Free The Angry Wife by Pearl S. Buck Page A

eyelids.
    “I only wanted to warn you,” he said sternly. “I think Bettina ought to be prepared. It’s natural that her mistress can’t be pleased. I’m not pleased myself.”
    Georgia’s dark eyes fell. Her narrow hands fluttered at her apron. “No, sir. I’m not pleased, either. I told Bettina so. And Bettina isn’t happy. She knows she can’t—” Georgia stopped.
    He wanted to ask “Can’t what?” But his dignity would not allow him. He was in a dangerous place, and he wanted to be out of it.
    “You had better find her and tell her,” he said severely.
    “Yes, sir. Thank you, Master Pierce.”
    He turned to the door abruptly and crept down the stair again. Once he wondered if the girl were staring after him and he turned and took a quick glance. But the door was shut.
    He reached the back porch and then his office in safety and he opened a door in the panel and took out a decanter and a glass and drank deeply of wine. The smell of October grapes reminded him of the day when he had come home, he thought to peace at last. “God,” he muttered with bitterness, “what peace!” and drank again.
    Upstairs in her own room Lucinda sat alone. She had come in, her skirts swirling, and had at once locked the door and sat down to think. Why she locked the door she did not know, but it was her first instinct. Now and then she locked it against Pierce in the night when she wanted to sleep, and in bed she lay wakened when she heard him turn the knob and find it locked and then curse and swear softly under his breath. He had learned that it was useless to call her. Nothing would persuade her to unlock the door after she had locked it. She would lie laughing into her pillow because she felt arrogant and powerful. She had a whip in her hand over Pierce, her husband, whom she loved.
    She wanted the door locked now against him because she wanted to be alone. Her room was silent and safe, closing her in from everybody. She had made the room exactly what she liked, and somehow even during the war she had kept it so. The flowers on the carpet were clear against the deep white pile of the background. It had come from Paris, and it would last forever. Georgia cleaned it with cornmeal twice a year even when cornmeal was their only food. The dirty meal was given to the pigs so it was not all waste. But she would not have dared to let Pierce know.
    So it was with the organdy curtains at the window. Somehow they were starched, even when there was no white bread. Georgia made the starch out of potatoes, long soaked.
    She sat thinking and staring out of the window, and little darts of fear and premonition ran needling through her veins. She tried to ignore them. It was Tom, not Pierce. But Pierce had not been really angry with Tom. Pierce sided with Tom in his heart. Men stood together against women, and Pierce stood by Tom. She longed for a woman friend to talk with, a woman who would feel as she did against men, and made up her mind that she would ride over and visit with Molly MacBain. Maybe she would tell her and maybe she wouldn’t, but anyway it would be strengthening just to talk with a woman. When she came back she would decide about Bettina. She put aside an uneasy thought that maybe she ought not ride now that she was going to have a baby. Pierce would be cross with her about it. She had not ridden for a month—let him be cross, though! She wanted to disobey him. But she delayed decision, nevertheless, and went on thinking.
    If she talked to Bettina it would set the girl up. Her own mother had never noticed her father’s mulatto children. They grew up in the servants’ quarters and everybody knew and nobody said anything. It was her father who had bought Georgia and Bettina and now that she thought of it she remembered how her mother had looked when he had come in and thrown down papers.
    “I’ve brought you two likely house girls, Laura,” he had shouted.
    Her anger against Bettina grew. Why, maybe even in her