Gods Men

6

HENRIETTA SAT SEWING IN the small living room of her home. She was not good at sewing. Her fingers were clumsy and the thread knotted often, but it did not occur to her to give up merely because she was not adept and so she sewed steadily on, glancing only occasionally through the window by which she sat. The scene was simple enough, a street of cheap houses much like this one that she and Clem had rented next to the store. Whatever grace the street had came from two rows of maple trees which were now beginning to show the hues of autumn. It was late afternoon and under the trees children were playing in the leaves, running hither and thither, apparently unwatched unless a quarrel brought a mother to the door.

“You, Dottie! Stop kicking your little brother!”

“But I wanna!”

“I don’t care what you want. Stop it, I say!”

She wondered if Clem wanted children. They had never talked of children, each for some unspoken reason. She was not sure whether she even wanted children. She had never got used to living in America and she would not know how to bring up a child. In China there had been the amahs. Here she would have to wash all the child’s things, and tend it herself when it cried. Besides, Clem was enough. He was a dozen men in one, with all the great schemes in his head. It would be as much as she could do to see that he lived to carry them through.

That he would succeed she did not doubt. From the moment she had seen him in the dingy college sitting room she had believed in him. Trust was the foundation of her love. She could not love anyone unless she trusted and for that reason she really loved no one except Clem and her father.

As long as she lived she would not forgive William because he was angry when he found that she had married Clem. She had written to Ruth, after all, and at first Ruth had not dared to tell William the whole truth. She had let William think the marriage had not yet taken place and he tried to stop it, thinking it still only an engagement. He had actually cabled to Peking to his mother. When she opened the cable from her mother forbidding her too late to marry Clem, she had known it was William’s doing.

“That ignorant fellow!” William had called Clem, and Ruth had told her.

Even Ruth was sorry. “I wish you’d told us, Henrietta. It wasn’t kind. He isn’t suitable for you. You won’t be able to bring him to William’s house.”

“I shall never want to go to William’s house.” That was what she had answered. She would never be afraid of William, however many newspapers he had. Clem was so innocent, so good. He did not like her to say anything against William.

“He’s your brother, hon — it would be nice if you could be friends.” That was all Clem said.

When she told him how William felt about their marriage, Clem only looked solemn. “He don’t understand, hon. People are apt to make mistakes when they don’t understand.” She could not persuade him to anger.

She had written to her parents herself, a vehement letter declaring her independence and Clem’s goodness, and her father had replied, mildly astonished at the fuss. “I don’t see why you should not marry Clem Miller. I should be sorry to see you in the circumstances of his father, but nowadays nobody lives by faith alone.”

Her mother had been surprisingly amiable, sending as a wedding present a tablecloth of grass linen embroidered by the Chinese convent nuns. Henrietta guessed shrewdly that her mother did not really care whom she married.

As for Clem, he wistfully admired William’s success.

“If William could get interested in my food idea, now, how we could go! He could set people thinking and then things would begin to happen.”

“He doesn’t want them to think,” Henrietta said quickly.

“Oh now, now!” Clem said.

The clock struck six and up and down the street the supper bells rang. She rose to look at the roast and potatoes in the oven and to cut bread and set out milk. Clem would be home soon and he would want to eat and get back to the store. She moved slowly, with a heavy grace of which she was unconscious. Her immobile face, grave under the braids of her dark hair, seldom changed its expression. Now that she was with Clem her eyes were finer than ever, large, and deep, set under her clear brows; yet at times they held a look of inner bewilderment as though she were uncertain of something, herself perhaps, or perhaps the world. It was no small bewilderment thus revealed but one as vague and large as her mind, as though she did not know what to think of human existence.

The door in the narrow hall opened sharply and then shut, and the atmosphere of the house changed. Clem had come in.

“Hon, you there?” It was his greeting although he knew she was always there.

“I’m here,” she replied. Her voice was big and deep. He came to the kitchen, his light step quick moving. Their eyes met, she standing by the stove with a pot holder in her hand, and he crossing to the sink to wash. He washed as he did everything, with nervous speed and thoroughness, and he dried his face and hair and hands on a brown huck towel that hung on the wall. Then he came to her and kissed her cheek. He was not quite as tall as she was.

“Food ready?”

“I am just dishing up.”

He never spoke of a meal but always of food. He sat down to the roast she set before him and began to carve it neatly and with the same speed with which he did all else. Two slices cut thin he arranged on a plate for her, put a browned potato beside them, and handed the plate to her. Then he cut his own slice, smaller and even thinner.

“Can’t you eat a little more, Clem?” Henrietta asked.

“Don’t dare tonight, hon. I have a man waiting for me over there.”

“You didn’t want to bring him home?”

“No. I was afraid we’d talk business all through our food and my stomach would turn on me again. I want a little peace, just with you.”

She sat in silence, helping him to raw tomatoes and then to lima beans. Then she helped herself. Neither spoke while they ate. She was used to this and liked it because she knew that in her silence he found rest. They were in communion, sitting here alone at their table. When he was rested he would begin to talk. He ate too fast but she did not remind him of it. She knew him better than she knew herself. He was made of taut wire and quicksilver and electricity. Whatever he did she must not lay one featherweight of reproach upon him. Sometimes she tortured herself with the fear that he would die young, worn out before his time by the enormous scheme he had undertaken, out she knew that she could not prevent anything. He must go his own way because for him there was no other, and she must follow.

In this country which was her own, she still continued to feel a stranger and her only security was Clem. Everything else here was different from Peking and her childhood and she would not have known how to live without him. When sometimes in the night she tried to tell him this he listened until she had finished. Then he always said the same thing, “Folks are the same anywhere, you’ll find, hon.”

But they were not. Nobody in America was like the Chinese she had known in Peking. She could not talk to anybody in New Point about — well, life! They talked here about things and she cared nothing about things. “All under Heaven …” that was the way old Mrs. Huang used to begin conversation when she went over to the Huang hutung.

