Gods Men (34 page)

Sun Yatsen did not answer for a moment. When he did speak it was to say with the utmost courtesy as he rose to his feet:

“I thank you, sir, for seeking me out. Thank you for caring for my people. I am touched, if not convinced.”

His English was admirable, the accent faintly Oxford. It was far better, indeed, than Clem's American speech, tinged with the flatness of Ohio plains.

“Good night,” Clem said. “I wish you luck, anyway, and I hope you won't forget what I've said, even if you don't agree with me, because I know I'm right.”

C
ANDACE FELT THAT WILLIAM
was annoyed. He stooped to kiss her as usual but she was sensitive to his mood after these years of marriage and she saw a wintry stillness gathered about his heavy brows and firm mouth. When he spoke his voice was formal.

“I am sorry to be late.”

“Are you late?” She yawned nicely behind her hand. “Then I'm late, too. I was tired when I came home from the matinée.”

“Was the play good?”

“You wouldn't think so.”

She rose from the chaise longue where she had been drowsing and looked from the window. Far below the vast park lay in shadows, pricked with lights. “I do hope the children are home. Nannie keeps them out too late. She is a fiend for fresh air.”

“There was a strong draft along the hall from the nursery door and so I suppose they are home,” William replied.

“Why do you think her first impulse upon entering a room is to open the windows?”

She asked the useless question while she was pulling on the satin slippers she had kicked off when she threw herself down. William seated himself in a chair and took his characteristic pose, his small dark hands gripped together, his legs, long and thin, crossed. Whatever the fashions for men, he wore his favorite gray, dark with a faint pinstripe, and his tie was dark blue. He did not answer his wife. This, too, was usual. Candace asked many questions she did not expect to have answered.

They were the queries of her idle mind. He had once given them thought until he discovered them meaningless.

She straightened her skirt and sauntering to her dressing table she picked up a brush and began smoothing out her short curls. Something was wrong but if she waited William would tell her. It might be anything, perhaps that he did not like the odor of food floating upstairs from the basement kitchen. The maids left the doors open in spite of her orders. Perhaps it was only while watching her as she brushed her hair he was reminded that she had decided to have her hair cut against his wishes.

“I had a letter from my father today,” William said abruptly.

“I thought something was wrong,” she said, not turning around but seeing him very well in the mirror. His face, always ashen, was no more so than usual. Something in his Chinese childhood, a doctor had said, perhaps the dysentery when he was four, had left his intestines filled with bacteria now harmless but more numerous than they should be.

“They have decided to take their furlough, after all,” he said.

She went on brushing her hair, watching his face. “That's good news, isn't it? I have never seen your father, and the boys have never seen even your mother.”

He frowned and the thick dark brows which always gave his face such somberness seemed to shadow and hide his deep-set eyes. “It is a bad time for me, nevertheless. I'd just decided to launch the new paper at once instead of waiting until spring.”

She whirled around. “Oh, William, you aren't going to start something more!”

“Why not?”

“But we don't see anything of you as it is!”

“I shan't need to work as long hours as I did with the others. I've made my place.”

“But why, when we're making money? You sacrifice yourself and us for nothing, darling!”

She let the brush fall to the floor and flew to his side and dropped on her knees, leaning her elbows on his lap and beseeching him. “I have always to take the boys everywhere without you. All last summer at the seashore you only came down for week ends, and scarcely that! It isn't right, William, now when they're beyond being babies. I didn't say anything when you were getting started, but today, just when I was thinking we might go to the theater sometimes together!”

He was entirely conscious of her beautiful face so near his, and he would have given much to be able to yield himself to her but he could not. Some inner resistance kept him even from her. He did not know what it was, but he felt it like an iron band around his heart. He could not give himself up to anyone, not even to his sons. He longed to play on the floor, to roll on the carpet as Jeremy did with his little daughters, but he could not. He was most at ease when he sat behind his great desk in the office giving orders to the men whom he employed.

