Portrait of a Marriage

by Pearl S. Buck

  “Well!” he said, panting. “So you’re here, too, today!”

  “Yes, Grandfather,” Richard said. He came leaping up through the grass.

  William gasped a moment. “Can I carry your paintbox, Grandfather?” Richard asked eagerly.

  “If you’re careful,” William said, and would not acknowledge that he was glad to give it up. Then he was struck with a suspicion of Ruth.

  “Did anybody send you after me?” he asked.

  “Nobody did,” Richard answered. He slipped his hand into his grandfather’s. “I was playing in the orchard and I saw you and came by myself.”

  “If anybody had sent you, I’d have told you to go home again,” William said. But he was glad the boy was here because to his alarm he could not see clearly. The boy’s face was blurred.

  “What are you going to do, Grandfather?” Richard asked.

  “Climb—to the top of the hill,” William, replied. He would, too, though he knew now he ought not to go on. Lightnings of pain were darting about his heart.

  “I have a nest up there,” Richard said eagerly. “Will I show it to you?”

  “Shall I—shall I,” William grumbled. “Learn to speak your words properly, child.”

  “Shall I,” Richard repeated. “Shall I, Grandfather?”

  “You come up here often, do you?” William asked.

  “Every day, just about, but I didn’t know you did,” the boy-replied.

  “I used to every day, too,” William said. He felt very badly, indeed, but if he did not go on now he never would reach the top again. He gathered all his strength together. “Come on,” he said, “let’s finish the last bit. I’ll lean on your shoulder, and you can help me up.”

  “All right, Grandfather,” Richard said.

  They went up, step by step. The child was proud of his responsibility, and tried to temper his energy to the slow old steps. Under his hand William felt the slender body, restrained, but springing ahead in spite of the child’s will to subdue it.

  “Steady, Rick,” he muttered. “Steady’s the only way I’ll get to the end now.”

  Ruth paused in her dusting to go to the door. The postman was there.

  “There’s a letter for you—from Hal,” he said. “I brought it up. He don’t write so often now, does he? Hope there’s nothing wrong.”

  “There wasn’t, last we heard,” she replied calmly.

  “Queer he don’t come back from that foreign place,” the postman went on.

  “He’s a wanderer,” Ruth said. She would not open the letter as long as he waited.

  “Ran away first when he was a kid, didn’t he?” the postman said, laughing.

  “Yes, he did,” Ruth said. Against her wish not to talk she could not keep from saying proudly, “—and managed somehow to keep alive and going for years and came home looking as fat and healthy as you please, and he’d been clear out to the west coast and even to Alaska.”

  “Hal’s smart that way,” the postman agreed. “Well, it’s sort of too bad he can’t help you folks out a little now with the farm. Mr. Barton don’t feel so good these days, does he?”

  “He’s frail,” Ruth said. “It’s his heart. He eats and sleeps real good, too.”

  “People with heart trouble don’t have energy,” the postman said. “Does Hal know?” he asked solemnly. “You’d ought to tell him, Mrs. Barton. Maybe he’d come home.”

  “Mr. Barton never wants I should tell the children about him,” she said. “He doesn’t want them to think he’s got any claim on ’em.”

  “Yeah?” the postman said. “Well, so long, Mrs. Barton, I guess I got to be goin’ on.”

  She sat down the moment he had gone to read Hal’s letter. It was from Paris, France. He was still living there with his wife, and the two little girls, Germaine and Angèle. He wrote seldom, only at Christmas or Fourth of July or some special day. This was written on Mother’s Day, he said. He enclosed two small square snapshots of the girls, thin, timid young creatures in ribbons and ruffles. Ruth examined them, the one after the other, without any feeling that they were even alive. She could not pronounce their names and had never tried to do it. Mimi’s regular monthly letters she never answered. What was the use when Mimi could not read English? They were addressed to William and he read them and told her what was in them and then he answered them.

