Gods Men (45 page)

Ancient wounds began to heal in William's heart, but he maintained his dignity and only slightly smiled. “I remember him as an autocratic young man, quite beyond noticing a mere American.”

“He knows better than that now, sir.”

Michael waited and when nothing more followed, he began again with imperturbable chatty briskness. “I wish you'd come and have a week with us, Mr. Lane. My father and mother would be enormously pleased, and I'd be honored.”

“I'm here on a holiday,” William replied. “That perhaps will excuse my ready acceptance of a kindly invitation. I should like to come and call upon your father, if I may. If you are there, it is all the better.”

“Then will you consider it an invitation, sir? If so, you'll have a note from my father. What week, sir?”

“Week after next?”

“Splendid! Shall you be in England for Christmas?”

“No, I must get home before then. My sons will be coming home from college.”

“Splendid! Where are you stopping?”

“I am at the Savoy.”

“Good! Then you'll hear from us. Hulme Castle, near Kerrington Downs.”

“Thank you.”

The two words were so spoken that they seemed dismissal but Michael refused to accept them. He divined in the American a diffidence so combined with pride that it had become arrogance, a knowledge of superiority augmented by the fear of an incomprehensible inferiority. This American had all the kingdoms of the earth, a handsome body, a shrewd mind, wealth that had become a fable about which people guessed and gossiped on two sides of the ocean, and from all this a power was emerging which Michael knew was viewed with gravity even in the Foreign Office.

An immense curiosity sprang up in his somewhat light and inquisitive mind, and he imagined himself talking William over with his sister, Emory.

“He's not a proper American at all. With just a little changing, he could make a fair stab at being an Englishman, if he wanted to. And the odd thing is that he would and he wouldn't want to—”

To bring his mind back from such words, he began to describe to William the recent hunting he had shared with his uncle in Scotland. Then a bell rang suddenly from the house and broke across Michael's endeavors to amuse.

“That's tea, I'm afraid,” he said cheerfully, and thankful to be relieved of the conversation, he was liberal enough to wonder if William felt a like relief and daresayed to himself that he did.

Hulme Castle, William discovered, was one of the relics of the time of William the Conqueror and since it was near Hulme Forest, it had often been the hunting box of kings. In the fifteenth century it fell into disrepair, its last use being to shelter a mistress of the then ruling king. In the early sixteenth century it was given to a newly created earl, who rebuilt the castle but not the keep, rebuilt also the Great Hall, and discovered among old ruins a chest left by King Edward III. In the seventeenth century King James visited the castle while hunting and in the eighteenth century the then existing earl finished the rebuilding of the whole castle, remodeling the kitchens entirely and adding a handsome picture gallery. No building had been done since. The present occupants were the Earl, his wife, his son Michael, and his daughter Emory. On the third Sunday of every month the castle was open to the public except for the rooms occupied by the family.

So much William discovered from a small book he found in the British Museum. He had taken time to find out all he could about Hulme Castle. It was a small estate but an ancient one.

From the main highway through the Downs William, seated in the heavy motorcar he had bought for his stay in England, saw Hulme Castle on a low and pleasant hill. Twin towers of Norman architecture guarded the entrance through which, on a soft gray English day, he approached his destination. The chauffeur pulled a huge knocker and the door was opened by a man in some sort of informal livery.

“Hulme Castle?” the chauffeur inquired, knowing well enough that it was.

“Hulme Castle,” the manservant replied.

William got out, properly dignified, and mounted the shallow stone steps.

The manservant took his things. “Mr. Lane?”

“Yes.”

“Come in, please, sir. We were expecting you. I will show you your room, sir. This way, please, sir.”

A huge table stood in the middle of the entrance hall and behind it double stairs wound upward to right and left. Upstairs William went down a long and wide hall into a large room, quite modern in its decoration. A small coal fire burned in a polished grate under a carved mantelpiece, upon which the only ornament was a silver bowl of ash-pink roses.

