Gods Men

1

A MARCH MORNING IN the year of our Lord, 1950, and the wind so high that on the top floor of a skyscraper in the city of New York William Lane felt a tremor under his feet. He stood by the immense plate-glass window set into the wall behind his desk. The city spread like a carpet before him, and over its horizon he saw the glimmer of hills and sea.

In his fashion he was a man of prayer, and he began his crowded days with these few moments of silence before his window and the world beyond. He had no petition in his heart nor did he ask anything of God. Prayer was an affirmation of himself and what he believed he was, a man of power for good, unmatched at least in his own country. Upon the streets below, so distant that he saw them as gray paths whereon there moved creatures insect-small, were the people whose thoughts he directed, whose minds he enlightened, whose consciences he guided. That they did not know it, that only a few people knew it, increased his power. Long ago he had given up the dream of being a popular leader. He had not the gift of winning popular love. Compelled at last to know that his looks, dark and grave, inspired fear rather than faith, he had immured himself in this great building. From here he had spread over the nation the network of his daily newspapers. For this he bought the services of men and their highest talents. There was no one, he believed, though without cynicism, who could not be bought. Nothing would persuade him, on the other hand, to buy a talent he did not want or which he could not mold to the shape of his own doctrine. The greatest writers found no space in his pages if they did not believe as he did. There were a few, not more than five or six, who were not tempted by fifty thousand dollars. There was only one who had not been tempted by twice that amount. None, he was sure, would refuse as much as he could offer, if he thought it right to offer it. What he bought was not only the fluid flow of men’s words. He bought also the quality of their spirits. A man hitherto incorruptible was valuable when he yielded, though only for a while, because he sold also the faith of the people in him.

Upon this March morning, while William thus communed with himself and God, he felt the tremor beneath his feet. He knew that a rigid building, unable to sway slightly before the winds of a storm, might have been overcome. Yielding only a little, the building was safe. Nevertheless, he did not like the tremor. It reminded him of other things that had once made him tremble.

Long ago in China, when he was a boy, he had seen a mob in the streets of Peking, a mob of angry common people who hated him not for what he was, for his white skin and light eyes, but for his kind. His insecurity, the insecurity of his kind on that day, had thrown him into a panic which, though it assailed him no more, he was never able to forget. Any crowd of people, any mass of commonplace faces above dingy clothing, made him remember, although he was no longer afraid, for he had nothing to fear. He was richer than anybody he knew and his friends were some of the richest men in the Western world. Among them he was unassailable, a man of rigid goodness in his personal life. That he had divorced his first wife to marry his second could not be counted a fault, as soon as one saw Emory. She was a creature as delicately pure as a frost flower; her English beauty, her grace combined with her goodness to make her irresistible. Compared to Candace, his first wife, Emory was spirit opposed to earth.

As he thought of his wife the door opened behind him. He did not turn. No one except his secretary dared to enter uncalled, and he waited until her timid voice spoke.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr. Lane.”

“Well?” he said in his dry voice.

“I wouldn’t have come in except that it’s your brother-in-law, Mr. Miller.”

“Does he have an appointment?”

“No, he doesn’t, Mr. Lane, and I reminded him of that, but he said he guessed you would see him anyway, because he has a big idea.”

He would have liked to say quite sharply that he was not interested in any big ideas that Clem Miller might have, but he did not like to give Miss Smith cause for gossip among the lesser staff. They would call him hard, as he knew he was often called, merely because on principle he did not believe in confusing justice with mercy. Nevertheless, it was outrageous for Clem to walk into the offices on a busy morning and expect to be given time for some crank idea. He did not like to remember that Henrietta’s husband, too, was a successful man. Clem had grown wealthy by the most absurd methods, so absurd that he believed the fellow, or almost did, when he said that he had never planned to make money. It was hard to believe that Clem did not want to be rich, although the way he and Henrietta lived was strange enough. In spite of wealth, they lived in a frame house on a side street of a town in Ohio. What Clem did with his money no one knew.

“Tell my brother-in-law I can give him exactly fifteen minutes. If he stays longer than that, get him out.”

“Yes, Mr. Lane,” Miss Smith breathed. Her name was not Smith but William Lane called all his secretaries Smith. They resented it but were paid so well that they did not dare to say so.

When he heard the door shut, William turned away from the window and sat down in the great chair behind the semicircular desk. Against the vast rectangle of light his domed head, his figure, slender but strong, square shouldered and tall, stood forth as though it were chiseled in stone. He sat immobile and waiting, looking at the door.

Thus Clem, coming through that door with his quick and nervous step, faced the mighty man. If he felt the slightest terror before William’s eyes, as gray and green as lichen, he did not show it. He was a small thin man, sandy-haired, and his very skin was the color of sand. Into this general insignificance were set his eyes, a quick, kingfisher blue.

“Well, hello, William,” Clem said in a high cheerful voice. “Your help out there is certainly for you. I could hardly get in here.”

“If I had known you were coming—” William began with dignity.

“I didn’t know I was coming myself,” Clem said. He sat down, not in the chair across the desk from William and facing him, but in a leather covered chair near the window. “Nice view you have here — I always like to look at it. How’s your wife?”

“Emory is quite well,” William said.

“Henrietta is well, too,” Clem said. “She’s gone to see Candace today.”

“What are you doing here?” William asked. He was accustomed to this husband of his sister’s, who jumped about the earth like a grasshopper. Only the coolness of his voice might have betrayed, and then only to Henrietta herself, his displeasure with his sister’s continuing friendship with his former wife.

“I got an idea and ran down to Washington,” Clem said. “The Food Minister in New Delhi wrote me there was a lot of hoarded wheat over there. I wasn’t sure he knew what he was talking about, sitting in an office in New Delhi. I guess he did, though. There is considerable wheat put away in India, from what I hear. I don’t hardly think it’s in the hands of dealers. It’s bidden by the peasants themselves, the way you or I might tuck away a bank account against a rainy day.”

William did not answer. He could not imagine himself tucking away money, nor could he imagine a rainy day. But Clem was incurably common.

Clem scratched his pale chin and went on talking. “If I could persuade these food hoarders of our own in Washington to let up a little and get some wheat over to India, of course it would bring out the wheat over there, and the price would go right down so the people could buy food. I don’t know as I can do anything in Washington, though — I don’t understand governments, least of all ours.”

“Upon that you and I can agree,” William said. “I thought that what we had in the White House during the war was bad enough. What we have now is worse.”

“Yeah,” Clem said, ruminating. “Don’t matter to me, though. I’m no politician. I just want to pry some wheat loose.”

“What did they say in Washington?” William asked.

“Oh, the usual patter — it would be interfering with internal affairs in India — meaning that if the people get food they might support the present government.”

“Don’t they like Nehru?” William asked this with some interest. He had not known what to make of that composite man upon his one visit to America.

“Sure they like him as far as he goes,” Clem said. “He don’t go far enough for some of our Republicans. They want him to swear eternal vengeance on the Russians and eternal loyalty to us. Nehru won’t swear; no sensible man would. But that don’t interest me, either. What interests me is getting people fed, if for no reason except that starvation is a shame and disgrace to the world and totally unnecessary in modern times. I don’t believe in using food, mind you, to manipulate people. Get everybody fed, says I — then you start even. Once all bellies are full, people won’t have to vote this way and that so as to get a meal. That’s democracy. We ain’t practicing it.”

Food and democracy were Clem’s themes, and long ago William had become bored with his brother-in-law. He saw dreaminess creep into Clem’s brilliant blue eyes, a tensity lifted the thin, almost boyish voice, and he recognized both as signs of what he called Clem’s fanaticism.

“I do not want to hurry you,” he said in his carefully controlled voice, “I do, however, have a business meeting of unusual importance within the next fifteen minutes.”

Clem brought back his eyes from the world beyond the window. The dreaminess vanished. He got up and went over to the chair facing William and sat down and leaned his elbows upon the desk. His square face looked suddenly sharp and even acute. “William, I get letters from China.”

William was startled. “How do you do that?”

“Somebody I used to know in Peking.”

“You’ll get yourself into trouble mixing with Communists,” William said sternly.

“I guess I won’t,” Clem said. “The Old Boy knows.” The Old Boy, in Clem’s language, was always the President of the United States.

“What does he say?” William asked.

“Just told me he didn’t approve,” Clem gave a sharp cackle.

William did not make a reply, and, as he foresaw, Clem went on without it. “William, there’s a mighty famine over yonder in China. You remember? Rivers rising, dikes crumbling away into the water.”

“A good thing,” William said. “It will teach the Chinese people that Communists cannot save them.”

“That ain’t enough, though, William,” Clem said with insistent earnestness. “That’s only the half of it. We got to get the other half across to them. We got to get food over there. What the Reds can’t do, we gotta do, or the people will think we can’t do it, either, and so what’s the use of giving us a try?”

“People ought to be punished for making the wrong choice,” William said grimly.

Clem saw the grimness with detached pity. “You oughtn’t to take pleasure in punishing people, William. I declare, it’s not worthy of such a big man as you are now. It’s kind of an Old Testament way of thinking that was done away with when the New Testament came along.”

“I will not discuss my religion with you,” William said with some violence.

“I don’t want to discuss religion, either,” Clem said. “I wouldn’t hardly know how to say what I believe, and it’s your business if you want to be a Catholic, and I told Henrietta so. I don’t mind what a man is, if he’s a good man — that’s what I always say. My father believed in faith, but it certainly didn’t save him, and I wouldn’t recommend it. I’m not really interested in religion. All I say is if a man don’t have a full belly—”

“I know what you say,” William said with weariness. “Let’s get to the point.”

Clem came to the point instantly. “William, I can get the food to send to China, and to India, too. We’re so stuffed with so much food over here that my buyers can get it by the hundreds of tons without bothering Washington at all. I can get my hands on ships, too. Even the Old Boy don’t have to do anything — just sit there and look the other way. But I need you, William.”

“What for?” William asked warily.

The light of gospel came into Clem’s blue eyes. He held up his right hand in unconscious gesture.

“William, I want you to get behind the idea with your newspapers, so that I won’t be hampered by any senators and the like! Everybody reads your papers, everybody over this broad land. There’s millions of people reads your newspapers that don’t read anything else. Even senators are still afraid of millions of people. I want you to tell the people that if we get our extra food over there to Asia it’s worth any number of bombs, atom bombs — hydrogen bombs, even—”

“Impossible!” William’s voice rang hard with anger. “If this is your wonderful idea—”

“My idea is to get food to the starving, William! I don’t ask you to do it. I’ve got my ways of getting into places. I’ve got my friends. I only ask you to explain to our people.”

“Your friends must be Communists!”

