Pearl Buck - Gods Men

“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 and 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.