Portrait of a Marriage

by Pearl S. Buck

  “My eyes aren’t so blue,” she insisted.

  “They’re the bluest eyes in the world. I can’t make them half blue enough,” he retorted.

  Then she was comforted somewhat and returned to her silence, and he worked on.

  By mid-August the picture was almost finished. He kept doing something to it, but they both knew it was finished.

  “Another week,” he said suddenly one day, “and it will really be done.”

  “Then I won’t see you no more, I guess,” she said in a low voice but plainly.

  “Why not?” he said cheerfully.

  His heart turned over when she spoke, but he did not want her to know it. He knew himself too warm, too weak before beauty, too easily ready to please and to love. And Ruth was sweet. It was delight that she had been exactly what he thought her, so exactly what she looked.

  The strange summer was nearly over. He had simply come here day after day, or he had not come. For two weeks, even, he had gone to Bar Harbor and had renewed his half-playful friendship with Elise. What his father had done to help Monty he did not know, preferring if he could to avoid family difficulties. But something had been done. That his mother had directed it, he guessed from her increase of authority over Monty. He had rather admired Monty’s urbane acceptance of this, while preferring not to know more about it.

  Elise had been beautiful enough, but he had not wanted to paint her. He had even kissed her once or twice. The first time, at a dance, he had taken her out on the terrace of her home that overlooked the sea. Most of the terraces did. His father’s home had a terrace even finer than the one upon which he stood with Elise when the mixture of moon and ocean and soft night air had made him put his arm about her and turn her lips to his. The kiss was sweet enough, perfumed and warm. She waited an instant, and he knew it was to hear him speak. If he offered her marriage, she would accept it.

  “Forgive me,” he whispered instead.

  She waited an instant more and then withdrew herself gently.

  “There is nothing to forgive,” she said lightly.

  He had never been so near liking her as he had been then.

  “Look, is that a little boat there, so late on the sea?” She had turned away from him.

  He had kissed her once more another night, and that time she had asked him nothing. She had simply yielded herself to him and, to his surprise, she returned his kiss. This time it was he who drew away. If she had not kissed him, he had sometimes wondered, would he have gone on to marriage? She was very beautiful and her beauty was deepened and illumined by the proud poise in which she enveloped all she said and did. To feel this pride and poise break and melt beneath his lips should, he thought, have swept his reason away. Instead it had repelled him. There was demand in the kiss, and he shrank from all demand. He knew he did not want to marry Elise, now or ever. The next morning he had started back for the farmhouse.

  When he was with Ruth she left him alone. His mind could pursue its thought undisturbed. And yet when he looked at her, there she was, waiting.

  “You’ll be busy in the city,” she said; “you won’t bother about comin’ out here.”

  He did not promise anything. Aware of his own warmth, he was sensible enough to know that warmth in a nature like his could grow cold in an instant’s distaste, as it had, indeed, with Elise. He saw this house, this kitchen, Ruth herself, with all the appreciation of his eye. But he could remember also, too sharply, things not beautiful—her father and mother, whose kind goodness was enough for them but not enough, perhaps, for him. Mr. Harnsbarger could talk and spit and cough with repulsive freedom, and Mrs. Harnsbarger was stupid. He wondered sometimes how Ruth could have come from those two. She had a brother who worked in the livery stable in the village. He had met Tom Harnsbarger one day when a windstorm had ended in steady rain.

  “Stop in the town and Tom’ll drive you to the railroad in one of his rigs,” Mrs. Harnsbarger had said.

  In a two-seated buggy he had had time in an hour to plumb Tom’s depths. They were not deep. He was a talkative, good-hearted fellow, at his best with horses.

  “Thought some of bein’ a vet,” Tom had said. “But Pop didn’t think much of payin’ out money to learn me about hosses. So I took me a job to the livery stable. I reckon it was for the best. I’m figurin’ on marryin’ a girl as has got somethin’. Linda Hofsammer she is, and we’ll set up a business of our own maybe.”

