Emory looked at him with new and sudden interest. “Has he really?”
He was entirely sensitive to this interest and anxious to make the most of it. “I can’t tell you how great his power is. His newspapers go into every little town and household — little easy papers that everybody can read. And then there’s the pictures. If people don’t want to read they can look at the pictures. I read them, too, and look at all the pictures. The queer thing to me is that you don’t learn anything, though — Miss — Lady—”
“Just Emory,” she reminded him.
He could not quite manage it. “I mean that it’s all amusing and nice but you don’t learn anything from it. You don’t learn why it is that the people in Asia want a better life and you don’t learn why it is that things don’t look so good even with the new government in China.”
At the thought of China Clem fell into thought. “I don’t know—” he murmured. “I can’t tell. I don’t think things are going right over there. Maybe I’ll run over as soon as I see this depression through.” He lifted his head. “What I wanted to talk to William about — if he could get converted, so to speak, to this idea of feeding people. It won’t be charity. It won’t cost us money.”
He began to explain the golden rule of his restaurants and somewhere in the midst of it they looked up and saw William at the door, upon his face surprise and disgust.
“Come along in, William,” Emory said at once. “I am listening to the most fascinating man. It’s Clem.”
Thus she conveyed to William that he was to take from his face that look calculated to wound, and that he must come in and sit down and be kind to Clem, because she wished it. Their eyes met for a brief full second and William yielded. He yielded to Emory as he had never yielded to anyone.
“How do you do,” he said to Clem.
“Fine,” Clem said, “How’s yourself?”
William did not answer. He sat down and took from Emory’s hand a cup of tea.
“I really came to see you,” Clem said looking at him. “But I have surely enjoyed talking to your good wife here. She has treated me well — fed me up and all. I didn’t eat lunch today.”
William did not show interest.
“Will you have a sandwich or a scone?” Emory murmured.
“Neither, thank you,” William said.
Clem felt the atmosphere of the room change and he made haste to say what he had come for. Probably they wanted to be alone and anyway he had been here long enough. “I don’t want to waste your time, William, but I do want to give you an idea. Or set it before you, anyway. I read your editorials every day and I see that you put in one idea every day, I guess an idea of your own. I can’t agree with most of them but that’s neither here nor there. It’s a free country. But I notice that people take your ideas pretty nearly wholesale. I move around a lot through the country and I hear men say things that I can see come right out of your mouth, so to speak. I can see you understand how most people are. They don’t know much and they talk a lot and naturally they have to have something to say and so they say what they hear somebody else say or what they read in the newspaper. I admire the way you can lay down something in a short plain way.”
“Thank you,” William said without gratitude.
Clem never noticed irony and he accepted the words as they stood. “That’s all right. Now here’s my idea. How about getting it across that we ought to give away our surpluses to the people who don’t have food? I mean these men in the breadlines, and selling apples on the street, and the families hungry at home. It won’t cost a thing.”
“What surpluses?” William asked in a cold voice.
“Our surpluses,” Clem repeated stoutly. “Even now we have surpluses, while the people are starving because they can’t buy food. It’s money that’s short, not food.”
William set down his cup. “What you propose would upset our whole system of government were it carried to logical conclusion. If people have no money they can’t buy. Your idea is to disregard money and give them food free. Who is to pay the men who produce the food?”
“But producers are not getting anything, anyway!” Clem cried. “The food is rotting and they are short, too.”
“It is better to let the food rot than it is to undermine our whole economic system,” William said firmly.
Clem gave him a wild look. “All right, William, pay the producers, then! Let them be paid out of tax money.”
“You mean the government ought to feed the people?” William was shocked to the soul. “That’s the welfare state!”
“Oh God!” Clem shouted. “Listen to the man! It’s the people I’m thinking of — the starving people, William! What’s a nation if it’s not the people? What’s business if there’s nobody to buy? What’s government if the citizens die?”
“This is quite ridiculous,” William said to Emory. He rose, towering over Clem, who rose to meet him. “We will never agree,” William said formally. “I must conduct my publications as I see fit. Believe me, I am sorry to see anyone hungry, but I feel that those who are hungry have some reason to be. Ours is a land of opportunity. My own life proves it. No one helped me to success. What I have done others can do. This is my faith as an American.”
For a moment Emory, watching the two embattled men, thought that Clem would spring at William. He gathered himself together, his fists clenched, his eyes lightning blue, electric with wrath. He glared at William for a long second and suddenly the wrath went out of him.
“You don’t know what you do.” The words came out of Clem like the sigh of death. He turned and went away as though he had been made deaf and struck blind.
When he was gone William sat down again. “Pour me another cup of tea, please, Emory.” He tried to make his voice usual.
“Of course, William. But is it hot enough?” She felt the pot.
“It is all right, I am sure.”
He waited until he had tasted the tea. “You see, Emory, how impossible the fellow is.”
“I don’t understand your American system yet, I’m afraid, William. Are there actually people starving?”
“Some people, of course, need food,” William said in a reasonable voice. “Charities, however, are alert. There is free food; the very thing he talks about is being done. I have given a great deal of money myself this winter to charity, in your name and mine together.”
He paused, but she did not thank him and he went on. “Who are these charity cases but the ones they have always been? They are the unskilled, the uneducated, the lazy, the drifters, the hangers-on, all the marginal people that are to be found in any modern industrial nation. In the ancient agricultural civilization of old China they were taken care of by the immense family system. Industry, of course, changes all that.”
“Shouldn’t there be some other means found to take the place of the family?”
“There are means,” William said with an edge of impatience. “Believe me when I say that nobody needs to starve here in America if he works. Even if he doesn’t want to work he need not starve. There are charities everywhere.”
“I see,” Emory said, her voice so soft that it was almost a whisper.
They did not speak for a few minutes, and when William put out his hand to her she took it and held it in both her own. It was the best hour of the day, this quiet one between tea and dinner. If they had guests they were friends and if they had no guests it was like this, William always tender toward her. She knew he loved her most truly. Indeed she knew he loved no one else. In some way she could not herself understand she had unsealed his heart which without her had been like a tomb. She was awed by this love for she had never known her power before. Cecil had loved her but she had perhaps loved him more than he did her. She had belonged to him but somehow William belonged to her. She was afraid, sometimes, for could not such possession place too great a demand upon her? She was not quite free any more because his love encompassed her about.