Portrait of a Marriage

by Pearl S. Buck

  “To live in America, far from the enemy—it is not a bad fate, that,” she said.

  “Not too bad, certainly,” Monsieur Albe agreed.

  They trudged home through strangely silent streets. Assuredly today the war news was bad. It was as well that the two girls could not hear it.

  William, in a big chair under the sycamore, read the letter again. Hal’s daughters were being sent to him, Germaine and Angèle. Hal was dead, with his wife. He had known it for nearly two hours, but he had not called Ruth. She had come to the kitchen door now and then, and he had pretended to be asleep, the letter in his hand. When she came to tell him dinner was ready, he could no longer put off telling her what was in the letter. Two young girls in the house, French, speaking only French, probably! Everything said to them, he must say. He must help them in every way he could, for he was responsible for their being. If he had not walked down the path, past this very tree, one summery day very like this one, all those years ago, none of this would have happened. Hal would have come home as Joel did, doubtless, and these little girls would have been born here.

  “Germaine and Angèle!” he murmured, his eyes closed in one of the moments of sleep that fell on him these days.

  “Are they all right?” Ruth’s voice, coming unexpectedly, startled him. He opened his eyes and saw her standing before him, her brown and red face full of health beneath her white hair. “Dinner’s ready,” she said. “Any news of Hal?” she said, glancing at the letter.

  He debated whether to tell her now or after dinner. But how could he eat? And when he did not she fretted.

  “This letter,” he said slowly, picking up the thin lined sheet, “has bad news in it.”

  He looked at her. Her face took on the firmness habitual to her when she made herself ready for a task.

  “What’s happened to Hal?”

  “A terrible, terrible accident, dear.”

  She sat down quickly on the garden bench. “You might just as well tell me, William.”

  So he told her, translating sentence by sentence the anguished French words. Then he folded the letter and put it in his pocket, and looking at her saw for the first time that she had become an old woman. He leaned over the arm of his chair and took her hand in his and held it, trying as he did so to control the slight palsy of his own hand.

  “My dear!” he said.

  But she said nothing. She sat in the absolute stillness of the animal wounded, staring across the valley and the river that lay a broad bright band along it. He thought, half wondering, half abashed, how much less he felt Hal’s death than he had the death of Elise’s younger son, years ago in the first world war. World wars! There would be nothing but world wars from now on. The world had become a neighborhood, what with fast trains and automobiles and airplanes, and the innocent would be involved with the guilty. But if life had any meaning it was simply that the innocent were always involved with the guilty—God who sent rain on the just and unjust alike! Not that he believed in God at this late hour of his own life. He was able to contemplate his own death calmly enough as an incident too infinitesimal to be of importance, even to himself. Its persistence did not interest him. He thought a great deal about it, however, and if he were given the choice afterward he was inclined to think he would choose eternal sleep. “I’ve had a long good life,” he thought. “There’s no use in having it all over again.”

  But Hal was another matter. Hal had been cut off in midlife, without knowing old age. William considered the value of these last fifteen years. No, he would not have missed them. They were as valuable as childhood, and he had enjoyed them far more than his childhood. Childhood had been insecure and bewildering. He had not known then from day to day what life might thrust upon him. But in old age life could play him no more tricks. He knew all about life, and death was no terror because it was simply an end. Yes, he would choose it to be an end.

  “What’ll we do with those girls?” Ruth asked. Her voice was so sudden that he jumped. His mind, always busy in the distances of eternity, came back to earth.

  “Why, they’re ours and I suppose we’ll have to keep them.” He had forgotten Hal again, but now he had to remember again these two young French girls who would be able to speak to no one in this house except him.

  “I shan’t ever feel they’re ours,” Ruth said definitely.

  “Oh, but—Ruth!” He was distressed at the thought of the two children, bereaved of all they knew, coming here to such a Ruth. “Dear, they’re Hal’s children.”

  “I can’t feel them,” she said.

  He pondered this slowly, his distress deepening. Mary’s house was full, and besides, to whom could they speak in Mary’s house? And he was so old. Even if they came here, how could he look after them? He had never been good with children. And, yet, he thought in sudden clarity, why should he blame Ruth? He was thinking of Germaine and Angèle not as Hal’s children nor his own grandchildren, but as two lonely French girls alien in an American farmhouse. Ruth would never understand them. But he had been in Paris.

  His mind wandered peacefully away from the children back to the Paris he had known fifty years ago. He saw it so clearly, the bright streets, the gay people, talking, laughing, eating in the sunshine, the pigeons with their rainbow breasts. Paris was full of pigeons.

  “I won’t have them here,” Ruth said.

  His mind raced back into his body. “What shall we do with them?” he asked, bewildered.

  “I don’t know.” Her voice was somber with angry grief. “Hal ought never to have stayed there in that foreign place. He ought to have come home. Then none of this would have happened. People ought to stay where they belong.”

  He laughed silently. “You’re a nice one to talk,” he said.

  “Where would I be if I’d stayed where my mother said I belonged?”

  But she refused to smile. “That’s different,” she said.

