Pearl Buck - Gods Men

“Continue then until you receive my next instruction,” Monsignor said.

So Father Malone had gone back to the rich house again. At this moment, however, when he sat alone with William in the silent opulent room, remote from any life he knew, he felt that the end of his work had surely come and that he must beg his superior to release him. He knew that William did deny his Lord, for he felt denial everywhere in this house, in William and in his wife and in the very existence of this place and in all it contained. But he could not explain how he felt this or why. Monsignor had not approved his speaking of poverty. Had he not received this disapproval he would have said earnestly to William, “You must give up all this and follow Christ.” But he did not dare to say this. He felt puzzled and tired and in spite of constant refusal he knew that he had eaten too much and too richly. Sitting in a highback Jacobean chair which he chose because it alone had a hard wooden seat, he twisted his workworn hands.

“It is time for me to leave you,” he said to William. “I have been detained by God to remind you of your father and of the land where you were born and to guide you to think of these things. Beyond that I am not able to go. I must commend you to Monsignor Lockhart, who is a wiser man in the Church than I am. I have no great learning. My books are fewer than a hundred. He has thousands of books upon his shelves and in many languages. He is continually in communication with those who know the Holy Father, whose face I shall never see.”

William did not deny this. He had indeed been stirred to the bottom of his soul by Malone. He envied the priest his unmoving faith, his confidence in prayer, his conviction of duty, the same faith, confidence, and conviction which his own father had possessed. But William was not able to proceed beyond the impulse of envy and of longing. His spiritual hunger had been increased and not satisfied. His loneliness was more and not less.

“Perhaps you are right,” he said. “Yet I am very grateful for what you have done.”

“It is not I but God working through me.”

“Then I thank God. Perhaps, in spite of not seeing it yet, my feet have, nevertheless, been set upon a path.”

“Monsignor Lockhart will lead you the rest of the way,” Father Malone replied.

Upon this they parted. In a short time Father Malone had packed his Chinese bag of split and woven rattan, and he refused the offer of William’s car. “I must report to my superior,” he said, “and it is only a short distance upon this same avenue. Let me walk. It will make me feel I am on my way home.”

William was perceptive enough to know what he meant and he let him go.

When Emory came home in the late afternoon she missed at once the third presence in the house. She had been on an ordinary errand to have her hair dressed, and when Henry opened the door to her he told her that the master had not returned to his office. She found William in the rather small room which they used as a sitting room when they were alone. He was stretched upon a reclining chair, gazing into the coals of a dying fire. He had not put on the lights, and there was a strange atmosphere of life and death in the room. She touched the switch by the door and the wall lights flamed.

“William, are you ill?” she exclaimed.

“No,” he replied. “I have been thinking all afternoon. Father Malone has gone.”

“Gone?”

“He says he wants me to go directly now to Monsignor Lockhart. He thinks it is time.”

She came to him and knelt at his side and put her hand on his that were folded across his body. “William, please do only what you wish!” she now said.

He moved his hands from under hers rather sharply. “No one can make me do otherwise!”

“But be sure that you know if they try.”

“You don’t flatter me, Emory. I am usually considered astute enough.”

He was determined to be hurt and she refused to hurt him. “I’m being stupid.” She got up and then sat down in a chair opposite him. “It’s hot in here. Shan’t I open the window?” The house with its central heating was always too hot for her English blood.

“I am not hot.”

“I suppose it’s because I have just come in from outside.”

She sat still for a few minutes, and then stealing a look at William she grew alarmed at the whiteness of his face. She got up again and went to him and curled on the floor beside him. She took his hand and leaned her cheek against it and made to him a complaint she had never made before.

“You haven’t loved me all the time Father Malone’s been here.” She put the palm of his hand against her soft red mouth.

Among the American women she was learning to know, there was shrewd interchange at once cynical and enjoyed by them. “You don’t know your man until you’ve slept with him,” was the common creed. They were all healthy handsome women, to whom chastity was not a jewel without price. Yet not one of them would have entertained the possibility of a lover, for their husbands were richer than potential lovers and men of position which they did not care to threaten. The difference between men, they frankly acknowledged, lay in their bank accounts rather than in their persons. They considered themselves exceedingly fortunate women and so they intended to live virtuously. But Emory was virtuous by nature.

She felt the palm under her lips tighten. It was impossible for William to speak of love. She crushed her mouth against his palm, tasting its flavor of soap and salt. If within a moment he did not respond she would laugh at herself and tease him for being so earnest about everything. “Don’t be so serious, darling — let’s go drown ourselves somewhere! Nobody will notice the difference and it would be fun. Something we’ve never done before!”

But tonight she would not need such nonsense. She recognized the familiar signs, the tightening of nerve and muscle, the response of his strangely awkward, rather short fingers. He sat up suddenly and drew her against him and she held her breath. He was always abrupt and unsharing but she was used to that now. He had to dominate her and though she had resisted this at first, now she no longer did so. Sex for a woman was nothing. It expressed no part of her being. It was an act of play, of symbolic yielding, a pleasant gesture, pleasing to receive and to give, a thing to forget, the preliminary to a possible experience of motherhood with which the man had little to do. She had decided against motherhood when she saw Will and Jerry. Candace had given William his sons and she divined that more sons would be meaningless for him and for her. With Cecil’s death had gone any need for a son of her own. She divined also that William would care nothing for daughters.

“Lock the door,” William commanded her. … She had a healthy body and she did not shrink from whatever William demanded. She accepted sex in exactly the same way that she enjoyed a cup of tea or a meal. There was nothing mysterious about it or even very interesting. What was interesting was William. She got to know him better in this brief occasional half hour than she could in a month of living. There was something cruel in him — no, not actually cruel, but he needed frightfully to be sure that he was right. Somewhere along the way of his childhood and his youth he had been so wounded in his self-love that now he knew best, he always knew best. And yet his self-confidence, his willfulness, his determination to make others obey him was not solid to the bottom of him. Sometimes when she had obeyed him utterly his command broke. He could not go on. He was not sure of himself. But why not? Who threatened him now?

So it happened tonight. In this quiet hour between day and night, when the servants were busy in the remote regions of the house, they had the complete privacy he demanded. Father Malone was gone. It could not have happened had he been in the house. And still William could not succeed. The fiasco came as it had sometimes before, though not always. Then why tonight?