Gods Men (48 page)

With her sons, she was cavalier. Will and Jerry, though tall young men, still cared more for football than for anything else on earth. “We mustn't blame your father,” she had said to them brightly. “The truth is, our marriage never quite came off, if you know what I mean. Why should you know? It's like a flower that doesn't quite bloom. Still, I've had you two and that is a great deal to get out of one marriage.” She had looked from one solemn young face to the other.

“Are you going to marry again?” It was Will's question. She met his young gray eyes and shook her head, still playfully. This was her protection now and forever, not to care too much, not to mind. She thought of fallen leaves floating upon the surface of the swimming pool, of leaves drifting down from the trees, of a bird resting upon the waves of atmosphere, of flower petals dropping upon the grass. Her father was right. Escape life, perhaps, but certainly escape pain! The blow had been dealt.

Jerry, the younger, had spoken with sudden rage. “Why don't you go and see that woman and tell her she has no right to—”

“Shut up,” Will said for her. “You don't understand. You're only a kid.”

Neither son had spoken one word of their father. He was immovable, unchangeable; none could reach him. Whatever he did was done. He was absolute.

William had needed none of them, not his mother, not Ruth. No one existed for him except himself, his monolithic being, his single burning purpose, more consuming than any he had ever known. He was ruthless in his office, angry with all delay, intolerably demanding upon his lawyers.

He had tried to compel Candace to go to Reno so that in six weeks he might be free. She had refused and old Roger Cameron had demanded an appointment. William had refused that. He gave orders that he would not speak with anyone on the telephone. He lived entirely in his apartment at the office and made no communication with his sons. After he was married to Emory he would let them see for themselves why he married her.

When he discovered that Candace was not going to Reno, he went himself. He endured weeks of loneliness without Emory, days when he called her by telephone that he might hear her voice and assure himself that she still lived, that she had not changed her mind, that she had no thought of delaying their marriage. His decree granted, he left by the next train and, speeding to England upon the fastest ship, he went straight to Hulme Castle.

She was there waiting for him, the wedding day set two days hence, and when he had her in his arms, he let down his heart. He put his face into the soft dark hair.

“Oh, my love—” They were words he had never used to Candace.

“You look fearfully tired, William.”

“I shan't be tired any more, Emory.”

She did not reply to this, and he stood for a moment letting his weariness drain away in the silence.

“Two days from now we'll be married.”

“Two days,” she echoed.

“I wish it were now.”

To this, too, she made no reply.

They were married in the room where they had first met. She did not want to be married in Hulme Abbey, where, had Cecil lived, the ceremony would have taken place. Her parents had agreed, and so an altar had been set up in the drawing room. No one was there beyond her family and the vicar and his wife and a few people whom William had never seen before. “A quick, quiet wedding,” he told her and she obeyed.

U
PON A GAY AND
prosperous people the thunder clouds of the Great Depression now crashed down their destruction. In the late summer, Clem had felt something was wrong. He could not define, even to Henrietta, his uneasiness, beginning at first as a personal discontent in his own mind, though he tried to do so one Sunday, the last in August. She was aware of his eternal searching for causes and, by her listening silences and her careful questions, helped him to see more clearly the vague shapes he perceived in the future.

Long ago Henrietta had come to understand that in Clem there was something of the seer, if not of the prophet. His instinct for humanity was so delicate, his perception of mankind so ready, that without magic and entirely reasonably he was able to forecast the possible in terms amazingly definite. Had he lived in ancient times, she sometimes mused, had he been born in those early ages when people explained the inexplicable, the mystic man, by saying he had been fathered by a god or had seen gods upon the mountains or in the flames of a burning bush, struck perhaps by lighting, they would have cried out that Clem was a prophet sent to them by God and they would have listened to him. And, were they frightened enough, they might have heeded him in time to avert disaster.

