Pearl Buck - Gods Men

“Yes, sir,” Barney Chester said. He was a pale dark young man, very slender and smart. William liked all his young men to look smart. Actually Barney had a somewhat soft heart which he daily denied. Certainly before the stern, gray-faced man behind the circular desk he would have been alarmed to allow the slightest hint of a heart to escape him. This was the best paying job a man of his age could have anywhere in the country, anywhere in the world, probably. Lane paid his men well and worked them hard. He wished that his wife Peggy were not expecting their second baby. He had counted on asking for his delayed vacation when the time came so that he could take care of Barney Junior. There was no one to look after him, except a servant. It did not occur to him to mention such humble difficulties to William, who was still giving orders.

“Be ready to leave day after tomorrow. I’ll see that you get priority on the plane.”

“Yes, sir,” Barney said.

IN THE HOUSE NOW grown shabby with the years and which Henrietta never thought of renovating, Clem sat reading the newspapers. The season was summer, the first summer after the war ended. Clem had barely survived the atomic bombs dropped upon two Japanese cities. Like many other Americans, he did not know that atomic bombs existed, until on the fifth day of August, a year ago, he had opened a newspaper, to discover with agony and actual tears that the bomb had already been dropped and hundreds of thousands of people he had never seen were killed. Although he, like other Americans, except the handful, had nothing to do with this act, he felt it was his fault. He got up blindly, the tears running down his thin cheeks, and went to find Henrietta. When he found her upstairs making the bed, he had been unable to speak for weeping. He could only hold out the newspaper, pointing at the headlines. When she saw what had happened she put her arms around him and the two of them stood weeping together, in shame and fear for what had been done.

For weeks after that Clem had been so nearly ill that she told Bump to trouble him about nothing. Clem asked very few questions any more. He was working with all his diminishing energy upon The Food, and he steadfastly refused to see a doctor or have any X-rays taken of his now permanently rebellious digestive organs.

“Don’t bother me, hon.” This was his reply to Henrietta’s pleas and despairs.

The big man in the White House was dead and a little man had taken his place. Clem went to see him immediately to preach for the last time his human gospel of food for the starving. The little man twinkled and smiled and took time to describe the United Nations plan for world food and somehow sent Clem away thinking that he had converted a President of the United States, but nothing happened.

In the spring Clem had talked of going to the San Francisco Conference to explain about how the starving people of the world must be fed if things were to go right. The Communists mustn’t be the ones to get the upper hand, but they would unless people had food to eat.

Henrietta had persuaded him against going. She knew now that people even in New Point were laughing at Clem. He was called crazy, a fanatic, nobody listened to a man who had spent his life on one idea.

She hated people because they were laughing at Clem. She drew him into their house, kept him busy, worked with him on his formula, anything to shield him from the cruel laughter of people who were not fit to tie his shoelaces.

On this summer morning when she was getting the breakfast dishes washed he sat reading the paper in the kitchen. Suddenly she heard him cry out.

“Hon!”

“Yes, Clem?”

“We’ve lost the war!”

“What on earth do you mean? The war is over.”

She left the dishpan, her hands soapy wet, and stood reading over his shoulder.

“We’ve said we ain’t going to help the subject peoples. It’s the beginning of a third World War.”

“Oh Clem, it’s not as bad as that!”

“It is. They’re all looking at San Francisco and what we’ve said there can’t be unsaid. ‘There comes a tide in the affairs of men …’ ”

He got up abruptly and went downstairs into his laboratory and she went on washing the dishes.

It was not until March, 1950 that Clem went to see William for the third and last time. By then so much of what he had foreseen had already come to pass that he thought he could convince William. Surely now he would believe that Clem was right. The Communists were ruling China and people were starving again by the tens of millions. Yusan was able to get word out about it. Old Mr. and Mrs. Fong were dead. Yusan was the head of the family. Peking was full of Russians all giving advice. Meanwhile Manchurian food was being traded for machinery.

“If America could get food to us—” Yusan wrote. The letter was on one tiny slip of paper in a small filthy envelope without a stamp. Mr. Kwok, now the head of a prosperous restaurant in New York, had brought it himself to Clem, and Clem had gone back with him to New York without telling Henrietta that he had made up his mind to go to William for the last time and beg him to tell the Americans that maybe they could still save China and the world if they would only understand. …

Three days later Henrietta saw Clem coming up the brick path to the house, dragging his pasteboard suitcase. He could not reach the door. She saw him crumple upon the walk and she ran outdoors and lifted him up.

He had not fainted, he was conscious.

“My legs just gave up, hon,” he whispered.

“You get in here and go to bed and stay there,” she cried, fierce with love.

But nobody could keep him in bed. He would not go to the hospital yet, he told Dr. Wood. Now more than ever he must finish his formula, now that William wouldn’t listen to him. So Henrietta heard how Clem had gone to William and how been denied.

“I’m just tired for once,” Clem said.

He was up again in a few days and at his formula again, experimenting over the gas ring with a mixture of dried milk and beans, fortified with minerals and shredded potato. Henrietta did not cross him in anything now. There was no use in pretending that he was not ill, but she was helpless. Clem would not have the doctor.

It became a race. He almost stopped eating and drinking and she kept at his side a cup of tea into which she slipped a beaten egg and a little sugar. He drank this slowly, a sip now and then, and so sustained his life.

By summer they both saw he could not win. One morning he was struggling to get out of bed. His nightshirt fell away from his neck, hollowed into triangular cavities. His ears looked enormous, his eyes were sick.

“Clem,” she cried. “You’ve got to think of me for once.” It was her last appeal.

“Don’t I think of you, hon?”

The strength was gone even from his voice. It sounded empty and ghostlike.

“You aren’t getting up,” she said. “You’re staying right there until I can get Doctor Wood.”

He sank back on the pillow, trying to smile. “You’ve got me — down,” he whispered.

She made haste then to the telephone, and found the doctor at his breakfast.

“I’ll come as soon as I—”

“No, you’ll come now,” she shrieked. “You’ll come right now, without one moment’s delay! I think he’s dying.”

She flew back to the bedside, the wide old-fashioned double bed where they had slept side by side in the years since she had given up everything to be his wife. He was lying just as she had left him but when she came in he opened his eyes drowsily and smiled.

“The doctor is coming right over, Clem. Don’t go to sleep.”

“No — I don’t want to.”