“Yet you don’t seem to enjoy life very much, William,” she said rather painfully. She had a profound capacity for enjoyment without a sense of guilt. Her father had frankly enjoyed getting rich and he distrusted all charities. She teased him sometimes by saying that he had become a Christian Scientist so that he could ignore the sufferings of others.
He had grinned and refused to be teased. “Maybe you’re right, daughter. Who knows why we do anything?”
Then he had turned grim. “If I see somebody starving, with my own eyes, I’ll feed ’em. I won’t pay out good cash for what I don’t see. Ten to one they’re lazy. If they hustled like I did. …”
Even going to church, while a social duty, had nothing to do with giving his money to strangers. Roger Cameron had cultivated no conscience in his children and Candace had grown up believing that pleasure was her normal occupation, once the dinner was planned and the children cared for. But no pleasure she devised could coax William from himself, or whatever it was that he dwelled upon in his soul. A ball which she planned as happily as a child might plan a birthday party fretted him with detail. A dish badly served spoiled his dinner. A servant who was not well trained — but of servants she would not think. He demanded of those in his service a degree of obedience and respect and outward decorum which had made her wretched until her father had found her crying one day. He had a way of coming to see her alone when he knew William was at his office. He took a cab and came all the way from Wall Street to arrive at three o’clock in the afternoon or at eleven o’clock in the morning.
On one such a visit he said, after he had inquired as to the cause of the tears his shrewd eyes had seen in spite of powder and even a dash of rouge, “You can’t find Americans who’ll give William the service he wants. We don’t respect ourselves enough yet. We’ve always got to be showing that we’re independent and don’t have to obey anybody. Besides, we’re too honest. When we hate anybody we act ugly. You hire your house full of English, Candy — they can act nice while they’re stirrin’ up poison for you. An English servant can polish your shoes as though he loved it. Of course he don’t.”
So she had filled the house with English servants, and a butler and a housekeeper kept their eyes upon William, the master.
“I don’t know that life is merely to be enjoyed,” William now said.
She was still crouching beside him. Idly she had taken one of his hands and playing with the fingers, she noticed the strange stiffness of his muscles.
“What’s life for?” she asked, not expecting an answer. “I don’t know, I don’t suppose anyone does, exactly. We’re here, that’s all.”
“It is for something more than amusement.” He disliked her playing with his hand and he drew it away, ostensibly to light a cigarette.
She felt his dislike and got to her feet gracefully, took his head between her hands and kissed his forehead.
“Poor darling, you’re so serious.”
“I don’t need your pity.”
“Oh, no, William, I didn’t mean that. Only, I enjoy life so much.”
She drew back and met the hurt look she feared. Why could she never learn how easily wounded he was? She cried out. “How silly we are to keep talking about nothing when you haven’t even told me your real news! When are your father and mother coming?”
He was relieved to be able to withdraw from her. “I had a cable this afternoon. They sailed the thirteenth on an Empress ship.”
“Then in a fortnight—”
“More or less. Just when I shall be busiest.”
“Never mind, I’ll look after them. Dad has time, too, now he’s retired enough to stop away from the office if he likes. And there’s Jeremy and Ruth—”
“I shall need Jeremy.”
Of the young men with whom he had begun the paper only Jeremy was left. One by one the others had deserted him. Martin Rosvaine had gone into the production of motion pictures and Blayne into the State Department with aspirations for an ambassadorship. He had not missed these two, but he had been sorry when Seth James quarreled with him, for he valued Seth’s brilliant and effervescent mind, the ideas which poured forth like sparks from a rocket. Most of them were useless, but he watched the scintillating performance because there were always one or even two or three ideas upon which he seized. They had made a good pair, for Seth’s weakness was his inability to discriminate between good ideas and foolish ones, and the paper would have been bankrupt had he been given authority. For that reason, William told himself, he had been compelled to keep control in his own hands even to the extent of buying up stock. Jeremy, of course, had never been a threat. He worked when he wished and William had learned to hire an understudy for him. But even yet he missed Seth, who had left him in anger and still refused to communicate with him.
The quarrel had been over a small matter, a difference of opinion so common to them that William had not troubled even to be polite. He had merely thrown abrupt words over his shoulder one night when they were all working long past midnight. Seth had said something about a story of some long-orphaned children in a foster home on a Pennsylvania farm. The farmer had lost his temper at a boy — he was still a boy, though a man in years — and the boy in terror and self-defense had rushed forward with a pitchfork, which had pierced the farmer’s leg. The wound was slight but the farmer had hacked the boy with an ax with which he was chopping wood and the boy had bled to death within an hour. There had been scandal enough so that Seth had gone impetuously to the scene himself to check the copy he was reading, and had come back flaming with anger at the conditions he found in the farmhouse: two half-starved grown girls, both mentally retarded, and a fat cruel old woman, and the boy hastily buried without anyone coming to investigate. The farmer lay in bed and babbled about self-protection. Seth had routed out police and they in turn had produced a thin frightened woman who claimed that she was only an employee of the organization that had placed the children and that she did not know whether there were any relatives. In the end the local publicity had spread to reach Ohio, whereupon Clem Miller of all people had come to Pennsylvania to see what was going on. He had taken the two girls away with him and had told the police that the place was not fit for any children, big or little.
To Seth Clem had said with furious zeal, “I hope you’ll tell William to make a real spread of this. Everybody in America ought to know about it. It’s a strange and pitiful thing — this was my grandfather’s place. He hung himself in that barn because he was too softhearted to get a neighbor off a farm — mortgage was called in. I came here myself when I was a kid, not knowing. These people were here already. I ran away — wanted all the kids to come with me, but only one would come.”
“It’s nothing but a local mess and of no significance,” William had said upon getting Clem’s message.
“But the boy’s death is significant,” Seth had insisted. “The very fact that orphaned children could be farmed out like that to such people, and no one care—”
“Well, no one does care,” William had retorted.
Seth’s answer had taken a long moment in coming and William, his mind upon his editorial, had not turned around. It came at last.
“You don’t care, that’s a fact,” Seth had said in a still voice. “You don’t care about anybody, damn you!”
He stalked to the door. “I’m not coming back here.”
“Don’t be foolish,” William said.
He had been very angry, nevertheless, when Seth walked out of the office. During the sleepless night in which he told Candace nothing except that the bread sauce on the pheasant he had eaten for dinner had not agreed with him, he made up his mind that when Seth came back in the morning he would ignore the whole matter. Otherwise he would have to fire him. But Seth did not come back. William had never heard from him since, but so far as he knew he was doing nothing of any use. He had backed two or three quixotic magazines, none of which were succeeding. Fortunately for Seth his father, old Mackenzie James, and Aunt Rosamond, too, had left him plenty of money. When William thought of their quarrel, as he often did, he was still convinced that he was right. A local murder in itself was not important. But William could never forget a wound and Seth had wounded him deeply. This was important.