Portrait of a Marriage

by Pearl S. Buck

  “Has it damaged the picture?” she asked anxiously.

  “Oh, never mind that,” he replied. “What’ll we do to clean its wings?”

  “We can’t do anything,” she said practically. She put it down upon the grass. William stooped to it.

  “Oh, dear, it’s simply quivering,” he said in agitation.

  “Never mind,” she said. “I’ll take it to the house. Maybe I can think of something.” She would quietly destroy it, she thought, where he could not see her do it.

  Many things she had had to destroy quietly without his knowing it—mice in the house, rats in the barn, a sick dog, an injured bird, kittens they could not keep. She had learned on that day years ago when without thinking she had put four blind kittens into a bag and tied it to a rock. He had happened to look out of the window of the spare room which he had made into a room for himself, and had come rushing down the stairs, shouting to her, “Ruth, what are you doing?”

  She had looked back at him, astonished at his agitation. “I’m just going to drown these cats, that’s all.”

  “Drown them?” His face went stone color.

  “Why not?” she asked. To her fright, he turned away from her and leaned against a tree, his head on his arms. She dropped the bag of mewling kittens.

  “Why, William, what’s wrong? Did you want I shouldn’t? But we’ve more cats in the barn now than we’d ought to have. Six cats have too many kittens to keep. We’d be all cats soon if we’d do that.”

  “Of course,” he said. He dropped his arm and stood staring at the squirming mass. She saw he was sick.

  “Look, William, I’ll let ’em out.”

  “Will you?” His face cleared. “That’s right, let them out. Here, I’ll help.” He stooped and loosened the string while she held the bag, and the small creatures crept out and the frantic cat-mother, hearing them, came hurrying across from the garden, howling as she came. He watched while she licked them and lay down and offered them her tits. And in a moment they were sucking and pacified and the cat was purring and looking at them with arrogant mother eyes.

  “See how proud she is,” he said laughing.

  Ruth did not answer. Someone still had to kill the kittens, she was thinking. It had to be done. They could not have hundreds of cats. She must do it later when he was gone.

  When she had it done, she wondered if he would miss the kittens or notice the mother cat, searching and crying. But no, he noticed nothing, and this surprised her again. It was not that he cared anything for the cats. He never fed them or indeed paid any heed to their existence. She concluded that he simply did not like to see things killed, and after that she managed to have everything killed when he was away, even the fowls she cooked for dinner. For this, too, he did not like to see. She could twist a chicken’s neck so swiftly and cleanly that there was no pain, and at first she did it before him without thinking. Then one day she saw the look in his eyes and stopped, though she defended herself, “How’d we ever eat meat otherwise, William?”

  He was ashamed. “I know, but somehow I don’t like you doing it, Ruth. You ought not to—you’re life-giving!”

  She did not know what to say, so she said nothing. But from that day on she managed that he never saw her kill a fowl again.

  Now she said of the butterfly, “Maybe I can brush its wings with turpentine.”

  “Do,” he said gratefully. “I never had such a thing happen before.”

  He was so perturbed that she saw it was useless to talk to him now, and she lifted the butterfly into her apron and went down the hill.

  When Hal came home at night she would whip him, she thought. Someone must manage him.

  Up on the hill William could work no more. He had caught upon Ruth’s face that look he could never wholly comprehend. It was a patient and accepting look, tinged only a little with rebellion now, when something he did or said was beyond her comprehension. He wondered if she despised him. Thus wondering, he approached her sometimes with diffidence. But never, never did her warm response fail. That was her greatness, that whatever he was, whenever he went away from her, he could return, sure that she never changed. He returned to her and lost himself in her, the self which he so often found a burden, its moods, its melancholy, its aimlessness, its strange, endless energy. She did not understand him, but he did not want understanding, nor indeed expect it. The last time he had seen Elise at his father’s house in February she had asked him in that half-direct fashion in which they found they had been able to speak to each other after marriage, “Do you find in your life any understanding?”

  He had pondered her question carefully. “Let us say, rather, that I find—what I want.”

  For he did not want understanding, necessarily, nor companionship. Long ago he knew he was happiest when lonely, happiest because then he was most free. He did not want a mind pursuing his mind, nor an imagination keeping pace with his. Had he been married to Elise, in spite of himself he would have found ways of evading her. But Ruth he need never evade, for he could leave her whenever he liked, his mind far from hers, his body, too, if he liked, though less and less often now did he leave this house. He needed to leave it less, physically, because mentally he left it when he liked. He had only to go into his own room or climb this hill, he had only to lift his brush and he was miles away. But Elise, had he married her, would have been at his side, and most of the time he could endure no one there.

  But then when there came that inevitable moment when he was weary of loneliness, frightened at loneliness because the universe is vast to the lonely soul, he had only to leave his room, come down from the hill, put aside his brush, and return to Ruth. And with that return he returned to the busy home, to the smell of baking bread and to the sound of churning milk and to the laughter and noise of children and food set upon the table hot and ready to eat, and to Ruth, always ready for him. Oh, the sweetness of night and the comfort of her strong, warm body! He looked out over the rolling hills, the rich fields, the lifting spires of small, comfortable towns.

