Angry Wife

by Pearl S. Buck

  “Does he know people?”

  “Yes—even knew he’d never seen Bettina before.”

  “I don’t suppose he asked for anybody—the children—”

  “He’s not up to that yet.”

  Her eyes were fixed on him strongly. “What is it?” he asked, trying to smile.

  “I have a queer feeling you haven’t really come home.”

  “It takes time,” he agreed. “You know, Luce, I have to bring myself home—bit by bit. I’ve lived so many days and nights away. Sometimes the nights were the worse—wondering about you, when the letters didn’t come.”

  “Pierce, you won’t be restless now? I mean—war’s awfully exciting, isn’t it?”

  “No—unless you like horror,” he said gravely.

  He looked around the room. “There’s nothing more exciting to me than this—being here at home—in your room. Luce, we’ll have lots more children, won’t we? That’s what’s exciting—you and me and our children growing up.”

  She drooped her beautiful blonde head. Somehow she had managed to keep her skin like a child’s in spite of these years of war. She was young, and so was he—she twenty-six, and he not yet thirty. They could have a half dozen children, easily. Her shining yellow hair, real yellow, rare as gold, was twisted about her head in a crown, not braided or curled, and her eyes were blue like his, but more blue.

  “How do you keep your dresses so pretty?” he muttered foolishly. He wanted to take her to bed now, this instant, and suddenly his physical need stupefied him with its intensity. He had been home for a week but it seemed to him he had only just seen her.

  “Georgia irons them every day,” she said.

  She was perfectly aware of what his look meant, the flame in the eyes, the concentration in his gaze, the slight tightening of his lips. But she saw no need to yield to it at this moment. After all, he was home to stay now. Old routines must be set up again. She rose, linked her hands together and yawned behind them prettily, smiling at him.

  “Here come the boys,” she said and threw open the door.

  The two boys were leaping up the stairs ahead of Georgia. They ran into the room, Martin, the elder, was eight and Carey five. “Where’s Tom?” Martin demanded. He was not afraid of his father because he had forgotten how it was to have a father in the house before. He had been loudly disappointed because Pierce declared himself too big and too old to play all the time.

  “Hush—Uncle Tom’s asleep,” Lucinda said, smiling. She was very proud of the two handsome blond boys she had borne.

  “How big is he?” Martin demanded.

  “As big as I am,” Pierce said, “but very thin.”

  “Big as you!” Martin wailed.

  “Maybe taller,” Pierce said firmly. “Looks like Tom’s grown during the war.”

  The interest went out of Martin’s face but he hid his disappointment by pushing his younger brother. Carey fell and cried.

  “Oh, you naughty boy,” Lucinda said. “Pierce, why must they always fight?”

  Pierce laughed. “Tom and I always fought,” he said. The small scene made him feel at home as nothing had. All of them were under one roof again, his children, Tom, he, his wife. They were a family. How passionately he had longed for the ties of a family about him! That was the worst of soldiering, after the sheer terror, horrible wounds—or death. A soldier was cut off from everything. He had not so much as a room of his own. He became only an atom, scarcely identified, adding his mite of energy to the great blind force of war.

  “Shall I take the children to bed now, ma’am?” Georgia’s voice, sweet and deep, came from the door. She had been standing there in silence, waiting, and when Carey fell, she came in and picked him up. Now he clung to her.

  “Go with Georgia, boys,” Lucinda commanded.

  Georgia carried Carey away in her arms and Martin leaped froglike from flower to flower in the rose-patterned carpet on the floor. The door closed on them.

  “They seem to like Georgia,” Pierce remarked.

  “Oh, they like both the girls,” Lucinda said. “Maybe they like Georgia a little better. She’s gentler than Bettina.” She went to the mirror and examined her hair in a hand glass and tucked in a smooth end.

  “Where did your father get them?” he asked.

