At this moment while she moved about the dining room, Henrietta’s husband came to the door and looked in. He made her think of a bird, slender, bright-faced, boyish, making so many little quick unconscious movements. He was completely different from Henrietta and yet there was something between them. She did not see why William had been angry when Henrietta married Clem.
“Come in, Clem,” she said sweetly.
He came in, his hands in his pockets jingling something, keys, coins — no, a small bottle of pills which he now brought out. “Can I find some water somewhere? All this has brought on my nervous indigestion.”
She lifted a cut-glass carafe from the sideboard and he whistled softly when he took it. “Solid, isn’t it?”
“A wedding present. If you saw the amount of cut glass I have packed away, besides all this!”
“Swell wedding, must have been. But then, William would have that. Did he ever tell you we met once?”
“No, did you?”
He rolled pills into the palm of his hand, threw them in his mouth, gulped them and washed them down with water he poured into a goblet on the table. “Maybe he has forgotten but I never have. A Chinese boy and I were kind of dancing around each other ready to let out our fists when William came by and stopped us.”
“Did he know you?”
Clem grinned mischievously and she saw freckles under his pale skin. “No — but he knew who I was.”
“What do you mean?”
“I came from the wrong side of the tracks, see?”
“There were no tracks in Peking, were there?”
“Oh yes, there were. The Lanes were aristocrats compared to us. Dr. Lane got a salary every month. They lived in a compound. My father hadn’t any salary. He was low enough to live on faith alone.”
They spoke in half whispers, almost guiltily, enjoying the respite from gloom. He had a sense of humor, Candace saw. And Clem saw a pleasant pretty woman, an honest woman at that, not too smart maybe, certainly not grand like his Henrietta, but nice to talk to, especially after a funeral.
“Christians are like other people. What’ll I call you — Mrs. William?”
“Oh, call me Candy.”
“Candy, eh? Nice name for you. My father was ignorant, Candy, just plain uneducated like I am. There’s a difference, though. I wanted an education and he didn’t believe it was right. He thought God would provide everything — even food, you know. Dr. Lane knew better. He was real well educated. Of course my father was only a farm boy.”
Candace stared at him, not comprehending in spite of what she heard. He tried further.
“All the well-heeled missionaries who didn’t have to trust God looked down on us, naturally. I guess my poor old dad was a sort of beggar sometimes. When he saw us hungry and no food in sight he used to push God a little.”
“How?”
Clem’s face turned red and the freckles disappeared. “He went to the other missionaries — or even sometimes to the Chinese — and told them we had nothing to eat.” He tried to laugh. “Kind of tattletale on God, I guess! Anyway, I don’t like to think of it.”
“I’m sure William has forgotten all of that,” Candace said, on a rush of pity and vague affection for this too honest man.
“Maybe,” Clem said. He looked sober and began jingling his pockets again.
Something haunted his restless blue eyes and Candace went on pitying him. “You’re very happy with Henrietta, aren’t you? She adores you, I think. When she talks about you she looks as though she were thinking of her child as well as her husband.”
“There is nobody in the whole world like Henrietta,” Clem said. The red had left his face as quickly as it had come and the freckles were back. “I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have her. She’s my life’s foundation. I’ll build all sorts of superstructures, maybe, in what I’m trying to do about food, but she keeps me steady. And here’s the thing — she never discourages me.”
“Wonderful! And what are you trying to do about food, Clem?”
“Oh — just feed the world.”
“Hush!”
She put a hand, pretty and ringed, upon Clem’s arm. They listened and she took it away again. William entered the room and she turned to him
“Clem and I are here waiting, William. Everything is ready.”
“I don’t know where everyone is,” William said.
He sat down in a great Jacobean chair that stood beside the long windows opening to a wide terrace. He still wore his black suit and above the dead hue of the broadcloth his face was whiter than ever, his brows more intense.
“Clem was talking about feeding the world.”
William glanced from under his eyebrows and Clem suddenly heard the jingling in his own pockets and took his hands out of them.
“You are in the food business, aren’t you?” William asked without interest.
“Yes,” Clem replied. “I’ve just opened a big new market at Dayton, Ohio.”
“What has that to do with the world?”
“Just a beginning,” Clem said without humility. He was surprised to find that he rather enjoyed talking with William. There was an edge to it. Walking briskly across the floor he took the other Jacobean chair on the opposite side of the window and turning sidewise began to talk with sudden fluency.
“I began in the simplest sort of way — with a grocery store, in fact, in a small town, New Point, Ohio. It’s still the home base. I have no family, you know — Boxer Rebellion put an end to that.”
“My father told me,” William said.
“Yes, well, we don’t have to remember the past. But the way we had to live when I was a kid I suppose made me awful interested in food. Can’t eat much myself — I have nervous indigestion. All that wonderful stuff on the table there — I won’t hardly touch it. A cup of tea maybe and a little chicken. Bread poisons me, though I make the finest bread. Say, William, do you remember Chinese bread?”
“My mother never let us eat Chinese things.”
“Well, we were thankful for that bread at our house. It was a lot easier to take than starvation. I learned what good bread was. I might send you a few loaves of my product.”
William was too shocked to thank him. “Is your business successful?” he asked coldly. The fellow looked like a country storekeeper.
“I undersell every staple,” Clem said with pride. “I watch the surplus everywhere in the country. Got twenty men doing just that. Some day I’ll be watching world surpluses. Then I’ll be doing what I mean to do.”
“You actually plan to establish a world food monopoly?” William for the first time in days looked interested.
“Hell no!” Clem said cheerfully. “I’m not interested in monopolies. I’m interested in getting people fed. If they can’t pay for it I give it to them.”
“You mean you give food to people?” William’s voice was unbelieving.
“Why not, if they’re hungry?”
“But you can’t stay in business that way.”
Clem wriggled in the huge chair, scratched one cheek and then the other with one hand, and then pulled the short hair over his right ear and rubbed both knees. “I don’t know why,” he said humbly “but I’m a millionaire already — or almost.”
Candace, seated upon one of the gilt dining chairs, suddenly began to laugh and William turned upon her.
“Why do you laugh, Candace?”
She buried her face in her hands and shook her head, still laughing. What had made her laugh was the look on William’s face but she could not tell him. “It’s so funny,” she gasped, her face still in her hands. “It’s so funny to get rich giving food away.”
“Nonsense,” William said. “Of course he doesn’t give it all away.”
“But to give any of it away,” she murmured. She found her handkerchief and wiped her eyes. Then she caught Clem grinning at her wryly.