Gods Men

12

IN THE HOUSE NOW grown shabby with the years and which Henrietta never thought of renovating, Clem sat reading the newspapers. The season was summer, the first summer after the war ended. Clem had barely survived the atomic bombs dropped upon two Japanese cities. Like many other Americans, he did not know that atomic bombs existed, until on the fifth day of August, a year ago, he had opened a newspaper, to discover with agony and actual tears that the bomb had already been dropped and hundreds of thousands of people he had never seen were killed. Although he, like other Americans, except the handful, had nothing to do with this act, he felt it was his fault. He got up blindly, the tears running down his thin cheeks, and went to find Henrietta. When he found her upstairs making the bed, he had been unable to speak for weeping. He could only hold out the newspaper, pointing at the headlines. When she saw what had happened she put her arms around him and the two of them stood weeping together, in shame and fear for what had been done.

For weeks after that Clem had been so nearly ill that she told Bump to trouble him about nothing. Clem asked very few questions any more. He was working with all his diminishing energy upon The Food, and he steadfastly refused to see a doctor or have any X-rays taken of his now permanently rebellious digestive organs.

“Don’t bother me, hon.” This was his reply to Henrietta’s pleas and despairs.

The big man in the White House was dead and a little man had taken his place. Clem went to see him immediately to preach for the last time his human gospel of food for the starving. The little man twinkled and smiled and took time to describe the United Nations plan for world food and somehow sent Clem away thinking that he had converted a President of the United States, but nothing happened.

In the spring Clem had talked of going to the San Francisco Conference to explain about how the starving people of the world must be fed if things were to go right. The Communists mustn’t be the ones to get the upper hand, but they would unless people had food to eat.

Henrietta had persuaded him against going. She knew now that people even in New Point were laughing at Clem. He was called crazy, a fanatic, nobody listened to a man who had spent his life on one idea.

She hated people because they were laughing at Clem. She drew him into their house, kept him busy, worked with him on his formula, anything to shield him from the cruel laughter of people who were not fit to tie his shoelaces.

On this summer morning when she was getting the breakfast dishes washed he sat reading the paper in the kitchen. Suddenly she heard him cry out.

“Hon!”

“Yes, Clem?”

“We’ve lost the war!”

“What on earth do you mean? The war is over.”

She left the dishpan, her hands soapy wet, and stood reading over his shoulder.

“We’ve said we ain’t going to help the subject peoples. It’s the beginning of a third World War.”

“Oh Clem, it’s not as bad as that!”

“It is. They’re all looking at San Francisco and what we’ve said there can’t be unsaid. ‘There comes a tide in the affairs of men …’ ”

He got up abruptly and went downstairs into his laboratory and she went on washing the dishes.

It was not until March, 1950 that Clem went to see William for the third and last time. By then so much of what he had foreseen had already come to pass that he thought he could convince William. Surely now he would believe that Clem was right. The Communists were ruling China and people were starving again by the tens of millions. Yusan was able to get word out about it. Old Mr. and Mrs. Fong were dead. Yusan was the head of the family. Peking was full of Russians all giving advice. Meanwhile Manchurian food was being traded for machinery.

“If America could get food to us—” Yusan wrote. The letter was on one tiny slip of paper in a small filthy envelope without a stamp. Mr. Kwok, now the head of a prosperous restaurant in New York, had brought it himself to Clem, and Clem had gone back with him to New York without telling Henrietta that he had made up his mind to go to William for the last time and beg him to tell the Americans that maybe they could still save China and the world if they would only understand. …

Three days later Henrietta saw Clem coming up the brick path to the house, dragging his pasteboard suitcase. He could not reach the door. She saw him crumple upon the walk and she ran outdoors and lifted him up.

He had not fainted, he was conscious.

“My legs just gave up, hon,” he whispered.

“You get in here and go to bed and stay there,” she cried, fierce with love.

But nobody could keep him in bed. He would not go to the hospital yet, he told Dr. Wood. Now more than ever he must finish his formula, now that William wouldn’t listen to him. So Henrietta heard how Clem had gone to William and how been denied.

“I’m just tired for once,” Clem said.

He was up again in a few days and at his formula again, experimenting over the gas ring with a mixture of dried milk and beans, fortified with minerals and shredded potato. Henrietta did not cross him in anything now. There was no use in pretending that he was not ill, but she was helpless. Clem would not have the doctor.

It became a race. He almost stopped eating and drinking and she kept at his side a cup of tea into which she slipped a beaten egg and a little sugar. He drank this slowly, a sip now and then, and so sustained his life.

By summer they both saw he could not win. One morning he was struggling to get out of bed. His nightshirt fell away from his neck, hollowed into triangular cavities. His ears looked enormous, his eyes were sick.

“Clem,” she cried. “You’ve got to think of me for once.” It was her last appeal.

“Don’t I think of you, hon?”

The strength was gone even from his voice. It sounded empty and ghostlike.

“You aren’t getting up,” she said. “You’re staying right there until I can get Doctor Wood.”

He sank back on the pillow, trying to smile. “You’ve got me — down,” he whispered.

She made haste then to the telephone, and found the doctor at his breakfast.

“I’ll come as soon as I—”

“No, you’ll come now,” she shrieked. “You’ll come right now, without one moment’s delay! I think he’s dying.”

She flew back to the bedside, the wide old-fashioned double bed where they had slept side by side in the years since she had given up everything to be his wife. He was lying just as she had left him but when she came in he opened his eyes drowsily and smiled.

“The doctor is coming right over, Clem. Don’t go to sleep.”

“No — I don’t want to.”

They stayed in silence for a moment, she holding one of his bony hands between hers. No use wasting his strength in talk!

But he began to talk. “Hon — the formula as far as I’ve gone—”

“Please, Clem.”

“Let me tell you — it’s all written down on that little pad in the upper right hand pigeonhole of my old desk. Hon — if I can’t finish it—”

“Of course you can finish it, Clem. You just won’t rest long enough. I’m going to take you to California, that’s what I’m going to do. …”

She was talking to keep him quiet and he knew it. As soon as she paused he began again.

“I think I’ve made a mistake using the dried milk, hon. There’ll be people in China, for instance, who won’t like the taste of milk. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that before. I ought to have, growing up in China—”

He stopped suddenly and looked at her in terror. “Hon — hon—” He was gasping.

“Clem, what is it?”

“The most awful pain here—” He locked his hands across his belly, and sweat burst from him and poured down his face.

“Oh, Clem, what shall I—”

But it was not necessary for her to do anything. He dropped away into unconsciousness.

