Gods Men (51 page)

“I want to keep you happy,” William said in a voice stifled by love. “I don't want you troubled.”

“Thank you, dear,” she said. “I am not troubled.”

He went away and she heard him mount the stairs to his rooms. He would bathe and change and come down again soon looking rested and handsome, the gentleman that he was of wealth and increasing leisure. He did not need to work as once he did, he had told her only yesterday. They might go to Italy this winter, stopping at Hulme Castle, of course.

She sat for a moment thinking of this and of Clem. Then with a sudden decisive movement she touched the bell. There was really nothing she could do about Clem. She had chosen William and her world was William's world.

The door opened. “Take away the tea things, please, Henry,” she said in her silvery English voice. “I am going upstairs and if any one telephones I am not to be disturbed.”

“Yes, madame,” Henry said.

From William's house Clem went downtown. He wanted comfort and reassurance. Henrietta could always give him comfort and encouragement but no one, not even she, could understand that now at this moment he needed the reassurance of fact. He must learn by actual test whether what he was doing was more than he feared it was, a drop in the vast bucket of human hunger. He avoided the hotel and taking a bus he swung downtown to Mott Street where his largest restaurant stood. It was a dingy-looking place now but there was no need to have it otherwise. People had already learned that they could get free food there, too many people. He saw many men and some women with children standing in a ragged shivering line waiting in the wintry twilight and he pulled up his collar and stood at the end. In a few seconds there were twenty more behind him.

They moved step by step with intolerable slowness. He must speak to Kwok about this. People must be served more quickly on such bitter nights. Speed was essential. They must hire more waiters, hire as many people as necessary.

He got in at last and took his place at a table already crowded. A waiter swabbed it off and did not recognize his guest.

“Whatcha want to eat?” he asked, still swabbing.

Clem murmured the basic meal. He waited again, glancing here and there, seeing everything. The room was far too crowded but it was warm and reasonably clean. It was big but not nearly big enough. He must see if he could rent the upper floor. In spite of the crowd the place was silent, or almost silent. People were crouched over the tables, eating. Only a few were talking, or laughing and briefly gay.

His plate came and he ate it. The food was good enough, filling and hot. The waiter kept looking at him and Clem saw him stop a moment later at the cashier's window. He ate as much as he could and then leaned to the man next to him at the long table, a young unshaven man who had cleaned his plate.

“Want this?” Clem muttered.

The sunken young eyes lit in the famished face. “Don't you want it?”

“I can't finish it—”

“Sure.”

The waiter was watching again but Clem got up and went to the cashier's window with his check. He leaned toward the grating and said in a low voice, “I'm sorry I can't pay anything.”

The sharp-faced Chinese girl behind the thin iron bars replied at once and her voice and accent were entirely American. “Oh yes, you can. You aren't hungry—not with that suit of clothes!”

“My only decent clothes,” Clem muttered.

“Pawn them,” she said briskly. “Everybody's doing that so's to pay for their meals.”

He turned in sudden fury and walked across the restaurant, pushing his way through the waiters. He went straight to Mr. Kwok's small office and found him there in his shirtsleeves, the oily sweat pouring down his face.

“Mr. Miller—” Mr. Kwok sprang to his feet. He pointed to his own chair. “Sit down, please.”

Clem was still furious. “No, I won't sit down. Look here, I came in tonight to see how things were going on. I told the cashier I couldn't pay just to try out the system. That damned girl at the window told me to go pawn my clothes!”

Mr. Kwok sweat more heavily. “Please, Mr. Miller, not so mad! You don't unnerstan'. We going broke this way—too many people eating every day. In China you know how people starving don't expect eating every day only maybe one time, two time, three time in a week. Here Americans expecting eating every day even they can't pay. Nobody can do so, Mr. Miller, not even such a big heart like yours. It can't be starving people eat like not starving. It don't make sense, Mr. Miller. At first yes, very sensible, because most people pay, but now too many people don't pay and still eating like before. What the hell! It's depression.”

The wrath went out of Clem. What the Chinese said was true. Too many people now couldn't pay. The job was beyond him, beyond anybody. Too many people, too many starving people.

“I guess you're right,” he said after a long pause.

He looked so pale when he got up, he swayed so strangely on his feet that Mr. Kwok was frightened and put out his hands and caught Clem by the elbows. “Please, Mr. Miller, are you something wrong?”

