Gods Men (57 page)

He tapped the sheets with the tips of his ringers. “If I were interested in what people say my papers would soon degenerate to gossip sheets. Do you know why they succeed? Because they tell people what to think! You're clever, Lem, but you aren't clever enough. People don't care to read what they already think or what any people think—they know all that well enough. They want to know what they ought to think. It is a spiritual desire, deep in the heart of mankind.”

He stopped and surveyed Lem, sitting huge and gross upon a straight-backed wooden chair. Lem overflowed the narrow seat and it was obvious from his clouded eyes and purplish cheeks that he ate and drank too much wherever he was. He was a disgusting sight.

“Man is a spiritual being,” William said sternly. His enunciation was incisively clear. “Man seeks truth, he wants divine guidance, he craves security of soul. In all your dispatches remember that, if you please.”

Lem swallowed once again his desire to fire himself, to bawl at William, to cry and howl. He could not afford it. His wife was in an expensive insane asylum. He bit his tongue for an instant and tasted the salt of his own blood. “Just what impression do you want me to give?” he then inquired in a sultry, gentle voice.

“Our people will now want to believe in the Chinese,” William said. “They will want to trust the Chinese leadership.”

Lem closed his bloodshot eyes. Against the lids he always saw Chinese faces, the starving, the homeless. War had been going on in China already for five years but nobody here had taken it seriously. Even the Chief here couldn't seem to believe it. Then he thought of his poor wife again, steadily and for a whole minute. Whenever he got angry with William he thought about her. He had been happy with her for two years and she had gone everywhere with him in China. He had met her there in Shanghai, a beautiful White Russian girl, and he had suspected there were things she had never told him and never could tell him. But she had been a wonderful wife and had spoiled him for anybody else.

One morning when he had wakened in the old Cathay Hotel, Lem had found her bending over him with his old-fashioned razor, and he had known that she was about to kill him. He had one instant of horror and then he saw that of course she was mad. She had never been sane since. He had brought her to America himself, sleeping neither by night or day. She tried to kill anybody who was with her and he could leave her with no one. He put her into an asylum near San Francisco. She never knew him when he went to see her. She always called him something else, names of men he had never heard of. But the bills were terrible every month and if he couldn't pay they would throw her out. It was not every place that would take such a violent case, they told him.

He had to stop seeing the Chinese when he shut his eyes. He had to see just Anastasie. He opened his eyes and said to William in the gentle and sultry voice, “Chief, I wish you'd go to China yourself. I wish you'd just go and see. You haven't been there for a long time. You ought to go and see what it's like now. Then you'd know—”

“I have already decided to go,” William replied. “I am going to see the Old Tiger.”

Chungking was a city set upon a hill. The sluggish yellow waters of the river wound around it and the tile-colored flights of steps led upward. There was nothing about it that was like Peking. Everything was at once familiar and strange. There were no palaces, no shining roofs, no dignity of marble archways and wide streets. The streets were crowded between gray-brick houses and fog-dampened walls. The cobblestones were slippery with water and slimy with filth. The people were grim-faced with continuing war and constant bombing. They did not look like the tall handsome people of the north. William was alarmed and dismayed when he thought of these people as the allies of America. What had they to give as allies? They were a danger and a liability. Yet Chiang must be held, he must be compelled, he must be supported.

The American car driven by a uniformed Chinese carried him at once to the Old Tiger's house outside the city. It was reassuring to enter something that did not look like a hovel. The air was chill and damp, as everything was, but from the hall he was led into a square room where a fire blazed.

“Please sit down,” the manservant said in Chinese.

The words smote William's ear with strange accustom. He had not spoken a single Chinese word for years, but the language lay in his memory. He felt syllables rise to his tongue. Perhaps he would be able to speak with Chiang in his own language. The Old Tiger spoke no English. No one knew how much he understood—probably more than he was willing for anyone to know.

