Gods Men

8

CLEM BIDED HIS TIME. His faith, fulfilling itself by his steady success, was only embattled when he met with opposition. He was amazed when he discovered those who would have laughed at him had he failed but who were angered by him when he did not fail, and who attacked him finally for undermining their own markets. These were the consolidated groceries and food companies, the chain stores which were beginning to form a net over the whole country. They declared that they, too, were selling to the people cheap and good food, and they began their warfare by insidious advertising against Clem’s wares, saying that cheap surplus foods were not guaranteed foods and carried in them the germs of disease and decay. Buy only our packaged foods, they screamed, buy foods only with our seal upon them.

“We must get some big lawyers,” Bump told Clem. During the war he had served as a food expert, and had won a medal for saving the nation millions of dollars in food, buying where experience with Clem had taught him to buy and buying, too, with Clem’s help. Somewhat reluctantly, when the war was over, he had married a German girl, Frieda Altmann, with whom he had fallen in love while he was overseas and they now had two fat children who looked, he often felt, entirely German. Nevertheless his Frieda was good and a fine cook and she adored Clem, whom she considered a god, and she was humble before Henrietta, whom she loved with enthusiasm. But Frieda did all things with enthusiasm.

Clem had only to be driven into a corner to become cool and aggressive. He hired two clever lawyers, Beltham and Black of Dayton, and entered into the private war which was to last as long as he lived.

For Clem himself the world war had been an atavism which could not be understood. Europe he knew little and his inclination was to think of it as a small and diverting piece of ground which included England. He had run over there, as he put it, the summer before the war, Henrietta, of course going with him. He still refused to allow an ocean between them. A few weeks in England had sufficed.

“Can’t tell these people anything,” he said to Henrietta. “They think I have only one idea. Well, that’s all I need. If an idea is big enough a man don’t need but one.”

He surveyed the tidy farms and smooth green hills of England with something like cynicism. “I seem to see India behind all this,” he said. “I see Egypt and the Middle East. Sometime we got to go and take a look at India, hon, and see the green hills there and the fat people. All these beef roasts and steaks and legs of mutton!”

In Europe he looked for hunger and found little. Instead he found prudence and habitual scarcity. The French threw nothing away and this he approved. A fish head belonged on the dish and not in the garbage can.

“There is no sweeter meat than the cheeks of a carp,” Mrs. Fong used to tell him in Peking and he had never forgotten.

The farms in Denmark were Clem’s delight. He visited them without introduction, appearing at a barn door while Henrietta lingered in the road outside. Sometimes he called her, sometimes he did not. One morning he beckoned to her fiercely.

“Come here, hon — this fellow has an idea!”

She looked into the wide barn door and there in the shadowy depths she saw the Danish farmer painting the walls. Pots of paint, green and sky blue, stood on the floor of beaten earth and with a large brush, not of a housepainter but of an artist, the farmer was painting the walls with scenes of green meadows and running water under blue skies.

When he saw their admiration and surprise, he grinned and spoke to them with a few words of the English he had learned in folk school.

“For wintar,” he explained. “Make cows happy. Grass nice, thinking summer.”

“Ain’t that smart?” Clem asked, turning to Henrietta. “He knows the cows get bored in the winter locked up in the barn and so he wants to make them happy. Good fellow!” He clapped the thick-bodied farmer on the back. “Nice idea! Bet they give more milk, too.”

They began a conversation of gestures and a dozen or so words. Clem picked up languages quickly and he carried small pocket dictionaries everywhere. From the Dane he learned that it was hard to export as much butter as they had to England, because English farmers had their own butter. Yet Denmark needed more coal, English coal, which was going instead to Italy to buy fresh fruit. If the new refrigerator cars really began to run in large numbers, then Denmark would have even less coal.

Clem became concerned in the perennial question of distribution.

