Portrait of a Marriage

by Pearl S. Buck

  Once again there was a wedding in the farmhouse, and William stood as a father in the room in which so many years before he, too, had stood as a bridegroom. By some chance Mary’s wedding dress was blue and she looked for the moment startlingly like Ruth on that earlier day. He had the odd discomfort of feeling that he was giving Ruth in marriage to the stout young farmer in a tight new black suit. But he went through with it gracefully and a little humorously. When it was done, he felt that something had cut clean between him and Mary. That bond of her daughterhood, always tenuous and frail, was gone when from among the little crowd of guests in the house he saw her standing beside her husband. She was thinking of no one now except herself and Joel. She would never think of anyone else again. He had a sudden, clear perception of this young woman who had been his daughter all these years—a narrow little heart in the body he had helped to make, a little heart that could be devoted to nothing but its own. Mary would defend her husband, right or wrong, because he was hers, she would love her children, not because they were children but because they were hers. All the little allegiance she had to him and to her mother would now be transferred to what was only hers. Without a word his heart bade her farewell and relinquished her.

  It was not too easily done. There was the loss of a child who might have been, though she had never been. He had a twinge of longing for a real child of his own, one to whom he could speak out of mutual comprehension. His imagination fluttered toward Jill. She was bringing in wineglasses and plates, her wide, thin mouth drawn tight in the task, but he did not move toward her. People were coming up to talk to him hesitantly. They were still shy with him, these people among whom he had lived as a foreigner all these years. But he had learned how to behave himself with them, how to listen, to smile, to answer a few quite common-place words. Cleverness frightened them, so he had learned not to be clever.

  “Hello there, Mr. Sieger! How is that fine grandson of yours?” This was the butcher, whose scarlet face cracked into smiles.

  “Swell! He’s walkin’ six months a’ready. Hope you’ll get so good a boy for your first, Mr. Barton!”

  Grandchild! William had not thought of grandchildren. He and Ruth with grandchildren! But it was inevitable, of course.

  “I hope I’ll be as lucky, Mr. Sieger.”

  “Don’t know why you won’t be,” Mr. Sieger chuckled. “They’re a hearty-lookin’ pair, I’ll say.”

  William smiled. His glance followed the butchers bright blue stare. Yes, Joel and Mary were a hearty pair. There would be nothing complex in that mating. But what if his own blood, subdued in Mary, broke free through the child? That was Nature’s wicked way, Nature always laughing behind the backs of her copulating human beings!

  In the midst of the strongly colored, strongly smelling country crowd he suddenly felt himself intolerably alone. Ruth was at the far end of the sitting room, busy with the wedding cake Mary was about to cut. He saw her face, flushed and concentrated upon the task. She had baked the wedding cake herself, as her mother had baked hers long ago. The recipe was the same, but would the result be as good?

  He slipped through the crowd unnoticed until he reached the stairs. He mounted them and went to the room he used for storage of paints and new canvases. He had a desk there, and he sat down to it and searched the world for someone to whom to speak. Then abruptly he drew a sheet of paper toward him and began a letter to Elise.

  … Hal was gone and Mary was gone, and the house closed about the space as though they had never been. Joel went away to war and Ruth and Mary had long talks together that no one else shared. But however often Mary came back to the house, she never was a part of it again, as William knew she would not be.

  “How are you, Father?” she said when she saw him.

  “Very well, thank you, Mary,” he said calmly.

  The months went on and he saw she was pregnant, but it was no more to him than if any farmer’s wife had so appeared before him. It was the sort of thing that Ruth would never mention. Some day she would come in and say calmly,

  “Mary’s had a little boy.”—Or a little girl.

  And he would say as calmly, “Is everything right?” and that would be all.

  He was scarcely aware of Jill because he was painting very fast this year. He felt especially well and full of energy, partly, perhaps, because the year was unusually dry. He was writing regularly to Elise, too, and his mind was stimulated and made alert by her long, closely written letters. The one he received the end of that April told of the death of her younger son, Reginald, the fair-haired one. He took out the little photograph he had never sent to Hal and studied it carefully. So quickly had that young life reached its crisis and passed! He had a strange sense of bereavement, because in her letters she had recently enclosed some of the letters from her sons, Don and Rex, she called them. They were, he thought, extraordinary letters, these young soldiers so brilliant, so fluent in thought and word, so aware of life and death, so conscious of every beauty about them. He saw sometimes Hal’s letters to Ruth. The boy wrote only to his mother, short, stolid letters whose chief news was what he ate and drank, where he spent his last day’s leave, and what he wanted sent to him. But they satisfied Ruth because they told her he was alive and had no wound.

  William, alone in his little room, read over again all of Rex’s letters. Now that the young man was dead he must return them to Elise. They would be precious to her. But he spent hours in copying pages from them, paragraphs and sentences that seemed to contain the young soul, though the body was broken and gone.

