Gods Men

2

UPON A SEA AS blue as the sky above it a British ship shone as white as a snowbank. William Lane, pacing the deck after a solid English breakfast, held his head high, aware of the glances which followed him as he went. Ladies were arranging themselves in the deck chairs, and only a few minutes earlier he had helped his mother with her rug, her cushion, her knitting, her book. Henrietta was writing letters in the salon, and Ruth was playing shuffleboard. When he felt like it he would join her, but just now he wanted to walk his mile about the deck.

Upon his father’s direction they had taken passage on the first ship that left Shanghai. Only the assurance of the Consul General had persuaded them to leave.

“You cannot possibly help anyone by remaining here,” the Consul General had said irritably to Mrs. Lane, when they had gone to him for advice. “Your husband is as safe as we can make him in the Legation Quarter with all the other foreigners. They are in a state of siege, of course, but they have plenty of food and water, and relief is on the way. It is only a matter of days.”

“Why should we go then?” Henrietta had asked in her blunt voice.

The Consul General had stared at the plain-faced girl. “Merely to get on your way,” he retorted. Merely to get out of my way, he meant.

Mrs. Lane decided the matter abruptly. “We had better go, or we may not get away for months,” she told William. “I will settle you in college and Henrietta in boarding school, and we will have the summer together with your grandfather at Old Harbor. If things are quiet in Peking by autumn I will go back. If not, your father will come home. We all need a rest and a change. I am sick of China and everything Chinese.”

So they had taken passage. Since British ships docked at Vancouver, their course was northerly and the weather was cool and fine.

William Lane tried not to think of his father and a good deal of the time he succeeded. He was feeling many things at this age, everything intensely. Above all, he was heartily glad that he would never again see the English boarding school where he had been so often unhappy. He was ashamed and yet proud of being American, ashamed because to be American at the school had kept him second-class, proud, because America was bigger than England. The consciousness of an inferiority which he could not believe was real had clouded his school days. He had isolated himself both from the Americans and from the English, living in loneliness.

He was altogether ashamed of being the son of a missionary. Even the children of English missionaries were secondary. The son of the American ambassador alone had any sort of equality with the English boys, and seeing this, William had often bitterly wished that his father had been an ambassador. Men ought to consider what they were, he thought gloomily, for the sake of their sons. He hated Henrietta because when she came last year to the school she had immediately joined the Americans and had foolishly declared that she did not care what her father was. Thus William and Henrietta had been utterly divided at school and their division had not mended. She had taken as her bosom friend a girl whom he particularly despised, the daughter of an American missionary who lived in an interior city and was of a lowly Baptist sect. The girl was loathsomely freckled and her clothes were absurd. She should never have been at the school, William felt, and to have her the chosen friend of his own sister degraded him. In his loneliness he developed a grandeur of bearing, a haughtiness of look, which warned away the ribald. He avoided Henrietta because she was not afraid of him. Sometimes she laughed at him. “You look like a rooster when you prance around like that,” she had once declared in front of their schoolmates. Shouts of laughter had destroyed his soul.

“I say,” the cricket captain had cried, “you do look like a cock, you know!”

Well, that was over. He need never return to the school. Yet he did not and would not acknowledge how profoundly he would like to have been English. The most that he allowed himself was to dream occasionally as he walked the decks, his head high, that people who did not know him would think he was English. Lane was a good English name. His accent, after four years at school, was clearly English. The most fortunate youth he had ever met was the son of an English lord who spent a day at the school once when his father was visiting on shore from an English battleship in the Chinese harbor.

He passed his sister Ruth at the shuffleboard. “I wish you’d play with me now, William,” she said in a plaintive voice.

“Very well, I will,” he replied. He paused, chose his pieces and the game began. He played much better than she did. The only fun he found in playing with her at all was to allow her to seem to win until the very end when, making up his mind that it was time to stop, he suddenly came in at the finish with victory.

“Oh William!” she cried, invariably disappointed.

“I can’t help it if I’m better than you,” he replied today and sauntered away, smiling his small dry smile.

He did not like to play with Henrietta. She was a changeable player, losing quickly sometimes and again winning by some fluke that he could not foresee. He never knew where he was with her.

There were no boys on the ship whom he cared to cultivate, but there was one young man, English, some five or six years older than he, to whom he would have liked to speak, except that the chap never spoke first, and William did not want to seem American. At school the chaps always said Americans were so free, rushing about and speaking first to everybody.

He would have been considerably bored had he not thought much about his future and had there not been so many meals. Just now the morning broth was being served on little wagons, pushed by white-robed Chinese table boys and deck stewards. He approached one of the wagons, took a cup of hot beef broth and a handful of what he had taught himself to call biscuits instead of crackers, and sat down in his deck chair beside his mother. She had already chosen chicken broth as lighter fare. She complained about the plethora of food and yet, he noticed, she ate as they all did. It cost nothing more, however much one ate, but none of them would say such a thing aloud except Henrietta.

“Henrietta seems to have picked up a young man,” his mother now remarked.

She nodded toward the upper deck, and William saw his sister leaning against the rail, the wind blowing her black hair from her face. She was talking in her earnest abrupt fashion to the young Englishman. A pang shot through his heart. He renounced the friendship he had craved. Whoever was Henrietta’s friend could never be his.

“Henrietta will speak to anybody,” he told his mother. “I noticed that at school.”

Clem plodded his way across the Chinese countryside. He was shrewd in the ways of the people and no human being was strange to him. Mercy he expected of none, kindness he did not count upon, and when he did not receive these, he blamed no one.

He walked by night and slept by day in the tall sorghum cane that grew in the fields at this season. When he saw no one ahead on a road as he peered out of the growth, he took advantage of this to cover as many miles as he could of those miles still between himself and the sea. The canes cut him from the sight of any farmer working in the fields and he had only to look ahead, for he walked faster than anyone coming from behind.

One day he fell in with an old country woman. She had long passed the age of concealing herself for modesty’s sake and she had paused to relieve herself by the road. Comfort was now above all else. Clem came upon her about noon on a lonely country road and for a moment he thought her part of a bandit group. When the canes are high it is the season of bandits and often a gang of men will carry with them an old woman as a decoy.

The old woman laughed when she saw his start. “Do not be afraid of me, boy,” she said in a cheerful voice while she tied her cotton girdle about her waist.

She spoke a country dialect which Clem understood, for its roots were the same language he had heard in Peking and so he said, “Grandmother, I am not afraid of you. What harm can we do each other?”

She laughed at nothing as country women will. “You cannot do me any harm,” she said in a voice very fresh for such a wrinkled face. “Thirty years ago perhaps but not now! Where are you going?”

She fell into pace beside him and he slowed his step. It would be well for him to be seen with this old woman. He might be taken for her grandson. “I am going east,” he said.

“How is it you are alone?” she asked.

He had tried to keep the dangerous blue of his eyes away from her, but when he stole a look at her, he saw that he need not take care. She had cataracts on both eyes, not heavy as yet, but filmed enough to see no more of him than his vague outlines.

“My father died in Peking,” he said truthfully, “and I am going to find my grandfather.”

“Where is your grandfather?” she asked.

“To the east,” he replied.

“I am going eastward, too,” she said. “Let us go together.”

“How far east?” he asked with caution.

She named a small city at the edge of the province.

“How is it you are alone?” he asked in his turn.

“I have no son,” she replied. “Therefore I have no daughter-in-law. But I have a daughter who is married to an ironsmith in the city and I go there to ask for charity. My old man, her father, died last week and I sold the house. We had two thirds of an acre of land. Had I a son I would have stayed on the land. But my fate is evil. My twin sons died together in one day when they were less than a year old.”

She sighed and loosened her collar as though she could not breathe and so her wrinkled neck was bare. Clem saw around it a dirty string on which hung an amulet.

“What is it you wear on your neck, Grandmother?” he asked.

She laughed again, this time half ashamed. “How do I know what it is?” she retorted.

“Where did you get it?” Clem asked.

“Why do you want to know?” the old woman asked suspiciously.

Now the amulet was a strange one for a Chinese woman to wear. It was a small brass crucifix wrapped around with coarse black thread.

“It looks Christian,” Clem said.

The old woman gave him a frightened look. “How does a boy like you know what is Christian?” she demanded, and she buttoned her coat.

“Are you a Christian?” Clem asked softly.

The old woman began to curse. “Why should I be a Christian? The Christians are bad. Our Old Buddha is killing them. You come from Peking; you ought to know that.”

“The cross is good,” Clem said in a whisper.

She stopped in the middle of the road and heard this. “Do you say it is good?” she asked.

“My father believed the cross was good,” Clem said.

“Was your father one of Them?”

Now Clem decided to risk his life. “Yes, and he is dead. They killed him.” All this he said without her knowing that he was not Chinese.

He saw her mobile wrinkled face grow kind. “Let us sit down,” she told him. “But first look east and west and see if there is anyone in sight.”

No one was in sight. The hot noonday sun poured down upon the dusty road.

“Have you eaten?” the old woman asked.

He had been walking for four days and his store of bread was gone. He had still some of the dried mustard wrapped in the cotton kerchief. “I have not eaten,” he said.

“Then we will eat together,” the old woman told him. “I have some loaves here. I made them this morning.”

“I have some dried mustard leaves,” Clem said.

They shared their food and the old woman prattled on. “I asked Heaven to let me meet with someone who could help me on the road. I had not walked above half the time between sunrise and noon when you came. This is because of the amulet.”

“Why do you say Heaven instead of God?” Clem asked.

“It is the same,” the old woman said easily. “The priest said I need not call the name of a foreign god. I may say Heaven as I always have.”

“What priest?” Clem asked.

“I can never remember his name.”

“A foreigner?”

“Foreign, but with black hair and eyes like ours,” the old woman said. “He wore a long robe and he had a big silver cross on his breast. He prayed in a foreign tongue.”

Catholic, Clem thought. “What did this priest say the amulet meant?” he asked.

The old woman laughed. “He told me but I cannot remember. It means good, though — nothing but good.” She looked so cheerful as she chewed the steamed bread, the sun shining on her wrinkled face, that she seemed to feel no pain at being alone.

“Did he teach you no prayers?” Clem asked.

“He did teach me prayers, but I could not remember them. So he bade me say my old O-mi-to-fu that I used to say to our Kwanyin, only when I say it I am to hold the amulet in my hand, so, and that makes the prayer go to the right place in Heaven.”

Wise priest, Clem thought, to use the old prayers for the new god! He had a moment’s mild uncensuring cynicism. Prayers and faith seemed dream stuff now that his father was dead.

The old woman was still talking. “He is dead, that piteous priest. If he had been alive I would have gone to find him. He lived in a courtyard near his own temple — not a temple, you understand, of our Buddha. There were gods in it, a man hanging on a wooden shape — bleeding, he was. I asked, ‘Why does this man bleed?’ and the priest said, ‘Evil men killed him.’ There was also a lady god like the Kwanyin, but with only two hands. She had white skin and I asked the priest if she were a foreigner and he said no, it was only that the image was made in some outer country where the people are white-skinned, but if the image had been made here the lady would have skin like ours, for this is her virtue that wherever she is, she looks like the people there. The man on the cross was her son, and I said why did she not hide him from the evil men and the priest said she could not. He was a willful son and he went where he would, I suppose.”

“How is it that the priest is dead?” Clem asked with foreboding.

The old woman answered still cheerfully. “He was cut in pieces by swordsmen and they fed the pieces to the dogs and the dogs sickened and so they said he was evil. I dared not tell them that I knew he was not evil. It was the day after my old man died and I had no one to protect me.”

They sat in the sun, finished now with their meal, and Clem hearing of the priest’s dreadful end felt shadows of his own fall upon him. “Come,” he said, “let us get on our way, Grandmother.”

He decided that he would keep his secret to himself. Yet as the day went on a good plan came to him. He could pretend to be blind, keep his blue eyes closed, feel his way, act as the old woman’s grandson, and so they could walk all day more quickly and safely than by night. Then too he could use the money which Mr. Fong had given him, which until now he dared not use at an inn. Yet to make the pretense it was needful to tell the old woman who he was and she was so simple that he could not make up his mind whether he dared to trust his life into her hands.

