Gods Men (55 page)

So it happened tonight. In this quiet hour between day and night, when the servants were busy in the remote regions of the house, they had the complete privacy he demanded. Father Malone was gone. It could not have happened had he been in the house. And still William could not succeed. The fiasco came as it had sometimes before, though not always. Then why tonight?

She waited a moment to make sure that it was to be so, and then it was so. He lay back exhausted without fulfillment. She buried her head against him, and began stroking his hand gently. It was listless and he did not speak a word. He never did.

This went on for what seemed an endless time. The room grew darker. Somewhere, at last, far off, the gong rang warning that dinner was only half an hour off. She let his hand fall and felt a wave of relief. Better luck perhaps, next time!

“I think Father Malone was right,” she said in her ordinary voice. “I do think you ought to go and see Monsignor Lockhart.”

W
HEN THE SECOND WORLD
war broke out Clem made up his mind to ignore it. “Let her blaze,” he told Henrietta in cosmic anger. “It's all got beyond me.”

“Aren't you going to close the restaurants now?” Henrietta had asked when people were working again on war jobs.

“I've been thinking about that,” Clem said. “I don't want to be in the restaurant business. I guess I'll let the fellows have them. They can set up for themselves somewhere or they can stay where they are. They've got to promise me, though, that they'll keep on giving free meals when necessary.”

“Since they've made money, I imagine they won't mind that,” Henrietta said. Chinese could always take care of themselves with ancestral prudence.

By that time the government had ordered surpluses given outright to hungry people. Nobody knew how much of this giving away was the fruit of a certain day when Clem at last sat with that fabulous man in the White House who could not stand up unless somebody helped him. Clem got on well with him. He tried to remember that the man behind the big desk covered with small objects was the President of the United States, but most of the time he forgot it. They talked all over the world. The man behind the desk showed extraordinary knowledge and also profound ignorance, and he did not care who knew it. Clem tried to tell him about China and then gave up. There was too much the man did not know. He knew as little about India, and believed that the only problem there was too many people, and Clem labored earnestly to make him see this was not true. India could produce plenty of food for many more people.

“China, for instance, is nearly self-supporting in food,” Clem said. “She doesn't import anything hardly. She grows immense amounts of food.”

“Seems to me I've heard of starving Chinese all my life,” said the man with the big smile.

“That's because they need railroads and truck highways,” Clem said. “They can't move surpluses. They starve in spots. It's the world situation in a big nutshell. Before you can have a steady peace, you've got to be able to move surpluses.”

The war had broken out in China and in Europe and it meant that in China at least there would be fewer new highways than ever. Still the big man did not care much about China. That was to come later. Clem went away attracted and confounded. The big man didn't see the world as round. For him it was flat. He couldn't imagine the underneath. The whole world would have to blaze with war before the big man understood that the world was one big round globe.

It had never been easy for Clem to write letters but when he got home to Henrietta he began the series of letters which were his effort to educate the man who didn't know the world was round. Sometimes these letters were long but usually they were not. The big man never answered them or acknowledged them himself, but Clem hoped that he read them. In them he tried to put down all he knew, including excerpts from the letters which Yusan wrote him.

“Of course we ought to help lick the Japs in China now,” Clem wrote, “but this is just the first step. As far as that goes the war really began when we let them have Manchuria. The next real job will come after the war when Chiang Kai-shek will have to hold his people together. It is easier for a soldier to keep on fighting than it is to get down to the necessary peace. It will be the Communists next, for sure, and that's what we have got to reckon with. My advice now is to give some little hint of friendship for the people of India so as to begin to win friendship from Asia. I know you don't want to get Winston worked up, but you could just say a word or two in the direction of India in your next fireside chat and this would please Indians by the millions as well as Chinese. If you would say you believe in the freedom of peoples but say it now, within this week, which is a time of crisis we don't know anything about over here, it would mean everything. Next month would be too late. They are all waiting.”

Clem had bought his first radio especially to hear the President, but he did not say one word about India or the freedom of the peoples in his next fireside talk. The famous voice came richly over the wires. “My friends …” but it didn't reach as far as China or India or Indonesia. Clem listened to the last rousing words and shut off the radio and was gloomy for so long that Henrietta was worried. She and Clem were no longer young and she wished that he could stop his world-worrying. Other people would have to take over and if they didn't, it could not be helped. Clem's stomach had been better after the depression but this second World War was making it worse again.

When she said something like this to Clem he would not listen to her. “I'm used to my stomach by now, hon. It hasn't won out on me yet.”

“You haven't won out either, Clem,” she said sharply. “It's a continual struggle and you know it.”

He grinned at her, although there was nothing cheerful to grin about. Pearl Harbor had done him as much damage internally as it had done the Hawaiian Islands and he did not dare to tell Henrietta that all his old symptoms had returned, and that he was afraid to eat.

When America had finally swung into war he offered himself as a supercook and was actually put in charge of the mess halls and kitchens of barracks near Dayton. While the war went on and he still continued his long-distance education of the White House, conducted without any response whatever, Clem made some thousands of American boys happy by excellent food and pleasant dining halls where they were allowed to smoke and where cages of singing canaries brightened up their meals. Outside the dining room Clem made the administration furious by the economies he suggested and even put into force so that his regiments, as he called them, became notorious or longed for, depending upon whether a man was brass or buttons.

Clem himself considered it piddling. He was marking time until the end of the war when he intended to marshal all his theories into one vast gospel and present them to the White House and then to the nations. He had long ago forgotten William's rebuff and he remembered now only the grace and kindness of William's wife, and he dreamed secretly without telling Henrietta that after the war was over he would go back to William, not this time to advocate a theory but with a formula in his hand, a formula for a food so cheap that until the world got its distribution fixed up, people could still be kept from starving.