  He meditated contradicting this, and decided against it. He did not often feel strong enough to contradict her. He began instead to think quite clearly what could be done if he accepted what she said. His mind had moments of surprising agility, and one of these came to him now.

  “Jill can help. She’s been to Paris a dozen times.”

  “What would Jill do with children?” Ruth asked. But relief was in her voice.

  “I have an idea she might enjoy them. She hasn’t anything of her own.”

  He did not want to discuss Jill too much, because he and Ruth saw her so differently. The distance between Ruth and this second daughter had grown greater and greater as the years passed. But to him Jill had grown very near. She had become a part of the world that he used to know. He talked with her as now he talked to no one. And Jill had plenty of money. When his mother died ten years ago, a very old woman, she had left all her money to Jill.

  “I don’t think she could remember who I was,” Jill told him when she came back from the funeral. “I mean, she always forgot I was your daughter. Somehow she thought I was Aunt Louise’s child. She used to say to me, ‘Your mother—’ and she always meant Aunt Louise.”

  “I suppose she forgot me long ago,” he had said rather sadly.

  “I don’t think she had forgotten so much as she wanted to think she had,” Jill said. “She was a vain old thing. Partly she left me her money because I was a success.”

  “Ah, well,” he had said, “I don’t want it.” No, he wanted nothing but what he had chosen to have.

  “I’ll write to Jill,” he said drowsily. The sunshine always made him drowsy.

  But he was not quite easy until he heard from Jill. Her large, square envelope reached him on the day the children’s ship was due. “Of course, dear—of course, of course!” That was the burden of the letter. But not for Hal’s sake, he saw that. Jill was taking them because they were French war orphans. Her handwriting was illegible. “Poor children! Oh, this war! It is the least I can do. I can’t go abroad. My doctor won’t hear to it. But I can do this. I’ll meet th
em myself—don’t worry, my dear.”

  … Germaine and Angèle, tightly hand in hand and terrified lest there be no one to meet them, stood waiting upon the ship’s deck.

  “I knew them at once,” Jill wrote him. “Two tragic thin young things in black, waiting to see if anyone wanted them. I put my arms around them. They have nothing but black frocks. I am going to buy them everything new, from hat to heels.”

  He read this letter to Ruth one night in the kitchen. They sat there by the stove instead of in the library now, partly because it was easier in the brief interval between supper and bed, partly because she was happier in the kitchen. And in a way so was he. Here in this smoke-browned room he had first seen her for what she was, all woman.

  “I think Hal’s two girls are cared for,” he said.

  “Children have to look after each other,” she said. “There comes a time when the old ones can’t.” They sat side by side on the old settle by the stove, and soon he began to nod. The room was so still.

  “Come to bed,” she said. And he rose at the sound of her voice and followed her.

  But by midnight he was awake again, as wide awake as though it were dawn. He had fretted once against this nightly wakefulness, thinking something was wrong with him, until hearing him complain one day Ruth had said placidly, “I reckon you’re just gettin’ old, William. I never saw an old person yet that didn’t go back to being a kind of baby, sleepin’ in the daytime and layin’ awake at night.”

  He had complained no more after that. Yes, he was getting old, and he lay patiently awake in the great double four-poster bed. A hundred years ago this bed had been brought into the room and never moved again. He had come into this house and found here his place to sleep. He ought to be glad he slept very little now. There was so much for the old to think about and so little time left in which to think.

  Around him the night was wonderfully soft and deep. Long ago he had learned to love the country night. It had been one of his many compensations. He heard Ruth breathing gently in her sleep at his side. She slept as peacefully as she had when she was a girl. All the processes of her being were full of health. She was sound and ripe, not old as he was old. Why did he think of compensations when he had had so rich a life? He remembered her as she had been on their first night together. The memory of that passion was only sweetness, now that passion had passed from them both. They did not need it any more. Their flesh had long since been made one. If his spirit was still solitary, it was his fault, not hers. He understood so well that her flashes of temper, her irritations with him which had grown during the years until sometimes they made him, momentarily, really unhappy, were because their spirits had remained separate while their bodies were one. He felt humbly that this was his fault, because Ruth had put her whole being into their marriage. But there had been that part of him which she had not needed, and so it had been left in him, unused. It went winging out of him now through the night.

  All the world for him to wander in was outside this quiet house. He lay dreaming not of anyone he knew but of things he had never seen, or seen but once when he was very young, and now would never see, people, places, pictures, friends he had never had, companionships he had not found. But there was no pain in any of this. Once in his strong middle age there had been. He had groaned then under the bondage of Ruth’s need of him, though it had been full of a suffering sweetness, too. When her need passed, it was too late. For now he had needed her more than ever she had him, and now he was utterly dependent upon her.

  He brought his wandering spirit home to her again and felt the comfort of her presence. She was so strong, she loved him, and it was long since too late for anything except their love. Their love had been the reality of his youth.

  “I couldn’t paint, that year in New York,” he thought in one of his flashes of clearest memory. “And I couldn’t have painted if I had left her during the years that Hal was lost.” He pondered on, “I should have been racked with her misery if I had not been here to comfort her. She needed me then—or Jill would have suffered.”

