Angry Wife

by Pearl S. Buck

  “Where has he been all day?” Lucinda asked. “He’s usually here for dinner, at least.”

  “We had a little set-to this morning,” Pierce replied. Tonight I’m going to have it out with him in the library.”

  “I shall stay here, unless you want me,” Lucinda replied calmly.

  “I think Tom and I had better be alone,” he replied.

  “But you might ask Marcus to bring in some sherry and a couple of glasses. I’ll make Tom drink in spite of himself.”

  He moved away lazily out of profound unwillingness and crossed the hall into the library. A few minutes later Marcus came in with a silver tray and the wine.

  “When Tom comes, bring him straight in here,” Pierce ordered.

  “Yassuh,” the old butler murmured.

  He was about to leave the room when Pierce stopped him. Marcus had been in this house when he and Tom were born. His father had bought him in New Orleans, the year before, a young and slender man, trained in a famous plantation household that had been dispersed on the death of the master. Who knew Tom and himself so well as old Marcus?

  “Marcus!” he called.

  The man stood waiting, his hands hanging at his sides. “Yassuh?”

  “Marcus, what do people say about my brother—and Bettina?”

  Marcus let his underlip hang. “I don’t listen to talk, Mas’ Pierce.”

  “They do talk?”

  “Some folks always talk.”

  “And others listen?”

  “Some folks always got their y’ears stickin’ out like umbrellas.”

  “Tom ought to marry—”

  “Yassuh.”

  “Do you think Bettina—will—would—go away—?” He could not go on.

  “I don’t know these yere young folks nowadays, sir,” Marcus said sadly. “But one thing I does believe in and it’s stickin’ to your own kind. I believe in lettin’ othah folks alone, man and woman, and lookin’ for your own skin coloh. Yassuh, then they’s no trouble, high or low.”

  “You’re right, Marcus.”

  “Yassuh.” The old man went out and Pierce poured himself wine. Black folk didn’t like mixture any better than white folk. He was not going to be easy with Tom, “so help me God,” he muttered to himself. He lifted his glass and across the golden rim of the wine he saw his brother at the door, and put it down again.

  “Come in, Tom,” he said drily.

  Tom came in, very tall and inclined to lounge. He sat down in one of the old leather chairs and slid to the small of his back. All afternoon in the school he had worked intensely, but not for one moment had he forgotten that this hour loomed ahead of him. He had passed through various moods, mingled and complex, wherein one emotion and then another rose above the others. Fear and love of his older brother, distaste for Lucinda, anger at himself for having let the years slip by without doing anything definite about Bettina, remorse for the three children—and underneath, a growing determination to be himself and do what he liked. What that was he did not actually know. When he thought of leaving Malvern and his brother he was torn in two. He did not want to live anywhere but here. He groaned aloud that he could not bring his children into this house where he had been born. Leslie was as brilliant as John and more beautiful, but he could never cross the threshold of this door except as a servant. Nothing that he could do for his son would change his inexorable destiny. He had fought to make such children free but they were not free, and for him the war was lost. The victors had been vanquished by the stubbornness of the persisting enemy. There was no victory and no peace because the hearts of men and women had not changed. Futile war and futile suffering and death!

  “Sherry?” Pierce asked.

  “Thanks,” Tom said. He reached out his narrow white hand and took the glass by its thin stem and sipped the wine. He never drank, because Bettina hated the smell of it. Somewhere in her childhood her father had drunk increasingly of wine until he had stupefied his conscience. But tonight he would drink. He felt his nerves as tight as violin strings inside his body. The wine would relax him and help him to listen to Pierce reasonably and then to answer without passion. Above everything he did not want to quarrel with the brother he loved. He raised his eyes to Pierce’s face and waited for him to begin.

  Meeting those troubled grey eyes, Pierce saw in a flicker of memory the brother whom he had protected and fought for through years of their common boyhood. He had been the favorite son of his father and Tom had always been the one wrong in any quarrel. The old instinct rose in him.