The monstrous folly of starvation anywhere in the world impressed him day and night. Food was abundant upon the land and in the sea. However many people were born and lived, there was more food than they could possibly eat. In America he saw apples rotting in orchards; corn used for fuel; granaries filled with wheat so that public money must buy still more, build still more granaries; eggs spoiling for lack of consumers; potatoes fed to beasts; fish made into fertilizers. Denmark had only butter to sell, but Americans had too much butter and would not buy. Argentine beef sold for pennies a pound because there was too much meat. The same story was everywhere in the world of starving people and rotting plenty.

“There has got to be some sort of over-all,” Clem said thoughtfully. “Not government, either — but what?” He had absorbed from the Chinese a deep distrust of government. Men in power, he had once declared, became more than men. They fancied themselves gods. Henrietta had laughed when he said this. She did not often laugh, and when she did he always wanted to know why. “Sometimes you act a little like God, yourself,” she had replied.

He was inexplicably hurt. “No — no — don’t say that, hon! Maybe like a father. Only like a father, though.”

She was learning to sheathe her bluntness because she did not always know what could hurt him. He went about so shining in his hopefulness, so childlike in his goodness, so impregnable in his devotion, that it seemed nothing could hurt him. Then she found that she alone could do the damage. Opposition from others, their laughter, their disbelief, he could and did ignore or accept as persecution by evil. But she whom he loved, who loved him, could pierce his bright armor and bring tears to his eyes. The first time she saw the tears she had wept with shame, had sworn to herself that she would never laugh at him, never caution him, never show doubt — nay, more, she would never feel doubt. The one sin she could commit, she told herself, was to hurt Clem.

The years had passed and still they had no children and still she did not mind. Clem filled every need of her being, and she devoted herself to him, taking over almost without his knowing it all the things which he hated to do: the meticulous detail of business, the bills, the arrangements for shipping, the delivery of carloads of foods, the refrigeration and preservation and then disposals. More and more she and Bump conferred on the carrying on of Clem’s decisions, daring and bold as they were, sometimes involving the loss of thousands of dollars as well as the possibilities of profits as great. Neither of them questioned what Clem decided to do. It remained for them merely to discover how to do it.

During the war, however, he had made a decision of his own so peculiar, so unlike him, that for a while Henrietta wondered what change had come in him that she did not understand. He had begun in recent years to read faithfully William’s newspapers. What he thought of them he never said, but his intense look, his frequent silences when he had studied a tabloid carefully, made Henrietta long to put a question to him. But she did not. He had never allowed her to complain to him fully about William.

“He’s your brother, hon,” Clem had said. “He’s part of your family. A family is a great thing to have. China would have died and disappeared long ago if it hadn’t been for the way families stick together over there.”

“I hope you won’t try to make me stick to mine,” Henrietta had retorted.

In one of William’s papers, more and more filled with pictures, Clem had discovered during the war a feature about Chinese coolies digging trenches in France. He found it one Sunday when he was at home, and sitting on the small of his back in a large armchair, his feet propped on the rungs of another chair in front of him, he had stared at the bewildered faces of Chinese farmers in France, staring back at him from the pages.

“I bet they don’t have a notion of why they’re there or why they’re digging those trenches,” he told Henrietta.

It was a peaceful morning in America, and townfolk walked quietly past the house with their children on their way to church. Henrietta looked at Clem. She knew him so well, so familiar was every line of that thin square face and every note of his brisk hurried speech, that she divined at once that in his musing tone and his meditative eye a plan was beginning to shape. She waited while she polished the silver, a task which she usually planned for this time when Clem was at home. She sat at the dining-room table covered with newspapers upon which the silver was spread.

“I bet those Chinese were just carted over there like cattle,” Clem mused. After a few minutes more he got up.

Henrietta followed him with her watchful look. “Can I get you something, Clem?”

He was hunting for paper and pen. “I want to write to Yusan. What are those Chinese farmers doing over there in France? I bet somebody’s up to something.”

She rose and found paper and pen, an envelope and the proper stamps, and when he had scrawled one of his brief letters, she sealed it and put it aside to mail in the morning.

