Come, My Beloved

by Pearl S. Buck

  MacArd was back in his office. Here he was used to being without Leila, and he plunged into the affairs which had accumulated during his absence, the large affairs which no one but himself could settle. He had trained his men to bring to him nothing except the crucial and the fundamental, and MacArd men knew better than to bring a problem to him unsolved. He expected them to present their problems with their own solutions for his approval or disapproval.

  “I pay a man to solve problems, not to bring them to me,” was his favorite retort.

  Everywhere through the immense MacArd Building one came upon placards whereon was printed a sentence in capital letters, EVERY PROBLEM HAS A SOLUTION—FIND IT, and MacArd men were hired and fired upon the basis of whether they took the slogan seriously. He allowed no ribaldry, no mockery, not even mild joking about it. A young man had once been making merry with a parody and MacArd had come stalking in to dismiss him as he stood.

  “There is a time to laugh and a time not to laugh,” he had thundered.

  He knew his Bible and he was fond of speaking in Biblical language. He liked to think, and sometimes to say, that he had been blessed with gold and possessions; with thousands of acres of land in the west, wherein sat mines of iron and silver; with networks of steel in railroads; with merchant ships upon all the oceans of the globe; with vaults in many banks, hiding their treasure of stocks and bonds in a score of vast interlocking industries. The numbers of men who served MacArd were thousands, men whose faces he never saw, men who spent their lives in mines under the earth, who drove his great engines, who manned his machines in factories, who captained his ships, and busied themselves upon the intricate matters of accounting and accumulating the figures which presented to him daily exactly what he was worth. He spent his days in this big office overlooking the harbor and the Statue of Liberty, a room as big as a house, furnished in velvet carpets and hangings and great mahogany tables and chairs, and his desk was his fortress.

  While his wife lived, she had made his sole alternative to this life. When he came home at night she was there, a figure of sweet gaiety and mild ironic humor, a woman who loved him and who was never afraid of him. He knew she was not afraid, and it was good for him to know that there was one person who did not walk softly before him, and before whom indeed he must not assume even his rightful air of conquest. For he had never wholly conquered her, she had remained her wilful independent self, taking refuge in wilfulness and refusing logic if she chose emotion.

  “But why—” how many of his sentences to her had begun thus while they talked.

  She never allowed him to go on. “Oh why, why, and I don’t care why, that’s why!” Thus she had chanted until at last after years of stubborn persistence he had given up and then somehow when he had given up and she knew that he had, their relationship became sweeter and deeper than ever, and he had fallen in love with her again. He was a man passionate and faithful, a righteous man, secretly romantic at the core, and she knew it. She held him by the heart.

  There were times now, since he came home from India, when he starved for her, when, in the midst of his day’s work, absorbed as he was with the space and the speed of all he did, he stopped for a moment, for ten minutes or for an hour, to battle with desperate loneliness. While she was alive he could forget her all day, but now that she was dead her spirit came dancing into this room where actually she had been but a few times while she was alive.

  “I dislike that castle of yours,” she had said. “You sit there like a king on a throne. King David, King David, but I am not your subject, just the same!”

  He could almost hear her laugh. This morning near midday, here in his office he could have sworn that he heard the echo of her laughter, and he lifted his head sharply. He was alone, studying the pages of a proposal for the purchase of new mines in South America, and he heard in the silence of the great room her distant laughter. She was not here, of course, not even the presence of her spirit was here, yet who could tell? He had always rejected the dreamful wishing of men who sought mediums and tried to raise the spirits of their dead, and yet he believed at last that somewhere she lived, cut off from him by an impenetrable wall. Who knew the thickness of the wall?

  Since that day in the hotel in Bombay when he had been reminded, or had reminded himself, he was not prepared to say which, but at any rate, when inexplicably he had remembered the words concerning the narrow Judean gate called The Eye of the Needle, through which a camel could hardly pass, as hardly as the rich man could pass into the Kingdom of Heaven, since that day he had not once felt near to Leila. He had tried to imagine what she might want him to do, but she was afar off, and he had rushed, away abruptly from India without finishing the journey. Now here in the midst of his day’s work, he felt her near again.

