Angry Wife

Chapter Five

BETTINA LAY ASLEEP IN the moonlight. Summer and winter she had her bed by the window where she could look out into the shrub-enclosed back yard. The lawn and the narrow flowerbeds which she tended so carefully by day were enchanting to her by night. When there was no moon she could smell the sweetness of the dark and the fragrance of dew. In winter the frost was fragrant. Like all women whose lives must be lived within boundaries, she had grown deeply and she had learned to make every small part of her life as large as the universe. Thus at night to single out a star and to lie in her bed gazing at it, to imagine its existence, enlarged her as a journey might enlarge a traveler. To dream of the one man she knew who possessed her, to ponder upon his qualities, his strength and his weakness, was enough for her whole life. Early in her life with Tom she had made up her mind to demand nothing of him. If he came it was her joy, but if he did not come, her life must go on. Sometimes he reproached her for this in one way or another. “I don’t believe you miss me, Bettina. You are just as happy when I am not here — you and the children.”

To which she answered out of her profound simplicity. “When you come it’s like the sun breaking through and taking hold of a day I thought was going to be dark. But if the sun don’t break through you have to go on living, Tom. Besides, I know you will come — sometime. So do the children.”

He had come to understand that reproach was folly. She was as fathomless as the sea and the sky, and as essential.

Now he hastened to her through the gathering night. Pierce’s words were a spur to his feet and with every step he took he swore that the path on which he walked would know him no more. Never again would he go to Malvern. He renounced his birthright.

He could see the low outlines of Bettina’s roof and the gate was still whiter than the darkness. He opened it and shut it loudly and then guided by the light of the candle that Bettina always kept in the window, he went into the house. If he came, he blew the candle out. If he did not come, it burned down into its pewter holder. Now, however, he lit the lamp in the living room and taking the candle with him he went upstairs into the room where she slept.

She lay on the wide bed by the window. He held the candle high and she opened her eyes and he was struck again by her extravagant beauty. Her pale face was set in the dark hair outspread on the pillow and her slender right arm was thrown above it. She made her nightgowns dainty and fine, and lace lay upon her bosom. She was fastidious even after all these years and she had her small reserves from him. Thus when the candlelight fell upon her she drew the sheet instinctively over her breasts. Then she smiled her slow and lovely smile. “Tom — I’d given you up tonight.”

He set the candle down on the table and sat down on the bed and began to speak urgently. “Listen, Bettina — understand quickly what I say. I want us to get up and go away — now.”

She sat up, instantly aware, and twisted her loose hair into a knot at her neck. She waited without speaking, her dark eyes wide.

Tom went on, “Pierce and I have quarreled. Lucinda came in. I don’t want to stay here another day. You and I and the children are going away together. We’re going now, because if I stay I might not be able to get away. And I want to go — I must go.”

“Darling, could you tell me?” She had dreamed often of going away with him, and there was nothing but joy in the thought. But she would not let him go in haste. She had to be sure that there was no other way and that it was what he wanted most.

“I don’t want to tell you,” Tom said abruptly. “But I know as I know my own soul that if I stay they will not rest until I am parted from you. I can’t part from you, Bettina.”

His hand searched for hers but she did not yield it to him.

“Did they want you to send me away?” she asked.

“They want me to marry another woman—” he said harshly.

“You aren’t married to me, Tom—”

“That’s not my fault — I’ve wanted you to marry me.”

“I can’t marry you, darling. The ministers wouldn’t marry us.”

“We’re going somewhere that I can marry you. Get up, Bettina, and get the children up. We’re going to catch the four o’clock train north.”

“Darling, I’ll go if you promise me one thing.”

“I can’t make promises now, Bettina—”

“Only this one, that if you want to come back, you will come back. I can’t take you away from Malvern forever, honey — you’ll hate me.”

“Malvern can burn down for all I care, and good riddance to all its old rubbish.”

“But you were born there!”

She bent her head on her knees and he stroked the soft nape of her neck upward with the sweep of her hair. “If it makes you feel better about going, I’ll promise,” he said: “But I know I’ll never want to come back. I’ve outgrown it. It’s dead — in the past.”

She lifted her head at his words. “You mean—”

“I mean you and I and our children are going to make our own world. It will be a good world, where everybody will be treated justly for what he is — even if it is only inside our own four walls.”

A good world! With these words he took her by the soul and only thus could he have won her to follow him. She had to know that what she did was for good, and now she believed him. She got out of bed and silently they packed his roundbacked trunk and two carpetbags with clothes for the children and themselves.

