Gods Men

4

ALONE IN HER SMALL HOT ROOM in the suburban house, Henrietta was writing a letter to Clem Miller. She was desperately tired and as usual, after she had been with William, melancholy wrapped her about. His first glance at her had been enough to tell her that she was still ugly, still all that she did not want to be. It was a sign of greatness in her which she did not recognize that she loved Ruth tenderly and humbly in spite of William’s preference. Why, she asked herself again tonight, did it matter what William thought? But she did care and would always care what he thought of her. It had begun in the old days in the mission house in Peking when the amah who had served them all had taught her that girls must always yield to the precious only son of the family.

“You,” Liu Amah had said, “you are only a girl. Weelee is a boy. Girls are not so good as boys. Men are more valuable than women.”

Henrietta sighed. It was late and she should have been sleeping but she could not. Her grandparents and Ruth had gone to sleep, or else by now her grandmother would have tapped at her door to inquire why her light was still on. Swept by the bottomless misery of youth, Henrietta had reached out into the night and had thought of Clem. His letter was still in her handbag and she read it through twice, carefully and slowly. Then she began to write.

Dear Clem:

You do not know me, but I am William Lane’s sister. William is too proud to write to you. He has always been a very proud boy and now he is worse than ever, although he is no longer a boy. He considers himself a man. I suppose he is a man since he has finished college. He is very smart. He was graduated yesterday with highest honors. I am sorry to say I don’t think he will ever write to you. But I think someone should, since you knew each other in old Peking, and so I am writing to you.

I don’t know anything much about you, and so I will tell you about myself. I am eighteen and next autumn I will go to college, I hope. I am not at all pretty — I had better tell you that right away. It is strange, for I look a good deal like William, and he is thought to be very handsome. I suppose it is not the way for a girl to look. My sister Ruth is pretty.

She paused and realized that she had nothing to say. This was another of her miseries. She felt so much, she was so racked with vague sorrows and longings and infinite loneliness and yet none of this could she put into words to anyone. She and Ruth went to a public school, since all the money had been needed for William, but she had found no special friends there. The girls thought her queer because she had grown up in China. Perhaps she was. She bit the end of her wooden pen and then went on.

Do you ever think of Peking? I do, often. From the window of my room there in the house where my parents live I used to look out upon a sweet little stubby pagoda — a dagoba, I think it was called. There were bells on the corners, and when my window was open and I lay in bed I could hear them ringing. Please tell me whether you think of such things. And shall you go back one day? I would like to but I cannot think how to earn my living there, not wanting to be a missionary.

Beyond this she could not go and so she signed herself sedately, sincerely his. When the letter was sealed it seemed to her that she must post it at once, even though it was now midnight. The small clock on her mantle gave this severe notice to her but she did not heed it. She put a dress over her nightgown, and with her feet slippered she went silently down the stairs and out of the back door to the street, where stood a postbox. At seven o’clock, she knew, the mail was collected and by breakfast time the letter would be on its way to the small Ohio town that seemed as far away as Peking. She heard the envelope rustle softly behind the shutter, and then she went back home and to her room again. Now she could go to bed. She had put forth a hand into the darkness and perhaps someone would reach out and clasp it. Comforted by hope she flung herself upon her bed and fell into a sleep that led her back into childhood dreams of a walled compound in Peking, a big shadowy mission house, where soft-footed brown servants came and went, bringing smiles and gentle encouragement to a shy and plain-faced American child.

When the letter reached Clem he was in the grocery store. It was the middle of the morning, and Owen Janison, the owner and his employer, came in from his daily trip across the street to the post office. Clem’s letters were few and until now they had borne Chinese stamps and postmarks.

“You got a letter from some place in New York, looks like,” Mr. Janison said. He was a tall thin man, whose mustaches hung down his chin and joined a faded yellow beard. He wore a gray suit and a stiff white shirt with a celluloid collar.

Clem was shirtsleeved behind the meat counter. He took the letter and looked at it carefully without opening it. “Thanks, Mr. Janison,” he said. He slapped a piece of corned beef on the scrubbed wooden counter and trimmed off some porous fat.

“A pound, did you say, Mrs. Bates?” he inquired.

“Mebbe a pound and a half,” the customer replied, hesitating. “Mr. Bates is terrible fond of the stuff though I don’t eat it myself, more’n a bite.”

Clem did not answer this remark. In the years since he and Bump, one weary morning, had walked into New Point, Ohio, he had learned to live upon two levels, the immediate and the real. Mrs. Bates was immediate but not real. Even Mr. Janison, upon whom he and Bump were dependent for their living, was immediate and not real. Real was the past and real the future, both equally clear to him alone. To recapture the past he had written to Yusan, Mr. Fong’s son, and he had received the letter from Dr. Lane. Yusan had forgotten his English and had given Clem’s letter to the missionary. From Dr. Lane had come a friendly letter, mainly about William and only a little about Yusan. Dr. Lane took it for granted that a youth in America named Clem Miller must be interested in his son William.

Reading the faintly stilted lines of the letter, for anything Dr. Lane wrote fell inevitably into the shape of a sermon, Clem had felt all the old realities. Yusan at sixteen was betrothed to a girl in the mission school, though the wedding was still far off. He had grown into a sober young man, over whose soul the missionary yearned. Yet Yusan refused to be Christian. Real was the memory of Yusan, the stubborn boy, growing into a young man. Real were the hours Clem had spent with him in Mr. Fong’s bare house. Real was the memory of the Peking streets, the wind-driven snows that covered the tiled roofs of house and palace in winter. Real were the fabulous summer skies. Clem remembered every detail of his childhood, the pleasure of owning sometimes three small cash with which he bought a triangular package of peanuts wrapped in handmade brown paper thick and soft like blotting paper. Real, too, was the joy of a hot sweet potato on a cold morning, bought from a vender’s little earthen oven, and real the pleasure of a crimson-hearted watermelon split upon a July day. Real were the caravans of camels padding through the dust, led by a man from Mongolia who knitted a garment as he walked, pulling from the camels the long strands of wool which they shed when the winter was ended. Real were the little apes on chains and the dancing bears, the traveling actors and the magicians and all that had made the city streets a pleasure for a wandering foreign child.

