Angry Wife

by Pearl S. Buck

  He smiled again, and again they smiled back at the tall handsome man, still young in his maturity. His voice grew grave.

  “There is a magic in railroads these days. They bind our nation together with more than bonds of steel. They bring us together in trade and exchange and friendship. It is doubtful whether even the war could have achieved our unity as a nation had not the railroads come quickly to take up the task. Old hatreds still remain, for many of us. Particularly in the South, the Yankees remain the Yankees. Even the children will scarcely forget. But the railroads are a new force. No hatred is in their history. They heal the wounds of the past, and they reach toward the future. Men of great vision, and John MacBain is one of them, have guided their building westward, and westward our nation has grown. It has been the railroads, too, that have delivered us from the horrid danger of socialism, and it is John MacBain whom we must thank for the fact that labor unions have been kept out of our state. The poison of the northern industrial states must not enter our fair mountain land.

  “We have been fortunate.” Pierce’s firm white hand lifted his wineglass again. “We have been spared the extremes into which our sister states have fallen. We have marched in steady progress upon the wheels of railroad development. Our great railroads have carried all of us to prosperity. Mines have been opened to provide steel and waterways have flourished in carrying the loads of lumber and ore we have needed. The produce of the land has been borne swiftly to all parts of the hungry nation, and we have profited by it all, from the first blow of the miner’s pick and the roll of the farmer’s wagon wheel, to the flow of gold into our coffers. Schools and churches have been built and cities grow. The force behind all our growth and all our wealth is the railroad. Ladies and gentlemen, let us drink to the new engine, the 600, the great eight-wheeler, designed especially for the bold slopes of our Mountain State!”

  They rose, skirts rustling, chairs scraping, and glasses clinked. They sat down again and talk broke out. Grey-haired Jim McCagney leaned his tall Scotch-Irish frame upon his elbows and called out a question.

  “Tell us something more about the engine, Pierce!”

  Pierce smiled. “You ought to ask John that,” he said in his even voice. “But I’ll tell you what I know. It’s bigger than the Larkins engines. We thought the top had been reached in them. Now I dare to prophesy that we will build something bigger even than this 600, beauty though she is. She weighs eight thousand pounds more than the Larkins and has more than twelve thousand square feet beyond her heating surface.”

  “Twelve thousand and fifty nine!” John MacBain shouted. “And she weighs one hundred and fifty three thousand pounds!”

  “That’s enough about engines,” Molly cried, springing to her feet. “Let’s begin the dancing—”

  Laughter broke out and the men rose to pull out the ladies’ chairs. They stood watching while the ladies lifted their ruffled skirts and walked out of the doors that were opened for them by footmen. Molly MacBain was proud that everything had gone so well. Her footmen, black as the West Virginia coal, were dressed in maroon uniforms, piped with yellow. She held her head high as she led her guests into her parlors. Beyond them doors opened into the ballroom.

  “The men won’t be long,” she promised them. “I told John I would be real mad with him if he got talkin’.”

  The ladies smiled and scattered, some to the powder rooms to mend their complexions, and some to sit by tables and look at albums. Lacey Mallows took out a tiny pipe and began to smoke it. Lucinda saw this and pointedly ignored it. The Henry Mallows, living so much in Paris, were rather fast. The others, following Lucinda’s lead, said nothing. Lucinda was always in the best of taste and those who followed what she did were sure to be right. She drifted toward a long mirror hung on the wall and saw that she was as fresh and lovely as when the evening began. She sat at its foot and fanned herself gently with a white ostrich feather fan, set in silver filigree and diamonds. It had been Pierce’s present when she had given him his third son, John.

  In the dining room the men were talking of railroads in frank harsh terms. Cut-throat competition was the threat.

  “I don’t see how you can keep it up, Mr. MacBain,” Henry Mallows said. He had inherited his share of the road from his father who had died last year and the sudden wealth had sent him hurrying home from Paris with his English wife. She was the daughter of the Earl of Marcy, but he tried not to mention it often. In the determinedly democratic atmosphere of his native state he had found it no advantage to him that his wife was titled in her own right in a foreign country.

  “It’s outdo the other fellow or bust,” John MacBain said flatly. “We’ve got to keep the trade, even if we ship cattle and goods free from California and back again. If another road can afford to ship a cow from Chicago to the coast for five dollars, we’ve got to do better.”

  The men looked at one another in consternation.

  Pierce laughed. “The other roads are worse off than we are,” he said gaily. “They can’t afford to make their own rolling stock—we can and do! Of course these cut-throat ways can’t last. Some day we’ll all be ready to quit. Then we’ll act like gentlemen and keep to our agreements. But we won’t act like gentlemen until we have to. Human nature! I see it in my own older sons. Those boys of mine will fight about something until they’re like beaten cocks. Then when they can’t fight any more, they come to terms.”

  Pierce’s children were his weakness, and his friends knew it. “I saw your eldest son the other day at the University,” a man said. “I went down to enter my own boy—fine looking fellow, yours! What’s he going to make of himself?”