When night drew near and a village showed itself in a distant cluster of lights, he thought he could tell her. He knew by now that she was good and only what she said she was, and if he were with her he might keep her awake to danger. If by chance she betrayed him as not Chinese, then he must make his escape as best he could.

So before they came to the village he took her aside, much to her bewilderment, for she did not know why he plucked her sleeve. Behind a large date tree, where he could see on all sides, he told her.

“Grandmother, you have been honest with me, but I have not told you who I am.”

“You are not a bandit!” she exclaimed in some terror.

“No — I am someone worse for you. My father was a foreigner, like your priest.”

“Is it true?” she exclaimed. She strained her eyes and then put up her hand to feel his face.

“It is true,” he said, “and my father and mother and my sisters were killed as the priest was killed and I go to the sea to find a ship to take me to my own country.”

“Pitiful — pitiful,” she murmured. “You are not very old. You are not yet grown.”

“No,” Clem said. “But I am alone, and so I am glad that you met with me.”

“It was the amulet,” she said. “Heaven saw us two lonely ones walking the same road and brought us together.”

“Grandmother,” he went on, “you cannot see my eyes, but they are not black as the priest’s eyes were.”

“Are they not?” she asked surprised. “What color are they, then?”

“Blue,” he told her.

“Blue?” she echoed. “But only wild beasts have blue eyes.”

“So have many of my people,” he said.

She shuddered. “Ah, I have heard that foreigners are like wild beasts!”

“My father was not,” Clem replied, “and my mother was very gentle. You would have liked her.”

“Did she speak our tongue?”

“Yes,” Clem said, and found that he could not tell more of his mother.

“Ai-ya,” the old woman sighed. “There is too much evil everywhere.”

“Grandmother,” Clem began again.

“I like to hear you call me so,” the old woman said. “I shall never have a grandson, since my sons are dead.”

“Will you help me?” Clem asked.

“Surely will I,” she replied.

And so he told her his plan and she listened, nodding. “A half-blind old woman leading a blind grandson,” she repeated.

“We can go to the village inn there and sleep under a roof. I have slept every night in the canes, and two nights it rained.”

“I have some money,” she said, fumbling in her waist.

“I also,” Clem said. “Let us spend mine first.”

“No, mine.”

“But mine, Grandmother, because when I get to my own country it will be no use to me.”

She was diverted by this. “How can money be no use?”

“We have a different coin,” he replied.

They began to walk again and planned as they went. Far from being stupid as he had thought her, she was shrewd and planned as well as he did. All her life she had been the wife of a small poor man compelled to evade the country police and tax gatherers and she knew how to seem what she was not and to hide what she was.

An hour later Clem was walking down the village street with her, his eyes shut, holding in his hand one end of a stick the other end of which she held. She led the way to the inn on the single street and asked for two places on the sleeping platform for herself and her grandson, and the innkeeper gave them without more questions than such men usually ask of those they have not seen before. The old woman told a simple story, much of it true, how her husband and son were both dead together of the same disease and how she had left only this grandson and they were returning to her old city where she had been reared and where she might find her daughter married to the ironsmith.

“What is his name?” the innkeeper asked.

“He is named Liu the Big,” the old woman said.

A traveler spoke up at this and said, “There is an ironsmith surnamed Liu who lives inside the east gate of that city and he forged me an iron for a wheel of my cart, when I came westward through there. He has the finger off one hand.”

“It is he,” the old woman said. “He lost the finger when he was testing a razor he had ground. It went through his finger like flame through snow.”

Clem passed the night lying among the travelers on a wide bed of brick overlaid with straw and slept in spite of the garlic-laden air because for the while he felt safe again.

Nights and days Clem spent thus, always as the grandson of the old woman, and each day she grew more fond of him. She told him many curious tales of her early childhood and she asked him closely about his own people and why he was here instead of in the land where he belonged and marveled that he knew nothing at all of his ancestors.

“You foreigners,” she said one day, “you grow mad with god-fever. There is something demon in your gods that they drive you so. Our gods are reasonable. They ask of us only a few good works. But for your gods good works are not enough. They must be praised and told they are the only gods and all others are false.”

She laughed and said cheerfully, “Heaven is full of gods, even as the earth is full of people, and some are good and some are evil and there is no great One Over All.”

Clem did not argue with her. There was no faith left in him except a small new faith in the goodness of a few people. Mr. Fong and his wife had been good to him and so now was this old woman good, and he listened to her as they walked over the miles, side by side unless they came among people when he took the end of the stick she held and pretended to be blind. From her lips he learned a sort of coarse wisdom as he went, and he measured it against what he had learned before and found it true. Thus, the old woman said, the great fault with Heaven and whatever gods there were was that they had not arranged that food could fall every night from the sky, enough for everybody to eat so that there could be no cause for quarrel.

“If the belly is full,” she said, “if we could know that it would always be full, men would be idle and laugh and play games like children, and then we would have peace and happiness.”

These words, Clem thought, were the wisest he had ever heard. If his father had needed to take no thought for food, then his faith might have been perfect. Assured of food, his father could have preached and prayed and become a saint.

Thus talking and thinking, sleeping in inns at night, Clem and the old woman reached the city where she must stop. He had noticed for a day or two that she seemed in an ill humor, muttering often to herself. “Well, why should I not?” this she asked herself. Or she said, “Who cares whether I—,” or “My daughter does not know if I live.”

Before they got into the city, on an afternoon after a thunderstorm during which they had taken refuge in a wayside temple where there were gods but no priests, the old woman came out with what she had been muttering to herself.

“Grandson, I ought to go to the coast with you. What will you do if I leave you? Some rascal will see your eyes and think to gain glory with the Empress and he will kill you and take your head to the capital to show for prize money.”

Clem refused at once such kindness. “Grandmother, you are old and tired. You told me yesterday that your feet were swollen.”

They made an argument out of it for a while and at last the old woman said, “Come with me at least to the door of my. daughter’s house. We will see what Big Liu says.”

To this Clem consented, and when they came to the city the old woman would not enter until just before the gates closed so that people could not see them clearly. As night fell they joined the last people crowding to get inside the gate and walking quietly along mingled with the people, they came to the house of Liu the ironsmith.

Clem’s first sight of the ironsmith all but overcame him. The forge was open to the street, and there the mighty man stood, his legs apart, his right arm uplifted and holding a great iron hammer, his left hand grasping thick tongs which held a red hot piece of metal. Upon this metal he beat with the hammer and the fiery sparks flew into the night with every blow. The ironsmith was black with smoke and his lips were drawn back from his teeth so that they showed very white, and so white, too, were the whites of his eyes, above which were fierce black brows.

“That is he,” the old woman whispered.

She went in boldly and called out above the din. “Eh, Big Liu! Is my daughter at home?”

Big Liu put down the hammer and stared at her. “It is not you, mother of my children’s mother!” This he shouted.

“It is I,” the old woman said. Then she wiped her eyes with her sleeves. “My old man her father, is dead.”

Big Liu still stared at her. “Come inside,” he commanded. When he saw Clem following he stopped again. “Who is this boy?” he asked.

“He is my foster grandson,” the old woman said and then she went on very quickly. “A poor orphan child he is, and I an old lonely woman and we fell in along the road and the gods sent him, I swear, for he took such care of me that I know he is no common child but some sort of spirit come down. His eyes are the eyes of Heaven and his heart is gentle.” Thus talking very fast while Big Liu stared the old woman tried to make Clem safe.

But Clem shook his head. “I will tell you who I am,” he said to Big Liu. They went into the inner room and all talk had to wait until the old woman and her daughter had cried their greetings, had exclaimed and wept and hugged the three small children. By this time Big Liu had taken thought and he knew that Clem was no Chinese and he was very grave. He got up and shut the doors while the women talked and wept, and at last he made them be silent and he turned to Clem.

“You are a foreigner,” he said.

“Yes,” Clem said. “I cannot hide it from you.”

Then he told him his story, and the old woman broke in often to tell how good he was and how they must help him, and if Big Liu did not think of a way, she must go with Clem herself to the sea.

Big Liu was silent for some time and even his wife looked grave and gathered her children near her. At last Big Liu said, “We must not keep you here for a single day. Were it known that there was a foreigner in my house you would be killed and we would all die with you. You must go on your way, as soon as the East Gate opens at dawn.”

Clem got up. “I will go,” he said.

Big Liu motioned with his huge black hand. “Wait — I will not send you out to die. I have an apprentice, my nephew, a lad older than you, and he shall lead you to the coast. Since you are here, wash yourself, and I will give you better garments. Then lie down to sleep for a few hours. My children’s mother shall make you food. Have you money?”

“He has no money,” the old woman said. “He would use his money on the way and so I will give him mine.”

Big Liu put out his hand again. “No, keep your money, good mother. I will give him enough.”

So it all happened. Clem obeyed Big Liu exactly as he had spoken for this big man had a voice and a manner of command, though he spoke slowly and simply. Clem washed himself all over with a wooden bucketful of hot water, and he put on some clean garments that the apprentice brought, who stared his eyes out at Clem’s white skin under his clothes.

Clem ate two bowls full of noodles and sesame oil and lay down on a bamboo couch in the kitchen while the apprentice lay on the floor. But Clem could not sleep. He knew that the ironsmith sat awake, fearful lest someone discover what was in his house, and although the old woman bade Clem not to be afraid, she could not sleep, either, and she came in again and again to see why he did not sleep and to tell him he must sleep to keep his strength. As for the apprentice, he did not like at all this new task, but still he had never been to the coast nor seen a ship, and so he was torn between fear and pleasure.

Before dawn broke Big Liu came in and Clem sprang up from the couch and put on his jacket.

The apprentice was sleeping but he got up, too, and yawned and wrapped his cotton girdle about himself and tied his queue around his head under his ragged fur cap and so they crept to the door.

“Come out this small back gate,” Big Liu said. “It lets into an alley full of filth, but still it is safer than the street.”

One moment the old woman held Clem back. She put her arms about his shoulders and patted his back and then sighed and moaned once or twice. “You will forget me when you cross that foreign sea,” she complained.

“I will never forget you,” Clem promised.

“And I have nothing to give you — yet, wait!”

She had thought of her amulet and she broke the string and tied it around his wrist, and the small cross hung there.

“I give this to you,” she said. “It will keep you safe. Only remember to say O-mi-to-fu when you pray, because the god of this amulet is used to that prayer.”

She wept a little and then pushed him from her gently, and so Clem left her and went on his way with the apprentice.

To this lad he said very little in the days that they traveled together, which days were fewer by half than those he had already come. They walked by day, the lad silent for the most part, too, and they slept at night in inns or sometimes only on a bank behind some trees for shelter, for the apprentice was fearful whenever they passed swordsmen. But never were they stopped, for Clem wore his old hat like any farmer boy and kept his eyes downcast.

When they came to the coast they parted, and Clem gave the apprentice nearly all that was left of his money. There were several ships in the harbor, and he would not let them go without finding one which would take him aboard. He was no longer afraid here, for it was a port and he saw policemen and he saw white men and women walking as they liked and riding in rikshas and carriages. He went near none of them for he did not want to be stopped in his purpose, which was to cross the sea and find his own country. But he did hear good news. Listening in an inn where he sat alone after the apprentice had left him, he heard that the Old Empress had been forced to yield to the white armies. She had fled her palace, leaving behind a young princess who had thrown herself into a well, and the foreign armies had marched into the city, plundering as they went and killing men and raping young women, so that all China was mourning the suffering which the Old Empress had brought upon them.

This Clem heard without being free to ask more about it. He wondered how the Fong household did, and whether they had shared in the suffering, and whether they in turn had been killed even as his family had been. But nothing could he know. When he had eaten he went to the docks and loitered among some sailors and on that same day he was able to find a ship and go aboard as a cabin boy. As for the apprentice, after staring half a day at the ships and wandering about the city, he left again for his home.

On the American freighter Clem made his way still eastward. The ship had brought ammunition and wheat to China and had taken away hides and vegetable oils. The hides, imperfectly cured, permeated the ship with their reek, and Clem, racked often with seasickness, wished sometimes that he too was dead. Yet the wish never lasted. Upon rolling gray seas the sun broke, the winds died and the waves subsided. Then, eating enormously in the galley with the thirty odd men who made up the crew, he wanted to live to reach the farm.

The men knew his story. They had heard it first on the pier at the port when, approaching one of them, he had asked timidly for a job on the ship.

