Angry Wife

by Pearl S. Buck

  “Feeling well again?” he asked.

  “Well as I’ll ever be,” John MacBain replied. He was chewing a twig of spice bush.

  “You look pretty good,” Pierce said gaily. He was warmly aware of the blood coursing through his own potent body, and of his child in Lucinda’s womb. He was too kind to dwell upon his own good fortune. “Going to farm again, John?” he asked.

  “No,” John MacBain said. “I’m thinking of moving away—take Molly to Wheeling, likely, and get me a job in the railroads. Railroads are the coming thing in the state, I hear. The city’ll give Molly life, I figure. It’s hard on her just fussing around an empty house.”

  “I hear about the railroads, too—” Pierce said. He did not want to talk about Molly.

  “Or mining,” John MacBain said moodily. “There’s coal mines opening toward the north of the state. I want to do something I never did before—start out fresh.”

  “We’ll miss you for neighbors,” Pierce said.

  “I’ll rent you the land but I shan’t sell the house,” John said. “I was born in it and so was my father. We’ll be back and forth, likely—summers, anyway.”

  “That’s good,” Pierce said.

  The bleakness in John’s eyes was a grey wall between them. He felt the constant knowledge of impatience that haunted them, and unable to think of further talk, he mounted his horse again.

  “Well, see you again, John. Let me know before you go. Lucinda will want you both over for dinner.”

  “It’ll be a while yet,” John said.

  Pierce rode away, feeling the envy in John MacBain’s eyes burn into his back. War was cruel and unjust—as cruel and unjust as God, who gave down rain on the good and evil. He resolved that as little as possible would he consider anything except the joy of life itself, of food and sleep and riding and hunting, of wine and children and sunshine and earth and the seasons. He would live for himself and his own, “so help me God,” he thought, “from now until I die.” He hardened his heart toward John MacBain and toward every maimed and wounded creature, and was arrogantly proud that he was whole.

  It was nearly one o’clock when he rounded the turn of the road and cantered up the avenue of oaks that led to the house. He dismounted and tossed the reins to Jake who came running out to meet him.

  “She’s lathered, you see,” he reminded him.

  “I’ll rub her down good,” Jake said.

  Pierce mounted the steps of his house and took satisfaction in the mended terrace and the newly painted porches. He owed money everywhere, even for the fresh white paint on the house, but men trusted him and Malvern. Their confidence was in tomorrow, and tomorrow would come. He leaped up the last steps and met his brother coming down the stairs into the hall, and was struck again, as he continually was, with Tom’s good looks. The youthful sallowness and slimness were gone. He had actually grown taller this last year.

  “Tom, you should have ridden out with me this morning!” he shouted. “God, how the land is producing!”

  Tom smiled. “You should have called me, Pierce,” he replied. “I found you gone when I came down for breakfast. Bettina said you’d been gone an hour.”

  “Oh well, I’ll let you be an invalid another month or two,” Pierce said indulgently. “Where’s Luce and the younguns? I’m starved clean to the bottom of me.”

  “Lucinda has been sitting in the summerhouse,” Tom replied. He stood leaning against the door jamb. “Here comes Bettina with the children.”

  Pierce turned and saw Bettina walking across the green lawns. She held a book in her hands, and the two boys were tugging at it. She stopped, and dropping on her knees she opened it, and they pored over it together.

  “Queer how those two girls know their books,” he said. “I wonder who taught them.”

  Tom did not answer and Pierce looked at him and saw what made him aghast. He had been trying not to think of it—but now Tom was well and it had better be said. Tom—Bettina! He felt suddenly sick.

  “Reckon I’ll go and wash,” he said. “If you see Luce, tell her I’ll go straight to the dining room.”

  “All right—” Tom’s voice was dreaming, and Pierce mounted the stairs on tiptoe. Did Lucinda know? Or was there anything to know? And what would he say to Tom? Nothing, probably! What a man did with a colored wench was his own business. Still—Tom! Here at Malvern!

