Pearl Buck - Gods Men

In Berlin William had suddenly decided that he wanted Emory to see Peking. He had met Hitler and had been reassured. Out of postwar confusion and the follies of the Weimar government, Hitler was building the faith of the German people in themselves and their destiny. The whole country was waking out of despair and discouragement. Trains were clean and on time, and Berlin itself was encouraging.

“There is nothing to worry about here,” William said in some surprise. “I don’t know what Michael was talking about.”

After his talk with Hitler he was even more pleased. “The man is a born leader,” he told Emory, “a Carlylean figure.” It was then that William decided to go to China, telling Emory that he felt that he could never explain himself to her altogether unless she saw the city of his childhood. They boarded a great Dutch plane that carried them to India and Singapore and from there they flew to China. Of India Emory saw nothing and did not ask to see anything. Cecil’s family had been dependent upon India and her curiosity had died with him.

They spent nearly two weeks in Peking. They wandered about among the palaces, now open to tourists, and William searched the painted halls, the carved pavilions, for the throne room where as a child his mother had led him before the Empress.

“William, after all this time, can you remember?” Emory asked, unbelieving.

“I remember the Empress as though she had set a seal upon me,” William replied.

He found the room at last and the very throne, but in what dust and decay!

“This is the place,” William said.

They stood together in silence and looked about them. The doors were barred no more and pigeons had dirtied the smooth tiled floors. The gold upon the throne had been scraped off by petty thieves and even the lazy guard who lounged in the courtyard offered them a sacred yellow tile from the roof for a Chinese dollar. William shook his head.

“I wonder,” Emory said in a low voice, “if one day Buckingham Palace will be like this?”

“I cannot imagine it,” William replied, and as though he could not bear the sight before them, he turned abruptly from the throne. “Let us go. We have seen it.”

“Perhaps it would have been better not to have seen it,” she suggested. “It might have been better to remember it as it was.”

To this William did not reply.

There was something of the same decay in the compound where he had been born and which had been his home. It was not empty. A thin little missionary was there, a pallid man who came to the door of the mission house, a shadow of a man, William thought with contempt, a feeble small fellow to take his father’s place! The little man looked at them with bewildered and spectacled eyes.

“This was Dr. Lane’s house, I believe,” William said, and did not tell him who he was.

“That was a long time ago,” the mild man said.

“May we look over the house?” Emory asked. “We knew Dr. and Mrs. Lane.”

“I suppose so — my wife isn’t in just now — she’s gone to the Bible women’s meeting.”

“Never mind,” William said suddenly. “I have no desire to see the house.”

They left at once and William, she divined, was thinking of his father. He thought a great deal of his father in those days in Peking — sometimes with the old bitterness but more often with a longing wonder at the happiness in which his father seemed to live.

“My father was anchored in his faith,” William said. “I have often envied him his ability to believe.”

Emory said at this moment what she had been thinking about for a long time. “I do think, William, that you ought to see a priest. A Catholic, if possible.”

He turned upon her his dark look. “Why?” But she fancied he was not surprised.

She responded with her gaze of clear kindness. “I cannot give you peace,” she said. “If peace is what you need—”

He denied this abruptly. “I don’t need peace.”

“Whatever it is you need,” she amended.

He did not reply to this but she did not forget his silence. They left Peking soon after that day, and in a few weeks were in New York and William plunged into feverish work.

Left to herself, Emory went out more than she had before. Even she was getting restless. The world was so strange, so full of horrible possibilities!

At a cocktail party one day many months later Emory observed an unusual figure, and seeing it was reminded of the unforgotten conversation in Peking. A tall cassocked priest stood near the door. He had an angular worn face and quietly gazing at him as she drank tea instead of cocktails she saw his hands, worn and rough, tightly clasped before him. His hair was a dark auburn and his skin was florid. As though he felt her eyes, he looked at her. His eyes were very blue. She turned her head and at the same moment she felt hands upon her shoulders. Looking up then she saw Jeremy Cameron, and she smiled at him. “Jeremy, you wretch, you and Ruth haven’t come near us since we came home!”

“Ruth is still at the shore with the children. She’ll be back Monday. Here’s someone who wants to meet you. Emory, this is Father Malone — my sister-in-law, Father, Lady Emory Hulme or Mrs. William Lane, as you please.”

Jeremy had been drinking, she saw. The dark pupils of his eyes were huge and set in reddened whites and his thin smooth cheeks were flushed.

She turned to smile at Father Malone. He stooped over her hand. “It is your husband I really want to meet and this explains my presence at an occasion so strange to me,” he said in a rugged voice. “I’ve just come from China, where I believe he was born.”

“Oh, I’m glad.” Genuine gladness indeed was in her voice. “Why not come home with me now? We can talk a little while before my husband comes in. He’ll be late. We were in China, ourselves.”

“I heard,” Father Malone said simply.

Jeremy rocked back and forth on his heels. “William was looking at Father Malone’s pictures today — wonderful pictures — people starving to death, somewhere in China of course — babies like dead mice, their arms and legs — wonderful. He hadn’t time to meet Father Malone himself and turned him over to me. He wants the pictures, though.”

“Famine,” the priest said simply. “That’s why I am here. I am sent to collect funds.”

His dark eyes were magnetic. Emory found herself looking at him and then not looking away quickly enough. He did not mind how long she gazed at him, and there was no personal response from him to a beautiful woman.

“Do let’s go.” She got up impulsively.

The controlled grace of her movements was self-conscious and yet nonetheless graceful. They left in a few minutes, the priest a handsome yet ascetic shadow behind her, and in the comfortable soundproofed car, riding through the evening traffic in perfect quiet, she put her questions. Father Malone answered them with simplicity and frankness, or so she thought. Yes, he had been many years in China, not in Peking, or the big cities, but in his own mission in a country region. He was a country priest and had been twenty years there.

“You must have been very young when you first went.”

Yes, he had been young, only a little more than twenty-five. He had gone to help an elder priest, who had died after a few years, of cholera, and then he had carried on.

“Do you feel your work is successful?”

“I do not think of success.” His somber voice, expressive of any emotion one might choose to imagine, made music of every word. “In the long processes of the Church one man’s work is only a link in the chain of eternity.”

“I do believe,” she said, with purposeful frankness, “that you have been sent to me at this particular moment. I will not pretend that I am a religious woman for by looking at me you, will see that I am not. But I love my husband and he needs something I cannot give him. He is a naturally religious man, and he does not know it. He has grown rich so fast. You know his father was a missionary.”