  Pierce inclined his head. “Martin will follow me at Malvern,” he said modestly. But the modesty deceived no one. Pierce met their smiling eyes and in the silence looked at John. He was sorry the talk had come around to sons. The look of suffering stillness that fell upon John when other men talked of their children was dark upon his face now. Pierce rose. “Let us join the ladies,” he said. “Mrs. MacBain extracted some sort of promise from John, I believe—she told me so.”

  They went out, well-fed men, rich men, determined to hold their riches in a state still poor. They were confident that from their prosperity would flow the prosperity of all.

  In the ballroom Pierce went to Molly as a matter of course. The hostess must have the first dance. She slipped easily into his arms, accustomed to the pose. She was growing a little solid, but she was still light and graceful enough when she danced. He was used to her step and he suited his rhythm to hers. They were old friends now, frank enough. He was accustomed to her frontal attacks and he was no longer afraid of her as once he had been in the days when he did not know if he wanted her. He knew now that he did not.

  “You men left the table earlier than I dared hope,” she said. Her frankest talk was always behind the screen of music when they were dancing. The band she had hired was playing a Strauss waltz, bows sweeping long across violin strings and the piano throbbing.

  “The talk got around to sons, and I saw John flinch as he always does,” Pierce said.

  “I wish John would let me adopt a boy, but he won’t,” Molly said. “He says if he can’t have his flesh and blood he don’t want somebody else’s.”

  “I can understand that,” Pierce replied. “I wouldn’t want Malvern inherited by any except my own.”

  “If John would take a boy, I’d have one for him,” Molly said laughing. “I’d be glad to—especially if you’d father him for me, Pierce. Wouldn’t it be kind of nice? He’d inherit our place—next to yours.”

  He was accustomed to these bold proposals and he smiled. “We’ve been through all this before, haven’t we?” he remarked. But he had never told her that John had once asked him the same thing.

  “Only in words,” she said wickedly.

  He laughed in spite of himself. “Molly, for God’s sake,” he protested. “You know what a fuss it would make in our families! Lucinda would leave me.”


  “My Gawd, Lucinda needn’t know,” she declared.

  “Lucinda always knows everything,” he said, in pretended rue.

  “I can fix it,” she persisted.

  “Please, lady, leave my life alone,” he begged in mock alarm.

  Molly dropped into utter seriousness. “Of course I know—you don’t want me—”

  “I don’t want you enough to roil up my life,” he countered.

  “I’m not young enough—that’s the truth!” she declared.

  She lifted her lashes and dared him, with eyes too bright, to deny it.

  “You’ll always be young,” he said gaily. “Please, Molly, when your hair is white—and mine too—keep on asking me! Something would go out of my life if you stopped making proposals to me which I can’t accept.”

  The waltz ended at exactly the right moment for him upon this casual gayety, which, affectionate though it was, he kept devoid of passion. She sighed, and he dropped his arms from about her and sighed in mimicry. Then he smiled and went to Lucinda and sat down beside her. She had been dancing with John and he had torn the ruffle of her skirt. She frowned at it. “I shall have to go and get it mended,” she said.

  “Lend me your fan while you’re gone,” he begged. “The rooms are too close.”

  “Sure it wasn’t Molly?” she inquired with malice.

  “Not after all these years,” he returned.

  “But you are so handsome, Pierce,” she murmured.

  “Thank you, my dear,” he replied. He took the fan from her hand and sat fanning himself without embarrassment. “I shan’t dance until you come back,” he said calmly.

  She was back in the middle of the next waltz, and took her fan away from him. “You mind looking silly less than any man I know,” she remarked. “Dance with me, please, Pierce!”

  “Did I look silly?” he asked. They began waltzing slowly. Lucinda did not like flourishes, and neither did he. “But everybody knew it was my wife’s fan. Besides, I still love the perfume you use and the fan kept blowing it to me.”

  She was mollified and smiled. “When shall we go home?” she murmured. Their steps matched perfectly. She saw Lacey Mallows watching them, and yielded herself a little more to Pierce’s embrace.

  “I always want to go home,” he said.

  “Molly wants us to stay until tomorrow,” she teased.

  “Then let’s stay,” he said promptly. He knew that it was the surest way to get her to go.

  She fell at once into his trap. “I sleep better in my own bed,” she said.

  “So do I,” he said;—“with you,” he added.

  She laughed. “Pierce, you aren’t a little drunk?”

  “I think not,” he said, “but maybe—”

  “If we are going home tonight, we’ll have to catch the twelve forty—” she reminded him.

  “John has the car at the siding. It will be easy,” he replied.

  At one o’clock they were going to bed in John MacBain’s private railroad car. Pierce in his fine linen nightshirt looked out of the window at the swiftly passing moonlit landscape. The whirling mountains were black against the dark blue sky. “God, what grades the men had to climb!” he murmured.

  Lucinda came to his side and he put his arm around her to steady her. “The road is astonishingly smooth, considering the solid rock they hewed,” he went on. He had blown out the kerosene lamps the better to see into the moonlight. “Tons of dynamite,” he murmured. They could see the engine turning a curve and spitting sparks. It turned and curved again and a cliff hid it.

  “Oh, stop thinking about railroads!” Lucinda cried.