The door opened and he looked up. It was not the Tiger who stood there, but a woman, slender and beautiful, her great eyes filled with ready pathos, her exquisite mouth sad. She put out both her hands.

“Mr. Lane. You are America, coming to our aid at last!”

He felt her soft feverish palms against his and was speechless. He did not know what to do with a lovely Chinese woman, one who looked so young, who spoke English naturally. He had never seen this sort of Chinese woman. The ones in Peking had bound feet, unless they were Manchu, but Chinese and Manchu alike they had been alien to him, except the old amah who had been only a servant—and except the Empress.

This beautiful woman with imperial grace sat down and bade him by a gesture to be seated.

“My husband is delayed but only for a moment. We have had bad news from the front. Of course, now everything will be righted, since America is joining us. I grieve for the sad event of Pearl Harbor, but, really, I do believe it was necessary to awaken the American people to our world danger. I do not think only of China—I think of the world. We must all think of the world.”

The door opened again and she broke off. A slender Chinese man in a long robe came in. It was the Old Tiger. Impossible indeed for anyone else to have those bold black eyes, that stubborn mouth! But he looked fragile. Was this the man who for fifteen years had conquered warlords and killed Communists? The Tiger put out his hand and withdrew it quickly as though he hated the touch of another's hand, and the act revealed him an old-fashioned Chinese, unwillingly yielding to a foreign custom. With an abrupt gesture he motioned to William to sit down again and himself took a chair far from the fire.

“Does this American speak Chinese?” he inquired of his wife.

“How can he?” she replied.

“I must confess that I understand a little, at least,” William said. “My childhood was spent in Peking.”

The Old Tiger nodded vigorously. “Good—good!” His voice was high and thin. When he spoke to his soldiers he was forced to shriek.

William contemplated his ally, this bony bald-headed man who was the master of millions of Chinese. Tiger was a good name for him. In repose he looked like a monster cat, soft and safe, except for the eyes where ferocious temper smoldered. He was old China, he hated the new, he was rooted in the past. Enough of his own childhood knowledge remained with William so that he knew exactly where the Tiger belonged. Had there been no revolution among the Chinese people he would have ascended the Dragon Throne and become a strong successor to the Old Buddha. He would have made a spectacular figure there, wrapped in gold-embroidered imperial robes, the Son of Heaven. And the Chinese people, William thought, would have been better off. What were they now but a scattered head? People needed to worship and when they were given no god, they made themselves a golden calf. There was tragedy in this man, deprived of his throne because of the age in which he had been born. A strange respectful tenderness crept into William's mood. He leaned toward the Old Tiger.

“I have come here to know how we can help you. There are two ways in which I myself can be of some use. I can influence millions of people. I can tell them—whatever you want me to tell them. I can also report to my government.”

He spoke in English and the beautiful woman translated rapidly into a Chinese so simple that he could understand it. The Old Tiger nodded his head and repeated the short word signifying good,
“Hao
—
hao
—
”
It was almost a purr. Not the soft purr of a cat, but the stiff, throaty rasp of a wild beast.

The beautiful woman seemingly effaced herself between the two men. She became an instrument, mild, almost shy. William all but forgot her as he pressed his arguments with the Tiger. But she was neither mild nor shy. A supreme actress by natural gift, she took his English words and remolded them into her fluent Chinese, stressing this word, muting that. When she perceived that he understood something of what she was saying, she varied her dialect slightly, slipping into a sort of Fukienese, excusing herself with adroitness.

“My husband comes from Fukien, and he understands that language better than Mandarin. It is essential that he grasp your every word.”

William could make nothing thereafter of what she said. He did not want to believe that she added meanings of her own. There was no reason why she should. He was ready for the utmost gift.

One hour, two hours went by. Suddenly the Tiger stood up.

“Hao!”
he cried in his thin sharp voice. “It is all good. We will do these things. I will command my men. I shall not rest until the yellow devils are driven into the sea.”