  She thought sometimes with bitterness that it was William’s blood in Hal that kept him restless and never willing to come home. Even now when William was old and half sick he was restless. Climbing that hill now! Though goodness knows she had done everything to make his life easy! “William’s had an awful easy life,” she muttered to herself.

  She took up Hal’s letter and unfolded it and began to read it carefully.

  Dear Mom:

  Well, I sure am having one swell time. I gave up the taxi business and am chauffeur for an American big shot. We drove all over England then drove through Belgium France Switzerland Italy. This is Spain. It didn’t make me feel too good to see the old battlefields and the cemeteries full of white crosses when we went to find the bosses son that fell in action. I sure was lucky to get out of it alive. There’s lots of talk over here now about a new war but I guess this time it wont get me. I had enough last time and wont go Mom you don’t need to worry. I guess war is hooey anyway.

  Well, Mom, we are all swell. The kids are swell. Mimi is a swell wife and mother. Wish you could come over to see us. Maybe with this new job we’ll get over to the States sometime. Would like to see the old place again and everybody in it. Well so long Mom and look after yourselves,

  Hal.

  “Now that’s real good news and I’ll tell William,” she murmured half aloud. She went to the door and looked out. William was still toiling up the hill in the sunshine. He had Richard by the hand. Where’d the child come from?

  “William!” she cried. But her lifted voice could not reach him. “He’s so foolish,” she thought with anxious anger. “He’ll come back dead beat, and for something he didn’t need to do.” She sighed and went back to her work. She had better get her work out of the way. He’d have to be taken care of as soon as he got home, like as not.

  “Don’t be so cross with me, Ruth,” he begged her faintly. He was in such physical distress that the added weight of her harsh, angry, frightened love was almost enough to send him over the edge that was always near him now, beyond which was darkness.

  “I’m not cross,” she retorted. “I’m just sayin’, William, that if you’d only listen to me—”

  “I do listen to you,” he whispered. “I have always listened to you.”

  “Well, I certainly told you not to try to climb that hill,” she retorted, “and carryin’ that paintbox too!”

  He did not answer. He closed his eyes and braced himself for the new attack upon him of the strong fresh pain. He must remember what the doctor told him, that he would probably not die in pain. Death would come stealing upon him in the night when he was asleep. He would simply not wake. That was his comfort.

  Ah, here was the agony! He groaned out of the depths of his being, a groan that was a retch from his soul.

  “Here, hold to me,” Ruth commanded him. She took his hands in the way that long experience together had taught them helped him most, and he clutched her hands. Sweat broke from his palms but her hands did not slip. The crest of pain passed.

  “You’re strong—as ever—” he gasped.

  “I have to be,” she retorted.

  But she was kind in her passionate way. She knew the habit of his pain. At just the right moment she gave him the tablets, at just the right moment she moved his arms and legs so that he could feel his body alive, and rubbed his flesh and then gave him a little hot milk and covered him against the inevitable chill that came over him when the pain was gone.

  “Now you go to sleep,” she said more gently than she had yet spoken. This attack had been worse than usual, she thought. “Maybe someday you’ll believe your old wi
fe,” she said with scolding tenderness. She bent and kissed his ash-white cheek, and felt the tears come suddenly to her eyes. She loved him still, though he made her so angry and though she thought sometimes she had never been really happy with him, after all. He seemed so gentle but at bottom he was stubborn. It didn’t matter what most men did around a place, he would never do anything. He wouldn’t even drive a nail or mend a shutter that the wind blew loose. She had had to do everything. Once she had wanted him to learn to milk the cows. But he had refused.

  “I couldn’t do it,” was all he said.

  “Somebody has to,” she had retorted.

  “I’m very sorry.” It was all he ever said when he refused her anything. He was sorry, too, she knew, but he never seemed to think he could not help being as he was. And she had learned to manage without his help because she loved him, always with that deep uneasiness that perhaps her love was not enough for him. But it was all she had.