Clem steadied himself. “No, I'm all right. I just got to think of something else, that's all. Good night, Mr. Kwok.”

He wrenched himself away from the kind supporting hands and went out of the door into the street. His idea wasn't working. Nothing was working. People were pawning their clothes in this bitter weather. They were being asked to pawn their clothes, pawn everything they could, doubtless. The waiters had been told to look and see what people wore. He remembered the hungry boy who had seized his plate and eaten the leftovers like a dog. That was what it had come to here in his own country. Someday people would be eating grass and roots and leaves here as they did in China.

“I got to get down to Washington,” he muttered into the cold darkness. “I gotta get down there one more time and tell them. …”

He found his way to the hotel where Henrietta waited for him, alarmed at his long absence.

“Clem—” she began, but he cut her off short.

“Get our things together, hon. We're taking the next train to Washington. I'm going to get to that fellow in the White House if I have to bust my way in.”

He did not get in, of course. She knew he could not. She waited outside in the lobby and read a pamphlet on a table full of pamphlets and magazines that had been sent for the President to read. He had no time to read them and they had been put here to help the people who waited to while away the time. In a pamphlet of five pages, in words as dry as dust, in sentences as terse as exclamations, but passionless, she read the whole simple truth. For twenty-nine months American business had been shrinking. Industrial production was fifty per cent of what it had been three years ago. The deflation in all prices was thirty-five per cent. Profits were down seventy-five per cent. Nineteen railroads during the last year had gone bankrupt. Farm prices had shrunk forty-nine per cent so far and were still going down. But—and here she saw how everlastingly right Clem was—there was more food than ever! Farmers had grown ten per cent more food in this year of starvation than they had grown three years ago in a time of plenty.

“Oh, Clem,” Henrietta whispered to her own heart. “How often you tell them and they will not listen! O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often. …”

She put the pamphlet back on the table and sat with her hands folded in her lap and her head bowed so that her hat hid the tears that kept welling into her eyes. It was for Clem she wept, for Clem in whom nobody believed except herself, and who was she except nobody? William had hurt him dreadfully but she did not know how because Clem would not tell her what had happened. He had spoken scarcely a word all the way down on the train. She had tried to make him sleep, even if they were only in a day coach—he wouldn't spend the money for berths—but though he leaned back and shut his eyes she knew he was not sleeping.

He came into the waiting room suddenly and she saw at once that he had failed. She got up and they went out of the building side by side. She took his hand but it was limp, and she let it go again.

“Did you see the President?” she asked when they were on the street. The sun was bright and cold and pigeons were looking around for food, but no one was there to feed them.

“No,” Clem said. “He was too busy. I talked to somebody or other, though, enough to know there was no use staying around.”

“Oh, Clem, why?”

“Why? Because they've got an idea of their own. Want to know what it is? Well, I'll tell you. They've got the idea of telling the farmers to stop raising so much food. That's their idea. Wonderful, ain't it, with the country full of starvation?”

He turned on her and gave a bark of laughter so fierce that people stared, but he did not see their stares. He was loping along as though he were in a race and she could scarcely keep up with him.

“Where are we going now, Clem?” she asked.

“We're going home to Ohio. I gotta sweat it out,” he said.

The nation righted itself in the next two years, slowly like a ship coming out of a storm. William wrote a clear and well-reasoned editorial for his chain of newspapers and pointed out to his millions of readers that the reforms were not begun by Franklin D. Roosevelt, the new President, but by Herbert Hoover who should have been re-elected in sheer justice that he might finish that which he had begun. It was already obvious, William went on, that the new inhabitant of the White House would run the nation into unheard-of national debt.

What William saw now in the White House was not the mature and incomparable man, toughened by crippling experience. He saw a youth he remembered in college, gay and willful and debonair, born as naturally as Emory to a castle and unearned wealth, but, unlike her, not controlled by any relationship to himself. Roosevelt, secure from the first moment of his birth, was uncontrollable and therefore terrifying, and William conveyed these fears in his usual editorial style, oversimple and dogmatically brief. To his surprise, he experienced his first rebellion. Millions of frightened people reading his editorials felt an inexplicable fury and newspaper sales dropped so sharply that the business office felt compelled to bring it to William's notice. He replied by a memorandum saying that he was sailing for England and Europe, especially Germany where he wanted to see for himself what was happening, and they could do as they liked while he was gone.

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.