Out of the need to bring nearer to him that reality of childhood in the remote land which was still his own but which he could not claim and which did not claim him, Clem had upon an impulse written to William, whom he remembered only as he had looked that day when a Chinese lad had called his father a beggar because he trusted God for bread.

The letter Mr. Janison now brought him was, he supposed, from William. He waited, however, until it was time for his midday meal, which he made by taking a roll of stale bread and cutting off a slice of cheese and eating in the storeroom. Mr. Janison went home to noonday dinner and Bump was working on a farm, now that school was over. Clem had been firm about Bump’s going to school. He had given up the hope that some day he himself would go to a school somewhere, though not to learn ordinary things like geography and arithmetic, which he could get for himself out of books in his room at night. He wanted to learn large important matters, such as how to feed millions of people. He was obsessed with the business of food, although his own appetite was frugal. A thin, middle-sized boy, he had grown into the same kind of young man. His frame had taken on bony squareness of shoulder, leanness at the hips, without any flesh. Even the square angles of his face remained fleshless and his cheeks were hollow and his blue eyes deep set.

He had discarded the faith of his father, and said no prayers except those he spoke to his own soul. There were, he believed, only a few essentials to a good life, but they were essential to all people, and food he put first, cheap, nourishing food. Bump, for example, could not be filled. He sat sometimes watching Bump eat in the small room they lived in together. He always got a good meal for Bump at night, a stew or a hunk of boiled beef and cabbage and plenty of bread and butter. His own slender appetite soon satisfied, he enjoyed Bump’s bottomless hunger. He had provided the food and this was the pleasure he felt. Nobody had given them anything. He had worked and bought the food. He bought cheap food for it was good enough. He had no desire for fancy eatables and was stern with Bump about cake and pie. If everybody could eat his fill of good plain food, he would tell Bump, then there wouldn’t be any more trouble in the world.

He was bringing up Bump himself and by himself, sometimes ruthlessly but on the whole kindly, with the deep paternal instinct with which indeed he viewed the world, though he did not know it. His cure for a drunk coming into the store to beg on a winter’s night for a nickel to buy “a cup of coffee,” was to take a stale loaf and slice off two thick pieces and thrust a wedge of cheese between them. “Eat that and you won’t want to get drunk for a while,” he said with young authority.

In the back room, the store empty during the town’s midday meal, he now sat down on a crate and took the letter from his pocket. Without wasting time on curiosity, he tore the envelope open and was amazed at the first words. He had never had a letter from a girl, nor ever written to one. He had thought little of any girl, being busy at earning his living and rearing Bump. Now a girl had written to him.

He read the letter carefully and considered it a sensible one and read it again. She remembered Peking, too, did she? He felt excited, not because she was a girl but because she, like him, had been born in another world which nobody here knew anything about. He had learned now to live in America, but there would always be the world for him as well, and other people. He could not talk about it to Americans. They did not want to know about it. The people here were satisfied not to know about anything except what happened in their own streets.

He sat musing until he heard the tinkle of the bell that announced a customer, and then he went back into the grocery store. He would answer the letter, maybe on Sunday when he had sent Bump off to Sunday School.

Thus two weeks later, on a Thursday morning, Henrietta received the letter for which she had waited and for which she had gone herself every morning to open the door for the postman. The moment she saw it she took it and thrust it into the bosom of her apron. That day she was cleaning the attic for her grandmother, a musty place, hot under the roof and filled with dead belongings. There she returned to read Clem’s letter.

Dear Henrietta,

It was a surprise of course but I had rather maybe have a letter from you than from William. I am older than you but I know I cannot go to college on account of earning my living. I am an orphan and I have an orphan also to support. I do not even know his whole name, Bump he is called but I am sure it is not his name. He says when he was little he was thought bumptious and so people began to call him that. He cannot remember any family and so was an Aid child. I don’t know why I tell you about him. Some day I will tell you how I got him.

I am a poor letter writer not having much time but I would like you to know that I do remember Peking. It would be nice to talk with you about it as nobody here knows anything about it over there. Who knows, sometime maybe I could come to see you though not until I get Bump educated. I have a great many ideas of what I want to do when that job is done when I can think of myself and my own life.

I would enjoy hearing from you again. Yours sincerely,

Clem Miller.

Thus began the passage of letters between a small town in Ohio and a suburb of New York. Without seeing each other for two more years, boy and girl wove between them a common web of dreams. So profound was their need to dream that neither spent the time to tell the other the bare facts of their lives; Henrietta that she had graduated from the big bare public high school almost friendless because the other girls thought her too proud to join their chatter of boys and dances, and Clem that he was grinding out his youth behind a counter in a country store. These things neither considered important They were both weaving together the fabric of the past to make the fabric of the future. It was years before Henrietta learned all the simple facts of Clem’s life.

These were the facts. He had turned back that day to see Bump padding through the dust after him. That night they had slept in a barn, taking care not to rouse the farmer and his family, and from it they had set forth again in the early morning.

“Reckon the Aid will chase us?” Bump asked in the course of the next day.

“I don’t think she’ll care what becomes of us,” Clem replied.

The sky was bright above their heads. On that day he began to have his first intimations of his own country. He had walked for endless miles across the Chinese land with an old woman he did not know, linking village to village with his lonely footsteps. Now he walked as many miles with a child who was a stranger to him, across a landscape strange to him, too. Here there were few villages and the farmhouses stood separate and solitary. He avoided them unless he needed food, and then he went to knock upon a kitchen door to ask for work. He was stiff with softhearted farm wives who wanted to give them a meal and he demanded that he be allowed to pay for what he got, and he was equally harsh with surly men who declared there was nothing for him to do. Work there must be, he told them, because they must have food.

How many days he walked in that bright autumn he did not count or care. Slowly he learned to love the look of this land, even its uncultivated spaces, its ragged roadsides, its sparsely settled miles. He learned to be wary of old tramps and to choose the back roads they avoided. In the back roads and the remote farmhouses the people he found were good. They were not gregarious, these countrymen of his. They did not live in big families as the Chinese did. Two generations in a house were enough and maybe too much. More often a man and woman and their children were alone under a roof. The children were usually towheaded and their faces were burned brown with the wind and sun, and because he was a stranger they ran when they saw him just as the Chinese children had done. He thought of these dwellers on the land as folk half wild and scarcely civilized and yet he kept among them.

“Ain’t we goin’ to settle down somewheres?” Bump asked, as the days went on.