“I went to the theater with you only last week,” he reminded her.

“But that was an opening night and you know what people go to that for—to see and be seen. I want us just to go sometimes all by ourselves, and only for the play.”

He did not enjoy the theater but he had never told her so. He could never forget that it was only a play. No stage excitement could reach him when he was fed daily by the excitement of his own life, his secret power which he felt growing beneath the power of the printed words he set upon his pages. He alone chose those words. What he did not want people to know he did not allow to be printed. They learned only what he selected. Sometimes, meditating upon his responsibility, he felt himself chosen and destined for some power over men which he had not yet reached. He had been reared in Calvinism and predestination, but in his rebellion against his childhood he had rejected all that his father taught him. He had become almost an atheist while he was in college. Now he was made religious by his own extraordinary success. In the few years since he had put out the first of his newspapers, their sales had soared into millions. Yet he was not satisfied. Even now, traveling upon a train, he could feel vaguely hurt that on every other seat there should be lying the crumpled sheets of a paper thrown away. People ought to keep what he had so carefully made. Then his mood changed to pride. There were two of his papers to one of any other. Such colossal success meant something. There was a God, after all—and predestination.

“What are you thinking about?” Candace asked.

The question slipped from her tongue and she wanted it back instantly but it was too late. William disliked to be asked what he was thinking about. It was an intrusion and she knew now that he guarded himself even from her. It had taken her time to learn this and meantime she had wept a good deal alone. Tears, she had now learned, only irritated him. She shed no more of them.

“No—don't answer me,” she said and impulsively she put her crossed fingers on his lips.

He took her hands rather gently, however, and did answer her. “I was thinking, Candy, that it is a great responsibility for one man to know that he feeds the minds—and the souls—of three million people.”

“Three million?”

“That is the number of our readers today. Rawlston gave me the last figures just before I came home. A year from now he says it will be twice that number. I suppose I am worth more than a million dollars, now.”

She was used to her father's joking, “A millionaire? Nothing to it. Just keep ridin' high and never look down.”

“You've made a great success, William.” She was not at all sure that this was the right thing to say and with his next words she knew it was not.

“I'm not thinking only in terms of personal success. It is easy to be successful here in America. Anyone with brains can make money.”

“But you do like money, William.” Her sense of being wrong compelled her to justify what she had said. Besides, it was true. In his own way William valued money far more than she did or ever could.

“It is only common sense to have money.” His voice was dry, his eyes severe and gray. “Without it one is hamstrung. There is no freedom without money.”

She remembered something she had heard her father once say. “A man needs enough room to swing a cat in.” Room, that was what money gave. A big house to live in, months in which to idle beside the sea, to live winter in summer and summer in winter, to buy without asking the price.

“Yet you don't seem to enjoy life very much, William,” she said rather painfully. She had a profound capacity for enjoyment without a sense of guilt. Her father had frankly enjoyed getting rich and he distrusted all charities. She teased him sometimes by saying that he had become a Christian Scientist so that he could ignore the sufferings of others.

He had grinned and refused to be teased. “Maybe you're right, daughter. Who knows why we do anything?”

Then he had turned grim. “If I see somebody starving, with my own eyes, I'll feed 'em. I won't pay out good cash for what I don't see. Ten to one they're lazy. If they hustled like I did. …”

Even going to church, while a social duty, had nothing to do with giving his money to strangers. Roger Cameron had cultivated no conscience in his children and Candace had grown up believing that pleasure was her normal occupation, once the dinner was planned and the children cared for. But no pleasure she devised could coax William from himself, or whatever it was that he dwelled upon in his soul. A ball which she planned as happily as a child might plan a birthday party fretted him with detail. A dish badly served spoiled his dinner. A servant who was not well trained—but of servants she would not think. He demanded of those in his service a degree of obedience and respect and outward decorum which had made her wretched until her father had found her crying one day. He had a way of coming to see her alone when he knew William was at his office. He took a cab and came all the way from Wall Street to arrive at three o'clock in the afternoon or at eleven o'clock in the morning.

