Angry Wife

by Pearl S. Buck

  Pierce smiled. They were very close, he and John. He had learned to love this man as his own brother. John knew him through and through, all his softness as well as his ruthlessness. There was no softness in John. He was as hard and driving as his own beloved locomotives.

  “Though some sons-of-guns are talking about laying down a strike road next to ours, by Gawd,” John said.

  “I suppose we can buy them out,” Pierce said mildly.

  “Hell no,” John said briskly. “Let them lay it and spend their money! Then we’ll run them out of business—make cars better than theirs and our engines faster. When they’re busted we’ll buy them out cheap.”

  Pierce gazed into the flaming logs. When he built the new library he was going to make an even bigger chimney piece. He yielded to the meditative reflective mood which became more and more natural to him as he grew older. Had Malvern not belonged to him—and he to Malvern—what would he have been? A very different man! He did not deceive himself. In the night when he woke and lay alone with himself he remembered his youth and the troubled ideals and dreams that had stirred in him after the war. His heart still moved when he thought of the young men who had died under his command. As clearly as he saw the faces of his own sons he could see young Barnstable’s face as he lay dead, his left arm and shoulder torn away. Pierce had sworn in those days that he would make a better world. It had been a better world for him and for his children, but he was not sure of anything else. He had made Malvern fulfill only his own dreams for himself.

  “You and Lucinda going to Baltimore in October for the big shindig?” John asked. He put down the papers and began to fill his pipe.

  “Lucinda won’t want to miss it, I am sure.” Pierce replied. “But I confess, John, I hate more and more to leave Malvern.”

  “I can’t blame you for that,” John said. “But you ought to go, Pierce. Not many American cities, can celebrate a hundred and fifty years—and they’re going to give the railroad a fine place in the parade.”

  “You don’t expect me to join the parade, I hope,” Pierce said smiling.

  The door opened and a man servant came in with fresh logs. He scarcely knew his own servants any more since Lucinda had hired an English housekeeper. He had only stipulated that the people on the place be kept in the house. But the children grew up fast. He had an idea that this young fellow was one of Joe’s younger brothers. Joe had married a pot-black young Negress the year after Georgia left. At the thought of Georgia he felt an old confusion, almost shy. But he did not allow himself to think of her.

  “I’m going to try out that new engine in May,” John went on. “I expect it to make a mile in two minutes, maybe in one.”

  Pierce got up restlessly. He paced the room, around the table, passed the window, and came back again to stand before the leaping flames that were roaring up the wide chimney. He said absently, “Strange that the last time we went to Baltimore the country looked as though it were going to pieces! Now we’re all riding high again—I’ll never understand the one or the other.” No, he would not see Georgia again when he went to Tom’s. It was too dangerous. Last time Lucinda—

  “We are selling more abroad than we’re buying. That’s why,” John said confidently, “money is coming into the country.”

  “It’s not as simple as that,” Pierce mused.

  He stood gazing into the fire. At one end of a pine log a narrow blue flame darted out like a sword and licked its way through the mass of coals, twice as hot and twice as fierce as ordinary flame.

  What had become of the surging mobs of people who had risen to burn the roundhouses and the stations and the houses of the rich in the decade through which they had passed? They were silent now, but for how long? For his lifetime, perhaps—but would Martin be strong enough for the next generation? Nothing had been really solved. Nobody knew, nobody understood, why there had been a crisis or why now the crisis had passed, and until people understood causes—

  “There has to be a topdog,” John was saying confidently. “If men like you and me don’t stay on top, Pierce, these radicals and socialists will ride us. And with that lot go the professional reformers and the internationalists—all enemies of the republic, I say.”

  “I suppose so,” Pierce said absently. Had he been as single-minded as John MacBain he would have been able to enjoy even Malvern more than he had. His love for Malvern was terrifying, and he knew it was because he felt it always possible that he might lose it. The life he had built up so carefully in beauty and richness and success might collapse. It was more than the danger in the nation. The possibility of weakness was within himself. Lucinda never let him forget that he was Tom’s brother.