She looked at Clem and smiled. “Do you remember how the Chinese loved to begin by saying, ‘All under Heaven’?”

“And go on to talk about everything under heaven!”

“Yes — you remember, too.”

“I wish I didn’t have to hurry, hon, but I do.”

“I know, I don’t know why I thought of that.”

They were silent again while he cleaned his plate and she pondered the ways of men and the things for which they sacrificed themselves. William, sitting in his splendid offices in New York, was a slave to a scheme as much as Clem was, and yet how differently and with what opposite purpose! She could not have devoted herself to Clem had he wanted to be rich for power. He did not think of money except as something to further his purpose, a purpose so enormous that she would have been afraid to tell anyone what it was, lest they think him mad. But she knew he was not mad.

Clem put down his knife and fork. “Well, what’s for dessert?”

“Stewed apples. I would have made a pie but you said last time—”

“Pie won’t leave me alone after I’ve eaten it. I can’t be bothered with something rarin’ in my stomach when I’ve got work to do.”

She rose, changed the plates, and brought the fruit. He ate it in a few bites, got up and threw himself in a deep rocking chair, and closed his eyes. For ten minutes he would sleep.

She sat motionless, not moving to clear the table or take up her sewing. She had learned to sit thus that his sleep might not be disturbed by any sound. His hearing was so sharp that the slightest movement or whisper could wake him. But she did not mind sitting and watching him while he slept. They were so close, so nearly one, that his sleep seemed to rest her, too. Only her mind wandered, vaguely awake.

He opened his eyes as suddenly as he had closed them, and getting up he came back to his seat at the table facing her.

“Hon, I feel I’m wasting you.”

She could not answer this, not knowing what he meant.

“Here I have married me a fine wife, college educated, and all she does is to cook my meals and darn my socks!”

“Isn’t that what wives are supposed to do?”

“Not mine!”

He looked at her fondly and she flushed. She had learned now that she would never hear the words of love that women crave from men. Clem did not know them. She doubted if he had ever read a book wherein they were contained. But she did not miss them for she had never had them, either. She knew very well that Clem was the only person who had ever loved her, and of his love she was sure, not by words but by his very presence whenever he came near. The transparency of his being was such that love shone through him like light. It shone upon her now as he sat looking at her, half smiling. She saw memory in his eyes.

“Remember that brown Chinese bread we used to have in Peking, hon? The kind they baked on the inside of the charcoal ovens, slapped against the side, and sprinkled with sesame seeds?”

“Yes, I remember … the flat ones. …”

“Yes.”

“What about it, Clem?”

“I don’t know. I get a hankering sometimes to taste it again. What say we go back, hon?”

“To China, Clem?”

“Just for a look around. I might forget what used to be if I saw what Peking is like now.”

He looked white and tired and her heart felt faint. Why did she always have that premonition, undefined, unreasonable, that she was stronger than he, more indestructible, more lasting? No flame like his burned within her, and she was not consumed.

“It would be good to go back, Clem.”

“Think so, hon? Well, we’ll see.”

He got up with his usual alertness and the premonition was gone. There was no reason to think — anything! But when he was gone she sat thinking and idle. Yes, she remembered the loaves of sesame bread hot from the oven of the old one-eyed vender. She had often slipped through the unguarded back gate and creeping beside the wall of the mission compound, she had waited, hidden by a clump of dwarf bamboo at the end of the wall. She could hear even now the vender’s high call as he came down the street, always at the same hour, that hungry midmorning hour on Saturday when she and Ruth were supposed to be doing their lessons for Monday. He always looked behind the bamboos for her and grinned when he saw her, his jaws altogether toothless.

“Hot ones,” she always said.

“Do I not know?” he retorted, and reaching down into the little earthen oven he peeled the bread cakes, two of them, from the sides. His hands were always filthy. Flour and dough blackened by smoke clung in their cracks and his nails were black claws, but she would not think of that in her hunger for the bread. She paid him two pennies and ran back into the compound, the cakes under her jumper. Ruth would not eat them because his hands were dirty and so she ate them herself, the flavor delicious, the sesame seeds nutlike in their delicacy. Clem had eaten that bread, too, but William never had. Like Ruth, William would have thought of the man’s dirty hands, but she and Clem thought of the bread, hot from the coals. It was good bread.

She rose and began to clear the table. What Clem was doing was as simple as what the old vender did. Two cakes of bread, for a penny apiece; the old vender made it and went about selling it. If it was good enough people bought it, that was all. Not only bread, either! If anything was good enough and cheap enough, people wanted it. That was all. What Clem was doing was simple and tremendous, so simple that people did not think he was doing anything, and so tremendous they would not have believed it had they known. Only when they saw the finished thing, the bread, the meat, the food, standing there ready to be bought, cheap and good, would they believe. And believing they still would not understand.

Sometimes at night Clem wanted to read the Bible. They did not go to church and neither of them said their prayers unless they felt like it. But sometimes he wanted to read aloud to her. The night before, when they were in bed, he had lighted the lamp and taken up the small old Bible he kept on the shelf under the bedside table. He turned to the place where Jesus had taken the loaves and fishes and had fed everybody that was hungry, and he read it slowly, almost as if to himself, while she listened. When he had read of the baskets of crumbs that were filled he closed the book and lay back on the pillow, his hands behind his head, his eyes fixed on the ceiling.

“That’s what I aim to do,” he had said. “In my own way, of course. But I like to read once in a while of how somebody else did it. We have the same idea — feed the hungry. I’ve got to find some way of making food cheaper, hon. I wish I could make it free. There ought to be a way for a starving man to get food without paying for it. There must be a way.”

When the table was cleared, the dishes washed, she sat down again to her sewing. The afternoon sun shone down on the quiet street. It was as peaceful and permanent a scene as a woman could look upon, and millions of women looked out upon just such quiet streets in small towns all over America. They would expect to spend their lives there, rearing their children, caring for their grandchildren. But Henrietta, lifting her eyes, knew that for her the street was only a moment’s scene. Clem wanted her to go with him, and there was no end to a road once he had set his feet upon it.

