Pearl Buck - Gods Men

“How many times can one man eat free?” Mr. Lim of San Francisco inquired.

“We don’t ask that,” Clem said. “We don’t ask anything, see? If anybody’s hungry, he eats. At the same time, we’ll serve other foods, cooked so good that people who have got money will pay for it. And our restaurants will look nice, too, so that people will want to come there. They won’t seem like handout places.”

The Chinese exchanged grins. Their salaries were secure and so they were highly diverted by this mad American. Since he had appealed to their honor they were prepared to respond with their most ingenious economies and seasonings. He in turn accepted their promises with complete faith.

“We can do such things as you talk,” Mr. Kwok of New York Chinatown now said. “Only thinking, however, is that we better hire our own cooks and waiters, each of us somebody he knows good.”

“Sure,” Clem agreed. “That’s all up to you. I hold you responsible, each for your own place.”

“Must be order, you see.” This was Mr. Pan of Chicago. “I know Americans think all equal but Chinese know better. For making something go, especially cheap and good, one man is top and everybody else in steps below, each man top to next man and next-to-top man is reporting to very top man. Each man is servant and at the same time boss, except bottom man, who is anxious for rising and does his best.”

“Sure,” Clem said. “You put it neat.”

With the simplest of casual organization, Clem arranged his markets and restaurants in an endless chain of co-operation. He did not expect perfection and did not get it. Nepotism in two of the restaurants was a drain on profits until he discovered it and fired the two managers and hired new ones. With the old managers went the entire staffs and with the new ones came new and chastened ones. The other four managers approved the changes and worked with the greater integrity and zeal. Clem’s Brother Man Restaurants without advertising lost no money the first year and saved thousands of people from hunger so quietly that the public knew nothing about it. Three per cent of the people who ate free meals could have paid and did not. This was balanced by sums from people who could and did pay extra because they liked the food. Clem was brazen about accepting such extra pay. On the bottom of the menu cards in large bold letters he printed this legend:

OUR PRICES ARE TOO LOW FOR PROFITS. IF YOU HAVE GOT MORE THAN YOUR MONEY’S WORTH FROM SOME DISH YOU HAVE ESPECIALLY ENJOYED, PLEASE PAY WHAT YOU THINK IT IS WORTH. THIS MONEY WILL GO TO FEED THE HUNGRY.

A surprising number of people paid extra, but Clem was not surprised. His faith in humanity increased as he grew older and made it unnecessary, he declared, for any further faith.

“The way I look at it is this, hon,” he said to Henrietta on one of their long flights across the plains of the West. “Everybody needs faith. Some people find it in God or in heaven or something way off. Take me, though, I get inspiration out of my faith in people here and now.”

In the middle of the next winter, however, Clem found himself puzzled. He was feeding people on a huge scale, not only through his markets but through his restaurants, and he saw that it was not enough. He turned his eyes away from the breadlines and knew that at last he had met a task that was beyond him.

The effect of this discovery upon him frightened Henrietta. She saw his first excitement and exuberance, his immense rise of energy, his self-confidence, and even his faith pass into an intense and grim determination as the hordes of the hungry increased over the nation. They gathered in the cities, for country people can hide themselves snugly into their farms and eat the food they produce and stop buying. Furniture and machinery which they had been tempted to buy on installments they relinquished, wary of their savings. They had lived without radios and without cars and washing machines and they could again. They withdrew into the past and lived as their grandparents had done and did not starve. They could still sleep in ancient beds and use old tables and sit on ladder-back chairs.

It was the cities that frightened Clem. Even in the cities where he had his restaurants, the breadlines began to stretch for blocks. When he found a family with seven children starving in New York he came back to Henrietta in the small room at a cheap hotel, which was his usual stopping place.

“I wouldn’t have thought it could be, hon,” he said mournfully. “Maybe in China or India, but here? Hon, how am I going to get the government to understand that people have got to be fed? A war will come out of this, hon. People won’t know why there’s a war and they’ll think it’s because of a whole lot of other things, but the bottom reason is because people can’t buy food because they don’t have the money to buy it with. That makes men fight.”

“Clem, you look sick!” Henrietta said. “I’m going to get you a doctor.”

“I am sick,” Clem said. “But it’s a sickness no doctor can cure. I’ll be sick as long as things go on like this.”

At noon he refused to eat and Henrietta went downstairs to eat alone, ashamed of her steady appetite. If Clem could only separate his soul from his body! But he could not and his body shared the tortures of his harassed soul. He blamed himself for things being what they were, and this Henrietta would have thought absurd except she had seen in her own father when she was a child the same suffering for the sins of others.

“Did we do our duty as Christians—” she remembered her father saying that year when they had left China, that fearful year when Clem had been left alone in Peking—“the world in a generation would be changed.”

Clem was like that, too. He wanted the world changed quickly because he saw it could be changed and he fretted himself almost to death because other people did not see what he did. Troubled and sad, she ate her robust meal, chewing each mouthful carefully because she believed Fletcher was right about that. She had got interested in Fletcherism because of Clem’s indigestion and especially because he was always in such a hurry that he swallowed his food whole.

When she went upstairs again he was lying on the bed, flat on his back, and she thought he was asleep. She tiptoed in and stood looking down at him. His hands were clasped behind his head and his eyes were closed. Then she saw his lashes quiver.

“That you, hon? I’ve been lying here thinking. I believe I’ve got an idea.”

“Oh, Clem, I hoped you were asleep! If you won’t eat—”

“I will eat but you know how I am. If I eat when I’m thinking something out the food just lays on my stomach. Hon, I am going to see your brother William.”

She sat down heavily in the soiled armchair. “Clem, it won’t do a bit of good.”

“It might, hon. He’s got a new wife.”

“Nobody could have been nicer than Candace.”

“Maybe so. She was mighty nice. But if William loves this woman, maybe it has done something to him. Maybe it’s stirred his heart.”

“I hope you don’t want me to go with you.”

“I was kind of hoping you would.”

“Clem — it won’t help! He’s invincible now. Everywhere we go people are reading his nasty little newspapers.”

“He must feel something for people, hon.”

“No, he doesn’t. He hates people. He despises them or he wouldn’t make such newspapers for them. I know why he does it, too. He feeds them the worst stuff so as to keep them down. It’s like feeding the Chinese opium — or giving whisky to the Indians. People learn to like it and because they like it they will follow the person that gives it to them.”

Clem, always generous, shook his head at this picture of William. “I kind of think I’ll go right away and see for myself, hon.”