The festival ended. One spring day followed another and May passed into June. People were eating big yellow apricots and one morning Mrs. Fong set a dish of them on the table.
“Eat these, little brother,” she bade Clem. “They cleanse the blood.”
He ate two and against his sense of decency hid two in his pockets to give his sisters when he went home after the lesson. These he bade them eat in secret, lest their father discover in Mrs. Fong a new source for food and go there to beg in God’s name. Ever since he had heard William Lane’s voice of scorn Clem could not think of his father asking a Chinese for food. Yet when he saw the eagerness with which his younger sisters seized the fruit he brought home to them, he could not refrain the next day from hiding a few cakes in his pockets and then two of the meat rolls. It was a sort of stealing, his ready conscience told him, and was it better to thieve than beg, and was he not worse than his father? “At least I do not take the food in the name of God,” he told himself, and continued to take it.
But guilt made him anxious one morning when Mr. Fong came into the sunlit brick-floored room. Mr. Fong sat down and drew his rusty black silk gown up over his knees. He was a tall man, a native of the city, and his smooth face was egg-shaped. Today, since it was warm, he had taken off his black cap. He had been freshly shaved and his queue was combed and braided with a black silk cord.
“Eh,” he began, looking at Clem. “I have something to say to you, Little Brother.”
“What is it, Elder Uncle?” Clem asked, and was much afraid.
“While I talk, you eat,” Mr. Fong said kindly. He clapped his hands at his eldest son, looking at him with always fond eyes. “Yusan, you go away and play somewhere.”
Yusan, pleased to be free, tied his book in a blue cotton square, thrust it in a drawer and left the room.
“Drink some tea,” Mr. Fong said to Clem. “What I am about to say does not mean that I am angry.”
Clem could neither eat nor drink upon these words. What would he do if kind Mr. Fong wanted him to come no more? There would be an end of books and food.
Mr. Fong got up and shut the door and drew the wooden bar across it. Then he sat himself down so near to Clem that his voice could pass into his ear.
“The Old Empress is about to command that all foreigners leave our city—even our country.” These were the horrifying words Clem now heard.
“But why?” he gasped.
“Hush—do you know nothing? Has your father not been told? You must go quickly or—” Mr. Fong drew his hand across his throat.
“What have they done?” Clem demanded. It did not occur to him for the moment that he himself was a foreigner, and the word “they” came to his tongue instead of “we.”
That his parents were foreign, he well knew. They were foreign even to him, whose birth and whose memories were only of the Chinese earth. They had no money to go away. But where could they hide? Who would dare to take them in? He could not believe that the proud missionaries would shelter them, nor could he ask Mr. Fong to risk the lives of his own family.
Meanwhile he felt cold and his knees began to tremble.
Mr. Fong cleared his throat, stroked his bare chin and began again his guttural whisper. “The foreign governments, you understand, are cutting up our country like a melon. This piece is for the Ying people, this piece is for the Teh people, this piece is for I-Ta-Lee, this for the wild Ruh people to the north.”
“My parents are Americans,” Clem urged.
Mr. Fong rolled his head around rapidly on his shoulders. “Your Mei people I know. They do not slice with a knife, but they come after the slices are cut and they say to us, ‘Since you have sliced to these other peoples, we too must be given some gift.’ True, true, you Mei people are better. You are against slicing, but you also wish gifts.”
“I have heard nothing,” Clem said doggedly.
“There is no time to tell you everything now,” Mr. Fong said. “Listen to this one word, Little Brother. Go home and tell your parents to flee to Shanghai. The times are bad. Do not delay lest the way be closed. I have a relative who works in the palace. I fear what is about to happen.”
“My father will not go,” Clem said sadly. “He believes in God.”
“This is no time to believe in God,” Mr. Fong replied in a sensible voice. “Tell him to save his family first.”
He rose, and opening the drawer he removed the blue cotton square from his son’s book and filled it with cakes and fruit. “Take this with you. Remember I do not hate you. If I dared I would ask your family here. But it would do them no good and my family would only be killed with them. We have been warned. Come no more, Little Brother, alas!”
So saying he thrust Clem out of a small back door. Clem found himself in an alleyway. On the street it seemed impossible to believe that doom hung over the city. It was a morning as mild as summer. The people of the city had risen from their beds, had washed themselves, had eaten, had set their faces to seem the same as on any other day. Clem had as usual left home very early, before the shops had taken down their boards, for Mr. Fong believed that the human brain was most active at sunrise. Often when Clem hurried on his way he met straggling rows of sleepy schoolboys, their books wrapped in blue cotton squares under their arms, already on their way to school. This morning, he remembered now, he had met none, and had wondered that he was so early.
Now hurrying on his way he knew that schools should be open and yet he saw not one schoolboy, and surely the shops must have taken down their boards, and yet they had not, although the sun was high. He made his way through strangely silent streets toward his home. Yet before he could reach it, at some signal he neither saw nor heard, the city began to stir, not to its usual life, but to something new and frightful. Good people stayed inside their gates, but the evil came out. Clem, clinging to walls and hiding in doorways, heard a bestial shouting, a rising roar, near the very quarter where the foreign legations were. There, too, the wealthy missionaries lived, the princes of the church. He hastened on toward his own. Perhaps they might be safe hidden among the houses of the poor. Perhaps God had some purpose, after all, in sheltering those who bore a cross.
At this moment Mr. Fong was looking up and down the street. He too saw that this day was different from any other and he knew why. His cousin had visited him about midnight and had told him what had taken place in the palace. Doubtless half the people in the city now knew. Many families had relatives inside the palace, women servants and court ladies, eunuchs who held offices from cooks to ministers, and these sowed among the people outside the Forbidden City the sayings and doings of those within. There was nothing the people did not know about their rulers.
Mr. Fong, remembering the agitated hours of last midnight, now decided to put up the boards of his shop and cease business for the day. Whatever happened he did not want to seem to know anything about it. He was a brave man but not a foolhardy one. He knew that the Old Woman would certainly lose but that she would be desperate and arrogant before she knew herself lost. Mr. Fong had read too much Western science. He knew that the Boxers could not possibly survive iron bullets. Still, it would take time to prove this. The Old Woman was so stubborn that she would have to see foreign armies marching into the city before she believed it could happen. He sighed in the semidarkness of his shop and was glad that he had had the prudence to buy up two months’ supply of millet and wheat. In the back court his wife had eleven hens and he had planted in another corner away from the chicken coop a small patch of cabbage. They would not starve.
He did not, however, feel strong enough to join his family for an hour or so. He wanted to be alone and as his usual pretext he drew out his account books and opened his ink boxes and uncovered his brushes. His wife never disturbed him when he was thinking, as she supposed, about money matters. Actually his mind went over all that his cousin had told the night before.
The city, his cousin had said, was full of Boxers. They were now bold enough to enter at every g
ate. Indeed they were wholly fearless ever since Prince Tuan had persuaded the Empress to let them come even into her presence and show proof of their magic powers.
“But are they magic?” Mr. Fong had asked his cousin with anxiety. In the midnight silence his reason was not so strong as by day.
“They are flesh and blood,” his old cousin had replied scornfully. This cousin was only a scribe in the palace but he was a man of sense and learning.
On the ninth day of the month, the cousin then went on to say, the very day when the Empress had returned to the city from the Summer Palace, some Boxers had gone to the race course three miles west of Peking and had set a fire, and they had thrown a Chinese Christian into the flames to burn to death. Inside the palace the Empress was telling her ministers that she would drive the foreigners from the city.
On the eleventh day, the cousin said, the Chancellor of the Japanese Legation was murdered outside the walls of the city. He had gone to the railway station to discover perhaps when the trains would run again to Peking. No trains were running now.
After telling all this, the cousin had gone away, drenched in gloom.
Mr. Fong sat another hour over his figures and then he closed his books, put them in the drawer and locked it. He went back into the inner courts where his family waited. They were all quiet, even Mrs. Fong. She was getting the noonday meal ready.
“Put more water into the millet from now on,” he commanded her. “We will drink soup instead of eating porridge.”
“Eh,” she sighed. “If we only live—”
He did not answer this. Having nothing else to do, he went to his room and began to read the Book of Changes, in which he often said all was foretold if one had the wit to understand.
After this silent meal, at which he strictly forbade any one of his family to go into the street and commanded the children to play quietly in the innermost court, he went to bed and to sleep for the afternoon. He rose only to eat once more at dusk and then he went back to bed. There was nothing he could do, he told his wife, and he had better save his strength for the days to come.
At midnight he woke abruptly to hear his wife screaming in his ears.
“Fong-ah!” she was calling. “Fong-ah, wake up.”
He had buried himself so deep in sleep that it was a minute or two before he could grunt a reply.
“Eh—what—” he muttered.
“The city is on fire!” she screamed.
He woke then and shuffled into his slippers lest a centipede sting him and ran into the court and looked up. The sky was red and the night was as light as day.
The children were awake now, and all were crying with fright and he turned on them fiercely when he came back into the house. “Be silent!” he commanded them. “Do you want the neighbors to think you are weeping for the foreigners?”
They fell silent instantly and he crept to his shop and opened the boards to the central door two inches, enough so that he could peer into the street. Twenty fires lit the sky and he knew what they were. The houses and churches of the Christians were burning. He closed the boards again and went back to his family. They were gathered in a small huddle in the gloom of the main room.
“Go back to bed,” he told them. “Fortunately we are not Christians and we will survive.”
Clem had waked his father after a moment of not knowing what to do. The fires were not near the hutung where they lived. They were nearly all in the better part of the city, near the Legation Quarters. He had not gone into the street since Mr. Fong had given him the warning. Even his father had gone out only by night—to beg, he supposed, at some missionary door, for he had come back with three loaves of foreign bread and some tinned stuff. One tin held Australian butter. Clem had never tasted butter. That night they had each eaten a slice of bread spread with the yellow butter and he had savored it curiously.
“We made our own butter on the farm,” his father said suddenly. Clem had been about to ask how when his mother said in a heartbroken voice, “Paul, don’t talk about the farm!”
Clem went to bed as soon as evening prayer was done, and had slept until the light from the red sky had wakened him in his corner of the small center room where his bed stood, a couch by day. He had got up and gone out into the court and then fearfully into the narrow street. There was no one in sight but he hurried through the gate again and barred it. Then because he was afraid and lonely he felt compelled to wake his father.
His father opened his eyes at once, silent and aware, and Clem motioned to him to come into the other room.
“Fires in the city!” he whispered.
His father came barefoot and in his underdrawers and they stared at the sky together.
“Don’t wake your mother or the girls,” his father whispered. “It’s a terrible sight—God’s judgment. I must go into the streets, Clem, to see what I can do. People will be suffering. You stay here.”
“Oh Papa,” Clem whispered, “don’t go. How shall I find you if something happens to you?”
“Nothing will happen,” his father said. “We will pray together before I go—as soon as I get my clothes on.”
Quickly his father was back again, dressed in his ragged cotton suit. “On your knees, dear boy,” he said in the same ghostly whisper.
For once Clem knelt willingly. He was helpless. They were all helpless. Now if ever God must save them.
“God who hearest all,” his father prayed, “Thou knows what is going on in this city. I feel I ought to be about my business and Thine. Probably there are a good many suffering people out there we ought to be looking after. Fires bring suffering as Thou knows. Protect my dear ones while I am gone and especially give strength to my dear son.”
His father paused and then in his usual firm voice he added, “Thy will be done, on earth as in heaven, for Thy Name’s sake. Amen!”
They got up and his father shook Clem’s hand strongly and was gone.
It was nearly dawn before Clem, sleepless upon the board of his bed, heard his father’s footsteps carefully upon the threshold. He sat up in bed and saw his father at the door drenched with sweat and black with smoke.
