The Angry Wife (33 page)

There were more than trees to mark the years. Mathews’ children grew up and started livery stables and grocery stores in the nearby towns, and inside his own house he had two grandchildren and Carey, two years after he left home, married the daughter of a millionaire mine owner.

Pierce did not like his new daughter-in-law. She was effusive over the charm of Malvern but he heard her praise with grim calm.

“It’s delightful, isn’t it, Carey? Such a wonderful background—” she exclaimed. Listening to her, watching her, Pierce decided not to give Carey the MacBain house. It would allow this young woman to stay too near. He’d keep it. Maybe by some strange chance, Tom would come back to Malvern. He dreamed of such strange things these days, gazing at the mountains.

Pierce looked to the mountains increasingly now when he was bored or lonely. He was often both. His Sally was planted deep in South America, with children of her own. Those people apparently did not believe in birth control—it was their religion, he supposed. But he could not reach out to Sally any more. And Lucie was Lucinda’s own shadow. He had never found a way to communicate with the child, though she was child no more, and engaged now to a young fellow from Baltimore—but he had no interest in it.

He met John MacBain sometimes, but John was tired and he was worried now by the talk of automobiles. If people bought cars of their own what would railroads do? There was even talk of freight being hauled by motor vehicles.

“It seems like railroads will never rightly come into their full glory,” John MacBain mourned. “People are always inventing something new before they get the good out of the old. We’ve only just begun to think about street cars and automatic stokers and here they’re plotting automobiles—”

Somewhere in the years John MacBain and Molly had reached the river which must part them or which they must cross together. Pierce knew of it, for John had sent for him abruptly one day from New York. Pierce had gone at once, with great distaste for that northern city, but with invincible loyalty to his friend. He found John and Molly together at the Waldorf in a state of mind that was iron on John’s part and fire on Molly’s.

Pierce was surprised to find them together in the same suite, for he had imagined that only Molly’s broken promise and final desertion could have moved John to go to New York after her. He sat in the room with them both.

“Pierce, you decide,” John announced.

“Decide?” Pierce murmured.

“Whether I’m being fair or not,” John went on. “I’ve let her have her rein now for years. Pierce, you know the whole story. But the time has come to stop. If I’d been—a whole man—it would have been time to stop—even with me. She can just as well stop with another man—and I mean Henry Mallows, by Gawd!”

Molly burst into loud tears, but John refused to be moved. He turned to Pierce pathetically. “Pierce, either she can stay with me and grow old with me decently or she can leave me. My patience has given out.” He pounded the table and overturned his glass of whiskey and water and the liquid spread over the floor.

Molly flew to mend the damage. “Oh, look what you’ve done, you big lout!” she cried in a trembling voice. She ran for a towel and wiped up the wet. “The table’s spotting, too!”

“Never mind,” Pierce said. He waited until she came back and then he went on, musingly. “Tables and chairs and things last so much longer than we do—I often think of that at Malvern. All the things I’ve gathered there—they’ll be there, but I won’t. There isn’t much time left for nonsense—after fifty—”

His quiet words brought a still cold air into the heated room. John sighed and, Molly wiped her eyes.

“You two,” Pierce said affectionately, “I can’t spare either of you and so you must stay together somehow. I don’t want any more changes in my lifetime—whatever comes after.”

He went home again after they had dined together and there had been no more talk. John and Molly went to Europe unexpectedly, and when they came back Molly had given herself up to fat and comfort and from then on John and she jogged along. Pierce looking at them wondered why it was that he and Lucinda could not do the same. But he could not, as John had, demand nothing but simplicities of marriage.

“I’ve given everything to my marriage,” Pierce said to himself. John and Molly had come for a brief visit before going home to Wheeling. Then they were gone and the house was somnolent. Martin’s family lived in the west wing, and when Pierce wanted quiet he drew a bar across the door between and it was understood that it remained so until he drew it back again. Mary Lou was compliant, never emerging, indeed, from the sweetness which she kept wrapped about her like a veil and through it Pierce saw her only dimly. But Martin seemed happy—as, happy as he needed to be. Pierce knew his eldest son well enough now to know that he demanded little from life beyond comfort and security and these he took for granted from Malvern.

Then why, Pierce asked himself on one somnolent autumn afternoon, was he himself not content? He found himself increasingly and unbearably lonely as he viewed old age just over the horizon of the mountains. There it was, like the setting sun, and he must watch night come on. He dreaded it and he longed for closeness and nearness to someone, and to whom could it be, if not to Lucinda? They must be wed again to one another for age as they had been for youth.

So he set himself to win her once more, to court her with new love. He could study her, he told himself, and learn afresh her little likes and dislikes, her taste in colors and flowers and perfumes, things he had forgotten for years. And jewels—he had given her jewels for the children. Now he would give her jewels for herself.

It was not easy. Hardest of all to bear was Lucinda’s surprise, cynical, half amused.

“What’s the matter with you, Pierce?” she inquired. “What do you want?”

“Only to tell you that I love you, my dear,” he said gently. But she seemed unable to believe him. She imagined with disgust that he wanted her body with some sort of recrudescent, elderly lust. He was too embarrassed to speak when he discovered her suspicions and for some time he refrained from so much as kissing her lips.

Then his loneliness overcame him and one November afternoon, when they had walked together through the woods, he sat down on a fallen log. When she sat down beside him he took her hand.

“I feel myself growing old, Luce,” he said.

“It’s about time,” she said with the faint smile she used so often now.

“No, don’t, my dear—” he begged her. “Don’t be cynical, Luce. It’s a desperate thing to grow old, and feel one’s wife doesn’t forgive him for something—he doesn’t know what. Darling, come close to me—I don’t mean—what you think—I mean—your heart, Luce—that’s far away from me. I must have your heart—because I can’t grow old alone—”

She sat as still in the soft autumn sunshine as though she were made of marble. He felt something struggle in her. Her fingers still fluttered but he held them fast.

“Tell me what it is you have against me,” he begged her. “Whatever it is, I will change it—do away with it—give it up—I promise you! But first you must tell me what it is or how will I know?”

She could not speak, or would not. But he held her fluttering, unwilling fingers and he told himself that if he were patient, loving but not passionate, if he could persuade her and make her believe him—

“I have no one but you now, to be near to me,” he said tenderly. “See, dear, I want to be near to you, too, in the way we should be, each trusting the other. I want to devote myself to you—I thought I had all my life—but if there is something you think keeps me from you—”

And then bit by bit she began to speak, and he let her speak.

“But you do know what it is,” she said.

“Indeed, I do not, Luce,” he said gently. “That is why I beg you—”

“You know—you know—every time you go there—”

“You mean—Tom? My brother?”

“He’s only part of it—you make an excuse of him—”

“Excuse for what, Luce? Tell me!”

“You go to see
her—
”

“Her?”

“That woman.”

“A woman, Luce?”

“Georgia.”

Now it was out. Now he knew. She sighed and drew her hand away. He sat staring at the tip of her shoe, peeping out from her long ruffled skirt. “Do you believe I have been unfaithful to you?” he asked abruptly.

“I don’t—think of such things,” she said faintly.

“Think of it for a moment, now. Do you?”

“You aren’t—different from other men.”

He felt his throat thicken with rage and swallowed it. He would be patient with her for his own sake, because he could not meet what lay over the horizon—alone.

“Will you believe me when I tell you that I have always been faithful to you—always?”

She did not stir or speak.

He went on. “Once and once only have I spoken alone to Georgia since she left Malvern, and there was not one word of love between us—I promise you.”

“Then why did you speak to her?” Lucinda’s words were like dry dead leaves fluttering to the ground.

He considered, remembering. “I want to be honest—I am honest when I say I don’t know. Somehow it had nothing to do with me—what she was. It had to do with the far future. I—how can I explain to you? I think we’ve been taught wrongly, you and I—we can’t change now. We belong to the past. But the future—”

He shook his head. He must not try to change her, for she could not change. He must not enter into that future, for he would not be alive when it came, and neither would she.

He said, “Georgia told me that day she was going to Europe with Tom’s daughter.”