“I shall want my books from Malvern,” Tom said. “I don’t care about anything else. I’ll write Pierce that he can send them by railroad freight.”

“I’ll have to tell Georgia where we are, Tom.”

“Of course.”

He lit the lantern an hour later and walked down the road to the livery stable and roused Pete Calloway and asked for a vehicle. “I’ll leave it at the railway station and you can fetch it tomorrow,” he said.

Pete, in his long cotton nightshirt, leaned out of the window. “How come you ain’t using your brother’s vehicle?” he asked.

“I’m going away on my own business,” Tom said, “and here’s your money.”

Pete came out scratching his head. “You ain’t quarreled with him, have you?”

“Him” within fifty miles of Malvern meant only Pierce, and Tom smiled. “In a way,” he said. “But never mind.”

Pete was hitching up his second-best surrey. “Tell George I’ll come around early to the station,” he drawled. “Want me to meet you tomorrow night?”

“No, thanks—” Tom replied. Tomorrow Pete would tell over and over again how he had been roused in the night and how Tom had told him he had quarreled with his brother. But by tomorrow nothing that happened here would matter. He dropped two dollars into Pete’s outstretched palm, saw how dirty that palm was, and climbed into the surrey and drove down the road again.

At the house Bettina and the children were dressed and waiting. Leslie was silent with astonishment and Georgy was ready to cry.

“Don’t cry,” Tom said. He picked her up and put her in the front seat beside him. “We are going to live where Papa can be at home with you always, like other people. Bettina, have you the money?”

He had long ago brought to her what he earned and, she kept it for him, using it when she needed it. At Malvern he had needed nothing except an occasional book.

“I have it all,” she said. She turned her head to look at the little house that had sheltered her for so long. Within it she had been safe enough, but she knew that it could not shelter her children. She turned her head away again and climbed into the surrey, holding her baby in her arms. Leslie climbed in after her, and thus they drove away into the night, their faces set toward the north.

Pierce woke feeling tired. At his side Lucinda lay still asleep and he got out of the wide bed and went into the room next hers, which he called his own. Sometimes he slept here when Lucinda did not want him with her. He hesitated a few minutes at his window. The dawn was just beginning to break. It was an hour he loved. The mountains in the distance were purple and the grass on the lawns was silvery with small dew-sprinkled cobwebs. Had he not felt tired he would have put on his riding things and gone out. Instead he turned and slid his big body between the clean fresh sheets of his own bed. The quarrel with Tom was still to be mended but he did not want to think about it. He burrowed his head into the pillows and went to sleep again.

From this sleep he was wakened two hours later by Lucinda herself. It was so unusual an occurrence that at first he could not bring himself to believe it was she who stood over him.

“Wh-wha-what—” he muttered thickly, staring at her with sleep-bleared eyes. He was at the bottom of an ocean and she was hauling him up, calling his name over and over again.

“Pray tell!” she now said sharply. “I never did see anyone so stupefied! Anyone would think you had gone to bed drunk. Pierce, wake up — Tom’s gone!”

She flung this at him like a spear and he sat up in bed and gaped at her.

“Gone where?” he asked out of confusion.

“Nobody knows — just gone! Pete Calloway came to say so. They’ve all gone.”

“Who?”

“Bettina — everybody! I sent Jake down to see. The house is empty. Pete said that George told him they all came to the station and Tom bought tickets for Philadelphia.”

“Oh, my God!” He was awake now and he leaped out of bed. Lucinda sat down.

“You get out of here, Lucinda,” he ordered her. “You know I can dress faster if you’re not here.”

“Oh, Pierce — you’re so silly — as if I hadn’t seen you naked thousands of times—”

It was an old quarrel between them, petty and inexplicable and yet profound. Pierce had the excessive modesty of the big man, and Lucinda had no modesty at all. Lucinda’s brazenness about her own body had secretly troubled and astonished Pierce through all the years of their marriage. There had been times when he found it exciting, but when these times were over, he disliked it. A truly good woman ought to cover herself. Yet he would not allow himself to think that Lucinda was not good. Her lack of natural modesty made his own increase. He did not like her in the room with him when he washed himself and dressed. To shave in her presence was ignoble and to scrub himself with soap and sponge before her was humiliation. He wanted to appear, even before her — ah, perhaps especially before her — as always himself and whole. There was nothing childish in his love of her.

She sauntered out of the room, half scornfully. Married people surely need not be so foolish, she thought. But in a strange and unconscious fashion it was more than foolishness to her. She was jealous of everything in Pierce. She wanted no reserves in him. Full possession must be hers, his body hers, in jealousy rather than passion.

But she went into her room, for it was quite true that he could not or would not dress as quickly if she were with him and this morning he must be quick. She was not sure what it would mean to have Tom gone. There could be no school, of course. That meant the children would be underfoot all day. Well, Georgia must look after them then and teach them. What would she do with John? John would grieve, she thought with irritation. But he must get over it. She sat down before her mirror and examined the details of her hair and her eyelashes and skin, the silver hand mirror flashing a reflected sunlight upon her head. On the whole, it was good that Tom had gone for a while. She put down the mirror. Of course, she thought, that was it — he had simply taken Bettina away. Then he would come back again. It was not likely that he would leave Malvern and all its benefits.

Pierce came into the room a few minutes later shaved and dressed. “Where’s Georgia?” he demanded.

“I sent her to get the children up,” Lucinda replied.

“She may know something,” Pierce said and went off to find her.

But Georgia did not know. He did not doubt the truth of her troubled eyes. She was curling Sally’s hair about her finger. The children knelt before her and cried out when he came in, “Uncle Tom’s run away!”

Everyone knew it, of course. There was no keeping things from the children in a huge household like this. Someone always told them.

“Georgia, you know anything about this?” he demanded.

She went on brushing the golden coils of Sally’s hair about her finger.

“No, sir,” she said. “Bettina didn’t tell me anything. It’s come as a — shock.”

She lifted her eyes to his and he saw them full of tears.

“Didn’t she tell you anything ever of such a possibility — if something went wrong?” he asked.

“No, sir,” she said simply.

He had an uncomfortable conviction that he ought to tell her about yesterday. Bettina was all she had.

“Go away, Sally,” he ordered. “I want to talk to Georgia.”

“But why can’t I hear?” Sally objected. “I know everything, anyway.”

Pierce was appalled. “What do you mean by everything?” he demanded.

“I know Uncle Tom and Bettina have children together,” she said.

“Oh, my God,” Pierce groaned, “go on away, will you? Go and find your mother.”

Then his heart twinged. It was his own fault that he had not put a stop to the mess long ago. But who could have foreseen that Tom would be so serious? He ought to have remembered that Tom had always been serious. He seized Sally and kissed her loudly, sighed, then let her go. He faced Georgia.

“Georgia, I did talk to Bettina yesterday but she didn’t give me a hint of what’s happened. Now Bettina surely must have said sometime or other to you that she might go away,” he argued.

Georgia stood up. “No, sir, we didn’t talk much any more about things.”

“What do you mean — any more?”

“We did talk a lot — at first,” Georgia replied. “I mean — we used to try to think what was to become of us. I think she thought we’d never marry, of course.”

“What’s the ‘of course’ about it?” Pierce demanded.

“She didn’t want us to marry — just anybody,” Georgia said delicately.

“And do you think Bettina did well to allow Tom — to — to—”

“No, sir, I never thought so,” Georgia said. “I told her from the first that it would be an embarrassment to the family — and to us. She understood that. But to be fair to Bettina, I think I ought to tell you, sir, that Master Tom certainly did persuade her.”

“I am sure he did,” Pierce said drily. He sighed again and stood up. “Well, I don’t know what has happened to me,” he said unhappily. “I don’t know if I’ve lost a brother or not. I reckon we’ll find out where they’ve gone. If she writes you, you must tell me at once.”

He was too upset to notice that she was silent. She stood motionless while he walked heavily out of the room. Going down the stairs to his breakfast, it occurred to him that Georgia had spoken for herself his one thought of yesterday. If Bettina had properly married before Tom had come home none of this would have happened. Georgia ought to be married. Trouble came from unmarried females in a house — females that were young and beautiful and low enough in position to be at the mercy of men. He stood indecisive and then tramped back upstairs again. She was standing just where he had left her, her head drooping, her hands clasped behind her, as though in meditation. When he came in she looked up.

“Georgia, something you said made me think.”

“Yes, sir?”

“You ought to get married yourself. We haven’t any right just to absorb your life the way we do in this house.”

She blushed and lifted her head still higher. “I don’t want to marry, thank you, sir.”

“Haven’t you ever seen any man you wanted to marry?” he persisted.

“No, sir,” she said quietly. She hesitated a moment and then went on. “And it wouldn’t be any good if I did, I don’t intend to marry, sir — ever.”

