Pearl Buck - Gods Men

The large drawing room made a pleasant place. The florist set up an altar at one end and Ruth’s college preacher came to marry them. William was kindly even to Henrietta, and to his grandparents he was almost gentle. They had aged very much. Henrietta matched him in being kind, and thought of Clem and still could not bring herself to speak his name.

None of them were staying after the wedding. They went with Jeremy and Ruth to the dock and saw them aboard a ship for France. William was not with them. A call from his office had compelled him away. Then, with her daffodil dress packed carefully in her suitcase, Henrietta went home with her grandparents.

That night she told them about Clem. They sat together in the large and now rather shabby living room, and she tried to make them see why she must marry Clem.

“He is the only person in the world who knows everything about me.” she told them.

They listened simply, knowing somehow that there was very much that they did not know. China was a land they could not imagine and it seemed to them monstrous and inexplicable.

“You won’t be going back to that China, I hope,” her grandmother murmured.

“I don’t know what Clem will do,” Henrietta said. “He is always thinking about the world. If he goes of course I will, too.”

The old couple had had a hard day and they were not interested in the world. Mr. Vandervent yawned and touched the bell. When Millie, who always sat up until the family was in bed, came he asked for milk.

“Make it hot, Millie, and put a little sherry wine in it.”

“I will, Mr. Vandervent,” she answered.

A few minutes later, drowsily drinking his sherried milk, he nodded his head to Henrietta. “I suppose it is only what we must expect,” he said vaguely. They went upstairs to bed without asking her anything more and she sat down at her desk to write Clem a long letter.

“Clem, I want to be married now. I don’t want to go on with my doctorate. …”

After her graduation from college she had decided to go on with her doctorate in chemistry with the hope that she could be useful to Clem. This was after something he had said one day.

“I do wish I could have studied chemistry, hon,” he had said. “Take soy beans, for instance. Remember how the Chinese eat bean curd? You reckon you know enough to help me, hon?”

“I’d have to study some more,” she said.

She was still a little hurt because he had cried out eagerly, “Do you reckon you could, hon?” But she would not let herself be hurt with Clem. She knew his greatness. He could not put himself first.

After she had finished college, summa cum laude, an honor of which she scorned to tell William and which Clem could not fully comprehend, and which seemed only to surprise her parents, she had entered Columbia for more work in chemistry. Now, halfway through, suddenly she could not go on.

She gave her wild arguments to Clem, that nobody loved her and that she was too lonely to live. Even at college she had been lonely because, not having lived in America, she could not talk with other girls. She wanted to be with Clem, and him alone, and never leave him.

Clem sent back words grave and wise about finishing her education and not regretting things later, and about not being able to forgive himself it afterward she were sorry. When he had a torrent of letters from her all saying the same thing over and over again, he knew that it was true that she could die of her loneliness, because it was like his, a spiritual hunger that sent out seeking roots to find an earth its own. It was time for them to come together.

He went to her one day in June and made himself known to her grandparents to satisfy his own conscience, since he could not speak face to face with her father nor would Henrietta allow him to tell William of their love. The old couple were bewildered and anxious to do no wrong, but when Clem talked to them a while they were glad to think that there was nothing they could do. The young people had made up their minds.

“You may write to Father and Mother and tell them you cannot do anything about us,” Henrietta said.

Her grandfather sighed. “We won’t write, Henrietta. We’ll leave it to you.”

“It’s up to you young people,” her grandmother murmured. “We’ve done our best.”

Henrietta was moved to kiss them both for the first time in her life. She was a new creature now that she had made Clem understand that it was right for them to be married at once. She was almost gay. No wedding, she said, for whom had they to invite?

As soon as Clem had the license, she and Clem and the grandparents went one evening to the parsonage of the Presbyterian church nearby and there they were married. She wore her yellow dress, and Clem bought her some shellpink roses to hold. He had bought, too, a wide, old-fashioned gold wedding ring, the only ring she had ever possessed. When Clem put it on her finger she knew it would be there forever, enclosing dust when she was dead.

They went back to the house soberly to eat of a cake Millie had made and drink a toast in burgundy wine from a bottle her grandfather opened. Then she changed into her dark blue silk suit, the only new garment she had bought, and she had a strange uncertain feeling that though her grandparents yearned over her, they were glad to see her go, glad to get youth out of their aging house. They were tired and they wanted to sleep.

HENRIETTA SAT SEWING IN the small living room of her home. She was not good at sewing. Her fingers were clumsy and the thread knotted often, but it did not occur to her to give up merely because she was not adept and so she sewed steadily on, glancing only occasionally through the window by which she sat. The scene was simple enough, a street of cheap houses much like this one that she and Clem had rented next to the store. Whatever grace the street had came from two rows of maple trees which were now beginning to show the hues of autumn. It was late afternoon and under the trees children were playing in the leaves, running hither and thither, apparently unwatched unless a quarrel brought a mother to the door.

“You, Dottie! Stop kicking your little brother!”

“But I wanna!”

“I don’t care what you want. Stop it, I say!”

She wondered if Clem wanted children. They had never talked of children, each for some unspoken reason. She was not sure whether she even wanted children. She had never got used to living in America and she would not know how to bring up a child. In China there had been the amahs. Here she would have to wash all the child’s things, and tend it herself when it cried. Besides, Clem was enough. He was a dozen men in one, with all the great schemes in his head. It would be as much as she could do to see that he lived to carry them through.

That he would succeed she did not doubt. From the moment she had seen him in the dingy college sitting room she had believed in him. Trust was the foundation of her love. She could not love anyone unless she trusted and for that reason she really loved no one except Clem and her father.

As long as she lived she would not forgive William because he was angry when he found that she had married Clem. She had written to Ruth, after all, and at first Ruth had not dared to tell William the whole truth. She had let William think the marriage had not yet taken place and he tried to stop it, thinking it still only an engagement. He had actually cabled to Peking to his mother. When she opened the cable from her mother forbidding her too late to marry Clem, she had known it was William’s doing.

“That ignorant fellow!” William had called Clem, and Ruth had told her.

Even Ruth was sorry. “I wish you’d told us, Henrietta. It wasn’t kind. He isn’t suitable for you. You won’t be able to bring him to William’s house.”