  He sat tense, his fists clenched upon the desk, concentrating upon the thought that she might actually be nearer than he knew, and sweat burst from his skin. He all but saw her, he felt her presence surely for an instant. Then he could not persuade himself that it was anything beyond the longing of his own heart and he turned cold, his sweat chilled, and he collapsed and bent his head upon his folded arms. In the depths of his disappointment he felt impelled to prayer.

  “God,” he groaned aloud, “God, show me what she means. What is it I am meant to do?”

  He waited in the silence and no voice spoke, until he heard his own voice lifted up, continuing, or so it seemed, in prayer.

  “Thou knowest that all I have is Thine.”

  These were the words he stammered, they came from within him, they spoke themselves, as though someone else spoke through his lips, someone voiceless using his voice.

  It was a strange experience quickly over, he was himself again almost immediately and yet he felt changed. He was bewildered, he was almost sure that more than his imagination had been here, yet he would have been ashamed to confess it, and had the door opened and one of his employees come in he would have been more brusque than usual. Had Leila somehow managed, not quite to break through the wall, but still to touch his memory again and so impel him to the words he had just spoken? Did she want him to know that if they were to be united beyond the wall there were things that he must do which he had not yet done, a consecration of his wealth which he never made? There was the chance. He was a practical man, but like all incredibly successful men who made their own miracles, he had regions past belief, imaginations which were possible realities. Much that had once been only imagination had indeed become real, and so why not anything?

  “All that I have is Thine—”

  The echoes lingered, and after an instant he struck the bell on the desk harshly. A middle-aged man came in, his secretary. He had never taken to the fad of having a woman in his office, he did not think women should be in business, certainly he did not want a strange woman near him now.

  “Thomas, see if Dr. Barton is at home and ask him if he will lunch with me today at one o’clock?”

  “Yes, sir,” the man replied.

  He went away and returned in a few minutes, noticing no difference in the grizzled figure at the desk. “Dr. Barton will be delighted, Mr. MacArd. Shall I give orders for the small dining room?”

  “Yes,” MacArd said. When he was alone he had a tray brought him from the kitchen suite on the top floor. When he had a business conference he ordered luncheon in the paneled dining room, but there was also a small glass-enclosed room on the roof, from where one could look out over the river and see the ocean far beyond. Only a most intimate associate ever lunched with him there, and sometimes Leila had come to dine with him on days when he could not leave the office at night. Together they had eaten and drank, and then for a few minutes, before he went back to his desk and she went home, he always turned off the lights so that she could see the dazzling city spread before her.

  “All yours, my sweet, my queen,” he used to say. “Yours, if you want it, to play with or to weave in a necklace or in your hair.”

  He had not used the room sin
ce she died. Now, when Thomas was gone, he threw down his pen and whirled his desk chair to face the wide window at his back. There gazing over the roof tops into the mild blue sky he reflected upon what it might cost him to acknowledge the full meaning of the words that an hour ago had been torn from his own lips.

  Dr. Barton listened respectfully to this richest man in his congregation. He was not a coward and had he felt it his duty he could have spoken plainly even to the great MacArd. Fortunately it was not likely that such would ever be his duty. MacArd was a man rigidly respectable, without grace, perhaps, but good, and if there were rumors of his ruthlessness in business, Dr. Barton supposed that a certain amount of that harsh quality was necessary for success. Caesar had qualities which did not belong to Christ, but which nevertheless were entirely suitable to Caesar.

  “It is a stupendous idea, Mr. MacArd,” Dr. Barton said with profound feeling.

