Angry Wife

by Pearl S. Buck

  “Indeed, I do not, Luce,” he said gently. “That is why I beg you—”

  “You know—you know—every time you go there—”

  “You mean—Tom? My brother?”

  “He’s only part of it—you make an excuse of him—”

  “Excuse for what, Luce? Tell me!”

  “You go to see her—”

  “Her?”

  “That woman.”

  “A woman, Luce?”

  “Georgia.”

  Now it was out. Now he knew. She sighed and drew her hand away. He sat staring at the tip of her shoe, peeping out from her long ruffled skirt. “Do you believe I have been unfaithful to you?” he asked abruptly.

  “I don’t—think of such things,” she said faintly.

  “Think of it for a moment, now. Do you?”

  “You aren’t—different from other men.”

  He felt his throat thicken with rage and swallowed it. He would be patient with her for his own sake, because he could not meet what lay over the horizon—alone.

  “Will you believe me when I tell you that I have always been faithful to you—always?”

  She did not stir or speak.

  He went on. “Once and once only have I spoken alone to Georgia since she left Malvern, and there was not one word of love between us—I promise you.”

  “Then why did you speak to her?” Lucinda’s words were like dry dead leaves fluttering to the ground.

  He considered, remembering. “I want to be honest—I am honest when I say I don’t know. Somehow it had nothing to do with me—what she was. It had to do with the far future. I—how can I explain to you? I think we’ve been taught wrongly, you and I—we can’t change now. We belong to the past. But the future—”

  He shook his head. He must not try to change her, for she could not change. He must not enter into that future, for he would not be alive when it came, and neither would she.

  He said, “Georgia told me that day she was going to Europe with Tom’s daughter.”

  Lucinda made a pettish movement. “But that’s so silly,” she exclaimed. “A niggra!”

  He was patient with her. “It doesn’t matter to us,” he said reasonably. “We have nothing to do with it. We live here at Malvern. You and I—we’ll grow old here.”

  She looked at him suddenly. “Do you mean you aren’t going to see Tom any more?” she asked.

  He looked down into her eyes. Ah, he knew her so well, all her little thoughts, all her narrow fears which she herself did not understand! He pitied her profoundly but to love her had become the habit of his life and he could not change.

  He spoke slowly, with pain. “If I promise never to go to Tom’s house again—will you forgive me?”

  She fluttered her eyelashes, lifted them up and then let them down. “Yes,” she said, “I’ll forgive you—”

  They rose, and she hesitated. Then she dropped her little handbag and her gloves and he felt her arms about his neck. She buried her face in his bosom and began to sob.

  “Why—why—my darling—” he stammered.

  “Oh, Pierce,” she cried, “you’re good!”

  He held her while she wept, and could not speak.

  Tom understood, of course. Tom did not blame him for anything. They met in a hotel in Baltimore and Pierce told him the simple truth in a few words.

  “I want peace,” he finished.

  Tom listened and forbore. “You are a free man,” he said at last, “as free as I am to make your choice.” They had talked little after that, for there was no more to say. Tom had brought pictures of his children, and Pierce looked at them. Leslie was the father of a child now, and a successful writer. He had written a bitter clever book. Tom had a copy but Pierce did not open it. Small Tom was going to be a doctor and Lettice was married.

  “Not one of them has crossed the line,” Tom said calmly. “But they’ve my blood to help them when I am dead.”

  He took a big photograph from his bag. “This is Georgy,” he said. “She’s the vanguard.”

  Pierce looked down at a beautiful young face, confident and brave.

  “You can see Georgy’s not afraid,” Tom said. “She’ll sing, maybe even in Washington. That’s her dream—to sing in Washington, where Lincoln was. Maybe she’ll sing in the White House—some day.”

  Pierce could not speak. He had no heart to dim his brother’s hope. Besides, perhaps Tom was right! Who could say what the future was to be except that it never could be like the past?

