Gods Men (41 page)

“There has got to be some sort of over-all,” Clem said thoughtfully. “Not government, either—but what?” He had absorbed from the Chinese a deep distrust of government. Men in power, he had once declared, became more than men. They fancied themselves gods. Henrietta had laughed when he said this. She did not often laugh, and when she did he always wanted to know why. “Sometimes you act a little like God, yourself,” she had replied.

He was inexplicably hurt. “No—no—don't say that, hon! Maybe like a father. Only like a father, though.”

She was learning to sheathe her bluntness because she did not always know what could hurt him. He went about so shining in his hopefulness, so childlike in his goodness, so impregnable in his devotion, that it seemed nothing could hurt him. Then she found that she alone could do the damage. Opposition from others, their laughter, their disbelief, he could and did ignore or accept as persecution by evil. But she whom he loved, who loved him, could pierce his bright armor and bring tears to his eyes. The first time she saw the tears she had wept with shame, had sworn to herself that she would never laugh at him, never caution him, never show doubt—nay, more, she would never feel doubt. The one sin she could commit, she told herself, was to hurt Clem.

The years had passed and still they had no children and still she did not mind. Clem filled every need of her being, and she devoted herself to him, taking over almost without his knowing it all the things which he hated to do: the meticulous detail of business, the bills, the arrangements for shipping, the delivery of carloads of foods, the refrigeration and preservation and then disposals. More and more she and Bump conferred on the carrying on of Clem's decisions, daring and bold as they were, sometimes involving the loss of thousands of dollars as well as the possibilities of profits as great. Neither of them questioned what Clem decided to do. It remained for them merely to discover how to do it.

During the war, however, he had made a decision of his own so peculiar, so unlike him, that for a while Henrietta wondered what change had come in him that she did not understand. He had begun in recent years to read faithfully William's newspapers. What he thought of them he never said, but his intense look, his frequent silences when he had studied a tabloid carefully, made Henrietta long to put a question to him. But she did not. He had never allowed her to complain to him fully about William.

“He's your brother, hon,” Clem had said. “He's part of your family. A family is a great thing to have. China would have died and disappeared long ago if it hadn't been for the way families stick together over there.”

“I hope you won't try to make me stick to mine,” Henrietta had retorted.

In one of William's papers, more and more filled with pictures, Clem had discovered during the war a feature about Chinese coolies digging trenches in France. He found it one Sunday when he was at home, and sitting on the small of his back in a large armchair, his feet propped on the rungs of another chair in front of him, he had stared at the bewildered faces of Chinese farmers in France, staring back at him from the pages.

“I bet they don't have a notion of why they're there or why they're digging those trenches,” he told Henrietta.

It was a peaceful morning in America, and townfolk walked quietly past the house with their children on their way to church. Henrietta looked at Clem. She knew him so well, so familiar was every line of that thin square face and every note of his brisk hurried speech, that she divined at once that in his musing tone and his meditative eye a plan was beginning to shape. She waited while she polished the silver, a task which she usually planned for this time when Clem was at home. She sat at the dining-room table covered with newspapers upon which the silver was spread.

“I bet those Chinese were just carted over there like cattle,” Clem mused. After a few minutes more he got up.

Henrietta followed him with her watchful look. “Can I get you something, Clem?”

He was hunting for paper and pen. “I want to write to Yusan. What are those Chinese farmers doing over there in France? I bet somebody's up to something.”

She rose and found paper and pen, an envelope and the proper stamps, and when he had scrawled one of his brief letters, she sealed it and put it aside to mail in the morning.

This was the beginning, as she knew it would be. The end was several months later when Clem and Yusan met in Paris. Clem, leaving her in charge, for Bump was now in the war himself, put the ocean between them for the first time.

“I'll only be gone a couple of weeks, hon,” he said. Agony was plain on his face. “I don't know why I'm doing this, but somehow I have to …”

“That's all right, Clem,” she said. It was not all right, it was far from all right, and she felt the physical tearing of her heart out of her flesh as she stood on the pier and watched him go away, his face whiter, his figure smaller as the ship moved toward the sea.

And Clem, his eyes fixed upon her who made his whole home, cried out against his own folly. Had Bump been at home he would have brought her along, but without Bump only Henrietta could hold together in his absence the vast structure of his markets. What drove him to France he scarcely knew except that when he hesitated the faces of the bewildered Chinese were there before him. He saw them in their villages, in their own fields, in the streets of the cities into which they flooded in times of famine and starvation. How could they understand France? He would get Yusan started and then he would come home again to Henrietta, maybe run over again a couple of times to see how they were making out, but taking her with him next time, for sure.

In Paris he met Yusan, who wore a new suit of Western clothes. At first Clem scarcely recognized him in the crowd of Frenchmen, except that they were all talking and Yusan was standing immobile, silent, watchful, and therefore as conspicuous as a statue of gold. Clem caught his hand and forgot for a moment even Henrietta.

“Yusan!”

“Elder Brother!”

They broke into Chinese simultaneously and the French men and women stared and cried out to heaven in admiration at such fluency, nothing of which was comprehensible to them. Clem liked the French people and bustled his way among them with the same assurance he had at home in America or in China. They had the same mixture of naturalness, simplicity, shrewdness, humor, childishness, and sophistication that made Americans and Chinese alike, too, and he had pondered this until he remembered that all children and old people are alike, the one because they are young and the other because they are old, the young knowing nothing and accepting everything, and the old knowing everything and therefore accepting anything as possible.

