Gods Men (44 page)

Nevertheless, like a king, he reflected, he could not put out his hand to anyone without its being misunderstood. The gesture of ordinary friendship was impossible for him. If he put out his hand it must be for a purpose that was not yet clear to him. He doubted very much whether there was a woman in the world who could give him real companionship. Only his loneliness was plain to him, and profound.

In this state of mind he left his office rather early and entered his waiting car. The chauffeur was surprised and pleased to see him. Doubtless the man had a family and thought of getting home early. William did not ask, however. He merely gave his abrupt nod and said, “Direct to Crest Hill.” He wanted to go home and survey his house and his wife. There was no reason why, having achieved everything else, he should not have personal satisfaction. It seemed a small thing, but without it on this opulent autumn afternoon nothing he had was all it should be.

At Crest Hill Candace had spent a beautiful, idle day. It was what she called a day of grace, of which there were too few in every season. Thus although leaves had fallen and the first frost had killed the flower borders, although her furs had been brought from storage, yet the day was as warm as June's best and she had done nothing at all. The outdoor swimming pool had been emptied and cleaned for winter, but she had ordered it filled again and had spent the morning in and out of the pool quite by herself and happy. She missed the boys but they had been going away to school for years and William she had learned not to miss, wherever he was. The huge house was unusually beautiful, the doors and windows open and the bowls on the table were full of late roses. Her rose gardens were sheltered by the greenhouses and escaped the early frosts. She was the most idle of women and enjoyed her idleness. A moment at the telephone could summon to her any of a hundred or so friends, men and women who were eager to share her genius for enjoyment, but she seldom summoned them. She liked best to be with Ruth and Jeremy and their little girls, and she disliked actively, out of all the world, only William's mother. For her own father she had a delicate affection so appreciative that she welcomed his coming to her but she made no demands upon him. She made no demands upon anyone, being content in herself. Marriage with William had not given her high romance, but then she did not want such romance. She would have had to live up to it.

She was not prepared therefore for William's too early arrival. At five o'clock, she told herself, she would leave the sun-soaked court surrounding the swimming pool and she would go upstairs, dry her hair, and put on a thin soft dress of some sort over her slip. Never willingly did she wear girdle or corset or any of the garments that women used to restrain themselves. What she would have done had she been fat she never stopped to ask herself, since she was not really fat. Old Roger's leanness had so blessed his daughter that even carelessness had made her only gently plump.

At five o'clock William entered the wide hall of his house and inquired of the man who took his hat and stick where Mrs. Lane might be found.

“Madame is in the court, sir,” the man replied.

William walked down the hall which bisected the huge house and stood between the open double doors. Candace was climbing out of the pool. Her blond skin, sunburned to a soft pale gold, was pretty enough in contrast to the green bathing suit she wore. Her long fair hair was wet and hanging down her back. She was a pleasant sight for any husband, and William felt vaguely angry that a woman who looked as Candace did should not provide for him the companionship which he needed. What, for example, could they do together now? She played a lazy game of tennis and she could not keep her mind on bridge. She enjoyed horseback riding and rode well, but there was no companionship in that pastime. He preferred to ride alone in the morning before breakfast.

“Why, William,” Candace called. “Has something happened?”

“Certainly not,” he replied. “Why should you think so?”

“You're home so early.”

“It was hot in town.”

“Come into the pool.”

“No, thank you.”

William did not enjoy swimming, either in the pool or the sea. He swam well, for he had been taught to do so at the English school. His hatred of the water went back to the day when a firm young English swimming master had thrown him into the Chinese sea, out of his depth, to compel him to swim for his life.

“Then I'll get out,” Candace said, and began to wring the water out of her hair.

“Don't trouble yourself,” William said. “I'll go upstairs and change.”

“Will you come back?”

“If you wish.”

“Of course I do.”

She dived into the pool again and he went upstairs slowly to his own rooms. His valet had foreseen his need and had put out for him a suit of cool tussah silk that had been packed away and now brought out once more for the unseasonable heat. William showered and shaved himself, for hot weather always made his black beard grow too fast. Then he dressed and went downstairs again, wishing restlessly that he could think of something he could enjoy. Candace was still in the pool, but a servant had brought tall glasses of some drink and set them on table under an umbrella.

He sighed and stretched himself in a comfortable chair. Candace saw him and swam slowly to the end of the pool and got out. She wrung her hair again, wound it on her head and wrapped a huge English bath towel about herself. William found no towels in America big enough for him, neither did he like colored towels. Miss Smith the eleventh had once ordered six dozen enormous English bath towels from London and had sent them to Ireland to be monogrammed. Only Candace had other towels than these. In her own bathroom shelves she kept towels of peach and jade green. In public, however—that is, before William—she enveloped herself in one of the six dozen.

“I'll just slip on something and be back,” she told him. He looked unusually handsome at this moment and impulsively she bent to kiss him. His dark hair was thinning slightly on top of his head, a spot she did not often see.

“William, you are getting bald!”

It was a wifely remark but the wrong one, she saw, the moment it was spoken. He did not reply; his eyebrows drew down and his mouth tightened.

“Not that it shows,” she said hastily.

“It must show or you would not have seen it,” William retorted.

“Oh well,” she said, laughed, and went on.

Upon him the careless remark fell like an arrow dropped from the sky. He was reminded that he was middle-aged. If he was ever to get anything out of life he must do it now. Decision accumulated in him. He recognized the process. A trickle, a slow stream, a monstrous river of feeling suddenly broke into inevitable sudden decision.

He would divorce Candace if necessary in order to get companionship before he died. He would find somewhere in the world the woman he needed.

