Gods Men (28 page)

Clem looked at his big dollar watch. “You can stay out till eleven o'clock but you can't play pool.”

“I was goin' to the nickelodeon.”

“All right.”

Thus Clem had had the room alone that Monday night while he wrote to Henrietta. It might have been the solitude that moved him to ask her now to marry him. It might have been his constant wish to comfort her loneliness. It was certainly his unchanging feeling of union with her, though he had never seen her face. She was the only person in the world who could understand when he spoke about his childhood, that other world where all his roots were planted so deeply that there could be no uprooting.

“You and I have not met,” he now wrote. “It may seem—” he paused here to look up the word in his dictionary—“presumptuous for me to have the idea. But I have it and I might as well tell you. It seems to me that you and I are meant to get married. I have not seen you nor you me, but I take it we don't care first for looks. There is something else we have together. We understand things, or so I feel. I hope you do, too.”

He paused here a long time. When he went on he wrote, “I do not like this idea of proposing to you by letter. If you are willing I will come to see you. Mr. Janison owes me some time and I have saved money. Bump can help in the store after school. I could get away a couple of days and have a whole afternoon with you.”

When he had written these words he then went on to tell her the usual news of his life. Bump had got to like school at last and was even talking of college. He'd have to work his way. He himself had given up hope of a real education but he read a lot, Miss Bean telling him what books. He had just finished
The Wealth of Nations.
It was hard going but full of sense. Then he told his big news. Mr. Janison, not having any children, had asked if he didn't want to consider taking over the store some day.

Clem chewed his pen a while when he had written this. Then he went on to tell Henrietta again what he felt and what he had never told anybody except her. “If I do take this store I won't be content just to handle the one outfit. I will likely start up my cheap food stores in other places. I haven't got it all worked out but I believe it can be done like I have told you. Farmers can sell cheap if they can sell direct. Plenty of people need to eat more and better food. I could maybe think out some way even to ship food across to the people in China, or maybe just help them over there, once I learned how here, to get their own food around. It's really a world proposition, as I see it.”

He paused again, frowned and sighed. “Henrietta, I hope you will understand that I am not just interested in material things. But I feel that if everybody had enough food so they did not need to worry about where their next meal was coming from, then they could think about better things. I have not the education for teaching people but I could feed them. Anyway, to my thinking, food is something people ought to have the way they have water and air. They ought not to have to ask for it or even work for it, for all have the right to live.”

He paused again and closed his letter with these words. “I hope you will forget your brother William's attitude toward you as you feel it is, and remember that I care enough to make up for it to you, if you will let me.”

Such a letter deserved many readings before it was committed to certainty, and he read it again and again. There was nothing in it to change, he decided finally, although he would have liked to make it more polished in the writing since she was in college. This he did not know how to do and so he sealed it, addressed it, and took it to the corner postbox. There he noticed by the town clock that it was a quarter past eleven. He was just beginning to allow himself to feel severe about Bump when he saw the light come on in the room above the store. The boy was home, then. Everything was all right. He walked down the street toward the store whistling slightly off key a tune whose name he did not know.

This was the letter Henrietta received on Thursday. She kept it with her all night, waking twice to read it over again by the thin light of a candle shaded against her sleeping roommate. Of course she wanted to marry Clem. No man had ever asked her to marry him, no boy had ever asked her to a dance. Yet she wanted to go slowly about loving Clem and marrying him because it was her whole romance and there would be no other. It was wonderful to feel his letter in her bosom, a warm and living promise of love. She could trust his love as she had not trusted even the love of her parents or Ruth's demanding affection. Tomorrow, in the library where it was quiet, up in the stacks where she had a cubbyhole because she was doing a piece of original research in her chemistry, she would write to Clem and tell him that if when they met, they both felt the same way …

The next day in the cubbyhole, writing these very words, she was interrupted by her giggling roommate.

“Henrietta, there's a man wants to see you!”

“A man?” She was incredulous, too.

