Gods Men (61 page)

“Henrietta, this is the dearest thing you could have done. I never expect any of William's family to—Sit down, please, and let me look at you. I cried so when I heard about Clem. I ought to have written but I couldn't.”

She was in a violet chiffon tea gown, long and full and belted with silver. She was very slender again and more beautiful than ever.

“Let me look at you,” Henrietta said. “Are you happy, Candy?”

Candace blushed. “I am happier than I've ever been in my life, happy the way I want to be happy.”

She put her hand on Henrietta's. “When I was with William I was happy, too. It is so easy for me to be happy. But then I was happy mostly by myself. Now I am happy with Seth.”

“I know,” Henrietta said. She did not take Candace's hand because she did not know how to do such things and Candace understood this and stroked her hand and took her own away again.

“I don't blame William,” she said gently. “I won't even let Seth hate him. William needed someone who could understand him. Seth and I of course have grown up in the same world.”

She smiled at Henrietta brilliantly and softly. “You must come and visit us, dear. We don't live here much. We live at the old seashore house.”

“Where is Seth working?” Henrietta asked.

“He doesn't work any more except on his plays,” Candace said sweetly. “He says William galvanized him in college or he never would have worked.” Candace laughed her rich youthful laughter. “Seth is so amusing. He says William shaped his life. First he influenced him to work for him and then he influenced him to work against him. Now, Seth says, he's not going to work at all because he's really freed himself of William. We're both very wicked, I daresay.”

“It isn't wicked to be happy,” Henrietta said.

Candace pressed her hand again. “How glad I am to hear you say that! I used to tell William so but he didn't know what I meant. I tell the boys that now, but they're William's sons, too. They're terribly proud of him.”

Henrietta said, “Tell me about yourself.”

Candace held up her hand. Her face so illumined from within, turned toward the door. “Wait! I hear Seth.” She rose and went to the door and called and he came.

Henrietta saw a tall, gray-haired man, with a handsome, determinedly quizzical face. He was the one she remembered and she put out her hand.

“How good of you to come,” he said. “Candy and I don't expect favors.”

“I am fond of Candace. I wanted to see if you were good enough for her.”

“Don't make up your mind at first sight,” he begged. “My weaknesses are so obvious.”

She smiled politely, not knowing how to answer nonsense and he looked at Candace.

“My love, I've had nothing to eat or drink since luncheon.”

“Oh—I'll ring for tea.” Her violet skirt flowed across the silvery gray carpet and she pulled a black bell rope, hung as a decoration by the marble mantelpiece.

They had tea then, a happy plentiful affair at which Henrietta sat loyally silent and faintly smiling, enjoying the warmth of the web these two wove about them, into which they wrapped her, too. They were mirthful without cruelty, and gaily frank with her.

“Your mother, darling,” Candace said to her, “has been cultivating England, as you know. She's used up all the available relatives—She's simply astonished everybody. Seth, where's the letter we had from Lady Astley?”

Seth pulled open the drawer of a mahogany escritoire, and tossed an envelope into her lap.

“You don't mind?” Candace inquired, eyes brimming with laughter.

“I know Mother,” Henrietta said.

Candace opened the pale blue writing paper, and began to read aloud:

What we cannot understand here in England is why Mrs. Lane isn't the mother of the President. I think she doesn't understand it, either. She's a joy and a treasure. She makes us laugh our heads off and then we can face these Socialists. Really, she's a good sport—we like her. There's something English about her if you know what I mean—something quite frightful. She's so sure she's wonderful. There'll always be England and that sort of thing—and of course there always will. It's wonderful to think that it's in America, too. We'll quite hate to see her leave. God help us, it's odd, but the American Queen Mother hates Labor, too! She calls herself a Republican. William the Son is a Republican, she says. What's a Republican, dear? Mind now and tell me when you write.

“How wicked we are to read this aloud,” Candace said looking with laughing rue at Seth, sunk in his chair and smoking his pipe.