“We don’t want no Chinks,” the sailor had replied.

“I am not Chinese,” Clem had said.

“You ain’t?” the sailor had said, unbelieving.

Clem had pointed to his eyes. “See, they are blue.”

“Damned if they ain’t,” the sailor had agreed after staring at him a moment “Hey, fellows, anybody ever seen a blue-eyed Chink?”

“When is a Chink not a Chink?” a sailor had inquired. “Why, when his ma is somethin’ else!”

“She wasn’t,” Clem had declared, with indignation. “She was good and so was my father and they were American and so am I.” But English felt strange upon his tongue after the many days when he had spoken only Chinese.

The men had gathered about him, delaying the pleasures they planned for their brief hours ashore, and with pity and wonder they had listened to his story which he had poured out. Looking from one coarse face to the other, he found himself telling everything to save his own life. Even the things he had not allowed himself to remember he told, and he began to sob again, trying not to, his fists clenched against his mouth.

The men listened and looked at each other, and one burly fellow took Clem’s head between his hands. “It’s all over, see? And we believe you, sonny. And you come with us, if we have to smuggle you. But the old man is soft enough. He’ll let you on board.”

They had dragged him before a little sharp-faced captain and made him tell his story all over again, and then he had been hired as a cabin boy. With the captain he held long conversations.

“Reckon you’ll never want to be going back to no heathen country after this!” the captain said.

“I don’t know,” Clem replied. He had mixed a whisky and soda, and set it before the captain. “I might have felt that way except that Mr. Fong saved my life. And people were kind all those days I tramped. I can’t forget the old grandmother.”

No, he could never forget. In the night, lying in his hard and narrow berth, tossed by the sea, he remembered the long days of tramping across the Chinese country, beside the old woman. Summer had ripened the fields, and the lengthening shadows of the green sorghum, high above their heads, gave them good shelter. Big Liu, too, had been kind. It would have been easy to tell the local police about a foreign boy and for the telling to have received a reward. Big Liu was poor enough to value money and Clem was a stranger. None would miss him if he died, but Big Liu had not betrayed him. Wonder and gratitude at the goodness of common men and women filled Clem’s heart with faith, not the faith of his father but a new faith, a faith which bound him to the earth.

The sailors, too, were kind, although they were rough and of an ignorance he had never yet seen. They were mannerless, coarse, drunken when they could get drink, lewd in act and speech, easily angry, always ready to fight. He thought of them as men half made, left unfinished, never taught. They knew no better than they did.

Were the people of his country all like these? He had none to judge by, never having known his own kind, except his father who he felt vaguely was a man peculiar. The delicacy of the Chinese was soothing and comfortable to remember. Here on the ship, though he knew the men were friendly to him, yet for some fault, or no fault except that a man might be surly from too much drink the night before on shore leave, he might feel his ears jerked or his head cuffed, or a blow between his shoulders might fell him. He learned it was useless to be angry, for immediately the man would joyfully urge him to fight, and he was no match for any of the men, short and slender as he was. Once he complained to the captain, but only once.

“You don’t think I’ll defend you?” the captain had said.

“No, sir,” Clem said, “except maybe to tell them to leave me alone.”

“Do they hate you?”

“No, sir. I don’t think they do; it’s like play, maybe.”

“Then put up or shut up,” the captain said.

Yet the long journey over the sea was good for Clem. An endless roar of command sounded in his ears. He was at the beck and call of all of them. Twice the ship stopped for coal, once in Japan, once again at the Hawaiian Isles, but he had no shore leave. He gazed across the dock at strange lands and unknown peoples and saw sharp mountains against the sky. At night he helped drunken sailors to bed, staggering under the load of their coarse bodies leaning on his shoulders, smelling the filthy reek of their breath. When one or another vomited before he could reach the rail, Clem had to clean the mess before the captain saw it. By morning all had to be shipshape, and sometimes there was little sleep for Clem. He loathed the coarseness of the men and yet he pitied it. They had nothing to make them better. They hated the sea, feared it, cursed it, and yet went on living by it, for they did not know what else to do. In a storm they were filled with blind terror. Clem felt old beside them, old as a father, and sometimes like a father he tended them, pulling off their sodden shoes when they slept before they could undress, bringing them coffee at dawn when they were too dazed to take watch. They were kind to him in return, half shamed because they knew him only a child, and yet helpless before him. He remained a stranger to them, aloof even while he served them. Pity prevented his blame, and his pity made them often silent when he came near them. But this he did not know. For himself he felt only increasing loneliness, and he longed for the voyage to end that he might find those who were his own.

The sea voyage ended at last and one day he went ashore into a country which was his and yet where he was still a stranger. The crew collected a purse for him, and he would never forget that. It meant that he could travel to the east on a railroad, instead of tramping the miles away as he had done across the country in China. He had not minded doing it there because he knew the people and there was the old woman at his side, but here where he did not know the people or the food it would have been different.

So though the sailors were so evil, they were good, too. On the first day ashore in San Francisco they went together to a shop and bought Clem a suit of clothes. It was too big for him, but he rolled up the pants and sleeves. They bought him two clean shirts and a red tie, a hat and a pair of shoes and three pairs of socks and a pasteboard suitcase. Then they took him to the railroad station and bought him a ticket to Pittsburgh on the day coach. There was not quite enough money, for they would not let him spend the ten dollars they had given him, and one of them had pawned a gold thumb ring he had bought in Singapore. They clapped him on the back, embraced him, and gave him good advice.

“Don’t talk with nobody, you hear, Clem?”

“Specially no women.”

“Aw, he’s too runty for women.”

“You’d be surprised if you knew women like I do. Don’t talk to ’em, Clem!”

“Don’t play no cards, Clem!”

“Send us a postcard once in a while, Clem, will ya?”

The train pulled out and he stood waving his new hat as they receded until he could see them no more. So he was alone again, riding in a train across his own country. He had a seat to himself, opposite a red-faced man in a gray suit who slept most of the time and grinned at him vaguely when he woke. “Don’t speak to nobody on the train,” the sailors had told him. “Shore fellows will take your money away from you.” He kept quiet and his wallet was in his breast pocket where he could feel it against his ribs every time he took a deep breath. When he needed money to spend on food he went into the men’s room and there alone he took out a dollar at a time, keeping his change in his hip pocket against the back of the seat.

Hour after hour, in every hour of daylight, he stared from the window, seeing a country he could not comprehend. It seemed empty and without people. Where were all the people? The mountains were higher than he could have imagined, the deserts wider and more desolate, their emptiness terrifying. To his amazement, many times at the stations he saw white men doing coolie work, and in the few fields between mountains and on the fringe of deserts he saw men and women more ragged, more poor, though white, than any he had seen in China. Where was the land of milk and honey his father used to call home?

One night while he slept upright in his seat, they rolled into green plains. When he woke at dawn it was to another country. Green fields and broad roads, big barns and compact clean farmhouses charmed his eyes. This was Pennsylvania, surely!

Long before Clem had begun his voyage William had reached America. The white English ship docked at Vancouver, and Mrs. Lane, brisk and experienced, bullied the courteous Canadian customs officers and found the best seats on the train that carried them across Canada to Montreal, where they changed for New York.

It was a smooth journey, and William enjoyed it with quiet dignity. He kept aloof from his mother and sisters, staying most of the time in the observation car where behind a magazine he listened to men’s talk. There was no difficulty in Montreal, and in New York his mother took them at once to the Murray Hill, where he had a room to himself because he was a boy. It was high ceilinged, and the tall windows had red velvet curtains held back by loops of brass. The luxury of the room and its bath pleased him. This then was America. It was better than he had feared.

They ate in a dining room where fountains played and canaries sang, and he enjoyed this, too.

“I believe in the best,” his mother said. “Besides, Papa and Mama always stayed here when we came to town.”

His mother kept him with her in New York for a week while she smoothed his path toward college, but Henrietta and Ruth she sent to her parents at Old Harbor. She did not take him at once to the office of the Mission Board. Instead she toured the best stores, asking to see young men’s clothing. When she found something she liked she made William try it on. She bought nothing, however, merely making notes of garments and prices.

With these in a small notebook in her handbag she went on the morning of the fourth day to the Board offices and there was received with a deference which was balm to William’s pride.

“Ah, Mrs. Lane,” a rosy faced white-haired executive said, “we’ve been expecting you. We had a cablegram from Dr. Lane. What can we do for you?”

“I have a good deal of shopping to do for my son’s entrance into Harvard,” Mrs. Lane said. Her voice and look were equally firm.

The plump elderly executive, a retired minister himself, looked doubtful. “We have special arrangements with medium-priced stores to give us a ten percent discount.”

Mrs. Lane interrupted without interest in the medium-priced stores. “I want to see the treasurer immediately.”

“Certainly, Mrs. Lane — this way, please,” the white-haired man said.

“You stay here, William,” Mrs. Lane commanded.

While William waited, his mother had a long interview with the mission treasurer which left him looking dazed and certainly left him silent. William had stayed in the reading room because his mother wanted, she said, to be alone with the finances. He had sauntered about, reading pamphlets impatiently. They were religious and full of hopeful accounts of the hospitals and schools and orphanages and churches with which he was entirely surfeited. He wanted to get away from everything he had known. When he entered college in the autumn he would not tell anyone who his father was or that he came from China.

“There now,” Mrs. Lane said when she emerged from the inner office. “I have everything all arranged. You’ll be able to get along nicely.” She held her long skirts in one hand and over her shoulder she said to the little mission treasurer, “Thank you, Mr. Emmons, you’ve been very helpful.”

Mr. Emmons broke his silence. “You do understand, don’t you, Mrs. Lane, that I haven’t made any promises? I mean — I’ll have to take up these rather unusual requests with the Board — evening clothes, for example—”

“I’m sure they’ll see that my son deserves some special consideration, after all we’ve been through,” Mrs. Lane said in her clear sharp voice. “Come, William, we can get the noon train after all.”

He had followed her, holding himself very straight and not speaking to the shabby little treasurer.

When they reached his grandfather’s house at Old Harbor, he was pleased to see it was a large one. It was old-fashioned and needed paint, but it stood in large, somewhat neglected grounds.

“Papa doesn’t keep things up the way he used to, I see,” his mother said. They had taken a hack at the station and now got down. She handed him her purse. “Pay the man his dollar, William,” she told him.

“Grass needs cutting,” she went on. “I suppose Papa can’t afford a gardener all the time, now he’s retired.”

The hack drove away, and William looked at the suitcases the man had set down in the path. “We’d better take what we can,” his mother said with some embarrassment. “I don’t know how many servants Papa has now. We used to have a houseman and three maids.”

She picked up two suitcases, and much against his will he took the other and followed her to the house. The door stood open and when they entered they were met by Henrietta and Ruth, dripping in bathing suits, and by a carelessly dressed old gentleman whom he recognized, though with extreme discomfort, as his grandfather.

Mrs. Lane swooped down upon him. “Well, Papa, here I am again!”

“You’ve grown a little older,” he said, looking at his tall daughter.

Mr. Vandervent was no longer imposing. He was a potbellied, mild-looking man, and he seemed timid before his tall grandson.

“How do, William,” he said, putting out a round little hand.

William clasped it coldly. “I’m very well, sir,” he replied correctly. “I hope you are, too.”

“So so,” Mr. Vandervent said. “The sea don’t really agree with me, but your grandma likes it.”

“What we’ve been through—” Mrs. Lane began.

She was interrupted by a loud scream. A tall fat woman burst through a swinging door, an apron tied about her waist.

“Helen, my goodness!”

It was her mother. They embraced and kissed. “I was just stirring up one of my chocolate cakes, thinking that William would probably — we only have two maids now, Helen — why, William, this isn’t you, never! Isn’t he the image of your father, Robert? Your great-grandfather was a real handsome man, William.”

Henrietta had disappeared and through the window William saw her walking along the shore. Ruth was standing on one foot and then another.

“William!” she now whispered. “Do get in your bathing suit. The ocean is wonderful.”

It gave him an excuse and he seized it.

“May I, Mother?”

“Go on,” his grandmother said heartily. “You’ll have time before supper.”

Supper! The word chilled his spine. He had heard it among the commoner missionaries, the Seventh Day Adventists, the Primitive Baptists, the Pentecostal people. At the English school the evening meal was always called dinner and since at his own home it had been so, too, it had not occurred to him that it could be anything else here.

