Gods Men

by Pearl S. Buck

  William rose. “I wouldn’t think of such a thing, Mr. Cameron,” he said in a firm and resonant voice. “I’m sure I can stand on my own feet.” It was entirely the proper answer, although he felt that the time would come when he would need Mr. Cameron. Far better to owe money to Mr. Cameron than to the father of Seth James.

  Before Mr. Cameron could reply, the door opened and Candace came in looking, her father thought fondly, like the morning star. She was all in rose and silver and wrapped in soft spring furs of white fox. Her cheeks were pink with the wind, for she had insisted on having the carriage windows open, and her yellow hair was curled about her ears and feathered over her forehead.

  “Why have you two hidden yourselves away here?” she demanded. “Mother says please come out at once and be public. We have callers.”

  “We’ve been talking business,” Mr. Cameron said. It was his instinctive reply to any demands from women.

  “Nonsense,” Candace said. “William hasn’t any business.”

  “He has an interesting idea,” Mr. Cameron said, fitting the tips of his fingers together. “A very interesting idea.”

  Then he got an idea himself. He rose and made haste with his slow step toward the door. “I’ll go, just to please your mother. William doesn’t have to be bothered with our friends unless he wants to. I’ll bet it’s the Cordies, anyway.”

  “It is,” Candace said, with dimples.

  “Don’t you come, William,” Mr. Cameron said. “They won’t remember you next time they see you, anyway.”

  Thus he left these two young members of his society together, and went his way inwardly pleased. Candace could be trusted. She wouldn’t let even her own husband do the family any damage. He was long used to eating his cake and having it too. The secret of such maneuvering had laid the foundation of his fortune—that and the resolute ignoring of the misfortunes of others. Maybe when the time came he would help William. He had a lot of loose cash he didn’t know what to do with.

  Left alone with Candace, William said nothing and she sat down in the chair where her father had been sitting, threw off her fur jacket, and lifted her small flowered hat from her head.

  “What have you two been talking about?” she asked.

  “Your father asked me what I wanted to do after I finished college and I said start a newspaper,” William replied.

  Her very clear blue eyes were sweetly upon him. “And why a newspaper?”

  William shrugged his handsome shoulders. “Why does one do anything except because it is what one wants to do?”

  “No, William, don’t run around the corner. Why do you feel so inferior to everybody?”

  She had thrust a point into his heart. His blood rushed into his face and he was careful not to look at her.

  “Do I feel inferior?” His usually careful voice was dangerously careless.

  “Don’t you?” she demanded.

  “I really don’t know myself.”

  She refused the responsibility of special knowledge. “Anybody can see that you never come straight out with answers. You always think what to say.”

  “I suppose that is because I have never lived much in America,” he replied. Though he despised his China, he often found it convenient to take refuge there. It gave him a reason, faintly romantic, for his difference from ordinary people.

  “You mean the Chinese don’t answer honestly?” she asked.

  “I think they prefer to answer correctly,” he said.

  “But honesty is always right.”

  “Is it?” he asked with wisdom gentle and superior.

  “Isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” he said again.

  “But you must think,” she cried with soft impatience.

  “I don’t always know what to think,” he replied. “I guess my way a good deal of the time. I meet people every day whom I cannot understand. I have no experience that would help me.”

  She considered this for a brief instant. “Are the Chinese so different from us or are you only pretending?”

  “Pretending what?”

  “That you are different.”

  “I hope I am not too different from you, Candy.”

  This was a bold step and she retreated.

  “I don’t know if you are or not. I can’t make you out, William.”

  He felt he had gone far enough. “Nor I you, sometimes, except today you look lovely. We don’t have to make each other out as you call it—not yet, anyway. Let’s not hurry, eh, Candy? I want you to know me, as I really think I don’t know myself. That means time, plenty of time.” He said all this with his cultivated English accent which he had not yet rejected.

  She fended him off.

  “Why do you keep talking about time?”

  He laughed silently. “Because I don’t want someone else to come dashing up on a steed of some sort and carry you off!”

  This was very plain indeed, and she dropped her eyes to the pink rose she had fastened upon her white fur muff, and considered. When she spoke it was with mild malice upon her tongue.

  “Yet I am sure that you always reach out to take what you want—as soon as you are sure you want it.”

  William met this with astuteness. “Ah, but you see, this time you might not want what I want. And I confess to being Chinese again to this extent: I don’t like to be refused, even indirectly. I prefer not to be put in that position.”

  “That’s your sense of inferiority again.”

  “Call it just being sensible.”

  “A bad sport, then.”

  “What we are talking about is not sport.”

  He spoke with such quiet authority that her youth was compelled to respect his. He was only a year older than she, and yet he might have been ten years her senior.

  “I don’t know what we are talking about,” she said willfully.

  “You and me,” he said gravely, “though two, or three years, perhaps, from now.”

  “I shan’t want to marry anybody for a long time yet,” she said.

  “That is all I wanted to know,” he replied. He had been leaning against the marble mantelpiece, his hands in his pockets. Now he went over to her and lifted her hand and put it to his lips. She would have pulled it away but he did not give her time. In the same instant he put her hand down and left the room. His lips had been cold and dry but his palm was damp. She took her handkerchief and rubbed her hand; then she thrust it deep into her muff and sat for a long time alone and thoughtful.

