Gods Men

by Pearl S. Buck

  “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 le
tters 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.

  6

  HENRIETTA SAT SEWING IN the small living room of her home. She was not good at sewing. Her fingers were clumsy and the thread knotted often, but it did not occur to her to give up merely because she was not adept and so she sewed steadily on, glancing only occasionally through the window by which she sat. The scene was simple enough, a street of cheap houses much like this one that she and Clem had rented next to the store. Whatever grace the street had came from two rows of maple trees which were now beginning to show the hues of autumn. It was late afternoon and under the trees children were playing in the leaves, running hither and thither, apparently unwatched unless a quarrel brought a mother to the door.

  “You, Dottie! Stop kicking your little brother!”

  “But I wanna!”

  “I don’t care what you want. Stop it, I say!”

  She wondered if Clem wanted children. They had never talked of children, each for some unspoken reason. She was not sure whether she even wanted children. She had never got used to living in America and she would not know how to bring up a child. In China there had been the amahs. Here she would have to wash all the child’s things, and tend it herself when it cried. Besides, Clem was enough. He was a dozen men in one, with all the great schemes in his head. It would be as much as she could do to see that he lived to carry them through.

  That he would succeed she did not doubt. From the moment she had seen him in the dingy college sitting room she had believed in him. Trust was the foundation of her love. She could not love anyone unless she trusted and for that reason she really loved no one except Clem and her father.

  As long as she lived she would not forgive William because he was angry when he found that she had married Clem. She had written to Ruth, after all, and at first Ruth had not dared to tell William the whole truth. She had let William think the marriage had not yet taken place and he tried to stop it, thinking it still only an engagement. He had actually cabled to Peking to his mother. When she opened the cable from her mother forbidding her too late to marry Clem, she had known it was William’s doing.

  “That ignorant fellow!” William had called Clem, and Ruth had told her.

  Even Ruth was sorry. “I wish you’d told us, Henrietta. It wasn’t kind. He isn’t suitable for you. You won’t be able to bring him to William’s house.”

  “I shall never want to go to William’s house.” That was what she had answered. She would never be afraid of William, however many newspapers he had. Clem was so innocent, so good. He did not like her to say anything against William.

  “He’s your brother, hon—it would be nice if you could be friends.” That was all Clem said.

  When she told him how William felt about their marriage, Clem only looked solemn. “He don’t understand, hon. People are apt to make mistakes when they don’t understand.” She could not persuade him to anger.

  She had written to her parents herself, a vehement letter declaring her independence and Clem’s goodness, and her father had replied, mildly astonished at the fuss. “I don’t see why you should not marry Clem Miller. I should be sorry to see you in the circumstances of his father, but nowadays nobody lives by faith alone.”

  Her mother had been surprisingly amiable, sending as a wedding present a tablecloth of grass linen embroidered by the Chinese convent nuns. Henrietta guessed shrewdly that her mother did not really care whom she married.

  As for Clem, he wistfully admired William’s success.

  “If William could get interested in my food idea, now, how we could go! He could set people thinking and then things would begin to happen.”

  “He doesn’t want them to think,” Henrietta said quickly.

  “Oh now, now!” Clem said.

  The clock struck six and up and down the street the supper bells rang. She rose to look at the roast and potatoes in the oven and to cut bread and set out milk. Clem would be home soon and he would want to eat and get back to the store. She moved slowly, with a heavy grace of which she was unconscious. Her immobile face, grave under the braids of her dark hair, seldom changed its expression. Now that she was with Clem her eyes were finer than ever, large, and deep, set under her clear brows; yet at times they held a look of inner bewilderment as though she were uncertain of something, herself perhaps, or perhaps the world. It was no small bewilderment thus revealed but one as vague and large as her mind, as though she did not know what to think of human existence.

  The door in the narrow hall opened sharply and then shut, and the atmosphere of the house changed. Clem had come in.

  “Hon, you there?” It was his greeting although he knew she was always there.

  “I’m here,” she replied. Her voice was big and deep. He came to the kitchen, his light step quick moving. Their eyes met, she standing by the stove with a pot holder in her hand, and he crossing to the sink to wash. He washed as he did everything, with nervous speed and thoroughness, and he dried his face and hair and hands on a brown huck towel that hung on the wall. Then he came to her and kissed her cheek. He was not quite as tall as she was.

  “Food ready?”

  “I am just dishing up.”

  He never spoke of a meal but always of food. He sat down to the roast she set before him and began to carve it neatly and with the same speed with which he did all else. Two slices cut thin he arranged on a plate for her, put a browned potato beside them, and handed the plate to her. Then he cut his own slice, smaller and even thinner.

  “Can’t you eat a little more, Clem?” Henrietta asked.

  “Don’t dare tonight, hon. I have a man waiting for me over there.”

  “You didn’t want to bring him home?”

  “No. I was afraid we’d talk business all through our food and my stomach would turn on me again. I want a little peace, just with you.”

  She sat in silence, helping him to raw tomatoes and then to lima beans. Then she helped herself. Neither spoke while they ate. She was used to this and liked it because she knew that in her silence he found rest. They were in communion,
sitting here alone at their table. When he was rested he would begin to talk. He ate too fast but she did not remind him of it. She knew him better than she knew herself. He was made of taut wire and quicksilver and electricity. Whatever he did she must not lay one featherweight of reproach upon him. Sometimes she tortured herself with the fear that he would die young, worn out before his time by the enormous scheme he had undertaken, out she knew that she could not prevent anything. He must go his own way because for him there was no other, and she must follow.

  In this country which was her own, she still continued to feel a stranger and her only security was Clem. Everything else here was different from Peking and her childhood and she would not have known how to live without him. When sometimes in the night she tried to tell him this he listened until she had finished. Then he always said the same thing, “Folks are the same anywhere, you’ll find, hon.”

  But they were not. Nobody in America was like the Chinese she had known in Peking. She could not talk to anybody in New Point about—well, life! They talked here about things and she cared nothing about things. “All under Heaven …” that was the way old Mrs. Huang used to begin conversation when she went over to the Huang hutung.

  She looked at Clem and smiled. “Do you remember how the Chinese loved to begin by saying, ‘All under Heaven’?”

  “And go on to talk about everything under heaven!”

  “Yes—you remember, too.”

  “I wish I didn’t have to hurry, hon, but I do.”

  “I know, I don’t know why I thought of that.”

  They were silent again while he cleaned his plate and she pondered the ways of men and the things for which they sacrificed themselves. William, sitting in his splendid offices in New York, was a slave to a scheme as much as Clem was, and yet how differently and with what opposite purpose! She could not have devoted herself to Clem had he wanted to be rich for power. He did not think of money except as something to further his purpose, a purpose so enormous that she would have been afraid to tell anyone what it was, lest they think him mad. But she knew he was not mad.