“I don’t care what they are, any more than I care what you are, just so they get our food to the starving. People will ask, where is the food coming from? America! Don’t you see? America don’t even ask if people are Communists. Good old America just feeds the starving. It’s the greatest advertisement for our democracy—”

“Impossible!” William said bitterly. “Sentimental, absurd! Clem, these people won’t ask anything. They’ll just eat. Most of them will think that it’s the Communists who are giving them food. You are too naïve.”

Clem refused to yield. “Even if they do think it’s the wrong party, they’ll be stronger to see tyranny in the end, won’t they? A starving man can’t see right or wrong. He just sees food. You’ve got no judgment when you’re hungry. You can’t even rebel.”

Clem watched William’s face for a waiting second. It did not change. “You’ve never been hungry, have you, William? I have.”

William did not need to answer.

Miss Smith opened the door softly. “I’m sorry to interrupt, Mr. Lane, but the gentlemen are waiting in the Board Room.”

Clem got up. “You don’t need to use fancy methods with me, lady. Just tell me it’s time to go. Well, William—”

“I wouldn’t think of doing what you suggest,” William said. “I don’t agree with you in any particular.”

Clem stood looking down on him. “Let ’em starve, eh, William?” he said after an infinitesimal pause.

“Let them starve until they confess their folly,” William said firmly and got up. “Good-by, Clem. Give my love to Henrietta.”

“Good-by,” Clem said and turning he left the room.

Neither of them had put out a hand to the other, but William did not notice it. He seldom shook hands with anyone. He disliked the contact, but more than that in recent years there were twinges of neuritis in his hands which made it painful to suffer the vigor of Clem’s grasp. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead and poured himself a drink of ice cold water from the silver thermos bottle on his desk. The strangest touch of fate in his strange life was the fact that Clem Miller was his brother-in-law, Clem, whom more than half a century ago he had first seen on a Peking street and never thought to see again — Clem, that pale and hungry boy, the son of the Faith Mission family, living in a cheap alleyway, a hutung in the poorest part of the city, Clem, whom even then he had despised. How had it come about? Half a century ago. …

Young William Lane, leaning back in his mother’s private riksha, perceived a short quarter of a mile ahead a knot of people. This in a Peking street meant some sort of disturbance. Possibly it meant only amusement. The people of the imperial city, accustomed to pleasure, were never too busy to pause for an hour or two and watch whatever passed, from the entourage of a court lady on her way to the Summer Palace to the tumbles of a trained bear and the antics of a shivering monkey. Since the season was spring it might now be a troupe of street actors, fresh from their winter in the south.

William leaned forward. “Lao Li, what is yonder?” he asked the riksha puller.

His Chinese was pure and somewhat academic, although he was only seventeen. Actually he was not proud of speaking good Chinese. It revealed too clearly that he was the son of a missionary. At the English boarding school in Chefoo where he spent most of the year, the aristocrats among the boys were the sons of diplomats and businessmen and they were careful to show no knowledge of the language of the natives. Among white people in China missionaries were distinctly low class. At school, William spoke pidgin English to the servants and pretended he did not understand them when they replied in Chinese. Now, however, he was at home for the Easter holidays, and since he had been born and had grown up in Peking, no pretense was possible.

“Something strange, Young Master,” Lao Li replied. He snatched his cotton jacket from his shoulders as he ran and wiped the sweat from his face. Foreigners were heavy — this young master, for example, though still growing, was already heavier than a man. He could remember when he had pulled him as a child. The years passed. He dared not slacken his pace. A riksha puller must not grow old. A steady job in a white man’s family could not be lost, however heavy the children were.

He snatched at a hope for rest. “Shall I not stop so that you can see for yourself?”

William’s haughty head was high. “What do I care what street people look at?”

“I only asked,” Lao Li muttered.

He tried to quicken his pace as he drew near to the crowd and then William’s shout startled him so that he nearly fell between the shafts.

“Stop!”

William, seated high, could look over the heads of the people. In the center of the crowd he saw a horrible sight. A white boy was locked in struggle with a Chinese boy. The onlookers were not laughing. They were intensely quiet.

“Let me down,” William said imperiously.

Lao Li lowered the shafts and William stepped over them and strode through the people.

“Let me pass,” he said to them in the same haughty voice. The Chinese parted mutely before him until he reached the center. There in silence the two boys were struggling together, the brown face, the white face, equally grim.

“Stop it, you,” William said loudly in English.

The white boy turned. “What business is it of yours?” he demanded. He was small and pale, his frame undernourished, and his gray cotton garments, shrunken by many washings, clung to his bones. Nevertheless there was a certain toughness in his square face, and under his sand-colored hair his eyes were a bright blue.

“Of course it is my business,” William retorted. He felt his own contrast. His English tweed suit had been made by an excellent Chinese tailor, and his shoes were polished every night by the house coolie — his boots, as he had learned to call them at school. To his horror, he saw that the other boy wore Chinese cloth shoes, ragged at the toes.

“It is degrading for a foreign chap to fight a Chinese,” he said severely. “It makes them look down on all of us. You have no right to behave in such a way as to bring discredit on us.”

The pale boy blinked rapidly and clenched his fists. “I’ll fight anybody I like!” His voice was high and ringing.

“Then I’ll have you reported to the Consul,” William declared. He allowed his somewhat cold eyes to travel slowly up and down the boy’s slight figure. “Who are you, anyway? I’ve never seen you before.”

“I’m Clem Miller.”

A faint movement of William’s lips was not a smile. “You mean the Faith Mission Miller?”

“Yes.” The bright blue eyes dared William’s scorn.

“In that case—” William shrugged his handsome shoulders. He turned as though to go and then paused. “Still, as an American, you might think of the honor of your country.”

“My father says the world is our country.”

To William Lane, the son of an Episcopal missionary, an aristocrat of the church, nothing could have been more sickening than this remark. He wheeled upon the pale boy. “As if it could be! You’re American no matter what you do, worse luck for the rest of us! What are you fighting this Chinese boy for?”

“He said my father was a beggar.”

“So he is, in a way,” William said.

“He is not!” Clem retorted. He clenched his fists again and began to whirl them toward William’s face.

William took one step backward. “Don’t be a fool, you! You know as well as I do that your father’s got no proper mission board behind him, no salary or anything.”

“We’ve got God!” Clem said in a loud clear voice.

William sneered. “You call it God? My mother says it’s begging. She says whenever your food’s gone your father comes around and tells us so. He tells everybody you have nothing to eat, but the Lord will provide. Actually who does provide? Well, my mother, for instance! We can’t see Americans starve. It would make us lose face before the Chinese.”

He felt a small strong fist just under his chin, and against all his sense of what was decent for a gentleman, he kicked out with his right foot. His shoe was of excellent leather, sharp at the edge of the sole, and it caught Clem under the knee cap with such pain that he dropped into the thick dust. William did not stop to see what happened next. He turned and strode through the waiting crowd again and took his seat in the riksha.

“Go on,” he said to Lao Li.

Behind his back the crowd murmured. Hands were put out to lift up the fallen boy, and the Chinese lad forgot the quarrel.

“That big American boy ought to die,” he declared. “You are the same kind of people, both from outside the seas. You should be brothers.”

Clem did not reply. After a few seconds of intense pain he limped away.

“Foreigners have bad tempers,” the crowd murmured. “They are very fierce. You see how they are, even with each other.”

A few turned upon the Chinese boy with advice. “You son of Han, be careful next time. Naturally a human being does not like to hear his father called a beggar, even though he is one.”

“We were really talking about the foreign god,” the boy explained. “His father asked my father for one of our loaves. He said they had no bread and my father being a baker, he said that the foreign god had told him to come to our house. My father gave him three loaves and the foreigner said his god always provided. But I said, ‘How is it he does not provide from among your own people?’ This foreign boy was with his father and he heard me say these words, and he told me to follow him, and when we were alone he began to hit me, as you saw.”

To this the crowd listened with interest and there was a division of opinion. Some thought the boy had spoken well enough and others said that silence was better than any speech where foreigners were concerned.

“Nevertheless,” said one man, who by his long robe was a scholar, “it is strange that the Jesus people are all rich except this one family who live among our poor.”

“Who can understand foreigners? There are too many of them here,” a butcher said. He carried yards of pig entrails looped over his bare arm, and they had begun to stink faintly in the sun and reminded him that he should be on his way. Slowly the crowd parted, and soon there were only the footsteps in the dust to tell of the scuffle.

William Lane paused at the front door of his home and waited. He had tried the door and found it unlocked, but he would not go in. In spite of his instructions the houseboy was not waiting in the hall to take his hat and topcoat. He wished that he dared to carry his malacca stick here as he did at school, but he did not quite dare. His sister Henrietta, two years younger than he, would laugh at him, and there was nothing he dreaded more than laughter. He pressed the bell and waited again. Almost instantly the door opened and Wang, the houseboy, smiled and gestured to him to enter, at the same time taking his hat. “It is the day your mother, the t’ai-t’ai, sits at home,” he said in Chinese. “So many ladies have come that I have been too busy.”

William did not answer this. Wang had been with the family for many years, and William took pains now to make him feel that the old days of childish comradeship were over. A young gentleman did not chatter with servants. “Where is my father?” he asked.

“The Teacher has not come home yet from the big church,” Wang replied. He smiled affectionately at the tall boy whom he remembered first as a baby, staggering about these very rooms. “Little Lord,” the servants had called him. Now he was called Big Little Lord. Sad it was that the family had no more sons, only the two girls.

“Where is my younger sister?” William asked. Of his two sisters he preferred Ruth.

“She is with your mother, and also your older sister,” Wang replied. “Forgive me, young sir. You would be surprised at the speed with which the foreign ladies eat and drink.”

He hung William’s hat upon a large mahogany hat rack, put his coat into the closet under the stairs and hastened smoothly back into the drawing room.

William hesitated. The noise of women’s voices, subdued only by the closed door into the wide hall where he stood, both tempted and repelled him. Most of the women were the middle-aged friends of his mother, who had known him from babyhood. Yet there might be a stranger or two. Peking was full of foreigners these days, tourists and visitors, and his father was one of the most liberal among the missionaries. His mother, he knew, often declared that she herself was not a missionary, she was only a missionary’s wife, and she would not pretend. Privately she had often complained to her son that it was a tragedy that his father had ever chosen to be a missionary in so repulsive a country as China, so distant from New York, where her home was.

“Your father could have been anything,” she told him often. “At Harvard he was brilliant and handsome. Of course everyone thought he would be a lawyer, like his father. Yours is a good family, William, and I do hope that you will remember it. I don’t want you to waste yourself.”

