Gods Men (42 page)

She was at home, as she was now as much as she could be, for she expected Clem at any moment, though he had not said he was coming. Her own longing for him reached across the sea and yearned for him with such intensity that she could divine, or she felt she could, the time when he would be coming.

“Oh Clem!” she cried at the front door.

“Hon—”

They fell into each other's arms. He felt her sturdy body and she was frightened at the thinness of his shoulder blades under her embrace.

“You've worked yourself to skin and bones!” she cried with terrified love.

“I'll be all right after a few days at home. My stomach went back on me a couple of weeks ago.”

They parted, their hands still clinging, and she led him in, made him sit down, and restrained herself from fussing over him, which he could not endure.

“I'll make you a cup of tea. Can you eat an egg?”

“I could eat a beefsteak, now,” Clem said. He looked around the shabby room fondly. “I guess I was crazy to go away, hon! Now that I'm back it seems crazy. But I had to go, and I'm not sorry. How's tricks?”

“Don't talk about tricks!” Henrietta retorted. “You rest yourself, Clem, do you hear me?”

“Why, hon, you aren't mad at me, are you?” His face was amazed. She had never been cross with him before.

To his further amazement now she began to weep! Standing there by the kitchen door, she took up the edge of her apron and wiped her eyes. “Of course I'm not mad,” she sobbed. “I'm just scared, that's all! Clem, if anything happened to you—if you should die—I wouldn't know what to do. Being without you just these weeks—I'm all upset—”

“Great guns,” Clem muttered. He got up and went to her and put his arms around her again. “I'm not going to die, hon. I wouldn't think of such a thing.”

She put her head on his shoulder and he stood quietly supporting her, loving her and not telling her how he really felt. He was not going to die, but he felt tired to the bone. The sight and the memory of those dark honest bewildered faces in France never left him for a moment. Nor were they all. In the fields of France there were such faces, and the same faces were here in the fields of Ohio, upon the streets of villages and in the slums of cities, not all honest and many far from good, and yet with the same confusion and bewilderment. And most dreadful of all, they were upon the fields of battle, and they lay dead in the mud of death. No, he must not die, but he was tired enough to die. Nobody knew what he was trying to say; not even those whom he wanted to save could understand.

But he must not give up, for all that. He must take up again where he left off.

This meant, as he discovered in the years that followed the war, an organizing of his markets and facing limitations and legalities which irked and distracted his free-thinking mind. The war fought for freedom brought with victory a loss of freedom for everyone, and there were times when Clem felt this loss descend most heavily upon himself. He was used to visiting another country as men visit a neighboring county, careless of all save his purpose in going. Now there was no more of this carelessness. Passports and visas made him groan, and even Bump could not assuage his irritation either by speed or by early preparation. Clem felt it an infringement upon his rights that he could not decide suddenly to go to India by the middle of next week or drop in on Siam and see how the rice crop was going.

His first visit to India grew out of a brief meeting, quite accidental, with a young Hindu in London during the war. They had met in the Tube, and had sat side by side for a few minutes. Clem had begun instantly to talk and then, forgetting his own destination, had got off with the young Hindu and had gone with him to his rooms in lodgings near the Tube station. Ram Goshal had at first been astounded by this slender, sand-colored American and then had succumbed to Clem's frightful charm. Clem discovered that Ram Goshal, although the son of a wealthy Indian, had given up society life to work for Gandhi, whom he had met a few years before when Gandhi, that rising star, had gone to London from South Africa with an Indian deputation. Ram Goshal had come back with Gandhi to London at the beginning of the war and at a meeting of Indians, Gandhi insisted that it would not be honorable in the time of England's trial and trouble to press their own claims for freedom. Self-denial at such an hour, he said, would be dignified and right and gain more in the end because it was right.

Ram Goshal, reared in sensitive tradition, had been won anew by the largeness of Gandhi's mind. He had declared himself his convert, though troubled by his father's wealth, which was in great modern industries in India, of which Gandhi did not approve.

