9
IN THE RICH YEARS that followed World War I William profited exceedingly. His tabloids were the most popular newspapers in the country and he had several foreign editions. The old offices were long since deserted and he owned a monumental building on the East River.
He was still not satisfied. He wanted his country to be the greatest country in the world, not only in words and imagination and national pride, but in hard fact. He saw American ships on all seas, and American newspapers, his papers in all countries, American names on business streets, and above all American churches and schools everywhere. America was his country, and he would make her great.
This was the motor behind the scheduled energy of his life. He gave huge sums to American foreign missions, always in memory of his father. He established a college in China, known as the Lane Memorial University, although he steadfastly refused to meet face to face the missionaries whose salaries he paid. He had set up an organization to do that, the Lane Foundation. He had never gone back to China, although sometimes he dreamed of Peking at night when he was especially tired, foolish dreams of little hutungs, quiet between enclosing walls, wisps of music winding from a lute, sunshine hot on a dusty sleeping street. Memories he had thought forgotten crept out at night from his mind exhausted by the day. He ignored them.
These were the times in America when anything could be done. Yet he was not doing all he dreamed of doing. The common people, as he called them, meaning those ordinary folk who come and go on the streets on foot, by bus and streetcar, those who crawl under the earth in subways and live on farms and in small towns and mediocre cities, all these who bought his newspapers as surely as they bought their daily loaf of bread at the corner grocery, they were not of enough importance to govern, even by their yea or nay, the possible secret country which he now perceived lay behind the façade of present America. He had thought, when he was in college dreaming of vast newspaper tentacles, that if he had the common people in his influence he could guide the country. He never used the word “control” and indeed he honestly abhorred it. But guidance was a good word, the guidance of God, which after his father’s death he himself continually sought as power and money accrued. Common people were weak and apathetic. They listened to anybody. Now that radio networks were beginning to tie the country together, his newspapers could no longer exclude. This troubled him mightily. Print had its rival. He considered making his newspapers almost entirely pictorial, so that reading was unnecessary, and then rejected the idea. Pictures could not keep common people from listening to the radio, which also required no reading. He must secure ear as well as eye and he began to plan the purchase of key networks.
In all this Candace was of no use to him. She had grown indifferent to the frightful responsibilities he undertook as his duty and she had even quarreled one day with his mother. He had never been able to discover either from her or his mother what had taken place, except that he had been the subject of their difference. Candace had simply laughed when he pressed her for detail.
“Your mother has lived too long in Peking.” It was all she would tell him.
His mother went a little further. “I hate to say it, William, but Candace doesn’t appreciate you as a wife should. Whether she understands the wonderful work you are doing is quite beside the point. I didn’t always understand your dear father, either, and certainly I could not always sympathize with his ideas or even with all that he did, but I always appreciated him.”
Candace had grown strange and reckless in these years after the war, likely on any Sunday morning to announce that she was going to the beach with the boys instead of sending them to Sunday School. That William himself did not go to church had nothing to do with his sons, who, he felt, should be taught some sort of religion. Indeed, he himself, since his father’s death, had felt the need to find God anew, but he could not return to the pusillanimities of his former rector. He sought a firmer faith, a stronger church, and there were times when he thought of Catholicism. This, however, had nothing to do with Candace and the two boys. The seashore place was another recklessness of hers, although he had quite willingly bought the mile of private ocean front in Maine. She had declared that she wanted only a shack, to which he had simply said there was a right way to do a thing, and comfort he must have, even though in summer he could only be there a day or two a week. He had hired a young architect who designed an extraordinary house on top of a gray cliff, and a sliding staircase, like an escalator, which let them down to the sea and to a huge cabaña. Altogether it was effective and he was proud of it.
He had to acknowledge to himself now that Candace had never meant very much to him, and it had been years since he needed anything of Roger Cameron. When Mrs. Cameron died last year old Roger told William that he wanted to sell his shares in the newspapers.
“The dividends are going up,” William said.
“That’s why I want to sell,” Roger had replied.
This made no sense but William did not reply because he was vaguely wounded. His pride rose and he sent a memorandum to the business manager that he wanted all shares in the corporation bought up so that he might be sole owner. When the reports came in he saw the name of Seth James. Seth was now backing a new daily paper that William saw at once was doomed to die. Seth should have known better, he had told himself, as with complacency he studied the first issues. “The paper with a purpose,” Seth had foolishly announced. Of course people would not buy it. People did not want to be taught. They wanted to be amused. William himself was never amused. It was Jeremy’s task to find among thousands of photographs for his tabloids, pictures sorted by twelve girls under twenty years of age, those scenes which would make people laugh. Horror was as good as laughter and horror William himself could judge. A murder skillfully portrayed, a strangled woman, a dying child, a family weeping after the father was crushed under a truck, a maniac escaped, an airplane that crashed into a small home on Long Island, these were all pleasing to people.
Yet such was William’s conscience since his father’s death that he allowed no issue of a paper to be sent to the people without its quota of religion. He truly believed in God. His own being, ordered by purpose, convinced him of the existence of God and his tabloids carried photographs of churches and ministers, priests and nuns. William was not narrow. People worshiped God in many ways, though he rejected any form not Christian. He had disagreed with Estey, his new assistant editor, over a photograph of the Panchen Lama — news, yes, but not religion. People the next week saw the benign face of the Lama appearing side by side with the President’s wife in her Easter frock.
On a day in early October he sat thinking of these things in his immense office on the top floor of his own building. The office opened into a handsome apartment where he could sleep on the nights when he had to work late. Caspar Wilde, the young English modernist, had designed it for him. William had wanted it done by a Swedish architect, but when he examined the designs laid before him he had been forced to see that there was nothing to equal English modern in its conservative and heavy soundness. It was exasperating but true. In spite of the World War there was as yet no crack in the armor of the British Empire. His reporters, stationed permanently in India as in almost every other country, informed him of bitter disappointment among Indians after the war.
“Educated Indian opinion complains that Britain shows no signs of fulfilling wartime promises for independence, made to leading Indian politicos. Rumors are that in the next war Indians will seize the opportunity for rebellion.”