  He went into his dressing room and poured the water out of the jug into the ewer, and felt the blood suddenly begin to pound through his body. Tom was not at all the sort of fellow to take up with a wench. Damn Lucinda for bringing two such pretty girls into the house! Now there would be mulatto children running around, cousins to his own children, and nobody saying a word because nobody would dare.

  “I shall ship that Bettina away,” he thought angrily. He scrubbed his hands and went down to the dining room and held his head very haughtily while his family gathered. Lucinda sat at the foot of the table and Tom at her right and the two boys opposite him. Pierce busied himself with his soup and then with carving the fowl. Lucinda asked him questions and he answered them. Yes, the wheat was very fine, as fine as the oats had been, and if the hot weather held the corn would be good, too. They were lucky.

  “Then why are you so cross, Papa?” Martin asked.

  Pierce cursed himself for not being able to hide his thoughts even from a child. “I have worries,” he said shortly.

  They were all silent after that, and in silence they ate the green apple tart which was their dessert. He called for the new cheese and Georgia brought it to him, and he took it coldly from her. He would settle his house once for all.

  Lucinda looked at him inquiringly when he rose.

  “I wish you’d come into the office, Lucinda,” he said still coldly. “I have something to talk about with you.”

  She followed him and Bettina came in for the children. He cast a swift look at her and imagined that under her gathered skirt her body swelled, and he grew deeply angry. How dared Tom do such a thing in this house!

  He shut the office door firmly behind Lucinda and sat down at the desk and shuffled some papers. She sat down in the leather armchair which his father had brought over from London years ago for this very room.

  “Well, Pierce?” she inquired.

  Then he found himself unable to speak. The blood came up under his collar.

  “Put down those papers,” she said. “Tell me what it is you have done.”

  He put down the papers at once. “I haven’t done anything,” he said savagely. “It’s your own colored girl I want to talk about.”

  “Georgia?”

  “No, Bettina.”

  Now he wished he had never begun. For it was not only Bettina of whom he must speak, but also his own brother. Instinctive loyalty beset him. Must he betray his own kind? Women never understood these things.

  Lucinda’s face had grown sharp. “Pierce, what do you mean? Tell me this minute. What’s Bettina done?”

  “Nothing that I know of. Probably just my imagination.”

  But she knew him. The faint look of guilt that haunts a man’s face when he speaks to his wife of sex now haunted his and he was betrayed.

  “Pierce Delaney, do you mean—”

  He banged both fists on the table. “I don’t mean anything. I don’t know whatever got into me to think I had to tell you.”

  But she pursued what she smelled as relentlessly as a cat pursues the scent of a mouse. “If I thought that Bettina could be carrying on right under my own eyes in my own house, I’d—I’d have her strapped. I don’t care how light-colored she is—she’s nothing but a nigger. What has she done? Why—why, Pierce, she hasn’t said anything to you?”

  He sighed in a great gust. “Good God, no! Now I’ve got you started, I wish I hadn’t spoken.”

  She forced him on. “Well, you have spoken, and you might just as well go on and tell me everything, because I’ll find out anyway.”

  He now saw how slender was the proof of what
he suspected. What had he seen? Nothing except such things as the look on Tom’s face when Bettina happened to be crossing the grass with the children.

  “I haven’t seen a thing,” he protested, “not a living thing.”

  “Pierce Delaney!” Lucinda screamed. “You stop!”

  He began to sweat and he pulled out his silk handkerchief and mopped his forehead and his cheeks. “Well, nothing I could really say I saw,” he amended.

  But she squeezed it out of him word by word and he told her.

  “Maybe Tom was only smiling at the sunshine or something,” he groaned at last when he had faltered out his suspicion. “Maybe he was pleased because I said the crops were going to be good.”

  “Oh, fiddle!” she cried, in such profound contempt that he felt allied to Tom as never before.

  “Anyway, I certainly am not going to accuse my own brother,” he protested. “Not without some proof.”

  “Pierce Delaney!” she said sternly. Her hands were clenched under her breasts. “You know as well as I do that you saw something or you wouldn’t have tried to tell me and then take it back. Whether you speak to Tom or not is just nothing. It’s I who will speak to Bettina.”

