Gods Men (35 page)

To Seth Clem had said with furious zeal, “I hope you'll tell William to make a real spread of this. Everybody in America ought to know about it. It's a strange and pitiful thing—this was my grandfather's place. He hung himself in that barn because he was too softhearted to get a neighbor off a farm—mortgage was called in. I came here myself when I was a kid, not knowing. These people were here already. I ran away—wanted all the kids to come with me, but only one would come.”

“It's nothing but a local mess and of no significance,” William had said upon getting Clem's message.

“But the boy's death is significant,” Seth had insisted. “The very fact that orphaned children could be farmed out like that to such people, and no one care—”

“Well, no one does care,” William had retorted.

Seth's answer had taken a long moment in coming and William, his mind upon his editorial, had not turned around. It came at last.

“You don't care, that's a fact,” Seth had said in a still voice. “You don't care about anybody, damn you!”

He stalked to the door. “I'm not coming back here.”

“Don't be foolish,” William said.

He had been very angry, nevertheless, when Seth walked out of the office. During the sleepless night in which he told Candace nothing except that the bread sauce on the pheasant he had eaten for dinner had not agreed with him, he made up his mind that when Seth came back in the morning he would ignore the whole matter. Otherwise he would have to fire him. But Seth did not come back. William had never heard from him since, but so far as he knew he was doing nothing of any use. He had backed two or three quixotic magazines, none of which were succeeding. Fortunately for Seth his father, old Mackenzie James, and Aunt Rosamond, too, had left him plenty of money. When William thought of their quarrel, as he often did, he was still convinced that he was right. A local murder in itself was not important. But William could never forget a wound and Seth had wounded him deeply. This was important.

He felt himself misunderstood; of all his men he thought that Seth had understood him best. For William did not think only of himself. All that he did, his monstrous effort, his tireless work, was, he believed, to make people know the truth. Why else did he scan every photograph that was to be printed, why read and read again the galley proofs except that he might make sure that the people were given truth and nothing but the truth? He had tried to say something like this to Seth one day and Seth had laughed.

“Truth is too big a word for one man to use,” Seth had declared. “For decency's sake, let's say truth as one man sees it.”

To this William had not replied. It was not truth as he or anyone else saw it. Surely truth was an absolute. It was an ideal, it was what was right, and right was another absolute. Facts had little to do with either. Facts, William often declared to his young subeditors, were only trees in a forest, useless until they were put to use, bewildering until they were chosen, cut down, and organized. The policy was to establish what was right, as a man might build his house.

“Our materials are facts,” William often said to his staff, looking from one tense young face to the other. The men admired him for his success, swift and immense. He was upheld by their admiration and only Seth had insisted on seeing the confusion behind their eyes. “When we know what we want to prove, we go out and find our facts. They are always there,” William said.

After Seth had deserted him, for to William, it could be called nothing but desertion, he had only Jeremy of the old gang. The rest of his huge staff was made up of many young men, whose names he was careful to remember if they were executives. To the others he paid no heed. They came and went and he judged them by the pictures they sent in and the copy they wrote. His young subeditors made up the paper, but he himself was the editor-in-chief, and mornings were hideous if he did not approve what they had done. For he must approve. No one went home unless he did—no one except Jeremy, whom he could not control. Jeremy alone at midnight put his hat on the side of his head and took up his walking stick. He would always be a little lame, and he made the most of his limp when he went into William's office.

“Good night, William, I've had enough for today.”

William never answered. Had Jeremy not been the son of Roger Cameron he would have thrown him out and closed the door.

“Ruth and I will take care of your parents,” Candace was saying. “They'll stay here, I suppose?”

“I suppose so,” William replied. He rose. “I shall have to get back to the office tonight, Candace. We'd better have dinner at once.”

