Gods Men

10

UPON A GAY AND prosperous people the thunder clouds of the Great Depression now crashed down their destruction. In the late summer, Clem had felt something was wrong. He could not define, even to Henrietta, his uneasiness, beginning at first as a personal discontent in his own mind, though he tried to do so one Sunday, the last in August. She was aware of his eternal searching for causes and, by her listening silences and her careful questions, helped him to see more clearly the vague shapes he perceived in the future.

Long ago Henrietta had come to understand that in Clem there was something of the seer, if not of the prophet. His instinct for humanity was so delicate, his perception of mankind so ready, that without magic and entirely reasonably he was able to forecast the possible in terms amazingly definite. Had he lived in ancient times, she sometimes mused, had he been born in those early ages when people explained the inexplicable, the mystic man, by saying he had been fathered by a god or had seen gods upon the mountains or in the flames of a burning bush, struck perhaps by lighting, they would have cried out that Clem was a prophet sent to them by God and they would have listened to him. And, were they frightened enough, they might have heeded him in time to avert disaster.

Now Clem and Henrietta, seated in rocking chairs upon their own narrow front porch, looked to the passer-by no different from any other middle-aged couple upon the street of an ordinary Ohio town. He talked and she listened and questioned. He was in his shirtsleeves and an old pair of gray trousers, and she saw that the collar of his blue shirt was torn. She resolved to throw it away secretly when he took it off that night. Clem was miserly about his clothes and declared them good enough to wear long after they had reached the point of dusting cloths and mops.

“I can’t just tell you in so many words how I feel about things,” Clem said. “It’s like sitting out on the grass on a nice bright day and then suddenly knowing that the earth is shaking under you — not much, but just a little. Or it’s like being in the woods, maybe, and wondering if you don’t smell smoke somewhere.”

“If you were in the woods and smelled smoke,” Henrietta said, “you’d find out first which way the wind was blowing and look in that direction, wouldn’t you?”

Clem flashed her an appreciative look. “I’ve thought of that. I can’t tell which way the wind is blowing — not yet. Crops were good enough this year, at least taking the country as a whole. Maybe things are all right. Maybe it’s nothing but my own queasy stomach. I oughtn’t to have eaten those corn dodgers last night.”

“I’ll never have them again,” Henrietta said.

Clem went on after a few seconds of rocking. “The trouble is that the way things are now in the world, we’re all tied together in one way or another. There might be an earthquake somewheres else which would upset us, too.”

She did not reply to this. The evening was pleasant though hot and children in bathing suits were playing with hoses, spraying each other and shrieking with laughter. Clem, deeply troubled by thoughts which were now roaming the world, saw nothing.

“The news from abroad is not bad, though, Clem,” she reminded him. “Yusan says the new government in China is bringing order and getting rid of the warlords, at least, and pushing Japan off. And Goshal says that Gandhi has made a sort of interlude in India.”

Clem got up. He walked across the porch, took out his penknife, and began to cut a few dead twigs from a huge wisteria vine that Henrietta had planted the first spring she came to New Point. Now, a thick and serpentine trunk, it crawled to the roof and clung about the chimney for support.

“Goshal is a Brahman no matter what I try to tell him,” Clem said. “What you call interlude, hon, is only a truce. Gandhi has got the British to compromise for a while for just one reason, and Goshal can’t see it. The price of food has gone down so much that millions of peasants are going to starve, hon, if something isn’t done quick.”

“City people will have more to eat if food is cheap,” Henrietta said.

“Most people don’t live in cities,” Clem said. “That’s not the point though, and I am surprised at you, hon. If the peasants and farmers starve it doesn’t help the factory workers in the long run. Gandhi is right when he says everything has to be done for the interests of the peasants. They’re basic everywhere in the world.”

Henrietta felt clarification begin in the waters of Clem’s soul. He was clipping one twig after another and they fell upon the wooden floor of the porch with soft dry snips of sound.

Clem went on, almost to himself. “And I don’t know what to think about things in China. A new government? Well, any government, I guess, is a good thing after all these years of fighting and goings on. I don’t blame Yusan for being glad about that. But I wrote him yesterday and told him that if this Chiang Kai-shek didn’t get down to earth with all his plans and study what the people need, it will be the same story. You don’t have to be an Old Empress to make the same mistakes.”

Henrietta was rocking back and forth silently, her following thoughts circling the globe.

“I don’t know,” Clem muttered. “How can I know? I don’t believe Japan is going to let things lay the way they are. They’ve been afraid for centuries, those people! They’ve got themselves all stewed up — can’t blame them, though — the way different nations have gone over and sliced off big hunks for themselves. ‘We’re next,’ that’s what the Japanese have been thinking for a mighty long time, hon! ‘If we don’t get going and carve ourselves out something big, we’re next.’ That’s what they think. Maybe they’re right, who knows? Only thing I know, hon, is that the earth is shaking right here under my feet. I don’t like the looks of things.”

He lifted his head and looked away over the housetops and beyond the trees. “Talk about smoke — the wind is from Europe, I reckon.”

The cyclone struck in October. Bred in the storms of the world it had gathered its furious circular force in the angry hunger of the peoples of Europe and then reaching its sharp funnel across the Atlantic Ocean it struck in Wall Street, in the heart of New York, in the most concentrated part of America.

Clem, on that first fatal morning, reached out of the front door to get the morning paper, half his face lathered with shaving soap. He saw the headlines as black as a funeral announcement and many times as large upon the front page, and knew that what he had feared had come. He wiped his cheek on the sleeve of his pajamas and sat down in the kitchen to read. Henrietta was making coffee. When she saw his face she set a cup before him and went out into the hall, got his overcoat, and wrapped it about him. Over his shoulders she saw the frightful announcement, CRASH IN WALL STREET SHAKES THE NATION!

“Tell Bump to get down here as fast as he can,” Clem ordered. “You and me and him have got to get right to work, hon.”

She obeyed him instantly as she would have obeyed the captain of an overloaded and sinking ship. There was no time to waste.

Clem dressed and ate a hasty breakfast and being immediately beset by the demons of indigestion, he was swallowing pepsin tablets when Bump came into the house. Henrietta had cleared the dining-room table of dishes and cloth, and Clem spread out the big sheets of white wrapping paper upon which he always did his large-scale figuring.

“Sit down,” he told Bump. “We’re going to have the worst depression in the history of the world. We got to get ready to feed people the way we’ve never done before. I’m going to open restaurants, Bump. It won’t be enough now to sell people food cheap. We got to be ready to give it away, cooked and ready to swallow, so that people won’t starve to death right here in our own land.”

He outlined in rapid broken sentences what he believed was sure to happen and Bump listened, cautious and reluctant and yet knowing from past experience how often Clem was right.

“We can hardly feed the whole nation, Clem,” he said at last.

Clem was immediately impatient. “I’m not talking about the nation. I’m talking about hungry people. I want to set up restaurants in the big cities as quick as we can. Our markets will supply our own restaurants. Whoever can pay will pay, of course. At first most people can pay and will want to. But I am thinking of January and February, maybe even this winter, and I’m thinking of next winter and maybe the winter after. That’s when things will get bad.”

It was impossible to get so huge a plan going as quickly as Clem thought it should and could. But it was done or began to be done within a time that was miraculous. Clem bought a small airplane which Henrietta, much against her secret inclination, learned to fly lest Clem insist on doing so and he, as she well knew, was not to be trusted with machinery. He expected divine miracles from engines made by man and while she had submitted for years to his mistreatment of automobiles, his wrenchings and poundings of parts he did not understand, the frightful speed at which he drove when he was in a hurry, she could not contemplate such maneuvers in the air.

She made a good pilot, to her own surprise, for she was an earthbound creature and hated suspension. Clem as usual was surprised at nothing she did, insisting upon her ability to do everything. At as low a height as she dared to maintain, they flew from city to city, her only apparent cowardice being that when they went to the coast to set up Clem’s restaurants in San Francisco and Los Angeles, she avoided the Rocky Mountains, and flew far south in order to escape them. Pilot and attendant, she followed Clem while, with his superb and reckless disregard of all business principles, he established during that first winter six restaurants across the country on the same magnitude as the markets. For these restaurants he hired Chinese managers.

“Only Chinese know how to make the best dishes of the cheapest food,” he explained to Henrietta. “They’ve been doing that for thousands of years.”

Knowing the importance of the spirit, he summoned his new staff to a conference in Chicago, where he put them up at a comfortable hotel while he talked to them about starvation and how to prevent it. He worked out one hundred menus, dependent upon the raw materials of the markets, and laid down the rule which should have ruined him and which instead led him eventually to new heights of prosperity.

“Any time anybody wants a free meal in any of our restaurants they can have it,” he said firmly. “Of course they can’t order strawberries and cream, but they can have meat stew and all the bread they want and they can have baked apples or prunes for dessert. Nobody will know whether they pay for it or not. They’ll get a check same as everybody else and they’ll go up to the cashier and just tell her quiet-like if they haven’t any money.”

“How many times can one man eat free?” Mr. Lim of San Francisco inquired.

“We don’t ask that,” Clem said. “We don’t ask anything, see? If anybody’s hungry, he eats. At the same time, we’ll serve other foods, cooked so good that people who have got money will pay for it. And our restaurants will look nice, too, so that people will want to come there. They won’t seem like handout places.”

The Chinese exchanged grins. Their salaries were secure and so they were highly diverted by this mad American. Since he had appealed to their honor they were prepared to respond with their most ingenious economies and seasonings. He in turn accepted their promises with complete faith.

“We can do such things as you talk,” Mr. Kwok of New York Chinatown now said. “Only thinking, however, is that we better hire our own cooks and waiters, each of us somebody he knows good.”

“Sure,” Clem agreed. “That’s all up to you. I hold you responsible, each for your own place.”

