Gods Men

5

“THERE’S A LETTER FROM your mother,” Candace said to William. She never opened letters addressed to him after she discovered during her honeymoon that he did not like it. She wondered sometimes if she were stupid because she could never foresee what he would like and what he would not. But once she knew she never forgot.

It was December and they were in the town house. Next week she must gather herself together for Christmas. She clung to these last days of the year, spending the midday hours in a large glass-enclosed porch. She was pregnant with her second child, and next summer there would be another baby.

Just now, Willie, William’s namesake, was nearly two years old. She had been married more than five years. She lay on a long and comfortable chair, feeling a little exhausted, perhaps from her horseback ride in the park. She had not told William that the doctor had forbidden riding because she did not intend to obey such orders. William, had he known, would have insisted upon obedience.

He sat down beside a small metal table and tore open the envelope thick with Chinese stamps. Two letters fell out, one with his father’s writing and the other from his mother. He chose his mother’s first, for she gave him the most news about what was happening in Peking. She gave the incidents and his father provided the commentary. William was profoundly interested in what was taking place there, for he believed that it was a preliminary pattern of what must happen all over Asia, a surging rise of the common people he feared and distrusted. The mob upon the Peking street had become a memory stamped upon his brain. The one power that could control such madness was in the unconquerable Empress. He remembered the brave old face, impatient and arrogant, bent above him when he was a little boy. He remembered the times he had climbed Coal Hill to look down upon the roofs of her palaces. Having now seen many mansions, he realized that the Old Empress had a magnificence that no mere millionaire could buy. Her palaces were forbidden to all men but no one could forbid an American boy to climb a hill and look down upon her roofs of porcelain blue and gold and upon her marble pillars, and anyone who passed could stare at her closed gates of enameled vermilion.

Early in July his mother had written of a garden party to be given in September in the Summer Palace and to which all diplomats and their friends had been invited. Now he read that it would never take place. The Old Empress had fallen ill on a bright day in the early autumn, his mother wrote. The young Emperor, sitting at his desk, was disturbed by a eunuch running in and crying out, “The Old Buddha is dead!” Without one word, without waiting one instant, the young Emperor began to write upon the sheet of paper he had been preparing for the brushing of a poem. Instead of the poem he wrote an order for the death of that statesman who had betrayed him to the Old Empress ten years earlier, when he had dreamed of making his country new again. Before he could seal the paper, the eunuch came running in to cry still more loudly, “The Old Buddha lives again!” She had rallied, to live weeks longer.

William kept silent, for Candace could not know what the Old Empress meant to him. He read on. She had rallied more than once after that, determined to outlive the young Emperor whom she so distrusted for his eagerness to change old ways for new. He, too, was ill, and she lived and lived again when she heard he was not dead. When she heard that at last he was gone, she gave a great gusty sigh and was willing to die.

“I of scanty merit,” the haughty old woman wrote in her last message to her people, “I have carried on the government, ever-toiling night and day. I have directed the metropolitan and provincial leaders and the military commanders, striving earnestly to secure peace. I have employed the virtuous in office and I have hearkened to the admonitions of my advisors. I have relieved the people in flood and famine. By the grace of Heaven I have suppressed all rebellions and out of danger I have brought back peace.”

William smiled grimly. Brave Old Empress, brave until the end! She had not died until she had seen that weakling dead, a degenerate youth, a puppet in the hands of revolutionists, who would have unleashed all the madness of the people.

Candace watched him but he did not know it. She could never read his face but she saw the passing smile and wanted to know its cause. “What is it, William? Has something happened?”

“Something is always happening,” William replied. He curved his lips downward very slightly. He was reading his father’s letter, a short one ending as usual with a bit from the Chinese classics. “We are upon the threshold of wonderful events, now that the cruel old woman is gone,” his father wrote. “As Mencius said four hundred years before Christ, The people are the foundation of the State; the national altars are second in importance; the monarch is the least important of them all.’ My son, I wish your life could have been spent here in China. It is the center of the coming world, though few know it.”

William smiled again at this, a different smile. He did not for one moment believe that China was the center of the world and he did not agree with Mencius.

