Pearl Buck - Gods Men

In all this Candace was of no use to him. She had grown indifferent to the frightful responsibilities he undertook as his duty and she had even quarreled one day with his mother. He had never been able to discover either from her or his mother what had taken place, except that he had been the subject of their difference. Candace had simply laughed when he pressed her for detail.

“Your mother has lived too long in Peking.” It was all she would tell him.

His mother went a little further. “I hate to say it, William, but Candace doesn’t appreciate you as a wife should. Whether she understands the wonderful work you are doing is quite beside the point. I didn’t always understand your dear father, either, and certainly I could not always sympathize with his ideas or even with all that he did, but I always appreciated him. ”

Candace had grown strange and reckless in these years after the war, likely on any Sunday morning to announce that she was going to the beach with the boys instead of sending them to Sunday School. That William himself did not go to church had nothing to do with his sons, who, he felt, should be taught some sort of religion. Indeed, he himself, since his father’s death, had felt the need to find God anew, but he could not return to the pusillanimities of his former rector. He sought a firmer faith, a stronger church, and there were times when he thought of Catholicism. This, however, had nothing to do with Candace and the two boys. The seashore place was another recklessness of hers, although he had quite willingly bought the mile of private ocean front in Maine. She had declared that she wanted only a shack, to which he had simply said there was a right way to do a thing, and comfort he must have, even though in summer he could only be there a day or two a week. He had hired a young architect who designed an extraordinary house on top of a gray cliff, and a sliding staircase, like an escalator, which let them down to the sea and to a huge cabaña. Altogether it was effective and he was proud of it.

He had to acknowledge to himself now that Candace had never meant very much to him, and it had been years since he needed anything of Roger Cameron. When Mrs. Cameron died last year old Roger told William that he wanted to sell his shares in the newspapers.

“The dividends are going up,” William said.

“That’s why I want to sell,” Roger had replied.

This made no sense but William did not reply because he was vaguely wounded. His pride rose and he sent a memorandum to the business manager that he wanted all shares in the corporation bought up so that he might be sole owner. When the reports came in he saw the name of Seth James. Seth was now backing a new daily paper that William saw at once was doomed to die. Seth should have known better, he had told himself, as with complacency he studied the first issues. “The paper with a purpose,” Seth had foolishly announced. Of course people would not buy it. People did not want to be taught. They wanted to be amused. William himself was never amused. It was Jeremy’s task to find among thousands of photographs for his tabloids, pictures sorted by twelve girls under twenty years of age, those scenes which would make people laugh. Horror was as good as laughter and horror William himself could judge. A murder skillfully portrayed, a strangled woman, a dying child, a family weeping after the father was crushed under a truck, a maniac escaped, an airplane that crashed into a small home on Long Island, these were all pleasing to people.

Yet such was William’s conscience since his father’s death that he allowed no issue of a paper to be sent to the people without its quota of religion. He truly believed in God. His own being, ordered by purpose, convinced him of the existence of God and his tabloids carried photographs of churches and ministers, priests and nuns. William was not narrow. People worshiped God in many ways, though he rejected any form not Christian. He had disagreed with Estey, his new assistant editor, over a photograph of the Panchen Lama — news, yes, but not religion. People the next week saw the benign face of the Lama appearing side by side with the President’s wife in her Easter frock.

On a day in early October he sat thinking of these things in his immense office on the top floor of his own building. The office opened into a handsome apartment where he could sleep on the nights when he had to work late. Caspar Wilde, the young English modernist, had designed it for him. William had wanted it done by a Swedish architect, but when he examined the designs laid before him he had been forced to see that there was nothing to equal English modern in its conservative and heavy soundness. It was exasperating but true. In spite of the World War there was as yet no crack in the armor of the British Empire. His reporters, stationed permanently in India as in almost every other country, informed him of bitter disappointment among Indians after the war.

“Educated Indian opinion complains that Britain shows no signs of fulfilling wartime promises for independence, made to leading Indian politicos. Rumors are that in the next war Indians will seize the opportunity for rebellion.”

This perhaps was a crack in the imperial armor, but no more.

William had no sympathy with independence for India. His imagination, anchored by the mob in the Peking street, saw in India those faces darkened by the Indian sun and multiplied by swarming millions. If and when the crack became disaster for the British Empire, his own country must be ready to assume control.

America was young. When this crazy period of postwar play was over, Americans would see their destiny and grow up. In his editorials he skillfully reminded them now and again of that destiny. He roused their pride by pictures of the greatest factories in the world, the largest airships, the fastest trains. It troubled him that the American army and navy were not more impressive. When the navy decided upon maneuvers anywhere in the world he sent a flock of photographers with them. Bright sea and flying flags and ranks of men in white duck made wonderful pictures.

The people were still in a playful mood. On this bright autumn afternoon even he was not inclined to be critical. Times were good and people had money to throw away. He himself would play if he could, but he did not find the usual diversions amusing or playful. At Chefoo he had learned to play a brilliant game of tennis, cruel in cuts and slashes, all but dishonest and certainly ruthless, but he seldom played. There was no incentive for he had no competitors. The careless padding about the courts with Candace at Crest Hill, his home on Long Island Sound, or on week ends facing Jeremy who refused to be any man’s enemy even at sport, could not divert his mind. He liked an enemy and with an enemy in tennis he came nearer to amusement, enjoyment, relaxation, perhaps, than at any other sport, when occasionally he found an opponent equal to him.

He sat rigidly in front of his huge circular desk, his hands clenched in fists upon its blond surface, thinking. He had everything in his life except human companionship. He was remote from every human creature, even from Candace and his sons, and certainly from his mother and sisters. He had no one near him, neither man nor woman. Jeremy had long ago taken his position as a jeering light-minded brother-in-law who knew he could not be fired because it would make an office scandal. Yet Jeremy had a flair which gave the papers the humor that no one else could supply, William because he did not know how, and the staff because they were afraid of him. Jeremy could have been his friend, William sometimes thought with a certain wistfulness, but he did not want to be. Perhaps he could not understand or value the purpose for which William lived. The Camerons were all light-minded. Old Roger nowadays was as gay as an ancient grasshopper and Candace had grown benign and careless of her figure. She laughed at everything Jeremy said when the families were together and even Ruth could not make her mindful of what was dignity. William knew that Ruth was his life-long possession, but he wondered sometimes in the gloom in which he lived whether, were he permanently out of earshot, she too would laugh. He had, in short, no one of his own. His sons did not interest him. He was as lonely as a king.