  She rose, spread her skirts and floated out of the room like an outraged swan, and he groaned again and laid his head down on his arms and knew that he must go and warn his brother. For a moment even Malvern was filled with misery. Then suddenly he lifted his head. He had thought of escape. He Would go and find Georgia and warn her and she could warn Bettina, who would warn Tom. He jumped up, suddenly nimble at the thought of mercy for Tom, and went out into the hall.

  At this hour of the day, where would Georgia be? In her room, maybe, in the attic, or maybe in the pantry, where Lucinda had said they took their fragmentary meals, standing at the tables. He walked softly through the halls toward the pantry. The front door was open as he passed and out on the lawn the children lay stretched on a blanket on the grass for their naps, while Joe sat near them, back against a tree, droning out a story. The air was still and hot and filled with noonday sleep. He opened the door to the pantry and saw no one. Beyond the door into the kitchen he heard the mumble of Annie’s voice complaining to her little slaveys, and he walked away again into the great front hall, and stood listening. Would Lucinda have found Bettina already? Where was Georgia?

  He remembered that there was a winding little stair that went up out of the back porch and he walked there and began to mount it softly. It led, as he well remembered, straight past the second floor into the attic. When he had been a boy he had escaped his father’s wrath more than once by that stair, dragging little Tom after him by the wrist. Under the attic eaves they had hid until wrath was spent and they dared come down again. He had not climbed the stairs since he had first gone away to the university, the year before he was married. Now the steps creaked under his weight but he went on.

  The door at the top was closed and he knocked softly.

  Georgia’s voice called, “It’s not locked!”

  He had a second’s wonder, “locked against whom?” and then he lifted the old-fashioned latch and looked in. She lay on the bed, dressed, but with her hair down and hanging over the pillow. At the sight of him she leaped up and gathered her hair together in one hand.

  “Oh—I thought it was Bettina!” she gasped. Her cream-colored face went pale.

  “Don’t be frightened, Georgia,” he said quickly. “I had to find you—I had to tell you. Look here, I say—please listen, Georgia, because I’ve got to tell you—”

  She had her hair knotted now, looping the ends through without hairpins. “Yes, sir, please—”

  “Your mistress thinks—she has an idea that there’s something going on between Bettina and my brother.”

  Georgia’s very lips went pale. “How did she know?”

  “Then there is something?”

  “I can’t tell you, Master Pierce.”

  Against his will he saw her black brows clear against her skin and the separate blackness of her long lashes set into her pale eyelids.

  “I only wanted to warn you,” he said sternly. “I think Bettina ought to be prepared. It’s natural that her mistress can’t be pleased. I’m not pleased myself.”

  Georgia’s dark eyes fell. Her narrow hands fluttered at her apron. “No, sir. I’m not pleased, either. I told Bettina so. And Bettina isn’t happy. She knows she can’t—” Georgia stopped.

  He wanted to ask “Can’t what?” But his dignity would not allow him. He was in a dangerous place, and he wanted to be out of it.

  “You had better find her and tell her,” he said severely.

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, Master Pierce.”

  He turned to the door abruptly and crept down the stair again. Once he wondered if the girl were staring after him and he turned and took a quick glance. But the door was shut.

  He reached the back porch and then his office in safety and he opened a door in the panel and took out a decanter and a glass and drank deeply of wine. The smell of October grapes reminded him of the day when he had come home, he thought to peace at last. “God,” he muttered with bitterness, “what peace!” and drank again.

  Upstairs in her own room Lucinda sat alone. She had come in, her skirts swirling, and had at once locked the door and sat down to think. Why she locked the door she did not know, but it was her first instinct. Now and then she locked it against Pierce in the night when she wanted to sleep, and in bed she lay wakened when she heard him turn the knob and find it locked and then curse and swear softly under his breath. He had learned that it was useless to call her. Nothing would persuade her to unlock the door after she had locked it. She would lie laughing into her pillow because she felt arrogant and powerful. She had a whip in her hand over Pierce, her husband, whom she loved.