  “I want to get you out of this trouble, Tom,” he said in his kindliest voice. “Let’s talk about it sensibly. I reckon Bettina told you about this morning.”

  “She didn’t tell me anything,” Tom said calmly. “But after you went she cried a bit. That’s unusual for her.”

  “I did wrong to go to her,” Pierce said honestly. “I don’t know what made me do it—something on the spur of the moment. Well, I should have waited to talk with you.” He paused and then went on with effort. “I suppose men never like to mess around in affairs like this. Of course I’ve known all these years that you and Bettina have—stayed together. Well, you and I had that out when it first began and I haven’t wanted to—speak again. But now Lucinda feels …”

  “I thought it was Lucinda,” Tom said, and was instantly angry.

  Pierce shot up his black eyebrows. “Lucinda naturally thinks further ahead for the children than I do,” he said. He was putting the restraint of patience upon himself, and Tom’s heart melted again. Pierce was so good!

  “Forgive me, Pierce,” he said.

  “Granted,” Pierce replied a little heavily. He tried to go on with what he was saying, but now Lucinda was clearly between them. He felt he must defend her. “I think Lucinda is right, Tom, and I must say so. When the children were little, it didn’t matter so much to the family. But now it’s different. John worships you, and I live in dread of his questions. It would be easy enough for me to explain it in a man-to-man fashion—he’s got to understand such things some day—but what I can’t explain is that this affair goes on and on, and that there are children in that house right on the road.”

  Tom’s anger suddenly burst, white hot. “It is easy to explain—you can just tell him that Bettina and I love one another and that the children are ours as he is yours and his mother’s.”

  “Tom, don’t be a fool—you know I can’t just say that—” Pierce’s voice was a groan.

  “But it’s so,” Tom insisted.

  “It isn’t really so,” Pierce retorted. “You can’t just act like Bettina was—was—”

  “I can and do act as though Bettina were white,” Tom said, with fury so vast that his voice was low and cold. “That is what you have to understand, Pierce—I feel to Bettina as my wife. I will take no other.” Thus he declared himself. His anger, rising out of old rebellion in this house, crystallized his love and clarified his conscience.

  Pierce rose half out of his chair, “Tom, do you mean to say that you will not marry a decent woman that we can be proud of as part of the family?”

  “I mean I will never marry any other woman than Bettina. I’ve begged Bettina to marry me. She won’t—because of you and Lucinda. She knows how you feel, you two. She says our marriage would drag me down, out of this family where I was born. She won’t do it. God have mercy, she’s so good—she’s—she’d beg me to marry a white woman, I believe, if I would do it! Why, why she’s better than any woman in the world, and if this precious family of ours doesn’t know enough to know it—God help us all, what did we fight the war for? It’s worse now than it was before.” He was beside himself with pain. He got up out of his chair and thrusting his hands into his pockets he began to walk in distraction about the room.

  Pierce stared at him. “Tom, what has come over you? You talk like a crazy man! Never in all my days have I heard such talk come from anybody: Why, the country would go to pieces if—if—why, damn you, Tom, I’ve a mind to
shove you out of the house!” He got to his feet and clenched his fists.

  “Pierce, I want to come in.” Lucinda stood at the door, a slender figure in her white poplin frock, her head held high. Both men turned at the sound of her voice. Tom sank into his chair, and Pierce turned to her.

  “Come in, my dear—” He was glad for her help. He began to see that something very deep indeed separated him from Tom, something that went back into their childhood, that had sent them to opposite sides in the war, something perhaps that even Malvern could not heal. He did not want to lose his brother, and yet how could he keep him?

  “I can’t help hearing what you two are saying when you talk so loudly,” Lucinda said in her cool high voice. She sat down and put her feet on a needlepoint footstool and crossed her hands on her lap. Oh her fingers were the diamond rings Pierce had given her when the two older boys were born and the sapphire brooch was on her breast. She turned her head with its piled blonde hair toward Tom. “Tom, I have never said anything to you. I don’t believe in inquiring into gentlemen’s affairs, but I do have to think of my children. Sally has already begun to ask questions and the niggras talk and she hears them, of course. I don’t intend to say anything now, either, but only to ask that whatever it is that is going on could be—put somewhere that it doesn’t show.”

