“A soldier.”
“Wearing what uniform?” Mr. Fong asked.
“That of the Imperial Palace,” Clem said. Clem was telling the truth, Mr. Fong saw by his desperate honest boy’s face.
“The Old Empress is gone mad,” Mr. Fong said between set teeth. “Can she turn back the clock? Are we to return to the age of our ancestors while the whole world goes on? She has made us the laughingstock of all peoples. They will send their armies and their guns, and we shall all be exterminated because we listened to an old ignorant woman who sits on a throne. I will not fear her!”
So saying he seized Clem by the ragged elbow of his jacket and led him into the house, and behind him the family followed.
“Take off his garments and let me clean them,” Mrs. Fong said.
“Go into the inner room and get into the bed there,” Mr. Fong said. “After all, we are an obscure family. We have no enemies, I believe. If anyone comes to ask why we had a foreign youth here to teach our son, I will say it is because the foreigner was only a beggar.”
Like a beggar then Clem went into the dark small inner room, and taking off his outer clothes he crept under the patched quilt on the bed. He was dried to the bone. There were no tears in him, in his mouth no spittle. His very bladder was dry and though his loins ached he could make no water. The palms of his hands and the soles of his feet itched. Tortured by this drought, he lay under the quilt and began to shake in a violent and icy chill.
Clem was hidden thus for how many days he did not know. Nor did he know what went on in the city. Not once did Mr. Fong or any of his family pass through the boarded doors of the shop. The cousin came sometimes at midnight, and through him Mr. Fong knew what was happening. Thus he knew that the Old Demon, in her wrath, had set the fourth day after the murder of the German as the day when all over the empire foreigners were to be killed.
There were other edicts. Thus on the seventh day of the seventh month the “Boxer Militia” was praised and exhorted to loyalty, and such Chinese as were Christians were told to repent if they wished to stay alive.
Mr. Fong, who was not a Christian, knew, too, from his cousin that all the foreigners in the city were locked into the Legation Quarter, and that a battle was raging against them. He had heard continuous shooting, but he did not dare to go out to see what it was. In his heart he tried to think how he could convey Clem secretly into the fortress of his own kind and so rid his household of the danger, but he could think of nothing. He did not dare tell even his cousin of Clem’s presence in the house, for if it were discovered that the cousin was at heart a friend of the young Emperor and therefore an enemy to the Old Empress, he might be arrested and tortured, and to save himself he might get grace by telling about his own relative who was shielding a foreigner. Mr. Fong said nothing and listened to everything.
To Clem day and night were alike. The door to his small inner room was kept barred and was opened only by Mrs. Fong bringing food, or sometimes by Mr. Fong coming in to feel the boy’s wrists for fever. Clem lay in a conscious stupor, refusing to remember what he had seen, neither thinking nor feeling.
Then one day, and at what hour he did not know, he felt himself unable to keep from weeping. The gathering strength of his body, too young to accept continuing sleep, roused his unwilling mind, and suddenly he saw clearly upon the background of his brain the memory of his dead family, hacked and hewed by swords, and he was strong enough for tears. His numbed spirit came back to life, and the tears flowed. From tears he rose to sobbing which he could not control, and hearing these sobs Mr. Fong hastened into the room. Clem had struggled up and was sitting on the edge of the bed, clutching his chest with his hands.
“There is no time to weep,” Mr. Fong said in a whisper. “I have been waiting for this awakening. You are too young to die of sorrow.”
He went to a chest that stood against the wall and brought out a short blue cotton coat and trousers.
“I bought these at a pawnshop two nights ago,” he went on. “The madness in the city has abated somewhat. It is said that the foreign armies are very near. I prepared the garments against this moment. They will fit you. We have made black dye for your hair and there are shoes here. Put these on, and eat well of the meal my children’s mother is cooking. She has baked loaves and wrapped salt fish and dried mustard greens into a package for you and put them into a basket such as country boys carry.”
Clem stopped sobbing. “What am I to do, Elder Brother?” he asked.
“You must make your way to the sea, to a ship,” Mr. Fong said in a whisper. His smooth face, usually so full, looked flat and his eyes were sunken under his sparse stiff brows. He had not shaved for days, and a stubble stood up on his head and his queue was ragged. “Now hear me carefully, Little Brother. All those of your kind who are not dead are locked behind walls in the foreign quarter, and a fierce battle has raged. We shall lose as soon as foreign soldiers with guns arrive at the city. Our stupid Old Woman will not know she has lost until she has to flee for her life. We can only wait for that hour, and it is not far off. But our people are not with her. You will be safe enough among the people. Avoid the cities, Little Brother. Stay close by the villages, and when you pass someone on the road, look down into the dust to hide the blue color of your eyes.”
Clem changed into the Chinese garments and though his legs trembled with weakness, the thought of escape gave him strength. He ate well of the strong meat broth and bread and garlic which Mrs. Fong set before him, all this being done in silence. When he had eaten she brought a bowl of black dye, such as old women smear upon their skulls when the hair drops out, and with a strong goose feather she smeared this dye upon his sand-colored hair and upon his eyebrows and even on his eyelashes.