“Some time soon. You have to get to school,” Clem said.

“Do I have to go to school?” Bump wailed.

“Surely you do,” Clem said sternly.

One day at last they came into a town he liked, though it looked no different from any other. But it was in Ohio, a state that he had come to enjoy in the past days, a place where the people were decent and Bible reading. They made him think of his own Bible-reading parents, mingling kindness with rigid goodness. The streets in the town were clean and there was. a schoolhouse of wood frame painted white. The church, the post office, and the general store stood around a green square, in the midst of which was a rough statue of Abraham Lincoln. These were the reasons Clem chose New Point, and he went first to the store. Inside he found the tall lean man who hired him, after some hesitation, and then let him rent a room upstairs as part of his weekly wage. Clem bought Bump a suit of clothes and a pair of shoes and two pairs of socks on credit, and started him to school the next Monday.

At the end of that Monday he had given Bump his first and only whipping. The boy had come back from school gloomy and had gone upstairs quietly. Clem was busy with a customer and as soon as he was free he hastened up the stairs behind the store. There he found the boy packing his clothes into a flour sack.

“What are you doing?” Clem demanded.

Bump scowled at him from under sunburned brows. “I ain’t stayin’ with you,” he said in a flat voice.

“Why not?” Clem asked.

“I ain’t goin’ to no school.”

Clem glared at the boy who had become his whole family. “Why not?” he asked again.

“I don’t like it.”

Rage filled Clem’s soul. Not to like to go to school, not to take the chance that was offered, not to accept the gift of sacrifice, seemed to him ingratitude so immense that earth could not hold it nor heaven allow it. He rushed at Bump and seized him by the seat of his trousers and swung him clear of the floor. He flung him down flat and knelt beside him and beat him with his open hands until the boy howled. Upon this scene Mr. Janison hastened up the stairs.

“Lay off!” he bellowed. “You want to kill that boy?”

Clem turned upon him a face set and white. “He’s going to take his chance if I do have to kill him,” he replied and finished his punishment. When he let Bump get up he pointed at the flour sack and waited until the weeping boy had unpacked it and put his clothes away again.

Janison waited, too, a quizzical look behind his mustaches. Then Clem turned solemnly to his employer. “I aim to bring this boy up like my own brother. That means he’s going to get a good education, the kind I’d give my eyes to have, nearly. He’s to be a man, not some worthless son-of-a-gun.”

Mr. Janison pulled his goatee. “Go to it,” he said. “That was as pretty a lickin’ as ever I see.”

He went downstairs again and Clem sat down on the bed. “Bump, I hope never to lick you again,” he said gravely. “I don’t believe in it and I don’t feel I ought to have to do it. But if you dare to run away and throw out a fine chance like I’m offering you, I will come after you and lick you wherever you are. You hear me?”

“Ye-es,” Bump sobbed.

“Well, then,” Clem did not know how to go on. “You come downstairs and I’ll get you some crackers and cheese — and some lickerish,” he said finally. Food, he thought, was what the boy needed, and something sweet, maybe.

During the next years, as Bump began to grow into a satisfactory boy, Clem wondered often about his beginnings. That he was a child without parents, Clem knew; without parents, that is, except in the simplest animal sense. Mom Berger had told him one night after the younger children were in bed, that they were all love children, “except that there Bump.”

“What is he?” Clem had asked.

“I dunno what you’d call him,” she had said mysteriously.

With an embarrassment which sat ridiculously upon her thick person, she had pursed her lips and remained silent. Pop Berger had taken up the sordid story.

“That there Bump,” he said after some moments of rumination and chewing upon a vast quid of tobacco. “He’s what you might call a rape child.”

Clem had flushed. “You mean—”

“Yeah,” Pop Berger had said slowly, relishing the evil news. “His paw attacked a girl on the streets of Philly. ’Twas all in the papers.”

“Yeah,” Mom Berger said from beside the stove. “And I ast you was it real rape. A woman don’t rape easy or if she do, it ain’t rape.”

Pop took the story away from her again. “Anyways, it was brought up in court for to be rape, and the raper, that was Bump’s paw, mind you, he had to pay the girl a hunnerd dollars.”

“Some women makes their livin’ one way and some another,” Mom Berger had said, and had clattered a stove lid to let Pop know that enough was enough.

If the story was true, Clem had told himself in reflecting pity, then Bump had no parents at all, neither father nor mother. By the accident of two conflicting bodies he had been conceived, his soul snared somewhere among the stars. He was not orphaned, for even an orphan had once possessed parents. The boy’s solitary creation moved all that was fatherly in Clem’s being, and it was most of him.

He had not been alone in what he did either for Bump or himself. With the affection so easily found in any small American town, the citizens observed the solitary and ambitious boy. They knew no more about him than that he was an orphan and they took it for granted that Bump was his brother. That he had run away from an eastern state endeared him to them. Mr. Janison soon began to spread news of Clem’s monstrous good qualities. His industry was astounding to the employer. When other young males of the town were crazed with spring and the baseball season, Clem continued behind his counter, even staying to sweep the store as usual when the day was over. His belated arrival on the baseball field and the frenzy of those who awaited him only made him more beloved. For all his medium stature, Clem had long strong arms that could perform wheels in the air and send a ball faster than imagination. “A good all-round feller,” New Point decided, “a feller that’ll make his way.”

Two persons kept to themselves their thoughts about Clem. Miss Mira Bean, Bump’s teacher to whom Clem had gone after the whipping, knew that Clem was more than New Point discerned. She knew it the first evening he had come to her door, clean and brushed and holding his cap in his hand.

“Come in,” she had said with her usual sharp manner to the young.

Clem had come into her small two-room flat.

“My name is Clem Miller.”

“Sit down,” she commanded.

The rooms were small and crowded with furniture and books. There was little space to sit, and he took the end of a haircloth sofa. Miss Bean was like any of the middle-aged women he saw upon the streets of New Point, a lean, sand-colored shape, washed and clean, straight-haired and gray-eyed.

“What do you want, Clem?” she asked.

“I want to talk to you about Bump,” he said. He had gone on then to tell why he had felt compelled to whip the boy.

“But I can’t whip him again,” he said. “You, Miss Bean, have got to make him like school well enough so he will want to get an education.”

“He’s got to stay in school, whether he likes it or not,” Miss Bean said somewhat harshly. “It’s the law.”