He mounted the stairs with laggard steps and was arrested by his mother’s voice. “Here, William, since you’re going up, you might as well take some of the suitcases.”

He stopped, not trusting his ears, and looked at his mother. She laughed, but he discerned embarrassment in the steel gray eyes she kept averted from his. “You may as well realize that you are in America, son,” she told him. “You’ll have to do a lot of waiting on yourself here.”

He stood still for one instant; then with a passionate energy he turned and ran downstairs and loaded himself with the bags and staggered upstairs again. Once he glanced over the balustrade to see if they were looking at him, but nobody was. His mother was talking about the siege, and they had forgotten him.

No one had told Clem to telegraph to his grandfather, and he would have been reluctant to spend the money. When he got off at last at Centerville, there was no one to meet him, but he had expected no one. Carrying his suitcase, he approached a fat man who was staring at the train and scratching his head.

“Can you tell me where Mr. Charles Miller lives?” Clem inquired.

The man had started a yawn and stopped it midway. “Never heard of him.”

“He lives on a farm,” Clem said.

“Your best bet would be that way,” the man said nodding toward the south.

“Thank you,” Clem said.

The man looked surprised but said nothing and Clem began walking. His days on the sea had made his feet tender although they had once been horny from long walking on rough Chinese roads. But his muscles still were strong. The heat here was nothing to that in China, and the air was sweet with some wild fragrance. He did not see anyone after he left the small railroad town, and this was strange. Were there no people here? It occurred to him that it was nearly noon, and they might be having a meal. Even so, where were the villages? As far as he could see there was no village in sight. The fields rolled away in high green waves against a sky of solid blue. They were planted with corn, he saw with surprise. Did the people here eat only corn?

After another hour he was tired and hungry and he wished that he had stopped to buy some food. Five miles had seemed nothing in his excitement. He sat down beside a small stream and drank and rested, and while he sat there a wagon came by, pulled by two horses as high as camels. A man drove them, seated on a bench in the wagon. “Hi, there, feller,” he called down. “Wanta ride?”

Clem was cautious. Why should a stranger offer him a ride? Might not the fellow be a bandit? “No, thank you,” he replied.

The man drew the wagon to a stop. “You look like a stranger.”

Clem did not reply. The barber on the ship had clipped his hair close to get rid of the dyed hair, and he was conscious of his baldness.

“Where you goin’?” the man asked.

“To Mr. Charles Miller’s farm,” Clem replied.

The man stared at him, his jaw hanging. He was a dirty fellow, clad in a sweat-soaked shirt and blue cotton trousers. Through the unbuttoned front of his shirt Clem saw a chest woolly with repulsively red hair.

“Old Charley Miller is dead,” the man said.

The sunlight glittering upon the landscape took on the sharpness of dagger points, springing from the edges of leaves, the tips of grass, the points of fence rails. Clem’s eyes blurred and weakness laid hold upon his knees.

“When did he die?” His mouth was full of dust.

“Coupla years ago.” The man prepared for the story. He spat thick brown spittle into the road and pushed back his torn straw hat.

“Fact is, the old man hung himself in his own barn. Disappointed, that’s what. He’d been tryin’ for ten years to get a job with the Republicans, and when they got in that year they give him the sheriff’s job. He had to put somebody off a farm the very first day — mortgage couldn’t be met. He was too softhearted to do it — he was awful soft-hearted, old Charley was. He just hung himself the night before — yeah.”

The man shook his head and sighed. “Wouldn’t hurt a flea, Charley wouldn’t. Couldn’t kill a fly. Lived all alone. He had a son somewheres, but he never come home.”

“His son was my father.” The words escaped Clem like a cry.

The man stared, brown saliva drooling down his chin. “You don’t, say!”

Clem nodded. “He’s dead, too. That’s why I came to find my grandfather. But if I haven’t anybody — I guess — I guess I don’t know what to do.”

The man was kind enough. “You get up here along of me, sonny, and I’ll take you to your grandpop’s farm, anyway. There’s folks livin’ there. Maybe they’ll lend a hand.”

For lack of any directing thought Clem obeyed. He lifted his suitcase and gave it to the man and then stepping upon the axle he crawled into the seat. There in the hot sunshine he sat, his suitcase between his knees, and in silence the man drove two miles and put him down before an unpainted gate set in a decaying picket fence lost in high weeds. The wagon went away and Clem stared at a small solid stone house.

This, then, was the place of which he had dreamed as long as he could remember. The grass grew long and unkempt even in the yard. Over the house leaned an enormous sycamore tree. Under this tree he saw some ragged children, two boys and two girls. The boys were about his own age, the girls younger, or at least smaller.

They were eating dry bread, tearing at hunks of it with their teeth as they held it. When they saw him they hid the bread in their hands, holding it behind them.

“What you want?” the bigger boy asked in a gruff voice. He had a thin freckled face and his hair grew long into his neck.

“Who lives here?” Clem asked.

“Pop and Mom Berger,” a girl said. She began to chew again at her bread. “You better go way or they’ll set the dogs on you.”

“Are you their children?” Clem asked. Where could he go in a strange country where nevertheless he belonged?

The thin boy answered again. “Naw, we’re Aid children.”

Clem looked at them, comprehending nothing. “You mean — Aid is your name?”

They looked at each other, confounded by this stupidity. “Aid children,” the girl repeated.

“What do you mean?” Clem asked.

“We’re Aid children. Children what ain’t got nobody.”

Clem gazed and his heart began to shrink. He, too, had nobody. Then was he, perforce, an Aid child?

Before he could reply to this frightful question, a short stout man ambled from the open door of the house and yelled: “Here, you kids — git back to work!” The children fled behind the house, and the man stared across the tumbled grass at Clem.

“Where’d you come from?” he demanded.

“I thought Charles Miller, my grandfather, was here,” Clem said.

“Been gone two years,” the man said. “I bought the place and took over the mortgage. I never heard he had no grandson.”

“I guess my father didn’t write. We lived a long way off.”

“Out West?”

“Yes.”

“Folks still there?”

“They’re dead. That’s why I came back.”

“Ain’t none of your folks around here as I know of.”

He was about to go back into the door when something seemed to occur to him. “How old are you?” he asked.

“Fifteen,” Clem said.

“Undersize,” the man muttered. “Well, you might as well come in. We was just thinkin’ we maybe could do with another Aid boy. The work’s gittin’ heavy.” He jerked his head. “C’mon in here.”

Clem took up his suitcase. He had nowhere else to go. He followed the man into the house.

“I’ll report you to the Aid next time she comes,” the man said.

William Lane was walking solitary along the beach. He had to be solitary a good deal of the time, for he had met no boys of his own age and it was intolerable to him to be with his sisters. Occasionally he went swimming with Ruth, but only at a time when the beach was not crowded. He had supposed of course that the beach was private since his grandfather’s house faced upon it, and on that first day of his arrival when he had gone for a swim with Ruth he had been shocked to see at least fifty people in or near the water.

“Does Grandfather let all these people use our beach?” he had asked Ruth.

Before she could answer he heard Henrietta’s horrid laughter. She came swimming out of the sea, her long straight hair lank upon her shoulders. “Nobody has private beaches here, stupid,” she had said in a rude voice.

Ruth had reproached her as usual for his sake.

“How can William know when it’s only his first day?”

“He’d better learn quick, then,” Henrietta had retorted and returned to the sea.

Now of course he knew the truth. The beach belonged to everybody. Anybody at all could come there. They were all Americans, he knew, and yet they were of a variety and a commonness which made him feel the loneliest soul in the world. He longed for his English schoolmates, and yet he was cut off from them forever, because he did not want to see them any more. He did not want them to know that America was exactly what they had said it was, a place full of common people.

He lifted his head with a resolute arrogant gesture which was almost unconscious but not quite, since he had caught it from the boy who had been the captain of the cricket team last year, a fair-haired tall young man, whose father was Sir Gregory Scott, the British Consul General. Ronald Scott had been all that was splendid and fearless. Why not, when he had everything?

At least, William thought, his grandfather’s house was better than some of the others facing the beach, and there were the two maids. He had felt slightly better when he discovered that most of the other houses had no servants, although in China women were only amahs for younger children. The two maids were old and badly trained. He had put his shoes outside his bedroom door the first night and they were still there the next morning but not polished.

“I say,” he had asked his mother, “who does the boots in this house?”

She had given him a curious smile. “We do them ourselves,” she said smoothly and without explanation. This was another thing that made him solitary. In Peking he had always been able to count on his mother, but here he did not know her as she was. She took his part when they were alone, but in front of other people he felt she did not. When he left his hat and coat in the hall for the maid to hang up his mother hung them up and his grandmother had been sharp about it. “William, don’t let your mother wait on you,” she had exclaimed. “Oh, never mind,” his mother had said quickly. “Now, Helen, don’t spoil the boy,” his grandmother had retorted.

“He’ll be going to college in just a few weeks, and then he’ll have to look after himself.” This was the feeble answer his mother had given. He had looked at both of them haughtily and had said nothing.

The air today was as clear and cool as a June day in Peking, and the sea was very blue. He had left the house after luncheon and seeing the beach crowded, he had walked straight away from it and toward the other part of Old Harbor, the best part. It had not taken him many days to find that the place where the really rich people lived was there. Great houses set in plenty of lawn faced wide bright beaches almost empty of people. Now almost every day he came here, always alone, too proud to pretend that he belonged here and yet longing to seem that he did before a chance passerby.

At this hour of early afternoon no one was to be seen. The heat of the sun was intense, though the air was cool, and the people were, he supposed, in their great houses. He was walking along the edge of a low bluff and suddenly he decided to climb it. The ascent was not difficult. He had only begun it when he saw a flight of wooden steps and was tempted to use them. It would be degrading to him if he were discovered trespassing, and yet his curiosity compelled him. He compromised by not using the steps and scrambled up the sandy rock ledge until he had reached the grass at the top. There he found himself still alone. For a quarter of a mile the lawn sloped back toward a knoll and hidden behind masses of trees he saw a vast house. His imagination hovered about it. Had his grandfather lived there and had he belonged there, how easily he might have been proud of his country!

He threw himself down upon the grass and buried his face in his arms. The sun beat upon his back and he felt suffocated with despair. He longed for the summer to be over so that he could leave his family and be alone at college. Yet how could he be successful there when it now appeared that his grandfather had no intention of helping him with any money? His mother had asked his grandparents outright if they could help him so that he could spend all his time in studying, and his grandfather had said, “Let him work his way through, as much as he can. It’ll be good for him.”

His mother had told him this with curious hesitation. “I suppose in a way it would be good for you,” she had said thoughtfully. “But in another way I know it wouldn’t. Work classes you here, actually, as much as it does in China. I wish we’d sent you to Groton.”

“Why didn’t you?” he had asked violently.

“Money,” she had said simply. “Just money. Everything goes back to that.”

“Does Grandfather have no money?” he had demanded.

“He seems to have enough for himself but nobody else,” his mother had replied. Then she had one of her inexplicable changes. “Why do I say that? He’s feeding us all — four of us, I suppose that’s something, week in and week out.”

William would have wept had he not been too proud. He continued now to lie like stone under the sun, his flesh hot and his heart cold. His disappointment was becoming insupportable. Of all that he had seen, nothing in his country was what he had hoped it would be, nothing except this spot where the great houses stood facing the sea from their heights of green, and here he did not belong.

At this moment he heard a voice.

“What are you doing here, boy?”

He lifted his head and saw an old gentleman leaning on a cane. A loose brown tweed cap hung over his forehead and he wore a baggy top coat of the same material. His face was brown, too, against the white of his pointed beard and mustaches.

“Trespassing, I’m afraid, sir.” William sprang to his feet and stood very straight. He went on in his best English manner, instilled by the headmaster in Chefoo. “I couldn’t resist climbing the bluff to see what was here. Then I was tired and wanted to rest a bit.”

“Do you like what you see?”

“Rather!”

He felt some sort of approval in the old gentleman, and he held his black head higher and compelled his gray gaze to meet the sharp blue eyes that were staring at him. Then he smiled, a slow cautious smile.

The old gentleman responded at once and laughed. “You sound English!”

“No, sir, I’m not. But I’ve just come from China.”

