Gods Men (14 page)

“This is William Lane, my dear,” Mr. Cameron said. “I found him lying on his stomach on top of the bluff, and he says he comes from, China.”

“Do you really?” Mrs. Cameron exclaimed. “How interesting!” She lifted large sweet brown eyes to William's face.

“I do, Mrs. Cameron,” William replied. “I'm glad if it interests you.”

“This is Jeremy,” Mr. Cameron said. The two boys touched hands.

Mr. Cameron sat down. “I have a daughter somewhere, too. Where is she, my dear?”

“Candace?” Mrs. Cameron was busy again with roses. “She went to the village to buy something or other. I begged her to wait and get it in town, but you know how she is.”

Mr. Cameron did not answer this. He looked at his son. “Well, Jeremy, William is going to Harvard, too. Coincidence, eh? You'll have to get acquainted.”

Jeremy smiled. His mouth, cut deep at the corners, was sweet and rather weak. “I'd like to—but imagine China! Did you find it exciting? Do sit down. I'd get up, only I'm not supposed to.”

William sat down. “It didn't seem exciting because I've always lived there.”

“Does it seem strange to you in America?”

“Not here,” William said.

“The Chinese love flowers, I suppose,” Mrs. Cameron said. William considered. “I didn't see very much of the Chinese, really. I grew up in a compound, and my mother was always afraid I'd catch something. But we did have chrysanthemums, and I remember the bowls of lilies our gardener used to bring before Chinese New Year.”

He felt he was not doing very well and his anxious instinct urged him to frankness. “I suppose I should know a great deal about the Chinese, but one doesn't think much when one is growing up. The common people are rather filthy, I'm afraid, and the others are fed up with Westerners just now and didn't want to mix with us. There was even real danger if they did—the old Empress didn't favor it.”

“A wicked old woman, from all I hear,” Mr. Cameron said suddenly. “Trying to stop normal trade!”

“I do hope your parents are safe,” Mrs. Cameron sighed. “What we've read in the newspapers has been dreadful. So shocking! As if what we were doing wasn't for their good!”

He was diverted from answer by hearing a clear young voice. “Oh, here you all are!”

A very pretty yellow-haired girl was coming toward them. She was all in white and she had a tennis racket with low-heeled white shoes tied to it. At the viny entrance she paused, the sunshine catching in her hair and making a nimbus about her pleasant rosy face. She looked like Jeremy and she had the same sweet mouth but the lips were full and red.

“Hello,” she said in a soft voice.

Jeremy said, “Come in. This is William Lane. William, this is my sister Candy.”

She nodded. “Do you play tennis?”

“I do, but I haven't my things.”

“Come along, we have plenty.”

“Candace dear—perhaps he doesn't want to—” Mrs. Cameron began.

“I'd like to, very much,” William said.

He rose. Tennis he played very well indeed. He had chosen it instead of cricket and his only chance for pleasurable revenge had been when a cricketer opposed him upon the immaculate coolie-kept courts at Chefoo.

“Come back again,” Jeremy said, his smile wistful.

“Do come back,” Mrs. Cameron said warmly.

Mr. Cameron was silent. Leaning against the back of the cushioned wicker chair, he had closed his eyes and fallen asleep.

Beside the girl William held himself straight and kept silent. His instinct for dignity told him that she was used to much talk and deference. To his thinking American women were pampered and deferred to far too much. Even the maids at his grandfather's house were sickening to him in their independence. In China an amah was not a woman—merely a servant.

“I hope you don't mind cement courts,” Candace said, as she gave him tennis shoes and a racket from a closet in the great hall. “Ours are frightfully old-fashioned, but my father won't change them. I like grass but of course grass isn't too easy at the beach. Though my father could, if he would—only he won't.”

“I shan't mind,” William said.

“How old are you?” Candace inquired, staring at his handsome profile.

“Seventeen.”

“I'm sixteen.”

“Are you going to college?”

“No, of course not—Miss Darrow's-on-the-Hudson, for a year, and then I'm to come out.”

