This Proud Heart: A Novel by Pearl S. Buck

Author:Pearl S. Buck
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781480421400
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

IV

EVERYTHING IN THE HOUSE, she thought, looking down the long narrow drawing room, was now in order. She had lived in Blake’s house weeks enough now to know when everything was ready for the day. At the end of the drawing room was a small formal garden and beyond the garden was the East River. Linlay, the Scotch gardener, came up from the country once or twice a week and saw to the plants around the pool. The chauffeur was to water between his visits. She had just been listening to Linlay’s complaints.

“Bantie don’t water half that he should, Ma’am. With your leave, I’ll speak to the maister.”

“Oh, no, Linlay,” she said quickly, “please don’t trouble my husband. I will speak to Bantie.” Next time—this afternoon when she was driving to the Metropolitan, she would remember to lean forward and say to young Bantie—She went alone almost every day to the Metropolitan. It was cool and empty and she could sit as long as she liked, pondering what she saw.

The house itself was very still in midsummer. The children had gone away to camp. Blake, in the first week, had said to her restlessly, “Don’t children go away to camps in the summer?” Certainly they should not be kept in town. Blake had been wonderfully generous about doing over the west end of the house for them, but it was hot. Besides, there was the morning she had found Blake in the drawing room holding his head in his hands, because John was leaping down the stairs.

“John!” she had called sharply, and had gone into the hall to meet him, flying at the last step. And then because of the innocence of his inquiring eyes she had not scolded him.

“Would you like to go to a camp?” she asked instead.

“Jane said she might take Marcia and me home,” he said, his voice tentative.

“This is home,” she said.

“Yes, I know,” he answered gently. “But I mean—you know—our real home.”

“No,” she said quickly. “I’d much rather you both went to camp and learned swimming and things.”

She worked with Jane for a week, getting them ready. Blake had been very good. He gave John an expensive fishing rod and explained about flies. There was almost nothing Blake did not know. But last week John had written to her privately: “Will you please send me an ordinary fishing rod and don’t tell Blake as the fellows say the ordinary kind like everybody has here are better, and we use worms.” So without telling Blake, and she would not for anything have told him, she had gone alone to a sports shop and sent a very ordinary-looking rod. Marcia was too young to write for herself. Every other week a prim official letter came announcing certain facts about Marcia, that she was quite well, that she was going to be a naturally good swimmer and rider, but that her appetite was capricious and she was a little willful. Susan asked, “Does Marcia seem at all

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