  He opened his shadowy eyes, as though she had spoken her love.

  “You could let me die, if I’m too much trouble,” he said with faint mischief. It was good to know himself alive again. He died in every bout of pain, no matter what the doctor said. Death was toying with him, keeping him alive for its pleasure. He might fool death and die, if Ruth would let him. But her hands, holding his, still would not let him loose.

  “You’re plenty of trouble,” Ruth retorted. “But you’re all I’ve got and I’ll have to put up with you.”

  He smiled, knowing this was her way of love.

  “Now you go right to sleep,” she said sharply.

  “I can’t,” he said apologetically. He never could sleep at once. “Turn on a little music, Ruth.”

  “You’d ought—”

  “Oh, please!” he whispered.

  So she turned the dial of the radio he kept by the bed. Out of the air there came a voice booming into the room, “War between England and Germany was declared today. The French armies are massing themselves behind the Maginot Line—”

  “War again!” he whispered, aghast. He had been expecting it for days, knowing it must come, but forgetting it as he forgot so much now, for hours at a time. Now it was here again, this supreme folly of the human race, ready to take boys like young Henry!

  “Oh, God—” he moaned, and fainted with new pain.

  … No one in France would say he believed that Paris would be bombed seriously. In the last war, of course, but there was the Maginot Line now. Nevertheless, Mimi, fifteen years old on the day when bombs were dropped over Paris and she and all the other girls rushed into the convent chapel with the nuns to pray until it was over, was not entirely easy this bright September morning in the clean little flat which was her pride and occupation.

  She hid this uneasiness, however, from Hal, who was home for a two days’ leave. She believed that women should keep men happy, and devoted herself to her husband when he was home, reserving her tempers, her attacks of nerves, and her explosions of anxiety until she was alone with her daughters. Hal looked robust and cheerful as a consequence, but Germaine and Angèle were pale and weary-looking young girls with apprehensive grey eyes. Neither of them was pretty, to Mimi’s not too secret woe, and she tried to atone for this by making their clothes very chic. Since she spent a great deal of time on these garments, she was easily angry if they were soiled or torn, and the two girls guarded themselves continually lest they make their mother angry. In consequence they moved about as little as possible.

  A plane soared over the city as the family sat at their breakfast near a sunny window. Mimi’s heart jumped. Now that Germans were actually attacking France, she could never hear a plane again and not feel her heart jump. But she would not allow herself to get up and see. Instead she spoke sharply to Germaine.

  “Take care how you eat that honey, or it will spill upon your front.”

  The girl stopped at her mother’s voice and the honey dripped from the spoon upon the tablecloth.

  “Oh, heaven,” Mimi moaned, “I knew when I allowed honey!” She dashed for a cloth, and sidewise she glanced from the window. Thank God, it was a French plane! But she felt intolerably restless. Was this a premonition? She wanted to get out of the house, out into the open where she could see what was coming. She hurried back to the table, her dark face tense. She scrubbed at the cloth. “I knew if I said honey—”

  “Be quiet,” Hal said. “What does it matter?”

  He spoke a simple, rough French that somehow served his needs. He gave a bit of his bacon to Germaine. He had eggs and bacon for breakfast, but Mimi and the girls had only their milky coffee and rolls. The honey was a treat because he was at home. The girl smiled through her tear-filled eyes, and took the bacon on her plate. Then she looked at her mother.

  “May I eat it, Maman?”

  “Certainly, since your papa so generously gives it,” Mimi said sternly. She sat down again. “’Al!” She could never pronounce his name otherwise.

  “Eh?” He scraped his egg from his plate without looking up.

  “Let us celebrate by a picnic in the country today, instead of the theater.”

  “I’ve seen country day after day,” he objected.

  “Ah, yes, but we have not! And it is still so hot today, is it not? The air—it is like the inside of a trunk! Think of the country, and a little stream where we can wade, and picking flowers! And the sky above us—so clear!”

