Gods Men (3 page)

“Your father could have been anything,” she told him often. “At Harvard he was brilliant and handsome. Of course everyone thought he would be a lawyer, like his father. Yours is a good family, William, and I do hope that you will remember it. I don't want you to waste yourself.”

His mother fed him a good deal of private heresy to which he did not make reply but which he stored in his heart. Certainly he would never be a missionary. The English boys at school had seen to that. A merchant prince, perhaps, or a diplomat, he did not yet know which. Although he dreamed of America, he could not see himself living anywhere except in China. It was comfortable here for a white man. He did not like the stories he heard of missionaries on furlough having to do their own cooking and cleaning. Here he never entered the kitchen or servants' quarters—at least, not now that he was practically grown. When he was small and often lonely and bored, since he was not allowed to play with Chinese children, he had gone sometimes to the servants' quarters for companionship. Wang had been young then and afraid of the cook, and he had welcomed William's friendship. Sometimes Wang had even taken him on the street secretly to see a Punch-and-Judy show or to buy some sweets.

That, of course, was long ago. Remembering the sweets, William decided suddenly to go into the drawing room. The cook made irresistible cakes for his mother's at-homes, two golden ones iced with dark chocolate, two snow-white ones layered with fresh cocoanut. More than mere food tempted him. Since he had come home only a few days ago, many of his mother's friends would not have seen him for several months, and he could exhibit his extraordinary growth. He had added inches to his height even since the long Christmas vacation and was well on his way, he hoped, to six feet, his father's height. There were times when he feared he would not reach it for his hands and feet were small. Just now, however, he was feeling encouraged about himself.

He opened the door and went in, holding his shoulders straight and his head high. Upon his face he put his look of stern young gravity. For a moment he stood with his back to the door, waiting.

His mother glanced at him. “Come in, William,” she said in her silvery company voice. “Leave the door open, please; it's a little warm.”

Her stone gray eyes, set somewhat near together under somewhat too heavy dark eyebrows, grew proud. She looked around the room where at half a dozen small teapoys the ladies were seated. “William is just home from school,” she announced. “Isn't he enormous? It's his last term.”

It was a comforting scene to William. The big room was warm and bright. Upon the polished floor lay great Peking rugs woven in blue and gold, and the furniture gleamed a dark mahogany. The pieces were far more valuable than mahogany, however. They were of blackwood, heavy as iron, Chinese antiques stolen from palaces and pawned by hungry eunuchs to dealers. The houses of Americans in Peking were crammed with such tables and screens and couches. Scattered among them were comfortable modern chairs padded with satin-covered cushions. Today sprays of forced peach blossom and two pots of dwarf plum trees provided flowers. Among these pleasant luxuries the ladies sat drinking their tea, and just now turning their faces toward him. Their voices rose to greet him.

“Why, William—how you've grown I Come and shake hands with me, you big boy.”

He went forward gracefully and shook hands with each one of ten ladies, ignoring his two sisters. Ruth sat upon a hassock by the grate fire of coals. Henrietta was eating a sandwich on the deep window seat. She did not look at him but Ruth watched him with her pleasant light blue eyes.

“Sit down, William, and have some tea,” his mother commanded. She was a tall woman, lean and large boned, and he had his looks from her, although she was almost ugly. What lacked delicacy in a woman made for strength in a man.

Once he had settled on a chair beside her, Wang handed him sandwiches and cake and in silence he proceeded to feed himself heartily. The ladies began to talk again. He perceived at once that they were talking about the Faith Mission family and saying exactly the sort of things with which he could agree. Mrs. Tibbert, a Methodist and therefore not quite the equal of Episcopalians and Presbyterians, although better than a Baptist, was redeemed by being the wife of a bishop. She was a small pallid woman, bravely dressed in a frock copied by a Chinese tailor from a
Delineator
model, and she had lost a front tooth and had a lisp.