Lucinda made a pettish movement. “But that’s so silly,” she exclaimed. “A niggra!”

He was patient with her. “It doesn’t matter to us,” he said reasonably. “We have nothing to do with it. We live here at Malvern. You and I—we’ll grow old here.”

She looked at him suddenly. “Do you mean you aren’t going to see Tom any more?” she asked.

He looked down into her eyes. Ah, he knew her so well, all her little thoughts, all her narrow fears which she herself did not understand! He pitied her profoundly but to love her had become the habit of his life and he could not change.

He spoke slowly, with pain. “If I promise never to go to Tom’s house again—will you forgive me?”

She fluttered her eyelashes, lifted them up and then let them down. “Yes,” she said, “I’ll forgive you—”

They rose, and she hesitated. Then she dropped her little handbag and her gloves and he felt her arms about his neck. She buried her face in his bosom and began to sob.

“Why—why—my darling—” he stammered.

“Oh, Pierce,” she cried, “you’re
good!”

He held her while she wept, and could not speak.

Tom understood, of course. Tom did not blame him for anything. They met in a hotel in Baltimore and Pierce told him the simple truth in a few words.

“I want peace,” he finished.

Tom listened and forbore. “You are a free man,” he said at last, “as free as I am to make your choice.” They had talked little after that, for there was no more to say. Tom had brought pictures of his children, and Pierce looked at them. Leslie was the father of a child now, and a successful writer. He had written a bitter clever book. Tom had a copy but Pierce did not open it. Small Tom was going to be a doctor and Lettice was married.

“Not one of them has crossed the line,” Tom said calmly. “But they’ve my blood to help them when I am dead.”

He took a big photograph from his bag. “This is Georgy,” he said. “She’s the vanguard.”

Pierce looked down at a beautiful young face, confident and brave.

“You can see Georgy’s not afraid,” Tom said. “She’ll sing, maybe even in Washington. That’s her dream—to sing in Washington, where Lincoln was. Maybe she’ll sing in the White House—some day.”

Pierce could not speak. He had no heart to dim his brother’s hope. Besides, perhaps Tom was right! Who could say what the future was to be except that it never could be like the past?

“I have a picture of Georgia, too,” Tom said quietly. “Do you want to see that? She’s—quite changed—from living in France so long.”

Pierce did not speak for a moment. He kept looking down into Georgy’s young and dauntless face. Ah, this was how Georgia would have looked—had she ever had a chance!

“Does she—look older?” he asked after a long moment.

“Younger—strangely younger,” Tom said. “Very beautiful—they’ve made a fuss over her there. Mademoiselle La Blanche they call her. She always wears white—”

Pierce’s heart beat hard once or twice. Then he quieted it. He had chosen Lucinda for old age and for death.

“No,” he said. “No—thanks, Tom—I’ll just remember Georgy—”

A Biography of Pearl S. Buck

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) was a bestselling and Nobel Prize-winning author of fiction and nonfiction, celebrated by critics and readers alike for her groundbreaking depictions of rural life in China. Her renowned novel
The Good Earth
(1931) received the Pulitzer Prize and the William Dean Howells Medal. For her body of work, Buck was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature—the first American woman to have won this honor.

Born in 1892 in Hillsboro, West Virginia, Buck spent much of the first forty years of her life in China. The daughter of Presbyterian missionaries based in Zhenjiang, she grew up speaking both English and the local Chinese dialect, and was sometimes referred to by her Chinese name, Sai Zhenzhju. Though she moved to the United States to attend Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, she returned to China afterwards to care for her ill mother. In 1917 she married her first husband, John Lossing Buck. The couple moved to a small town in Anhui Province, later relocating to Nanking, where they lived for thirteen years.

Buck began writing in the 1920s, and published her first novel,
East Wind: West Wind
in 1930. The next year she published her second book,
The Good Earth
, a multimillion-copy bestseller later made into a feature film. The book was the first of the Good Earth trilogy, followed by
Sons
(1933) and
A House Divided
(1935). These landmark works have been credited with arousing Western sympathies for China—and antagonism toward Japan—on the eve of World War II.