Candace, watching his face, felt one of her waves of recklessness creep upon her. Why was she afraid of William? She had not been afraid of him before she was married and she could think of no single reason, certainly no incident, to explain why she should now feel that he might be cruel. Jeremy was partly responsible. Jeremy was drinking too much. She had tried to say something to her father about it but he refused to believe it. His religion was a cushion against everything that he did not like and he took refuge in it without shame. There was no use in talking to her mother and she was afraid to tell William. He was hard enough upon Jeremy in the office — hard upon Seth, too. Seth was the chief copy editor. Jeremy was managing editor and stood between Seth and William. William insisted on seeing all the copy and Seth had to make it follow the policy William outlined for his staff upon every event as it came about in the world.

“We don’t have to think,” Jeremy had said with his too sprightly humor. “It’s wonderful not to have to think, Candy. It leaves you so much time.”

Seth was not so gay. He refused to talk about William and with Candace he was exceedingly formal. She had to ask Jeremy what was the matter with Seth.

“An independent mind,” Jeremy said with his changeless merriment. “It’s one mind too many. We don’t need it. We have William’s.”

No one could contradict William. The fantastic success of his newspapers was the final answer to any disagreement with his decisions. In five years the one newspaper he had begun in New York had grown into four, the others published in Chicago, St. Louis, and San Francisco. With a wily combination of pictures, cartoons, and text, William had devised something that had become indispensable to millions of people he never saw. His papers were small enough to handle easily on the subways and while men were eating their lunches at crowded drugstore counters. He gave them exactly what they wanted: financial and business news in a brief space, with a short half column of prediction and advice; news in carefully chosen pictures of tense drama, and photographs cropped to show nothing but concentrated action; news in capsules of simply written, carefully shaped text, suited to millions of people who read with difficulty and thought very little, and who craved constant diversions because of their inner emptiness. William was too clever to preach. What he wanted could be done by his choice of what news to tell and how it was told. Elimination was half the secret of his power, and headlines were the rest of it. Headlines alone could tell people how to think.

Jeremy, Martin Rosvaine, and Seth James met sometimes to talk of the papers and of William. They were awed by his genius while they grew more and more afraid of him.

“In another ten years William will be telling the world what to think and nobody will know it,” Martin said. “Of course Aunt Rosamond simply loves it. She won’t let him pay her back her hundred thousand.”

Aunt Rosamond, as soon as she heard that Roger Cameron had given William a hundred thousand dollars, had insisted on matching it. William had returned Roger’s money but it was true that Aunt Rosamond refused any such return.

“The interest is my annuity, William, dear boy,” Aunt Rosamond cackled in her hoarse old voice. She was almost blind but now and again she insisted upon a visit from William, and he treated her half affectionately. There was something he liked in the rude, ruthless, selfish old woman who enjoyed his success and laughed at his newspapers.

“Wonderful trash,” she called them when they were alone, and gave him a dig in the ribs with her sharp old elbow.

Upon the three young men, however, William’s monstrous and increasing success was beginning to have effect. Martin had attacks of conscience, irritated by Aunt Rosamond’s greed, Seth threatened rebellion against William’s interference with copy, and Jeremy had begun to drink. The long indecision about Ruth, the months when they were half engaged, the months when he felt he did not want to marry anybody, other months when it was Ruth he did not want, had become years. Through it all her unchanging patience, her unfailing sweetness and faithful love had never let him go. In the end Ruth had won.

A month ago Candace thought Jeremy had softened and become more like the boy she had always known, a moody boy, gay with a gaiety she disliked, but capable of times of thoughtful gravity, hours when he could talk with her, moments out of which he sometimes brought a handful of verses to be cherished. He had not written poetry for years, but now perhaps he would again and she hoped he would, for it was good for him to write poetry. Something in him was crystalized and so became permanent.

She thought she understood the change in him when he told her that he had made up his mind to marry Ruth. He had really fallen in love with Ruth at last, she believed, though Jeremy gave as his reason when he told her so that Ruth was the opposite of William and therefore he could not help loving her.

“But you did like William in college,” Candace said.

“I got to depend on him,” Jeremy said. “I couldn’t have passed my exams without him. I have the same feeling now.”

“You don’t have to work at all,” Candace said. “You and Ruth could live somewhere quite happily. Father wouldn’t mind.”

