Pearl Buck - Come, My Beloved

“David will do something quite different from you, King David,” she had said. The name his mother used for his father suited him and yet she had taught the son to perceive that however autocratic his father might be there was always the core of romance in him. “It’s romance that makes your father want to conquer the world,” his mother had once told him. “Long ago I tried to make him stop, we had enough money, more than we could ever spend, and then I saw that it wasn’t more money he wanted but greater dreams. Each dream leads to another as it becomes reality. The world is his theater and he is playwright, designer, producer, director, and star actor.”

She had laughed that day and then was suddenly grave. “And never forget, David, that he is really a king, a man among men. Your father could never do a small or petty deed. Oh, he can be cruel in a big way, but I’ve always known that if he saw the human beings he was cruel to, he would stop everything to rescue them, even from himself. The trouble is he doesn’t see them unless someone shows them to him. That is my business. Only I don’t always find them.”

She had made it her business to keep his father human and sometimes in the long quiet days David wondered if now it were his business, too, to keep his father aware of men, the average men, the little men, above whom he towered so high that he seldom stooped to see them. Yet he had seen them clearly enough in India, not individually, perhaps, but the mass of them, swarming in misery upon the starving earth, and he had been angry at their misery.

“What are you doing with yourself, David?” his father asked abruptly one morning at breakfast.

“Nothing at all for a few months,” David replied. “I hope by then I shall know what I want to do. Something, of course.”

“Want to go to Maine?” his father demanded.

“No, thank you,” David said. “I had rather be here with you.”

MacArd did not answer this. The words gave him comfort, his son’s presence made this still a home, but he must not grow to lean on the boy. He had said nothing of his big plan, and now he felt moved to share it. David might think it absurd, one never knew what the young felt, and there was a good deal of atheism in the colleges. He had never asked David anything about his religious beliefs. He said,

“You might like to help Dr. Barton in a job I have just put up to him.”

“What is that?” David asked half idly. He liked the family minister, though without profound feeling. He was an adherent, like the family doctor or dentist, better than Enderby, of course, but he had not liked the sermon Dr. Barton had preached at his mother’s funeral. Barton did not understand his mother or appreciate her depth and charm.

“I am planning a great memorial to your mother’s memory,” MacArd said. “It is to be a school of theology, a comprehensive institution dedicated to a practical missionary purpose. Barton is looking for suitable sites and we shall engage the best architects. I told him that he could have men from my office if he wanted them, but it occurs to me now that you might enjoy helping him yourself. Perhaps enjoy is not the word. I mean, it might interest you, give you some comfort, to help him. Then you and I could work together, too. I shall appreciate that.”

David was too surprised to speak. A theological seminary with a missionary purpose? He was not at all sure that his mother would have chosen such a memorial. But then she would have chosen no memorial at all. She had a gay humility, she disparaged her own gifts merrily and constantly, she rejected the monumental as pompous. Yet he knew her well enough to know, too, that if his father had wished to present her even with a monument, she would have accepted it with tender charm. “How fascinating!” He could hear her say the words again, as he had once heard her say them when his father had given her a preposterous showy necklace of square diamonds from his South African mines.

“Why a school of theology, Father?” he asked.

MacArd undertook earnestly the task of explaining himself to his son.

“It came to me after India. I saw the enormous contrast between the English and the Indian, or between ourselves and those wretched natives, for that matter. There must be some reason why the western world has risen in wealth and power. Call it the favor of God, if you like to use religious terms, which may be as true as any other. But the fact is that the people over there are oppressed by the weight of an evil and superstitious religion, whereas our religion has made us free men. We have overthrown our tyrants, we have been inspired by our faith. Surely men are not so different that what inspires and strengthens some cannot also and likewise strengthen and inspire others. If this is true, and I believe it to be so, then it is my Christian duty to share with the whole world what I myself have, and I am sure your mother would have agreed with me, if she had been with us in India. This is the logical conclusion. The only way to put a big idea into big action is to train plenty of men to carry it out. I propose to do it at the MacArd School of Theology.”

“I see,” David said. He had listened attentively, his quick mind, accustomed to his father’s concise speech, seizing and enriching every word. He had expected to be repelled but he was not. In spite of the unconscious arrogance of his father’s voice and bearing, the words themselves had not conveyed arrogance. His father did not, then, despise those dark and hopeless people clinging to their barren land. On the contrary, he implied that had they inspiration like his own there was no reason why they should not have all that he had.

“I’d like to think about what you have told me,” he said “It is interesting. I can see that it might be important.”

“It is very important,” his father said with emphasis. “I intend to make MacArd Memorial the greatest center in the world for a practical progressive Christianity that will improve the world.”

He got up. There was no need for answer. It was time for him to be downtown.

“Good-by, son,” he said in his heartiest manner. “Think it over and come with me if you can. It would mean a lot to me.”

David said nothing but he gave his mother’s smile and MacArd saw the smile and felt the old pang at his heart. So much Leila had left him when she died, and yet it would never be enough, because she had taken herself away. He must so live and so conduct himself that the hope of meeting her again in some eternity might be realized, if such hope was a possibility, as he now believed it was. Indeed, he must believe it was. He tried to return his son’s smile, raised his hand in silent gesture and went away.

David poured himself a second cup of coffee. His mother had made it a family habit that they be left alone at this meal, and Enderby did not intrude after he had brought in bacon, eggs, rolls and toast and coffee. Unless someone pressed the bell he would not return until he was sure that no one remained at the table, and David sat drinking his coffee and gazing reflectively into the formal garden upon which the French windows opened. Flowers were blooming in neat beds and at the far end a figure of Italian marble, a slender girl pouring water into a pool from a jar on her shoulder, made a focus for his eyes. His mother had been fond of the figure, a symbol, she had once said to him while they sat together at this table, of life-giving water, flowing from a deathless source. Once when they had been driving through the mountains north of the city they had come upon a vast overflowing lake, one of the reservoirs which supplied the city water, and she had pointed it out to him saying, “The water in our fountain comes from here, and it is the gathered waters of all these hills and valleys, pouring together.”