Clem had sat looking at her. “I don’t think you ought to take advantage of that,” he said. “The law is on your side, of course. But even the law can’t make a boy get an education. It can only make him sit so many hours a day where you are. He’s got to like it before he can get educated.”

Miss Bean was not a stupid woman and she was struck with this wisdom in a youth who was still too young to be called a man.

“You’re right about that,” she said after a moment.

She had done her best, not only for Bump, but also for Clem, lending him books, guiding his reading, letting him talk to her for hours on Sundays. For though Clem made Bump go to Sunday School and lectured him about the value of going to church, he himself never went.

“Whyn’t you go, then, if it’s so good?” Bump grumbled.

Clem, polishing Bump’s ragged school shoes, paused to answer this as honestly as he could. “I just can’t get myself to it,” he confessed. “What’s more, I can’t tell you why. Something happened to me once somewhere.”

“What was it?” Bump asked.

Clem shook his head. “It would take me too long to tell you.”

He never told anyone anything about himself. It would indeed have taken him too long. Where would he begin, and how would he explain his origins? How could he ever tell anyone in this peaceful town in Ohio that he had once lived in Peking, China, and that he had seen his parents killed? There were things too endless to tell. Only to Henrietta was he one day to speak, because she knew at least the beginning.

The church bell came to his aid. “You run along,” he told Bump briskly. The shoes were polished and he washed his hands in the china bowl. Then he fixed Bump’s tie to exactitude and parted his hair again and brushed it. “Mind you learn the golden text,” he said sternly.

The minister at the Baptist Church was the other person in New Point who kept to himself his thoughts about Clem. He stopped sometimes in the store to see the industrious young man and to invite him to come to the house of God. He was a red-haired, freckle-faced young minister, fresh of voice and sprightly in manner, and there was nothing in him to dislike. But Clem did fear him, nevertheless, though the young minister was persuasive and ardent.

“Come to worship God with us, my friend,” he said to Clem one day at the meat counter. He had come to buy a pound of beef for stew.

Clem fetched out a piece of nameless beef and searched for the knife. “I don’t have much time, Mr. Brown,” he said mildly. “I really need my Sundays.”

“It costs more time in the end not to be a Christian, more time in eternity.”

Clem smiled and did not answer. He cut the meat and weighed it, and then cut another slice. “Tell Mrs. Brown I’m putting in a little extra.” This was his usual answer to those whom he refused something. He gave a little extra food.

The store, Clem knew as the years passed, was not his final destination. He was learning about buying and selling, and he was learning about his own people. Living among the kindly citizens of the small town, he began to recover from the shock of the farm and the man and woman who lived upon it. In its way, he sometimes mused, it had been a shock as severe as that he had received when he found his parents murdered on that summer’s day in Peking. He was taut with nervous energy, he never rested, and there were days when he could not eat without nausea. Food he held sacred, yet food could lie heavy in his own belly. He could not drink milk or eat butter because he could not bear the smell of the cow, and he disliked eggs. Meat he ate almost not at all, partly because he had been so little used to it. He forgot himself. Around the matter of food his imagination played and upon it his creative power was focused. Under Miss Bean’s dry guidance, he read economics and came upon Malthus, and lost his temper. The man must have been one of those blind thinkers, sitting in his study, playing with figures instead of getting out and seeing what was really going on in the world. People were starving, yes, but food was rotting because they could not get it. There was plenty of food, there were not too many people, the trouble was that men had not put their minds to the simple matter of organization for distribution. Food must be bought where it was plentiful and cheap and carried to where the people could buy it.

When this idea first came into Clem’s mind, its effect upon him was like that of religious conversion. He did not know it yet, but he was illumined as his father before him had been, not then by the satisfaction of feeding human bodies, but by the excitement of saving men’s souls. Clem had no interest in saving souls, for he had a high and unshakable faith in the souls of men as he saw them, good enough as God had made them, except when the evils of earth beset them. And these evils, he was convinced, rose first of all from hunger, for from hunger came illness and poverty and all the misery that forced men into desperation and then into senseless quarrels. Their souls were degraded and lost because of the clamoring hunger of their bodies. As simply as his father had left his home and followed God’s call across the sea, so simply now did Clem believe that he could cure the sorrows of men and women and their children.

He did not want to leave his own country as his father had done. Here among his own people he would do his work, and if he were proved right, as he knew he would be, then he would spread his plan of salvation to other lands and other peoples and first, of course, to the Chinese. Other people would see his success and follow him. If he had money he would not keep it. He would pour it all into spreading the gospel of good food for all mankind.

On Sundays when Bump was at Sunday School and the town in its Sabbath quiet, Clem in his room alone or walking into the countryside beyond Main Street, planned the business of his life. As soon as Bump was through high school he would begin and Bump could help him. Mr. Janison had offered him a partnership in the store in three more years. He would take it. He had to have a center somewhere. He would make New Point the center of a vast marketing network, buying tons of food in regions where harvests were plentiful, and supplying markets wherever there was scarcity. Meanwhile he must prepare himself. He must learn accounting and management as well as marketing. He must learn the geography of the country until he knew it as he knew the palm of his own hand, so that he could see what harvests could be expected from every part of it.

A vast scheme, he told himself, and a noble one, and he wanted to tell Henrietta. He clarified his own mind for many weeks afterward, writing to her every week of his developing ideas.

“Keep my letters, Henrietta,” he told her. “I haven’t time to make copies. Sometime I may want to check with myself and see how well my notions have worked.”

Henrietta kept his letters with reverence. She bought a tin box and painted it red and kept it locked and in the back of her closet. The key she wore around her neck, and when she wrote this to Clem he sent her a strange dirty-looking little amulet on a string and told her how he had come by it from an old woman in China. “Put it in the box along with my letters,” he told her. “It might bring us luck.”

William’s wedding was in September after his graduation from college. He had not wanted so early a marriage, and he had suggested to Candace that they wait for a year, or even two, until he knew where he was going to find the two hundred thousand dollars he felt was the least possible capital upon which he could hope to start his newspaper. Candace, who could be a laggard when she must decide, had pouted at the idea of delay.

“If it is only money—”

“It is not just money,” William said. “I must make my plans very carefully. You don’t just start a newspaper. You have to have a prospectus and a dummy and you have to get advertising together.”