  As the last months of college passed, William was oppressed by fear lest his parents decide to return for his commencement, a fear that he had never acknowledged even to himself until his father had written in April from Peking:

  Neither your mother nor I can be there to see you take your honors, my dear son. This is a real grief to us. We have discussed the matter many times, and at first I was inclined, with her, to use our small savings and ask for leave of absence without salary. Then it seemed to me that I had no right to put personal feelings ahead of God’s work. This is a peculiar age in which we now live in China. The opportunity to preach the gospel is unprecedented. Much as I deplore the manner in which we finally brought the Old Empress to her knees, and especially the looting of the city by Western troops, nevertheless it has taught her a lesson. We are given every opportunity now. God works in mysterious ways and we must not lose the harvest. I only wish the old Dowager Empress could understand that she is defeated. Alas, she cannot imagine it.

  Two weeks later his mother had sent pleasantly heartbroken pages:

  My darling William, I cannot see you in all the pride of graduation from Harvard! The girls are costing us so much this year. Henrietta’s operation for appendicitis has prevented it. The Board paid for it, of course, as they should do, but when I asked for a brief furlough to see my own only son graduate they refused me, saying that they had already been put to much expense. We cannot blame Henrietta, still it does seem strange it should have happened like this. We could
use our savings—such a mite—but I will not do it, for it would give the Board future ideas. They owe us much for just living so far from our homes. Oh my son, do have many pictures taken of the event! I am sure that you have friends who will, for your mother’s sake, make the day visible to me. Do beg dear Jeremy, or Mr. Cameron. Tell them how my heart aches not to be with you and them.

  William had written a suitably sad letter and then, his spirit freed from the possibility of the presence of his preposterous parents, he had set himself to finish his senior year with glory.

  One evening in June he was dressing himself for a dance. It was a few days before commencement and Martin Rosvaine’s family in Boston was giving him the occasion. The Rosvaines were old Bostonians, proper except that their ancestry was French instead of English. Wealth mended this defect and Gallic gaiety lingered in their blood and made them enjoy pleasures more lavish than could be found usually among other Bostonians. William was as near complete happiness on this evening as his unfulfilled ambitions allowed. Candace was among the young women invited and she and her parents were staying at the Hotel Somerset until after commencement. He felt a warm anticipation when he thought of her soft and pretty face, and he wondered if he would tell her that his name stood among those few who would receive their diplomas summa cum laude. He decided that he would not, because Jeremy had barely passed, in spite of William’s unflagging help with higher mathematics and modern languages. Candace was quick to be scornful of boasting and he could not explain to her that the English schoolmasters had grounded him well and had taught him to dig into fundamentals. Jeremy, persuaded by tutors through a delicate childhood, had not known that mathematics must be seized as one seizes a thistle, that German cannot be learned unless it is grappled with and overcome by force, that French can elude mind and tongue with its smoothness and escape memory entirely. Because an English schoolmaster in a Chinese seaport had used a ruler freely upon William’s palms, had cracked him over the skull, had tweaked his ears, had poured out the bitterest and most dry sarcasm about upstart Americans who were properly only English colonists, William had learned early how to achieve even his small ambitions. Somewhere in dark and private action there had to be struggle and mastery.

  Never having had the advantage of such knowledge, Jeremy had been content to escape failure. He was now lying in bed, dressed in lavender silk pajamas becoming to his fair hair and pale skin. He had declared himself exhausted by watching the baseball game in the afternoon. Idly he watched William shave clean his strong dark beard with an old-fashioned razor. June sunshine poured through the windows and William stood with his feet in a bright square. His mind was busy with plans that had nothing to do with college. After commencement was over he would take two weeks’ holiday with the Camerons, and then he would plunge into the matter of getting money for the newspaper. His first plans for getting money he had given up altogether. He could not beg money from his college mates and their relatives. He would find it himself, get it, if possible, from Roger Cameron, borrow it perhaps, with Roger’s backing. Then he could hire Martin Rosvaine and Seth James. But he would do most of the work himself.

  “You’re thinking about the paper,” Jeremy said suddenly.

  “So I am,” William replied. He was putting on his tie, his small fingers, expert and supple. “How did you know?”

  “I know that godalmighty look on your face,” Jeremy replied lazily. “I fear and respect it.”

  “I’m no son of a millionaire,” William said with a mirthless smile. “I have to get out and hustle, the way your old man did. Maybe my son will be able to lie around and write poetry.”

  “I can’t imagine your son doing such a thing,” Jeremy retorted.

  He fell silent at this mention of William’s son, for inevitably a son must have a mother, and he knew by now that William wanted to marry Candace. He was in the puzzling place of being the confidant of both his sister and his friend and of being unable to betray to either what the other told him. Each was equally unsure. William had said frankly, only a few days ago, “I don’t know if I am doing wisely in letting myself fall in love with Candy. I like her being your sister, I like the notion of being your brother-in-law, you son-of-a-gun! But she’s used to everything and I shall have a hard row to hoe. I shan’t want her running home to papa, either. When I marry I’ll be the boss. If I have to eat cornpone, she’ll have to eat it and like it.”