  “The automobile will hurt your business some day,” William had said.

  “Reckon or’nary folks’ll never do without hosses,” Tom had said cheerfully.

  That night he remembered clearly, because he had been so late that he had to tell his mother what he had been doing. She had invited guests for a dinner party and his lateness had annoyed her. And so out of an old childish fear which he despised and yet could not overcome, he had broken his resolve not to tell her of Ruth.

  “I was painting, Mother, and the storm delayed me.”

  “Where is this wonderful painting, pray?”

  At the head of the long mahogany table her head rose, taller than ever because she wore a small diamond tiara. At the sight of her his heart shivered beyond his control, as it used to do when he was a little boy and she swept into the nursery at night dressed to go out and scolded him for some fault he had committed in the day.

  “It’s in a stone farmhouse miles from here,” he said too brightly. “It’s marvelous—an old, smoke-darkened kitchen and a pretty farm girl. I’m painting her in the kitchen.”

  “Bring it here and let me see it,” his mother had commanded.

  He had brought the picture home that night, thinking that if it rained the next day he would work on it. So he had had to fetch it down from his studio and he had had to endure what they said. Whether his mother liked it or not he did not know. She had lifted her gold-framed pince-nez and stared at it—stared, he felt, only at Ruth. And his father had only murmured something about the shadows under the beams. They had said nothing at all, then or afterward to him. But he had heard his mother say again and again since then to others, “Do come and see what William is going to offer to the Academy this winter—a little peasant girl! She could have been painted abroad, but the fascinating thing is she wasn’t. She’s a girl on a Pennsylvania farm.”

  “It’s quite nice,” his father agreed, antiphonally.

  He had stood by many times, compelled to show his picture, and always vaguely angry at the handsome, well-dressed women who were his mother’s friends, and ashamed before his father’s silence.

  “Sweet!” the women murmured. “A pretty child—” “How quaint the kitchen is!” “It could be Belgium.” “Or Brittany.” “No, it’s Holland.”

  And yet not one of them but would be horrified if he had said, “That’s the girl I’m in love with.”

  Lucky he was not in love with her—quite!

  “I’m going to send you a pass on my father’s railroad,” he said to Ruth, “and you shall go and see yourself in a New York gallery.”

  “Will you be there?” she asked.

  “Of course,” he replied, and gave her the smile for which she had learned so painfully to wait because it made her sad and happy. If she was not to see him again she wanted to die. If he went away, then no one would be alive to her any more because whether she drew her breath or not she would be dead if she saw him no more.

  One day in early September the picture was finally finished. He could no longer pretend to himself that it was not, nor pretend, either, that he came now for any other reason than to see Ruth. He could not come again without acknowledging to himself what this morning he had denied to his mother. For his mother had spoken at last. She had said in her imperious, direct fashion, calling to him as he passed by her door on the way downstairs to his breakfast, “William! Come here, please!”

  He went in and found her breakfasting in bed, her greying hair smoothly curled and a lace jacket over her shoulders.

  “Good morning, Mother,” h
e said.

  “Sit down,” she replied. “William, I’m worried about your not finishing that picture—you’ve never spent so long on one. You’re not becoming entangled with that girl, are you?”

  “Certainly not,” he had replied indignantly.

  “Because it would never do,” she said, breaking off a bit of toast and buttering it quickly. “You’d be very unhappy. Marriage is only tolerable when it takes place between equals. Even then it’s not always tolerable.”

  He did not answer this. Silence, he had found years ago, was the swiftest way to release him from his mother.

  “Well, go to your breakfast,” she said, “though you might kiss me first.”

  He came to her, and suddenly she seized his hand and held it in her thin, strong hand. “Sure?” she urged him.

  “Don’t be silly, Mother,” he had said impatiently, and leaned to kiss her; “as if I could!” And he had gone away determined that indeed he could not.

