Portrait of a Marriage

by Pearl S. Buck

  “What’s happened?” she whispered.

  “Dearest, be still. You shouldn’t ever have gone over there alone—you should have told me, at least.”

  “I didn’t want—to bother you.”

  “Dearest, how could it have been bother?” He caressed her hand passionately. “I’m such a bad husband to you, poor darling.”

  She smiled, a faint, white smile. “You’re the—one—I want.”

  He bowed his head over her hand. Yes, it was true. By that strange chance which had first brought him to this house and then kept him here, each was still the one the other wanted.

  Outside the house the world circled into war. Ruth measured its speed through Hal. She lay upon her bed, thinking over his brief letters. The war was a long way off because Hal was still in a North Carolina camp. It was nearer because maybe he would be in the next regiment to go abroad.

  It came very near on the day he sailed. She was well again, out of bed, but the doctor would not let her walk downstairs for another few days. She was straightening her white cotton underwear in her bureau drawers when Hal walked in on his final furlough. He was wearing his new uniform and the tears came to her eyes when she saw him. He bent to kiss her and she put up her arms in a rare gesture of love.

  “Hello, Mom—cleanin’ again! Always cleanin’, ain’t you!”

  “I got to do something. Oh, Hal, do you have to go?”

  “I want to, Mom—”

  William, watching them together, knew that they were one flesh in a manner that he and Ruth could never be. He left them and went off alone. He could not work because he felt himself alone. Strange that a man could in love bestow his son upon a woman and rob himself in doing it! Hal was his flesh made in his own image, without that part which in William was alien to Ruth. Hal was a William born and reared in this house, in Ruth’s own ways. All that she did not understand in William was not in Hal. She comprehended wholly this youth that had William’s body and her mind.

  It was evening before William came back to the house. At the barn Joel was milking the cows and Mary was carrying in the buckets of milk. William met her, a foaming bucket in each hand. Her placid face was stirred into a smile unusual to her. She did not see William until he called to her.

  “Mary!”

  She started and the milk slopped over the edge of the bucket. “Father! Where have you been? Mom’s been asking for you. She’s that worried about you.”

  “I thought Hal was here.”

  “He’s gone long a’ready. Where was you?”

  “Just walking about.”

  She stared at him with her round blue eyes. “What for?”

  “Trying to see what I wanted to paint next.”

  “Oh! Want supper?”

  “I’ll get something.”

  “Mom’s had hers.”

  “All right.”

  Her eyes lost interest and she went on with her buckets. In the barnyard Joel suddenly began to whistle as loud and clear as a mocking bird. William went into the house and up the stairs. Jill met him at the top.

  “Father! Oh, where have you been?” She wound her thin, brown arms around him eagerly and he put his arm about her for a moment.

  “Nowhere—just walking.”

  “Mother’s asked me twenty times. She’s gone to bed again. Hal’s gone.”

  “I know.” He tiptoed into the room and Ruth cried out, “William, is it you?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “William, where have you been?”

  He sat down on the bed beside her. “I thought you wanted to be alone a little with Hal. Dearest, you aren’t feeling worse, are you?”

  She gazed up at him out of clear blue eyes, as young those eyes as the first time he looked into them.

  “I’m tired, that’s all. But why for should I want to be alone with our son?”

  “I thought you did.”

  “I missed you. You’d ought to have been here when he went.”

  “He didn’t miss me.”

  “But I did.” Her full lower lip quivered and the tears came into her eyes. They looked up at him, out of the depths, bluer than ever. “Oh, William, what if he’s killed? I can’t help thinkin’—maybe I’ve kissed him for the last time. Oh, this terrible war! I wouldn’t mind so much even if it was to fight for somethin’ on our own soil, but to go off to them foreign countries!”

  “The countries our forefathers came from, darling, so not quite alien to us.”

  He held her hand in both his. This hand of hers, grown firmer with the years, lay warm and powerful between his two encircling ones, his always so much more flexible than hers.

  “I don’t care for ’em,” she said rebelliously. “What do I care what happens to a lot of strangers? What I care is what happens in our own house. He’d no call to go.”

  “Dearest, every young man is going to have to go very soon. It’s war.” He saw her beautiful face quiver and break, and leaned to take her in his arms. “Don’t, darling!”

  But she was sobbing into his breast, wordless with sorrow, and he held her and let her weep. In sorrow she returned to him. She was so strong for life, and the day’s work, so seldom was she weak or did she weep, that there was a sort of ecstasy in this moment which gave her to him again. She sobbed a while, then lay still, her cheek against his shoulder.

  “War’s come into this house,” she said at last, her voice broken like a child’s.

  “War has come into many a house,” he said gently, “and it will come into many more.”

  “I only think of mine,” she said stubbornly. Then she seized him passionately in her arms. “I’ve got you, though,” she cried. “Nothing can take you away from me, William!”

  “Nothing,” he said gravely, “nothing in life.”

  “We aren’t going to die!” she cried. “I reckon we’ll live forever and ever.”

  “I reckon,” he agreed, taking her word for his own. He held her and felt her holding him and perceived through every vein and nerve and muscle of her the gathering again of her passion for him.

  “Sweet!” he murmured.

  She put his hand to her breast and lifted her eyelids. That slow upsweep of dark, thick lashes was whip to his heart. He bent and crushed her mouth with his. This union of flesh to flesh, how infinitely richer it was now than it had ever been! Once there was mere hunger to satisfy, first body hunger, blood hunger. Then there had been hunger for children. Body to body they had created the children. But now there was no more such simple hunger. The flesh was long since satisfied, and there would be no more children. This—this was for communion, body to body, heart to heart, spirit to spirit, symbolic and significant of two beings fused in one.

  It was long past dark when at last he rose and slipped the wooden bolt of the door and went out. The house was dark. The girls had gone to bed. No, under Jill’s door at the end of the hall he saw a thin streak of light. But he did not go to it. He wanted to see no one. The house was his. He went downstairs to the kitchen and lit a lamp, and found wine and bread and applesauce and cheese, and he ate. Then he rose, yawned and stretched. He blew out the light and went to the open kitchen door and stood looking out into the soft black night. The summer nights were always soft. The river kept the air damp and mild and good for sleep. The air was still. Impossible to believe that anywhere in the world was committed the folly of struggle and noise and dying! None of that was life. Life was here, in this house, between him and Ruth.

  He went upstairs softly and softly let himself into their room.

  “Asleep?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “I was waitin’ for you. We’ll sleep together.”

  … When Ruth was well again and outdoors, she saw in a moment what in a month William had not seen. Mary and Joel were in love with each other. She was well satisfied when she saw it. She liked Joel, his father’s son through and through. The do-less mother had been nothing but a tool in his creation, a cradle for his body. He was born of her and free of her a
nd had no more to do with her. A sturdy, plain-faced boy, with none of his mother’s foolish, pale prettiness, he was handy at everything that had to do with land and beast.

  “That boy of mine—he gets a crop no matter what,” Henry boasted. “Nothing goes wrong that he has the watchin’ of.”

  So as Ruth was able she walked about the garden and the barn, her eyes sharp on everything, stables and fowl coops, and the fields as far as she could see. Everything was better than she had left it. The cows were clean and placid. Those to calve were healthy, and two more were started. That left only the two they were milking now. Three of the sows had farrowed and only two piglets were lost. Small jobs she had not been able to get done were done, the coops cleaned, the woodshed filled, the water troughs scoured, the two horses re-shod.

  When Joel came over in the evening to milk, she went out to him.

  “You’ve done wonderful, Joel,” she said. “I’ll never forget it, and I shall tell your father so.”

  “That’s all right,” Joel said. He dug his forehead into the cow’s flank as he milked. “I only did what I’d a mind to.”

  “Then all the better of you,” she said.

  It was at this moment that Mary brought out the pails, and Ruth saw Joel lift his head quickly and watch her as she came. She knew then that he loved Mary. Yes, but what of Mary? She saw her daughter walk shyly near her.

  “Mother, had you ought to be out so long?”

  “I can’t bear to just sit,” she replied.

  Mary laughed at Joel. “Mother’s that hard to manage!”

  “Be you the same?” he asked, laughing back at her.

  The laughter, the quick, flying looks of the young eyes told the older Ruth. “She loves him back, I reckon,” she thought.

  “Well, I’ll be goin’ in,” she said suddenly. This was enormous knowledge. Would William want it? Yes, he must want it, for it was right. Mary and Joel, there was rightness in the marriage. She had not been able to marry Joel’s father because William had come by one day, but now there was not another William for Mary. Strange how like her Mary was in looks! But that was as far as the likeness went. Mary would never have seen a young William anywhere.

  “Rest a little, Mom,” Mary begged.

  “Well, maybe,” Ruth replied.

  She went back to the house and lay down on the couch in the dining room and waited for William to come in. Jill was in the kitchen, getting the supper. Did Jill know? But she would speak to no one before William. She lay there thinking of Henry. Curious and queer it was how blood came back to blood in the generations! Part of her through Mary was going to be married after all to Henry. She didn’t mind. Mary was the part that could have married Henry anyway, if William hadn’t come.

  Through the open door she now saw William strolling down the path, his knapsack over his shoulder. So he must have looked that day when he first walked that path. But now his dark hair was silver. She watched him, content with him. For years he hadn’t left her, not even to go to the city. That his father, and others, too, sometimes wrote to him, she knew, but she ignored those letters. Sometimes she found them in the pockets of his clothes when she turned them out to clean them, but she felt no temptation to read them. They had nothing to do with her. Letters! They meant so little. It was living with people that made them real. She remembered suddenly what she had not thought of for years, the letter William had once written her. She had worn it around her neck until her wedding night.

  He came in and she drew him to her with her smile.

  “What are you smiling about?” he asked.

  “A queer thing!”

  He threw off his knapsack and came to sit beside her. “What queer thing?”

  “Do you mind a letter you wrote me once when you was in New York?”

  “The only one I ever wrote you, and you never answered it!” he replied.

  “I was afraid to!” She considered for a moment telling him why. To this day he had never seen her writing. She had never written to anyone but Hal. “You know everything about me, so I reckon I’ll tell you—I was plain scared to write back.”

  “Why, darling?”

  “You wrote so beautiful, and I couldn’t, and I was afraid you’d think less of me.”

  “Ruth!”

  It was pathetic to him to imagine that humble young girl afraid of him because she loved him!

  “I couldn’t even read all you wrote.”

  “Couldn’t you, dear? What did you do?” He touched her cheek, her neck, her eyebrows with his paint-stained fingers. He knew the noble shape of this head so well by his touch that he felt sometimes he had molded it as a sculptor molds clay.

  “I folded it into a piece of red ribbon and made it into a good luck piece.” She laughed at that girl she had been and was still, half ashamed of her, and not quite sure he would not be ashamed of her, too. But he was only moved.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about it? You’ve kept something all these years! I’ll never know you—what else haven’t you told me?”

  “I’d half forgotten it.”

  “What made you remember it now?”

  “I don’t know. Yes, I reckon it was Mary and Joel. William, they’re in love!”

  “They are!” He drew back his hand quickly. He had seen nothing. “Did they tell you?”

  “No, they didn’t need to!”

  He considered the matter, staring down at her. “I don’t know that I care to be tied to old Fasthauser.”

  “It’s not him—it’s Joel.”

  “He looks like his father.”

  “Mary looks like me.”

  “I don’t like it the better for that!” He rose and began walking up and down the room, his hands in his pockets.

  “That’s how you get your pockets full of paint!” she cried.

  He took his hands out of his pockets. “That clod!”

  “Joel’s a real good farmer,” she said.

  He did not answer. It had not occurred to him that Ruth’s children and his would be marrying—anybody.

  “Who’d Mary marry if it wasn’t a boy like Joel?” Ruth asked. “Where would she see anybody different?”

  He could not answer this. If he himself had been different, if he had taken Ruth away from here instead of coming here to live, his daughters might have met young men not like Joel.

  “I suppose you’re right,” he said. “Well, it can’t be helped.”

  He went into the kitchen to wash, not knowing what more to say at the moment, and there he found Jill, her face red from the oven from which she was taking out a deep apple pie.

  “What do you know about your sister and Joel?” he asked abruptly.

  She set the pie on the floor, closed the oven door and looked up at him on her knees. “It’s terrible!” she said. “I’ll never understand Mary, never! He smells so—like cows! And his hands, his hands make me sick!” She lifted the pie to the table and turned on him. “Father, can’t you stop them?”

  He began scrubbing his hands at the sink. “What have I to offer Mary that’s better?”

  “But he’s so repulsive!”

  “I suppose she doesn’t think so. And your mother says he’s good.”

  “Oh, Joel’s good! But marrying—” She hesitated, and he saw her struggling to put into words the delicacy of her flesh. He was startled at the sudden comprehension of this delicacy. What was the use of delicacy in this plain frame? What useless thing had he bestowed upon this daughter?

  “Jill, what about you?”

  “Me? What do you mean?”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I want to help you to do whatever you want.”

  “I knew you would, Father. My trouble is, I don’t know. Mary’s always known.”

  He saw her tremble a little. She turned her face away and looked out of the window beyond the table by which she stood.

  “You mean Mary’s doing now what she wants but you’re not?” />
  “Well, she’s always said she’d marry a farmer. But I’m different.”

  He went to her and put his arm around her thin, narrow shoulders. “Different, Jill?”

  “Yes. I don’t see things so clear.”

  “What things?”

  “Maybe—myself.” She turned those small, disconcerting grey eyes of hers upon him, and his arm dropped. How curiously unmingled Ruth’s blood was with his in these children of theirs! One could sort them out, this child’s eyes and Mary’s face Ruth’s blood, and Mary’s shape his own, and his mind, or part of it, in Jill’s skull so totally different from his own, and Hal’s body his except his hands which were Ruth’s, and in the boy that restlessness which was all that William’s blood had been able to do in him! If only he could have sorted them all out and put them together again to make whole human beings!

  In his pocket at this moment was a letter from Elise. She had not written to him in all these years. Now she wrote to say she had two boys in France, and his boy would be going, too. Perhaps they would meet. Would he give his son the names of her sons? She sent their pictures. He had looked a long time at little snapshots of two young men, one fair, one dark, both very English and very gay. He would not send them on to Hal. Better if they did not meet, his son and Elise’s.

  “I want to help you,” he told his daughter Jill.

  Adoration blazed in her little passionate eyes. “I know you do,” she said. “I always know you do.”

  … War grew and spread but Hal was alive. As long as he was alive the war could be endured. Ruth did not ask who was winning in those foreign countries far off. She cared nothing who won or lost. All the outcome of war in which millions of men were wounded and died and in which nations sank like ships, all was bound up in the shape of the one man to whom she had given birth. Hal was still alive. Then she was winning the war. If Hal were to die, for her the war would be lost.

  Joel must go now, too. All young men must go. The wedding must be first, so that he and Mary could have a week together.

  “We want it right here,” Mary said. “We don’t want to go away. I’ll just go over to his house, that’s all. I’ll stay there with his folks when he’s gone.”