Portrait of a Marriage

by Pearl S. Buck

  “I shall telephone to see if Louise and Monty can come for Sunday,” his mother said. “It will be quite a family party.”

  “That will be nice,” he said quietly. Well, he would see what his family seemed to him now, after Ruth.

  He went that afternoon to the station to meet Elise and her husband, still weighing, still reasoning. Did he mind, would he mind if he saw Elise step off the train with another man? His father had sent his own private railway car to New York for them, and so he walked to the end of the platform where he knew it would be. As a boy he had known that car very well. It had taken them back and forth to Florida in the winter, and once he had been brought home in it from Groton, very ill with influenza, so that his mother’s doctor could tend him. She trusted no other. Well, he had not died and so her judgment was justified, though the school doctor had considered it folly.

  He stood waiting while the train rushed to him, bore down upon him, and then rushed past him. The heavy private car paused almost in front of him, and in a moment the door opened and the old Negro porter, who had always taken care of it, put down the steps. In a moment Elise came out, looking, he saw instantly, more handsome than he had ever seen her. She was in dark fur from head to foot, and a scarlet camellia was pinned to her collar. Her pale, scarlet-lipped face was cool and pleasant until she saw him. Then the cool look broke. Her dark eyes laughed and she cried out,

  “William, how perfectly delightful! But I didn’t dream—Ronnie, this is William!”

  A tall, thin Englishman with a belted coat appeared from behind her and put out a long, thin hand and shook hands with painful force.

  “How do you do,” he muttered under his short blond mustache.

  He looked so exactly like many another Englishman that William had seen in various parts of the world that it was not possible to understand yet why Elise had chosen him from all the others. But there must be a reason.

  “How do you do,” William said, and withdrew his hand. He wondered a little if Ronnie minded Elise’s joy. For as they walked along the platform she made no concealment of her joy. She was franker than she had ever been, as though she dared to be so now that she was safely married.

  “William, if anybody had asked me what I wanted most in the world, I would have said to see you!”

  He smiled, not knowing quite what to do with this and wondering, had Ronnie’s thin profile not been on the other side of that glowing face, if he could have responded more suitably. But he found it easy to forget Ronnie. That tall, lounging figure, his hands always in his pockets, loomed amiably silent in the background, laughing suddenly when a joke was made, answering a question with the greatest possible economy of words, and never volunteering anything in the way of speech. And it was easier than it had ever been to be with Elise. They felt free with one another as neither had ever been free before.

  He had not suspected her of so much gaiety. She had never been gay with him, being always weighted with something he did not want to understand. But now she danced with him, sang to his playing in a deep soft contralto, put her hand in his arm to saunter about the house, sat by him in the car, and one night to his quivering alarm slipped her hand into his under the fur robe. He held it hard for one second and then, conscious of Ronnie’s shadow in the darkness just beyond her, he put her hand down. But he had time in that second to wonder at the narrow hand that could be crushed like a handful of petals. This hand he held, but Ruth’s sturdy, warm hand held his as firmly as he held hers.

  On Sunday, when Louise and Monty came, the home was complete; that is, nearly. For they sat seven at table, an awkward number, his mother said, but they must just do with it. He sat between Elise and Monty, and not caring greatly for his brother-in-law, he devoted himself to Elise easily. No one mentioned Ruth. He waited for Louise to ask him about her privately, and he made opportunity again and again, but Louise let all pass. He saw at last that she was determined not to speak of Ruth. His mother, perhaps, had commanded that.

  He began to feel by Sunday night that someone must speak of Ruth. If no one did, then he himself would begin to tell of her, how lovely she was, how sweet. If he could speak of her he would prove his loyalty to her. But as though they felt the possibility of her name being spoken before them, they began to talk, his mother leading the conversation through her recall of an experience in England many years before. William heard her laugh.

  “I am not at all psychic,” she said, “but I was at Fairfax one year—the year I was to be presented. Do you know Fairfax, Ronnie?”