  Lucinda came in at this moment, black velvet trailing to her feet. She was still so beautiful that he could not fail to see it and to admire her for preserving her gift.

  “Are you two men going to spend the evening here?” she demanded. “The guests will come at any moment, Pierce—and Molly is back from her ride, John.”

  As soon as Lucinda entered the room, doubt left it. She was sure of herself and of her right to enter and to stay. And then behind her the hall rose to life. The great front door opened with a swirl of snow, voices mingled with laughter, and at the same moment Molly came downstairs and into the library. Molly by heroism had kept her figure slim enough to ride her horse. Her full face was handsome and rosy and her red hair held no grey. She and John were still together but he had ceased to ask her what she did and she went away from him for weeks at a time. Pierce knew because he had found John alone at his Wheeling mansion, wintry and silent, one November day. They had talked business all evening and not once had he mentioned Molly until at midnight they had stood up to part.

  “She’s left me for a while, Pierce,” John said with dry lips.

  “On a visit,” Pierce said gently.

  “Yes—just a visit—” John said. He looked at Pierce with such shame and agony in his eyes that Pierce had looked away.

  “The war changed all of us,” he said. “I often wonder what I’d have been—without it. … And Tom, of course—”

  “Yes, it wrecked Tom,” John said. He considered Tom as one dead. Then he cleared his throat. “I feel such awful pity for—for Molly, Pierce. I want you to know I don’t blame her. I’m only grateful—she’ll never leave me for good. She’s told me that—I didn’t ask it—but she promised me.”

  “Molly’s a good woman,” Pierce had said gravely.

  “Yes,” John had replied. Then after a second, “The war wasn’t her fault—nor mine.”

  “No,” Pierce had said.

  John had looked at him and a strange bewilderment came into his eyes. “Whose fault was it though, Pierce?”

  “God knows, I don’t, any more,” Pierce had said. “All that we fought for seemed so clear when we were fighting—those fellows dying! But now—it’s all a murk. Even the ones who were slaves aren’t better off.” He had spoken savagely at that moment. Had there never been a war Tom would have been at Malvern.

  Molly came up to him now and slipped her arm through his. Lucinda met his eyes with smiling tolerance. Long ago she had ceased to have any jealousy toward Molly. He knew that. But now sudden perception came into his mind. Had her tolerance begun after that first time he had gone to see Georgia? Had she said to herself, “Let him have anyone except Georgia?” He felt Molly’s plump shoulder pressing his arm and could barely keep himself from moving from her in repulsion at Lucinda’s duplicity.

  “Come!” he said, forcing himself to heartiness. “The guests are waiting.”

  “John was asking if you’d want to go to Baltimore in October,” he said to Lucinda that night. He sat watching her while she performed the last rites upon her skin. Her maid had brushed and braided her hair and gone away. It was past midnight. The guests were in their rooms.

  Lucinda did not look at him. At the mention of Baltimore she stiffened. It had been on a visit to Baltimore that she had discovered that he sometimes
saw Georgia. Not that he had to this day acknowledged it—he maintained that he went only to see Tom, and upon that they had quarreled.

  “I hope I have the right to see my own brother!” he had insisted coldly.

  She had turned to him with dreadful acumen. “As if you could lie to me!” she had cried. “Pierce Delaney, I can see through you as though you were made of glass! You want to see Georgia!”

  He had been staggered. She had discovered what he himself had refused to know. Then she had spat out the words at him. “You and your brother Tom!”

  He had stared at her, his blood frozen in his veins with terror. “How foul women are,” he had muttered, and he had left the room instantly. They had never spoken of Georgia again.

  She did not speak of her now. “Everything depends upon when Martin and Mary Louise decide to be married,” she said lightly.

  “I have no desire to go to Baltimore,” he said. “I’m getting too old for such shindigs.”

