Gods Men (8 page)

“Why didn't you go with William?” Clem asked.

Dr. Lane was still searching. “Here's a basket. I didn't go because of my parish. The Chinese Christians are having a time of sore trial. I can't do much for them except just stay. Here are some tins of milk and some meat—potted ham, I believe.”

He filled the basket and put a kitchen towel over it. “Better not carry the tins in the open. They might tempt someone. I wish I could send you home in the riksha but of course the puller has gone—a faithful fellow, too. Lao Li was his name. There's only the gate keeper.”

He was leading the way to the door. “You'd better get home as fast as you can. Tell your father that he must get your family into the Legation Quarter if any trouble comes. We'll have to stick together. I suppose our governments will send soldiers to rescue us. They may be on the way.”

“I'm afraid my father won't go into the Legation,” Clem said. To explain that his father would consider such retreat a total loss of faith, might hurt Dr. Lane's feelings.

But Dr. Lane knew. “Ah,” he said, “it takes more courage than I have for such faith. For myself, I can—but not for my son.”

They were at the door now and the old gateman was waiting.

“Good-by, Clem,” Dr. Lane said.

“Good-by, sir.”

The gateman stared at the basket, and he went into his little room and brought out some old shoes and put them on top of the towel. “Let it seem rubbish,” he said, “otherwise you will be robbed.”

The gate shut behind Clem and he was alone in the street, the basket heavy upon his arm. It was midmorning, and the sun was beginning to be hot. There were a few people about now, all men, and he saw they were soldiers, wearing the baggy brightly colored uniform of the Imperial Palace. He tried to escape their notice, and had succeeded, he thought, for their officer was laughing and joking and did not notice him. They were looking at a foreign gun the officer held. Then they did see him and they started after him. He began to run. On another day, at another hour, he might have shown better sense by stopping to talk with them in their own tongue. Now he wanted only to keep his face hidden from them, his face and his pale foreign eyes. He ran out of the alleyways into Hatamen Street, the eastern boundary of the Legation. Perhaps he could get into the Legation gate. He turned and was stopped by a small procession of two sedan chairs and their outriders. In the sedans he looked into two foreign faces, arrogant, severe, bearded faces he had never seen before. Before he could slip away into an alley again, he was caught between the Chinese soldiers and the foreigners in their sedans. The soldiers blocked the street so that the bearers were forced to set the sedans down.

Now the curtain of the first sedan lifted and the foreigner put out his head and shouted fiercely to the soldiers, “Out of the way! I am Von Ketteler, the German Ambassador, and I go for audience with the Empress!”

The second sedan opened and he heard a guttural warning. It came too late. The Chinese officer raised his foreign gun and leveled it at the German. Clem saw a spit of fire and the Ambassador crumpled, dead. Clem crawled behind the sedan, and clutching his basket, he hurried as fast as he could from the dreadful spot.

Homeward he ran through streets now filling with people. It was hopeless to escape them. Hands reached out and tore away the coverings of the basket and revealed the food. Dirty hands fought for the tins and emptied the basket in an instant, and then he felt hands laid upon him.

“A foreigner, a foreign devil—” he heard voices screaming at the sight of his face. He burrowed among legs and forced his way through, agile with terror, and hid himself inside an open gate, looking this way and that until he saw a woman's angry face at a window and then he darted out again. Now he was near home and the crowd was surging in the opposite direction to see the murdered German. He was safe for a moment but what would he do without the food? He began to sob and tried to stop because his sobs shook him so he could not run, and then he had no breath to run and so he walked, limping and gasping, down the hutung to the small gate. He would have to knock; he was too weary to try to climb the wall. Ah, the gate was open! He stopped, bewildered, and then saw something bright in the dust of the threshold at his feet. It was blood, brightly red, curling at the edges in the dust. A new more desperate terror fell upon him. He could not think. He ran through the gate and into the meager courtyard. The paper-latticed doors of the little central room were swinging to and fro, and he pushed his way through them.

