Pearl Buck - Gods Men

He supposed she was not young — that is, she was certainly not a young girl. She was perhaps thirty. He could not understand how it was that he had found her unmarried and one day told her so in words that he feared were crude. She hesitated, then said with scarcely a change in her look or in that sweet deep voice:

“I suffered the same fate that so many English women did. My fiancé was killed during the war. He was Cecil Randford, son of the Earl of Randford. We had grown up together.”

William heard the name with pangs of jealousy which he tried to hide. “Forgive me,” he muttered.

“I do,” she replied simply.

By the third day he wished that he dared to ask her to call him by his Christian name. Lady Emory had a sort of intimacy which Mr. Lane did not have. If he had been Sir William! But he was not. He fretted himself about his courtship. There was so little time. He wanted to get it over, to have her love him quickly, to take her home with him soon and begin their life together. When he went back at Christmas he wanted to get through the hateful business of telling Candace and his sons and of consulting with his lawyers and his public-relations men as to how divorce and remarriage might be accomplished swiftly and privately. He ground his teeth when he thought of the pleasure that common people took in these matters, which should be as private as a man’s own thoughts.

Meantime it was impossible to talk to the Earl or to Lady Hulme, he discovered. He did not exist for them, and yet they were aware that in his way he was important because he was rich. Nor was he at ease with them even though his week was swiftly passing. This castle, this English family, he approached with a diffidence that he would not recognize although he had long since reached a height in his own country that made a secretary’s telephone call enough to open even the door of the White House — not the big front door into which sightseers and patriotic Americans swarmed but the side door where a huge brass key is kept turned. He reminded himself that the Earl of Hulme was not the King of England, that there were many peers of whom he was only one.

The first sight of the castle by daylight had been comforting. It would take a great deal of money to modernize it. For fifty bedrooms there were only five baths, inconvenient, and of plumbing so ancient that tanks of water hung above the toilet seats and water for the enormous tub was warmed by gas heaters that threatened to asphyxiate bathers unless carefully tended. William was surprised to have a manservant remain in the room, his back carefully turned, when he took his bath the first night because the heater had looked for the last few months as though it might explode if overworked, and Americans, as everyone knew, insisted on having their tubs full.

“It was much easier, sir, in the old days when we fetched in tin baths,” the man had said, not looking around.

“Why don’t you get some American plumbers?” William asked, submerged in soapsuds. The water was beautifully soft.

“They could never understand the system, sir,” the man said. “Let me know when you’ve quite done, sir. I’ll turn it off and get quite out of your way.”

He did so a few minutes later and William, wrapped in a bath sheet, had returned to his own room down a hall an eighth of a mile long.

Here in his vast room he felt the silence centuries deep about him. It made him think of Peking and temples and palaces and the Old Empress again. It was the atmosphere he loved and he would have given his soul to have been born to it, for it was something which could not be imitated or made. To belong in it, to know the certainty of place, would have given him peace. Yet he was ashamed to acknowledge his own longing. Before these English, he must be his best, an American, rich, powerful, able to hold his own, a republican among aristocrats. He looked at himself in the long gilt-framed mirror and chose a somber tie.

Lady Emory had neither wish for love nor expectation of it. Her self-control was absolute and by now had penetrated every fiber of her being. She had been reared in self-control and believed that decency depended upon it. Only with Cecil, whom she had trusted entirely, had she felt that she did not need to think of herself, and so she had loved him with warmth and reality if not with heartiness. Nevertheless she was glad now that she had not married him, since he would have been killed, anyway, and not having married him she had learned to be glad that she had not slept with him that last night before he joined his regiment. They had discussed the last night frankly, as they discussed everything, their vocabulary being the same and their thoughts and ideas identical. It was not a question of sin or decency or of personal morality, since they were irrevocably in love. It was the far more important matter of an heir. Unlikely as it was that there could be any issue after a first and single union it was still possible that she might have a child, the heir of Randford.

“I shouldn’t like him born anyhow, you know, darling,” Cecil had said.

“We should have married,” she had murmured.

“I hate these hurried, patched-up weddings,” he had persisted. “I want to marry you in state, my darling. The Earls of Randford have always married their wives in the little abbey, and the tenants would hardly forgive me, you know, if I scamped it.”

“What if …” she had not been able to finish.

“No ifs,” he had said gaily. He was a god, young and blond, defying death.

So they had denied themselves for the sake of the child, who was never to be born, though they could not know it, and she had not allowed herself to regret her acquiescence. Cecil had felt his duty to his race, and though he loved her and she had never doubted his love, he drew her into his duty. This she had understood, for she had been reared within it, too. A noblewoman, however loved and cherished for her own sake, was nonetheless dedicated to the sacred future. She would not have been happy, either, had she forgotten that. Their love was purified by their faith in themselves and their kind, their belief that they were more than simple human beings.

Now that Cecil was dead she was released from that duty. There was nothing sacred in her being anything except herself. She knew no other heir of England whom she wanted to marry, or who wanted to marry her, and had there been such an one, it was doubtful whether the high sense of obligation would have been enough. With Cecil she could consecrate herself but without him, and therefore without love, even duty was not enough for her. There was no reason why she should consider it necessary merely to produce an heir for an ancient house. She was quite free.

Such freedom led to the immense restlessness which her self-control concealed beneath a cloak of consideration and kindness, these being also essentials of habitual good breeding. Only Michael divined that beneath the cloak so gracefully worn she was trembling with discontent.

“You need to get away,” he had told her. “You are jumpy.”

“I am not jumpy,” she had replied with unusual brusqueness.

“Don’t pretend,” Michael had said. “You ought to marry. Cecil has been dead for years.”

“I don’t see anyone to marry,” she had retorted.

“I’ll look about,” he had promised in a lordly way.

To which she had merely said, as she used to say to him when he was a little boy, “Don’t be silly.”

Nevertheless he had come back from London some months later with the preposterous declaration that he had found a chap, an American, who might be amusing for her to marry. Such conversation of course was not carried on before their parents. Even so she had been irritated by it. “I can’t imagine any marriage amusing,” she had told him. They were outdoors in the yew garden and she was on her knees by the Italian fountain, cleaning away fallen leaves. Michael stood watching her, not offering to help. He did not like to dirty his hands.