“Georgia, every woman ought to marry,” he declared.

“I don’t want to bring another human being into the world — as I was brought here,” she said in a strange quiet voice.

“But — but—” he stammered, “if you married a man — of your own race—”

“What is my race?” she asked him.

“Well—” he began, “well—”

“Yes, I know,” she said in the same strange still voice. “Colored is where I belong — outside. But inside — I don’t.”

He was completely miserable in the presence of her soul thus bared before him and he retreated in haste. “You know, Georgia, if there was anything I could do — any single thing. My God, when I was fighting in the war I never dreamed of all it couldn’t settle! But what can I do, Georgia?”

“Not a thing, Master Pierce, except just go on being — kind.”

She was suddenly her usual self again and she turned to the bureau, opened the top drawer and began to sort Sally’s ribbons. He stared at her back and at her reflected face in the mirror. Her lashes were downcast and her soft mouth firm, and feeling that he was where he should not be, he turned and went downstairs again, confused and unhappy.

Tom and Bettina had grown silent as the night wore on. The children curled into the red plush seat and were asleep and Bettina held the baby in her arms. Tom sat beside her, his arm touching hers to the shoulder. At first they had talked much in the excitement of what they had done, but as dawn broke over the fleeing landscape they ceased. They were tired and Bettina was bewildered with doubt. They had acted in such haste. Could she make it up to him if some day he was sorry?

But Tom would allow himself no doubts. He wanted to build the foundations of his new life carefully and he meant first to find a decent place for his family to live. “My family,” he thought, and felt an unspeakable tenderness for this little group of human beings who depended upon him so wholly because he had created them. He had no worry about money. Bettina had enough of his savings for their immediate needs and he would write Pierce and ask for his share of their inheritance. He had a respectable amount of money left him by his mother, besides, if he wanted to use it. He was fortunate. Not every man could start a new life with such confidence.

Forgetting the constant, irritating motion of the train he pondered on what it was he wanted most for his children. It was simple enough — a place where they could grow up as other children did in this country of theirs — his children’s country. He had fought and nearly died to make it so. His jaw grew grim at the memories that crowded into his mind. Not he alone had died to make the children free. He remembered and would remember forever the young men’s bodies, carted out of the prison camps, dying and dead, and shoveled into shallow graves. These, too, had died for his children. God helping him, he would try to find a place where what they had done would count at last.

He turned to Bettina. “We shall live in Philadelphia,” he said.

“Oh, I would like that,” Bettina exclaimed.

“The City of Brotherly Love,” he said with a dry smile. “The variety may be better in the north.”

“If a slave got to Philadelphia, he was safe,” Bettina said simply.

The city became home to them from then on, although neither of them had ever seen it. When they stopped at the station the next afternoon it was home. Tom refused to notice the stares of the people around him as he marched through the waiting room. He carried the baby and the two older children clung to Bettina’s hands. A porter took their bags, his eyes bulging, too. It was to this porter that Bettina turned in private inquiry.

“Can we folks put up at the hotels here?” she whispered.

He caught the whisper and exchanged secret looks with her. He shook his head. “You can’t, nor the children,” he mumbled. “You gotta go to a boardinghouse — downtown—”

How could she convey this to Tom? She caught step with him and looked up to him pleadingly. “Honey, let’s sit down and rest a minute.”

They sat down on the nearest bench. She took a startled glance to see if she would be forbidden and was reassured by the sight of an old black woman in a creased grey cotton frock, drowsing at the end of the seat and clutching a worn carpetbag to her lean stomach.

“Tom, where are you going to take us, dear?”

“To a hotel,” he replied.

“Honey, they won’t let us in — me and the children.”

He stared at her and suddenly flushed. “They’d better.”

“No, Tom, honey — wait! Let’s not begin quarreling with folks here. Let’s find a quiet boardinghouse for me and the children, and you go to a hotel for a few days. Then we can look around and find the house we want. It would make me much happier that way, I don’t want to go where I’m not wanted — please, Tom!”

He yielded because he was tired and in spite of all, a stranger here. “Very well,” he said.

They started again, the porter following with the bags and he found them a horse cab outside on the street driven by a ragged black man. The porter leaned to whisper to him as he turned and stared at Tom. What he was saying was plain enough to Bettina, and she pressed a coin into his hand after Tom had paid him. “Thank you for helping me and my children,” she whispered.

“Woman, you shore needs help!” the porter whispered back.

It was the beginning of their new life.