This was the beginning, as she knew it would be. The end was several months later when Clem and Yusan met in Paris. Clem, leaving her in charge, for Bump was now in the war himself, put the ocean between them for the first time.

“I’ll only be gone a couple of weeks, hon,” he said. Agony was plain on his face. “I don’t know why I’m doing this, but somehow I have to …”

“That’s all right, Clem,” she said. It was not all right, it was far from all right, and she felt the physical tearing of her heart out of her flesh as she stood on the pier and watched him go away, his face whiter, his figure smaller as the ship moved toward the sea.

And Clem, his eyes fixed upon her who made his whole home, cried out against his own folly. Had Bump been at home he would have brought her along, but without Bump only Henrietta could hold together in his absence the vast structure of his markets. What drove him to France he scarcely knew except that when he hesitated the faces of the bewildered Chinese were there before him. He saw them in their villages, in their own fields, in the streets of the cities into which they flooded in times of famine and starvation. How could they understand France? He would get Yusan started and then he would come home again to Henrietta, maybe run over again a couple of times to see how they were making out, but taking her with him next time, for sure.

In Paris he met Yusan, who wore a new suit of Western clothes. At first Clem scarcely recognized him in the crowd of Frenchmen, except that they were all talking and Yusan was standing immobile, silent, watchful, and therefore as conspicuous as a statue of gold. Clem caught his hand and forgot for a moment even Henrietta.

“Yusan!”

“Elder Brother!”

They broke into Chinese simultaneously and the French men and women stared and cried out to heaven in admiration at such fluency, nothing of which was comprehensible to them. Clem liked the French people and bustled his way among them with the same assurance he had at home in America or in China. They had the same mixture of naturalness, simplicity, shrewdness, humor, childishness, and sophistication that made Americans and Chinese alike, too, and he had pondered this until he remembered that all children and old people are alike, the one because they are young and the other because they are old, the young knowing nothing and accepting everything, and the old knowing everything and therefore accepting anything as possible.

Yusan, following Clem’s directions, had come over with a shipload of the coolies, as they were called. He had volunteered as an interpreter for them, and had been accepted. Now at last his English, learned so early and of late years revived and maintained because of Clem, was of the utmost use. He had his men already established in barracks near the front, where new trenches must continually be dug. At night they lay down to the sound of the booming cannon, and sometimes the Chinese in the farthest sectors were killed, even as the French, the English, and the Americans were killed. But the Chinese had no inkling of why they were there or why they were killed. They had been lured by the promise of pay for their families at home and a little for themselves, and they were here.

Clem left Paris the same day with Yusan, traveling by train and by military truck. He had his own pass, stamped and signed in Washington before he left, and he was sent through without delay, Yusan at his side. The days on the ship had filled Clem to bursting with plans and ideas and he paused only briefly to ask about Yusan’s family.

“All well,” Yusan said. “Two more grandsons I have given my parents or they would not have let me come, except that you asked it.”

“What about Sun Yatsen?” Clem asked.

Yusan shook his head. “One reason I was glad to come with you, Elder Brother, is that everything is altogether confused. Sun Yatsen has not tied our country together. He was too much in Japan, and Japan wants to eat us alive. Now this has become clear to all in the Twenty-one Demands. It is true that Sun has left Japan, but he does not know what to do next. First we are a republic and then we are not a republic. He has destroyed the old government but he does not know how to make a new one.”

Clem remembered that dark night in the tin hut in San Francisco and now described it to Yusan. “I told him he ought to get down to the people. I told him if he didn’t get the people fed and looked after, he would surely fail.”

“He will always be a hero, Elder Brother,” Yusan said. “We will not forget that he freed us from the Manchu yoke. But he has not led us onward from there. He wants obedience and when we hesitate, he says we are like a tray of sand. Elder Brother, you know we Chinese always work together. But we do not believe all wisdom is in one man.”

