When she said something like this to Clem he would not listen to her. “I’m used to my stomach by now, hon. It hasn’t won out on me yet.”
“You haven’t won out either, Clem,” she said sharply. “It’s a continual struggle and you know it.”
He grinned at her, although there was nothing cheerful to grin about. Pearl Harbor had done him as much damage internally as it had done the Hawaiian Islands and he did not dare to tell Henrietta that all his old symptoms had returned, and that he was afraid to eat.
When America had finally swung into war he offered himself as a supercook and was actually put in charge of the mess halls and kitchens of barracks near Dayton. While the war went on and he still continued his long-distance education of the White House, conducted without any response whatever, Clem made some thousands of American boys happy by excellent food and pleasant dining halls where they were allowed to smoke and where cages of singing canaries brightened up their meals. Outside the dining room Clem made the administration furious by the economies he suggested and even put into force so that his regiments, as he called them, became notorious or longed for, depending upon whether a man was brass or buttons.
Clem himself considered it piddling. He was marking time until the end of the war when he intended to marshal all his theories into one vast gospel and present them to the White House and then to the nations. He had long ago forgotten William’s rebuff and he remembered now only the grace and kindness of William’s wife, and he dreamed secretly without telling Henrietta that after the war was over he would go back to William, not this time to advocate a theory but with a formula in his hand, a formula for a food so cheap that until the world got its distribution fixed up, people could still be kept from starving.
He set up a small laboratory in the basement of the house and with Henrietta to help him with her knowledge of chemistry refurbished and brought up to date with some new books, he began to work with the best soybeans he could get, the beans that Chinese farmers grew for their own food. Clem planted these seeds and tended them like hothouse asparagus, and as the war continued his harvests grew until he had enough soybean meal to make real experiments possible. He and Henrietta ate one formula after another, and studied seasoning and spoilage.
“We ought to have a real food chemist,” Henrietta told him on one of these days. “I don’t know how to get the taste you want, Clem. I don’t even know what it is.”
“It’s kind of like those meat rolls I used to eat at the Fongs’,” Clem said dreamily.
“But you were a half-starved boy then and anything would have been wonderful,” Henrietta suggested.
“Yes, but I never forget.”
Clem never forgot anything. He did not forget how it had felt to be a half-starved boy and his unforgetting mind made him know how people anywhere felt and what they wanted. The man in the White House could have got from Clem an accurate temperature of most of the world’s peoples in the crowded countries of Asia, but he did not know it, or even that he needed to know it. Meantime Clem had isolated himself from the war and was living ahead in the years after, when the new world would begin.
“War’s nothing but an epidemic,” he told Henrietta. “If you don’t prevent it in time it comes and then you have to go through with it. I’m glad we have no children, hon.”
“We might have had a girl,” Henrietta said with a wry smile.
“No, I’m glad we haven’t. She’d have been in love with a boy.”
The long process whereby William Lane decided to become a Catholic was one of combined logic and faith. His conscience, always his most fretful member, had become irritated beyond endurance by the monstrosity of his success, which was now uncontrollable. He needed to do nothing except to read his newspapers critically and then keep or discharge his editors. From somewhere in his ancestry, distilled through generations of New England lawyers, preachers, and reformers, he had received the gift of the critical mind attuned to his times. Long ago he had become as independent as a feudal baron. His chain of newspapers rested upon the solid properties of his own printing presses, and these in turn were set upon the sure output of his paper mills, which in finality rested upon the firm foundations of timbered land, stretching in miles across spaces of the north, in Canada as well as in the United States. He was impervious to the dangers and restrictions possible even to him, as the war blazed separately first in Asia and then in Europe. A pity about Hitler! Had he been well advised, Hitler could have been a savior against communism, the final enemy.
Upon the frightful morning after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when his valet drew the window curtains, William was weighed down by the necessity of making up his mind quickly upon a new policy for his staff. People must know immediately where he stood.
As usual when he felt confusion he decided to talk with Monsignor and he telephoned before he got up.
“Yes, William?” Monsignor said over the telephone. After two years or so, they had come to this intimacy. “How can I help you?”
“I feel confused,” William replied. “This war is bringing many problems. I must decide some of them today. I should like to talk with you this morning before I go to my office.”
“I am at your disposal,” the priest replied.
So William went immediately after he had eaten. Emory always breakfasted in her room, and he saw no one except servants whom he did not count. The morning sun shone down upon the magnificent granite Cathedral near the priest’s private home. Both stood in the upper part of the city against a background of skyscrapers, and their solidity was reassuring. Even bombs could scarcely prevail against the aging gray structure of the Cathedral, as formidable as a medieval castle. He rang the bell at a Gothic doorway and was immediately admitted by a young priest who led him in silence over thick velvet carpets spread upon stone floors. There was not one moment of waiting. It was an atmosphere far more courteous than that of the White House, where last week William had gone to call upon the President, repressing his personal dislike to do his patriotic duty, and had been kept waiting for nearly a quarter of an hour. In the end Roosevelt, though jovial, had not seemed grateful for William’s offer of help.
Monsignor’s library was a beautiful room. The crimson of the carpets was repeated in the velvet hangings at the Gothic windows, and mahogany bookcases reached to the arched ceilings. The air was warm and slightly fragrant. There was a great deal of gold decoration centering in a massive crucifix that hung in a long alcove, but carried out also in wide gold satin bookmarks, in the frames of two or three fine paintings.
Monsignor Lockhart was a handsome man, erect and dignified. His features were clear and he had fine, deep-set eyes of a clear hard blue.
“Sit down, William,” he said.
William sat down in a cushioned Gothic chair and began to consider his worries. There was nothing wrong in his daily life. He had no sins. He was entirely faithful to his wife and she to him. He knew that Emory, although she was a beautiful woman, was also fastidious, and he trusted her entirely and had never regretted his marriage. In her way she was his equal. There was no man in America above him in influence and few as rich. Had he been English he would of course have had a title. In that case he would have been poorer than he was, and Emory would not have enjoyed poverty. She had the finest jewels of any woman he knew. Emory in soft black chiffon, high at the neck and long sleeved, wearing her diamonds, was all he conceived of as beauty in woman. She had become a Catholic with him, and she liked wearing black chiffon and diamonds. With her dove-gray frocks she wore pearls.