He folded his hands, this time without pretense of foreign custom, nodded twice to William, and went out of the room, his step silent and swift.

William was left with the beautiful woman. She put one soft pale hand upon his sleeve. “Dear Mr. Lane, your coming is an answer to prayer. I believe that. I believe so much in prayer, don't you? Every morning my husband and I pray together.”

Tears came to her eyes and she took a little lace handkerchief from her sleeve and wiped them away. “You know China.” Her voice was a whisper now, broken with her tears. “I can speak to you. You see my husband. He is so strong, so good, he is really good. He wants to save our people not only from the present enemy but from those who are far worse. You understand me, Mr. Lane. I am sure you do. But my husband must be helped. He has not had the advantage of education. He has many impulses. I try to control them through praying with him, Mr. Lane. What I cannot do, God will do.”

William listened with rising sympathy.

“You have a very responsible work to do,” he said. “Perhaps you are in the key position of the whole world.”

His voice was grave and he meant it to be so, and she looked at him sorrowfully. Her big black eyes were shining and the tears were gone. Her hands were outstretched to him again.

“You must help me, promise me you will help me!”

He took her hands in his own. “I promise.”

A week later, after incessant flying, from the dried sands of the northwest to the green provinces of the south, hours broken only by descents into cities where he sat out long feasts given in his honor, he went southward and then across the mountains and seas homeward. Wherever he went the beautiful woman had gone with him, and with them was always a third, a general usually, whom they picked up from the region and who could give them the latest news of the war. She translated for William as she had for the Tiger, giving him a continuing drama of a brave poverty-stricken people, patriots who wanted only guns in their hands, a few tanks and planes, to become invincible.

“Like your own Washington,” she urged. “Like Jefferson, like Lincoln!”

He might have distrusted her eagerness, but she was always ahead of his mood. She knew when to let tears fill her eyes, but she knew also when to make her eyes hard and her voice firm. She knew when to show anger at a subordinate, when to be a queen and when to be a woman. Watching her he felt a new regret that the Phoenix Throne, too, had been destroyed. She would have made an empress fit to sit beside the Tiger on the Dragon Throne. People feared her, that he perceived, and he admired her for it. There must always be some whom the people fear.

At the end of the week he left convinced that because of her it was safe to uphold the Old Tiger. Without her there might be treachery; with her there was no danger. When they parted at the final airport she used her tears again.

“Dear America,” she breathed. “Give her my love. Give everybody my love! Tell them I spend my life to teach my people the lessons that I was taught over there!”

He reached Washington exactly on schedule and made his report, and took the next plane home. It was snowing softly when he got out of the plane. The chauffeur was there to meet him. When he stepped into the car he found Emory, looking very pretty in a silver-gray frock and hat.

“This is good of you, Emory,” he exclaimed.

“Not good of me. I've missed you terribly.”

He crushed her shoulders in his arm and kissed her. She smelled of a delicate perfume, clean and warm, and he was grateful for all that was his, his wife, his home, his business, his country.

“I'm glad to be back. China is hell now.”

“Is it, William? Then do you feel your trip was wasted?”

“No, far from it. I made them feel that America is behind them. I made them promises that I must see fulfilled. My work is cut out for me, Emory, I can tell you. I've got to shape public opinion to support those two people who are all that stand between us and defeat in Asia.”

“Don't tell me now, William. You look fearfully tired.”

“I hope we haven't any guests tonight.”

“No, of course not. Just you and me.”

He sighed and relaxed as much as he could. Everything had a new meaning for him. He felt as he never had before the value of being an American. The big car gliding over the great highways, the smokestacks of the factories, the lifted outlines of the city beyond, this could only be America. If China was hell, this was heaven, and it was his own. Nothing must be allowed to destroy it or bring it down to dust, now or ever. Holding Emory's hand in his, he dedicated himself afresh and with all his heart to his own country.