“Must be order, you see.” This was Mr. Pan of Chicago. “I know Americans think all equal but Chinese know better. For making something go, especially cheap and good, one man is top and everybody else in steps below, each man top to next man and next-to-top man is reporting to very top man. Each man is servant and at the same time boss, except bottom man, who is anxious for rising and does his best.”

“Sure,” Clem said. “You put it neat.”

With the simplest of casual organization, Clem arranged his markets and restaurants in an endless chain of co-operation. He did not expect perfection and did not get it. Nepotism in two of the restaurants was a drain on profits until he discovered it and fired the two managers and hired new ones. With the old managers went the entire staffs and with the new ones came new and chastened ones. The other four managers approved the changes and worked with the greater integrity and zeal. Clem’s Brother Man Restaurants without advertising lost no money the first year and saved thousands of people from hunger so quietly that the public knew nothing about it. Three per cent of the people who ate free meals could have paid and did not. This was balanced by sums from people who could and did pay extra because they liked the food. Clem was brazen about accepting such extra pay. On the bottom of the menu cards in large bold letters he printed this legend:

OUR PRICES ARE TOO LOW FOR PROFITS. IF YOU HAVE GOT MORE THAN YOUR MONEY’S WORTH FROM SOME DISH YOU HAVE ESPECIALLY ENJOYED, PLEASE PAY WHAT YOU THINK IT IS WORTH. THIS MONEY WILL GO TO FEED THE HUNGRY.

A surprising number of people paid extra, but Clem was not surprised. His faith in humanity increased as he grew older and made it unnecessary, he declared, for any further faith.

“The way I look at it is this, hon,” he said to Henrietta on one of their long flights across the plains of the West. “Everybody needs faith. Some people find it in God or in heaven or something way off. Take me, though, I get inspiration out of my faith in people here and now.”

In the middle of the next winter, however, Clem found himself puzzled. He was feeding people on a huge scale, not only through his markets but through his restaurants, and he saw that it was not enough. He turned his eyes away from the breadlines and knew that at last he had met a task that was beyond him.

The effect of this discovery upon him frightened Henrietta. She saw his first excitement and exuberance, his immense rise of energy, his self-confidence, and even his faith pass into an intense and grim determination as the hordes of the hungry increased over the nation. They gathered in the cities, for country people can hide themselves snugly into their farms and eat the food they produce and stop buying. Furniture and machinery which they had been tempted to buy on installments they relinquished, wary of their savings. They had lived without radios and without cars and washing machines and they could again. They withdrew into the past and lived as their grandparents had done and did not starve. They could still sleep in ancient beds and use old tables and sit on ladder-back chairs.

It was the cities that frightened Clem. Even in the cities where he had his restaurants, the breadlines began to stretch for blocks. When he found a family with seven children starving in New York he came back to Henrietta in the small room at a cheap hotel, which was his usual stopping place.

“I wouldn’t have thought it could be, hon,” he said mournfully. “Maybe in China or India, but here? Hon, how am I going to get the government to understand that people have got to be fed? A war will come out of this, hon. People won’t know why there’s a war and they’ll think it’s because of a whole lot of other things, but the bottom reason is because people can’t buy food because they don’t have the money to buy it with. That makes men fight.”

“Clem, you look sick!” Henrietta said. “I’m going to get you a doctor.”

“I am sick,” Clem said. “But it’s a sickness no doctor can cure. I’ll be sick as long as things go on like this.”

At noon he refused to eat and Henrietta went downstairs to eat alone, ashamed of her steady appetite. If Clem could only separate his soul from his body! But he could not and his body shared the tortures of his harassed soul. He blamed himself for things being what they were, and this Henrietta would have thought absurd except she had seen in her own father when she was a child the same suffering for the sins of others.

“Did we do our duty as Christians—” she remembered her father saying that year when they had left China, that fearful year when Clem had been left alone in Peking—“the world in a generation would be changed.”

Clem was like that, too. He wanted the world changed quickly because he saw it could be changed and he fretted himself almost to death because other people did not see what he did. Troubled and sad, she ate her robust meal, chewing each mouthful carefully because she believed Fletcher was right about that. She had got interested in Fletcherism because of Clem’s indigestion and especially because he was always in such a hurry that he swallowed his food whole.

When she went upstairs again he was lying on the bed, flat on his back, and she thought he was asleep. She tiptoed in and stood looking down at him. His hands were clasped behind his head and his eyes were closed. Then she saw his lashes quiver.

“That you, hon? I’ve been lying here thinking. I believe I’ve got an idea.”

“Oh, Clem, I hoped you were asleep! If you won’t eat—”

“I will eat but you know how I am. If I eat when I’m thinking something out the food just lays on my stomach. Hon, I am going to see your brother William.”

She sat down heavily in the soiled armchair. “Clem, it won’t do a bit of good.”

“It might, hon. He’s got a new wife.”

“Nobody could have been nicer than Candace.”

“Maybe so. She was mighty nice. But if William loves this woman, maybe it has done something to him. Maybe it’s stirred his heart.”

“I hope you don’t want me to go with you.”

“I was kind of hoping you would.”

“Clem — it won’t help! He’s invincible now. Everywhere we go people are reading his nasty little newspapers.”

“He must feel something for people, hon.”

“No, he doesn’t. He hates people. He despises them or he wouldn’t make such newspapers for them. I know why he does it, too. He feeds them the worst stuff so as to keep them down. It’s like feeding the Chinese opium — or giving whisky to the Indians. People learn to like it and because they like it they will follow the person that gives it to them.”

Clem, always generous, shook his head at this picture of William. “I kind of think I’ll go right away and see for myself, hon.”

Henrietta’s anger rose in spite of love. “Very well,” she declared. “Go if you must. But I will not go with you.”

He sighed and got off the bed. He put on his coat and smoothed his hair with his hand. Then he bent to kiss her tenderly.

“You don’t feel mad with me, do you?”

“Oh no, Clem, except—”

“Except what?” He paused and looked down upon her, his eyes bright blue in his white face and his lips pursed quizzically.

“Clem, you’re too good, that’s all. You won’t believe that anybody isn’t good.”

“That’s my faith, I guess.”

He turned at the door, looked as if he were about to say something more, kept silent instead and went his way.

Lady Emory was alone for luncheon. She was, of course, Mrs. William Lane and by now she was well used to it in all external ways. She was beginning to feel that the huge comfortable house in uptown New York was her own, and in certain ways that Hulme Castle could never be. From earliest memory she had known that while Hulme Castle was her shelter it was not her home. William had divined this very soon after their marriage and had offered to put at her disposal as much money as needed to repair the castle and put in bathrooms.

“It will make you feel more free to go there and stay as long as you like, now that you are my wife,” he had said quite gracefully.

Her father had refused the gift, however. He saw no need for more bathrooms since he himself still used a tin tub brought into his room in the mornings and set before the fire.

“I believe William would like to come here and stay sometimes, Father,” she had replied to this prejudice. “He would feel less like a guest if he had some part in the castle.”

She said this quite as gracefully as William had but her father had only grumbled and it had taken Michael to persuade him to let William repair at least the west wing as a place where Emory and her husband might stay when they came to England. Lady Hulme had early discerned in William a rather touching desire to own some part of Hulme Castle and so she had been grateful to Michael who, after all, was the one most to be considered, since he was the future heir.

As for America, as far as Emory had seen it, it was amazing. The people were very friendly, perhaps too friendly. She had been invited to a great many dinner parties and everybody had persisted in calling her Lady Emory, and this made her feel at home. William, too, called her Lady Emory in the house to the servants. Naturally when he introduced her it was as his wife, Mrs. Lane. She felt in spite of his real love for her that she did not know him as well as she hoped she would one day. He had a strange and almost forbidding dignity which she did not dislike, although she saw that it cut him off from ordinary people and even from her, sometimes. She was used to that. In his way her father had a dignity, too. He would have been outraged by familiarity from his inferiors.

Moreover, there was something about this dignity of William’s which ennobled her and their life. She was proud of his straight handsome body and was well aware of their regal appearance together.

He never talked to her of his first wife. In marriage he and she were utterly alone, and for this she was grateful. Instead, he told her much about his boyhood in Peking, and she who had never thought of China as a place existent upon this earth, now perceptively saw him there, a tall solitary boy, august in his place as the only son of the family, hungry for communication when there could be none, alien from his parents and sisters as he was from the Chinese he knew, who apparently were all servants.

“Did you not know any Chinese boys?” she asked.

“They were not allowed in the compound,” he replied. “My mother did not like them to hang about. Even my father’s study had a separate entrance so that when the Chinese came to see him they need not enter the hall.”

“Did you try to know anybody secretly?” she asked.

“It would not have occurred to me,” he replied sincerely.

Then bit by bit there came out the remembered fragments of his life in the Chefoo school and here she perceived he had been shaped. She saw the proud boy slighted and condemned by the careless lordly English boys she knew so well, for Cecil had been such a boy. Unconsciously William revealed to her his wounds never healed.

It was not all bitterness. He could speak sometimes of wide Peking streets and of the beauty of the porcelain roofs on the palaces of the dying Empire. He told her one meditative evening how his mother had taken him to see the Empress when he was a small boy. “I bowed before her, but I didn’t kneel because I was an American. The Chinese had to kneel and keep their heads on the floor. I remember her thin hands — yours remind me of them. They were narrow and pale and very beautiful. But the palms were stained red and the long nails shielded in gold gem-studded protectors. I looked at her face — a most powerful face.”

“Did she speak to you?”

“I don’t remember that. The people called her the Old Buddha. They were afraid of her and so they admired her. People have to have someone like her. I was sorry when she died and that revolutionary fellow, Sun Yatsen, took over. People can’t respect a common fellow like that — someone just like themselves. Maybe this new man, Chiang Kai-shek, will be better. He is a soldier, used to command. There is no democratic nonsense about him.”

