Portrait of a Marriage

by Pearl S. Buck

  “Well, you and me, Ruth, we got together after all in that boy, though by a long, roundabout way. I’d rather have taken a short cut, myself.”

  “Shame on you, Henry Fasthauser,” she said to him, though by now she had said it so often that it didn’t mean much. So she added severely, “Ain’t you ever goin’ to quit that kind of talk? We’re gettin’ old, Henry, and it ain’t decent.”

  “Long as I’m man and you’re woman I’m liable to say things,” he said mischievously.

  So she had walked away. Nobody could say she hadn’t always been a strict good woman, with thought for no man except her husband.

  It was at this moment that she heard the sound of an automobile on the road. Tom said there were lots of them, but still they had never had one stop at this gate before. She looked up from the strawberry bowl and saw a tall woman in a tan coat step out. A wide, scarflike veil tied her big hat on so that Ruth could not see her face. But the woman walked with a long, foreign sort of stride and in a moment Ruth saw her face, a thin, dark face, the eyes big and black.

  “Is this where Mr. William Barton lives?” the woman asked. She had a fine voice, rich and echoing, as though maybe she could sing.

  “Yes, it is,” Ruth said. She did not get up or stop hulling the berries.

  “Will you tell him an old friend has come to see him?”

  “I don’t rightly know where he is, at the moment,” Ruth said. She set the bowl down and rose. “I’m sorry I can’t shake hands,” she said, holding out her red-stained hands. The woman looked surprised.

  “Oh,” she said, “are you—”

  “I’m Mrs. Barton,” Ruth said gravely.

  “Oh,” the woman said again. She stared at Ruth, her black eyes big and intense. They felt hot on her face, Ruth thought.

  “Come in,” she said. “If you’ll sit down, I’ll find him.” She led the way into the cool house, and into the sitting room which William had repapered and furnished not with new things but with some of the oldest things her mother had.

  “This is William’s house,” the woman murmured.

  “My own folks have lived here close on two hundred years,” Ruth said.

  She left the woman there and went to ring the kitchen bell for William. If she could honestly have not found him she would have been glad. She would have liked an excuse to go back to that strange woman and say that she could not see William.

  But William, walking in a little grove of white birches near the creek, heard the bell clearly and a moment later Ruth saw him coming toward the house. She was at the sink scrubbing her hands when he came in.

  “Anything wrong?” he asked as he stepped in the door.

  “There’s a strange woman to see you—says she’s an old friend.” Ruth did not look up. There was no getting the red stain off. It would have to wear away.

  “But I haven’t any old friends,” William said, wondering. He thought of Elise at once, but the ocean was between him and Elise.

  “Well, that’s what she says,” Ruth said.

  “Where is she?”

  “In the sittin’ room.”

  “I’ll go in and see.” He strode past her and then, perhaps because he had thought of Elise so instantly, he came back three steps and put his arms around Ruth and kissed her firmly on the mouth. “You smell of sunshine and warm strawberries,” he said. He took her hands and dried them one after the other on the tan linen towel, and kissed one stained palm and the other. “Do you know how I love your hands?”

  She smiled and blushed and drew her hands away. “Go along with you, William—she’s waitin’ long a’ready. Shall I. bring in some dandelion wine and little cakes?”

  “Yes, do. Where’s Jill?”

  “Readin’, I reckon. It’s all she does nowadays.”

  “She ought to help you.” He hurried away then. A dozen steps across the dining room and he opened the door of the sitting room and saw Elise. She had taken off her veil, and under the big hat she looked almost the young girl he had seen her last.

  “Elise!” He sprang forward and took her hand in both of his. “I thought of you when Ruth said an old friend and then I said it couldn’t be you.”

  “Don is dead, William.”

  She felt suddenly that she had come all the way to say only this. It was not what she had planned to say, but when she looked into William’s unchanged brown eyes, she knew why she had come.

  “Oh, Elise!” He sat down on the sofa beside her, still holding her hands. “Dear Elise! How long have you known?”