“Well,” Clem said briskly, dismissing the revolutionist. “I guess he has to learn in his own way. Now, Yusan, here’s my idea—”

He caught a certain quizzical look in Yusan’s dark and narrow eyes and he grinned. “Don’t you get me mixed up with Sun! I’ll give you my ideas but I don’t insist on anything. You do what you like with them. My ideas are a gift. Take them or leave them.”

“Elder Brother, I accept the gift,” Yusan said.

Neither of them looked out of the window at the lovely French landscapes that fled past one after the other. Night fell and they approached the war sector and they did not see that beauty had ended and the barrenness of death was about them. From the train they got into a truck and drove through the night over roads once smooth and now rutted with shell holes. This in turn gave way to rough bare ground and so they came to their destination. Clem walked into a barrack filled with homesick Chinese men, not one of whom could read or write or even speak with the people around him. In the dim light they lay on army cots and listened to one man who played a wailing village tune upon a two-stringed violin he had brought from home.

“Brothers!” Yusan cried above the music. “Here is the Elder Brother of whom I have told you!”

They got up from their cots, the fiddler stopped his wail, and the lantern lights were turned up. Clem saw himself surrounded by the familiar faces, the brown, good faces, the honest eyes, of Chinese villagers. He felt again the old love, paternal perhaps, but grateful and rich with faith. These were the good, these were the simple, these were the plain of the earth. He began to speak to them:

“Brothers, when I heard you were here, I feared lest you might be suffering, and so I have come to see if your life is good and what can be done to help you if it is not good.”

“He left his home,” Yusan put in. “He came a long way over the sea and he can be trusted. I have known him since my childhood.”

The men were silent, their hungry eyes fixed upon Clem.

“Are you well fed?” Clem asked.

The men looked at one of their number, a young strong fellow with a square fresh face. He spoke for them:

“We are well fed but with foreign food. We are treated kindly enough. Our sorrow is that we cannot write to our families or read what they have written to us. We can neither read nor write.”

“The letters can be read to you,” Clem said. “Letters can also be written for you.”

The young man looked at his fellows and began again. “Why we are here we do not know. Is our country also at war?”

“In a way, yes,” Clem replied. “That is, China has declared war against the Germans.”

“We do not know the Germans,” the young man said “Which men are they?”

Clem felt his old sickness of the heart. “None of us know our enemies. I also do not know a single German. Let us not think of them. Let us only think of ways to make your life better.”

For how could he or anyone explain to these men why there was a war and why they had left their homes and families and come here to dig trenches for white men to hide themselves in while they killed other white men? Who could explain such things to anyone? The world was full of discontent and because people were hungry and afraid they followed one little leader and another, hoping somewhere to find plenty, and peace for themselves and their children, even as these men had been willing to come so far, not because they believed in what they did, but that their families at home might receive each month some money wherewith to buy food.

Clem spent most of that night talking with the men, asking them questions, too, and writing down their answers. He spent the next days with Yusan planning, and a full month he spent getting what he needed to fulfill those plans from officers who considered him mad. But Clem was used now to men who thought him mad and he paid no heed to what they thought of him, spending his energy instead on getting them to do what he needed to have done until in sheer angry impatience they yielded and cursed him and wanted him gone.

By the end of the month he had helped Yusan to set up a school where the men could learn to read and write, if they wished, and he set up an office, with two Chinese from Paris, to read the men’s letters from home and write in reply. He set up also a small shop, to be supplied regularly from Paris with Chinese foods and sweets and tea. Once a week he planned a night of amusement, a place where the Chinese could hear their own music, could eat their own sweetmeats and drink tea together, and see Chinese plays and Western pictures. He hired a Chinese cook who was given a license to vend his own wares and make his living thereby. He established Yusan in all this, and in his first moment of leisure he discovered that he was homesick for Henrietta and could no longer endure his absence from her, although he had scarcely thought of her for the whole month, even as he had not once thought of himself.

