Portrait of a Marriage

by Pearl S. Buck

  “Though why,” she told William plaintively, “when he has done his best to make them rich! He loses his own money, too, but they never seem to think of that.”

  William had enjoyed being something of a young lion, a handsome one, too, he was told. Elise told him herself in the half-reckless fashion she made part of her smoldering charm.

  “You’ve grown too handsome,” she had said at Louise’s first dinner when she found him at her right. “The country air agrees with you.”

  He had examined this for a moment. Then he replied equably, “Let us see what the air of New York will do,” and had accepted with a smile the swift look she flung him from her amber eyes.

  When she turned her head without reply to this, he accepted that, too, and found upon his own right another pretty girl, a very pretty girl, he thought carelessly. Indeed, New York was full of pretty girls. In his first success he saw them around him as thick as bees and noticed them scarcely more.

  For he wanted to be serious about his work. His exhibition had been greatly praised. He had sold nearly a dozen of his paintings. He could twenty times have sold the picture of Ruth, but each time he had answered it was not for sale. Yet he knew that he ought to sell it as soon as he could. As long as he had it he could not forget Ruth, and he had made up his mind now that he wanted to forget her. The picture hung opposite the entrance to the gallery, and he went there again and again alone, to meet her blue eyes looking at him. Sometimes he stood before the picture to test the quality of his art—or so he told himself. But whenever he did this he seemed to step again into her presence, to feel again her warm, robust health that clarified by its simplicity all who came near her. Each time he broke away from her. “I must sell it,” he told himself. For he knew that she could never belong here. And here in New York, he was beginning to believe, was where he wanted to live.

  But as the exhibition went on he was further than ever from being able to sell the picture. At last in a fit of sharp jealousy he took it out of the gallery. Too many men stood gazing at it. The director had protested.

  “That picture has been praised by every critic. Why, people come especially to see it.”

  “That’s why I am taking it away,” William replied.

  “You’re crazier even than most artists,” the director retorted.

  But William had not listened to him. The picture was now in his own room safe from the eyes of other men. For the last and immediate reason he had taken it out of the gallery was that he had seen two of his own friends, staring at it. “Is the model a friend of yours, Bill?” one of them had asked him.

  He had replied coldly, “She is a farmer’s daughter I chanced to see last summer when I was on a painting trip and I painted her in her own kitchen.”

  “Give us the address, will you, old boy?” the other man said jeeringly. “We might be walking that way ourselves.”

  It was the idlest of talk, and yet he had been instantly angry and foolishly serious.

  “It would be a liberty,” he said, and had removed the picture that very day.

  Now when he woke in the morning his eyes fell first upon Ruth, her eyes lifted to him, and she was what he looked upon last when he put out the light beside his bed when he slept. He enjoyed the variety of his daily life, and yet he had a sense of homecoming to her at night.

  One night when for some reason he was sleepless he rose resolved to write to her, that he might perhaps ease himself by communication. Sitting at his desk he poured out a warm, swiftly written letter. He wanted her to know that he was keeping her picture. It hung in his room and he could not part with it. Some day he would have to come and see her, just to make sure she was flesh and blood.

  He posted the letter without reading it again lest by day it seem too ardent, and he waited for her answer, wondering what sort of letter she would write, imagining its childlike quality and the longings she would be too innocent to hide. But she did not answer, and as week passed into week and he realized that he was to have no answer, this hurt him. He wondered why she did not write and whether she had forgotten him.

  The real reason did not occur to him. When she received this letter Ruth was so sorrowful that nothing could have moved her to answer it. She could not read half of his handwriting. It was fine, beautiful writing, but to her, accustomed to the plain childlike script of the scarcely literate, it was almost entirely illegible. With the instinctive secretiveness of the partly ignorant that made her determine to keep everything in her life to herself, she showed it to no one. She sat hours in her attic room puzzling over the letter, writing down each precious word she deciphered. When she had read all she could, she decided sadly that she must never answer it. Her handwriting could only make him look down on her and her spelling was miserable. She had gone no further than the fifth grade in the one-room country school, and then her father had said she could not be spared, because that was the winter her mother fell down the stone steps of the cellar and broke her hip.

  “I’m too far beneath William in every way,” she told herself. So she took his letter and folded it very small and sewed it into a scrap of red silk ribbon and hung it by a cord around her neck for a good luck piece.

  If she had written to him, her letter might indeed have cooled him, but when she did not, it seemed to him that he must see her again if only to make sure that he did not love her. He deliberately compared her sometimes with Elise. Elise after waiting the winter through had in March suddenly announced her engagement to an Englishman whom nobody knew. She told William abruptly one day when she met him upon the avenue. She had just been, she said, to see his pictures again.

  “But you have painted nothing new,” she said. “I go every now and then to see if you have.”

  “I know,” he said abashed, “and I cannot tell you why. I have the impulse to paint, but when I take up my palette, the impulse is dead.”

