Pearl Buck - Angry Wife

This letter he found among all the letters on his desk one morning in August. He caught the next train out of the small depot near Malvern, which had been put in especially for his shipments of cattle to the coast. The road to White Sulphur he himself had done much to build, a decade ago and more, foreseeing that it would bring to the great watering place visitors from all over the world.

The spa had never looked more beautiful than it did this day when he stepped from the train in sore anxiety. The sky was cloudless, and the huge hotel sparkled under the sunshine, its paint as white as snow, its flags brilliant. Small guest cottages shone among the green of the trees and up and down the walk guests strolled, the women carrying bright parasols and the men bareheaded or wearing wide straw hats. He himself had visited here not long before in order to inspect the new game of golf which some Scotchmen had brought over.

But now he wanted only to find Lucinda quickly. He directed the carriage he had hired at the station to go straight to the cottage which he and Lucinda regularly used when they came here to drink the waters. It was the hour before the great afternoon dinner, and he knew that Lucinda would be there. He found her on the small piazza, Lucie and Mary Lou beside her. She was fanning herself with a silken Chinese fan and looked the picture of idle pleasure as he stepped from the carriage.

“Pierce!” she cried. “Of all things!”

But he could not greet her. “Lucinda, how could you let Sally leave you?” he demanded.

He had tried to think how to break the dreadful news, but when he saw her he forgot all he had planned.

“Mercy, Pierce,” Lucinda cried. “How you scare me! Where did you come from? Why didn’t you write me you were coming?”

“When did Sally leave you?” Pierce demanded.

Mary Lou looked down at the embroidery she was doing, and Lucie was silent with fright.

“Pray tell,” Lucinda said impatiently, “what is the matter with you, Pierce? Sally left two days ago to visit in New York. She went with the Carrington Randolphs — you know that Candace is her best friend. What is wrong with that?”

He held out Sally’s letter then and she took it. He stood waiting, watching her face, and he saw the blood drain away from her cheeks. She read it and looked up at him and he could not have asked for more horror than he saw there.

“Oh, Pierce!” she whispered—“oh — how could she—”

The letter dropped to the floor. Lucie in her small secret way reached for it. She read it and Mary Lou glanced over her shoulder.

“There is nothing we can do, Luce,” Pierce groaned. “Only, who is this fellow? The Randolphs? I shall go to them at once—”

“Here is a corner turned down and glued,” Lucie announced. “It has ‘For Mama’ written on it very tiny.”

“Give it to me,” Lucinda cried. She snatched the letter and tore the corner open. Inside Sally had written in small and clear letters, “Tell Mama for her comfort that the Lopez de Pre’ family is four hundred years old.”

Lucinda’s fair skin flushed rose-colored. “As if that matters!” she cried passionately—“when the man is black!”

She turned on Pierce in sudden fury. “This comes of you and your precious brother! Sally would never — never have done such a thing if it hadn’t been for Tom!”

There was such hatred in her bright blue eyes that he stepped back involuntarily. “Take heed what you say, Lucinda,” he said to her sternly.

“It’s true, it’s true!” she cried. “This is what happens when you treat niggras like white — they steal into your house—”

“Be silent!” he shouted, and taking her by the arm, he pulled her into the house and shut the door and put down the open windows.

But Lucinda would not listen to him. She flung herself on her bed and wept aloud. “I shall have nothing left,” she sobbed, “nothing — nothing—”

He accused her, “You think of yourself — only of yourself—”

She roused herself to shake her fists at him in her rage. “I do not think of myself, Pierce Delaney! I think of all — all of us white women fending off those niggras that men like you love so much — trying to keep them out of our homes — to keep them from robbing us of all we have left—”

She looked so absurd, so melodramatic in her anger and her weeping that he began to laugh loud, cruel laughter.

“Oh don’t be so silly, Luce!” he shouted. He threw a look of disgust at her grimacing tear-stained face. “Good God, women like you — you drive us — to — to—”

“To what?” she screamed. “Go on — say it!”

“I won’t!” he bellowed.

“Mama — Mama!” Lucie’s frightened voice at the door recalled them both. “People can hear you and Papa!”

Lucinda got up from the bed and went to the washstand and poured water into the china basin and began to wash her face.

Pierce sat down. “I shall go straight after that fellow,” he muttered. “I shall fetch Sally home.”

Lucinda shouted. “It’s too late, you fool — I won’t have a black grandchild — I can tell you.”

“Brazilians aren’t black,” he retorted.

But he was not sure what they were, and he did not go. When he reached New York two days later, Carrington Randolph met him and took him to the hotel. There in the vast quiet parlor of a Waldorf suite he met Mrs. Randolph and Candace, who waited for them.

“I know how you feel,” Mrs. Randolph said gently. She was a tall thin Virginian with a pretty face too small and delicate for her long body. “Of course we’d all rawtheh have had our deah Sally mah’y a Virginia gentleman, and indeed I thought she was going to fancy our own son — he’s so in love with her. But she didn’t tell anybody — not even Candy, did she, honey?”

Candace shook her dark head. She was a year older than Sally, a rebellious, spoiled, secretly intelligent girl. “Sally didn’t tell anybody very much,” she said guardedly. She smiled. “But he is very rich,” she added.

“That would make no difference to Sally,” Pierce declared.

“Well, then he’s good-looking,” Candace said wilfully.

“Only so dark,” Mrs. Randolph mourned.

Carrington Randolph cleared his throat. “The tragic thing about it is that the fellow is Catholic, and so I suppose Sally’s tied for life. I assure you, if we had known — but we didn’t. She simply left us a note, saying she’d written you—”

Pierce looked from one to the other of them. “I can only hope and pray that he is good to her,” he said simply.

He went back to Malvern and tried to build over the emptiness which Sally had left. When he had told Lucinda all there was to tell, she looked at him in silence. She gave no sign of remembering the dreadful things she had said at White Sulphur, but he would never forget them as long as he lived. When Sally’s letters began to come from Brazil, long letters in which there was not the slightest hint of repentance or of missing him or indeed of thinking of them at all, Lucinda read them once and then put them aside.

But alone in his library Pierce read them again and again. He was unable to tell whether she was happy or unhappy. Sally had poured her life into an unknown household and she was absorbed with it. Mother-in-law, father-in-law, aunts and uncles and cousins, the vigorous, voluble, brilliant family, he came slowly to know them in a strange, imaginative fashion through her letters. But the one he wanted to know most of all was the man who was her husband and of him Sally spoke the least, except at the end of each letter to stress again the underscored words, “Papa, I am happy. Dear Papa, I am very happy—”

He went on soberly building. The library wing was finished, a noble room, high-ceiled and paneled in walnut that he had grown on his own land and that had been five years in seasoning. When the room was done he hung in it the best of his paintings, one of them a gentle green Corot his grandfather had bought in France, and another a Romney portrait from England, of one of his own ancestors. Over the mantel he put his own portrait, painted when he was forty by Dabney Williams.