  “Life, now that I know any moment brings death, is so wonderfully precious. It is worth so much more than anything else that I wonder sometimes why I do not throw down my gun and simply run away. I could do it. The terrain here is familiar to me. I could lose myself some night on sentry duty, strip off my uniform, speak French or German as the need arose. I speak either as well as English. I know that in my heart I value life more than anything, more than country or honor, or any of the big words. I value my five senses, my body, my physical being. And yet I know that the reason I do not desert is because there is something more to me than these. I do my duty, not because I am a patriot—I am not—nor because I am honorable in the conventional sense, but simply because to desert would be to destroy something else that is me, as much as body is.”

  … “There’s a sunset tonight, Mother. Nothing to see against it except ruins, but there it blazes just the same. It’s the eternal in this universe—it goes on, just the same, whatever we do upon the earth.”

  … “I would have liked to be really in love before this war got me. I don’t mean taking a fancy to some girl. I mean the real thing, love, marriage, children, going on forever and ever. I want something beautiful that lasts forever, beyond myself.”

  Over and over again in the letters was this longing for an eternity. William, copying the young man’s fine, straight writing, pondered this need. Was he satisfied now in that endless darkness which was his? Who could tell?

  He sent the letters back to Elise with a note of his own, impersonal as all their letters were impersonal, and yet he knew that what he said would comfort her. For they no longer needed the other’s personal being. What they gave each other was the reassurance of mind to mind.

  “I know you are able to encompass death, dear Elise,” he wrote. “It is not necessary for me to speak of Rex’s death. What interests me far more is the persistence of his being. The being does continue, I believe, when the mind has positive qualities beyond the body. How, I cannot ascertain any more than anyone else. But I am quite sure that some people—not all—do go on alive after the body dies, and of them I know your son is one.”

  He went downstairs that night in one of the peculiar fits of loneliness that beset him when he had wandered far from Ruth.

  “Ruth, Ruth!” he called her through the house.

  She was outdoors in the vegetable garden picking corn for supper.

  “Well,” she cried. “Where
’ve you been, William?”

  “Upstairs,” he said.

  She paused to gaze at him closely. “You feel all right? You look a little funny, dazed or something. You didn’t get too much sun today, did you?”

  “I need you,” he said.

  She never quite knew what he meant by that, but she knew how to deal with it.

  “Help me get this ready to eat,” she said. “I’m behind hand today. A hen stole a nest and I was bounden determined to find it.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes, I did. She’d gone around the pigpen in that old trough we don’t use no more.”

  He sat beside her on a bench made of a split log on four legs and tore the green sheaths slowly from the bright yellow corn.

  “How beautiful this is,” he said. The silk lay smooth against the kernels and he stripped it off, strand by strand and put eternity aside.

  “Could I,” he asked himself that night, “have slept with Elise like this, night after night, and found it good?” He knew he could not. The simplicity of Ruth was the fountain in which he refreshed himself. He sat beside her in silence that he might discover what was the exact quality of the repose which his spirit found in her. It was soothing and somnolent, it encased him, not with hard, exact substance, but with warm fluidity which gave itself to his being. With her he need not think or question or argue; he need not speak unless he wished to speak. They talked together very little, less and less as the years went on. When she spoke he listened without hearing, and what she said in her rich soft voice only deepened the restfulness of her presence. He had come to depend upon her for everything except the restless core of his mind. Now Elise had come back. The war had thrown her back into his life.

  But in Elise there could have been no return from himself, as he returned from himself to Ruth, because he could not have left Elise. Where he went Elise would have gone, and they would have been together always, and he would have been she, and she would have been he, and there would have been neither rest nor release in the inevitability of their absolute unity. Better for them that the ocean lay between!

  In a large, square English garden at the back of a square English house in Kent, Elise sat reading William’s letter which had come that day enclosed about Rex’s letters which he was returning.

  She read his letter over and over again because it contained the only comfort that anyone had been able to give her since that second fearful moment yesterday morning. She had been in the garden just like this, because the house was unbearable when she was so anxious that she could not sleep or eat. The weather was glorious, had been so one day after another, windless, clear, mild. But if it had rained she would have put on a mackintosh and stayed outdoors. Was this partly also because Ronnie was in the house? She and Ronnie were fond of each other, but she had learned to share the silence in which he preferred to live and it was easier to be silent when she was outdoors, alone.

  But no silence, no manufactured calm, no compelled tranquility in talk had been any use. She saw the maid bring the second telegram and knew when she saw it that she had always known it would come. Yes, she knew, even when her heart’s first wild thought as she read the first telegram had been that at least then it was not Don. Now it was Don, too.

  She read the telegram, the formal communication which notified her, with regret, that her son Donald had been killed in action. Her lips grew stiff and her chin began to quiver.

  “Well, Minnie—” she tried to say.

  “Oh, my dear,” Minnie cried, “it’s never Master Donald!”

  She nodded, her chin still quivering, and began to walk to the house. Ronnie must be told. She had been the one both times to get the telegram. This time she need not speak. She would just hold it out to him. Rex had been his favorite, and that time she had felt she must comfort him. This time there simply was no comfort.

  So she walked quickly up the terrace steps and across the flags to the open French windows of the library where he sat reading and handed the telegram to him. He read it. Then he rose, his book sliding from his knees, and put his arms about her. She laid her cheek against his tweed shoulder and held herself breathless and tight, her eyes closed. If she could tighten every muscle, every sinew, perhaps she would not cry.

