“Malcolm—” That was what the man had actually dared to call him. “Malcolm, you are young and perhaps you will listen to me.”
“I don’t understand,” he had stammered, angry and taken back at such daring.
“Don’t try to understand now,” the curate had urged. The fever was plain enough then. You could see the flames leaping up inside him somewhere and shining through his pale eyes. “Just remember this — unless the hungry are fed, you will be driven away from all this. It is coming, mind you — you’ve got to save yourself. I warn you, hear the voice of God!”
He had wheeled without answer and left the curate standing there and he had not once looked back.
“Nonsense,” Lady Hulme now said. “William is a very handsome man. I don’t see the least resemblance to any Hindu, not to speak of that odd man.”
She broke off, noticing how brightly the sun shone through the bottle of port. Suddenly she felt that it was a pity not to taste so beautiful a liquid. If her nose grew red it would not matter — poor Malcolm had long since ceased to notice how she looked. She poured herself a glass of the rich port, very slowly, the sun filtering through the crimson wine.
… Outside in the soft English sunshine Emory was listening to the last fragments of a conversation which had been of more than American tractors.
“I can’t tell yet whether it’s good or bad,” Michael said. “I can only say that there’s something new happening in Germany and Italy. New, or maybe something very old, I can’t tell which. If it goes well it’ll be a new age for Europe and therefore the world. I don’t think things will go well.”
“You don’t believe that democracy will work in Europe, do you?” William asked.
“Of course not,” Michael said impatiently. “But it’s these chaps — Hitler, you know, and Mussolini. They’ve no breeding. Get a common man at the top and ten to one he can’t keep his senses about him.”
Emory cried out, wary of a certain reserve in William’s look, “Oh, Michael, how silly of you. As if we weren’t all common at bottom! Who was the first Earl of Hulme, pray? A constable of Hulme Castle, that’s all, and a traitor against his King, at that.”
Michael was stubborn. “That’s just what I said. He couldn’t keep his senses. He got thinking he was greater than the King.”
“What happened to him?” William asked with restrained curiosity.
“The Queen Mother got her back up,” Michael said. “There was a long siege and our arrogant ancestor was starved into obedience.” He lifted his whip. “You’ll see the marks of the battle there, though it was more than five hundred years ago.”
Upon the thick stone walls were ancient scars and William gazed at them. “A very good argument against everybody’s having enough food,” he said thoughtfully. “Food is a weapon. The best, perhaps, in the world!”
The day ended peacefully as usual, but William was restless during the night and rose early. He wanted, he explained to Emory, to go to Germany and see for himself. To Germany then they went.
In Berlin William had suddenly decided that he wanted Emory to see Peking. He had met Hitler and had been reassured. Out of postwar confusion and the follies of the Weimar government, Hitler was building the faith of the German people in themselves and their destiny. The whole country was waking out of despair and discouragement. Trains were clean and on time, and Berlin itself was encouraging.
“There is nothing to worry about here,” William said in some surprise. “I don’t know what Michael was talking about.”
After his talk with Hitler he was even more pleased. “The man is a born leader,” he told Emory, “a Carlylean figure.” It was then that William decided to go to China, telling Emory that he felt that he could never explain himself to her altogether unless she saw the city of his childhood. They boarded a great Dutch plane that carried them to India and Singapore and from there they flew to China. Of India Emory saw nothing and did not ask to see anything. Cecil’s family had been dependent upon India and her curiosity had died with him.
They spent nearly two weeks in Peking. They wandered about among the palaces, now open to tourists, and William searched the painted halls, the carved pavilions, for the throne room where as a child his mother had led him before the Empress.
“William, after all this time, can you remember?” Emory asked, unbelieving.
“I remember the Empress as though she had set a seal upon me,” William replied.
He found the room at last and the very throne, but in what dust and decay!
“This is the place,” William said.
They stood together in silence and looked about them. The doors were barred no more and pigeons had dirtied the smooth tiled floors. The gold upon the throne had been scraped off by petty thieves and even the lazy guard who lounged in the courtyard offered them a sacred yellow tile from the roof for a Chinese dollar. William shook his head.
“I wonder,” Emory said in a low voice, “if one day Buckingham Palace will be like this?”
“I cannot imagine it,” William replied, and as though he could not bear the sight before them, he turned abruptly from the throne. “Let us go. We have seen it.”
“Perhaps it would have been better not to have seen it,” she suggested. “It might have been better to remember it as it was.”
To this William did not reply.
There was something of the same decay in the compound where he had been born and which had been his home. It was not empty. A thin little missionary was there, a pallid man who came to the door of the mission house, a shadow of a man, William thought with contempt, a feeble small fellow to take his father’s place! The little man looked at them with bewildered and spectacled eyes.
“This was Dr. Lane’s house, I believe,” William said, and did not tell him who he was.
“That was a long time ago,” the mild man said.
“May we look over the house?” Emory asked. “We knew Dr. and Mrs. Lane.”
“I suppose so — my wife isn’t in just now — she’s gone to the Bible women’s meeting.”
“Never mind,” William said suddenly. “I have no desire to see the house.”
They left at once and William, she divined, was thinking of his father. He thought a great deal of his father in those days in Peking — sometimes with the old bitterness but more often with a longing wonder at the happiness in which his father seemed to live.
“My father was anchored in his faith,” William said. “I have often envied him his ability to believe.”
Emory said at this moment what she had been thinking about for a long time. “I do think, William, that you ought to see a priest. A Catholic, if possible.”
He turned upon her his dark look. “Why?” But she fancied he was not surprised.
She responded with her gaze of clear kindness. “I cannot give you peace,” she said. “If peace is what you need—”
He denied this abruptly. “I don’t need peace.”
“Whatever it is you need,” she amended.
He did not reply to this but she did not forget his silence. They left Peking soon after that day, and in a few weeks were in New York and William plunged into feverish work.
Left to herself, Emory went out more than she had before. Even she was getting restless. The world was so strange, so full of horrible possibilities!
At a cocktail party one day many months later Emory observed an unusual figure, and seeing it was reminded of the unforgotten conversation in Peking. A tall cassocked priest stood near the door. He had an angular worn face and quietly gazing at him as she drank tea instead of cocktails she saw his hands, worn and rough, tightly clasped before him. His hair was a dark auburn and his skin was florid. As though he felt her eyes, he looked at her. His eyes were very blue. She turned her head and at the same moment she felt hands upon her shoulders. Looking up then she saw Jeremy Cameron, and she smiled at him. “Jeremy, you wretch, you and Ruth haven’t come near us since we came home!”