Lying in the warm declining sun he felt his deep and habitual tension suddenly relax. He had made a decision which though massive was right and therefore irrevocable. All his large decisions had come suddenly after long periods of indecisive restlessness. When he saw what he must do it was like coming out of a tunnel into the light. He closed his eyes and sipped his iced drink. He was not a simple physical creature such as he believed most American men were. He was not interested in dirty schoolboyish talk, and jokes about sex bored him. Something in his birth and childhood, the deep maturity of the Chinese, perhaps, or the intolerable wisdom of England, had aged even his youth.

When the thought of England came to him, he felt a strange nostalgia. He did not want to go back to China, but to go to England might give him the rest that he needed. Alone in England even for a few weeks, as silent as he wished, with nothing planned and yet ready for anything that might occur to him, he could cure himself, or be cured, of his spiritual restlessness. The peace that passeth understanding, of which his father spoke so often, might yet be his.

But he must be alone. Merely to be alone, he now felt, would bring him some of the peace. He thought of his office and the quiet apartment opening into it, and was eager to be there where he need not speak to Candace or see her. He got up and went into the house and met her coming downstairs, in a floating chiffon dress of apple green.

“I shall have to go back to town,” he said abruptly.

“Oh—I am sorry for that.”

She spoke sincerely but without petulance. After these years she was accustomed to William's sudden decisions. She would wait until he was gone and then she would call up Jeremy. If he and Ruth were at home she would drive over to their house and dine with them. William's mother was there, but on this heavenly evening she could bear that. Jeremy's house stood near the water, its lawn sloping down to the Sound, and the moon would be beautiful upon the waves.

“Shall you be late, William?”

“I don't know. Don't sit up for me, of course.”

“If I am not here, I'll be at Jeremy's. Don't sit up for me, either.”

She put her hands on his shoulders and pressed herself against him. He kissed her cheek but did not respond to the pressure. Ah well, her father had said loving was enough! She made it do.

William could have explained to no one his impulse toward England at this hour of his life. He had been often in England in recent years, but only for short times and for business. Now he wanted an indefinite time which might be short or long. He told himself that this depended upon how he felt. Actually he knew that he was going on a search, a romantic search, absurd if it were spoken, and therefore it could not be spoken. His real life had always been secret. Now he felt the need to confide. Vague need, vague longing, the middle-aged desire to live before he died, the thirst to learn how to enjoy before he lost the power, these were his private reasons, not to be shared.

He stayed in London for some days, ostensibly to attend a few business conferences. He toyed with the idea of setting up an entirely English office for the publication of a purely English tabloid and to discuss this he met Lord Northcliffe for a week end, and acknowledged frankly his debt to the master journalist.

“I saw one of your papers in the reading room at Harvard, my lord, and began that very day to plan my life around a newspaper like it.”

“Really,” the stubby lord said without surprise. “We've a bit in common, you and I, haven't we? Success from the middle classes, eh? Your father was something odd, as I remember—so was mine.”

William preferred not to answer this. He remembered that this baronet had once put on his head a hat worn by Napoleon and had said without vanity, “It fits me, by Jove!” Since then he had spent some of his swift wealth upon such fantasies as arctic exploration, had forced upon his quiet countrymen noisy automobiles, had given prizes for airplane models and attempts at flying, and now clamored for fellow patriots to prepare themselves against the dangers of a rising Germany.

There was something about this plebeian lord which repelled William. They parted without being friends, the Englishman feeling with amazement that William was what he had never seen before, an American snob, and William feeling that England was better than this Englishman thought she was and that he was somehow unworthy. If he had met Alfred Harmsworth as a schoolboy he would have fought him and easily licked him. He sat, later that week, for an evening under the scintillations of an aging Herbert Wells, refusing however, to join in the absurd games devised for his amusement. He remained saturnine even before the brisk sallies and the ceaseless flow of his host's fixed though fluid opinions.

After three or four weeks of being a quiet guest, unobtrusively American in English country houses, William met a young man to whom he was exceedingly attracted. He could not account for the singular strength of this attraction until he discerned in the young man a faint resemblance to the hero of his youth in the Chefoo school, the son of the British ambassador. This young man's name was Michael Culver-Hulme, a name ancient enough in English history and with many branches. In the stillness of a Sunday afternoon before tea at Blakesbury House, where William had been invited by Lord Saynes, who had heard of his wealth and power, he met Michael.

Culver-Hulme, a distant cousin of Saynes, had asked frankly for the chance to meet the American whom everybody had heard about and almost no one had seen. Lord Saynes had laughed.

“What do you want to meet the chap for?” he had inquired of Michael.

Michael had replied, “I've a fancy to see him, that's all. My uncle went to school with him—my mother's brother. He's told me rather grim tales. He's quite proud now of having gone to school with him, though in the old days they all made fun of him. It seems he used to stalk about the school grounds rather like a silent and haughty young Hamlet.”

On this Sunday afternoon, beneath a sky of milky November blue, the Englishman saw William leaning lonely against a stone wall, gazing across the lawns to the valley beyond. He went to him with the bold and entirely natural charm which was both assured and youthful.

“I say, sir, I hope you won't mind if I butt in?”

“Not at all,” William said. He smiled slightly. “Our World War seems to have left its effect at least upon the English language.”

“Not so much as your wonderful papers, sir. I wonder if you know how much they're admired? I've heard that Northcliffe himself has taken a point or two.”

William felt the soft warmth of young flattery steal about his heart. He was flattered often enough, but this English flattery was sweet, and he did not discard it with his usual cynicism.

“I wonder if you could by any chance have had a relative once at an English school in China? I don't believe in coincidence. But you look alike.”

“Not coincidence, sir. Many of our family have been in China or India. It's a family tradition. It was my uncle, I think. He's often spoken of you and been quite proud about it.”