Gods Men (30 page)

They went back to the house soberly to eat of a cake Millie had made and drink a toast in burgundy wine from a bottle her grandfather opened. Then she changed into her dark blue silk suit, the only new garment she had bought, and she had a strange uncertain feeling that though her grandparents yearned over her, they were glad to see her go, glad to get youth out of their aging house. They were tired and they wanted to sleep.

H
ENRIETTA SAT SEWING IN
the small living room of her home. She was not good at sewing. Her fingers were clumsy and the thread knotted often, but it did not occur to her to give up merely because she was not adept and so she sewed steadily on, glancing only occasionally through the window by which she sat. The scene was simple enough, a street of cheap houses much like this one that she and Clem had rented next to the store. Whatever grace the street had came from two rows of maple trees which were now beginning to show the hues of autumn. It was late afternoon and under the trees children were playing in the leaves, running hither and thither, apparently unwatched unless a quarrel brought a mother to the door.

“You, Dottie! Stop kicking your little brother!”

“But I wanna!”

“I don't care what you want. Stop it, I say!”

She wondered if Clem wanted children. They had never talked of children, each for some unspoken reason. She was not sure whether she even wanted children. She had never got used to living in America and she would not know how to bring up a child. In China there had been the amahs. Here she would have to wash all the child's things, and tend it herself when it cried. Besides, Clem was enough. He was a dozen men in one, with all the great schemes in his head. It would be as much as she could do to see that he lived to carry them through.

That he would succeed she did not doubt. From the moment she had seen him in the dingy college sitting room she had believed in him. Trust was the foundation of her love. She could not love anyone unless she trusted and for that reason she really loved no one except Clem and her father.

As long as she lived she would not forgive William because he was angry when he found that she had married Clem. She had written to Ruth, after all, and at first Ruth had not dared to tell William the whole truth. She had let William think the marriage had not yet taken place and he tried to stop it, thinking it still only an engagement. He had actually cabled to Peking to his mother. When she opened the cable from her mother forbidding her too late to marry Clem, she had known it was William's doing.

“That ignorant fellow!” William had called Clem, and Ruth had told her.

Even Ruth was sorry. “I wish you'd told us, Henrietta. It wasn't kind. He isn't suitable for you. You won't be able to bring him to William's house.”

“I shall never want to go to William's house.” That was what she had answered. She would never be afraid of William, however many newspapers he had. Clem was so innocent, so good. He did not like her to say anything against William.

“He's your brother, hon—it would be nice if you could be friends.” That was all Clem said.

When she told him how William felt about their marriage, Clem only looked solemn. “He don't understand, hon. People are apt to make mistakes when they don't understand.” She could not persuade him to anger.

She had written to her parents herself, a vehement letter declaring her independence and Clem's goodness, and her father had replied, mildly astonished at the fuss. “I don't see why you should not marry Clem Miller. I should be sorry to see you in the circumstances of his father, but nowadays nobody lives by faith alone.”

Her mother had been surprisingly amiable, sending as a wedding present a tablecloth of grass linen embroidered by the Chinese convent nuns. Henrietta guessed shrewdly that her mother did not really care whom she married.

As for Clem, he wistfully admired William's success.

“If William could get interested in my food idea, now, how we could go! He could set people thinking and then things would begin to happen.”

“He doesn't want them to think,” Henrietta said quickly.

“Oh now, now!” Clem said.

The clock struck six and up and down the street the supper bells rang. She rose to look at the roast and potatoes in the oven and to cut bread and set out milk. Clem would be home soon and he would want to eat and get back to the store. She moved slowly, with a heavy grace of which she was unconscious. Her immobile face, grave under the braids of her dark hair, seldom changed its expression. Now that she was with Clem her eyes were finer than ever, large, and deep, set under her clear brows; yet at times they held a look of inner bewilderment as though she were uncertain of something, herself perhaps, or perhaps the world. It was no small bewilderment thus revealed but one as vague and large as her mind, as though she did not know what to think of human existence.

