Pearl Buck - Death in the Castle

EVERY BOOK TELLS TWO stories: one concerns the characters, the other the author, and how he happened to write such a book. Death in the Castle began some years ago in England. With Tad Danielewski, my partner in Stratton Productions, I visited a beautiful ancient castle. Out of its hoary shadows and castellated towers the characters emerged, fictitious and yet so strangely vivid that their story unfolded in my mind in an instant

Since Tad Danielewski is a stage and screen director, we immediately fell into a discussion of how their story was to be presented. He thought in film, I thought in novel. We decided upon a cooperative effort. I wrote the novel, he wrote the screenplay. The work went on almost simultaneously.

Perhaps the reader will find the same enchantment that I experienced when the story took shape, as if in double exposure — one faithfully echoing the other, promising a new kind of excitement generated by the magic of the screen and the participating audience.

The purpose of art is communication, but in the arts each uses its own means, and each gains its own response. In the novel the reader is required to exert his creative imagination in order to participate. In the film participation is more direct and less subjective, for the viewer feels that he is actively transported into the scene itself.

We bring you both: now the novel, a little later the film, of Death in the Castle.

— PEARL S. BUCK

THE DELICATE SUNSHINE OF an English spring shone through the tall and mullioned windows of the castle. He had been up since dawn, on horseback as he was every morning, riding about the farm while she slept. By the time he had cantered home it was half past nine and he was hungry. He had tramped into the dining hall where they had all their meals, except tea. She talked sometimes of a breakfast room, but he was accustomed from his earliest memory to this enormous room and the long table beneath the chandelier where they now sat, he at the north end and she at the south.

This morning, however, she had been up earlier than usual. How else could the bowl of daffodils on the table be explained? They lifted their yellow trumpets, three or four dozen of them, in a big silver bowl on the lace mat. Unless Kate had got into the garden? Years ago they had decided not to talk at breakfast, though the decision had been forgotten more often than not. She had even complained because he expected her, a young bride, to eat breakfast with him. He could see her yet, a slip of a girl, an English beauty, blue eyes under honey-colored hair, facing him across the distance. He could hear her high sweet voice, complaining and willful.

“It’s such a beastly time of day, Richard! My parents never wanted to see each other so early.”

“My dear,” he had retorted, laughing. “If I had been compelled to face your mother every morning I might have felt the same. She is a Gorgon but you’re not. You’ve a face like a rose, Mary, and I want to see it across my breakfast kidney and bacon. It’s my prerogative.”

“All the same, I shan’t talk,” she had threatened while her eyes smiled.

“You needn’t,” he had said, and through the thirty-five years of their happy marriage she had been very nearly silent in the morning, though faithfully breakfasting with him. Stubborn little thing!

He looked at the rose of a face now, across the table. It was still pretty, a slightly faded rose, perhaps, but worth looking at, and not at all what her mother’s had been — more like her father’s perhaps, a gentle peer retiring too early to a crumbling Cornwall fortress of a castle. He had merely brought her from one castle to another, except that he had not allowed this castle to crumble and never would, in spite of these preposterous times when one was to be penalized, it seemed, for having been born in one’s family seat.

She caught his half-frowning glance over the daffodils and lifted her eyebrows to inquire.

“Nothing,” he said abruptly, “just remembering an odd moment.”

Wells, who was both cook and butler in these lean days, had been standing with his back to them, facing the buffet; he now broke an egg into hot water. She liked her egg poached, with a side serving of kippered herring. Wells, tall and erect in a worn gray uniform, was bone thin with age; his white hair was brushed carefully, his hands were still steady. He had been footman when Sir Richard was a boy and Lady Mary a small fair-haired girl in short white frocks. They were enchanted enemies in those days, he and she, their families distant neighbors, and Mary had pretended not to see Richard when he came with his mother to tea and showed off with handsprings and gymnastics when the two of them were sent out to play on the lawn.

Wells turned to reveal a long and melancholy face. “Will you have an egg this morning, Sir Richard? With your kidney and bacon?”

“I will, thanks,” he replied. “I daresay I’ll need it. Is Kate gone to the station yet?”

“It’s a bit early, sir. She’s just dusting the great hall, preparatory to the American, sir.”

“Go and tell her she’ll be late.”

“Yes, Sir Richard.”

The old man left the room, coping bravely with a slight limp. Silence fell. Lady Mary drank her tea, gazing reflectively at the daffodils. Sir Richard buttered his toast and glanced at her.

“I say, my dear, you’ll meet with us, you know.”

For a moment he thought she would not break her silence. Then she spoke, her voice still high and sweet and oddly youthful with the hair now white.

“I hadn’t thought I should. Must I?”

“I shan’t want to meet him alone,” he said.

“Did you telephone Philip Webster?”

“By Jove, I forgot!” He leapt to his feet and was halfway to the door when she spoke again.

“I telephoned him.”

He paused. “What? I say, that was good of you! I don’t know why I forgot—”

“You won’t need me if he’s here.”

“Yes, I shall. Moral support. Webster’s such a pessimist — convinced the worst will happen, and I am too easily convinced.”

He sat down again. Somehow once the conversation was begun, he wanted to keep it going. “It was Webster who thought of this business with the American. He’ll push me. He’ll tell me the country is doomed and the castle with it and all that rot.”

She poured a second cup of tea. “Why he should have found the American, of all people! Perhaps it was because your father sold the two paintings from the ballroom to an American the year we were married. But that was so long ago! Remember? To pay for our honeymoon tour, I’m afraid, poor dear!”

“I paid for the honeymoon,” Sir Richard said flatly. It was the ballrooms he paid for. “Everything for the land, in those days,” he went on, grumbling. “He scrimped me to the bone at Oxford. A lot of good it did! The land was never better, but it’s still not enough, unless we modernize. And taxes! I thought when we let the damned public come in we might be saved. Nothing is enough, it seems. Government wants everything.”

She spread marmalade on a bit of toast. “Yes, it was the paintings reminded Philip. Fancy his resorting to an American otherwise!”

He was suddenly irritable. The pounding headache, to which he had become liable in the last year, had attacked him again. “Stop complaining about what I cannot help,” he said sharply.

Out in the hall Wells stood in disapproval of his granddaughter. “Kate, you’re wanted. They think you’ll be late.”

“Yes, Granddad, just one more minute, please.”