  “That’s it, old girl,” Ronnie murmured, “mustn’t cry. Take it standing, won’t we! We’ve reached bottom now—nothing more to lose!”

  Yes, that was it. She had nothing more to lose. Both her sons were gone. There was no comfort in the thought, but it was bitter and tonic. She crushed down her swelling heart, and after a moment they drew apart, each aware that the other was able to go on without further communication. Ronnie took off his reading glasses and polished them slowly, his fair, aging face sad enough. She sat down, and stared at the rug.

  “Now that this has happened,” Ronnie said, “I think I must get into it.”

  “What will you do?” Her eyes picked out a little running thread of scarlet in the small fine Persian pattern.

  “There’s things I could do. But what about you? I don’t like leaving you here alone in this big house.”

  “It is too big, isn’t it?” she replied. “Would you mind if I went home?”

  “Home?”

  “To America.”

  “You don’t mean—to stay?”

  “Of course not—only for a while.”

  “It might be the best thing.”

  So it was decided, but because Ronnie could never do anything at once, they would not go for a few days. The house they would offer for a hospital. She put away a few things and decided to leave the rest because she realized that she cared for nothing. Then she sat outdoors in the garden again, reading and rereading William’s letter. Could it have been written about Don? Rex wrote her often, and Don almost never, and yet she loved Don, her firstborn, better. Was Don the sort of spirit that would go on living? If not, then she had no use for eternity.

  “I shall ask William,” she thought to herself.

  And then she sat there in the soft English sunshine, both her sons dead, and thought of William. When she saw William she would cry and cry. Ronnie would never let her cry, but William would. “William—William!” she murmured, and at the sound of his name the tears rushed to her eyes and brimmed there, waiting to fall.

  Hal was not wounded. The first year of war had ended and the second year begun and one battle after another was fought and lost or fought and won and still he came through them whole. He wrote to his mother boasting that the enemy had not yet made a bullet that could get him. Joel was wounded and came home, his right shoulder hanging lower than the left.

  “So long as there’s enough of me left to make a farmer,” he said, grinning.

  There was enough for this and more and soon Mary was pregnant again. Her first boy was named Henry after Joel’s father, and William watched him sometimes with quiet irony. Henry Fasthauser, his grandson! The old Henry he seldom saw, but when he did both were good-natured. Ruth had let most of the farm to Henry, who farmed it with his own and paid her for it.

  “It’s the best way I can help you,” he had told her when Joel went away.

  “Reckon it is,” she said gratefully. They had looked at one another, each ready to say more, but neither did. What could she do for him in return? She had wanted to ask. But there was nothing she could do, and so she had kept silence. She loved William and would love him forever—why, she did not know. There was nothing he did for her that paid her for all her work, except that he was himself and made anything she did worth doing because it was for him. What she got from him she could never put into words but it was what no other man she had ever seen possessed. She had married above herself, but she had made William happy.

  He seemed more than usually happy these days, she thought, that second spring of the war. It was early June and wild strawberries were thick and she had gathered a pailful, though they were tedious to pick, because William loved wild strawberry jam. It was mid-afternoon and she sat on the
doorstep of the front door, under the shade of the crooked old sycamore that leaned over the house, hulling the delicate fruit. Her fingers were stained scarlet. The second summer of the wicked war, she thought, her mind floating away, and Hal was alive and William was well and happier than he had been in a long time. He had not left home for years, even to go to the city to see his parents, the last time, indeed, just before Hal ran away. He must have quarreled with his father, though she had never asked. But she remembered often that William had talked then of going away. Well, he had not gone, and though now he painted less rather than more, his pictures were better. Even she could see that there was something new in them. But he spent a great deal of time not painting, only walking, reading, thinking, writing. He had made the parlor into a library. Books covered the walls up to the ceiling. What her mother and father would have thought of the wastefulness of such a lot of books—a lot more than anybody except William could read—though now Jill was beginning to read too much. She worried about Jill. She was so plain. There wouldn’t be many men who would see behind those sad little grey eyes and the big mouth. She had pretty hands, thin and fine like William’s, but what man around here would notice a woman’s hands?

  And as always she did, Ruth turned for comfort to Mary. Mary was having a real woman’s life, now that Joel was back from the war with only his right shoulder stiff. The rest of him was as good as ever and he could farm, and he and Mary would have a lot of children, but none of them smarter than little Henry. She and old Henry took mutual comfort in that sturdy, strong boy of theirs. She smiled, remembering what old Henry had said only yesterday in his shameless way—old they called him only because of little Henry, for Henry wasn’t old by a long time, yet.

  She had gone over to see Mary about a recipe and the two Henrys had been in the yard. Old Henry was trimming out a lilac bush and little Henry was playing in the dead branches. She had stopped a moment to watch the handsome, rosy boy, who, everybody said, looked like her. He did, too. She could see it herself, though she couldn’t say it because he was so pretty a boy. And old Henry had given her a big grin and said,