“A young man, terribly skinny, covered with dust!”

She knew instantly that it was Clem. Without a word more she ran down the narrow iron steps and across the hall, across a stretch of lawn to the dormitory sitting room. It was early afternoon and no one else was there except Clem. He stood in the middle of the floor waiting for her.

“I had to come,” he said abruptly and shook her hand with a wrenching grip. “I oughtn't to have put it in a letter. If a fellow wants to marry a girl he ought to come and say so.”

“Oh,” she gasped, “that's all right. I didn't mind.”

They stood looking at each other, drinking in the detail of the flesh. They were both plain, both honest, both lonely, and one face looking at the other saw there its own reflection.

“Henrietta, do you feel the way I do?” Clem asked. His voice trembled.

Henrietta flushed. Then he did not mind the way she looked, her straight dark hair, her ugly nose and small gray eyes, her wide mouth.

“You might not like me—after you got to know me.” Her voice was trembling too.

“Everything you are shines right out of you,” he said. “You're the kind I need—somebody to put my faith in. Oh, I need faith!”

She gave a great sigh that ended in a choking gasp. “Nobody has ever really needed me, I guess. Oh, Clem—”

They put their arms around each other awkwardly and their lips met in the passionless kiss of inexperienced love.

He stayed the rest of the day and she forgot her work. They wandered together over the campus and she told him about the buildings and pointed out her window. She took him into the chemistry laboratory, empty by the end of the day, and explained to him what she was trying to do, and he listened, straining to understand the union of the elements.

“I sure do wish I had education,” he said with such longing that she could not bear his deprivation.

“Clem, why can't you give up the store and go to college? Lots of fellows work their way through, or very nearly.”

He shook his head. “I can't afford to do it. I'm too far on my way. Besides, I haven't time for all of it. I just want to learn what I need—this chemistry stuff, for instance, I have an idea I could discover a whole lot of new foods. Has anybody gone at it that way?”

“Not that I know of,” she said.

They took the eight o'clock train to town and had a sandwich together at a cheap restaurant. The night was warm and the darkness was not deep when they were finished. They walked up and down the platform together, hand in hand, dreading to part, now that they had met.

“When shall we meet again?” she asked.

“I don't know,” he said. “I ought to ask your father, I guess. Isn't that the right thing?”

“I wish nobody needed to know,” she cried with passion. “I wish you and I could just go off together and nobody ever know.”

“I guess that wouldn't be just the right thing,” he said in a reasonable voice. “I'd feel a whole lot better if I wrote to your father telling about all this. Maybe I ought to tell William.”

“No!” Henrietta cried. She scuffed the edge of her shoe along the black cindered ground. “I want it all to myself—until we really are married.”

“Won't you tell William?” Clem looked grave.

“No,” Henrietta said in the same passionate voice. “At least we don't have to tell William.”

“He'll have to know sooner or later,” Clem said.

“Let him find out!” she cried.

The train came racketing in, drowning their voices, and they kissed again quickly, mindful of people about them though they were all strangers, and then Clem swung himself up the steps and she stood with her hands in the pockets of her green coat, watching until the train was gone.

“T
HERE'S A LETTER FROM
your mother,” Candace said to William. She never opened letters addressed to him after she discovered during her honeymoon that he did not like it. She wondered sometimes if she were stupid because she could never foresee what he would like and what he would not. But once she knew she never forgot.

It was December and they were in the town house. Next week she must gather herself together for Christmas. She clung to these last days of the year, spending the midday hours in a large glass-enclosed porch. She was pregnant with her second child, and next summer there would be another baby.

Just now, Willie, William's namesake, was nearly two years old. She had been married more than five years. She lay on a long and comfortable chair, feeling a little exhausted, perhaps from her horseback ride in the park. She had not told William that the doctor had forbidden riding because she did not intend to obey such orders. William, had he known, would have insisted upon obedience.

