Pearl Buck - Gods Men

“It’s his own fault if he is lonely,” Jeremy had retorted. “He holds himself above everybody. Yes, he does, Ruth. He lords it over us all.”

“I know it seems that way, Jeremy, but really inside he’s quite lost.”

Jeremy had snorted and Ruth nodded her head up and down very positively. “Yes, William is lost. He needs something he hasn’t got. None of us can give it to him.”

Upon this Candace had spoken. “If Emory can give it to him, then I shall be glad.”

“Oh, Candy, you’re so generous,” Ruth had cried, the tears streaming from her soft blue eyes.

But still she had defended William in her heart and Candace saw it, and because Jeremy loved his wife he, too, would allow William his way. She had no knight, unless her old father came forward. But he evaded life nowadays, indeed not from lack of love, so much as from too much love. So sensitive had he grown as age came upon him, so excessively tender, so wishful that human beings should all be happy, that when they were not he could not bear to be near them. So because she loved him, Candace had shielded her heart from her father and affected to be gay about William’s new love, and she insisted that of course he must marry Emory, and she even pretended that she and Emory could and would meet and be friends, while in her heart she knew that this could never be.

With her sons, she was cavalier. Will and Jerry, though tall young men, still cared more for football than for anything else on earth. “We mustn’t blame your father,” she had said to them brightly. “The truth is, our marriage never quite came off, if you know what I mean. Why should you know? It’s like a flower that doesn’t quite bloom. Still, I’ve had you two and that is a great deal to get out of one marriage.” She had looked from one solemn young face to the other.

“Are you going to marry again?” It was Will’s question. She met his young gray eyes and shook her head, still playfully. This was her protection now and forever, not to care too much, not to mind. She thought of fallen leaves floating upon the surface of the swimming pool, of leaves drifting down from the trees, of a bird resting upon the waves of atmosphere, of flower petals dropping upon the grass. Her father was right. Escape life, perhaps, but certainly escape pain! The blow had been dealt.

Jerry, the younger, had spoken with sudden rage. “Why don’t you go and see that woman and tell her she has no right to—”

“Shut up,” Will said for her. “You don’t understand. You’re only a kid.”

Neither son had spoken one word of their father. He was immovable, unchangeable; none could reach him. Whatever he did was done. He was absolute.

William had needed none of them, not his mother, not Ruth. No one existed for him except himself, his monolithic being, his single burning purpose, more consuming than any he had ever known. He was ruthless in his office, angry with all delay, intolerably demanding upon his lawyers.

He had tried to compel Candace to go to Reno so that in six weeks he might be free. She had refused and old Roger Cameron had demanded an appointment. William had refused that. He gave orders that he would not speak with anyone on the telephone. He lived entirely in his apartment at the office and made no communication with his sons. After he was married to Emory he would let them see for themselves why he married her.

When he discovered that Candace was not going to Reno, he went himself. He endured weeks of loneliness without Emory, days when he called her by telephone that he might hear her voice and assure himself that she still lived, that she had not changed her mind, that she had no thought of delaying their marriage. His decree granted, he left by the next train and, speeding to England upon the fastest ship, he went straight to Hulme Castle.

She was there waiting for him, the wedding day set two days hence, and when he had her in his arms, he let down his heart. He put his face into the soft dark hair.

“Oh, my love—” They were words he had never used to Candace.

“You look fearfully tired, William.”

“I shan’t be tired any more, Emory.”

She did not reply to this, and he stood for a moment letting his weariness drain away in the silence.

“Two days from now we’ll be married.”

“Two days,” she echoed.

“I wish it were now.”

To this, too, she made no reply.

They were married in the room where they had first met. She did not want to be married in Hulme Abbey, where, had Cecil lived, the ceremony would have taken place. Her parents had agreed, and so an altar had been set up in the drawing room. No one was there beyond her family and the vicar and his wife and a few people whom William had never seen before. “A quick, quiet wedding,” he told her and she obeyed.

UPON A GAY AND prosperous people the thunder clouds of the Great Depression now crashed down their destruction. In the late summer, Clem had felt something was wrong. He could not define, even to Henrietta, his uneasiness, beginning at first as a personal discontent in his own mind, though he tried to do so one Sunday, the last in August. She was aware of his eternal searching for causes and, by her listening silences and her careful questions, helped him to see more clearly the vague shapes he perceived in the future.

Long ago Henrietta had come to understand that in Clem there was something of the seer, if not of the prophet. His instinct for humanity was so delicate, his perception of mankind so ready, that without magic and entirely reasonably he was able to forecast the possible in terms amazingly definite. Had he lived in ancient times, she sometimes mused, had he been born in those early ages when people explained the inexplicable, the mystic man, by saying he had been fathered by a god or had seen gods upon the mountains or in the flames of a burning bush, struck perhaps by lighting, they would have cried out that Clem was a prophet sent to them by God and they would have listened to him. And, were they frightened enough, they might have heeded him in time to avert disaster.

Now Clem and Henrietta, seated in rocking chairs upon their own narrow front porch, looked to the passer-by no different from any other middle-aged couple upon the street of an ordinary Ohio town. He talked and she listened and questioned. He was in his shirtsleeves and an old pair of gray trousers, and she saw that the collar of his blue shirt was torn. She resolved to throw it away secretly when he took it off that night. Clem was miserly about his clothes and declared them good enough to wear long after they had reached the point of dusting cloths and mops.

“I can’t just tell you in so many words how I feel about things,” Clem said. “It’s like sitting out on the grass on a nice bright day and then suddenly knowing that the earth is shaking under you — not much, but just a little. Or it’s like being in the woods, maybe, and wondering if you don’t smell smoke somewhere.”

“If you were in the woods and smelled smoke,” Henrietta said, “you’d find out first which way the wind was blowing and look in that direction, wouldn’t you?”

Clem flashed her an appreciative look. “I’ve thought of that. I can’t tell which way the wind is blowing — not yet. Crops were good enough this year, at least taking the country as a whole. Maybe things are all right. Maybe it’s nothing but my own queasy stomach. I oughtn’t to have eaten those corn dodgers last night.”

“I’ll never have them again,” Henrietta said.

Clem went on after a few seconds of rocking. “The trouble is that the way things are now in the world, we’re all tied together in one way or another. There might be an earthquake somewheres else which would upset us, too.”