“Lay off!” he bellowed. “You want to kill that boy?”
Clem turned upon him a face set and white. “He’s going to take his chance if I do have to kill him,” he replied and finished his punishment. When he let Bump get up he pointed at the flour sack and waited until the weeping boy had unpacked it and put his clothes away again.
Janison waited, too, a quizzical look behind his mustaches. Then Clem turned solemnly to his employer. “I aim to bring this boy up like my own brother. That means he’s going to get a good education, the kind I’d give my eyes to have, nearly. He’s to be a man, not some worthless son-of-a-gun.”
Mr. Janison pulled his goatee. “Go to it,” he said. “That was as pretty a lickin’ as ever I see.”
He went downstairs again and Clem sat down on the bed. “Bump, I hope never to lick you again,” he said gravely. “I don’t believe in it and I don’t feel I ought to have to do it. But if you dare to run away and throw out a fine chance like I’m offering you, I will come after you and lick you wherever you are. You hear me?”
“Ye-es,” Bump sobbed.
“Well, then,” Clem did not know how to go on. “You come downstairs and I’ll get you some crackers and cheese—and some lickerish,” he said finally. Food, he thought, was what the boy needed, and something sweet, maybe.
During the next years, as Bump began to grow into a satisfactory boy, Clem wondered often about his beginnings. That he was a child without parents, Clem knew; without parents, that is, except in the simplest animal sense. Mom Berger had told him one night after the younger children were in bed, that they were all love children, “except that there Bump.”
“What is he?” Clem had asked.
“I dunno what you’d call him,” she had said mysteriously.
With an embarrassment which sat ridiculously upon her thick person, she had pursed her lips and remained silent. Pop Berger had taken up the sordid story.
“That there Bump,” he said after some moments of rumination and chewing upon a vast quid of tobacco. “He’s what you might call a rape child.”
Clem had flushed. “You mean—”
“Yeah,” Pop Berger had said slowly, relishing the evil news. “His paw attacked a girl on the streets of Philly. ’Twas all in the papers.”
“Yeah,” Mom Berger said from beside the stove. “And I ast you was it real rape. A woman don’t rape easy or if she do, it ain’t rape.”
Pop took the story away from her again. “Anyways, it was brought up in court for to be rape, and the raper, that was Bump’s paw, mind you, he had to pay the girl a hunnerd dollars.”
“Some women makes their livin’ one way and some another,” Mom Berger had said, and had clattered a stove lid to let Pop know that enough was enough.
If the story was true, Clem had told himself in reflecting pity, then Bump had no parents at all, neither father nor mother. By the accident of two conflicting bodies he had been conceived, his soul snared somewhere among the stars. He was not orphaned, for even an orphan had once possessed parents. The boy’s solitary creation moved all that was fatherly in Clem’s being, and it was most of him.
He had not been alone in what he did either for Bump or himself. With the affection so easily found in any small American town, the citizens observed the solitary and ambitious boy. They knew no more about him than that he was an orphan and they took it for granted that Bump was his brother. That he had run away from an eastern state endeared him to them. Mr. Janison soon began to spread news of Clem’s monstrous good qualities. His industry was astounding to the employer. When other young males of the town were crazed with spring and the baseball season, Clem continued behind his counter, even staying to sweep the store as usual when the day was over. His belated arrival on the baseball field and the frenzy of those who awaited him only made him more beloved. For all his medium stature, Clem had long strong arms that could perform wheels in the air and send a ball faster than imagination. “A good all-round feller,” New Point decided, “a feller that’ll make his way.”
Two persons kept to themselves their thoughts about Clem. Miss Mira Bean, Bump’s teacher to whom Clem had gone after the whipping, knew that Clem was more than New Point discerned. She knew it the first evening he had come to her door, clean and brushed and holding his cap in his hand.
“Come in,” she had said with her usual sharp manner to the young.
Clem had come into her small two-room flat.
“My name is Clem Miller.”
“Sit down,” she commanded.
The rooms were small and crowded with furniture and books. There was little space to sit, and he took the end of a haircloth sofa. Miss Bean was like any of the middle-aged women he saw upon the streets of New Point, a lean, sand-colored shape, washed and clean, straight-haired and gray-eyed.
“What do you want, Clem?” she asked.
“I want to talk to you about Bump,” he said. He had gone on then to tell why he had felt compelled to whip the boy.
“But I can’t whip him again,” he said. “You, Miss Bean, have got to make him like school well enough so he will want to get an education.”
“He’s got to stay in school, whether he likes it or not,” Miss Bean said somewhat harshly. “It’s the law.”
Clem had sat looking at her. “I don’t think you ought to take advantage of that,” he said. “The law is on your side, of course. But even the law can’t make a boy get an education. It can only make him sit so many hours a day where you are. He’s got to like it before he can get educated.”
Miss Bean was not a stupid woman and she was struck with this wisdom in a youth who was still too young to be called a man.
“You’re right about that,” she said after a moment.