  “I have a picture of Georgia, too,” Tom said quietly. “Do you want to see that? She’s—quite changed—from living in France so long.”

  Pierce did not speak for a moment. He kept looking down into Georgy’s young and dauntless face. Ah, this was how Georgia would have looked—had she ever had a chance!

  “Does she—look older?” he asked after a long moment.

  “Younger—strangely younger,” Tom said. “Very beautiful—they’ve made a fuss over her there. Mademoiselle La Blanche they call her. She always wears white—”

  Pierce’s heart beat hard once or twice. Then he quieted it. He had chosen Lucinda for old age and for death.

  “No,” he said. “No—thanks, Tom—I’ll just remember Georgy—”

  A Biography of Pearl S. Buck

  Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) was a bestselling and Nobel Prize-winning author of fiction and nonfiction, celebrated by critics and readers alike for her groundbreaking depictions of rural life in China. Her renowned novel The Good Earth (1931) received the Pulitzer Prize and the William Dean Howells Medal. For her body of work, Buck was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature—the first American woman to have won this honor.

  Born in 1892 in Hillsboro, West Virginia, Buck spent much of the first forty years of her life in China. The daughter of Presbyterian missionaries based in Zhenjiang, she grew up speaking both English and the local Chinese dialect, and was sometimes referred to by her Chinese name, Sai Zhenzhju. Though she moved to the United States to attend Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, she returned to China afterwards to care for her ill mother. In 1917 she married her first husband, John Lossing Buck. The couple moved to a small town in Anhui Province, later relocating to Nanking, where they lived for thirteen years.

  Buck began writing in the 1920s, and published her first novel, East Wind: West Wind in 1930. The next year she published her second book, The Good Earth, a multimillion-copy bestseller later made into a feature film. The book was the first of the Good Earth trilogy, followed by Sons (1933) and A House Divided (1935). These landmark works have been credited with arousing Western sympathies for China—and antagonism toward Japan—on the eve of World War II.

  Buck published several other novels in the following years, including many that dealt with the Chinese Cultural Revolution and other aspects of the rapidly changing country. As an American who had been raised in China, and who had been affected by both the Boxer Rebellion and the 1927 Nanking Incident, she was welcomed as a sympathetic and knowledgeable voice of a culture that was much misunderstood in the West at the time. Her works did not treat China alone, however; she also set her stories in Korea (Living Reed), Burma (The Promise), and Japan (The Big Wave). Buck’s fiction explored the many differences between East and West, tradition and modernity, and frequently centered on the hardships of impoverished people during times of social upheaval.

  In 1934 Buck left China for the United States in order to escape political instability and also to be near her daughter, Carol, who had been institutionalized in New Jersey with a rare and severe type of mental retardation. Buck divorced in 1935, and then married her publisher at the John Day Company, Richard Walsh. Their relationship is thought to have helped foster Buck’s volume of work, which was prodigious by any standard.

  Buck also supported various humanitarian causes throughout her life. These included women’s and civil rights, as well as the treatment of the disabled. In 1950, she published a memoir, The Child Who Never Grew, about he
r life with Carol; this candid account helped break the social taboo on discussing learning disabilities. In response to the practices that rendered mixed-raced children unadoptable—in particular, orphans who had already been victimized by war—she founded Welcome House in 1949, the first international, interracial adoption agency in the United States. Pearl S. Buck International, the overseeing nonprofit organization, addresses children’s issues in Asia.

  Buck died of lung cancer in Vermont in 1973. Though The Good Earth was a massive success in America, the Chinese government objected to Buck’s stark portrayal of the country’s rural poverty and, in 1972, banned Buck from returning to the country. Despite this, she is still greatly considered to have been “a friend of the Chinese people,” in the words of China’s first premier, Zhou Enlai. Her former house in Zhenjiang is now a museum in honor of her legacy.