His mother fed him a good deal of private heresy to which he did not make reply but which he stored in his heart. Certainly he would never be a missionary. The English boys at school had seen to that. A merchant prince, perhaps, or a diplomat, he did not yet know which. Although he dreamed of America, he could not see himself living anywhere except in China. It was comfortable here for a white man. He did not like the stories he heard of missionaries on furlough having to do their own cooking and cleaning. Here he never entered the kitchen or servants’ quarters — at least, not now that he was practically grown. When he was small and often lonely and bored, since he was not allowed to play with Chinese children, he had gone sometimes to the servants’ quarters for companionship. Wang had been young then and afraid of the cook, and he had welcomed William’s friendship. Sometimes Wang had even taken him on the street secretly to see a Punch-and-Judy show or to buy some sweets.

That, of course, was long ago. Remembering the sweets, William decided suddenly to go into the drawing room. The cook made irresistible cakes for his mother’s at-homes, two golden ones iced with dark chocolate, two snow-white ones layered with fresh cocoanut. More than mere food tempted him. Since he had come home only a few days ago, many of his mother’s friends would not have seen him for several months, and he could exhibit his extraordinary growth. He had added inches to his height even since the long Christmas vacation and was well on his way, he hoped, to six feet, his father’s height. There were times when he feared he would not reach it for his hands and feet were small. Just now, however, he was feeling encouraged about himself.

He opened the door and went in, holding his shoulders straight and his head high. Upon his face he put his look of stern young gravity. For a moment he stood with his back to the door, waiting.

His mother glanced at him. “Come in, William,” she said in her silvery company voice. “Leave the door open, please; it’s a little warm.”

Her stone gray eyes, set somewhat near together under somewhat too heavy dark eyebrows, grew proud. She looked around the room where at half a dozen small teapoys the ladies were seated. “William is just home from school,” she announced. “Isn’t he enormous? It’s his last term.”

It was a comforting scene to William. The big room was warm and bright. Upon the polished floor lay great Peking rugs woven in blue and gold, and the furniture gleamed a dark mahogany. The pieces were far more valuable than mahogany, however. They were of blackwood, heavy as iron, Chinese antiques stolen from palaces and pawned by hungry eunuchs to dealers. The houses of Americans in Peking were crammed with such tables and screens and couches. Scattered among them were comfortable modern chairs padded with satin-covered cushions. Today sprays of forced peach blossom and two pots of dwarf plum trees provided flowers. Among these pleasant luxuries the ladies sat drinking their tea, and just now turning their faces toward him. Their voices rose to greet him.

“Why, William — how you’ve grown I Come and shake hands with me, you big boy.”

He went forward gracefully and shook hands with each one of ten ladies, ignoring his two sisters. Ruth sat upon a hassock by the grate fire of coals. Henrietta was eating a sandwich on the deep window seat. She did not look at him but Ruth watched him with her pleasant light blue eyes.

“Sit down, William, and have some tea,” his mother commanded. She was a tall woman, lean and large boned, and he had his looks from her, although she was almost ugly. What lacked delicacy in a woman made for strength in a man.

Once he had settled on a chair beside her, Wang handed him sandwiches and cake and in silence he proceeded to feed himself heartily. The ladies began to talk again. He perceived at once that they were talking about the Faith Mission family and saying exactly the sort of things with which he could agree. Mrs. Tibbert, a Methodist and therefore not quite the equal of Episcopalians and Presbyterians, although better than a Baptist, was redeemed by being the wife of a bishop. She was a small pallid woman, bravely dressed in a frock copied by a Chinese tailor from a Delineator model, and she had lost a front tooth and had a lisp.

“It’s stupid, really, talking about trusting God for everything and then collecting, really, from all of us. We can’t let them starve, of course. I wonder if a petition to the Consul—”

“The way they live!” Mrs. Haley exclaimed. She was a Seventh Day Adventist, and even less than a Baptist. It was confusing to the Chinese to be told that Sunday was on Saturday, although immersion, upon which Baptists and Seventh Day Adventists insisted, the Presbyterians and Episcopalians declared was the most confusing of all doctrinal practices. Ignorant Chinese tended to be impressed by much water, and sprinkling seemed stingy, especially in hot weather.

Mrs. Henry Lodge, the wife of the leading Presbyterian minister, was charitable, as she could afford to be, since her house was one of the handsomest in Peking, and her husband the highest paid among the missionaries, besides being related to the Lodges of Boston. “I feel so sorry for the little children,” she said gently. White-haired and pretty and gowned in a soft gray Chinese crepe with rose ruching, she made a picture which the other ladies, though Christians, were compelled to envy. William looked at her with appreciation. So a lady ought to look, and to call her attention to himself, he decided to tell the story of his own recent experience.

“Mrs. Lodge, perhaps you’d like to know. As I was coming home today—”

He told the story well and was sensible enough to be modest and merciful toward the ill-dressed boy whom he had publicly reproved. When he had finished he was rewarded.

“I am glad you helped him, William,” Mrs. Lodge said.

“That was Christian of you — and brotherly. ‘Unto the least of these,’ our dear Lord tells us—”

“Thank you, Mrs. Lodge,” William said.

Clem Miller had walked away from the crowd as quickly as he could. He would have liked to run, but his clumsy cloth shoes and his sore knee made this impossible. What he remembered about William Lane were his shoes, those strong and well-fitting shapes of brown leather, protecting the tenderness of soles and the ends of toes. A good kick from such a shoe would leave its proper mark.

“Yet it will never be I who have American shoes,” he muttered.

His articulate thoughts were always in Chinese, not the fluid tonal Chinese of Peking, but the scavenger Chinese, the guttural coolie vernacular of treaty ports where boat people lived. His first home had been on a boat, for his father, anxious to follow in the exact footsteps of Jesus, had preached from the waters of the dirty Whangpoo in Shanghai to those who gathered upon the shores to listen. There had been more staring than listening, and respectable Christians had come by night to reproach his parents for bringing shame upon them by such beggarly behavior.

They still lived like beggars. Clem, scuffling through the Peking dust, could not deny the accusation which William had made. He had looked more than once through the gate of the compound in which William lived, and by the standards of those who made their homes in big houses of gray brick, roofed with palace tiles of blue and green, the four rooms in a Chinese alley, where he lived with his parents and his sisters, were beggarly. His mother, uncomplaining and of a clinging faith, had nevertheless refused to live on the boat any more after the baby Arthur had fallen overboard into the river and been drowned.

There had been long argument over it between his parents. “Mary, it will look as though you couldn’t trust God no more, because of trial,” Paul Miller had told his weeping wife.

She had tried to stop her sobs with a bit of ragged handkerchief at her lips. “I do trust. It’s only I can’t look at the water now.”

Arthur’s little body had not been returned. They had searched the banks day after day, but the river had clutched the child deep in its tangled currents. So after weeks they had given up this search and had come north to Peking. Paul Miller had taken to God the matter of the dollars necessary for third-class train fare, and then he had gone to the other Shanghai missionaries to bid them farewell, as brothers in Christ. They had responded with sudden generosity by collecting a purse for him, and the missionary women had met together and packed a box of clothing for Mrs. Miller and the children.

“See how the Lord provides when we trust him!” Thus his father had cried out, his mild blue eyes wet with grateful tears.

“Clem, your father is right,” his mother said, “we’ve always been provided for, though sometimes God tests our faith.”

Clem had not answered. At this period of his life he was in a profound confusion he dared not face, even alone. The world was divided into the rich who had food and the poor who had not, and though he had been told often of the camel’s eye through which the rich would find it hard to enter heaven, yet God seemed indulgent to them and strangely careless of the poor. The poor Chinese, for example, the starving ones, God who saw all things must also see them, but if so He kept silent.

Pondering upon the silence of God, Clem himself grew increasingly silent. There were times when he longed to leave his family and strike out alone across the golden plains, to make for the coast, to find a ship and get a job that would see him across the Pacific to the fabulous land where his parents had been born. Once there he would go straight across on foot to his grandfather’s farm in Pennsylvania.

Yet he could not leave his pitiful family, though now past his fifteenth birthday, and he troubled himself much about his future. Such thoughts he kept to himself, knowing that were he to speak of them, his parents, incorrigible in their faith, would only bid him put his trust in God. That was well enough, but who was going to teach him Latin and mathematics and English grammar? He had bought a few old English textbooks in a Chinese secondhand book shop, paying for them by teaching English to the bookseller’s ten-year-old son. These books he studied alone, but he felt sorely the need of a teacher. And he could not beg. Though he ate the food his parents somehow got, he could not ask of the prosperous missionaries anything for himself. Today, on the way home from Mr. Fong’s bookshop, he had seen his father at the baker’s, and then had come the fight, after his father had gone on.

Otherwise the day had been fine, though the evening air was now laced with a cold wind from the northwest. He loved the city at this hour. The people were kind enough to him, even though he had fought that one impudent boy. He was sorry for it now. From how the boy looked at it, he had been right. The Miller family, though they trusted in God, were beggars.

He entered the door of his home with so bitter a look upon his face that his mother, setting the square Chinese table with bowls and chopsticks for supper, stopped to look at him. Pottery bowls and bamboo chopsticks were cheaper than plates and knives and forks.

“What’s wrong with you, son?” Her voice was childishly sweet and her face was still round and youthful. Her hair, once of the softest red gold, was now a sandy gray. In spite of his adolescent doubts of her he loved her, so soft was she, so tender to him and to them all.

For the moment, nevertheless, he hardened his heart and blurted his thoughts. “Mama, somehow I’m beginning to see it, we’re really beggars.”

She leaned on the table upon her outspread hands. “Why, Clem!”

He went on unwillingly, hardening himself still more. “A Chinese boy called us beggars, and I lit into him. Now don’t look at me like that, Mama. William Lane came by at that moment, and he — he helped me to stop. But he thought the boy was right.”

“I tremble for you, darling. If we lose our faith, we have nothing left.”

“I want more faith, Mama.” His brain, honest yet agile, was seeking proof at last.

“I don’t see how Papa could show more faith, Clem. He never wavered, even when we lost little Artie. He sustained me.”

Her voice broke, and her full small mouth quivered. The tears, always waiting like her smile, ran from her golden brown eyes.

“He could have more faith,” Clem said.

“But how, dear?”

“If he wouldn’t go and tell people when the bread is gone — at least if he wouldn’t tell the missionaries.”

He lifted his eyes to hers, and to his amazement he saw clear terror. Her round cheeks, always pale, turned greenish. She did not deceive him, and for this his love clung to her always. She held out her hands in a coaxing gesture, and when he did not move, she came to him and knelt beside the bamboo stool upon which he sat, her face level with his.

“Son, dear, what you’re saying I’ve said, too, in my own heart, often.”