He bade Yusan good-by then, took a ship for home, and reached his house on a Saturday afternoon, so white and spent that Henrietta cried out at the sight of him as he entered the picket gate.

She was at home, as she was now as much as she could be, for she expected Clem at any moment, though he had not said he was coming. Her own longing for him reached across the sea and yearned for him with such intensity that she could divine, or she felt she could, the time when he would be coming.

“Oh Clem!” she cried at the front door.

“Hon—”

They fell into each other’s arms. He felt her sturdy body and she was frightened at the thinness of his shoulder blades under her embrace.

“You’ve worked yourself to skin and bones!” she cried with terrified love.

“I’ll be all right after a few days at home. My stomach went back on me a couple of weeks ago.”

They parted, their hands still clinging, and she led him in, made him sit down, and restrained herself from fussing over him, which he could not endure.

“I’ll make you a cup of tea. Can you eat an egg?”

“I could eat a beefsteak, now,” Clem said. He looked around the shabby room fondly. “I guess I was crazy to go away, hon! Now that I’m back it seems crazy. But I had to go, and I’m not sorry. How’s tricks?”

“Don’t talk about tricks!” Henrietta retorted. “You rest yourself, Clem, do you hear me?”

“Why, hon, you aren’t mad at me, are you?” His face was amazed. She had never been cross with him before.

To his further amazement now she began to weep! Standing there by the kitchen door, she took up the edge of her apron and wiped her eyes. “Of course I’m not mad,” she sobbed. “I’m just scared, that’s all! Clem, if anything happened to you — if you should die — I wouldn’t know what to do. Being without you just these weeks — I’m all upset—”

“Great guns,” Clem muttered. He got up and went to her and put his arms around her again. “I’m not going to die, hon. I wouldn’t think of such a thing.”

She put her head on his shoulder and he stood quietly supporting her, loving her and not telling her how he really felt. He was not going to die, but he felt tired to the bone. The sight and the memory of those dark honest bewildered faces in France never left him for a moment. Nor were they all. In the fields of France there were such faces, and the same faces were here in the fields of Ohio, upon the streets of villages and in the slums of cities, not all honest and many far from good, and yet with the same confusion and bewilderment. And most dreadful of all, they were upon the fields of battle, and they lay dead in the mud of death. No, he must not die, but he was tired enough to die. Nobody knew what he was trying to say; not even those whom he wanted to save could understand.

But he must not give up, for all that. He must take up again where he left off.

This meant, as he discovered in the years that followed the war, an organizing of his markets and facing limitations and legalities which irked and distracted his free-thinking mind. The war fought for freedom brought with victory a loss of freedom for everyone, and there were times when Clem felt this loss descend most heavily upon himself. He was used to visiting another country as men visit a neighboring county, careless of all save his purpose in going. Now there was no more of this carelessness. Passports and visas made him groan, and even Bump could not assuage his irritation either by speed or by early preparation. Clem felt it an infringement upon his rights that he could not decide suddenly to go to India by the middle of next week or drop in on Siam and see how the rice crop was going.

His first visit to India grew out of a brief meeting, quite accidental, with a young Hindu in London during the war. They had met in the Tube, and had sat side by side for a few minutes. Clem had begun instantly to talk and then, forgetting his own destination, had got off with the young Hindu and had gone with him to his rooms in lodgings near the Tube station. Ram Goshal had at first been astounded by this slender, sand-colored American and then had succumbed to Clem’s frightful charm. Clem discovered that Ram Goshal, although the son of a wealthy Indian, had given up society life to work for Gandhi, whom he had met a few years before when Gandhi, that rising star, had gone to London from South Africa with an Indian deputation. Ram Goshal had come back with Gandhi to London at the beginning of the war and at a meeting of Indians, Gandhi insisted that it would not be honorable in the time of England’s trial and trouble to press their own claims for freedom. Self-denial at such an hour, he said, would be dignified and right and gain more in the end because it was right.

