Pearl Buck - Gods Men

“It’s hard on a man not being able to finish his days in his proper place,” the Earl said.

He fell into silence over his roast beef and port, a silence which his wife could not allow for long.

“What are you thinking of, Malcolm, pray tell?” Lady Hulme asked. She did not drink port for it made small red veins come out on her nose.

“Do you remember, my dear, that old chap we dug up in the church when we put. in the hot-water pipes?” the Earl asked with entire irrelevance.

“Father, what makes you think of him now?” Emory asked.

“He’d been lying there a hundred and fifty years, you know, and his bones were as good as anything, white as chalk, but holding together, you know,” the Earl replied.

Lady Hulme was diverted by the memory. She remembered perfectly clearly the June morning years ago when the men came to say that they had struck a coffin in Hulme Abbey and both of them had gone over to look at it. The coffin was only wood and was quite gone really except for bits of metal, but there in the dust lay the most beautiful silvery skeleton. Luckily it was not a Hulme ancestor but some physician who had served the family and had been given the honor of burial in the abbey.

“You don’t think that he took drugs or something that kept his bones hard?” she now asked.

“Might have,” the Earl conceded. “Still, perhaps it was only the dryness of the abbey, eh? Maybe the hundreds of sermons the vicars preached, eh?”

He choked on his own humor and exploded into frightful coughing. Lady Hulme waited. He choked rather easily nowadays, especially on port. When he subsided, red-eyed and gasping, she felt it wise to change the subject, lest he be tempted to another joke.

Before she could speak Emory lifted her head.

“Hark — Isn’t that the horses?” They listened.

“Yes,” she exclaimed. “It’s William.”

She got up with her stealing grace and went out, and Lady Hulme said aloud what she had been thinking.

“Do you like Emory’s husband — really, I mean?”

“How could anybody like him?” the Earl replied in a voice restored to common sense. “There is something feverish in him.”

“I thought he seemed as cool as anything today.”

“He is the sort that burns inside, you know, my dear, like that what’s-his-name from India that we dined with once at Randford. I don’t know how the Earl felt but I know I was jolly glad to be away after dinner.”

“What’s-his-name” was a small dark man named Mohandas Gandhi. He had come over to England for conferences and he had refused to wear proper clothes or eat proper food. The government had been compelled to recognize him, nevertheless, and there was a frightful picture of him taken with the King and wearing almost nothing — just the bed sheet or whatever it was that he wrapped about his nakedness. It did seem that when a man came to a civilized country he might behave better. When the Earl of Hulme had muttered as much behind his mustaches to the Earl of Randford, his host had smiled at him and murmured in reply:

“You are simple, my dear fellow. Gandhi is too clever for you. His hold on the masses of India is immense just because he won’t wear anything but the sheet. That’s what the peasants wear and they like to think that one of them wears a sheet right in the presence of you and me and even the King. It makes them trust him. If he put on striped trousers and a morning coat, they’d think he had betrayed them.”

The Earl of Hulme had been stupefied by such independence and now felt that if something had been done about it then India would not be dreaming today of getting away from the Empire. What would happen to the world if men were allowed to come into the presence of their betters dressed like goatherds? Upon that day he had stared a good deal at the small man whose perpetual smile was as cool as a breeze, and after an hour of this persistent gaze he had discerned beneath the coolness what he called the fever. He recognized it because he had seen it elsewhere. There had been a curate in his youth who had burned to improve the lot of the tenants, and he had seen the old Earl, his father, fly into fury.

“Read your Bible, sir!” the old nobleman had thundered at the tall, hungry-eyed curate. “Does it or does it not say that I am to put my tenants into palaces?”

“It says the strong must bear the burdens of the weak,” the foolhardy man had replied.

That was the curate’s end. He had killed himself as nicely as though a rope had been put about his neck. He had left in disgrace and was never heard of again. But young Malcolm, watching, had felt the fever burning inside that lean frame. On the last day, when he thought the curate had gone, he found himself face to face with him in the park. The chap had walked about to find him.

“Malcolm—” That was what the man had actually dared to call him. “Malcolm, you are young and perhaps you will listen to me.”

“I don’t understand,” he had stammered, angry and taken back at such daring.

“Don’t try to understand now,” the curate had urged. The fever was plain enough then. You could see the flames leaping up inside him somewhere and shining through his pale eyes. “Just remember this — unless the hungry are fed, you will be driven away from all this. It is coming, mind you — you’ve got to save yourself. I warn you, hear the voice of God!”

He had wheeled without answer and left the curate standing there and he had not once looked back.

“Nonsense,” Lady Hulme now said. “William is a very handsome man. I don’t see the least resemblance to any Hindu, not to speak of that odd man.”

She broke off, noticing how brightly the sun shone through the bottle of port. Suddenly she felt that it was a pity not to taste so beautiful a liquid. If her nose grew red it would not matter — poor Malcolm had long since ceased to notice how she looked. She poured herself a glass of the rich port, very slowly, the sun filtering through the crimson wine.

… Outside in the soft English sunshine Emory was listening to the last fragments of a conversation which had been of more than American tractors.

“I can’t tell yet whether it’s good or bad,” Michael said. “I can only say that there’s something new happening in Germany and Italy. New, or maybe something very old, I can’t tell which. If it goes well it’ll be a new age for Europe and therefore the world. I don’t think things will go well.”

“You don’t believe that democracy will work in Europe, do you?” William asked.

“Of course not,” Michael said impatiently. “But it’s these chaps — Hitler, you know, and Mussolini. They’ve no breeding. Get a common man at the top and ten to one he can’t keep his senses about him.”

Emory cried out, wary of a certain reserve in William’s look, “Oh, Michael, how silly of you. As if we weren’t all common at bottom! Who was the first Earl of Hulme, pray? A constable of Hulme Castle, that’s all, and a traitor against his King, at that.”

Michael was stubborn. “That’s just what I said. He couldn’t keep his senses. He got thinking he was greater than the King.”

“What happened to him?” William asked with restrained curiosity.

“The Queen Mother got her back up,” Michael said. “There was a long siege and our arrogant ancestor was starved into obedience.” He lifted his whip. “You’ll see the marks of the battle there, though it was more than five hundred years ago.”

Upon the thick stone walls were ancient scars and William gazed at them. “A very good argument against everybody’s having enough food,” he said thoughtfully. “Food is a weapon. The best, perhaps, in the world!”

The day ended peacefully as usual, but William was restless during the night and rose early. He wanted, he explained to Emory, to go to Germany and see for himself. To Germany then they went.