She had done her best, not only for Bump, but also for Clem, lending him books, guiding his reading, letting him talk to her for hours on Sundays. For though Clem made Bump go to Sunday School and lectured him about the value of going to church, he himself never went.
“Whyn’t you go, then, if it’s so good?” Bump grumbled.
Clem, polishing Bump’s ragged school shoes, paused to answer this as honestly as he could. “I just can’t get myself to it,” he confessed. “What’s more, I can’t tell you why. Something happened to me once somewhere.”
“What was it?” Bump asked.
Clem shook his head. “It would take me too long to tell you.”
He never told anyone anything about himself. It would indeed have taken him too long. Where would he begin, and how would he explain his origins? How could he ever tell anyone in this peaceful town in Ohio that he had once lived in Peking, China, and that he had seen his parents killed? There were things too endless to tell. Only to Henrietta was he one day to speak, because she knew at least the beginning.
The church bell came to his aid. “You run along,” he told Bump briskly. The shoes were polished and he washed his hands in the china bowl. Then he fixed Bump’s tie to exactitude and parted his hair again and brushed it. “Mind you learn the golden text,” he said sternly.
The minister at the Baptist Church was the other person in New Point who kept to himself his thoughts about Clem. He stopped sometimes in the store to see the industrious young man and to invite him to come to the house of God. He was a red-haired, freckle-faced young minister, fresh of voice and sprightly in manner, and there was nothing in him to dislike. But Clem did fear him, nevertheless, though the young minister was persuasive and ardent.
“Come to worship God with us, my friend,” he said to Clem one day at the meat counter. He had come to buy a pound of beef for stew.
Clem fetched out a piece of nameless beef and searched for the knife. “I don’t have much time, Mr. Brown,” he said mildly. “I really need my Sundays.”
“It costs more time in the end not to be a Christian, more time in eternity.”
Clem smiled and did not answer. He cut the meat and weighed it, and then cut another slice. “Tell Mrs. Brown I’m putting in
a little extra.” This was his usual answer to those whom he refused something. He gave a little extra food.
The store, Clem knew as the years passed, was not his final destination. He was learning about buying and selling, and he was learning about his own people. Living among the kindly citizens of the small town, he began to recover from the shock of the farm and the man and woman who lived upon it. In its way, he sometimes mused, it had been a shock as severe as that he had received when he found his parents murdered on that summer’s day in Peking. He was taut with nervous energy, he never rested, and there were days when he could not eat without nausea. Food he held sacred, yet food could lie heavy in his own belly. He could not drink milk or eat butter because he could not bear the smell of the cow, and he disliked eggs. Meat he ate almost not at all, partly because he had been so little used to it. He forgot himself. Around the matter of food his imagination played and upon it his creative power was focused. Under Miss Bean’s dry guidance, he read economics and came upon Malthus, and lost his temper. The man must have been one of those blind thinkers, sitting in his study, playing with figures instead of getting out and seeing what was really going on in the world. People were starving, yes, but food was rotting because they could not get it. There was plenty of food, there were not too many people, the trouble was that men had not put their minds to the simple matter of organization for distribution. Food must be bought where it was plentiful and cheap and carried to where the people could buy it.
When this idea first came into Clem’s mind, its effect upon him was like that of religious conversion. He did not know it yet, but he was illumined as his father before him had been, not then by the satisfaction of feeding human bodies, but by the excitement of saving men’s souls. Clem had no interest in saving souls, for he had a high and unshakable faith in the souls of men as he saw them, good enough as God had made them, except when the evils of earth beset them. And these evils, he was convinced, rose first of all from hunger, for from hunger came illness and poverty and all the misery that forced men into desperation and then into senseless quarrels. Their souls were degraded and lost because of the clamoring hunger of their bodies. As simply as his father had left his home and followed God’s call across the sea, so simply now did Clem believe that he could cure the sorrows of men and women and their children.
He did not want to leave his own country as his father had done. Here among his own people he would do his work, and if he were proved right, as he knew he would be, then he would spread his plan of salvation to other lands and other peoples and first, of course, to the Chinese. Other people would see his success and follow him. If he had money he would not keep it. He would pour it all into spreading the gospel of good food for all mankind.
On Sundays when Bump was at Sunday School and the town in its Sabbath quiet, Clem in his room alone or walking into the countryside beyond Main Street, planned the business of his life. As soon as Bump was through high school he would begin and Bump could help him. Mr. Janison had offered him a partnership in the store in three more years. He would take it. He had to have a center somewhere. He would make New Point the center of a vast marketing network, buying tons of food in regions where harvests were plentiful, and supplying markets wherever there was scarcity. Meanwhile he must prepare himself. He must learn accounting and management as well as marketing. He must learn the geography of the country until he knew it as he knew the palm of his own hand, so that he could see what harvests could be expected from every part of it.
A vast scheme, he told himself, and a noble one, and he wanted to tell Henrietta. He clarified his own mind for many weeks afterward, writing to her every week of his developing ideas.
“Keep my letters, Henrietta,” he told her. “I haven’t time to make copies. Sometime I may want to check with myself and see how well my notions have worked.”