  He looked down at her. The filmy stuff of her nightgown flowed to her feet, and there were ruffles at her bosom and her wrists. Her long fair hair was loose on her shoulders. He lifted her into his arms. “The way you keep hold of me,” he murmured into her fragrant neck. “The shameful way you never let me go! How can you go on getting prettier every year? What chance has anybody else, you little selfish thing? Look here—don’t you blame me for anything that happens tonight—”

  “I won’t,” she said sweetly. “Really, I won’t, Pierce.”

  But he knew the reason for her willingness. She was afraid, a little afraid, of Molly MacBain. He smiled at his cynicism and accepted his Lucinda for what she was—a pretty woman, and his own.

  He reached home in the full pride of possession. Jake met them at the station with the new surrey and the matched bay horses of Malvern breeding, and when they swept up the long drive of oaks which his grandfather had planted, he turned to Lucinda in profound pleasure.

  “There isn’t a place even in Virginia to match Malvern,” he declared.

  Lucinda, very composed in her dove-grey traveling dress, smiled. “I shan’t be satisfied until we have the new greenhouse and when that is finished I want a formal garden laid out below the slope.”

  She lifted her parasol and pointed to the hollow at the foot of the knoll upon which the great house stood.

  It was early summer and the green of grass and trees was bright. “It would be pleasant to sit on the terrace and look down on the garden,” she went on.

  “You always want something more, my pet,” Pierce said with amiable sarcasm.

  “Why not, when I can have it?” she replied.

  He did not answer. The children had heard the surrey and were gathering on the top step to meet them. Martin and Carey were at school in Virginia, but Sally, John and little Lucie were standing and waiting. Georgia had dressed them in their best and she had curled Sally’s hair down her shoulders. The morning sunlight fell on them warmly and Pierce felt his throat catch in absurd sentimentality. “You’ve given me wonderful children, Luce,” he said. He tried to make his voice casual but he knew it was not.

  Lucinda smiled and then frowned. “I wish John didn’t look so much like Tom. That means he won’t be as handsome as the other boys.”

  As soon as she spoke Tom’s name the whole problem of their lives came back upon them. They put it aside again and again, now to go to Wheeling on railroad business, now to White Sulphur on a holiday, but when they came home it was always there waiting. Pierce did not answer her, but he remembered the promise he had given her this time before they went away. He had promised her that he would tell Tom firmly at last that he must marry and settle down. Whether he kept Bettina was no one’s business, but he had to keep her elsewhere than in that house by the road, where whenever there was another child, everyone knew it. Tom had now three children by Bettina, children who were own cousins to his children and Lucinda’s. This was what Lucinda could not endure. She had faced Pierce with it last week.

  “If only our children didn’t love Tom so much and hang on his every word!” she complained.

  “Tom’s their teacher and I reckon it’s only natural,” Pierce had replied.

  “That’s what is so disgusting,” she had said angrily. “You pay Tom to run the Academy, and we send our children there, and everybody knows.”

  “I don’t consider it my affair,” he had retorted to end the talk.

  “But it is your affair when your own children are involved,” she had retorted in turn. “It isn’t as it used to be before the war, when a man could go to a black wench in the quarters or get her to his room and nobody be the wiser and little mulattos were only niggers with the rest. Things can’t be hidden the way they used to be—everybody knows about. Tom and Bettina. Why, it’s as bad as if they were married! As soon as that boy is ready for school—you mark my words, Pierce—Tom will want him to go to the Academy with our own children.”

  He was outraged by Lucinda’s absurdity. “You know Tom wouldn’t mix white and black that way,” he grumbled.

  She had laughed her cruelly light laughter. “Do you think Tom calls his children black?” she cried.

  “But they are,” he had protested.

  She had laughed again and suddenly he had hated her laughter. It occurred to him that Lucinda never laughed except at some
one else.

  “Tom’s no fool,” he had said loudly.

  She had patted the ruffles of her skirt, and made her voice casual again.

  “You’re too soft, Pierce. You always want to avoid trouble. But somewhere you have to make a stand, even with your own brother.”

  “Well, well,” he had muttered. “Let it be until we get back from John’s shindig, then I’ll see what’s what.”

  “Is that a promise?”

  “Well, yes—it is.”

  Now the children ran down the steps to meet them and in a moment he had his daughter in his arms. His first embrace was always for Sally and she knew it and all the others knew it. John and Lucie submitted to their mother’s kiss and waited until Pierce opened his arms to them. John was a quiet child, undeniably like Tom in his looks, and Lucie was a miniature of Lucinda. Her likeness to her mother disturbed Pierce sometimes, and occasionally it had occurred to him that if he watched Lucie he might understand Lucinda too well. The veneer of manners and behavior which covered Lucinda had not yet accumulated over Lucie, and the child was frankly selfish. Pierce was never willing to face Lucie’s faults because he loved his wife truly. He stopped now and kissed Lucie with gentleness. The little blonde girl returned the kiss demurely and without emotion. Pierce never kissed his sons. He put his arm on John’s shoulder and walked up the steps with him and Lucinda followed with the girl. John rubbed his head against his father’s solid body.