Ram Goshal, reared in sensitive tradition, had been won anew by the largeness of Gandhi’s mind. He had declared himself his convert, though troubled by his father’s wealth, which was in great modern industries in India, of which Gandhi did not approve.

“God forbid,” Gandhi has said, “that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of three hundred million people took to similar economic exploitation it would strip the world bare like locusts.”

Clem could not, however, agree entirely with what Gandhi said, as Ram Goshal had quoted it.

“You can’t get rid of something just by stopping it,” Clem had told the young Indian. “Industrialism is here to stay. We’ve got to learn how to use it. We can’t go back to the first century because we don’t like this one.”

Ram Goshal had begged Clem to go to India. “You will understand India,” he declared, his eyes dark, huge, and liquid with admiration. “You are like us, you are a practical mystic.” Then those profound eyes, haunted with the endless history of his people, glinted with humor as he gazed upon Clem. “You remember what Lord Rosebery said about Cromwell?”

“I am not an educated man,” Clem said, humble before this young scholar of the East.

“He said that Cromwell was a practical mystic, the most formidable and terrible of all combinations. That is you, too — therefore I do beseech you to stop in my country and look with your own eyes upon my starving people.”

Clem could refuse neither such warmth, such eloquence, nor the brown beauty of the young Indian’s face and he promised to go as soon as possible after the war.

He decided suddenly one January day that he would take a few months off from the constant persecutions of his rivals, the chain groceries, being moved to this by a letter from Ram Goshal, now in India. Gandhi was then in the full tide of the noncooperation movement and Ram Goshal was in some trouble. His father disagreed with Gandhi, and, had Ram Goshal not been his only son, would certainly have disinherited him.

Clem read this letter thoughtfully and handed it to Henrietta.

“Hon, I feel I better go over and see for myself whether the British intend to do any better about feeding the people in India. If they don’t I guess Gandhi is right. But I want to be sure about the British.”

“Of course, Clem,” Henrietta said. She suspected that Clem, whether consciously or not she did not know, was thus postponing a decision which Bump and the two young lawyers were pressing upon him. That Clem might defeat the purpose of the organized groceries to put him out of business, they declared, he must organize himself into Consolidated Markets, Inc. Clem, in spite of the three young men, still refused. He wanted most of his markets movable, his clerks ready to go wherever surplus foods were stagnant. Vast buildings and established staffs did not interest him. He did not want a name. His business was simply to gather food together and get it to people in need. When the need was over, the supply would cease.

While Henrietta thus suspected Clem she saw him look at her with sudden love.

“What is it, Clem?”

“Hon, the two words you said …”

“Yes, Clem?”

“You said, ‘of course.’ That’s what you always say to my notions — Wonderful wife!”

So rarely did he speak words of love that tears gathered under her eyelids. “I mean it, dear.”

“I know it.” He bent and kissed the thick coil of hair on top of her head, and so began the journey to India.

In Bombay they went straight to Ram Goshal’s house, a gorgeous palace outside the city beyond the Towers of Silence. Ram Goshal’s father was fat, quarrelsome, clever, and he gave Clem no chance to talk, and perforce Clem listened.

“I do not oppose freedom, you understand, Mr. Miller. You Americans, I understand, love freedom very much. But the British have not oppressed me. I tell my son it is entirely because of the British that we are so prosperous. Gandhi is not so prosperous with them, but we are not Gandhi. There is no reason why we should fight his battles.”

Ram Goshal, too filial to argue against his father, sat miserable in silence, taking his opportunity at night to keep Clem wakeful for hours. This combined with Indian food cut the visit short. All the courteous welcome and the eagerness of father and son to win America to their side could not mitigate the indigestibility of Indian food. Clem’s delicate stomach rebelled at curry and pepper and fried breads. In England he had rejected great roasts and thick beefsteaks, boiled cabbage and white potatoes, and now in India he rejected cocoanut meats and sweets, peas overcooked and pepper-hot and every variety of food too highly seasoned.