  He had enjoyed the luncheon, the dishes were prepared with perfection, and he had tried to check his appetite. MacArd ate with careless speed, accustomed doubtless to such food, but it was a feast even for a minister as well placed as Dr. Barton. He knew that gluttony was the vice into which many men like himself fell, and he struggled continually against it. A fat man of God, a voluptuous priest, was repulsive if not actually sinful, and he did not deceive himself. Gluttony was also a sensual vice.

  “You like it?” MacArd demanded. “You see the need?”

  “It is an idea worthy of your managerial genius,” Dr. Barton replied.

  “It is the fruit of my trip to India,” MacArd replied. “The Indians need a decent religion, a creed that will make men of them instead of supine animals. Practical Christianity is the answer, Barton, a vital, missionary creed that will destroy their idols, clean out their vile temples, and give them energy. I say India, but I mean the world. I want to establish a center of virile Christian training from which men will go out into all the world, preaching a gospel of faith and works. I shall make it a memorial to my beloved wife. I want it called the Leila MacArd School of Theology. I want the standards to be the highest and the men to be of the best. I want you to help me find the right place for it and then choose the best men in the country for the faculty. When a man says he is a graduate of MacArd, it must mean that he is a man of natural technical ability trained to the highest degree to spread the gospel of Christianity.”

  A waiter came in noiselessly to remove the plates and the butler served the dessert, a creamy ice and small cakes and hot coffee. MacArd pushed his dish away.

  “Bring me apple pie and cheese,” he ordered.

  “Yes, sir,” the butler replied, and taking the dish away he was back again with a quarter of apple pie, while the waiter presented a tray of various cheeses.

  MacArd pointed to a sharp Norwegian cheese and talked on rapidly while the waiter served him.

  “First the place,” he proclaimed, “then architects to design the finest possible buildings.”

  Dr. Barton was overcome. “Do you have any financial figure in mind, Mr. MacArd?”

  “I am not thinking in figures,” MacArd replied. “I am thinking only of achievement.”

  “Admirable,” Dr. Barton murmured. “It is quite possible that the world will be changed as a result of what you do.”

  He ate his cream ice thoughtfully and nibbled a cake. He hoped that he was not thinking of himself, he earnestly strove not to do so, but it was quite possible that Mr. MacArd would offer him the position as the first President of the MacArd School of Theology. It was of course to be a memorial to Mrs. MacArd, but inevitably it would be known as the MacArd School. She would have been the first to recognize that necessity. He remembered her as a slender tall woman, always gracious, and disturbing only because one was not quite sure whether she was about to laugh. Sometimes when he was preaching with the utmost sincerity he had chanced to look down upon her in the MacArd pew, the central front pew, and he met her eyes fixed upon him and he had caught in them the brightness of laughter. He had learned not to look at her in church.

  MacArd tapped the tablecloth with his large fingers. Bunches of red hair shone between the knuckles.

  “Well,” he said briskly. “I guess that’s all, Barton. You have your job cut out for you. You can have any help you need here at the office, leg men and so on.”

  “Thank you,” Dr. Barton said. “I prefer to do some preliminary reconnoitering myself, if you don’t mind. We don’t want to duplicate existing conditions.”

  “There doesn’t exist such an institution as I plan,” MacArd said heartily. “It is something unique, something great, a center of missionary force, MacArd men must know it is their duty to go into all the world, not settle down in some comfortable pulpit here at home.”

  Dr. Barton tried to be humorous. “I trust you are not speaking of me.”

  “Of course not,” MacArd replied. “Our churches have to be supplied. Besides, you are not a young man. It is the young who must undertake the sort of thing I have in mind.”

  Dr. Barton was relieved. He rose, conscious of an atmosphere thickening with impatience.

  “I shall let you bear from me in a very few days, Mr. MacArd,” he said. He rose, a pleasantly rotund figure, and shook hands warmly with his chief parishioner and went away.

