7
CANDACE FELT THAT WILLIAM was annoyed. He stooped to kiss her as usual but she was sensitive to his mood after these years of marriage and she saw a wintry stillness gathered about his heavy brows and firm mouth. When he spoke his voice was formal.
“I am sorry to be late.”
“Are you late?” She yawned nicely behind her hand. “Then I’m late, too. I was tired when I came home from the matinée.”
“Was the play good?”
“You wouldn’t think so.”
She rose from the chaise longue where she had been drowsing and looked from the window. Far below the vast park lay in shadows, pricked with lights. “I do hope the children are home. Nannie keeps them out too late. She is a fiend for fresh air.”
“There was a strong draft along the hall from the nursery door and so I suppose they are home,” William replied.
“Why do you think her first impulse upon entering a room is to open the windows?”
She asked the useless question while she was pulling on the satin slippers she had kicked off when she threw herself down. William seated himself in a chair and took his characteristic pose, his small dark hands gripped together, his legs, long and thin, crossed. Whatever the fashions for men, he wore his favorite gray, dark with a faint pinstripe, and his tie was dark blue. He did not answer his wife. This, too, was usual. Candace asked many questions she did not expect to have answered.
They were the queries of her idle mind. He had once given them thought until he discovered them meaningless.
She straightened her skirt and sauntering to her dressing table she picked up a brush and began smoothing out her short curls. Something was wrong but if she waited William would tell her. It might be anything, perhaps that he did not like the odor of food floating upstairs from the basement kitchen. The maids left the doors open in spite of her orders. Perhaps it was only while watching her as she brushed her hair he was reminded that she had decided to have her hair cut against his wishes.
“I had a letter from my father today,” William said abruptly.
“I thought something was wrong,” she said, not turning around but seeing him very well in the mirror. His face, always ashen, was no more so than usual. Something in his Chinese childhood, a doctor had said, perhaps the dysentery when he was four, had left his intestines filled with bacteria now harmless but more numerous than they should be.
“They have decided to take their furlough, after all,” he said.
She went on brushing her hair, watching his face. “That’s good news, isn’t it? I have never seen your father, and the boys have never seen even your mother.”
He frowned and the thick dark brows which always gave his face such somberness seemed to shadow and hide his deep-set eyes. “It is a bad time for me, nevertheless. I’d just decided to launch the new paper at once instead of waiting until spring.”
She whirled around. “Oh, William, you aren’t going to start something more!”
“Why not?”
“But we don’t see anything of you as it is!”
“I shan’t need to work as long hours as I did with the others. I’ve made my place.”
“But why, when we’re making money? You sacrifice yourself and us for nothing, darling!”
She let the brush fall to the floor and flew to his side and dropped on her knees, leaning her elbows on his lap and beseeching him. “I have always to take the boys everywhere without you. All last summer at the seashore you only came down for week ends, and scarcely that! It isn’t right, William, now when they’re beyond being babies. I didn’t say anything when you were getting started, but today, just when I was thinking we might go to the theater sometimes together!”
He was entirely conscious of her beautiful face so near his, and he would have given much to be able to yield himself to her but he could not. Some inner resistance kept him even from her. He did not know what it was, but he felt it like an iron band around his heart. He could not give himself up to anyone, not even to his sons. He longed to play on the floor, to roll on the carpet as Jeremy did with his little daughters, but he could not. He was most at ease when he sat behind his great desk in the office giving orders to the men whom he employed.
“I went to the theater with you only last week,” he reminded her.
“But that was an opening night and you know what people go to that for — to see and be seen. I want us just to go sometimes all by ourselves, and only for the play.”
He did not enjoy the theater but he had never told her so. He could never forget that it was only a play. No stage excitement could reach him when he was fed daily by the excitement of his own life, his secret power which he felt growing beneath the power of the printed words he set upon his pages. He alone chose those words. What he did not want people to know he did not allow to be printed. They learned only what he selected. Sometimes, meditating upon his responsibility, he felt himself chosen and destined for some power over men which he had not yet reached. He had been reared in Calvinism and predestination, but in his rebellion against his childhood he had rejected all that his father taught him. He had become almost an atheist while he was in college. Now he was made religious by his own extraordinary success. In the few years since he had put out the first of his newspapers, their sales had soared into millions. Yet he was not satisfied. Even now, traveling upon a train, he could feel vaguely hurt that on every other seat there should be lying the crumpled sheets of a paper thrown away. People ought to keep what he had so carefully made. Then his mood changed to pride. There were two of his papers to one of any other. Such colossal success meant something. There was a God, after all — and predestination.
“What are you thinking about?” Candace asked.
The question slipped from her tongue and she wanted it back instantly but it was too late. William disliked to be asked what he was thinking about. It was an intrusion and she knew now that he guarded himself even from her. It had taken her time to learn this and meantime she had wept a good deal alone. Tears, she had now learned, only irritated him. She shed no more of them.
“No — don’t answer me,” she said and impulsively she put her crossed fingers on his lips.
He took her hands rather gently, however, and did answer her. “I was thinking, Candy, that it is a great responsibility for one man to know that he feeds the minds — and the souls — of three million people.”
“Three million?”
“That is the number of our readers today. Rawlston gave me the last figures just before I came home. A year from now he says it will be twice that number. I suppose I am worth more than a million dollars, now.”
She was used to her father’s joking, “A millionaire? Nothing to it. Just keep ridin’ high and never look down.”
“You’ve made a great success, William.” She was not at all sure that this was the right thing to say and with his next words she knew it was not.
“I’m not thinking only in terms of personal success. It is easy to be successful here in America. Anyone with brains can make money.”
“But you do like money, William.” Her sense of being wrong compelled her to justify what she had said. Besides, it was true. In his own way William valued money far more than she did or ever could.
“It is only common sense to have money.” His voice was dry, his eyes severe and gray. “Without it one is hamstrung. There is no freedom without money.”
She remembered something she had heard her father once say. “A man needs enough room to swing a cat in.” Room, that was what money gave. A big house to live in, months in which to idle beside the sea, to live winter in summer and summer in winter, to buy without asking the price.