Gods Men (24 page)

Dear William,

You may not remember me. Once you told me to stop fighting a Chinese fellow in Peking. I never saw you after that. I am here at a grocery store. Got a fair job. Wish, though, I had a chance at your education. Am fighting my way up though. I got your address from your father. Wrote to some friends of mine named Fong in Peking but had forgot a good deal of my Chinese and wrote English thinking maybe their son, Yusan, would be able to read print. He showed the letter to your father, and I got a letter that way telling me you were finishing college. I haven't had the chance. Your father told me to get in touch, and I am doing so in memory of old days.

Yours sincerely,

Clem Miller.

“Who is it from?” Ruth asked, as they walked toward the street.

William was looking up and down for a hack. The sun was getting hot. “You remember that Faith Mission family in Peking?”

Ruth shook her head. “I can't remember very much about Peking.”

“I remember them,” Henrietta said suddenly. “Let me read the letter.”

“You may keep it if you like,” William said carelessly. “There is no reason for me to answer it.”

He saw a hack, called it, and they climbed in, he taking the small and uncomfortable seat although Ruth offered to sit there. “You are my guests,” he said with his best smile.

The day went on, he living each hour of it grimly and correctly. He showed his family about the college and his grandmother suggested seeing his rooms. He put this off until Henrietta was suddenly cross. “I think you don't want us to see them,” she declared.

Upon this, with secret anger, he led them to the rooms, dreading the possibility that the Camerons were there. But the rooms were empty, and his grandmother sat down in Jeremy's easy chair and slipped her shoe from her heel. “I bought new shoes for the big day,” she said in apology. “You know what they do to your feet.”

He did not reply to this dreadful remark, and was restless until he got them up again. Yet not in time, for at the moment when they reached the door Jeremy came in and William could not refuse introductions. Jeremy, with his usual grace, stood talking to the elders and Ruth joined them. Henrietta waited in her stolid fashion.

It lasted but a moment, and he was leading them on again, now toward the gate and the hack. Then they were gone and he felt exhausted and yet he could not show exhaustion, for men he did not know stopped to congratulate him on his honors. He tried to accept their praise modestly, to seem careless as though honors meant nothing to him, but he imagined that they saw through his pretense, and then he grew brief and proud and he felt hurt and weary. He was hot and he wanted a bath and a few minutes' sleep.

Half an hour later, stretched on his bed in his room alone, the shades drawn to shut out the sun, when he tried to think of Candace he found himself thinking instead of Aunt Rosamond. It might be very easy indeed to get money from an old lady like that, perhaps a great deal of money. Then after some deep thinking of this sort he felt that he would like honestly to be ashamed of it, but he could not be. He had nothing and no one to help him. There was not one person in his own family who could be anything but a hindrance to him, and the sooner he separated himself from them the better. He toyed with the memory of Aunt Rosamond's invitation. It meant nothing He knew by now that the rich could speak pleasant words as easily as they breathed, with as little significance. It was hard to be the friend of rich men and their sons, but it was the only way to get what he needed for his own independence. Some day, when he had all he wanted, he would let them know how he despised them.

A
LONE IN HER SMALL HOT ROOM
in the suburban house, Henrietta was writing a letter to Clem Miller. She was desperately tired and as usual, after she had been with William, melancholy wrapped her about. His first glance at her had been enough to tell her that she was still ugly, still all that she did not want to be. It was a sign of greatness in her which she did not recognize that she loved Ruth tenderly and humbly in spite of William's preference. Why, she asked herself again tonight, did it matter what William thought? But she did care and would always care what he thought of her. It had begun in the old days in the mission house in Peking when the amah who had served them all had taught her that girls must always yield to the precious only son of the family.

“You,” Liu Amah had said, “you are only a girl. Weelee is a boy. Girls are not so good as boys. Men are more valuable than women.”

