Pearl Buck - Angry Wife

“I’ll tell him, sir,” Georgia replied.

“‘I don’t even know where he is,” Pierce grumbled.

“I know,” she said. Her cheeks dimpled. “It’s safe enough that if he thinks you’re busy he’s in the kitchen.”

She lifted the speaking tube from its hook near his bed and called into it, “Joe?”

She looked at Pierce, still smiling. “He’s there,” she said. “I knew he wouldn’t be working on the holly. He’s afraid of thorns.”

“Joe lazy?” he inquired. He enjoyed dimples in any woman’s cheeks.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she replied.

The dimples were still there and he kept looking at them. Then he felt his old uneasiness toward her. “Why don’t you and Joe get married, Georgia?” he asked abruptly.

The dimples disappeared instantly. She hung up the speaking tube and flushed a deep rose. “I couldn’t marry — him,” she said in a low voice.

“It would be a good thing,” he argued, still looking at her. “I’d give you the stone tenant house to live in.”

She gazed back at him, her eyes suffering. “I — can’t,” she whispered. Her face, open and quivering before his gaze, was like a magnolia flower. Her eyes were enormous and wet with sudden tears. The moment grew long, too long, then suddenly seeing the look upon his face she yielded to herself. She ran across the room and knelt before him, and bent her head to his feet.

He was horrified and shaken. He looked down into her face and despised himself because he could not keep from seeing how beautiful she was. “I ought to send you away,” he said in a strange hard voice.

“I have no home in the world but here,” she whispered.

“Get up!” he commanded her. He stepped back and turned and strode toward the door. He looked back and she was there, on her knees still, her delicate hands clasped, looking at him with her dark and sorrowful eyes.

“I must leave in half an hour,” he told her, and heard his own voice dry and harsh.

“Yes, sir.” The words were a sigh.

He hastened downstairs to find Lucinda. She had left the landing and was in the library, still surrounded by holly wreaths and servants. She was standing by the mantelpiece, directing the placing of the decorations behind the portrait of his mother. He went and stood beside her silently, and looked at his mother’s face.

“Do you think that wreath is too heavy?” Lucinda inquired.

“Perhaps,” he said absently. He wanted to feel his mother’s presence and Lucinda’s. He put his arm about Lucinda’s waist and took her right hand and pressed it to his lips. She let him caress her and then pulled her hand away, lifting her eyebrows at the servants who were stealing looks at them.

“Come to the door with me, Luce,” he begged. “I shan’t be seeing you maybe for a week.”

“A week!” she echoed. “Pierce — that’s Christmas Eve!”

“I’ll try to get home sooner,” he said.

“Has Georgia got your things ready?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said shortly. The enormous complexity of his life suddenly appalled him. If he did not send Georgia away, how would he hide from Lucinda what he knew? And if he did send her away, what reason would he give? He heartily longed to tell Lucinda exactly what had happened and let her deal with Georgia as she would. But prudence forbade this. Lucinda would never believe that he had not done something to bring Georgia to her knees before him. Lucinda would never believe in his innocence — nor in any man’s where a woman was concerned. He felt sweat stir at the roots of his hair and along his upper lip under his moustache, and he dared not put himself at her mercy. She was his wife and she knew the secret weaknesses of his being and his life was with her and must be with her through the years until old age and death, and he could not be at her mercy.

“Goodbye, honey,” he said. “Don’t bother to come to the door, after all. The house looks lovely. And I’ll be back before Christmas Eve, for sure.”

Lucinda kissed him gratefully. “If you can get some champagne in Wheeling bring home a dozen bottles, Pierce. The boys won’t think it’s a real party without it.”

“I will, my dear,” he promised her.

He dreaded to go into the hall lest Georgia were there. But she was not. Joe was getting the bags into the carriage, and he grinned at Pierce.

“I shore did hustle myself,” he panted. Pierce climbed into the carriage and Joe arranged the fur robe over his knees and jumped on the driving seat and the coachman pricked the twin black carriage horses with his whip and they set off down the long avenue of oaks.

“We’ve been through trouble before,” John said. There had been no pretense at festivity this time when Pierce arrived at the great mansion set on a hill outside Wheeling, nor at any time during the days he had been here. On the fourth day, after an almost silent dinner, the three of them at one end of the huge oval dining table in an enormous dining room, Molly had gone upstairs and John had brought him to the dark paneled library. A fire burned in an English iron grate under a white marble mantlepiece where a wreath of marble was upheld by naked cupids. It was near midnight and they were still talking, and the burden of their talk was what it had been for hours on each of the days he had been here in John’s house. Financial depression threatened the country. Men had seen it coming in vague and inexplicable fashion, a storm on the horizon, a wind on the sea. Pierce had not felt it at Malvern, and soundly rooted in his lands, he had taken the warnings he read in newspapers as the nervousness of business men whose fortunes were in flexible money instead of in farms and cattle.

But John had told him that the depression had already fallen upon the railroads. Passenger traffic was growing so light that it scarcely paid to run the trains on short journeys, and freight was falling off alarmingly fast. Something had to be done to check the downward spiral of the times.

“I should have thought that the expansion before the war would have taught you railroad fellows something,” Pierce said sourly.

John looked at him and grinned. “You ought to understand. You’ve done a little expanding yourself at Malvern.”

“Only for myself and my family,” Pierce grumbled. I haven’t taken the savings of widows and orphans.”

“You’ve used the savings of widows and orphans,” John retorted. “What would you have been if you hadn’t? Not the Squire of Malvern!”

Pierce avoided the thought. “After all you’ve told me, there’s only one thing to be done. Depression has hit the whole country and we know it. Then wages have got to come down.”

“Easier said than done,” John reminded him. “The men will go on strike.”

“Let them,” Pierce said.

“You don’t keep up with the times down there in the country, Pierce,” John complained. “Don’t you read any newspapers? Have you ever heard of a fellow called Marx?”

“No,” Pierce said, “who is he?”

“Oh, my God,” John groaned. “Did you ever hear of a communist, Pierce?”

“No,” Pierce said.

John leaned on the mantelpiece and shook a long forefinger at him. “You listen to me, Pierce,” he said in the sharp high voice with which he harangued directors at dinner tables and gangs at the works. “A strike isn’t a local nuisance nowadays. It’s something more, by Gawd!”

“What?” asked Pierce.

“That’s what I don’t know,” John’s forefinger dropped. “That’s what I’m trying to find out. When we have a strike here, in West Virginia, I don’t feel the roots are here.”

“Where are they?” Pierce asked, smiling incredulously.

“Over in Europe somewhere,” John said solemnly.