Clem was master now in the store. He had bought out Mr. Janison after he and Henrietta were married, and Bump, too, was a full partner. Clem was immensely proud of Bump and, since he was a college graduate, Clem treated him with something like reverence. It was a miracle to Clem to see that the lost child had become a serious, spectacled young man, honest and painfully hard working — though unfortunately without a sense of humor. Bump listened to everything Clem said, and to his nonsense as well as to his commands, to his dreams as well as to his calculations, he gave the same intense attention. He gave his advice when Clem asked for it, which was often, and tried not to be hurt when Clem did not take it. Clem was an individual of deepest dye, and in his way a selfishly unselfish man. He paid no heed whatever to any schemes for the benefit of mankind except his own. He was convinced more than ever that any government would fail unless people were first given a steady diet of full meals, but given this diet almost any government would do, and he preached this as a gospel.

With Bump at his side, always with a pad and pencil, Clem toured the country in one of the earliest of the Ford cars. In villages and out-of-the-way places, wherever crops rotted because the railroads could not serve the farmers, he found ways of conveying the foods by hack, by wagon, and as time went on by truck to railways or to markets. His markets he established anywhere there were people and food near enough to be brought together. Travelers came upon huge, hideously cheap structures in the midst of the tents of migrant workers as well as in the slums of great cities. Some of the structures were permanent, some were immense corrugated tin shacks, made to be taken away when people moved on.

In spite of himself, Clem was beginning to make money. He looked at Bump with a lifted right brow one day and threw half a dozen checks at him across the big pine table in the back room of the store, where he made his head office.

“More stuff for the bank, Bump. I’ll have to begin thinking of ways to spend it. All I need ahead is enough to start the next market, but it keeps rolling in. Guess I’ll have to begin on the rest of the world.”

In this instant an old smoldering homesickness sprang into flame. With money piling up he could go to China at last. He had no wish to stay there. He wanted merely to go back to walk again the dusty streets, to enter again Mr. Fong’s house, and to see for himself the graves of his parents and sisters. For Yusan, reviving his English, had written to him long ago the Mr. Fong had gone secretly for the dead bodies and had buried them outside the city in his own family cemetery upon one of the western hills. Upon two heavy Chinese coffins, in each of which was a child with a parent, Mr. Fong had sealed the lids, had lied to the guards at the city gate, and pretended that the dead were his brother and his wife, stricken together of a contagious fever, he had put the wounded bodies into the earth. Could Clem see for himself not only the graves of his dead, but also the faces of the living people friendly again and cheerful as he remembered them, then some secret load of which he never allowed himself to think might roll away. He would be homesick no more for any other country. But he could not go without Henrietta. He could hop into his Ford, rebuilt to his order so that it would survive equally well the hill roads in West Virginia and the sands in Nebraska, and he could leave her for weeks, so long as they were on the same soil. But he could not contemplate the ocean between them.

One day last November he had seen an item in the country newspaper, the only newspaper he read. There was no big headline, and it was not even on the front page. Nevertheless it was a piece of news whose importance no one but himself in the town, perhaps no one but himself in the state and perhaps in the nation could understand. The Empress of China was dead. This in itself was enough to change the atmosphere of his living memory.

Clem read and sat down on a keg and read again. So she was dead, that gorgeous and evil woman, whose legend he had heard in the city over which she had brooded, a monstrous, gaudy bird of prey! When he thought of her gone, of Peking freed of her presence, of the palaces empty, bonds fell from his heart. His parents, his little sisters, were avenged. He need not think of them any more. The past was ended for him.

Now, with these checks before him, it suddenly came to him that it was time to go to China.

“Bump!” he cried. “Take over, will you? I’m going home.”

Bump nodded, and the young clerks glared at Clem. But he saw nothing. He walked home with his brisk half trot and opened the front door and shouted:

“Hon, I guess we’re going to China now!” From far off, somewhere in the back yard where she was taking dry fresh clothes from the line, came Henrietta’s voice.

“All right, Clem!”

Swaying in a temperamental train northward from Nanking, Henrietta gave herself up to nostalgia. In their small compartment Clem gazed, ruminating, from the dirty windows. It was comforting to see good green fields of cabbage and young winter wheat. The Chinese knew how to feed themselves. His stomach, always ready for protest, was soothed and he turned to Henrietta.

“You know, hon?”

“What should I know?” A flicker upon her grave lips was her smile for him.

“When I get to Peking I am going to hunt up one of those old Mohammedan restaurants and get me a good meal of broiled mutton. I have a hunch it would set well with me.”

“If you think so then it will,” she replied.

They had received no mail for weeks, but she had supposed that at this time of year her parents were in Peking, and soon she would meet them. How she would behave depended upon how they received Clem. Her father, she knew, would be amiable, his nature and his religion alike compelling him to this, but her mother she could not predict. To prepare them she had telegraphed from the bleak hotel in Shanghai. To this telegram she had no answer while they waited for hotel laundry to be done. Twenty-four hours was enough for laundry, but a zealous washerman starched Clem’s collars beyond endurance for his thin neck, and the starch had to be washed out again. The laundryman declared himself unable to cope with collars that had no starch, and Henrietta had borrowed a charcoal iron from a room boy and ironed for a day while Clem roamed the streets of the Chinese city. They left the next day without waiting for the telegram. Her father might be on one of his preaching trips, her mother perhaps visiting in Tientsin while he was gone.

At Nanking, however, a telegram reached her, forwarded from the hotel and provoking in its economy: DR. AND MRS. LANE LEFT FOR UNITED STATES.

“But why?” she asked Clem.

“We’d better go on to Peking and find out,” he said. “We’ve been traveling too fast for letters, hon.”