Henrietta kept his letters with reverence. She bought a tin box and painted it red and kept it locked and in the back of her closet. The key she wore around her neck, and when she wrote this to Clem he sent her a strange dirty-looking little amulet on a string and told her how he had come by it from an old woman in China. “Put it in the box along with my letters,” he told her. “It might bring us luck.”
William’s wedding was in September after his graduation from college. He had not wanted so early a marriage, and he had suggested to Candace that they wait for a year, or even two, until he knew where he was going to find the two hundred thousand dollars he felt was the least possible capital upon which he could hope to start his newspaper. Candace, who could be a laggard when she must decide, had pouted at the idea of delay.
“If it is only money—”
“It is not just money,” William said. “I must make my plans very carefully. You don’t just start a newspaper. You have to have a prospectus and a dummy and you have to get advertising together.”
“You could do all those things as well after we were married as before,” she insisted. “I’m going to talk to Papa.”
When she said this William was about to forbid her and then he did not. All summer he had worked hard and late in the city and he had worked alone. Through months so hot that one by one Martin Rosevaine and Blayne Parker and Seth James had stolen away to luxurious homes by sea and mountain and lake, William had lived steadily alone in a cheap two-room flat in lower New York, working day and night upon one dummy after another to get exactly the newspaper he wanted. Once a month he allowed himself to visit Candace. Upon such a visit they were now talking.
“I don’t want to depend upon your father,” he said at last.
“Don’t be silly,” Candace replied with easy rudeness. “Papa would do anything for me.”
“So would I,” he said, smiling.
“Then let me talk to Papa,” she said.
“But don’t ask him for money, please,” he replied. “I can find it somewhere.”
He was sorely tempted by the old possibility behind her words, for he had felt compelled to delay his marriage while he searched for money. Grimly handsome and determinedly suave, he had made friends wherever he could among the rich. He was not one of them but he knew how to be. Though through this summer he had stripped himself bare as a coolie, a towel about his loins while he sweated at his desk night after night, there had been other nights when his garments were such that he feared no valet as he sallied forth to dine or dance among the wealthy. He did not talk easily but his high-held head and his correct courtesy served him well enough instead. Silence had this value, he found, that when he did talk people listened.
On this next visit, the last before his marriage, Roger Cameron asked him to come into his private library one night after dinner. William knew the room well for he had made free of it during college vacations. The books were curious and heterogeneous, and they provided a fair pattern of Mr. Cameron’s self-education. There was a whole shelf on Christian Science and now, in later years, another on the religions of India.
“Sit down,” Mr. Cameron said. “Candace has been talking to me.”
“I asked her not to, sir,” William said somewhat sternly. But he sat down.
“Yes, well, Candy never obeys anybody,” Mr. Cameron replied mildly. “Now, William, she wants to get married and she tells me you feel you can’t for a year or two.”
“I feel only that I should see my way fairly clear before I take on the support of a wife and a house and so on,” William said.
“That’s reasonable,” Mr. Cameron said. “Very right and reasonable. I did no more in my young days. Fact is, I had to wait. Mrs. Cameron’s father wouldn’t hear to anything else, no matter how she cried or how I got mad. We waited. Well, thinking about that makes me feel I don’t want my girl to go through the same thing her mother did. How much money do you need, William?”
William looked reluctant. “I don’t know exactly.”
“No, I know you don’t,” Mr. Cameron said with mild impatience. “I’m just asking.”
“I think I should
see two hundred thousand dollars ahead,” William said.
Mr. Cameron pulled his underlip. “You don’t need that all at once.”
“No, but I have to be able to lay my hands on it.”
They were silent for a while. The big room was dark with oak paneling and the lights were lost in the beamed ceiling.
“Suppose you tell me a little more about this paper,” Roger Cameron said at last. “What makes you want a paper, anyway? Why don’t you come into the Stores with me?”
“I appreciate that, Mr. Cameron,” William said very properly. “I do, indeed. But I have set my heart on building up an entirely original sort of newspaper. If it is successful, I shall begin a chain. It will sell for two cents, and it will have more news that two cents ever bought before.”
“You’ll have to get a lot of advertising,” Mr. Cameron said.
“That’s where the money will be,” William replied. “But it’s not entirely a matter of money.”
“If it’s not a matter of money, what is it?” Mr. Cameron asked with some astonishment.
“I want to accomplish more than making money,” William said. He was not afraid to tell Mr. Cameron the truth. His thin erect body, his high head, his small tense hands clasped together were taut with earnestness. “I look at it this way, Mr. Cameron. Most of the world is made up of common people. They are stupid and ignorant. What they learn in school doesn’t help them to think. They cannot think. They have to be told what to think. They don’t know what is right and wrong. They have to be told.”
“People don’t like to think,” Mr. Cameron said shrewdly.
“I know that,” William said. “Therefore they act without thought or they listen to Socialists and agitators and they act foolishly and endanger decent people. I propose to do the thinking, Mr. Cameron. That is why I want a newspaper.”
Gods Men Page 20