Emory listened, knowing that he was telling her things he had never told anyone, things that he had forgotten and now drew up out of the wells of his being. At the bottom of everything there was always a permanent complaint against his parents because they had robbed him of his birthright of pride. It had been impossible to explain to them why he was ashamed, and he was the more ashamed because he had the agony of wanting to be proud of his father, and then the humbling realization of knowing that there was something of his father in himself in spite of this hatred, and that he could not simply enjoy all that he had, his money and his great houses and the freedom that success should have bought him, because he could never be free. God haunted him.

This was the bitterness and the trouble and the terror that she found in William’s soul. It made her thoughtful indeed. His conscience was the fox in his vitals.

Upon such musing alone and by the fire in the drawing room of her American home she took her usual afternoon tea on the cold January day. It was not often that she was alone but she had felt tired, the intense activity of this new world city being something to which she was not used. She had been invited to a cocktail party given for that playwright now most successful upon Broadway, Seth James, and. when she telephoned to William that she would not go he had replied that he himself must go since Seth had been a former employee with whom he had disagreed, and if he did not go, it might appear that he held a grudge.

“Do go, by all means,” Emory had said at once.

She found it comfortable to be alone for an hour. It seemed difficult to be alone in America, although in Hulme Castle it had been the most natural state. Now, after she had eaten some small watercress sandwiches and drunk two cups of English tea, she went to the piano William had had made to order especially for her touch and sitting down before it she played for perhaps half an hour, transporting herself as she did so to some vague and distant place that was not America and yet not quite England. She had no wish to return to Hulme Castle and she was quite happy here in this house, as happy as she thought she could be in mortal life. Cecil had left her entirely now, even her dreams, and she seldom thought of him.

In the midst of her music the door opened and she heard the slight cough with which the second man announced his deprecatory presence.

“Well, Henry?” she called, softening her melody without stopping it.

“Please, madame, Mr. Lane’s brother-in-law is here.”

“Mr. Jeremy Cameron?”

She had met Jeremy and William’s rather sweet sister Ruth. She had found it difficult to get on with Ruth’s soft effervescence, but Jeremy she thought charming, although it was unfortunate that he was also the brother of William’s first wife.

“I do hope you won’t mind it that I am Candace’s brother,” Jeremy had said directly when they were first alone. “I assure you that Candace entirely understands about things. She wouldn’t mind meeting you, as a matter of fact — she’s a warmhearted sort of creature.”

“I don’t mind in the least your being her brother,” Emory had replied.

“It’s not Mr. Jeremy, please madame,” Henry now said. “It’s the other brother-in-law — a Mr. Miller, I believe.”

“Oh—” Lady Emory rose from the piano. She knew about Henrietta who, William said, had married a strange sort of man named Clem, who had made an odd success in food monopolies. While she stood in the middle of the floor somewhat uncertain as to how she would receive Clem or whether she should receive him at all, he was at the door looking altogether shadowy, with his sandy gray hair blown about.

“Do come in,” she said.

She was struck by his excessive thinness and the startling blue of his eyes.

“You look cold!” she said with her involuntary kindness. “I think you should have some hot tea.”

To Henry, still hovering in the doorway, she said with distinctness, “Please fetch a pot of hot tea, Henry.”

“Yes, madame.” Henry’s voice breathed doubt as he disappeared.

Clem saw a woman, a lady, who was all gentleness and kindness. It was true that he felt ill for a moment when he first came in. He had eaten nothing since morning.

“I guess I am a little hungry,” he said and tried to smile.

She had him in a comfortable chair instantly and put a hassock under his feet. The fire burned pleasantly and the vast room was quiet about him. Everything was comforting and warm and he sighed away his haste and intensity. In his taut body one muscle and another relaxed. The man came back with hot tea and she poured him a cup.

“Bring him a soft-boiled egg,” she told the man.

“I can’t eat eggs,” Clem protested.

“Indeed you can,” she replied with firmness. “You want an egg — you are so pale.”

“No milk in my tea, please,” Clem said.

While he waited he drank two cups of the delicious hot tea and ate one of the hot biscuits she called scones, and when the egg came it was two, served in a covered cup. There were triangles of toast with it and he ate and felt renewed to the soul.

“Wonderful what food can do,” he said and smiled at her and she smiled back.

“I don’t know what to call you,” he said next.

“Emory, of course. You’re Clem, I know.”

“Aren’t you a lady or something?”

“In a way. Never mind that, though, now that I’m an American.”

Clem folded a small lace-edged napkin with care and put it on the tray.

“I see you believe in feeding folks and that’s what I came to see William about. Maybe he’s told you about me?”

“I believe he said you deal in foods?”

“I like to put it that I deal with people and getting them fed.”

He leaned forward, looking extraordinarily restored and reminding her somehow of the young men in London who were always talking in Hyde Park. She had never stopped to listen to any of them but often they had the same sandy look and shining, too blue eyes. While she sat gazing at him and thinking this, Clem was fluent in preaching his own gospel to this kindly, attentive woman. He had all but forgotten that she took Candace’s place and that he ought not to like her so much, but he did like her. Candace had been kind, too, but it was with a child’s kindness and he had never been sure she understood him. But this woman did understand and she was not at all a child. There was even something sad about her dark eyes.

“You see what I mean?” he paused to ask.

“I do see indeed,” she replied. “I think it is a wonderful idea, only of course you are far ahead of your times. That’s the tragedy of great primary ideas. You won’t live to see it believed or practiced that people have the right to food as they have the right to water and air. The holy trinity of human life!”

He could not bear to have her merely understand him or even believe in him. When one believed, one must act.

He put forth his effort again. “We’ve got to get people to see this, though. That is what I came to William for. He has such power over people.”

Emory looked at him with new and sudden interest. “Has he really?”

He was entirely sensitive to this interest and anxious to make the most of it. “I can’t tell you how great his power is. His newspapers go into every little town and household — little easy papers that everybody can read. And then there’s the pictures. If people don’t want to read they can look at the pictures. I read them, too, and look at all the pictures. The queer thing to me is that you don’t learn anything, though — Miss — Lady—”

“Just Emory,” she reminded him.

He could not quite manage it. “I mean that it’s all amusing and nice but you don’t learn anything from it. You don’t learn why it is that the people in Asia want a better life and you don’t learn why it is that things don’t look so good even with the new government in China.”

At the thought of China Clem fell into thought. “I don’t know—” he murmured. “I can’t tell. I don’t think things are going right over there. Maybe I’ll run over as soon as I see this depression through.” He lifted his head. “What I wanted to talk to William about — if he could get converted, so to speak, to this idea of feeding people. It won’t be charity. It won’t cost us money.”

He began to explain the golden rule of his restaurants and somewhere in the midst of it they looked up and saw William at the door, upon his face surprise and disgust.

“Come along in, William,” Emory said at once. “I am listening to the most fascinating man. It’s Clem.”

Thus she conveyed to William that he was to take from his face that look calculated to wound, and that he must come in and sit down and be kind to Clem, because she wished it. Their eyes met for a brief full second and William yielded. He yielded to Emory as he had never yielded to anyone.

“How do you do,” he said to Clem.

“Fine,” Clem said, “How’s yourself?”

William did not answer. He sat down and took from Emory’s hand a cup of tea.

“I really came to see you,” Clem said looking at him. “But I have surely enjoyed talking to your good wife here. She has treated me well — fed me up and all. I didn’t eat lunch today.”

William did not show interest.

“Will you have a sandwich or a scone?” Emory murmured.

“Neither, thank you,” William said.

Clem felt the atmosphere of the room change and he made haste to say what he had come for. Probably they wanted to be alone and anyway he had been here long enough. “I don’t want to waste your time, William, but I do want to give you an idea. Or set it before you, anyway. I read your editorials every day and I see that you put in one idea every day, I guess an idea of your own. I can’t agree with most of them but that’s neither here nor there. It’s a free country. But I notice that people take your ideas pretty nearly wholesale. I move around a lot through the country and I hear men say things that I can see come right out of your mouth, so to speak. I can see you understand how most people are. They don’t know much and they talk a lot and naturally they have to have something to say and so they say what they hear somebody else say or what they read in the newspaper. I admire the way you can lay down something in a short plain way.”

“Thank you,” William said without gratitude.

Clem never noticed irony and he accepted the words as they stood. “That’s all right. Now here’s my idea. How about getting it across that we ought to give away our surpluses to the people who don’t have food? I mean these men in the breadlines, and selling apples on the street, and the families hungry at home. It won’t cost a thing.”

“What surpluses?” William asked in a cold voice.

“Our surpluses,” Clem repeated stoutly. “Even now we have surpluses, while the people are starving because they can’t buy food. It’s money that’s short, not food.”

William set down his cup. “What you propose would upset our whole system of government were it carried to logical conclusion. If people have no money they can’t buy. Your idea is to disregard money and give them food free. Who is to pay the men who produce the food?”

“But producers are not getting anything, anyway!” Clem cried. “The food is rotting and they are short, too.”

“It is better to let the food rot than it is to undermine our whole economic system,” William said firmly.

Clem gave him a wild look. “All right, William, pay the producers, then! Let them be paid out of tax money.”

“You mean the government ought to feed the people?” William was shocked to the soul. “That’s the welfare state!”

“Oh God!” Clem shouted. “Listen to the man! It’s the people I’m thinking of — the starving people, William! What’s a nation if it’s not the people? What’s business if there’s nobody to buy? What’s government if the citizens die?”

“This is quite ridiculous,” William said to Emory. He rose, towering over Clem, who rose to meet him. “We will never agree,” William said formally. “I must conduct my publications as I see fit. Believe me, I am sorry to see anyone hungry, but I feel that those who are hungry have some reason to be. Ours is a land of opportunity. My own life proves it. No one helped me to success. What I have done others can do. This is my faith as an American.”

For a moment Emory, watching the two embattled men, thought that Clem would spring at William. He gathered himself together, his fists clenched, his eyes lightning blue, electric with wrath. He glared at William for a long second and suddenly the wrath went out of him.

“You don’t know what you do.” The words came out of Clem like the sigh of death. He turned and went away as though he had been made deaf and struck blind.

When he was gone William sat down again. “Pour me another cup of tea, please, Emory.” He tried to make his voice usual.

“Of course, William. But is it hot enough?” She felt the pot.

“It is all right, I am sure.”

He waited until he had tasted the tea. “You see, Emory, how impossible the fellow is.”

“I don’t understand your American system yet, I’m afraid, William. Are there actually people starving?”

“Some people, of course, need food,” William said in a reasonable voice. “Charities, however, are alert. There is free food; the very thing he talks about is being done. I have given a great deal of money myself this winter to charity, in your name and mine together.”

He paused, but she did not thank him and he went on. “Who are these charity cases but the ones they have always been? They are the unskilled, the uneducated, the lazy, the drifters, the hangers-on, all the marginal people that are to be found in any modern industrial nation. In the ancient agricultural civilization of old China they were taken care of by the immense family system. Industry, of course, changes all that.”

“Shouldn’t there be some other means found to take the place of the family?”

“There are means,” William said with an edge of impatience. “Believe me when I say that nobody needs to starve here in America if he works. Even if he doesn’t want to work he need not starve. There are charities everywhere.”

“I see,” Emory said, her voice so soft that it was almost a whisper.

They did not speak for a few minutes, and when William put out his hand to her she took it and held it in both her own. It was the best hour of the day, this quiet one between tea and dinner. If they had guests they were friends and if they had no guests it was like this, William always tender toward her. She knew he loved her most truly. Indeed she knew he loved no one else. In some way she could not herself understand she had unsealed his heart which without her had been like a tomb. She was awed by this love for she had never known her power before. Cecil had loved her but she had perhaps loved him more than he did her. She had belonged to him but somehow William belonged to her. She was afraid, sometimes, for could not such possession place too great a demand upon her? She was not quite free any more because his love encompassed her about.

“I am ashamed that my sister’s husband should have forced his way into this room and destroyed your peace,” William said.

“Oh no,” she said. “It was very interesting. As a matter of fact—” but she left her sentence there and he did not ask for its end. Instead he got up and bent down to kiss her. She rather enjoyed his kiss and she leaned back her head to receive it.

“I want to keep you happy,” William said in a voice stifled by love. “I don’t want you troubled.”

“Thank you, dear,” she said. “I am not troubled.”

He went away and she heard him mount the stairs to his rooms. He would bathe and change and come down again soon looking rested and handsome, the gentleman that he was of wealth and increasing leisure. He did not need to work as once he did, he had told her only yesterday. They might go to Italy this winter, stopping at Hulme Castle, of course.

She sat for a moment thinking of this and of Clem. Then with a sudden decisive movement she touched the bell. There was really nothing she could do about Clem. She had chosen William and her world was William’s world.

The door opened. “Take away the tea things, please, Henry,” she said in her silvery English voice. “I am going upstairs and if any one telephones I am not to be disturbed.”

“Yes, madame,” Henry said.

From William’s house Clem went downtown. He wanted comfort and reassurance. Henrietta could always give him comfort and encouragement but no one, not even she, could understand that now at this moment he needed the reassurance of fact. He must learn by actual test whether what he was doing was more than he feared it was, a drop in the vast bucket of human hunger. He avoided the hotel and taking a bus he swung downtown to Mott Street where his largest restaurant stood. It was a dingy-looking place now but there was no need to have it otherwise. People had already learned that they could get free food there, too many people. He saw many men and some women with children standing in a ragged shivering line waiting in the wintry twilight and he pulled up his collar and stood at the end. In a few seconds there were twenty more behind him.

They moved step by step with intolerable slowness. He must speak to Kwok about this. People must be served more quickly on such bitter nights. Speed was essential. They must hire more waiters, hire as many people as necessary.

He got in at last and took his place at a table already crowded. A waiter swabbed it off and did not recognize his guest.

“Whatcha want to eat?” he asked, still swabbing.

Clem murmured the basic meal. He waited again, glancing here and there, seeing everything. The room was far too crowded but it was warm and reasonably clean. It was big but not nearly big enough. He must see if he could rent the upper floor. In spite of the crowd the place was silent, or almost silent. People were crouched over the tables, eating. Only a few were talking, or laughing and briefly gay.

His plate came and he ate it. The food was good enough, filling and hot. The waiter kept looking at him and Clem saw him stop a moment later at the cashier’s window. He ate as much as he could and then leaned to the man next to him at the long table, a young unshaven man who had cleaned his plate.

“Want this?” Clem muttered.

The sunken young eyes lit in the famished face. “Don’t you want it?”

“I can’t finish it—”

“Sure.”

The waiter was watching again but Clem got up and went to the cashier’s window with his check. He leaned toward the grating and said in a low voice, “I’m sorry I can’t pay anything.”

The sharp-faced Chinese girl behind the thin iron bars replied at once and her voice and accent were entirely American. “Oh yes, you can. You aren’t hungry — not with that suit of clothes!”

“My only decent clothes,” Clem muttered.

“Pawn them,” she said briskly. “Everybody’s doing that so’s to pay for their meals.”

He turned in sudden fury and walked across the restaurant, pushing his way through the waiters. He went straight to Mr. Kwok’s small office and found him there in his shirtsleeves, the oily sweat pouring down his face.

“Mr. Miller—” Mr. Kwok sprang to his feet. He pointed to his own chair. “Sit down, please.”

Clem was still furious. “No, I won’t sit down. Look here, I came in tonight to see how things were going on. I told the cashier I couldn’t pay just to try out the system. That damned girl at the window told me to go pawn my clothes!”

Mr. Kwok sweat more heavily. “Please, Mr. Miller, not so mad! You don’t unnerstan’. We going broke this way — too many people eating every day. In China you know how people starving don’t expect eating every day only maybe one time, two time, three time in a week. Here Americans expecting eating every day even they can’t pay. Nobody can do so, Mr. Miller, not even such a big heart like yours. It can’t be starving people eat like not starving. It don’t make sense, Mr. Miller. At first yes, very sensible, because most people pay, but now too many people don’t pay and still eating like before. What the hell! It’s depression.”

The wrath went out of Clem. What the Chinese said was true. Too many people now couldn’t pay. The job was beyond him, beyond anybody. Too many people, too many starving people.

“I guess you’re right,” he said after a long pause.

He looked so pale when he got up, he swayed so strangely on his feet that Mr. Kwok was frightened and put out his hands and caught Clem by the elbows. “Please, Mr. Miller, are you something wrong?”

Clem steadied himself. “No, I’m all right. I just got to think of something else, that’s all. Good night, Mr. Kwok.”

He wrenched himself away from the kind supporting hands and went out of the door into the street. His idea wasn’t working. Nothing was working. People were pawning their clothes in this bitter weather. They were being asked to pawn their clothes, pawn everything they could, doubtless. The waiters had been told to look and see what people wore. He remembered the hungry boy who had seized his plate and eaten the leftovers like a dog. That was what it had come to here in his own country. Someday people would be eating grass and roots and leaves here as they did in China.

“I got to get down to Washington,” he muttered into the cold darkness. “I gotta get down there one more time and tell them. …”

He found his way to the hotel where Henrietta waited for him, alarmed at his long absence.

“Clem—” she began, but he cut her off short.

“Get our things together, hon. We’re taking the next train to Washington. I’m going to get to that fellow in the White House if I have to bust my way in.”

He did not get in, of course. She knew he could not. She waited outside in the lobby and read a pamphlet on a table full of pamphlets and magazines that had been sent for the President to read. He had no time to read them and they had been put here to help the people who waited to while away the time. In a pamphlet of five pages, in words as dry as dust, in sentences as terse as exclamations, but passionless, she read the whole simple truth. For twenty-nine months American business had been shrinking. Industrial production was fifty per cent of what it had been three years ago. The deflation in all prices was thirty-five per cent. Profits were down seventy-five per cent. Nineteen railroads during the last year had gone bankrupt. Farm prices had shrunk forty-nine per cent so far and were still going down. But — and here she saw how everlastingly right Clem was — there was more food than ever! Farmers had grown ten per cent more food in this year of starvation than they had grown three years ago in a time of plenty.

“Oh, Clem,” Henrietta whispered to her own heart. “How often you tell them and they will not listen! O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often. …”

She put the pamphlet back on the table and sat with her hands folded in her lap and her head bowed so that her hat hid the tears that kept welling into her eyes. It was for Clem she wept, for Clem in whom nobody believed except herself, and who was she except nobody? William had hurt him dreadfully but she did not know how because Clem would not tell her what had happened. He had spoken scarcely a word all the way down on the train. She had tried to make him sleep, even if they were only in a day coach — he wouldn’t spend the money for berths — but though he leaned back and shut his eyes she knew he was not sleeping.

He came into the waiting room suddenly and she saw at once that he had failed. She got up and they went out of the building side by side. She took his hand but it was limp, and she let it go again.

“Did you see the President?” she asked when they were on the street. The sun was bright and cold and pigeons were looking around for food, but no one was there to feed them.

“No,” Clem said. “He was too busy. I talked to somebody or other, though, enough to know there was no use staying around.”

“Oh, Clem, why?”

“Why? Because they’ve got an idea of their own. Want to know what it is? Well, I’ll tell you. They’ve got the idea of telling the farmers to stop raising so much food. That’s their idea. Wonderful, ain’t it, with the country full of starvation?”

He turned on her and gave a bark of laughter so fierce that people stared, but he did not see their stares. He was loping along as though he were in a race and she could scarcely keep up with him.

“Where are we going now, Clem?” she asked.

“We’re going home to Ohio. I gotta sweat it out,” he said.

The nation righted itself in the next two years, slowly like a ship coming out of a storm. William wrote a clear and well-reasoned editorial for his chain of newspapers and pointed out to his millions of readers that the reforms were not begun by Franklin D. Roosevelt, the new President, but by Herbert Hoover who should have been re-elected in sheer justice that he might finish that which he had begun. It was already obvious, William went on, that the new inhabitant of the White House would run the nation into unheard-of national debt.

What William saw now in the White House was not the mature and incomparable man, toughened by crippling experience. He saw a youth he remembered in college, gay and willful and debonair, born as naturally as Emory to a castle and unearned wealth, but, unlike her, not controlled by any relationship to himself. Roosevelt, secure from the first moment of his birth, was uncontrollable and therefore terrifying, and William conveyed these fears in his usual editorial style, oversimple and dogmatically brief. To his surprise, he experienced his first rebellion. Millions of frightened people reading his editorials felt an inexplicable fury and newspaper sales dropped so sharply that the business office felt compelled to bring it to William’s notice. He replied by a memorandum saying that he was sailing for England and Europe, especially Germany where he wanted to see for himself what was happening, and they could do as they liked while he was gone.

Emory received the news of the journey with her usual calm. They had not gone to England or Italy the year before, and she felt a change now would be pleasant. Alone with William she might discover what it was that kept him perpetually dissatisfied, not with her, but with the very stuff of life itself. She never mentioned to him her discernment of his discontent, for by now she knew it was spiritual and that he was only beginning to perceive this for himself. She refused again a thought which came to trouble her. Did William feel a lack in her own love for him? Was there such a lack? She made no answer. He had so much. He had all the money he had ever imagined he would have, and the most successful chain of popular newspapers. He was already planning the next presidential candidate, for this man in the White House could not possibly survive a first term. That he hungered for something he did not have, something more than woman could give, was now plain, perhaps even to William himself.

Or did his spirit seek after his father? One day on their voyage, William said, “I often think about my father. I wish you had known him, Emory. You would have understood each other. He was a great man, never discovered.”

“I wish I might have known him, dear,” she observed. They were in their deck chairs after breakfast and the sun was brilliant upon a hard blue sea.

“I wonder … I often wonder …” William mused somewhat heavily.

Emory delayed opening her novel. “About what, William?”

“Whether he would approve what I do — what I am!”

Approval. That was the word, the key! She saw it at once and grasped it. William needed the approval of someone he felt was his spiritual superior. For she knew that he was a man of strongly spiritual nature, a religious man without a religion. Emory herself was not spiritual, not religious at any rate, and she could not help him. She did not carry the conversation beyond her usual mild comment.

“I feel sure he would approve you, William, but I wish he were here to tell you so.”

Within herself, after that conversation, she began the active search for the religion that William needed. It must be one strong enough for him, organized and ancient, not Buddhism, which was too gentle, not Hinduism, which was too merciful, not Taoism, which was too gay, imbued as it was with human independence even of God, and Confucianism was dead. She knew something of all religions, for after Cecil’s death she had searched the scriptures of many and in the end had grown indifferent to all. Instead of religion she had developed a deep native patience, and detached by early shock, nothing now could disturb the calm which had grown like a protective shell, lovely as mother-of-pearl, over her own soul. She wished indeed that she could have known his father, for in that dead father, she felt sure at last, was the key to this living husband of hers. His mother, she had soon found, had been merely the vessel of creation.

Emory rather liked the vessel, nevertheless. She comprehended early with her subtle humor that there was not an ounce of the spiritual in her mother-in-law’s bustling body. Mrs. Lane used God for her own purposes, which were always literal and material, reveling in William’s success, in his wealth, in his new relation to an English Earl. Soon after William’s marriage she had announced that she was going to England and that she would enjoy a visit at Hulme Castle. Emory had written to her own mother with entire frankness, saying that her mother-in-law would be the easiest of guests and not in the least like William. “Old Mrs. Lane is always ready to worship,” Emory wrote, and drew a small cat face grinning upon the wide margin of the heavy handmade paper that bore her name but also the Hulme coat of arms.

She had seen Mrs. Lane off and upon the deck of the great ship had given her a huge corsage of purple orchids which would last the voyage, a package of religious novels, and a box of French chocolates. “Food for body and soul,” she had said with private cynicism. Mrs. Lane, who had a strong digestion and liked sweets, did not comprehend cynicism. She had thanked her new daughter-in-law with the special warmth she had for the well born. She stood at the handrail of the upper deck, wrapped in a fur coat and a tightly veiled hat, and waved vigorously.

At first the divorce had seemed horrible to her, until she discovered how thoroughly she approved of Emory and her English relations. She made compromise. It was not as if William needed the Cameron money any more. Emory was really much better suited to him in his present position than Candace was. Men did outgrow women. There was no use pretending, although, thank God, her own husband had never outgrown her. Such remarks she had poured into Ruth’s ears, and Ruth always listened.

This mother, Emory had soon perceived, was of no real use to William, and at first she had thought that any connection between William and his mother must have ended with the physical cutting of the umbilical cord. Later she had seen that she had been wrong. Mrs. Lane had created a division in William. To her he owed his respect for wealth, for castles, for birth, for—

At this point Emory checked herself. She was being nasty, for did she not enjoy William’s wealth? Worse than that she was being unjust to him, whose soul hungered after higher things than those which he had. She wanted William to be really happy and not in the way that America meant happiness, which was something too fervid and occasional. She wanted William to be satisfied in ways that she knew he was not. She wanted his restless ambition stilled, and the vague wounds of his life healed. Some of them she had been able to heal merely by being what she was, English and his wife.

Hulme Castle was unusually beautiful on the afternoon when they were driven up the long winding road from the downs. The winter had been mild, the chauffeur said, explaining the amount of greenery about the old towers and walls.

Her parents were in the long drawing room, though it was not yet noon, and she was touched to think they were waiting for her, putting aside their usual morning pursuits.

“My dears—” she said, bending to kiss them.

William was quietly formal and nothing much was said. Her parents did not feel at ease with him, nor, as she saw, quite at ease even with her. Then Michael came in dressed in his riding things and ease flowed into the room with him.

“I say, you two — you haven’t been shown up to your part of the castle yet?”

“You told us not,” Lady Hulme reminded him.

“No. Come along. I wanted to show it to you,” Michael said.

They followed him, laughing at his impatience, and then Emory saw that even William, so scant in his praise of anyone, was touched by what Michael had done. He had really made a small private castle of one wing. It had its separate entrance, its own kitchen, and four baths.

“I shall be able to rest here, Emory,” William said so gravely that she perceived he needed rest.

“Come along, William,” Michael said when they had seen everything. “We’d better leave Emory for a bit with her mother. I have to ride to the next town to see about getting a tractor. I thought we’d get our luncheon there, perhaps. You could advise me — it’s an American machine.”

Emory laughed. “You’re not very subtle, Michael, but then you never were.” They laughed with her and went off, nevertheless, and she lunched with her parents.

The castle, she discovered, was in a strange state of flux. Her father, deeply angry over the increase in death duties, was threatening to move into the gate house with her mother and a couple of servants and let Michael take the castle and assume title so far as was possible. She listened to this talk at the immense dining table, her father at one end, her mother at the other, and she in between as she used to be.

“It’s hard on a man not being able to finish his days in his proper place,” the Earl said.

He fell into silence over his roast beef and port, a silence which his wife could not allow for long.

“What are you thinking of, Malcolm, pray tell?” Lady Hulme asked. She did not drink port for it made small red veins come out on her nose.

“Do you remember, my dear, that old chap we dug up in the church when we put. in the hot-water pipes?” the Earl asked with entire irrelevance.

“Father, what makes you think of him now?” Emory asked.

“He’d been lying there a hundred and fifty years, you know, and his bones were as good as anything, white as chalk, but holding together, you know,” the Earl replied.

Lady Hulme was diverted by the memory. She remembered perfectly clearly the June morning years ago when the men came to say that they had struck a coffin in Hulme Abbey and both of them had gone over to look at it. The coffin was only wood and was quite gone really except for bits of metal, but there in the dust lay the most beautiful silvery skeleton. Luckily it was not a Hulme ancestor but some physician who had served the family and had been given the honor of burial in the abbey.

“You don’t think that he took drugs or something that kept his bones hard?” she now asked.

“Might have,” the Earl conceded. “Still, perhaps it was only the dryness of the abbey, eh? Maybe the hundreds of sermons the vicars preached, eh?”

He choked on his own humor and exploded into frightful coughing. Lady Hulme waited. He choked rather easily nowadays, especially on port. When he subsided, red-eyed and gasping, she felt it wise to change the subject, lest he be tempted to another joke.

Before she could speak Emory lifted her head.

“Hark — Isn’t that the horses?” They listened.

“Yes,” she exclaimed. “It’s William.”

She got up with her stealing grace and went out, and Lady Hulme said aloud what she had been thinking.

“Do you like Emory’s husband — really, I mean?”

“How could anybody like him?” the Earl replied in a voice restored to common sense. “There is something feverish in him.”

“I thought he seemed as cool as anything today.”

“He is the sort that burns inside, you know, my dear, like that what’s-his-name from India that we dined with once at Randford. I don’t know how the Earl felt but I know I was jolly glad to be away after dinner.”

“What’s-his-name” was a small dark man named Mohandas Gandhi. He had come over to England for conferences and he had refused to wear proper clothes or eat proper food. The government had been compelled to recognize him, nevertheless, and there was a frightful picture of him taken with the King and wearing almost nothing — just the bed sheet or whatever it was that he wrapped about his nakedness. It did seem that when a man came to a civilized country he might behave better. When the Earl of Hulme had muttered as much behind his mustaches to the Earl of Randford, his host had smiled at him and murmured in reply:

“You are simple, my dear fellow. Gandhi is too clever for you. His hold on the masses of India is immense just because he won’t wear anything but the sheet. That’s what the peasants wear and they like to think that one of them wears a sheet right in the presence of you and me and even the King. It makes them trust him. If he put on striped trousers and a morning coat, they’d think he had betrayed them.”