  Her manner, her appearance, were so pure and so impeccable that both men felt gross and uncomfortable. Lucinda was the good woman, protecting her children. Pierce who loved her felt himself humbled. But Tom did not love her.

  “As long as there are women like you, Lucinda,” he drawled, restraining his fury, “there will be no justice on this earth. You will keep your foot on the neck of any woman who threatens your sacred position in the home.”

  It was Lucinda who understood first what he meant. The quick red of her blonde coloring flowed up her slender white neck into her cheeks. “I certainly don’t feel myself threatened in my home by a niggra wench,” she said.

  “Yes, you do,” Tom said, ruthlessly. “Why else do you care so much, you white women?”

  “I don’t care—” she cried.

  “You care,” he repeated, “because you’re afraid of losing your men and you keep the other women down under your feet, because if you don’t they’ll be your equals and they will invade your sacred homes and rival you and excel you because men love them and escape you.”

  Lucinda screamed. “Tom, you stop—Pierce, make him stop that foul dirty talk—”

  From sheer anger she began suddenly to cry and Tom clamped his jaws shut. “Sorry,” he said abruptly to Pierce. “I reckon that’s been shut up in me for a long time. I’d better go.”

  Lucinda took the handkerchief from her eyes. “Yes, go!” she cried, “go and never come back!”

  Tom rose. “Very well, madam—”

  Pierce woke from his daze. “Now Tom—now Luce—look, we’re one family! Luce didn’t mean that, Tom.”

  Lucinda stabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief. “Don’t call me Luce!” she sobbed.

  “Lucinda doesn’t mean that, Tom,” Pierce began again. “Please, Tom, try to be reasonable. Try to see our side of it—the family side.”

  He went over to Lucinda and took her right hand and held it. “Lucinda, honey, we’re going to fix things—don’t worry. Tom isn’t going to be unreasonable, honey—”

  But Tom was walking to the door. He passed through it, and then paused in the hall. He lifted his head, and stood in one of those moments he knew so well, when the love and pain of living overwhelmed him. He had so nearly given up life once, in the prison, he had fought so hard for it again in this mighty old house which had sheltered him since his birth. Here he had found Bettina and without her he would have surely died. Even Pierce could not have stayed with him night and day through all the lonely hours of his weakness. The house had given him his life, but Bettina had saved that life. His eyes roamed over the hall, the stairs, which he and Pierce had climbed as children, the heavy walnut balustrade down which they had slid as little boys, Pierce always first and fearless and he coming after, terrified, but following Pierce. He could not bear to go.

  And then in the midst of his pain and his longing he heard Lucinda’s voice lifted in wild reproach.

  “Oh, Pierce, you’re standing up for him, you beast! You’re a beast like all the others—men are beasts—beasts—beasts—”

  “I’m not!” Pierce roared. “Look here, Luce—if—if it were before the war and I could do it—I’d—I’d sell Bettina and her brats down the river and get rid of them all—”

  “I wish it were before the war!” Lucinda sobbed.

  “God dammit, so do I!” Pierce cried.

  Tom heard his brother’s voice and hastened away. The house could shelter him no more.

  Chapter Five

  BETTINA LAY ASLEEP IN the moonlight. Summer and winter she had her bed by the window where she could look out into the shrub-enclosed back yard. The lawn and the narrow flowerbeds which she tended so carefully by day were enchanting to her by night. When there was no moon she could smell the sweetness of the dark and the fragrance of dew. In winter the frost was fragrant. Like all women whose lives must be lived within boundaries, she had grown deeply and she had learned to make every small part of her life as large as the universe. Thus at night to single out a star and to lie in her bed gazing at it, to imagine its existence, enlarged her as a journey might enlarge a traveler. To dream of the one man she knew who possessed her, to ponder upon his qualities, his strength and his weakness, was enough for her whole life. Early in her life with Tom she had made up her mind to demand nothing of him. If he came it was her joy, but if he did not come, her life must go on. Sometimes he reproached her for this in one way or another. “I don’t believe you miss me, Bettina. You are just as happy when I am not here—you and the children.”