Henrietta sighed. It was late and she should have been sleeping but she could not. Her grandparents and Ruth had gone to sleep, or else by now her grandmother would have tapped at her door to inquire why her light was still on. Swept by the bottomless misery of youth, Henrietta had reached out into the night and had thought of Clem. His letter was still in her handbag and she read it through twice, carefully and slowly. Then she began to write.

Dear Clem:

You do not know me, but I am William Lane's sister. William is too proud to write to you. He has always been a very proud boy and now he is worse than ever, although he is no longer a boy. He considers himself a man. I suppose he is a man since he has finished college. He is very smart. He was graduated yesterday with highest honors. I am sorry to say I don't think he will ever write to you. But I think someone should, since you knew each other in old Peking, and so I am writing to you.

I don't know anything much about you, and so I will tell you about myself. I am eighteen and next autumn I will go to college, I hope. I am not at all pretty—I had better tell you that right away. It is strange, for I look a good deal like William, and he is thought to be very handsome. I suppose it is not the way for a girl to look. My sister Ruth is pretty.

She paused and realized that she had nothing to say. This was another of her miseries. She felt so much, she was so racked with vague sorrows and longings and infinite loneliness and yet none of this could she put into words to anyone. She and Ruth went to a public school, since all the money had been needed for William, but she had found no special friends there. The girls thought her queer because she had grown up in China. Perhaps she was. She bit the end of her wooden pen and then went on.

Do you ever think of Peking? I do, often. From the window of my room there in the house where my parents live I used to look out upon a sweet little stubby pagoda—a dagoba, I think it was called. There were bells on the corners, and when my window was open and I lay in bed I could hear them ringing. Please tell me whether you think of such things. And shall you go back one day? I would like to but I cannot think how to earn my living there, not wanting to be a missionary.

Beyond this she could not go and so she signed herself sedately, sincerely his. When the letter was sealed it seemed to her that she must post it at once, even though it was now midnight. The small clock on her mantle gave this severe notice to her but she did not heed it. She put a dress over her nightgown, and with her feet slippered she went silently down the stairs and out of the back door to the street, where stood a postbox. At seven o'clock, she knew, the mail was collected and by breakfast time the letter would be on its way to the small Ohio town that seemed as far away as Peking. She heard the envelope rustle softly behind the shutter, and then she went back home and to her room again. Now she could go to bed. She had put forth a hand into the darkness and perhaps someone would reach out and clasp it. Comforted by hope she flung herself upon her bed and fell into a sleep that led her back into childhood dreams of a walled compound in Peking, a big shadowy mission house, where soft-footed brown servants came and went, bringing smiles and gentle encouragement to a shy and plain-faced American child.

When the letter reached Clem he was in the grocery store. It was the middle of the morning, and Owen Janison, the owner and his employer, came in from his daily trip across the street to the post office. Clem's letters were few and until now they had borne Chinese stamps and postmarks.

“You got a letter from some place in New York, looks like,” Mr. Janison said. He was a tall thin man, whose mustaches hung down his chin and joined a faded yellow beard. He wore a gray suit and a stiff white shirt with a celluloid collar.

Clem was shirtsleeved behind the meat counter. He took the letter and looked at it carefully without opening it. “Thanks, Mr. Janison,” he said. He slapped a piece of corned beef on the scrubbed wooden counter and trimmed off some porous fat.

“A pound, did you say, Mrs. Bates?” he inquired.

“Mebbe a pound and a half,” the customer replied, hesitating. “Mr. Bates is terrible fond of the stuff though I don't eat it myself, more'n a bite.”

Clem did not answer this remark. In the years since he and Bump, one weary morning, had walked into New Point, Ohio, he had learned to live upon two levels, the immediate and the real. Mrs. Bates was immediate but not real. Even Mr. Janison, upon whom he and Bump were dependent for their living, was immediate and not real. Real was the past and real the future, both equally clear to him alone. To recapture the past he had written to Yusan, Mr. Fong's son, and he had received the letter from Dr. Lane. Yusan had forgotten his English and had given Clem's letter to the missionary. From Dr. Lane had come a friendly letter, mainly about William and only a little about Yusan. Dr. Lane took it for granted that a youth in America named Clem Miller must be interested in his son William.

