Emory listened, knowing that he was telling her things he had never told anyone, things that he had forgotten and now drew up out of the wells of his being. At the bottom of everything there was always a permanent complaint against his parents because they had robbed him of his birthright of pride. It had been impossible to explain to them why he was ashamed, and he was the more ashamed because he had the agony of wanting to be proud of his father, and then the humbling realization of knowing that there was something of his father in himself in spite of this hatred, and that he could not simply enjoy all that he had, his money and his great houses and the freedom that success should have bought him, because he could never be free. God haunted him.
This was the bitterness and the trouble and the terror that she found in William’s soul. It made her thoughtful indeed. His conscience was the fox in his vitals.
Upon such musing alone and by the fire in the drawing room of her American home she took her usual afternoon tea on the cold January day. It was not often that she was alone but she had felt tired, the intense activity of this new world city being something to which she was not used. She had been invited to a cocktail party given for that playwright now most successful upon Broadway, Seth James, and. when she telephoned to William that she would not go he had replied that he himself must go since Seth had been a former employee with whom he had disagreed, and if he did not go, it might appear that he held a grudge.
“Do go, by all means,” Emory had said at once.
She found it comfortable to be alone for an hour. It seemed difficult to be alone in America, although in Hulme Castle it had been the most natural state. Now, after she had eaten some small watercress sandwiches and drunk two cups of English tea, she went to the piano William had had made to order especially for her touch and sitting down before it she played for perhaps half an hour, transporting herself as she did so to some vague and distant place that was not America and yet not quite England. She had no wish to return to Hulme Castle and she was quite happy here in this house, as happy as she thought she could be in mortal life. Cecil had left her entirely now, even her dreams, and she seldom thought of him.
In the midst of her music the door opened and she heard the slight cough with which the second man announced his deprecatory presence.
“Well, Henry?” she called, softening her melody without stopping it.
“Please, madame, Mr. Lane’s brother-in-law is here.”
“Mr. Jeremy Cameron?”
She had met Jeremy and William’s rather sweet sister Ruth. She had found it difficult to get on with Ruth’s soft effervescence, but Jeremy she thought charming, although it was unfortunate that he was also the brother of William’s first wife.
“I do hope you won’t mind it that I am Candace’s brother,” Jeremy had said directly when they were first alone. “I assure you that Candace entirely understands about things. She wouldn’t mind meeting you, as a matter of fact—she’s a warmhearted sort of creature.”
“I don’t mind in the least your being her brother,” Emory had replied.
“It’s not Mr. Jeremy, please madame,” Henry now said. “It’s the other brother-in-law—a Mr. Miller, I believe.”
“Oh—” Lady Emory rose from the piano. She knew about Henrietta who, William said, had married a strange sort of man named Clem, who had made an odd success in food monopolies. While she stood in the middle of the floor somewhat uncertain as to how she would receive Clem or whether she should receive him at all, he was at the door looking altogether shadowy, with his sandy gray hair blown about.
“Do come in,” she said.
She was struck by his excessive thinness and the startling blue of his eyes.
“You look cold!” she said with her involuntary kindness. “I think you should have some hot tea.”
To Henry, still hovering in the doorway, she said with distinctness, “Please fetch a pot of hot tea, Henry.”
“Yes, madame.” Henry’s voice breathed doubt as he disappeared.
Clem saw a woman, a lady, who was all gentleness and kindness. It was true that he felt ill for a moment when he first came in. He had eaten nothing since morning.
“I guess I am a little hungry,” he said and tried to smile.
She had him in a comfortable chair instantly and put a hassock under his feet. The fire burned pleasantly and the vast room was quiet about him. Everything was comforting and warm and he sighed away his haste and intensity. In his taut body one muscle and another relaxed. The man came back with hot tea and she poured him a cup.
“Bring him a soft-boiled egg,” she told the man.
“I can’t eat eggs,” Clem protested.
“Indeed you can,” she replied with firmness. “You want an egg—you are so pale.”
“No milk in my tea, please,” Clem said.
While he waited he drank two cups of the delicious hot tea and ate one of the hot biscuits she called scones, and when the egg came it was two, served in a covered cup. There were triangles of toast with it and he ate and felt renewed to the soul.
“Wonderful what food can do,” he said and smiled at her and she smiled back.
“I don’t know what to call you,” he said next.
“Emory, of course. You’re Clem, I know.”
“Aren’t you a lady or something?”
“In a way. Never mind that, though, now that I’m an American.”
Clem folded a small lace-edged napkin with care and put it on the tray.
“I see you believe in feeding folks and that’s what I came to see William about. Maybe he’s told you about me?”
“I believe he said you deal in foods?”
“I like to put it that I deal with people and getting them fed.”