Indian food cast his frame into rebellion and Henrietta took him to an English hotel, where he fasted for three days and then took to tea and soft-boiled eggs, while Ram Goshal stayed by him to see him well again.

Clem smiled his white and childlike smile. “I’m a fine one to be telling people about food, Ram Goshal. I have to live on pap.”

“You are like Gandhi,” Ram Goshal said. “You use your body merely as a frail shelter, a house by the wayside, something that barely serves while your spirit lives and does its work.”

Clem was too American for this Indian ardor. “I hope I am a man of common sense,” he said briefly. “Certainly I’m sorry about my weak stomach.”

As soon as he was well he wanted to leave Bombay, and saying farewell to Ram Goshal, he wandered about the country for weeks with Henrietta to see how the people fared. It was impossible to travel alone, and they were forced to hire a bearer, a servant to look after them, a dark Moslem named Wadi, who encouraged them to look at Moslems and avoid Hindus until Clem discovered what was happening. Thereafter to a pouting Wadi he decreed the day’s journey, poring over books and maps the night before. There was no sight-seeing. Clem wanted to go to villages, to see what people had in their cooking pots and what they grew in their fields. He grew more and more depressed at what he found. After they left the coastal plains there was nothing, it seemed, but endless deserts.

“The land is poor, hon,” Clem said. “I don’t know what these books are talking about when they say the people are poor but the land is rich. I don’t see any rich land.”

He turned northward at last to New Delhi, strengthened by rising anger and determined to cope with the rulers of empire in their lair. The stony hills outside the window of the train, the sparse brush, the dry soil, the pale spots of cultivation increased his wrath, until when he reached the monumental capital of empire, he was, he said, “fit to be tied.”

Yet in justice he was compelled to admit that empire alone was not to blame for half-starved people and skeleton cattle. Whoever ruled India, still the sun shone down in sultry fury upon the blackened earth. It was winter in Ohio, a season which there meant snow upon level plains and rounded hills, and in New York meant lights shining from icy windows and snow crusted upon sidewalks and trampled into streets, and red-cheeked women at crowded theater doors. In India it meant the slow mounting of a torrid heat, so dry that the earth lay empty beneath it. Over the sick surface thin animals wandered dreaming of grass, and thin human bodies waited, feeble hands busy at pottery wheels, the dry earth stirred into clay, with a bowlful of water to make more empty bowls, plenty of bowls that could be broken after they had been touched by the lips of the unclean.

“A few wells here and there,” Clem said to Henrietta, his skin as dry as any Indian’s, “and this desert might be planted to grain.”

But wells were not dug and who could blame men that they did not dig wells when the sun burning upon a dead leaf turned it crisp, charred at the edges and wrinkled as a dead baby’s hand?

In the capital Clem, a pure flame of zeal, marched into the marble halls of empire and demanded to see the Viceroy. An American millionaire may see even the king and so he was received, making his way unmoved between rows of turbaned underlings. A mischievous old face, Indian, shrewd and obsequious, peered from under a multicolored pile of taffeta.

“I am Sir Girga — honored, sir, to conduct you to His Excellency the Viceroy.”

The mischievous old face, set upon a waspish body and a pair of tottering legs, guided him into a vast hall where The Presence sat, and there brought him before a cold English face made cautious by splendor.

Clem, knowing no better, sat down on a convenient chair surrounded by space and then began to tell the ruler how subjects could and should be fed.

“Irrigation is the first thing,” he said in his dry nasal American voice. He was unexpectedly hot and he wished he could take off his coat, but he went on. “The water table in India is high, I notice. Twenty feet and there is plenty of water — sometimes even ten or twelve. By my calculations, which I have taken carefully over sample regions, India could feed itself easily and even export food.”

The Viceroy, immaculate in white tussah silk tailored in London, stared down on him as upon a worm. “You do not understand our problems,” he said in a smooth deep Oxford accent. “More food would simply mean more people. They breed, Mr. — ” he paused to look at a card which Sir Girga obligingly held out for him to see—“Miller.”