Now Clem and Henrietta, seated in rocking chairs upon their own narrow front porch, looked to the passer-by no different from any other middle-aged couple upon the street of an ordinary Ohio town. He talked and she listened and questioned. He was in his shirtsleeves and an old pair of gray trousers, and she saw that the collar of his blue shirt was torn. She resolved to throw it away secretly when he took it off that night. Clem was miserly about his clothes and declared them good enough to wear long after they had reached the point of dusting cloths and mops.

“I can't just tell you in so many words how I feel about things,” Clem said. “It's like sitting out on the grass on a nice bright day and then suddenly knowing that the earth is shaking under you—not much, but just a little. Or it's like being in the woods, maybe, and wondering if you don't smell smoke somewhere.”

“If you were in the woods and smelled smoke,” Henrietta said, “you'd find out first which way the wind was blowing and look in that direction, wouldn't you?”

Clem flashed her an appreciative look. “I've thought of that. I can't tell which way the wind is blowing—not yet. Crops were good enough this year, at least taking the country as a whole. Maybe things are all right. Maybe it's nothing but my own queasy stomach. I oughtn't to have eaten those corn dodgers last night.”

“I'll never have them again,” Henrietta said.

Clem went on after a few seconds of rocking. “The trouble is that the way things are now in the world, we're all tied together in one way or another. There might be an earthquake somewheres else which would upset us, too.”

She did not reply to this. The evening was pleasant though hot and children in bathing suits were playing with hoses, spraying each other and shrieking with laughter. Clem, deeply troubled by thoughts which were now roaming the world, saw nothing.

“The news from abroad is not bad, though, Clem,” she reminded him. “Yusan says the new government in China is bringing order and getting rid of the warlords, at least, and pushing Japan off. And Goshal says that Gandhi has made a sort of interlude in India.”

Clem got up. He walked across the porch, took out his penknife, and began to cut a few dead twigs from a huge wisteria vine that Henrietta had planted the first spring she came to New Point. Now, a thick and serpentine trunk, it crawled to the roof and clung about the chimney for support.

“Goshal is a Brahman no matter what I try to tell him,” Clem said. “What you call interlude, hon, is only a truce. Gandhi has got the British to compromise for a while for just one reason, and Goshal can't see it. The price of food has gone down so much that millions of peasants are going to starve, hon, if something isn't done quick.”

“City people will have more to eat if food is cheap,” Henrietta said.

“Most people don't live in cities,” Clem said. “That's not the point though, and I am surprised at you, hon. If the peasants and farmers starve it doesn't help the factory workers in the long run. Gandhi is right when he says everything has to be done for the interests of the peasants. They're basic everywhere in the world.”

Henrietta felt clarification begin in the waters of Clem's soul. He was clipping one twig after another and they fell upon the wooden floor of the porch with soft dry snips of sound.

Clem went on, almost to himself. “And I don't know what to think about things in China. A new government? Well, any government, I guess, is a good thing after all these years of fighting and goings on. I don't blame Yusan for being glad about that. But I wrote him yesterday and told him that if this Chiang Kai-shek didn't get down to earth with all his plans and study what the people need, it will be the same story. You don't have to be an Old Empress to make the same mistakes.”

Henrietta was rocking back and forth silently, her following thoughts circling the globe.

“I don't know,” Clem muttered. “How can I know? I don't believe Japan is going to let things lay the way they are. They've been afraid for centuries, those people! They've got themselves all stewed up—can't blame them, though—the way different nations have gone over and sliced off big hunks for themselves. ‘We're next,' that's what the Japanese have been thinking for a mighty long time, hon! ‘If we don't get going and carve ourselves out something big, we're next.' That's what they think. Maybe they're right, who knows? Only thing I know, hon, is that the earth is shaking right here under my feet. I don't like the looks of things.”

He lifted his head and looked away over the housetops and beyond the trees. “Talk about smoke—the wind is from Europe, I reckon.”