He leaned forward, looking extraordinarily restored and reminding her somehow of the young men in London who were always talking in Hyde Park. She had never stopped to listen to any of them but often they had the same sandy look and shining, too blue eyes. While she sat gazing at him and thinking this, Clem was fluent in preaching his own gospel to this kindly, attentive woman. He had all but forgotten that she took Candace’s place and that he ought not to like her so much, but he did like her. Candace had been kind, too, but it was with a child’s kindness and he had never been sure she understood him. But this woman did understand and she was not at all a child. There was even something sad about her dark eyes.
“You see what I mean?” he paused to ask.
“I do see indeed,” she replied. “I think it is a wonderful idea, only of course you are far ahead of your times. That’s the tragedy of great primary ideas. You won’t live to see it believed or practiced that people have the right to food as they have the right to water and air. The holy trinity of human life!”
He could not bear to have her merely understand him or even believe in him. When one believed, one must act.
He put forth his effort again. “We’ve got to get people to see this, though. That is what I came to William for. He has such power over people.”
Emory looked at him with new and sudden interest. “Has he really?”
He was entirely sensitive to this interest and anxious to make the most of it. “I can’t tell you how great his power is. His newspapers go into every little town and household—little easy papers that everybody can read. And then there’s the pictures. If people don’t want to read they can look at the pictures. I read them, too, and look at all the pictures. The queer thing to me is that you don’t learn anything, though—Miss—Lady—”
“Just Emory,” she reminded him.
He could not quite manage it. “I mean that it’s all amusing and nice but you don’t learn anything from it. You don’t learn why it is that the people in Asia want a better life and you don’t learn why it is that things don’t look so good even with the new government in China.”
At the thought of China Clem fell into thought. “I don’t know—” he murmured. “I can’t tell. I don’t think things are going right over
there. Maybe I’ll run over as soon as I see this depression through.” He lifted his head. “What I wanted to talk to William about—if he could get converted, so to speak, to this idea of feeding people. It won’t be charity. It won’t cost us money.”
He began to explain the golden rule of his restaurants and somewhere in the midst of it they looked up and saw William at the door, upon his face surprise and disgust.
“Come along in, William,” Emory said at once. “I am listening to the most fascinating man. It’s Clem.”
Thus she conveyed to William that he was to take from his face that look calculated to wound, and that he must come in and sit down and be kind to Clem, because she wished it. Their eyes met for a brief full second and William yielded. He yielded to Emory as he had never yielded to anyone.
“How do you do,” he said to Clem.
“Fine,” Clem said, “How’s yourself?”
William did not answer. He sat down and took from Emory’s hand a cup of tea.
“I really came to see you,” Clem said looking at him. “But I have surely enjoyed talking to your good wife here. She has treated me well—fed me up and all. I didn’t eat lunch today.”
William did not show interest.
“Will you have a sandwich or a scone?” Emory murmured.
“Neither, thank you,” William said.
Clem felt the atmosphere of the room change and he made haste to say what he had come for. Probably they wanted to be alone and anyway he had been here long enough. “I don’t want to waste your time, William, but I do want to give you an idea. Or set it before you, anyway. I read your editorials every day and I see that you put in one idea every day, I guess an idea of your own. I can’t agree with most of them but that’s neither here nor there. It’s a free country. But I notice that people take your ideas pretty nearly wholesale. I move around a lot through the country and I hear men say things that I can see come right out of your mouth, so to speak. I can see you understand how most people are. They don’t know much and they talk a lot and naturally they have to have something to say and so they say what they hear somebody else say or what they read in the newspaper. I admire the way you can lay down something in a short plain way.”
“Thank you,” William said without gratitude.
Clem never noticed irony and he accepted the words as they stood. “That’s all right. Now here’s my idea. How about getting it across that we ought to give away our surpluses to the people who don’t have food? I mean these men in the breadlines, and selling apples on the street, and the families hungry at home. It won’t cost a thing.”
“What surpluses?” William asked in a cold voice.
“Our surpluses,” Clem repeated stoutly. “Even now we have surpluses, while the people are starving because they can’t buy food. It’s money that’s short, not food.”
William set down his cup. “What you propose would upset our whole system of government were it carried to logical conclusion. If people have no money they can’t buy. Your idea is to disregard money and give them food free. Who is to pay the men who produce the food?”
“But producers are not getting anything, anyway!” Clem cried. “The food is rotting and they are short, too.”
“It is better to let the food rot than it is to undermine our whole economic system,” William said firmly.
Clem gave him a wild look. “All right, William, pay the producers, then! Let them be paid out of tax money.”
“You mean the government ought to feed the people?” William was shocked to the soul. “That’s the welfare state!”
“Oh God!” Clem shouted. “Listen to the man! It’s the people I’m thinking of—the starving people, William! What’s a nation if it’s not the people? What’s business if there’s nobody to buy? What’s government if the citizens die?”