  Summer crept over the city in a mist of heat. Great houses along the Avenue were closed and the families went away to Bar Harbor, to Newport and the coasts of New England. In other years David had gone with his mother to a quiet beach in Maine that faced the south because of the curving bay. This year as a matter of course he stayed on in the city, breakfasting each morning with his father and he was there at night to dine with him when he came home. He knew that his father worried about him intermittently between bouts of work, and he endeavored freshly every day to be cheerful and sympathetic, ready to listen to whatever his father chose to tell him. It did not occur to him to share his own thoughts or feelings, not only because he had never done so, but because there was nothing, he would have said, to share. He was not unhappy, the loneliness for his mother had settled into a dreamy melancholy and he spent his days in a continuing peace which he knew was only an interval. Some time soon he must make up his mind about what he wanted to be. One thing he knew, that he would not go into his father’s offices, but this was not expected of him. So much his mother had done for him during the years she had made it quite plain that David was not like his father and must not be expected to follow in those immense footsteps.

  “David will do something quite different from you, King David,” she had said. The name his mother used for his father suited him and yet she had taught the son to perceive that however autocratic his father might be there was always the core of romance in him. “It’s romance that makes your father want to conquer the world,” his mother had once told him. “Long ago I tried to make him stop, we had enough money, more than we could ever spend, and then I saw that it wasn’t more money he wanted but greater dreams. Each dream leads to another as it becomes reality. The world is his theater and he is playwright, designer, producer, director, and star actor.”

  She had laughed that day and then was suddenly grave. “And never forget, David, that he is really a king, a man among men. Your father could never do a small or petty deed. Oh, he can be cruel in a big way, but I’ve always known that if he saw the human beings he was cruel to, he would stop everything to rescue them, even from himself. The trouble is he doesn’t see them unless someone shows them to him. That is my business. Only I don’t always find them.”

  She had made it her business to keep his father human and sometimes in the long quiet days David wondered if now it were his business, too, to keep his father aware of men, the average men, the little men, above whom he towered so high that he seldom stooped to see them. Yet he had seen them clearly enough in India, not individually, perhaps, but the mass of them, swarming in misery upon the starving earth, and he had been angry at their misery.

  “What are you doing with
yourself, David?” his father asked abruptly one morning at breakfast.

  “Nothing at all for a few months,” David replied. “I hope by then I shall know what I want to do. Something, of course.”

  “Want to go to Maine?” his father demanded.

  “No, thank you,” David said. “I had rather be here with you.”

  MacArd did not answer this. The words gave him comfort, his son’s presence made this still a home, but he must not grow to lean on the boy. He had said nothing of his big plan, and now he felt moved to share it. David might think it absurd, one never knew what the young felt, and there was a good deal of atheism in the colleges. He had never asked David anything about his religious beliefs. He said,

  “You might like to help Dr. Barton in a job I have just put up to him.”

  “What is that?” David asked half idly. He liked the family minister, though without profound feeling. He was an adherent, like the family doctor or dentist, better than Enderby, of course, but he had not liked the sermon Dr. Barton had preached at his mother’s funeral. Barton did not understand his mother or appreciate her depth and charm.

  “I am planning a great memorial to your mother’s memory,” MacArd said. “It is to be a school of theology, a comprehensive institution dedicated to a practical missionary purpose. Barton is looking for suitable sites and we shall engage the best architects. I told him that he could have men from my office if he wanted them, but it occurs to me now that you might enjoy helping him yourself. Perhaps enjoy is not the word. I mean, it might interest you, give you some comfort, to help him. Then you and I could work together, too. I shall appreciate that.”

  David was too surprised to speak. A theological seminary with a missionary purpose? He was not at all sure that his mother would have chosen such a memorial. But then she would have chosen no memorial at all. She had a gay humility, she disparaged her own gifts merrily and constantly, she rejected the monumental as pompous. Yet he knew her well enough to know, too, that if his father had wished to present her even with a monument, she would have accepted it with tender charm. “How fascinating!” He could hear her say the words again, as he had once heard her say them when his father had given her a preposterous showy necklace of square diamonds from his South African mines.