Gods Men

by Pearl S. Buck

  His plate came and he ate it. The food was good enough, filling and hot. The waiter kept looking at him and Clem saw him stop a moment later at the cashier’s window. He ate as much as he could and then leaned to the man next to him at the long table, a young unshaven man who had cleaned his plate.

  “Want this?” Clem muttered.

  The sunken young eyes lit in the famished face. “Don’t you want it?”

  “I can’t finish it—”

  “Sure.”

  The waiter was watching again but Clem got up and went to the cashier’s window with his check. He leaned toward the grating and said in a low voice, “I’m sorry I can’t pay anything.”

  The sharp-faced Chinese girl behind the thin iron bars replied at once and her voice and accent were entirely American. “Oh yes, you can. You aren’t hungry—not with that suit of clothes!”

  “My only decent clothes,” Clem muttered.

  “Pawn them,” she said briskly. “Everybody’s doing that so’s to pay for their meals.”

  He turned in sudden fury and walked across the restaurant, pushing his way through the waiters. He went straight to Mr. Kwok’s small office and found him there in his shirtsleeves, the oily sweat pouring down his face.

  “Mr. Miller—” Mr. Kwok sprang to his feet. He pointed to his own chair. “Sit down, please.”

  Clem was still furious. “No, I won’t sit down. Look here, I came in tonight to see how things were going on. I told the cashier I couldn’t pay just to try out the system. That damned girl at the window told me to go pawn my clothes!”

  Mr. Kwok sweat more heavily. “Please, Mr. Miller, not so mad! You don’t unnerstan’. We going broke this way—too many people eating every day. In China you know how people starving don’t expect eating every day only maybe one time, two time, three time in a week. Here Americans expecting eating every day even they can’t pay. Nobody can do so, Mr. Miller, not even such a big heart like yours. It can’t be starving people eat like not starving. It don’t make sense, Mr. Miller. At first yes, very sensible, because most people pay, but now too many people don’t pay and still eating like before. What the hell! It’s depression.”

  The wrath went out of Clem. What the Chinese said was true. Too many people now couldn’t pay. The job was beyond him, beyond anybody. Too many people, too many starving people.

  “I guess you’re right,” he said after a long pause.

  He looked so pale when he got up, he swayed so strangely on his feet that Mr. Kwok was frightened and put out his hands and caught Clem by the elbows. “Please, Mr. Miller, are you something wrong?”

  Clem steadied himself. “No, I’m all right. I just got to think of something else, that’s all. Good night, Mr. Kwok.”

  He wrenched himself away from the kind supporting hands and went out of the door into the street. His idea wasn’t working. Nothing was working. People were pawning their clothes in this bitter weather. They were being asked to pawn their clothes, pawn everything they could, doubtless. The waiters had been told to look and see what people wore. He remembered the hungry boy who had seized his plate and eaten the leftovers like a dog. That was what it had come to here in his own country. Someday people would be eating grass and roots and leaves here as they did in China.

  “I got to get down to Washington,” he muttered into the cold darkness. “I gotta get down there one more time and tell them. …”

  He found his way to the hotel where Henrietta waited for him, alarmed at his long absence.

  “Clem—” she began, but he cut her off short.

  “Get our things together, hon. We’re taking the next train to Washington. I’m going to get to that fellow in the White House if I have to bust my way in.”

  He did not get in, of course. She knew he could not. She waited outside in the lobby and read a pamphlet on a table full of pamphlets and magazines that had been sent for the President to read. He had no time to read them and they had been put here to help the people who waited to while away the time. In a pamphlet of five pages, in words as dry as dust, in sentences as terse as exclamations, but passionless, she read the whole simple truth. For twenty-nine months American business had been shrinking. Industrial production was fifty per cent of what it had been three years ago. The deflation in all prices was thirty-five per cent. Profits were down seventy-five per cent. Nineteen railroads during the last year had gone bankrupt. Farm prices had shrunk forty-nine per cent so far and were still going down. But—and here she saw how everlastingly right Clem was—there was more food than ever! Farmers had grown ten per cent more food in this year of starvation than they had grown three years ago in a time of plenty.