So they sat in the compartment and watched the landscape turn from rolling hills to the flat gray fields of the north. Clem was unusually silent and she knew that he was facing his own memories at last. They were tender toward each other, thoughtful about small comforts, and now and again at some well-remembered sight and sound, a chubby child barefoot in the path, the clear sad note of a blind man’s small brass gong, they looked at each other and smiled without speaking. She did not ask Clem what his thoughts were, shrinking from intrusion even of love upon that gravity.

The country grew poorer as they went north and villagers, despoiled by bandits of their homes, came to the train platform to beg. They stood in huddles, holding up their hands like cracked bowls, wailing aloud the disasters that had fallen upon them. A few small cash fell out of the windows of second- and third-class windows and once she put out her hands filled with small bills and saw the unbelieving joy upon the faces of the people.

“American — American!” they shrieked after her beseechingly.

“I’m glad you did that, hon,” Clem said.

“It’s no use, of course,” she said and got up and went to the club car because she could not sit still. There, his back to the window and the ruined village and the beggars, a young Chinese in a long gown of bright blue brocaded silk was looking at a copy of one of William’s newspapers. She wondered how he had got the paper, but would not ask. Doubtless some American traveler had left it at a hotel, and it had been picked up eagerly, as all American papers were. She sat down near him and after a few minutes he pointed to the photographs.

“Is this your country?”

“Yes,” she said. “It is the land of my ancestors.”

“How is it that you speak Chinese?”

“I lived here as a child.”

“And you come back, when you could stay in your own land?”

“Not everything there is as you see.”

“But this is true?”

He kept his eyes upon pictures of rich interiors of millionaires’ houses, upon huge motor cars and vast granaries and machinery which he could not comprehend.

“Such things can be found,” she admitted.

She wanted to explain to him how anything was true in America, all that he saw and all that was not there for him to see. But she knew it was no use beginning, for he would only believe what he saw, and then she was really convinced that William had done this with purpose, that there would never be anything in the pages of William’s papers except what he wanted people to read, the pictures he wanted them to see. And so, no one would ever really know America, and to her the best of America was not there, for the best was not in the riches and the splendor, in the filled granaries and the machines.

She got up because she did not want to talk to the young man any more and went back to the little compartment. Clem sat asleep, his head bobbing on his thin neck. A frightening tenderness filled her heart. He was too good to live, a saint and a child. Then she comforted herself. Surely his was the goodness of millions of ordinary American men, whether rich or poor, and Clem was not really a rich man, because he did not know how to enjoy riches, except to use them for his dreams of feeding people. He liked his plain old brass bed at home, a thing of creaking joints and sagging wire mattress, and he still thought a rocking chair was the most comfortable seat man could devise. He was narrow and limited and in some ways very ignorant, but all the beauty of America was in him, because he talked to everybody exactly the same way and it did not occur to him to measure one man against another or even against himself.

She sat down beside him. Softly she put her arm around him and drew his head down to rest upon her shoulder and he did not wake.

In Peking Clem continued silent. Against his will the horror of old memories fell upon him. Here he had been an outcast child respected neither by Americans nor Chinese, because of his father’s faith and poverty. By accident the hotel where he and Henrietta lodged was upon the very street where he had fought the baker’s son and where William had descended from his mother’s private riksha. He pointed out the spot to Henrietta ten minutes after they had entered the room and for the first time he told her the story. Listening, she discerned by the intuition which worked only toward Clem, that the old pain still lingered.

“William was a hateful boy,” she declared with fierceness.

Clem shook his head at this. He was repelled by judgments. “I was a pitiful specimen, I guess.” He dismissed himself. “We’d better go and find out about your folks, hon.”

So they left the hotel and walked down the broad street, followed by clamoring riksha men who felt themselves defrauded of their right to earn a living when two foreigners walked.

“I’d forgotten how poor the people are. I guess I never knew before, being so poor myself.”

“Here is the back gate of the compound,” Henrietta said. “I used to creep out here to buy steamed meat rolls and sesame bread.”

They entered the small gate and walked to the front of the square brick mission house.

“I was here once,” Clem said. “It all looks smaller.”

The house was locked, but a gateman ran toward them.

“Where is Lao Li?” Henrietta asked.

The gateman stared at her. “He has gone back to his village. How did you know him?”

“I grew up here,” Henrietta said. “I am the Lane elder daughter. Where are my parents?”

The gateman grinned and bowed. “They have gone to their own country, Elder Sister. Your honored father grew thin and ill. He goes to find your elder brother, who is now a big rich man in America.”

“Can it be?” Henrietta asked of Clem.

“Could be, hon — want to go right home?”

She pondered and spoke after a moment. “No — we’re here. Haven’t I forsaken them to cleave to you, Clem? I really have. Besides, Mother would go straight to William, not to me.”

Clem received this without reply, and they went away again. The quiet compound, budding with spring, was like an island enclosed and forgotten in the midst of the city. The only sign of life was two women and a little boy at the far end of the lawn, digging clover and shepherd’s-purse to add to their meal that night.

“It all seems dead,” Henrietta said.

“It is dead, hon,” Clem replied. “In its way all that old life is dead, but the ones who live it don’t know it — not even your father, I guess. What say we find the Fongs?”

Mr. Fong had prospered during the years of civil war. Ignoring the political maneuvers of military men and passing by in silence the rantings of students upon the streets, he had begun to stock his book shop with other things people wanted to buy, needles and threads, brightly colored woolen yarns, clocks and dishes, machine-knitted vests and socks, leather shoes and winter gloves, pocketbooks and fountain pens and tennis shoes, pencils and rubber hot-water bottles. Most of his goods came from Japan and he was uneasy about this, for young students who were also zealous patriots often ransacked shops, heaped the goods in bonfires, and pasted labels on the shop windows announcing that so and so was a traitor and a Japan lover. Mr. Fong made two cautious trips a year to Japan to buy goods, and he had consulted with the Japanese businessmen with whom he did such profitable trade, and thereafter his goods were marked “Made in USA.” A small shipping town in Japan was named Usa for this convenience. Mr. Fong had then continued to prosper without sense of sin, for he considered all warfare nonsense and beneath the notice of sensible businessmen. He had peace of mind in other ways, for his family shared his health and prosperity and his eldest son had continued to improve the English which Clem had long ago begun to teach him. Yusan was now a tall youth, already married to a young woman his parents had chosen for him, and she had immediately become pregnant.