On one such a visit he said, after he had inquired as to the cause of the tears his shrewd eyes had seen in spite of powder and even a dash of rouge, “You can't find Americans who'll give William the service he wants. We don't respect ourselves enough yet. We've always got to be showing that we're independent and don't have to obey anybody. Besides, we're too honest. When we hate anybody we act ugly. You hire your house full of English, Candy—they can act nice while they're stirrin' up poison for you. An English servant can polish your shoes as though he loved it. Of course he don't.”

So she had filled the house with English servants, and a butler and a housekeeper kept their eyes upon William, the master.

“I don't know that life is merely to be enjoyed,” William now said.

She was still crouching beside him. Idly she had taken one of his hands and playing with the fingers, she noticed the strange stiffness of his muscles.

“What's life for?” she asked, not expecting an answer. “I don't know, I don't suppose anyone does, exactly. We're here, that's all.”

“It is for something more than amusement.” He disliked her playing with his hand and he drew it away, ostensibly to light a cigarette.

She felt his dislike and got to her feet gracefully, took his head between her hands and kissed his forehead.

“Poor darling, you're so serious.”

“I don't need your pity.”

“Oh, no, William, I didn't mean that. Only, I enjoy life so much.”

She drew back and met the hurt look she feared. Why could she never learn how easily wounded he was? She cried out. “How silly we are to keep talking about nothing when you haven't even told me your real news! When are your father and mother coming?”

He was relieved to be able to withdraw from her. “I had a cable this afternoon. They sailed the thirteenth on an Empress ship.”

“Then in a fortnight—”

“More or less. Just when I shall be busiest.”

“Never mind, I'll look after them. Dad has time, too, now he's retired enough to stop away from the office if he likes. And there's Jeremy and Ruth—”

“I shall need Jeremy.”

Of the young men with whom he had begun the paper only Jeremy was left. One by one the others had deserted him. Martin Rosvaine had gone into the production of motion pictures and Blayne into the State Department with aspirations for an ambassadorship. He had not missed these two, but he had been sorry when Seth James quarreled with him, for he valued Seth's brilliant and effervescent mind, the ideas which poured forth like sparks from a rocket. Most of them were useless, but he watched the scintillating performance because there were always one or even two or three ideas upon which he seized. They had made a good pair, for Seth's weakness was his inability to discriminate between good ideas and foolish ones, and the paper would have been bankrupt had he been given authority. For that reason, William told himself, he had been compelled to keep control in his own hands even to the extent of buying up stock. Jeremy, of course, had never been a threat. He worked when he wished and William had learned to hire an understudy for him. But even yet he missed Seth, who had left him in anger and still refused to communicate with him.

The quarrel had been over a small matter, a difference of opinion so common to them that William had not troubled even to be polite. He had merely thrown abrupt words over his shoulder one night when they were all working long past midnight. Seth had said something about a story of some long-orphaned children in a foster home on a Pennsylvania farm. The farmer had lost his temper at a boy—he was still a boy, though a man in years—and the boy in terror and self-defense had rushed forward with a pitchfork, which had pierced the farmer's leg. The wound was slight but the farmer had hacked the boy with an ax with which he was chopping wood and the boy had bled to death within an hour. There had been scandal enough so that Seth had gone impetuously to the scene himself to check the copy he was reading, and had come back flaming with anger at the conditions he found in the farmhouse: two half-starved grown girls, both mentally retarded, and a fat cruel old woman, and the boy hastily buried without anyone coming to investigate. The farmer lay in bed and babbled about self-protection. Seth had routed out police and they in turn had produced a thin frightened woman who claimed that she was only an employee of the organization that had placed the children and that she did not know whether there were any relatives. In the end the local publicity had spread to reach Ohio, whereupon Clem Miller of all people had come to Pennsylvania to see what was going on. He had taken the two girls away with him and had told the police that the place was not fit for any children, big or little.