Reading the faintly stilted lines of the letter, for anything Dr. Lane wrote fell inevitably into the shape of a sermon, Clem had felt all the old realities. Yusan at sixteen was betrothed to a girl in the mission school, though the wedding was still far off. He had grown into a sober young man, over whose soul the missionary yearned. Yet Yusan refused to be Christian. Real was the memory of Yusan, the stubborn boy, growing into a young man. Real were the hours Clem had spent with him in Mr. Fong's bare house. Real was the memory of the Peking streets, the wind-driven snows that covered the tiled roofs of house and palace in winter. Real were the fabulous summer skies. Clem remembered every detail of his childhood, the pleasure of owning sometimes three small cash with which he bought a triangular package of peanuts wrapped in handmade brown paper thick and soft like blotting paper. Real, too, was the joy of a hot sweet potato on a cold morning, bought from a vender's little earthen oven, and real the pleasure of a crimson-hearted watermelon split upon a July day. Real were the caravans of camels padding through the dust, led by a man from Mongolia who knitted a garment as he walked, pulling from the camels the long strands of wool which they shed when the winter was ended. Real were the little apes on chains and the dancing bears, the traveling actors and the magicians and all that had made the city streets a pleasure for a wandering foreign child.

Out of the need to bring nearer to him that reality of childhood in the remote land which was still his own but which he could not claim and which did not claim him, Clem had upon an impulse written to William, whom he remembered only as he had looked that day when a Chinese lad had called his father a beggar because he trusted God for bread.

The letter Mr. Janison now brought him was, he supposed, from William. He waited, however, until it was time for his midday meal, which he made by taking a roll of stale bread and cutting off a slice of cheese and eating in the storeroom. Mr. Janison went home to noonday dinner and Bump was working on a farm, now that school was over. Clem had been firm about Bump's going to school. He had given up the hope that some day he himself would go to a school somewhere, though not to learn ordinary things like geography and arithmetic, which he could get for himself out of books in his room at night. He wanted to learn large important matters, such as how to feed millions of people. He was obsessed with the business of food, although his own appetite was frugal. A thin, middle-sized boy, he had grown into the same kind of young man. His frame had taken on bony squareness of shoulder, leanness at the hips, without any flesh. Even the square angles of his face remained fleshless and his cheeks were hollow and his blue eyes deep set.

He had discarded the faith of his father, and said no prayers except those he spoke to his own soul. There were, he believed, only a few essentials to a good life, but they were essential to all people, and food he put first, cheap, nourishing food. Bump, for example, could not be filled. He sat sometimes watching Bump eat in the small room they lived in together. He always got a good meal for Bump at night, a stew or a hunk of boiled beef and cabbage and plenty of bread and butter. His own slender appetite soon satisfied, he enjoyed Bump's bottomless hunger. He had provided the food and this was the pleasure he felt. Nobody had given them anything. He had worked and bought the food. He bought cheap food for it was good enough. He had no desire for fancy eatables and was stern with Bump about cake and pie. If everybody could eat his fill of good plain food, he would tell Bump, then there wouldn't be any more trouble in the world.

He was bringing up Bump himself and by himself, sometimes ruthlessly but on the whole kindly, with the deep paternal instinct with which indeed he viewed the world, though he did not know it. His cure for a drunk coming into the store to beg on a winter's night for a nickel to buy “a cup of coffee,” was to take a stale loaf and slice off two thick pieces and thrust a wedge of cheese between them. “Eat that and you won't want to get drunk for a while,” he said with young authority.

In the back room, the store empty during the town's midday meal, he now sat down on a crate and took the letter from his pocket. Without wasting time on curiosity, he tore the envelope open and was amazed at the first words. He had never had a letter from a girl, nor ever written to one. He had thought little of any girl, being busy at earning his living and rearing Bump. Now a girl had written to him.