“How lucky your nose is not high!” she whispered. When she had finished she stood back to look at him and admire the change. “You look better as a Chinese!”
Mr. Fong laughed soundlessly and then pressed the basket on Clem’s arm and together they took him to the small back door. “You know your way to the South Gate,” Mr. Fong whispered. “The wind now is from the south. Follow it and walk for three days, and then turn eastward to the sea. There find a ship that flies a foreign flag, and ask for a task of some sort upon it.”
Clem stood for one instant beside the door. “I thank you for my life,” he stammered.
“Do not thank us,” Mr. Fong replied. “The stupidity of the Old Woman has not made us enemies. Return to the land of your ancestors. But do not forget us. Take this, Little Brother. If I were not so poor I would give you a full purse.” He put a purse into Clem’s hand and Clem tried to push it away.
“You must take it for my own ease of mind,” Mr. Fong said. So Clem took it.
Even Yusan, his childish pupil, must give him a last gift. The boy did not understand why Clem must be hidden or why be sent out in secret, but he clung to Clem’s hand and gave him two copper coins. Mrs. Fong touched the edge of her sleeves to her eyes and patted Clem’s arm once and then twice, and Mr. Fong opened the door and Clem went out.
It was night, at what hour he could not tell, but the darkness was deep and the city was silent. He stood listening, and he heard the soft sound of the wooden bar as Mr. Fong drew it against the inside of the door. Still listening he heard in the distance the cracking of guns, a volley and then another. He could only go on, and feeling the dust soft beneath his feet, he lifted his face to the wind and let it guide him southward.
2
UPON A SEA AS blue as the sky above it a British ship shone as white as a snowbank. William Lane, pacing the deck after a solid English breakfast, held his head high, aware of the glances which followed him as he went. Ladies were arranging themselves in the deck chairs, and only a few minutes earlier he had helped his mother with her rug, her cushion, her knitting, her book. Henrietta was writing letters in the salon, and Ruth was playing shuffleboard. When he felt like it he would join her, but just now he wanted to walk his mile about the deck.
Upon his father’s direction they had taken passage on the first ship that left Shanghai. Only the assurance of the Consul General had persuaded them to leave.
“You cannot possibly help anyone by remaining here,” the Consul General had said irritably to Mrs. Lane, when they had gone to him for advice. “Your husband is as safe as we can make him in the Legation Quarter with all the other foreigners. They are in a state of siege, of course, but they have plenty of food and water, and relief is on the way. It is only a matter of days.”
“Why should we go then?” Henrietta had asked in her blunt voice.
The Consul General had stared at the plain-faced girl. “Merely to get on your way,” he retorted. Merely to get out of my way, he meant.
Mrs. Lane decided the matter abruptly. “We had better go, or we may not get away for months,” she told William. “I will settle you in college and Henrietta in boarding school, and we will have the summer together with your grandfather at Old Harbor. If things are quiet in Peking by autumn I will go back. If not, your father will come home. We all need a rest and a change. I am sick of China and everything Chinese.”
So they had taken passage. Since British ships docked at Vancouver, their course was northerly and the weather was cool and fine.
William Lane tried not to think of his father and a good deal of the time he succeeded. He was feeling many things at this age, everything intensely. Above all, he was heartily glad that he would never again see the English boarding school where he had been so often unhappy. He was ashamed and yet proud of being American, ashamed because to be American at the school had kept him second-class, proud, because America was bigger than England. The consciousness of an inferiority which he could not believe was real had clouded his school days. He had isolated himself both from the Americans and from the English, living in loneliness.
He was altogether ashamed of being the son of a missionary. Even the children of English missionaries were secondary. The son of the American ambassador alone had any sort of equality with the English boys, and seeing this, William had often bitterly wished that his father had been an ambassador. Men ought to consider what they were, he thought gloomily, for the sake of their sons. He hated Henrietta because when she came last year to the school she had immediately joined the Americans and had foolishly declared that she did not care what her father was. Thus William and Henrietta had been utterly divided at school and their division had not mended. She had taken as her bosom friend a girl whom he particularly despised, the daughter of an American missionary who lived in an interior city and was of a lowly Baptist sect. The girl was loathsomely freckled and her clothes were absurd. She should never have been at the school, William felt, and to have her the chosen friend of his own sister degraded him. In his loneliness he developed a grandeur of bearing, a haughtiness of look, which warned away the ribald. He avoided Henrietta because she was not afraid of him. Sometimes she laughed at him. “You look like a rooster when you prance around like that,” she had once declared in front of their schoolmates. Shouts of laughter had destroyed his soul.
“I say,” the cricket captain had cried, “you do look like a cock, you know!”
Well, that was over. He need never return to the school. Yet he did not and would not acknowledge how profoundly he would like to have been English. The most that he allowed himself was to dream occasionally as he walked the decks, his head high, that people who did not know him would think he was English. Lane was a good English name. His accent, after four years at school, was clearly English. The most fortunate youth he had ever met was the son of an English lord who spent a day at the school once when his father was visiting on shore from an English battleship in the Chinese harbor.
He passed his sister Ruth at the shuffleboard. “I wish you’d play with me now, William,” she said in a plaintive voice.
