Pearl Buck - Angry Wife

To Jim McCagney he wrote: “We overbuilt. Let’s face our own mistake. We went too fast for the country. But the country will catch up with us if we can be willing to make less profit for the next few years. It’s a great country, and we haven’t begun to produce what we can. I’m a farmer and I know.”

At Malvern he steadily set himself to bigger crops and finer animals, as his duty to the nation.

But underneath all his efforts he still knew secret terror. He woke at night in a sweat, seeing the faces of the mob. In his dreams they were mixed up strangely with Tom and Tom’s house and the faces of Tom’s children — yes, and of Georgia’s. He woke frightened even on the clear bright mornings of autumn and harvest and the peace which followed the summer’s storms.

“We’ve got to do something about the poor,” he told Lucinda again and again and at the next Board meeting in a restored Baltimore he argued his fellow members into setting up a relief department in the company for the benefit of the sick and aged and those who had suffered from accident in their work.

He met the solid opposition of everyone, even of John MacBain.

“We licked them with the help of the Army, and that’s how we’ll have to lick them always,” John declared.

But Pierce argued his case stubbornly. “For our own safety it is better to have contented workingmen than discontented ones.”

“You can’t satisfy workingmen,” Jonathan Yates said with his thin tired smile. He was more relentless than any of them, now that he had risen above his fellows.

“We’ve got to be realistic,” Henry Mallows said. His narrow face hardened. He tore the gold band from a slender cigar and lit it. Perfume spread in the air with the smoke. “Anything that doesn’t bring in returns to the stockholders—” he went on.

John MacBain looked at him with the repulsion he would have showed a snake. “Oh hell,” he said suddenly. “I’m with Pierce Delaney, after all.”

“And I,” Pierce said quietly, “consider it the height of realism and self-interest for the rich to be generous to the poor. There is a point, Mallows, where it is good business to keep workingmen alive.”

But it was not until the next year, when the new decade began and the depression was over, that Pierce succeeded in establishing his relief department. Six thousand dollars were laid aside, and within the first five months almost six hundred people were aided in one way or another.

In his library at Malvern, Pierce read the reports and approved them and felt that with his own hands he was building a dam against the disaster of the future.

THE DANGEROUS DECADE PASSED, AND THE INEXPLICABLE tides of prosperity rolled over the country again. At Malvern, Pierce put up new greenhouses and stables. When John MacBain came in January his land hunger grew beyond control.

Pierce had made the library into his business office, and was dreaming of a new south wing which would be the formal library for the house. The plans lay on the great oak table in the middle of the room. Less and less often now did Pierce leave home and more and more men came to Malvern to see him. They were glad to come for the house was famous. Secretly Pierce was somewhat ashamed of the new livery which Lucinda had designed for the men servants. The crimson and yellow seemed to him absurd. But he humored her in all things and laughed with his friends gently behind her back. Lucinda was still pretty enough to be excused for follies.

Pierce stood before the great window and surveyed his lands, now white under a foot of soft snow. “John, you might as well sell me your place — I’ve rented all these years.”

John, sitting in a wing chair by the roaring fire, was studying a sheet of paper. “I’ll leave the house as a summer place for you and Mollie,” Pierce went on.

John did not look up. “I don’t want that house,” he said drily. “I haven’t been in it for a handful of years and you know it.”

“Then I’ll let Carey have it some day,” Pierce said promptly. “I’ve been wanting to settle a house on him when he marries. Martin’s to have this one, of course.”

“You going to let him come here after he’s married?” John inquired. Martin’s engagement to Mary Louise Wyeth had been announced at the great Christmas party.

“The place is big enough for us all,” Pierce replied. He had been pleased with the small demure girl whom Martin had brought to Malvern for inspection. Martin had grown up handsome and strong and comfortably average as a young man. He had been graduated from the University decently but without honors. He danced beautifully and rode well. Lucinda was enormously proud of him. Carey was a shrewd thin young chap, already a skilled debater. It was useful to have a lawyer in the family — a good second son, prudent and contented with his place.

“What are you going to provide for your third son, you lord of the manor?” John inquired with affectionate sarcasm.

“So far John doesn’t seem to want anything of me,” Pierce replied. He sat down in the great chair opposite his friend.

“Every family has to have a radical,” John said absently. He pursed his lips over his papers. “You’re going to get a pretty piece of money this year, Pierce.”

“That’s why I want to buy your land,” Pierce retorted.

John grinned, and looked at him over his spectacles. “You’ve a lust for land. If I weren’t an honest man I could bleed you white!”

Pierce smiled. They were very close, he and John. He had learned to love this man as his own brother. John knew him through and through, all his softness as well as his ruthlessness. There was no softness in John. He was as hard and driving as his own beloved locomotives.

“Though some sons-of-guns are talking about laying down a strike road next to ours, by Gawd,” John said.

“I suppose we can buy them out,” Pierce said mildly.

“Hell no,” John said briskly. “Let them lay it and spend their money! Then we’ll run them out of business — make cars better than theirs and our engines faster. When they’re busted we’ll buy them out cheap.”

Pierce gazed into the flaming logs. When he built the new library he was going to make an even bigger chimney piece. He yielded to the meditative reflective mood which became more and more natural to him as he grew older. Had Malvern not belonged to him — and he to Malvern — what would he have been? A very different man! He did not deceive himself. In the night when he woke and lay alone with himself he remembered his youth and the troubled ideals and dreams that had stirred in him after the war. His heart still moved when he thought of the young men who had died under his command. As clearly as he saw the faces of his own sons he could see young Barnstable’s face as he lay dead, his left arm and shoulder torn away. Pierce had sworn in those days that he would make a better world. It had been a better world for him and for his children, but he was not sure of anything else. He had made Malvern fulfill only his own dreams for himself.

“You and Lucinda going to Baltimore in October for the big shindig?” John asked. He put down the papers and began to fill his pipe.

“Lucinda won’t want to miss it, I am sure.” Pierce replied. “But I confess, John, I hate more and more to leave Malvern.”

“I can’t blame you for that,” John said. “But you ought to go, Pierce. Not many American cities, can celebrate a hundred and fifty years — and they’re going to give the railroad a fine place in the parade.”

“You don’t expect me to join the parade, I hope,” Pierce said smiling.

The door opened and a man servant came in with fresh logs. He scarcely knew his own servants any more since Lucinda had hired an English housekeeper. He had only stipulated that the people on the place be kept in the house. But the children grew up fast. He had an idea that this young fellow was one of Joe’s younger brothers. Joe had married a pot-black young Negress the year after Georgia left. At the thought of Georgia he felt an old confusion, almost shy. But he did not allow himself to think of her.