The Eternal Wonder (18 page)

Lying there on the warm French earth, his cheek pressed against its green moss, he pondered his own question, adding to it his eternal why. Why was he as he was? What was his compound? Without vanity, he accepted the fact of his own superiority, his own self-confidence. He knew that whatever he chose to do he would do superbly well. He did not think of fame—indeed, he did not care for it. His own need to live in freedom, to learn in his own way, at his own speed, was now his supreme desire. How he would express his self-gained knowledge was as yet unknown to him. But there was a way, waiting, and he would find it.

He turned on his back, head on his clasped hands, and gazed into the leaf-flecked blue sky and waited while slowly a decision found itself invincibly in his own being. It was not only in his mind. It was a decision forming throughout his whole being. He would never again go to school—not to college—ever! Others could not teach him what he wanted now to know. Books he would always learn from, for people, great people, put the best of themselves into books. Books were a distillation of people. But people would be his teachers, and people were not in schoolrooms. People were everywhere.

Decision! He had decided. He recognized finality and a deep peace pervaded his being, as real as though he had drunk an elixir, a wine, had eaten a consecrated bread. Whatever came to him was good. It was life. It was knowledge. He sprang up from the earth. He brushed the leaves from his hair and with his handkerchief he brushed the dampness of moss from his cheek. Then he walked back into the city.

FROM THAT DAY ON,
HE
devoted his time to the new learning. He who had spent his life as long as he could remember with books, still read as a matter of habit and necessity. On any fair afternoon he wandered to the book stalls of the Left Bank and
spent hours there, browsing, searching, tasting one book and another to take an armful of books back with him to the big attic room that in its fashion had become home to him. For he came to perceive that since people were his study, his teachers, the objects through which he could satisfy his persistent wonder about life itself, his own being among others, wherever he lived for the moment, there was his home. It was as though he had reached a place that he had been seeking all his life, a point of knowing himself first, and where he was meant to be and what he was meant to do. Now he could satisfy his hunger to know, his eternal sense of persistent wonder about life, its reason, its purpose, for now he had found his teachers, and these teachers were wherever he happened to be. A new and delicious joy filled his entire being. He had no sense of compulsion. He was entirely and truly free.

Therefore on this August morning, a hot and sunny morning, a day of quiet in the city, for this was the month of holiday and many people were away at seaside and country resorts, he lingered at the bookstalls and fell into conversation with the wizened old woman who was dusting her stall. He had seen her often, had always replied to her cheerful greetings, her chirping comments, her sly, suggestive remarks on certain books a young man might like, especially one, this morning, which she said an American might like.

“And why especially an American?” he asked.

He spoke French easily now, being long past the stage where he was compelled to translate French mentally into English before he could converse.

The old woman was only too ready to converse. He was her first customer, August being a poor business month, and she was as cheerful as a cricket.

“Ah, the Americans,” she exclaimed. “So young, so full of
sex—always the sex! Me, I remember—ah yes, I remember—my husband was a real man in such matters … but Americans are so young—even white hairs don’t mean age when it comes to sex—the men—the women—I tell you—”

She shook her tousled white head and cackled laughter. Then she sighed. “Alas! We French! It is soon over with us. Is it because we are poor? Too soon we must think of how to earn a loaf of bread, a bottle of cheap red wine! From birth to death—behold me, myself, old as an ancient crab—yet rain or sun I am here, am I not? Ah, truly!”

“Have you no children?” he asked.

The question was mild, almost abstracted, for he had his eyes on a book in another stall, but it loosed her complete concern. She beat her breast.

“I have the best son on the Earth,” she declared. “He is married to a seamstress, a good young woman. They both work. There are two children. Her mother cares for them during the day. But I—I am proud to work. I have a room next to their apartment. They have two rooms—well, call it three. My son is clever. He has put up a small wall, behind which her mother sleeps. The wife leaves very early for work—also my son. He is a guard at a factory. We eat our evening meal together. But I am independent, you understand? Two evenings in the seven I buy food and cook dinner. They make me welcome, ah yes—I am still welcome!”

