Pearl Buck - Angry Wife

“I haven’t lost any war,” she said.

He laughed at her. “You little Southern rebel,” he said. “Of course you have!”

He seized the mirror and put it down, swept her into his arms and kissed her hard. Then he held her at arm’s length. “You’re going to lose all your battles with me, hereafter,” he said. “I haven’t been a soldier for nothing all these years.”

Yes, he told himself — he was going to keep the upper hand in his own home.

“Pierce, you’re ruining my hair,” she wailed.”

“Damn your hair,” he said.

“Look here, my beauty,” he told her in the night “Don’t bear me a boy this time, if you please. I want some daughters — pretty ones! I shan’t keep the ugly ones.”

Lucinda laughed into her down pillow. “What will you give me for a girl, Pierce?” she asked. The room was flickering with firelight. He had heaped logs on the hearth and blown out the candles. They had no coal oil for the crystal lamps but plenty of candles. Georgia knew how to make them and scent them with bayberries and juniper.

“Girls actually aren’t worth as much in the market as boys,” he said. “Let’s see — I always give you diamonds for the boys, don’t I?”

“My diamond bracelet for Martin and the diamond brooch for Carey,” she said promptly.

“Pearls for the girls?” he suggested.

“Sapphires,” she bargained.

“Sapphires,” he promised. “But you’re greedy, you little wretch! Sapphires — I shall have to get them from Paris.”

“At that it’ll be less trouble for you than for me,” she said, laughing.

“All right, wretch,” he promised. He pulled her into his arms—“anything — anything — little wretch!”

But in the middle of this soft night, in the quiet of the house where he had been born and lived out all his childhood and youth, in the full sight of the thinnest crescent moon he had ever seen, a rim of silver at the edge of the shadowy full moon hanging, above the mountains, in the depth of the great bed where he lay with his wife, he knew that he was changed. War had made him hard. He valued as he never had the few good things of life, love and passion, sleep, morning, food, work, the wind and the sun. But he would never play again as he had played. He would never again be idle, never gay in the old unthinking fashion—

“You hurt me,” Lucinda said suddenly.

He paid no heed to her complaint until he heard her sob.

“What the devil is the matter with you?” he demanded.

“I don’t like you,” she sobbed childishly. “You weren’t like this — before.”

He released her instantly, “You can scarcely expect me to be exactly what I was before.” Lying naked in the bed his formality suddenly seemed ridiculous to him and he burst into loud laughter.

“Pierce, you stop laughing!” Lucinda cried. She beat his breast with her fists when he went on laughing. “Pierce, stop it — you’re crazy!”

He stopped laughing as suddenly as he had begun. “Oh well,” he said. “Maybe it’s worth a sapphire.”

He fell asleep as quickly as though neither passion nor anger had been. The war had taught him that.

In the bedroom across the hall Tom woke. Something warm and sweet was in his mouth. Food again! He began to eat with a new hunger and saw a woman’s face bent over him. It was a brown face, but the lamp shining from the table behind, lit the dark hair curling about it She was feeding him in teaspoonfuls and he was swallowing. His mind was clear, as it had been most of the time even in prison, but to know did not mean he would have strength to speak. Fellows had been taken out of the prison in the dead cart when they were alive and knowing, but too weak to protest against their own burial.

“More,” he said distinctly.

“There’s plenty more,” Bettina answered. “I made a full bowl.”

He wondered drowsily what it was. Something sweet and something smooth, slipping down his throat. A custard, maybe, with eggs and milk and white sugar. Only where did she get eggs and milk and white sugar in a war? He felt impelled to answer his own question. He opened his eyes with effort.

“We won — war,” he announced.

“Surely we did,” she agreed. She lifted another spoonful and put it to his mouth.

When he could swallow no more because sleep made it impossible, she put the dish down. The light fell on his face. The terror was already fading from it. In a few days, when his lips were not fleshless, he would not look so like a skeleton. Then the door opened and Georgia came into the room. She wore a long white dressing gown and she had loosened her hair. It flowed down over her shoulders, fine and curly and black.

“How is he?” she whispered.

“You don’t have to whisper,” Bettina whispered. “When he sleeps he hears nothing.”

They stood looking down at him, side by side.

“He’s so young,” Bettina said.

“I heard them say twenty-three,” Georgia answered.

“Then he went when he was nineteen. How long was he in prison — did you hear them say?”

“That I did not,” Georgia answered.

They lingered, looking at his face, at his hands, lying helpless on the white coverlet. “He has nice hands,” Georgia said, “I like a man to have nice hands. Remember Father’s hands, Bettina?”

Bettina nodded.

“Shan’t I take a turn with him, so you can sleep?” Georgia asked.

Bettina shook her head. “I want to be here when he wakes,” she said.

She gave her sister a gentle push. “You go to your bed,” she commanded her. “It’s me that she set to nurse him back to health and strength.”

She watched her sister’s figure glide across the floor and she watched while the door latched. Then she sat down again in her seat by the bed, her eyes fixed on his face.

Down the hall Georgia walked, barefoot, without sound. She passed “their” bedrooms — her mistress’s and master’s — She remembered what he had told her.

“Surely, I’m free,” she thought. “I could go away. I don’t have to take even their wages.” She heard voices murmuring, and under the door a crack of light showed. The high transom was bright. They were still awake! But she had waked, too, out of dreamless sleep. The house seemed strange now that the master had come home.

“That’s what he is,” she thought, “even though he tells me I’m not to call him that. A house must have a master.”

She had always come and gone into that room, and her mistress had never seemed to care. It was as though she were nobody at all, until now. But now the whole house was different. Her mistress was different, too. Women were always different when men came into the house.

She went noiselessly past the door. Then she reached the attic stairs. “God help me they don’t creak,” she thought.

It was the one thing she and Bettina had asked, that they might sleep in the house instead of out in the quarters. Her mistress had looked at them coldly. They had stood, hand in hand, waiting for her question. But she had not put the question.

“Very well,” she had said in her cool voice. “You may sleep in the attic. But you’ll have to be quiet. I don’t want to hear even your walking around.”

Up in the attic she and Bettina had made a home for themselves. They had found an old rope bottom bed and a discarded bureau. Rags they had made into rugs and they had crocheted covers for the bed and the bureau top. But they had learned to walk as softly as shadows in the top of the great house and to talk in whispers.

She took off her dressing gown and crept into the bed. Still she could not sleep. She lay quivering, aware, feeling, not thinking. There was no use thinking in a life like hers. She was a creature in the sea, tossed here and there by tides she did not understand.