The Earl of Hulme had been stupefied by such independence and now felt that if something had been done about it then India would not be dreaming today of getting away from the Empire. What would happen to the world if men were allowed to come into the presence of their betters dressed like goatherds? Upon that day he had stared a good deal at the small man whose perpetual smile was as cool as a breeze, and after an hour of this persistent gaze he had discerned beneath the coolness what he called the fever. He recognized it because he had seen it elsewhere. There had been a curate in his youth who had burned to improve the lot of the tenants, and he had seen the old Earl, his father, fly into fury.

“Read your Bible, sir!” the old nobleman had thundered at the tall, hungry-eyed curate. “Does it or does it not say that I am to put my tenants into palaces?”

“It says the strong must bear the burdens of the weak,” the foolhardy man had replied.

That was the curate’s end. He had killed himself as nicely as though a rope had been put about his neck. He had left in disgrace and was never heard of again. But young Malcolm, watching, had felt the fever burning inside that lean frame. On the last day, when he thought the curate had gone, he found himself face to face with him in the park. The chap had walked about to find him.

“Malcolm—” That was what the man had actually dared to call him. “Malcolm, you are young and perhaps you will listen to me.”

“I don’t understand,” he had stammered, angry and taken back at such daring.

“Don’t try to understand now,” the curate had urged. The fever was plain enough then. You could see the flames leaping up inside him somewhere and shining through his pale eyes. “Just remember this — unless the hungry are fed, you will be driven away from all this. It is coming, mind you — you’ve got to save yourself. I warn you, hear the voice of God!”

He had wheeled without answer and left the curate standing there and he had not once looked back.

“Nonsense,” Lady Hulme now said. “William is a very handsome man. I don’t see the least resemblance to any Hindu, not to speak of that odd man.”

She broke off, noticing how brightly the sun shone through the bottle of port. Suddenly she felt that it was a pity not to taste so beautiful a liquid. If her nose grew red it would not matter — poor Malcolm had long since ceased to notice how she looked. She poured herself a glass of the rich port, very slowly, the sun filtering through the crimson wine.

… Outside in the soft English sunshine Emory was listening to the last fragments of a conversation which had been of more than American tractors.

“I can’t tell yet whether it’s good or bad,” Michael said. “I can only say that there’s something new happening in Germany and Italy. New, or maybe something very old, I can’t tell which. If it goes well it’ll be a new age for Europe and therefore the world. I don’t think things will go well.”

“You don’t believe that democracy will work in Europe, do you?” William asked.

“Of course not,” Michael said impatiently. “But it’s these chaps — Hitler, you know, and Mussolini. They’ve no breeding. Get a common man at the top and ten to one he can’t keep his senses about him.”

Emory cried out, wary of a certain reserve in William’s look, “Oh, Michael, how silly of you. As if we weren’t all common at bottom! Who was the first Earl of Hulme, pray? A constable of Hulme Castle, that’s all, and a traitor against his King, at that.”

Michael was stubborn. “That’s just what I said. He couldn’t keep his senses. He got thinking he was greater than the King.”

“What happened to him?” William asked with restrained curiosity.

“The Queen Mother got her back up,” Michael said. “There was a long siege and our arrogant ancestor was starved into obedience.” He lifted his whip. “You’ll see the marks of the battle there, though it was more than five hundred years ago.”

Upon the thick stone walls were ancient scars and William gazed at them. “A very good argument against everybody’s having enough food,” he said thoughtfully. “Food is a weapon. The best, perhaps, in the world!”

The day ended peacefully as usual, but William was restless during the night and rose early. He wanted, he explained to Emory, to go to Germany and see for himself. To Germany then they went.

In Berlin William had suddenly decided that he wanted Emory to see Peking. He had met Hitler and had been reassured. Out of postwar confusion and the follies of the Weimar government, Hitler was building the faith of the German people in themselves and their destiny. The whole country was waking out of despair and discouragement. Trains were clean and on time, and Berlin itself was encouraging.

“There is nothing to worry about here,” William said in some surprise. “I don’t know what Michael was talking about.”

After his talk with Hitler he was even more pleased. “The man is a born leader,” he told Emory, “a Carlylean figure.” It was then that William decided to go to China, telling Emory that he felt that he could never explain himself to her altogether unless she saw the city of his childhood. They boarded a great Dutch plane that carried them to India and Singapore and from there they flew to China. Of India Emory saw nothing and did not ask to see anything. Cecil’s family had been dependent upon India and her curiosity had died with him.

They spent nearly two weeks in Peking. They wandered about among the palaces, now open to tourists, and William searched the painted halls, the carved pavilions, for the throne room where as a child his mother had led him before the Empress.

“William, after all this time, can you remember?” Emory asked, unbelieving.

“I remember the Empress as though she had set a seal upon me,” William replied.

He found the room at last and the very throne, but in what dust and decay!

“This is the place,” William said.

They stood together in silence and looked about them. The doors were barred no more and pigeons had dirtied the smooth tiled floors. The gold upon the throne had been scraped off by petty thieves and even the lazy guard who lounged in the courtyard offered them a sacred yellow tile from the roof for a Chinese dollar. William shook his head.

“I wonder,” Emory said in a low voice, “if one day Buckingham Palace will be like this?”

“I cannot imagine it,” William replied, and as though he could not bear the sight before them, he turned abruptly from the throne. “Let us go. We have seen it.”

“Perhaps it would have been better not to have seen it,” she suggested. “It might have been better to remember it as it was.”

To this William did not reply.

There was something of the same decay in the compound where he had been born and which had been his home. It was not empty. A thin little missionary was there, a pallid man who came to the door of the mission house, a shadow of a man, William thought with contempt, a feeble small fellow to take his father’s place! The little man looked at them with bewildered and spectacled eyes.

“This was Dr. Lane’s house, I believe,” William said, and did not tell him who he was.

“That was a long time ago,” the mild man said.

“May we look over the house?” Emory asked. “We knew Dr. and Mrs. Lane.”

“I suppose so — my wife isn’t in just now — she’s gone to the Bible women’s meeting.”

“Never mind,” William said suddenly. “I have no desire to see the house.”

They left at once and William, she divined, was thinking of his father. He thought a great deal of his father in those days in Peking — sometimes with the old bitterness but more often with a longing wonder at the happiness in which his father seemed to live.

“My father was anchored in his faith,” William said. “I have often envied him his ability to believe.”

Emory said at this moment what she had been thinking about for a long time. “I do think, William, that you ought to see a priest. A Catholic, if possible.”

He turned upon her his dark look. “Why?” But she fancied he was not surprised.

She responded with her gaze of clear kindness. “I cannot give you peace,” she said. “If peace is what you need—”

He denied this abruptly. “I don’t need peace.”

“Whatever it is you need,” she amended.

He did not reply to this but she did not forget his silence. They left Peking soon after that day, and in a few weeks were in New York and William plunged into feverish work.

Left to herself, Emory went out more than she had before. Even she was getting restless. The world was so strange, so full of horrible possibilities!

At a cocktail party one day many months later Emory observed an unusual figure, and seeing it was reminded of the unforgotten conversation in Peking. A tall cassocked priest stood near the door. He had an angular worn face and quietly gazing at him as she drank tea instead of cocktails she saw his hands, worn and rough, tightly clasped before him. His hair was a dark auburn and his skin was florid. As though he felt her eyes, he looked at her. His eyes were very blue. She turned her head and at the same moment she felt hands upon her shoulders. Looking up then she saw Jeremy Cameron, and she smiled at him. “Jeremy, you wretch, you and Ruth haven’t come near us since we came home!”

“Ruth is still at the shore with the children. She’ll be back Monday. Here’s someone who wants to meet you. Emory, this is Father Malone — my sister-in-law, Father, Lady Emory Hulme or Mrs. William Lane, as you please.”

Jeremy had been drinking, she saw. The dark pupils of his eyes were huge and set in reddened whites and his thin smooth cheeks were flushed.

She turned to smile at Father Malone. He stooped over her hand. “It is your husband I really want to meet and this explains my presence at an occasion so strange to me,” he said in a rugged voice. “I’ve just come from China, where I believe he was born.”

“Oh, I’m glad.” Genuine gladness indeed was in her voice. “Why not come home with me now? We can talk a little while before my husband comes in. He’ll be late. We were in China, ourselves.”

“I heard,” Father Malone said simply.

Jeremy rocked back and forth on his heels. “William was looking at Father Malone’s pictures today — wonderful pictures — people starving to death, somewhere in China of course — babies like dead mice, their arms and legs — wonderful. He hadn’t time to meet Father Malone himself and turned him over to me. He wants the pictures, though.”

“Famine,” the priest said simply. “That’s why I am here. I am sent to collect funds.”

His dark eyes were magnetic. Emory found herself looking at him and then not looking away quickly enough. He did not mind how long she gazed at him, and there was no personal response from him to a beautiful woman.

“Do let’s go.” She got up impulsively.

The controlled grace of her movements was self-conscious and yet nonetheless graceful. They left in a few minutes, the priest a handsome yet ascetic shadow behind her, and in the comfortable soundproofed car, riding through the evening traffic in perfect quiet, she put her questions. Father Malone answered them with simplicity and frankness, or so she thought. Yes, he had been many years in China, not in Peking, or the big cities, but in his own mission in a country region. He was a country priest and had been twenty years there.

“You must have been very young when you first went.”

Yes, he had been young, only a little more than twenty-five. He had gone to help an elder priest, who had died after a few years, of cholera, and then he had carried on.