Three hours later in the hospital in Dayton, Dr. Wood came out of the operating room. Henrietta had been sitting motionless for more than an hour, refusing to expect either good or ill. Her years with Clem, being his shadow, had taught her how to wait, not thinking, not impatient, letting her mind busy itself with the surface her eyes presented to her, the people coming and going, the bowl of flowers on the table, the branches of a tree outside the window.

“I imagine you are half prepared for what I must tell you, Mrs. Miller,” Dr. Wood said.

He was a kindly middle-aged man, so obviously a small-town doctor that anybody could have guessed what he was. His strength was in knowing what he did not know and when he had seen Clem’s ash-white face upon the pillow this morning he had simply said briskly, “We’ll get this fellow straight to the city hospital,” and had sent for the ambulance.

While it screamed its way through the roads to Dayton he had sat beside Clem, with Henrietta near, and had said nothing at all. In the hospital he had taken Clem immediately into the operating room, and had stayed with him while a young surgeon operated.

“I have not prepared myself,” Henrietta said quietly. “I have only waited.”

“He has no stomach left,” Dr. Wood said gently. This strong woman’s face looking at his made him feel that it was no use holding back one iota of truth. “He should have been operated on long ago. An old condition, he’s a worrier, of course — and it’s turned suddenly malignant.”

“Not a worrier, exactly,” Henrietta murmured. Her heart had stopped beating for a long tight moment and now began again very hard. “He simply takes the whole world as his own responsibility. He starves with every hungry man, woman, and child, he crucifies himself every day.”

“Too bad,” Dr. Wood said. “That sort of thing is no use, you know. One man can’t do it all. I suppose you told him so often enough.”

“No, thank God, I never did,” Henrietta got up.

“They won’t want you just now—”

“I’ll just go anyway,” Henrietta said. “They can’t keep me away from him.”

She did not stop to ask how long Clem would live. However long it was, she would stay with him and never leave him, not for a night, not for an hour, never at all. She walked into the door from which Dr. Wood had come, and nobody stopped her. …

Clem lived for not quite a week. She was not sure that he knew she was there all the time but she stayed with him just the same. He might come to himself in spite of what the doctors and nurses said.

“It’s really impossible, Mrs. Miller,” the night nurse said. “He’s so drugged, you know, to keep him from pain. He must have suffered terribly for a long time.”

“He never said he did,” Henrietta replied. Was it possible that Clem had suffered without telling her? It was possible. He would have been afraid that she would stop him before his work was done, in that fearful race he was running. How could she not have seen it? She had seen it, of course, in the tightness in his look, his staying himself to lean upon his hands on the table, hanging upon his shoulders as though they were a rack — a cross, she told herself. She kept thinking of Clem upon a cross. Plenty of people thought him a fool, a fanatic, and so he was, to them. But she knew his heart. He could not be other than what he was. He had been shaped by his parents, from their simple minds and tender hearts, from their believing faith, their fantastic folly, their awful death. The hunger of his own childhood he had made into the hunger of the world.

“Hon,” he had often said, and she would hear those words in whatever realm his soul must dwell, “Hon, you can’t preach to people until you’ve fed them. I’ll feed them and let others do the preaching.”

It was like him to choose the harder part. Anybody could preach.

“You must eat something, Mrs. Miller,” they said to her.

So she ate whatever it was they brought, as much as she could, at least. Clem would want her to eat, and if he could drag himself out of the darkness where he slept he would tell her, “You eat, now, hon.”

They fed him through his veins. There was nothing left of his stomach. “The surgeon could scarcely sew it together again,” the nurse told her. “It was like a piece of rotted rubber. How he ever kept up!”

“He always had strength from somewhere,” Henrietta said.

“Didn’t you know?” the nurse inquired. She told the other nurses that Mrs. Miller was a queer, heavy sort of woman. You didn’t know what she was thinking about.

“I never felt I could interfere with him,” Henrietta said.

“Stupid,” the nurse told the others, for wouldn’t a sensible woman have made a man get himself examined, if she cared about him? She might have saved his life.

“I suppose I could have saved his life,” Henrietta said slowly. “But I understood him so well. I knew there were things he cared for much more than life. So I couldn’t interfere.”

This was as much as she ever said.

“I’d say she didn’t give a hoot for him,” the nurse told the others, “except anybody can see the way she sits there that she’s dying with him. There won’t be anything alive in her after he’s gone.”

Clem died at two o’clock one night. He never came back to consciousness. Henrietta would not allow it. Dr. Wood came several times a day and that evening he was there about ten o’clock, and he told her that Clem would not live through the night.

“If you want me to, Mrs. Miller, I can leave off the hypodermic and he’ll come back to himself enough to know you, maybe.”

“In pain?”

“I’m afraid so.”

No use bringing Clem back in pain; that would be selfish. One moment was nothing in comparison to the years that she had lived with him and the years that she must live without him. She shook her head. The doctor gave the hypodermic himself and went away.

Clem died quietly. She knew the instant of his going. She had sat in her usual place, not stirring, had refused at midnight a cup of beef broth the nurse brought in and took away again. Soon after midnight she felt the sense of approaching death as clearly as though she too must partake of it. With every moment that passed she felt a strange oppression growing upon her. At two o’clock it was there, and she knew it. Her flesh received the blow, her heart the arrest. His hand lay in hers, light and cold, and she leaned upon the bed, her face near his. No use touching his lips. A kiss was no communication now. Better to remember the living acts of love that once had been between them than to take into her endless memory the last unanswered gift. He had been a perfect lover, not frequent, never pressing, but sweet and courteous to her. Direct and sometimes brusque he had been in daily life, too busy to think of her often, and yet she knew he kept her always with him as he kept his own soul. Yet there were the rare times, the hours when he made love to her, each perfect because he won her anew, never persuading, leading and never compelling, flesh meeting and always more than flesh — and when it was over his tender gratitude.

“Thanks, hon. You make love very sweet.”

She would never hear those words again! She had not thought of that. The tears which had not come came now, slow and hot.

“I’m afraid it’s the last, Mrs. Miller,” the nurse said. She was standing at the other side of the bed, her fingers on Clem’s pulse.

Henrietta stood up. Her heart was beating so fast again that she was dizzy. Her knees were trembling.

“Could you just — turn away — a minute—”

The nurse turned her head and bit her lip. However often they died, it was always terrific. You couldn’t get used to it.

