This Clem heard without being free to ask more about it. He wondered how the Fong household did, and whether they had shared in the suffering, and whether they in turn had been killed even as his family had been. But nothing could he know. When he had eaten he went to the docks and loitered among some sailors and on that same day he was able to find a ship and go aboard as a cabin boy. As for the apprentice, after staring half a day at the ships and wandering about the city, he left again for his home.
On the American freighter Clem made his way still eastward. The ship had brought ammunition and wheat to China and had taken away hides and vegetable oils. The hides, imperfectly cured, permeated the ship with their reek, and Clem, racked often with seasickness, wished sometimes that he too was dead. Yet the wish never lasted. Upon rolling gray seas the sun broke, the winds died and the waves subsided. Then, eating enormously in the galley with the thirty odd men who made up the crew, he wanted to live to reach the farm.
The men knew his story. They had heard it first on the pier at the port when, approaching one of them, he had asked timidly for a job on the ship.
“We don’t want no Chinks,” the sailor had replied.
“I am not Chinese,” Clem had said.
“You ain’t?” the sailor had said, unbelieving.
Clem had pointed to his eyes. “See, they are blue.”
“Damned if they ain’t,” the sailor had agreed after staring at him a moment “Hey, fellows, anybody ever seen a blue-eyed Chink?”
“When is a Chink not a Chink?” a sailor had inquired. “Why, when his ma is somethin’ else!”
“She wasn’t,” Clem had declared, with indignation. “She was good and so was my father and they were American and so am I.” But English felt strange upon his tongue after the many days when he had spoken only Chinese.
The men had gathered about him, delaying the pleasures they planned for their brief hours ashore, and with pity and wonder they had listened to his story which he had poured out. Looking from one coarse face to the other, he found himself telling everything to save his own life. Even the things he had not allowed himself to remember he told, and he began to sob again, trying not to, his fists clenched against his mouth.
The men listened and looked at each other, and one burly fellow took Clem’s head between his hands. “It’s all over, see? And we believe you, sonny. And you come with us, if we have to smuggle you. But the old man is soft enough. He’ll let you on board.”
They had dragged him before a little sharp-faced captain and made him tell his story all over again, and then he had been hired as a cabin boy. With the captain he held long conversations.
“Reckon you’ll never want to be going back to no heathen country after this!” the captain said.
“I don’t know,” Clem replied. He had mixed a whisky and soda, and set it before the captain. “I might have felt that way except that Mr. Fong saved my life. And people were kind all those days I tramped. I can’t forget the old grandmother.”
No, he could never forget. In the night, lying in his hard and narrow berth, tossed by the sea, he remembered the long days of tramping across the Chinese country, beside the old woman. Summer had ripened the fields, and the lengthening shadows of the green sorghum, high above their heads, gave them good shelter. Big Liu, too, had been kind. It would have been easy to tell the local police about a foreign boy and for the telling to have received a reward. Big Liu was poor enough to value money and Clem was a stranger. None would miss him if he died, but Big Liu had not betrayed him. Wonder and gratitude at the goodness of common men and women filled Clem’s heart with faith, not the faith of his father but a new faith, a faith which bound him to the earth.
The sailors, too, were kind, although they were rough and of an ignorance he had never yet seen. They were mannerless, coarse, drunken when they could get drink, lewd in act and speech, easily angry, always ready to fight. He thought of them as men half made, left unfinished, never taught. They knew no better than they did.
Were the people of his country all like these? He had none to judge by, never having known his own kind, except his father who he felt vaguely was a man peculiar. The delicacy of the Chinese was soothing and comfortable to remember. Here on the ship, though he knew the men were friendly to him, yet for some fault, or no fault except that a man might be surly from too much drink the night before on shore leave, he might feel his ears jerked or his head cuffed, or a blow between his shoulders might fell him. He learned it was useless to be angry, for immediately the man would joyfully urge him to fight, and he was no match for any of the men, short and slender as he was. Once he complained to the captain, but only once.
“You don’t think I’ll defend you?” the captain had said.
“No, sir,” Clem said, “except maybe to tell them to leave me alone.”
“Do they hate you?”
“No, sir. I don’t think they do; it’s like play, maybe.”
“Then put up or shut up,” the captain said.
Yet the long journey over the sea was good for Clem. An endless roar of command sounded in his ears. He was at the beck and call of all of them. Twice the ship stopped for coal, once in Japan, once again at the Hawaiian Isles, but he had no shore leave. He gazed across the dock at strange lands and unknown peoples and saw sharp mountains against the sky. At night he helped drunken sailors to bed, staggering under the load of their coarse bodies leaning on his shoulders, smelling the filthy reek of their breath. When one or another vomited before he could reach the rail, Clem had to clean the mess before the captain saw it. By morning all had to be shipshape, and sometimes there was little sleep for Clem. He loathed the coarseness of the men and yet he pitied it. They had nothing to make them better. They hated the sea, feared it, cursed it, and yet went on living by it, for they did not know what else to do. In a storm they were filled with blind terror. Clem felt old beside them, old as a father, and sometimes like a father he tended them, pulling off their sodden shoes when they slept before they could undress, bringing them coffee at dawn when they were too dazed to take watch. They were kind to him in return, half shamed because they knew him only a child, and yet helpless before him. He remained a stranger to them, aloof even while he served them. Pity prevented his blame, and his pity made them often silent when he came near them. But this he did not know. For himself he felt only increasing loneliness, and he longed for the voyage to end that he might find those who were his own.