  He looked at the children. “What do you say, infants?”

  They looked at their mother.

  “Picnic,” Angèle whispered.

  “Then,” Hal said, “picnic it is.” He dipped up a spoonful of honey. “That’s to make a sweet finish,” he said, and licked the spoon.

  … Who could have foretold that day? The hours of the morning passed so quickly, so happily. The stifling about Mimi’s heart eased. She forgot for a little while the deep memories of German planes diving over the city, over the convent chapel, forgot the frantic prayers to God who lived above the sky full of evil. The lovely summer day moved on, so gentle, so tranquil. They ate their lunch under a tree and afterwards she slept a little, and then they waded in the brook together, and Hal had just slipped upon a wet smooth stone and had fallen. She screamed with laughter, it was so amusing, his rueful round face.

  “What the heck,” he shouted, he who always returned to English when he was disturbed!

  “’Eck—what is it?” she had just cried, still laughing, when out of the sky something dived down, black as an angry bird. Oh, she had heard airplanes roaring high above them all day, now and again, but so high and so she had not looked. She would not look.

  Now she looked and her laughter froze. Above her was the swastika, black against silver and blue.

  “Oh, my ’Al!” she screamed. “They come again!”

  That was all. That was the end of her life and Hal’s. The two young girls who had run like partridges escaped by a few yards the volcano of water and earth. Barefooted, hand in hand, they stood motionless while the young man in the sky, who had stopped for an idle moment to spoil a little picnic, went darting on to his real business.

  Hand in hand in the terrible silence the girls stole to the edge of the crater to see if their parents were there, and saw what was flung into cruel dismemberment outward from the violence of its center. Speechless, they sat down and put on their stockings and shoes and tied them. The picnic basket was there unhurt, and so was their mother’s handbag. Angèle turned to Germaine.

  “Should we take back the things?”

  “Certainly,” Germaine said. “Maman wouldn’t like us to leave her things behind.”

  They picked up the basket and the bag and trudged to the bus line. In the purse was money and they bought their tickets back to Paris. The city was very quiet, very peaceful in the late afternoon. People were sober. The news from the front was grave, very grave. They sat outdoors, drinking and eating, to talk about how bad it was. No one paid particular heed to two pale, very neat young girls carryi
ng a basket between them.

  They returned therefore to their house, and only at the familiar door did it come to them all that had happened. They looked at one another.

  “Alas,” Germaine gasped, “we have no parents!”

  Angèle’s pale grey eyes widened and seeing the terror in her elder sister’s face, she began to cry loudly, as her mother had never let her cry. The concierge came waddling out.

  “What is it?” she cried. Then she saw who it was, the two well-behaved young daughters of the big American. “And now?” she asked, and stood as they sobbed out the impossible truth, the sweat pouring off her as she heard it.

  Obviously, she said to all the neighbors assembling to hear her crying and calling, obviously there was but one thing to do. The children had a rich grandfather. Their mother had said so continually. She wrote to him regularly, being a prudent woman. She boasted that his French was perfect, Parisian in fact. And obviously, therefore, the little girls must be sent straight to this rich old man, who would give them love and every luxury. The things in the flat, if sold, doubtless would provide enough for the tickets third class. Germaine, a big girl, could look after Angèle. The neighbors approving, the thing was to be done.

  Meanwhile, a letter of course must be sent, announcing the sad affair. Voluble French voices, contradicting and interrupting, settled the fate of the two listening girls, and crying out how fortunate they were to have a rich American grandfather, kind French people took care of the children until they could be sent. Madame d’Aubigne, who lived in the flat above them, took them in with her and dyed their frocks black, and Monsieur Albe undertook the sale of the furnishings. In less than a week all was ready and the two little girls were put on the train for Calais.

  “Do not forget us when you become rich Americans,” they said, pressing kisses and bonbons upon the black-frocked children. “Do not forget!” They were all at the station and saw them off, and Madame d’Aubigne sighed.