“Then why don’t you tell Papa?” he demanded. He could not understand why it was that though he loved her so much he no longer wished to touch her or be touched by her. He dreaded a caress.

She did not offer it. She rose and clasped her hands and looked down at him.

“For why you can’t do it, neither,” she said. “It would break his heart to think we had doubted.”

“It’s not doubt — it’s just wanting proof,” he insisted.

“But asking God for proof is doubt, my dearie,” she said quickly. “Papa has explained that to us, hasn’t he? Don’t you remember, Clem?”

He did remember. His father, at the long family prayers held morning and evening every day, had taught them in his eager careful way, dwelling upon each detail of God’s mercy to them, that to ask God to prove Himself was to court Satan. Doubt was the dust Satan cast to blind the eyes of man.

“And besides,” his mother was saying, “I love Papa too much to hurt him, and you must love him, too, Clem. He hasn’t anybody in the world but us, and really nobody but you and me, for the children are so little. He has to believe in our faith, to keep him strong. And Papa is so good, Clem. He’s the best man I ever saw. He’s like Jesus. He never thinks of himself. He thinks of everybody else.”

It was true. Though sometimes he hated the unselfishness of his father, though his father’s humility made him burn with shame, he knew these were but aspects of a goodness so pure that it could not be defiled. He yielded to its truth and sighed. Then he rose from the stool and looked toward the table.

“Is Papa home?”

“No — not yet. He went down to preach in the market place.”

Paul Miller had left the market place where he had gone to preach the saving grace of Jesus, for the people were busy and indifferent. On the way home he met Dr. Lane, returning from his Wednesday afternoon catechism class in the church. Ordinarily the tall handsome missionary, settled comfortably in a riksha, would have passed the short figure plodding through the dust with no more than a friendly, though somewhat embarrassed, nod. Today, however, he stopped the riksha. “Miller, may I have a word with you?”

“Certainly, Brother Lane.”

Henry Lane winced at the title. Brother he was, of course, spiritually, to all mankind, for he hoped he was a true Christian. But to hear it shouted thus cheerfully in the streets by a white man who wore patched garments was not pleasant. He did not encourage his wife or his son when they criticized the Faith Mission family. Indeed, he reminded them that Christ could be preached in many ways. Now, however, he had to conceal feelings that he was too honest to deny to himself were much like theirs. It was humiliating to the foreign community of Peking to have the Millers there. It was even worse that they were missionaries of a sort, preaching at least the same Saviour. The Faith Mission family had caused wonder and questions even in his own well-established church.

On the street Chinese began to gather about the two Americans, the immediate crowd that seemed to spring from the very dust. Henry Lane took it for granted that no Chinese spoke English and ignored them.

“Miller, it occurs to me that I ought to warn you that there is very likely to be trouble here against foreigners. I don’t like the talk I hear.”

He glanced at the crowd. In the pale and golden twilight the faces were bemused with their usual quiet curiosity.

“What have you heard, Brother Lane?” Paul Miller asked. He rested his hands on the fender of the riksha, and admired, as he had before, the delicate spirituality of the elder man’s looks. It did not occur to him to envy the good black broadcloth of the missionary’s garments or the whiteness of his starched collar and the satin of his cravat. Dr. Lane lowered his voice.

“It is reported to me by one of my vestrymen, whose brother is a minister at the Imperial Court, that the Empress Dowager is inclined to favor the Boxers. She viewed personally today an exhibition of their nonsensical pretensions of inviolability to bullet wounds and bayonet thrusts. That is all she fears — our foreign armies. If she is convinced that these rascals are immune to our weapons she may actually encourage them to drive us all out by force. You must think of your family, Miller.”

“What of yours, Brother Lane?”

“I shall send them to Shanghai. Our warships are there,” Henry Lane replied.

Paul Miller took his hands from the polished wooden fender.

He looked at the watching Chinese faces, pale in the growing dusk. “I put my faith in God and not in warships,” he said simply.

Henry Lane, good Christian though he was, felt his heart sting. “It is my duty to warn you.”

“Thank you, Brother.”

“Good night,” Henry Lane said and motioned to the riksha puller to move on.

Paul Miller stood ankle deep in the spring dust and watched the riksha whirl away. His face was square and thin, and his skin was still pink and white, although it had been twenty years since first he heard the call of God at a camp meeting in Pennsylvania, and leaving his father’s farm, to the consternation of that old man, had gone to China, as the only heathen land of which he had heard. Faith had provided the meager means for himself and Mary to cross the continent in a tourist coach, and the Pacific by steerage. Neither had been home since. He did not feel it fair to ask God for furloughs, although other missionaries took them every seven years. He was living by faith.

His mouth trembled and his eyes smarted. Until now he had never faced the possibility of death. They had been hungry often and sometimes sick, and the sorrow over Artie continued in him, though he tried not to think about it. But death at the hands of cruel men, his Mary and his little ones, this he had not dreamed of, even in the nights when Satan tempted him with doubt and with homesickness for the sweet freshness of the farm life he had long ago lived. He was often homesick, but he no longer told Mary. At first they had cried themselves to sleep with homesickness, he a man grown. His mother had written to him now and again until she died, ten years ago, but he had never had a letter from his father. He did not even know if he lived.

There in the darkening Chinese street, amid the dim lights of oil lanterns and candles of cows’ fat, listening to the sounds of coming night, mothers calling their children in from the streets, a sick child crying, an angry quarrel somewhere, the slam of wooden doors sliding into place in front of shops, a wailing two-stringed violin, the howl of the rising night wind, he was overcome with terror. He was a stranger and in a strange land. Whither could he and his little family flee? He thought of his wife’s tender looks, the gentleness of the two pale little girls, his son’s growing manhood. These were all he had, given him by God, and what did they have? He had robbed them of their birthright upon the farm, the safety of their own kind about them, a roof secure above their humble heads. If evil men killed these for whom he was responsible he could believe no more in God. In the darkness he stretched his hands toward heaven. The cold and twinkling stars were above him. There was no moon. None could see him, and he fell upon his knees, even here in the street, and he cried out to God. Then clenching his hands upon his bosom he lifted his face up and shut his eyes against the laughing stars.

“Oh, God,” he whispered. “Thou who at this moment maybe art looking down upon my dear old home, which I left, dear God, thinking it was what Thou wanted. Thou canst see into all hearts and knowest whether it is true that evil men are seeking our lives. Humbly I say I have noticed some difference myself in the Chinese in the last months. Our landlord wants us to move without reason. I have kept him paid up, though it has been hard to find the money always on time. But Thou dost provide. Save our lives and keep us safe, I now pray, and especially those dear ones whom Thou has given me, and yet I say Thy will be done, and I will not love them above Thee.”

His head sank upon his breast and his chin rested upon his folded hands. He waited for the tide of faith to swell into his heart.

It came at last, warming the blood in his veins, strengthening his heart like wine, convincing him that he was doing what was right. “Fear not, for I am with thee always—” He could hear the words he knew so well.

“Amen, God,” he replied with reverence. He rose and plodded along the empty street toward the four small rooms where those whom he loved awaited him. Yes, he struggled constantly not to love them too well. They were not, he told himself, all that he had. For he had the immeasurable love of God.

In less than half an hour he opened the door of his home and saw the sight which always gladdened him. The table was set for the evening meal. Mary sat beside the lighted oil lamp mending some garment, and Clem was studying one of his books. The two little girls were playing with a clay doll which a kindly Chinese woman had given them.

They looked up when he came in, and he heard their greetings. For some foolish reason he could not keep the tears from his eyes. Mary rose and came toward him and he was glad the light was dim. Even so he closed his eyes when he kissed her lest a tear fall upon her face. Then he stooped to the little girls and avoided the eyes of his son.

Only when he had conquered his sudden wish to weep did he speak to Clem. “What’s the book, son?”

“A history book, Papa. I got it today at Mr. Fong’s shop.”

“What history?”

“A history of America.”

He scarcely heard Clem’s voice. He was savoring his relief, the assurance God was giving him. They were all here, all safe. He would not tell them about the danger. There was no need. It was gone. “I will put my trust in the Lord.” With these silent words he bade his heart be still.

The lamps in the mission house were all lit, and Dr. Lane was upstairs dressing for dinner. He did not encourage his wife’s ideas to the extent of wearing evening clothes every night as the English did, but he put on a fresh shirt and changed his coat. When he had left college, twenty years ago, he had been what he now called a dreamer. That is, he had believed in asceticism for the man of God. The stringency of war years had shaped him, although in his father’s house no one had actually joined the army. But they had sheltered slaves from the South, had spent a good deal of money helping them to settle and find work, and his father had been a leader in the Episcopal church in Cambridge. When he had announced his call to the mission field, however, his father had been plainly angry.

“Of course we must send missionaries to heathen lands,” he had declared to the young Henry, “but I don’t feel that we must send our best young men. My father didn’t want me to go to war, and I didn’t go.”

“God didn’t call you to go to war,” Henry had replied.

The struggle with his father, wherein he had not yielded, had helped him when a few months later he fell in love with Helen Vandervent at Old Harbor. She was then the handsomest girl he had ever seen, a creature built on a noble scale even in her youth. He was tall but she was well above his shoulder, and proud and worldly, as he soon knew. He had gone on his knees to God, asking for strength to tame her, not for strength to give her up. Even so she had not yielded to him for nearly two years. She loved him, and she told him that she did, but his belief in her love was chilled by her unwillingness to share the life he felt must be his. This she had denied.

“I don’t ask you to give up being a minister,” she had said. “Surely there are souls to be saved here at home.” Twenty years ago she had said it and he could still remember how she had looked, a tall handsome girl in a bright blue frock and coat. Even her hat was plumed with blue, but a frill of white satin lined the brim. She was queenly in youth, imperious in confidence, and his heart had staggered under the impact of her will.

“Ah, but I must serve God where He bids me go,” he had told her, summoning the reserves of his own will.

She had shrugged her shoulders and maintained her love and willfulness for nearly six months more, while by day and by night he prayed God for strength in himself and deepening in her love, that she might be softened. Strength he got, but he saw no softening in her and so he tore himself away from her one dreadful summer’s evening by the sea at Old Harbor. He had gone thither for one last trial of her love. It was an evil chance. She was surrounded by other young men, who were not beset by God and therefore were free to please her. He got her away at last and on the edge of the cliff above the beach he faced her.

“Helen, I am going to China — alone if you will not come with me.”

