Pearl Buck - Gods Men

She did not reply to this. The evening was pleasant though hot and children in bathing suits were playing with hoses, spraying each other and shrieking with laughter. Clem, deeply troubled by thoughts which were now roaming the world, saw nothing.

“The news from abroad is not bad, though, Clem,” she reminded him. “Yusan says the new government in China is bringing order and getting rid of the warlords, at least, and pushing Japan off. And Goshal says that Gandhi has made a sort of interlude in India.”

Clem got up. He walked across the porch, took out his penknife, and began to cut a few dead twigs from a huge wisteria vine that Henrietta had planted the first spring she came to New Point. Now, a thick and serpentine trunk, it crawled to the roof and clung about the chimney for support.

“Goshal is a Brahman no matter what I try to tell him,” Clem said. “What you call interlude, hon, is only a truce. Gandhi has got the British to compromise for a while for just one reason, and Goshal can’t see it. The price of food has gone down so much that millions of peasants are going to starve, hon, if something isn’t done quick.”

“City people will have more to eat if food is cheap,” Henrietta said.

“Most people don’t live in cities,” Clem said. “That’s not the point though, and I am surprised at you, hon. If the peasants and farmers starve it doesn’t help the factory workers in the long run. Gandhi is right when he says everything has to be done for the interests of the peasants. They’re basic everywhere in the world.”

Henrietta felt clarification begin in the waters of Clem’s soul. He was clipping one twig after another and they fell upon the wooden floor of the porch with soft dry snips of sound.

Clem went on, almost to himself. “And I don’t know what to think about things in China. A new government? Well, any government, I guess, is a good thing after all these years of fighting and goings on. I don’t blame Yusan for being glad about that. But I wrote him yesterday and told him that if this Chiang Kai-shek didn’t get down to earth with all his plans and study what the people need, it will be the same story. You don’t have to be an Old Empress to make the same mistakes.”

Henrietta was rocking back and forth silently, her following thoughts circling the globe.

“I don’t know,” Clem muttered. “How can I know? I don’t believe Japan is going to let things lay the way they are. They’ve been afraid for centuries, those people! They’ve got themselves all stewed up — can’t blame them, though — the way different nations have gone over and sliced off big hunks for themselves. ‘We’re next,’ that’s what the Japanese have been thinking for a mighty long time, hon! ‘If we don’t get going and carve ourselves out something big, we’re next.’ That’s what they think. Maybe they’re right, who knows? Only thing I know, hon, is that the earth is shaking right here under my feet. I don’t like the looks of things.”

He lifted his head and looked away over the housetops and beyond the trees. “Talk about smoke — the wind is from Europe, I reckon.”

The cyclone struck in October. Bred in the storms of the world it had gathered its furious circular force in the angry hunger of the peoples of Europe and then reaching its sharp funnel across the Atlantic Ocean it struck in Wall Street, in the heart of New York, in the most concentrated part of America.

Clem, on that first fatal morning, reached out of the front door to get the morning paper, half his face lathered with shaving soap. He saw the headlines as black as a funeral announcement and many times as large upon the front page, and knew that what he had feared had come. He wiped his cheek on the sleeve of his pajamas and sat down in the kitchen to read. Henrietta was making coffee. When she saw his face she set a cup before him and went out into the hall, got his overcoat, and wrapped it about him. Over his shoulders she saw the frightful announcement, CRASH IN WALL STREET SHAKES THE NATION!

“Tell Bump to get down here as fast as he can,” Clem ordered. “You and me and him have got to get right to work, hon.”

She obeyed him instantly as she would have obeyed the captain of an overloaded and sinking ship. There was no time to waste.

Clem dressed and ate a hasty breakfast and being immediately beset by the demons of indigestion, he was swallowing pepsin tablets when Bump came into the house. Henrietta had cleared the dining-room table of dishes and cloth, and Clem spread out the big sheets of white wrapping paper upon which he always did his large-scale figuring.

“Sit down,” he told Bump. “We’re going to have the worst depression in the history of the world. We got to get ready to feed people the way we’ve never done before. I’m going to open restaurants, Bump. It won’t be enough now to sell people food cheap. We got to be ready to give it away, cooked and ready to swallow, so that people won’t starve to death right here in our own land.”

He outlined in rapid broken sentences what he believed was sure to happen and Bump listened, cautious and reluctant and yet knowing from past experience how often Clem was right.

“We can hardly feed the whole nation, Clem,” he said at last.

Clem was immediately impatient. “I’m not talking about the nation. I’m talking about hungry people. I want to set up restaurants in the big cities as quick as we can. Our markets will supply our own restaurants. Whoever can pay will pay, of course. At first most people can pay and will want to. But I am thinking of January and February, maybe even this winter, and I’m thinking of next winter and maybe the winter after. That’s when things will get bad.”

It was impossible to get so huge a plan going as quickly as Clem thought it should and could. But it was done or began to be done within a time that was miraculous. Clem bought a small airplane which Henrietta, much against her secret inclination, learned to fly lest Clem insist on doing so and he, as she well knew, was not to be trusted with machinery. He expected divine miracles from engines made by man and while she had submitted for years to his mistreatment of automobiles, his wrenchings and poundings of parts he did not understand, the frightful speed at which he drove when he was in a hurry, she could not contemplate such maneuvers in the air.

She made a good pilot, to her own surprise, for she was an earthbound creature and hated suspension. Clem as usual was surprised at nothing she did, insisting upon her ability to do everything. At as low a height as she dared to maintain, they flew from city to city, her only apparent cowardice being that when they went to the coast to set up Clem’s restaurants in San Francisco and Los Angeles, she avoided the Rocky Mountains, and flew far south in order to escape them. Pilot and attendant, she followed Clem while, with his superb and reckless disregard of all business principles, he established during that first winter six restaurants across the country on the same magnitude as the markets. For these restaurants he hired Chinese managers.

“Only Chinese know how to make the best dishes of the cheapest food,” he explained to Henrietta. “They’ve been doing that for thousands of years.”

Knowing the importance of the spirit, he summoned his new staff to a conference in Chicago, where he put them up at a comfortable hotel while he talked to them about starvation and how to prevent it. He worked out one hundred menus, dependent upon the raw materials of the markets, and laid down the rule which should have ruined him and which instead led him eventually to new heights of prosperity.

“Any time anybody wants a free meal in any of our restaurants they can have it,” he said firmly. “Of course they can’t order strawberries and cream, but they can have meat stew and all the bread they want and they can have baked apples or prunes for dessert. Nobody will know whether they pay for it or not. They’ll get a check same as everybody else and they’ll go up to the cashier and just tell her quiet-like if they haven’t any money.”