  And now what had he but this tender, clinging love of his for her, and her strong love for him? Even if he often made her angry, he knew it was because she loved him. She had taken him into her being and he could disturb her as no one else could because he was in her being and yet not wholly hers, however much he tried to be and longed to be. He wanted in nothing any more to be alien to her, for there was a comfort in their love now vaster than life itself. He moved a little and felt a piercing pain, and for a second was frightened.

  “Ruth!” he whispered. He did not want to waken her, but if he needed her he must. He could never go through a bout of his pain alone. But the pain did not return. He waited, but still he was free of it.

  “I can sleep,” he thought gratefully. But he was a little cold. He turned and curved his body against the warmth of Ruth’s body and put his arm about her. They had slept thus so many years that she did not wake. They had slept thus so long together that almost instantly he fell asleep.

  When she woke, his arm was fast and hard about her. She could not move from his clutch.

  “William!” she cried to waken him. But he did not waken.

  “William!” she screamed.

  She forced his arm away, then, strong with sudden terror. “William, William—William!”

  She flung him on his back, and he lay there before her, his face full of peace, unanswering, dead.

  “Oh,” she moaned. “Oh, my dear!”

  She leaped out of bed and ran to telephone the doctor. But it was no use, of course.

  “It’s happened just as you said it would,” she gasped over the telephone. “He’s gone from me, in his sleep.”

  “I’ll be right over, Mrs. Barton,” the doctor said. “Don’t bother about anything—just rest.”

  But she was not able to rest. She must tend William. There must be something to be done for him. He must be made neat and his hair brushed and the bed straightened.

  She fetched water in a basin and put it on a chair by the bed, and sobbing all the time, she washed his hands and face as she had done every morning when she got up.

  “Oh, my dear,” she moaned. “Did you call me and I didn’t hear? I’m such a wicked sound sleeper. Oh, William, William!”

  She hung over him, knowing it their last hour together alone. Once the doctor came, once they—they began—She laid her head down upon his breast.

  “I wisht I hadn’t been so cross with you a many times,” she murmured. “I wisht it now, something terrible! Oh, to think we couldn’t see our golden wedding day, William—William!”

  … They took him away in such a cruel little while. She stood watching as they lifted the tall figure from the bed. Other people had dressed him while she put on her own clothes.

  “Go into the kitchen, Mother,” Mary said. “There’s nothing more you can do for him.” Both the girls had come at once. Jill brought the two little girls, but Ruth scarcely looked at them.

  “My life’s over,” she thought. “I’ve lost him.”

  She had tried to prepare herself for this moment ever since she knew it must come, but she was not prepared. Nothing could really prepare her for the end of all that for which she had worked and lived. She could not remember what it had been like in this house before William came that day to dinner, nor could she imagine what it would be like now.

  “I can remember exactly how he looked that first day in this very room,” she thought, looking around the kitchen. She sat down, gazing at the walls, the furniture. She had loved him the moment she saw him. She loved him now.

  “Though why I’ve been so crotchety cross with him lately I don’t know and can’t think,” she said to herself. Tears gathered in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. “I wasn’t good enough for him,” she thought, “I was never good enough for him and all along I knew I wasn’t.”

  This was her grief. She had kept it down all her life but now it rose up, now that William was
gone.

  “He was better’n me. He wasn’t even cross with me, ever,” she thought wretchedly. “Oh, William, I wisht you had been, sometimes!”

  Mary came in and found her sobbing aloud. She put her arms about the old woman.

  “Now Mother, don’t,” she said. “It had to come, Mom. We knew it had to come and it came so easy, in his sleep.”

  Ruth shook her head. “I ain’t cryin’ just for that,” she said. But she could not explain to a child what had been between her and William. So she wiped her eyes. “I guess I better get myself cleaned up,” she said.

  “Yes, folks’ll be coming,” Mary said.

  Young Henry came in, pencil and paper in his hand. “Grandmom, there’s a reporter here from the county paper. He wants some information about Grandfather. They’ve got the—the obituary but they aren’t quite sure about his family. Wasn’t his father the Harold Barton who had the big railroad company?”

  “Yes, he was,” Ruth said. “But you tell that man to wait. I’ll come and give him the straight of it all myself. I want it right.”

  She hurried upstairs and washed herself and put on her best black dress and came down to the parlor where the young man was. Jill was there, too. She had never seen her mother so handsome, she thought. Ruth entered the room with a plain dignity.

  The young man rose. “You are Mrs. William Barton?” he asked.

  “I am,” Ruth replied. Yes, she was that. She would always be Mrs. William Barton.

  … She went through three days in a stately dream. Again and again the doorbell rang and she always answered it herself. Her children let her, and her neighbors, too, who had come in to help, when they saw it was a comfort to her.

  “Mrs. William Barton?”

  “I am Mrs. William Barton,” she said proudly.

  There was a wreath of white flowers, or a telegram, or a little group of school children, or a stammering, halting man.

  “I used to see Mr. Barton, ma’am,” one said, “used to fit his shoes. I thought maybe—”