  “Oh, Clem,” Henrietta whispered to her own heart. “How often you tell them and they will not listen! O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often. …”

  She put the pamphlet back on the table and sat with her hands folded in her lap and her head bowed so that her hat hid the tears that kept welling into her eyes. It was for Clem she wept, for Clem in whom nobody believed except herself, and who was she except nobody? William had hurt him dreadfully but she did not know how because Clem would not tell her what had happened. He had spoken scarcely a word all the way down on the train. She had tried to make him sleep, even if they were only in a day coach—he wouldn’t spend the money for berths—but though he leaned back and shut his eyes she knew he was not sleeping.

  He came into the waiting room suddenly and she saw at once that he had failed. She got up and they went out of the building side by side. She took his hand but it was limp, and she let it go again.

  “Did you see the President?” she asked when they were on the street. The sun was bright and cold and pigeons were looking around for food, but no one was there to feed them.

  “No,” Clem said. “He was too busy. I talked to somebody or other, though, enough to know there was no use staying around.”

  “Oh, Clem, why?”

  “Why? Because they’ve got an idea of their own. Want to know what it is? Well, I’ll tell you. They’ve got the idea of telling the farmers to stop raising so much food. That’s their idea. Wonderful, ain’t it, with the country full of starvation?”

  He turned on her and gave a bark of laughter so fierce that people stared, but he did not see their stares. He was loping along as though he were in a race and she could scarcely keep up with him.

  “Where are we going now, Clem?” she asked.

  “We’re going home to Ohio. I gotta sweat it out,” he said.

  The nation righted itself in the next two years, slowly like a ship coming out of a storm. William wrote a clear and well-reasoned editorial for his chain of newspapers and pointed out to his millions of readers that the reforms were not begun by Franklin D. Roosevelt, the new President, but by Herbert Hoover who should have been re-elected in sheer justice that he might finish that which he had begun. It was already obvious, William went on, that the new inhabitant of the White House would run the nation into unheard-of national debt.

  What William saw now in the White House was not the mature and incomparable man, toughened by crippling experience. He saw a youth he remembered in college, gay and willful and debonair, born as naturally as Emory to a castle and unearned wealth, but, unlike her, not controlled by any relationship to himself. Roosevelt, secure from the first moment of his birth, was uncontrollable and therefore terrifying, and William conveyed these fears in his usual editorial style, oversimple and dogmatically brief. To his surprise, he experienced his first rebellion. Millions of frightened people reading his editorials felt an inexplicable fury and newspaper sales dropped so sharply that the business office felt compelled to bring it to William’s notice. He replied by a memorandum saying that he was sailing for England and Europe, especially Germany where he wanted to see for himself what was happening, and they could do as they liked while he was gone.

  Emory received the news of the journey with her usual calm. They had not gone to England or Italy the year before, and she felt a chan
ge now would be pleasant. Alone with William she might discover what it was that kept him perpetually dissatisfied, not with her, but with the very stuff of life itself. She never mentioned to him her discernment of his discontent, for by now she knew it was spiritual and that he was only beginning to perceive this for himself. She refused again a thought which came to trouble her. Did William feel a lack in her own love for him? Was there such a lack? She made no answer. He had so much. He had all the money he had ever imagined he would have, and the most successful chain of popular newspapers. He was already planning the next presidential candidate, for this man in the White House could not possibly survive a first term. That he hungered for something he did not have, something more than woman could give, was now plain, perhaps even to William himself.

  Or did his spirit seek after his father? One day on their voyage, William said, “I often think about my father. I wish you had known him, Emory. You would have understood each other. He was a great man, never discovered.”

  “I wish I might have known him, dear,” she observed. They were in their deck chairs after breakfast and the sun was brilliant upon a hard blue sea.