  He put the final touch upon the picture late in the afternoon. It was to deepen the blue in Ruth’s eyes. Then he laid down his brushes.

  “It is done, Ruth,” he said. “Come and see yourself.”

  She came to his side and stood for a thoughtful moment.

  “Is that how I look to you?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he replied.

  What she saw was a rosy, strong girl, full of health, in a blue dress and a white apron. She recognized her hands, always a little rough so that she was ashamed of them. He had not spared them.

  “They’ll laugh at me maybe in New York,” she said.

  “They’ll think you are beautiful,” he” said.

  “I could have put on my Sunday dress, though,” she objected.

  “You ought to wear nothing but blue, for the sake of your eyes,” he said, and then he added playfully, “—make me a promise?”

  “What?” she said quickly and felt her heart smother. What could he want of her but to tell her he loved her?

  “Wear nothing but blue,” he said.

  She felt cast down enough to weep. It was nothing. “I couldn’t promise that,” she said. “My best dress is pink.”

  “I was joking,” he said hastily.

  “Besides, what would you care when you won’t be seeing me no more?” she said.

  “Don’t forget you’re coming to New York,” he said gaily. And all the time he was putting away his brushes and his paints, and now he folded his easel and took up the picture. It was not very large and he carried it in a frame he had devised for his wet paintings. Now he was ready to go.

  “I shan’t say good-by,” he said, “because we will see each other again.”

  She did not answer except to put out her hand and to try to keep from crying. He saw her tears and refused himself the luxury of comforting her. He took her hand, but he did not hold it beyond the instant.

  “I’ll write you when my pictures are hung,” he said, maintaining his gaiety.

  She understood so little of the hanging of pictures that she scarcely heard him. He was going away, that was all, and she loved him. And he, seeing in her eyes everything she felt, trembled and wavered and wished that he were gone, or that someone would come in, or at least that she were not so pretty, or her breath not so sweet or that she were less to him—or more. He stood a quivering second and then, hating himself, he seized her with his free left arm and kissed her, and then he rushed out of the house and down the lane. “Damn!” he said with fury to his shaken heart.

  He came into the formal, handsome hall of his home and saw the light of a blazing fire between the dark velvet curtains of the drawing room. He went toward it and found his parents waiting for dinner. He stood there in his walking clothes, his picture under his arm.

  “I’ve finished it,” he said.

  “Quite finished?” his mother asked.

  “Completely,” he replied, aware of deeper meanings between them.

  “Then let us see it,” his father said.

  William opened the press which held his canvas and set the picture upon the mantel between the lighted silver candlesticks. It was a proper light for it. Shadows deepened and the highlights came forward. His tridimensional technique had never been more successful. His father rose to examine the picture.

  “It’s the best thing you’ve ever done,” he said.

  “I know it is,” William replied. It was the only picture with which he had ever been completely satisfied when he finished it. He could see his father asking himself if this painting were good enough for his gallery.

  “It is really quite fine,” his father said, hesitating. “A slight immaturity is, perhaps, its only fault—a fault time will correct.”

  “Oh, it’s immature, of course,” William said, laughing. “It’s not good enough to put among your immortals, I know. But I’ll reach that some day.”

  His father was relieved at his gaiety. “I am sure you will, my son,” he said.

  “Now that your pictures are ready to exhibit,” his mother said, “I wonder if you wouldn’t like a winter in New York? Your father and I have been talking about it for you—a bachelor apartment somewhere, perhaps, where you could have your friends and your work, too.”

  He perfectly saw through her plan and was about to tell her so, laughing again, when it came to him that it might be useful to him to have rooms of his own in New York.

  “Thanks—it’s good of you and I’d like it,” he said equably. “Now I’ll go and dress for dinner. I shan’t be a minute.”

