She considered this for a brief instant. “Are the Chinese so different from us or are you only pretending?”
“Pretending what?”
“That you are different.”
“I hope I am not too different from you, Candy.”
This was a bold step and she retreated.
“I don’t know if you are or not. I can’t make you out, William.”
He felt he had gone far enough. “Nor I you, sometimes, except today you look lovely. We don’t have to make each other out as you call it — not yet, anyway. Let’s not hurry, eh, Candy? I want you to know me, as I really think I don’t know myself. That means time, plenty of time.” He said all this with his cultivated English accent which he had not yet rejected.
She fended him off.
“Why do you keep talking about time?”
He laughed silently. “Because I don’t want someone else to come dashing up on a steed of some sort and carry you off!”
This was very plain indeed, and she dropped her eyes to the pink rose she had fastened upon her white fur muff, and considered. When she spoke it was with mild malice upon her tongue.
“Yet I am sure that you always reach out to take what you want — as soon as you are sure you want it.”
William met this with astuteness. “Ah, but you see, this time you might not want what I want. And I confess to being Chinese again to this extent: I don’t like to be refused, even indirectly. I prefer not to be put in that position.”
“That’s your sense of inferiority again.”
“Call it just being sensible.”
“A bad sport, then.”
“What we are talking about is not sport.”
He spoke with such quiet authority that her youth was compelled to respect his. He was only a year older than she, and yet he might have been ten years her senior.
“I don’t know what we are talking about,” she said willfully.
“You and me,” he said gravely, “though two, or three years, perhaps, from now.”
“I shan’t want to marry anybody for a long time yet,” she said.
“That is all I wanted to know,” he replied. He had been leaning against the marble mantelpiece, his hands in his pockets. Now he went over to her and lifted her hand and put it to his lips. She would have pulled it away but he did not give her time. In the same instant he put her hand down and left the room. His lips had been cold and dry but his palm was damp. She took her handkerchief and rubbed her hand; then she thrust it deep into her muff and sat for a long time alone and thoughtful.
As the last months of college passed, William was oppressed by fear lest his parents decide to return for his commencement, a fear that he had never acknowledged even to himself until his father had written in April from Peking:
Neither your mother nor I can be there to see you take your honors, my dear son. This is a real grief to us. We have discussed the matter many times, and at first I was inclined, with her, to use our small savings and ask for leave of absence without salary. Then it seemed to me that I had no right to put personal feelings ahead of God’s work. This is a peculiar age in which we now live in China. The opportunity to preach the gospel is unprecedented. Much as I deplore the manner in which we finally brought the Old Empress to her knees, and especially the looting of the city by Western troops, nevertheless it has taught her a lesson. We are given every opportunity now. God works in mysterious ways and we must not lose the harvest. I only wish the old Dowager Empress could understand that she is defeated. Alas, she cannot imagine it.
Two weeks later his mother had sent pleasantly heartbroken pages:
My darling William, I cannot see you in all the pride of graduation from Harvard! The girls are costing us so much this year. Henrietta’s operation for appendicitis has prevented it. The Board paid for it, of course, as they should do, but when I asked for a brief furlough to see my own only son graduate they refused me, saying that they had already been put to much expense. We cannot blame Henrietta, still it does seem strange it should have happened like this. We could use our savings — such a mite — but I will not do it, for it would give the Board future ideas. They owe us much for just living so far from our homes. Oh my son, do have many pictures taken of the event! I am sure that you have friends who will, for your mother’s sake, make the day visible to me. Do beg dear Jeremy, or Mr. Cameron. Tell them how my heart aches not to be with you and them.
William had written a suitably sad letter and then, his spirit freed from the possibility of the presence of his preposterous parents, he had set himself to finish his senior year with glory.
One evening in June he was dressing himself for a dance. It was a few days before commencement and Martin Rosvaine’s family in Boston was giving him the occasion. The Rosvaines were old Bostonians, proper except that their ancestry was French instead of English. Wealth mended this defect and Gallic gaiety lingered in their blood and made them enjoy pleasures more lavish than could be found usually among other Bostonians. William was as near complete happiness on this evening as his unfulfilled ambitions allowed. Candace was among the young women invited and she and her parents were staying at the Hotel Somerset until after commencement. He felt a warm anticipation when he thought of her soft and pretty face, and he wondered if he would tell her that his name stood among those few who would receive their diplomas summa cum laude. He decided that he would not, because Jeremy had barely passed, in spite of William’s unflagging help with higher mathematics and modern languages. Candace was quick to be scornful of boasting and he could not explain to her that the English schoolmasters had grounded him well and had taught him to dig into fundamentals. Jeremy, persuaded by tutors through a delicate childhood, had not known that mathematics must be seized as one seizes a thistle, that German cannot be learned unless it is grappled with and overcome by force, that French can elude mind and tongue with its smoothness and escape memory entirely. Because an English schoolmaster in a Chinese seaport had used a ruler freely upon William’s palms, had cracked him over the skull, had tweaked his ears, had poured out the bitterest and most dry sarcasm about upstart Americans who were properly only English colonists, William had learned early how to achieve even his small ambitions. Somewhere in dark and private action there had to be struggle and mastery.
Never having had the advantage of such knowledge, Jeremy had been content to escape failure. He was now lying in bed, dressed in lavender silk pajamas becoming to his fair hair and pale skin. He had declared himself exhausted by watching the baseball game in the afternoon. Idly he watched William shave clean his strong dark beard with an old-fashioned razor. June sunshine poured through the windows and William stood with his feet in a bright square. His mind was busy with plans that had nothing to do with college. After commencement was over he would take two weeks’ holiday with the Camerons, and then he would plunge into the matter of getting money for the newspaper. His first plans for getting money he had given up altogether. He could not beg money from his college mates and their relatives. He would find it himself, get it, if possible, from Roger Cameron, borrow it perhaps, with Roger’s backing. Then he could hire Martin Rosvaine and Seth James. But he would do most of the work himself.
“You’re thinking about the paper,” Jeremy said suddenly.
“So I am,” William replied. He was putting on his tie, his small fingers, expert and supple. “How did you know?”
“I know that godalmighty look on your face,” Jeremy replied lazily. “I fear and respect it.”
“I’m no son of a millionaire,” William said with a mirthless smile. “I have to get out and hustle, the way your old man did. Maybe my son will be able to lie around and write poetry.”