Pearl Buck - Angry Wife

“See here, Luce, we can’t go to sleep like this!”

“I can go to sleep anyhow — I’m dead,” she retorted.

“You know I have to feel things are all right between us—”

“Aren’t they? I didn’t know they weren’t.”

He was silent a moment. Then he put his hand through the darkness and touched her soft breast.

She shook his hand off. “Please, Pierce — not tonight, for mercy’s sake!”

“You’re cold as stone these days—” he accused her.

“No, I’m not,” she denied. “But you’ve grown — careless.”

“I want another child, Luce!”

“Diamonds and sapphires couldn’t tempt me,” she replied firmly.

He leaped out of bed at that and went stamping into his own room and banged the door. He was not given to self-pity, but he allowed himself a measure of it now. What was the use of a man’s being faithful to his wife? If Lucinda only knew, he thought savagely, that twice in the fortnight he had refused other women — but he could not tell her. She would laugh aloud and then turn on him with malice and suspicion. He could hear her voice. “And what, pray tell, made her think you were — willing?”

No denials could be valid. Truth itself was not valid to Lucinda where the maleness of a man was concerned. He got into his solitary bed, and in a temper he pulled the covers strongly and left his feet bare. In fury he wrapped them about his feet and lay in a snarl of sheets and blankets and dug his head into the pillows. Lucinda was not a comfortable woman. She did not appreciate him nor the strength of his self-denials. Then he grinned at himself ruefully in the darkness. Self-denial? He was in love with Lucinda still, and she alone could stir his passion. But she was not comfortable, he maintained against this too severe honesty. He loved her more than she loved him. He sighed gustily into the night. It would be pleasant to be loved, for once, more than he loved. He fell asleep, still warming himself with self-pity.

In the midst of the peace of the next summer, after the spring crops had been sown and the winter wheat harvested, at the time of year when Malvern was at the heights of its glory, Pierce one day picked up the county newspaper after his ample noon meal. He lay on a long wicker chair on the terrace, preparing for his usual afternoon nap.

At the sight of the headlines all thought of sleep left him abruptly. He sat up, reading avidly, then groaned and threw the paper on the stone flags. Then he seized it to read again the shocking news. Two days ago, in Martinsburg, a sensible city of his own state, the railroad crews had struck in protest to the third cut in their wages.

All during the spring Pierce had followed with approval the news of the recurring wage cuts for the railroad employees. It was only fair, he told himself and Lucinda and anyone else who was near him, that workingmen should share the growing disaster of the times. He himself was suffering enough by not getting any dividends. Martin and Carey, home for holidays, had listened to him in their separate ways, Martin without interest and Carey with shrewd, smiling attention. The only dissenting voice in his house was his third son John, who out of perversity and contrariness to himself, Pierce felt, took the side of the workingmen. But he shouted John down easily.

“Don’t talk about what you can’t understand!” he had ordered.

The last time John had muttered something. Pierce could not hear it.

“What did you say, sir?” he demanded.

John had lifted his head. “I said that I don’t think you understand things yourself,” Father—”

Pierce had been shocked at such impudence. “Understand what?” he had demanded of this gangling boy.

“What it’s like to be a workingman,” John said sturdily.

Pierce had snorted laughter. “And you think you do?” he had inquired.

“I have more imagination than you have, Father,” John had replied fearlessly.

Pierce’s anger melted. He liked his sons to be fearless even toward himself. “Get along with you and your imagination,” he said, his eyes twinkling. Then out of respect for the boy he had added honestly, “And I like you to stand up to me, John — it’s manly of you.”

He had been comforted by the warm look in the boy’s grey eyes — Tom’s eyes, they were.

But there was no doubt that depression was sweeping over the country like a hurricane. No one understood why these storms recurred in a country where enterprise was free and where every man got what he deserved if he worked hard. Pierce believed that it was a man’s own fault if he did not prosper, and with his feet firm upon his own soil, he took the depression as an act of God, inexplicable and irritating as acts of God were apt to be.

He had been pleased when in May the other railroads had begun to cut wages drastically and had complained loudly to John MacBain and his own directors because their railroad did not do so. A few weeks ago he had been delighted to receive from the president of the company a notice that at last wages had been reduced, in despair over the continuing depression. In a brief note to John MacBain, for Pierce hated letterwriting, he had expressed his pleasure and his confidence that dividends could be restored soon.

“We are on the right track at last,” he had written John. “Labor has got out of hand and must be controlled. People who have put their money into the railroads must get it back.” This letter John had not answered, but John also hated to write letters and never did so unless there was a crisis.

Only yesterday, in church, Pierce had given thanks to God sincerely for all good things, including health and peace in his time. The glorious summer sunshine had slanted down through the stained glass windows of the Presbyterian church of his fathers. Here he and Tom had sat as small boys, sighing and wriggling. Here his children had been christened. He had thanked God frankly for wealth — well, why not for wealth?

And even while he was giving thanks to God this thing had already happened! He felt cheated and he got up impulsively to find Lucinda and complain to her. Then he sat down again and stared across his fields to the mountains. Lucinda would not be interested. She had always divided life firmly into what was men’s business and what was hers. Whatever the difficulties he had, she did not consider them her affair. Money might be hard to get, but what else had men to do but to get it? He missed Tom, as he often did, in swift short spasms of needing to talk to a man. Malvern had good neighbors. Nobody could be more fun than the Raleighs and the Bentons and the Carters and the Hulmes and a dozen other families, when it came to fox-hunting and horse-racing. Pierce took pride in the fact that on any weekend he could gather twenty families at Malvern and on any day in hunting season. But his sons were still young and he had no man in the house to quarrel with and argue with and be knit to, as he had been knit to Tom.

What would Tom think of such news? He got up again and began to pace the sunlit flags of the long terrace. Philadelphia was near Baltimore. He could go to the company offices at Baltimore and find out for himself exactly what was happening and what might be expected to happen. He could reinforce company policies with his own advice. Then he’d run over to Philadelphia and see Tom.

“I might as well own up that I want to see the fellow again,” he thought sentimentally. He had not seen Tom once in all these years, although they had written regularly if not often. He wouldn’t tell Lucinda — they had not mentioned Tom for a long while. He had stopped telling her even when he had a letter, because she closed her lips firmly at the very sound of Tom’s name.

But he went to find her to tell her of his plan to go to Baltimore. He found her surrounded by their daughters, to whom she was teaching sewing. That is, she was sitting in her rose-satin chair, in her own sitting room upstairs, taking dainty stitches in a bit of linen, and Sally and Lucie were sitting beside her. Lucie was absorbed but Sally was frowning and pausing every moment to look out the open window. Between the two girls Georgia came and went, examining stitches and correcting mistakes. She looked at him when he came in and away again. Since that strange day when she had knelt at his feet, she had spoken no word to him beyond what was absolutely necessary in the communication of servant to master. His own behavior had been as careful, and between them, like scar tissue over a wound, they had constructed a surface.