Pearl Buck - Gods Men

William sat down. “Indeed?”

“Your father was a missionary.”

“Yes.”

“I, too, am a missionary,” Father Malone said after a moment. “I have been recalled for a time to collect famine funds. I brought with me the pictures which you saw today. I hoped that you would want to print them for I am told your publications reach millions of Americans, and they might be moved to send me money for food.”

“Thousands of pictures come to me every week,” William said. “I may not be able to use many of yours. Besides, we have our own photographers who know exactly what I want.”

“You do not feel moved to present the appeal for the starving?” The priest’s deep voice was calm and inquiring.

“I hesitate to embark upon relief work,” William replied. “One doubts the basic efficacy of it in a country so vast as China. Famine is endemic there, as I remember.”

“You feel no duty toward those people?”

William looked at him again unwillingly. “Only in memory of my father.”

“You deny the memory,” Father Malone said. So positive was his voice that William was instantly angry.

“Dinner is served,” the butler announced at the door.

They rose, Emory first in her rose and gray taffeta, and behind her Father Malone, stark and severe in his black garments, and William a little distance behind him. The priest’s words had fallen upon his angry heart like a sword.

“You have been stifling your soul,” Father Malone said to William Lane. He was very tired. The special mission which he had assumed as he came to know William was nearly completed. It had not been easy, far more difficult indeed than feeding the starving children and praying for the ignorant peasants who were his flock in China. The Church there was gracious to the ignorant. It did not expect a peasant to understand the mysteries. To come to Mass, to wear an amulet, to know the name of the Virgin and one or two saints was as much as he insisted upon in his village. Even confession he did not press, for how could an old man or even a young woman confess when they did not know sin? The knowledge of sin was for their children, the second generation, and in that knowledge it was his duty to instruct them. By the fifth generation he expected a priest. The Church was infinitely patient.

“You have denied your Lord,” he said.

He had tarried for days in this vast and wicked city, for so he had felt he should do. Yet when he found that the wife of this rich and powerful man believed that her husband sought God, he had felt unable to undertake so vast a responsibility alone. He had gone immediately to his local superior, Monsignor John Lockhart, to ask for direction.

John Lockhart was an Englishman, a priest of high intellect and conviction, who might have become a Cardinal of the Church had he been ambitious. But he did not wish to enter into the higher arenas, where, he thought, though without disloyalty, the air was not so pure as it might have been. Princes of the Church were subject, perhaps, to some of the temptations of earthly kings. This did not keep him from believing that the Church was the best means yet devised and developed for the guidance and control of weak and faulty human nature. He listened carefully to the shabby priest from China who sat on the edge of his chair and talked diffidently about William Lane.

“A man stubborn in his own pride,” Monsignor Lockhart said after listening. “Nevertheless he has seen religious righteousness in his father and he cannot forget it. He was reared with a conscience. He has repudiated it until now. As you have told me, you have had only to look at his face to see it tortures him.”

“Does he know it?” Father Malone asked.

“No, and it is your duty to make it known to him,” Monsignor replied.

Father Malone did not answer this. He continued to sit on the edge of his chair, his hands clasped in front of him in his habitual manner. He knew what he was, a missionary priest, a hewer of wood and a drawer of water in the palaces of the Church.

“In famine times I know that many souls are driven to the Church,” Monsignor continued. “It is our duty to feed body and soul. But sometimes there is one man who can at a certain moment be worth more to the Church than ten thousand others, and William Lane is one of them. He is very powerful and he does not know what to do with his power. He seeks to direct but he himself needs direction. In his discontent he has married again, but he cannot be satisfied with women. His hunger is of the soul.”

Father Malone had listened, and had prayed, when he was alone again, that he might see clearly what he ought to do. He did not presume to approach God directly with his own words, but while his lips murmured the beautiful Latin syllables his heart poured into them his own desire to draw to God this singular and powerful man. The task was not easy and he knew, in his humility, that he could not complete it. It would be necessary for some higher priest, some more astute mind, to fulfill the mission, perhaps the Monsignor himself. There were distances in William Lane that a common priest like himself could not reach, and depths from which he shrank.

“You have told me more than once that I have denied my Lord,” William now said with some impatience. “I am not aware that I have done so.”

Father Malone was alarmed at the fierceness of William’s eyes, at the vehemence in his voice. He had lived long among a gentle people and he missed them. His soul loathed the fleshpots among which he sojourned. At Monsignor’s command he had continued to accept William’s hospitality and he had a room and a bath here in this velvet-lined house. The bed was soft and he could not sleep upon it, and at night he had at first laid himself upon the floor and even the floor was too soft with carpet and undercarpet. Then he found that the bathroom floor was of marble and upon that surface he laid himself and found it warmed with inner pipes. He longed for his earthen-floored cell and for the icy mornings of a northern Chinese winter and a bowl of millet gruel. The flash of silver and the smoke of hot meats upon the lace-covered table in this house filled him with a sense of sin. How could he speak of God here? And the woman, telling him again and again how much he did for her husband and all the time she herself took not one word of what he said to herself!

He went increasingly often to Monsignor for counsel and he had said on his last visit, only two days ago, “Would it not be well to separate the man from the luxury which surrounds him? How can we find his soul when it is sunk in the fleshpots?”

Monsignor had looked at him out of deep, shrewd eyes. “In what sense separate?” he inquired.

“William Lane is at heart an ascetic,” Father Malone replied. “He possesses much, but he eats little and his ways are frugal. He does not drink much wine, he does not often smoke tobacco. We could make a priest out of him could we get him alone into the wilderness. If I took him back to my village, I could even entice him to love the people, which is the beginning of righteousness.”

“To what end?” his superior inquired.

Father Malone was astonished. “To the end that his soul may be saved!”

Monsignor got up and walked about his library. It was a noble room, and the mahogany book shelves reached from floor to ceiling. He had the finest religious library in America and was among its most learned prelates, in spite of his lack of religious ambitions.

“You go beyond your duty,” he said sharply. “I have told you only to awaken his soul.”

“I have done so,” Father Malone replied. He was almost as uneasy here as he was in William’s house. It was not for him to question the ways of his superiors. The Holy Father himself lived in a great palace which was one of the wonders of the world. God used riches as well as poverty for His own glory, he reminded himself.