On a certain clear cool day in early spring Mr. Fong felt that life would be entirely good if politicians and soldiers and students were cast into the sea. His content was increased by the pleasant smell of hot sugar and lard that Mrs. Fong was mixing together in preparation for some cakes, helped by his eldest daughter, who was already betrothed to a young man whose father was a grain dealer. Mr. Fong’s two younger sons, Yuming and Yuwen, were playing with jackstones in the court, for the holiday of the Crack of Spring had begun.

Upon this pleasant household Clem and Henrietta arrived. The door was opened by Yuwen, who had been born after Clem went away. Nevertheless the American was a legend in the Fong family and Yuwen recognized him with alacrity and smiles. He left the door ajar and ran back to tell his father that Mr. Mei had come back. Mr. Fong dropped his pipe and shouted for Yusan, who was in his own part of the house and made haste to the gate.

With hands outstretched he greeted Clem. “You have come back — you have come back!” he spluttered. “Is this your lady? Come in — come in — so you have come back!”

“I have come back,” Clem said.

Thus Clem with Henrietta at his side entered again this fragment of the old world of his childhood and smelled again the familiar smells of a Chinese household, a mingling of sweetmeats and incense and candles of cowfat. There was even the old faint undertone of urine, which told him that Mr. Fong had not become more modern during the years and that he still stepped just outside his door when it was necessary. Smell of whitewash from the walls, smell of old wood from the rafters, and the damp smell of wet flagstones in the court were all the same. The pomegranate tree was bigger, and the goldfish in the square pool, roused by the sun, were huge and round.

Clem gazed down into the shallow pool. “Same fish?”

“The same,” Mr. Fong said. “Here everything is the same.”

A scream made them turn. Mrs. Fong rushed out of the open doors of the central living room.

“You are come — you are come!”

She took Clem’s hand in both of hers. “He is like my son,” she told Henrietta. Her round face was a net of smiling wrinkles.

“You must take her for your daughter-in-law.” Clem said. “Her father is Lane Teacher.”

“A good man, a good man!” Mr. Fong cried.

Yusan came out next and he and Clem shook hands in the foreign fashion, and then Yusan put his hand over Clem’s. “We have often asked the gods to bring you back to us.” To Henrietta he said with great courtesy, “My inner one asks you to go to her. She is very big just now with our first child, and does not like to come out before men she has not seen before.”

“Come with me,” Mrs. Fong said, and Henrietta stepped over the high wooden threshold.

“We will sit in the sun,” Mr. Fong said to Clem. “I do not need to be polite with you. Yuming, Yuwen — do not stand there staring. Go and fetch tea and food.”

The three men sat down upon porcelain stools set in the court and Mr. Fong surveyed with love this one returned. “You are too thin,” he told Clem. “You must eat more.”

“Elder Brother, I have a weak stomach,” Clem replied.

“Then you are too agitated about something,” Mr. Fong said. “Tell me what it is. You must not agitate yourself.”

Thus invited Clem began talking, as he always did sooner or later, about his hope of selling cheap food even here in China.

Mr. Fong and Yusan listened. Yusan never spoke before his father did, and Mr. Fong said, “What you have undertaken is far beyond the power of one man. It is no wonder that you have a weak stomach and that you are too thin. A wise man measures his single ability and does not go beyond it. What you are doing is more than a king can do, and certainly more than the Old Empress ever did. As for these new men we have now, they do not think of such a thing as feeding the people.”

“Are they worse rulers than the Old One?” Clem asked.

Mr. Fong looked in all four directions and up at the empty sky. Then he drew his seat near to Clem’s and breathed these words into his ear.

“In the old days we had only certain rulers. There was the Old Buddha and in each province the viceroy and then the local magistrate. These all took their share. But now little rulers run everywhere over the land. It is this little man and that little man, all saying they come from the new government and all wanting cash. We are worse off than before.”

The two younger boys came out with an old woman servant bringing some of the new cakes and tea.

“Eat,” Mr. Fong said. “Here your mind may be at peace and your stomach will say nothing.”

Not in years had Clem eaten a rich sweetmeat, but he was suddenly hungry for these cakes that he remembered from his childhood. He took one and ate it slowly, sipping hot tea between each bite.

“When one eats lard and sugar,” Mr. Fong said, “hot tea should surround the food. … Thus also one drinks wine with crabs.”

Clem said, “Strange that I do feel peace here as I have felt it nowhere else. In spite of the wars and the new rulers, I feel peace here in your house.” His Chinese lay ready on his tongue. He spoke it with all the old fluency and ease. His thoughts flowed into soft rich vowel sounds in the rising and falling tones.

“We are at peace here,” Mr. Fong agreed. “The outside disturbance has nothing to do with our peace within. Stay here with us, live here, and we will make you well.”

In a corner Yuming and Yuwen were eating cakes heartily in front of a fat Pekinese dog, who snuffled through his nose and blinked his marble-round eyes at the hot delicious fragrance. It did not occur to either boy to share his cake with the dog. To give a beast food made for human beings would have been a folly, and the Fongs did not commit follies. A hard, age-old wisdom informed them all. Clem sat watching, relaxed, though he was not less aware of all that weighed upon his conscience. Peace was sweet, and sweet it was to find nothing changed. Of all places in the world, here was no change.

In the small square central room of the three rooms which Mr. Fong had allotted for his son and his son’s wife, Henrietta sat between Mrs. Fong and Jade Flower, who was Yusan’s wife. Each held one of her hands and stroked it gently, gazing at her and asking small intimate questions.

“How is it you have no child?” Mrs. Fong asked.