  He left the picture on the mantelpiece, amused at his instinctive reluctance to leave it alone with them. They would both, he knew, look at Ruth anxiously the moment he was gone. But she could bear their gazing eyes, he told himself. They could not disturb her serenity. He thought with some shame of his kiss. But could she not bear that, too? How sweet her lips had been, how shy and soft! He remembered Elise’s clinging kiss with fresh disgust. Ruth’s lips were like a child’s. At this distance, in this warm familiar room, the kiss seemed nothing. He had done a young girl no damage, and of this he was even a little proud. Not every man could have been so strict with himself toward a pretty and childlike creature. He had even gone away without definite promise of meeting her again. He would put off that meeting day by day until at last all desire for it had dulled. When that time came, it would be easy to forget he had said that she was to come to New York. Thus his heart assured itself. On the other hand, he thought, if he found it too hard never to see her, if desire were not so easy to dispel, he could summon her to New York. Anything was possible. No door was locked. Everything depended on how he felt, and with possibilities of any sort to fit his need he was now comforted.

  He ran downstairs happily aware that he felt well and was looking unusually handsome. There was the picture of her upon the mantel, her steady dark blue eyes lifted as she paused in the cutting of the loaf she held in her hand upon the kitchen table. When he entered the drawing room it seemed as though her eyes lifted to his coming.

  “What shall you call the picture?” his father asked him.

  He paused, meeting Ruth’s steadfast eyes. He had never thought of it before. “Give us this day our daily bread,” he said, and knew it right.

  Ruth, moving about the kitchen after supper, forced her mind to imagine what his home could be. She was sifting flour and mixing lard and milk and measuring yeast for the making of bread. At the same table at which she had stood so many hours while he painted her she now stood to do this, stirring the dough in the brown crockery bowl and turning it out upon the board for the first kneading. And all the time her thoughts were painfully trying to see what she had never seen, the sort of house he lived in, the clothes he wore. Dinner was at night. She knew that because he had often said, “I must hurry, I’ll be late for dinner and my parents don’t like that.”

  “Why, you mean supper,” she had said the first time, and then he had explained.

  Every night they put on their good clothes and then ate—she c
ould never understand that.

  “Don’t you go somewheres when you’re all dressed up?” she had asked, wondering.

  He had laughed. “Only sometimes,” he had replied.

  She thought of them sitting at home dressed up. And what did they do? People who lived in the same house hadn’t much to say to one another. She and her parents scarcely spoke for hours together except about the work.

  She sighed and went on kneading with her strong hands, her thumbs turning the soft dough inward. Soon the yeast began to do its work and bubbles cracked as she kneaded and she knew the bread was ready for its first rising. She rolled it into a round mass and put it into the bowl again and covered it with a clean towel. Then she went about the room, settling the fire for the night and putting out dishes for their early breakfast. The small tasks left her mind empty and she filled it with thinking of William. But try as she did, she could not see him where he was. She could only see him here in this kitchen, as he had been hour after hour, looking at her. She went and stood by the table in the pose he had given her and looked where he had always stood so that the light from the open door could fall upon his canvas.

  But he was not there. The door was shut and beyond it was the night. “He won’t be here no more,” she thought and forced herself to believe it. “It’s all finished,” she thought and turned toward the stairs and climbed them. “And better so,” she told herself, undressing and climbing into the little low bed under the eaves, “for I’m not his kind.”

  And then she lay awake, not weeping, but in a humble literal sadness, to realize the truth.

  The devil of it was, he told himself angrily, that he could not paint in New York. Here in his own apartment, with the good north light in the room he had made into a studio, he could not paint. The city was full of pictures. He saw them everywhere. But when he put his hand to his brushes, its cunning was gone. He had no heart for his work.

  At first he had thought merely that it was the strangeness of the new place and the excitement of his success that made him restless. His success Louise had made the most of, grateful for the excuse it gave her to invite guests to her home who might otherwise have wondered why they must dine with her and Monty. She had found New York society cold and self-contained. Philadelphia might have been a continent away. And Monty, she discovered, had enemies. Whenever he lost money for people, they hated him.