Pearl Buck - Gods Men

No one noticed his silence. Lord Hulme was eating with enjoyment, and drinking his tea from a large breakfast cup.

“I hope you weren’t seasick,” Lady Hulme said.

“Thanks, no,” William replied.

“It’s so beastly when one is,” Lady Hulme observed. “Of course American men are not so heartless as Englishmen. Malcolm always has believed that I am seasick purposely.”

“You are, my dear,” the Earl said.

“There, you see,” Lady Hulme said. “We went to Sicily for our honeymoon thirty-five years ago and I got ill in the little boat that took us across the Channel and had nowhere to lay my head. He wouldn’t let me put it upon his knee.”

“Oh, come now,” the Earl retorted. “As I remember, I hadn’t a chance to walk about — your head was always on my knee.”

They wrangled amiably, worrying the old subject between them, and Emory sat watching them with amused and lovely eyes, glancing now and again at William. She did not interrupt and at last Lady Hulme was weary.

“More tea all around,” she announced.

The Earl, revived by tea and argument, turned to William. “I see those papers of yours sometimes. What sort reads them, shopgirls and so on, I suppose!”

Michael sprang into the arena. “Everybody reads them, Father.”

“Really? Mostly pictures, though, aren’t they?”

William took the Englishman into his confidence. “Our people don’t read very much. One has to use pictures to convey one’s meaning.”

“Ah, then you have a purpose?” Lord Hastings said rather quickly.

“Doesn’t everyone have a purpose?” William replied. “The power potentiality of several million people is a responsibility. One cannot simply ignore it.”

“Ah,” the Earl said. He tipped his cup, emptied it, wiped his mustache with his lace napkin, rolled it up, and put it in the cup. Then he got up. “I suppose you’d like a walk? Michael and I always get one in before dinner.”

The early twilight was not far off and William would have preferred to stay in the great firelit room with the beautiful woman who sat in such silent repose, but some compulsive hand from the past reached out and he rose. After tea at school the headmaster ordered a walk for everyone. Not to want fresh air was a sign of laziness, weakness, coddling one’s self, all English sins.

“Those boots right for mud?” Michael was looking down at William’s well-polished country oxfords.

“Quite all right,” William said.

They tramped out into the shadowy fragrance, Michael respectfully in the rear. The Earl lit a short and ancient pipe, refusing William’s aid. “Thanks, no — I’ve got long matches — have ’em made to order. They’ve a chemical in the tip that keeps them from blowing out in a wind.”

After this a long silence fell as the three men walked through country lanes. William knew the English silence and he determined that he would not break it. Let these Englishmen know that he could endure the severest test! The Earl turned away from the drive and across a sloping lawn to a meadow. At a gate in a white fence he paused again to fill his pipe.

“I’ve never been to America. Michael is always wanting to go. But since he’s the only son, I’ve forbidden it — for the present.”

Michael laughed. “I have to marry and present him with an heir before he’ll let me go anywhere.”

“That is the way the Chinese feel, too,” William said. “But I hope you will visit us some day.”

“Where do you live?” the Earl inquired.

“I have a house in New York and another in the country.” William’s voice was as detached and tranquil as any Englishman’s.

“You do yourselves very well, you Americans!”

“Not better than you English!”

“Ah, but it’s taken us thousands of years.”

“We had a bigger bit of land to begin with.”

The Earl knocked the ash from his pipe and opened the gate. A hen pheasant started out of the grass and he watched her scuttling flight. “What fools we were to go after India instead of keeping America!” He was filling his pipe again. “Think of what the Empire would be if we’d really fought you rebels in 1776 instead of hankering after the fleshpots of that sun-blasted continent! It would have been to your advantage as well as ours. We’d have been invincible today against Germany or Russia if we’d been one country.”

“We, on the other hand, might have been merely a second Canada,” William said. “Perhaps we needed independence to develop.”

“Nonsense,” the Earl retorted. “It’s stock that counts. The people of India have no stamina — always burning with some sort of fever of the spirit. It’s the unhealthy climate.”

“I can’t imagine ourselves part of an empire,” William said.

“Not now, of course,” the Earl conceded. He stole a sharp shrewd darting glance at William. “Certainly not when you’re dreaming of your own empire.”

“I doubt we want an empire,” William replied.

Nevertheless the idea played about his mind as they walked across the meadow. Empires had their day, and the ancient British Empire was dying as surely as the sun was setting across the wooded hill opposite the brook. He saw the sunset bright in the still-flowing wafers.

“Do you fish in the brook?” he asked Michael.

“Nothing much there,” Michael replied. “A trout now and then.”

“The boys in the village catch everything. They’ve got very lax about poaching,” the Earl said rather angrily.

They reached the brook after another silence and stood gazing into its shallow clarity. There were minnows in plenty darting about under the surface, snatching at the last chance for food. The Earl stirred them with his walking stick. “There’re always minnows, somehow.”

He said it in a musing voice but William saw no significance in the words and did not answer.

“Millions of minnows,” Michael said.

The Earl was looking across the brook as though he pondered the other side and then changed his mind. “We’d better go back, I dare say. The evening is turning chill.”

They climbed the hill again, this time in silence that none broke. When they entered the great square hall of the castle, Simpkins met them and took their hats and sticks. The Earl yawned.

“We’ll meet again at dinner — in an hour.” He walked away with his heavy step and William stood uncertainly.

Michael, so fresh and friendly, now seemed uncertain too. “I hope you won’t mind my parents, sir. I always forget how they are until I’m home again. Will you come in by the fire or go upstairs?”

“I shall enjoy you all,” William said with unusual grace. He looked into the great room behind the hall and saw it empty. Lady Emory had gone. “And I think I shall go upstairs until dinner.”

After that day William made no pretense to himself. For the first time in his life, he had fallen desperately in love.

His eyes, covert but acute, had searched every woman whom he had met and others whom he had not met. Their eyes in turn had gazed upon him with courtesy and with indifference. The young had looked upon him as old and forbidding, and from those who were not young he had averted his own eyes. English women did not age with grace or beauty. He found them garrulous or caustic, and from sharpness he shrank by instinct. He wanted intelligence but not sarcastic wit which he was not skilled enough to master and therefore despised. If he disapproved he said so plainly and finally. Sarcasm, he said often, was the exhibitionism of a showy but weak ego, the displeasure of a coward, and the natural refuge of those who had only their tongues for weapons.

All that he had ever dreamed of England and what England had meant to him, all that he had never acknowledged even to himself, now centered in a woman whom he did not ask himself if he understood, for he knew she understood him. He was able to talk at last and to tell her all that he had never told anyone. She listened, her eyes thoughtful and kind. Kindness was her genius. It shone not only upon him but upon everyone who was near her. Her father and brother basked in it, accepted it, took it for granted, imposed upon her, William decided, during the week of days that followed one after the other. Guests came and went and drew from her kindness what they needed. She was busy continually and yet she had time for him, lending him her whole attention in the hours they were together.