He looked at her with bewildered eyes. “I don’t know why I can’t do that,” he said.

Only then did she really begin to think about Ruth. “Jeremy, I haven’t said I’m glad. But I think I am. Will William like it?”

“Of course he won’t,” Jeremy said. “Even Ruth thinks that.”

“Oh, why not?”

“He has an instinct to deny everybody except himself. He likes to feel he has no flesh and blood of his own. He’d like to have a myth about him that he was born without parents — pure son of God.”

Candace was shocked. “That’s a mean thing to say when I’m going to have a baby.”

“Oh, the baby will certainly be another son of God,” Jeremy had said too flippantly. He had been lying on his back on the grass, his body limp, his voice lazy, staring at patches of sky between the leaves of the maples. Candace had not answered him.

“William,” she now said, “I want to tell you something.”

William folded the letters from China. “Well?”

“Jeremy and Ruth are engaged at last,” she said baldly. “I’m glad. It’s been on and off for years — he couldn’t make up his mind.” She turned her head to look at William and saw a bluish flush upon his face.

“When did this take place?” he asked.

“About a month ago.”

“And you have known all this time?”

“Not quite all.”

She waited for his anger but it did not fall. The bluish flush died away and he was more ashen than ever.

“Don’t you think it’s rather nice?” she asked.

He got up, his letters in his hand. “I don’t think one way or the other about it,” he said. “It seems to me a matter of no importance at all.”

“Then you won’t mind her being married here?”

“I suppose not.”

“I’d like to make it a pretty wedding — soon, before I get too clumsy. They don’t want to wait.”

“Do as you please,” William said. He hesitated a moment and then went on rather abruptly. “These letters give me an idea for an editorial I’d like to write for tomorrow. I hope you won’t mind if I don’t show up for dinner.”

“I’ll miss you,” she said with her coaxing smile.

“I’m sorry,” he said rather formally. He bent over her, however, and kissed her hair before he went his way. She watched him as he walked and seeing his bent head, his hands holding the letters clasped behind his back, she thought suddenly that he looked like a priest. That, perhaps, was what William should have been.

Ruth was married on New Year’s Eve and Henrietta was her maid of honor. Upon this Ruth had insisted, and Candace had chosen the wedding garments. Ruth of course must wear white satin, but Candace designed for Henrietta a thick, clinging silk of daffodil yellow to be worn with a wide green sash. Henrietta’s darkness was made to glow. She did not protest. Holding within her breast the ineffable secret of Clem, she allowed herself to be dressed for the first time in her life with purpose for beauty.

She was twice in William’s house, and the first time was after the fitting of her dress, when Candace brought both young women home for luncheon. William was not there, but Jeremy was. He had left the office brazenly early, without telling anybody.

“What is the use of being William’s brother-in-law if I have to be afraid of him?” he inquired of them. “He can’t fire me.”

“Oh, Jeremy,” Ruth cried, softly shocked.

“Jeremy is not to be taken seriously since he grew up,”

Candace told Henrietta. “He used to be quite serious when he was a little boy.”

They were at the long table in the big dining room, and the mahogany shone through Italian lace. They sat two by two, Henrietta beside Candace, and the ends of the table were empty, though the butler had set William’s place. His place was always set, whether he came or not.

“When I was a little boy I was serious because I thought I was going to die,” Jeremy said, tilting his wine glass as closely as he could without spilling the red wine. “Now I know I have to live. One has to be gay when one cannot escape life. Eh, Ruthie?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ruth cried happily.

The wedding was beautiful. William gave Ruth away since their father was in Peking, and against his dignity her white softness was the contrast of a rose against rock. The wedding was in William’s house, although Ruth had wanted a church wedding, and had thought that it would be in St. John’s where William and Candace went regularly on Sunday mornings. So it had been planned. But William, at Christmastime, had come into some strange conflict with the rector, which he had never explained, and had withdrawn his membership. He went to church no more and it would have been too conspicuous to have allowed the wedding to take place somewhere else. It was only a small wedding. Ruth had never come out, and she knew few people. There was no reason, William told Candace, why his friends, or hers either, should be invited to come to see a young woman married of whose existence they had only accidentally heard.

