Gods Men

by Pearl S. Buck

  “I don’t know,” Clem muttered. “How can I know? I don’t believe Japan is going to let things lay the way they are. They’ve been afraid for centuries, those people! They’ve got themselves all stewed up—can’t blame them, though—the way different nations have gone over and sliced off big hunks for themselves. ‘We’re next,’ that’s what the Japanese have been thinking for a mighty long time, hon! ‘If we don’t get going and carve ourselves out something big, we’re next.’ That’s what they think. Maybe they’re right, who knows? Only thing I know, hon, is that the earth is shaking right here under my feet. I don’t like the looks of things.”

  He lifted his head and looked away over the housetops and beyond the trees. “Talk about smoke—the wind is from Europe, I reckon.”

  The cyclone struck in October. Bred in the storms of the world it had gathered its furious circular force in the angry hunger of the peoples of Europe and then reaching its sharp funnel across the Atlantic Ocean it struck in Wall Street, in the heart of New York, in the most concentrated part of America.

  Clem, on that first fatal morning, reached out of the front door to get the morning paper, half his face lathered with shaving soap. He saw the headlines as black as a funeral announcement and many times as large upon the front page, and knew that what he had feared had come. He wiped his cheek on the sleeve of his pajamas and sat down in the kitchen to read. Henrietta was making coffee. When she saw his face she set a cup before him and went out into the hall, got his overcoat, and wrapped it about him. Over his shoulders she saw the frightful announcement, CRASH IN WALL STREET SHAKES THE NATION!

  “Tell Bump to get down here as fast as he can,” Clem ordered. “You and me and him have got to get right to work, hon.”

  She obeyed him instantly as she would have obeyed the captain of an overloaded and sinking ship. There was no time to waste.

  Clem dressed and ate a hasty breakfast and being immediately beset by the demons of indigestion, he was swallowing pepsin tablets when Bump came into the house. Henrietta had cleared the dining-room table of dishes and cloth, and Clem spread out the big sheets of white wrapping paper upon which he always did his large-scale figuring.

  “Sit down,” he told Bump. “We’re going to have the worst depression in the history of the world. We got to get ready to feed people the way we’ve never done before. I’m going to open restaurants, Bump. It won’t be enough now to sell people food cheap. We got to be ready to give it away, cooked and ready to swallow, so that people won’t starve to death right here in our own land.”

  He outlined in rapid broken sentences what he believed was sure to happen and Bump listened, cautious and reluctant and yet knowing from past experience how often Clem was right.

  “We can hardly feed the whole nation, Clem,” he said at last.

  Clem was immediately impatient. “I’m not talking about the nation. I’m talking about hungry people. I want to set up restaurants in the big cities as quick as we can. Our markets will supply our own restaurants. Whoever can pay will pay, of course. At first most people can pay and will want to. But I am thinking of January and February, maybe even this winter, and I’m thinking of next winter and maybe the winter after. That’s when things will get bad.”

  It was impossible to get so huge a plan going as quickly as Clem thought it should and could. But it was done or began to be done within a time that was miraculous. Clem bought a small airplane which Henrietta, much against her secret inclination, learned to fly lest Clem insist on doing so and he, as she well knew, was not to be trusted with machinery. He expected divine miracles from engines made by man and while she had submitted for years to his mistreatment of automobiles, his wrenchings and poundings of parts he did not understand, the frightful speed at which he drove when he was in a hurry, she could not contemplate such maneuvers in the air.

  She made a good pilot, to her own surprise, for she was an earthbound creature and hated suspension. Clem as usual was surprised at nothing she did, insisting upon her ability to do everything. At as low a height as she dared to maintain, they flew from city to city, her only apparent cowardice being that when they went to the coast to set up Clem’s restaurants in San Francisco and Los Angeles, she avoided the Rocky Mountains, and flew far south in order to escape them. Pilot and attendant, she followed Clem while, with his superb and reckless disregard of all business principles, he established during that first winter six restaurants across the country on the same magnitude as the markets. For these restaurants he hired Chinese managers.

