Gods Men

by Pearl S. Buck

  “You are simple, my dear fellow. Gandhi is too clever for you. His hold on the masses of India is immense just because he won’t wear anything but the sheet. That’s what the peasants wear and they like to think that one of them wears a sheet right in the presence of you and me and even the King. It makes them trust him. If he put on striped trousers and a morning coat, they’d think he had betrayed them.”

  The Earl of Hulme had been stupefied by such independence and now felt that if something had been done about it then India would not be dreaming today of getting away from the Empire. What would happen to the world if men were allowed to come into the presence of their betters dressed like goatherds? Upon that day he had stared a good deal at the small man whose perpetual smile was as cool as a breeze, and after an hour of this persistent gaze he had discerned beneath the coolness what he called the fever. He recognized it because he had seen it elsewhere. There had been a curate in his youth who had burned to improve the lot of the tenants, and he had seen the old Earl, his father, fly into fury.

  “Read your Bible, sir!” the old nobleman had thundered at the tall, hungry-eyed curate. “Does it or does it not say that I am to put my tenants into palaces?”

  “It says the strong must bear the burdens of the weak,” the foolhardy man had replied.

  That was the curate’s end. He had killed himself as nicely as though a rope had been put about his neck. He had left in disgrace and was never heard of again. But young Malcolm, watching, had felt the fever burning inside that lean frame. On the last day, when he thought the curate had gone, he found himself face to face with him in the park. The chap had walked about to find him.

  “Malcolm—” That was what the man had actually dared to call him. “Malcolm, you are young and perhaps you will listen to me.”

  “I don’t understand,” he had stammered, angry and taken back at such daring.

  “Don’t try to understand now,” the curate had urged. The fever was plain enough then. You could see the flames leaping up inside him somewhere and shining through his pale eyes. “Just remember this—unless the hungry are fed, you will be driven away from all this. It is coming, mind you—you’ve got to save yourself. I warn you, hear the voice of God!”

  He had wheeled without answer and left the curate standing there and he had not once looked back.

  “Nonsense,” Lady Hulme now said. “William is a very handsome man. I don’t see the least resemblance to any Hindu, not to speak of that odd man.”

  She broke off, noticing how brightly the sun shone through the bottle of port. Suddenly she felt that it was a pity not to taste so beautiful a liquid. If her nose grew red it would not matter—poor Malcolm had long since ceased to notice how she looked. She poured herself a glass of the rich port, very slowly, the sun filtering through the crimson wine.

  … Outside in the soft English sunshine Emory was listening to the last fragments of a conversation which had been of more than American tractors.

  “I can’t tell yet whether it’s good or bad,” Michael said. “I can only say that there’s something new happening in Germany and Italy. New, or maybe something very old, I can’t tell which. If it goes well it’ll be a new age for Europe and therefore the world. I don’t think things will go well.”

  “You don’t believe that democracy will work in Europe, do you?” William asked.

  “Of course not,” Michael said impatiently. “But it’s these chaps—Hitler, you know, and Mussolini. They’ve no breeding. Get a common man at the top and ten to one he can’t keep his senses about him.”

  Emory cried out, wary of a certain reserve in William’s look, “Oh, Michael, how silly of you. As if we weren’t all common at bottom! Who was the first Earl of Hulme, pray? A constable of Hulme Castle, that’s all, and a traitor against his King, at that.”

  Michael was stubborn. “That’s just what I said. He couldn’t keep his senses. He got thinking he was greater than the King.”

  “What happened to him?” William asked with restrained curiosity.

  “The Queen Mother got her back up,” Michael said. “There was a long siege and our arrogant ancestor was starved into obedience.” He lifted his whip. “You’ll see the marks of the battle there, though it was more than five hundred years ago.”

  Upon the thick stone walls were ancient scars and William gazed at them. “A very good argument against everybody’s having enough food,” he said thoughtfully. “Food is a weapon. The best, perhaps, in the world!”

