Pearl Buck - Angry Wife

“I wouldn’t marry a Yankee, Papa,” Sally declared.

“Of course not,” Pierce agreed. He looked at Georgia again and his smile faded. He remembered the evening that lay ahead. He did not want to tell her what he had said to Bettina. What if she asked? He decided to go downstairs.

“Goodnight, Sally, honey. Sapphires bring happiness — they brought me you.”

He kissed her and went back to the drawing room where Lucinda sat by a lamp crocheting a cobweb of lace.

“Tom is coming in to talk to me,” he told her abruptly.

“Where has he been all day?” Lucinda asked. “He’s usually here for dinner, at least.”

“We had a little set-to this morning,” Pierce replied. Tonight I’m going to have it out with him in the library.”

“I shall stay here, unless you want me,” Lucinda replied calmly.

“I think Tom and I had better be alone,” he replied.

“But you might ask Marcus to bring in some sherry and a couple of glasses. I’ll make Tom drink in spite of himself.”

He moved away lazily out of profound unwillingness and crossed the hall into the library. A few minutes later Marcus came in with a silver tray and the wine.

“When Tom comes, bring him straight in here,” Pierce ordered.

“Yassuh,” the old butler murmured.

He was about to leave the room when Pierce stopped him. Marcus had been in this house when he and Tom were born. His father had bought him in New Orleans, the year before, a young and slender man, trained in a famous plantation household that had been dispersed on the death of the master. Who knew Tom and himself so well as old Marcus?

“Marcus!” he called.

The man stood waiting, his hands hanging at his sides. “Yassuh?”

“Marcus, what do people say about my brother — and Bettina?”

Marcus let his underlip hang. “I don’t listen to talk, Mas’ Pierce.”

“They do talk?”

“Some folks always talk.”

“And others listen?”

“Some folks always got their y’ears stickin’ out like umbrellas.”

“Tom ought to marry—”

“Yassuh.”

“Do you think Bettina — will — would — go away—?” He could not go on.

“I don’t know these yere young folks nowadays, sir,” Marcus said sadly. “But one thing I does believe in and it’s stickin’ to your own kind. I believe in lettin’ othah folks alone, man and woman, and lookin’ for your own skin coloh. Yassuh, then they’s no trouble, high or low.”

“You’re right, Marcus.”

“Yassuh.” The old man went out and Pierce poured himself wine. Black folk didn’t like mixture any better than white folk. He was not going to be easy with Tom, “so help me God,” he muttered to himself. He lifted his glass and across the golden rim of the wine he saw his brother at the door, and put it down again.

“Come in, Tom,” he said drily.

Tom came in, very tall and inclined to lounge. He sat down in one of the old leather chairs and slid to the small of his back. All afternoon in the school he had worked intensely, but not for one moment had he forgotten that this hour loomed ahead of him. He had passed through various moods, mingled and complex, wherein one emotion and then another rose above the others. Fear and love of his older brother, distaste for Lucinda, anger at himself for having let the years slip by without doing anything definite about Bettina, remorse for the three children — and underneath, a growing determination to be himself and do what he liked. What that was he did not actually know. When he thought of leaving Malvern and his brother he was torn in two. He did not want to live anywhere but here. He groaned aloud that he could not bring his children into this house where he had been born. Leslie was as brilliant as John and more beautiful, but he could never cross the threshold of this door except as a servant. Nothing that he could do for his son would change his inexorable destiny. He had fought to make such children free but they were not free, and for him the war was lost. The victors had been vanquished by the stubbornness of the persisting enemy. There was no victory and no peace because the hearts of men and women had not changed. Futile war and futile suffering and death!

“Sherry?” Pierce asked.

“Thanks,” Tom said. He reached out his narrow white hand and took the glass by its thin stem and sipped the wine. He never drank, because Bettina hated the smell of it. Somewhere in her childhood her father had drunk increasingly of wine until he had stupefied his conscience. But tonight he would drink. He felt his nerves as tight as violin strings inside his body. The wine would relax him and help him to listen to Pierce reasonably and then to answer without passion. Above everything he did not want to quarrel with the brother he loved. He raised his eyes to Pierce’s face and waited for him to begin.

Meeting those troubled grey eyes, Pierce saw in a flicker of memory the brother whom he had protected and fought for through years of their common boyhood. He had been the favorite son of his father and Tom had always been the one wrong in any quarrel. The old instinct rose in him.

“I want to get you out of this trouble, Tom,” he said in his kindliest voice. “Let’s talk about it sensibly. I reckon Bettina told you about this morning.”

“She didn’t tell me anything,” Tom said calmly. “But after you went she cried a bit. That’s unusual for her.”

“I did wrong to go to her,” Pierce said honestly. “I don’t know what made me do it — something on the spur of the moment. Well, I should have waited to talk with you.” He paused and then went on with effort. “I suppose men never like to mess around in affairs like this. Of course I’ve known all these years that you and Bettina have — stayed together. Well, you and I had that out when it first began and I haven’t wanted to — speak again. But now Lucinda feels …”

“I thought it was Lucinda,” Tom said, and was instantly angry.

Pierce shot up his black eyebrows. “Lucinda naturally thinks further ahead for the children than I do,” he said. He was putting the restraint of patience upon himself, and Tom’s heart melted again. Pierce was so good!

“Forgive me, Pierce,” he said.

“Granted,” Pierce replied a little heavily. He tried to go on with what he was saying, but now Lucinda was clearly between them. He felt he must defend her. “I think Lucinda is right, Tom, and I must say so. When the children were little, it didn’t matter so much to the family. But now it’s different. John worships you, and I live in dread of his questions. It would be easy enough for me to explain it in a man-to-man fashion — he’s got to understand such things some day — but what I can’t explain is that this affair goes on and on, and that there are children in that house right on the road.”

Tom’s anger suddenly burst, white hot. “It is easy to explain — you can just tell him that Bettina and I love one another and that the children are ours as he is yours and his mother’s.”

“Tom, don’t be a fool — you know I can’t just say that—” Pierce’s voice was a groan.

“But it’s so,” Tom insisted.

“It isn’t really so,” Pierce retorted. “You can’t just act like Bettina was — was—”

“I can and do act as though Bettina were white,” Tom said, with fury so vast that his voice was low and cold. “That is what you have to understand, Pierce — I feel to Bettina as my wife. I will take no other.” Thus he declared himself. His anger, rising out of old rebellion in this house, crystallized his love and clarified his conscience.

Pierce rose half out of his chair, “Tom, do you mean to say that you will not marry a decent woman that we can be proud of as part of the family?”