  She wanted the door locked now against him because she wanted to be alone. Her room was silent and safe, closing her in from everybody. She had made the room exactly what she liked, and somehow even during the war she had kept it so. The flowers on the carpet were clear against the deep white pile of the background. It had come from Paris, and it would last forever. Georgia cleaned it with cornmeal twice a year even when cornmeal was their only food. The dirty meal was given to the pigs so it was not all waste. But she would not have dared to let Pierce know.

  So it was with the organdy curtains at the window. Somehow they were starched, even when there was no white bread. Georgia made the starch out of potatoes, long soaked.

  She sat thinking and staring out of the window, and little darts of fear and premonition ran needling through her veins. She tried to ignore them. It was Tom, not Pierce. But Pierce had not been really angry with Tom. Pierce sided with Tom in his heart. Men stood together against women, and Pierce stood by Tom. She longed for a woman friend to talk with, a woman who would feel as she did against men, and made up her mind that she would ride over and visit with Molly MacBain. Maybe she would tell her and maybe she wouldn’t, but anyway it would be strengthening just to talk with a woman. When she came back she would decide about Bettina. She put aside an uneasy thought that maybe she ought not ride now that she was going to have a baby. Pierce would be cross with her about it. She had not ridden for a month—let him be cross, though! She wanted to disobey him. But she delayed decision, nevertheless, and went on thinking.

  If she talked to Bettina it would set the girl up. Her own mother had never noticed her father’s mulatto children. They grew up in the servants’ quarters and everybody knew and nobody said anything. It was her father who had bought Georgia and Bettina and now that she thought of it she remembered how her mother had looked when he had come in and thrown down papers.

  “I’ve brought you two likely house girls, Laura,” he had shouted.

  Her anger against Bettina grew. Why, maybe even in her own mother’s house, her own father—

  She began to cry softly. It was sadly hard to be a woman, so hard to hold her own when she had no real power at all and had
to ask for everything she wanted, even new satin to cover the parlor furniture! She had to get what she wanted anyway she could. She thought of all the things she wanted. Every room in the house needed something new. Pierce didn’t understand that the house was her world, her place where she had to live. Men went out but women stayed at home and in the home they had to have new things sometimes or go crazy fretting and mending. She wiped her eyes and sighed and then got up suddenly and put on her grey riding habit and went downstairs, feeling sad and a little weak.

  Out on the lawn Joe was waving a branch over the sleeping children and no one else was to be seen. She did not want to meet Pierce and she had a conviction that Bettina and Tom were together this very minute, probably up in his room. Bettina still came and went there. It made her physically sick to think of it, here where she lived, in her own home! She clenched her hands against her breast and thought of marching upstairs. But she did not. A woman had to think how to do a thing like that. Just to make a fuss wasn’t enough.

  She went outside the open door and down the steps and Joe got to his feet. She motioned to him and he came softly across the grass.

  “Tell Jake to bring a horse around quickly, and don’t wake the children.”

  “Yassum,” Joe whispered. He went noiselessly away and she sat down on the bottom step and pulled her hat over her eyes to shade her skin from the sun. If she walked around the boys would wake out of sheer contrariness and she wanted to ride off by herself. Maybe she would go to see Molly. Maybe she wouldn’t. She just wanted the feeling of running away. If Pierce worried about her, let him be worried.

  She saw Jake leading the horse and got up and went to meet him, so that the horse’s hooves would not clatter on the gravel. Joe stooped and she stepped into his hand and sprang into the side saddle and lifted her whip.

  “If your master wants to know where I am, tell him I’ve gone for a ride and that’s all.”

  “Yassum,” Joe said. He stood looking after her thoughtfully and scratching himself, his head, his armpits, the palms of his hands. “Reckon there’s some kinda ructions,” he mumbled to himself. He tiptoed back to the tree and looked down on the little sleeping boys. A small breeze had sprung up and he sniffed it. “Reckon it’ll keep off the flies,” he mumbled. He settled himself under the tree, his head on a root, folded his arms and dropped into instant sleep.