Pearl Buck - Gods Men

But he must be alone. Merely to be alone, he now felt, would bring him some of the peace. He thought of his office and the quiet apartment opening into it, and was eager to be there where he need not speak to Candace or see her. He got up and went into the house and met her coming downstairs, in a floating chiffon dress of apple green.

“I shall have to go back to town,” he said abruptly.

“Oh — I am sorry for that.”

She spoke sincerely but without petulance. After these years she was accustomed to William’s sudden decisions. She would wait until he was gone and then she would call up Jeremy. If he and Ruth were at home she would drive over to their house and dine with them. William’s mother was there, but on this heavenly evening she could bear that. Jeremy’s house stood near the water, its lawn sloping down to the Sound, and the moon would be beautiful upon the waves.

“Shall you be late, William?”

“I don’t know. Don’t sit up for me, of course.”

“If I am not here, I’ll be at Jeremy’s. Don’t sit up for me, either.”

She put her hands on his shoulders and pressed herself against him. He kissed her cheek but did not respond to the pressure. Ah well, her father had said loving was enough! She made it do.

William could have explained to no one his impulse toward England at this hour of his life. He had been often in England in recent years, but only for short times and for business. Now he wanted an indefinite time which might be short or long. He told himself that this depended upon how he felt. Actually he knew that he was going on a search, a romantic search, absurd if it were spoken, and therefore it could not be spoken. His real life had always been secret. Now he felt the need to confide. Vague need, vague longing, the middle-aged desire to live before he died, the thirst to learn how to enjoy before he lost the power, these were his private reasons, not to be shared.

He stayed in London for some days, ostensibly to attend a few business conferences. He toyed with the idea of setting up an entirely English office for the publication of a purely English tabloid and to discuss this he met Lord Northcliffe for a week end, and acknowledged frankly his debt to the master journalist.

“I saw one of your papers in the reading room at Harvard, my lord, and began that very day to plan my life around a newspaper like it.”

“Really,” the stubby lord said without surprise. “We’ve a bit in common, you and I, haven’t we? Success from the middle classes, eh? Your father was something odd, as I remember — so was mine.”

William preferred not to answer this. He remembered that this baronet had once put on his head a hat worn by Napoleon and had said without vanity, “It fits me, by Jove!” Since then he had spent some of his swift wealth upon such fantasies as arctic exploration, had forced upon his quiet countrymen noisy automobiles, had given prizes for airplane models and attempts at flying, and now clamored for fellow patriots to prepare themselves against the dangers of a rising Germany.

There was something about this plebeian lord which repelled William. They parted without being friends, the Englishman feeling with amazement that William was what he had never seen before, an American snob, and William feeling that England was better than this Englishman thought she was and that he was somehow unworthy. If he had met Alfred Harmsworth as a schoolboy he would have fought him and easily licked him. He sat, later that week, for an evening under the scintillations of an aging Herbert Wells, refusing however, to join in the absurd games devised for his amusement. He remained saturnine even before the brisk sallies and the ceaseless flow of his host’s fixed though fluid opinions.

After three or four weeks of being a quiet guest, unobtrusively American in English country houses, William met a young man to whom he was exceedingly attracted. He could not account for the singular strength of this attraction until he discerned in the young man a faint resemblance to the hero of his youth in the Chefoo school, the son of the British ambassador. This young man’s name was Michael Culver-Hulme, a name ancient enough in English history and with many branches. In the stillness of a Sunday afternoon before tea at Blakesbury House, where William had been invited by Lord Saynes, who had heard of his wealth and power, he met Michael.

Culver-Hulme, a distant cousin of Saynes, had asked frankly for the chance to meet the American whom everybody had heard about and almost no one had seen. Lord Saynes had laughed.

“What do you want to meet the chap for?” he had inquired of Michael.

Michael had replied, “I’ve a fancy to see him, that’s all. My uncle went to school with him — my mother’s brother. He’s told me rather grim tales. He’s quite proud now of having gone to school with him, though in the old days they all made fun of him. It seems he used to stalk about the school grounds rather like a silent and haughty young Hamlet.”

On this Sunday afternoon, beneath a sky of milky November blue, the Englishman saw William leaning lonely against a stone wall, gazing across the lawns to the valley beyond. He went to him with the bold and entirely natural charm which was both assured and youthful.

“I say, sir, I hope you won’t mind if I butt in?”

“Not at all,” William said. He smiled slightly. “Our World War seems to have left its effect at least upon the English language.”

“Not so much as your wonderful papers, sir. I wonder if you know how much they’re admired? I’ve heard that Northcliffe himself has taken a point or two.”

William felt the soft warmth of young flattery steal about his heart. He was flattered often enough, but this English flattery was sweet, and he did not discard it with his usual cynicism.

“I wonder if you could by any chance have had a relative once at an English school in China? I don’t believe in coincidence. But you look alike.”

“Not coincidence, sir. Many of our family have been in China or India. It’s a family tradition. It was my uncle, I think. He’s often spoken of you and been quite proud about it.”

Ancient wounds began to heal in William’s heart, but he maintained his dignity and only slightly smiled. “I remember him as an autocratic young man, quite beyond noticing a mere American.”

“He knows better than that now, sir.”

Michael waited and when nothing more followed, he began again with imperturbable chatty briskness. “I wish you’d come and have a week with us, Mr. Lane. My father and mother would be enormously pleased, and I’d be honored.”

“I’m here on a holiday,” William replied. “That perhaps will excuse my ready acceptance of a kindly invitation. I should like to come and call upon your father, if I may. If you are there, it is all the better.”

“Then will you consider it an invitation, sir? If so, you’ll have a note from my father. What week, sir?”

“Week after next?”

“Splendid! Shall you be in England for Christmas?”

“No, I must get home before then. My sons will be coming home from college.”

“Splendid! Where are you stopping?”

“I am at the Savoy.”

“Good! Then you’ll hear from us. Hulme Castle, near Kerrington Downs.”

“Thank you.”

The two words were so spoken that they seemed dismissal but Michael refused to accept them. He divined in the American a diffidence so combined with pride that it had become arrogance, a knowledge of superiority augmented by the fear of an incomprehensible inferiority. This American had all the kingdoms of the earth, a handsome body, a shrewd mind, wealth that had become a fable about which people guessed and gossiped on two sides of the ocean, and from all this a power was emerging which Michael knew was viewed with gravity even in the Foreign Office.