Henrietta bent over Clem and laid her cheek against his. She put her lips to his ear and said very clearly, reaching with all her heart into the space between the stars:

“Thank you, my dearest. You’ve made love very sweet.”

It was the last time in her life that she ever spoke the word, love. She buried it with him, like a flower.

After Clem was dead, there was nothing to do but keep on until what he had wanted to do was done. This was all she had. Now that he was gone, it was astonishing how little else was left. Even his face seemed to fade from her mind. There had been few hours indeed when he had been hers undivided. Most of their companionship, and she now felt their only real companionship, had been when he talked to her about his work, his plans, and finally his dream, his obsession.

Clem had been her only lover, the only man who had ever asked her to marry him, the only man she could have married. Her alien childhood had shaped her. She was far past middle age now, a woman remote and alone. Bump remained nearer to her than any human creature, and he was kind enough, but always anxious and now aghast at the burden that Clem’s death had left upon him. He said the markets had to be sold and Henrietta agreed. She had no heart for the big business they had become and without Clem’s idealistic genius, there was nothing to hold them together.

It was not difficult to sell. In each of the huge self-serving concerns there was a man, usually the one Clem had put in charge, who was willing to buy her out. Her terms were absurdly low and she put no limit on the time for payment. For a while she tried to stipulate that Clem’s ideas were to be kept, that people were to have food cheaper there than they could buy it elsewhere. This too she was compelled to give up. It took genius to be so daring, and she found none. To Bump she simply gave the market in Dayton, and after some thought she gave him, too, her house, when after six months she made up her mind to go to New York with Berkhardt Feld, the famous German food chemist.

This aged scientist had left Germany secretly one day when he saw Hitler strutting like a pouter pigeon before a dazed mass of humanity who were anxiously willing to worship anything. Fortunately he was quite alone. He and his wife had been childless, a fact for which he never ceased to thank God when he understood what was happening to Germany, and then his wife had died. He had mourned her desperately, for he was a lonely man and Rachel had been his family and his friend. When he saw Hitler he stopped grieving and became glad that she was dead. It was easy to pack his personal belongings into a kerchief, hide in a pair of woolen socks the formula that represented his life work, and in his oldest clothes to take to the road and the border. People had not reached the point yet of killing any Jew they met and he saw contempt rather than madness in the careless glances cast at him as he went. He had money enough to get him over the border, and in France he found royalties from his last scientific work, The Analysis of the Chemistry of Food in Relation to Human Character.

From Paris he had gone to London, had been restless there because it was still too near Germany, and friends had got him to New York. Here, gratefully, he sank into the swarm of various humanity and spent almost nothing while he worked in the laboratory of a man who was a chemist for a general food company, a man named Bryan Holt who knew Berkhardt Feld as a genius. He found a room for the old man in a clean, cheap boardinghouse and gave him a desk and a small wage as his assistant. If they ever discovered anything together he would be generous and divide the profit that came from it. Since he belonged to the company, however, it was not likely that such profits would be enormous. Dr. Feld cared nothing for money, except that he would not owe anyone a penny. He paid his way carefully and did without what he could not buy.

Henrietta had found Dr. Feld first through finding among Clem’s papers a letter which he had written to Bryan Holt, trying, as Henrietta could see, to get the young scientist to help him devise a food cheap and nourishing that could serve as a stopgap until people became sensible enough, as Clem put it, to see that everybody got food free. There had been no time for an answer. Clem had died the week after he had written this letter. Ah, but in the letter she found her treasure, the voice of Clem, the words which she had longed to hear and yet which he did not speak to her because she had not allowed him to come back in pain. Here was the reward for her love, when she had denied even her crying heart. Clem knew he was dying, long before she had been compelled to believe it, and he had written to the young scientist:

“I am in some haste for I am struck with a mortal disease and may die any time. This does not matter. I have been very lucky. I have discovered a basic truth in my lifetime and so it will not die with me. What I have spent my life to prove will be proved because it is truth. Though I lie in my grave, this is my victory.”

Clem victorious! Of course he was, for who could destroy his truth? Here was the command she knew and prepared as of old to obey.

To Bryan Holt then Henrietta decided to go when she had given Clem’s few suits to the Salvation Army, and had found herself possessed of an astonishing amount of money in more than twenty banks in various cities where money had been paid into Clem’s accounts from the markets. His records were scanty but very clear indeed were certain notes on The Food, as he called it. The Food was half chemical, half natural, a final mingling of bean base with minerals and vitamins, which if he could get a chemist to work it out with him might, he had believed, make it possible for him to feed millions of people for a few cents apiece. This was the final shape of his dream, or as William had once called it, his obsession. It might be that the two were the same thing.

The first meeting with Holt had not been promising. Holt had not answered Clem’s letter because it sounded absurd. He was respectful before Henrietta’s solid presence, her square pale face and big, well-shaped hands. She had immense dignity. He tried to put it kindly but she saw what he meant. This young man was not the one she sought, but there would be another. Clem, though he had died, yet lived.

“Many people thought my husband was unbalanced,” she said in her calm voice. “That is because he was far ahead of his time. It will be twenty-five years, much more if we don’t have another war, before statesmen realize that what he said is plain common sense. There will not cease to be ferment in the world unless people are sure of their food. It is not necessary that you agree with my husband and me. I am come only to ask you questions about his formula.”

Bryan Holt wanted to get rid of her, though he was polite since he was almost young enough to be her son. So he said:

“I have a very fine scientist here working with me who has come from Europe. He will be more useful to you than I can possibly be.”

With this he had summoned from a remote desk a shambling old figure who was Dr. Berkhardt Feld, and so by accident Henrietta found her ally. When she had talked with Dr. Feld for a few hours she proposed to find a small laboratory for him alone, with an apartment where he could make his home. Then if he would teach her to help him, building upon her college chemistry, which was all she had, she would come to him every day and they could perhaps fulfill Clem’s life work.

To Dr. Feld this was heaven unexpected. None of Clem’s ideas were fantastic to him. They were merely axiomatic. It would not be too difficult to find the formula which Clem had begun very soundly upon a bean base, a matter perhaps of only a few years, by which time it might be hoped the wise men of the world would be ready to consider what must be done for millions of orphaned and starving.

“Then, then, liebe Frau Müller,” Dr. Feld said fervently, making of Henrietta as German a creature as he could, “we will be ready perhaps with The Food.”

The tears came to Henrietta’s eyes. She thanked Dr. Feld in her dry, rather harsh voice and told him to be ready to move as soon as she could go home and get her things.