He had the vaguest notions of what it meant for a girl to come out, but now that he knew he was a year older than she, he felt more at ease. “Shall you come out in New York?”

“Of course—where else?”

“I thought perhaps in London.”

“No, my father is frightfully American. I might be presented at the Court of St. James's later. The man who was once my father's partner is the American Ambassador there.”

“I knew a lot of English people in China.”

“Really?”

“I didn't like them. Very conceited, as though they owned the country. Their merchant ships ply all the inner waters and their men-of-war, too. If it hadn't been for us, they'd have made a colony out of the whole of China.”

“Really? But don't they do that sort of thing very well?”

“They've no right to hog everything,” William said stiffly.

Candace mused upon this. “I suppose not, though I haven't thought about such things. We've always been in England a lot—Mother and Jeremy and I. My father has no time.”

“What does your father do?”

“He's in the Stores—and in Wall Street—and that means he's in everything.”

They were at the courts now, two smooth wire-enclosed rectangles surrounded by lawns set with chairs and big umbrellas. No one else was about.

“It's too hot to play, and that's why no one is here,” Candace said carelessly. “Two hours from now the place will be jammed.”

“I mustn't stay,” William said quickly.

“Why not?”

“In bathing things and a jacket?”

“It doesn't matter. We'll all bathe before sundown. There's a dance tonight. Do you like to dance?”

“Yes.”

He danced badly, never having had lessons, and he made up his mind to speak to his mother about it. Before he went to Harvard he must have lessons.

They were playing now, and he found within a few minutes that he could beat her, not easily, but surely. She played well, for a girl, her white figure flying about the court opposite him, though she served carelessly.

“I don't see how you hit the ball standing still,” she called to him at last with some irritation.

“I don't actually stand still,” he called back. “I was taught not to run about; the sun was hot in China.”

“It's hot here, too.”

She flung down her racket at the end of an hour and came to the net to shake hands with him formally.

“There, that's enough for one day. You do play well. I have to go now and change. People are coming, and I'm dripping. You can leave the shoes and racket here.”

She did not again suggest his staying to tea and he withdrew, deeply wounded. “Good-by, then, I'd better be getting along.”

She waved her racket at him and smiled and left him to find his way alone. He ought not to have played so well, he supposed. For his own sake he should have allowed her to win. American girls were spoiled. Then he lifted his head. He would always play his best and he would yield to no one.

He went across the wide lawn and down the steps to the beach and turned homeward, his jacket over his arm and the sun beating down on his shoulders. The water was rippling over the sand and he walked in the waves curling in tendrils from the sea. At his grandfather's house he went in, carrying plenty of wet sand upon his feet. Millie, the lesser of the maids, came out with a broom.

“Oh, look at those feet,” she exclaimed. “Just after I've swept, too! I declare, Willum—”

They were alone and he turned on her with the fury of a young tiger. “What do you mean by calling me Willum?” he hissed at her through white set teeth. “How dare you? You have no more manners than a—a savage!”

He left her instantly and did not turn to see her shocked face. Halfway upstairs, he heard a door slam.

After a little while his mother tapped at the door of his room.

“Come in,” he said listlessly. He had bathed and put on fresh clothes and had sat down at his desk to write, toying with some verses.

“William,” his mother began. “What did you say to Millie?”

He whirled on his chair. “What did she say to me, you had better ask. She called me Willum!”

“Hush, William. Don't be so angry. She comes from Maine and everybody—”

“I don't care where she comes from. She can call me Master William.”

“She wouldn't call anybody master.”

“Then she needn't speak to me.”

“William, it's not easy living with all of us in this house. The maids aren't used to children.”

“I am not a child.”

“I know, but—”

“Mother, I simply do not intend to be insulted by servants.”

“I know, dear, but they aren't our servants.”

“Any servants.”

His mother sat down in a rocking chair. “In some ways it is really easier to live in Peking, I admit. But we are Americans, William, and you must get used to it.”

“I shan't allow myself to get used to that sort of thing.”

He was aware of her admiration behind her distress. She was proud of his spirit, proud of his looks, proud of his pride. She rocked helplessly for a few minutes and then got up. “I'll give Millie something, this once.”