Left alone after dinner, Candace put the two boys to bed, annoying the nurse Nannie by this unwanted help. The house was so silent afterward that she went to her own room and turned on all the rose-shaded lights and lay down to read, and then could not read. Instead she thought about William, whom she loved in spite of her frequent disappointment in their life together. She was not a stupid woman, although her education had been foolish, as she now knew. A finishing school and some desultory travel were all she had accomplished before her wedding day, and since then her life had been shaped around William's driving absorption in the newspapers. She could not understand this absorption. Her father had worked, too, but only when it was necessary. Other people worked for him and he fired them when they did not do what he told them. A few hours in his offices sufficed to bring the money rolling in from hundreds of stores all over the country. It would have been so pleasant if William had been willing to go into the Cameron Stores, but this he had refused to do. She did not know what he really wanted. When they were married she supposed he wanted only to be rich, for of course only rich men were successful. Yet he could have been rich almost at once had he taken the partnership her father had later offered him.

Thus she discovered that he wanted something beyond money. Yet what more was there than a handsome and comfortable home, a wife such as she tried to be and really was, wasn't she, and dear, healthy boys? One day, soon after they were married, in those days when she still thought that she could help him, she had said she thought his picture papers were childish and he had replied coldly that most people were childish and his discovery of this fact had given him the first idea for his papers.

“I like people and you hate them,” she had then declared in one of her flashes.

“I neither like them nor hate them,” he had replied.

Yet she believed that he loved her, and she knew she loved him. Why, she did not fully know. Who could explain a reason for love? Seth James had once wanted her to marry him. Since they were children he had talked about it, and Seth was good to the soul of him, kind and honest—yet she could not love him.

Surely it was strange not to know William better after years of marriage. She knew every detail of his body, his head, nobly shaped, but the eyes remote and deep under the too heavy brows; a handsome nose William had, and a fine mouth except that it was hard. His figure was superb, broad-shouldered, lean, tall, but when he was naked she looked away because he was hairy. Black hair covered his breast, his arms, his shoulders and legs. She disliked the look of his hands, though she loved him. Yet how little love revealed! What went on in his mind? They were often silent for hours together. What did he long for above all? It was not herself, nor even the two boys, though he had been pleased that his children were boys. He did not care for girls, and this she had not understood until one day Ruth had told her that in Peking the Chinese always felt sorry for a man when his child was born a girl. It was a sign of something unsuccessful in his house. No matter how many sons a Chinese had he always wanted more.

“But William isn't Chinese,” she had told Ruth, making a wry face.

Ruth had given her pretty laugh. Then she had shaken her head rather soberly. “He's not really American, though, Candy.”

What was really American? Jeremy was American, and Ruth had adapted herself to him, copying even his speech. They were quite happy since they had the two girls. Ruth had been absurdly grateful when Jeremy seemed really to prefer girls.

She loved Jeremy with her whole tidy little being and had no thought for anyone else, except William. William she was proud of and afraid of, and the only quarrel she had with Jeremy was when she asked him not to make William angry. Jeremy, of course, was afraid of nothing, not even of William.

Yet William loved his country. He was capable of sudden long speeches about America. Once at an office banquet to celebrate his first million readers, William had talked almost an hour and everybody listened as though hypnotized, even Candace herself. The big hotel dining room was still and suddenly she began to smell the flowers, the lilies and roses, on the tables, although she had not noticed their fragrance before. Words had poured out of William as though he had kept them pent in him. She heard the echoes of them yet.

“It is the hour of American destiny.

—We have been sowing and now we are about to reap.

—I see the harvest in terms of the whole world.

—The world will listen to our voices, speaking truth.

—We are young but we have learned in our youth to control the forces of water and air—the forces which are locked into ore and coal.

—Old countries are dying and passing away. England is weak with age, an ancient empire, her rulers grown tired. France is sunk in dreams and Italy slumbers. But we of America, we are awake. The name America will be heard among every people. It is our time, our hour. It is we who will write the history of the centuries to come. …”

Candace had listened, alarmed and half ashamed and yet fascinated. This was William, her husband!

