Pearl Buck - Gods Men

Upon his father’s direction they had taken passage on the first ship that left Shanghai. Only the assurance of the Consul General had persuaded them to leave.

“You cannot possibly help anyone by remaining here,” the Consul General had said irritably to Mrs. Lane, when they had gone to him for advice. “Your husband is as safe as we can make him in the Legation Quarter with all the other foreigners. They are in a state of siege, of course, but they have plenty of food and water, and relief is on the way. It is only a matter of days.”

“Why should we go then?” Henrietta had asked in her blunt voice.

The Consul General had stared at the plain-faced girl. “Merely to get on your way,” he retorted. Merely to get out of my way, he meant.

Mrs. Lane decided the matter abruptly. “We had better go, or we may not get away for months,” she told William. “I will settle you in college and Henrietta in boarding school, and we will have the summer together with your grandfather at Old Harbor. If things are quiet in Peking by autumn I will go back. If not, your father will come home. We all need a rest and a change. I am sick of China and everything Chinese.”

So they had taken passage. Since British ships docked at Vancouver, their course was northerly and the weather was cool and fine.

William Lane tried not to think of his father and a good deal of the time he succeeded. He was feeling many things at this age, everything intensely. Above all, he was heartily glad that he would never again see the English boarding school where he had been so often unhappy. He was ashamed and yet proud of being American, ashamed because to be American at the school had kept him second-class, proud, because America was bigger than England. The consciousness of an inferiority which he could not believe was real had clouded his school days. He had isolated himself both from the Americans and from the English, living in loneliness.

He was altogether ashamed of being the son of a missionary. Even the children of English missionaries were secondary. The son of the American ambassador alone had any sort of equality with the English boys, and seeing this, William had often bitterly wished that his father had been an ambassador. Men ought to consider what they were, he thought gloomily, for the sake of their sons. He hated Henrietta because when she came last year to the school she had immediately joined the Americans and had foolishly declared that she did not care what her father was. Thus William and Henrietta had been utterly divided at school and their division had not mended. She had taken as her bosom friend a girl whom he particularly despised, the daughter of an American missionary who lived in an interior city and was of a lowly Baptist sect. The girl was loathsomely freckled and her clothes were absurd. She should never have been at the school, William felt, and to have her the chosen friend of his own sister degraded him. In his loneliness he developed a grandeur of bearing, a haughtiness of look, which warned away the ribald. He avoided Henrietta because she was not afraid of him. Sometimes she laughed at him. “You look like a rooster when you prance around like that,” she had once declared in front of their schoolmates. Shouts of laughter had destroyed his soul.

“I say,” the cricket captain had cried, “you do look like a cock, you know!”

Well, that was over. He need never return to the school. Yet he did not and would not acknowledge how profoundly he would like to have been English. The most that he allowed himself was to dream occasionally as he walked the decks, his head high, that people who did not know him would think he was English. Lane was a good English name. His accent, after four years at school, was clearly English. The most fortunate youth he had ever met was the son of an English lord who spent a day at the school once when his father was visiting on shore from an English battleship in the Chinese harbor.

He passed his sister Ruth at the shuffleboard. “I wish you’d play with me now, William,” she said in a plaintive voice.

“Very well, I will,” he replied. He paused, chose his pieces and the game began. He played much better than she did. The only fun he found in playing with her at all was to allow her to seem to win until the very end when, making up his mind that it was time to stop, he suddenly came in at the finish with victory.

“Oh William!” she cried, invariably disappointed.

“I can’t help it if I’m better than you,” he replied today and sauntered away, smiling his small dry smile.

He did not like to play with Henrietta. She was a changeable player, losing quickly sometimes and again winning by some fluke that he could not foresee. He never knew where he was with her.

There were no boys on the ship whom he cared to cultivate, but there was one young man, English, some five or six years older than he, to whom he would have liked to speak, except that the chap never spoke first, and William did not want to seem American. At school the chaps always said Americans were so free, rushing about and speaking first to everybody.

He would have been considerably bored had he not thought much about his future and had there not been so many meals. Just now the morning broth was being served on little wagons, pushed by white-robed Chinese table boys and deck stewards. He approached one of the wagons, took a cup of hot beef broth and a handful of what he had taught himself to call biscuits instead of crackers, and sat down in his deck chair beside his mother. She had already chosen chicken broth as lighter fare. She complained about the plethora of food and yet, he noticed, she ate as they all did. It cost nothing more, however much one ate, but none of them would say such a thing aloud except Henrietta.

“Henrietta seems to have picked up a young man,” his mother now remarked.

She nodded toward the upper deck, and William saw his sister leaning against the rail, the wind blowing her black hair from her face. She was talking in her earnest abrupt fashion to the young Englishman. A pang shot through his heart. He renounced the friendship he had craved. Whoever was Henrietta’s friend could never be his.

“Henrietta will speak to anybody,” he told his mother. “I noticed that at school.”

Clem plodded his way across the Chinese countryside. He was shrewd in the ways of the people and no human being was strange to him. Mercy he expected of none, kindness he did not count upon, and when he did not receive these, he blamed no one.

He walked by night and slept by day in the tall sorghum cane that grew in the fields at this season. When he saw no one ahead on a road as he peered out of the growth, he took advantage of this to cover as many miles as he could of those miles still between himself and the sea. The canes cut him from the sight of any farmer working in the fields and he had only to look ahead, for he walked faster than anyone coming from behind.

One day he fell in with an old country woman. She had long passed the age of concealing herself for modesty’s sake and she had paused to relieve herself by the road. Comfort was now above all else. Clem came upon her about noon on a lonely country road and for a moment he thought her part of a bandit group. When the canes are high it is the season of bandits and often a gang of men will carry with them an old woman as a decoy.

The old woman laughed when she saw his start. “Do not be afraid of me, boy,” she said in a cheerful voice while she tied her cotton girdle about her waist.

She spoke a country dialect which Clem understood, for its roots were the same language he had heard in Peking and so he said, “Grandmother, I am not afraid of you. What harm can we do each other?”

She laughed at nothing as country women will. “You cannot do me any harm,” she said in a voice very fresh for such a wrinkled face. “Thirty years ago perhaps but not now! Where are you going?”