“Oh, Clem,” Henrietta whispered to her own heart. “How often you tell them and they will not listen! O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often. …”
She put the pamphlet back on the table and sat with her hands folded in her lap and her head bowed so that her hat hid the tears that kept welling into her eyes. It was for Clem she wept, for Clem in whom nobody believed except herself, and who was she except nobody? William had hurt him dreadfully but she did not know how because Clem would not tell her what had happened. He had spoken scarcely a word all the way down on the train. She had tried to make him sleep, even if they were only in a day coach — he wouldn’t spend the money for berths — but though he leaned back and shut his eyes she knew he was not sleeping.
He came into the waiting room suddenly and she saw at once that he had failed. She got up and they went out of the building side by side. She took his hand but it was limp, and she let it go again.
“Did you see the President?” she asked when they were on the street. The sun was bright and cold and pigeons were looking around for food, but no one was there to feed them.
“No,” Clem said. “He was too busy. I talked to somebody or other, though, enough to know there was no use staying around.”
“Oh, Clem, why?”
“Why? Because they’ve got an idea of their own. Want to know what it is? Well, I’ll tell you. They’ve got the idea of telling the farmers to stop raising so much food. That’s their idea. Wonderful, ain’t it, with the country full of starvation?”
He turned on her and gave a bark of laughter so fierce that people stared, but he did not see their stares. He was loping along as though he were in a race and she could scarcely keep up with him.
“Where are we going now, Clem?” she asked.
“We’re going home to Ohio. I gotta sweat it out,” he said.
The nation righted itself in the next two years, slowly like a ship coming out of a storm. William wrote a clear and well-reasoned editorial for his chain of newspapers and pointed out to his millions of readers that the reforms were not begun by Franklin D. Roosevelt, the new President, but by Herbert Hoover who should have been re-elected in sheer justice that he might finish that which he had begun. It was already obvious, William went on, that the new inhabitant of the White House would run the nation into unheard-of national debt.
What William saw now in the White House was not the mature and incomparable man, toughened by crippling experience. He saw a youth he remembered in college, gay and willful and debonair, born as naturally as Emory to a castle and unearned wealth, but, unlike her, not controlled by any relationship to himself. Roosevelt, secure from the first moment of his birth, was uncontrollable and therefore terrifying, and William conveyed these fears in his usual editorial style, oversimple and dogmatically brief. To his surprise, he experienced his first rebellion. Millions of frightened people reading his editorials felt an inexplicable fury and newspaper sales dropped so sharply that the business office felt compelled to bring it to William’s notice. He replied by a memorandum saying that he was sailing for England and Europe, especially Germany where he wanted to see for himself what was happening, and they could do as they liked while he was gone.
Emory received the news of the journey with her usual calm. They had not gone to England or Italy the year before, and she felt a change now would be pleasant. Alone with William she might discover what it was that kept him perpetually dissatisfied, not with her, but with the very stuff of life itself. She never mentioned to him her discernment of his discontent, for by now she knew it was spiritual and that he was only beginning to perceive this for himself. She refused again a thought which came to trouble her. Did William feel a lack in her own love for him? Was there such a lack? She made no answer. He had so much. He had all the money he had ever imagined he would have, and the most successful chain of popular newspapers. He was already planning the next presidential candidate, for this man in the White House could not possibly survive a first term. That he hungered for something he did not have, something more than woman could give, was now plain, perhaps even to William himself.
Or did his spirit seek after his father? One day on their voyage, William said, “I often think about my father. I wish you had known him, Emory. You would have understood each other. He was a great man, never discovered.”
“I wish I might have known him, dear,” she observed. They were in their deck chairs after breakfast and the sun was brilliant upon a hard blue sea.
“I wonder … I often wonder …” William mused somewhat heavily.
Emory delayed opening her novel. “About what, William?”
“Whether he would approve what I do — what I am!”
Approval. That was the word, the key! She saw it at once and grasped it. William needed the approval of someone he felt was his spiritual superior. For she knew that he was a man of strongly spiritual nature, a religious man without a religion. Emory herself was not spiritual, not religious at any rate, and she could not help him. She did not carry the conversation beyond her usual mild comment.
“I feel sure he would approve you, William, but I wish he were here to tell you so.”
Within herself, after that conversation, she began the active search for the religion that William needed. It must be one strong enough for him, organized and ancient, not Buddhism, which was too gentle, not Hinduism, which was too merciful, not Taoism, which was too gay, imbued as it was with human independence even of God, and Confucianism was dead. She knew something of all religions, for after Cecil’s death she had searched the scriptures of many and in the end had grown indifferent to all. Instead of religion she had developed a deep native patience, and detached by early shock, nothing now could disturb the calm which had grown like a protective shell, lovely as mother-of-pearl, over her own soul. She wished indeed that she could have known his father, for in that dead father, she felt sure at last, was the key to this living husband of hers. His mother, she had soon found, had been merely the vessel of creation.
Emory rather liked the vessel, nevertheless. She comprehended early with her subtle humor that there was not an ounce of the spiritual in her mother-in-law’s bustling body. Mrs. Lane used God for her own purposes, which were always literal and material, reveling in William’s success, in his wealth, in his new relation to an English Earl. Soon after William’s marriage she had announced that she was going to England and that she would enjoy a visit at Hulme Castle. Emory had written to her own mother with entire frankness, saying that her mother-in-law would be the easiest of guests and not in the least like William. “Old Mrs. Lane is always ready to worship,” Emory wrote, and drew a small cat face grinning upon the wide margin of the heavy handmade paper that bore her name but also the Hulme coat of arms.
She had seen Mrs. Lane off and upon the deck of the great ship had given her a huge corsage of purple orchids which would last the voyage, a package of religious novels, and a box of French chocolates. “Food for body and soul,” she had said with private cynicism. Mrs. Lane, who had a strong digestion and liked sweets, did not comprehend cynicism. She had thanked her new daughter-in-law with the special warmth she had for the well born. She stood at the handrail of the upper deck, wrapped in a fur coat and a tightly veiled hat, and waved vigorously.
At first the divorce had seemed horrible to her, until she discovered how thoroughly she approved of Emory and her English relations. She made compromise. It was not as if William needed the Cameron money any more. Emory was really much better suited to him in his present position than Candace was. Men did outgrow women. There was no use pretending, although, thank God, her own husband had never outgrown her. Such remarks she had poured into Ruth’s ears, and Ruth always listened.