“Tea is being served in the Panel Room, sir, to the left at the bottom of the stair,” the man said and disappeared.

William went to the wide leaded window. The sill was deep in the thick stone wall and he looked down over the tops of oaks still green. The hill declined sharply beneath this western wall and on the horizon the sun was setting, pink among the gray clouds. The castle was filled with silence and with peace, and he saw no human being. A feeling of rest and remoteness stole upon him and he sighed.

He stepped into the same stillness a few moments later when, having washed his hands and face, he went downstairs. The door of the Panel Room was open and he heard someone playing the piano. Of music he knew nothing and he had not missed it, but he was intelligent enough to know that the person now playing was a musician. He crossed the hall, entered the door, and saw something that he might have imagined. A long, beautifully shaped room, paneled in oak, spread before him. At the far end was a large fireplace, and above it the coat of arms of Hulme. Before the fire a tea table was set and an old man, the Earl himself doubtless, sat in an easy chair of faded red leather. Across the fireplace sat Lady Hulme, unmistakable, tall, thin, weathered, and wearing an old tweed suit. She was knitting something brown. Michael leaned against the mantle, his hands in his pockets, gazing at the fire, and at the piano sat a woman in a long crimson dress.

She lifted her head and smiled, a gesture of invitation, while she went on playing softly and firmly the closing chords. The Earl saw him and then Michael, and with the same smile and gesture they waited, Michael halfway across the room, the Earl standing. Lady Hulme lifted her large pale blue eyes, dropped them again, and continued her knitting.

At the piano the last chord sounded deeply. Michael leaped forward and wrenched William's hand.

“How awfully good of you to come! This is my father—and my mother.”

William touched the Earl's dry old hand and received a nod from Lady Hulme.

“Very good of you,” the Earl murmured. “It's a long way from London, I'm afraid. We're very quiet.”

“I like quiet,” William said.

He turned, still delaying, still dreading.

“This is my sister Emory,” Michael said simply.

William took a long cool hand into his own. “I'm afraid I interrupted the music.”

“We were only waiting for you,” she replied.

“Emory, pour tea,” Lady Hulme commanded. “I've dropped a stitch.”

She moved to obey, and for one instant William looked down into eyes dark and clear, set in a pale and beautiful face. He saw her mouth, the lips tender and delicate, quiver and smile half unwillingly, or so he imagined. She was tall and so thin that she might have been ill except for the look of clear health in her eyes and her pale skin.

“Do sit down,” she said in her sweet English voice, and seated herself by the tea table. “I'm filled with curiosity about you. I've never met an American.”

“I am not typical, I am afraid,” William replied, and tried not to stare at her hands as they moved above the cups. They were exquisite hands, and there was something about them so familiar that he frowned unconsciously to remember. Then memory came back to him. He had seen hands like these long ago, when as a little boy with his mother, he had looked at the hands of the Old Empress in Peking, the same thin smooth hands!

“Come along, Emory,” Lady Hulme said in her husky voice, still knitting briskly. She paused, however, to pull a bell rope with vigor as William sat down, and the manservant came in with a plate of hot scones on a silver tray.

“Hello, Simpkins,” Michael said. “How is it you're passing the tea today?”

“Matthews has mumps,” Lady Hulme said. “It's absurd, really, but he caught them from the new housemaid, I believe.”

“He did, my lady,” Simpkins said very gently.

Lady Hulme turned to William. “I hear you have pots of money. Here's your tea.”

“Don't heed my mother,” Michael said rather quickly. “She likes to think she's daring. Why do you say such a thing, Mother?”

“Why not?” Lady Hulme retorted. Her face remained expressionless, whatever she said, the large eyes like pale lamps in her face that was reddened by sun and wind. “I can't think of anything nicer than having pots of money. One needn't be ashamed of it. I wish your father had it.”

William took his tea and helped himself to thin bread and butter and a hot scone. Some pleasant-looking cake waited upon a small, three-tiered table, but he knew, from school memory, that it would not be passed to him until he had eaten his bread and butter and scone. Sweets came last or not at all.