“I have never conceived,” Henrietta replied. She had been afraid at first that she could no longer speak Chinese, but it was there, waiting the sight of a Chinese face. Something warmly delicate, the old natural human understanding she remembered so well and had missed so much was between her and these two.

Mrs. Fong exclaimed in pity. “Now what will you do for your him?” “Him” was husband. Mrs. Fong was too well bred to use the word.

“What can I do?” Henrietta asked.

Mrs. Fong drew nearer. “You must mend your strength. You are both so thin. Stay with us and I will feed you plenty of red sugar and blood pudding. That is very good for young women who do not conceive quickly. When you have been with us a month, I will guarantee that you will conceive. My son’s wife was less than that.”

“Fourteen days,” Jade Flower said in a pretty little voice, and giggled.

Mrs. Fong frowned at her, then smiled and concerned herself again with Henrietta.

“Have you been married more than a year?”

“Much more,” Henrietta said.

Mrs. Fong looked alarmed. “You should not have waited so long. You should have come to us before. Do they not understand what to do in your country?”

“Perhaps they are not so anxious for children,” Henrietta replied. She could not explain to this woman, who was all mother, that Clem was somehow her child as well as her husband, and that she did not greatly care if there were no children, because she did not need to divide herself. Mrs. Fong would not have understood. Was it not for the man’s sake that a wife bore children?

“It may be better to take a second wife for him and let her bear the children for both of you,” Mrs. Fong said.

“This is not allowed in our country,” Henrietta said.

Mrs. Fong opened her eyes. “What other way is there for childless wives?”

“They remain childless,” Henrietta said.

Jade Flower gave a soft scream. “But what does he say?”

“He is good to me,” Henrietta said.

“He must be very good,” Mrs. Fong agreed. She stroked Henrietta’s hand again. “Nevertheless, it is not wise to count on too much goodness from men. Little Sister, you shall drink red sugar in hot water and I will kill one of our geese and make a blood pudding.” She looked at Henrietta. “Can you, for the sake of a child, drink the blood fresh and hot?”

“I cannot,” Henrietta said quickly.

“That is what I did,” Jade Flower urged. “I drank it one day and soon I had happiness in me.”

Mrs. Fong frowned at her daughter-in-law and smiled at Henrietta. “We must not compel,” she advised. “Not all women are alike. Some women cannot drink blood, not even to have a child. If they drink it, they vomit it up. I will make it into a pudding. Two or three puddings, one every day. Then we will see — we will see—” and she stroked Henrietta’s hand.

“You trouble yourself without avail,” Mr. Fong said to Clem. They had been several days in Peking, living in the home of the Fong family. Clem’s digestion ran smoothly and he was more quiet in mind than he had been for years.

“How do I trouble myself?” he asked.

They sat in the big family room, a comfortable, shabby, not-too-clean place, where the dogs wandered in and out and the cats sprawled in the warmest spot of sunshine, and neighbor children came to stare at the Americans, while Mrs. Fong bustled everywhere. Henrietta was unraveling an old sweater to knit a new jacket and cap for the Fong grandchild to be born now at any hour.

Mr. Fong cleared his throat and spat into a piece of brown paper, which he then threw under the table. “You think that you, one man, can feed the whole world. This is a dangerous dream. It only gives you the stomach trouble of which you have told me. Nothing is more dangerous than for one man to think he can do the work of all men.”

Clem’s skin prickled at this criticism. He was secretly proud of his dream, which he had done so much to fulfill. At heart a truly modest man, he had nevertheless the modest man’s pride in his modesty in the face of achievement.

Mr. Fong, wrapped in an ancient black silk robe long since washed brown and ragged at the edges, perfectly understood what Clem was feeling. He looked at him over his brass spectacles and said, emphasizing his words with his forefinger, “It is presumptuous for man to consider himself as a god. The head raised too high even in good will be struck off too soon. Each should tend only his own. Beyond there is no responsibility.”

He picked up a cat that happened to be lying by his chair and held it uncomfortably about its belly. “This creature is blind. I do not feed any of the cats, not even this one. They are here to catch mice. But the other cats bring at least one mouse each day to this blind cat.”

The aged cat, outraged by his grasp, now scratched him with both hind and forelegs and yowled. Immediately three cats came into the room and looked pleadingly at Mr. Fong, who dropped the cat and wiped his bleeding hand on his gown.

“Please continue to teach my husband,” Henrietta said. “I want him to live a long life.”

Mr. Fong inclined his head. He was so much older than Clem that he knew he could say anything to him. Meanwhile nothing Clem said impressed him. Yusan listened with deference, since in this case he was the younger man, but he had no wish to take the part which Clem wanted to put upon him.

“I shall certainly see that my own family is fed, and such others as are dependent upon us. It would be foolish to go further.” This was Yusan’s conclusion. He went about these days from shop to house in perpetual readiness to hear a small loud cry from the three rooms which were his home under this roof, and he was impervious, in his generation, to the cries of others.

Clem, walking with Henrietta one afternoon upon the city wall, a vantage which gave them a wide view over the roofs of houses and the green trees of the courtyards, paused to gaze down into the vast square of the city. The palace roofs were brilliant under the sun of autumn and the temple roofs were royal blue. “I guess Yusan doesn’t get my ideas,” he said sadly enough to arrest Henrietta’s wandering attention.

“Oh well,” she replied for comfort, “there aren’t any very hungry people around. Maybe that’s why. Even the beggars are fat.”

She loved Clem with the entire force of her nature but she had never shared his sense of mission. For that, too, she must perhaps thank this city where she had spent her childhood and where she had learned early that women were of little value. It was a lesson to be learned soon, for it needed to be lifelong. Nothing in America had taught her more or differently. She was useful to Clem, and as long as he needed her, her life had meaning.

“I wish I could see Sun Yatsen,” Clem said suddenly. “I believe he’d understand what I’m talking about.”

“Who knows where he is?” Henrietta asked.

