Pearl Buck - Gods Men

His plate came and he ate it. The food was good enough, filling and hot. The waiter kept looking at him and Clem saw him stop a moment later at the cashier’s window. He ate as much as he could and then leaned to the man next to him at the long table, a young unshaven man who had cleaned his plate.

“Want this?” Clem muttered.

The sunken young eyes lit in the famished face. “Don’t you want it?”

“I can’t finish it—”

“Sure.”

The waiter was watching again but Clem got up and went to the cashier’s window with his check. He leaned toward the grating and said in a low voice, “I’m sorry I can’t pay anything.”

The sharp-faced Chinese girl behind the thin iron bars replied at once and her voice and accent were entirely American. “Oh yes, you can. You aren’t hungry — not with that suit of clothes!”

“My only decent clothes,” Clem muttered.

“Pawn them,” she said briskly. “Everybody’s doing that so’s to pay for their meals.”

He turned in sudden fury and walked across the restaurant, pushing his way through the waiters. He went straight to Mr. Kwok’s small office and found him there in his shirtsleeves, the oily sweat pouring down his face.

“Mr. Miller—” Mr. Kwok sprang to his feet. He pointed to his own chair. “Sit down, please.”

Clem was still furious. “No, I won’t sit down. Look here, I came in tonight to see how things were going on. I told the cashier I couldn’t pay just to try out the system. That damned girl at the window told me to go pawn my clothes!”

Mr. Kwok sweat more heavily. “Please, Mr. Miller, not so mad! You don’t unnerstan’. We going broke this way — too many people eating every day. In China you know how people starving don’t expect eating every day only maybe one time, two time, three time in a week. Here Americans expecting eating every day even they can’t pay. Nobody can do so, Mr. Miller, not even such a big heart like yours. It can’t be starving people eat like not starving. It don’t make sense, Mr. Miller. At first yes, very sensible, because most people pay, but now too many people don’t pay and still eating like before. What the hell! It’s depression.”

The wrath went out of Clem. What the Chinese said was true. Too many people now couldn’t pay. The job was beyond him, beyond anybody. Too many people, too many starving people.

“I guess you’re right,” he said after a long pause.

He looked so pale when he got up, he swayed so strangely on his feet that Mr. Kwok was frightened and put out his hands and caught Clem by the elbows. “Please, Mr. Miller, are you something wrong?”

Clem steadied himself. “No, I’m all right. I just got to think of something else, that’s all. Good night, Mr. Kwok.”

He wrenched himself away from the kind supporting hands and went out of the door into the street. His idea wasn’t working. Nothing was working. People were pawning their clothes in this bitter weather. They were being asked to pawn their clothes, pawn everything they could, doubtless. The waiters had been told to look and see what people wore. He remembered the hungry boy who had seized his plate and eaten the leftovers like a dog. That was what it had come to here in his own country. Someday people would be eating grass and roots and leaves here as they did in China.

“I got to get down to Washington,” he muttered into the cold darkness. “I gotta get down there one more time and tell them. …”

He found his way to the hotel where Henrietta waited for him, alarmed at his long absence.

“Clem—” she began, but he cut her off short.

“Get our things together, hon. We’re taking the next train to Washington. I’m going to get to that fellow in the White House if I have to bust my way in.”

He did not get in, of course. She knew he could not. She waited outside in the lobby and read a pamphlet on a table full of pamphlets and magazines that had been sent for the President to read. He had no time to read them and they had been put here to help the people who waited to while away the time. In a pamphlet of five pages, in words as dry as dust, in sentences as terse as exclamations, but passionless, she read the whole simple truth. For twenty-nine months American business had been shrinking. Industrial production was fifty per cent of what it had been three years ago. The deflation in all prices was thirty-five per cent. Profits were down seventy-five per cent. Nineteen railroads during the last year had gone bankrupt. Farm prices had shrunk forty-nine per cent so far and were still going down. But — and here she saw how everlastingly right Clem was — there was more food than ever! Farmers had grown ten per cent more food in this year of starvation than they had grown three years ago in a time of plenty.

“Oh, Clem,” Henrietta whispered to her own heart. “How often you tell them and they will not listen! O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often. …”

She put the pamphlet back on the table and sat with her hands folded in her lap and her head bowed so that her hat hid the tears that kept welling into her eyes. It was for Clem she wept, for Clem in whom nobody believed except herself, and who was she except nobody? William had hurt him dreadfully but she did not know how because Clem would not tell her what had happened. He had spoken scarcely a word all the way down on the train. She had tried to make him sleep, even if they were only in a day coach — he wouldn’t spend the money for berths — but though he leaned back and shut his eyes she knew he was not sleeping.

He came into the waiting room suddenly and she saw at once that he had failed. She got up and they went out of the building side by side. She took his hand but it was limp, and she let it go again.

“Did you see the President?” she asked when they were on the street. The sun was bright and cold and pigeons were looking around for food, but no one was there to feed them.

“No,” Clem said. “He was too busy. I talked to somebody or other, though, enough to know there was no use staying around.”

“Oh, Clem, why?”

“Why? Because they’ve got an idea of their own. Want to know what it is? Well, I’ll tell you. They’ve got the idea of telling the farmers to stop raising so much food. That’s their idea. Wonderful, ain’t it, with the country full of starvation?”

He turned on her and gave a bark of laughter so fierce that people stared, but he did not see their stares. He was loping along as though he were in a race and she could scarcely keep up with him.

“Where are we going now, Clem?” she asked.

“We’re going home to Ohio. I gotta sweat it out,” he said.

The nation righted itself in the next two years, slowly like a ship coming out of a storm. William wrote a clear and well-reasoned editorial for his chain of newspapers and pointed out to his millions of readers that the reforms were not begun by Franklin D. Roosevelt, the new President, but by Herbert Hoover who should have been re-elected in sheer justice that he might finish that which he had begun. It was already obvious, William went on, that the new inhabitant of the White House would run the nation into unheard-of national debt.

What William saw now in the White House was not the mature and incomparable man, toughened by crippling experience. He saw a youth he remembered in college, gay and willful and debonair, born as naturally as Emory to a castle and unearned wealth, but, unlike her, not controlled by any relationship to himself. Roosevelt, secure from the first moment of his birth, was uncontrollable and therefore terrifying, and William conveyed these fears in his usual editorial style, oversimple and dogmatically brief. To his surprise, he experienced his first rebellion. Millions of frightened people reading his editorials felt an inexplicable fury and newspaper sales dropped so sharply that the business office felt compelled to bring it to William’s notice. He replied by a memorandum saying that he was sailing for England and Europe, especially Germany where he wanted to see for himself what was happening, and they could do as they liked while he was gone.