There he stopped. Upon the rough brick floor his father lay, resting in his own blood which flowed slowly from a great gash in his throat, so deep that the head was half severed. His arms were flung wide, his legs outspread. Upon the quiet face, though bled white, he saw his father's old sweet smile, the greeting he gave to all alike who entered this house, to strangers and to his own, and now to his son. Under the half closed lids the blue eyes seemed watching. Clem gazed down at his father, unable to cry out. He knew. He had often seen the dead. In winter people froze upon the streets, beggars, refugees from famine, a witless child, a runaway slave, an unwanted newborn girl. But this was his father.

He choked, his breath would not come up, and he tried to scream. It was well for him that no sound came, for in the silence he might have been heard, and those who had gone might have come back. He gave a great leap across his father's feet and ran into the other room where his mother's bed was. There he saw the other three, his mother, his two sisters. They were huddled into the back of the big Chinese bed, the two children clinging to their mother, but they had not escaped. The same thick sword that had cut his father's throat had rolled the heads from the children. Only his mother's long blonde hair hid what had been done to her, and it was bloodied a bright scarlet.

He stood staring, his mouth dried, his eyes bulging from their sockets. He could not cry, he could not move. There was no refuge to which he could flee. Where in this whole city could he find a hole in which to hide? He thought for one instant of William Lane and the security of that solid house enclosed behind walls. The next instant he knew that there was no safety there. The dead might be lying on those floors, too. No, his own kind could not save him.

He turned and ran as he had come along the high walls of the alleys, by lonely passage's away from the main streets back again to Mr. Fong's house.

In the central room behind the shop Mr. Fong was sitting in silence with his wife and their children. News had flown around the city from the Imperial Palace that two Germans had fired on innocent Chinese people and that a brave Chinese soldier had taken revenge by killing one of the Germans and wounding the other. Mr. Fong doubted the story but did not know how to find out the truth.

“The wind blows and the grass must bend,” he told Mrs. Fong. “We will remain silent within our own doors.”

He was troubled in mind because his eldest son could speak English and he feared that it might cause his death. Not only foreigners were to be killed. The Old Buddha had commanded today at dawn, at her early audience in the palace, that all who had eaten of the foreign religion and all who could speak foreign languages were also to be killed.

Mr. Fong had just finished quarreling with his wife, and this was another reason for the silence of the family. The quarrel, built upon the terror of what was taking place in the city, of which rumors were flying everywhere, had been over the very matter of the eldest son speaking English.

“I told you not to let our Yusan learn the foreign tongue,” Mrs. Fong had said in a loud whisper. Sweat was running down the sides of her face by her ears. Though she fanned herself constantly with her palm leaf fan nothing dried her sweat this day.

“Who could tell that the Old Empress would put the Young Emperor in jail?” Mr. Fong replied. “Two years ago everything was for progress. Had all gone well, the young Emperor would now be on the throne and the Old Woman would be in prison.”

“The gods would not have it so,” Mrs. Fong declared.

Nothing made Mr. Fong more angry than talk of gods. He read as many as possible of the books of revolutionary scholars and other books which they had translated from foreign countries. Thus he knew many things which he concealed from Mrs. Fong, who could not read at all. Through his cousin he had learned much that happened in the Forbidden City. He had long known that there was a certain troupe of actors who, a few years before, had been summoned from Shanghai to play before the Imperial Court. Among the actors were the two famous rebel scholars, Liang Ch'i Ch'ao and T'an Tzut'ung, and they were responsible for informing the young Emperor that times had changed and that railroads and schools and hospitals were good things. What pity that all their efforts now had failed! That man at court whom they had trusted, that Yuan Shih K'ai, though pretending sympathy with them, had betrayed them to the chief eunuch Jung-lu, because the two had long ago sworn blood brotherhood, and Jung-lu had told the Old Empress, and so she had won after all. Liang had escaped with K'ang Yu-wei, the young Emperor's tutor, but T'an had been killed. Since then the Old Demon, as Mr. Fong called her in his private thoughts, had gone from worse to madness.

There was no use in telling Mrs. Fong all this. He heard her voice complaining against him still, though under her breath, and being frightened and weary and more than a little fearful that she was right, he squared his eyebrows and opened his mouth and shouted at her.

