Gods Men (20 page)

His father's letters always took him back to China, however much he might resist. He could see clearly that bold figure of the Old Empress, great enough to accept defeat lightly and so be still imperial, still powerful. There was power in her which William felt was sacred, compelling a quality in himself which might be a similar power. As he grew into manhood to his full height of six feet one, he felt the excitement of his ambition surging into his body and his mind. He was drawn always to the powerful and the proud. Once he had passed the famous president of the university crossing the yard with an enormous watermelon under his arm, and he never felt the same respect again for him. Whatever the genius of Charles Eliot, and William acknowledged genius, it was lessened by the man's lack of pride. Nothing could have persuaded William to carry even a bundle under his arm.

Indeed, few of his professors fulfilled his secret expectations. It was hard to give high respect to a pudgy philosopher with a big head thatched with rough yellowish gray hair covered with an old tired-looking hat, or a little man with a high forehead and a shaggy disheveled mustache. Two men alone satisfied his instinct for dignity and seriousness. One was a great handsome German who looked like the Kaiser and taught psychology with the voice of a thundering god. The other was a tall slender man, a Spaniard, whose eyes were dark and cold. Under George Santayana alone William sat with complete reverence. The man was an aristocrat.

The same absolute and delicate pride he had seen long ago in the Chinese Empress, a quality which could not stoop to common folk. For William democracy meant no more than that from among the common mass a king might arise, a Carlylean hero, a leader unexplained. People tried to explain such persons by many myths of virgin births and immaculate conceptions. Chinese history, he had often heard his father say, was rich with such myths. The unexplained great men, born of ordinary parents must, the people felt, be the sons of gods.

In the dark depths of his emotions William acknowledged the possibility of explanation. How explain himself? There was no one in his family like him. He could not be explained any more than the Chinese Empress could be, for she was born the daughter of a common small military official. Somewhere in the path of the generations, certain genes met to make the invincible combination. He would never forget the haughty face of the indomitable ruler bent above him, a young American boy. It had been his first glimpse of greatness and it remained in him, a permanent influence.

So William created his world in his own image. The sons of gods were the saviors of mankind and they lived upon the Gold Coast, anywhere in the world.

William folded his father's letter and saw on the back of the sheet one further note:

By the by, here is something interesting. You remember the Faith Mission family Miller, who were killed by the Boxers. Actually the boy escaped. Quite by accident I met a Chinese who had saved his life and sent him on his way to the coast. From there, if he got a ship, he may have reached America safely—may be there now, under God's care.

This news did not interest William. That brief and humiliating moment in the dusty Peking street was repulsive even in memory. He crushed the letter in his hand and threw it into the wastepaper basket under the desk.

In William's junior year he reached his final hatred of Franklin Roosevelt when Roosevelt was chosen president of the
Crimson.
William had supposed himself secure for the place and he did not know why he had failed. He was not able to bide his disappointment from Jeremy, always quick to feel suffering in anyone else.

“Sorry, William,” Jeremy said. “You would have done a magnificent job.”

“It doesn't matter,” William said with a grimace.

“Don't be ashamed of feeling,” Jeremy said gently.

William allowed a few words to escape from his vast inner misery. “It seems unjust that I shouldn't get it, and that fellow got it so easily.”

He saw Jeremy looking at him with a peculiar and pitying gaze and he averted his eyes.

“I'd like to say something to you, William, if you'll let me,” Jeremy said after a moment.

“Well?” William heard his own voice harsh.

“Perhaps we can't say such things to each other. We never have, somehow. Perhaps if we could we would both feel better.”

“Say what you like,” William said. He sat down abruptly at the desk and pretended to fill his fountain pen with ink.

“Roosevelt has got everything he wanted because he is warm toward everybody. He is full of a sort of—of—love, if you know what I mean.”

“I'm afraid I don't,” William said. “He is full of loose ideas, so far as I am concerned.”

“I know some of his ideas are crazy,” Jeremy admitted. “But everything else about him is so right that he can just about think as he likes.”

William dropped the pen and it fell on the floor. His gray eyes were furious under his black brows and his lips tightened. “I suppose you mean his father is rich, his mother is socially correct, they live on the right street, all the sort of things that I haven't!”

“You know I don't mean that,” Jeremy said. “We'd better drop it.”

They had dropped it and he was too proud to tell Jeremy that he did know what he meant. For William was beginning to know that he lacked one grace among his gifts. He could not win love from ordinary people. He excused himself by saying that it was because they felt his superiorities, his obvious mental power, his ability to do easily what others did only by effort. The superior man, he told himself, turning the pages of his Nietzsche, must always be hated by his inferiors, but even this hatred could be turned to advantage and used as a tool for further power for good.

“I must expect hatred,” William thought. “I must accept it as my due because I am not understood. What the common man cannot understand he hates.”

Sometimes he thought even Jeremy hated him. But such moments passed and he was careful to seem kinder to his friend, more quick to help him, more patient with his frailties, his headaches, his manners.

William, relentlessly remembering his defeat, was further disturbed by an editorial in the
Crimson
before the class elections. Roosevelt wrote:

“There is a higher duty than to vote for one's personal friends, and that is to secure for the whole class leaders who really deserve the positions.”

These were the words of a man determined to be a liberal in spite of class and property. While the Gold Coast repudiated them, votes belonged to the many.

William never forgave Franklin Roosevelt. He had already begun to believe that the people anywhere in the world were clods and fools and now he was convinced of their folly. The Boers who fought England were clods and fools. The Chinese he remembered upon the streets of Peking were clods and fools. From now on he spoke to no one at Harvard except those who lived on the Gold Coast.

Yet he heard one day a remark that horrified him again. A pallid professor with long mustaches said these words with an emphasis too fervent for William's taste: “The American people control their own destiny.”