  “You find nothing to inspire you here.” She made the statement as final as though it were something she had discovered. And then with scarcely a pause she went on, “I wondered if I should meet you today. If I did, I had made up my mind to tell you before I told anyone else of my engagement. I am going to marry Ronnie Bartram—You don’t know him. He’s an Englishman—a younger son of Sir Roger Bartram. We’ll live in London after we’re married.”

  She said this quite calmly, standing there before him, the wind blowing her red skirts and whipping the fur on the big collar of her black jacket. She put up her hand to hold her small red hat, and at that moment he saw how incomparably beautiful she was, her hair so dark, her eyes amber, and in the pale gold of her skin, her red mouth. He noticed too, that she stood in front of a florist’s window, so that behind here were massed flowers. Whether this was intentional he could not say. He could never be sure that anything Elise did was not intentional, and he was repelled again.

  Some faint fear of his childhood crept up in him again, his mother’s all-seeing watchful eyes had made him feel a prisoner. Spontaneity drained out of him now with Elise as it used to do in his mother’s presence. Then he was impatient. Really there was no reason why Elise should be so willfully intentional in all she said and did. They had known each other too long to be evasive. He did not want to complain against her, because it would only begin one of her long argumentative conversations.

  There seemed nothing for him to say, in spite of his irritation, and yet he felt stupidly sad to think that whatever he had to do with her was over. They had been children together in the close circle of their class.

  “I hope with all my heart that you will be happy, Elise.”

  “You can scarcely hope it as much as I do,” she said.

  He was surprised into awkwardness. “Don’t you know—aren’t you—you wouldn’t be foolish, Elise?”

  “I don’t know what you mean by foolish,” she said. She leaned against the window and put her hands in her black muff and looked at him. “Women must marry, you know. None of us ever knows whether we’ll be happy. We wait and fi
nd out.”

  He had so seldom seen her wholly serious that it embarrassed him. “Then—let me hope more than ever,” he said.

  “Thank you.” She put out a small, black-gloved hand and he took it for a moment and pressed it, wanting to say more and yet knowing there was nothing to be said. She drew her hand away quickly, nodded and went on. He gave one glance at her graceful figure. She held her shoulders flying like wings and her head was high. He felt his irritation melt away and he was suddenly nearer to loving her than he had ever been. She was of his breed and his world. There was much in them that was alike. He restrained his feet from running after her. For if he should pursue her, to what would he persuade her? He wanted to persuade no one to anything.

  So he went back to his rooms and when he was there he sat a long time before the picture of Ruth, comparing her with Elise, eyes to eyes, lips to lips, and all the difference there was between the two, and of the two, he chose Ruth. He chose her for her frankness and for her simplicity. Her silences hid no provocations, and when she spoke he could accept her words for what they said, and not for what they left unsaid. He wanted to be forever free.

  “She shall be kept herself,” he thought tenderly. And he came to think of her as a sweet and private possession, a loveliness that no one knew about except himself.

  In the spring it became impossible to refuse his longing. The painting was only an invitation. Ruth was alive and he could go to her.

  He went in May, without going home or telling anyone that he had left the city. He prayed the gods he did not believe in that she would be alone when he found her, even perhaps in the kitchen so that he could see his picture come alive. The prayer took on the aspects of passion as he approached the house, but without his painting knapsack. This time he had not come to paint. He had come to find her.

  He had planned his coming for midafternoon, remembering that it was at this hour she was most likely to be idle. He came to the kitchen door, his heart beating. The door was open and he looked in. She was not there, no one was there. His heart subsided so quickly that he felt faint. He went in. The room was clean and quiet, and he felt somehow that she had left it only a few minutes before. His senses, always too quivering, felt her still near. He sat down to wait, hoping that it would be she who would enter and not her mother or father. Yet he was aware, too, of his own danger and he knew that it would be better if one of them came first to remind him of their being. For he was frightened now by the strength and steadfastness of his longing, and he still would not acknowledge any purpose to his coming except simply to see her. How would she seem to him after a winter away, after a winter among very different people?

  He looked about the simple room. Everything was exactly as it used to be, except that the table at which he had painted Ruth, and which had used to stand by the fireplace, was now by the window where he had placed it. It stood there empty, its surface polished and old with use. As he looked about the room he had a strange feeling of homecoming, as though here in this house he had been born and had lived as a child. The full, rich silence, the faint ticking of the tall clock in the corner, sunlight falling through the door, the shining kettle on the stove, the worn chairs, and the small hooked rag rugs, he felt he remembered from childhood. He could scarcely have imagined a place more different from the house where actually he had been born and lived as a child. He could not comprehend this feeling of homecoming to what he had never had.

  And then through the open door he saw Ruth coming down the path which led to the kitchen from the orchard. She had a trowel in one hand and a basket in the other. She came straight toward him, her brown head bent a little in the bright sun, her face grave. She was thinner, he saw, but lovelier than ever. He rose and stood waiting and all his heart rushed to meet her. As though she felt a warm force drawing her she lifted her head and then she saw him. She dropped the basket and trowel and came straight to him, not pausing or faltering. They said not a word. Their eyes held each other’s eyes, and he drew her to him and she was drawn until they were face to face, and then he put out his arms and she came into them and he bowed his head and laid his cheek upon her hair.