Clem paused for thought. “I believe Yusan knows.”

“Then ask him,” Henrietta suggested.

Instead Clem decided to ask Mr. Fong. He did not believe that there were secrets between this father and son.

Mr. Fong received the question with calm.

“The time is not ripe for Sun Yatsen’s return,” he said.

“Where is he, then?” Clem demanded.

“Perhaps in Europe, perhaps in Malaya,” Mr. Fong said. “He is gathering his powers.”

“At least he is not in China?”

“Certainly he is not in China,” Mr. Fong said firmly.

Clem said no more. The atmosphere in Peking was one of waiting, neither anxious nor tense. Empire had gone, in all but name, and the people did not know what came next. But they were at peace. They had never been dependent upon rulers and governments. Within themselves they had the knowledge of self-discipline. Fathers commanded sons, and sons did not rebel. All was in order, and would remain in order so long as the relationship held between the generations. Meanwhile the people lived and enjoyed their life.

Clem’s early mood of unusual relaxation changed to restlessness. The peace of the Fong household began to weigh on him. The grandchild was born, fortunately a son, and Yusan was immediately absorbed in fatherhood. Old Mr. Fong relapsed into being a contented grandfather. Although Clem and his wife were welcome to stay the rest of their lives, they were becoming merely members of the family.

The end of the visit came on the day when Mr. Fong and Yusan hired four rikshas and took Clem and Henrietta outside the city walls to the graves upon the hills. The visit had been many times postponed, Mr. Fong saying that Clem must not be disturbed by sorrow until his digestion was sound. Suddenly he had decided upon the day, and Yusan had so told Clem on the night before.

“Elder Brother, my father has prepared the visit to your family tombs. Tomorrow, if you are willing?”

“I am ready,” Clem said.

So they had set out, and an hour’s ride had brought them before two tall, peaked graves. Clem stood with bowed head while Mr. Fong and Yusan thrust sticks of incense into the ground and lit them and Henrietta picked wild flowers and laid them upon the weedy sod. There was no other prayer. Clem took Henrietta’s hand and they stood together for a few minutes, he remembering with sad gravity what was long gone, and she comforting him.

When the moments were over they got into their rikshas again, and when Clem got back he went aside with Mr. Fong and tried to tell him his gratitude.

“You have kept the graves of my parents as though they were your own family,” Clem said.

“Are not all under Heaven one family?” Mr. Fong replied.

Nevertheless he perceived thereafter Clem’s restlessness. One day he invited Clem to come into his private office, a small square room behind the shop, with enclosed shelves upon which were the old account books of five hundred years of Fong shopkeepers.

Mr. Fong closed the door carefully and motioned Clem to a seat. Then he opened a drawer of his desk and took out a slip of paper upon which an address was brushed in Chinese characters.

“Go to this place,” Mr. Fong said. “You will find the one you seek. Give him my name to send you in, and if he asks for further proof, describe this room. He has sat upon that very chair where you sit.”

Clem looked at the paper. It bore an address in San Francisco.

“You had better go at once,” Mr. Fong said. “He comes back soon. Something will happen this very month here in this city. Whether it fails or succeeds he will come back. If it is successful he will take power. If it fails, he must come to comfort his followers.”

Clem got up. “Thank you, Elder Brother,” he said to Mr. Fong. “I hope I can repay you for your faith. I hope he’ll listen to me.”

The next day he left Peking, Henrietta with him, but not yet understanding why he must go away so quickly.

“I’ll tell you, hon,” Clem said. “I’ll tell you as soon as I have time.”

There was time only when Clem was imprisoned by the sea. In Shanghai he spent money like the rich man he was that he might get berths upon an Empress ship leaving the dawn after they had arrived. He could haggle over the price of an overcoat and he had never worn a custom-made suit in his life, but when it was a matter of getting what he wanted, money was only made to be used. They caught the ship and Clem, studying timetables, planned the swiftest route from Vancouver to San Francisco. The English ship was still the most swift.

“One of these days we’ll fly, hon,” Clem said to Henrietta. “Before I die, that will surely be.”

“We’ll fly in heaven, I suppose,” Henrietta said now with her small smile.

“Long before that,” Clem said. “It’ll be a sorry thing for many if they have to wait for heaven!”

At last, almost reluctantly, on the second day out, he told Henrietta why it was he wanted to see that man, Sun Yatsen.

“He’s going to get China, see, hon? I can feel it in my bones. The people there are just waiting for somebody to save them and he has risen out of nowhere, the way savior men always do. They come up out of the earth, see? They get an idea, a big idea — just one is enough. He’s got the idea of giving the Chinese people their own government. Well, he’ll do it if he can get them to believe in him. People got to have faith, hon. He’s got to have faith, too. Everybody who does anything has got to have faith in a big idea. So I’m going to him and I’m going to say, look, if you give the people food, they’ll believe in you. Now how are you going to give your people food? Some men do it one way, some another, but nobody ever got people to follow him without giving them food. People have got to be fed. Remember Jesus and the loaves and fishes.”

He was standing against the rail, his back to the sea, and Henrietta was lying on the long chair he had lugged here by a lifeboat on the highest deck, away from everybody as she liked to be. By squinting a little she gazed at his face, and imagined that the bright sea shone through his eye sockets, so blue were his eyes this day. The color of his eyes was a barometer of the measure of his hope. When he was on the crest of a new hope, his eyes were sea blue, and when he was cast down, as sometimes he was, they were almost gray.

“He’ll listen to you,” Henrietta said. “I’m sure he will listen to you.”

The train from Vancouver reached San Francisco just after sunset. Clem deserted Henrietta at the station.

“Hon, you can get yourself to the hotel, can’t you? Hop into a hack with our stuff. I guess the Cliff House is all right. Wait there for me — don’t go out walking by yourself or anything!”

It was Clem’s fantasy that Henrietta must not walk out alone after dark lest she be molested.

“You’d better tell me where you are going,” Henrietta said. “If you don’t come back I’ll know where to look for you.”

