Portrait of a Marriage

by Pearl S. Buck

  But William loved this Ruth if anything more passionately than he had Ruth the girl. He began to be a little more helpless than he had been, waiting for her to do for him small things that he once had done for himself or even for her. Thus he sat at table and waited for her to refill his dish or to bring the coffee pot from the stove, or he waited in his room while she fetched his clean shirt in the morning, or his cap and coat when he went outside. He was not aware of this change in himself. He only knew that she did everything for him and that now he could not live without her.

  She had never looked so beautiful nor been so content. Out of her content her body had blossomed until there were times when he could not bear its beauty calmly. He must woo her and possess her, then, even when he came upon her in the day. And here in the shelter of her home she allowed him and gave to him freely and with joy. Their marriage began again, as the house became their own. It seemed to him that he discovered for the first time how deeply passionate she was. And then she conceived her first child.

  It was by now spring of their second year together. Without saying that they would stay he knew that for the sake of their love he would never take her away from this house and this land. She was nourished here to her fullest being. At the work she loved best she grew so beautiful, so rich, that he could not disturb that sacred growth.

  “Selfishly,” he thought, “it suits me to have her perfection. I ought to be able to work—out of perfection!”

  He began to study the landscape and the people that he might discover pictures for himself. Twice he painted Mr. Harnsbarger, once in the old wooden armchair the old man’s father had sat in and again outdoors, against the red barn, the summer wind blowing his white beard. He sent the pictures to New York and they were received as promise of some change to come in his work. “There is a mildness in these pictures new to William Barton’s work”—this is what he read. It made him angry.

  “I am too damned well fed,” he thought. He pondered this a while, and, still angry, put it aside. It was tradition that art could not come out of plenitude and peace. But there was goodness in plenitude and peace, and why should he not prove them as rich a ground for creation as any other? The arts, if not art itself, flourished when men were free from fear and poverty.

  He gave himself up therefore to this landscape, determined to possess it through full enjoyment of all its fertile beauty. But he decided that he would do no more portraits. The faces he saw in the small town and at the farms here did not make his hand reach for brush or pencil. They were too placid and cheeks were sleek and full. The smoothness of the landscape had bred them alike. He turned to sky and hill, to the anguished white sycamores that the winds had twisted and suddenly rising streams had torn and tried to drown, to birch trees shivering in the spring wood, to unexpected rocks upon a hill. There were not many rocks, Under the rich topsoil there lay the foundation of hidden shale and this was the bedrock of streams. But the thick dark topsoil hid every edge and harshness, except sometimes upon the crest of a hill, where the red rock broke through. His one painting that year which brought him notice was “Red Rock, Pennsylvania.”

  And yet he knew that only a few hundred miles away the bed of shale which spread underneath all this county to the north and the west of the farmhouse held iron and coal. If he had traveled only that short distance he might have seen faces again to paint. But he did not travel away from Ruth.

  He waited for the birth of his first child, more curious about himself than about Ruth. For to have a child, he saw, was simply her own furthering. It was so natural to her to conceive, to grow toward motherhood, to look forward to the child’s birth as she might toward a festival, that none of it was strange to her,

  But he felt changed by the very contemplation of a new creature with him and Ruth in his house. He felt unwillingly drawn into these generations, as though for its own purposes the house had enticed him here and when he had taken Ruth away it had drawn her back again, and him through her, until it had what it wanted, yet another generation.

  “Six generations,” old Mr. Harnsbarger gloated. “It’ll be a boy, too. We always have boys first.”

  It was a boy. William stared down into a small round face and tried to realize that this was his son. But he could only see the likeness in this face to all the generations that had been in the house.

  Ruth lay back upon her pillows serene and triumphant. She had been right and William wrong. William had wanted her to go to a Philadelphia hospital to have the baby. But she had said she must and would stay at home as her mother had done, and old Mrs. Laubscher would take care of her.

  “But if something goes wrong?” William said.

  “I know a’ready it won’t,” she had said.

  And nothing had. Old Mrs. Laubscher had done everything right, even to bringing in the axe under her apron so that William wouldn’t see it. She cut the baby’s cord with the axe so he would be a good woodchopper. And Ruth herself had listened to all the midwife had told her while she was pregnant. She had even walked under the washline so the cord wouldn’t be wrapped around the baby’s neck. From the beginning everything had been right. She was sure she knew what that beginning was, a Sunday when she had been plain happy all day, when everything had gone right from the moment she had got out of bed. The bread had baked beautifully on Saturday. She had gone to bed happy that night.

  “This child was begot on a Sunday for sure,” Mrs. Laubscher had said when she caught him. “He just jumps out, he’s so strong.”

  “He was,” Ruth said. “And I remember I laughed.”

  “That’s why he’s so handsome a’ready,” Mrs. Laubscher affirmed. She had wrapped the baby in a blanket and held him up, a roundheaded fellow. “Now will I dip his hands and feet in spring water,” the old woman said. She dipped the small, clenched fists, one then the other, into a bowl of water that stood on the table, and then his feet. “So he won’t never get frostbite.”

  She washed him then and tidied the room, and when William came in, she hurried out with the child’s placenta tied in a bit of rag. Out in the garden she buried it under a rose bush, so that Ruth’s beauty would not fade.

  “A sweet, pretty girl,” she thought, and smoothed the earth over the roots. She sighed, for she was very fat, and then rose to her feet and dusted her hands. She would give the new father a few minutes to look at his son, and then she would carry the baby up to the attic herself to make sure he was upstairs before down. “People fergit so,” she muttered, “and then they don’t know how it is they gits bad luck.”

  In the bedroom William stood looking at his son. He knew in that instant that he would not be a good father. He felt no extension of himself in this small creature.

  “Isn’t it rather fat?” he inquired.

  Ruth laughed. “He’s a fine fat baby,” she said with joy.

  He looked at her instead of the baby. She was more beautiful than ever.

  “I believe you’ve simply been having a good time,” he said.

  “I have,” she retorted.

  “I thought women were supposed to suffer or something,” he grumbled in mock reproach, and she laughed again so that he had to restrain himself from taking her in his arms.

  “Let’s not have any more,” he said jealously.

  “What would I do with only one?” she asked him. “There’s got to be somebody for him to play with.”

  “Why?” he said stubbornly.

  “Oh, you’re silly,” she answered, smiling. “What’ll we call him, William?”

  “Harold,” he said, “Harold, after my father.”

  Ruth considered the name. “There’s never been a Harold here,” she said.

  “There’ll be one now, then,” William said.

  She bore him two more children after that, both girls, one after the other, and then he declared it enough. He saw her enriched by them, her beauty new again in the midst of the three small creatures. He painted her thus once, and was surprised when the critics failed to s
ee improvement in his work.

  “It’s the best thing I have ever done,” he said to Ruth with anger.

  “It is, too,” she agreed warmly. “But those people think everything has to be done in New York or it’s no good.”

  “Right,” he said, secretly surprised by her shrewdness.

  He resolved then in his wrath that he would show them what he could do. He would never send pictures to New York again. He would give exhibitions himself. He would live in this quiet spot and paint such pictures that everybody would come to see them. He painted diligently, and each year he exhibited his pictures in the village Masonic hall. Country school children were brought to see them, and the village newspaper wrote loyally of them every year. Usually a few newspaper men came from Philadelphia. Once he read, as he might have read his own obituary, ‘a column by a great critic in a New York newspaper, deploring his loss. “William Barton’s promise, so strikingly begun, has not fulfilled itself,” the article had said. He had read his own death, or so it seemed that day. He had burned the paper so that Ruth would never see it, but he could not burn his brain to ashes and his brain held the words, unforgotten.

  They had their use. Whenever he felt himself growing lax and ceasing to find inspiration, he remembered them and began a fresh picture. Eight hours a day, he told people who asked him, were his minimum. “I work regularly,” he said, “because it is the only way to accomplishment.” For twelve years he had painted steadily and as steadily refused to believe that he was being each year more wholly forgotten.

  … “Daddy!” Jill’s voice upon the stair called him.

  “Yes, dear?” he called from his room.

  “Dinner’s ready. I’ve done your brushes.”

  “All right, dear.” He combed his hair and rubbed a bit of paint from his shirt with the stopper of a small bottle of turpentine which Ruth kept in his room. Jill was still on the stair.

  “Can I come in?” she called.

  “Of course,” he said. She came into his room and stood watching him, not quite at ease and yet longing for ease with him. But he could not give it to her. By some curious freak of mischievous nature, this child had exactly old Mr. Harnsbarger’s small grey eyes in her fresh face and he saw every time he looked at his daughter the soul of the old man seated in her eyes. It was unreasonable, but there it was. Even though he saw her longing to love him, she looked through those eyes and he was repelled.

  “Daddy, are you going to do anything special this afternoon?”

  He had not planned it, but when she asked him he suddenly thought that it was time he went to see his parents. He did not go half often enough, now that they were so old.

  “I’m thinking I ought to go to the city,” he said.

  “Oh,” she replied, disappointed.

  His heart reproached him. “Had you anything in mind?” he asked.

  “I thought maybe you’d think of something nice we could do,” she said.

  If she had made a dear plan of her own, he might have yielded to it. As it was, he thought a little impatiently that she had no imagination. None of the three children had any imagination.

  “I think I ought to go see my father,” he said gently. She did not answer, and he made amends by squeezing her shoulders in his arm as they went down stairs. He had taken the children one by one to see his parents, but it was not successful. The children, who looked only rosy and healthy at home, were bumpkins in his mother’s drawing room. Their manners were Ruth’s making. “Yes, ma’am,” she had taught them to say, and “Pleased to meet you.” He had not the heart to tell her that these phrases were not what he had been taught, nor that when his children uttered them out of their anxiety to behave well, his mother’s sharp, handsome old face grew ironical, though she said nothing. He had taken none of them again since. Hal last year had upset his grandfather’s wineglass over the lace tablecloth and his mother had said, “Never mind—the child doesn’t know any better.”

  “Where’s Hal?” he inquired at his own table, a few minutes later.

  “He ran away,” Ruth said. She pressed her beautiful, full lips together as she dished out chicken stew rapidly upon the plates before her. “And William, I shall whip him when he comes home, for I told him he wasn’t to go till his work was done.”

  “Now, Ruth,” he said, “I hate whipping.”

  She was about to speak and did not. “Somebuddy’s got to do something,” she had been about to cry out. But silence she had learned. She glanced about the table to see that all was right, and she did not answer him.

  In his library old Mr. Barton examined carefully the painting William had finished this morning. Upon an impulse of doubt William had brought it with him. It was good, or perhaps it was not. His father stepped back from it without speaking.

  “A very American sort of landscape,” William said uneasily.

  “Ah,” said his father, “yes, it is.”

  “I had a curious thing happen to it,” William said. “A butterfly flung itself against the paint. Its wing dust stuck and I had the feeling of painting it into the picture.”

  Mr. Barton looked at his son. He had put away his glasses and now he sat down to steady his legs. He was very old, and he had always dreaded speaking of anything unpleasant. But he and his wife had often talked about the question of speaking to William.

  “It is no use not to speak the truth,” she had said firmly only this morning at breakfast. Age had made her bitter and cold and doubtful of good in anything. But age always did that to women. Mr. Barton could not understand it. He himself had grown gentler and warmer as he grew old, as men did.

  He made up his mind suddenly at this moment after dinner when he was alone with his son that he would speak. For the end of old age was death, and then there would be no more speaking.

  “William,” he said, “yours is a good talent. At one time I thought it was perhaps genius.”

  He looked about the walls of his library. In the far corner there still hung the small canvas.

  “I used to dream of the day when I would hang one of your pictures in my gallery,” he said. “I used to think I would hang it where my last Corot hangs. I was going to make a ceremony of taking it down and putting yours there instead.”

  William tried to laugh. “I never could be that good,” he said.

  “But why not?” the old critic asked. “Why not?”

  “Mine is a secondary talent,” William said ruthlessly and bled beneath his own wound.

  “No,” his father said, “no—a very superb talent, laid away in a napkin of content.” He looked at William’s canvas. “Soil too rich,” he said; “the green’s too lush. The essential form is lost. When there is no form, there is no meaning. A fine technique, William, signifying nothing.”

  “Speak out,” William said steadily.

  “I will,” his father replied. “Go away somewhere alone and see if you can paint. It will soon be too late.”

  He rose and without drama he turned the picture toward the wall.

  “Thanks,” William said slowly.

  “Shall we return to your mother?” his father asked.

  “Yes,” William replied.

  … He did not leave his father’s house until very late. His sister Louise came in with her husband and two friends, a dark young woman and a man with her. He saw Louise and Monty two or three times a year, often enough so that they were perfectly familiar to him, and yet today he felt isolated.

  “There you are, William,” Louise said.

  “How are you?” Monty murmured. He held out his long languid hand.

  William ignored it, suddenly realizing that he disliked Monty and had always disliked him. He was too successful, unreasonably successful. Monty was now a very rich man, by means which were not quite clear. International banking, it seemed, had given Monty his opportunity. He and Louise spent half their year in Paris. Old Mr. Barton, hearing rumors of Monty’s wealth, seeing its evidences indeed in Louise’s increasingly fabulous jewels, be
gged him to buy pictures.

  “There is nothing like a fine painting as an investment,” he told Monty gravely. “It brings pleasure and it is always salable.”

  But Monty remained cold, his pale, pleasant eyes resting inattentively upon the pictures his father-in-law loved. Monty contradicted no one, but he always did only as he liked. Against that pallid silent self Louise had battered and had not prevailed. She had come now to accept him as he was, and even to be proud of him, since success proved him right. His friends were her trial. He made strange friends, such as these two who were here today. Where had he found this dark young woman and this, man who was neither husband nor brother?

  “I say, Lou, would your people mind if we took a couple of people with us to dinner there tomorrow?” he had asked.

  That was all she knew about them. “Mother doesn’t like strangers,” she had said coldly.

  “Tell her they’re my cousins,” he said.

  “But they’re not, Monty!”

  He gave her his sidelong smile. “Don’t be like your mother, Lou,” he said gently. “I’d hate to have to begin lying to you, too, my dear.”

  It was what she feared, that some day he would begin lying to her and then he would be lost to her. As it was, he told her, or so she thought, everything he did or was about to do, and he listened to her, or she still thought he did, when the margin for honesty was not too narrow.

  “You must be honest, Monty,” she said.

  He smiled. “Of course,” he agreed.

  But the margin was so narrow that sometimes, when she sat alone, she was glad she had no children. Her only child had been born dead, and she had wanted no more of such suffering as childbirth. If she could hold Monty straight as long as her parents lived, perhaps afterward she could just rest. Though how she could rest, either with or without Monty, she did not know. But at least there were no children.

  She looked at William. All these years, where had he been living? She had little curiosity. Most of the time she was too tired to wonder about other people. Besides, she had taken for granted what her mother said, that William’s family was better forgotten.