Pearl Buck - Gods Men

“This chap isn’t amusing, exactly,” he said.

“He’s rather terrifying actually — immensely tall and thin, greenish gray eyes under black brows, and that sort of thing. He looks immensely unhappy, I must say, the way Americans do if they are not the giggling kind. He’s searching, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Searching?” She had looked up.

“He’s rich as mud,” Michael said. “It can’t be that. I can’t make him out, except that there’s power in him.”

“What power?”

“I don’t know — energy, smothered under something impatience held down, enemy of everybody! He’s not friendly, doesn’t put out his hand when he sees you. I’ve invited him down — you’ll see.”

She had been attracted to William Lane the moment she had looked up from the piano and had seen him standing there. She had gone on playing so that she could look at him without speaking. He was not youthful, and above all things now youth wearied her. For the first time in these ten years she had found herself conscious of being a woman, not young but still beautiful and wanting so to be thought.

She had seen very soon that William thought her beautiful not merely for herself but for what she was over and beyond. He valued her for what she had inherited, but which was nevertheless a part of her, and it pleased her to have it so. He could not, she believed, have fallen in love merely with beauty. A chorus girl whom a king might love would have repelled him.

Pondering upon this, asking herself why it was that kings and peers throughout the history of England could so joyously lie upon hay and straw with milkmaids and gypsies who could not be queens, she penetrated the secret of William’s soul. He wanted a queen that he might be king. His kingdom he had made, a modern kingdom, money and power in absolute combination now as always, and over it he reigned ably enough. But the secret longing was in his soul unrevealed, and perhaps unknown even to himself. If she accepted him he would be assured. He would have evidence of what had been unseen, he would become in substance that which he had hoped he was.

At thirty, she reflected, as the days of that week passed, a woman accepts quickly or she rejects. He was in the decade beyond her and was, moreover, a man accustomed to quick decisions. He let her know within a few days that his was made. When he left Hulme Castle at the end of the week he managed to say good-by alone with her, and she helped him to arrange it so.

“May I come back in a fortnight?” he asked.

“We shall be happy to see you,” she had replied, purposely conventional.

“It will be a long fortnight for me, Lady Emory.”

She had only smiled at this, and she looked down and saw his hand clasping hers. A strange small hand he had, curiously hairy!

“Come,” she said to herself in silence, “let’s not think of such things as that!”

To discipline herself, she let him hold her hand a second longer.

When William came back after a fortnight he found Lady Emory so composed, as she led him on the second evening to a part of the castle still unknown to him, that he wondered if she had divined his thoughts. He was surprised to feel his heart begin to beat more quickly than he had ever felt it before.

“You haven’t seen the gallery, I think,” She opened a paneled door and he saw a space, seemingly endless, hung with paintings. “Let’s walk right away down to the end. The view is the loveliest picture of all.”

He followed her a long way to the great windows from ceiling to floor at the end of the gallery, and when she sat down on a yellow satin sofa he took his seat there, too, but not near her.

She looked at him, her dark eyes quietly waiting, and he saw with some shock that she was used to men falling suddenly in love with her, that she was prepared, and then he dreaded so soon to put her to the test of proposal.

“Did you know I grew up as a boy in China?” he asked her abruptly.

“Yes. But what makes you think of it now?” Lady Emory asked.

“Something about this castle, the silence here, and the moon shining as it used to on a palace in Peking.”

“The moon was late tonight.”

“Do you take an interest in the comings and the goings of the moon?” He accompanied this unusual triviality with an effort at a smile.

“No except that from a window in my room it rather forces itself upon me.”

He did not reply to this, and after a while she said, “Tell me something about your childhood in China. I’ve never been anywhere except in Europe.”

“I don’t want to think of my childhood,” he said with the strange sort of abruptness which she was beginning to realize did not mean irritation.

“Was it unhappy?” she persisted.

“No, just useless to me.”

“Useless?”

“Yes. I was the son of a missionary. You don’t think there could be any advantage to me to have missionary parents, do you? I kept it a secret all the time I was at college. It was a fearful disadvantage to me even in the English prep school I went to in China.” He wanted her to know the worst about him and he pressed the point. “To be the son of a missionary made my classmates think I must be queer. As a matter of fact, my father was rather remarkable. I didn’t discover it, though, until he came home to die in my house.”

“Tell me about him.” Her voice led him on.

“Sometime, Lady Emory. I don’t want to talk about him now.”

“Wait,” Lady Emory said. Her brown eyes widened a little and her soft voice took a slight imperious edge. “I wonder if I know what you want to talk about to me. If I do, I beg you to remember that we scarcely know each other.”

“You may not know me but I know you,” William replied. Passion seized him with a violence monstrous even to himself. He did not want to wait one moment to take this beautiful Englishwoman into his arms. He wanted her now, he wanted it settled.

Lady Emory looked frightened. “How can you know me?”

“I’ve always known England,” William said. “I’ve always loved England, against my will I confess, but there it is. Now I’ve found you and you are the personification of all that I have loved.”

“Michael said you were married—”

“That has nothing to do with you or me.”

“No.” Her word was a breath, a sigh, and he let it be acceptance. He took one step and she rose at his approach, and he drew her into his arms. Sweet and fearful was this exultation, his soaring pride in what he had, this arrogance of love! He was speechless, his face in the darkness of her hair, and he did not notice her silence or the still motionlessness with which she stood.

She was shocked to discover that the conviction in which she had sheathed herself since last she stood in Cecil’s arms was entirely false. She did not feel repelled at all by another man’s body pressed against her own. She had supposed it would be intolerable, eternally abhorrent, and it was not. It was even pleasant and comforting, as it would be pleasant and comforting to live in riches and plenty, no more a burden to her parents because she did not marry, no more a charity for Michael when his inheritance came to him. England was old and tired, and somehow with her dead lover it had died for her. America was young and strong, a rising empire, and to go there now, to leave England and take her own unspent womanhood with her, would be the nearest happiness that she could know. And this American, she perceived, contrary to what she had always heard about Americans, was neither stupid nor boyish.

“You can’t love me — as quickly as I have loved you — I don’t expect it—” William was stammering these broken sentences.

She was an honest woman, though beautiful, and what she now knew she would do, she wanted done with all her heart.