The old gentleman looked interested. “China, eh? Where?”

“Peking, sir.”

“Been a lot of trouble over there.”

“Yes, sir, that’s why we came away — all of us, that is, except my father. He is in the siege.”

The old gentleman sat down carefully on a boulder placed for the purpose. “It is very nasty, all those Americans locked up there. The Chinese will have to be taught a good lesson, especially as we have always been decent to them — the Open Door and so on. What’s your father doing in Peking?”

It was the question he had been dreading. He toyed for an instant with the idea of a lie and decided against it. “I hope you won’t think it strange, sir, but he’s a missionary — Episcopal.” He want to explain, but could not bring himself to it, that being Episcopal meant at least a Christian aristocracy.

He averted his eyes to avoid the inevitable look of disgust. To his astonishment the old gentleman was cordial. “A missionary, is he? Now that’s interesting. We’re Christian Scientists. What’s your name?”

“Lane. William Lane.”

He was as much disconcerted by approval as he might have been by rebuff. Before he had time to adjust himself the old gentleman said in a dry, kindly voice; “Now you come on up to the house. Mrs. Cameron will want a look at you. You can talk to her about your father. She’s interested in foreign travel. I’m pretty busy, myself.”

He stumped ahead of William, panting a little as the lawn rose toward the house. Behind him William walked gracefully, almost forgetting himself in his excitement. He was to enter this house, looming ahead in all its white beauty.

“I have a son,” Mr. Cameron was saying. “He isn’t as strong as we wish he was and we have him here trying to get him ready for Harvard in the autumn — freshman.”

“I’m going to Harvard, too,” William said.

“Then Jeremy will want to see you,” Mr. Cameron said.

He paused on a wide white porch and William was compelled to stop, too, though his feet urged him to the door. Mr. Cameron’s sharp small blue eyes roamed over the sea and the sky and fixed themselves upon the horizon.

“No storm in sight,” he murmured.

He turned abruptly and led the way through the open door into a wide hall that swept through the house to open again at the back upon gardens of blooming flowers.

“I don’t know where anybody is,” Mr. Cameron murmured again. He touched a bell and a uniformed manservant appeared and took his cap and coat, glanced at William and looked away.

“Where is Mrs. Cameron?”

“In the rose garden, sir.”

“Tell her I’m bringing someone to see her. Is Jeremy with her?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very well.”

The man went silently toward the end of the hall and Mr. Cameron said to William, “It is always warm in the gardens. Come along.”

He strolled toward the door and William followed him. His eyes stole right and left, and he saw glimpses of great cool rooms furnished in pale blue and rose. Silver gray curtains hung to the floor at the windows, and flowers were massed in bowls. Here were his dreams. He lifted his head and smiled. If such dreams could be real he would have them, someday, for his own.

The smell of hot sunshine upon fragrant flowers scented the air of the gardens as they reached the open doors. He knew very well from the garden about the mission house in Peking that only workmen could bring about the high perfection of what he now saw. Formal flower beds as precise as floral carpets stretched about him. A path of clean red brick led to an arbor a quarter of a mile away, and the arbor itself stood in a mass of late blooming roses. The manservant emerged from the arbor and stood respectfully while Mr. Cameron approached.

“Mrs. Cameron is here, sir. I am to bring tea in half an hour, sir, if you wish.”

“Oh, all right,” Mr. Cameron replied carelessly.

They entered the vine-hung arbor, and William saw a slender pretty woman, whose hair was graying, and a boy of his own age. She was sitting by a table filling a wicker basket with roses. The boy was stretched on a couch, a book turned face down on his lap. He was tall, with light hair and pale skin and pale blue eyes.

“This is William Lane, my dear,” Mr. Cameron said. “I found him lying on his stomach on top of the bluff, and he says he comes from, China.”

“Do you really?” Mrs. Cameron exclaimed. “How interesting!” She lifted large sweet brown eyes to William’s face.

“I do, Mrs. Cameron,” William replied. “I’m glad if it interests you.”

“This is Jeremy,” Mr. Cameron said. The two boys touched hands.

Mr. Cameron sat down. “I have a daughter somewhere, too. Where is she, my dear?”

“Candace?” Mrs. Cameron was busy again with roses. “She went to the village to buy something or other. I begged her to wait and get it in town, but you know how she is.”

Mr. Cameron did not answer this. He looked at his son. “Well, Jeremy, William is going to Harvard, too. Coincidence, eh? You’ll have to get acquainted.”

Jeremy smiled. His mouth, cut deep at the corners, was sweet and rather weak. “I’d like to — but imagine China! Did you find it exciting? Do sit down. I’d get up, only I’m not supposed to.”

William sat down. “It didn’t seem exciting because I’ve always lived there.”

“Does it seem strange to you in America?”

“Not here,” William said.

“The Chinese love flowers, I suppose,” Mrs. Cameron said. William considered. “I didn’t see very much of the Chinese, really. I grew up in a compound, and my mother was always afraid I’d catch something. But we did have chrysanthemums, and I remember the bowls of lilies our gardener used to bring before Chinese New Year.”

He felt he was not doing very well and his anxious instinct urged him to frankness. “I suppose I should know a great deal about the Chinese, but one doesn’t think much when one is growing up. The common people are rather filthy, I’m afraid, and the others are fed up with Westerners just now and didn’t want to mix with us. There was even real danger if they did — the old Empress didn’t favor it.”

“A wicked old woman, from all I hear,” Mr. Cameron said suddenly. “Trying to stop normal trade!”

“I do hope your parents are safe,” Mrs. Cameron sighed. “What we’ve read in the newspapers has been dreadful. So shocking! As if what we were doing wasn’t for their good!”

He was diverted from answer by hearing a clear young voice. “Oh, here you all are!”

A very pretty yellow-haired girl was coming toward them. She was all in white and she had a tennis racket with low-heeled white shoes tied to it. At the viny entrance she paused, the sunshine catching in her hair and making a nimbus about her pleasant rosy face. She looked like Jeremy and she had the same sweet mouth but the lips were full and red.

“Hello,” she said in a soft voice.

Jeremy said, “Come in. This is William Lane. William, this is my sister Candy.”

She nodded. “Do you play tennis?”

“I do, but I haven’t my things.”

“Come along, we have plenty.”

“Candace dear — perhaps he doesn’t want to—” Mrs. Cameron began.

“I’d like to, very much,” William said.

He rose. Tennis he played very well indeed. He had chosen it instead of cricket and his only chance for pleasurable revenge had been when a cricketer opposed him upon the immaculate coolie-kept courts at Chefoo.

“Come back again,” Jeremy said, his smile wistful.

“Do come back,” Mrs. Cameron said warmly.

Mr. Cameron was silent. Leaning against the back of the cushioned wicker chair, he had closed his eyes and fallen asleep.

Beside the girl William held himself straight and kept silent. His instinct for dignity told him that she was used to much talk and deference. To his thinking American women were pampered and deferred to far too much. Even the maids at his grandfather’s house were sickening to him in their independence. In China an amah was not a woman — merely a servant.

“I hope you don’t mind cement courts,” Candace said, as she gave him tennis shoes and a racket from a closet in the great hall. “Ours are frightfully old-fashioned, but my father won’t change them. I like grass but of course grass isn’t too easy at the beach. Though my father could, if he would — only he won’t.”

“I shan’t mind,” William said.

“How old are you?” Candace inquired, staring at his handsome profile.

“Seventeen.”

“I’m sixteen.”

“Are you going to college?”

“No, of course not — Miss Darrow’s-on-the-Hudson, for a year, and then I’m to come out.”

He had the vaguest notions of what it meant for a girl to come out, but now that he knew he was a year older than she, he felt more at ease. “Shall you come out in New York?”

“Of course — where else?”

“I thought perhaps in London.”

“No, my father is frightfully American. I might be presented at the Court of St. James’s later. The man who was once my father’s partner is the American Ambassador there.”

“I knew a lot of English people in China.”

“Really?”

“I didn’t like them. Very conceited, as though they owned the country. Their merchant ships ply all the inner waters and their men-of-war, too. If it hadn’t been for us, they’d have made a colony out of the whole of China.”

“Really? But don’t they do that sort of thing very well?”

“They’ve no right to hog everything,” William said stiffly.

Candace mused upon this. “I suppose not, though I haven’t thought about such things. We’ve always been in England a lot — Mother and Jeremy and I. My father has no time.”

“What does your father do?”

“He’s in the Stores — and in Wall Street — and that means he’s in everything.”

They were at the courts now, two smooth wire-enclosed rectangles surrounded by lawns set with chairs and big umbrellas. No one else was about.

“It’s too hot to play, and that’s why no one is here,” Candace said carelessly. “Two hours from now the place will be jammed.”

“I mustn’t stay,” William said quickly.

“Why not?”

“In bathing things and a jacket?”

“It doesn’t matter. We’ll all bathe before sundown. There’s a dance tonight. Do you like to dance?”

“Yes.”

He danced badly, never having had lessons, and he made up his mind to speak to his mother about it. Before he went to Harvard he must have lessons.

They were playing now, and he found within a few minutes that he could beat her, not easily, but surely. She played well, for a girl, her white figure flying about the court opposite him, though she served carelessly.

“I don’t see how you hit the ball standing still,” she called to him at last with some irritation.

“I don’t actually stand still,” he called back. “I was taught not to run about; the sun was hot in China.”

“It’s hot here, too.”

She flung down her racket at the end of an hour and came to the net to shake hands with him formally.

“There, that’s enough for one day. You do play well. I have to go now and change. People are coming, and I’m dripping. You can leave the shoes and racket here.”

She did not again suggest his staying to tea and he withdrew, deeply wounded. “Good-by, then, I’d better be getting along.”

She waved her racket at him and smiled and left him to find his way alone. He ought not to have played so well, he supposed. For his own sake he should have allowed her to win. American girls were spoiled. Then he lifted his head. He would always play his best and he would yield to no one.

He went across the wide lawn and down the steps to the beach and turned homeward, his jacket over his arm and the sun beating down on his shoulders. The water was rippling over the sand and he walked in the waves curling in tendrils from the sea. At his grandfather’s house he went in, carrying plenty of wet sand upon his feet. Millie, the lesser of the maids, came out with a broom.

“Oh, look at those feet,” she exclaimed. “Just after I’ve swept, too! I declare, Willum—”

They were alone and he turned on her with the fury of a young tiger. “What do you mean by calling me Willum?” he hissed at her through white set teeth. “How dare you? You have no more manners than a — a savage!”

He left her instantly and did not turn to see her shocked face. Halfway upstairs, he heard a door slam.

After a little while his mother tapped at the door of his room.

“Come in,” he said listlessly. He had bathed and put on fresh clothes and had sat down at his desk to write, toying with some verses.

“William,” his mother began. “What did you say to Millie?”

He whirled on his chair. “What did she say to me, you had better ask. She called me Willum!”

“Hush, William. Don’t be so angry. She comes from Maine and everybody—”

“I don’t care where she comes from. She can call me Master William.”

“She wouldn’t call anybody master.”

“Then she needn’t speak to me.”

“William, it’s not easy living with all of us in this house. The maids aren’t used to children.”

“I am not a child.”

“I know, but—”

“Mother, I simply do not intend to be insulted by servants.”

“I know, dear, but they aren’t our servants.”

“Any servants.”

His mother sat down in a rocking chair. “In some ways it is really easier to live in Peking, I admit. But we are Americans, William, and you must get used to it.”

“I shan’t allow myself to get used to that sort of thing.”

He was aware of her admiration behind her distress. She was proud of his spirit, proud of his looks, proud of his pride. She rocked helplessly for a few minutes and then got up. “I’ll give Millie something, this once.”

She went out of the room, and he was alone again. He was not writing verses to Candace. He was not attracted by her. He was writing something about a man’s soul finding its own country, but he could not satisfy his fastidious taste in words. His poetry was not good enough and he tore the sheets into bits and threw them into the wastepaper basket.

The farm in Pennsylvania was as remote from the rest of the world as though it were an island in the sea. Nothing else existed. No one came near and the inhabitants never went away. The five children, of whom Clem was now one, made a human group, solid because they were utterly alone and at the mercy of two grown people, a man and a woman, who were cruel.