“Nonsense,” he said. “Henrietta knows we like the old gal. God, how I envy the old! They had the world all straight, heaven and hell, God and the devil, peace and war, good and bad, moral and immoral, stuffed and hungry and rich and poor—” Candace joined in the chant. “Young and old—”

“Black and white—”

“Gold and silver—”

“East side, West side, and never the twain shall meet—”

“King and subject—”

“City and Country—”

“Capital and Labor—”

“Union and nonunion—”

“Capitalist and Communist—”

“White man, black man—”

“Stop,” Candace said, “we're making Henrietta dizzy.”

“No, you're not,” Henrietta replied. “You're just making me laugh. Bless you both for being happy. Now I've got to go.”

They let her go, clamoring for her return, making her promise that she would come to spend a month with them at the seashore house. She would not, of course, but she could not tell them so, lest they keep her to make her promise, and then she went away, back to the subway and downtown again to her little hole in the wall.

It was long past twilight. Dr. Feld might still be working but she did not go to see. When she shut the door upon that splendid foolish happiness she stepped from moonshine into darkness. She was so accustomed to loneliness that she could not quite understand why the loneliness was deeper than it had been before, since she had found out exactly what she wanted to know, that Candace was happy and that none of them owed a debt to her any more through William. Then she remembered that neither Seth nor Candace had asked her where she lived or what she was doing. It had not occurred to them. They were not cruel, they were not even selfish or unthinking. They were simply ignorant, Candace naturally, so, Seth perhaps willfully so. He had returned to the world into which he had been born, and Candace had never left it. For them no other existed. They had never known, could never know, what Clem had always known.

It occurred to her later, after she sat trying to study a chemistry text, that perhaps that was why Candace had never understood William. William knew, too, another world. She let the book fall to the floor and sat for a long time, pondering this astonishing fact: Clem and William, so utterly different, were alike!

William Lane was no longer a young man. When he saw his two sons, both married and with children of their own, his grandchildren, he felt alarmingly old. On the other hand, his mother was robust and alive, though in her eighties, and so he was still young. He had come to the point of being proud of her, though frequently irritated by her increasing irresponsibility. Now, for example, when Ruth was in such trouble with Jeremy, who had become a really hopeless sot, his mother was gallivanting in England. He complained of this to Emory who listened with her usual grace and then made a wise suggestion. He depended very much on her wisdom.

“Why not cable your mother to come home and live with Ruth?” Emory said.

“An excellent idea,” William replied.

Mrs. Lane received the cable the next day. She had been staying at a big country house in Surrey, where the tenants at Christmastime had gathered in the real old English way to drink the health of the lord in spite of government. There was something about English life that made her think of Peking and she would have liked to spend the rest of her life in England except that the Socialists were spoiling everything. There was no reason for an American to endure the austerity upon which Sir Stafford Cripps insisted, especially an American woman. She would have stayed longer, however, with her friend, the Countess of Burleigh, had she not received William's cable. Jeremy, it appeared, had been taken to a special sort of hospital and Ruth needed her.

Mrs. Lane shrugged her handsome heavy shoulders when she read the telegram the footman brought her. She was having a quiet tea with the Countess, just the two of them. The Countess was old, too, and always looking for diversion and Mrs. Lane had been diverting her by a long visit.

“I cannot understand why my children still insist upon my returning to them at every crisis in their lives,” she now complained to the Countess. “One would think that at my age I might be allowed my freedom. But no—William, it seems, feels I must come home. My elder daughter is of course absorbed in her grief—I told you she lost her husband—and so my poor youngest child turns to me. Her husband has been taken sadly.”

“What's wrong with him?” the Countess inquired. She had been a music-hall star in her younger days and she continued to look very smart in spite of a tendency to palsy, and she talked with the youthful Cockney twang that she pretended she used on purpose.

“I fancy he's been drinking too much again,” Mrs. Lane replied.

“Ah, if it's that,” the Countess said decisively, “then you're rahhly in trouble, my deah. I know poor Harold was the same—would have his little tipple, he would, and he ended that way. Nothin' to do about it, nyether. I used to rampage a bit and he'd get frightened at first. In the end, poah deah, it only made him drink more. I had to let him drink himself to death, I rahhly did.”