“God forbid,” Gandhi has said, “that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of three hundred million people took to similar economic exploitation it would strip the world bare like locusts.”

Clem could not, however, agree entirely with what Gandhi said, as Ram Goshal had quoted it.

“You can't get rid of something just by stopping it,” Clem had told the young Indian. “Industrialism is here to stay. We've got to learn how to use it. We can't go back to the first century because we don't like this one.”

Ram Goshal had begged Clem to go to India. “You will understand India,” he declared, his eyes dark, huge, and liquid with admiration. “You are like us, you are a practical mystic.” Then those profound eyes, haunted with the endless history of his people, glinted with humor as he gazed upon Clem. “You remember what Lord Rosebery said about Cromwell?”

“I am not an educated man,” Clem said, humble before this young scholar of the East.

“He said that Cromwell was a practical mystic, the most formidable and terrible of all combinations. That is you, too—therefore I do beseech you to stop in my country and look with your own eyes upon my starving people.”

Clem could refuse neither such warmth, such eloquence, nor the brown beauty of the young Indian's face and he promised to go as soon as possible after the war.

He decided suddenly one January day that he would take a few months off from the constant persecutions of his rivals, the chain groceries, being moved to this by a letter from Ram Goshal, now in India. Gandhi was then in the full tide of the noncooperation movement and Ram Goshal was in some trouble. His father disagreed with Gandhi, and, had Ram Goshal not been his only son, would certainly have disinherited him.

Clem read this letter thoughtfully and handed it to Henrietta.

“Hon, I feel I better go over and see for myself whether the British intend to do any better about feeding the people in India. If they don't I guess Gandhi is right. But I want to be sure about the British.”

“Of course, Clem,” Henrietta said. She suspected that Clem, whether consciously or not she did not know, was thus postponing a decision which Bump and the two young lawyers were pressing upon him. That Clem might defeat the purpose of the organized groceries to put him out of business, they declared, he must organize himself into Consolidated Markets, Inc. Clem, in spite of the three young men, still refused. He wanted most of his markets movable, his clerks ready to go wherever surplus foods were stagnant. Vast buildings and established staffs did not interest him. He did not want a name. His business was simply to gather food together and get it to people in need. When the need was over, the supply would cease.

While Henrietta thus suspected Clem she saw him look at her with sudden love.

“What is it, Clem?”

“Hon, the two words you said …”

“Yes, Clem?”

“You said, ‘of course.' That's what you always say to my notions—Wonderful wife!”

So rarely did he speak words of love that tears gathered under her eyelids. “I mean it, dear.”

“I know it.” He bent and kissed the thick coil of hair on top of her head, and so began the journey to India.

In Bombay they went straight to Ram Goshal's house, a gorgeous palace outside the city beyond the Towers of Silence. Ram Goshal's father was fat, quarrelsome, clever, and he gave Clem no chance to talk, and perforce Clem listened.

“I do not oppose freedom, you understand, Mr. Miller. You Americans, I understand, love freedom very much. But the British have not oppressed me. I tell my son it is entirely because of the British that we are so prosperous. Gandhi is not so prosperous with them, but we are not Gandhi. There is no reason why we should fight his battles.”

Ram Goshal, too filial to argue against his father, sat miserable in silence, taking his opportunity at night to keep Clem wakeful for hours. This combined with Indian food cut the visit short. All the courteous welcome and the eagerness of father and son to win America to their side could not mitigate the indigestibility of Indian food. Clem's delicate stomach rebelled at curry and pepper and fried breads. In England he had rejected great roasts and thick beefsteaks, boiled cabbage and white potatoes, and now in India he rejected cocoanut meats and sweets, peas overcooked and pepper-hot and every variety of food too highly seasoned.

Indian food cast his frame into rebellion and Henrietta took him to an English hotel, where he fasted for three days and then took to tea and soft-boiled eggs, while Ram Goshal stayed by him to see him well again.