“You mean it is the policy of your government to keep people hungry?” Clem inquired.

“We must take things as we find them,” the Viceroy replied.

In England, Clem reflected, this might have been a nice sort of fellow. His face was not cruel, only empty. Everything had to be emptied out of a man’s heart if he sat long in this vacuum. Clem looked around the enormous hall, embellished with gold in many varieties of decoration.

“I see your point,” he said after a long while. And then, after another while he said abruptly, “I don’t agree with it, though.”

“Really!” There was a hint of sarcasm but Clem never noticed sarcasm. He went on.

“We’ve never tried feeding the world. Ever seen how much meat comes from a sow? She farrows big litters until you don’t know what to do with all the pork. Of course in America we throw away mountains of good food, besides eating too much. You English eat too much, too, in my opinion — all that meat!”

The Face continued empty and looking at it Clem said, “I will grant America is the most guilty of all countries, so far as waste goes.”

“Undoubtedly you know,” The Face said.

Clem said good-by after a half hour of this. He then walked behind the trotting Sir Girga who saw him through the forest of lackeys to the front gate, beyond which an absurd Indian vehicle called a tonga awaited him, to the derision of the lordly Indian doormen.

He went back to the hotel where in one of the rows of whitewashed rooms Henrietta sat in her petticoat and corset cover, fanning herself. “We’ll just mosey along to Java before we go home,” he told her. “It’s about as I thought. They aren’t interested in feeding people.”

In Java he was stirred to enthusiasm by the sight of land so rich that while one field was planted with rice seedlings, another was being harvested. Men carried bundles of rice over their shoulders, the heads so heavy that they fell in a thick, even fringe of gold. The Dutch were more than polite to an American millionaire and he was shown everywhere, presumably, and everywhere he saw, or was shown, a contented and well-fed people. It was only accidentally that he found out that there was an independence party. One night when he was walking alone, as no foreigner should do in a well-arranged empire, a note was thrust into his hand and when he got back to the hotel and a lamp he found that it was a scrawl in English which said that he ought to examine the jails. This of course he was not allowed to do.

It was a good experience for Clem. He was thoughtful for some days on the voyage home and Henrietta waited for what he was thinking. As usual it came out in a few words one night when they were pacing the deck.

“We’ve still got freedom in America, hon,” he said. “I’m going home and look the whole situation over again and see if Bump and those lawyer fellows are right. If I have to organize I will, but I want to organize so that I’m not hamstrung by laws and red tape. I’ll organize for more freedom, see?”

“I believe that is Bump’s idea,” Henrietta said.

Clem would not accept this. “Yeah, but his idea of a man’s independence and my idea are not the same. He’s like those lawyer fellows — he wants laws as clubs, see? Clubs to make the other fellow do what you want! But my idea is to use laws to keep my freedom to do what I want. I don’t want to interfere with the other fellow, or drive him out of business.”

There was a difference, as Henrietta could see, a vast and fundamental difference. Clem was noncompetitive in a competitive world. It was strange enough to think that it had taken India to show Clem the value of law in his own country, but so it had done, and when they reached home Clem plunged into this new phase of his existence. Beltham and Black summoned to their aid an elder firm of lawyers as consultants, and Bump frankly sided with the four lawyers. Against them all Clem sat embattled day after day across the old pine table that still served him as his desk.

“What you want is impossible, Clem!” Bump cried at last. He was tired out. The lawyers were irritable at their client’s obstinacy. Those were the days, too, when Frieda was expecting her third child and she was homesick for Germany, so that Bump had no peace at home, either.

Clem lifted his head, looked at them all. He was dead white and thin to his bones, but his eyes were electric blue.

“Impossible?” His voice was high and taut as a violin string. “Why, Bump, don’t you know me after all these years? You can’t say that word to me!”