  “Since just before I sailed.” She had not cried at all, and now she knew she was going to have to cry. An enormous flood rushed up from her heart. Tears swam up to her eyes, gathered and began rolling down her cheeks. “Killed—in action,” she said faintly. “That’s all I know.”

  “And your husband?”

  “He simply had to go into war work. The house is quite empty—” Her lips quivered and then with a loud cry she covered her face with both hands and bent over and began at last to weep in great clear sobs.

  William did not speak. Gently he took off her big hat and laid it down. Her black hair was an even grey, he saw with a shock. But his own hair was white. Years had passed over them both. It was hard to believe, so natural did it seem to see Elise again. No, but a lifetime had passed. She had been a bride, and now her two grown sons were dead. Yet she was Elise and he was William and they had known one another as children. He put his arm about her shoulder.

  “It will do you so much good to cry,” he said gently. “Poor Elise, I can tell you’ve been bottling yourself up, and that was always hard for you to do, I remember.”

  “Do you remember me like that?” She looked up at him, her face wet. Now he saw that she was older. Tears revealed her. She would always be handsome because the lines of her bones were so good—her skeleton would be handsome when her flesh was dust. But her mouth was sad and there were lines about her eyes, and one deep line between her brows as though she were used to frowning. It was not a happy face, and life, not death, had made it so.

  “I do remember you,” he said simply.

  The door opened and Ruth stood there, a tray in her hands, and on the tray small old glasses full of the dandelion wine and a silver plate of the salt-sweet cakes she always kept to go with it.

  Her blue eyes opened wide. “Are you ready, William?”

  “Yes, of course,” he said quickly. He was aware of his arm across Elise’s shoulder and took it away too quickly. His impulse was to cry out to Ruth in self-defense, “She has lost both her sons—” but he restrained himself. To Elise Ruth was a stranger. “Drink a little of Ruth’s good wine, Elise,” he said. “It will make you feel better.”

  So without looking again at Ruth he took the tray from her and set it down and lifted a glass from the tray and gave it to Elise. But when he took another for Ruth, he saw to his amazement that she was gone. When he took the tray she had simply turned and left the room. He was angry with her, and surprised at his anger, because it was so unusual to him. He had never been angry with Ruth before! He sat down again and tasted the wine and put the glass down.

  And Elise could not drink, either, for her sobbing. She wanted to talk, to tell him everything about Don, how he looked, and how strong a child he had always been, never any trouble and clever in school, and honors at Cambridge. He had planned to go into government—it was the tradition of Ronnie’s English family. Now all of it was over before it was begun.

  “Why, William? Why—why?” she sobbed.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “If I could answer that—it’s all chance, so far as I can see, chance when one’s born, chance in everything that one does, and so, I suppose, chance when one dies.”

  “But—but in your letter about Rex,” she said piteously, “you spoke of persistence after death, for some people, at least. Do you have anything to guide you—is there any way to know what sort of people—why Rex more than Don, for instance? Don was less delicate than
Rex, that was all. He loved life more than Rex did, really—you know, physical life, eating, drinking, sport—he worried me terribly because he was always falling in love. But it was never serious—he used to say it was just defining for him the person he was really going to fall in love with some day.”

  He let her talk on and on, and slowly the image of a strong, vivid young male creature began to come back to life before his eyes.

  “Do you have those little snapshots I sent you?” she said suddenly. “Have you them, William? I thought I had prints of them, but I couldn’t find them. And I always loved particularly that one of Don.”

  “Yes, of course I have them,” he said. “I’ll get them.” He rose to cross the hall to the room he had made into a library. The house was as quiet as though no one were in it except Elise and him. Where was Ruth? But he could not go now to find her.

  Then when he opened the library door he saw Jill, her thin body almost hidden in one of the two deep chairs he had bought when he put in the fireplace.

  “Hello,” she said, looking up from her book.

  “There you are,” he said.