“This is quite ridiculous,” William said to Emory. He rose, towering over Clem, who rose to meet him. “We will never agree,” William said formally. “I must conduct my publications as I see fit. Believe me, I am sorry to see anyone hungry, but I feel that those who are hungry have some reason to be. Ours is a land of opportunity. My own life proves it. No one helped me to success. What I have done others can do. This is my faith as an American.”
For a moment Emory, watching the two embattled men, thought that Clem would spring at William. He gathered himself together, his fists clenched, his eyes lightning blue, electric with wrath. He glared at William for a long second and suddenly the wrath went out of him.
“You don’t know what you do.” The words came out of Clem like the sigh of death. He turned and went away as though he had been made deaf and struck blind.
When he was gone William sat down again. “Pour me another cup of tea, please, Emory.” He tried to make his voice usual.
“Of course, William. But is it hot enough?” She felt the pot.
“It is all right, I am sure.”
He waited until he had tasted the tea. “You see, Emory, how impossible the fellow is.”
“I don’t understand your American system yet, I’m afraid, William. Are there actually people starving?”
“Some people, of course, need food,” William said in a reasonable voice. “Charities, however, are alert. There is free food; the very thing he talks about is being done. I have given a great deal of money myself this winter to charity, in your name and mine together.”
He paused, but she did not thank him and he went on. “Who are these charity cases but the ones they have always been? They are the unskilled, the uneducated, the lazy, the drifters, the hangers-on, all the marginal people that are to be found in any modern industrial nation. In the ancient agricultural civilization of old China they were taken care of by the immense family system. Industry, of course, changes all that.”
“Shouldn’t there be some other means found to take the place of the family?”
“There are means,” William said with an edge of impatience. “Believe me when I say that nobody needs to starve here in America if he works. Even if he doesn’t want to work he need not starve. There are charities everywhere.”
“I see,” Emory said, her voice so soft that it was almost a whisper.
They did not speak for a few minutes, and when William put out his hand to her she took it and held it in both her own. It was the best hour of the day, this quiet one between tea and dinner. If they had guests they were friends and if they had no guests it was like this, William always tender toward her. She knew he loved her most truly. Indeed she knew he loved no one else. In some way she could not herself understand she had unsealed his heart which without her had been like a tomb. She was awed by this love for she had never known her power before. Cecil had loved her but she had perhaps loved him more than he did her. She had belonged to him but somehow William belonged to her. She was afraid, sometimes, for could not such possession place too great a demand upon her? She was not quite free any more because his love encompassed her about.
“I am ashamed that my sister’s husband should have forced his way into this room and destroyed your peace,” William said.
“Oh no,” she said. “It was very interesting. As a matter of fact—” but she left her sentence there and he did not ask for its end. Instead he got up and bent down to kiss her. She rather enjoyed his kiss and she leaned back her head to receive it.
“I want to keep you happy,” William said in a voice stifled by love. “I don’t want you troubled.”
“Thank you, dear,” she said. “I am not troubled.”
He went away and she heard him mount the stairs to his rooms. He would bathe and change and come down again soon looking rested and handsome, the gentleman that he was of wealth and increasing leisure. He did not need to work as once he did, he had told her only yesterday. They might go to Italy this winter, stopping at Hulme Castle, of course.
She sat for a moment thinking of this and of Clem. Then with a sudden decisive movement she touched the bell. There was really nothing she could do
about Clem. She had chosen William and her world was William’s world.
The door opened. “Take away the tea things, please, Henry,” she said in her silvery English voice. “I am going upstairs and if any one telephones I am not to be disturbed.”
“Yes, madame,” Henry said.
From William’s house Clem went downtown. He wanted comfort and reassurance. Henrietta could always give him comfort and encouragement but no one, not even she, could understand that now at this moment he needed the reassurance of fact. He must learn by actual test whether what he was doing was more than he feared it was, a drop in the vast bucket of human hunger. He avoided the hotel and taking a bus he swung downtown to Mott Street where his largest restaurant stood. It was a dingy-looking place now but there was no need to have it otherwise. People had already learned that they could get free food there, too many people. He saw many men and some women with children standing in a ragged shivering line waiting in the wintry twilight and he pulled up his collar and stood at the end. In a few seconds there were twenty more behind him.
They moved step by step with intolerable slowness. He must speak to Kwok about this. People must be served more quickly on such bitter nights. Speed was essential. They must hire more waiters, hire as many people as necessary.
He got in at last and took his place at a table already crowded. A waiter swabbed it off and did not recognize his guest.
“Whatcha want to eat?” he asked, still swabbing.
Clem murmured the basic meal. He waited again, glancing here and there, seeing everything. The room was far too crowded but it was warm and reasonably clean. It was big but not nearly big enough. He must see if he could rent the upper floor. In spite of the crowd the place was silent, or almost silent. People were crouched over the tables, eating. Only a few were talking, or laughing and briefly gay.
Gods Men Page 39