“You could do all those things as well after we were married as before,” she insisted. “I’m going to talk to Papa.”

When she said this William was about to forbid her and then he did not. All summer he had worked hard and late in the city and he had worked alone. Through months so hot that one by one Martin Rosevaine and Blayne Parker and Seth James had stolen away to luxurious homes by sea and mountain and lake, William had lived steadily alone in a cheap two-room flat in lower New York, working day and night upon one dummy after another to get exactly the newspaper he wanted. Once a month he allowed himself to visit Candace. Upon such a visit they were now talking.

“I don’t want to depend upon your father,” he said at last.

“Don’t be silly,” Candace replied with easy rudeness. “Papa would do anything for me.”

“So would I,” he said, smiling.

“Then let me talk to Papa,” she said.

“But don’t ask him for money, please,” he replied. “I can find it somewhere.”

He was sorely tempted by the old possibility behind her words, for he had felt compelled to delay his marriage while he searched for money. Grimly handsome and determinedly suave, he had made friends wherever he could among the rich. He was not one of them but he knew how to be. Though through this summer he had stripped himself bare as a coolie, a towel about his loins while he sweated at his desk night after night, there had been other nights when his garments were such that he feared no valet as he sallied forth to dine or dance among the wealthy. He did not talk easily but his high-held head and his correct courtesy served him well enough instead. Silence had this value, he found, that when he did talk people listened.

On this next visit, the last before his marriage, Roger Cameron asked him to come into his private library one night after dinner. William knew the room well for he had made free of it during college vacations. The books were curious and heterogeneous, and they provided a fair pattern of Mr. Cameron’s self-education. There was a whole shelf on Christian Science and now, in later years, another on the religions of India.

“Sit down,” Mr. Cameron said. “Candace has been talking to me.”

“I asked her not to, sir,” William said somewhat sternly. But he sat down.

“Yes, well, Candy never obeys anybody,” Mr. Cameron replied mildly. “Now, William, she wants to get married and she tells me you feel you can’t for a year or two.”

“I feel only that I should see my way fairly clear before I take on the support of a wife and a house and so on,” William said.

“That’s reasonable,” Mr. Cameron said. “Very right and reasonable. I did no more in my young days. Fact is, I had to wait. Mrs. Cameron’s father wouldn’t hear to anything else, no matter how she cried or how I got mad. We waited. Well, thinking about that makes me feel I don’t want my girl to go through the same thing her mother did. How much money do you need, William?”

William looked reluctant. “I don’t know exactly.”

“No, I know you don’t,” Mr. Cameron said with mild impatience. “I’m just asking.”

“I think I should see two hundred thousand dollars ahead,” William said.

Mr. Cameron pulled his underlip. “You don’t need that all at once.”

“No, but I have to be able to lay my hands on it.”

They were silent for a while. The big room was dark with oak paneling and the lights were lost in the beamed ceiling.

“Suppose you tell me a little more about this paper,” Roger Cameron said at last. “What makes you want a paper, anyway? Why don’t you come into the Stores with me?”

“I appreciate that, Mr. Cameron,” William said very properly. “I do, indeed. But I have set my heart on building up an entirely original sort of newspaper. If it is successful, I shall begin a chain. It will sell for two cents, and it will have more news that two cents ever bought before.”

“You’ll have to get a lot of advertising,” Mr. Cameron said.

“That’s where the money will be,” William replied. “But it’s not entirely a matter of money.”

“If it’s not a matter of money, what is it?” Mr. Cameron asked with some astonishment.

“I want to accomplish more than making money,” William said. He was not afraid to tell Mr. Cameron the truth. His thin erect body, his high head, his small tense hands clasped together were taut with earnestness. “I look at it this way, Mr. Cameron. Most of the world is made up of common people. They are stupid and ignorant. What they learn in school doesn’t help them to think. They cannot think. They have to be told what to think. They don’t know what is right and wrong. They have to be told.”

“People don’t like to think,” Mr. Cameron said shrewdly.

“I know that,” William said. “Therefore they act without thought or they listen to Socialists and agitators and they act foolishly and endanger decent people. I propose to do the thinking, Mr. Cameron. That is why I want a newspaper.”

“How do you know people are going to take to your thoughts?” Mr. Cameron asked. He was very much astonished. He did not know himself what to think of this young man with his lichen-gray eyes.

“I won’t say they are my thoughts, Mr. Cameron,” William said. “I shall do exactly what you do in the Stores. You have men whose job it is to find out what sells best and you buy in quantity what you think people want. Actually, you show people what they ought to buy. That is what I shall do. My paper will be full of what people like. There’ll be plenty of stories with pictures about oddities, about murders, about accidents. But there’ll be events that happen in the world, too, that people ought to know about.”

“Where are your ideas coming in?” Mr. Cameron demanded.

“In the way everything is told,” William said. “And not told,” he added.

Mr. Cameron shot him a sharp look. “Smart,” he murmured. “Very smart. I hope you’re always right.”

“I won’t be always right,” William replied. “But I shall try to be.”

It was more than he had told anybody, even his friends. They knew that he was to be the editor for he had always assumed that he would be, but they did not know that he planned to shape every item, every line, decide the news he would not tell as well as what he did. The paper would be a reflection of his mind and the direction that of his own soul. When he had put out his first issue he would take it to big business firms and show it to top men. He’d say, “Here is your safeguard. Advertise here and help me influence the people toward Us and away from Them.”

“You don’t like folks, do you?” Mr. Cameron said suddenly.

William did not know how to answer. Then he chose the truth. “I have a profound pity for them,” he said.

“Pity breeds contempt,” Mr. Cameron said sententiously.

“Perhaps,” William said. “You feel the same way, though, Mr. Cameron.”

Mr. Cameron was pulling his lower lip again. “In a way,” he admitted.

“I knew it as soon as I saw the Stores,” William said. “If you didn’t despise people you couldn’t sell that stuff to them.”

“Here — here—” Mr. Cameron said sheepishly.

“I admire you for it,” William said. “But I have a little more idealism than you have. I think the people can be guided to better things.”

Mr. Cameron looked at him sidewise. “You may be wrong, William. People are awfully mulish.”

William did not yield. “They can be influenced toward something or away from it, just as in the Stores. If you should decide that purple was to be the season’s color, you could get people to buy things in purple.”

“I don’t care,” Mr. Cameron said. “It makes no difference to me what they buy.”

“I do care,” William said.

They did not talk much after that, but after another ten minutes Mr. Cameron got up. “Well, William, whatever your reasons are I’ll say this: I’ll put away a hundred thousand dollars — half of what you need — and keep it handy, and I want you to go ahead and have the wedding.”

William flushed. “Nothing would please me better, Mr. Cameron,” he said.

His marriage day dawned as bright as though he had commanded the sun. At that light striking through his open windows he remembered a story his mother used to tell of his childhood. He had waked once at dawn in the old temple where his family was summering upon one of those bare brown mountains outside the city of Peking. The light was pearly above the horizon and he had shouted, leaping out of bed, “Come up, Sun!” At that moment, as though in obedience to his command, the sun sprang above the edge of the earth. He could not have been more than four years old.

The sun had come up as suddenly this morning and he lay realizing as much as he could the meaning of this day. Everything was ready and all that he had to do was simply to be the bridegroom that the day demanded. He had no doubt of himself, for he was to be alone. He had struggled for months over the matter of his sisters and his grandparents and then had dismissed his conscience. Both the girls were at college and his grandfather was not well. The old man was recovering slowly from a stroke and one side of his face was askew. William would not have them at his wedding.

When Candace spoke of them he shook his head. “I don’t want them there,” he said. She had looked at him with strange eyes and had said nothing.

The bridesmaids were six of Candace’s schoolmates and friends. Jeremy was his best man and Martin, Blayne and Seth were his ushers. He had made everything as he wanted it.

The door opened and the valet came in, a middle-aged man with a careful English accent.

“Shall I draw your bath, sir?”

“If you please.”

“Mrs. Cameron thought you might like your breakfast fetched on a tray.”

“I would, thanks.”

The ceremony was to be at noon and they were sailing for England immediately. Roger Cameron was giving them the trip. He was giving them a house, too. Not a large one, but a pleasant small structure of cream-colored brick near Washington Square. William had not pretended that either luxury was in his power to provide.

“Someday I’ll be able to do all these things for Candy, sir,” he had said, gracefully accepting the gifts.

“Of course you will,” Roger Cameron had replied.

The bath water stopped running and a valet held up a silk robe, his head turned away. William got out of bed and drew it about his shoulders.

“Bring breakfast in half an hour,” he said with the brusque manner he had learned in his childhood toward servants.

The valet disappeared and William went into the bath. He would stay in his room this morning, away from everyone. The rehearsal had gone off well yesterday. There was no detail left for anxiety. Candace was supposed to sleep until just before she needed to dress for the ceremony. He did not want to see Jeremy or any of the fellows. He could do with two hours or so of pure leisure.

There was a knock at the door and he answered. A footman came in with a small wheeled table on which was set a large tray of covered dishes. In the midst of them was a little silver bowl of roses.

“Your breakfast, Mr. Lane,” the man murmured.

“Set it there by the window, Barney,” William replied. The man was young and not much older than William himself. He was Irish, as his somewhat shapeless face declared, and his eyes were innocent and humble as the eyes of the poor and ignorant should always be. William liked him and had sometimes encouraged him to talk.

“ ’Tis a nice day for it, sir,” Barney now said. He arranged the tray by the window, from which could be seen the trees of the park, their green tinged with coming autumn.

“It is, indeed,” William said. He had put on his new dressing gown, an affair of blue and black stripes, effective with his dark hair and stone-gray eyes. He should perhaps have kept it for tomorrow when he would be breakfasting with Candace, but he felt that magnificence alone had also its special pleasure.

Barney hovered about the table. “Your eggs is turned as you like ’em, sir, and the toast I did myself.”

“Thank you.”

“Well, sir,” Barney said at last, “my best wishes, I’m sure.”

“Thank you,” William said again.

Upon such composure Barney retired. When he had eaten William sat for a while, smoking a cigarette and drinking a second cup of coffee. Two hours were left in which he need do nothing. He did not know how to do nothing. He thought of going to bed, but he could sleep no more. He did not want to think about Candace. There would be plenty of time for that. He could not read.

Two hours — a valuable space of time! When would he be alone again? He got up abruptly and went to the desk at the other end of the room and sat down before it. There for the two hours he worked steadily and in silence until the thump upon his door announced Jeremy. It was time to get ready for his wedding.

A perfect wedding, of course, he had expected. Anything less would have surprised and annoyed him. His ushers did their work well and Jeremy was only less efficient. He seemed strangely thoughtful throughout the ceremony and hesitated a long moment when it came to the ring, so long that Candace looked at him with startled eyes. But the ring was there in Jeremy’s vest pocket and he gave it to William with a veiled, beseeching look.

William did not notice the look. He was absorbed in the proper conduct of his own part, and he slipped the ring on Candace’s finger and made his promises. Going down the aisle a few minutes later, his steps measured to the music, he held his head high in his habitual proud fashion.

The fashionable church was crowded. He looked at no one, and yet he was aware of every personage there. Beside him Candace walked as proudly as he did, but it was he who set the step. He had begun the stately march of his life.

Clem’s engagement to Henrietta took place abruptly and even awkwardly. The first tentative letters that they had exchanged had carried far more than their proper weight of meaning. They were secret communications between two persons completely solitary. Though Henrietta had moved apparently serene through public high school in the comfortable, unfashionable suburb, living with Ruth, their grandparents, and the two elderly housemaids, she knew herself as lonely as though she lived upon a desert isle. Ruth was popular and pretty and might easily have married while very young any of several men, even before she went to college. That she did not do so, that she postponed marriage by going to college, was because she visited more and more often in William’s home. Vacations soon meant a few hurried days with Henrietta and getting a wardrobe together suitable for the rest of the vacation, even the long summer, with William and Candace. There was no discussion of Henrietta’s going, too. Ruth had learned to live delicately between her brother and sister, conveying to each the impression of apology and greater affection.

“I feel guilty,” she told Henrietta. “I go flying off and you stay here and take care of the grandparents.”

“It is what I want to do,” Henrietta said.

Ruth paused in the folding of a silky film. “You would like Candace if you let yourself. Everybody does. She’s very easy.”

“I daresay I would like Candace but there’s William,” Henrietta replied with her terrible honesty.

“He is your brother,” Ruth persisted, though timidly. She was equally afraid of Henrietta and William.