No one noticed his silence. Lord Hulme was eating with enjoyment, and drinking his tea from a large breakfast cup.

“I hope you weren't seasick,” Lady Hulme said.

“Thanks, no,” William replied.

“It's so beastly when one is,” Lady Hulme observed. “Of course American men are not so heartless as Englishmen. Malcolm always has believed that I am seasick purposely.”

“You are, my dear,” the Earl said.

“There, you see,” Lady Hulme said. “We went to Sicily for our honeymoon thirty-five years ago and I got ill in the little boat that took us across the Channel and had nowhere to lay my head. He wouldn't let me put it upon his knee.”

“Oh, come now,” the Earl retorted. “As I remember, I hadn't a chance to walk about—your head was always on my knee.”

They wrangled amiably, worrying the old subject between them, and Emory sat watching them with amused and lovely eyes, glancing now and again at William. She did not interrupt and at last Lady Hulme was weary.

“More tea all around,” she announced.

The Earl, revived by tea and argument, turned to William. “I see those papers of yours sometimes. What sort reads them, shopgirls and so on, I suppose!”

Michael sprang into the arena. “Everybody reads them, Father.”

“Really? Mostly pictures, though, aren't they?”

William took the Englishman into his confidence. “Our people don't read very much. One has to use pictures to convey one's meaning.”

“Ah, then you have a purpose?” Lord Hastings said rather quickly.

“Doesn't everyone have a purpose?” William replied. “The power potentiality of several million people is a responsibility. One cannot simply ignore it.”

“Ah,” the Earl said. He tipped his cup, emptied it, wiped his mustache with his lace napkin, rolled it up, and put it in the cup. Then he got up. “I suppose you'd like a walk? Michael and I always get one in before dinner.”

The early twilight was not far off and William would have preferred to stay in the great firelit room with the beautiful woman who sat in such silent repose, but some compulsive hand from the past reached out and he rose. After tea at school the headmaster ordered a walk for everyone. Not to want fresh air was a sign of laziness, weakness, coddling one's self, all English sins.

“Those boots right for mud?” Michael was looking down at William's well-polished country oxfords.

“Quite all right,” William said.

They tramped out into the shadowy fragrance, Michael respectfully in the rear. The Earl lit a short and ancient pipe, refusing William's aid. “Thanks, no—I've got long matches—have 'em made to order. They've a chemical in the tip that keeps them from blowing out in a wind.”

After this a long silence fell as the three men walked through country lanes. William knew the English silence and he determined that he would not break it. Let these Englishmen know that he could endure the severest test! The Earl turned away from the drive and across a sloping lawn to a meadow. At a gate in a white fence he paused again to fill his pipe.

“I've never been to America. Michael is always wanting to go. But since he's the only son, I've forbidden it—for the present.”

Michael laughed. “I have to marry and present him with an heir before he'll let me go anywhere.”

“That is the way the Chinese feel, too,” William said. “But I hope you will visit us some day.”

“Where do you live?” the Earl inquired.

“I have a house in New York and another in the country.” William's voice was as detached and tranquil as any Englishman's.

“You do yourselves very well, you Americans!”

“Not better than you English!”

“Ah, but it's taken us thousands of years.”

“We had a bigger bit of land to begin with.”

The Earl knocked the ash from his pipe and opened the gate. A hen pheasant started out of the grass and he watched her scuttling flight. “What fools we were to go after India instead of keeping America!” He was filling his pipe again. “Think of what the Empire would be if we'd really fought you rebels in 1776 instead of hankering after the fleshpots of that sun-blasted continent! It would have been to your advantage as well as ours. We'd have been invincible today against Germany or Russia if we'd been one country.”

“We, on the other hand, might have been merely a second Canada,” William said. “Perhaps we needed independence to develop.”

“Nonsense,” the Earl retorted. “It's stock that counts. The people of India have no stamina—always burning with some sort of fever of the spirit. It's the unhealthy climate.”