  “God, what a good life I have!” he thought.

  … In her kitchen Ruth lifted the lid of the garbage pail and threw the butterfly into the refuse. Then she went back to her work, her strong face closed over her thoughts. The girls came in from blackberrying and she directed them quietly, with no spare words.

  “Put the pails down cellar. You can help me this afternoon to make jam. Now get yourselves washed. Your father’ll want everything ready when he comes in.”

  She had brought them up so that the two words “your father” were the sign of last compulsion. William, who never commanded them, was through her in command of them all. They loved him and yearned to be close to him, but their mother had kept him far from them with her threats of him. “Your father won’t like so much noise,” she said. “Your father don’t want you girls should go barefoot so big,” she said. “Your father wants you to grow up a hard-workin’ good man,” she told Hal. None of them had heard such things from their father, but they believed her and their love for their father was shadowed by fear. For they, each child felt, belonged to their mother. They were made of her. Their speech was like hers and they took their manners from her and never from their father. This they did without knowing it, and if they had been pressed for a reason they would have said in wonder, “But nobody talks like Pop does. He talks like out of a book. Real talk is what Mom talks.”

  So also did her hearty ways of eating seem to them the real way. She lifted a chicken bone in her fingers and bit the meat from it and so did they. Not one of them cut the meat away in bits as their father did. Like her they drank milk and not the foreign wines William kept in the cool earth-floored cellar. Not even Hal had ever tasted his father’s wine in secret, nor had it occurred to William to offer it. He did not so much share their life, the children felt without being able to say this, as come into their life that went on so heartily about their mother. They loved him delicately, in a restrained fashion, as something precious a
nd fine, but which they did not know how to use. And without knowing it, William by his difference from them deepened the distance between himself and his children. Though they learned to do as their mother did, they saw William’s difference in his fastidiousness at table, in his scrupulous cleanliness of person, in his speech. And a fastidiousness of his spirit which they could not perceive forbade him to judge them, lest in so doing he seem to judge Ruth. For he had said to himself until it was now the habit of his being, “I will not have Ruth changed. What she is, is what I want.”

  Once Mary asked her mother, “What is Pop’s job?”

  “He’s an artist, and you know that,” she said, “and don’t call him Pop, even to me. He doesn’t like it.”

  “Is being an artist a job?”

  “Of course it is,” Ruth said.

  But in her own heart Ruth often wished that William had what she called a real job, that he was a farmer like Henry Fasthauser, or that he had a garage like Tom’s. Tom had been smart enough to buy out the livery stable and then sell off the horses and set up one of the first garages. Everybody was going to have automobiles pretty soon, he said. Tom was making good money. But picture-making was never sure money. Even if William did sell four or five pictures a year, she hated the uncertainty of money coming in.

  “I’d rather have fifteen dollars a week steady, year in and year out,” she often thought, “than a couple of hundred all of a sudden.”

  She watched her children narrowly for signs of interest in painting, ready to work passionately against a thing in them which she accepted as inevitable in William. But there were no signs.

  … William, coming home to his midday dinner, entered the door with his invariable pleasure. Ruth kept the house always clean, warm in winter, cool in summer. He had made changes enough in the farmhouse until now it seemed his as well as Ruth’s. Nothing, of course, could be changed while the old pair had lived. He had spent many an hour planning, while he listened to Mr. Harnsbarger telling over and over again the same stories of his boyhood on this very farm, how one day he would rip the ceilings from the old hewn beams, how he would take out partitions and enlarge the rooms, how he would put back the old bricks into the dining-room floor. For years it had looked as though Mr. Harnsbarger would live forever after his wife died of dropsy. But a new highway had been made out of the road beyond the lawn, and he had stepped in front of a truck one day and had been killed. He was then eighty-one. That morning he had eaten his breakfast with all his usual zest, and, putting on his old straw hat, he had said to Ruth as he always did, “Guess I’ll walk around a little.”

  “All right, Pop,” she had said.

  William, coming down late as usual, that he might breakfast after the garrulous old man was finished, was in time to see a strong young man, a stranger, carrying a crumpled heap in his arms which he laid on the parlor sofa. It was old Mr. Harnsbarger, his face untouched, but his thin body crushed across the loins.

  And William had been ashamed because his first involuntary thought at that moment, though driven away at once, had been that now he could make the house what he wanted it.

  But he had had to make what he wanted out of what he had, ever since he knew that because Ruth could not become part of his world, he must become part of hers. Would not or could not, he would never know, because he would not inquire. If she should be unhappy, it would not matter which it was. To keep her happy had been essential to his own happiness. And because she never complained, he had made himself sensitive to every change in her look and voice. When he returned to her, he must find her content. Her content was the atmosphere of his soul.

  “Dinner ready?” he called gaily from the hall.

  Ruth came out of the kitchen. Her hands were white with flour and her look was anxious.

  “Aren’t you a little early, William?” she asked. “I’m just makin’ the biscuits.”

  “No hurry,” he said quickly, “I have to clean up. Did the butterfly recover?”

