Pearl Buck - Angry Wife

“I mean I will never marry any other woman than Bettina. I’ve begged Bettina to marry me. She won’t — because of you and Lucinda. She knows how you feel, you two. She says our marriage would drag me down, out of this family where I was born. She won’t do it. God have mercy, she’s so good — she’s — she’d beg me to marry a white woman, I believe, if I would do it! Why, why she’s better than any woman in the world, and if this precious family of ours doesn’t know enough to know it — God help us all, what did we fight the war for? It’s worse now than it was before.” He was beside himself with pain. He got up out of his chair and thrusting his hands into his pockets he began to walk in distraction about the room.

Pierce stared at him. “Tom, what has come over you? You talk like a crazy man! Never in all my days have I heard such talk come from anybody: Why, the country would go to pieces if — if — why, damn you, Tom, I’ve a mind to shove you out of the house!” He got to his feet and clenched his fists.

“Pierce, I want to come in.” Lucinda stood at the door, a slender figure in her white poplin frock, her head held high. Both men turned at the sound of her voice. Tom sank into his chair, and Pierce turned to her.

“Come in, my dear—” He was glad for her help. He began to see that something very deep indeed separated him from Tom, something that went back into their childhood, that had sent them to opposite sides in the war, something perhaps that even Malvern could not heal. He did not want to lose his brother, and yet how could he keep him?

“I can’t help hearing what you two are saying when you talk so loudly,” Lucinda said in her cool high voice. She sat down and put her feet on a needlepoint footstool and crossed her hands on her lap. Oh her fingers were the diamond rings Pierce had given her when the two older boys were born and the sapphire brooch was on her breast. She turned her head with its piled blonde hair toward Tom. “Tom, I have never said anything to you. I don’t believe in inquiring into gentlemen’s affairs, but I do have to think of my children. Sally has already begun to ask questions and the niggras talk and she hears them, of course. I don’t intend to say anything now, either, but only to ask that whatever it is that is going on could be — put somewhere that it doesn’t show.”

Her manner, her appearance, were so pure and so impeccable that both men felt gross and uncomfortable. Lucinda was the good woman, protecting her children. Pierce who loved her felt himself humbled. But Tom did not love her.

“As long as there are women like you, Lucinda,” he drawled, restraining his fury, “there will be no justice on this earth. You will keep your foot on the neck of any woman who threatens your sacred position in the home.”

It was Lucinda who understood first what he meant. The quick red of her blonde coloring flowed up her slender white neck into her cheeks. “I certainly don’t feel myself threatened in my home by a niggra wench,” she said.

“Yes, you do,” Tom said, ruthlessly. “Why else do you care so much, you white women?”

“I don’t care—” she cried.

“You care,” he repeated, “because you’re afraid of losing your men and you keep the other women down under your feet, because if you don’t they’ll be your equals and they will invade your sacred homes and rival you and excel you because men love them and escape you.”

Lucinda screamed. “Tom, you stop — Pierce, make him stop that foul dirty talk—”

From sheer anger she began suddenly to cry and Tom clamped his jaws shut. “Sorry,” he said abruptly to Pierce. “I reckon that’s been shut up in me for a long time. I’d better go.”

Lucinda took the handkerchief from her eyes. “Yes, go!” she cried, “go and never come back!”

Tom rose. “Very well, madam—”

Pierce woke from his daze. “Now Tom — now Luce — look, we’re one family! Luce didn’t mean that, Tom.”

Lucinda stabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief. “Don’t call me Luce!” she sobbed.

“Lucinda doesn’t mean that, Tom,” Pierce began again. “Please, Tom, try to be reasonable. Try to see our side of it — the family side.”

He went over to Lucinda and took her right hand and held it. “Lucinda, honey, we’re going to fix things — don’t worry. Tom isn’t going to be unreasonable, honey—”

But Tom was walking to the door. He passed through it, and then paused in the hall. He lifted his head, and stood in one of those moments he knew so well, when the love and pain of living overwhelmed him. He had so nearly given up life once, in the prison, he had fought so hard for it again in this mighty old house which had sheltered him since his birth. Here he had found Bettina and without her he would have surely died. Even Pierce could not have stayed with him night and day through all the lonely hours of his weakness. The house had given him his life, but Bettina had saved that life. His eyes roamed over the hall, the stairs, which he and Pierce had climbed as children, the heavy walnut balustrade down which they had slid as little boys, Pierce always first and fearless and he coming after, terrified, but following Pierce. He could not bear to go.

And then in the midst of his pain and his longing he heard Lucinda’s voice lifted in wild reproach.

“Oh, Pierce, you’re standing up for him, you beast! You’re a beast like all the others — men are beasts — beasts — beasts—”

“I’m not!” Pierce roared. “Look here, Luce — if — if it were before the war and I could do it — I’d — I’d sell Bettina and her brats down the river and get rid of them all—”

“I wish it were before the war!” Lucinda sobbed.

“God dammit, so do I!” Pierce cried.

Tom heard his brother’s voice and hastened away. The house could shelter him no more.

BETTINA LAY ASLEEP IN the moonlight. Summer and winter she had her bed by the window where she could look out into the shrub-enclosed back yard. The lawn and the narrow flowerbeds which she tended so carefully by day were enchanting to her by night. When there was no moon she could smell the sweetness of the dark and the fragrance of dew. In winter the frost was fragrant. Like all women whose lives must be lived within boundaries, she had grown deeply and she had learned to make every small part of her life as large as the universe. Thus at night to single out a star and to lie in her bed gazing at it, to imagine its existence, enlarged her as a journey might enlarge a traveler. To dream of the one man she knew who possessed her, to ponder upon his qualities, his strength and his weakness, was enough for her whole life. Early in her life with Tom she had made up her mind to demand nothing of him. If he came it was her joy, but if he did not come, her life must go on. Sometimes he reproached her for this in one way or another. “I don’t believe you miss me, Bettina. You are just as happy when I am not here — you and the children.”

To which she answered out of her profound simplicity. “When you come it’s like the sun breaking through and taking hold of a day I thought was going to be dark. But if the sun don’t break through you have to go on living, Tom. Besides, I know you will come — sometime. So do the children.”

He had come to understand that reproach was folly. She was as fathomless as the sea and the sky, and as essential.

Now he hastened to her through the gathering night. Pierce’s words were a spur to his feet and with every step he took he swore that the path on which he walked would know him no more. Never again would he go to Malvern. He renounced his birthright.

He could see the low outlines of Bettina’s roof and the gate was still whiter than the darkness. He opened it and shut it loudly and then guided by the light of the candle that Bettina always kept in the window, he went into the house. If he came, he blew the candle out. If he did not come, it burned down into its pewter holder. Now, however, he lit the lamp in the living room and taking the candle with him he went upstairs into the room where she slept.