Read Online The Eternal Wonder by Pearl S. Buck - Free Book Online Page B

what—but as though your father were saying something to us. It’s comforting somehow.”
    She looked at him wistfully. “Oh, Rannie, I do hope I’ll be the sort of mother you need! I’ve always left you to your father since you were a baby, that is … because he’s … he was so much wiser than I, and he knew you were no ordinary child. I hope … I hope I’ll be able to … not of course take his place—that I could never, never do—but fulfill my own place as perhaps I haven’t, because perhaps I haven’t felt it necessary, but you must help me. You must tell me if there is anything I should be doing that I’m not doing, for it won’t be lack of willingness, darling, but just that I don’t know enough.”
    He met her pleading look with a tenderness he had never felt before. All his deepest love he had given to his father, but now he saw her separately, a childlike creature and yet a woman, of whose flesh he had been born and to whom in a way, too, he belonged.
    “There is something you can do for me, Mother,” he said.
    “And that is?” his mother asked.
    “I’d like to know everything about my father—everything—everything. I realized now that when we were together we always talked about me—or something I was thinking about. I was selfish.”
    “No, you weren’t selfish,” she said quickly. “He was simply—overcome with joy that he had a mind like yours to teach, to work with. He—he was—a born teacher and he revered a fine brain. He used to speak of your—your brain—as a treasure.”
    “But I want to know him now,” he said.
    She looked at him with a wondering love. “How could you know? …” she murmured.
    “Know what, Mother?”
    “That what you have just said comforts me as nothing else could! I’d never have thought of it myself—that I, I could keep him alive for you! I’ll do my best—I’ll remember everything. I can’t all at once, you know, Rannie—but as one thing and another happens in our lives, I’ll remember.”
    And in comforting her he himself was comforted. They had a way now to live, a purpose in their life together as mother and son. They would keep his father alive.
    IT WAS NOW EVENING ANDthey sat in the study. She had decided that the study was the room where it would be best for them to talk. It would bring his father nearer, she said. Nothing in the room was changed. On the desk his manuscript lay half-finished in his father’s fine, close handwriting. Someday, his mother said, he, the son, would finish it. His father had allowed it and he had been reading it slowly, carefully, understanding and not understanding the philosophy it proclaimed, and yet fascinated by it. Every scientist an artist? Every artist a scientist? What was the secret they held in common?
    “Light the fire, son,” his mother said. “There’s snow in the air.”
    He stooped to set the lighter ablaze beneath the logs, as he had so often seen his father do. The logs were dry and the flames roared up the chimney.
    “Sit in his chair, son,” his mother said on this, the first of their evenings. “I like to see you sitting there.”
    He settled himself in his father’s chair. He liked sitting there, his body settling into the hollows his father’s body had shaped during the years.
    “I met your father in college,” his mother began. “I thought he was the handsomest man I’d ever seen. He wasn’t the sports type, not the football hero and all that, though he played a sharp game of tennis. When he found I was the champion tennis player, he challenged me promptly. I beat him—”
    She paused to laugh, her eyes suddenly sparkling. “I don’t think he liked that too well. And I told myself I was a fool and probably he’d never want to see me again. But I was wrong. He told me afterwards, when we’d got to know each other quite well, that he liked me for doing my best against him. He thought he was pretty good, and he confessed to being mortified at being beaten by a