“Do you feel your work is successful?”

“I do not think of success.” His somber voice, expressive of any emotion one might choose to imagine, made music of every word. “In the long processes of the Church one man’s work is only a link in the chain of eternity.”

“I do believe,” she said, with purposeful frankness, “that you have been sent to me at this particular moment. I will not pretend that I am a religious woman for by looking at me you, will see that I am not. But I love my husband and he needs something I cannot give him. He is a naturally religious man, and he does not know it. He has grown rich so fast. You know his father was a missionary.”

“I do know,” Father Malone said. “That is why I have come to him first — that and his great wealth.”

“His father was a Protestant, of course,” Emory went on. “I never knew him, but he has left an indelible impression upon William’s soul. William, being a very clever man, can scarcely accept the sort of religion that his father had. He will need something much more subtle, if I may say so.”

“The Church has everything for all souls,” Father Malone said. His voice, so full of confidence, his mild and handsome profile gazing ahead into the turmoil of the crowded streets, renewed Emory’s admiration without in the least moving her heart. But then, her heart knew no hungers.

The heavy car drew up at the house and the chauffeur sprang out and opened the door of the car. They mounted the marble steps. The evening air was sweet and cold, and the lights of the city were twinkling. At the top of the steps Emory touched the bell and upon impulse that seemed sudden she looked up at the tall priest.

“I’m very happy. I want my husband to be happy, too.”

“Why not?” Father Malone replied. He smiled down upon her, celibate and monastic though he was, and by that smile he made himself her ally.

William, coming in later than he had said he would, paused as Henry took his things. He heard a man’s voice.

“Who is here?” he demanded.

“A friend of madame’s, sir. He’s a priest, sir. She brought him home with her. He’s to stay for dinner, sir.”

Henry disappeared and William went quietly up the stairs. And why a priest? He was fearfully tired and wanted to be alone. The old sense of emptiness was creeping back into him again though he had been married so few years. He avoided knowing it. If Emory could not fill the emptiness then nowhere on earth could he find peace. He refused thought and began instead to worry about lesser matters. Jeremy, for example, getting drunk and coming into the office to announce loudly his disgust with his job and with everything and that he wouldn’t resign and wanted to be fired! He would have to talk with Ruth as soon as she came back. She ought not to linger on at the seashore, leaving Jeremy at loose ends.

He shrugged his shoulders abruptly. Why should he, in his position, be troubled about anyone? The familiar hard surface crept over his mind and spirit and he proceeded to bathe and dress in his usual evening garments, laid out for him by his valet. He was hungry. The day at the office had been long and the proofs of his editorial more than usually full of mistakes. He would have to find another editor. It seemed stupid that his young men could not adjust to his demands. He kept them young, letting them go soon after thirty-five, because youth was essential to the style he had developed.

His mind, ranging among faces and men, lingered upon Seth James. He had not seen Seth for a long time, but he had kept within his knowledge all that Seth had done since the success of his play on Broadway. Seth had started another magazine which had failed. William’s private scouts told him that Seth had lost more than a million dollars on it. Perhaps it was time to bring him back — if he wanted him. But could Seth be convinced? He might talk to Emory about it, get her, perhaps, to go after Seth. She had a sort of integrity which he could neither fathom nor reach.

He had not told her that a few days ago he had met Candace upon the street, and had hesitated, not knowing whether to speak or not. She had decided the matter quickly by putting out her gloved hand.

“William, surely you won’t just pass without speaking?”

He took her hand, felt embarrassed, tried to smile. “I wasn’t sure you’d want to.”

“There is no reason why I wouldn’t want to speak to you, William.”

“How is your father?”

“Just letting himself get old — sleeping a good deal, a saintly stillness over him, all the time.”

“I hope he doesn’t dislike me?”

“He doesn’t dislike anybody.”

They stood between two passing streams of people and he was afraid one of the damned gossip columnists might see them together and put out a story in a newspaper or on the air. This was intolerable and so he had lifted his hat abruptly and left her. There was no reason to tell Emory. The meeting meant nothing.

When he was dressed the emptiness came over him again. It was more than emptiness. He felt a strange and puzzling gnawing of the heart which he could not explain. What was he doing that he should not be doing? Every success was in his possession. He had ceased to ask himself how much money he had. There was more than he could possibly spend with his decent and frugal tastes. His houses were finished and beautiful and to Emory he gave an income extravagantly large. Candace, too, he had not stinted and his sons both had had allowances beyond their needs. His yearly gift to his father’s mission was a solid foundation upon which others built. For his mother he had arranged an annuity of ten thousand a year. He had done everything he ought to do.

He should perhaps have entered politics long ago, instead of building his newspapers. This thought, disturbing him very much, caused him to sit down in his leather easy chair and close his eyes. His small hairy hands gripped the carved ends of the hand rests. He should not have been content with the power of shaping the minds of people by choosing what pictures they should see, what news they should read, what ideas, in short, should be offered to their minds. This was only passive government. There was nothing stable in America. This country which William longed to love and did love with fear and anger and contempt, had no bedrock of class, no governing element such as England had. Wealth was the only vantage. William despised charm and knew that he had none of it. And yet without it, he knew, he could never have won, not in America, not in this, his own country. Think of that fellow in the White House! He gave up the notion of politics and opened his eyes. He could not descend to the sordid race. Besides, what if he had been defeated? Folly, folly! He was pre-eminent as he was and without a rival in sight. What more did he want than he had? He wanted to be satisfied with himself and he was not.

A tap at his door made him get up and go to the window. “Come in!”

“Madame asks if you are ready, sir,” Henry said behind his back.

“I am coming down at once.”

He passed the man and went down the wide curving stairs, comforted for the moment as he often was by the vista of his home, the huge beautiful rooms spreading from the great entrance hall. He ought indeed to be satisfied with himself. Roger Cameron had been satisfied with half of this. Scrambling up that cliff, those years ago, he had not dreamed of such a vista, all his own.

He crossed the hall and went into the drawing room at the right. A tall figure rose at his entrance and stood with clasped hands. Emory spoke from a low rose-red velvet chair.

“William, this is Father Malone. He was in your office today with some pictures and Jeremy brought him along to the cocktail party, and I brought him home to you.”

The strong hands unclasped and the priest put out the right one, not speaking. William felt it powerfully about his own much smaller hand, and quickly withdrew it.

“I am sorry I was busy when you were announced in the office today,” he said, looking away. He took a glass of sherry from a silver tray presented now by the butler.

Father Malone sat down. A perfect quiet pervaded his being and from this quiet he looked at William so steadily that William felt himself compelled to respond, and turning he looked down into the profoundly dark and deep-set eyes.

“The reason I brought him home,” Emory went on, “is because Father Malone comes from some place quite near Peking and I thought you would enjoy one another.”

William sat down. “Indeed?”

“Your father was a missionary.”

“Yes.”

“I, too, am a missionary,” Father Malone said after a moment. “I have been recalled for a time to collect famine funds. I brought with me the pictures which you saw today. I hoped that you would want to print them for I am told your publications reach millions of Americans, and they might be moved to send me money for food.”

“Thousands of pictures come to me every week,” William said. “I may not be able to use many of yours. Besides, we have our own photographers who know exactly what I want.”

“You do not feel moved to present the appeal for the starving?” The priest’s deep voice was calm and inquiring.

“I hesitate to embark upon relief work,” William replied. “One doubts the basic efficacy of it in a country so vast as China. Famine is endemic there, as I remember.”

“You feel no duty toward those people?”

William looked at him again unwillingly. “Only in memory of my father.”

“You deny the memory,” Father Malone said. So positive was his voice that William was instantly angry.

“Dinner is served,” the butler announced at the door.

They rose, Emory first in her rose and gray taffeta, and behind her Father Malone, stark and severe in his black garments, and William a little distance behind him. The priest’s words had fallen upon his angry heart like a sword.

“You have been stifling your soul,” Father Malone said to William Lane. He was very tired. The special mission which he had assumed as he came to know William was nearly completed. It had not been easy, far more difficult indeed than feeding the starving children and praying for the ignorant peasants who were his flock in China. The Church there was gracious to the ignorant. It did not expect a peasant to understand the mysteries. To come to Mass, to wear an amulet, to know the name of the Virgin and one or two saints was as much as he insisted upon in his village. Even confession he did not press, for how could an old man or even a young woman confess when they did not know sin? The knowledge of sin was for their children, the second generation, and in that knowledge it was his duty to instruct them. By the fifth generation he expected a priest. The Church was infinitely patient.

“You have denied your Lord,” he said.

He had tarried for days in this vast and wicked city, for so he had felt he should do. Yet when he found that the wife of this rich and powerful man believed that her husband sought God, he had felt unable to undertake so vast a responsibility alone. He had gone immediately to his local superior, Monsignor John Lockhart, to ask for direction.

John Lockhart was an Englishman, a priest of high intellect and conviction, who might have become a Cardinal of the Church had he been ambitious. But he did not wish to enter into the higher arenas, where, he thought, though without disloyalty, the air was not so pure as it might have been. Princes of the Church were subject, perhaps, to some of the temptations of earthly kings. This did not keep him from believing that the Church was the best means yet devised and developed for the guidance and control of weak and faulty human nature. He listened carefully to the shabby priest from China who sat on the edge of his chair and talked diffidently about William Lane.

“A man stubborn in his own pride,” Monsignor Lockhart said after listening. “Nevertheless he has seen religious righteousness in his father and he cannot forget it. He was reared with a conscience. He has repudiated it until now. As you have told me, you have had only to look at his face to see it tortures him.”

“Does he know it?” Father Malone asked.

“No, and it is your duty to make it known to him,” Monsignor replied.

Father Malone did not answer this. He continued to sit on the edge of his chair, his hands clasped in front of him in his habitual manner. He knew what he was, a missionary priest, a hewer of wood and a drawer of water in the palaces of the Church.

