Gods Men (60 page)

“Could you just—turn away—a minute—”

The nurse turned her head and bit her lip. However often they died, it was always terrific. You couldn't get used to it.

Henrietta bent over Clem and laid her cheek against his. She put her lips to his ear and said very clearly, reaching with all her heart into the space between the stars:

“Thank you, my dearest. You've made love very sweet.”

It was the last time in her life that she ever spoke the word, love. She buried it with him, like a flower.

After Clem was dead, there was nothing to do but keep on until what he had wanted to do was done. This was all she had. Now that he was gone, it was astonishing how little else was left. Even his face seemed to fade from her mind. There had been few hours indeed when he had been hers undivided. Most of their companionship, and she now felt their only real companionship, had been when he talked to her about his work, his plans, and finally his dream, his obsession.

Clem had been her only lover, the only man who had ever asked her to marry him, the only man she could have married. Her alien childhood had shaped her. She was far past middle age now, a woman remote and alone. Bump remained nearer to her than any human creature, and he was kind enough, but always anxious and now aghast at the burden that Clem's death had left upon him. He said the markets had to be sold and Henrietta agreed. She had no heart for the big business they had become and without Clem's idealistic genius, there was nothing to hold them together.

It was not difficult to sell. In each of the huge self-serving concerns there was a man, usually the one Clem had put in charge, who was willing to buy her out. Her terms were absurdly low and she put no limit on the time for payment. For a while she tried to stipulate that Clem's ideas were to be kept, that people were to have food cheaper there than they could buy it elsewhere. This too she was compelled to give up. It took genius to be so daring, and she found none. To Bump she simply gave the market in Dayton, and after some thought she gave him, too, her house, when after six months she made up her mind to go to New York with Berkhardt Feld, the famous German food chemist.

This aged scientist had left Germany secretly one day when he saw Hitler strutting like a pouter pigeon before a dazed mass of humanity who were anxiously willing to worship anything. Fortunately he was quite alone. He and his wife had been childless, a fact for which he never ceased to thank God when he understood what was happening to Germany, and then his wife had died. He had mourned her desperately, for he was a lonely man and Rachel had been his family and his friend. When he saw Hitler he stopped grieving and became glad that she was dead. It was easy to pack his personal belongings into a kerchief, hide in a pair of woolen socks the formula that represented his life work, and in his oldest clothes to take to the road and the border. People had not reached the point yet of killing any Jew they met and he saw contempt rather than madness in the careless glances cast at him as he went. He had money enough to get him over the border, and in France he found royalties from his last scientific work,
The Analysis of the Chemistry of Food in Relation to Human Character.

From Paris he had gone to London, had been restless there because it was still too near Germany, and friends had got him to New York. Here, gratefully, he sank into the swarm of various humanity and spent almost nothing while he worked in the laboratory of a man who was a chemist for a general food company, a man named Bryan Holt who knew Berkhardt Feld as a genius. He found a room for the old man in a clean, cheap boardinghouse and gave him a desk and a small wage as his assistant. If they ever discovered anything together he would be generous and divide the profit that came from it. Since he belonged to the company, however, it was not likely that such profits would be enormous. Dr. Feld cared nothing for money, except that he would not owe anyone a penny. He paid his way carefully and did without what he could not buy.

Henrietta had found Dr. Feld first through finding among Clem's papers a letter which he had written to Bryan Holt, trying, as Henrietta could see, to get the young scientist to help him devise a food cheap and nourishing that could serve as a stopgap until people became sensible enough, as Clem put it, to see that everybody got food free. There had been no time for an answer. Clem had died the week after he had written this letter. Ah, but in the letter she found her treasure, the voice of Clem, the words which she had longed to hear and yet which he did not speak to her because she had not allowed him to come back in pain. Here was the reward for her love, when she had denied even her crying heart. Clem knew he was dying, long before she had been compelled to believe it, and he had written to the young scientist:

“I am in some haste for I am struck with a mortal disease and may die any time. This does not matter. I have been very lucky. I have discovered a basic truth in my lifetime and so it will not die with me. What I have spent my life to prove will be proved because it is truth. Though I lie in my grave, this is my victory.”

