Pearl Buck - Gods Men

“Brothers!” Yusan cried above the music. “Here is the Elder Brother of whom I have told you!”

They got up from their cots, the fiddler stopped his wail, and the lantern lights were turned up. Clem saw himself surrounded by the familiar faces, the brown, good faces, the honest eyes, of Chinese villagers. He felt again the old love, paternal perhaps, but grateful and rich with faith. These were the good, these were the simple, these were the plain of the earth. He began to speak to them:

“Brothers, when I heard you were here, I feared lest you might be suffering, and so I have come to see if your life is good and what can be done to help you if it is not good.”

“He left his home,” Yusan put in. “He came a long way over the sea and he can be trusted. I have known him since my childhood.”

The men were silent, their hungry eyes fixed upon Clem.

“Are you well fed?” Clem asked.

The men looked at one of their number, a young strong fellow with a square fresh face. He spoke for them:

“We are well fed but with foreign food. We are treated kindly enough. Our sorrow is that we cannot write to our families or read what they have written to us. We can neither read nor write.”

“The letters can be read to you,” Clem said. “Letters can also be written for you.”

The young man looked at his fellows and began again. “Why we are here we do not know. Is our country also at war?”

“In a way, yes,” Clem replied. “That is, China has declared war against the Germans.”

“We do not know the Germans,” the young man said “Which men are they?”

Clem felt his old sickness of the heart. “None of us know our enemies. I also do not know a single German. Let us not think of them. Let us only think of ways to make your life better.”

For how could he or anyone explain to these men why there was a war and why they had left their homes and families and come here to dig trenches for white men to hide themselves in while they killed other white men? Who could explain such things to anyone? The world was full of discontent and because people were hungry and afraid they followed one little leader and another, hoping somewhere to find plenty, and peace for themselves and their children, even as these men had been willing to come so far, not because they believed in what they did, but that their families at home might receive each month some money wherewith to buy food.

Clem spent most of that night talking with the men, asking them questions, too, and writing down their answers. He spent the next days with Yusan planning, and a full month he spent getting what he needed to fulfill those plans from officers who considered him mad. But Clem was used now to men who thought him mad and he paid no heed to what they thought of him, spending his energy instead on getting them to do what he needed to have done until in sheer angry impatience they yielded and cursed him and wanted him gone.

By the end of the month he had helped Yusan to set up a school where the men could learn to read and write, if they wished, and he set up an office, with two Chinese from Paris, to read the men’s letters from home and write in reply. He set up also a small shop, to be supplied regularly from Paris with Chinese foods and sweets and tea. Once a week he planned a night of amusement, a place where the Chinese could hear their own music, could eat their own sweetmeats and drink tea together, and see Chinese plays and Western pictures. He hired a Chinese cook who was given a license to vend his own wares and make his living thereby. He established Yusan in all this, and in his first moment of leisure he discovered that he was homesick for Henrietta and could no longer endure his absence from her, although he had scarcely thought of her for the whole month, even as he had not once thought of himself.

He bade Yusan good-by then, took a ship for home, and reached his house on a Saturday afternoon, so white and spent that Henrietta cried out at the sight of him as he entered the picket gate.

She was at home, as she was now as much as she could be, for she expected Clem at any moment, though he had not said he was coming. Her own longing for him reached across the sea and yearned for him with such intensity that she could divine, or she felt she could, the time when he would be coming.

“Oh Clem!” she cried at the front door.

“Hon—”

They fell into each other’s arms. He felt her sturdy body and she was frightened at the thinness of his shoulder blades under her embrace.

“You’ve worked yourself to skin and bones!” she cried with terrified love.

“I’ll be all right after a few days at home. My stomach went back on me a couple of weeks ago.”

They parted, their hands still clinging, and she led him in, made him sit down, and restrained herself from fussing over him, which he could not endure.

“I’ll make you a cup of tea. Can you eat an egg?”

“I could eat a beefsteak, now,” Clem said. He looked around the shabby room fondly. “I guess I was crazy to go away, hon! Now that I’m back it seems crazy. But I had to go, and I’m not sorry. How’s tricks?”

“Don’t talk about tricks!” Henrietta retorted. “You rest yourself, Clem, do you hear me?”

“Why, hon, you aren’t mad at me, are you?” His face was amazed. She had never been cross with him before.

To his further amazement now she began to weep! Standing there by the kitchen door, she took up the edge of her apron and wiped her eyes. “Of course I’m not mad,” she sobbed. “I’m just scared, that’s all! Clem, if anything happened to you — if you should die — I wouldn’t know what to do. Being without you just these weeks — I’m all upset—”

“Great guns,” Clem muttered. He got up and went to her and put his arms around her again. “I’m not going to die, hon. I wouldn’t think of such a thing.”

She put her head on his shoulder and he stood quietly supporting her, loving her and not telling her how he really felt. He was not going to die, but he felt tired to the bone. The sight and the memory of those dark honest bewildered faces in France never left him for a moment. Nor were they all. In the fields of France there were such faces, and the same faces were here in the fields of Ohio, upon the streets of villages and in the slums of cities, not all honest and many far from good, and yet with the same confusion and bewilderment. And most dreadful of all, they were upon the fields of battle, and they lay dead in the mud of death. No, he must not die, but he was tired enough to die. Nobody knew what he was trying to say; not even those whom he wanted to save could understand.

But he must not give up, for all that. He must take up again where he left off.

This meant, as he discovered in the years that followed the war, an organizing of his markets and facing limitations and legalities which irked and distracted his free-thinking mind. The war fought for freedom brought with victory a loss of freedom for everyone, and there were times when Clem felt this loss descend most heavily upon himself. He was used to visiting another country as men visit a neighboring county, careless of all save his purpose in going. Now there was no more of this carelessness. Passports and visas made him groan, and even Bump could not assuage his irritation either by speed or by early preparation. Clem felt it an infringement upon his rights that he could not decide suddenly to go to India by the middle of next week or drop in on Siam and see how the rice crop was going.

His first visit to India grew out of a brief meeting, quite accidental, with a young Hindu in London during the war. They had met in the Tube, and had sat side by side for a few minutes. Clem had begun instantly to talk and then, forgetting his own destination, had got off with the young Hindu and had gone with him to his rooms in lodgings near the Tube station. Ram Goshal had at first been astounded by this slender, sand-colored American and then had succumbed to Clem’s frightful charm. Clem discovered that Ram Goshal, although the son of a wealthy Indian, had given up society life to work for Gandhi, whom he had met a few years before when Gandhi, that rising star, had gone to London from South Africa with an Indian deputation. Ram Goshal had come back with Gandhi to London at the beginning of the war and at a meeting of Indians, Gandhi insisted that it would not be honorable in the time of England’s trial and trouble to press their own claims for freedom. Self-denial at such an hour, he said, would be dignified and right and gain more in the end because it was right.