Pearl Buck - Gods Men

It was a smooth journey, and William enjoyed it with quiet dignity. He kept aloof from his mother and sisters, staying most of the time in the observation car where behind a magazine he listened to men’s talk. There was no difficulty in Montreal, and in New York his mother took them at once to the Murray Hill, where he had a room to himself because he was a boy. It was high ceilinged, and the tall windows had red velvet curtains held back by loops of brass. The luxury of the room and its bath pleased him. This then was America. It was better than he had feared.

They ate in a dining room where fountains played and canaries sang, and he enjoyed this, too.

“I believe in the best,” his mother said. “Besides, Papa and Mama always stayed here when we came to town.”

His mother kept him with her in New York for a week while she smoothed his path toward college, but Henrietta and Ruth she sent to her parents at Old Harbor. She did not take him at once to the office of the Mission Board. Instead she toured the best stores, asking to see young men’s clothing. When she found something she liked she made William try it on. She bought nothing, however, merely making notes of garments and prices.

With these in a small notebook in her handbag she went on the morning of the fourth day to the Board offices and there was received with a deference which was balm to William’s pride.

“Ah, Mrs. Lane,” a rosy faced white-haired executive said, “we’ve been expecting you. We had a cablegram from Dr. Lane. What can we do for you?”

“I have a good deal of shopping to do for my son’s entrance into Harvard,” Mrs. Lane said. Her voice and look were equally firm.

The plump elderly executive, a retired minister himself, looked doubtful. “We have special arrangements with medium-priced stores to give us a ten percent discount.”

Mrs. Lane interrupted without interest in the medium-priced stores. “I want to see the treasurer immediately.”

“Certainly, Mrs. Lane — this way, please,” the white-haired man said.

“You stay here, William,” Mrs. Lane commanded.

While William waited, his mother had a long interview with the mission treasurer which left him looking dazed and certainly left him silent. William had stayed in the reading room because his mother wanted, she said, to be alone with the finances. He had sauntered about, reading pamphlets impatiently. They were religious and full of hopeful accounts of the hospitals and schools and orphanages and churches with which he was entirely surfeited. He wanted to get away from everything he had known. When he entered college in the autumn he would not tell anyone who his father was or that he came from China.

“There now,” Mrs. Lane said when she emerged from the inner office. “I have everything all arranged. You’ll be able to get along nicely.” She held her long skirts in one hand and over her shoulder she said to the little mission treasurer, “Thank you, Mr. Emmons, you’ve been very helpful.”

Mr. Emmons broke his silence. “You do understand, don’t you, Mrs. Lane, that I haven’t made any promises? I mean — I’ll have to take up these rather unusual requests with the Board — evening clothes, for example—”

“I’m sure they’ll see that my son deserves some special consideration, after all we’ve been through,” Mrs. Lane said in her clear sharp voice. “Come, William, we can get the noon train after all.”

He had followed her, holding himself very straight and not speaking to the shabby little treasurer.

When they reached his grandfather’s house at Old Harbor, he was pleased to see it was a large one. It was old-fashioned and needed paint, but it stood in large, somewhat neglected grounds.

“Papa doesn’t keep things up the way he used to, I see,” his mother said. They had taken a hack at the station and now got down. She handed him her purse. “Pay the man his dollar, William,” she told him.

“Grass needs cutting,” she went on. “I suppose Papa can’t afford a gardener all the time, now he’s retired.”

The hack drove away, and William looked at the suitcases the man had set down in the path. “We’d better take what we can,” his mother said with some embarrassment. “I don’t know how many servants Papa has now. We used to have a houseman and three maids.”

She picked up two suitcases, and much against his will he took the other and followed her to the house. The door stood open and when they entered they were met by Henrietta and Ruth, dripping in bathing suits, and by a carelessly dressed old gentleman whom he recognized, though with extreme discomfort, as his grandfather.

Mrs. Lane swooped down upon him. “Well, Papa, here I am again!”

“You’ve grown a little older,” he said, looking at his tall daughter.

Mr. Vandervent was no longer imposing. He was a potbellied, mild-looking man, and he seemed timid before his tall grandson.

“How do, William,” he said, putting out a round little hand.

William clasped it coldly. “I’m very well, sir,” he replied correctly. “I hope you are, too.”

“So so,” Mr. Vandervent said. “The sea don’t really agree with me, but your grandma likes it.”

“What we’ve been through—” Mrs. Lane began.

She was interrupted by a loud scream. A tall fat woman burst through a swinging door, an apron tied about her waist.

“Helen, my goodness!”

It was her mother. They embraced and kissed. “I was just stirring up one of my chocolate cakes, thinking that William would probably — we only have two maids now, Helen — why, William, this isn’t you, never! Isn’t he the image of your father, Robert? Your great-grandfather was a real handsome man, William.”

Henrietta had disappeared and through the window William saw her walking along the shore. Ruth was standing on one foot and then another.

“William!” she now whispered. “Do get in your bathing suit. The ocean is wonderful.”

It gave him an excuse and he seized it.

“May I, Mother?”

“Go on,” his grandmother said heartily. “You’ll have time before supper.”

Supper! The word chilled his spine. He had heard it among the commoner missionaries, the Seventh Day Adventists, the Primitive Baptists, the Pentecostal people. At the English school the evening meal was always called dinner and since at his own home it had been so, too, it had not occurred to him that it could be anything else here.

He mounted the stairs with laggard steps and was arrested by his mother’s voice. “Here, William, since you’re going up, you might as well take some of the suitcases.”

He stopped, not trusting his ears, and looked at his mother. She laughed, but he discerned embarrassment in the steel gray eyes she kept averted from his. “You may as well realize that you are in America, son,” she told him. “You’ll have to do a lot of waiting on yourself here.”

He stood still for one instant; then with a passionate energy he turned and ran downstairs and loaded himself with the bags and staggered upstairs again. Once he glanced over the balustrade to see if they were looking at him, but nobody was. His mother was talking about the siege, and they had forgotten him.

No one had told Clem to telegraph to his grandfather, and he would have been reluctant to spend the money. When he got off at last at Centerville, there was no one to meet him, but he had expected no one. Carrying his suitcase, he approached a fat man who was staring at the train and scratching his head.

“Can you tell me where Mr. Charles Miller lives?” Clem inquired.

The man had started a yawn and stopped it midway. “Never heard of him.”

“He lives on a farm,” Clem said.

“Your best bet would be that way,” the man said nodding toward the south.