Read Online The Angry Wife by Pearl S. Buck - Free Book Online

dress every night now as she had before the war.
    She herself was already wearing her yellow taffeta, which she complained was in rags and tatters, except that Georgia held it together by delicate darning. She had looked neither ragged nor tattered, however, as she sat in her highbacked chair, her hands folded together like magnolia petals.
    “You may expect an addition to your family, Mr. Delaney,” she said.
    “Indeed!” he cried. He sat up and took his hands out of his pockets. “When, may I ask?”
    “In the first two weeks of September, likely,” she said.
    She sat very straight and full of dignity, and he smiled and went over to her and took her head between his hands and kissed her forehead.
    “Careful of my pompadour, please,” she cautioned him.
    He sat down again. “And what shall her name be, Luce?” he inquired.
    “I had thought of Sapphira,” she replied. “It’s a Bible name,” she added.
    He reflected. “Wasn’t she a liar, Luce?” he asked.
    “She obeyed her husband, I believe,” Lucinda replied. “It is in my memory that her husband bade her tell a lie.”
    He had burst out laughing. “Why, Luce, all women are liars! They don’t need to have men teach them.”
    “Indeed they are not,” she had cried.
    “Indeed they are,” he had cried back at her, “and if you plague me I shall utterly destroy your pompadour.”
    He knew by now that a threat to disarrange her hair was the surest way to subjugate her, and she knew that since he came back from the war he was capable of doing it. Twice when she had plagued him he had tumbled and tossed her and left her half crying with rage.
    Riding over the fields solitary in the morning he smiled, thinking of the evening. He was tender toward her always, even when he was rough, accepting her little tempers and tantrums with loud laughter, and holding her hands when she fell into a rage. For she could beat him when she was angry and this amused him mightily. It seemed to him that she was the essence of all that was feminine and he loved her profoundly, more he knew, although he would never acknowledge it, than she could possibly love him. He did not blame her for this. She loved him as well as she could, and she could love no one better, or so he believed. With that he could comfort himself. Yet he wondered if there were somewhere, in some women, something more than she could give him. He blushed now when he thought of this. Luce had given him sons and she would give him daughters. He had no reproach against her. But it was strange how war loosened the withers of a man’s soul. Many imaginings came into his own mind now which before the war he could not have had. He was beset by the continual knowledge of the shortness of time and the richness of life. War had shown him both.
    He lifted his hand and drank in the morning sunshine. Once when he and Tom were children they had kept a pet crow, and on a fine morning like this one, the crow would bathe its body in the sun. It would ruffle its feathers and hold them apart for the sun to penetrate into the skin, and then, still unsatisfied, it would turn its beak to the sun and open it wide and let the sun pour down its throat, as though the light were food. He opened his own mouth now and felt the sun warm on his tongue. He could almost taste it, sparkling and pure.
    At the boundaries of Malvern he found John MacBain, leaning on a fence, his straw hat pulled down over his eyes. He was on his feet again, thin as a withe and leathery, alive, but with a curiously dead look in his eyes.
    “You there, John!” Pierce called and cantered his mare. Then he jumped down and threw the reins over the beast’s neck and sauntered toward his neighbor.
    “Feeling well again?” he asked.
    “Well as I’ll ever be,” John MacBain replied. He was chewing a twig of spice bush.
    “You look pretty good,” Pierce said gaily. He was warmly aware of the blood coursing through his own potent body, and of his child in