The door in the narrow hall opened sharply and then shut, and the atmosphere of the house changed. Clem had come in.

“Hon, you there?” It was his greeting although he knew she was always there.

“I'm here,” she replied. Her voice was big and deep. He came to the kitchen, his light step quick moving. Their eyes met, she standing by the stove with a pot holder in her hand, and he crossing to the sink to wash. He washed as he did everything, with nervous speed and thoroughness, and he dried his face and hair and hands on a brown huck towel that hung on the wall. Then he came to her and kissed her cheek. He was not quite as tall as she was.

“Food ready?”

“I am just dishing up.”

He never spoke of a meal but always of food. He sat down to the roast she set before him and began to carve it neatly and with the same speed with which he did all else. Two slices cut thin he arranged on a plate for her, put a browned potato beside them, and handed the plate to her. Then he cut his own slice, smaller and even thinner.

“Can't you eat a little more, Clem?” Henrietta asked.

“Don't dare tonight, hon. I have a man waiting for me over there.”

“You didn't want to bring him home?”

“No. I was afraid we'd talk business all through our food and my stomach would turn on me again. I want a little peace, just with you.”

She sat in silence, helping him to raw tomatoes and then to lima beans. Then she helped herself. Neither spoke while they ate. She was used to this and liked it because she knew that in her silence he found rest. They were in communion, sitting here alone at their table. When he was rested he would begin to talk. He ate too fast but she did not remind him of it. She knew him better than she knew herself. He was made of taut wire and quicksilver and electricity. Whatever he did she must not lay one featherweight of reproach upon him. Sometimes she tortured herself with the fear that he would die young, worn out before his time by the enormous scheme he had undertaken, out she knew that she could not prevent anything. He must go his own way because for him there was no other, and she must follow.

In this country which was her own, she still continued to feel a stranger and her only security was Clem. Everything else here was different from Peking and her childhood and she would not have known how to live without him. When sometimes in the night she tried to tell him this he listened until she had finished. Then he always said the same thing, “Folks are the same anywhere, you'll find, hon.”

But they were not. Nobody in America was like the Chinese she had known in Peking. She could not talk to anybody in New Point about—well, life! They talked here about things and she cared nothing about things. “All under Heaven …” that was the way old Mrs. Huang used to begin conversation when she went over to the Huang hutung.

She looked at Clem and smiled. “Do you remember how the Chinese loved to begin by saying, ‘All under Heaven'?”

“And go on to talk about everything under heaven!”

“Yes—you remember, too.”

“I wish I didn't have to hurry, hon, but I do.”

“I know, I don't know why I thought of that.”

They were silent again while he cleaned his plate and she pondered the ways of men and the things for which they sacrificed themselves. William, sitting in his splendid offices in New York, was a slave to a scheme as much as Clem was, and yet how differently and with what opposite purpose! She could not have devoted herself to Clem had he wanted to be rich for power. He did not think of money except as something to further his purpose, a purpose so enormous that she would have been afraid to tell anyone what it was, lest they think him mad. But she knew he was not mad.

Clem put down his knife and fork. “Well, what's for dessert?”

“Stewed apples. I would have made a pie but you said last time—”

“Pie won't leave me alone after I've eaten it. I can't be bothered with something rarin' in my stomach when I've got work to do.”

She rose, changed the plates, and brought the fruit. He ate it in a few bites, got up and threw himself in a deep rocking chair, and closed his eyes. For ten minutes he would sleep.

She sat motionless, not moving to clear the table or take up her sewing. She had learned to sit thus that his sleep might not be disturbed by any sound. His hearing was so sharp that the slightest movement or whisper could wake him. But she did not mind sitting and watching him while he slept. They were so close, so nearly one, that his sleep seemed to rest her, too. Only her mind wandered, vaguely awake.