That decision made, she began to clean away what was left in the house of all her years of marriage to Clem. Among the things she would never throw away was the red tin box of Clem’s letters and with them the old amulet which he had given her. It was still in the folded paper in which he had sent it to her. She opened the paper and cried out as though he were there, “I always meant to ask you about this!”

How much of him she had meant to ask about in the long last years she had expected to have with him, years that would never be! She cried a little and closed the box and put it into her trunk to go with her to New York. Someday, when she could bear to do it, she would read all his letters over again. So much, so much she would never know about Clem because he had been busy about the business of mankind!

On the night before she left, she invited Bump and Frieda to supper, that she might ask something of Bump. She did not mind Frieda, a lump of a woman, goodhearted, stupid and kind.

“I wish you would tell me all that you can remember of Clem when you first saw him on that farm. He never could or would tell me much about it.”

She soon saw that Bump could not tell her much either. “He was just about the way he always was,” he said, trying hard to recall that pallid, dusty boy who had walked into their sorrowful small world so many years ago. “The thing I do remember was that he wasn’t afraid of anybody. He’d seen a lot, I guess. I don’t know what all. But I always took it that he’d had adventures over there in China. He never talked about them, though. He pitched in right where we were. The Bergers never beat him up the way they did us. He even stopped them beating us, at least when he was around. When he decided to leave, the others were afraid to go with him. They were afraid of the Aid people catching them again and things were tough if they caught you. I was afraid, too, but after he was gone, I was more afraid to stay. I don’t think he was too pleased to see me padding along behind him, though. I’ve often thought about that. But he didn’t tell me to go back.”

There was nothing more, apparently. Clem’s outlines remained simple and angular. After Bump had gone she studied again the notes Clem had left about The Food. If she went on trying to do what he had wanted to do then perhaps she could keep his memory with her, so that she would not forget when she was old how he had looked and what had been the sound of his voice. …

It did not occur to Henrietta to find her family and tell them that she was in New York. She had not even thought to tell them of Clem’s death, but they had seen the announcement in a paragraph in the New York papers. Clem was well enough known for that. William had telegraphed his regret and Ruth had sent a floral cross to the funeral. Her mother was in England and it had been some weeks before a letter had come from her saying that she never thought Clem had a healthy color and she was not surprised. Henrietta must take good care of herself. It was fortunate there was plenty of money. If Henrietta wished, she would come and live with her, but she could not live in the Middle West. New York or Boston would be pleasant. Henrietta had not answered the letter.

Now that Clem was gone she was lonely again, but not as she would have been had he never come. He had shared with her and did still share with her in memory her alien childhood which no one could understand who had only been a child here in America. Without loving China, without feeling for the Chinese anything of Clem’s close affection, she was eternally divided in soul and spirit. It occurred to her sometimes in her solitary life that this division might also explain William. Perhaps all that he did was done to try and make himself whole. The wholeness which she had been able to find in Clem because they understood one another’s memories, William had found no one to share. Perhaps he could not be made whole through love. She would go and see Candace. Upon this decision she went to the laboratory as usual.

Dr. Feld, observing the large silent woman who worked patiently at his command, mused sometimes upon her remoteness and her completion. She needed no one, even as he needed none. They had finished their lives, he in Germany, she — where? Perhaps in China, perhaps in a grave. What more they did now was only to spend the remaining time usefully. He wished that he could have known the man who had left behind him these extraordinary though faulty notes. She had told him that her husband had had only a few years of education and no training in science.

“His knowledge must have been intuitive, dear madame,” he had replied.

“He was able to learn from human beings,” she said. “He felt their needs and based his whole life upon what he found out. He called it food, but it was more than food for the body. He made of human need his philosophy and religion. Had you met him you would have thought him a very simple man.”

“So is Einstein,” Dr. Feld said.

They did not talk much. When they did speak it was about Clem or the formula. He explained the peculiar, almost atomic vitality of vitamins. “The source of all life is in the atom,” he said solemnly. “God is not in the vastness of greatness. He is hid in the vastness of smallness. He is not in the general. He is in the particular. When we understand the particular, then we will know all.” When he really talked he spoke in German. She was glad that she had taken German in college and had kept the language alive in her reading.

One summer afternoon she took off her big white apron and reached for her hat and coat. “I’m going away early today, Dr. Feld, to see someone I know.”

He looked surprised and pleased. “Good — you have friends, dear madame.”

So Henrietta went away and rode the subway uptown and walked to Sutton Place.

She found the doorway in a quiet street, in a row of black and white houses with white Venetian blinds. The slanting sun shone into the street with glitter and shadow. The door opened promptly and a little maid in black and white asked her to come in please, her voice very fresh and Irish. She followed her into a square big room, immaculate in white and gold. The maid tripped away. Henrietta sat in a vast gold satin chair and a moment later Candace came in, looking soft and still young, her eyes tender and her hair a silvery gold. Her full sweet mouth smiled and Henrietta felt a fragrant kiss upon her cheek.

“Henrietta, this is the dearest thing you could have done. I never expect any of William’s family to — Sit down, please, and let me look at you. I cried so when I heard about Clem. I ought to have written but I couldn’t.”

She was in a violet chiffon tea gown, long and full and belted with silver. She was very slender again and more beautiful than ever.

“Let me look at you,” Henrietta said. “Are you happy, Candy?”

Candace blushed. “I am happier than I’ve ever been in my life, happy the way I want to be happy.”

She put her hand on Henrietta’s. “When I was with William I was happy, too. It is so easy for me to be happy. But then I was happy mostly by myself. Now I am happy with Seth.”

“I know,” Henrietta said. She did not take Candace’s hand because she did not know how to do such things and Candace understood this and stroked her hand and took her own away again.

“I don’t blame William,” she said gently. “I won’t even let Seth hate him. William needed someone who could understand him. Seth and I of course have grown up in the same world.”

She smiled at Henrietta brilliantly and softly. “You must come and visit us, dear. We don’t live here much. We live at the old seashore house.”

“Where is Seth working?” Henrietta asked.

“He doesn’t work any more except on his plays,” Candace said sweetly. “He says William galvanized him in college or he never would have worked.” Candace laughed her rich youthful laughter. “Seth is so amusing. He says William shaped his life. First he influenced him to work for him and then he influenced him to work against him. Now, Seth says, he’s not going to work at all because he’s really freed himself of William. We’re both very wicked, I daresay.”

“It isn’t wicked to be happy,” Henrietta said.

Candace pressed her hand again. “How glad I am to hear you say that! I used to tell William so but he didn’t know what I meant. I tell the boys that now, but they’re William’s sons, too. They’re terribly proud of him.”

