Gods Men (31 page)

“That's what I aim to do,” he had said. “In my own way, of course. But I like to read once in a while of how somebody else did it. We have the same idea—feed the hungry. I've got to find some way of making food cheaper, hon. I wish I could make it free. There ought to be a way for a starving man to get food without paying for it. There must be a way.”

When the table was cleared, the dishes washed, she sat down again to her sewing. The afternoon sun shone down on the quiet street. It was as peaceful and permanent a scene as a woman could look upon, and millions of women looked out upon just such quiet streets in small towns all over America. They would expect to spend their lives there, rearing their children, caring for their grandchildren. But Henrietta, lifting her eyes, knew that for her the street was only a moment's scene. Clem wanted her to go with him, and there was no end to a road once he had set his feet upon it.

Clem was master now in the store. He had bought out Mr. Janison after he and Henrietta were married, and Bump, too, was a full partner. Clem was immensely proud of Bump and, since he was a college graduate, Clem treated him with something like reverence. It was a miracle to Clem to see that the lost child had become a serious, spectacled young man, honest and painfully hard working—though unfortunately without a sense of humor. Bump listened to everything Clem said, and to his nonsense as well as to his commands, to his dreams as well as to his calculations, he gave the same intense attention. He gave his advice when Clem asked for it, which was often, and tried not to be hurt when Clem did not take it. Clem was an individual of deepest dye, and in his way a selfishly unselfish man. He paid no heed whatever to any schemes for the benefit of mankind except his own. He was convinced more than ever that any government would fail unless people were first given a steady diet of full meals, but given this diet almost any government would do, and he preached this as a gospel.

With Bump at his side, always with a pad and pencil, Clem toured the country in one of the earliest of the Ford cars. In villages and out-of-the-way places, wherever crops rotted because the railroads could not serve the farmers, he found ways of conveying the foods by hack, by wagon, and as time went on by truck to railways or to markets. His markets he established anywhere there were people and food near enough to be brought together. Travelers came upon huge, hideously cheap structures in the midst of the tents of migrant workers as well as in the slums of great cities. Some of the structures were permanent, some were immense corrugated tin shacks, made to be taken away when people moved on.

In spite of himself, Clem was beginning to make money. He looked at Bump with a lifted right brow one day and threw half a dozen checks at him across the big pine table in the back room of the store, where he made his head office.

“More stuff for the bank, Bump. I'll have to begin thinking of ways to spend it. All I need ahead is enough to start the next market, but it keeps rolling in. Guess I'll have to begin on the rest of the world.”

In this instant an old smoldering homesickness sprang into flame. With money piling up he could go to China at last. He had no wish to stay there. He wanted merely to go back to walk again the dusty streets, to enter again Mr. Fong's house, and to see for himself the graves of his parents and sisters. For Yusan, reviving his English, had written to him long ago the Mr. Fong had gone secretly for the dead bodies and had buried them outside the city in his own family cemetery upon one of the western hills. Upon two heavy Chinese coffins, in each of which was a child with a parent, Mr. Fong had sealed the lids, had lied to the guards at the city gate, and pretended that the dead were his brother and his wife, stricken together of a contagious fever, he had put the wounded bodies into the earth. Could Clem see for himself not only the graves of his dead, but also the faces of the living people friendly again and cheerful as he remembered them, then some secret load of which he never allowed himself to think might roll away. He would be homesick no more for any other country. But he could not go without Henrietta. He could hop into his Ford, rebuilt to his order so that it would survive equally well the hill roads in West Virginia and the sands in Nebraska, and he could leave her for weeks, so long as they were on the same soil. But he could not contemplate the ocean between them.

One day last November he had seen an item in the country newspaper, the only newspaper he read. There was no big headline, and it was not even on the front page. Nevertheless it was a piece of news whose importance no one but himself in the town, perhaps no one but himself in the state and perhaps in the nation could understand. The Empress of China was dead. This in itself was enough to change the atmosphere of his living memory.

Clem read and sat down on a keg and read again. So she was dead, that gorgeous and evil woman, whose legend he had heard in the city over which she had brooded, a monstrous, gaudy bird of prey! When he thought of her gone, of Peking freed of her presence, of the palaces empty, bonds fell from his heart. His parents, his little sisters, were avenged. He need not think of them any more. The past was ended for him.

Now, with these checks before him, it suddenly came to him that it was time to go to China.

“Bump!” he cried. “Take over, will you? I'm going home.”

Bump nodded, and the young clerks glared at Clem. But he saw nothing. He walked home with his brisk half trot and opened the front door and shouted:

“Hon, I guess we're going to China now!” From far off, somewhere in the back yard where she was taking dry fresh clothes from the line, came Henrietta's voice.

“All right, Clem!”

Swaying in a temperamental train northward from Nanking, Henrietta gave herself up to nostalgia. In their small compartment Clem gazed, ruminating, from the dirty windows. It was comforting to see good green fields of cabbage and young winter wheat. The Chinese knew how to feed themselves. His stomach, always ready for protest, was soothed and he turned to Henrietta.

“You know, hon?”

“What should I know?” A flicker upon her grave lips was her smile for him.

“When I get to Peking I am going to hunt up one of those old Mohammedan restaurants and get me a good meal of broiled mutton. I have a hunch it would set well with me.”

“If you think so then it will,” she replied.

They had received no mail for weeks, but she had supposed that at this time of year her parents were in Peking, and soon she would meet them. How she would behave depended upon how they received Clem. Her father, she knew, would be amiable, his nature and his religion alike compelling him to this, but her mother she could not predict. To prepare them she had telegraphed from the bleak hotel in Shanghai. To this telegram she had no answer while they waited for hotel laundry to be done. Twenty-four hours was enough for laundry, but a zealous washerman starched Clem's collars beyond endurance for his thin neck, and the starch had to be washed out again. The laundryman declared himself unable to cope with collars that had no starch, and Henrietta had borrowed a charcoal iron from a room boy and ironed for a day while Clem roamed the streets of the Chinese city. They left the next day without waiting for the telegram. Her father might be on one of his preaching trips, her mother perhaps visiting in Tientsin while he was gone.