  “Only Chinese know how to make the best dishes of the cheapest food,” he explained to Henrietta. “They’ve been doing that for thousands of years.”

  Knowing the importance of the spirit, he summoned his new staff to a conference in Chicago, where he put them up at a comfortable hotel while he talked to them about starvation and how to prevent it. He worked out one hundred menus, dependent upon the raw materials of the markets, and laid down the rule which should have ruined him and which instead led him eventually to new heights of prosperity.

  “Any time anybody wants a free meal in any of our restaurants they can have it,” he said firmly. “Of course they can’t order strawberries and cream, but they can have meat stew and all the bread they want and they can have baked apples or prunes for dessert. Nobody will know whether they pay for it or not. They’ll get a check same as everybody else and they’ll go up to the cashier and just tell her quiet-like if they haven’t any money.”

  “How many times can one man eat free?” Mr. Lim of San Francisco inquired.

  “We don’t ask that,” Clem said. “We don’t ask anything, see? If anybody’s hungry, he eats. At the same time, we’ll serve other foods, cooked so good that people who have got money will pay for it. And our restaurants will look nice, too, so that people will want to come there. They won’t seem like handout places.”

  The Chinese exchanged grins. Their salaries were secure and so they were highly diverted by this mad American. Since he had appealed to their honor they were prepared to respond with their most ingenious economies and seasonings. He in turn accepted their promises with complete faith.

  “We can do such things as you talk,” Mr. Kwok of New York Chinatown now said. “Only thinking, however, is that we better hire our own cooks and waiters, each of us somebody he knows good.”

  “Sure,” Clem agreed. “That’s all up to you. I hold you responsible, each for your own place.”

  “Must be order, you see.” This was Mr. Pan of Chicago. “I know Americans think all equal but Chinese know better. For making something go, especially cheap and good, one man is top and everybody else in steps below, each man top to next man and next-to-top man is reporting to very top man. Each man is servant and at the same time boss, except bottom man, who is anxious for rising and does his best.”

  “Sure,” Clem said. “You put it neat.”

  With the simplest of casual organization, Clem arranged his markets and restaurants in an endless chain of co-operation. He did not expect perfection and did not get it. Nepotism in two of the restaurants was a drain on profits until he discovered it and fired the two managers and hired new ones. With the old managers went the entire staffs and with the new ones came new and chastened ones. The other four managers approved the changes and worked with the greater integrity and zeal. Clem’s Brother Man Restaurants without advertising lost no money the first year and saved thousands of people from hunger so quietly that the public knew nothing about it. Three per cent of the people who ate free meals could have paid and did not. This was balanced by sums from people who could and did pay extra because they liked the food. Clem was brazen about accepting such extra pay. On the bottom of the menu cards in large bold letters he printed this legend:

  OUR PRICES ARE TOO LOW FOR PROFITS. IF YOU HAVE GOT MORE THAN YOUR MONEY’S WORTH FROM SOME DISH YOU HAVE ESPECIALLY ENJOYED, PLEASE PAY WHAT YOU THINK IT IS WORTH. THIS MONEY WILL GO TO FEED THE HUNGRY.

  A surprising number of pe
ople paid extra, but Clem was not surprised. His faith in humanity increased as he grew older and made it unnecessary, he declared, for any further faith.

  “The way I look at it is this, hon,” he said to Henrietta on one of their long flights across the plains of the West. “Everybody needs faith. Some people find it in God or in heaven or something way off. Take me, though, I get inspiration out of my faith in people here and now.”

  In the middle of the next winter, however, Clem found himself puzzled. He was feeding people on a huge scale, not only through his markets but through his restaurants, and he saw that it was not enough. He turned his eyes away from the breadlines and knew that at last he had met a task that was beyond him.