Yusan, following Clem's directions, had come over with a shipload of the coolies, as they were called. He had volunteered as an interpreter for them, and had been accepted. Now at last his English, learned so early and of late years revived and maintained because of Clem, was of the utmost use. He had his men already established in barracks near the front, where new trenches must continually be dug. At night they lay down to the sound of the booming cannon, and sometimes the Chinese in the farthest sectors were killed, even as the French, the English, and the Americans were killed. But the Chinese had no inkling of why they were there or why they were killed. They had been lured by the promise of pay for their families at home and a little for themselves, and they were here.

Clem left Paris the same day with Yusan, traveling by train and by military truck. He had his own pass, stamped and signed in Washington before he left, and he was sent through without delay, Yusan at his side. The days on the ship had filled Clem to bursting with plans and ideas and he paused only briefly to ask about Yusan's family.

“All well,” Yusan said. “Two more grandsons I have given my parents or they would not have let me come, except that you asked it.”

“What about Sun Yatsen?” Clem asked.

Yusan shook his head. “One reason I was glad to come with you, Elder Brother, is that everything is altogether confused. Sun Yatsen has not tied our country together. He was too much in Japan, and Japan wants to eat us alive. Now this has become clear to all in the Twenty-one Demands. It is true that Sun has left Japan, but he does not know what to do next. First we are a republic and then we are not a republic. He has destroyed the old government but he does not know how to make a new one.”

Clem remembered that dark night in the tin hut in San Francisco and now described it to Yusan. “I told him he ought to get down to the people. I told him if he didn't get the people fed and looked after, he would surely fail.”

“He will always be a hero, Elder Brother,” Yusan said. “We will not forget that he freed us from the Manchu yoke. But he has not led us onward from there. He wants obedience and when we hesitate, he says we are like a tray of sand. Elder Brother, you know we Chinese always work together. But we do not believe all wisdom is in one man.”

“Well,” Clem said briskly, dismissing the revolutionist. “I guess he has to learn in his own way. Now, Yusan, here's my idea—”

He caught a certain quizzical look in Yusan's dark and narrow eyes and he grinned. “Don't you get me mixed up with Sun! I'll give you my ideas but I don't insist on anything. You do what you like with them. My ideas are a gift. Take them or leave them.”

“Elder Brother, I accept the gift,” Yusan said.

Neither of them looked out of the window at the lovely French landscapes that fled past one after the other. Night fell and they approached the war sector and they did not see that beauty had ended and the barrenness of death was about them. From the train they got into a truck and drove through the night over roads once smooth and now rutted with shell holes. This in turn gave way to rough bare ground and so they came to their destination. Clem walked into a barrack filled with homesick Chinese men, not one of whom could read or write or even speak with the people around him. In the dim light they lay on army cots and listened to one man who played a wailing village tune upon a two-stringed violin he had brought from home.

“Brothers!” Yusan cried above the music. “Here is the Elder Brother of whom I have told you!”

They got up from their cots, the fiddler stopped his wail, and the lantern lights were turned up. Clem saw himself surrounded by the familiar faces, the brown, good faces, the honest eyes, of Chinese villagers. He felt again the old love, paternal perhaps, but grateful and rich with faith. These were the good, these were the simple, these were the plain of the earth. He began to speak to them:

“Brothers, when I heard you were here, I feared lest you might be suffering, and so I have come to see if your life is good and what can be done to help you if it is not good.”

“He left his home,” Yusan put in. “He came a long way over the sea and he can be trusted. I have known him since my childhood.”

The men were silent, their hungry eyes fixed upon Clem.

“Are you well fed?” Clem asked.

The men looked at one of their number, a young strong fellow with a square fresh face. He spoke for them:

“We are well fed but with foreign food. We are treated kindly enough. Our sorrow is that we cannot write to our families or read what they have written to us. We can neither read nor write.”

“The letters can be read to you,” Clem said. “Letters can also be written for you.”

The young man looked at his fellows and began again. “Why we are here we do not know. Is our country also at war?”

“In a way, yes,” Clem replied. “That is, China has declared war against the Germans.”

“We do not know the Germans,” the young man said “Which men are they?”

Clem felt his old sickness of the heart. “None of us know our enemies. I also do not know a single German. Let us not think of them. Let us only think of ways to make your life better.”

For how could he or anyone explain to these men why there was a war and why they had left their homes and families and come here to dig trenches for white men to hide themselves in while they killed other white men? Who could explain such things to anyone? The world was full of discontent and because people were hungry and afraid they followed one little leader and another, hoping somewhere to find plenty, and peace for themselves and their children, even as these men had been willing to come so far, not because they believed in what they did, but that their families at home might receive each month some money wherewith to buy food.

Clem spent most of that night talking with the men, asking them questions, too, and writing down their answers. He spent the next days with Yusan planning, and a full month he spent getting what he needed to fulfill those plans from officers who considered him mad. But Clem was used now to men who thought him mad and he paid no heed to what they thought of him, spending his energy instead on getting them to do what he needed to have done until in sheer angry impatience they yielded and cursed him and wanted him gone.

By the end of the month he had helped Yusan to set up a school where the men could learn to read and write, if they wished, and he set up an office, with two Chinese from Paris, to read the men's letters from home and write in reply. He set up also a small shop, to be supplied regularly from Paris with Chinese foods and sweets and tea. Once a week he planned a night of amusement, a place where the Chinese could hear their own music, could eat their own sweetmeats and drink tea together, and see Chinese plays and Western pictures. He hired a Chinese cook who was given a license to vend his own wares and make his living thereby. He established Yusan in all this, and in his first moment of leisure he discovered that he was homesick for Henrietta and could no longer endure his absence from her, although he had scarcely thought of her for the whole month, even as he had not once thought of himself.

He bade Yusan good-by then, took a ship for home, and reached his house on a Saturday afternoon, so white and spent that Henrietta cried out at the sight of him as he entered the picket gate.