  “They were payment for a betting debt,” Lucinda said in a careless voice. “He went to the races in Kentucky—you know he always did. Mother scolded and he went just the same.” She laughed. “He always won, you know, so her scolding never did any good. But she was cross when he came home with two more colored wenches! We had so many already.”

  “Good pair, though,” Pierce said.

  “Yes, but Mother said they didn’t fit anywhere.”

  “You mean—they were rebellious?”

  “Oh no, Mother wouldn’t have stood for that. But they’d been taught to read and you never know—” her voice trailed. “For instance,” she said, looking over the top of the ivory glass at her husband. “Why should Georgia suddenly begin to say ‘ma’am’ to me, instead of ‘mistress,’ the way she always has?”

  Pierce laughed, aware as he did so of something like an old timidity before Lucinda. Well, he wouldn’t be afraid of his wife, not after four years at war and two of being a major! “Why, I told her to do that, Luce,” he said. “I told her I didn’t want to be called master. We’ve lost the war. Our only hope for the future is to remember we’ve lost it and begin to live in the new way.”

  “I haven’t lost any war,” she said.

  He laughed at her. “You little Southern rebel,” he said. “Of course you have!”

  He seized the mirror and put it down, swept her into his arms and kissed her hard. Then he held her at arm’s length. “You’re going to lose all your battles with me, hereafter,” he said. “I haven’t been a soldier for nothing all these years.”

  Yes, he told himself—he was going to keep the upper hand in his own home.

  “Pierce, you’re ruining my hair,” she wailed.”

  “Damn your hair,” he said.

  “Look here, my beauty,” he told her in the night “Don’t bear me a boy this time, if you please. I want some daughters—pretty ones! I shan’t keep the ugly ones.”

  Lucinda laughed into her down pillow. “What will you give me for a girl, Pierce?” she asked. The room was flickering with firelight. He had heaped logs on the hearth and blown out the candles. They had no coal oil for the crystal lamps but plenty of candles. Georgia knew how to make them and scent them with bayberries and juniper.

  “Girls actually aren’t worth as much in the market as boys,” he said. “Let’s see—I always give you diamonds for the boys, don’t I?”

  “My diamond bracelet for Martin and the diamond brooch for Carey,” she said promptly.

  “Pearls for the girls?” he suggested.

  “Sapphires,” she bargained.

  “Sapphires,” he promised. “But you’re greedy, you little wretch! Sapphires—I shall have to get them from Paris.”

  “At that it’ll be less trouble for you than for me,” she said, laughing.

  “All right, wretch,” he promised. He pulled her into his arms—“anything—anything—little wretch!”

  But in the middle of this soft night, in the quiet of the house where he had been born and lived out all his childhood and youth, in the full sight of the thinnest crescent moon he had ever seen, a rim of silver at the edge of the shadowy full moon hanging, above the mountains, in the depth of the great bed where he lay with his wife, he knew that he was changed. War had made him hard. He valued as he never had the few good things of life, love and passion, sleep, morning, food, work, the wind and the sun. But he would never play again as he had played. He would never again be idle, never gay in the old unthinking fashion—

  “You hurt me,” Lucinda said suddenly.

  He paid no heed to her complaint until he heard her sob.

  “What the devil is the matter with you?” he demanded.r />
  “I don’t like you,” she sobbed childishly. “You weren’t like this—before.”

  He released her instantly, “You can scarcely expect me to be exactly what I was before.” Lying naked in the bed his formality suddenly seemed ridiculous to him and he burst into loud laughter.

  “Pierce, you stop laughing!” Lucinda cried. She beat his breast with her fists when he went on laughing. “Pierce, stop it—you’re crazy!”

  He stopped laughing as suddenly as he had begun. “Oh well,” he said. “Maybe it’s worth a sapphire.”

  He fell asleep as quickly as though neither passion nor anger had been. The war had taught him that.

