Gods Men (54 page)

“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.

“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?