“Will you not always be welcome?”

She shook her head. “One does not ask too much of life. I pray the good God that when my hour comes it will be quick. If He is merciful, it will come in my sleep, after a day’s work. Ah yes, that would be happiness—to lie asleep in my bed—I have a good bed. That I saved. When we were married, my husband said, ‘At least let us have a good bed.’ So we had it. And I kept it. There, pray God, let me die in peace. The bed where I first knew love, where my children were born, where my husband died—” She wiped her rheumy eyes with ends of the black scarf that hung about her neck.

“You had more children?”

“A daughter who died at birth—”

He put his hand on her shoulder, forgetting the book.

“Don’t cry—I cannot bear it because I don’t know how to comfort you!”

She smiled up at him through her tears. “I thought I had done with weeping long ago. But no one asks me such questions now—only the price of a book and trying to buy it cheaper!”

“But to me you are a human being,” he said, and smiled at her and went away, putting the coins for the book in her dry old palm.

That night he did not go out on the streets as he usually did for his long evening walks. Instead he sat on the low windowsill and looked out over the city until the twilight faded into night and the electric globes sparkled as far as the horizon. He kept thinking of the old woman. It was a life. Poor as it was, it was a human life: birth and childhood, a woman and a man in marriage, children—one dead, one alive. Then death splitting a life in half, and now what was life for this human being except work? Except work and still life itself—waking in the morning to another day—life itself!

He rose and lit the small lamp on the table and, as though impelled, he wrote down the story of the old woman. It was only a shred of a story, a shred of a life, but writing it down as he remembered it, as he felt it, brought him a new sort of relief—not physical, as he felt after an orgasm with Lady Mary, but something deep—very deep, which was so new to him that he did not try to fathom it or explain it. Instead he laid himself upon his bed and fell quickly asleep.

IT WAS A HOT DAY
in early September. People were coming back to the city. He sat down at a small round metal table under the awning outside a café. It was late morning, too early for luncheon, but he was hungry. He was growing, still growing, now well over six feet and his skeleton bare of flesh. His skin was smooth and clear, and although he had always kept his auburn red hair cut short, now that the new style was coming in that men, at least young men, were beginning to wear their hair longer, he was letting his own hair grow, washing it daily, for to be clean was a passion, yes, and there was little time for anything more. If women looked at him with more than a glance, he was not aware of it. If his eyes caught hers, he met the look with such blankness she went on and he did not notice it. He knew, or thought he knew, all about women; Lady Mary was a woman, was she not? He had not forgotten her, but she belonged to his past. But everything belonged to his past, once he had lived through it. He lived intensely in the moment, in every day as it came, without planning or preparation. He was always consumed in thinking. About what? About what he had learned today merely in living—the people who had come and gone, the people with whom he had talked or had not wanted to talk so that he could simply study their faces, their hands, their behavior. He stored them away in his memory and this he did unconsciously. They remained with him. Though they came and went, these people he collected stayed with him. He thought of them with wonder and question. He asked questions if they were willing to answer him, as usually they were, for most people he met were interested in themselves and he had a concern to know, which he himself could not yet understand. These strangers—why did he want to know where they came from and went, what they did and thought, any scrap of information they were ready to give him?

He never asked their names. He did not care to know their names.

They were human beings and that was enough for him. It was an endless pursuit, one continuing wonder. Meanwhile he had little interest in himself beyond this accumulating knowledge of human beings.

Today, being fine, the sidewalks were crowded as they had not been in recent weeks. His gaze moved swiftly from one face to another, until a girl passed and her eyes met his. For an instant their eyes caught and held and this time he smiled. She hesitated, then stopped.

“You are keeping this chair for a friend?” she asked.