The sea voyage ended at last and one day he went ashore into a country which was his and yet where he was still a stranger. The crew collected a purse for him, and he would never forget that. It meant that he could travel to the east on a railroad, instead of tramping the miles away as he had done across the country in China. He had not minded doing it there because he knew the people and there was the old woman at his side, but here where he did not know the people or the food it would have been different.
So though the sailors were so evil, they were good, too. On the first day ashore in San Francisco they went together to a shop and bought Clem a suit of clothes. It was too big for him, but he rolled up the pants and sleeves. They bought him two clean shirts and a red tie, a hat and a pair of shoes and three pairs of socks and a pasteboard suitcase. Then they took him to the railroad station and bought him a ticket to Pittsburgh on the day coach. There was not quite enough money, for they would not let him spend the ten dollars they had given him, and one of them had pawned a gold thumb ring he had bought in Singapore. They clapped him on the back, embraced him, and gave him good advice.
“Don’t talk with nobody, you hear, Clem?”
“Specially no women.”
“Aw, he’s too runty for women.”
“You’d be surprised if you knew women like I do. Don’t talk to ’em, Clem!”
“Don’t play no cards, Clem!”
“Send us a postcard once in a while, Clem, will ya?”
The train pulled out and he stood waving his new hat as they receded un
til he could see them no more. So he was alone again, riding in a train across his own country. He had a seat to himself, opposite a red-faced man in a gray suit who slept most of the time and grinned at him vaguely when he woke. “Don’t speak to nobody on the train,” the sailors had told him. “Shore fellows will take your money away from you.” He kept quiet and his wallet was in his breast pocket where he could feel it against his ribs every time he took a deep breath. When he needed money to spend on food he went into the men’s room and there alone he took out a dollar at a time, keeping his change in his hip pocket against the back of the seat.
Hour after hour, in every hour of daylight, he stared from the window, seeing a country he could not comprehend. It seemed empty and without people. Where were all the people? The mountains were higher than he could have imagined, the deserts wider and more desolate, their emptiness terrifying. To his amazement, many times at the stations he saw white men doing coolie work, and in the few fields between mountains and on the fringe of deserts he saw men and women more ragged, more poor, though white, than any he had seen in China. Where was the land of milk and honey his father used to call home?
One night while he slept upright in his seat, they rolled into green plains. When he woke at dawn it was to another country. Green fields and broad roads, big barns and compact clean farmhouses charmed his eyes. This was Pennsylvania, surely!
Long before Clem had begun his voyage William had reached America. The white English ship docked at Vancouver, and Mrs. Lane, brisk and experienced, bullied the courteous Canadian customs officers and found the best seats on the train that carried them across Canada to Montreal, where they changed for New York.
It was a smooth journey, and William enjoyed it with quiet dignity. He kept aloof from his mother and sisters, staying most of the time in the observation car where behind a magazine he listened to men’s talk. There was no difficulty in Montreal, and in New York his mother took them at once to the Murray Hill, where he had a room to himself because he was a boy. It was high ceilinged, and the tall windows had red velvet curtains held back by loops of brass. The luxury of the room and its bath pleased him. This then was America. It was better than he had feared.
They ate in a dining room where fountains played and canaries sang, and he enjoyed this, too.
“I believe in the best,” his mother said. “Besides, Papa and Mama always stayed here when we came to town.”
His mother kept him with her in New York for a week while she smoothed his path toward college, but Henrietta and Ruth she sent to her parents at Old Harbor. She did not take him at once to the office of the Mission Board. Instead she toured the best stores, asking to see young men’s clothing. When she found something she liked she made William try it on. She bought nothing, however, merely making notes of garments and prices.
With these in a small notebook in her handbag she went on the morning of the fourth day to the Board offices and there was received with a deference which was balm to William’s pride.
“Ah, Mrs. Lane,” a rosy faced white-haired executive said, “we’ve been expecting you. We had a cablegram from Dr. Lane. What can we do for you?”
“I have a good deal of shopping to do for my son’s entrance into Harvard,” Mrs. Lane said. Her voice and look were equally firm.
The plump elderly executive, a retired minister himself, looked doubtful. “We have special arrangements with medium-priced stores to give us a ten percent discount.”
Mrs. Lane interrupted without interest in the medium-priced stores. “I want to see the treasurer immediately.”
“Certainly, Mrs. Lane—this way, please,” the white-haired man said.
“You stay here, William,” Mrs. Lane commanded.
While William waited, his mother had a long interview with the mission treasurer which left him looking dazed and certainly left him silent. William had stayed in the reading room because his mother wanted, she said, to be alone with the finances. He had sauntered about, reading pamphlets impatiently. They were religious and full of hopeful accounts of the hospitals and schools and orphanages and churches with which he was entirely surfeited. He wanted to get away from everything he had known. When he entered college in the autumn he would not tell anyone who his father was or that he came from China.