  She laughed at this. “As if you didn’t know you are handsomer than ever!” She came and sat on a footstool at his knee. The glow from the coals in the small brass decorated grate, which she had brought over from England shone upon her face. He felt an amazing tenderness for her and put his hand on her neck. But she slipped from under his touch. “Not tonight,” she said firmly.

  He withdrew his hand quickly and with anger. “You don’t allow me even to show you affection, without thinking I—” he broke off.

  Lucinda laughed. “I know you too well, my dear,” she said—Then she yawned. “But I have nothing on my conscience. I am a very good wife to you, I’m sure—you are treated well, Pierce, and you know it.”

  “I don’t want to be—treated well—as you call it—” he said.

  “Now let’s not begin on what you want—at this hour of the night,” she said. She got up quickly and moved about, straightening one small object after another, a luster bowl on the table, a small French clock beside her bed, a Dresden china pair of figures on the mantel, the crystal-hung candlesticks on the mantel.

  “I know it means nothing to you what I want,” he said somberly. “You’ve made out a formula for me, damn you, Luce! You run me on a schedule—a timetable—you don’t allow anything for my feelings—”

  “Your feelings, my dear,” she interposed, “always have the same common denominator.”

  He clasped his jaws shut and got up. “Good night,” he said.

  “Now you are angry,” she said brightly. “You can’t bear the truth, can you, Pierce! You never could … So you’ll never get the truth from me … I promise you! Don’t worry!”

  She was angry, too, and this was rare enough to make him pause. “I am not angry,” he said more mildly. “It’s just that you—think you know everything—about everything.”

  “Only about you,” she said.

  She climbed into the high bed and lay back against her lace-edged pillows and yawned again.

  “Good night, Pierce,” she said. “Get up in a good mood tomorrow, please.” She blew out the lamp and he had to stumble through the darkness as best he could.

  He went into his own room prickling with rage. She had put him in the wrong again in her own inexplicable fashion. But he was not in the wrong. She had him in a cage of her own making, a cage whereby whatever he said she let him know that she had known already what he was going to say and how he was going to feel. He rebelled against her calm assumption that there was nothing in him which she did not know and yet he was hamstrung by the thought that even so she might be right. She had an uncanny way of ferreting out his most secret thought. Whether there was something in this of the telepathy out of which people were making parlor games nowadays—but he had gone to such absurd lengths as not to think in her presence of things which he wished to keep to himself. And yet he loved her more than ever, too, in a helpless fashion. She was in his being, his children’s mother. He wished Sally were at home, but Sally was at school in Lewisburg … And Sally was growing away from him, too—he suspected her of it. Even last summer she was always off on some visit or other. He had never felt close to Lucie, the last child to be at home. Lucinda had hired an English governess for her.

  He sighed and climbed into his great bed and blew out the lamp. Away from Malvern people looked up to him as a successful man. Even at Malvern they looked up to him. Only Lucinda reduced him to an unreasonable, disgusting creature, always at the mercy of—of animal passion. He closed his eyes and waited fretfully for sleep.

  In late May John asked him to go to Philadelphia to look at the site for a great new terminal building. He showed the letter to Lucinda. She read it, and raised her eyebrows.

  “I suppose you think you have to go,” she said.

  “It is not a matter of what I think,” Pierce returned with firmness. “When John asks me to do something for the business I must do it.” She shrugged her shoulders at the word “business,” and the talk was ended.

  He approached Philadelphia with his usual calm. Many times now during the years he had come here to see Tom. Many times? Perhaps half a dozen times, all told, always with business as his honest purpose. Out of the half dozen times twice he saw only Tom, downtown at his hotel. They had exchanged brief news about the family on both sides. The other times he had gone to Tom’s home.

  Tom had had no more children. Leslie had grown up and had gone to New York to work on a newspaper. There he had married a young West Indian. Pierce had never seen her, but he had looked at the wedding photograph in the parlor of Tom’s home. If he was surprised at the sight of the dark loveliness of the girl in the long white satin gown and cloudy white veil he had said nothing. Not by one word did he ever let Tom know such surprise. Leslie had grown into a handsome fellow dismayingly like Pierce’s own father. He was clever and quick and more and more he had cut himself off from his family and lived in the world of his own kind in New York.

