This Proud Heart (45 page)

“I expect everything,” she said proudly.

“Well,” he rejoined, “I hope you get it.”

She did not answer.

“Am I to tell the old fellow?” he asked her after a moment.

“No, I will tell him myself,” she replied. And then she leaned forward impulsively. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Blake, what of you and me?”

She had put it to him. He looked at her, and she met his gaze fully, her own eyes questioning.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Are you happy without me?” she asked.

“Are you without me?” he replied.

“I can’t just—go on with you,” she said. “It must mean something to us both.”

“Of course,” he agreed amiably. She waited, but he did not speak. A log slipped in the fireplace and when she moved he was ahead of her.

“Let me,” he begged. And when he sat down again, he said, “You could make something rather decent out of this old house, Susanne. It has lines.” He was looking about the room.

“Yes,” she said.

Then she saw he would never speak to her from within himself. He had so long evaded himself, so long hidden from any truth whatsoever, that face to face with it he would not meet it. And she was born to truth and must have it. If they lived together, now that the bond of flesh was broken, she would in her intolerant necessity drive him again and again to a finality which he as often would evade, until at last he would hate her, as even now she could not longer love him. No, she no longer loved him, but she would never forget that once she had loved him with completest passion. She was silent a long time, thinking, and he sat smoking and gazing into the fire.

“Blake,” she said at last, very gently, “would you mind very much if—if I asked you to let me stay here?”

“Divorce?” He spoke the word out quickly and sharply.

“If you’d rather have it so,” she answered. “I don’t care—only let me live here and do my work.”

“Haven’t met somebody?”

She shook her head.

“No,” she said, “no, of course not.”

He smiled. “I’d understand,” he said.

But she did not answer. It was still impossible to know how he really felt.

“I have been quite happy with you, Susanne,” he went on in his even, pleasant voice. “At first I used to wonder sometimes if I would be. You aren’t the type I’ve—you were challenging, though, because you were impregnable. At first I wanted to break down your pride, and then I fell in love with you.”

“My pride is not broken,” she said quietly.

“It’s a damned instinctive sort of thing in you.”

It was the nearest moment to truth in him, and now she understood him and she said with instant sympathy, “I know I am not a comfortable woman for a wife.”

“You’re only half there,” he said, smiling. “A man likes to possess his wife.”

“I know,” she said, a little drearily, “and I am not to be possessed.” She waited and then she said firmly, “And I was born so.”

He did not answer, but he sat looking at her.

“I always wanted everything,” she said to him, half pleadingly, to explain herself a little if she could. “I wanted to be everything—to be a good wife and the sort of mother the children would want, and do my work, too. And when you came, I wanted to be—your love, as well.”

“I suppose,” he said, half grudgingly, “you were all those things.”

“I don’t know why we talk as though I were dead,” she said. “I am more alive than I have ever been—more aware of everything.”

And indeed this was true. In this awareness she saw, in a great intuitive light and with a sad humility, that her grave fault lay in her very being, which differed too far from the average human, and so was not to be borne by them. Women were not her close friends because she did what they did and too much besides. Why else had Mary never loved her, and why now did Marcia draw back so often when she put out her arms, except that Marcia’s own slight warmth was not enough to bear her mother’s too rich loving? She had been too much for David Barnes, for whom his Titans were enough. She had been too much for Mark, and she was too much now for Blake. He would perhaps have forgiven her if Joseph Hart had not liked what she had made. Each had wanted something from her that the other had not. But she had given too fully to their need, and each had felt the weight of all else that she was besides, and each had known that he alone was not enough for her and the knowledge was too bitter and there must be escape from it. She was too much for everyone, and none could fill her and each knew it and went away.

There was no one left her, except John. She must be very careful of John. She must let him carve his figures small, in wood, and not let him feel the hugeness of her marbles. She would hide away her largeness from him until she died.

“You have told me so often I am simple—I think you said once, stupid—” she said to Blake. “You were so right. It has taken me so long to see what was wrong with me.”

He did not ask her what she saw. “I meant,” he said, “that you are naïve, expecting people to take you as you are. You go to them directly, as a child does. But you aren’t a child and they don’t know what to do with you.”

“Yes,” she said, “I know. People only take others as they themselves are—as they themselves are able. I should have understood that long ago, shouldn’t I?”

They talked with long pauses, hers longing and doubtful, his half wary, and the afternoon was nearly gone. The sun was beginning to slant across the room. It fell upon the worn blue carpet, the carpet she and Mark had bought when they began their life. That life had been and passed, but it had taken its place in the whole. And now, by the very scantiness of the words she and Blake could speak to each other, she felt this life passing from her, too.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “Don’t ask me, my dear, to probe into psychology. The plain truth is—” He paused a moment and turned his head away, and then he said, “Whatever we had, it seems to have escaped us.”

