“I wish nobody needed to know,” she cried with passion. “I wish you and I could just go off together and nobody ever know.”
“I guess that wouldn’t be just the right thing,” he said in a reasonable voice. “I’d feel a whole lot better if I wrote to your father telling about all this. Maybe I ought to tell William.”
“No!” Henrietta cried. She scuffed the edge of her shoe along the black cindered ground. “I want it all to myself — until we really are married.”
“Won’t you tell William?” Clem looked grave.
“No,” Henrietta said in the same passionate voice. “At least we don’t have to tell William.”
“He’ll have to know sooner or later,” Clem said.
“Let him find out!” she cried.
The train came racketing in, drowning their voices, and they kissed again quickly, mindful of people about them though they were all strangers, and then Clem swung himself up the steps and she stood with her hands in the pockets of her green coat, watching until the train was gone.
5
“THERE’S A LETTER FROM your mother,” Candace said to William. She never opened letters addressed to him after she discovered during her honeymoon that he did not like it. She wondered sometimes if she were stupid because she could never foresee what he would like and what he would not. But once she knew she never forgot.
It was December and they were in the town house. Next week she must gather herself together for Christmas. She clung to these last days of the year, spending the midday hours in a large glass-enclosed porch. She was pregnant with her second child, and next summer there would be another baby.
Just now, Willie, William’s namesake, was nearly two years old. She had been married more than five years. She lay on a long and comfortable chair, feeling a little exhausted, perhaps from her horseback ride in the park. She had not told William that the doctor had forbidden riding because she did not intend to obey such orders. William, had he known, would have insisted upon obedience.
He sat down beside a small metal table and tore open the envelope thick with Chinese stamps. Two letters fell out, one with his father’s writing and the other from his mother. He chose his mother’s first, for she gave him the most news about what was happening in Peking. She gave the incidents and his father provided the commentary. William was profoundly interested in what was taking place there, for he believed that it was a preliminary pattern of what must happen all over Asia, a surging rise of the common people he feared and distrusted. The mob upon the Peking street had become a memory stamped upon his brain. The one power that could control such madness was in the unconquerable Empress. He remembered the brave old face, impatient and arrogant, bent above him when he was a little boy. He remembered the times he had climbed Coal Hill to look down upon the roofs of her palaces. Having now seen many mansions, he realized that the Old Empress had a magnificence that no mere millionaire could buy. Her palaces were forbidden to all men but no one could forbid an American boy to climb a hill and look down upon her roofs of porcelain blue and gold and upon her marble pillars, and anyone who passed could stare at her closed gates of enameled vermilion.
Early in July his mother had written of a garden party to be given in September in the Summer Palace and to which all diplomats and their friends had been invited. Now he read that it would never take place. The Old Empress had fallen ill on a bright day in the early autumn, his mother wrote. The young Emperor, sitting at his desk, was disturbed by a eunuch running in and crying out, “The Old Buddha is dead!” Without one word, without waiting one instant, the young Emperor began to write upon the sheet of paper he had been preparing for the brushing of a poem. Instead of the poem he wrote an order for the death of that statesman who had betrayed him to the Old Empress ten years earlier, when he had dreamed of making his country new again. Before he could seal the paper, the eunuch came running in to cry still more loudly, “The Old Buddha lives again!” She had rallied, to live weeks longer.
William kept silent, for Candace could not know what the Old Empress meant to him. He read on. She had rallied more than once after that, determined to outlive the young Emperor whom she so distrusted for his eagerness to change old ways for new. He, too, was ill, and she lived and lived again when she heard he was not dead. When she heard that at last he was gone, she gave a great gusty sigh and was willing to die.
“I of scanty merit,” the haughty old woman wrote in her last message to her people, “I have carried on the government, ever-toiling night and day. I have directed the metropolitan and provincial leaders and the military commanders, striving earnestly to secure peace. I have employed the virtuous in office and I have hearkened to the admonitions of my advisors. I have relieved the people in flood and famine. By the grace of Heaven I have suppressed all rebellions and out of danger I have brought back peace.”
William smiled grimly. Brave Old Empress, brave until the end! She had not died until she had seen that weakling dead, a degenerate youth, a puppet in the hands of revolutionists, who would have unleashed all the madness of the people.
Candace watched him but he did not know it. She could never read his face but she saw the passing smile and wanted to know its cause. “What is it, William? Has something happened?”
“Something is always happening,” William replied. He curved his lips downward very slightly. He was reading his father’s letter, a short one ending as usual with a bit from the Chinese classics. “We are upon the threshold of wonderful events, now that the cruel old woman is gone,” his father wrote. “As Mencius said four hundred years before Christ, The people are the foundation of the State; the national altars are second in importance; the monarch is the least important of them all.’ My son, I wish your life could have been spent here in China. It is the center of the coming world, though few know it.”
William smiled again at this, a different smile. He did not for one moment believe that China was the center of the world and he did not agree with Mencius.
Candace, watching his face, felt one of her waves of recklessness creep upon her. Why was she afraid of William? She had not been afraid of him before she was married and she could think of no single reason, certainly no incident, to explain why she should now feel that he might be cruel. Jeremy was partly responsible. Jeremy was drinking too much. She had tried to say something to her father about it but he refused to believe it. His religion was a cushion against everything that he did not like and he took refuge in it without shame. There was no use in talking to her mother and she was afraid to tell William. He was hard enough upon Jeremy in the office — hard upon Seth, too. Seth was the chief copy editor. Jeremy was managing editor and stood between Seth and William. William insisted on seeing all the copy and Seth had to make it follow the policy William outlined for his staff upon every event as it came about in the world.
“We don’t have to think,” Jeremy had said with his too sprightly humor. “It’s wonderful not to have to think, Candy. It leaves you so much time.”
Seth was not so gay. He refused to talk about William and with Candace he was exceedingly formal. She had to ask Jeremy what was the matter with Seth.
“An independent mind,” Jeremy said with his changeless merriment. “It’s one mind too many. We don’t need it. We have William’s.”
No one could contradict William. The fantastic success of his newspapers was the final answer to any disagreement with his decisions. In five years the one newspaper he had begun in New York had grown into four, the others published in Chicago, St. Louis, and San Francisco. With a wily combination of pictures, cartoons, and text, William had devised something that had become indispensable to millions of people he never saw. His papers were small enough to handle easily on the subways and while men were eating their lunches at crowded drugstore counters. He gave them exactly what they wanted: financial and business news in a brief space, with a short half column of prediction and advice; news in carefully chosen pictures of tense drama, and photographs cropped to show nothing but concentrated action; news in capsules of simply written, carefully shaped text, suited to millions of people who read with difficulty and thought very little, and who craved constant diversions because of their inner emptiness. William was too clever to preach. What he wanted could be done by his choice of what news to tell and how it was told. Elimination was half the secret of his power, and headlines were the rest of it. Headlines alone could tell people how to think.