He was not sure that she believed it. She had shaken her head willfully and he had left her and come ahead to China not knowing whether she would follow him. Only when she was convinced that in Peking she could live a civilized life had she written at last that she would marry him. He had yielded enough to give her Peking. The first two years he had spent alone in an interior town, where life was primitive. In her heart she had never yielded, that he knew, although she believed that she was a Christian. In her way she was, he also believed. She kept his home comfortably, managed the servants with justice and carried out her ambitions for the children.

He worried secretly about his son. There was something hard and proud in the boy. William laughed too seldom; he fell into a dark fury at any small family joke made at his expense, even in affection.

Sometimes, musing upon this dear only son, he remembered a foolish thing his wife had done. She had taken the boy, when he was only nine years old, to an audience with the Empress Dowager. Once a year the Old Buddha gave a party to the American ladies. Somehow upon that occasion Helen had told the chief lady-in-waiting that she would like to bring her son to pay his respects to the Empress. The lady had laughed, had said something to the Empress, who was in one of her unaccountable moods, alternating between childishness and tyranny. Then the lady had said, “Our ancient Ancestor says she would like to see a foreign little boy. Please bring him on the next feast day, which is the Crack of Spring.”

Upon a cold day William had gone with his mother to the Imperial Palace and had waited hours in an icy anteroom. At the hour of noon a tall eunuch had summoned them at last into The Presence. William had walked behind his mother and at the command of the eunuch had bowed very low before the spectacular old woman sitting on a glittering dragon throne. It was understood even then that no Americans were required to prostrate themselves.

The Empress was in a good mood. The brilliant and still wintry sun streamed across the tiled floors and fell upon her gold encrusted robes and upon her long jeweled hands lying over her knees. William saw first the embroidered edge of her yellow satin robe, and then lifting his eyes higher, he saw the fabulous hands and then the ends of her long jade necklace and so his eyes rose at last to the enameled face, to the large shining eyes, to the elaborate jeweled headdress. Eunuchs and ladies, seeing this boldness of this child, waited for the royal fury. It did not fall. In the eyes of the young handsome American boy the Empress saw such worship, such admiring awe, that she laughed. Then everybody laughed except William, who stood gazing at her without response. Suddenly the mood changed. The Empress frowned, waved her encased fingertips, and turned away her head.

The Chief Eunuch stepped forward instantly and hurried them away.

“Why did the Empress get angry with me?” William asked his father when at home he was once again warmed and fed.

“Who can understand the heart of the Empress?” he replied.

Mrs. Lane hastened to speak. “William, we must remember that you are the only American boy who has ever seen the great Empress Dowager of China. That’s the important thing, isn’t it?”

Dr. Lane had not liked this.

“Helen, in the sight of God, all are alike,” he had reminded his wife.

“Of course, I know that,” she replied. “But we aren’t God, are we? The Empress is still the Empress and there is no use in pretending that William has not had a great honor, for he has. It’s a wonderful thing and I must say that if I hadn’t had the courage to push forward and ask for it, he would not have had the chance.”

Dr. Lane, thinking now of his son, sighed as he so often did, without knowing it. Helen had not changed very much. Sometimes, although she observed quite carefully all the outward forms of religion, he feared that at heart she was nevertheless a worldly woman.

William, who had been named for Helen’s father, not his, had grown up clever and proud. Whether the boy’s heart had ever been touched he did not know. Perhaps a boy’s heart was never touched until the dews of young manhood fell upon it. Dr. Lane remembered even himself as a callous youth until suddenly one day when he was almost twenty he had perceived that life was a gift in his hand, to be used or wasted. God had spoken to him at that moment.

The Chinese dinner gong struck softly, and he turned the oil lamp low. It was a fine bit of furnishing, something Helen had contrived from a Ming jar. She had a taste for luxury. Outside Peking it might not have been fitting to a minister of Christ who secretly believed in poverty, but in Peking the houses of the diplomats were so much richer that this house was not remarkable. The fantastic extravagance of the Imperial Court set the atmosphere of the city. Yet the old Empress was conscience-stricken now. The monies which had been collected from the people for a modern navy she had spent upon a huge marble boat, set in the lake at the Summer Palace. While her ministers prophesied disaster from the West and the young Emperor fomented secret rebellion, she was dickering with that absurd secret society of the Boxers. They, excited by her notice, were boasting like fools that they were invulnerable. Neither swords nor bullets, they declared, could pierce their flesh. They had a magic, they told the superstitious Empress, and she might be desperate enough to believe them.

He went slowly down the carpeted stairs, uneasy in his heart, not knowing what to do. Precautions would be taken, of course, by the American Embassy. Yet should he wait for this? William was ready for college, and Helen longed for a summer at home. Home was always America.

He went into the dining room where his family was waiting for him and took his seat at the head of the oval table. The linen was fine and the Chinese nuns at the Catholic convent had embroidered it with a large heavy monogram. It was the sort of thing, he told himself, which looked expensive but was not. The nuns worked cheaply and he had not the heart to deny Helen beauty of so little cost. After all, she had given up a great deal to become his wife. She missed the New York season every year, music and theater and parties. She had never enjoyed Chinese theater although the finest was here in Peking and this was as well, perhaps, for most of the missionaries were still puritans and he was always uneasily conscious of their criticism, unspoken, of his wife. Most of them came from simpler homes than his in America and this did not make them more merciful. Perhaps had she had time to learn Chinese — yet for that he could scarcely blame her. William had been born a scant year after their marriage and the two girls followed quickly. Since her passionate anger with him that day when she found herself pregnant for the third time, there had been no more children.

He folded his napkin and looked about the table at every face. Ruth was growing very pretty. She looked like his side of the family. William and Henrietta took after their mother, the boy was handsome but Henrietta had missed her mother’s distinction. She would have to go in for good works. He was not sure that he wanted any of his children to be missionaries. That was as God willed. He smiled at them.

“How would my family like to go home for this summer?”

Wang, robed in a long white linen gown, was serving the soup. From it rose the smell of chicken delicately flavored with fresh ginger.

“Why, Henry!” his wife exclaimed. “I thought you said we couldn’t this year because the house at Peitaiho was costing so much.”

Like most of the missionaries they had a summer home at the seashore. A hurricane had torn the roof from the walls during the winter and it had cost some hundreds of Chinese dollars to replace.

“We could rent the house,” he replied. “That would pay something toward the tickets. I don’t think we can ask the Board for expenses, since my furlough is not due yet.”

“I don’t want to go,” Henrietta announced in a flat voice. She was gulping her soup but Dr. Lane did not correct her. He had a sympathy with Henrietta which he himself could not explain.

“But is William quite ready for Harvard?” Mrs. Lane asked. Her eyes were upon Wang as he served croutons.

“Since he has been taught by English standards, I believe he would have no difficulty,” Dr. Lane replied. He disliked soup, and he helped himself well to the crisp croutons.

“I’d like to go,” William said. The thought of having no more to face the arrogance of English boys, who still called all Americans rebels and missionaries yellow dogs, cheered him. He began to eat with sudden appetite.

Ruth was silent, her mild blue eyes stealing from face to face.

“I had better tell you the truth,” Dr. Lane decided. “I do not at all like the way things look. Something is seething in the countryside. The young Emperor is in difficulties again with the Old Empress and she has locked him up. The gossip is that she is determined to kill his tutors for encouraging his Western ideas. But she will have to do something to satisfy her ministers. They are outraged with the new foreign concessions she has been compelled to give the German government. If she should take it into her ignorant old head to exterminate all foreigners, I don’t want my family here.”

He tried to speak humorously, but they saw that he was anxious. His quiet rather delicate face, always pale, now looked white above his clipped gray beard and mustache.

“I’ve always said the Chinese hate us,” Mrs. Lane said.

“I don’t believe they hate us,” he said mildly.

“They’ve killed those German missionaries,” she argued.

He put down his soup spoon. “That was an accident, as I’ve told you, Helen. The bandits just happened to attack a town where the Germans were.”

“Even bandits have no right to kill foreigners,” she retorted. No one paid any heed to Wang until she said almost violently, “Wang, take away the soup plates!”

“I don’t think Wang hates us, Mother,” Ruth said when he had left the room. Her voice, soft and timid, was different from the other voices. Even Dr. Lane, accustomed to many years of preaching, spoke with an articulate clarity which was almost forceful.

“That’s because he gets paid,” Mrs. Lane replied.

Dr. Lane felt obliged, for the sake of the children, to pursue truth. “If the Chinese feel antiforeign, it is the result of the way Germany has behaved. To seize ports and demand the use of the whole bay, besides all that indemnity, just made an excuse for the murder of the missionaries. Then Russia, then England, then even our own government — all this is at the bottom of these so-called antiforeign outbreaks. Naturally the Chinese don’t want to see their country sliced away.”

Mrs. Lane interrupted. “Oh, of course, Henry, you always think the Chinese are right!” She went on, repressing his attempted reply. “If there is any danger, I want to go away at once. But I won’t go without you. I will not allow you to sacrifice yourself for these people. Your first duty is to the children and to me.”

“I don’t think I can go,” he replied. “I don’t think I ought to go. The Chinese Christians will expect me to stay. The Boxers will be against them as well as us, if things break loose. Of course the Legation soldiers will protect us, but I don’t want you and the children to face a siege, if it comes to that. But it would not look well for me to run. It would not be possible for my conscience. My duty to God comes first.”

The children fell into silence. By the patient firmness with which their father spoke they understood that he was determined to go through an argument with their mother. Usually she won, but when their father brought God into the conversation this early, they guessed the end. Alone he might lose, but under that divine leadership, he would prevail even against her.

Yet only a few days later Mrs. Lane was ready to go and at once. It was Saturday and Dr. Lane was working on his usual Sunday sermon. He had chosen a text strangely inept for the times. “The wicked flee when no man pursueth,” and he was weaving his thoughts, divinely directed, about the profound meaning hidden in these words, when he heard Mrs. Lane’s voice crying aloud his name. Almost immediately the door of his study opened, and he saw William. The boy’s garments were covered with dust, his face was ashen and there was a cut on his forehead. He stood there speechless.

Dr. Lane cried out, rising from his chair. “William! What has happened to you?”

William’s lips moved. “The — the people — a mob—”

“What?” Dr. Lane exclaimed. He hurried into the hall and there found his wife sitting upon one of the carved Chinese chairs, looking faint.

“Helen, what—”

“There was a mob!” she cried. “I thought we couldn’t get away. If it hadn’t been for Lao Li — William and I crowded into the same riksha.”

“Where was this?” Dr. Lane broke in.

“At that tailor shop on Hatamen Street, where I always go for William’s clothes. He needs a new suit—”

“What did William do?” Dr. Lane demanded. Instinctively he knew that someone had done something. Mobs did not gather without cause.

Mrs. Lane sobbed. “Nothing — I don’t know! There was a man sleeping against his riksha when we came out — a beggar. William pushed him with his foot; he didn’t kick him. The people sprang at us from every door. Oh, Henry, I want to get right out of here — all of us!”

He soothed her gently, directing Wang meanwhile to make some tea. “Helen, I quite agree that you should go. The people are very touchy. Don’t go out again, my dear. There might be a real incident.”

“It was an incident!” she insisted. “If you’d seen their frightful faces — where’s William? Henry, you must find William! They pushed him down into the dust, and if Lao Li hadn’t helped him, they would have trampled him to death.”

“Go into the living room and wait for your tea,” Dr. Lane said. He was very much disturbed, but it would not do to show it. He had told William, how often, never to touch a Chinese. They considered it an indignity to be touched. Once, he remembered, in a New Year’s crowd upon the street when he had taken the children out to see the sights, William in six-year-old impatience had pulled the queue of a tall old gentleman standing in front of him, and the man had turned on them in a fury. Dr. Lane had been compelled to apologize again and again, and only William’s youth had saved them from serious trouble.

He searched for William and found him upstairs in his room, changing his clothes. He had put a bit of gauze and some sticking plaster on his forehead.

“Did you disinfect that cut?” Dr. Lane asked.

“Yes, sir, thoroughly,” William said.

The boy’s face was still white, Dr. Lane noticed. “You had better go downstairs and have some tea with your mother. You look rather shaken.”

“I do feel so, a bit.”

“Never touch a Chinese. Do you remember?” Dr. Lane said with unusual sternness.

“It was a beggar, leaning against the riksha.”

“Never mind who he is or what he is doing. Never touch a Chinese!” Dr. Lane repeated more loudly.

“Yes, sir.”

William turned his back on his father and began tying a fresh tie. His hands were trembling and he stood so that his father could not see him. The people had turned on him, ignorant common people who did not know his name! He, American and white, the son of privilege, had been beset by poor and filthy people. He would never feel safe again. He wanted to get away from Peking, from China, from these hordes of people—

“You might have been killed,” his father said.

William could not deny it. It was true. He might have been trampled upon by vile bare feet. Lao Li had lifted him up and shielded him until he could get to the riksha where his mother was shrieking. They had clung together in the riksha while Lao Li, bending his head, butted his way through the crowd and William had stared out at the angry people, pressing against the wheels. He would never forget the faces, never as long as he lived.

The next week with his mother and sisters he left Peking.

The northern spring drew on. The duststorms subsided, the willow trees grew green and the peach trees bloomed. The festival of Clear Spring was observed with the usual joy and freedom. People strolled along the streets, the men carrying bird cages and the women their children, and over the doorways of houses were hung the mingled branches of willow green and peach pink. The Imperial Court made great holiday of the feast and the Old Empress ordered special theatricals. Outwardly the city was as calm, as stable, as it had been for hundreds of years, and yet every Chinese past childhood knew that it was not so.

The Empress had expressed her feelings in December, when the two German missionaries had been killed in the province of Shantung. The foreign governments had demanded that the provincial governor, Yu Hsien, be removed. The palace news trickled through the city, through eunuchs and servants. Everybody heard that the Old Buddha, as they called the Empress, had at first refused to withdraw Yu Hsien. Her ministers had surrounded her, telling her the size of the foreign guns and the number of soldiers already in the foreign legations. She would not believe that foreigners could prevail against her, but she had been compelled by her ministers. Yet when she had withdrawn Yu Hsien and had appointed Yuan Shih K’ai in his place, as her ministers had recommended, she had given the huge inner province of Shansi to Yu Hsien. In a rage she had set him higher than before, and the people had laughed in rueful admiration. “Our Old Buddha,” they told each other, “our Old Buddha always has her way. She is a woman as well as ruler.” They were proud of her, though they hated her.

The spring had never been more beautiful. The Americans in the city were reassured by the warmth of the sun, by the blossoming fruit trees, by the amiability of the crowds upon the streets. The guards sent the year before to strengthen the legations had been withdrawn again, and the murder of the missionaries had been paid for. Shansi was far enough away so that Yu Hsien, though as high a governor as before, seemed banished, and life in the wide streets went on as usual.

Nevertheless the consuls had warned all Westerners to stay off the streets during the festival, lest some brawl arise which might make cause for fresh trouble. But the day passed in peace, and in the afternoon the foreigners came out of their compounds and walked about. In the morning the farmers had brought in fresh young greens from outside the city, turnips and radishes and onions and garlic from their new fields, and the people, surfeited with the bread and sweet potatoes of winter, ate to renew their blood. The hundreds of the poor who could not buy went outside the city gates to dig the sweet clover and shepherd’s purse to roll in their sheets of baked bread. Children played in the sunshine beside their mothers, shedding their padded coats and running about barebacked.

Clem Miller, pursuing his daily round, felt no difference upon the streets. Since the day when William Lane had stopped the fight he had spoken to no white person outside his own family. His father, he knew, was disturbed and uneasy, but then he was always anxious lest their food be short and always trying to deny anxiety even to himself, lest perchance God, whom he yearned to believe was tender and careful of His own, be made angry by the unbelief of Paul Miller and so refuse to supply food to those who depended upon him. Clem himself had no direct experience of God. Though he prayed as he had been taught, night and morning and sometimes feverishly in between, on the chance that it might do good when their food was low or when there was no cash to pay the landlord, he was still not sure that God gave such gifts. He wondered if his father, too, was not sure and if uncertainty were the cause of his father’s uneasiness. He loved his father and felt something childlike in him and he asked no more for proof of faith, only eating the less at home. It was easier to declare himself not hungry, and he filled himself on the sweetmeats that were always on the table when he went to teach Mr. Fong’s eldest son at the bookshop.

For Mr. Fong, observing the American boy’s thin body and hollowed cheeks, had taken pity. He said to Mrs. Fong, the mother of his children, “See how the young foreigner eats up the sweets! He does not get enough food. Put some small meat rolls in the dish tomorrow, and boil eggs and peel them and set them on the table.”

Mrs. Fong was a Buddhist and ate neither meat nor eggs herself, but she did not believe that foreigners would go to heaven anyhow, and since she would gain merit for her soul by feeding one who could make no return, she obeyed her husband. Each day, therefore, Clem found some sort of hearty food waiting, and his pupil Yusan urged him to eat, having been so bidden by his mother. Clem ate, thinking that perhaps this also was God’s provision. Yet it was hard to believe that God used heathen to perform his mercies. In confusion he believed and did not believe, and meanwhile his growing body would have starved without the food.

No one spoke to him of the Empress and her whims or of the demands now of Italy as well as Germany. Italy was a place of which he had never heard except that Christopher Columbus had come from there. No one told him either of the warships steaming into Chinese harbors from Britain, Germany and France. His world was in the dust of Peking, and when he dreamed it was of a farm in a place called Pennsylvania. How big Pennsylvania was he did not know, except that it was more than a city. He had learned when he was quite little not to ask his parents about it because it made them both sad and sometimes his mother wept.

The festival ended. One spring day followed another and May passed into June. People were eating big yellow apricots and one morning Mrs. Fong set a dish of them on the table.

“Eat these, little brother,” she bade Clem. “They cleanse the blood.”

He ate two and against his sense of decency hid two in his pockets to give his sisters when he went home after the lesson. These he bade them eat in secret, lest their father discover in Mrs. Fong a new source for food and go there to beg in God’s name. Ever since he had heard William Lane’s voice of scorn Clem could not think of his father asking a Chinese for food. Yet when he saw the eagerness with which his younger sisters seized the fruit he brought home to them, he could not refrain the next day from hiding a few cakes in his pockets and then two of the meat rolls. It was a sort of stealing, his ready conscience told him, and was it better to thieve than beg, and was he not worse than his father? “At least I do not take the food in the name of God,” he told himself, and continued to take it.

But guilt made him anxious one morning when Mr. Fong came into the sunlit brick-floored room. Mr. Fong sat down and drew his rusty black silk gown up over his knees. He was a tall man, a native of the city, and his smooth face was egg-shaped. Today, since it was warm, he had taken off his black cap. He had been freshly shaved and his queue was combed and braided with a black silk cord.

“Eh,” he began, looking at Clem. “I have something to say to you, Little Brother.”

“What is it, Elder Uncle?” Clem asked, and was much afraid.

“While I talk, you eat,” Mr. Fong said kindly. He clapped his hands at his eldest son, looking at him with always fond eyes. “Yusan, you go away and play somewhere.”

Yusan, pleased to be free, tied his book in a blue cotton square, thrust it in a drawer and left the room.

“Drink some tea,” Mr. Fong said to Clem. “What I am about to say does not mean that I am angry.”

Clem could neither eat nor drink upon these words. What would he do if kind Mr. Fong wanted him to come no more? There would be an end of books and food.

Mr. Fong got up and shut the door and drew the wooden bar across it. Then he sat himself down so near to Clem that his voice could pass into his ear.

“The Old Empress is about to command that all foreigners leave our city — even our country.” These were the horrifying words Clem now heard.

“But why?” he gasped.

“Hush — do you know nothing? Has your father not been told? You must go quickly or—” Mr. Fong drew his hand across his throat.

“What have they done?” Clem demanded. It did not occur to him for the moment that he himself was a foreigner, and the word “they” came to his tongue instead of “we.”

That his parents were foreign, he well knew. They were foreign even to him, whose birth and whose memories were only of the Chinese earth. They had no money to go away. But where could they hide? Who would dare to take them in? He could not believe that the proud missionaries would shelter them, nor could he ask Mr. Fong to risk the lives of his own family.

Meanwhile he felt cold and his knees began to tremble.

Mr. Fong cleared his throat, stroked his bare chin and began again his guttural whisper. “The foreign governments, you understand, are cutting up our country like a melon. This piece is for the Ying people, this piece is for the Teh people, this piece is for I-Ta-Lee, this for the wild Ruh people to the north.”

“My parents are Americans,” Clem urged.

Mr. Fong rolled his head around rapidly on his shoulders. “Your Mei people I know. They do not slice with a knife, but they come after the slices are cut and they say to us, ‘Since you have sliced to these other peoples, we too must be given some gift.’ True, true, you Mei people are better. You are against slicing, but you also wish gifts.”

“I have heard nothing,” Clem said doggedly.

“There is no time to tell you everything now,” Mr. Fong said. “Listen to this one word, Little Brother. Go home and tell your parents to flee to Shanghai. The times are bad. Do not delay lest the way be closed. I have a relative who works in the palace. I fear what is about to happen.”

“My father will not go,” Clem said sadly. “He believes in God.”

“This is no time to believe in God,” Mr. Fong replied in a sensible voice. “Tell him to save his family first.”