Clem victorious! Of course he was, for who could destroy his truth? Here was the command she knew and prepared as of old to obey.

To Bryan Holt then Henrietta decided to go when she had given Clem's few suits to the Salvation Army, and had found herself possessed of an astonishing amount of money in more than twenty banks in various cities where money had been paid into Clem's accounts from the markets. His records were scanty but very clear indeed were certain notes on The Food, as he called it. The Food was half chemical, half natural, a final mingling of bean base with minerals and vitamins, which if he could get a chemist to work it out with him might, he had believed, make it possible for him to feed millions of people for a few cents apiece. This was the final shape of his dream, or as William had once called it, his obsession. It might be that the two were the same thing.

The first meeting with Holt had not been promising. Holt had not answered Clem's letter because it sounded absurd. He was respectful before Henrietta's solid presence, her square pale face and big, well-shaped hands. She had immense dignity. He tried to put it kindly but she saw what he meant. This young man was not the one she sought, but there would be another. Clem, though he had died, yet lived.

“Many people thought my husband was unbalanced,” she said in her calm voice. “That is because he was far ahead of his time. It will be twenty-five years, much more if we don't have another war, before statesmen realize that what he said is plain common sense. There will not cease to be ferment in the world unless people are sure of their food. It is not necessary that you agree with my husband and me. I am come only to ask you questions about his formula.”

Bryan Holt wanted to get rid of her, though he was polite since he was almost young enough to be her son. So he said:

“I have a very fine scientist here working with me who has come from Europe. He will be more useful to you than I can possibly be.”

With this he had summoned from a remote desk a shambling old figure who was Dr. Berkhardt Feld, and so by accident Henrietta found her ally. When she had talked with Dr. Feld for a few hours she proposed to find a small laboratory for him alone, with an apartment where he could make his home. Then if he would teach her to help him, building upon her college chemistry, which was all she had, she would come to him every day and they could perhaps fulfill Clem's life work.

To Dr. Feld this was heaven unexpected. None of Clem's ideas were fantastic to him. They were merely axiomatic. It would not be too difficult to find the formula which Clem had begun very soundly upon a bean base, a matter perhaps of only a few years, by which time it might be hoped the wise men of the world would be ready to consider what must be done for millions of orphaned and starving.

“Then, then,
liebe
Frau Müller,” Dr. Feld said fervently, making of Henrietta as German a creature as he could, “we will be ready perhaps with The Food.”

The tears came to Henrietta's eyes. She thanked Dr. Feld in her dry, rather harsh voice and told him to be ready to move as soon as she could go home and get her things.

That decision made, she began to clean away what was left in the house of all her years of marriage to Clem. Among the things she would never throw away was the red tin box of Clem's letters and with them the old amulet which he had given her. It was still in the folded paper in which he had sent it to her. She opened the paper and cried out as though he were there, “I always meant to ask you about this!”

How much of him she had meant to ask about in the long last years she had expected to have with him, years that would never be! She cried a little and closed the box and put it into her trunk to go with her to New York. Someday, when she could bear to do it, she would read all his letters over again. So much, so much she would never know about Clem because he had been busy about the business of mankind!

On the night before she left, she invited Bump and Frieda to supper, that she might ask something of Bump. She did not mind Frieda, a lump of a woman, goodhearted, stupid and kind.

“I wish you would tell me all that you can remember of Clem when you first saw him on that farm. He never could or would tell me much about it.”

