Pearl Buck - Angry Wife

“WE ARE FORTUNATE,” PIERCE Delaney said to his wife.

She did not answer. Outside the window open by her couch, the deep stillness of late October afternoon lay across the landscape of Malvern. The air was warm and fragrant. The servants had been picking the purple grapes. She could not learn to call them servants instead of slaves. Pierce was going to pay them wages. Georgia, her own maid, would get wages!

“Aren’t we fortunate, Luce?” Pierce’s big voice demanded.

“I wish you wouldn’t call me Luce,” she answered. “I like my own name.”

“Lucinda,” he said, smiling. “It’s such a prim name.”

“Nevertheless, it’s my name,” she replied.

But he could not quarrel even in fun. He wanted peace, now; as long as he lived he wanted only peace. He stood before the high window and gazed at the landscape for which he had been as homesick, all during the war, as he had been even for his family. There were not many in the world to match it for beauty. Beyond the rich level lands of his farms the foothills rose, softly wooded, into the blue heights of the Alleghenies. It was country fit for all his dreams of peace and he would spend his life in fulfilling them. Only to live, after these years, would be enough, but to live here was heaven.

Without turning he spoke. “The war is over, Tom and I are both alive, the house isn’t in ruins. Not many families have as much!”

“Pierce, darling —”

At the sound of Lucinda’s voice he wheeled. She was lying on her rose satin sofa, her white arms flung above her head, her white hands clasped. Her slender body was hidden in a froth of creamy lace and silk, except for her little bare feet.

He took off the stiff leather belt of his uniform, threw it on the floor and went across the bedroom. He knelt beside her and lifted her into his arms. The moment stood still for him, clear and deep. For the first time he felt sure of being alive. He was at home again, in his own house, with Lucinda, his wife. His two children, his sons, were sound and full of health. Even the work on the land had not stopped. Everything he possessed had miraculously escaped destruction. His mind raced back over the years through which he had just passed. They were already compressed into a single experience of torture, in which he saw the faces of his own men whom he had not often been able to save. They were not all dead — a few had escaped, many more lay in hospitals. But most of them were dead. Kneeling there with his face in the laces upon his wife’s bosom, he read upon his brain the figures of the dead. They were so young! This was their tragedy — so young to die for so vague a cause. Thousands of young boys in uniforms had died to compel the nation to remain a union, thousands in grey had died for the right of a state to be free if it liked. Somewhere between them the fate of black men and women had been entangled.

Feeling the beat of Lucinda’s heart under his lips, aware of the softness of her flesh, breathing in her scent, he asked himself if even the death of many could hold united those who wanted to be free of one another. It might have been easier if he and his family had lived in the high North or the deep South. But Malvern, his inheritance, lay in the borderland. Men from the south and the north had swept across the mountains to rest here in Malvern Valley, under the great oaks, even upon the verandas of the house. He had been home for a few days of furlough when Grant’s men had come marching by, and looking down on them from an attic window, hiding himself, he had been horrified to see how much his enemies looked like his own men, There was only the slight outward difference of the uniform. The boys’ faces were the same.

More than Malvern lay in the border country. In the months when the war drew nearer, grim and inevitable, he had had to decide whether, when war was declared, he would go North or South. He hated slavery, while he loved his own slaves. Some deep conservatism in his being, love of form and order, necessity to preserve and persist, made him know that union was essential for their country, still so new. A handful of states, flying apart in quarrels, would mean early death to the nation. But he had stayed by the South. The last moment had come, and in its clarity Lucinda and Malvern had outweighed all else. Heart and not head had decided. He knew that he would fight and perhaps die for her, here in his house. But Tom, his brother, had gone North.

“When do you think Tom will get home?” Lucinda asked.

She curled herself into his arms. When she made herself small in his arms his heart quivered with tenderness. It seemed impossible that she had borne him two sons. He thought of them playing somewhere about the place, sturdy, blond, gay and quarrelsome, affectionate and rebellious, as he and Tom had been in this house of their fathers. By her own strength Lucinda had kept them untouched by the miseries of the war. She was a strong little thing!

“Joe will be here at any moment with him,” he said. He laid her gently back on her silken pillows and got up and walked to the window. Almost unconsciously he had picked up his belt and now he stood by the window, strapping it about his waist again.

A slender, hard waist, Lucinda thought with pleasure. The war had done him good. She felt idly complacent. She was safe. The house needed new hangings and new carpets. She wanted to cover the mohair furniture in the parlors with satin as soon as she decently could. Enough of the slaves had stayed on, for wages, to make her life still possible. Nothing would be changed.

She felt joy running in her veins. Her heart softened, She got up and went over to the tall figure at the window. He was staring out into the sunshine, his face grave and his steel blue eyes tragic. She hated the look. He was remembering something she did not know.

“Pierce,” she said, “Pierce, darling—”

He turned to her quickly, seized her in his arms again and held her with pain and love. How much he could never tell her!

“Everything is going to be the same,” she whispered.

“I’ll make it the same,” he said passionately, and felt his throat grow tight over tears. Strange how a man could go through death again and again, could lose what he loved most! For in the hour of battle he had loved his men better than anything. There had been moments when if sacrifice of himself and his wife and his sons, his house and lands, all that he was fighting for, could have saved the losing day, he would have let them all go into the loss, for victory’s sake. Yet he had never wept, or wanted to weep, as he did now, when he had come home to his unchanged house. It was so exactly the same that he could not keep back his tears. But this Lucinda could not understand, and for no fault of her own. They would have had to live through the same things to have had the same understanding and he could only be thankful that she had stayed safely at home.

The door opened. Someone stood on the threshold an instant, saw them and closed the door.

Lucinda pulled herself out of his arms and smoothed her straight fair hair. “Come in, Georgia,” she called.

Georgia opened the door gently and stood, hesitating and shy, aware that she had interrupted a scene of love. Pierce saw the awareness in her dark eyes, in the half smile of her lips, in the timidity of her bearing. She looked at Lucinda and he saw what he had not known before, that she was afraid of her mistress.

“It’s all right, Georgia,” he said kindly.

“I declare I didn’t know you were in here, Miss Lucie,” the dark girl said.

“Don’t come in without knocking, Georgia,” Lucinda said sharply.