He set up a small laboratory in the basement of the house and with Henrietta to help him with her knowledge of chemistry refurbished and brought up to date with some new books, he began to work with the best soybeans he could get, the beans that Chinese farmers grew for their own food. Clem planted these seeds and tended them like hothouse asparagus, and as the war continued his harvests grew until he had enough soybean meal to make real experiments possible. He and Henrietta ate one formula after another, and studied seasoning and spoilage.

“We ought to have a real food chemist,” Henrietta told him on one of these days. “I don't know how to get the taste you want, Clem. I don't even know what it is.”

“It's kind of like those meat rolls I used to eat at the Fongs',” Clem said dreamily.

“But you were a half-starved boy then and anything would have been wonderful,” Henrietta suggested.

“Yes, but I never forget.”

Clem never forgot anything. He did not forget how it had felt to be a half-starved boy and his unforgetting mind made him know how people anywhere felt and what they wanted. The man in the White House could have got from Clem an accurate temperature of most of the world's peoples in the crowded countries of Asia, but he did not know it, or even that he needed to know it. Meantime Clem had isolated himself from the war and was living ahead in the years after, when the new world would begin.

“War's nothing but an epidemic,” he told Henrietta. “If you don't prevent it in time it comes and then you have to go through with it. I'm glad we have no children, hon.”

“We might have had a girl,” Henrietta said with a wry smile.

“No, I'm glad we haven't. She'd have been in love with a boy.”

The long process whereby William Lane decided to become a Catholic was one of combined logic and faith. His conscience, always his most fretful member, had become irritated beyond endurance by the monstrosity of his success, which was now uncontrollable. He needed to do nothing except to read his newspapers critically and then keep or discharge his editors. From somewhere in his ancestry, distilled through generations of New England lawyers, preachers, and reformers, he had received the gift of the critical mind attuned to his times. Long ago he had become as independent as a feudal baron. His chain of newspapers rested upon the solid properties of his own printing presses, and these in turn were set upon the sure output of his paper mills, which in finality rested upon the firm foundations of timbered land, stretching in miles across spaces of the north, in Canada as well as in the United States. He was impervious to the dangers and restrictions possible even to him, as the war blazed separately first in Asia and then in Europe. A pity about Hitler! Had he been well advised, Hitler could have been a savior against communism, the final enemy.

Upon the frightful morning after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when his valet drew the window curtains, William was weighed down by the necessity of making up his mind quickly upon a new policy for his staff. People must know immediately where he stood.

As usual when he felt confusion he decided to talk with Monsignor and he telephoned before he got up.

“Yes, William?” Monsignor said over the telephone. After two years or so, they had come to this intimacy. “How can I help you?”

“I feel confused,” William replied. “This war is bringing many problems. I must decide some of them today. I should like to talk with you this morning before I go to my office.”

“I am at your disposal,” the priest replied.

So William went immediately after he had eaten. Emory always breakfasted in her room, and he saw no one except servants whom he did not count. The morning sun shone down upon the magnificent granite Cathedral near the priest's private home. Both stood in the upper part of the city against a background of skyscrapers, and their solidity was reassuring. Even bombs could scarcely prevail against the aging gray structure of the Cathedral, as formidable as a medieval castle. He rang the bell at a Gothic doorway and was immediately admitted by a young priest who led him in silence over thick velvet carpets spread upon stone floors. There was not one moment of waiting. It was an atmosphere far more courteous than that of the White House, where last week William had gone to call upon the President, repressing his personal dislike to do his patriotic duty, and had been kept waiting for nearly a quarter of an hour. In the end Roosevelt, though jovial, had not seemed grateful for William's offer of help.

Monsignor's library was a beautiful room. The crimson of the carpets was repeated in the velvet hangings at the Gothic windows, and mahogany bookcases reached to the arched ceilings. The air was warm and slightly fragrant. There was a great deal of gold decoration centering in a massive crucifix that hung in a long alcove, but carried out also in wide gold satin bookmarks, in the frames of two or three fine paintings.

Monsignor Lockhart was a handsome man, erect and dignified. His features were clear and he had fine, deep-set eyes of a clear hard blue.

“Sit down, William,” he said.

William sat down in a cushioned Gothic chair and began to consider his worries. There was nothing wrong in his daily life. He had no sins. He was entirely faithful to his wife and she to him. He knew that Emory, although she was a beautiful woman, was also fastidious, and he trusted her entirely and had never regretted his marriage. In her way she was his equal. There was no man in America above him in influence and few as rich. Had he been English he would of course have had a title. In that case he would have been poorer than he was, and Emory would not have enjoyed poverty. She had the finest jewels of any woman he knew. Emory in soft black chiffon, high at the neck and long sleeved, wearing her diamonds, was all he conceived of as beauty in woman. She had become a Catholic with him, and she liked wearing black chiffon and diamonds. With her dove-gray frocks she wore pearls.

No, his worries were entirely a matter of his responsibilities to the world, to the millions of people who looked at the pictures he alone chose and who read what he allowed to be printed. He wanted God's guidance for this enormous responsibility, and for the stewardship, too, of his vast wealth. He did not want to give his money to any cause or organizations which would not submit to his direction. Unless he directed, he could not be sure of the right use of his support. He never gave money to a person.

He made known his wish to do right, never stronger than now, in view of the mounting war, and Monsignor listened thoughtfully, his hands folded. They were much alike, these two men, and they knew it. Toward human beings they were almost equally paternal. Priest and man, they had already what this world could give.