Henrietta said, “Tell me about yourself.”

Candace held up her hand. Her face so illumined from within, turned toward the door. “Wait! I hear Seth.” She rose and went to the door and called and he came.

Henrietta saw a tall, gray-haired man, with a handsome, determinedly quizzical face. He was the one she remembered and she put out her hand.

“How good of you to come,” he said. “Candy and I don’t expect favors.”

“I am fond of Candace. I wanted to see if you were good enough for her.”

“Don’t make up your mind at first sight,” he begged. “My weaknesses are so obvious.”

She smiled politely, not knowing how to answer nonsense and he looked at Candace.

“My love, I’ve had nothing to eat or drink since luncheon.”

“Oh — I’ll ring for tea.” Her violet skirt flowed across the silvery gray carpet and she pulled a black bell rope, hung as a decoration by the marble mantelpiece.

They had tea then, a happy plentiful affair at which Henrietta sat loyally silent and faintly smiling, enjoying the warmth of the web these two wove about them, into which they wrapped her, too. They were mirthful without cruelty, and gaily frank with her.

“Your mother, darling,” Candace said to her, “has been cultivating England, as you know. She’s used up all the available relatives — She’s simply astonished everybody. Seth, where’s the letter we had from Lady Astley?”

Seth pulled open the drawer of a mahogany escritoire, and tossed an envelope into her lap.

“You don’t mind?” Candace inquired, eyes brimming with laughter.

“I know Mother,” Henrietta said.

Candace opened the pale blue writing paper, and began to read aloud:

What we cannot understand here in England is why Mrs. Lane isn’t the mother of the President. I think she doesn’t understand it, either. She’s a joy and a treasure. She makes us laugh our heads off and then we can face these Socialists. Really, she’s a good sport — we like her. There’s something English about her if you know what I mean — something quite frightful. She’s so sure she’s wonderful. There’ll always be England and that sort of thing — and of course there always will. It’s wonderful to think that it’s in America, too. We’ll quite hate to see her leave. God help us, it’s odd, but the American Queen Mother hates Labor, too! She calls herself a Republican. William the Son is a Republican, she says. What’s a Republican, dear? Mind now and tell me when you write.

“How wicked we are to read this aloud,” Candace said looking with laughing rue at Seth, sunk in his chair and smoking his pipe.

“Nonsense,” he said. “Henrietta knows we like the old gal. God, how I envy the old! They had the world all straight, heaven and hell, God and the devil, peace and war, good and bad, moral and immoral, stuffed and hungry and rich and poor—” Candace joined in the chant. “Young and old—”

“Black and white—”

“Gold and silver—”

“East side, West side, and never the twain shall meet—”

“King and subject—”

“City and Country—”

“Capital and Labor—”

“Union and nonunion—”

“Capitalist and Communist—”

“White man, black man—”

“Stop,” Candace said, “we’re making Henrietta dizzy.”

“No, you’re not,” Henrietta replied. “You’re just making me laugh. Bless you both for being happy. Now I’ve got to go.”

They let her go, clamoring for her return, making her promise that she would come to spend a month with them at the seashore house. She would not, of course, but she could not tell them so, lest they keep her to make her promise, and then she went away, back to the subway and downtown again to her little hole in the wall.

It was long past twilight. Dr. Feld might still be working but she did not go to see. When she shut the door upon that splendid foolish happiness she stepped from moonshine into darkness. She was so accustomed to loneliness that she could not quite understand why the loneliness was deeper than it had been before, since she had found out exactly what she wanted to know, that Candace was happy and that none of them owed a debt to her any more through William. Then she remembered that neither Seth nor Candace had asked her where she lived or what she was doing. It had not occurred to them. They were not cruel, they were not even selfish or unthinking. They were simply ignorant, Candace naturally, so, Seth perhaps willfully so. He had returned to the world into which he had been born, and Candace had never left it. For them no other existed. They had never known, could never know, what Clem had always known.

It occurred to her later, after she sat trying to study a chemistry text, that perhaps that was why Candace had never understood William. William knew, too, another world. She let the book fall to the floor and sat for a long time, pondering this astonishing fact: Clem and William, so utterly different, were alike!

William Lane was no longer a young man. When he saw his two sons, both married and with children of their own, his grandchildren, he felt alarmingly old. On the other hand, his mother was robust and alive, though in her eighties, and so he was still young. He had come to the point of being proud of her, though frequently irritated by her increasing irresponsibility. Now, for example, when Ruth was in such trouble with Jeremy, who had become a really hopeless sot, his mother was gallivanting in England. He complained of this to Emory who listened with her usual grace and then made a wise suggestion. He depended very much on her wisdom.

“Why not cable your mother to come home and live with Ruth?” Emory said.

“An excellent idea,” William replied.

Mrs. Lane received the cable the next day. She had been staying at a big country house in Surrey, where the tenants at Christmastime had gathered in the real old English way to drink the health of the lord in spite of government. There was something about English life that made her think of Peking and she would have liked to spend the rest of her life in England except that the Socialists were spoiling everything. There was no reason for an American to endure the austerity upon which Sir Stafford Cripps insisted, especially an American woman. She would have stayed longer, however, with her friend, the Countess of Burleigh, had she not received William’s cable. Jeremy, it appeared, had been taken to a special sort of hospital and Ruth needed her.

Mrs. Lane shrugged her handsome heavy shoulders when she read the telegram the footman brought her. She was having a quiet tea with the Countess, just the two of them. The Countess was old, too, and always looking for diversion and Mrs. Lane had been diverting her by a long visit.

“I cannot understand why my children still insist upon my returning to them at every crisis in their lives,” she now complained to the Countess. “One would think that at my age I might be allowed my freedom. But no — William, it seems, feels I must come home. My elder daughter is of course absorbed in her grief — I told you she lost her husband — and so my poor youngest child turns to me. Her husband has been taken sadly.”

“What’s wrong with him?” the Countess inquired. She had been a music-hall star in her younger days and she continued to look very smart in spite of a tendency to palsy, and she talked with the youthful Cockney twang that she pretended she used on purpose.

“I fancy he’s been drinking too much again,” Mrs. Lane replied.

“Ah, if it’s that,” the Countess said decisively, “then you’re rahhly in trouble, my deah. I know poor Harold was the same — would have his little tipple, he would, and he ended that way. Nothin’ to do about it, nyether. I used to rampage a bit and he’d get frightened at first. In the end, poah deah, it only made him drink more. I had to let him drink himself to death, I rahhly did.”