  Lettice wanted to be a trained nurse and Georgy was to be a teacher. Of all the children only Georgy was filled with the fierce flame of equality. She was going south, she said, as soon as she finished school, and work for the sharecroppers. Georgy was dark, so dark that she would have to move into the Jim Crow cars in Virginia. Pierce smothered the strange feeling it gave him when he thought of the slim brown creature who was his own niece having to declare herself. Some day, of course, he told himself in the secret recesses of his conscience, all such things would have to cease. His own niece, Jim Crowed on the railroad that enriched Malvern—but he could do nothing about it. … Small Tom no one knew. He was in the throes of boyhood, a tall, gangling, curly-haired boy whose lips were a trifle too full.

  John MacBain met him at the station and together they got into a carriage and the black coachman drove them to the busiest part of downtown, where the new building was to stand. It would cover a whole block.

  “It’s a great expense even for a terminal,” Pierce said.

  “It won’t just be a terminal,” John retorted. “We are planning to push the road on north—to Newark, maybe, and Jersey City, or even to New York.”

  “I hope it is worth it to the stockholders,” Pierce said somewhat bleakly.

  He and John represented different elements in the business. Pierce considered himself and was considered the representative of the stockholders. John was president and represented management. John said crisply, “You know our policy, Pierce—it’s always been sound—management conservative and stockholders patient, labor responsible. Then we’ll all win together.”

  “This is a damned politicians’ town,” Pierce growled. “You’re going to have to line the pockets of a hundred or two of them.”

  “We never have played politics and we never will,” John said firmly. “Once start bribing politicians and they’ll drive you to bankruptcy with their greed.”

  Pierce looked doubtfully at the big square. It was hard to imagine the shops and houses torn down and a great high building reared in the midst of these pushing crowds of people.


  “I’m afraid of expansion, John,” he said. “Remember what expansion did to us in those other years.”

  “This isn’t expansion,” John retorted. “We are following trade this time—not going ahead of it. We’re connecting the terminals that trade has already made—not building side lines.”

  “John, as long as the railroad is under your management I’ll agree to anything,” Pierce said at last. “But don’t take your hands off the engine for one moment.”

  John gave his thin long smile. “I plan to live another thirty years, Pierce,” he drawled. “And all I’ve got to live for is the railroad.”

  They parted, John having got his way, “as management always does,” Pierce told him with a rueful smile, and then Pierce kept the carriage and drove across town into the quiet streets where Tom’s world was. A peaceful world, Pierce always thought, aloof and untouched by rivalry or struggle. It had been a matter for secret surprise to him that Tom had lifted no banners and had led no crusade for the people into which he had married. “In your own way,” he had once told Tom, “you have lived as selfish a life as I have myself at Malvern.”

  “There is a difference,” Tom had retorted. “My life in itself has been a revolution—yours hasn’t.”

  He thought of Tom’s words now as he drove down the tree-lined street. Quietly, house by house, the well-to-do Negroes had moved into this fine and old section of the city. There was nothing external to tell of the change. Houses were spacious and lawns were neat, gardens were beautiful and the streets clean. A few well-dressed children played behind closed iron gates. One had to look closely to see that they were not white. Pierce had always the illusion when he came here that he was leaving one country and going into another, as in Europe one passed from Germany into France. He was uneasy in the illusion, for this was a country within a country.

  He got out of the cab before the whitewashed stone house, paid the cabman and opened the white-painted gate. He walked down the path to the front door and rang the bell. A maid in a white frilled apron opened the door. She greeted him quietly and asked him to come in. At the same moment he heard light footsteps on the stair and Georgy ran down. She stood still upon seeing him, uncertain, as all Tom’s children were still uncertain of him. He saw the doubt in her dark eyes and felt compunction. After all, these children were not to blame for being born.