Pearl Buck - Angry Wife

Forgetting the constant, irritating motion of the train he pondered on what it was he wanted most for his children. It was simple enough — a place where they could grow up as other children did in this country of theirs — his children’s country. He had fought and nearly died to make it so. His jaw grew grim at the memories that crowded into his mind. Not he alone had died to make the children free. He remembered and would remember forever the young men’s bodies, carted out of the prison camps, dying and dead, and shoveled into shallow graves. These, too, had died for his children. God helping him, he would try to find a place where what they had done would count at last.

He turned to Bettina. “We shall live in Philadelphia,” he said.

“Oh, I would like that,” Bettina exclaimed.

“The City of Brotherly Love,” he said with a dry smile. “The variety may be better in the north.”

“If a slave got to Philadelphia, he was safe,” Bettina said simply.

The city became home to them from then on, although neither of them had ever seen it. When they stopped at the station the next afternoon it was home. Tom refused to notice the stares of the people around him as he marched through the waiting room. He carried the baby and the two older children clung to Bettina’s hands. A porter took their bags, his eyes bulging, too. It was to this porter that Bettina turned in private inquiry.

“Can we folks put up at the hotels here?” she whispered.

He caught the whisper and exchanged secret looks with her. He shook his head. “You can’t, nor the children,” he mumbled. “You gotta go to a boardinghouse — downtown—”

How could she convey this to Tom? She caught step with him and looked up to him pleadingly. “Honey, let’s sit down and rest a minute.”

They sat down on the nearest bench. She took a startled glance to see if she would be forbidden and was reassured by the sight of an old black woman in a creased grey cotton frock, drowsing at the end of the seat and clutching a worn carpetbag to her lean stomach.

“Tom, where are you going to take us, dear?”

“To a hotel,” he replied.

“Honey, they won’t let us in — me and the children.”

He stared at her and suddenly flushed. “They’d better.”

“No, Tom, honey — wait! Let’s not begin quarreling with folks here. Let’s find a quiet boardinghouse for me and the children, and you go to a hotel for a few days. Then we can look around and find the house we want. It would make me much happier that way, I don’t want to go where I’m not wanted — please, Tom!”

He yielded because he was tired and in spite of all, a stranger here. “Very well,” he said.

They started again, the porter following with the bags and he found them a horse cab outside on the street driven by a ragged black man. The porter leaned to whisper to him as he turned and stared at Tom. What he was saying was plain enough to Bettina, and she pressed a coin into his hand after Tom had paid him. “Thank you for helping me and my children,” she whispered.

“Woman, you shore needs help!” the porter whispered back.

It was the beginning of their new life.

PERFORCE, PIERCE WAS COMPELLED in the next years to put aside thinking of his family. The railroad stocks upon which Malvern still depended for the capital to expand its acres and to build the barns needed for housing greater crops suddenly weakened. In the last ten years the nation had gone wild over railroads. Little towns and villages had seen themselves swollen into cities and railroad centers, whirlpools of trade and commerce. In the years since Pierce had bought his first railroad shares, new roads had been incorporated almost every month. Railroad promoters rode east and west in palatial private cars, and dined and got drunk with promoters of stores and shops and locomotive works, and enthusiastic men sat far into the night mapping new cities which were never to exist except upon paper.

Pierce heard vaguely of these doings, but Malvern lay around him, so peaceful and so eternal, he could not believe that beneath Malvern, in banks and railroads, the foundations of his life were shaking. John MacBain had spoken out his fears and warnings half a dozen times, but Pierce, with the hearty good humor of a man who lives upon fertile lands, had taken them as manifestations of John’s old tendency toward secret despair.

One morning after mid-December, when Lucinda was superintending the making of the yards of holly wreath to hang along the halls for Christmas, Jake brought him a telegram from John. It contained few words. “Things are bad. Come quick. John.”

He took the telegram to Lucinda as she sat enthroned in a huge oak chair on the stair landing. At her feet Georgia crouched, weaving the holly twigs in and out with scarlet cord. Along the balustrade two or three young servants crawled, twining the wreath in and out of the banisters.

Lucinda read the telegram, her pretty brows knit in a frown. “Oh Pierce, of all things, just at Christmas!” she cried.

“Christmas is a week off,” he said gravely. “I’ve got to go.”

“I always count that Christmas begins when the boys come home,” she protested.

“John wouldn’t send for me unless he really needed me,” he replied.

“Probably Molly has been playing the fool,” she said sharply. Never before had she remarked on Molly’s escapades.

He lifted his eyebrows at her. “I don’t think it’s Molly,” he replied. “John can handle her. No, it’s the railroad. Things haven’t been going too well—”

Now she was alarmed. “Why, Pierce—”

“Too much expansion,” he said briefly. Then he bent and kissed her hair. “Never mind Luce — go on with Christmas — whatever it is we’ll have Christmas as usual.”

She nodded. Whatever it was, it was not her business.

Georgia stood up and red holly berries fell from her frock. “Shall I go and help pack, ma’am?” she asked in her gentle voice.

“Yes — well, I suppose so,” Lucinda said, vexed.

“Minnie can take my place,” Georgia suggested.

Pierce turned and went upstairs and behind him he heard Georgia’s soft footfall. He had come to take her presence so much for granted in his house that she was scarcely a creature apart now from its life. He went into his rooms and she followed. To his own bedroom in the last five years he had added a booklined sitting room, so that if he were wakeful he could get up and read. He did not sleep well since Tom had gone away. It would take years to convince him that Tom was never coming back. When once in six months he had one of Tom’s long letters he slept very badly indeed. Tom was perfectly happy as the headmaster of his own small private school. None of the retribution which should have fallen on his head had come. Pierce dared not show the letters to Lucinda, lest such happiness infuriate her. He locked them into a small strong box in his desk.

“I can pack your things, sir,” Georgia was saying. “Why don’t you sit down and rest yourself?”

He looked at her and yielded. “Well, maybe I will. I ought to look up some of my papers before I go.”

“Yes, sir.”

She went into his bedroom, leaving the door open between. He heard drawers open and shut, and the latch of his closet sounded once or twice. She knew where everything was, for it was she who kept his things in order. Joe was his valet, but Georgia kept his things neat. He was aware of a mild friendship between her and Joe. Joe had never married—

He got up and went into his bedroom. Georgia was folding his white evening shirts carefully. She looked up.

“I didn’t tell Joe I was going,” he said abruptly. “I’ll want him along, of course.”