This was not encouraging, and Mrs. Lane took her way homeward by plane as soon as she could get a seat, which she was able to do very soon, to the surprise and annoyance of the man who had already engaged it. She knew how to use William’s name in secret places.

She found Ruth alone. Emory, who had come to meet her at the air field, went with her. Ruth began to weep when she saw her mother in the hall standing still so that the maid could take off her coat properly, and Mrs. Lane, regarding her daughter’s tears, saw that Ruth cried as a middle-aged woman exactly as she had as a child, almost soundlessly and with bewildered pathos. She put out her stout arms and wrapped Ruth in them. “There, there,” she said. “Everything is going to be all right now. I’ve come to stay with you. You need me more than Henrietta does. Where is Henrietta?”

“I don’t know,” Ruth sobbed. “I can’t think about anybody but Jeremy. Oh Mother, why does he — the doctor says it’s a symptom. Something is still making him unhappy — but it’s not me, I’m sure. I do everything he wants me to.”

“Nonsense,” Mrs. Lane said, pulling her daughter along firmly in the circle of her right arm as she moved into the drawing room. “Men like to get drunk — some men. That’s all there is to it. It’s not any woman’s fault.”

Emory kissed Ruth an inch or two off the cheek. “William feels quite desperate, too, dear Ruth. We all want to help poor Jeremy.”

“He was so deceitful about it, Mother—” Ruth cried. “He went off to the office every day apparently to work and instead he took a room at his club and just began, and went on, all by himself. When he didn’t come home, of course we had to find him. He had locked the door and they had to break it down. He was unconscious. I had Doctor Blande go and get him. They took him straight to the hospital. I haven’t even — seen him. Doctor Blande says I mustn’t just now.”

She began to cry again. Mrs. Lane sighed and Emory sat, quietly beautiful, looking at these American relatives. She knew why Jeremy had gone off. It was his revenge upon William, the revenge of a weak man upon one invincible. She had sympathy for the weak, but she was prudent enough to cast her lot with the invincible. William was right to be invincible in the sort of world there was now. It was the only chance one had for survival. She was invincible, too, at William’s side. She pitied Ruth and felt a new admiration for William’s mother, sitting solidly and without tears.

“Ruth, there’s not a bit of use in your crying now that I’m here,” Mrs. Lane said. “I’m sorry for you. Your father was a saint. You’re used to good men. William, too, is so good. It’s natural that a man like Jeremy should be a trial to you. But you belong to the family and you’ll be taken care of. My advice is to let Jeremy stay right where he is until William tells us what to do. Maybe you ought to let Candace know, so she can go to see him.”

Ruth shivered. “Oh, I can’t! She’d think it was somehow our fault.”

“Then she’s very silly,” Mrs. Lane said loudly. “The trouble with Jeremy is that he was brought up to be spoiled. He can’t live up to William’s standards. Now you go and wash your face and brush your hair. You’ll feel better. There’s nothing you can do for Jeremy, not a thing. We may as well have a bite of something to eat and go to a matinee! It will take our minds off our troubles. Emory, why don’t you come with us? That’s a handsome frock you have on. I’ve always liked that shade of yellow, especially with jade. That’s handsome jade, too.”

“William brought it from China,” Emory said. “Madame Chiang gave it to him for me.”

“She has wonderful taste,” Mrs. Lane said. “What a pity the Communists have taken over!”

They were alone, for Ruth had left the room as obediently as though she were a little girl. Mrs. Lane leaned toward Emory. “Jade looks nice with dark hair and eyes. William ought never to have married Candace. She was a blonde, you know. He always liked brunettes best. The Chinese wear a lot of jade. Of course they’re always brunette. Some of the Chinese women have very beautiful skin. It reminds me of yours. I used to know the Old Empress Dowager. In fact, we were almost intimate. She had that sort of skin, very smooth and golden. She wore a lot of jade. William always liked to hear about her. I took him to see her once, by special permission.”

“He has told me that,” Emory said.

“Nobody could forget the Empress,” Mrs. Lane said with complacency.

Ruth came in, looking pretty again. Her short curly hair was almost white and very becoming. They went away at once since it was already late, and they found the theaters so crowded that they could only get seats at a new musical.

At the dinner table that night Emory described to William the effect of the afternoon and he listened gravely. They seldom had guests nowadays. Since the war they had fewer really distinguished visitors from abroad and not many Americans were interesting enough to be invited for a whole evening.

“I shall advise Ruth to get a divorce,” William said with decision. He had grown very handsome with the years. The discontent which had marred his face from childhood was almost gone.

“Oh, can you?” Emory murmured mildly.

“Certainly, why not? She’s not a Catholic,” William replied. “Moreover, at her age she will certainly not marry again. For my own part, I shall be glad to be rid of Jeremy.”

Emory did not reply. They sat in comfortable silence. She was glad that she need not live now in England. How ghastly might her life have been in such penury as Michael and his family endured! He was trying to make the farmlands pay, for the government was threatening to take over Hulme Castle if he could not. The only really safe and comfortable spot now in the world was America.

This thought moved her to an unusual idea. “William, what would you think of a cozy family dinner now that your mother is back, something to gather us together again in these troubled times? After all, there’s nothing quite like family. I think it would comfort your poor sisters and impress the children, you know. We needn’t ask the grandchildren.”

William’s heavy eyebrows moved. He pushed aside his salad. He had never liked salads, which he called food for rabbits. “I am going to Washington next week to insist on more arms for Chiang. I gave my promise to him — a promise I hold sacred, in spite of what’s happened in Korea.”

Emory evaded this. William had grown amusingly dictatorial in these past few years. “Why shouldn’t I just telephone them for tomorrow night? After all, it’s family. One needn’t be too formal.”

William reflected, then consented. “Very well. But tell them to be prompt. Will’s wife is always late.”

Emory rose at once and walked with her long lingering step across the floor. “I’ll telephone Henrietta first.”

None of them would think of saying he or she could not come, unless Henrietta declared she had to work in her absurd laboratory. She would tell her that she needn’t dress, at least.

“You mean we aren’t to dress?” Henrietta inquired over the telephone. “But I have a quite decent black gown. I had to get it when Clem was given an award in Dayton — for the citizen who had done the most for the town during the war.”

“Oh, then we’ll dress,” Emory replied. “William always does anyway.”

So she had telephoned to everybody to dress, and therefore it was upon his family in its best trappings that William looked the next evening, after he had said his usual grace before the meal. The dinner was excellent, hearty without being heavy. Emory understood food as Candace never had and she had no qualms about dismissing a careless cook. She never allowed herself to become involved in the domestic situation of any servant, a fault which had been very trying in Candace. They had once endured abominable omelets for nearly three years because the cook had a crippled son. In the end William had dismissed the cook himself one Sunday morning over a piece of yellow leather on his plate.

Tonight the bouillon, the soufflé, the roast pheasant, and the vegetables were all delicious. He did not care for sweets but Emory had a Russian dessert that he had never tasted before, flavored with rum. “It is a pity,” he remarked, “that our relations with the Russians cannot be confined to their sweets.” Everybody laughed and even Emory smiled.

His mother was looking very handsome in a lilac velvet, trimmed at the bosom with a fall of cream-colored lace. No one would dream that she had ever been the wife of a missionary in China. She had kept her stout figure in spite of her age, and her visit in England, prolonged as it had been, had given her an imperial air, enhanced by the pile of white curls on her head, which he liked. He was proud of her and, the dinner over, he led her to the most comfortable chair in the long drawing room.

“You’re looking well, Mother.”

“I am in splendid health, thank God,” she replied in a resonant voice. “I’ve had no chance at you, you naughty boy. Oh, I know you’ve been too busy for your old mother.” She leaned over the edge of her chair while the others were settling themselves. “Now, William, I want you to have a talk with Henrietta. She is living all by herself somewhere way downtown in the most miserable little apartment. It doesn’t look right for your sister.”

“What is she doing?” he asked. He knew vaguely from Emory that Henrietta was still working on one of Clem’s absurd notions and his eyes fell on her as he spoke. She was sitting in her characteristic repose.

“She’s working at some laboratory with an old Jew. I don’t know what she’s doing. Clem was a queer duck, if you ask me.”

At this moment Henrietta raised her dark eyes and smiled at them. She was gentler than she used to be, though even more withdrawn.

“I want a word with you later, Henrietta,” he called.

She nodded and her eyes fell.

Ruth was very pretty in spite of her troubles. He had time now to look at each one of his family. She had gained some weight — eating, probably, to take her mind off Jeremy. Of all of them Ruth looked the most like his father, her features delicate and her bones fine. Yet there was nothing in her face of that spiritual quality which he remembered with reverence as being his father’s habitual expression. Her two daughters were nondescript young matrons, he thought. They looked like all the modern women, flaring blond hair, wide painted mouths, a clatter of thin bracelets and high heels. He supposed they were well enough and certainly they need not worry him now that they had husbands.

He had taken no more relatives into the business, not even his own sons. He wanted to be free to dismiss incompetents like Jeremy. Not that his sons were incompetent in any way. Both of them were successful men, Will a lawyer, Jerry a surgeon. They were married and he had three grandchildren, two of them boys. He did not know his sons’ wives very well and had even been accused of passing them on the street without recognizing them. He had grumbled a good deal when Jerry married an ordinary trained nurse while he was an intern. William had a theory that it would be better for all young people if they were married in the Chinese fashion by their parents, in order that one could be sure of what was coming into the family. When he had said this to Emory she had gone into fits of laughter. “You are the most unrealistic of men,” she had declared. “Don’t you know yet that you are living in modern America?” He did not know what she meant and was too proud to say so.

His sons and Ruth’s daughters seemed on the best of terms with Emory. She sat among them and behind her coffee table, appearing, he thought with self-congratulation, entirely happy. Her darkly regal head was bent while she busied herself with cups. She wore a coral-colored gown of some sort that he did not remember having seen before. The full skirt flowed round her like a calyx, and she had on her diamonds.

It was all very pleasant and he did not remember ever having been quite so happy before. Everything was well with him, and it was dawning upon him that perhaps even the war had been good for him in its own way. The world needed leadership as never before. He must not allow himself to think of retiring, however much Emory hoped for it. Monsignor Lockhart had said to him only last week that the new war in Asia might be the — beginning of mankind’s most titanic struggle. Within the next years—

“William,” Emory said. “Your mother wants to know what you think is going to happen in China. Why don’t you tell us all?”

So he began, sitting in his high-backed armchair. “A very strange new China, not at all what you and I remember, Henrietta, in old Peking. You would like it less than ever, Mother. I don’t suppose Ruth remembers. …”

They listened to his picture of Communist China, no one interrupting him except his mother, who put in small cries of horror and interjections of outrage.

“But how repulsive, William!” And at the end, “I’m glad your father isn’t here to see it. He would want to go straight over there — though as I always said, what one man can do I don’t know. ‘You’re wasting yourself,’ that’s what I always told him.”

“One man can do a great deal,” William said.

She heaved a mighty sigh and shook her head.

“Not any man, of course,” William said, “but one who knows, one who has faith in God, has infinite power.”

His mother looked rebellious. “Your father always thought he knew, too, William. He was always so sure that God told him what was best. I don’t know that there’s any difference between then and now.”

“There is a great deal of difference,” William said gravely. “Now we really do know.”

Emory, scenting the dissension always possible in the presence of her mother-in-law, chose a lighter substance for talk.

“William says the Old Tiger’s wife is very beautiful, though she’s Chinese.”

“So was the Empress Dowager,” Mrs. Lane said promptly. “The Empress was not Chinese exactly — Manchu, of course, but it’s almost the same — and she was very beautiful. I shall never forget her. She had long eyes, very long and brilliant. She had a temper, as any woman worth her salt has. Her mouth was very red — of course she painted. Her skin was wonderful and smooth and white as anybody’s. I never felt it was really her fault that things went as wrong as they did. She was so charming, and always perfectly lovely to me. I took William to see her — do you remember, William?”

“I can never forget,” William said.

“Powerful, wasn’t she! With such charm, too!”

“She killed an extraordinary number of people.” This was Henrietta’s voice coming so quietly that it seemed almost indifferent.

“Oh well,” Mrs. Lane said, “we don’t know what provocation she had.”

“It is never right to kill people,” Henrietta said with what Mrs. Lane felt was her childish stubbornness.

William answered his sister. “It is sometimes necessary. In order that the end may not be lost, the means must sometimes be very severe.”

“Then the end is lost,” Henrietta said. She lifted her head when she said this, and Emory felt that the family was really very difficult. They seemed determined to disturb life. She turned to the younger men.

“Will, why don’t you and Jerry and the girls open the doors into the music room and roll back the carpet? I’ll play for you and we can watch you dance.”