“Very well, I will,” he replied. He paused, chose his pieces and the game began. He played much better than she did. The only fun he found in playing with her at all was to allow her to seem to win until the very end when, making up his mind that it was time to stop, he suddenly came in at the finish with victory.
“Oh William!” she cried, invariably disappointed.
“I can’t help it if I’m better than you,” he replied today and sauntered away, smiling his small dry smile.
He did not like to play with Henrietta. She was a changeable player, losing quickly sometimes and again winning by some fluke that he could not foresee. He never knew where he was with her.
There were no boys on the ship whom he cared to cultivate, but there was one young man, English, some five or six years older than he, to whom he would have liked to speak, except that the chap never spoke first, and William did not want to seem American. At school the chaps always said Americans were so free, rushing about and speaking first to everybody.
He would have been considerably bored had he not thought much about his future and had there not been so many meals. Just now the morning broth was being served on little wagons, pushed by white-robed Chinese table boys and deck stewards. He approached one of the wagons, took a cup of hot beef broth and a handful of what he had taught himself to call biscuits instead of crackers, and sat down in his deck chair beside his mother. She had already chosen chicken broth as lighter fare. She complained about the plethora of food and yet, he noticed, she ate as they all did. It cost nothing more, however much one ate, but none of them would say such a thing aloud except Henrietta.
“Henrietta seems to have picked up a young man,” his mother now remarked.
She nodded toward the upper deck, and William saw his sister leaning against the rail, the wind blowing her black hair from her face. She was talking in her earnest abrupt fashion to the young Englishman. A pang shot through his heart. He renounced the friendship he had craved. Whoever was Henrietta’s friend could never be his.
“Henrietta will speak to anybody,” he told his mother. “I noticed that at school.”
Clem plodded his way across the Chinese countryside. He was shrewd in the ways of the people and no human being was strange to him. Mercy he expected of none, kindness he did not count upon, and when he did not receive these, he blamed no one.
He walked by night and slept by day in the tall sorghum cane that grew in the fields at this season. When he saw no one ahead on a road as he peered out of the growth, he took advantage of this to cover as many miles as he could of those miles still between himself and the sea. The canes cut him from the sight of any farmer working in the fields and he had only to look ahead, for he walked faster than anyone coming from behind.
One day he fell in with an old country woman. She had long passed the age of concealing herself for modesty’s sake and she had paused to relieve herself by the road. Comfort was now above all else. Clem came upon her about noon on a lonely country road and for a moment he thought her part of a bandit group. When the canes are high it is the season of bandits and often a gang of men will carry with them an old woman as a decoy.
The old woman laughed when she saw his start. “Do not be afraid of me, boy,” she said in a cheerful voice while she tied her cotton girdle about her waist.
She spoke a country dialect which Clem understood, for its roots were the same language he had heard in Peking and so he said, “Grandmother, I am not afraid of you. What harm can we do each other?”
She laughed at nothing as country women will. “You cannot do me any harm,” she said in a voice very fresh for such a wrinkled face. “Thirty years ago perhaps but not now! Where are you going?”
She fell into pace beside him and he slowed his step. It would be well for him to be seen with this old woman. He might be taken for her grandson. “I am going east,” he said.
“How is it you are alone?” she asked.
He had tried to keep the dangerous blue of his eyes away from her, but when he stole a look at her, he saw that he need not take care. She had cataracts on both eyes, not heavy as yet, but filmed enough to see no
more of him than his vague outlines.
“My father died in Peking,” he said truthfully, “and I am going to find my grandfather.”
“Where is your grandfather?” she asked.
“To the east,” he replied.
“I am going eastward, too,” she said. “Let us go together.”
“How far east?” he asked with caution.
She named a small city at the edge of the province.
“How is it you are alone?” he asked in his turn.
“I have no son,” she replied. “Therefore I have no daughter-in-law. But I have a daughter who is married to an ironsmith in the city and I go there to ask for charity. My old man, her father, died last week and I sold the house. We had two thirds of an acre of land. Had I a son I would have stayed on the land. But my fate is evil. My twin sons died together in one day when they were less than a year old.”
She sighed and loosened her collar as though she could not breathe and so her wrinkled neck was bare. Clem saw around it a dirty string on which hung an amulet.
“What is it you wear on your neck, Grandmother?” he asked.
She laughed again, this time half ashamed. “How do I know what it is?” she retorted.
“Where did you get it?” Clem asked.
“Why do you want to know?” the old woman asked suspiciously.
Now the amulet was a strange one for a Chinese woman to wear. It was a small brass crucifix wrapped around with coarse black thread.
“It looks Christian,” Clem said.
The old woman gave him a frightened look. “How does a boy like you know what is Christian?” she demanded, and she buttoned her coat.
“Are you a Christian?” Clem asked softly.
The old woman began to curse. “Why should I be a Christian? The Christians are bad. Our Old Buddha is killing them. You come from Peking; you ought to know that.”
“The cross is good,” Clem said in a whisper.
She stopped in the middle of the road and heard this. “Do you say it is good?” she asked.
Gods Men Page 7