William began then in earnest the study of the history and government of his own country. He perceived to his dismay that the professor's remark was a true one. Clods and fools though they might be, the American people elected their rulers, laughed at them, despised or admired them, obeyed or disobeyed them, clung to them or rejected them. He began after that to look at the people he passed on the street with consternation and even fear. Out of ignorance apparent upon their faces, obvious in their crude speech, these men chose from among themselves certain ones upon whom they bestowed the powers of state. It was monstrous. For months William felt himself in a den of lions. He tried to talk to Jeremy, who first laughed at him and then tried to explain:

“Americans aren't just people—they are Americans.”

William had no such reverence. What he saw beyond the Gold Coast reminded him ominously of the streets and roads of China. He had feared the common people there. Had they not risen up in all their folly against men like his father? Von Ketteler had been murdered by an ignorant clod. He remembered that dignified German, who at the Fourth of July celebrations at the American Embassy had more than once spoken to him with courtesy. The common people could rise against their betters anywhere and kill them, unless they were taught and controlled.

Yet, how to control these boisterous, independent, noisy jokesters who were the common folk of his own country? They would not tolerate a real ruler. They had no respect for those above them. They delighted to pull down the great and destroy them. Look at Admiral Dewey, a hero for an hour, whose plaster triumphal arch, designed for marble, fell to dust and was carted away by the garbage collectors! The whim of the people was the most frightening force in the world.

Upon this William pondered, knowing now his own lack of charm, that strange senseless power to attract his fellows, the charm which young Franklin Roosevelt possessed as easily as he possessed height, fearlessness, and ready laughter. Without this frail gift, William told himself proudly, he must rely upon his brains and devise a means of teaching and controlling the wild beast of the multitudes. He would lead them wisely, insidiously, charming them through words, himself never seen.

In that third year in college he wrote to his father to say that he would not come back to China. “I feel I am needed more here than there. The truth is, I am not impressed by American civilization. I intend to start some sort of newspaper, something ordinary people will read, or at least look at, and so do what I can to enlighten my fellow countrymen.”

Some day, William vowed to his own heart, he would be the editor and owner of a newspaper, perhaps even a chain of newspapers, by which he could defeat any man he disliked or disapproved. To dislike was to disapprove. Money, of course, he must have but he would get it somehow. Quite stupid men were able to get rich.

Meanwhile, Franklin Roosevelt did not win the Phi Beta Kappa key, and William felt assuaged when he himself was among the chosen.

Yet the college years, as they passed, were good ones. He became a member of the Cameron family and spent his vacations with them, after brief duty visits to his grandparents and his sisters. It was accepted now that William was independent and different. Henrietta was proudly silent with him, Ruth worshiped him timidly, and his grandparents tried, somewhat in vain, to treat him as an ordinary young man. They knew he was extraordinary. Even Mrs. Cameron saw that now. It was pleasant to have about her a handsome young man who knew how to dress and was always ready to do what she needed done. He paid little attention to Candace, she reflected after each vacation, and he behaved like a strong elder brother to her poor son. She introduced William to the ladies at her Christmas At Home and forgot to mention that his father was a missionary, leaving the impression that he was connected with the diplomatic corps in Peking. William did not correct her.

His dreams hovered about the many happy weeks he spent in the great square house on Fifth Avenue. Each summer he accepted a job that Mr. Cameron offered him. He went to Europe with Jeremy, a combination secretary and guide, and they shared a valet. Together the two young men wandered about old cities and sailed the Mediterranean. It was a matter of course that William would always go home with Jeremy when the journey was over. He had his own two rooms in the vast Cameron house. They opened into Jeremy's suite. From there he seldom wrote to or heard from his sisters and his grandparents, and Peking he had nearly forgotten. The Camerons had become his family.

He thought about the Camerons a great deal, pondering again the question of how, through them, he might reach vague heights he imagined but could not see. Among the many things he discussed with Jeremy this was not one. William was not crude. He had lived too long among Chinese, even though only servants. He felt crudity in his mother and shrank from it, but he forgave her because of her willingness to sacrifice. His mother was “for” him, as he put it, and when he discovered this quality in any person, he overlooked all else. Nevertheless he was glad that during his college years his mother was remote in Peking. He was still not yet sure that the Camerons were entirely “for” him, not even Jeremy. This uncertainty made him pleasantly diffident and unselfish in his dealings with each of them. To Jeremy, he gradually became someone always willing to spare him tiresome stairways when he wanted a book from the library, and so he wore away dislike. To William's listening silence Jeremy in vacations talked more freely than at college, uncovering a delicate and poetic mind, racked with questions, and a spirit confounded by conscience. Thus Jeremy spoke on the solid matter of money.

“I know that if my father had not been rich I would now have been dead. But I wish I could owe my life to something else.”

“Perhaps you might say that you owe it to your father's being so able as to get rich,” William had suggested.

“I don't know that merely being able to get rich is anything particularly noble,” Jeremy had replied.

“Not everyone can do it, nevertheless,” William said. “Your father must have had some natural gift.”

A look of aversion came upon Jeremy's pale and too mobile face. “The gift is only that of being able to overcome someone less strong in the competitive game.”

To this William put up silence, and into the silence Jeremy continued to talk. “Sons of rich men always complain of their father's riches, I suppose. Yet there ought to be some way of living without stamping all the ants to death.”

Still William made no answer. Jeremy had come to no grips with life. The trouble with Jeremy was that he wanted nothing. He himself wanted everything; success with the newspaper he meant to have, and after that a wife beautiful and wealthy, a mansion to live in, a place in the world where he could be unique in some fashion he did not yet know, and the means to all this, he perceived, was money. He was perfectly sure that money was what he wanted first of all.