  William had looked particularly handsome at the moment when he had so spoken. They had come back to their rooms from a stag dinner at their club, and he was wearing new evening clothes presented somehow by his mother. He had gone down to New York to have them fitted.

  Jeremy had laughed. “I’ll guarantee you won’t eat cornpone twice yourself,” he had replied. William’s taste in food was fastidious and expensive, shaped, Jeremy always said, by his early years of feeding upon shark’s fins and bird’s-nest soup in Peking.

  When Candace had last mused upon marriage in his presence he had warned her that William was hardhearted.

  “He has to be the master,” he had told Candace.

  “Has he been that with you?” she demanded.

  “No, because he has not got all he wants from me yet.”

  “What does he want?”

  “He wants power more than anything,” Jeremy said thoughtfully.

  “That’s because he feels inferior,” Candace said at once. “He is afraid, in his heart. That’s so pitiful, Jeremy. He doesn’t know that he needn’t be afraid of anything or anybody, because actually he’s wonderful. He doesn’t know how wonderful he is.”

  Jeremy grinned in brotherly fashion. “Doubtless he’d like to have you tell him so. But I warn you, Candy! You’ll have to give up to him, once he’s got you.” Then, after an instant’s silence, “It makes my flesh crawl.”

  This startled her. “Why?” she demanded.

  He shook his head. “There’s no love in him anywhere, for anybody.”

  “Maybe he’s had nobody to love,” she said simply.

  Fragments of such conversations came back to him as he lay watching William dress.

  “You’re going to be late,” William said, throwing him a sharp look. His light eyes under the dark and heavy brows had a strange metallic quality.

  “My family is used to me. They’ll wait. Maybe we’ll do the waiting. I wish my father had bought an Apperson instead of a Maxwell.”

  “The Maxwell is bigger,” William said.

  Mr. Cameron had surprised them all by buying an automobile after Easter, and had chosen the Maxwell for touring. It ran by steam, an idea already old-fashioned, but Mr. Cameron was afraid of the new-fangled gasoline cars.

  A gooselike honking rose through the open window, followed by a hissing of steam. Jeremy leaped out of bed, put his head out of the window and shouted to the chauffeur, “Cool her off, Jackson!” He disappeared into the bathroom, snatching towels as he went, soft silky towels embroidered in Ireland with a large and intricate initial.

  Left alone, William thought of Candace while he finished his toilet. His fingernails perfected, his coat adjusted, his tie correct, his hair smooth, he examined himself in the mirror. The dark oval of his face did not displease him, although he did not like the faint resemblance he saw there to Henrietta.

  He looked at his watch. It was later than he had thought and he wondered if the florist had delivered the pink rosebuds and blue forget-me-nots he had ordered for Candace. His thoughts played pleasantly about her for a moment. He had made up his mind to marry her, and thinking of it he felt a hitherto vague excitement suddenly focus itself. Why should he not ask her tonight? A warm, fine night, the romantic setting of an opulent house, his own sense of success to be crowned soon with summa cum laude—what else did he lack? He was not impulsive, emotion had waxed slowly to this moment, and he would complete this first era of his history by settling the matter of his marriage.

  He was so silent and even solemn that Jeremy watched him thoughtfully while dressi
ng. In the car they were compelled to silence, muffled in caps and dusters, while Jackson speeded at more than ten miles an hour across the darkening countryside. There was a rising wind, and when in Boston the door of the huge house opened to them, sustained by a footman, both young men went at once to a dressing room to wash the gray dust from their faces.

  William was separated from Jeremy immediately by Martin, come to find him.

  “William—I say!” Martin cried in a low voice of excitement. “My old Aunt Rosamond is here and she’s interested in the newspaper!” He had pulled William into a corner under the vast oaken darkness of the stairs.

  “I can’t ask people for money,” William muttered.

  “Don’t be silly,” Martin said. He took William by the elbow and pushed toward the ballroom, where an old lady in black lace and diamonds sat in a high-backed chair against some palms.

  “Auntie, this is William Lane,” Martin said.

  William bowed.

  “So you’re the young man,” Aunt Rosamond said in a loud voice. “Come from China, my grandson tells me. It’s an awful country, from all I hear, tying up women’s feet and killing missionaries!”

  “I hope that is over, Miss Rosvaine,” William said gracefully.

  “Don’t talk about China, Auntie,” Martin said impatiently. “Talk about our newspaper!” Over the plumed white head, Martin’s eye met William’s and winked.

  “Why should she care about a picture paper for people who can scarcely read?” William asked.

  “Aunt Rosamond is a shrewd woman,” Martin replied. “Aren’t you, Auntie? Why, she tells her own investment men what to buy and what to sell.”

  Aunt Rosamond giggled. “I’m old enough to be their mother,” she said in her harsh, loud voice. “I’m old enough to be anybody’s mother. I could be your great-grandmother, only I’m glad I’m not. Young men are so ribald these days. Is your newspaper goin’ to make money?”