“I can’t help that,” Henrietta replied. “Don’t forget I knew him long before you did — and much better. We had those two years together at the Chefoo school when you were at home in Peking with Papa and Mama.”

Nevertheless, when Ruth was gone, when she had waved to the pretty face under the flowery hat, smiling through the train window, Henrietta knew she was lonely. Like William’s the lines of her face were severe and her frame was angular and tall. Inside she was like him and yet how unlike! She was so like him that she could see in herself his very faults. She had no sense of humor, neither had he. But in their spirits there was no likeness. She was possessed with honesty and a depth of simplicity that frightened away all but the brave, and among the young there are few who are brave. Young men feared her and young girls avoided her. There remained Clem, whom she never had seen and who had never seen her. To Clem, in long silent summer evenings, she poured out her feelings almost unrestrained. He answered her letters on Sundays, when he had sent Bump to church. He had no other vacant hour throughout the week. Even on Sundays he had to work on the books for Mr. Janison.

She went to a small girls’ college, an inexpensive one, while Ruth had decided to go to Vassar. She did not want to be with Ruth for by then even she could see that Ruth had chosen William and the sort of life he wanted. She listened to Ruth’s accounts of that life, repelled and forlorn. Ruth’s flying blond hair, her sweet blue eyes, her white skin and slender shape were the means whereby she was welcomed in William’s life. William was living in a beautiful house, neither large nor small, on Fifth Avenue. Candace had furnished it in pink and gray and gold. There was a great room where they gave parties. It had been two rooms but William had ordered the wall between taken down. William worked fearfully hard and his paper was getting to be successful. Everybody was talking about it.

“We ought to be proud of him,” Ruth said.

Henrietta did not answer this. She sat gazing at Ruth rather stolidly and no one could have known that she was in her heart giving up this younger sister whom she tenderly loved. When Ruth came back from a long summer spent with William, she had been prepared to tell her about Clem. She had planned it in many ways. She might say, “Ruth, I don’t want you to think I’m in love, but …” Or she might say, “Do you remember the Faith Mission family in Peking? Well, I know Clem again.” Or she might simply choose one of Clem’s letters, perhaps the one that explained how he wanted to open a chain of markets, right across the country, in which people could buy good food cheaply, or if they had no money, they could simply ask for it free. “People don’t ask unless they must — that is, most people,” Clem had written. He had a deep faith in the goodness of people. People didn’t like to beg or to be given something for nothing. The human heart was independent. Henrietta was moved by the greatness of Clem’s faith. In her loneliness she wanted desperately to believe that this was true. But when Ruth talked about William, Henrietta could not tell her about Clem. The two names were not to be linked together.

Then one day she saw something new in Ruth’s face, a quiver about the soft lips, a shyness in those mild eyes. Ruth, catching the loving query in Henrietta’s look, suddenly collapsed into tears, her arms around Henrietta’s neck and her body flung across her sister’s lap.

“Why, baby,” Henrietta breathed. She had not used the name since they had been little girls playing house, and she had always been the mother and Ruth her child. She put her arms about the small creature now and hugged her, and felt how strangely long it was since she had offered a caress to anyone. She and Ruth had not been demonstrative in recent years, and there was no one else.

“I’m in love,” Ruth sobbed. “I’m terribly, terribly in love.”

“Don’t cry,” Henrietta whispered. “Don’t mind, Ruthie. It’s all right. It’s not wrong. Who is it?”

“Jeremy,” Ruth said in the smallest voice.

Henrietta did not release her hold. She tried to remember Jeremy’s face as she had seen it when William graduated from college. A nice face, rather thin, very pale, very kind, this she remembered. Then she remembered slow, rather careful movements, as though something inside hurt him, and very pale and delicate hands, bony and not small.

“Does he know?” she asked.

“Yes, he does,” Ruth said. She slid from Henrietta’s lap to the floor and leaned against her knee and wiped her eyes with the edge of Henrietta’s gingham skirt. “He told me first — I wouldn’t have dared—”

“You mean you are engaged?” Henrietta asked.

Ruth nodded. “I suppose so — as soon as he dares to tell. Candace knows, but none of us dares to tell William.”

“Why not?” Henrietta said with fierceness. “Is there any reason why it is his business?”

“It just seems to be,” Ruth said.

“Nonsense,” Henrietta replied.

Her mind flew to Clem. Was not this the moment to reveal that she too was beginning to love? But still she could not speak of him.

“I’ll tell William myself,” she declared.

“Oh no,” Ruth said quickly. “Jeremy wants to do it. He will, one of these days. I don’t know why he thinks William won’t like it.”

“I know,” Henrietta said. Her voice was gloomy. “William doesn’t want the people he goes about with to think he has any family at all. Nobody is good enough for him.”

“That’s not quite true,” Ruth said. “William’s very nice to me, usually.”

“Because you always do what he says,” Henrietta said.

“Well, usually I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t,” Ruth said. “Anyway, it’s to be kept a secret for a while.”

She got up from the floor and went to the mirror and smoothed her curls. The intimate moment was over. William had broken it as he always did, and Henrietta said nothing about Clem.

The college year began again and the sisters parted.

Clem’s Sunday letters reached Henrietta on Wednesday. She had chemistry laboratory on Wednesday afternoons and among her test tubes she read the long, closely written letter lying between her notes. Then one week there came the letter she had not expected. On Thursday she scarcely ever bothered to go to see whether she had mail, but that day she had happened to pass by the office and, on the chance that there might be a rare letter from her mother, she stopped and found instead another letter from Clem.

“Do I have to be home early?” Bump had inquired.

He was now a pudgy boy who had just begun to wear spectacles. Long ago he had given up rebelling against Clem.

Clem looked at his big dollar watch. “You can stay out till eleven o’clock but you can’t play pool.”

“I was goin’ to the nickelodeon.”

“All right.”

Thus Clem had had the room alone that Monday night while he wrote to Henrietta. It might have been the solitude that moved him to ask her now to marry him. It might have been his constant wish to comfort her loneliness. It was certainly his unchanging feeling of union with her, though he had never seen her face. She was the only person in the world who could understand when he spoke about his childhood, that other world where all his roots were planted so deeply that there could be no uprooting.