Under cover of the music and the rhythm of brisk feet swinging into new intricate steps, William went to Henrietta.

“Let us go into my library. I would like to know what you are doing.”

She rose almost obediently and followed him, her black-robed figure upright and dignified. Since Clem’s death she had not cut her hair and now, almost entirely white, it was long enough to be coiled around her head and held at the back with a silver comb. Emory’s eyes, from the piano, followed the tall figures. It was surprising how much William and Henrietta looked like each other. Yet they were utterly unlike. Henrietta was espousing poverty for Clem’s cause. Emory had learned much about that solitary laboratory and the old scientist who worked there. And yet perhaps there was a likeness between William and Henrietta. A great deal of character and spiritual energy could be stubbornly bestowed upon something chosen and the chosen substance was changed, transubstantiated, and so deified.

Emory understood this without in the least partaking of it, kindly cynical as she was to the core of her heart, sadly agnostic, while she bowed her head. America was her country now and this her family. Her parents had been killed by one of the final buzz bombs. They had gone up to London, thinking it safe at last, and then the new horrible bombs began to fall. Poor Michael, in Hulme Castle, was still trying to make the land produce those impossible harvests under the cruelly critical eyes of the incredible government the British people had chosen for themselves after the war! William said he would never go to England until it fell. It might be a long time, it might be never. Her hands flew over the keys. She played as beautifully as ever, with a natural rhythm which she could suit as easily to a rhumba as to a waltz. Nothing made any difference so long as the music went on, the music and the dancing.

“So you see,” Henrietta was saying behind the library door which was so heavy that it shut out the music, “I shall simply keep on with Clem’s work until I succeed in what he wanted to do.”

William was too stupefied to speak. He had thought Clem a fanatic and a fool while he lived, and in so far as he had given any thought to him since his death it was to believe that Henrietta was better off alone. When he thought of Clem now it was still as the pale boy whom he had first seen in Peking in a silly quarrel with a Chinese, an affair no more dignified today as he remembered it than it had been then. He had been repelled by Clem as a pale young man in a collar too big for him, after he had become Henrietta’s husband, and there was that final folly of the day when Clem had come to his office with his absurd proposals and without any appointment. Clem never learned anything. His life had been all of a piece, all nonsense except that he had made some money for Henrietta. William had never acknowledged Clem as a part of the family and he did not do so now. Careful for once of his sister’s feelings, he made no reference to Clem. He spoke to her entirely for her own good.

“If, as you say, you have had by chance a respectable fortune left to you it seems madness to consume it on any idea so fantastic. If people were given food, which is, after all, the one basic necessity, most of them would never work again.”

Henrietta tried once more. “You see, William, it is not only that they should not be allowed to starve. I believe, and Clem did, too, that unless people are fed they will rise up against any government they happen to have. The government that first understands the anger in the hearts of hungry people will be the one that wins. People feel they ought not to have to starve for any reason whatever. Dr. Feld says that Hitler’s promises of food were the first steps to his power.”

William was walking restlessly about the room and she kept watching him. “The idea is so fantastic,” he was repeating. “Think of feeding the people of China! It can’t be done.”

“It’s got to be done,” she said. “And there are the people of India and all the other peoples.”

“Fantasy, fantasy,” William muttered.

She contradicted him flatly. “Not fantasy, William, but purest common sense. Do you know why you can’t see it? Because you and Clem worked at opposite poles. He believed the world could get better only when people were better. He believed that people themselves could make a good world if only they were free from simple misery. That was Clem’s faith. Yours isn’t that. You think people have to be compelled from the outside, shaped, ordered, disciplined, told what to do. I don’t know where your faith is — I suppose you have it, for in your own stubborn way, William, I can see you are working for the same thing Clem was.”

William was suddenly violently angry. “I deny the slightest resemblance to him! Henrietta, I tell you—”

He raised his clenched hands and saw that they were trembling and dropped them. “Clem was a dangerous man, a menace, or might have been if he had been successful. He worked at the very roots of our nation to destroy us. I don’t like to say this, Henrietta — I don’t forget you are my sister — but now that he’s dead, you had better know the truth.”

Henrietta remained calm. “Well, William, we don’t understand each other. We never did. But someday it will be proved that Clem was right. That is my faith. And when he is proved right, William, you will be defeated, you and with you the Old Tiger and his beautiful wife and all the rest of your kind. How wrong that Old Empress was whom Mother continues to worship!”

“Henrietta, you’re talking very wickedly.”

“I daresay.”

She was so calm, so immovably stubborn, that for a moment he felt quite sick with rage, exactly as he had so often felt when they were children together in China. But he managed to follow her into the hall and help her on with her wrap, a black wool cape. For she was determined to leave him and, so far as he could see, to leave them all. She would not allow him to tell the others that she was going.

“No use disturbing them,” she said in her short fashion.

So he let her out of the door himself and then stood at a window watching her. She did not call a cab. Instead she began to walk down the street, her bare head held very high, and the wind blowing hard and her cape flying out behind her. It was a clear night, and he could see a strip of stars above. At the far corner she stopped for a bus. He could still see her waiting there, and he would have continued to watch her except that one of those miserable creatures came shambling up to her. Under the light of the street lamp William saw her open her handbag and take out money and give it to the beggar, thereby encouraging, he thought bitterly, all such persons everywhere. He pulled the curtains together across the window and trembled with anger. He had been angry with Henrietta all his life, and with that fellow Clem!

He stood behind the curtains, thick and velvet, and summoned his old arrogant spirit. He would not suffer fools! He closed his eyes, and waited. No reassurance rose to meet his soul’s demands. He wished he had not thought of Clem. He saw him again now. Inside his brain, inside his closed eyelids, he saw Clem, that boy, intrepid in the Chinese street, ready to fight, Clem marching unbidden into his office. The fellow had no breeding, never knew his place. Dead, luckily! He had the world to himself, now that Clem was dead.

He opened his eyes and heard faintly the music that Emory made and mingled with it the soft movement of dancing feet. He turned away from the window. Then he felt the familiar chill upon his heart. The old childish doubt of himself, the profound eternal doubt that had haunted him from his earliest memory, fell upon him again, this time so heavily that he felt too tired to shake it off.

What if he had always been wrong? The vague shape of victory — was it he? Or was it Clem? His imagination, diseased and tortured by his soul’s perpetual uncertainty, lifted Clem from the grave, brought him back to life, clothed him in the dark garments of doubt and fear.

Could Clem be right? If so, then he himself was wrong and being wrong was doomed. But was Clem right? How could he ever know?