Pearl Buck - Gods Men

Emory received the news of the journey with her usual calm. They had not gone to England or Italy the year before, and she felt a change now would be pleasant. Alone with William she might discover what it was that kept him perpetually dissatisfied, not with her, but with the very stuff of life itself. She never mentioned to him her discernment of his discontent, for by now she knew it was spiritual and that he was only beginning to perceive this for himself. She refused again a thought which came to trouble her. Did William feel a lack in her own love for him? Was there such a lack? She made no answer. He had so much. He had all the money he had ever imagined he would have, and the most successful chain of popular newspapers. He was already planning the next presidential candidate, for this man in the White House could not possibly survive a first term. That he hungered for something he did not have, something more than woman could give, was now plain, perhaps even to William himself.

Or did his spirit seek after his father? One day on their voyage, William said, “I often think about my father. I wish you had known him, Emory. You would have understood each other. He was a great man, never discovered.”

“I wish I might have known him, dear,” she observed. They were in their deck chairs after breakfast and the sun was brilliant upon a hard blue sea.

“I wonder … I often wonder …” William mused somewhat heavily.

Emory delayed opening her novel. “About what, William?”

“Whether he would approve what I do — what I am!”

Approval. That was the word, the key! She saw it at once and grasped it. William needed the approval of someone he felt was his spiritual superior. For she knew that he was a man of strongly spiritual nature, a religious man without a religion. Emory herself was not spiritual, not religious at any rate, and she could not help him. She did not carry the conversation beyond her usual mild comment.

“I feel sure he would approve you, William, but I wish he were here to tell you so.”

Within herself, after that conversation, she began the active search for the religion that William needed. It must be one strong enough for him, organized and ancient, not Buddhism, which was too gentle, not Hinduism, which was too merciful, not Taoism, which was too gay, imbued as it was with human independence even of God, and Confucianism was dead. She knew something of all religions, for after Cecil’s death she had searched the scriptures of many and in the end had grown indifferent to all. Instead of religion she had developed a deep native patience, and detached by early shock, nothing now could disturb the calm which had grown like a protective shell, lovely as mother-of-pearl, over her own soul. She wished indeed that she could have known his father, for in that dead father, she felt sure at last, was the key to this living husband of hers. His mother, she had soon found, had been merely the vessel of creation.

Emory rather liked the vessel, nevertheless. She comprehended early with her subtle humor that there was not an ounce of the spiritual in her mother-in-law’s bustling body. Mrs. Lane used God for her own purposes, which were always literal and material, reveling in William’s success, in his wealth, in his new relation to an English Earl. Soon after William’s marriage she had announced that she was going to England and that she would enjoy a visit at Hulme Castle. Emory had written to her own mother with entire frankness, saying that her mother-in-law would be the easiest of guests and not in the least like William. “Old Mrs. Lane is always ready to worship,” Emory wrote, and drew a small cat face grinning upon the wide margin of the heavy handmade paper that bore her name but also the Hulme coat of arms.

She had seen Mrs. Lane off and upon the deck of the great ship had given her a huge corsage of purple orchids which would last the voyage, a package of religious novels, and a box of French chocolates. “Food for body and soul,” she had said with private cynicism. Mrs. Lane, who had a strong digestion and liked sweets, did not comprehend cynicism. She had thanked her new daughter-in-law with the special warmth she had for the well born. She stood at the handrail of the upper deck, wrapped in a fur coat and a tightly veiled hat, and waved vigorously.

At first the divorce had seemed horrible to her, until she discovered how thoroughly she approved of Emory and her English relations. She made compromise. It was not as if William needed the Cameron money any more. Emory was really much better suited to him in his present position than Candace was. Men did outgrow women. There was no use pretending, although, thank God, her own husband had never outgrown her. Such remarks she had poured into Ruth’s ears, and Ruth always listened.

This mother, Emory had soon perceived, was of no real use to William, and at first she had thought that any connection between William and his mother must have ended with the physical cutting of the umbilical cord. Later she had seen that she had been wrong. Mrs. Lane had created a division in William. To her he owed his respect for wealth, for castles, for birth, for—

At this point Emory checked herself. She was being nasty, for did she not enjoy William’s wealth? Worse than that she was being unjust to him, whose soul hungered after higher things than those which he had. She wanted William to be really happy and not in the way that America meant happiness, which was something too fervid and occasional. She wanted William to be satisfied in ways that she knew he was not. She wanted his restless ambition stilled, and the vague wounds of his life healed. Some of them she had been able to heal merely by being what she was, English and his wife.

Hulme Castle was unusually beautiful on the afternoon when they were driven up the long winding road from the downs. The winter had been mild, the chauffeur said, explaining the amount of greenery about the old towers and walls.

Her parents were in the long drawing room, though it was not yet noon, and she was touched to think they were waiting for her, putting aside their usual morning pursuits.

“My dears—” she said, bending to kiss them.

William was quietly formal and nothing much was said. Her parents did not feel at ease with him, nor, as she saw, quite at ease even with her. Then Michael came in dressed in his riding things and ease flowed into the room with him.

“I say, you two — you haven’t been shown up to your part of the castle yet?”

“You told us not,” Lady Hulme reminded him.

“No. Come along. I wanted to show it to you,” Michael said.

They followed him, laughing at his impatience, and then Emory saw that even William, so scant in his praise of anyone, was touched by what Michael had done. He had really made a small private castle of one wing. It had its separate entrance, its own kitchen, and four baths.

“I shall be able to rest here, Emory,” William said so gravely that she perceived he needed rest.

“Come along, William,” Michael said when they had seen everything. “We’d better leave Emory for a bit with her mother. I have to ride to the next town to see about getting a tractor. I thought we’d get our luncheon there, perhaps. You could advise me — it’s an American machine.”

Emory laughed. “You’re not very subtle, Michael, but then you never were.” They laughed with her and went off, nevertheless, and she lunched with her parents.

The castle, she discovered, was in a strange state of flux. Her father, deeply angry over the increase in death duties, was threatening to move into the gate house with her mother and a couple of servants and let Michael take the castle and assume title so far as was possible. She listened to this talk at the immense dining table, her father at one end, her mother at the other, and she in between as she used to be.