“In famine times I know that many souls are driven to the Church,” Monsignor continued. “It is our duty to feed body and soul. But sometimes there is one man who can at a certain moment be worth more to the Church than ten thousand others, and William Lane is one of them. He is very powerful and he does not know what to do with his power. He seeks to direct but he himself needs direction. In his discontent he has married again, but he cannot be satisfied with women. His hunger is of the soul.”

Father Malone had listened, and had prayed, when he was alone again, that he might see clearly what he ought to do. He did not presume to approach God directly with his own words, but while his lips murmured the beautiful Latin syllables his heart poured into them his own desire to draw to God this singular and powerful man. The task was not easy and he knew, in his humility, that he could not complete it. It would be necessary for some higher priest, some more astute mind, to fulfill the mission, perhaps the Monsignor himself. There were distances in William Lane that a common priest like himself could not reach, and depths from which he shrank.

“You have told me more than once that I have denied my Lord,” William now said with some impatience. “I am not aware that I have done so.”

Father Malone was alarmed at the fierceness of William’s eyes, at the vehemence in his voice. He had lived long among a gentle people and he missed them. His soul loathed the fleshpots among which he sojourned. At Monsignor’s command he had continued to accept William’s hospitality and he had a room and a bath here in this velvet-lined house. The bed was soft and he could not sleep upon it, and at night he had at first laid himself upon the floor and even the floor was too soft with carpet and undercarpet. Then he found that the bathroom floor was of marble and upon that surface he laid himself and found it warmed with inner pipes. He longed for his earthen-floored cell and for the icy mornings of a northern Chinese winter and a bowl of millet gruel. The flash of silver and the smoke of hot meats upon the lace-covered table in this house filled him with a sense of sin. How could he speak of God here? And the woman, telling him again and again how much he did for her husband and all the time she herself took not one word of what he said to herself!

He went increasingly often to Monsignor for counsel and he had said on his last visit, only two days ago, “Would it not be well to separate the man from the luxury which surrounds him? How can we find his soul when it is sunk in the fleshpots?”

Monsignor had looked at him out of deep, shrewd eyes. “In what sense separate?” he inquired.

“William Lane is at heart an ascetic,” Father Malone replied. “He possesses much, but he eats little and his ways are frugal. He does not drink much wine, he does not often smoke tobacco. We could make a priest out of him could we get him alone into the wilderness. If I took him back to my village, I could even entice him to love the people, which is the beginning of righteousness.”

“To what end?” his superior inquired.

Father Malone was astonished. “To the end that his soul may be saved!”

Monsignor got up and walked about his library. It was a noble room, and the mahogany book shelves reached from floor to ceiling. He had the finest religious library in America and was among its most learned prelates, in spite of his lack of religious ambitions.

“You go beyond your duty,” he said sharply. “I have told you only to awaken his soul.”

“I have done so,” Father Malone replied. He was almost as uneasy here as he was in William’s house. It was not for him to question the ways of his superiors. The Holy Father himself lived in a great palace which was one of the wonders of the world. God used riches as well as poverty for His own glory, he reminded himself.

“Continue then until you receive my next instruction,” Monsignor said.

So Father Malone had gone back to the rich house again. At this moment, however, when he sat alone with William in the silent opulent room, remote from any life he knew, he felt that the end of his work had surely come and that he must beg his superior to release him. He knew that William did deny his Lord, for he felt denial everywhere in this house, in William and in his wife and in the very existence of this place and in all it contained. But he could not explain how he felt this or why. Monsignor had not approved his speaking of poverty. Had he not received this disapproval he would have said earnestly to William, “You must give up all this and follow Christ.” But he did not dare to say this. He felt puzzled and tired and in spite of constant refusal he knew that he had eaten too much and too richly. Sitting in a highback Jacobean chair which he chose because it alone had a hard wooden seat, he twisted his workworn hands.

“It is time for me to leave you,” he said to William. “I have been detained by God to remind you of your father and of the land where you were born and to guide you to think of these things. Beyond that I am not able to go. I must commend you to Monsignor Lockhart, who is a wiser man in the Church than I am. I have no great learning. My books are fewer than a hundred. He has thousands of books upon his shelves and in many languages. He is continually in communication with those who know the Holy Father, whose face I shall never see.”

William did not deny this. He had indeed been stirred to the bottom of his soul by Malone. He envied the priest his unmoving faith, his confidence in prayer, his conviction of duty, the same faith, confidence, and conviction which his own father had possessed. But William was not able to proceed beyond the impulse of envy and of longing. His spiritual hunger had been increased and not satisfied. His loneliness was more and not less.

“Perhaps you are right,” he said. “Yet I am very grateful for what you have done.”

“It is not I but God working through me.”

“Then I thank God. Perhaps, in spite of not seeing it yet, my feet have, nevertheless, been set upon a path.”

“Monsignor Lockhart will lead you the rest of the way,” Father Malone replied.

Upon this they parted. In a short time Father Malone had packed his Chinese bag of split and woven rattan, and he refused the offer of William’s car. “I must report to my superior,” he said, “and it is only a short distance upon this same avenue. Let me walk. It will make me feel I am on my way home.”

William was perceptive enough to know what he meant and he let him go.

When Emory came home in the late afternoon she missed at once the third presence in the house. She had been on an ordinary errand to have her hair dressed, and when Henry opened the door to her he told her that the master had not returned to his office. She found William in the rather small room which they used as a sitting room when they were alone. He was stretched upon a reclining chair, gazing into the coals of a dying fire. He had not put on the lights, and there was a strange atmosphere of life and death in the room. She touched the switch by the door and the wall lights flamed.

“William, are you ill?” she exclaimed.

“No,” he replied. “I have been thinking all afternoon. Father Malone has gone.”

“Gone?”

“He says he wants me to go directly now to Monsignor Lockhart. He thinks it is time.”

She came to him and knelt at his side and put her hand on his that were folded across his body. “William, please do only what you wish!” she now said.

He moved his hands from under hers rather sharply. “No one can make me do otherwise!”

“But be sure that you know if they try.”

“You don’t flatter me, Emory. I am usually considered astute enough.”

He was determined to be hurt and she refused to hurt him. “I’m being stupid.” She got up and then sat down in a chair opposite him. “It’s hot in here. Shan’t I open the window?” The house with its central heating was always too hot for her English blood.

“I am not hot.”

“I suppose it’s because I have just come in from outside.”

She sat still for a few minutes, and then stealing a look at William she grew alarmed at the whiteness of his face. She got up again and went to him and curled on the floor beside him. She took his hand and leaned her cheek against it and made to him a complaint she had never made before.

“You haven’t loved me all the time Father Malone’s been here.” She put the palm of his hand against her soft red mouth.

Among the American women she was learning to know, there was shrewd interchange at once cynical and enjoyed by them. “You don’t know your man until you’ve slept with him,” was the common creed. They were all healthy handsome women, to whom chastity was not a jewel without price. Yet not one of them would have entertained the possibility of a lover, for their husbands were richer than potential lovers and men of position which they did not care to threaten. The difference between men, they frankly acknowledged, lay in their bank accounts rather than in their persons. They considered themselves exceedingly fortunate women and so they intended to live virtuously. But Emory was virtuous by nature.

She felt the palm under her lips tighten. It was impossible for William to speak of love. She crushed her mouth against his palm, tasting its flavor of soap and salt. If within a moment he did not respond she would laugh at herself and tease him for being so earnest about everything. “Don’t be so serious, darling — let’s go drown ourselves somewhere! Nobody will notice the difference and it would be fun. Something we’ve never done before!”

But tonight she would not need such nonsense. She recognized the familiar signs, the tightening of nerve and muscle, the response of his strangely awkward, rather short fingers. He sat up suddenly and drew her against him and she held her breath. He was always abrupt and unsharing but she was used to that now. He had to dominate her and though she had resisted this at first, now she no longer did so. Sex for a woman was nothing. It expressed no part of her being. It was an act of play, of symbolic yielding, a pleasant gesture, pleasing to receive and to give, a thing to forget, the preliminary to a possible experience of motherhood with which the man had little to do. She had decided against motherhood when she saw Will and Jerry. Candace had given William his sons and she divined that more sons would be meaningless for him and for her. With Cecil’s death had gone any need for a son of her own. She divined also that William would care nothing for daughters.

“Lock the door,” William commanded her. … She had a healthy body and she did not shrink from whatever William demanded. She accepted sex in exactly the same way that she enjoyed a cup of tea or a meal. There was nothing mysterious about it or even very interesting. What was interesting was William. She got to know him better in this brief occasional half hour than she could in a month of living. There was something cruel in him — no, not actually cruel, but he needed frightfully to be sure that he was right. Somewhere along the way of his childhood and his youth he had been so wounded in his self-love that now he knew best, he always knew best. And yet his self-confidence, his willfulness, his determination to make others obey him was not solid to the bottom of him. Sometimes when she had obeyed him utterly his command broke. He could not go on. He was not sure of himself. But why not? Who threatened him now?

So it happened tonight. In this quiet hour between day and night, when the servants were busy in the remote regions of the house, they had the complete privacy he demanded. Father Malone was gone. It could not have happened had he been in the house. And still William could not succeed. The fiasco came as it had sometimes before, though not always. Then why tonight?

She waited a moment to make sure that it was to be so, and then it was so. He lay back exhausted without fulfillment. She buried her head against him, and began stroking his hand gently. It was listless and he did not speak a word. He never did.

This went on for what seemed an endless time. The room grew darker. Somewhere, at last, far off, the gong rang warning that dinner was only half an hour off. She let his hand fall and felt a wave of relief. Better luck perhaps, next time!

“I think Father Malone was right,” she said in her ordinary voice. “I do think you ought to go and see Monsignor Lockhart.”