He sat down beside a small metal table and tore open the envelope thick with Chinese stamps. Two letters fell out, one with his father's writing and the other from his mother. He chose his mother's first, for she gave him the most news about what was happening in Peking. She gave the incidents and his father provided the commentary. William was profoundly interested in what was taking place there, for he believed that it was a preliminary pattern of what must happen all over Asia, a surging rise of the common people he feared and distrusted. The mob upon the Peking street had become a memory stamped upon his brain. The one power that could control such madness was in the unconquerable Empress. He remembered the brave old face, impatient and arrogant, bent above him when he was a little boy. He remembered the times he had climbed Coal Hill to look down upon the roofs of her palaces. Having now seen many mansions, he realized that the Old Empress had a magnificence that no mere millionaire could buy. Her palaces were forbidden to all men but no one could forbid an American boy to climb a hill and look down upon her roofs of porcelain blue and gold and upon her marble pillars, and anyone who passed could stare at her closed gates of enameled vermilion.

Early in July his mother had written of a garden party to be given in September in the Summer Palace and to which all diplomats and their friends had been invited. Now he read that it would never take place. The Old Empress had fallen ill on a bright day in the early autumn, his mother wrote. The young Emperor, sitting at his desk, was disturbed by a eunuch running in and crying out, “The Old Buddha is dead!” Without one word, without waiting one instant, the young Emperor began to write upon the sheet of paper he had been preparing for the brushing of a poem. Instead of the poem he wrote an order for the death of that statesman who had betrayed him to the Old Empress ten years earlier, when he had dreamed of making his country new again. Before he could seal the paper, the eunuch came running in to cry still more loudly, “The Old Buddha lives again!” She had rallied, to live weeks longer.

William kept silent, for Candace could not know what the Old Empress meant to him. He read on. She had rallied more than once after that, determined to outlive the young Emperor whom she so distrusted for his eagerness to change old ways for new. He, too, was ill, and she lived and lived again when she heard he was not dead. When she heard that at last he was gone, she gave a great gusty sigh and was willing to die.

“I of scanty merit,” the haughty old woman wrote in her last message to her people, “I have carried on the government, ever-toiling night and day. I have directed the metropolitan and provincial leaders and the military commanders, striving earnestly to secure peace. I have employed the virtuous in office and I have hearkened to the admonitions of my advisors. I have relieved the people in flood and famine. By the grace of Heaven I have suppressed all rebellions and out of danger I have brought back peace.”

William smiled grimly. Brave Old Empress, brave until the end! She had not died until she had seen that weakling dead, a degenerate youth, a puppet in the hands of revolutionists, who would have unleashed all the madness of the people.

Candace watched him but he did not know it. She could never read his face but she saw the passing smile and wanted to know its cause. “What is it, William? Has something happened?”

“Something is always happening,” William replied. He curved his lips downward very slightly. He was reading his father's letter, a short one ending as usual with a bit from the Chinese classics. “We are upon the threshold of wonderful events, now that the cruel old woman is gone,” his father wrote. “As Mencius said four hundred years before Christ, The people are the foundation of the State; the national altars are second in importance; the monarch is the least important of them all.' My son, I wish your life could have been spent here in China. It is the center of the coming world, though few know it.”

William smiled again at this, a different smile. He did not for one moment believe that China was the center of the world and he did not agree with Mencius.

Candace, watching his face, felt one of her waves of recklessness creep upon her. Why was she afraid of William? She had not been afraid of him before she was married and she could think of no single reason, certainly no incident, to explain why she should now feel that he might be cruel. Jeremy was partly responsible. Jeremy was drinking too much. She had tried to say something to her father about it but he refused to believe it. His religion was a cushion against everything that he did not like and he took refuge in it without shame. There was no use in talking to her mother and she was afraid to tell William. He was hard enough upon Jeremy in the office—hard upon Seth, too. Seth was the chief copy editor. Jeremy was managing editor and stood between Seth and William. William insisted on seeing all the copy and Seth had to make it follow the policy William outlined for his staff upon every event as it came about in the world.