Clem smiled his white and childlike smile. “I'm a fine one to be telling people about food, Ram Goshal. I have to live on pap.”

“You are like Gandhi,” Ram Goshal said. “You use your body merely as a frail shelter, a house by the wayside, something that barely serves while your spirit lives and does its work.”

Clem was too American for this Indian ardor. “I hope I am a man of common sense,” he said briefly. “Certainly I'm sorry about my weak stomach.”

As soon as he was well he wanted to leave Bombay, and saying farewell to Ram Goshal, he wandered about the country for weeks with Henrietta to see how the people fared. It was impossible to travel alone, and they were forced to hire a bearer, a servant to look after them, a dark Moslem named Wadi, who encouraged them to look at Moslems and avoid Hindus until Clem discovered what was happening. Thereafter to a pouting Wadi he decreed the day's journey, poring over books and maps the night before. There was no sight-seeing. Clem wanted to go to villages, to see what people had in their cooking pots and what they grew in their fields. He grew more and more depressed at what he found. After they left the coastal plains there was nothing, it seemed, but endless deserts.

“The land is poor, hon,” Clem said. “I don't know what these books are talking about when they say the people are poor but the land is rich. I don't see any rich land.”

He turned northward at last to New Delhi, strengthened by rising anger and determined to cope with the rulers of empire in their lair. The stony hills outside the window of the train, the sparse brush, the dry soil, the pale spots of cultivation increased his wrath, until when he reached the monumental capital of empire, he was, he said, “fit to be tied.”

Yet in justice he was compelled to admit that empire alone was not to blame for half-starved people and skeleton cattle. Whoever ruled India, still the sun shone down in sultry fury upon the blackened earth. It was winter in Ohio, a season which there meant snow upon level plains and rounded hills, and in New York meant lights shining from icy windows and snow crusted upon sidewalks and trampled into streets, and red-cheeked women at crowded theater doors. In India it meant the slow mounting of a torrid heat, so dry that the earth lay empty beneath it. Over the sick surface thin animals wandered dreaming of grass, and thin human bodies waited, feeble hands busy at pottery wheels, the dry earth stirred into clay, with a bowlful of water to make more empty bowls, plenty of bowls that could be broken after they had been touched by the lips of the unclean.

“A few wells here and there,” Clem said to Henrietta, his skin as dry as any Indian's, “and this desert might be planted to grain.”

But wells were not dug and who could blame men that they did not dig wells when the sun burning upon a dead leaf turned it crisp, charred at the edges and wrinkled as a dead baby's hand?

In the capital Clem, a pure flame of zeal, marched into the marble halls of empire and demanded to see the Viceroy. An American millionaire may see even the king and so he was received, making his way unmoved between rows of turbaned underlings. A mischievous old face, Indian, shrewd and obsequious, peered from under a multicolored pile of taffeta.

“I am Sir Girga—honored, sir, to conduct you to His Excellency the Viceroy.”

The mischievous old face, set upon a waspish body and a pair of tottering legs, guided him into a vast hall where The Presence sat, and there brought him before a cold English face made cautious by splendor.

Clem, knowing no better, sat down on a convenient chair surrounded by space and then began to tell the ruler how subjects could and should be fed.

“Irrigation is the first thing,” he said in his dry nasal American voice. He was unexpectedly hot and he wished he could take off his coat, but he went on. “The water table in India is high, I notice. Twenty feet and there is plenty of water—sometimes even ten or twelve. By my calculations, which I have taken carefully over sample regions, India could feed itself easily and even export food.”

The Viceroy, immaculate in white tussah silk tailored in London, stared down on him as upon a worm. “You do not understand our problems,” he said in a smooth deep Oxford accent. “More food would simply mean more people. They breed, Mr.—” he paused to look at a card which Sir Girga obligingly held out for him to see—“Miller.”

“You mean it is the policy of your government to keep people hungry?” Clem inquired.

“We must take things as we find them,” the Viceroy replied.