He opened his eyes as suddenly as he had closed them, and getting up he came back to his seat at the table facing her.

“Hon, I feel I'm wasting you.”

She could not answer this, not knowing what he meant.

“Here I have married me a fine wife, college educated, and all she does is to cook my meals and darn my socks!”

“Isn't that what wives are supposed to do?”

“Not mine!”

He looked at her fondly and she flushed. She had learned now that she would never hear the words of love that women crave from men. Clem did not know them. She doubted if he had ever read a book wherein they were contained. But she did not miss them for she had never had them, either. She knew very well that Clem was the only person who had ever loved her, and of his love she was sure, not by words but by his very presence whenever he came near. The transparency of his being was such that love shone through him like light. It shone upon her now as he sat looking at her, half smiling. She saw memory in his eyes.

“Remember that brown Chinese bread we used to have in Peking, hon? The kind they baked on the inside of the charcoal ovens, slapped against the side, and sprinkled with sesame seeds?”

“Yes, I remember … the flat ones. …”

“Yes.”

“What about it, Clem?”

“I don't know. I get a hankering sometimes to taste it again. What say we go back, hon?”

“To China, Clem?”

“Just for a look around. I might forget what used to be if I saw what Peking is like now.”

He looked white and tired and her heart felt faint. Why did she always have that premonition, undefined, unreasonable, that she was stronger than he, more indestructible, more lasting? No flame like his burned within her, and she was not consumed.

“It would be good to go back, Clem.”

“Think so, hon? Well, we'll see.”

He got up with his usual alertness and the premonition was gone. There was no reason to think—anything! But when he was gone she sat thinking and idle. Yes, she remembered the loaves of sesame bread hot from the oven of the old one-eyed vender. She had often slipped through the unguarded back gate and creeping beside the wall of the mission compound, she had waited, hidden by a clump of dwarf bamboo at the end of the wall. She could hear even now the vender's high call as he came down the street, always at the same hour, that hungry midmorning hour on Saturday when she and Ruth were supposed to be doing their lessons for Monday. He always looked behind the bamboos for her and grinned when he saw her, his jaws altogether toothless.

“Hot ones,” she always said.

“Do I not know?” he retorted, and reaching down into the little earthen oven he peeled the bread cakes, two of them, from the sides. His hands were always filthy. Flour and dough blackened by smoke clung in their cracks and his nails were black claws, but she would not think of that in her hunger for the bread. She paid him two pennies and ran back into the compound, the cakes under her jumper. Ruth would not eat them because his hands were dirty and so she ate them herself, the flavor delicious, the sesame seeds nutlike in their delicacy. Clem had eaten that bread, too, but William never had. Like Ruth, William would have thought of the man's dirty hands, but she and Clem thought of the bread, hot from the coals. It was good bread.

She rose and began to clear the table. What Clem was doing was as simple as what the old vender did. Two cakes of bread, for a penny apiece; the old vender made it and went about selling it. If it was good enough people bought it, that was all. Not only bread, either! If anything was good enough and cheap enough, people wanted it. That was all. What Clem was doing was simple and tremendous, so simple that people did not think he was doing anything, and so tremendous they would not have believed it had they known. Only when they saw the finished thing, the bread, the meat, the food, standing there ready to be bought, cheap and good, would they believe. And believing they still would not understand.

Sometimes at night Clem wanted to read the Bible. They did not go to church and neither of them said their prayers unless they felt like it. But sometimes he wanted to read aloud to her. The night before, when they were in bed, he had lighted the lamp and taken up the small old Bible he kept on the shelf under the bedside table. He turned to the place where Jesus had taken the loaves and fishes and had fed everybody that was hungry, and he read it slowly, almost as if to himself, while she listened. When he had read of the baskets of crumbs that were filled he closed the book and lay back on the pillow, his hands behind his head, his eyes fixed on the ceiling.