She soon saw that Bump could not tell her much either. “He was just about the way he always was,” he said, trying hard to recall that pallid, dusty boy who had walked into their sorrowful small world so many years ago. “The thing I do remember was that he wasn't afraid of anybody. He'd seen a lot, I guess. I don't know what all. But I always took it that he'd had adventures over there in China. He never talked about them, though. He pitched in right where we were. The Bergers never beat him up the way they did us. He even stopped them beating us, at least when he was around. When he decided to leave, the others were afraid to go with him. They were afraid of the Aid people catching them again and things were tough if they caught you. I was afraid, too, but after he was gone, I was more afraid to stay. I don't think he was too pleased to see me padding along behind him, though. I've often thought about that. But he didn't tell me to go back.”

There was nothing more, apparently. Clem's outlines remained simple and angular. After Bump had gone she studied again the notes Clem had left about The Food. If she went on trying to do what he had wanted to do then perhaps she could keep his memory with her, so that she would not forget when she was old how he had looked and what had been the sound of his voice. …

It did not occur to Henrietta to find her family and tell them that she was in New York. She had not even thought to tell them of Clem's death, but they had seen the announcement in a paragraph in the New York papers. Clem was well enough known for that. William had telegraphed his regret and Ruth had sent a floral cross to the funeral. Her mother was in England and it had been some weeks before a letter had come from her saying that she never thought Clem had a healthy color and she was not surprised. Henrietta must take good care of herself. It was fortunate there was plenty of money. If Henrietta wished, she would come and live with her, but she could not live in the Middle West. New York or Boston would be pleasant. Henrietta had not answered the letter.

Now that Clem was gone she was lonely again, but not as she would have been had he never come. He had shared with her and did still share with her in memory her alien childhood which no one could understand who had only been a child here in America. Without loving China, without feeling for the Chinese anything of Clem's close affection, she was eternally divided in soul and spirit. It occurred to her sometimes in her solitary life that this division might also explain William. Perhaps all that he did was done to try and make himself whole. The wholeness which she had been able to find in Clem because they understood one another's memories, William had found no one to share. Perhaps he could not be made whole through love. She would go and see Candace. Upon this decision she went to the laboratory as usual.

Dr. Feld, observing the large silent woman who worked patiently at his command, mused sometimes upon her remoteness and her completion. She needed no one, even as he needed none. They had finished their lives, he in Germany, she—where? Perhaps in China, perhaps in a grave. What more they did now was only to spend the remaining time usefully. He wished that he could have known the man who had left behind him these extraordinary though faulty notes. She had told him that her husband had had only a few years of education and no training in science.

“His knowledge must have been intuitive, dear madame,” he had replied.

“He was able to learn from human beings,” she said. “He felt their needs and based his whole life upon what he found out. He called it food, but it was more than food for the body. He made of human need his philosophy and religion. Had you met him you would have thought him a very simple man.”

“So is Einstein,” Dr. Feld said.

They did not talk much. When they did speak it was about Clem or the formula. He explained the peculiar, almost atomic vitality of vitamins. “The source of all life is in the atom,” he said solemnly. “God is not in the vastness of greatness. He is hid in the vastness of smallness. He is not in the general. He is in the particular. When we understand the particular, then we will know all.” When he really talked he spoke in German. She was glad that she had taken German in college and had kept the language alive in her reading.

One summer afternoon she took off her big white apron and reached for her hat and coat. “I'm going away early today, Dr. Feld, to see someone I know.”

He looked surprised and pleased. “Good—you have friends, dear madame.”

So Henrietta went away and rode the subway uptown and walked to Sutton Place.

She found the doorway in a quiet street, in a row of black and white houses with white Venetian blinds. The slanting sun shone into the street with glitter and shadow. The door opened promptly and a little maid in black and white asked her to come in please, her voice very fresh and Irish. She followed her into a square big room, immaculate in white and gold. The maid tripped away. Henrietta sat in a vast gold satin chair and a moment later Candace came in, looking soft and still young, her eyes tender and her hair a silvery gold. Her full sweet mouth smiled and Henrietta felt a fragrant kiss upon her cheek.