  “Who’s the caller?” she asked.

  “An old friend,” he said. He opened the drawer where he kept Elise’s letters. He had put the photographs in this drawer with them, not in an envelope, but loosely. The one of Rex was there, but not the one of Don. He searched again, sure that it must be there. It was not, and he began to look through the letters. It was in none of them.

  “Strange!” he muttered. “What could I have done with it?” He turned to Jill. “You haven’t seen a photograph anywhere, have you? I may have dropped it. It was of a tall, dark young man in the uniform of an English soldier.”

  He was amazed to see her face turn a bright crimson.

  “I took it,” she said.

  “You took it! But why? It was no one you knew.”

  “I—liked his face.” She bent her head and fluttered the pages of her book. Then she shut it and looked at him bravely. “I was going to ask you—who he was.”

  “When did you take it?”

  “Several weeks ago.”

  “You’ve had it all this time without asking me?”

  “I was afraid you’d think I was silly.”

  Her lips were trembling with distress. He continued to gaze at her, incredulous.

  “But it seems a very strange thing to do—to take a photograph out of my drawer.”

  She stood up quickly. “I was straightening your desk. Mother told me to, and I put your drawers in order and I saw the picture. I thought the dark one was you at first, when you were young, maybe in one of those foreign countries you told us you went to before you met mother. Then I saw it wasn’t really you. But something about him made me want the picture for my own. I ought to have asked you—only I was ashamed to.”

  “Do you have the picture now?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Shall I get it?”

  “Please do, Jill.”

  He waited, leaning against the desk, while she was away. What did this mean, he wondered? A romantic impulse in a young and lonely creature, perhaps no more, and yet he never felt that any impulse Jill had was meaningless. He had a strange sense of tragedy hanging over her, something frustrated, something gone wrong. She came back, and held out a little packet to him. She had wrapped the picture in silvery tissue paper. He did not open it. He took it, and something in her eyes made him know that he must tell her this young man was dead.

  “The reason I want it,” he said, “is because the lady who has come to see me is his mother. She married an Englishman and she had these two sons. Both of them have been killed in the war. She happens not to have a print of this picture.”

  He saw that blushing face grow pale before his eyes. Even her lips were drained.

  “How terrible!” she whispered. It was what any girl might have said, but he saw in her eyes and in the tightening of her body more than the commonplace words said.

  “It is very terrible,” he said gravely. He walked quickly to the door, leaving her standing in the middle of the room staring after him, taking in what he had said. Then in the hall he heard the door flung open and she caught his arm.

  “Father, could I come in and speak to his mother?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  So she came in with him. She was always shy, this Jill, and yet when they entered the room where Elise sat, she snatched the picture from William’s hand and gave it to Elise herself.

  “Oh, I’m so—sorry!” she said impetuously. She had a beautiful deep voice and William had never heard it so beautiful. She sank down beside Elise and took her hand. “I feel I know him. I did know him. I’ve looked at his picture every day. I wanted to know him. Now I never can.” She looked at Elise piteously, uncertain of her understanding, and Elise looked back, and then as though they had known each other, the two put their arms about each other and wept together.

  And William, amazed and confounded, left the room very quietly and went back to the library and sat there alone, to ponder upon the meaning of Elise in this house.

  In the sitting room Elise drew a little away from Jill, but only far enough that she might see this girl who was weeping because Don was dead.

  “Are you William’s daughter?”

  “Yes, I’m Jill.”

  “You cry as though you had known my son.”

  “I feel as if I had.” Jill searched the tired, dark face. This was his mother! “I had the strangest feeling when I found his picture in the drawer. I knew him. I had seen him. At first I wondered if it could be a picture of my father when he was young.”

  “Did you see that he looked like William? Oh, no one ever saw that but me! I never dared tell anyone!”

  “I saw it. Then I knew it wasn’t my father but someone else. And I took the picture, thinking I’d find out. I’ve kept it ever since, and looked at it”—she laughed in sheer excitement, without mirth—“almost as though I were in love with him.”