The cyclone struck in October. Bred in the storms of the world it had gathered its furious circular force in the angry hunger of the peoples of Europe and then reaching its sharp funnel across the Atlantic Ocean it struck in Wall Street, in the heart of New York, in the most concentrated part of America.

Clem, on that first fatal morning, reached out of the front door to get the morning paper, half his face lathered with shaving soap. He saw the headlines as black as a funeral announcement and many times as large upon the front page, and knew that what he had feared had come. He wiped his cheek on the sleeve of his pajamas and sat down in the kitchen to read. Henrietta was making coffee. When she saw his face she set a cup before him and went out into the hall, got his overcoat, and wrapped it about him. Over his shoulders she saw the frightful announcement,
CRASH IN WALL STREET SHAKES THE NATION!

“Tell Bump to get down here as fast as he can,” Clem ordered. “You and me and him have got to get right to work, hon.”

She obeyed him instantly as she would have obeyed the captain of an overloaded and sinking ship. There was no time to waste.

Clem dressed and ate a hasty breakfast and being immediately beset by the demons of indigestion, he was swallowing pepsin tablets when Bump came into the house. Henrietta had cleared the dining-room table of dishes and cloth, and Clem spread out the big sheets of white wrapping paper upon which he always did his large-scale figuring.

“Sit down,” he told Bump. “We're going to have the worst depression in the history of the world. We got to get ready to feed people the way we've never done before. I'm going to open restaurants, Bump. It won't be enough now to sell people food cheap. We got to be ready to give it away, cooked and ready to swallow, so that people won't starve to death right here in our own land.”

He outlined in rapid broken sentences what he believed was sure to happen and Bump listened, cautious and reluctant and yet knowing from past experience how often Clem was right.

“We can hardly feed the whole nation, Clem,” he said at last.

Clem was immediately impatient. “I'm not talking about the nation. I'm talking about hungry people. I want to set up restaurants in the big cities as quick as we can. Our markets will supply our own restaurants. Whoever can pay will pay, of course. At first most people can pay and will want to. But I am thinking of January and February, maybe even this winter, and I'm thinking of next winter and maybe the winter after. That's when things will get bad.”

It was impossible to get so huge a plan going as quickly as Clem thought it should and could. But it was done or began to be done within a time that was miraculous. Clem bought a small airplane which Henrietta, much against her secret inclination, learned to fly lest Clem insist on doing so and he, as she well knew, was not to be trusted with machinery. He expected divine miracles from engines made by man and while she had submitted for years to his mistreatment of automobiles, his wrenchings and poundings of parts he did not understand, the frightful speed at which he drove when he was in a hurry, she could not contemplate such maneuvers in the air.

She made a good pilot, to her own surprise, for she was an earthbound creature and hated suspension. Clem as usual was surprised at nothing she did, insisting upon her ability to do everything. At as low a height as she dared to maintain, they flew from city to city, her only apparent cowardice being that when they went to the coast to set up Clem's restaurants in San Francisco and Los Angeles, she avoided the Rocky Mountains, and flew far south in order to escape them. Pilot and attendant, she followed Clem while, with his superb and reckless disregard of all business principles, he established during that first winter six restaurants across the country on the same magnitude as the markets. For these restaurants he hired Chinese managers.

“Only Chinese know how to make the best dishes of the cheapest food,” he explained to Henrietta. “They've been doing that for thousands of years.”

Knowing the importance of the spirit, he summoned his new staff to a conference in Chicago, where he put them up at a comfortable hotel while he talked to them about starvation and how to prevent it. He worked out one hundred menus, dependent upon the raw materials of the markets, and laid down the rule which should have ruined him and which instead led him eventually to new heights of prosperity.

“Any time anybody wants a free meal in any of our restaurants they can have it,” he said firmly. “Of course they can't order strawberries and cream, but they can have meat stew and all the bread they want and they can have baked apples or prunes for dessert. Nobody will know whether they pay for it or not. They'll get a check same as everybody else and they'll go up to the cashier and just tell her quiet-like if they haven't any money.”