At Nanking, however, a telegram reached her, forwarded from the hotel and provoking in its economy:
DR. AND MRS. LANE LEFT FOR UNITED STATES.

“But why?” she asked Clem.

“We'd better go on to Peking and find out,” he said. “We've been traveling too fast for letters, hon.”

So they sat in the compartment and watched the landscape turn from rolling hills to the flat gray fields of the north. Clem was unusually silent and she knew that he was facing his own memories at last. They were tender toward each other, thoughtful about small comforts, and now and again at some well-remembered sight and sound, a chubby child barefoot in the path, the clear sad note of a blind man's small brass gong, they looked at each other and smiled without speaking. She did not ask Clem what his thoughts were, shrinking from intrusion even of love upon that gravity.

The country grew poorer as they went north and villagers, despoiled by bandits of their homes, came to the train platform to beg. They stood in huddles, holding up their hands like cracked bowls, wailing aloud the disasters that had fallen upon them. A few small cash fell out of the windows of second- and third-class windows and once she put out her hands filled with small bills and saw the unbelieving joy upon the faces of the people.

“American—American!” they shrieked after her beseechingly.

“I'm glad you did that, hon,” Clem said.

“It's no use, of course,” she said and got up and went to the club car because she could not sit still. There, his back to the window and the ruined village and the beggars, a young Chinese in a long gown of bright blue brocaded silk was looking at a copy of one of William's newspapers. She wondered how he had got the paper, but would not ask. Doubtless some American traveler had left it at a hotel, and it had been picked up eagerly, as all American papers were. She sat down near him and after a few minutes he pointed to the photographs.

“Is this your country?”

“Yes,” she said. “It is the land of my ancestors.”

“How is it that you speak Chinese?”

“I lived here as a child.”

“And you come back, when you could stay in your own land?”

“Not everything there is as you see.”

“But this is true?”

He kept his eyes upon pictures of rich interiors of millionaires' houses, upon huge motor cars and vast granaries and machinery which he could not comprehend.

“Such things can be found,” she admitted.

She wanted to explain to him how anything was true in America, all that he saw and all that was not there for him to see. But she knew it was no use beginning, for he would only believe what he saw, and then she was really convinced that William had done this with purpose, that there would never be anything in the pages of William's papers except what he wanted people to read, the pictures he wanted them to see. And so, no one would ever really know America, and to her the best of America was not there, for the best was not in the riches and the splendor, in the filled granaries and the machines.

She got up because she did not want to talk to the young man any more and went back to the little compartment. Clem sat asleep, his head bobbing on his thin neck. A frightening tenderness filled her heart. He was too good to live, a saint and a child. Then she comforted herself. Surely his was the goodness of millions of ordinary American men, whether rich or poor, and Clem was not really a rich man, because he did not know how to enjoy riches, except to use them for his dreams of feeding people. He liked his plain old brass bed at home, a thing of creaking joints and sagging wire mattress, and he still thought a rocking chair was the most comfortable seat man could devise. He was narrow and limited and in some ways very ignorant, but all the beauty of America was in him, because he talked to everybody exactly the same way and it did not occur to him to measure one man against another or even against himself.

She sat down beside him. Softly she put her arm around him and drew his head down to rest upon her shoulder and he did not wake.

In Peking Clem continued silent. Against his will the horror of old memories fell upon him. Here he had been an outcast child respected neither by Americans nor Chinese, because of his father's faith and poverty. By accident the hotel where he and Henrietta lodged was upon the very street where he had fought the baker's son and where William had descended from his mother's private riksha. He pointed out the spot to Henrietta ten minutes after they had entered the room and for the first time he told her the story. Listening, she discerned by the intuition which worked only toward Clem, that the old pain still lingered.

“William was a hateful boy,” she declared with fierceness.

Clem shook his head at this. He was repelled by judgments. “I was a pitiful specimen, I guess.” He dismissed himself. “We'd better go and find out about your folks, hon.”

So they left the hotel and walked down the broad street, followed by clamoring riksha men who felt themselves defrauded of their right to earn a living when two foreigners walked.

“I'd forgotten how poor the people are. I guess I never knew before, being so poor myself.”

“Here is the back gate of the compound,” Henrietta said. “I used to creep out here to buy steamed meat rolls and sesame bread.”

They entered the small gate and walked to the front of the square brick mission house.

“I was here once,” Clem said. “It all looks smaller.”

The house was locked, but a gateman ran toward them.

“Where is Lao Li?” Henrietta asked.

The gateman stared at her. “He has gone back to his village. How did you know him?”

“I grew up here,” Henrietta said. “I am the Lane elder daughter. Where are my parents?”

The gateman grinned and bowed. “They have gone to their own country, Elder Sister. Your honored father grew thin and ill. He goes to find your elder brother, who is now a big rich man in America.”

“Can it be?” Henrietta asked of Clem.

“Could be, hon—want to go right home?”

She pondered and spoke after a moment. “No—we're here. Haven't I forsaken them to cleave to you, Clem? I really have. Besides, Mother would go straight to William, not to me.”

Clem received this without reply, and they went away again. The quiet compound, budding with spring, was like an island enclosed and forgotten in the midst of the city. The only sign of life was two women and a little boy at the far end of the lawn, digging clover and shepherd's-purse to add to their meal that night.

“It all seems dead,” Henrietta said.