  They looked at each other, trembling in the knowledge of what might have been. Then Jill whispered, “I couldn’t have said that if he’d been alive.”

  “I know.”

  The strangest sweetest sense of certainty filled the two of them. Hand held fast to hand.

  Elise spoke. “It’s the first thing I’ve had to comfort me. I shall want to tell you everything about him, from the moment he was born. I want us to be together—you and me. Do you think your father would let you come away with me?”

  “He would. I don’t know about Mother.”

  “I forgot her.”

  Their hands loosened a little, then Elise clutched Jill’s hand again.

  “Try, dear! For my sake! I’ve been so sad. And I have nobody.”

  “I will,” Jill promised. Her wandering, warm heart that longed to love someone with all its strength fluttered about this woman like a hovering bird near shelter. “I want to be with you,” she said. “Maybe it’s where I belong.”

  “No,” Ruth said.

  Elise was gone. Up in the attic Ruth had stood at a gable window watching the tall veiled figure get into the car. William helped her in, though a man dressed in a sort of uniform, not a soldier, was there to do it. But Jill was there, too. What was Jill doing there and why should the woman bend over the side of the car and take Jill’s face in her hands and kiss her? Ruth felt a queer jealousy. A strange woman had no business to kiss one of her children!

  She came downstairs, her face calm and her heart cold at the surface and hot inside. She met William and Jill in the front hall.

  “Where have you been?” William asked. “I wanted you to meet Elise. But when I turned around you had gone.”

  “I went to clean the attic,” Ruth said. “I hadn’t time to stay downstairs. Jill, the strawberries are put down to sugar. You can make the jam for me this afternoon. Be sure you don’t let it burn. Wild strawberries can’t stand a scorch.”

  “All right, Mother.” But she looked at William
as though she wanted something. William looked back at her.

  “What is it, you two?” Ruth asked sharply.

  “Mother, could I go to visit that lady?” Jill asked the question quickly as though she were afraid to ask it.

  “She’s a stranger,” Ruth said.

  “No, she’s not,” William said. “She’s an old friend, Ruth. I used to know her quite well. She wants Jill to come and stay with her a while.”

  “No,” Ruth said, “no.”

  She had not meant to speak so flatly, but the word flew out of her mouth from somewhere deep in her.

  “Oh, Mother,” Jill cried.

  “Wait, Jill,” William commanded. “Let me explain things to your mother.”

  They stood there the three of them in a second’s silence. Then Ruth spoke to Jill. “You go and get that jam started.”

  “All right, Mother.”

  There were the two of them left. William looked down into Ruth’s eyes, those blue eyes that he had never seen hostile. But they were hostile now.

  “Come, my darling,” he said. He put his arm lightly about her body, marveling at its resistance as, without a word, she obeyed him and came with him into the library. He shut the door behind them. “Now,” he said.

  She stood in the middle of the floor, a woman defiant. Her bright chestnut hair, with its two white wings above her eyebrows, her strong, bare neck, her smooth, rosy face, her whole bold, resilient figure, he saw her entire and his heart leaped in admiration of her as she was. He knew her limitations now. There was nothing about her he did not know, her ignorance and her wisdom, her prejudices and her illimitable generosities, her health of blood and mind, and above all for him still, her robust and undying beauty.

  “What do you want to ask me first?” he said quietly.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I don’t ask anything.”

  He was too surprised to know what to do except question her. “Why, Ruth?”

  “Long ago I said to myself that I would never ask you anything beyond what had to do with me.” Her eyes, unfaltering, were as clear as day. “I knew when you first came in this house that you came from a world I didn’t know—couldn’t, because I don’t belong to it. Maybe some day, I used to think, you’d want to go back to it. Well, if you did, I wouldn’t hold you back. That’s what first I said. Now I know—after we’ve been together so long—I’ll do my level best to hold you back anyhow I can. If I let Jill go—it’ll be partly letting you go. I can’t.”