  “I wonder … I often wonder …” William mused somewhat heavily.

  Emory delayed opening her novel. “About what, William?”

  “Whether he would approve what I do—what I am!”

  Approval. That was the word, the key! She saw it at once and grasped it. William needed the approval of someone he felt was his spiritual superior. For she knew that he was a man of strongly spiritual nature, a religious man without a religion. Emory herself was not spiritual, not religious at any rate, and she could not help him. She did not carry the conversation beyond her usual mild comment.

  “I feel sure he would approve you, William, but I wish he were here to tell you so.”

  Within herself, after that conversation, she began the active search for the religion that William needed. It must be one strong enough for him, organized and ancient, not Buddhism, which was too gentle, not Hinduism, which was too merciful, not Taoism, which was too gay, imbued as it was with human independence even of God, and Confucianism was dead. She knew something of all religions, for after Cecil’s death she had searched the scriptures of many and in the end had grown indifferent to all. Instead of religion she had developed a deep native patience, and detached by early shock, nothing now could disturb the calm which had grown like a protective shell, lovely as mother-of-pearl, over her own soul. She wished indeed that she could have known his father, for in that dead father, she felt sure at last, was the key to this living husband of hers. His mother, she had soon found, had been merely the vessel of creation.

  Emory rather liked the vessel, nevertheless. She comprehended early with her subtle humor that there was not an ounce of the spiritual in her mother-in-law’s bustling body. Mrs. Lane used God for her own purposes, which were always literal and material, reveling in William’s success, in his wealth, in his new relation to an English Earl. Soon after William’s marriage she had announced that she was going to England and that she would enjoy a visit at Hulme Castle. Emory had written to her own mother with entire frankness, saying that her mother-in-law would be the easiest of guests and not in the least like William. “Old Mrs. Lane is always ready to worship,” Emory wrote, and drew a small cat face grinning upon the wide margin of the heavy handmade paper that bore her name but also the Hulme coat of arms.

  She had seen Mrs. Lane off and upon the deck of the great ship had given her a huge corsage of purple orchids which would last the voyage, a package of religious novels, and a box of French chocolates. “Food for body and soul,” she had said with private cynicism. Mrs. Lane, who had a strong digestion and liked sweets, did not comprehend cynicism. She had thanked her new daughter-in-law with the special warmth she had for the well born. She stood at the handrail of the upper deck, wrapped in a fur coat and a tightly veiled hat, and waved vigorously.

  At first the divorce had seemed horrible to her, until she discovered how thoroughly she approved of Emory and her English relations. She made compromise. It was not as if William needed the Cameron money any more. Emory was really much better suited to him in his present position than Candace was. Men did outgrow women. There was no use pretending, although, thank God, her own husband had never outgrown her. Such remarks she had poured into Ruth’s ears, and Ruth always listened.

  This mother, Emory had soon perceived, was of no real use to William, and at first she had thought that any connection between William and his mother must have ended with the physical cutting of the umbilical cord. Later she had seen that she had been wrong. Mrs. Lane had created a division in William. To her he owed his respect for wealth, for castles, for birth, for—

  At this point Emory checked herself. She was being nasty, for did she not enjoy William’s wealth? Worse than that she was being unjust to him, whose soul hungered after higher things than those which he had. She wanted William to be really happy and not in the way that America meant happiness, which was something too fervid and occasional. She wanted William to be satisfied in ways that she knew he was not. She wanted his restless ambition stilled, and the vague wounds of his life healed. Some of them she had been able to heal merely by being what she was, English and his wife.

  Hulme Castle was unusually beautiful on the afternoon when they were driven up the long winding road from the downs. The winter had been mild, the chauffeur said, explaining the amount of greenery about the old towers and walls.

  Her parents were in the long drawing room, though it was not yet noon, and she was touched to think they were waiting for her, putting aside their usual morning pursuits.

  “My dears—” she said, bending to kiss them.