“Be quiet, you who are a fool!”

Mrs. Fong began to cry, and the children not knowing which way to turn between their parents, began to wail with their mother.

In the midst of this hubbub which, having aroused, Mr. Fong now tried to stop, they heard a stealthy beating upon the back door. Mr. Fong raised his hand.

“Be quiet!” he commanded again in a loud whisper.

Instantly all were still. They could hear very well the sound of fists upon the barred gate.

“It is only one pair of hands,” Mr. Fong decided. “Therefore I will open the gate and see who it is. Perhaps it is a message from my cousin.”

He rose, and Mrs. Fong, recalled to her duty, rose also, and with her the children. Thus together they went into the narrow back court and inch by inch Mr. Fong drew back the bar. The beating ceased when this began, and at last Mr. Fong opened the gate a narrow way and looked out. He turned his head toward Mrs. Fong.

“It is Little Foreign Brother!” he whispered.

“Do not let him enter,” she exclaimed. “If he is found here, we shall all be killed.”

Mr. Fong held the gate, not knowing what to do. Against his own will he heard Clem's voice, telling him horrible news.

“My father and mother, they are dead! My sisters are dead! Their heads are off. My father lies on the floor. His throat is gashed. I have nowhere to go.”

Against his will Mr. Fong opened the gate, allowed. Clem to come in, and then barred it again quickly. The boy had vomited and the vomit still clung to his clothes. His face was deathly and his eyes sunken, even in so short a time.

“Now what shall we do?” Mrs. Fong demanded.

“What can we do?” Mr. Fong replied.

They stood looking at each other, trying to think. Clem, past thought, stared at their faces.

“We must consider our own children,” Mrs. Fong said. But she was a kind woman and now that she saw the boy and the state he was in she wished to clean him and comfort him, in spite of her fright.

“Why should they kill your family?” Mr. Fong demanded of Clem. “Your father was poor and weak but a good man.”

“It is not only my father,” Clem said faintly. “I saw them kill a German and another only barely escaped though he was shot in the leg.”

“Did the Germans not shoot into a crowd?” Mr. Fong demanded.

Clem shook his head. “There was no crowd. Only me.”

“Who shot then?”

“A soldier.”

“Wearing what uniform?” Mr. Fong asked.

“That of the Imperial Palace,” Clem said. Clem was telling the truth, Mr. Fong saw by his desperate honest boy's face.

“The Old Empress is gone mad,” Mr. Fong said between set teeth. “Can she turn back the clock? Are we to return to the age of our ancestors while the whole world goes on? She has made us the laughingstock of all peoples. They will send their armies and their guns, and we shall all be exterminated because we listened to an old ignorant woman who sits on a throne. I will not fear her!”

So saying he seized Clem by the ragged elbow of his jacket and led him into the house, and behind him the family followed.

“Take off his garments and let me clean them,” Mrs. Fong said.

“Go into the inner room and get into the bed there,” Mr. Fong said. “After all, we are an obscure family. We have no enemies, I believe. If anyone comes to ask why we had a foreign youth here to teach our son, I will say it is because the foreigner was only a beggar.”

Like a beggar then Clem went into the dark small inner room, and taking off his outer clothes he crept under the patched quilt on the bed. He was dried to the bone. There were no tears in him, in his mouth no spittle. His very bladder was dry and though his loins ached he could make no water. The palms of his hands and the soles of his feet itched. Tortured by this drought, he lay under the quilt and began to shake in a violent and icy chill.

Clem was hidden thus for how many days he did not know. Nor did he know what went on in the city. Not once did Mr. Fong or any of his family pass through the boarded doors of the shop. The cousin came sometimes at midnight, and through him Mr. Fong knew what was happening. Thus he knew that the Old Demon, in her wrath, had set the fourth day after the murder of the German as the day when all over the empire foreigners were to be killed.

There were other edicts. Thus on the seventh day of the seventh month the “Boxer Militia” was praised and exhorted to loyalty, and such Chinese as were Christians were told to repent if they wished to stay alive.