That night in the silence of their own house she had been unusually silent. He had seemed exhausted, his face pallid as water under a gray sky, and he did not speak to her.

“You were very eloquent tonight, William,” she had said at last, because something was necessary to be spoken between them. “I suppose your preacher father is somewhere in you, after all.”

“I wasn't preaching,” he had said harshly. “I was telling the truth.”

At this moment the telephone rang upon the small rosewood table beside her bed and, lifting the receiver, she heard her father's nasal voice.

“William?”

“William is at the office, Father,” she told him. “There's only me at home.”

He hesitated. “You in bed, Candy?”

“Not really. I'm just upstairs because I don't like being downstairs alone.”

“Maybe I'll come around. Your mother's got a sick headache and she's gone to sleep.”

“Do, Father. I'll come down and be waiting.”

Such visits at night were not unusual. Her father liked to walk in darkness when the city streets were empty, and once or twice a month he rang the doorbell and when the door was opened stood peering doubtfully into the hall. “William here?”

It was always his first question, though why Candace did not know, for sometimes he came in whether William were home or not, to stay a moment or an hour. He had a delicacy which told him, his foot upon the threshold, whether his visit was opportune.

Tonight she was more than usually pleased, for she was in a mood to talk and there was no one with whom she could talk more easily than with her father. Her mother was well enough when it came to the matter of servants and children but tonight she wanted to talk about something more, although she did not know exactly what.

When the doorbell rang she hastened downstairs to open the door herself, for the maids were asleep. Her father stood upon the big door mat, looking gray and cold and yet somehow cheerful, the tip of his long nose red and his eyes small and keen.

“This is nice,” he said as she took off his overcoat. “I feel in the need of a little light conversation. It looks like rain and my knees are stiff.”

“You shouldn't be walking on such a night,” she scolded with love.

“I shan't yield my life to my knees,” he said.

The fire was red coals in the living-room grate and he took the tongs from her. He was skillful at fires, manipulating the live coals under the fresh fuel and coaxing a flame from the least of materials. It was one of his pet economies, left over from the days when as a child he had picked up coal from the railroad yards in a Pennsylvania mining town.

When the fire was blazing he sat down, rubbing his hands clean on his white silk handkerchief. “Well, how's tricks?”

“Oh, we're all well,” she replied. “Willie is on the honor roll at school. William was quite pleased. The real news is that William's parents are coming from China.”

“I thought they'd decided to stay for another year.”

“So did I.”

“It's the old lady, I imagine,” he said thoughtfully and gazed into the fire. “I suppose William's glad?”

Candace laughed. “He seems rather annoyed.”

Roger Cameron liked to hear his daughter laugh. He looked up and smiled. It was a pleasant moment, the big room shadowed in corners and lit here by the fire and the lamp. She looked pretty in a rose-colored wool dressing gown, pretty and maybe happy, too. For a while after her marriage he had wondered if she was happy and them had decided she could be, mainly because she had a fine digestion and no ambitions. He had taken care in her education that she should not be placed in the atmosphere of ambitious women. There were such women in the Stores, and none of them, he believed, were happy. His secretary, Minnie Forbes, whom he had employed since she was twenty-one, was devoured with dry unhappiness, perhaps because Minnie would have been shocked to know that she was in love with her employer. Roger knew very well that she was and was grateful for her ignorance. He himself loved his wife in a mild satisfactory way, and had no desire to love anyone else. The brief months when as a young man he had been passionately in love with her he remembered as extremely uncomfortable, for he could not keep his mind on his business. He had been relieved when he discovered that she was not the extraordinary creature his fancy had led him to imagine her, and then he had settled down to the homely and unromantic married love which he had enjoyed now throughout forty peaceful years. He and his wife were deeply attached, but she did not regret his business trips, and he enjoyed them with the single-minded pursuit of more business.