Gods Men (37 page)

“I'll do my best, Mr. Lane.”

“Very well.”

William was putting on his overcoat and hat. Brownell sprang to his aid.

“Here, let me help.”

“Get back to your job,” William ordered, and hastened from the room.

Yet he knew Sir Henry was right. That was the worst of all, next to the fact of death itself. Now day by day he sat beside his father's bed, silent in the silence of his house, having ordered the nurses to stay in his dressing room unless they were needed and forbidding any others except Dr. Bartram. Sir Henry would have been foolish to come and yet he ought to have set a price. Every man had his price and William could have paid it. His father was a man of importance, the father of William Lane, a rising power in America. It was an insult he would not forgive, and he added it to the mountain of insults he had taken in his boyhood. Sitting beside his dying father he brooded upon the mountain and how he would level it, by what means and with what purpose. Those tiny islands, clutching at half the world, those arrogant men sitting in their dinner coats at solitary tables in jungles, served by millions of dark men—it was monstrous. His country, his beautiful youthful America, despised and laughed at, even as he himself had been laughed at by stupid English boys who could not spell! In those days he had been ashamed of his father because he was only a missionary, but now that missionary was the father of William Lane. The missionary was lifted up out of his humility and poverty. He had become the father of a man whose first million was doubling itself.

Tears stung William's eyes. Money could not delay by one hour the death of his father, even his. He leaned toward the bed and took his father's hand in his own. The hands were not alike. He had his small dark hands from his mother. His father's were big and bony, and now how thin and helpless.

“Father—” he whispered. For a moment he thought him dead.

But Dr. Lane was not dead. He turned his head slowly, the same nobly shaped head that he had given to his son when he begot him.

“Yes, William?” The voice was faint but clear.

“You know I am doing everything I can?”

“Yes, my son. … It is quite all right. … I must die, you know.”

“I can't let you die.”

“That is very good of you, William. … I appreciate it. … To want me to live—”

“Because I need you, Father.”

The words broke from him and the moment he had spoken them he knew them true. He had never really talked with his father and now it seemed to him that to his father alone could he speak of himself and the immense restlessness that filled him day and night. Now that he had set up this vast successful machine that brought money rolling in whether he was there or not, then what next? Now that he had power, millions of people his, too, looking at the pictures he chose, reading the words he wrote or permitted to be written, what next?

“Father, if you leave me—if you really think—”

“I know God has told me.”

“Then tell me before you go—what am I to do?”

“Do?”

“With myself.”

He saw his father's dark eyes open wide with final energy.

“William, you must listen to your own conscience. … It is the voice of God … in your breast. ‘Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth.' All that you have—all your great gifts, my son … dedicate them to God. Oh God—I thank thee—thou hast—brought me to my son in time—”

The faint voice died away and the old man fell into sudden sleep as he did after the least exertion. He did not speak again.

William sat beside him through the hours. The nurses came and went, doing their duty. The doctor came, spoke a few words. “It can't last, Mr. Lane. Any moment, I am afraid.”

William did not reply. That night, twenty minutes after midnight, his father without waking ceased to breathe.

Clem had plunged himself again into his own country. He had failed in China but he was not discouraged. Such was his faith in that which he believed. He had said very little to Henrietta about the brief visit to the shack in San Francisco, but she comprehended the refusal and perceived that as usual Clem had only been strengthened by it.

“Someday they'll see I'm right, hon,” he told her. “They” were the powers, those who did not believe in his faith, the greedy, the selfish, the politicians, the small-minded. He did not hate, neither did he despise. Instead he was possessed by a vast patience, a mighty omniscience. He could wait.

Meanwhile he worked. He decided to open his largest and cheapest market in Dayton. Each of his markets had its own peculiar name. This one he called “People's Choice.”

“I don't want a chain name,” Clem said when Bump spoke of the advantages of a chain of markets all called by the same name. “I want people to think the markets are theirs. Each one must be different, suited to a town and its folks.”