  The effect of this discovery upon him frightened Henrietta. She saw his first excitement and exuberance, his immense rise of energy, his self-confidence, and even his faith pass into an intense and grim determination as the hordes of the hungry increased over the nation. They gathered in the cities, for country people can hide themselves snugly into their farms and eat the food they produce and stop buying. Furniture and machinery which they had been tempted to buy on installments they relinquished, wary of their savings. They had lived without radios and without cars and washing machines and they could again. They withdrew into the past and lived as their grandparents had done and did not starve. They could still sleep in ancient beds and use old tables and sit on ladder-back chairs.

  It was the cities that frightened Clem. Even in the cities where he had his restaurants, the breadlines began to stretch for blocks. When he found a family with seven children starving in New York he came back to Henrietta in the small room at a cheap hotel, which was his usual stopping place.

  “I wouldn’t have thought it could be, hon,” he said mournfully. “Maybe in China or India, but here? Hon, how am I going to get the government to understand that people have got to be fed? A war will come out of this, hon. People won’t know why there’s a war and they’ll think it’s because of a whole lot of other things, but the bottom reason is because people can’t buy food because they don’t have the money to buy it with. That makes men fight.”

  “Clem, you look sick!” Henrietta said. “I’m going to get you a doctor.”

  “I am sick,” Clem said. “But it’s a sickness no doctor can cure. I’ll be sick as long as things go on like this.”

  At noon he refused to eat and Henrietta went downstairs to eat alone, ashamed of her steady appetite. If Clem could only separate his soul from his body! But he could not and his body shared the tortures of his harassed soul. He blamed himself for things being what they were, and this Henrietta would have thought absurd except she had seen in her own father when she was a child the same suffering for the sins of others.

  “Did we do our duty as Christians—” she remembered her father saying that year when they had left China, that fearful year when Clem had been left alone in Peking—“the world in a generation would be changed.”

  Clem was like that, too. He wanted the world changed quickly because he saw it could be changed and he fretted himself almost to death because other people did not see what he did. Troubled and sad, she ate her robust meal, chewing each mouthful carefully because she believed Fletcher was right about that. She had got interested in Fletcherism because of Clem’s indigestion and especially because he was always in such a hurry that he swallowed his food whole.

  When she went upstairs again he was lying on the bed, flat on his back, and she thought he was asleep. She tiptoed in and stood looking down at him. His hands were clasped behind his head and his eyes were closed. Then she saw his lashes quiver.

  “That you, hon? I’ve been lying here thinking. I believe I’ve got an idea.”

  “Oh, Clem, I hoped you were asleep! If you won’t eat—”

  “I will eat but you know how I am. If I eat when I’m thinking something out the food just lays on my stomach. Hon, I am going to see your brother William.”

  She sat down heavily in the soiled armchair. “Clem, it won’t do a bit of good.”

  “It might, hon. He’s got a new wife.”

  “Nobody could have been nicer than Candace.”

  “Maybe so. She was mighty nice. But if William loves this woman, maybe it has done something to him. Maybe it’s stirred his heart.”

  “I hope you don’t want me to go with you.”

  “I was kind of hoping you would.”

  “Clem—it won’t help! He’s invincible now. Everywhere we go people are reading his nasty little newspapers.”

  “He must feel something for people, hon.”

  “No, he doesn’t. He hates people. He despises them or he wouldn’t make such newspapers for them. I know why he does it, too. He feeds them the worst stuff so as to keep them down. It’s like feeding the Chinese opium—or giving whisky to the Indians. People learn to like it and because they like it they will follow the person that gives it to them.”

  Clem, always generous, shook his head at this picture of William. “I kind of think I’ll go right away and see for myself, hon.”

  Henrietta’s anger rose in spite of love. “Very well,” she declared. “Go if you must. But I will not go with you.”

  He sighed and got off the bed. He put on his coat and smoothed his hair with his hand. Then he bent to kiss her tenderly.

  “You don’t feel mad with me, do you?”

  “Oh no, Clem, except—”

  “Except what?” He paused and looked down upon her, his eyes bright blue in his white face and his lips pursed quizzically.