“I’ll get back all right,” Clem said. “Chinese all know me, I guess.”

He hurried off, too busy to do what she asked, jumped into a horse cab and gave directions. Then he sat, taut, leaning dangerously forward while the cabman drove him over the rough streets. He sought the Chinese rebel in one of the miserable tin shacks which had sprung up in the ruins of old Chinatown after the great fire. The old dark beautiful city within a city, small and close, set like a gem within San Francisco — the haunted narrow streets that were the center of Chinese life transplanted and nourished by generations of homesick Chinese — had been wiped out. Those living creatures who remained alive had made such shelters as they could, and they walked the streets, still dazed and lost. There was no beauty springing new from ashes.

Clem, however, did not include beauty within the necessities. Oblivious to ugliness, he dismissed the cab and walked briskly through the dim streets to the address he had memorized, so often had he read it. Even the smell of old Chinatown was gone, that mingling of herbs and wine, that scent of sandalwood and incense, that sad sweetness of opium and the lusty reek of roasting pork and garlic and noodles frying in sesame oil. The sound of temple bells was gone, and the venders were no more. The clash of cymbals from the theater was silenced and the theater itself was still in ruins. Instead the night air was weighted still with the acrid smell of ash and seaweed and charcoal smoke from the braziers of families cooking in the open.

On the old Street of Gamblers, its iron gates a ruin of twisted rust Clem found the place he sought. The door was locked, a flimsy partition of wood, and he knocked upon it. It was not opened at once and he heard the sound of voices within.

“Open the door!” a strong voice said. “Of whom am I afraid?”

Then it was opened, and a cautious yellow face peered into the twilight.

“What thing you want?” the face asked.

“I am looking for the Elder Brother,” Clem said in Chinese.

Clem held up his left hand and on the palm he traced with the forefinger of his right hand the ideograph of Sun.

“Come in,” the face said. The door opened widely enough to let Clem in. The shack was one room, partitioned by a curtain, and it could be seen that it belonged to a laundryman. The face belonged to the laundryman and he went back to the table piled with the clothes he was ironing, paying no further heed to Clem.

Two men sat at a small table scarcely larger than a stool. One was Sun Yatsen, the other was the cramped, humped figure of an American.

Clem spoke to Sun. “I am sent here by Mr. Fong, the bookseller on Hatamen Street, in Peking.”

“I know him,” Sun replied in a quiet voice.

“I have come with an idea which may be useful to you,” Clem said.

“I have no seat to offer you,” Sun replied. “Pray take mine.”

He rose, but Clem refused. The laundryman came forward then with a third stool and Clem sat down. Sun did not introduce the American.

“Proceed, if you please,” he said in his strangely quiet voice. “I am to set sail shortly for my own country, and these last days, perhaps hours, are valuable to me.”

“Has the news been good or bad?” Clem asked.

“It is bad,” Sun said. “I am used to bad news. But I must get home.”

The hunchback interrupted him with a high sharp positive voice. “The news will always be bad unless you have an army. No revolution has ever succeeded until there was an army.”

“Perhaps,” Sun Yatsen said, without change in voice or face.

“I haven’t come to talk about an army,” Clem said. He felt uncomfortable in the presence of the white-faced hunchback. He hated intrigue and he did not believe revolutions were necessary. People fought when they got hungry. When they starved they were desperate. But after it was over everything depended again on whether the new rulers fed them. If not, it all began over again.

“I want to talk to you about food,” Clem said abruptly. “I want to tell you what I believe. People will never be permanently at peace unless the means of getting food is made regular and guaranteed. Now I have worked out a plan.”

He leaned forward, and began to speak in Chinese. Thus he shut out the hunchback. He had a feeling that the hunchback was an enemy. That small bitter white face, tortured with a lifetime of pain and misfortune, spoke cruelty and violence. But if he had thought by speaking in Chinese to drive the man away, he failed. The hunchback waited motionless, his eyes veiled as though he were asleep. The laundryman stopped ironing and listened to Clem’s quick, persuading words.

“True, true,” he muttered, to no one.

Clem’s eyes were fixed upon the face of the revolutionist. He studied the high forehead, the proud mouth, the wide nostrils, the broad and powerful skull. He could not tell whether or not he was impressing his own faith upon this man.

Sun Yatsen was a good listener. He did not interrupt. When Clem had made plain his desire to organize in China a means of food distribution that would guarantee the contentment of the people, Sun Yatsen shook his head.

“I have only so much money. I can choose between an army which will fight the enemies of the people and set up a righteous government for the people by the people and of the people, or I can, as you suggest, merely feed the people.”

“Your government will not stand if the people are not fed,” Clem said.

Sun Yatsen smiled his famous winning smile. “I have no government yet. First must come first, my friend.”

“Only if the people have food will they believe in you,” Clem said. “When they believe in you, you can set up what government you choose.”

“It depends on one’s point of view,” Sun Yatsen said suddenly in English. “If I set up a government then I shall be able to feed the people.”

The hunchback came to life. He opened his narrow and snakelike eyes.

“Exactly,” he said. “Force comes first.”

Clem got to his feet. “It is a misfortune that I didn’t find you alone,” he said to Sun Yatsen. “I guess I have failed. But you will fail, too. Your government will fail, and somebody else will come in and the way they will get, in is just by promising the people food. Maybe they won’t even have to deliver. Maybe by that time the people will be so hungry that just a promise will be enough.”

Sun Yatsen did not answer for a moment. When he did speak it was to say with the utmost courtesy as he rose to his feet:

“I thank you, sir, for seeking me out. Thank you for caring for my people. I am touched, if not convinced.”

His English was admirable, the accent faintly Oxford. It was far better, indeed, than Clem’s American speech, tinged with the flatness of Ohio plains.

“Good night,” Clem said. “I wish you luck, anyway, and I hope you won’t forget what I’ve said, even if you don’t agree with me, because I know I’m right.”