“There now,” Mrs. Lane said when she emerged from the inner office. “I have everything all arranged. You’ll be able to get along nicely.” She held her long skirts in one hand and over her shoulder she said to the little mission treasurer, “Thank you, Mr. Emmons, you’ve been very helpful.”
Mr. Emmons broke his silence. “You do understand, don’t you, Mrs. Lane, that I haven’t made any promises? I mean—I’ll have to take up these rather unusual requests with the Board—evening clothes, for example—”
“I’m sure they’ll see that my son deserves some special consideration, after all we’ve been through,” Mrs. Lane said in her clear sharp voice. “Come, William, we can get the noon train after all.”
He had followed her, holding himself very straight and not speaking to the shabby little treasurer.
When they reached his grandfather’s house at Old Harbor, he was pleased to see it was a large one. It was old-fashioned and needed paint, but it stood in large, somewhat neglected grounds.
“Papa doesn’t keep things up the way he used to, I see,” his mother said. They had taken a hack at the station and now got down. She handed him her purse. “Pay the man his dollar, William,” she told him.
“Grass needs cutting,” she went on. “I suppose Papa can’t afford a gardener all the time, now he’s retired.”
The hack drove away, and William looked at the suitcases the man had set down in the path. “We’d better take what we can,” his mother said with some embarrassment. “I don’t know how many servants Papa has now. We used to have a houseman and three maids.”
She picked up two suitcases, and much against his will he took the other and followed her to the house. The door stood open and when they entered they were met by Henrietta and Ruth, dripping in bathing suits, and by a carelessly dressed old gentleman whom he recognized, though with extreme discomfort, as his grandfather.
Mrs. Lane swooped down upon him. “Well, Papa, here I am again!”
“You’ve grown a little older,” he said, looking at his tall daughter.
Mr. Vandervent was no longer imposing. He was a potbellied, mild-looking man, and he seemed timid before his tall grandson.
“How do, William,” he said, putting out a round little hand.
William clasped it coldly. “I’m very well, sir,” he replied correctly. “I hope you are, too.”
“So so,” Mr. Vandervent said. “The sea don’t really agree with me, but your grandma likes it.”
“What we’ve been through—” Mrs. Lane began.
She was interrupted by a loud scream. A tall fat woman burst through a swinging door, an apron tied about her waist.
“Helen, my goodness!”
It was her mother. They embraced and kissed. “I was just stirring up one of my chocolate cakes, thinking that William would probably—we only have two maids now, Helen—why, William, this isn’t you, never! Isn’t he the image of your father, Robert? Your great-grandfather was a real handsome man, William.”
Henrietta had disappeared and through the window William saw her walking along the shore. Ruth was standing on one foot and then another.
“William!” she now whispered. “Do get in your bathing suit. The ocean is wonderful.”
It gave him an excuse and he seized it.
“May I, Mother?”
“Go on,” his grandmother said heartily. “You’ll have time before supper.”
Supper! The word chilled his spine. He had heard it among the commoner missionaries, the Seventh Day Adventists, the Primitive Baptists, the Pentecostal people. At the English school the evening meal was always called dinner and since at his own home it had been so, too, it had not occurred to him that it could be
anything else here.
He mounted the stairs with laggard steps and was arrested by his mother’s voice. “Here, William, since you’re going up, you might as well take some of the suitcases.”
He stopped, not trusting his ears, and looked at his mother. She laughed, but he discerned embarrassment in the steel gray eyes she kept averted from his. “You may as well realize that you are in America, son,” she told him. “You’ll have to do a lot of waiting on yourself here.”
He stood still for one instant; then with a passionate energy he turned and ran downstairs and loaded himself with the bags and staggered upstairs again. Once he glanced over the balustrade to see if they were looking at him, but nobody was. His mother was talking about the siege, and they had forgotten him.
No one had told Clem to telegraph to his grandfather, and he would have been reluctant to spend the money. When he got off at last at Centerville, there was no one to meet him, but he had expected no one. Carrying his suitcase, he approached a fat man who was staring at the train and scratching his head.
“Can you tell me where Mr. Charles Miller lives?” Clem inquired.
The man had started a yawn and stopped it midway. “Never heard of him.”
“He lives on a farm,” Clem said.
“Your best bet would be that way,” the man said nodding toward the south.
“Thank you,” Clem said.
The man looked surprised but said nothing and Clem began walking. His days on the sea had made his feet tender although they had once been horny from long walking on rough Chinese roads. But his muscles still were strong. The heat here was nothing to that in China, and the air was sweet with some wild fragrance. He did not see anyone after he left the small railroad town, and this was strange. Were there no people here? It occurred to him that it was nearly noon, and they might be having a meal. Even so, where were the villages? As far as he could see there was no village in sight. The fields rolled away in high green waves against a sky of solid blue. They were planted with corn, he saw with surprise. Did the people here eat only corn?
Gods Men Page 9