  “Clem, you’re too good, that’s all. You won’t believe that anybody isn’t good.”

  “That’s my faith, I guess.”

  He turned at the door, looked as if he were about to say something more, kept silent instead and went his way.

  Lady Emory was alone for luncheon. She was, of course, Mrs. William Lane and by now she was well used to it in all external ways. She was beginning to feel that the huge comfortable house in uptown New York was her own, and in certain ways that Hulme Castle could never be. From earliest memory she had known that while Hulme Castle was her shelter it was not her home. William had divined this very soon after their marriage and had offered to put at her disposal as much money as needed to repair the castle and put in bathrooms.

  “It will make you feel more free to go there and stay as long as you like, now that you are my wife,” he had said quite gracefully.

  Her father had refused the gift, however. He saw no need for more bathrooms since he himself still used a tin tub brought into his room in the mornings and set before the fire.

  “I believe William would like to come here and stay sometimes, Father,” she had replied to this prejudice. “He would feel less like a guest if he had some part in the castle.”

  She said this quite as gracefully as William had but her father had only grumbled and it had taken Michael to persuade him to let William repair at least the west wing as a place where Emory and her husband might stay when they came to England. Lady Hulme had early discerned in William a rather touching desire to own some part of Hulme Castle and so she had been grateful to Michael who, after all, was the one most to be considered, since he was the future heir.

  As for America, as far as Emory had seen it, it was amazing. The people were very friendly, perhaps too friendly. She had been invited to a great many dinner parties and everybody had persisted in calling her Lady Emory, and this made her feel at home. William, too, called her Lady Emory in the house to the servants. Naturally when he introduced her it was as his wife, Mrs. Lane. She felt in spite of his real love for her that she did not know him as well as she hoped she would one day. He had a strange and almost forbidding dignity which she did not dislike, although she saw that it cut him off from ordinary people and even from her, sometimes. She was used to that. In his way her father had a dignity, too. He would have been outraged by familiarity from his inferiors.

  Moreover, there was something about this dignity o
f William’s which ennobled her and their life. She was proud of his straight handsome body and was well aware of their regal appearance together.

  He never talked to her of his first wife. In marriage he and she were utterly alone, and for this she was grateful. Instead, he told her much about his boyhood in Peking, and she who had never thought of China as a place existent upon this earth, now perceptively saw him there, a tall solitary boy, august in his place as the only son of the family, hungry for communication when there could be none, alien from his parents and sisters as he was from the Chinese he knew, who apparently were all servants.

  “Did you not know any Chinese boys?” she asked.

  “They were not allowed in the compound,” he replied. “My mother did not like them to hang about. Even my father’s study had a separate entrance so that when the Chinese came to see him they need not enter the hall.”

  “Did you try to know anybody secretly?” she asked.

  “It would not have occurred to me,” he replied sincerely.

  Then bit by bit there came out the remembered fragments of his life in the Chefoo school and here she perceived he had been shaped. She saw the proud boy slighted and condemned by the careless lordly English boys she knew so well, for Cecil had been such a boy. Unconsciously William revealed to her his wounds never healed.

  It was not all bitterness. He could speak sometimes of wide Peking streets and of the beauty of the porcelain roofs on the palaces of the dying Empire. He told her one meditative evening how his mother had taken him to see the Empress when he was a small boy. “I bowed before her, but I didn’t kneel because I was an American. The Chinese had to kneel and keep their heads on the floor. I remember her thin hands—yours remind me of them. They were narrow and pale and very beautiful. But the palms were stained red and the long nails shielded in gold gem-studded protectors. I looked at her face—a most powerful face.”

  “Did she speak to you?”

  “I don’t remember that. The people called her the Old Buddha. They were afraid of her and so they admired her. People have to have someone like her. I was sorry when she died and that revolutionary fellow, Sun Yatsen, took over. People can’t respect a common fellow like that—someone just like themselves. Maybe this new man, Chiang Kai-shek, will be better. He is a soldier, used to command. There is no democratic nonsense about him.”