  Buck’s parents, Caroline Stulting and Absalom Sydenstricker, were Southern Presbyterian missionaries.

  Buck was born Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker in Hillsboro, West Virginia, on June 26, 1892. This was the family’s home when she was born, though her parents returned to China with the infant Pearl three months after her birth.

  Buck lived in Zhenjiang, China, until 1911. This photograph was found in her archives with the following caption typed on the reverse: “One of the favorite locations for the street barber of China is a temple court or the open space just outside the gate. Here the swinging shop strung on a shoulder pole may be set up, and business briskly carried on. A shave costs five cents, and if you wish to have your queue combed and braided you will be out at least a dime. The implements, needless to say, are primitive. No safety razor has yet become popular in China. Old horseshoes and scrap iron form one of China’s significant importations, and these are melted up and made over into scissors and razors, and similar articles. Neither is sanitation a feature of a shave in China. But then, cleanliness is not a feature of anything in the ex-Celestial Empire.”

  Buck’s writing was notable for its sensitivity to the rural farming class, which she came to know during her childhood in China. The following caption was found typed on the reverse of this photograph in Buck’s archive: “Chinese beggars are all ages of both sexes. They run after your rickshaw, clog your progress in front of every public place such as a temple or deserted palace or fair, and pester you for coppers with a beggar song—‘Do good, be merciful.’ It is the Chinese rather than the foreigners who support this vast horde of indigent people. The beggars have a guild and make it very unpleasant for the merchants. If a stipulated tax is not paid them by the merchant they infest his place and make business impossible. The only work beggars ever perform is marching in funeral and wedding processions. It is said that every family expects 1 or 2 of its children to contribute to support of family by begging.”

  Buck worked continually on behalf of underprivileged children, especially in the country where she grew up. The following caption was found typed on the reverse of this photograph in Buck’s archive: “The children of China seem to thrive in spite of dirt and poverty, and represent nature’s careful selection in the hard race for the right to existence. They are peculiarly sturdy and alert, taken as a whole, and indicate something of the virility of a nation that has continued great for four thousand years.”

  Johann Waldemar de Rehling Quistgaard painted Buck in 1933, when the writer was forty-one years old—a year after she won the Pulitzer Prize for The Good Earth. The portrait currently hangs at Green Hills Farm in Pennsylvania, where Buck lived from 1934 and which is today the headquarters for Pearl S. Buck International. (Image courtesy of Pearl S. Buck International, www.pearlsbuck.org.)

  Richard J. Walsh—Buck’s publisher and second husband—pictured in China with an unidentified rickshaw man. Walsh’s tweed suit and pipe are typical of his signature daily attire.

  Buck receiving her Nobel Prize from the King of Sweden, Gustav V, in 1938. (Image courtesy of Pearl S. Buck International, www.pearlsbuck.org.)

  Buck and Walsh with their daughter, Elizabeth.

  Buck in the 1930s.

  Walsh—with his ever-present pipe—pictured with an unidentified child.

  Buck addresses an audience in Korea in 1964, discussing the issues of poverty and discrimination faced by children in Asia. She established the Orphanage and Opportunity Center in Buchon City, Korea, in 1965.

  Buck in her fifties.

  This family photograph was taken on Buck’s seventieth birthday, June 26, 1962. The gathering included Buck’s children, grandchildren, and some of the children supported by Pearl S. Buck International.

  Buck on her seventieth birthday.

  Pearl Buck’s legacy lives on through Pearl S. Buck International, a non-profit organization dedicated to humanitarian causes around the world.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1947 by Pearl S. Buck

  Cover design by Alexander Doolan

  978-1-4804-2114-1

  This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

  345 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

  EBOOKS BY PEARL S. BUCK

  FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

  Available wherever ebooks are sold

  Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media.

  Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases

  Sign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.

  Sign up now at

  www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters

  FIND OUT MORE AT

  WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM

  FOLLOW US:

  @openroadmedia and

  Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia