Gods Men

by Pearl S. Buck

  “You can’t love me—as quickly as I have loved you—I don’t expect it—” William was stammering these broken sentences.

  She was an honest woman, though beautiful, and what she now knew she would do, she wanted done with all her heart.

  She stepped back, but only a little, and she let him hold her hands. “I suppose it is too soon,” she said frankly. “But I don’t think it is at all impossible—William!”

  July in Ohio could be as hot as in India. Henrietta felt the heat. She had spent the last month with Clem in Mexico, where he had gone to confer with the Food Minister who wanted American wheat. Washington had been apathetic and he had called on Clem who, after listening carefully, had insisted on seeing Mexico for himself, so that he would know just how much the people needed wheat. He had not noticed the hot weather. His blood ran cool and he was thinner than ever. Mexican food was poison to him, the tamales hot as Indian food and even the vegetables full of red peppers, the spinach boiled to the color and taste of dead grass. He doggedly ate the native foods here as elsewhere, however, because he wanted to know what the people lived on, and afterward was tortured with the dyspepsia that got worse as he grew older. He had promised to get the wheat somehow, and they had come home.

  Their house now as they opened the front door was hot and dusty and the air was stale.

  “You get your dress off, hon,” Clem said to Henrietta. “Go upstairs and put on a wrapper and relax. I’ll open the windows.”

  Henrietta obeyed without answer. She had begun to gain weight and it was a relief to get out of her corset. She went upstairs into the large bathroom which Clem had fitted up himself and modeled after the ones in India. She stood in the big zinc-lined tray and filled a jar with water from the tap; then with a dipper she poured it over herself Indian fashion. The house was full of things that Clem had admired in other countries. He liked chopsticks, for instance, better than knives and forks. They were cleaner, he said. The water was lukewarm but even so, cooler than she was. She toweled herself and then put on the negligee that Clem always called a wrapper. She did not mind. It was comfortable to live with a man who did not know what she wore.

  She went downstairs to unpack the groceries they had bought for supper. Clem had taken off his coat and sat in his white shirtsleeves at the dining table, figuring on a sheet of paper. His shoulder blades were sharp and the back of his neck was hollowed. He had lost weight in the Mexico heat. She did not speak aloud her worry. Nothing annoyed him more than to hear her worry about his being thin.

  She sat down in a large wicker chair, tore open the envelope which was postmarked New York City, and began to read to herself. The first paragraph revealed catastrophe. Her mother wrote, “I am glad your poor father has passed on. He could never have endured what is about to happen to our family. I have wept and prayed to no avail. William is adamant. He is beyond my reach. I remember when he was a small infant upon my bosom. I know he is my son, but I cannot recognize him. What have we done to deserve this?”

  Thus far Henrietta went without comment to Clem. Then she saw the next sentence and a smothered cry escaped her.

  “What is it?” Clem asked.

  He turned from his figures. It was not like Henrietta to cry out about anything. Now her large gray eyes were wide, staring at the sheet she held. They were the color of William’s eyes but not like them in their depths.

  “William is going to divorce Candace!” She breathed the words with the utmost horror, and he received them with horror as they looked at each other.

  “What’s Candace done?” he asked sternly.

  Henrietta returned to the letter. “She can’t have done anything,” she murmured. Her eyes swept down the page. “Mamma doesn’t say—yes, she does. She says Candace is just what she always was—there’s no excuse for William—he doesn’t even make an excuse—you know how he is. He always does what he is going to do and never says why. Mamma says it’s just an infatuation. It’s an Englishwoman he met on his trip.”

  Henrietta would have cried had she tears, but she had none. Against William her heart hardened, and she crushed the letter in her hand and threw it into the woven wicker wastepaper basket. She had never loved Candace but now she almost loved her. Long ago she had left her father’s profound faith, but she had a sort of religion, fed by Clem’s unselfishness and devotion to his single cause. The Camerons were good people, in their way as good as her father had been, and all the old decencies remained. A man did not divorce his wife without cause and the best of men did not divorce their wives for any cause. William had left the ranks of the good.

  “I don’t ever want to see William again,” she declared with passion. Clem rose from his chair and came over and knelt beside her. She put her head down and upon his narrow bony shoulders. His thin arms went around her.

  “There, there,” he muttered.

  “Oh, Clem,” she sighed, half heartbroken. “I am glad you are good. It’s your goodness that I trust.”

  He pondered this, patting her back in a rhythm. “Maybe we need some sort of religion, hon,” he said at last. “We grew up with God, you know. We haven’t deserted Him exactly, we just haven’t known how to fit Him in.”

  “You don’t need anything, you’re just naturally good.”

  “I might be on the wrong track, always thinking about food. Man does not live by bread alone.”

  She pressed his head against her cheek. “Don’t be different, Clem!” Then after a minute, “Poor Candace! I must write her a letter.”

  She got up and sat down where Clem had sat, and saw upon the pages of yellow paper he used for his endless figuring the words: “Average yield per acre (Mexico)” followed by lines of calculations of Mexico’s millions of people. She tore off a yellow sheet, too tired to look for better writing paper.

  Dear Candace,

  We are just home from Mexico. I found Mother’s letter here. I cannot say a word of comfort to you. I am ashamed that William is my brother. None of us have ever understood him. Mother is glad my father is dead and I think I am too, unless Father could have kept William from being so wicked.

  There is nothing I can do, I guess. It’s too late. I don’t pray as I used to but if I did, I would go down on my knees. Perhaps I should even yet. I feel closer to you than I ever have. And there are the two boys—how they must despise their father! It is all wicked and you have never deserved anything like this. I cannot imagine what reason he gives. You are so pretty and so good tempered. I hope William suffers for this.

  Candace read the letter in her old room at her father’s house. She smiled rather sadly, thinking that she had never known Henrietta until now, when the bond between them was broken. She glanced at the small silver clock on the dressing table. She was no longer William’s wife. The decree was to be granted at noon and it was now six minutes beyond. She had been acutely aware of the time as it had passed and then had forgotten it for a few minutes and in that little space of time it was over. She let the letter drop on the floor and leaned her head back against the back of the chair and closed her eyes.

  She had protested nothing. That was her pride. Jeremy had flung himself out of William’s offices forever, he said, but when she saw Ruth she had made him go back. Ruth had no defense for William—she was too gentle and good for that. But she did not blame him, for to her alone William had explained himself, and she had tried to explain him also to Jeremy and to Candace. “He’s always been different from everybody,” Ruth said in her earnest, sweet little voice. “He’s been so lonely all his life. I sometimes think if Father hadn’t died … Father understood William, but he had to wait for him to grow up. I remember Father saying that once.”

  “It’s his own fault if he is lonely,” Jeremy had retorted. “He holds himself above everybody. Yes, he does, Ruth. He lords it over us all.”

  “I know it seems that way, Jeremy, but really inside he’s quite lost.”

  Jeremy had snorted and Ruth nodded her head up and down very positivel
y. “Yes, William is lost. He needs something he hasn’t got. None of us can give it to him.”

  Upon this Candace had spoken. “If Emory can give it to him, then I shall be glad.”

  “Oh, Candy, you’re so generous,” Ruth had cried, the tears streaming from her soft blue eyes.

  But still she had defended William in her heart and Candace saw it, and because Jeremy loved his wife he, too, would allow William his way. She had no knight, unless her old father came forward. But he evaded life nowadays, indeed not from lack of love, so much as from too much love. So sensitive had he grown as age came upon him, so excessively tender, so wishful that human beings should all be happy, that when they were not he could not bear to be near them. So because she loved him, Candace had shielded her heart from her father and affected to be gay about William’s new love, and she insisted that of course he must marry Emory, and she even pretended that she and Emory could and would meet and be friends, while in her heart she knew that this could never be.

  With her sons, she was cavalier. Will and Jerry, though tall young men, still cared more for football than for anything else on earth. “We mustn’t blame your father,” she had said to them brightly. “The truth is, our marriage never quite came off, if you know what I mean. Why should you know? It’s like a flower that doesn’t quite bloom. Still, I’ve had you two and that is a great deal to get out of one marriage.” She had looked from one solemn young face to the other.

  “Are you going to marry again?” It was Will’s question. She met his young gray eyes and shook her head, still playfully. This was her protection now and forever, not to care too much, not to mind. She thought of fallen leaves floating upon the surface of the swimming pool, of leaves drifting down from the trees, of a bird resting upon the waves of atmosphere, of flower petals dropping upon the grass. Her father was right. Escape life, perhaps, but certainly escape pain! The blow had been dealt.

  Jerry, the younger, had spoken with sudden rage. “Why don’t you go and see that woman and tell her she has no right to—”

  “Shut up,” Will said for her. “You don’t understand. You’re only a kid.”

  Neither son had spoken one word of their father. He was immovable, unchangeable; none could reach him. Whatever he did was done. He was absolute.

  William had needed none of them, not his mother, not Ruth. No one existed for him except himself, his monolithic being, his single burning purpose, more consuming than any he had ever known. He was ruthless in his office, angry with all delay, intolerably demanding upon his lawyers.

  He had tried to compel Candace to go to Reno so that in six weeks he might be free. She had refused and old Roger Cameron had demanded an appointment. William had refused that. He gave orders that he would not speak with anyone on the telephone. He lived entirely in his apartment at the office and made no communication with his sons. After he was married to Emory he would let them see for themselves why he married her.

  When he discovered that Candace was not going to Reno, he went himself. He endured weeks of loneliness without Emory, days when he called her by telephone that he might hear her voice and assure himself that she still lived, that she had not changed her mind, that she had no thought of delaying their marriage. His decree granted, he left by the next train and, speeding to England upon the fastest ship, he went straight to Hulme Castle.

  She was there waiting for him, the wedding day set two days hence, and when he had her in his arms, he let down his heart. He put his face into the soft dark hair.

  “Oh, my love—” They were words he had never used to Candace.

  “You look fearfully tired, William.”

  “I shan’t be tired any more, Emory.”

  She did not reply to this, and he stood for a moment letting his weariness drain away in the silence.

  “Two days from now we’ll be married.”

  “Two days,” she echoed.

  “I wish it were now.”

  To this, too, she made no reply.

  They were married in the room where they had first met. She did not want to be married in Hulme Abbey, where, had Cecil lived, the ceremony would have taken place. Her parents had agreed, and so an altar had been set up in the drawing room. No one was there beyond her family and the vicar and his wife and a few people whom William had never seen before. “A quick, quiet wedding,” he told her and she obeyed.

  10

  UPON A GAY AND prosperous people the thunder clouds of the Great Depression now crashed down their destruction. In the late summer, Clem had felt something was wrong. He could not define, even to Henrietta, his uneasiness, beginning at first as a personal discontent in his own mind, though he tried to do so one Sunday, the last in August. She was aware of his eternal searching for causes and, by her listening silences and her careful questions, helped him to see more clearly the vague shapes he perceived in the future.

  Long ago Henrietta had come to understand that in Clem there was something of the seer, if not of the prophet. His instinct for humanity was so delicate, his perception of mankind so ready, that without magic and entirely reasonably he was able to forecast the possible in terms amazingly definite. Had he lived in ancient times, she sometimes mused, had he been born in those early ages when people explained the inexplicable, the mystic man, by saying he had been fathered by a god or had seen gods upon the mountains or in the flames of a burning bush, struck perhaps by lighting, they would have cried out that Clem was a prophet sent to them by God and they would have listened to him. And, were they frightened enough, they might have heeded him in time to avert disaster.

  Now Clem and Henrietta, seated in rocking chairs upon their own narrow front porch, looked to the passer-by no different from any other middle-aged couple upon the street of an ordinary Ohio town. He talked and she listened and questioned. He was in his shirtsleeves and an old pair of gray trousers, and she saw that the collar of his blue shirt was torn. She resolved to throw it away secretly when he took it off that night. Clem was miserly about his clothes and declared them good enough to wear long after they had reached the point of dusting cloths and mops.

  “I can’t just tell you in so many words how I feel about things,” Clem said. “It’s like sitting out on the grass on a nice bright day and then suddenly knowing that the earth is shaking under you—not much, but just a little. Or it’s like being in the woods, maybe, and wondering if you don’t smell smoke somewhere.”

  “If you were in the woods and smelled smoke,” Henrietta said, “you’d find out first which way the wind was blowing and look in that direction, wouldn’t you?”

  Clem flashed her an appreciative look. “I’ve thought of that. I can’t tell which way the wind is blowing—not yet. Crops were good enough this year, at least taking the country as a whole. Maybe things are all right. Maybe it’s nothing but my own queasy stomach. I oughtn’t to have eaten those corn dodgers last night.”

  “I’ll never have them again,” Henrietta said.

  Clem went on after a few seconds of rocking. “The trouble is that the way things are now in the world, we’re all tied together in one way or another. There might be an earthquake somewheres else which would upset us, too.”

  She did not reply to this. The evening was pleasant though hot and children in bathing suits were playing with hoses, spraying each other and shrieking with laughter. Clem, deeply troubled by thoughts which were now roaming the world, saw nothing.

  “The news from abroad is not bad, though, Clem,” she reminded him. “Yusan says the new government in China is bringing order and getting rid of the warlords, at least, and pushing Japan off. And Goshal says that Gandhi has made a sort of interlude in India.”

  Clem got up. He walked across the porch, took out his penknife, and began to cut a few dead twigs from a huge wisteria vine that Henrietta had planted the first spring she came to New Point. Now, a thick and serpentine trunk, it crawled to the roof and clung about the chimney for support.

  “Goshal is a Brahman no matter
what I try to tell him,” Clem said. “What you call interlude, hon, is only a truce. Gandhi has got the British to compromise for a while for just one reason, and Goshal can’t see it. The price of food has gone down so much that millions of peasants are going to starve, hon, if something isn’t done quick.”

  “City people will have more to eat if food is cheap,” Henrietta said.

  “Most people don’t live in cities,” Clem said. “That’s not the point though, and I am surprised at you, hon. If the peasants and farmers starve it doesn’t help the factory workers in the long run. Gandhi is right when he says everything has to be done for the interests of the peasants. They’re basic everywhere in the world.”

  Henrietta felt clarification begin in the waters of Clem’s soul. He was clipping one twig after another and they fell upon the wooden floor of the porch with soft dry snips of sound.

  Clem went on, almost to himself. “And I don’t know what to think about things in China. A new government? Well, any government, I guess, is a good thing after all these years of fighting and goings on. I don’t blame Yusan for being glad about that. But I wrote him yesterday and told him that if this Chiang Kai-shek didn’t get down to earth with all his plans and study what the people need, it will be the same story. You don’t have to be an Old Empress to make the same mistakes.”

  Henrietta was rocking back and forth silently, her following thoughts circling the globe.