Pearl Buck - Gods Men

Henrietta’s anger rose in spite of love. “Very well,” she declared. “Go if you must. But I will not go with you.”

He sighed and got off the bed. He put on his coat and smoothed his hair with his hand. Then he bent to kiss her tenderly.

“You don’t feel mad with me, do you?”

“Oh no, Clem, except—”

“Except what?” He paused and looked down upon her, his eyes bright blue in his white face and his lips pursed quizzically.

“Clem, you’re too good, that’s all. You won’t believe that anybody isn’t good.”

“That’s my faith, I guess.”

He turned at the door, looked as if he were about to say something more, kept silent instead and went his way.

Lady Emory was alone for luncheon. She was, of course, Mrs. William Lane and by now she was well used to it in all external ways. She was beginning to feel that the huge comfortable house in uptown New York was her own, and in certain ways that Hulme Castle could never be. From earliest memory she had known that while Hulme Castle was her shelter it was not her home. William had divined this very soon after their marriage and had offered to put at her disposal as much money as needed to repair the castle and put in bathrooms.

“It will make you feel more free to go there and stay as long as you like, now that you are my wife,” he had said quite gracefully.

Her father had refused the gift, however. He saw no need for more bathrooms since he himself still used a tin tub brought into his room in the mornings and set before the fire.

“I believe William would like to come here and stay sometimes, Father,” she had replied to this prejudice. “He would feel less like a guest if he had some part in the castle.”

She said this quite as gracefully as William had but her father had only grumbled and it had taken Michael to persuade him to let William repair at least the west wing as a place where Emory and her husband might stay when they came to England. Lady Hulme had early discerned in William a rather touching desire to own some part of Hulme Castle and so she had been grateful to Michael who, after all, was the one most to be considered, since he was the future heir.

As for America, as far as Emory had seen it, it was amazing. The people were very friendly, perhaps too friendly. She had been invited to a great many dinner parties and everybody had persisted in calling her Lady Emory, and this made her feel at home. William, too, called her Lady Emory in the house to the servants. Naturally when he introduced her it was as his wife, Mrs. Lane. She felt in spite of his real love for her that she did not know him as well as she hoped she would one day. He had a strange and almost forbidding dignity which she did not dislike, although she saw that it cut him off from ordinary people and even from her, sometimes. She was used to that. In his way her father had a dignity, too. He would have been outraged by familiarity from his inferiors.

Moreover, there was something about this dignity of William’s which ennobled her and their life. She was proud of his straight handsome body and was well aware of their regal appearance together.

He never talked to her of his first wife. In marriage he and she were utterly alone, and for this she was grateful. Instead, he told her much about his boyhood in Peking, and she who had never thought of China as a place existent upon this earth, now perceptively saw him there, a tall solitary boy, august in his place as the only son of the family, hungry for communication when there could be none, alien from his parents and sisters as he was from the Chinese he knew, who apparently were all servants.

“Did you not know any Chinese boys?” she asked.

“They were not allowed in the compound,” he replied. “My mother did not like them to hang about. Even my father’s study had a separate entrance so that when the Chinese came to see him they need not enter the hall.”

“Did you try to know anybody secretly?” she asked.

“It would not have occurred to me,” he replied sincerely.

Then bit by bit there came out the remembered fragments of his life in the Chefoo school and here she perceived he had been shaped. She saw the proud boy slighted and condemned by the careless lordly English boys she knew so well, for Cecil had been such a boy. Unconsciously William revealed to her his wounds never healed.

It was not all bitterness. He could speak sometimes of wide Peking streets and of the beauty of the porcelain roofs on the palaces of the dying Empire. He told her one meditative evening how his mother had taken him to see the Empress when he was a small boy. “I bowed before her, but I didn’t kneel because I was an American. The Chinese had to kneel and keep their heads on the floor. I remember her thin hands — yours remind me of them. They were narrow and pale and very beautiful. But the palms were stained red and the long nails shielded in gold gem-studded protectors. I looked at her face — a most powerful face.”

“Did she speak to you?”

“I don’t remember that. The people called her the Old Buddha. They were afraid of her and so they admired her. People have to have someone like her. I was sorry when she died and that revolutionary fellow, Sun Yatsen, took over. People can’t respect a common fellow like that — someone just like themselves. Maybe this new man, Chiang Kai-shek, will be better. He is a soldier, used to command. There is no democratic nonsense about him.”

Emory listened, knowing that he was telling her things he had never told anyone, things that he had forgotten and now drew up out of the wells of his being. At the bottom of everything there was always a permanent complaint against his parents because they had robbed him of his birthright of pride. It had been impossible to explain to them why he was ashamed, and he was the more ashamed because he had the agony of wanting to be proud of his father, and then the humbling realization of knowing that there was something of his father in himself in spite of this hatred, and that he could not simply enjoy all that he had, his money and his great houses and the freedom that success should have bought him, because he could never be free. God haunted him.

This was the bitterness and the trouble and the terror that she found in William’s soul. It made her thoughtful indeed. His conscience was the fox in his vitals.

Upon such musing alone and by the fire in the drawing room of her American home she took her usual afternoon tea on the cold January day. It was not often that she was alone but she had felt tired, the intense activity of this new world city being something to which she was not used. She had been invited to a cocktail party given for that playwright now most successful upon Broadway, Seth James, and. when she telephoned to William that she would not go he had replied that he himself must go since Seth had been a former employee with whom he had disagreed, and if he did not go, it might appear that he held a grudge.

“Do go, by all means,” Emory had said at once.

She found it comfortable to be alone for an hour. It seemed difficult to be alone in America, although in Hulme Castle it had been the most natural state. Now, after she had eaten some small watercress sandwiches and drunk two cups of English tea, she went to the piano William had had made to order especially for her touch and sitting down before it she played for perhaps half an hour, transporting herself as she did so to some vague and distant place that was not America and yet not quite England. She had no wish to return to Hulme Castle and she was quite happy here in this house, as happy as she thought she could be in mortal life. Cecil had left her entirely now, even her dreams, and she seldom thought of him.

In the midst of her music the door opened and she heard the slight cough with which the second man announced his deprecatory presence.