To Clem the memory of his dead parents and the two little girls who had been his sisters grew vague and distant. They had been killed by men he had never seen, a violence as inexplicable as a typhoon out of the southern seas. But here in this enchanting landscape the cruelty was mean and constant. There was no escape from it.

The man and woman, as he called them always in his thinking, his tongue refusing to call them Pop and Mom, were animal in their cruelty, snarling at the helpless children, striking them in fatigue or disappointment. Thus when the spotted cow had a bull calf instead of a heifer, Pop Berger pushed Tim.

“Git out of my way!” he had bellowed.

Tim stepped back to escape the man’s upraised fist but it struck him and he fell against the corner of the stone wall of the barn.

Clem saw all and said nothing. His watching eyes, his silence, the strangeness of his unexplained presence, kept the Bergers shy of him. They had not yet beaten him. His swiftness at work, his intelligence, superior to any in the house, gave them no excuse, and while with the other children they needed no excuse, with him they still searched for one. He rose at early dawn and went out and washed himself in the brook behind the house, “the run” it was called, and then he went to the milking. He could not drink milk, however hungry he was, and he was always hungry. The warm sweetish animal smell of milk sickened his stomach, the thick coarseness of the cows’ teats in his hands disgusted him. Yet he treasured the stuff and learned to get the last drop from a cow, enough so that he dared to give the children a secret cupful apiece. The cup he hid behind a loosened stone in the barn wall. The children learned to come to him one by one, as soon as he began the milking, before Pop got out of bed. The cup of fresh milk stayed their lean stomachs until the breakfast of cornmeal mush. And the day went on in harshest labor, the thoughts of all of them dwelling always upon food.

Clem, always until now pallid and small, suddenly began to grow. His bones increased in size and he was obsessed with hunger. He would not steal from these strangers into whose midst he had fallen and therefore he starved. He imagined food, heaping bowls of rice and browned fish and green cabbage. In China God had given them food, and he had eaten. His hunger all but drove him back to praying to God again as his father had done. But his father had gone out to other people who had answered the prayers for God. Here there were no such people that he knew. It did not occur to him that God would work through such people as the Bergers.

He was stupefied by these human beings among whom he found himself. Who were they? Where were those to whom they were kin? No one came near the farmhouse, neither friends nor relatives. In China all persons had relatives, a clan to which they belonged. These, the evil man and woman, the desolate children, belonged nowhere. Clem had no communication with them, for they said nothing to him or to each other except the few necessary words of work and food. The silence in the house was that of beasts. Nothing softened the hopeless harshness of the days, there was no change except the change of day and night.

Yet as one glorious day followed another Clem felt there must be escape. This was a net into which he had fallen, a snare he had not suspected. He must simply leave it. Whatever lay outside could not be worse than this. The desolate children seemed never to dream of escape, but they had no dreams of any kind, he discovered. Their hope went no further than to steal something to eat when Mom Berger was not looking, to stop working when Pop’s back was turned. They were ignorant, and he soon found, depraved as well. When he first discovered this depravity he was sick. His own parents had been people of pure heart, and from them he had inherited a love of cleanness. Mr. Fong had been clean in speech and act. Though Clem had seen a simple naturalness in the behavior of men in the countryside about Peking, it had been clean. Birth was clean, and the life of man and woman together was decent. There was nothing about it which he did not know as he knew life itself. But what he found here was indecency, the furtive fumbling of boys and girls who were animals. Pop grinned when he saw it, but Mom Berger yelled, “Cut that out, now!”

She was a thick-set woman, her neck as wide as her head, her waist as wide as her shoulders, her ankles as big as her calves. She wore a shapeless dress like a huge pillowcase without a belt. Except sometimes when she went to town with Pop, she was barefoot. Clem had never seen the feet of a woman before. Chinese women always wore shoes on their little bound feet and his mother had worn stockings and shoes. In China it was a disgrace for a woman to show her feet. And so it should be, Clem told himself, avoiding the sight of those fleshy pads upon which Ma Berger moved.

For the first few days he had lived in complete silence toward the children. There was no time for talk, had he been so inclined. Pop took him upstairs into a filthy room where there were a wide bed, a broken chair, some hooks upon the plastered wall. On the hooks hung a few ragged garments. Pop scratched his head as he stared about the room. “Reckon that bed won’t hold four of you,” he had rumbled. “You’ll have to have a shakedown, I guess. I’ll tell Mom.”

He went down the narrow circular stairs and left Clem alone. This was his return. He walked to one of the windows, deep set in the heavy stone wall, and gazed out of it to see the countryside beautiful. Long low hills rolled away toward the horizon and fields lay richly between. He had never seen such trees, but then he had seen very few trees. The northern Chinese landscape was bare of them, except for a few willows and a date tree or two at a village. This was a country fit for dreams, but he knew that whatever had been the dreams once held in this house, there could be no more. He tried to imagine his father, a boy perhaps in this very room, hearing the voice of God bid him go to a far country. Oh, if his father had not listened to God, he, Clem, might have been born here, too, and this would have been his home. Now it could never be that.

He heard heavy panting on the stairs, and Mom Berger’s loud voice cried at him.

“Come here, you, boy, and help me with these yere quilts!”

He went to the stair and saw her red face staring at him over an armful of filthy bedding.

“Am I to sleep on this?” he demanded.

“You jes’ bet you are,” she retorted. “Lay ’em to suit yourself.”

She threw the quilts down and turned and went downstairs again, and he picked them up and folded them neatly, trying to find the cleanest side for sleep. He would have to sleep in his clothes until he could get away, for of course he would go within the next day or two, as soon as he found the name of a town or of a decent farm.

But he did not go. The misery of the five children held him. He had no family left, and in a strange reasonless sort of way he felt these pull upon him. He would go, but only when he had given them help, had found their families, or had found some good man to whom he could complain of their plight. His wandering and his loneliness made him reliant upon himself. He was not afraid, but if he left them as they were, he would keep remembering them.

In silence on that first day he had made his pallet and put his locked suitcase at the head of it. Into the suitcase he folded his good clothes, and put on instead the ragged blue overalls. Then he went downstairs.

The big kitchen was also the living room. Mom Berger was cooking something in a heavy iron pot, stirring it with a long iron spoon.

“Pop says you’re to go out to that field yonder,” she told him, and nodded her head to the door. “They’re cuttin’ hay.”

He nodded and walked out to a field where he saw them all working in the distance. The sun was hot but not as hot as he had known it in Peking, and so it seemed only pleasant. The smell of the grass and the trees was in his nostrils, a rich green fragrance of the earth. What was hay? He had never seen it. When he got near he saw it was only grass such as the Chinese cut on hillsides for fuel.

He waited a moment until Pop Berger saw him. “Hey you, get to work there! Help Tim on that row!” Clem went to the sandy-haired boy. “You’ll have to show me. I’ve never cut hay.”

“Where’d you come from?” Tim retorted, without wanting to know. “You kin pitch.”

Clem did not answer. He watched while Tim’s rough claws grasped a huge fork and pitched hay upon a wagon pulled by two huge gray horses. It looked easy but it was hard. Nevertheless he had continued to pitch doggedly until the sun had set.

From that day on his life had proceeded. The work changed from one crop to another, but the hours were the same, from dawn to dark for them all. The girls worked in the house with the woman.

He became aware, however, of a certain day, dim in the minds of the children when he first came, which became more probable as the month dragged on. They expected a visit from what they called the Aid. What this Aid was Clem could not find out. He put questions to Tim, the eldest and most articulate of the boys. To the girls he did not speak at all. He felt a terror in them so deep, a timidity so rooted, that he thought they would run if he called their names, Mamie or Jen.

“Aid?” Tim had repeated stupidly. They were raking manure out of the barn. “Aid? It’s just — Aid. It’s a woman.”

“Why is she called Aid?” Tim considered this for a full minute.

“I dunno.”

“Does she help you?”

“Nope — never did. Talks to Pop and Mom.”

“What does she say?”

“Axes things.”

“What things?”

“Different — like does we work good, does the boys and girls sleep in one room — like that.” Tim grinned. “They’re scared of her.”

“Why don’t you tell her?”

“Tell her what?”

“That you don’t get enough to eat — that they hit you.”

Tim’s wide pale mouth was always open. “We’re only Aid children.”

“What is that?” Clem began all over again.

“I tole you,” Tim said patiently. “We ain’t got no folks.”

“You mean you don’t know where your parents are?”

Tim shook his head.

“Are they dead?” Clem demanded.

“Bump never had none,” Tim offered.

Bump was the second boy, now bringing the wheelbarrow to fill with manure.

“Bump, haven’t you any kin?” Clem asked.

“What’s ’at?” Bump asked.

“Uncles and aunts and cousins.”

“I got nawthin’,” Bump said. He was spading up the manure that Clem had put into piles.

“Doesn’t anybody come and see you?”

“Nobody knows we’re here lessen the Aid tells,” Bump said.

“Then why do you all want this Aid woman to come?”

“Cause Mom gets a big dinner,” Tim said with a terrible eagerness. “She don’t say nothin’ neither when we eat. Don’t dast to.”

Clem threw down the fork be was using. “If you’d tell the Aid woman they’re mean to you, maybe she’d put you somewhere else.”

There was silence to this, then Tim spoke. “We’re used to it here. We been here all of us together. Maybe Bump would get somewhere way off, and we’re used to Mamie and Jen, too. They’re scared to go off by theirselves. I promised we wouldn’t never say nawthin’.”

Clem perceived in this a fearful pathos. These homeless and orphaned children had made a sort of family of their own. Within the cruel shell of circumstance they had assumed toward one another the rude simplicities of relationship. Tim, because he was the eldest, was a sort of father, and the others depended on him. Mamie, the older girl, so lifeless, so still, was nevertheless a sort of mother. As the days went on he perceived that this was the shape they made for themselves, even in depravity. The man and woman were outside their life, as unpredictable as evil gods. They suffered under them, they were silent, and they were able to do this because they had within themselves something that stood for father and mother, for brother and sister. Because of the family they had made for themselves out of their own necessity, they preferred anything to separation.

Clem asked no more questions, and judgment died from his heart. Something almost like love began to grow in him toward these children. He wondered how he could join them and whether they would accept him. He had held aloof because they were filthy and unwashed, because their scalps were covered with scales, because they had boils continually. He had thought of leaving them as soon as he could. But as weeks went on he knew he could not leave them — not yet. They were all he had.

He pondered upon their solitude. In China, whence he had come, all people being set in their natural families, there were no solitary children, except perhaps in a time of famine or war when anyone might be killed. If parents died of some catastrophe together, there were always uncles and aunts, and if these died, then there were first cousins and if these died there were second and third and tenth and twentieth cousins, all those of the same surname, and children were treasured and kept within the circle of the surname. But these children had no surname. He had inquired of Tim, and Tim had said after his usual moment of thought, “It’s writ down in the Aid book.”

“But what is it?” Clem had insisted.

“I — disremember,” Tim had said at last.

As the day when the Aid was to come drew near Mom Berger became more irritable. “I gotta get this house cleaned,” she said one morning in the kitchen, when the children stood eating their bread and drinking weak, unsweetened coffee. “The Aid’ll be here come Tuesday week. You girls better git started upstairs this very day. Everything’s gotta be washed — clothes and all.”

From that day until the Tuesday which was dreaded and anticipated there was no peace in the house or in the barn. Even the barn had to be cleaned.

“That Aid woman,” Pop snarled, “she ain’t satisfacted to stay in the house. No, she’s liable to come snoopin’ out here among the cows. I’m goin’ to tell her that’s why I need more help, Clem. I’m goin’ to tell her if I have to clean this yere barn I gotta have another boy. That’s what I’m goin’ to tell her.”

“How often does she come?” Clem asked with purposeful mildness.

“The law claims once in three months. She don’t get round that often though — maybe oncet, twicet a year. Always tells us before she comes. I git a postcard a month or so ahead.”

On the day before, they took baths. The woman heated kettles of hot water and in the woodshed the boys washed one after the other in a tin tub with soft homemade soap.

“You ain’t hardly dirty, Clem,” Tim said with some admiration, staring at Clem’s clean body.

“I wash in the run,” he replied.

“What’ll you do come winter?”

“Break ice — if I’m still here.”

They all glanced at the door at these words. Tim whispered, his eyes still on the latch, “You wouldn’t go an’ leave us, would you?”