The large drawing room made a pleasant place. The florist set up an altar at one end and Ruth’s college preacher came to marry them. William was kindly even to Henrietta, and to his grandparents he was almost gentle. They had aged very much. Henrietta matched him in being kind, and thought of Clem and still could not bring herself to speak his name.

None of them were staying after the wedding. They went with Jeremy and Ruth to the dock and saw them aboard a ship for France. William was not with them. A call from his office had compelled him away. Then, with her daffodil dress packed carefully in her suitcase, Henrietta went home with her grandparents.

That night she told them about Clem. They sat together in the large and now rather shabby living room, and she tried to make them see why she must marry Clem.

“He is the only person in the world who knows everything about me.” she told them.

They listened simply, knowing somehow that there was very much that they did not know. China was a land they could not imagine and it seemed to them monstrous and inexplicable.

“You won’t be going back to that China, I hope,” her grandmother murmured.

“I don’t know what Clem will do,” Henrietta said. “He is always thinking about the world. If he goes of course I will, too.”

The old couple had had a hard day and they were not interested in the world. Mr. Vandervent yawned and touched the bell. When Millie, who always sat up until the family was in bed, came he asked for milk.

“Make it hot, Millie, and put a little sherry wine in it.”

“I will, Mr. Vandervent,” she answered.

A few minutes later, drowsily drinking his sherried milk, he nodded his head to Henrietta. “I suppose it is only what we must expect,” he said vaguely. They went upstairs to bed without asking her anything more and she sat down at her desk to write Clem a long letter.

“Clem, I want to be married now. I don’t want to go on with my doctorate. …”

After her graduation from college she had decided to go on with her doctorate in chemistry with the hope that she could be useful to Clem. This was after something he had said one day.

“I do wish I could have studied chemistry, hon,” he had said. “Take soy beans, for instance. Remember how the Chinese eat bean curd? You reckon you know enough to help me, hon?”

“I’d have to study some more,” she said.

She was still a little hurt because he had cried out eagerly, “Do you reckon you could, hon?” But she would not let herself be hurt with Clem. She knew his greatness. He could not put himself first.

After she had finished college, summa cum laude, an honor of which she scorned to tell William and which Clem could not fully comprehend, and which seemed only to surprise her parents, she had entered Columbia for more work in chemistry. Now, halfway through, suddenly she could not go on.

She gave her wild arguments to Clem, that nobody loved her and that she was too lonely to live. Even at college she had been lonely because, not having lived in America, she could not talk with other girls. She wanted to be with Clem, and him alone, and never leave him.

Clem sent back words grave and wise about finishing her education and not regretting things later, and about not being able to forgive himself it afterward she were sorry. When he had a torrent of letters from her all saying the same thing over and over again, he knew that it was true that she could die of her loneliness, because it was like his, a spiritual hunger that sent out seeking roots to find an earth its own. It was time for them to come together.

He went to her one day in June and made himself known to her grandparents to satisfy his own conscience, since he could not speak face to face with her father nor would Henrietta allow him to tell William of their love. The old couple were bewildered and anxious to do no wrong, but when Clem talked to them a while they were glad to think that there was nothing they could do. The young people had made up their minds.

“You may write to Father and Mother and tell them you cannot do anything about us,” Henrietta said.

Her grandfather sighed. “We won’t write, Henrietta. We’ll leave it to you.”

“It’s up to you young people,” her grandmother murmured. “We’ve done our best.”

Henrietta was moved to kiss them both for the first time in her life. She was a new creature now that she had made Clem understand that it was right for them to be married at once. She was almost gay. No wedding, she said, for whom had they to invite?

As soon as Clem had the license, she and Clem and the grandparents went one evening to the parsonage of the Presbyterian church nearby and there they were married. She wore her yellow dress, and Clem bought her some shellpink roses to hold. He had bought, too, a wide, old-fashioned gold wedding ring, the only ring she had ever possessed. When Clem put it on her finger she knew it would be there forever, enclosing dust when she was dead.

They went back to the house soberly to eat of a cake Millie had made and drink a toast in burgundy wine from a bottle her grandfather opened. Then she changed into her dark blue silk suit, the only new garment she had bought, and she had a strange uncertain feeling that though her grandparents yearned over her, they were glad to see her go, glad to get youth out of their aging house. They were tired and they wanted to sleep.