“If I had not been what I am—” she began.

“I wouldn’t have fallen in love with you at all,” Blake finished. He was on his feet, belting in his overcoat. His face looked a little white, his lips dry. She was suddenly seized with a shadowy, enormous pain.

“Oh, Blake,” she cried, “you’ve given me very much!”

“So have you given much to me, Susanne.” But when she put out her hand, he shook his head. “No, don’t mind,” he said, “don’t try to catch what’s gone. I grieve that it’s gone. I wish it might have stayed, but nothing stays. I know—I have that sense of end about everything. I always have had. Before I begin, I feel the end.”

“Did you feel so about me, too?” she asked.

“I think I did,” he said slowly. “I think I must have, because all this doesn’t seem strange to me. I feel as though I’d lived it before.”

He took her hand and kissed it and she saw his eyes were wintry. “He will look like that when he is old,” she thought.

“We will see each other, perhaps, often,” she said.

“Why not?” he asked. He was going toward the door and he bent and took up his hat and gloves. His stick fell, and he stooped to pick it up.

“I’ll write you,” he said, “we can settle the details easily enough. Strange!” He paused and looked about the hall. “I had the sense of this end even when I came into this room today.”

It was impossible to tell whether or not he grieved.

“If I thought you were grieved,” she said earnestly, putting her hand on his arm, “it would shake me very much.”

“Are you grieving?” he asked her.

“I think I could, Blake—I feel somehow that I shall.”

“Ah,” he said, “you’ll grieve because nothing lasts—that’s all. It is the final grief we spend our lives trying to escape. Goodbye, Susanne, and thank you.”

He had gone so suddenly that it seemed a vanishment. She saw him step into his car and the car darted away into the twilight gathering black under the trees.

She went back, dazed, into the room. The sun had left it, but the fire was burning with a steady richness of fallen coals, and the room was as full of warmth and light as ever. She sat down, still dazed. He had made the time pass half lightly, yet with such terrible finality. It was over. Did she grieve? She did not know. It was as though under some powerful anaesthesia he had given her a blow, and she had taken it.

“You will grieve because nothing lasts, that’s all,” he had said.

Ah, but in her everything lasted. She had all she ever had. Everything she had, the home she and Mark had made, his death, Blake’s sharp and passionate love to make her know herself a woman, the children—she had all of it forever, to be the rich experience from which she drew her life, her life which was so much more than her mortal body was.

Yes, she would grieve sometimes, at night perhaps, but in the morning she would get up and go to work, and then she would not grieve. She would forget to grieve.

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.

Buck published several other novels in the following years, including many that dealt with the Chinese Cultural Revolution and other aspects of the rapidly changing country. As an American who had been raised in China, and who had been affected by both the Boxer Rebellion and the 1927 Nanking Incident, she was welcomed as a sympathetic and knowledgeable voice of a culture that was much misunderstood in the West at the time. Her works did not treat China alone, however; she also set her stories in Korea (
Living Reed
), Burma (
The Promise
), and Japan (
The Big Wave
). Buck’s fiction explored the many differences between East and West, tradition and modernity, and frequently centered on the hardships of impoverished people during times of social upheaval.

In 1934 Buck left China for the United States in order to escape political instability and also to be near her daughter, Carol, who had been institutionalized in New Jersey with a rare and severe type of mental retardation. Buck divorced in 1935, and then married her publisher at the John Day Company, Richard Walsh. Their relationship is thought to have helped foster Buck’s volume of work, which was prodigious by any standard.

Buck also supported various humanitarian causes throughout her life. These included women’s and civil rights, as well as the treatment of the disabled. In 1950, she published a memoir,
The Child Who Never Grew
, about her life with Carol; this candid account helped break the social taboo on discussing learning disabilities. In response to the practices that rendered mixed-raced children unadoptable—in particular, orphans who had already been victimized by war—she founded Welcome House in 1949, the first international, interracial adoption agency in the United States. Pearl S. Buck International, the overseeing nonprofit organization, addresses children’s issues in Asia.

Buck died of lung cancer in Vermont in 1973. Though
The Good Earth
was a massive success in America, the Chinese government objected to Buck’s stark portrayal of the country’s rural poverty and, in 1972, banned Buck from returning to the country. Despite this, she is still greatly considered to have been “a friend of the Chinese people,” in the words of China’s first premier, Zhou Enlai. Her former house in Zhenjiang is now a museum in honor of her legacy.

Buck’s parents, Caroline Stulting and Absalom Sydenstricker, were Southern Presbyterian missionaries.