Bump paused in the scrubbing of his piteous ribs. “Clem, don’t you go and leave me!”

“I don’t belong here,” Clem said simply.

“You belong to us,” Tim said.

“Do I? How?” Clem felt a starting warmth in the inner desolation of silence.

Tim had one of his long pauses, shivering and naked. His shoulder bones were cavernous, and between his sharp hip bones his belly was a cavity. Pale hairs of adolescence sprouted upon his chest and pelvis. “You ain’t got nobody, neither.”

“That’s so,” Clem said.

Tim made a huge effort of imagination. “Know what?”

“What?”

“Sposin’ we lived by ourselves on this yere farm — You could be the boss, say, like you was our father.”

The woman’s fists pounded on the door. “Git out o’ that, you fellers!” she yelled. “The girls gotta wash.”

They hurried, all except Clem. He took the pail of cold water and doused himself clean of the water in which the others had bathed.

“Maybe I’ll stay,” he said to himself. “Maybe I’d better.”

In the night, in a bed cleaner than he had slept in since he came, he began to think about his strange family. Food was what they needed. He recalled the boys’ bodies as he had seen them today naked, their ribs like barrel staves, their spines as stark as ropes, their hollow necks and lean legs. Food was the most precious thing in the world. Without it people could not be human. They could not think or feel or grow, or if they grew, they grew like sick things, impelled not by health. Everybody ought to have food. Food ought to be free, so that if anybody was hungry, he could simply walk somewhere not very far and get it. Food should be as free as air.

He began to dream about himself grown and a man, rich and independent. When he got rich he would see that everybody would have food. “I won’t depend on God, like Papa did,” he thought.

The Aid came just before noon. They had all been waiting for her through an endless morning. The barn was clean, the house was clean. Whatever had not been washed was hidden away until she was gone. The girls were in almost new dresses which Clem had not seen them wear before. They had on shoes and stockings for the first time. Pop was in his good clothes, but he had taken off his coat, lest it seem that he did not work.

“Put it on when you sit down to table, though,” Mom ordered.

“You don’t have to teach me no manners,” Pop said.

She sat all the time because she too had on shoes and stockings and her feet hurt. The girls had to bring her anything she wanted. She had on a gray cotton dress that was almost clean. Clem had put on his good clothes that the sailors had bought him. They sat about the kitchen smelling the food on the stove, their stomachs aching with hunger.

“Here she comes,” Pop cried suddenly.

Through the open door they all stared. Clem saw a small thin woman in a black dress come down from a buggy, which she drove herself. She tied the horse to the gate and came up the walk carrying a worn black leather bag. Pop hastened to her and Mom got up on her sore feet.

“Well, well!” he shouted. “We didn’t really know when to expect you and we just went about our business. Now we’re just goin’ to set down to eat dinner. I’d ha’ killed a chicken if I’d been shore you was comin’. As it is, we only got pork and greens and potatoes. New potatoes though, I will say, and scullions.”

“That sounds good,” the woman said. She had a dry voice, not unkind, and she stood in the doorway and looked at them all. “Well, how’s everybody?”

“Pretty good,” Mom Berger said. “The children look a little peaky on account of a summer cold. They like to play barefoot in the run, and I hate to tell ’em not to. You know how children are. Come and set down while I dish up.”

“It’s been a hot summer,” the Aid woman sighed. She sat down and took off her rusty black hat. “Well, I see they’re growing.”

“That’s another reason for their peakiness,” Ma Berger said. “I keep tryin’ to feed ’em up, but they don’t fatten no matter how I do. Their appetites is good, too. You’ll see how they eat. But I don’t begrudge ’em.”

“I’m sure you don’t,” the Aid said absently. She was searching through some papers in her bag. “I guess I’d better begin checking now. I have to get on right after dinner. The territory is more’n I can manage, really. Let’s see, you have five children. Why — the book says four!”

Pop began hastily. “This yere Clem is a new boy. Just turned up one day and I kep’ him, because he hadn’t nowhere to go. I was goin’ to tell you.”

“Boy, where do you come from?” The Aid was suddenly stern.

“From out West,” Clem said. He was standing, as all the children were. He had told none of them that he came from China. They would know nothing about China and he could not begin to tell them.

“You can’t just come here like that,” the Aid declared. Indignation sparkled in her little black eyes. “You should have stayed where you was. The state can’t take charity cases from other states. It’s going to make a lot of trouble for me.”

“I thought my grandfather was still alive,” Clem said. “He used to live here.”

“Old Charley Miller,” Pop explained. “Him as hanged himself when he got to be sheriff.”

The Aid stared at Clem. “You’re his grandson?” she demanded.

“Yes.”

“Say, ‘yes, ma’am’ to me,” she said sharply. “Where’s your proof?”

“I haven’t any,” Clem said.

“He’s Charley’s grandson all right,” Pop said quickly. “He’s got the same kind of a face and his eyes is just the same color and all. I’ll guarantee him.”

“I don’t know what to do,” the Aid sighed. She had a thin washed-away face and a small wrinkled mouth. Behind her spectacles her eyes were dead when the small flare of anger was gone. There was no wedding ring on her hand. She had never been married and she was tired of other people’s children.

“Why don’t you just mark down five?” Pop coaxed her. “It’ll save you trouble.”

“I could do that,” she mused. “One of the children in the last house died. I could just transfer the money from that one to this one.”

“ ’Twould save you trouble,” he said again.

So it was done. Clem took the place of the dead boy.

They all sat down to dinner. On the table a platter of pork and greens was surrounded by boiled potatoes and by dishes of sweet and sour pickles. There were apple pies to be eaten, too, and the children had milk from a pitcher, all except Clem who took water.

“You must drink milk, boy,” the Aid said. “That’s why it’s so good for children to live on farms.”

“I don’t like milk,” Clem said.

“Say ma’am,” the Aid reminded him. “And it don’t matter what you like. You make him drink it, Mrs. Berger.”

“I certainly will,” Mom promised.

There was no time for any talk. At the table there was only time for eating. The children ate desperately until they could eat no more.

“I see what you mean,” the Aid said. “At this age they just can’t be filled up.”

“I do my best,” Mom said.

When the meal was over the Aid rose and put on her hat. “Everybody looks nice, Mrs. Berger,” she said. “I’m always glad to give you a recommend. I don’t believe I’ll bother to go upstairs. I can go through the barn on my way out, Mr. Berger — though you always — the children are real lucky. Better off than in their own homes. What’s that?”

Some noises coming from Tim stopped her at the door. He looked helplessly at Clem.

“He wants to know what his last name is,” Clem said for him.

The Aid’s empty eyes suddenly lit, and she stepped toward him. “Will you say ma’am when you speak to me?”

Clem did not answer, and Pop broke in quickly. “I’ll shore learn him before you git here next time.”

“Well, I hope so,” the Aid replied with indignation. She forgot Clem’s question and went on briskly toward the barn.

The conscience in Clem’s bosom was as concrete as a jewel and as pure. He felt its weight there day and night. It had grown with his growth and now had facets which were strange to him. Thus while his father’s too simple faith had been its beginning, it had taken on accretion not of faith but of doubt, mingled with suffering, pity and love, first for his father and mother and sisters when they were hungry, and now after their death, pity for hunger wherever he found it. He, too, was hungry here on his dead grandfather’s farm, but his hunger only hastened the growth of his conscience and made it more weighty. If he were hungry, what of these others, these children? For he perceived that Tim, though older than himself and inches taller, was and would always be only a child. Others must feed him as long as he lived and he would always be at the mercy of any man with a measurable brain. Mamie, too, was meek and mild, and Jen was an aspen of a child, trembling always with terror remembered and terror about to loom again. Bump was stolid and silent and he followed Clem like a dog. At night with dumb persistence he insisted upon sleeping beside Clem’s pallet.

How could anyone know what was in any of them? They were obsessed with hunger. They dared not steal bread from the breadbox or leftover bits in the cupboard, but they did steal from the dog. Mom Berger scraped the bottoms of pots and the cracked bones and heaped them upon an old tin pie plate outside the kitchen door. There Clem, coming suddenly from the barn one day, found the four children, as he thought of them, waiting for the mongrel dog to eat its fill. They dared not snatch from the beast lest it growl and Mom Berger hear. But they were using wile. Bump, for whom the dog had a fondness, was coaxing him, though in silence, from his plate. When the dog looked up to wag his tail, Tim and Mamie snatched handfuls of the refuse. When they saw Clem’s eyes fixed upon them they shrank back as though he might have been Pop Berger. This caused the conscience in him to burn with the scintillating flame he knew so well, a fire at once cold and consuming. He did not love these ragged children, he was repelled by their filth and their ignorance. The language they spoke was, it seemed to him, the grunting communication of beasts. Nevertheless, they did not deserve to starve.

Seeing them with the dog’s food clutched in their hands, staring at him in fear, he turned and went back to the barn. There he sat down again to his task of husking the last of the corn. Pop Berger lay asleep upon the haymow. Thinking of the work to come, Pop had yawned heavily after the midday meal. “Reckon you kin finish the corn,” he had said and had thrown himself on the hay. Clem had gone to the house after an hour to get a drink. The pork and cabbage they had eaten had been very salty, but he had forgotten his thirst. His mind burned with the determination to escape.

“Of the thirty-six ways of escape,” Mr. Fong had once told Clem, “the best is to run away.” It was an ancient Chinese saying, and it came back to Clem’s mind now. He was Chinese in more ways than he knew. The early wisdom of people who had long learned what was essential had seeped into him from the days when he first began to know that he was alive. Courageous though he was, and with a tough natural courage, he knew that the first wisdom of a wise man is to stay alive. Only the dead must be silent, only the dead are helpless.

His father’s conscience, too, was his inheritance — yes, and his grandfather’s also. There were times when Clem went alone into the barn to stand and gaze at the beam that Pop Berger had pointed out to him.

“That there’s the one he hang himself on.”

“Why did he do it?” Clem had once asked.

“Softhearted,” Pop had answered in accusation. He had added details later. “The ole feller took a new rope he’d bought a couple days before to tie up a calf with. He hed some kinda crazy notion if good men could git into the gov’ment they could straighten things out. He didn’t want the sheriff’s job, though — wanted to give it up right away, but the party boss told him he had to keep it for the sake of the party, like. First thing ole man had to do was close the mortgage on that there farm, yander.” Pop Berger’s thick forefinger pointed next door. “He wuz softhearted, like I said. He said he’d ruther die. Nobody took him serious, like. Doggone if the old man didn’t mean it. Next day somebuddy found him hangin’ dead.”

Clem never answered. Pop Berger could not comprehend the only answer that he could have made. Of course his grandfather would rather die. It had been his way of escape from an intolerable duty. He thought a great deal about his grandfather, searching out about the barn, the house, the farm, the small signs of a conscientious, careful, good old man. The cow stalls, for example, were larger than most. There was room for a cow to lie full length in a stall. Pop fretted at the waste of room. There was a trough outside big enough for all the horses to drink at once. The water ran into it through an iron pipe from the well so that it was always fresh. In the house the step between kitchen and living room had been taken away and made into a gentle slope. His grandmother had gone blind in her old age, Pop told him.

Heir of the conscience of his fathers, Clem could not be hardened by the miseries of his present life. Instead he felt a constant soreness in his breast, an ache of remorse for sins of which he was not guilty. This discomfort he now tried to heal superficially by helping the children to get more food to eat. It was not easy, and after some struggle within himself he decided, remembering the dog’s dish, upon simple theft.

After the Aid woman had gone, not to return he knew for many months, even perhaps a year, he was angered to see how instantly the man and woman fell back into their careless cruelty. The meat was put away and the milk was watered. Yet he dared not complain. He, too, was now in the power of these two, and if they saw his courage they could prevent the escape he planned. His Chinese childhood had taught him never to be reckless even in anger, for anger is no weapon. Anger can give energy to the mind but only if it is harnessed and held in control. Therefore he locked his anger behind his teeth and, having decided upon theft, he used a deep cunning. He stole food so cleverly that the man thought the woman had eaten some leftover, and she thought the man had taken it. Neither believed the other and they snarled at each other, while the blank faces of the children told nothing. It comforted Clem to know meanwhile that inside Tim’s slack stomach there was a piece of boiled beef or a slice of home-cured ham, and that Jen had a lump of butter on a piece of bread. He was just in giving out his booty, saving nothing for himself. At the table he had courage enough to eat more than the younger ones, and since he worked well and was seemingly obedient, Pop gave him more than he might have given. Milk Clem stole without heed. In the pasture, hidden behind the brow of a hill, the children learned to come to him between meals, and he took a tin can from under a rock and milked a can full from one cow and another, never too much from one. Each child had a can full at least twice a day of the pure milk, warm from the cow’s body. When they were strong enough, Clem told himself, they would run away together. It must be before the winter fell again.