  William was quietly formal and nothing much was said. Her parents did not feel at ease with him, nor, as she saw, quite at ease even with her. Then Michael came in dressed in his riding things and ease flowed into the room with him.

  “I say, you two—you haven’t been shown up to your part of the castle yet?”

  “You told us not,” Lady Hulme reminded him.

  “No. Come along. I wanted to show it to you,” Michael said.

  They followed him, laughing at his impatience, and then Emory saw that even William, so scant in his praise of anyone, was touched by what Michael had done. He had really made a small private castle of one wing. It had its separate entrance, its own kitchen, and four baths.

  “I shall be able to rest here, Emory,” William said so gravely that she perceived he needed rest.

  “Come along, William,” Michael said when they had seen everything. “We’d better leave Emory for a bit with her mother. I have to ride to the next town to see about getting a tractor. I thought we’d get our luncheon there, perhaps. You could advise me—it’s an American machine.”

  Emory laughed. “You’re not very subtle, Michael, but then you never were.” They laughed with her and went off, nevertheless, and she lunched with her parents.

  The castle, she discovered, was in a strange state of flux. Her father, deeply angry over the increase in death duties, was threatening to move into the gate house with her mother and a couple of servants and let Michael take the castle and assume title so far as was possible. She listened to this talk at the immense dining table, her father at one end, her mother at the other, and she in between as she used to be.

  “It’s hard on a man not being able to finish his days in his proper place,” the Earl said.

  He fell into silence over his roast beef and port, a silence which his wife could not allow for long.

  “What are you thinking of, Malcolm, pray tell?” Lady Hulme asked. She did not drink port for it made small red veins come out on her nose.

  “Do you remember, my dear, that old chap we dug up in the church when we put. in the hot-water pipes?” the Earl asked with entire irrelevance.

  “Father, what makes you think of him now?” Emory asked.

  “He’d been lying there a hundred and fif
ty years, you know, and his bones were as good as anything, white as chalk, but holding together, you know,” the Earl replied.

  Lady Hulme was diverted by the memory. She remembered perfectly clearly the June morning years ago when the men came to say that they had struck a coffin in Hulme Abbey and both of them had gone over to look at it. The coffin was only wood and was quite gone really except for bits of metal, but there in the dust lay the most beautiful silvery skeleton. Luckily it was not a Hulme ancestor but some physician who had served the family and had been given the honor of burial in the abbey.

  “You don’t think that he took drugs or something that kept his bones hard?” she now asked.

  “Might have,” the Earl conceded. “Still, perhaps it was only the dryness of the abbey, eh? Maybe the hundreds of sermons the vicars preached, eh?”

  He choked on his own humor and exploded into frightful coughing. Lady Hulme waited. He choked rather easily nowadays, especially on port. When he subsided, red-eyed and gasping, she felt it wise to change the subject, lest he be tempted to another joke.

  Before she could speak Emory lifted her head.

  “Hark—Isn’t that the horses?” They listened.

  “Yes,” she exclaimed. “It’s William.”

  She got up with her stealing grace and went out, and Lady Hulme said aloud what she had been thinking.

  “Do you like Emory’s husband—really, I mean?”

  “How could anybody like him?” the Earl replied in a voice restored to common sense. “There is something feverish in him.”

  “I thought he seemed as cool as anything today.”

  “He is the sort that burns inside, you know, my dear, like that what’s-his-name from India that we dined with once at Randford. I don’t know how the Earl felt but I know I was jolly glad to be away after dinner.”

  “What’s-his-name” was a small dark man named Mohandas Gandhi. He had come over to England for conferences and he had refused to wear proper clothes or eat proper food. The government had been compelled to recognize him, nevertheless, and there was a frightful picture of him taken with the King and wearing almost nothing—just the bed sheet or whatever it was that he wrapped about his nakedness. It did seem that when a man came to a civilized country he might behave better. When the Earl of Hulme had muttered as much behind his mustaches to the Earl of Randford, his host had smiled at him and murmured in reply: