On the twentieth day of that month Clem was waked by his mother in the early morning. He opened his eyes and saw her finger on her lips. He got up and followed her into the court. There were times when between his parents he felt he had no life of his own. Each made him the keeper of secrets from the other, each strove to bear the burden of danger alone, with only Clem’s help.
“Clem dear,” his mother said in her pretty coaxing voice. In the dawn she had a pale ghostlike look and he saw what he had seen before but today too clearly, that she was wasting away under this strain of waiting for lonely death.
“Yes, Mama,” he said.
“Clem, we haven’t anything left to eat. I’m afraid to tell Papa.”
“Oh Mama,” he cried. “Is all that bread gone?”
“Yes, and all the tins. I have a little flour I can mix with water for this morning. That’s all.”
He knew what she wanted and dreaded to ask him and he offered himself before she spoke.
“Then I will go into the streets and try to find something, Mama.”
“Oh Clem, I’m afraid for you to, but if you don’t Papa will, and you can slip through the hutungs better than he can. He’ll stop maybe to pray.”
“I won’t do that,” he said grimly.
“Then put on your Chinese clothes.”
“I’d better not go until after breakfast, Mama, or Papa will notice.”
“Oh yes, that’s true. Go after breakfast when he is studying his Bible.”
“Yes.”
His mother’s soft eyes were searching his face with anxious sadness. “Oh Clem, forgive me.”
“There isn’t anything to forgive, Mama. It’s not your fault.” He saw the tears well into her eyes and with love and dreadful impatience he stopped them.
“Don’t cry, please, Mama. I’ve got all I can bear.” He turned away, guilty for his anger, and yet protecting himself with it.
He was silent during the meager breakfast, silent when his father prayed longer than usual. The food was hot. They were out of fuel but he had torn some laths from a plaster wall. Their landlord did not come near them now. They were only grateful that he did not turn them into the streets.
After breakfast Clem waited for his father to go into the inner room and then he got the ragged blue cotton Chinese garments and put them on where the girls could not see him and know that he was going out. Not bidding even his mother good-by, waiting until she was in the small kitchen, he climbed the wall so that he would not leave the gate open and dropped into the alleyway.
Where in all the vast enemy city should he go for food? He dared not go to Mr. Fong. There was nowhere to go indeed except to Mr. Lane, alone in the compound. He had given them food before and he would give again, and Clem did not mind going now that William was not there. So by alleyways and back streets, all empty, he crept through the city toward the compound. None of the compounds were in the Legation Quarter, but this one was nearer than the others.
The gate was locked when he came and he pounded on it softly with his fists. A small square opened above him and the gateman’s face looked out. When he saw the foreign boy, he drew back the bar and let him in.
“Is the Teacher at home?” Clem asked safely inside.
“He is always at home now,” the gateman replied. “What is your business?”
“I have something to ask,” Clem said.
In usual times the gateman would have refused him, as Clem well knew, but now he refused no white face. These foreigners were all in piteous danger and he was a fool to stay by his own white master, but still he did. He had no wife or child and there was only his own life, which was worth little. Thus he plodded ahead of Clem to the big square house and knocked at the front door. It was opened by Dr. Lane himself, who was surprised to see a foreign boy.
“Do I know you?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” Clem replied. “But I know you, sir. I am Clem Miller.”
“Oh yes,” Dr. Lane said vaguely. “The Millers—I know your father. Come in. You shouldn’t be out on the streets.”
“My father doesn’t know that I am,” Clem replied. He stepped into the house. It looked bare and cool.
“My family is in Shanghai,” Dr. Lane said. “I’m camping out. Did you know my son William? Sit down.”
“I’ve seen him,” Clem said with caution. He sat down on the edge of a carved chair.
Dr. Lane continued to look at him with sad dark eyes. He had a kind face except that it looked as though he were not listening.
“What did you come for?” he asked in a gentle voice.
“We have no food,” Clem said simply. The blood rushed into his pale face. “I know you have helped us before, Dr. Lane. I wouldn’t have come if I had known where else to go.”
“That is quite all right,” Dr. Lane said. “I’ll be glad—”
Clem interrupted him. “One more thing, Dr. Lane. I don’t consider that when I ask you for food it’s God’s providing. I know it isn’t. I don’t think like my father on that. I wouldn’t come just for myself, either. But there’s my mother and my two sisters.”
“That’s all right,” Dr. Lane said. “I have more food than I need. A good many tins of stuff—we had just got up an order from Tientsin before the railroad was cut.”
The house was dusty, Clem saw, and the kitchen was empty. Dr. Lane seemed helpless. “I don’t know just where things are. The cook left yesterday. He was the last one. I can’t blame them. It’s very dangerous to stay.”
“Why didn’t you go with William?” Clem asked.
Dr. Lane was still searching. “Here’s a basket. I didn’t go because of my parish. The Chinese Christians are having a time of sore trial. I can’t do much for them except just stay. Here are some tins of milk and some meat—potted ham, I believe.”
He filled the basket and put a kitchen towel over it. “Better not carry the tins in the open. They might tempt someone. I wish I could send you home in the riksha but of course the puller has gone—a faithful fellow, too. Lao Li was his name. There’s only the gate keeper.”
He was leading the way to the door. “You’d better get home as fast as you can. Tell your father that he must get your family into the Legation Quarter if any trouble comes. We’ll have to stick together. I suppose our governments will send soldiers to rescue us. They may be on the way.”
“I’m afraid my father won’t go into the Legation,” Clem said. To explain that his father would consider such retreat a total loss of faith, might hurt Dr. Lane’s feelings.
But Dr. Lane knew. “Ah,” he said, “it takes more courage than I have for such faith. For myself, I can—but not for my son.”
They were at the door now and the old gateman was waiting.
“Good-by, Clem,” Dr. Lane said.
“Good-by, sir.”
The gateman stared at the basket, and he went into his little room and brought out some old shoes and put them on top of the towel. “Let it seem rubbish,” he said, “otherwise you will be robbed.”
The gate shut behind Clem and he was alone in the street, the basket heavy upon his arm. It was midmorning, and the sun was beginning to be hot. There were a few people about now, all men, and he saw they were soldiers, wearing the baggy brightly colored uniform of the Imperial Palace. He tried to escape their notice, and had succeeded, he thought, for their officer was laughing and joking and did not notice him. They were looking at a foreign gun the officer held. Then they did see him and they started after him. He began to run. On another day, at another hour, he might have shown better sense by stopping to talk with them in their own tongue. Now he wanted only to keep his face hidden from them, his face and his pale foreign eyes. He ran out of the alleyways into Hatamen Street, the eastern boundary of the Legation. Perhaps he could get into the Legation gate. He turned and was stopped by a small procession of two sedan chairs and their outriders. In the sedans he looked into two foreign faces, arrogant, severe, bearded faces he had never seen before.
Before he could slip away into an alley again, he was caught between the Chinese soldiers and the foreigners in their sedans. The soldiers blocked the street so that the bearers were forced to set the sedans down.
Now the curtain of the first sedan lifted and the foreigner put out his head and shouted fiercely to the soldiers, “Out of the way! I am Von Ketteler, the German Ambassador, and I go for audience with the Empress!”
The second sedan opened and he heard a guttural warning. It came too late. The Chinese officer raised his foreign gun and leveled it at the German. Clem saw a spit of fire and the Ambassador crumpled, dead. Clem crawled behind the sedan, and clutching his basket, he hurried as fast as he could from the dreadful spot.
Homeward he ran through streets now filling with people. It was hopeless to escape them. Hands reached out and tore away the coverings of the basket and revealed the food. Dirty hands fought for the tins and emptied the basket in an instant, and then he felt hands laid upon him.
“A foreigner, a foreign devil—” he heard voices screaming at the sight of his face. He burrowed among legs and forced his way through, agile with terror, and hid himself inside an open gate, looking this way and that until he saw a woman’s angry face at a window and then he darted out again. Now he was near home and the crowd was surging in the opposite direction to see the murdered German. He was safe for a moment but what would he do without the food? He began to sob and tried to stop because his sobs shook him so he could not run, and then he had no breath to run and so he walked, limping and gasping, down the hutung to the small gate. He would have to knock; he was too weary to try to climb the wall. Ah, the gate was open! He stopped, bewildered, and then saw something bright in the dust of the threshold at his feet. It was blood, brightly red, curling at the edges in the dust. A new more desperate terror fell upon him. He could not think. He ran through the gate and into the meager courtyard. The paper-latticed doors of the little central room were swinging to and fro, and he pushed his way through them.
There he stopped. Upon the rough brick floor his father lay, resting in his own blood which flowed slowly from a great gash in his throat, so deep that the head was half severed. His arms were flung wide, his legs outspread. Upon the quiet face, though bled white, he saw his father’s old sweet smile, the greeting he gave to all alike who entered this house, to strangers and to his own, and now to his son. Under the half closed lids the blue eyes seemed watching. Clem gazed down at his father, unable to cry out. He knew. He had often seen the dead. In winter people froze upon the streets, beggars, refugees from famine, a witless child, a runaway slave, an unwanted newborn girl. But this was his father.
He choked, his breath would not come up, and he tried to scream. It was well for him that no sound came, for in the silence he might have been heard, and those who had gone might have come back. He gave a great leap across his father’s feet and ran into the other room where his mother’s bed was. There he saw the other three, his mother, his two sisters. They were huddled into the back of the big Chinese bed, the two children clinging to their mother, but they had not escaped. The same thick sword that had cut his father’s throat had rolled the heads from the children. Only his mother’s long blonde hair hid what had been done to her, and it was bloodied a bright scarlet.
He stood staring, his mouth dried, his eyes bulging from their sockets. He could not cry, he could not move. There was no refuge to which he could flee. Where in this whole city could he find a hole in which to hide? He thought for one instant of William Lane and the security of that solid house enclosed behind walls. The next instant he knew that there was no safety there. The dead might be lying on those floors, too. No, his own kind could not save him.
He turned and ran as he had come along the high walls of the alleys, by lonely passage’s away from the main streets back again to Mr. Fong’s house.
In the central room behind the shop Mr. Fong was sitting in silence with his wife and their children. News had flown around the city from the Imperial Palace that two Germans had fired on innocent Chinese people and that a brave Chinese soldier had taken revenge by killing one of the Germans and wounding the other. Mr. Fong doubted the story but did not know how to find out the truth.
“The wind blows and the grass must bend,” he told Mrs. Fong. “We will remain silent within our own doors.”
He was troubled in mind because his eldest son could speak English and he feared that it might cause his death. Not only foreigners were to be killed. The Old Buddha had commanded today at dawn, at her early audience in the palace, that all who had eaten of the foreign religion and all who could speak foreign languages were also to be killed.
Mr. Fong had just finished quarreling with his wife, and this was another reason for the silence of the family. The quarrel, built upon the terror of what was taking place in the city, of which rumors were flying everywhere, had been over the very matter of the eldest son speaking English.
“I told you not to let our Yusan learn the foreign tongue,” Mrs. Fong had said in a loud whisper. Sweat was running down the sides of her face by her ears. Though she fanned herself constantly with her palm leaf fan nothing dried her sweat this day.
“Who could tell that the Old Empress would put the Young Emperor in jail?” Mr. Fong replied. “Two years ago everything was for progress. Had all gone well, the young Emperor would now be on the throne and the Old Woman would be in prison.”
“The gods would not have it so,” Mrs. Fong declared.
Nothing made Mr. Fong more angry than talk of gods. He read as many as possible of the books of revolutionary scholars and other books which they had translated from foreign countries. Thus he knew many things which he concealed from Mrs. Fong, who could not read at all. Through his cousin he had learned much that happened in the Forbidden City. He had long known that there was a certain troupe of actors who, a few years before, had been summoned from Shanghai to play before the Imperial Court. Among the actors were the two famous rebel scholars, Liang Ch’i Ch’ao and T’an Tzut’ung, and they were responsible for informing the young Emperor that times had changed and that railroads and schools and hospitals were good things. What pity that all their efforts now had failed! That man at court whom they had trusted, that Yuan Shih K’ai, though pretending sympathy with them, had betrayed them to the chief eunuch Jung-lu, because the two had long ago sworn blood brotherhood, and Jung-lu had told the Old Empress, and so she had won after all. Liang had escaped with K’ang Yu-wei, the young Emperor’s tutor, but T’an had been killed. Since then the Old Demon, as Mr. Fong called her in his private thoughts, had gone from worse to madness.
There was no use in telling Mrs. Fong all this. He heard her voice complaining against him still, though under her breath, and being frightened and weary and more than a little fearful that she was right, he squared his eyebrows and opened his mouth and shouted at her.
“Be quiet, you who are a fool!”
Mrs. Fong began to cry, and the children not knowing which way to turn between their parents, began to wail with their mother.
In the midst of this hubbub which, having aroused, Mr. Fong now tried to stop, they heard a stealthy beating upon the back door. Mr. Fong raised his hand.
“Be quiet!” he commanded again in a loud whisper.
Instantly all were still. They could hear very well the sound of fists upon the barred gate.
“It is only one pair of hands,” Mr. Fong decided. “Therefore I will open the gate and see who it is. Perhaps it is a message from my cousin.”
He rose, and Mrs. Fong, recalled to her duty, rose also, and with her the children. Thus together they went into the narrow back court and inch by inch Mr. Fong drew back the bar. The beating ceased when this began, and at last Mr. Fong opened the gate a narrow way and looked out. He turned his head toward Mrs. Fong.
“It is Little Foreign Brother!” he whispered.
“Do not let him enter,” she exclaimed. “If he is found here, we shall all be killed.”
Mr. Fong held the gate, not knowing what to do. Against his own will he heard Clem’s voice, telling him horrible news.
“My father and mother, they are dead! My sisters are dead! Their heads are off. My father lies on the floor. His throat is gashed. I have nowhere to go.”
Against his will Mr. Fong opened the gate, allowed. Clem to come in, and then barred it again quickly. The boy had vomited and the vomit still clung to his clothes. His face was deathly and his eyes sunken, even in so short a time.
“Now what shall we do?” Mrs. Fong demanded.
“What can we do?” Mr. Fong replied.
They stood looking at each other, trying to think. Clem, past thought, stared at their faces.
“We must consider our own children,” Mrs. Fong said. But she was a kind woman and now that she saw the boy and the state he was in she wished to clean him and comfort him, in spite of her fright.
“Why should they kill your family?” Mr. Fong demanded of Clem. “Your father was poor and weak but a good man.”
“It is not only my father,” Clem said faintly. “I saw them kill a German and another only barely escaped though he was shot in the leg.”
“Did the Germans not shoot into a crowd?” Mr. Fong demanded.
Clem shook his head. “There was no crowd. Only me.”
“Who shot then?”
Gods Men Page 6