When autumn came, he had supposed they would all go to school. Tim had told him that the law said they had to go to free school and even Pop had to obey the law. That would make it easy, Clem planned, for them to run away. They could be a day upon their way before night came and before Pop, finding that they did not come home, could report their escape.

But he had not counted on Pop’s cleverness. Pop said one day in the barn, “They ain’t no call for you to go to school, Clem. You’re too big.”

Clem looked up from the hay chopper. “I want to go to school.”

Pop chuckled. “Yeah? Ain’t nobody knows you’re even here.” Clem stared in silence, waiting. A frightful comprehension was stealing into his brain.

“See?” Pop said. He was picking his teeth after the noon meal and he leaned against a cow stall. “You jest come here, didn’t you? You don’t belong nowheres, as I see it. School board don’t even know you’re alive.”

“I could tell them,” Clem said in a tight voice.

“Just you try,” Pop said.

Clem did not answer. He went on chopping the hay while his mind worked fast. This was the final reason why he had to go at once. He would wait no longer. To grow up in ignorance and loneliness was more than he could do. He had dreamed vaguely of finding people to help him, school teachers whom he could tell of the misery of the children. Perhaps Pop had thought of that, too.

“We dassent tell the teacher anything,” Mamie had said once. “Pop says he’d kill us if we told, and he would, too.”

“Yeah, he would,” Tim agreed.

“Well, ain’t you goin’ to say nothin’?” Pop inquired now.

“No,” Clem said. “I’ve never been to school anyway.” He kept his face averted and Pop saw only his bent, subdued body working at the hay chopper, and he sauntered away.

But Clem, whose patience was the long endurance of those who have never known better, had suddenly reached the moment of decision. He would run away on Saturday when the man and woman went to the town to do their marketing. He must leave this desecrated house of his forefathers and he must take the children with him, for his own peace, for without him they would starve. Sooner or later they would sicken one by one, and then they would die because they were already half starved, their frail bodies struggling and scarcely able to live even when they were not ill. Where he would go he did not know, nor what he would do with them. Even though he found work, how could he earn enough to feed them?

He looked back on the days in Peking as sweetness he had not known enough to taste while it was in his mouth. He remembered the pleasantness of Mr. Fong’s shop, the coziness of the inner rooms where he had sat at the square table teaching Yusan. It had been a home rich in kindness and his eyelids smarted now when he thought of it. Of his own parents he would not think. He remembered them no more as they had been when they were living but only as he had seen them dead, and this memory he could not endure and he put it from him so far that it had become blankness. He could not remember even their faces. Mr. Fong’s he saw clearly, and Mrs. Fong’s face he saw always wreathed in smiles as it was when she brought in the cakes and meat rolls. He dreamed of that food.

Slowly, while his conscience burned, Clem made his plans. On Saturday, early, as soon as the man and woman had left the house, he would tell the children. He did not dare to prepare them earlier for they were too childish to be trusted. He would help them to gather their clothes together and tie them in bundles. They would take whatever food was left in the house.

Saturday morning dawned clear and cool. Hateful as his life was to him, Clem had fallen in love with the land. He woke early as usual, even before the heavy footsteps of the man shook the narrow stairs, and he put on his clothes and let himself out from the window upon the roof of a shed below and thence he dropped to the ground. At the stream he washed himself in a small pool below a shallow falls. The stream bed was of rock, slanted in layers so precise that when the falls rose after a rain, slabs came off like great Chinese tiles. He had taken a score or so of them and had laid them neatly at the bottom of the pool and when the sun shone through the water, as it did this morning, the stones shone in hues of wet amber and chestnut and gold.

The stream was out of sight of the house, hidden by a spinney of young sycamore trees, the children of a mighty old sycamore whose roots drove through the hillside to the sources of water. Behind this wall of tender green, Clem stripped himself and plunged into the water, this morning almost winter cold. Above him the hills rose gently, the woods green but flecked with the occasional gold of autumn. The sky was beautiful, a softer blue than Chinese skies and more often various with white and moving clouds.

Yet where, Clem often asked himself, were the people upon this land, and how could it be that a house full of children at the mercy of a man and woman, ignorant and brutish, remained unknown and unsought? In China it would not have been possible for an old man’s house to have been unvisited, or to have been sold after his death in so summary a fashion. He had asked Pop Berger once who had sold the house and had been told that it went for unpaid taxes. But why were the taxes not paid by some kinsman? How had it come to pass that his old grandfather had been so solitary, even though his son had gone so far? And why, and why, and this was the supreme question, never to be answered, had his father left his home and the aging man to go across the sea to a country he had never seen, where the people spoke a tongue strange to him, and there try to tell of a god unwanted and unknown? None of these questions could be answered. What Pop had said was true. There was no one who knew of his existence.

Clem stepped out of the small cold pool and dried himself by stripping the water from his body with his hands and then by waving his arms and jumping up and down. In spite of poor food he was healthy and his blood rushed to his skin with heat and soon he put on his clothes and climbed the hill to the house. Pop Berger was already out at the barn, and Clem went in; without greeting he took a small stool and a pail and began to milk a brindled cow.

At first, accustomed by the Chinese to greeting anyone he met, he had tried to greet the man and the woman and the children when he first saw them in the morning. Then he perceived that this only surprised them and that it roused their contempt because they thought he was acting with some sort of pretense. He learned to keep his peace and to proceed in silence to work for food.

This morning there was none of the usual dawdling and shouting. Pop Berger harnessed the wagon early and began piling into it the few bags of grain he wanted to sell, and some baskets of apples. He left all the milking to Clem, and stamped away into the kitchen to eat and to dress himself. There the woman, too, made haste, eating and dressing, and within the hour the pair were ready to be gone, leaving the dishes and the house to the two girls.

“You, Clem!” Pop Berger shouted from the wagon seat. “You can git the manure cleaned out today. Don’t forget the chickens. Tim can do whatever you tell him. I told him a’ready to lissen to what you sayed.”

“And I’ve left the food you’re to eat in the pantry, and that’s all anybody is to have. Don’t open no jars or nothin’!” Mom shouted.

Clem had come out of the barn and he nodded, standing very straight, his arms folded as he watched them drive off. He wondered that he did not hate them and yet he did not. They were what they were through no fault of their own, their ignorance was bestial but innocent and their cruelty was the fruit of ignorance. He had seen degenerate cruelty sometimes in the streets of Peking. There the people knew, there they had been taught what humanity was, and when they violated what they knew, the evil was immense. But these two, this man and this woman, had never been taught anything. They functioned as crudely as animals. Where had they come from, he often wondered, and were the others all like them? There were no neighbors near, and he had no one with whom to compare them.

He finished milking the cows and carried the milk into the springhouse, where it would be cool. Then he went into the kitchen to find food. There, as usual when the man and woman were gone, nothing was being done. The bare table was littered with dirty dishes. Mamie and Jen sat beside it, silent and motionless in dreadful weariness. Tim slumped in Pop Berger’s ragged easy chair. Bump was still eating, walking softly about the table, picking crumbs.

“Got breakfast for me, Mamie?” Clem asked.

She nodded toward the stove and he opened the oven door, took out a bowl of hominy, and sat down at the end of the table.

He looked at them, one and the other. Tim’s lack luster eyes, agate brown, held less expression than a dog’s and his mouth, always open, showed a strange big tongue bulging against his teeth. His body, long and thin, a collection of ill-assorted bones, folded itself into ungainly shapes. Mamie was small, a colorless creature not to be remembered for anything. Jen might die. The springs of life were already dead in her. She did not grow.

“Come here,” he said to Bump. “I don’t want all this. Finish it, if you like.”

He held out his bowl and Bump snatched it, went behind the stove on the woodpile, and sat down in his hiding place. Often the woman lifted the poker and drove him out of it, but today he could enjoy it.

“Listen to me, all of you,” Clem said, leaning on the table.

They turned their faces toward him.

“How would you like to go away from here?” He spoke clearly and definitely, for he had learned that only so did they heed him. Accustomed to the loud voices of the man and woman they seemed to hear nothing else.

“Where?” Tim asked after a pause.

“I don’t know — run away, find something better.”

“Where would we sleep?” Mamie asked.

“We’d take a blanket apiece, sleep by a haystack somewhere until we got ourselves a house, or some rooms.”

“What would we eat?” she asked again.

“I’d work and get money and buy something. Tim could work, too. Maybe you could find a job helping in a house.”

He had expected some sort of excitement, even a little joy, but there was neither. They continued to stare at him, their eyes still dull. Jen said nothing, as though she had not heard. She seemed half asleep, or perhaps even ill.

“Jen, are you sick?” Clem asked.

She lifted her large, pale blue eyes to his face, looking not quite at his eyes, but perhaps at his mouth. She shook her head. “Awful tired,” she whispered.

“Too tired to come with us — out into the sunshine, Jen? We could stop and rest after we had got a few miles away.”

She shook her head again.

“If Jen don’t go, I won’t neither,” Mamie said.

“I ain’t goin’,” Tim said.

Clem started at them. “But you don’t like it here,” he urged. “They’re mean to you. You don’t get enough to eat.”

“We’re only Aid children,” Tim said. “If we went somewheres else it would be just like it is here.”

“You wouldn’t be Aid children,” Clem declared. “I’d fix things.”

“We’ll always be Aid children,” Tim repeated. “Once you’re Aid you can’t do nothin’ about it.”

Clem was suddenly angry. “Then I’ll leave you here. I’ve made up my mind to go and go I shall. You can tell them when they get home tonight. Say I’ve gone and I’m not coming back ever. They needn’t look for me.”

They stared at him, Jen’s eyes spilling with tears. “Where you goin’?” Tim asked in a weak voice.

“Back where I came from,” Clem said recklessly. He longed unutterably to get back somehow to Mr. Fong’s house in the familiar streets of Peking, which he had not known he loved. That was impossible, but to leave this house was possible. For the moment anger quenched his conscience. He had given them their chance and they would not take it. He had said he would take the burden of them on his own back, though he was no kin of theirs, and they had refused him even this hard way to his own freedom. Now he would think only of himself.

He leaped up the crooked stairs and took his suitcase and crammed his clothes into it. He had a little money left from the store the sailors had given him and he had kept it with him always in the small leather bag one of the sailors had made. This bag he had kept tied about his waist, night and day, lest the woman or the man discover it and take it from him. He paused for a moment to decide the matter of a blanket and then revolted at the thought of taking anything from this house. He would not even take bread with him. Alone he would be free to starve if he must.

Down the stairs he went again, carrying his suitcase. They were still in the kitchen as he had left them. None of them had moved. Their eyes met him as he came in, faintly aghast, and yet unspeaking.

“Good-by, all of you,” he said bravely. “Don’t forget I wanted you to come with me.”

He drew his folded cap out of his pocket and put it on his head.

“Good-by,” he said again.

They stared at him, still unanswering, and upon the strength of his continuing anger he strode out of the room and across the weedy yard to the gate which hung crooked upon its hinges. He leaped over it and marched down the road, his head high, to meet a world he did not know.

Despair drove him and lent him courage, and then the beauty of the land lifted his heart. Surely somewhere there were kind people, someone like Mr. Fong, who would recognize him and give him shelter for a while. He would work and repay all that he received and some day he would, after all, come back and see the wretched children he had left in that kitchen.

He had gone perhaps a mile when he heard the sound of feet padding in the dusty road. He stopped and turning his head he saw Bump running doggedly along, and he waited.

“What do you want, Bump?” he asked the sandy-faced, sandy-haired child who blinked at him, panting. The signs of hominy were still about his mouth.

“I’m comin’ with you,” he gasped.

Clem glared at him, for a moment resentful of the least of burdens. Then his conscience leaped into life again. Surely he could take this small creature with him, wherever he went, a younger brother.

“All right,” he said shortly. “Come along.”