  In the bedroom across the hall Tom woke. Something warm and sweet was in his mouth. Food again! He began to eat with a new hunger and saw a woman’s face bent over him. It was a brown face, but the lamp shining from the table behind, lit the dark hair curling about it She was feeding him in teaspoonfuls and he was swallowing. His mind was clear, as it had been most of the time even in prison, but to know did not mean he would have strength to speak. Fellows had been taken out of the prison in the dead cart when they were alive and knowing, but too weak to protest against their own burial.

  “More,” he said distinctly.

  “There’s plenty more,” Bettina answered. “I made a full bowl.”

  He wondered drowsily what it was. Something sweet and something smooth, slipping down his throat. A custard, maybe, with eggs and milk and white sugar. Only where did she get eggs and milk and white sugar in a war? He felt impelled to answer his own question. He opened his eyes with effort.

  “We won—war,” he announced.

  “Surely we did,” she agreed. She lifted another spoonful and put it to his mouth.

  When he could swallow no more because sleep made it impossible, she put the dish down. The light fell on his face. The terror was already fading from it. In a few days, when his lips were not fleshless, he would not look so like a skeleton. Then the door opened and Georgia came into the room. She wore a long white dressing gown and she had loosened her hair. It flowed down over her shoulders, fine and curly and black.

  “How is he?” she whispered.

  “You don’t have to whisper,” Bettina whispered. “When he sleeps he hears nothing.”

  They stood looking down at him, side by side.

  “He’s so young,” Bettina said.

  “I heard them say twenty-three,” Georgia answered.

  “Then he went when he was nineteen. How long was he in prison—did you hear them say?”

  “That I did not,” Georgia answered.

  They lingered, looking at his face, at his hands, lying helpless on the white coverlet. “He has nice hands,” Georgia said, “I like a man to have nice hands. Remember Father’s hands, Bettina?”

  Bettina nodded.

  “Shan’t I take a turn with him, so you can sleep?” Georgia asked.

  Bettina shook her head. “I want to be here when he wakes,” she said.

  She gave her sister a gentle push. “You go to your bed,” she commanded her. “It’s me that she set to nurse him back to health and strength.”

  She watched her sister’s figure glide across the floor and she watched while the door latched. Then she sat down again in her seat by the bed, her eyes fixed on his face.

  Down the hall Georgia walked, barefoot, without sound. She passed “their” bedrooms—her mistress’s and master’s—She remembered what he had told her.

  “Surely, I’m free,” she thought. “I could go away. I don’t have to take even their wages.” She heard voices murmuring, and under the door a crack of light showed. The high transom was bright. They were still awake! But she had waked, too, out of dreamless sleep. The house seemed strange now that the master had come home.

  “That’s what he is,” she thought, “even though he tells me I’m not to call him that. A house must have a master.”

  She had always come and gone into that room, and her mistress had never seemed to care. It was as though she were nobody at all, until now. But now the whole house was different. Her mistress was different, too. Women were always different when men came into the house.

  She went noiselessly past the door. Then she reached the attic stairs. “God help me they don’t creak,” she thought.

  It was the one thing she and Bettina had asked, that they might sleep in the house instead of out in the quarters. Her mistress had looked at them coldly. They had stood, hand in hand, waiting for her question. But she had not put the question.

  “Very well,” she had said in her cool voice. “You may sleep in the attic. But you’ll have to be quiet. I don’t want to hear even your walking around.”

  Up in the attic she and Bettina had made a home for themselves. They had found an old rope bottom bed and a discarded bureau. Rags they had made into rugs and they had crocheted covers for the bed and the bureau top. But they had learned to walk as softly as shadows in the top of the great house and to talk in whispers.

  She took off her dressing gown and crept into the bed. Still she could not sleep. She lay quivering, aware, feeling, not thinking. There was no use thinking in a life like hers. She was a creature in the sea, tossed here and there by tides she did not understand.

  “But wherever you are,” her mother had said, “begin to live right there and look after yourselves. Only thing, I hope you will always be together.”