  “The butterfly?” she repeated. Then she remembered. “I fixed it up all right,” she said calmly. “It flew away as good as new.” Long ago she had arranged her conscience to cover anything that was necessary for William’s comfort.

  “That’s good,” he said gratefully. He saw his daughters coming up from the cellar and waited for them. “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello, Father,” Mary replied. Jill did not speak.

  “Come and kiss me,” he said. They came to him warmly and laid their cheeks against his shoulders. He kissed one forehead and the other. They enjoyed his caress. Their mother never kissed them. They would have been shy, because she would have been shy had she done so. Why this was, they had never thought to wonder. She was as close to them as their own bodies, and perhaps that was why. But William kissed his children often. Even Hal he had only recently ceased to kiss good night, and then because he saw the boy himself was ill at ease. When he saw this, he never kissed him again. Without saying anything he had the next night clasped his shoulders for a quick instant in his arm.

  “Good night, son,” he had said.

  Hal was too young to hide his relief. And William, catching that quick lighting, had thought half morbidly, “I mustn’t be a burden on them with my difference.”

  But the girls liked to have his affection and offered him their fresh cheeks and smooth foreheads.

  “You smell of sunshine and earth,” he said. “You smell the way your mother smells, and that’s the best perfume for a woman. Want to clean my brushes?”

  “Yes,” Jill said eagerly.

  “Fine—then I’ll only have to clean myself,” he said. He put the dirty brushes into her hand and went upstairs. The bathroom he had made almost at once after he married Ruth. The old man had not objected to that, though he himself had still bathed in the tin tub on Saturday nights, in the woodshed in summer and the kitchen in winter. He became curiously shameless in his old age. When Saturday night came, he bustled about his bath caring nothing for anyone. Ruth remonstrated with him sometimes.

  “Pop, you’d ought to draw the bar across the kitchen door or give a yell to a body when you’re washin’ yourself.”

  “I don’t care a mite,” he said gaily. “Them as comes around can see what they can see, far’s I care.”

  William, to whom Saturday night was no different from another, grew used to coming upon the sinewy old man, standing naked in his tub, laving himself. Once he paused, struck by a certain beauty in the sight, an old man making himself clean.

  “You would make a picture as you are now,” he suggested.

  But the old man threw the bar of homemade soap at him. All his old decencies sprang to life.

  “You git out of here with that talk!” he bellowed. “I ain’t goin’ to have my picture hangin’ up nekked for folks to see, yet!”

  William had gone away laughing, but still regretful. He was always regretful if a picture escaped his brush. He painted old Mr. Harnsbarger half a dozen times, but never without thinking of that one pose refused and remembering how beautiful the water and the firelight had been upon an old man’s body.

  Now he whistled softly while he scrubbed his hands. He was pleasantly tired, very hungry, and almost content with his morning’s work. He was accustomed, or nearly accustomed, to this feeling of almost content with his work. Why he could never quite bring it up to the measure of fullness he was not sure. He went into his own room when he had washed, and sat down in the big chair by the window and pulled out his pipe. It was not that he had evaded the investigation of his own state of mind. He had dug deep into himself again and again. Was he or was he not sure of the quality of his work? He had thought sometimes of talking with his father about it. There had never been a further mention of a picture of his going into the gallery of the great house which was no longer his home.

  But this fact gave him no light upon himself. Even when he and his father were alone, there lay like a mountain between them the disapprobation of his mother, and indeed, of his
father too, a disapproval the more intense and the more difficult because his mother chose to ignore it altogether, and by this ignoring magnified it infinitely. If he could have gained greater awards, found high commissions, made his pictures valuable, he could have won his own assurance. But he had chosen to live here with Ruth, far from the places where prizes were given and commissions won. And he was too cynical not to know that no more in painting than in other art were awards and commissions given for pure merit. No, merit had to join with influence and flattery. Well, he thought abruptly, he had avoided all that. What he longed for was not such reward for such work, but merely to know absolutely the quality of his own work. Was it good? Could it have been better?

  He never put it to himself—could his work have been better had he not married Ruth?—for he could conceive of no life without Ruth. And if he had stayed in New York, what would he have painted? Not landscape, certainly! He had been working on a nude when he left. He had never finished it because he had found out suddenly how Ruth felt, while she stood for his model.

  “Stand in the sun,” he had told her that morning. “Let me see the sun shine through your flesh.”

  She moved into the long block of sunshine that fell through an eastern window, and tried not to mind. She was married to him. Nothing could be wicked between her and William, could it? It was not wicked for her to take off all her clothes in the daylight before him so long as the doors were locked, was it?

  “That’s right,” he said eagerly. “That’s what I want. Now pretend the sunshine is a mantle. Pretend you are wrapping it about you.”

  She obeyed again, putting out her arms as though they drew to her fold and fold of glittering, silver cobweb stuff.

  “The silver mantle!” he murmured. “The mantle of light—” He began to paint furiously and she stood motionless. The sunshine would last less than an hour. Then a high building would cut it off. She would put on her clothes and do her housekeeping—that is, if he would let her. He did not let her. When the sunshine disappeared as though a touch had put it out, he threw down his brush. She had already turned, and was reaching for her garments.