“I must clean myself before your mother sees me,” he said. “Get me some water in the basin—some soap if we have any. I’ll wash here in the court. Has your mother waked?”
“No,” Clem said and got out of bed. He went to the old well in the little courtyard and let down the wooden bucket. A bit of soap was hidden where he had left it above a beam, his own bit of soap, still left from a yellow bar his mother had managed to give him at Christmas. He stood beside his father while he stripped and began to wash.
“The Boxers are in the city,” his father said in a low voice. “The Old Empress has given us up. We are in the hands of God. The persecution of the Christians has begun.”
“What about the other foreigners?” Clem asked. For the first time he knew that his place must be among those who had rejected him. William Lane, that proud boy—
“I went to Brother Lane’s house,” his father was saying. “Of all of them, Brother Lane is the kindest. He gave me the food I have brought back and a little money. A man of tender heart! He is alone in his compound. He has sent his family away to Shanghai. They went before the railroads were broken. He has been sheltering Chinese Christians but now they are leaving him. It is safer for them to be among their own people.”
Now Clem was really afraid. If the railroads were broken Peking was cut off.
His father looked at him tenderly. “Are you fearful, Clem? Don’t be so, my son. The Lord is the strength of our lives. Of whom shall we be afraid?”
Clem did not answer. They were alone among enemies. He sent his own angry prayer toward the sky, where sunshine and smoke were in combat. “God, if you fail my father, I will never pray again.”
Then he turned and went into the house and heard his sisters talking softly over their clay doll while their mother still slept.
Mr. Fong knew upon each day what had ha
ppened in the palace. His old cousin stole out by night to report the doings of the Empress whom he now called the Old Demon.
“A mighty struggle is going on,” he declared to Mr. Fong in the depths of the night. The two men sat in the shop in darkness. The cousin would not allow a candle to be lit, neither would he allow the presence of Mrs. Fong. His hatred of the Empress had become so violent that he trusted no woman. Yet his family feeling was such that he felt obliged to tell Mr. Fong of all possible dangers in order that the Fong clan might be kept safe.
Mr. Fong dared not tell his cousin of their one real danger, which was Clem. Neighbors had seen the foreign boy coming day after day to the house.
“Proceed,” Mr. Fong said to his cousin.
“Prince Ching has been dismissed. He was the only reasonable one. She has appointed that blockhead Prince Tuan and three others who understand nothing. This is to prepare for her open union with the foolish Boxers.”
On the sixteenth day of this month the cousin reported that the Empress had called a meeting of her clansmen and then of the Manchus to whom she belonged and the Chinese whom she ruled. To these she spoke long of the evils the foreigners had done. She said the Manchus wanted war.
“Then she was confounded,” the cousin whispered, “for even among the Manchus there was Natsung, a man of sense, who told her she could not fight the world. He was upheld by a Chinese, Hsu Ching-cheng. The young Emperor, as her nephew, also begged her not to ruin the country. Upon this the great quarrel burst forth. That fool Prince Tuan spoke for the Boxers, though Prince Su spoke against him, saying that it was madness to believe that these ignorant men could not be shot to strips of flesh.”
On the eighteenth day the cousin told Mr. Fong that the Empress had seen the Boxers prove their powers, and she had decided to join with them.
“When the young Emperor heard the Old Demon declare this,” the cousin said, “he began to weep aloud and he left the room. It is now too late for us to hope. Prepare yourself, Elder Brother, and prepare our family for what must come, for we are lost. The forts at Tientsin have already fallen to the foreign armies but our people do not know it. Neither do the foreigners here in the city know it, since they have no word from the advancing armies sent to rescue them. And the Old Demon puts her faith in these monsters, the Boxers! Tomorrow, before the foreigners can hear of the loss of the forts or of their own coming rescue, she will demand that they leave the city. But how can they go, hundreds of them with women and little children? They will not go. Then the Boxers will try to kill them all. For this our people will be cruelly punished when the foreign armies reach the city. Prepare—prepare, Elder Brother!”
Gods Men Page 5