Portrait of a Marriage

by Pearl S. Buck

  Her brown hair was curling about her face in the heat and her cheeks were pink. She sat clasping his hand, and he could feel life pouring into him through the union. She was alive again and she made him alive. He caught the smell of her and she was fragrant. He remembered a story that he had read somewhere of a Chinese emperor’s concubine whom the emperor had loved for no other reason than that the woman, when she was hot, gave off a fragrance. Loving Ruth, he could understand loving a woman for no other reason than that she was fragrant.

  When they reached the farmhouse she ran everywhere with exclamations of joy and relief. Nothing was changed. Nothing had been changed in a hundred years. But it was all new to her because she had never been away from it before. Now that she had come back to what she knew, he saw her in an hour return completely to herself. It was as though the whitefaced, drooping girl he had grown used to seeing had never existed. Here was the girl he had fallen in love with and married in this old house. In a few days he, too, began to feel they had never been away. He put aside the unfinished canvas he had brought with him and began a new one, the scene westward from the old ash tree under which he had lain that summer’s day now a year ago. He had not been able, that day, to find a picture. He wondered at himself for that.

  “Why didn’t I simply paint what was before my eyes?” he thought. It seemed to him as he thought this that he had found a painter’s secret.

  He had kept paying the rent on the apartment through the summer, but they had not gone back. Nor had he, after long self-questioning during that autumn, gone back alone. If he went back alone he would not be able to work. He could only work when he was with her. It was necessary for him to be with her in order to forget her, as a man when he has eaten and slept forgets these necessities and goes on with joy out of the strength he has found to do what he likes. He found that he could leave her easily in this house. In New York he was always uneasy when he was away from her. At first he had even made her come with him to the parties and evenings to which he was invited. But that was before he knew her hatred of strangers. He had gone with her to buy frocks and hats suitable for these occasions.

  “Now you must feel at ease,” he had commanded her. “You can, you know. You need only to say to yourself, ‘I am the prettiest woman here. William says so.’”

  But it had been no help, neither frocks nor praise. She had not been at ease. And after a few times, seeing her misery, her clenched hands and scarlet face, he had let her stay at home and had gone alone. Then he was not at ease. He found himself impatient to be with her, not only because he was genuinely happiest when he was with her, but because he could not bear to think of her loneliness in those rooms of theirs.

  But here in the farmhouse she was never lonely. Without any jealousy whatever, he knew that here she was no longer dependent upon him. The fowls she fed, the cows she milked with such pleasure, the work she did and loved, all these gave her companionship. He might have been jealous, perhaps, if she had not given him her love with such ardor and continuous intensity that he felt himself indispensable to her at least in love. Joy now overflowed in her and she let that abundance pour into love for him. With all she had to do, the incessant care of her sick mother and the care of the home besides, she was never too weary for him.

  Out of his absolute physical satisfaction he found he could leave her easily, and so one day in early autumn he had gone on the impulse of a moment to see his parents.

  “Do you mind if I go to see my father and mother?”

  He went into the kitchen where she was making bread and asked the question abruptly. She answered him, he was sure, with whole honesty.

  “Why, no, William, I don’t believe I do.” She paused, her hands in the floury dough, and considered him.

  “If you do, I won’t go.”

  “I can’t see why I should mind—stands to reason you’ve got to go sometimes, and it’s real nice today. You’ll be home to supper?”

  “Yes—that is, they might want me to stay for dinner, of course.”

  “Dinner?” The old confusion caught her for a moment. Then she laughed. “Oh, I’d forgot—your folks do call it that. Well, anyway, you’ll be home tonight, William? I do think I’d kind of mind if we sleep apart when we never have.”

  “So would I.” He bent to kiss her damp throat and smelled again her peculiar roselike fragrance.

  “I’d say you fed on rose leaves if I didn’t know you need more solid fare,” he said.

  She only smiled as she always did when he said a pretty thing. She was kneading dough again, the firm thrust of her rounded fists beating the dough into life. So he left her.

  He had caught a local train and sauntered into his father’s house as though he had never been away. The old butler let him in.

  “Mr. William!”

  “Hello there, anybody home?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Barton have gone to the Academy, sir, but I expect them back at any moment. Tea is ready in the library, sir.”

  “Then I’ll wait there.”

  But he did not. On the way he turned down the passage to his father’s gallery and went from picture to picture. There were, he knew, two hundred of them, never more, never less. When his father found a finer picture than any he had, he took one down from these walls and hung it in the museum of art that he was building for the city. After his death, these would all go to that museum. He had made this plain to everyone, saying that he would have no sort of quibbling over his pictures.

  William walked slowly along, seeing one familiar picture after another. There was nothing new. He wondered, acknowledging the folly of his wonder, whether perhaps his painting, which his father had bought, might be hung here. When he saw plainly that it was not, he was scarcely disappointed, because he had not expected to see it. Yet because it was not there, unreasonable though it was, he felt a foolish hurt and a determination that one day a painting of his would hang among that company.

  He left the gallery, fortified by the hardness that his hurt pride gave him, and entered the library, his head held high, to find his parents waiting for him.

  “There you are, William,” his mother said. She put out her hand and turned her cheek to him. He bent and kissed her and smelled the dry, powdery scent which he remembered from childhood.

  “How are you, Mother?”

  “Very well, thank you, dear. We always are, after Bar Harbor. It’s the air.” She did not, he noticed, ask him how he was.

  “Well, William,” his father said. He was holding his cup of tea and stirring and he did not put out a hand to his son.

  “You’re looking better than when I last saw you, sir.”

  “I’m very well, thanks.”

  He sat down, took his cup from his mother’s hand, helped himself to thin chicken sandwiches, and found that he had nothing to say to his parents. They were determined, he saw, to ask him nothing. Very well, then, he would say nothing.

  Then in spite of himself he began to be softened. After all, this was their home. And this home began to influence him, with its mellow, meticulous beauty. He had not realized how much he had missed this sort of beauty, the careful cultivated beauty of old books and the fire burning under a carved mantel, and the great Corot over it for the keynote of the room. Its green, deep and mossy, was repeated in the carpet and the hangings. He caught a ruddy glint in a corner against a dark panel and saw his own little painting.

  “That’s where you hung it,” he said impulsively.

  Their eyes turned to it.

  “A very charming thing,” his mother said.

  “I think so,” his father agreed.

  It was the first time his father had ever hung a painting of his anywhere in the house, and he felt pleased in spite of himself.

  “I’m glad you think it’s good enough to put in here,” he said.

  “We thought that corner needed a bit of brightening,” his mother said.

  He felt silence would be ungracious and he went on to ask of his sister. “How i
s Louise?”

  “Quite well,” his mother said. “That is, as well as could be expected in her condition.”

  “Oh, is she—” he hesitated.

  “Yes, next April. I’m sorry she didn’t wait a little. I always feel it’s better taste to wait a few years.”

  His mother lifted her eyebrows and put the subject aside. His father delicately said nothing for a moment. He tasted his tea and put in more hot water. Then he said,

  “Elise was married this summer in Bar Harbor.”

  “Was she?” William asked stupidly.

  “Didn’t you get an invitation?” his mother inquired.

  “No,” he said.

  “That’s odd, I think,” she said. Her voice rose a little toward sharpness. “Everyone was invited.”

  “It was a handsome wedding,” his father said.

  “Too many people.” His mother’s lips were firm.

  “Well, she has connections,” his father agreed mildly.

  What sort of man did Elise marry? William kept the question unspoken. Why should he ask it when he did not care? Then his father began to speak exactly as though he had asked it.

  “She has married a very fine man—imposing looking, rather, eh, Henrietta?”

  “Very handsome,” his mother agreed.

  “I suppose Elise will live in England?” He asked the question out of an incurious mind, but he must show an interest.

  “Yes,” his mother replied, “but they are not sailing for another month yet. She wants him to know something of her country before they leave it.”

  That sounded so exactly like Elise that he could hear her voice saying it. She loved her own country and he wondered if she would be happy away from it. But he did not put the wonder into words, either.

  When he had gone away he felt that most of the conversation with his parents had been in what they did not say. And yet there had been a gain, too. His mother had said in a business sort of voice as he left, “By the bye, William, perhaps we should know your address—in case, that is, you are not returning at once to New York.”

  “I don’t know when we are going back,” he said. “Ruth didn’t like it there. So for the present just address me at Hesser’s Corners, care of Harnsbarger’s Farm.”

  His mother’s face had never been more inscrutable than it became when he mentioned Ruth. But her voice was kind.

  “Very well, dear boy.” She put out her hand to him and his father went with him as far as the library door. He let himself out.

  But it was Elise who had made him finally determine that he would live where he was. On the morning after his visit to his mother he went out on the hillside to paint and he found himself confused by the landscape around the farmhouse as he had been confused when he first saw it. He was not able to eliminate its infinitely rich detail. The undulating folds of one hill upon another, the fat cattle, the great barns, the plethoric, sturdy houses, the thickly spotted woods and the lush fields, became monotonous in their plenteousness of color and fertility. He thought of painting Ruth again, in their house, but now she seemed no longer the accent, as she once had been. She had become part of all else.

  “After all, Millet painted the same peasants over and over,” he muttered. But those peasants of Millet’s expressed something in themselves, he thought. They were combatants and they fought the earth they loved, they struggled with it and wrenched their bread from its reluctant grasp. There was no struggle here. This earth was so rich that it yielded instantly. And man did not fight it with bare hands and a hoe. He rode high above it, crushing it to dust under the harrowing teeth of a machine, and the earth was submissive. There was no sign of struggle in the smooth, fat faces he saw when he sauntered to the village. Even Mr. Harnsbarger’s round face was then marked by little except years of plenty. He had considered painting that old face under its fringe of white hair and then had given up. “Who wants to see nothing in a face but too much scrapple and pie?” he thought. He closed his paintbox, folded his easel, and spent the morning in the woods on his back, staring into the dappled trees. At noon he found a letter in the mailbox by the road down at the end of the lane. It was from his father. His father’s handwriting was growing old and it quivered upon the page.

  Dear William:

  Elise and her husband are spending the week end with us before they sail. It occurs to your mother and me that you might enjoy seeing her. Will you give us a week end, dear boy? It would be a pleasure to us. Your mother sends her love.

  Yours,

  Father

  They wanted him to see Elise—that was his first thought, and his mother had been too clever to write him. She had told his father to write the letter, so gentle a letter and yet without mention of Ruth. He stood in the road, looking at the tremulous handwriting. No, in their way they missed him. In their way, too, they were shy. They dreaded new situations. His father doubtless had told his mother of meeting Ruth, and of how speechless she had been.

  “It was like having to sit down with a housemaid.” He could hear his father say that. Why? Because, he now realized in a sudden agony, he had, against all his will and inclination, thought that very thing himself.

  “Oh, my dear wife!” he cried passionately to the blue and silent sky.

  But still he could understand his parents so well. It was not that they were snobs. It was simply that they were uneasy when people were, as they thought, out of place. They were themselves easily abashed. His father had been as uncomfortable with Ruth as she with him.

  He turned sharply and strode up the sunny lane, the open letter fluttering in his hand.

  “Ruth!” he shouted.

  She was behind the house, hanging up snow-white sheets upon a line, and the wind bellied them and she struggled with the clothespins, her arms high above her head.

  “What a picture you make!” he shouted against the wind.

  “Stop thinkin’ of pictures a minit and help me!” she cried back.

  But he was no good at it. His hands, so nimble and dexterous with brushes, fumbled with clothespins and shrank from the wet cotton cloth.

  “Oh, well,” she said good-humoredly, “go along.”

  Then he saw the letter flying over the grass. The wind had snatched it from his pocket. “I say!” He rushed after it, caught it, and brought it to her. “Ruth, tell me what you want me to do.”

  He read the letter to her, watching her puckering her brows over the edge of the paper. She looked steadily at him.

  “What ought you to do?” she asked.

  “Only what you want me to do,” he said.

  She considered the letter again. “Who’s this—” She hesitated.

  “Elise? Oh, an old friend.”

  “Partikler?”

  “Not very.”

  “Do you want to see her?”

  “Not especially.”

  “What do you ask me for, then?”

  “They are my parents, of course. They’d like to see me.”

  Upon the smooth rose and cream of her skin the sunshine fell piercingly, but there was not a flaw. The clear blue and white of her eyes were as faultless. He could see the separateness of her dark, upturned lashes rooted in the delicacy of her eyelids, and above them the soft brush of her full brows. Her lips were parted and the sunlight gleamed upon her white teeth. She breathed health as she stood before him, and there was wholesomeness in all her beauty. Her eyelids fell. She stooped for another curl of wet sheet.

  “’Tain’t for me to say what you should do about them.”

  He looked down upon the nape of her neck, smooth and white beneath the knot of shining brown hair.

  “It is for you to say about you and me, though.”

  “’Twon’t make a bit of difference about you and me, I reckon, whatever you do. Here, take a-holt of this with me and let’s wring it dryer.”

  He took one end of the heavy sheet and held it fast while she twisted out a few drops of water.

  “If you really feel that, deare
st, then I will go,” he said.

  “I don’t say one thing and feel another,” she said.

  Did she speak curtly or did he imagine it? “I know that, dear,” he replied.

  She was inaccessible as she hung up the fluttering wet sheet, and so he leaned and kissed the top of her head and went away.

  Was it good to sleep in his childhood home? He weighed himself as he went through every old habit of movement. Did he like this better than he knew? He watched himself, taking the pulse of his emotions and measuring his enjoyment. Certainly there was much he enjoyed. It was more than the physical enjoyment of his old rooms, his books, and the furniture to which his hand went out in accustomed usage. It was something in the atmosphere of the whole house, he decided. The people who had lived in it, his grandparents and his parents, yes, and Louise, and he, too, and all their friends, had left their echoes here, their shapes, the habits of their thought and being, just as the farmhouse was full of Ruth’s ancestors.

  He enjoyed with conscious pleasure this atmosphere of his own kind, wondering if he were disloyal to Ruth. But in his mood of temporary detachment he wanted to find out if he could be disloyal to her. If he could be, that also had its significance. He was too much a man of the world, not to weigh the depth of his love for Ruth.

  He gave himself wholeheartedly therefore to this house. Since neither his father nor his mother mentioned Ruth, he did not mention her. It was exactly as though he had been away on a tour and was home again, except that no questions were asked him of where he had been or what he had seen. He went about the house, seeing everything freshly after his absence, playing the piano, studying the pictures, discussing with his mother the placing of a new rose garden for the spring. His father was excited over the possibility of a Titian being put on sale in Italy and he was cabling every few hours to his dealer in Rome. It was all exactly as it used to be.