“It's stupid, really, talking about trusting God for everything and then collecting, really, from all of us. We can't let them starve, of course. I wonder if a petition to the Consul—”

“The way they live!” Mrs. Haley exclaimed. She was a Seventh Day Adventist, and even less than a Baptist. It was confusing to the Chinese to be told that Sunday was on Saturday, although immersion, upon which Baptists and Seventh Day Adventists insisted, the Presbyterians and Episcopalians declared was the most confusing of all doctrinal practices. Ignorant Chinese tended to be impressed by much water, and sprinkling seemed stingy, especially in hot weather.

Mrs. Henry Lodge, the wife of the leading Presbyterian minister, was charitable, as she could afford to be, since her house was one of the handsomest in Peking, and her husband the highest paid among the missionaries, besides being related to the Lodges of Boston. “I feel so sorry for the little children,” she said gently. White-haired and pretty and gowned in a soft gray Chinese crepe with rose ruching, she made a picture which the other ladies, though Christians, were compelled to envy. William looked at her with appreciation. So a lady ought to look, and to call her attention to himself, he decided to tell the story of his own recent experience.

“Mrs. Lodge, perhaps you'd like to know. As I was coming home today—”

He told the story well and was sensible enough to be modest and merciful toward the ill-dressed boy whom he had publicly reproved. When he had finished he was rewarded.

“I am glad you helped him, William,” Mrs. Lodge said.

“That was Christian of you—and brotherly. ‘Unto the least of these,' our dear Lord tells us—”

“Thank you, Mrs. Lodge,” William said.

Clem Miller had walked away from the crowd as quickly as he could. He would have liked to run, but his clumsy cloth shoes and his sore knee made this impossible. What he remembered about William Lane were his shoes, those strong and well-fitting shapes of brown leather, protecting the tenderness of soles and the ends of toes. A good kick from such a shoe would leave its proper mark.

“Yet it will never be I who have American shoes,” he muttered.

His articulate thoughts were always in Chinese, not the fluid tonal Chinese of Peking, but the scavenger Chinese, the guttural coolie vernacular of treaty ports where boat people lived. His first home had been on a boat, for his father, anxious to follow in the exact footsteps of Jesus, had preached from the waters of the dirty Whangpoo in Shanghai to those who gathered upon the shores to listen. There had been more staring than listening, and respectable Christians had come by night to reproach his parents for bringing shame upon them by such beggarly behavior.

They still lived like beggars. Clem, scuffling through the Peking dust, could not deny the accusation which William had made. He had looked more than once through the gate of the compound in which William lived, and by the standards of those who made their homes in big houses of gray brick, roofed with palace tiles of blue and green, the four rooms in a Chinese alley, where he lived with his parents and his sisters, were beggarly. His mother, uncomplaining and of a clinging faith, had nevertheless refused to live on the boat any more after the baby Arthur had fallen overboard into the river and been drowned.

There had been long argument over it between his parents. “Mary, it will look as though you couldn't trust God no more, because of trial,” Paul Miller had told his weeping wife.

She had tried to stop her sobs with a bit of ragged handkerchief at her lips. “I do trust. It's only I can't look at the water now.”

Arthur's little body had not been returned. They had searched the banks day after day, but the river had clutched the child deep in its tangled currents. So after weeks they had given up this search and had come north to Peking. Paul Miller had taken to God the matter of the dollars necessary for third-class train fare, and then he had gone to the other Shanghai missionaries to bid them farewell, as brothers in Christ. They had responded with sudden generosity by collecting a purse for him, and the missionary women had met together and packed a box of clothing for Mrs. Miller and the children.

“See how the Lord provides when we trust him!” Thus his father had cried out, his mild blue eyes wet with grateful tears.

“Clem, your father is right,” his mother said, “we've always been provided for, though sometimes God tests our faith.”

Clem had not answered. At this period of his life he was in a profound confusion he dared not face, even alone. The world was divided into the rich who had food and the poor who had not, and though he had been told often of the camel's eye through which the rich would find it hard to enter heaven, yet God seemed indulgent to them and strangely careless of the poor. The poor Chinese, for example, the starving ones, God who saw all things must also see them, but if so He kept silent.