“You and I have not met,” he now wrote. “It may seem—” he paused here to look up the word in his dictionary—“presumptuous for me to have the idea. But I have it and I might as well tell you. It seems to me that you and I are meant to get married. I have not seen you nor you me, but I take it we don’t care first for looks. There is something else we have together. We understand things, or so I feel. I hope you do, too.”

He paused here a long time. When he went on he wrote, “I do not like this idea of proposing to you by letter. If you are willing I will come to see you. Mr. Janison owes me some time and I have saved money. Bump can help in the store after school. I could get away a couple of days and have a whole afternoon with you.”

When he had written these words he then went on to tell her the usual news of his life. Bump had got to like school at last and was even talking of college. He’d have to work his way. He himself had given up hope of a real education but he read a lot, Miss Bean telling him what books. He had just finished The Wealth of Nations. It was hard going but full of sense. Then he told his big news. Mr. Janison, not having any children, had asked if he didn’t want to consider taking over the store some day.

Clem chewed his pen a while when he had written this. Then he went on to tell Henrietta again what he felt and what he had never told anybody except her. “If I do take this store I won’t be content just to handle the one outfit. I will likely start up my cheap food stores in other places. I haven’t got it all worked out but I believe it can be done like I have told you. Farmers can sell cheap if they can sell direct. Plenty of people need to eat more and better food. I could maybe think out some way even to ship food across to the people in China, or maybe just help them over there, once I learned how here, to get their own food around. It’s really a world proposition, as I see it.”

He paused again, frowned and sighed. “Henrietta, I hope you will understand that I am not just interested in material things. But I feel that if everybody had enough food so they did not need to worry about where their next meal was coming from, then they could think about better things. I have not the education for teaching people but I could feed them. Anyway, to my thinking, food is something people ought to have the way they have water and air. They ought not to have to ask for it or even work for it, for all have the right to live.”

He paused again and closed his letter with these words. “I hope you will forget your brother William’s attitude toward you as you feel it is, and remember that I care enough to make up for it to you, if you will let me.”

Such a letter deserved many readings before it was committed to certainty, and he read it again and again. There was nothing in it to change, he decided finally, although he would have liked to make it more polished in the writing since she was in college. This he did not know how to do and so he sealed it, addressed it, and took it to the corner postbox. There he noticed by the town clock that it was a quarter past eleven. He was just beginning to allow himself to feel severe about Bump when he saw the light come on in the room above the store. The boy was home, then. Everything was all right. He walked down the street toward the store whistling slightly off key a tune whose name he did not know.

This was the letter Henrietta received on Thursday. She kept it with her all night, waking twice to read it over again by the thin light of a candle shaded against her sleeping roommate. Of course she wanted to marry Clem. No man had ever asked her to marry him, no boy had ever asked her to a dance. Yet she wanted to go slowly about loving Clem and marrying him because it was her whole romance and there would be no other. It was wonderful to feel his letter in her bosom, a warm and living promise of love. She could trust his love as she had not trusted even the love of her parents or Ruth’s demanding affection. Tomorrow, in the library where it was quiet, up in the stacks where she had a cubbyhole because she was doing a piece of original research in her chemistry, she would write to Clem and tell him that if when they met, they both felt the same way …

The next day in the cubbyhole, writing these very words, she was interrupted by her giggling roommate.

“Henrietta, there’s a man wants to see you!”

“A man?” She was incredulous, too.

“A young man, terribly skinny, covered with dust!”

She knew instantly that it was Clem. Without a word more she ran down the narrow iron steps and across the hall, across a stretch of lawn to the dormitory sitting room. It was early afternoon and no one else was there except Clem. He stood in the middle of the floor waiting for her.

“I had to come,” he said abruptly and shook her hand with a wrenching grip. “I oughtn’t to have put it in a letter. If a fellow wants to marry a girl he ought to come and say so.”

“Oh,” she gasped, “that’s all right. I didn’t mind.”

They stood looking at each other, drinking in the detail of the flesh. They were both plain, both honest, both lonely, and one face looking at the other saw there its own reflection.

“Henrietta, do you feel the way I do?” Clem asked. His voice trembled.

Henrietta flushed. Then he did not mind the way she looked, her straight dark hair, her ugly nose and small gray eyes, her wide mouth.

“You might not like me — after you got to know me.” Her voice was trembling too.

“Everything you are shines right out of you,” he said. “You’re the kind I need — somebody to put my faith in. Oh, I need faith!”

She gave a great sigh that ended in a choking gasp. “Nobody has ever really needed me, I guess. Oh, Clem—”

They put their arms around each other awkwardly and their lips met in the passionless kiss of inexperienced love.

He stayed the rest of the day and she forgot her work. They wandered together over the campus and she told him about the buildings and pointed out her window. She took him into the chemistry laboratory, empty by the end of the day, and explained to him what she was trying to do, and he listened, straining to understand the union of the elements.

“I sure do wish I had education,” he said with such longing that she could not bear his deprivation.

“Clem, why can’t you give up the store and go to college? Lots of fellows work their way through, or very nearly.”

He shook his head. “I can’t afford to do it. I’m too far on my way. Besides, I haven’t time for all of it. I just want to learn what I need — this chemistry stuff, for instance, I have an idea I could discover a whole lot of new foods. Has anybody gone at it that way?”

“Not that I know of,” she said.

They took the eight o’clock train to town and had a sandwich together at a cheap restaurant. The night was warm and the darkness was not deep when they were finished. They walked up and down the platform together, hand in hand, dreading to part, now that they had met.

“When shall we meet again?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I ought to ask your father, I guess. Isn’t that the right thing?”

“I wish nobody needed to know,” she cried with passion. “I wish you and I could just go off together and nobody ever know.”

“I guess that wouldn’t be just the right thing,” he said in a reasonable voice. “I’d feel a whole lot better if I wrote to your father telling about all this. Maybe I ought to tell William.”

“No!” Henrietta cried. She scuffed the edge of her shoe along the black cindered ground. “I want it all to myself — until we really are married.”

“Won’t you tell William?” Clem looked grave.

“No,” Henrietta said in the same passionate voice. “At least we don’t have to tell William.”

“He’ll have to know sooner or later,” Clem said.

“Let him find out!” she cried.

The train came racketing in, drowning their voices, and they kissed again quickly, mindful of people about them though they were all strangers, and then Clem swung himself up the steps and she stood with her hands in the pockets of her green coat, watching until the train was gone.