He rose, and opening the drawer he removed the blue cotton square from his son’s book and filled it with cakes and fruit. “Take this with you. Remember I do not hate you. If I dared I would ask your family here. But it would do them no good and my family would only be killed with them. We have been warned. Come no more, Little Brother, alas!”

So saying he thrust Clem out of a small back door. Clem found himself in an alleyway. On the street it seemed impossible to believe that doom hung over the city. It was a morning as mild as summer. The people of the city had risen from their beds, had washed themselves, had eaten, had set their faces to seem the same as on any other day. Clem had as usual left home very early, before the shops had taken down their boards, for Mr. Fong believed that the human brain was most active at sunrise. Often when Clem hurried on his way he met straggling rows of sleepy schoolboys, their books wrapped in blue cotton squares under their arms, already on their way to school. This morning, he remembered now, he had met none, and had wondered that he was so early.

Now hurrying on his way he knew that schools should be open and yet he saw not one schoolboy, and surely the shops must have taken down their boards, and yet they had not, although the sun was high. He made his way through strangely silent streets toward his home. Yet before he could reach it, at some signal he neither saw nor heard, the city began to stir, not to its usual life, but to something new and frightful. Good people stayed inside their gates, but the evil came out. Clem, clinging to walls and hiding in doorways, heard a bestial shouting, a rising roar, near the very quarter where the foreign legations were. There, too, the wealthy missionaries lived, the princes of the church. He hastened on toward his own. Perhaps they might be safe hidden among the houses of the poor. Perhaps God had some purpose, after all, in sheltering those who bore a cross.

At this moment Mr. Fong was looking up and down the street. He too saw that this day was different from any other and he knew why. His cousin had visited him about midnight and had told him what had taken place in the palace. Doubtless half the people in the city now knew. Many families had relatives inside the palace, women servants and court ladies, eunuchs who held offices from cooks to ministers, and these sowed among the people outside the Forbidden City the sayings and doings of those within. There was nothing the people did not know about their rulers.

Mr. Fong, remembering the agitated hours of last midnight, now decided to put up the boards of his shop and cease business for the day. Whatever happened he did not want to seem to know anything about it. He was a brave man but not a foolhardy one. He knew that the Old Woman would certainly lose but that she would be desperate and arrogant before she knew herself lost. Mr. Fong had read too much Western science. He knew that the Boxers could not possibly survive iron bullets. Still, it would take time to prove this. The Old Woman was so stubborn that she would have to see foreign armies marching into the city before she believed it could happen. He sighed in the semidarkness of his shop and was glad that he had had the prudence to buy up two months’ supply of millet and wheat. In the back court his wife had eleven hens and he had planted in another corner away from the chicken coop a small patch of cabbage. They would not starve.

He did not, however, feel strong enough to join his family for an hour or so. He wanted to be alone and as his usual pretext he drew out his account books and opened his ink boxes and uncovered his brushes. His wife never disturbed him when he was thinking, as she supposed, about money matters. Actually his mind went over all that his cousin had told the night before.

The city, his cousin had said, was full of Boxers. They were now bold enough to enter at every gate. Indeed they were wholly fearless ever since Prince Tuan had persuaded the Empress to let them come even into her presence and show proof of their magic powers.

“But are they magic?” Mr. Fong had asked his cousin with anxiety. In the midnight silence his reason was not so strong as by day.

“They are flesh and blood,” his old cousin had replied scornfully. This cousin was only a scribe in the palace but he was a man of sense and learning.

On the ninth day of the month, the cousin then went on to say, the very day when the Empress had returned to the city from the Summer Palace, some Boxers had gone to the race course three miles west of Peking and had set a fire, and they had thrown a Chinese Christian into the flames to burn to death. Inside the palace the Empress was telling her ministers that she would drive the foreigners from the city.

On the eleventh day, the cousin said, the Chancellor of the Japanese Legation was murdered outside the walls of the city. He had gone to the railway station to discover perhaps when the trains would run again to Peking. No trains were running now.

After telling all this, the cousin had gone away, drenched in gloom.

Mr. Fong sat another hour over his figures and then he closed his books, put them in the drawer and locked it. He went back into the inner courts where his family waited. They were all quiet, even Mrs. Fong. She was getting the noonday meal ready.

“Put more water into the millet from now on,” he commanded her. “We will drink soup instead of eating porridge.”

“Eh,” she sighed. “If we only live—”

He did not answer this. Having nothing else to do, he went to his room and began to read the Book of Changes, in which he often said all was foretold if one had the wit to understand.

After this silent meal, at which he strictly forbade any one of his family to go into the street and commanded the children to play quietly in the innermost court, he went to bed and to sleep for the afternoon. He rose only to eat once more at dusk and then he went back to bed. There was nothing he could do, he told his wife, and he had better save his strength for the days to come.

At midnight he woke abruptly to hear his wife screaming in his ears.

“Fong-ah!” she was calling. “Fong-ah, wake up.”

He had buried himself so deep in sleep that it was a minute or two before he could grunt a reply.

“Eh — what—” he muttered.

“The city is on fire!” she screamed.

He woke then and shuffled into his slippers lest a centipede sting him and ran into the court and looked up. The sky was red and the night was as light as day.

The children were awake now, and all were crying with fright and he turned on them fiercely when he came back into the house. “Be silent!” he commanded them. “Do you want the neighbors to think you are weeping for the foreigners?”

They fell silent instantly and he crept to his shop and opened the boards to the central door two inches, enough so that he could peer into the street. Twenty fires lit the sky and he knew what they were. The houses and churches of the Christians were burning. He closed the boards again and went back to his family. They were gathered in a small huddle in the gloom of the main room.

“Go back to bed,” he told them. “Fortunately we are not Christians and we will survive.”

Clem had waked his father after a moment of not knowing what to do. The fires were not near the hutung where they lived. They were nearly all in the better part of the city, near the Legation Quarters. He had not gone into the street since Mr. Fong had given him the warning. Even his father had gone out only by night — to beg, he supposed, at some missionary door, for he had come back with three loaves of foreign bread and some tinned stuff. One tin held Australian butter. Clem had never tasted butter. That night they had each eaten a slice of bread spread with the yellow butter and he had savored it curiously.

“We made our own butter on the farm,” his father said suddenly. Clem had been about to ask how when his mother said in a heartbroken voice, “Paul, don’t talk about the farm!”

Clem went to bed as soon as evening prayer was done, and had slept until the light from the red sky had wakened him in his corner of the small center room where his bed stood, a couch by day. He had got up and gone out into the court and then fearfully into the narrow street. There was no one in sight but he hurried through the gate again and barred it. Then because he was afraid and lonely he felt compelled to wake his father.

His father opened his eyes at once, silent and aware, and Clem motioned to him to come into the other room.

“Fires in the city!” he whispered.

His father came barefoot and in his underdrawers and they stared at the sky together.

“Don’t wake your mother or the girls,” his father whispered. “It’s a terrible sight — God’s judgment. I must go into the streets, Clem, to see what I can do. People will be suffering. You stay here.”

“Oh Papa,” Clem whispered, “don’t go. How shall I find you if something happens to you?”

“Nothing will happen,” his father said. “We will pray together before I go — as soon as I get my clothes on.”

Quickly his father was back again, dressed in his ragged cotton suit. “On your knees, dear boy,” he said in the same ghostly whisper.

For once Clem knelt willingly. He was helpless. They were all helpless. Now if ever God must save them.

“God who hearest all,” his father prayed, “Thou knows what is going on in this city. I feel I ought to be about my business and Thine. Probably there are a good many suffering people out there we ought to be looking after. Fires bring suffering as Thou knows. Protect my dear ones while I am gone and especially give strength to my dear son.”

His father paused and then in his usual firm voice he added, “Thy will be done, on earth as in heaven, for Thy Name’s sake. Amen!”

They got up and his father shook Clem’s hand strongly and was gone.

It was nearly dawn before Clem, sleepless upon the board of his bed, heard his father’s footsteps carefully upon the threshold. He sat up in bed and saw his father at the door drenched with sweat and black with smoke.

“I must clean myself before your mother sees me,” he said. “Get me some water in the basin — some soap if we have any. I’ll wash here in the court. Has your mother waked?”

“No,” Clem said and got out of bed. He went to the old well in the little courtyard and let down the wooden bucket. A bit of soap was hidden where he had left it above a beam, his own bit of soap, still left from a yellow bar his mother had managed to give him at Christmas. He stood beside his father while he stripped and began to wash.

“The Boxers are in the city,” his father said in a low voice. “The Old Empress has given us up. We are in the hands of God. The persecution of the Christians has begun.”

“What about the other foreigners?” Clem asked. For the first time he knew that his place must be among those who had rejected him. William Lane, that proud boy—

“I went to Brother Lane’s house,” his father was saying. “Of all of them, Brother Lane is the kindest. He gave me the food I have brought back and a little money. A man of tender heart! He is alone in his compound. He has sent his family away to Shanghai. They went before the railroads were broken. He has been sheltering Chinese Christians but now they are leaving him. It is safer for them to be among their own people.”

Now Clem was really afraid. If the railroads were broken Peking was cut off.

His father looked at him tenderly. “Are you fearful, Clem? Don’t be so, my son. The Lord is the strength of our lives. Of whom shall we be afraid?”

Clem did not answer. They were alone among enemies. He sent his own angry prayer toward the sky, where sunshine and smoke were in combat. “God, if you fail my father, I will never pray again.”

Then he turned and went into the house and heard his sisters talking softly over their clay doll while their mother still slept.

Mr. Fong knew upon each day what had happened in the palace. His old cousin stole out by night to report the doings of the Empress whom he now called the Old Demon.

“A mighty struggle is going on,” he declared to Mr. Fong in the depths of the night. The two men sat in the shop in darkness. The cousin would not allow a candle to be lit, neither would he allow the presence of Mrs. Fong. His hatred of the Empress had become so violent that he trusted no woman. Yet his family feeling was such that he felt obliged to tell Mr. Fong of all possible dangers in order that the Fong clan might be kept safe.

Mr. Fong dared not tell his cousin of their one real danger, which was Clem. Neighbors had seen the foreign boy coming day after day to the house.

“Proceed,” Mr. Fong said to his cousin.

“Prince Ching has been dismissed. He was the only reasonable one. She has appointed that blockhead Prince Tuan and three others who understand nothing. This is to prepare for her open union with the foolish Boxers.”

On the sixteenth day of this month the cousin reported that the Empress had called a meeting of her clansmen and then of the Manchus to whom she belonged and the Chinese whom she ruled. To these she spoke long of the evils the foreigners had done. She said the Manchus wanted war.

“Then she was confounded,” the cousin whispered, “for even among the Manchus there was Natsung, a man of sense, who told her she could not fight the world. He was upheld by a Chinese, Hsu Ching-cheng. The young Emperor, as her nephew, also begged her not to ruin the country. Upon this the great quarrel burst forth. That fool Prince Tuan spoke for the Boxers, though Prince Su spoke against him, saying that it was madness to believe that these ignorant men could not be shot to strips of flesh.”

On the eighteenth day the cousin told Mr. Fong that the Empress had seen the Boxers prove their powers, and she had decided to join with them.

“When the young Emperor heard the Old Demon declare this,” the cousin said, “he began to weep aloud and he left the room. It is now too late for us to hope. Prepare yourself, Elder Brother, and prepare our family for what must come, for we are lost. The forts at Tientsin have already fallen to the foreign armies but our people do not know it. Neither do the foreigners here in the city know it, since they have no word from the advancing armies sent to rescue them. And the Old Demon puts her faith in these monsters, the Boxers! Tomorrow, before the foreigners can hear of the loss of the forts or of their own coming rescue, she will demand that they leave the city. But how can they go, hundreds of them with women and little children? They will not go. Then the Boxers will try to kill them all. For this our people will be cruelly punished when the foreign armies reach the city. Prepare — prepare, Elder Brother!”

On the twentieth day of that month Clem was waked by his mother in the early morning. He opened his eyes and saw her finger on her lips. He got up and followed her into the court. There were times when between his parents he felt he had no life of his own. Each made him the keeper of secrets from the other, each strove to bear the burden of danger alone, with only Clem’s help.

“Clem dear,” his mother said in her pretty coaxing voice. In the dawn she had a pale ghostlike look and he saw what he had seen before but today too clearly, that she was wasting away under this strain of waiting for lonely death.

“Yes, Mama,” he said.

“Clem, we haven’t anything left to eat. I’m afraid to tell Papa.”

“Oh Mama,” he cried. “Is all that bread gone?”

“Yes, and all the tins. I have a little flour I can mix with water for this morning. That’s all.”

He knew what she wanted and dreaded to ask him and he offered himself before she spoke.

“Then I will go into the streets and try to find something, Mama.”

“Oh Clem, I’m afraid for you to, but if you don’t Papa will, and you can slip through the hutungs better than he can. He’ll stop maybe to pray.”

“I won’t do that,” he said grimly.

“Then put on your Chinese clothes.”

“I’d better not go until after breakfast, Mama, or Papa will notice.”

“Oh yes, that’s true. Go after breakfast when he is studying his Bible.”

“Yes.”

His mother’s soft eyes were searching his face with anxious sadness. “Oh Clem, forgive me.”

“There isn’t anything to forgive, Mama. It’s not your fault.” He saw the tears well into her eyes and with love and dreadful impatience he stopped them.

“Don’t cry, please, Mama. I’ve got all I can bear.” He turned away, guilty for his anger, and yet protecting himself with it.

He was silent during the meager breakfast, silent when his father prayed longer than usual. The food was hot. They were out of fuel but he had torn some laths from a plaster wall. Their landlord did not come near them now. They were only grateful that he did not turn them into the streets.

After breakfast Clem waited for his father to go into the inner room and then he got the ragged blue cotton Chinese garments and put them on where the girls could not see him and know that he was going out. Not bidding even his mother good-by, waiting until she was in the small kitchen, he climbed the wall so that he would not leave the gate open and dropped into the alleyway.

Where in all the vast enemy city should he go for food? He dared not go to Mr. Fong. There was nowhere to go indeed except to Mr. Lane, alone in the compound. He had given them food before and he would give again, and Clem did not mind going now that William was not there. So by alleyways and back streets, all empty, he crept through the city toward the compound. None of the compounds were in the Legation Quarter, but this one was nearer than the others.

The gate was locked when he came and he pounded on it softly with his fists. A small square opened above him and the gateman’s face looked out. When he saw the foreign boy, he drew back the bar and let him in.

“Is the Teacher at home?” Clem asked safely inside.

“He is always at home now,” the gateman replied. “What is your business?”

“I have something to ask,” Clem said.

In usual times the gateman would have refused him, as Clem well knew, but now he refused no white face. These foreigners were all in piteous danger and he was a fool to stay by his own white master, but still he did. He had no wife or child and there was only his own life, which was worth little. Thus he plodded ahead of Clem to the big square house and knocked at the front door. It was opened by Dr. Lane himself, who was surprised to see a foreign boy.

“Do I know you?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” Clem replied. “But I know you, sir. I am Clem Miller.”

“Oh yes,” Dr. Lane said vaguely. “The Millers — I know your father. Come in. You shouldn’t be out on the streets.”

“My father doesn’t know that I am,” Clem replied. He stepped into the house. It looked bare and cool.

“My family is in Shanghai,” Dr. Lane said. “I’m camping out. Did you know my son William? Sit down.”

“I’ve seen him,” Clem said with caution. He sat down on the edge of a carved chair.

Dr. Lane continued to look at him with sad dark eyes. He had a kind face except that it looked as though he were not listening.

“What did you come for?” he asked in a gentle voice.

“We have no food,” Clem said simply. The blood rushed into his pale face. “I know you have helped us before, Dr. Lane. I wouldn’t have come if I had known where else to go.”

“That is quite all right,” Dr. Lane said. “I’ll be glad—”

Clem interrupted him. “One more thing, Dr. Lane. I don’t consider that when I ask you for food it’s God’s providing. I know it isn’t. I don’t think like my father on that. I wouldn’t come just for myself, either. But there’s my mother and my two sisters.”

“That’s all right,” Dr. Lane said. “I have more food than I need. A good many tins of stuff — we had just got up an order from Tientsin before the railroad was cut.”

The house was dusty, Clem saw, and the kitchen was empty. Dr. Lane seemed helpless. “I don’t know just where things are. The cook left yesterday. He was the last one. I can’t blame them. It’s very dangerous to stay.”

“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.

Mr. Fong, who was not a Christian, knew, too, from his cousin that all the foreigners in the city were locked into the Legation Quarter, and that a battle was raging against them. He had heard continuous shooting, but he did not dare to go out to see what it was. In his heart he tried to think how he could convey Clem secretly into the fortress of his own kind and so rid his household of the danger, but he could think of nothing. He did not dare tell even his cousin of Clem’s presence in the house, for if it were discovered that the cousin was at heart a friend of the young Emperor and therefore an enemy to the Old Empress, he might be arrested and tortured, and to save himself he might get grace by telling about his own relative who was shielding a foreigner. Mr. Fong said nothing and listened to everything.

To Clem day and night were alike. The door to his small inner room was kept barred and was opened only by Mrs. Fong bringing food, or sometimes by Mr. Fong coming in to feel the boy’s wrists for fever. Clem lay in a conscious stupor, refusing to remember what he had seen, neither thinking nor feeling.

Then one day, and at what hour he did not know, he felt himself unable to keep from weeping. The gathering strength of his body, too young to accept continuing sleep, roused his unwilling mind, and suddenly he saw clearly upon the background of his brain the memory of his dead family, hacked and hewed by swords, and he was strong enough for tears. His numbed spirit came back to life, and the tears flowed. From tears he rose to sobbing which he could not control, and hearing these sobs Mr. Fong hastened into the room. Clem had struggled up and was sitting on the edge of the bed, clutching his chest with his hands.

“There is no time to weep,” Mr. Fong said in a whisper. “I have been waiting for this awakening. You are too young to die of sorrow.”

He went to a chest that stood against the wall and brought out a short blue cotton coat and trousers.

“I bought these at a pawnshop two nights ago,” he went on. “The madness in the city has abated somewhat. It is said that the foreign armies are very near. I prepared the garments against this moment. They will fit you. We have made black dye for your hair and there are shoes here. Put these on, and eat well of the meal my children’s mother is cooking. She has baked loaves and wrapped salt fish and dried mustard greens into a package for you and put them into a basket such as country boys carry.”

Clem stopped sobbing. “What am I to do, Elder Brother?” he asked.

“You must make your way to the sea, to a ship,” Mr. Fong said in a whisper. His smooth face, usually so full, looked flat and his eyes were sunken under his sparse stiff brows. He had not shaved for days, and a stubble stood up on his head and his queue was ragged. “Now hear me carefully, Little Brother. All those of your kind who are not dead are locked behind walls in the foreign quarter, and a fierce battle has raged. We shall lose as soon as foreign soldiers with guns arrive at the city. Our stupid Old Woman will not know she has lost until she has to flee for her life. We can only wait for that hour, and it is not far off. But our people are not with her. You will be safe enough among the people. Avoid the cities, Little Brother. Stay close by the villages, and when you pass someone on the road, look down into the dust to hide the blue color of your eyes.”

Clem changed into the Chinese garments and though his legs trembled with weakness, the thought of escape gave him strength. He ate well of the strong meat broth and bread and garlic which Mrs. Fong set before him, all this being done in silence. When he had eaten she brought a bowl of black dye, such as old women smear upon their skulls when the hair drops out, and with a strong goose feather she smeared this dye upon his sand-colored hair and upon his eyebrows and even on his eyelashes.

“How lucky your nose is not high!” she whispered. When she had finished she stood back to look at him and admire the change. “You look better as a Chinese!”

Mr. Fong laughed soundlessly and then pressed the basket on Clem’s arm and together they took him to the small back door. “You know your way to the South Gate,” Mr. Fong whispered. “The wind now is from the south. Follow it and walk for three days, and then turn eastward to the sea. There find a ship that flies a foreign flag, and ask for a task of some sort upon it.”

Clem stood for one instant beside the door. “I thank you for my life,” he stammered.

“Do not thank us,” Mr. Fong replied. “The stupidity of the Old Woman has not made us enemies. Return to the land of your ancestors. But do not forget us. Take this, Little Brother. If I were not so poor I would give you a full purse.” He put a purse into Clem’s hand and Clem tried to push it away.

“You must take it for my own ease of mind,” Mr. Fong said. So Clem took it.

Even Yusan, his childish pupil, must give him a last gift. The boy did not understand why Clem must be hidden or why be sent out in secret, but he clung to Clem’s hand and gave him two copper coins. Mrs. Fong touched the edge of her sleeves to her eyes and patted Clem’s arm once and then twice, and Mr. Fong opened the door and Clem went out.

It was night, at what hour he could not tell, but the darkness was deep and the city was silent. He stood listening, and he heard the soft sound of the wooden bar as Mr. Fong drew it against the inside of the door. Still listening he heard in the distance the cracking of guns, a volley and then another. He could only go on, and feeling the dust soft beneath his feet, he lifted his face to the wind and let it guide him southward.