Pondering upon the silence of God, Clem himself grew increasingly silent. There were times when he longed to leave his family and strike out alone across the golden plains, to make for the coast, to find a ship and get a job that would see him across the Pacific to the fabulous land where his parents had been born. Once there he would go straight across on foot to his grandfather's farm in Pennsylvania.

Yet he could not leave his pitiful family, though now past his fifteenth birthday, and he troubled himself much about his future. Such thoughts he kept to himself, knowing that were he to speak of them, his parents, incorrigible in their faith, would only bid him put his trust in God. That was well enough, but who was going to teach him Latin and mathematics and English grammar? He had bought a few old English textbooks in a Chinese secondhand book shop, paying for them by teaching English to the bookseller's ten-year-old son. These books he studied alone, but he felt sorely the need of a teacher. And he could not beg. Though he ate the food his parents somehow got, he could not ask of the prosperous missionaries anything for himself. Today, on the way home from Mr. Fong's bookshop, he had seen his father at the baker's, and then had come the fight, after his father had gone on.

Otherwise the day had been fine, though the evening air was now laced with a cold wind from the northwest. He loved the city at this hour. The people were kind enough to him, even though he had fought that one impudent boy. He was sorry for it now. From how the boy looked at it, he had been right. The Miller family, though they trusted in God, were beggars.

He entered the door of his home with so bitter a look upon his face that his mother, setting the square Chinese table with bowls and chopsticks for supper, stopped to look at him. Pottery bowls and bamboo chopsticks were cheaper than plates and knives and forks.

“What's wrong with you, son?” Her voice was childishly sweet and her face was still round and youthful. Her hair, once of the softest red gold, was now a sandy gray. In spite of his adolescent doubts of her he loved her, so soft was she, so tender to him and to them all.

For the moment, nevertheless, he hardened his heart and blurted his thoughts. “Mama, somehow I'm beginning to see it, we're really beggars.”

She leaned on the table upon her outspread hands. “Why, Clem!”

He went on unwillingly, hardening himself still more. “A Chinese boy called us beggars, and I lit into him. Now don't look at me like that, Mama. William Lane came by at that moment, and he—he helped me to stop. But he thought the boy was right.”

“I tremble for you, darling. If we lose our faith, we have nothing left.”

“I want more faith, Mama.” His brain, honest yet agile, was seeking proof at last.

“I don't see how Papa could show more faith, Clem. He never wavered, even when we lost little Artie. He sustained me.”

Her voice broke, and her full small mouth quivered. The tears, always waiting like her smile, ran from her golden brown eyes.

“He could have more faith,” Clem said.

“But how, dear?”

“If he wouldn't go and tell people when the bread is gone—at least if he wouldn't tell the missionaries.”

He lifted his eyes to hers, and to his amazement he saw clear terror. Her round cheeks, always pale, turned greenish. She did not deceive him, and for this his love clung to her always. She held out her hands in a coaxing gesture, and when he did not move, she came to him and knelt beside the bamboo stool upon which he sat, her face level with his.

“Son, dear, what you're saying I've said, too, in my own heart, often.”

“Then why don't you tell Papa?” he demanded. He could not understand why it was that though he loved her so much he no longer wished to touch her or be touched by her. He dreaded a caress.

She did not offer it. She rose and clasped her hands and looked down at him.

“For why you can't do it, neither,” she said. “It would break his heart to think we had doubted.”

“It's not doubt—it's just wanting proof,” he insisted.

“But asking God for proof is doubt, my dearie,” she said quickly. “Papa has explained that to us, hasn't he? Don't you remember, Clem?”

He did remember. His father, at the long family prayers held morning and evening every day, had taught them in his eager careful way, dwelling upon each detail of God's mercy to them, that to ask God to prove Himself was to court Satan. Doubt was the dust Satan cast to blind the eyes of man.

“And besides,” his mother was saying, “I love Papa too much to hurt him, and you must love him, too, Clem. He hasn't anybody in the world but us, and really nobody but you and me, for the children are so little. He has to believe in our faith, to keep him strong. And Papa is so good, Clem. He's the best man I ever saw. He's like Jesus. He never thinks of himself. He thinks of everybody else.”