The tables were filling and the question was a natural one. She was an unusual-looking girl—an Oriental, or at least partly so. Her dark eyes were long and slanted.

“No, mademoiselle,” he replied. ‘‘Please seat yourself.”

She sat down and drew off her short white gloves. That was unusual too, the gloves—most girls no longer wore them, even in Paris. She studied the menu and did not look at him. He looked at her with his usual frank curiosity, wondering if she would be willing to talk. Her oval face was interestingly different from the usual pretty girl’s face. The features were delicate, the nose low-bridged and straight, the lips delicately cut, the skin cream-colored and very fine. Her hands, as she drew off the gloves, were long and narrow. When she had given her order, she caught his steady gaze and gave him a slight, quick smile and looked away.

“Forgive me,” he said, “but you are not French, mademoiselle?”

“I am a French citizen,” she said, “but my father is Chinese. That is, he was born in China, where his father’s family remains—that is, as many as are still alive.”

She paused to reflect, and then went on, slightly frowning. “I suppose that even the dead still remain there, but we do not know where. Certainly not in the family burial grounds, since they were—since they died in … unusual ways.”

She took a sip of wine from the glass that had been brought her. He studied her face, a thoughtful, abstract face, not thinking of him, but certainly of something very far away, having nothing to do with him. He was overcome with his usual wondering curiosity.

“China,” he repeated. “I have not been there but my grandfather was there, long ago, and he has told me many things.”

“Your grandfather is—American?”

“How did you know?”

“Your French is perfect—but almost too perfect for a Frenchman! You understand?”

He laughed with her laughter. “Is it a compliment or not?”

“Take it for what you please,” she said. “The fact is we are both somewhat foreign, on opposite sides of the world. But you have the advantage, I think. You have lived in your ancestral country. I have never been in China. I speak Chinese, but badly I fear, though my father has tried to teach me. But my mother, who was an American, talked with me when I was a child more than my father did, and so I know English also. Would you prefer we speak English?”

“Would you?”

She hesitated. “I am more easy in French. Besides, even my American mother spent a lot of time here in Paris and she also spoke fluent French, even to me sometimes. Alas, she never learned Chinese. There was a prejudice. I never understood it. But my father has taught me Chinese also after—well! I have little chance to speak English. But I speak English also. Let us speak in English, for my practice! I don’t have any English-speaking friends.”

“What does your father do here?” he asked in English.

She replied in his language, a trifle slowly but precisely. “He is a collector and dealer of Oriental art objects, but of course especially of the Chinese. Unfortunately it is not so easy now to get art objects out of China. But he knows the necessary people in Hong Kong.”

“Have you been in Hong Kong?”

“Oh, yes—I travel with my father. Of course, being Chinese, he hoped I’d be a son. When I wasn’t, still being very Chinese, he made the best of it. But then I’ve tried, too.”

“You have tried—”

“To take the place of a son.”

“Very difficult, I should say—when a girl is as beautiful as you are!”

She smiled but did not reply to this obvious small talk.

He discerned in her something of his own aloofness and remained silent. Now it was her turn to ask questions if she had any curiosity about him—that is to say, if she were interested in him. He wondered how old she was and resolved to conceal his own age. He was in years so distressingly young. How often he would have liked to lie about his age, to say, for example, that he was twenty-two or -three! He was never able to lie. Honesty was an absolute—but then he could be silent. He watched her as she sipped her drink meditatively, meanwhile gazing about her at the people.

She was looking at him now. “It is your first visit here?”

“Yes.”

“And you came from—”

“I was in England all winter.”

“You have a slight English accent but not quite English!”

He laughed. “That’s clever of you! No, as I said, I’m American—from the very heart of my country.”

“Where is that heart?”

“The Midwest—if we’re speaking geographically.”

“You are here to study something?”

“I suppose one could say so.”

She lifted her delicate eyebrows. “You are very mysterious!”