She went out of the room, and he was alone again. He was not writing verses to Candace. He was not attracted by her. He was writing something about a man's soul finding its own country, but he could not satisfy his fastidious taste in words. His poetry was not good enough and he tore the sheets into bits and threw them into the wastepaper basket.

The farm in Pennsylvania was as remote from the rest of the world as though it were an island in the sea. Nothing else existed. No one came near and the inhabitants never went away. The five children, of whom Clem was now one, made a human group, solid because they were utterly alone and at the mercy of two grown people, a man and a woman, who were cruel.

To Clem the memory of his dead parents and the two little girls who had been his sisters grew vague and distant. They had been killed by men he had never seen, a violence as inexplicable as a typhoon out of the southern seas. But here in this enchanting landscape the cruelty was mean and constant. There was no escape from it.

The man and woman, as he called them always in his thinking, his tongue refusing to call them Pop and Mom, were animal in their cruelty, snarling at the helpless children, striking them in fatigue or disappointment. Thus when the spotted cow had a bull calf instead of a heifer, Pop Berger pushed Tim.

“Git out of my way!” he had bellowed.

Tim stepped back to escape the man's upraised fist but it struck him and he fell against the corner of the stone wall of the barn.

Clem saw all and said nothing. His watching eyes, his silence, the strangeness of his unexplained presence, kept the Bergers shy of him. They had not yet beaten him. His swiftness at work, his intelligence, superior to any in the house, gave them no excuse, and while with the other children they needed no excuse, with him they still searched for one. He rose at early dawn and went out and washed himself in the brook behind the house, “the run” it was called, and then he went to the milking. He could not drink milk, however hungry he was, and he was always hungry. The warm sweetish animal smell of milk sickened his stomach, the thick coarseness of the cows' teats in his hands disgusted him. Yet he treasured the stuff and learned to get the last drop from a cow, enough so that he dared to give the children a secret cupful apiece. The cup he hid behind a loosened stone in the barn wall. The children learned to come to him one by one, as soon as he began the milking, before Pop got out of bed. The cup of fresh milk stayed their lean stomachs until the breakfast of cornmeal mush. And the day went on in harshest labor, the thoughts of all of them dwelling always upon food.

Clem, always until now pallid and small, suddenly began to grow. His bones increased in size and he was obsessed with hunger. He would not steal from these strangers into whose midst he had fallen and therefore he starved. He imagined food, heaping bowls of rice and browned fish and green cabbage. In China God had given them food, and he had eaten. His hunger all but drove him back to praying to God again as his father had done. But his father had gone out to other people who had answered the prayers for God. Here there were no such people that he knew. It did not occur to him that God would work through such people as the Bergers.

He was stupefied by these human beings among whom he found himself. Who were they? Where were those to whom they were kin? No one came near the farmhouse, neither friends nor relatives. In China all persons had relatives, a clan to which they belonged. These, the evil man and woman, the desolate children, belonged nowhere. Clem had no communication with them, for they said nothing to him or to each other except the few necessary words of work and food. The silence in the house was that of beasts. Nothing softened the hopeless harshness of the days, there was no change except the change of day and night.

Yet as one glorious day followed another Clem felt there must be escape. This was a net into which he had fallen, a snare he had not suspected. He must simply leave it. Whatever lay outside could not be worse than this. The desolate children seemed never to dream of escape, but they had no dreams of any kind, he discovered. Their hope went no further than to steal something to eat when Mom Berger was not looking, to stop working when Pop's back was turned. They were ignorant, and he soon found, depraved as well. When he first discovered this depravity he was sick. His own parents had been people of pure heart, and from them he had inherited a love of cleanness. Mr. Fong had been clean in speech and act. Though Clem had seen a simple naturalness in the behavior of men in the countryside about Peking, it had been clean. Birth was clean, and the life of man and woman together was decent. There was nothing about it which he did not know as he knew life itself. But what he found here was indecency, the furtive fumbling of boys and girls who were animals. Pop grinned when he saw it, but Mom Berger yelled, “Cut that out, now!”