philosophy I am hewing out of this old brain of mine. Is it too soon after dinner to think grave thoughts?”

“Not if you are thinking them,” she said, smiling.

He was silent for a long, moment, perhaps to collect those thoughts, perhaps to change the playful mood in which they had dined to his usual philosophical searching. Then he began afresh.

“You have had a very profound influence upon me, Edith, and therefore upon my thinking. I have rewritten several chapters in my philosophy which I had thought was permanent. You have brought a new urgency upon me to consider death, its finality, its meaning. I want to prove that death is not final. I want to assure myself that
I
continue because
you
continue. As for others, let them continue if they wish. It is
my
immortality which I must prove and to myself first. Therefore I have been considering death anew. Is it an end, or is it an entrance? But what is this self of mine which can consider death as though it were a state separate from the self? Ah, it’s the separateness that is so significant! I contemplate death as though I were continuing after its arrival, exactly as I contemplate it before its arrival. I, therefore, survive since I can contemplate myself afterward as well as before. Is that specious, my darling? Be frank—I urge the truth! Don’t let my new anxiety to live beyond the grave lead me into false paths!”