  Thus they stood. He knew it was not what he had planned but it was what he wanted. And she knew only that what was, must be.

  And then, after this moment, long and close, he lifted her face with his hand under her chin and he kissed her. Thus without a word, he discovered and declared his love.

  … Mrs. Harnsbarger, coming through the narrow hall in her soft grey felt slippers, paused at the kitchen door. She had forgotten to put potatoes to soak for the making of yeast. What she saw put everything from her mind. There was Ruth, and William had her in his arms.

  “Well, well,” she said heavily.

  They sprang apart, only their hands clinging. William began to stammer.

  “I—I don’t blame you for being surprised, Mrs. Harnsbarger.”

  “Surprised ain’t enough yet,” she replied slowly. “I’m all in a heap.” This, to her, could mean only one thing.

  “I found I couldn’t do without Ruth,” William said. He looked at Ruth. He was smiling but she was grave and silent.

  Mrs. Harnsbarger sat down. “Well, young man,” she said. She seemed unable to go beyond this.

  Still Ruth said nothing. Clinging to his hand, she looked at him with her large clear gaze. In her silence he felt compelled to speak. He tried to do so with as much dignity as he could, yet feeling himself somehow in a foolish place.

  “Of course I was going to ask you, Mrs. Harnsbarger—and Ruth’s father,” he said. “But this has only just happened to us.”

  “I don’t know what’ll he say,” Mrs. Harnsbarger said.

  William felt an uprising annoyance. “I hope he has no objection to me,” he said. It would be amusing, he thought haughtily, if this farmer and his stupid wife objected to him!

  “We was countin’ on Ruth marryin’ somebuddy that would help on the farm,” Mrs. Harnsbarger said doubtfully. “Somebuddy like Henry Fasthauser, Ruthie,” she explained to her daughter.

  “I’ll marry William, Mother,” she replied.

  William drew her to him. “Ah, that’s right,” he exclaimed. “We stand by each other.” He was absurdly grateful to her. It was sweet to have her choose him even if his rival was only someone named Henry Fasthauser. He wondered who the man was and if Ruth had even thought of him. He held her hand tightly in his, a firm hand, not too small in his clasp.

  “Well, it won’t be so easy for your father, yet,” Mrs. Harnsbarger said. And after a moment of long silence she rose, sighing, “I guess I might as well set my yeast, anyhow.”

  She began her work, and Ruth and William moved toward the door together. William paused and she turned her head to him.

  “Speak for me, though, Mrs. Harnsbarger,” he said with his most charming smile.

  “I reckon Ruth’ll have her way,” she said without turning from her potatoes. “She always has.”

  William laughed, but Mrs. Harnsbarger was serious. She was already peeling potatoes, her lips pursed.

  “Come, William,” Ruth said with decision. She led him into the garden and they walked on together shyly between rows of vegetables, past the chicken yard to the orchard. Now that all had been declared, they felt weighed down with what must be said and planned. And each had a secret weight besides. He was thinking, “How shall I tell my parents?” And she was thinking, “How can I learn enough, quick, to be his wife?”

  Neither could answer these questions, and because they could not they turned the more eagerly to the simplicity of love. Because they were afraid secretly of what they had allowed themselves, they longed to be bound together more securely, so that they could not be separated by anyone. They went into the orchard and sat down in the long grass and thus hidden they put all else aside except the freedom they now had for love. It was easier to love than to think. She gave her lips to him with eager delight, now that he was to be her husband. And he fondled the sweet ful
lness of her throat and her smooth arms and took her hands and kissed the palms. They smelled of soap, clean and unscented. She pulled them away.

  “I’m ashamed how my hands are,” she said. “They’re not fit for you to kiss.”

  “I love them,” he said passionately. “They’re strong, good hands, beautiful hands. When I hold them I feel I am holding to something.” He kissed them again and put them to his cheeks. “My dear,” he murmured, “my very dear!”

  She had no words to match this. She could only listen, quivering. His words were music and singing.

  “I love every look of yours,” he said, “the curl of your eyelashes, your hair, the turn of your chin to your throat. When you walk I think of wind blowing over wheat. You’re earth and water and bread and light.”

  She had no idea of what he meant, but she saw the tremor of his lips and the blaze of his dark eyes. And when he took her in his arms she gave herself up to him. Why not, when they were to be married? She had longed for him. In this rich countryside it was no sin for man and woman to join themselves when love was declared for marriage. Many a first-born followed soon after a wedding. And he put aside ruthlessly all caution, all possibility of regret to come. This was return, the return of all his being to its self.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said thickly. “Tell me if I hurt you.”

  But she would have borne any pain when it was intermingled with this joy that rushed upon her and made her weak and strong, in which she was lost and found herself.

  No words were needed now. Words encumber and delay. She had no words, and he did not want them from her. Her strong, fresh body was enough. It was enough and enough, and through her he satisfied himself. His deepest hunger was being fed by her, and then he was fed. And then he lay in such peace as he had never known. Under him the earth, above him the sky, and between was he.