Such thoughts mingled with his prayer without disturbing it, and when he had finished praying he touched the button of his telephone again. Miss Smith’s voice answered, irritatingly weak. She would not last long, he thought with momentary contempt.
“I want to speak to Mrs. Lane,” he commanded. A moment later the buzz told him that his wife waited.
“Emory? Have we anything on for tonight?”
“I half promised we’d go to that opening of the Picasso—”
“Cancel it! I feel that I need some relaxation in view of all that’s ahead of me. Let’s have dinner at the Waldorf—I’ll order a table—and then we’ll go to see something at the theater. What’s that new musical? Night in Peking?”
“I’d enjoy that. And I’ll get the tickets.”
Emory’s silvery voice was complacent and sweet. She was always ready to fall in with his wishes. When he had told her he wanted her to enter the Church with him, she had scarcely hesitated a moment.
“I’ve been thinking about it. I believe a solid religion will be good for you, William,” she had said.
“What do you mean by that?” he had demanded.
“Life isn’t enough for you,” she had replied with her strange thoughtfulness. She seemed to think a good deal without letting her thoughts oppress her, or him.
“It will be good for you, too, I think,” he had said.
“Why not?” she had replied, with one of her graceful smiles.
He was very effective that night. There was no fiasco whatever. He must have been successful at something or other at the office, Emory thought, one of his big plans, perhaps, which he would tell her about afterward. He was all of a piece, this man. Power flowed from him or, locked in him, wrecked his peace of mind and made him impotent. As always he made her his instrument and she did not rebel. Why, indeed, should she? He gave her all she wanted now in the world, which was luxury, which was beauty. Her wants were few but huge, and for beauty money was necessary, plenty of money, a mine of gold, the source inexhaustible. Only William possessed the golden touch nowadays. The old inherited capitalism was almost over, but he was the new capitalist. He had found the fresh source in the need of the people to be amused and to be led. And he led them—he led them into green pastures.
The staff perceived as soon as it congregated for the ferocity of the day’s work that there was to be no idleness. William reached the office early and even the least of them understood at once that it was going to be one of his good days. Whatever thought of weariness, whatever listlessness of the night before that any one of them had felt was gone in the instant. Today the utmost would be demanded of them mingled with excitement and some terror. It was doubtful that they would all be at their jobs by night. On William’s good days inevitably someone was fired. The weaker members decided not to go out to lunch. William himself never ate lunch.
“Miss Smith,” William said, “give me all the recent dispatches from China. I want to study them.”
This news from behind the circular desk was telegraphed through the offices and gusts of relief followed. Focus upon China meant focus upon Lemuel Barnard, who had just returned to make his report of the Chinese situation.
The first assistant editor thoughtfully started his search for Lem who at this time of the morning might still be anywhere but certainly not at his desk. Telephone messages began urgently though cautiously to permeate the city. The receptionist in the main entrance, Louise Henry, a pretty auburn-haired girl from Tennessee, stayed by the telephone as much as she dared. She had left Lem somewhere between midnight and dawn at a night club. Shortly before noon, she found him where no one expected him, in bed at his hotel room and asleep. Louise waked him.
“Lem, get over here quick. He’s been studying your dispatches all morning!”
“Oh hell,” Lem groaned and rolled out of bed.
At one o’clock William was delayed. Miss Smith brought in an envelope which she recognized as coming from her employer’s divorced wife and which therefore she was not to open. She took it in at once to William, though fearful as she did so, for he had left orders that he was not to be disturbed. By then Lem was waiting out in the hall with Louise.
“I don’t want to interrupt,” Miss Smith began.
“Well, you have interrupted,” William said.
“This—” Miss Smith faltered. She put the letter on the desk and went out.
William saw at once that it was from Candace. He did not immediately put down the map he was studying. Instead he discovered what he had been looking for, an old camel route from Peking into Sinkiang, and then he put down the map and took up the envelope. So far as he had any contact with Candace she had not changed. The heavy cream paper she always had used when he knew her as his wife, she continued to use. The fine gold lettering of the address simply carried the name Candace Lane instead of Mrs. William Lane. When he slit the envelope and took out the single sheet it contained, she began the letter as she usually did.
Dear William,
I have not written you for a good many months because until now there has been nothing to write. You hear from the boys regularly, I hope, and I live here in the same idle way. Today though there is something to write. I am going to be married again. I suppose this would not interest you, except I think I ought to tell you that I am going to marry Seth James. He was in love with me long ago when I was just a girl, before you and I were engaged. We began being friends again after Father died, and now it seems natural to go on into marriage. I expect to be happy. We shall keep on living here. Seth has always liked this house. But we’ll have his town house, too. As you probably know, his paper failed, and he lost so much money that he has only enough to live on now and not enough to venture into anything else except maybe another play. But he says he will enjoy just living here with me. We will be married on Christmas Eve. Will and Jerry approve, by the way. It’s sweet of them.
