Pearl Buck - Gods Men

There he stopped. Upon the rough brick floor his father lay, resting in his own blood which flowed slowly from a great gash in his throat, so deep that the head was half severed. His arms were flung wide, his legs outspread. Upon the quiet face, though bled white, he saw his father’s old sweet smile, the greeting he gave to all alike who entered this house, to strangers and to his own, and now to his son. Under the half closed lids the blue eyes seemed watching. Clem gazed down at his father, unable to cry out. He knew. He had often seen the dead. In winter people froze upon the streets, beggars, refugees from famine, a witless child, a runaway slave, an unwanted newborn girl. But this was his father.

He choked, his breath would not come up, and he tried to scream. It was well for him that no sound came, for in the silence he might have been heard, and those who had gone might have come back. He gave a great leap across his father’s feet and ran into the other room where his mother’s bed was. There he saw the other three, his mother, his two sisters. They were huddled into the back of the big Chinese bed, the two children clinging to their mother, but they had not escaped. The same thick sword that had cut his father’s throat had rolled the heads from the children. Only his mother’s long blonde hair hid what had been done to her, and it was bloodied a bright scarlet.

He stood staring, his mouth dried, his eyes bulging from their sockets. He could not cry, he could not move. There was no refuge to which he could flee. Where in this whole city could he find a hole in which to hide? He thought for one instant of William Lane and the security of that solid house enclosed behind walls. The next instant he knew that there was no safety there. The dead might be lying on those floors, too. No, his own kind could not save him.

He turned and ran as he had come along the high walls of the alleys, by lonely passage’s away from the main streets back again to Mr. Fong’s house.

In the central room behind the shop Mr. Fong was sitting in silence with his wife and their children. News had flown around the city from the Imperial Palace that two Germans had fired on innocent Chinese people and that a brave Chinese soldier had taken revenge by killing one of the Germans and wounding the other. Mr. Fong doubted the story but did not know how to find out the truth.

“The wind blows and the grass must bend,” he told Mrs. Fong. “We will remain silent within our own doors.”

He was troubled in mind because his eldest son could speak English and he feared that it might cause his death. Not only foreigners were to be killed. The Old Buddha had commanded today at dawn, at her early audience in the palace, that all who had eaten of the foreign religion and all who could speak foreign languages were also to be killed.

Mr. Fong had just finished quarreling with his wife, and this was another reason for the silence of the family. The quarrel, built upon the terror of what was taking place in the city, of which rumors were flying everywhere, had been over the very matter of the eldest son speaking English.

“I told you not to let our Yusan learn the foreign tongue,” Mrs. Fong had said in a loud whisper. Sweat was running down the sides of her face by her ears. Though she fanned herself constantly with her palm leaf fan nothing dried her sweat this day.

“Who could tell that the Old Empress would put the Young Emperor in jail?” Mr. Fong replied. “Two years ago everything was for progress. Had all gone well, the young Emperor would now be on the throne and the Old Woman would be in prison.”

“The gods would not have it so,” Mrs. Fong declared.

Nothing made Mr. Fong more angry than talk of gods. He read as many as possible of the books of revolutionary scholars and other books which they had translated from foreign countries. Thus he knew many things which he concealed from Mrs. Fong, who could not read at all. Through his cousin he had learned much that happened in the Forbidden City. He had long known that there was a certain troupe of actors who, a few years before, had been summoned from Shanghai to play before the Imperial Court. Among the actors were the two famous rebel scholars, Liang Ch’i Ch’ao and T’an Tzut’ung, and they were responsible for informing the young Emperor that times had changed and that railroads and schools and hospitals were good things. What pity that all their efforts now had failed! That man at court whom they had trusted, that Yuan Shih K’ai, though pretending sympathy with them, had betrayed them to the chief eunuch Jung-lu, because the two had long ago sworn blood brotherhood, and Jung-lu had told the Old Empress, and so she had won after all. Liang had escaped with K’ang Yu-wei, the young Emperor’s tutor, but T’an had been killed. Since then the Old Demon, as Mr. Fong called her in his private thoughts, had gone from worse to madness.

There was no use in telling Mrs. Fong all this. He heard her voice complaining against him still, though under her breath, and being frightened and weary and more than a little fearful that she was right, he squared his eyebrows and opened his mouth and shouted at her.

“Be quiet, you who are a fool!”

Mrs. Fong began to cry, and the children not knowing which way to turn between their parents, began to wail with their mother.

In the midst of this hubbub which, having aroused, Mr. Fong now tried to stop, they heard a stealthy beating upon the back door. Mr. Fong raised his hand.

“Be quiet!” he commanded again in a loud whisper.

Instantly all were still. They could hear very well the sound of fists upon the barred gate.

“It is only one pair of hands,” Mr. Fong decided. “Therefore I will open the gate and see who it is. Perhaps it is a message from my cousin.”

He rose, and Mrs. Fong, recalled to her duty, rose also, and with her the children. Thus together they went into the narrow back court and inch by inch Mr. Fong drew back the bar. The beating ceased when this began, and at last Mr. Fong opened the gate a narrow way and looked out. He turned his head toward Mrs. Fong.

“It is Little Foreign Brother!” he whispered.

“Do not let him enter,” she exclaimed. “If he is found here, we shall all be killed.”

Mr. Fong held the gate, not knowing what to do. Against his own will he heard Clem’s voice, telling him horrible news.

“My father and mother, they are dead! My sisters are dead! Their heads are off. My father lies on the floor. His throat is gashed. I have nowhere to go.”

Against his will Mr. Fong opened the gate, allowed. Clem to come in, and then barred it again quickly. The boy had vomited and the vomit still clung to his clothes. His face was deathly and his eyes sunken, even in so short a time.

“Now what shall we do?” Mrs. Fong demanded.

“What can we do?” Mr. Fong replied.

They stood looking at each other, trying to think. Clem, past thought, stared at their faces.

“We must consider our own children,” Mrs. Fong said. But she was a kind woman and now that she saw the boy and the state he was in she wished to clean him and comfort him, in spite of her fright.

“Why should they kill your family?” Mr. Fong demanded of Clem. “Your father was poor and weak but a good man.”

“It is not only my father,” Clem said faintly. “I saw them kill a German and another only barely escaped though he was shot in the leg.”

“Did the Germans not shoot into a crowd?” Mr. Fong demanded.

Clem shook his head. “There was no crowd. Only me.”

“Who shot then?”

“A soldier.”

“Wearing what uniform?” Mr. Fong asked.

“That of the Imperial Palace,” Clem said. Clem was telling the truth, Mr. Fong saw by his desperate honest boy’s face.