People's Choice was his first city market and he built it outside the city where land was cheap, at the end of a trolley line.

On the opening day Henrietta had come to help. Clem had lured thousands of people by his announcement of free foods on this first day. By ten o'clock the trolley cars were crowded beyond control and well-fed people were struggling to reach counters where loaves of bread, pounds of cake, and baskets of fruit were waiting to be given away. The day was clear and cool and through the great glass windows the sun poured over stacked counters and heaped bins. Clem had devised an effect at once modern and old-fashioned. Apples were piled upon the floor in corners, and bananas hung from the ceiling.

“Help yourselves, folks,” Clem shouted cheerfully. “Take a pumpkin home and make yourselves a pie. Here's old-fashioned molasses—dip it up, folks! It's bottling that makes it come high—five cents a dipper, folks! I bought it in N'Orleans for you—by the barrel, folks—and plenty. Here's bread—take a loaf, and here's butter from Wisconsin—straight from the farmers, and that's why I can afford to give it away today. Tomorrow you'll pay less for it than you pay in any store in the city. If anybody is hungry he can have a loaf free. Give and it shall be given unto you. Don't take it if you're not hungry, but if you're hungry and can't pay for it, we'll always give it to you. No caviar here, folks, no fancy notions, just plain food straight from the people who raise it.”

In and out among the surging, staring people he wove his way, alert, smiling, his sandy head held high, his small blue eyes snapping and twinkling and seeing everything at once. He wore overalls of denim like his clerks, or “hands” as he called them, and his hands were men from anywhere, two Chinese boys who were working their way through college, a Negro he had seen in Louisiana and liked, Swedish farm boys from Minnesota. He had picked his men and trained them himself, saying that clerks from other stores were no good to him.

His business was unorthodox and filled with risk, and when a man became fearful because of small children and a nervous wife, he let him go and found the boys, the young who dared to be reckless. He would send Bump overnight to California or Florida to buy up carloads of cheap oranges, to West Virginia to sweep up a harvest of turnips that were overloading the market, to Massachusetts to bid for a haul of fish that threatened to bring down the price on New York markets. Wherever there was unwanted food, food about to be thrown away, as Maine farmers were about to throw away half their crop of potatoes last summer, Clem or Bump was there. Clem trusted no other to buy for him, since in the narrow margin of buying and selling lay his profits and in his profits was his ability to expand his markets and his faith. His heritage from his father was an invincible belief in goodness, not in the goodness of God to which his father had so persistently trusted, but in the goodness of man. Clem believed more profoundly than ever that with his stomach full any man preferred to be good. Therefore the task of the righteous, of whom Clem considered himself one, was to see that everybody had food.

In his hours of dreaming, for he did no work on Sunday and his markets were rigidly locked on that day, he gave himself up to still more huge fantasies about feeding all the hungry in the world. There in his ugly little house in New Point, Ohio, where he lived in complete happiness with Henrietta, he saw the people in China and India someday crowding to his markets. His failure with Sun Yatsen in San Francisco, his conviction of future success made his dreams the richer and more real.

He recalled the long journey he had made on foot from Peking to the sea. The old agony of the moment when he saw his parents and sisters murdered had softened and dimmed. Instead he remembered the winding cobbled roads of the country that tied the villages together, the dusty footpaths on either side of the cobbles, the fields green with new wheat in spring, with the tall sorghum corn in summer. Someday in those Chinese villages and market towns his foods would stand displayed.

People's Choice promised, even this first day, to be instantly successful and Clem saw himself growing still richer. According to any rules he should not be getting so rich. He had no desire to be a millionaire like William, and he was almost ashamed of his mounting bank accounts. But he never gave money away. Some deep prejudice against organized charity, against packaged religions and vague idealism, made him keep his hands in his pockets. He gave to any man or woman or child who wore a ragged coat or who needed a doctor, and a few words scribbled on a torn scrap of paper or an old envelope provided food from his nearest market for anyone, from a hungry college student to a passing drunk or a springtime tramp. But he gave no large checks to soliciting treasurers and college presidents, and the churches, even of his home town, had come to look for no more from him than ten dollars dropped into the collection box at Christmas.