  Her mother had died so long ago she could remember her now only by summoning her consciously to memory. All she saw was a dim dark face, darker than her own or Bettina’s, dark but beautiful, more like Bettina than like her, more Indian than Negro. But her father she remembered well. He was an old white man, always old. They had lived with him in a great house with pillars to hold up the heavy roof of the porch. Once there had been a white mistress in the house but never had there been children. She and Bettina were his only children. He had treated them as his children, too, and had made the slaves treat them so after his white wife died. It had been easy, for there were no visitors. Long before Georgia’s memory visitors had stopped coming. She and Bettina both knew that it had happened when he took their mother into the house. She had not been one of the slaves. She was a stranger whom he had bought in New Orleans and she had kept herself a stranger always. But she had been wise. She had lived in the house but she allowed none of the slaves to wait on her or on the children. She had made herself a housekeeper, and she thanked the slaves carefully when they helped her, and she never gave an order. It was always “please, will you”—and “I’m sorry to ask you”—Behind the extreme courtesy they had lived together, the three of them, separate from everyone, even the father.

  “He’s your father, but you can’t act like his children,” she had told them, “even if he does treat you right,” she had added.

  So she and Bettina had grown up as solitary as orphans, even when the tall thin old Englishman had held them on his knees and kissed their smooth golden cheeks.

  After their mother died, when she was eleven and Bettina nine, they had gone on alone together, growing up, slender, silent, obedient always to the old man. “Sir,” they had always called him, neither master nor father. He used to look at them. She remembered and never could she forget how he used to look at them, pitying and frightened, as though something he had done in a moment had surprised even himself.

  “I don’t know what’s to become of you two girls,” he used to mutter. He was very old, then, too old to do anything but let them wait on him.

  “Don’t worry about us, sir—” she had always said. That, too, was her mother’s teaching … “Don’t ever let men get to thinking you trouble, father or husband. Men don’t like trouble with women.”

  She had kept these teachings in her heart and had taught them to Bettina who could not remember the least image of their mother.

  After a while the old man had given up even his worry. He grew older and slept more often, and had taken much waiting upon, until the day when h
e died in a moment and they had found him dead.

  “What’s goin’ to become of us, Georgia?” Bettina had asked.

  “We’ll have to wait and see,” she had answered.

  “Maybe he’s left his will for us,” Bettina whispered.

  “Hush,” Georgia said. One of the teachings of her mother had been, “Don’t expect anything. Then what you get seems good and enough.”

  But there was no will and no mention of them and when a cousin came as the next heir, he sold the house and the land and the slaves, and they were sold, too. If they had not been slaves before they now became slaves.

  Thus had they gone into the next great house. It was no question there—they were slaves. And then, because they had worked well and always in that deep silence which they kept about them like a dark velvet curtain, Miss Lucie had brought them here when again the great house fell. Great houses always fell. She lay gazing up into the thick beams above her head. Would this great house fall, too?

  Pierce, waking just after dawn, got out of the bed. He moved as stealthily as he knew how, but Lucinda waked.

  “Go to sleep, Luce,” he commanded. “It’s the middle of the night for you.”

  “Where are you going?” she asked. Her blue eyes opened wide at him.

  “I’m going for a ride,” he said. “I’ll be back in time to breakfast with you.”

  He stooped and kissed her mouth. Her breath was not quite sweet in the morning. He knew it and yet it always shocked him a little that it could be, so fastidious was she in every detail of her person. Inside the lovely shell of her body surely there should be no corruption. She was asleep again, lying placidly on her pillow, her hands on her breast. Lovely she was, and he had no complaint against her. By the time he got back she would have washed her mouth with one of her fragrant waters. He had no need to notice an offense not greater than the scent of a faded rose—he who was fresh home from the stench of dying men on a battlefield! Yet that stench had so pervaded him for four years that now his nostrils were always to the wind, like a dog’s. He smelled what he would never have noticed in the days before he had smelled death.