Good-by, William
CANDACE
The letter was so like her that for a moment William felt an amazing twinge of the heart. Candace was a good woman, childish but good. He had an envious reverence for sheer goodness, the quality his father had possessed in purity, and which he sometimes longed to know that he had. This longing he hid in the secret darkness of his own heart, among those shadows of his being which no one had ever penetrated, even Emory, for whom he felt something more near to admiration than he had ever felt toward any human person. She met him well at every point of his being. Her mind was quicker than his own and he suspected, without ever saying so, that it was more profound. She filled his house with music. Yet, though quite independent of him, she never talked too much, she never led in any conversation when he was present, she deferred to him not with malice as so many women did to men, not with the ostentation which made a mockery of deference. He believed that she admired him, too, and this gave him confidence in himself and in her, although her admiration was not flat and without criticism as Candace’s had been. Yet even Emory did not have the pure goodness of which he had been conscious in his father and now perceived unwillingly in Candace.
His eye fell on the letter again. Christmas Eve? He was leaving for China the day after Christmas. This made him remember Lem Barnard. He buzzed long and steadily until Miss Smith came to the door, her pale eyes popped in the way he intensely disliked.
“Tell Barnard to come here,” he commanded. “I suppose he’s about the office?”
“Oh yes, sir, he’s been here for hours—” She liked Lem, as everybody did.
William did not answer this. He frowned unconsciously and drummed his fingers upon the table. Within fifty seconds Lem Barnard shambled in, a huge lumbering fellow, overweight, and wearing as usual a dirty tweed suit. A button was gone from the coat and he needed a haircut.
“Sit down, Lem,” William said. He opened a folder on the desk before him. “I have been reading over your recent dispatches. China is going to be very important to us now. We have to have a policy, well defined a
nd clear to everybody. There must be no confusion between editors and reporters. You are to find the sort of news that fits our policy.”
The veins on Lem’s temples swelled slightly but William did not look at him. He went on, ruffling the edges of the typed pages as he did so.
“These reports you’ve sent for the last three months have been very troublesome. I’ve had to go over everything myself. There has been little I could use. This is not the time, let me tell you, to bring back gossip and rumors about the Chiangs—either husband or wife.”
Lem exploded, “I’ve only told you what Chinese people themselves are saying.”
“I don’t care what Chinese people are saying,” William retorted. “I never care what any people say. I am interested in telling them what to say.”
He tapped the sheets with the tips of his ringers. “If I were interested in what people say my papers would soon degenerate to gossip sheets. Do you know why they succeed? Because they tell people what to think! You’re clever, Lem, but you aren’t clever enough. People don’t care to read what they already think or what any people think—they know all that well enough. They want to know what they ought to think. It is a spiritual desire, deep in the heart of mankind.”
He stopped and surveyed Lem, sitting huge and gross upon a straight-backed wooden chair. Lem overflowed the narrow seat and it was obvious from his clouded eyes and purplish cheeks that he ate and drank too much wherever he was. He was a disgusting sight.
“Man is a spiritual being,” William said sternly. His enunciation was incisively clear. “Man seeks truth, he wants divine guidance, he craves security of soul. In all your dispatches remember that, if you please.”
Lem swallowed once again his desire to fire himself, to bawl at William, to cry and howl. He could not afford it. His wife was in an expensive insane asylum. He bit his tongue for an instant and tasted the salt of his own blood. “Just what impression do you want me to give?” he then inquired in a sultry, gentle voice.
“Our people will now want to believe in the Chinese,” William said. “They will want to trust the Chinese leadership.”
Lem closed his bloodshot eyes. Against the lids he always saw Chinese faces, the starving, the homeless. War had been going on in China already for five years but nobody here had taken it seriously. Even the Chief here couldn’t seem to believe it. Then he thought of his poor wife again, steadily and for a whole minute. Whenever he got angry with William he thought about her. He had been happy with her for two years and she had gone everywhere with him in China. He had met her there in Shanghai, a beautiful White Russian girl, and he had suspected there were things she had never told him and never could tell him. But she had been a wonderful wife and had spoiled him for anybody else.
One morning when he had wakened in the old Cathay Hotel, Lem had found her bending over him with his old-fashioned razor, and he had known that she was about to kill him. He had one instant of horror and then he saw that of course she was mad. She had never been sane since. He had brought her to America himself, sleeping neither by night or day. She tried to kill anybody who was with her and he could leave her with no one. He put her into an asylum near San Francisco. She never knew him when he went to see her. She always called him something else, names of men he had never heard of. But the bills were terrible every month and if he couldn’t pay they would throw her out. It was not every place that would take such a violent case, they told him.
He had to stop seeing the Chinese when he shut his eyes. He had to see just Anastasie. He opened his eyes and said to William in the gentle and sultry voice, “Chief, I wish you’d go to China yourself. I wish you’d just go and see. You haven’t been there for a long time. You ought to go and see what it’s like now. Then you’d know—”
“I have already decided to go,” William replied. “I am going to see the Old Tiger.”
Chungking was a city set upon a hill. The sluggish yellow waters of the river wound around it and the tile-colored flights of steps led upward. There was nothing about it that was like Peking. Everything was at once familiar and strange. There were no palaces, no shining roofs, no dignity of marble archways and wide streets. The streets were crowded between gray-brick houses and fog-dampened walls. The cobblestones were slippery with water and slimy with filth. The people were grim-faced with continuing war and constant bombing. They did not look like the tall handsome people of the north. William was alarmed and dismayed when he thought of these people as the allies of America. What had they to give as allies? They were a danger and a liability. Yet Chiang must be held, he must be compelled, he must be supported.
The American car driven by a uniformed Chinese carried him at once to the Old Tiger’s house outside the city. It was reassuring to enter something that did not look like a hovel. The air was chill and damp, as everything was, but from the hall he was led into a square room where a fire blazed.
“Please sit down,” the manservant said in Chinese.
The words smote William’s ear with strange accustom. He had not spoken a single Chinese word for years, but the language lay in his memory. He felt syllables rise to his tongue. Perhaps he would be able to speak with Chiang in his own language. The Old Tiger spoke no English. No one knew how much he understood—probably more than he was willing for anyone to know.
The door opened and he looked up. It was not the Tiger who stood there, but a woman, slender and beautiful, her great eyes filled with ready pathos, her exquisite mouth sad. She put out both her hands.
“Mr. Lane. You are America, coming to our aid at last!”
He felt her soft feverish palms against his and was speechless. He did not know what to do with a lovely Chinese woman, one who looked so young, who spoke English naturally. He had never seen this sort of Chinese woman. The ones in Peking had bound feet, unless they were Manchu, but Chinese and Manchu alike they had been alien to him, except the old amah who had been only a servant—and except the Empress.
This beautiful woman with imperial grace sat down and bade him by a gesture to be seated.
“My husband is delayed but only for a moment. We have had bad news from the front. Of course, now everything will be righted, since America is joining us. I grieve for the sad event of Pearl Harbor, but, really, I do believe it was necessary to awaken the American people to our world danger. I do not think only of China—I think of the world. We must all think of the world.”
The door opened again and she broke off. A slender Chinese man in a long robe came in. It was the Old Tiger. Impossible indeed for anyone else to have those bold black eyes, that stubborn mouth! But he looked fragile. Was this the man who for fifteen years had conquered warlords and killed Communists? The Tiger put out his hand and withdrew it quickly as though he hated the touch of another’s hand, and the act revealed him an old-fashioned Chinese, unwillingly yielding to a foreign custom. With an abrupt gesture he motioned to William to sit down again and himself took a chair far from the fire.
“Does this American speak Chinese?” he inquired of his wife.
“How can he?” she replied.
“I must confess that I understand a little, at least,” William said. “My childhood was spent in Peking.”
The Old Tiger nodded vigorously. “Good—good!” His voice was high and thin. When he spoke to his soldiers he was forced to shriek.
William contemplated his ally, this bony bald-headed man who was the master of millions of Chinese. Tiger was a good name for him. In repose he looked like a monster cat, soft and safe, except for the eyes where ferocious temper smoldered. He was old China, he hated the new, he was rooted in the past. Enough of his own childhood knowledge remained with William so that he knew exactly where the Tiger belonged. Had there been no revolution among the Chinese people he would have ascended the Dragon Throne and become a strong successor to the Old Buddha. He would have made a spectacular figure there, wrapped in gold-embroidered imperial robes, the Son of Heaven. And the Chinese people, William thought, would have be
en better off. What were they now but a scattered head? People needed to worship and when they were given no god, they made themselves a golden calf. There was tragedy in this man, deprived of his throne because of the age in which he had been born. A strange respectful tenderness crept into William’s mood. He leaned toward the Old Tiger.
“I have come here to know how we can help you. There are two ways in which I myself can be of some use. I can influence millions of people. I can tell them—whatever you want me to tell them. I can also report to my government.”
He spoke in English and the beautiful woman translated rapidly into a Chinese so simple that he could understand it. The Old Tiger nodded his head and repeated the short word signifying good, “Hao—hao—” It was almost a purr. Not the soft purr of a cat, but the stiff, throaty rasp of a wild beast.
The beautiful woman seemingly effaced herself between the two men. She became an instrument, mild, almost shy. William all but forgot her as he pressed his arguments with the Tiger. But she was neither mild nor shy. A supreme actress by natural gift, she took his English words and remolded them into her fluent Chinese, stressing this word, muting that. When she perceived that he understood something of what she was saying, she varied her dialect slightly, slipping into a sort of Fukienese, excusing herself with adroitness.
“My husband comes from Fukien, and he understands that language better than Mandarin. It is essential that he grasp your every word.”
William could make nothing thereafter of what she said. He did not want to believe that she added meanings of her own. There was no reason why she should. He was ready for the utmost gift.
One hour, two hours went by. Suddenly the Tiger stood up.
“Hao!” he cried in his thin sharp voice. “It is all good. We will do these things. I will command my men. I shall not rest until the yellow devils are driven into the sea.”
Gods Men Page 44