  To which she answered out of her profound simplicity. “When you come it’s like the sun breaking through and taking hold of a day I thought was going to be dark. But if the sun don’t break through you have to go on living, Tom. Besides, I know you will come—sometime. So do the children.”

  He had come to understand that reproach was folly. She was as fathomless as the sea and the sky, and as essential.

  Now he hastened to her through the gathering night. Pierce’s words were a spur to his feet and with every step he took he swore that the path on which he walked would know him no more. Never again would he go to Malvern. He renounced his birthright.

  He could see the low outlines of Bettina’s roof and the gate was still whiter than the darkness. He opened it and shut it loudly and then guided by the light of the candle that Bettina always kept in the window, he went into the house. If he came, he blew the candle out. If he did not come, it burned down into its pewter holder. Now, however, he lit the lamp in the living room and taking the candle with him he went upstairs into the room where she slept.

  She lay on the wide bed by the window. He held the candle high and she opened her eyes and he was struck again by her extravagant beauty. Her pale face was set in the dark hair outspread on the pillow and her slender right arm was thrown above it. She made her nightgowns dainty and fine, and lace lay upon her bosom. She was fastidious even after all these years and she had her small reserves from him. Thus when the candlelight fell upon her she drew the sheet instinctively over her breasts. Then she smiled her slow and lovely smile. “Tom—I’d given you up tonight.”

  He set the candle down on the table and sat down on the bed and began to speak urgently. “Listen, Bettina—understand quickly what I say. I want us to get up and go away—now.”

  She sat up, instantly aware, and twisted her loose hair into a knot at her neck. She waited without speaking, her dark eyes wide.

  Tom went on, “Pierce and I have quarreled. Lucinda came in. I don’t want to stay here another day. You and I and the children are going away together. We’re going now, because if I stay I might not be able to get away. And I want to go—I mus
t go.”

  “Darling, could you tell me?” She had dreamed often of going away with him, and there was nothing but joy in the thought. But she would not let him go in haste. She had to be sure that there was no other way and that it was what he wanted most.

  “I don’t want to tell you,” Tom said abruptly. “But I know as I know my own soul that if I stay they will not rest until I am parted from you. I can’t part from you, Bettina.”

  His hand searched for hers but she did not yield it to him.

  “Did they want you to send me away?” she asked.

  “They want me to marry another woman—” he said harshly.

  “You aren’t married to me, Tom—”

  “That’s not my fault—I’ve wanted you to marry me.”

  “I can’t marry you, darling. The ministers wouldn’t marry us.”

  “We’re going somewhere that I can marry you. Get up, Bettina, and get the children up. We’re going to catch the four o’clock train north.”

  “Darling, I’ll go if you promise me one thing.”

  “I can’t make promises now, Bettina—”

  “Only this one, that if you want to come back, you will come back. I can’t take you away from Malvern forever, honey—you’ll hate me.”

  “Malvern can burn down for all I care, and good riddance to all its old rubbish.”

  “But you were born there!”

  She bent her head on her knees and he stroked the soft nape of her neck upward with the sweep of her hair. “If it makes you feel better about going, I’ll promise,” he said: “But I know I’ll never want to come back. I’ve outgrown it. It’s dead—in the past.”

  She lifted her head at his words. “You mean—”

  “I mean you and I and our children are going to make our own world. It will be a good world, where everybody will be treated justly for what he is—even if it is only inside our own four walls.”

  A good world! With these words he took her by the soul and only thus could he have won her to follow him. She had to know that what she did was for good, and now she believed him. She got out of bed and silently they packed his roundbacked trunk and two carpetbags with clothes for the children and themselves.