Bump, that cautious and careful young man, mindful of his college degree in economics and business management, warned him that sooner or later the organized food interests would attack him.

“You can't go on underselling them without their trying to get your hide,” Bump warned. His relationship to Clem remained nebulous, profound though unexpressed. Clem was too young to be his foster father and he had never offered to be his brother. Bump was shrewd and he recognized in Clem a genius inexplicable. It was comprised of a daring that was absurd, a naïveté that was laughable, an ignorance that was almost illiterate, and out of daring, naïveté, and ignorance Clem succeeded in all he did. He had found a formula so simple that only a man as simple as himself could have proved it valid.

He declared it to gaping, staring thousands at noon this day of the opening of his new market. Six trumpeters, hired for the occasion, blew a frightful blast as the hour struck noon. The crowd, transfixed, paused to turn their heads toward the source of noise, and there in the center of the glittering brass, set upon a sort of balcony of boards rigged with ropes, they saw Clem in his overalls, with a megaphone.

“Folks!” he shouted. “This is more than just a market. It is a sign of what I believe in, a manifestation of my faith. ‘Faith is the evidence of things hoped for,' the Bible says, and ‘the evidence of things unseen.' Well, my hope is to see no more hunger, anywhere in the world. Food is the most important thing in the world. Food is one of a trinity with air and water. If I were President of the United States, which otherwise I am glad I am not, I would make bread and meat, milk and eggs, fruit and vegetables free to everybody. Then we would have no more war. It would be cheaper to feed people free like that than it would be to have a war, like what may come out of Asia someday if somebody don't do something, because the people are starving.”

The people stood motionless, listening and wondering if he were mad. He took a deep breath and began again.

“Now don't get me wrong. I don't believe in charity, nor do we have to have the government doing this kind of thing. I'm not president, don't expect to be, don't want to be. But I'm doing what I can here, and you see it, don't you? If it's good, if it helps you, then all I ask is for you to believe in the idea. Thank you, folks—that's all. And let me tell you that you'll find free box lunches packed and ready for you down at the south end of the market. Ice cream is free for everybody, so's milk and soda pop. Have a good time, folks!”

He was in a frenzy of happiness. To the people who milled around him during the afternoon he talked in a stream of advice, explanation, and remonstrance. “What you'll find here is not all foods but just the essential foods and all cheap. I buy surpluses and that means whatever is in season and therefore cheapest. For instance, last winter when the big cold in the West was freezing cattle solid, I bought 'em that way and sold beef cheap. Price of meat came down right away. The beef was good, too. Freezing made it tender.

“Now here in this market, you won't find cucumbers in January. But you'll find mountains of them in summer when you want to be making your pickles. And I provide recipes, too. Where do I get them? From people like you. When you make something good write in and tell me about it. Look at that pile of leaflets there—take some—take a lot and give 'em to your friends. They'll tell you what to do with cucumbers when they're cheap and how to make jelly out of apple peelings and what not to throw into your garbage pails. Buy cheap, and don't waste. We could feed the world on what we throw away—yep, that's true, too. Nobody needs to starve—not anywhere in the world!”

People listened and laughed. “You sound like a preacher!”

Clem grinned his dry sandy grin. “Maybe I am—a new gospel I preach unto you. Nobody needs to be hungry.”

It was in the midst of such harangue in the late afternoon that he saw Henrietta standing in the far corner, very quiet in her dark blue suit and hat, and holding in her hands a yellow slip of paper. He was used to telegrams from his scouts scattered over the country, announcing a glut of oranges in the Southwest or corn in Indiana or truck-garden stuff in New Jersey. Such telegrams had to be heeded immediately and so he suddenly stopped talking and wove his way through the crowds, pushing them gently with his sharp elbows.