This was not encouraging, and Mrs. Lane took her way homeward by plane as soon as she could get a seat, which she was able to do very soon, to the surprise and annoyance of the man who had already engaged it. She knew how to use William's name in secret places.

She found Ruth alone. Emory, who had come to meet her at the air field, went with her. Ruth began to weep when she saw her mother in the hall standing still so that the maid could take off her coat properly, and Mrs. Lane, regarding her daughter's tears, saw that Ruth cried as a middle-aged woman exactly as she had as a child, almost soundlessly and with bewildered pathos. She put out her stout arms and wrapped Ruth in them. “There, there,” she said. “Everything is going to be all right now. I've come to stay with you. You need me more than Henrietta does. Where is Henrietta?”

“I don't know,” Ruth sobbed. “I can't think about anybody but Jeremy. Oh Mother, why does he—the doctor says it's a symptom. Something is still making him unhappy—but it's not me, I'm sure. I do everything he wants me to.”

“Nonsense,” Mrs. Lane said, pulling her daughter along firmly in the circle of her right arm as she moved into the drawing room. “Men like to get drunk—some men. That's all there is to it. It's not any woman's fault.”

Emory kissed Ruth an inch or two off the cheek. “William feels quite desperate, too, dear Ruth. We all want to help poor Jeremy.”

“He was so deceitful about it, Mother—” Ruth cried. “He went off to the office every day apparently to work and instead he took a room at his club and just began, and went on, all by himself. When he didn't come home, of course we had to find him. He had locked the door and they had to break it down. He was unconscious. I had Doctor Blande go and get him. They took him straight to the hospital. I haven't even—seen him. Doctor Blande says I mustn't just now.”

She began to cry again. Mrs. Lane sighed and Emory sat, quietly beautiful, looking at these American relatives. She knew why Jeremy had gone off. It was his revenge upon William, the revenge of a weak man upon one invincible. She had sympathy for the weak, but she was prudent enough to cast her lot with the invincible. William was right to be invincible in the sort of world there was now. It was the only chance one had for survival. She was invincible, too, at William's side. She pitied Ruth and felt a new admiration for William's mother, sitting solidly and without tears.

“Ruth, there's not a bit of use in your crying now that I'm here,” Mrs. Lane said. “I'm sorry for you. Your father was a saint. You're used to good men. William, too, is so good. It's natural that a man like Jeremy should be a trial to you. But you belong to the family and you'll be taken care of. My advice is to let Jeremy stay right where he is until William tells us what to do. Maybe you ought to let Candace know, so she can go to see him.”

Ruth shivered. “Oh, I can't! She'd think it was somehow our fault.”

“Then she's very silly,” Mrs. Lane said loudly. “The trouble with Jeremy is that he was brought up to be spoiled. He can't live up to William's standards. Now you go and wash your face and brush your hair. You'll feel better. There's nothing you can do for Jeremy, not a thing. We may as well have a bite of something to eat and go to a matinee! It will take our minds off our troubles. Emory, why don't you come with us? That's a handsome frock you have on. I've always liked that shade of yellow, especially with jade. That's handsome jade, too.”

“William brought it from China,” Emory said. “Madame Chiang gave it to him for me.”

“She has wonderful taste,” Mrs. Lane said. “What a pity the Communists have taken over!”

They were alone, for Ruth had left the room as obediently as though she were a little girl. Mrs. Lane leaned toward Emory. “Jade looks nice with dark hair and eyes. William ought never to have married Candace. She was a blonde, you know. He always liked brunettes best. The Chinese wear a lot of jade. Of course they're always brunette. Some of the Chinese women have very beautiful skin. It reminds me of yours. I used to know the Old Empress Dowager. In fact, we were almost intimate. She had that sort of skin, very smooth and golden. She wore a lot of jade. William always liked to hear about her. I took him to see her once, by special permission.”