Pearl Buck - Gods Men

But wells were not dug and who could blame men that they did not dig wells when the sun burning upon a dead leaf turned it crisp, charred at the edges and wrinkled as a dead baby’s hand?

In the capital Clem, a pure flame of zeal, marched into the marble halls of empire and demanded to see the Viceroy. An American millionaire may see even the king and so he was received, making his way unmoved between rows of turbaned underlings. A mischievous old face, Indian, shrewd and obsequious, peered from under a multicolored pile of taffeta.

“I am Sir Girga — honored, sir, to conduct you to His Excellency the Viceroy.”

The mischievous old face, set upon a waspish body and a pair of tottering legs, guided him into a vast hall where The Presence sat, and there brought him before a cold English face made cautious by splendor.

Clem, knowing no better, sat down on a convenient chair surrounded by space and then began to tell the ruler how subjects could and should be fed.

“Irrigation is the first thing,” he said in his dry nasal American voice. He was unexpectedly hot and he wished he could take off his coat, but he went on. “The water table in India is high, I notice. Twenty feet and there is plenty of water — sometimes even ten or twelve. By my calculations, which I have taken carefully over sample regions, India could feed itself easily and even export food.”

The Viceroy, immaculate in white tussah silk tailored in London, stared down on him as upon a worm. “You do not understand our problems,” he said in a smooth deep Oxford accent. “More food would simply mean more people. They breed, Mr. — ” he paused to look at a card which Sir Girga obligingly held out for him to see—“Miller.”

“You mean it is the policy of your government to keep people hungry?” Clem inquired.

“We must take things as we find them,” the Viceroy replied.

In England, Clem reflected, this might have been a nice sort of fellow. His face was not cruel, only empty. Everything had to be emptied out of a man’s heart if he sat long in this vacuum. Clem looked around the enormous hall, embellished with gold in many varieties of decoration.

“I see your point,” he said after a long while. And then, after another while he said abruptly, “I don’t agree with it, though.”

“Really!” There was a hint of sarcasm but Clem never noticed sarcasm. He went on.

“We’ve never tried feeding the world. Ever seen how much meat comes from a sow? She farrows big litters until you don’t know what to do with all the pork. Of course in America we throw away mountains of good food, besides eating too much. You English eat too much, too, in my opinion — all that meat!”

The Face continued empty and looking at it Clem said, “I will grant America is the most guilty of all countries, so far as waste goes.”

“Undoubtedly you know,” The Face said.

Clem said good-by after a half hour of this. He then walked behind the trotting Sir Girga who saw him through the forest of lackeys to the front gate, beyond which an absurd Indian vehicle called a tonga awaited him, to the derision of the lordly Indian doormen.

He went back to the hotel where in one of the rows of whitewashed rooms Henrietta sat in her petticoat and corset cover, fanning herself. “We’ll just mosey along to Java before we go home,” he told her. “It’s about as I thought. They aren’t interested in feeding people.”

In Java he was stirred to enthusiasm by the sight of land so rich that while one field was planted with rice seedlings, another was being harvested. Men carried bundles of rice over their shoulders, the heads so heavy that they fell in a thick, even fringe of gold. The Dutch were more than polite to an American millionaire and he was shown everywhere, presumably, and everywhere he saw, or was shown, a contented and well-fed people. It was only accidentally that he found out that there was an independence party. One night when he was walking alone, as no foreigner should do in a well-arranged empire, a note was thrust into his hand and when he got back to the hotel and a lamp he found that it was a scrawl in English which said that he ought to examine the jails. This of course he was not allowed to do.

It was a good experience for Clem. He was thoughtful for some days on the voyage home and Henrietta waited for what he was thinking. As usual it came out in a few words one night when they were pacing the deck.

“We’ve still got freedom in America, hon,” he said. “I’m going home and look the whole situation over again and see if Bump and those lawyer fellows are right. If I have to organize I will, but I want to organize so that I’m not hamstrung by laws and red tape. I’ll organize for more freedom, see?”

“I believe that is Bump’s idea,” Henrietta said.

Clem would not accept this. “Yeah, but his idea of a man’s independence and my idea are not the same. He’s like those lawyer fellows — he wants laws as clubs, see? Clubs to make the other fellow do what you want! But my idea is to use laws to keep my freedom to do what I want. I don’t want to interfere with the other fellow, or drive him out of business.”

There was a difference, as Henrietta could see, a vast and fundamental difference. Clem was noncompetitive in a competitive world. It was strange enough to think that it had taken India to show Clem the value of law in his own country, but so it had done, and when they reached home Clem plunged into this new phase of his existence. Beltham and Black summoned to their aid an elder firm of lawyers as consultants, and Bump frankly sided with the four lawyers. Against them all Clem sat embattled day after day across the old pine table that still served him as his desk.

“What you want is impossible, Clem!” Bump cried at last. He was tired out. The lawyers were irritable at their client’s obstinacy. Those were the days, too, when Frieda was expecting her third child and she was homesick for Germany, so that Bump had no peace at home, either.

Clem lifted his head, looked at them all. He was dead white and thin to his bones, but his eyes were electric blue.

“Impossible?” His voice was high and taut as a violin string. “Why, Bump, don’t you know me after all these years? You can’t say that word to me!”

IN THE RICH YEARS that followed World War I William profited exceedingly. His tabloids were the most popular newspapers in the country and he had several foreign editions. The old offices were long since deserted and he owned a monumental building on the East River.

He was still not satisfied. He wanted his country to be the greatest country in the world, not only in words and imagination and national pride, but in hard fact. He saw American ships on all seas, and American newspapers, his papers in all countries, American names on business streets, and above all American churches and schools everywhere. America was his country, and he would make her great.

This was the motor behind the scheduled energy of his life. He gave huge sums to American foreign missions, always in memory of his father. He established a college in China, known as the Lane Memorial University, although he steadfastly refused to meet face to face the missionaries whose salaries he paid. He had set up an organization to do that, the Lane Foundation. He had never gone back to China, although sometimes he dreamed of Peking at night when he was especially tired, foolish dreams of little hutungs, quiet between enclosing walls, wisps of music winding from a lute, sunshine hot on a dusty sleeping street. Memories he had thought forgotten crept out at night from his mind exhausted by the day. He ignored them.

These were the times in America when anything could be done. Yet he was not doing all he dreamed of doing. The common people, as he called them, meaning those ordinary folk who come and go on the streets on foot, by bus and streetcar, those who crawl under the earth in subways and live on farms and in small towns and mediocre cities, all these who bought his newspapers as surely as they bought their daily loaf of bread at the corner grocery, they were not of enough importance to govern, even by their yea or nay, the possible secret country which he now perceived lay behind the façade of present America. He had thought, when he was in college dreaming of vast newspaper tentacles, that if he had the common people in his influence he could guide the country. He never used the word “control” and indeed he honestly abhorred it. But guidance was a good word, the guidance of God, which after his father’s death he himself continually sought as power and money accrued. Common people were weak and apathetic. They listened to anybody. Now that radio networks were beginning to tie the country together, his newspapers could no longer exclude. This troubled him mightily. Print had its rival. He considered making his newspapers almost entirely pictorial, so that reading was unnecessary, and then rejected the idea. Pictures could not keep common people from listening to the radio, which also required no reading. He must secure ear as well as eye and he began to plan the purchase of key networks.