  The day ended peacefully as usual, but William was restless during the night and rose early. He wanted, he explained to Emory, to go to Germany and see for himself. To Germany then they went.

  In Berlin William had suddenly decided that he wanted Emory to see Peking. He had met Hitler and had been reassured. Out of postwar confusion and the follies of the Weimar government, Hitler was building the faith of the German people in themselves and their destiny. The whole country was waking out of despair and discouragement. Trains were clean and on time, and Berlin itself was encouraging.

  “There is nothing to worry about here,” William said in some surprise. “I don’t know what Michael was talking about.”

  After his talk with Hitler he was even more pleased. “The man is a born leader,” he told Emory, “a Carlylean figure.” It was then that William decided to go to China, telling Emory that he felt that he could never explain himself to her altogether unless she saw the city of his childhood. They boarded a great Dutch plane that carried them to India and Singapore and from there they flew to China. Of India Emory saw nothing and did not ask to see anything. Cecil’s family had been dependent upon India and her curiosity had died with him.

  They spent nearly two weeks in Peking. They wandered about among the palaces, now open to tourists, and William searched the painted halls, the carved pavilions, for the throne room where as a child his mother had led him before the Empress.

  “William, after all this time, can you remember?” Emory asked, unbelieving.

  “I remember the Empress as though she had set a seal upon me,” William replied.

  He found the room at last and the very throne, but in what dust and decay!

  “This is the place,” William said.

  They stood together in silence and looked about them. The doors were barred no more and pigeons had dirtied the smooth tiled floors. The gold upon the throne had been scraped off by petty thieves and even the lazy guard who lounged in the courtyard offered them a sacred yellow tile from the roof for a Chinese dollar. William shook his head.

  “I wonder,” Emory said in a low voice, “if one day Buckingham Palace will be like this?”

  “I cannot imagine it,” William replied, and as though he could not bear the sight before them, he turned abruptly from the throne. “Let us go. We have seen it.”

  “Perhaps it would have been better not to have seen it,” she suggested. “It might have been better to remember it as it was.”

  To this William did not reply.

  There was something of the same decay in the compound where he had been born and which had been his home. It was not empty. A thin little missionary was there, a pallid man who came to the door of the mission house, a shadow of a man, William thought with contempt, a feeble small fellow to take his father’s place! The little man looked at them with bewildered and spectacled eyes.

  “This was Dr. Lane’s house, I believe,” William said, and did not tell him who he was.

  “That was a long time ago,” the mild man said.

  “May we look over the house?” Emory asked. “We knew Dr. and Mrs. Lane.”

  “I suppose so—my wife isn’t in just now—she’s gone to the Bible women’s meeting.”

  “Never mind,” William said suddenly. “I have no desire to see the house.”

  They left at once and William, she divined, was thinking of his father. He thought a great deal of his father in those days in Peking—sometimes with the old bitterness but more often with a longing
wonder at the happiness in which his father seemed to live.

  “My father was anchored in his faith,” William said. “I have often envied him his ability to believe.”

  Emory said at this moment what she had been thinking about for a long time. “I do think, William, that you ought to see a priest. A Catholic, if possible.”

  He turned upon her his dark look. “Why?” But she fancied he was not surprised.

  She responded with her gaze of clear kindness. “I cannot give you peace,” she said. “If peace is what you need—”

  He denied this abruptly. “I don’t need peace.”

  “Whatever it is you need,” she amended.

  He did not reply to this but she did not forget his silence. They left Peking soon after that day, and in a few weeks were in New York and William plunged into feverish work.

  Left to herself, Emory went out more than she had before. Even she was getting restless. The world was so strange, so full of horrible possibilities!

  At a cocktail party one day many months later Emory observed an unusual figure, and seeing it was reminded of the unforgotten conversation in Peking. A tall cassocked priest stood near the door. He had an angular worn face and quietly gazing at him as she drank tea instead of cocktails she saw his hands, worn and rough, tightly clasped before him. His hair was a dark auburn and his skin was florid. As though he felt her eyes, he looked at her. His eyes were very blue. She turned her head and at the same moment she felt hands upon her shoulders. Looking up then she saw Jeremy Cameron, and she smiled at him. “Jeremy, you wretch, you and Ruth haven’t come near us since we came home!”

  “Ruth is still at the shore with the children. She’ll be back Monday. Here’s someone who wants to meet you. Emory, this is Father Malone—my sister-in-law, Father, Lady Emory Hulme or Mrs. William Lane, as you please.”

  Jeremy had been drinking, she saw. The dark pupils of his eyes were huge and set in reddened whites and his thin smooth cheeks were flushed.

  She turned to smile at Father Malone. He stooped over her hand. “It is your husband I really want to meet and this explains my presence at an occasion so strange to me,” he said in a rugged voice. “I’ve just come from China, where I believe he was born.”

  “Oh, I’m glad.” Genuine gladness indeed was in her voice. “Why not come home with me now? We can talk a little while before my husband comes in. He’ll be late. We were in China, ourselves.”

  “I heard,” Father Malone said simply.

  Jeremy rocked back and forth on his heels. “William was looking at Father Malone’s pictures today—wonderful pictures—people starving to death, somewhere in China of course—babies like dead mice, their arms and legs—wonderful. He hadn’t time to meet Father Malone himself and turned him over to me. He wants the pictures, though.”

  “Famine,” the priest said simply. “That’s why I am here. I am sent to collect funds.”

  His dark eyes were magnetic. Emory found herself looking at him and then not looking away quickly enough. He did not mind how long she gazed at him, and there was no personal response from him to a beautiful woman.

  “Do let’s go.” She got up impulsively.

  The controlled grace of her movements was self-conscious and yet nonetheless graceful. They left in a few minutes, the priest a handsome yet ascetic shadow behind her, and in the comfortable soundproofed car, riding through the evening traffic in perfect quiet, she put her questions. Father Malone answered them with simplicity and frankness, or so she thought. Yes, he had been many years in China, not in Peking, or the big cities, but in his own mission in a country region. He was a country priest and had been twenty years there.

  “You must have been very young when you first went.”

  Yes, he had been young, only a little more than twenty-five. He had gone to help an elder priest, who had died after a few years, of cholera, and then he had carried on.

  “Do you feel your work is successful?”

  “I do not think of success.” His somber voice, expressive of any emotion one might choose to imagine, made music of every word. “In the long processes of the Church one man’s work is only a link in the chain of eternity.”

  “I do believe,” she said, with purposeful frankness, “that you have been sent to me at this particular moment. I will not pretend that I am a religious woman for by looking at me you, will see that I am not. But I love my husband and he needs something I cannot give him. He is a naturally religious man, and he does not know it. He has grown rich so fast. You know his father was a missionary.”

  “I do know,” Father Malone said. “That is why I have come to him first—that and his great wealth.”

  “His father was a Protestant, of course,” Emory went on. “I never knew him, but he has left an indelible impression upon William’s soul. William, being a very clever man, can scarcely accept the sort of religion that his father had. He will need something much more subtle, if I may say so.”

  “The Church has everything for all souls,” Father Malone said. His voice, so full of confidence, his mild and handsome profile gazing ahead into the turmoil of the crowded streets, renewed Emory’s admiration without in the least moving her heart. But then, her heart knew no hungers.

  The heavy car drew up at the house and the chauffeur sprang out and opened the door of the car. They mounted the marble steps. The evening air was sweet and cold, and the lights of the city were twinkling. At the top of the steps Emory touched the bell and upon impulse that seemed sudden she looked up at the tall priest.

  “I’m very happy. I want my husband to be happy, too.”

  “Why not?” Father Malone replied. He smiled down upon her, celibate and monastic though he was, and by that smile he made himself her ally.

  William, coming in later than he had said he would, paused as Henry took his things. He heard a man’s voice.

  “Who is here?” he demanded.

  “A friend of madame’s, sir. He’s a priest, sir. She brought him home with her. He’s to stay for dinner, sir.”

  Henry disappeared and William went quietly up the stairs. And why a priest? He was fearfully tired and wanted to be alone. The old sense of emptiness was creeping back into him again though he had been married so few years. He avoided knowing it. If Emory could not fill the emptiness then nowhere on earth could he find peace. He refused thought and began instead to worry about lesser matters. Jeremy, for example, getting drunk and coming into the office to announce loudly his disgust with his job and with everything and that he wouldn’t resign and wanted to be fired! He would have to talk with Ruth as soon as she came back. She ought not to linger on at the seashore, leaving Jeremy at loose ends.

  He shrugged his shoulders abruptly. Why should he, in his position, be troubled about anyone? The familiar hard surface crept over his mind and spirit and he proceeded to bathe and dress in his usual evening garments, laid out for him by his valet. He was hungry. The day at the office had been long and the proofs of his editorial more than usually full of mistakes. He would have to find another editor. It seemed stupid that his young men could not adjust to his demands. He kept them young, letting them go soon after thirty-five, because youth was essential to the style he had developed.

  His mind, ranging among faces and men, lingered upon Seth James. He had not seen Seth for a long time, but he had kept within his knowledge all that Seth had done since the success of his play on Broadway. Seth had started another magazine which had failed. William’s private scouts told him that Seth had lost more than a million dollars on it. Perhaps it was time to bring him back—if he wanted him. But could Seth be convinced? He might talk to Emory about it, get her, perhaps, to go after Seth. She had a sort of integrity which he could neither fathom nor reach.

  He had not told her that a few days ago he had met Candace upon the street, and had hesitated, not knowing whether to speak or not. She had decided the matter quickly by putting out her gloved hand.

  “William, surely you won’t just
pass without speaking?”

  He took her hand, felt embarrassed, tried to smile. “I wasn’t sure you’d want to.”

  “There is no reason why I wouldn’t want to speak to you, William.”

  “How is your father?”

  “Just letting himself get old—sleeping a good deal, a saintly stillness over him, all the time.”

  “I hope he doesn’t dislike me?”

  “He doesn’t dislike anybody.”

  They stood between two passing streams of people and he was afraid one of the damned gossip columnists might see them together and put out a story in a newspaper or on the air. This was intolerable and so he had lifted his hat abruptly and left her. There was no reason to tell Emory. The meeting meant nothing.

  When he was dressed the emptiness came over him again. It was more than emptiness. He felt a strange and puzzling gnawing of the heart which he could not explain. What was he doing that he should not be doing? Every success was in his possession. He had ceased to ask himself how much money he had. There was more than he could possibly spend with his decent and frugal tastes. His houses were finished and beautiful and to Emory he gave an income extravagantly large. Candace, too, he had not stinted and his sons both had had allowances beyond their needs. His yearly gift to his father’s mission was a solid foundation upon which others built. For his mother he had arranged an annuity of ten thousand a year. He had done everything he ought to do.

  He should perhaps have entered politics long ago, instead of building his newspapers. This thought, disturbing him very much, caused him to sit down in his leather easy chair and close his eyes. His small hairy hands gripped the carved ends of the hand rests. He should not have been content with the power of shaping the minds of people by choosing what pictures they should see, what news they should read, what ideas, in short, should be offered to their minds. This was only passive government. There was nothing stable in America. This country which William longed to love and did love with fear and anger and contempt, had no bedrock of class, no governing element such as England had. Wealth was the only vantage. William despised charm and knew that he had none of it. And yet without it, he knew, he could never have won, not in America, not in this, his own country. Think of that fellow in the White House! He gave up the notion of politics and opened his eyes. He could not descend to the sordid race. Besides, what if he had been defeated? Folly, folly! He was pre-eminent as he was and without a rival in sight. What more did he want than he had? He wanted to be satisfied with himself and he was not.