  “Rather,” Ronnie said, taking his pipe out of his mouth. He looked vaguely enthusiastic, as though he were about to speak, then he put his pipe back in his mouth and said nothing.

  “I went up those long stairs to my room to go to bed.” Mrs. Barton went on. “I remember it was quite late, we had been dancing. Just as I reached the top I heard a rustle of skirts, not silk, and there were two nuns. I was so surprised. But I bowed and they passed me, smiling. In the morning I asked the old Earl, ‘Who are the charming nuns?’

  “‘Nuns?’ he said, without being in the least surprised. ‘Did you see them?’

  “‘Yes, two of them,’ I told him.

  “‘Oh,’ he said, ‘they lived here nine hundred years ago. Fairfax was a nunnery then.’”

  Ronnie took his pipe out of his mouth again. “There’s a window at Fairfax, nobody can find the room to it.”

  “What do you mean, Ronnie?” Elise asked. Her amused eyes sought William’s.

  “Went to a house party there once,” Ronnie said, holding his pipe carefully poised. “We went into every room in the castle and hung towels out of all the windows. Then we went out and damned if there wasn’t one window with no towel. They said any number of people had tried it and it’s always the same.”

  Monty opened his sleepy, long-lashed eyes at his wife. “Isn’t that where you said the bells ring in the ballroom at dawn?”

  “Yes, I’ve heard them myself,” Louise said. “The ballroom was once the chapel.”

  “Ah,” old Mr. Barton said, “there’s nothing strange in all that. People go on living where they belong.”

  “Let’s dance,” Elise said suddenly.

  And a moment later William was dancing with her.

  “I wonder if I dare to live in England,” she said to him. “Will I grow to believe in ghosts, too?”

  “I can’t imagine it,” he said, smiling down at her.

  And then she of all people in this house spoke to him of Ruth.

  “Are you quite happy, William?”

  “Do you mean—now?”

  “No, of course not. I mean with your wife. Isn’t her name Ruth?”

  “Yes, it is. And I am happy.”

  “Quite?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “Would I like her?”

  “I cannot imagine anyone not liking her.”

  “Shall I ever see her?”

  “I don’t know—that is for you to say.”

  “Not just now, William. Perhaps when I come back next year. I am coming home every year, you know. Ronnie has promised me.”

  “But England will grow to be home to you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because—in a sense—I have gone very far away to live, too, though it’s only a few miles.”

  “Is it altogether different from this?”

  “Yes.”

  “But it is home?”

  “Wherever Ruth is, that is home.”

  She sighed at that, and soon she stopped and said she was tired. She put out her hand to him.

  “When are you going away, William?”

  He had not known until this moment. But now he knew that all here was ended for him, this house, this company, this life.

  “Tomorrow, after an early breakfast.”

  They all looked at him when he said this, but no one spoke except Elise.

  “Good-by then, William.”

  “Good-by,” he said.

&n
bsp; He went upstairs very soon after that. No one else said good-by, and yet he knew and they all knew that he would not see them again—not like this. Then, looking about the room which had been the refuge for his boyhood, he made up his mind suddenly that he would sleep under this roof no more, no, not even tonight. He changed his clothes, and when the house was still he went down and opened a side door into the garden and climbed over a low wall and found himself in the quiet side street to the west of the house. Three blocks and he caught a late trolley that took him to the railroad station. He waited an hour and caught a milk train that dropped him within walking distance of the farm.

  The farmhouse was never locked at night. “I haven’t never turned a key in my house,” old Mr. Harnsbarger often boasted. “Only city folks lock up.” So the doors were open and William had only to walk in. But he paused a moment before he entered. Night had never been so beautiful upon the land. There was no wind and every tree and bush stood still and to its shape, and the moonlight poured down, white and clear, so clear that he felt all things growing in the quiet, bright night. These were his, these valleys and hills, the woods and the stream and the small lake at the bottom of the hill, and behind him was Ruth’s home and Ruth.

  He opened the door and went in and the house received him with its familiar odor of old wood and clean lime plaster and the spiceries of cooking. He went up the twisting stairs, his way lit by patches of moonlight upon the floor, and lifted the iron latch of the bedroom and went in. Perhaps Ruth was awake and waiting for him. He tip-toed over to the bed and looked down at her. She was asleep, her two long brown braids tossed over the pillow. Above the ruffle of her high-necked nightgown her face was lovely as a child’s in its calm. But it was not a child’s face, it was Ruth’s face, the red lips full and firm, the brow a woman’s brow, wise and wide.

  “Oh, my beautiful,” he whispered.

  And every other face in the world, Elise’s face, faded and left him. This was his wife.

  He undressed and crept into bed beside her and curled against her. She woke, not to speech, not to exclaim at his return, but only to put her arms about him, to receive him and make him her own again.

  When he woke in the morning he knew that here with her was his home and here alone.

  He had not seen Ruth’s mother for weeks before she died. Ruth would not let him go into the room. “’Tisn’t good to see her now,” Ruth said shortly. But he knew from Ruth’s grave, quiet face one late afternoon when he came in from a day’s painting by the river that death was coming into the house. He wondered if he could help Ruth to bear the sorrow, and yet he wondered if it was a sorrow, so calm was Ruth’s voice when she spoke. He brought death out into the open that night when they lay ready for sleep, so that he might know what its weight was upon her.

  “Do you think your mother will die, darling?”

  “I know she will—any day, any hour. The doctor told me last week.”

  “Dearest, why didn’t you tell me?” He waited for her voice to answer through the darkness. When it came, her voice was full of honest surprise.

  “Why, I don’t know, William.”

  “I don’t want you to keep sorrows to yourself, sweet.”

  She pondered this. “It’s funny, but it don’t hardly seem a sorrow for poor Mom to die,” she said gently. “’Course I wish it hadn’t to be. But when I see her like she is now—it seems as if death was just the next thing for her. If she was young and struck down, I’d grieve turrible. When a thing’s right and to be, I guess it isn’t a sorrow. It’s only natural.”

  She spoke out of profound harmony of her own being with all life upon the earth and he could say nothing. He drew near to her and breathed in her health and her repose, and felt himself made quiet and simple again. This was her secret, that in her presence all that was fretful and complex with his own complexity resolved itself into what was essential. All else fell away.

  So on the day of her mother’s death he felt scarcely a shadow upon the quiet house. The end came, the expected, foreordained end. Ruth had everything ready for it. It seemed almost that she knew the very hour. She came out of her mother’s room one early evening when they had just finished their supper, and she spoke to her father.

  “Dad, Mom’s passed away.”

  Mr. Harnsbarger put down his farm journal and went at once to his wife’s room. William rose and put out his arms and she came into them. Thus clasped he felt her body stiffen for a moment against tears and he said very gently,

  “Don’t mind crying, dear.”

  So she wept, but only for a moment. Then she shook the tears from her lashes.

  “I’m cryin’ for myself, I guess—not for her. She was all right, she just shut her eyes and sighed and slipped off. But it comes over me now that I won’t see her no more.”

  In a few moments she was herself, and he did not see her weep again, no, not even in the little church where, it seemed to him in the least civilized of burial services, they listened to a sermon upon the dead woman, who lay in the open coffin beside the pulpit.

  “Our neighbor was a woman of few words but many good deeds,” the little preacher shouted. His round face and round belly were not necessarily signs of appetite so much as of the fact that his salary was partly paid to him in food and he had to eat what was given him, scrapple and sausage and pies and cakes and sides of pork and sacks of potatoes. He would miss Mrs. Harnsbarger’s doughnuts. Twice a month she had brought him doughnuts, and double on Ash Wednesdays. “She lays here having earned her eternal rest,” he said solemnly at the end of an hour.

  Then they walked out into the clear, cold afternoon and stood about the grave. The sunlight shone into it joyously and marked the clear division of the soil. The dark, fertile topsoil was two feet thick. Beneath that was red clay, and beneath that the shale upon which every house in the region was founded. The bottom of the grave was shale, but a spring had seeped through, and that the coffin might not rest in water the old sexton had cut two red cedar logs and fitted them into the ends of the grave.

  They stood about the grave and sang a hymn and heard the minister’s voice reading and praying. He was bald, under a long lock of pale tan hair, and the wind lifted this lock and it fluttered on his shoulder and across his eyes until he fumbled in his pocket and found a small skull cap and put it on without stopping in his prayer. William, unable to bow his head, watched this and then looked away across the old, deeply set tombstones, across the rolling hills and valleys. Just beyond the churchyard was a quarry, now no longer worked. The township had waged a lawsuit against the owner of the quarry to prevent his blasting under the graves and had won it, and he had moved away in disgruntlement. William could just see the edge of the chasm a few feet from where he stood.

  They walked back to the farmhouse after the funeral was over, and there the people ate and drank cake and wine, and talked in quiet tones of everyday affairs. There was even a little mild laughter. Among them Ruth moved competent and self-controlled, seeing that all went well. They went away soon and decently, shaking hands with the family.

  “’Twas a nice occasion,” they said.

  “Everything went off like she’d of had it,” they said.

  They went home each to take up his life as he had before, and in this house too all went as it had, except that Tom, Ruth’s brother, stayed for a day or two. But then he grew restless for the village, especially because he was debating the question with everybody whether he would “cater” to the new automobile trade that was now beginning to cut into the livery business.

  “A newfangled thing that won’t last,” old Mr. Harnsbarger snorted. “Horses has always been and always will be.”

  “Says you,” Tom retorted with good humor. He looked, this brother of Ruth’s, like any of the men anywhere in the valley. There was nothing to mark him as Ruth’s brother and William felt no kinship with him. But for that matter, he felt none with anybody except Ruth. As long as he lived he would call her father Mr. Harnsbarger.r />
  But Mr. Harnsbarger grew suddenly old. He wanted them now to promise him they would always live in the farmhouse.

  “’Tisn’t as if you had reg’lar work, William,” he said. “What you do can just as well be done here as anywhere.” The change in this old man was astonishing, and William saw it with keenest perception. He would have said that old Mrs. Harnsbarger had for years meant nothing to her husband. They had interchanged not a dozen words a day, and his tone of voice toward her was a habitual grumble to which she gave no heed. And yet when she died he was maimed.

  “I didn’t think I’d ever be a widower,” he said mournfully to Ruth.

  “If ’twouldn’t been you a widower ’twould ’a been Mom a widow yet, though, Pop,” she said.

  “So ’twould,” he said, struck, “but I’d never thought it out thataway.”

  He muttered the thought over to himself occasionally in the days after the funeral and seemed to find comfort in its inevitability. “What you said was full of common sense,” he told Ruth. It was after this that he spoke to William.

  But in the night Ruth spoke to William herself with the delicate directness which was her particular manner of speaking with him. She spoke to no one else with just this mixture of timidity and frankness and sweetness.

  “I put you first, William,” she said to him. “If you want to go, we’ll go, and Father can hire somebuddy, though I pray we don’t have to live in a city.”

  “Let’s stay for a while, anyway,” he said reasonably. “Maybe I can work here as well as anywhere.”

  In a week the house went on as though death had not come into it. It was not so much that old Mrs. Harnsbarger seemed gone as that it seemed she was still there. Ruth, William thought, pondering it, became her mother, too, in some way of her own. There was nothing of her mother about her, and yet she moved more quietly. She ran less often, and now she did not leap up from her seat as a girl does but she rose gracefully slow as a woman does to do what must be done. Thus, perhaps, the dead live on.