Pearl Buck - Gods Men

She waited a moment to make sure that it was to be so, and then it was so. He lay back exhausted without fulfillment. She buried her head against him, and began stroking his hand gently. It was listless and he did not speak a word. He never did.

This went on for what seemed an endless time. The room grew darker. Somewhere, at last, far off, the gong rang warning that dinner was only half an hour off. She let his hand fall and felt a wave of relief. Better luck perhaps, next time!

“I think Father Malone was right,” she said in her ordinary voice. “I do think you ought to go and see Monsignor Lockhart.”

WHEN THE SECOND WORLD war broke out Clem made up his mind to ignore it. “Let her blaze,” he told Henrietta in cosmic anger. “It’s all got beyond me.”

“Aren’t you going to close the restaurants now?” Henrietta had asked when people were working again on war jobs.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Clem said. “I don’t want to be in the restaurant business. I guess I’ll let the fellows have them. They can set up for themselves somewhere or they can stay where they are. They’ve got to promise me, though, that they’ll keep on giving free meals when necessary.”

“Since they’ve made money, I imagine they won’t mind that,” Henrietta said. Chinese could always take care of themselves with ancestral prudence.

By that time the government had ordered surpluses given outright to hungry people. Nobody knew how much of this giving away was the fruit of a certain day when Clem at last sat with that fabulous man in the White House who could not stand up unless somebody helped him. Clem got on well with him. He tried to remember that the man behind the big desk covered with small objects was the President of the United States, but most of the time he forgot it. They talked all over the world. The man behind the desk showed extraordinary knowledge and also profound ignorance, and he did not care who knew it. Clem tried to tell him about China and then gave up. There was too much the man did not know. He knew as little about India, and believed that the only problem there was too many people, and Clem labored earnestly to make him see this was not true. India could produce plenty of food for many more people.

“China, for instance, is nearly self-supporting in food,” Clem said. “She doesn’t import anything hardly. She grows immense amounts of food.”

“Seems to me I’ve heard of starving Chinese all my life,” said the man with the big smile.

“That’s because they need railroads and truck highways,” Clem said. “They can’t move surpluses. They starve in spots. It’s the world situation in a big nutshell. Before you can have a steady peace, you’ve got to be able to move surpluses.”

The war had broken out in China and in Europe and it meant that in China at least there would be fewer new highways than ever. Still the big man did not care much about China. That was to come later. Clem went away attracted and confounded. The big man didn’t see the world as round. For him it was flat. He couldn’t imagine the underneath. The whole world would have to blaze with war before the big man understood that the world was one big round globe.

It had never been easy for Clem to write letters but when he got home to Henrietta he began the series of letters which were his effort to educate the man who didn’t know the world was round. Sometimes these letters were long but usually they were not. The big man never answered them or acknowledged them himself, but Clem hoped that he read them. In them he tried to put down all he knew, including excerpts from the letters which Yusan wrote him.

“Of course we ought to help lick the Japs in China now,” Clem wrote, “but this is just the first step. As far as that goes the war really began when we let them have Manchuria. The next real job will come after the war when Chiang Kai-shek will have to hold his people together. It is easier for a soldier to keep on fighting than it is to get down to the necessary peace. It will be the Communists next, for sure, and that’s what we have got to reckon with. My advice now is to give some little hint of friendship for the people of India so as to begin to win friendship from Asia. I know you don’t want to get Winston worked up, but you could just say a word or two in the direction of India in your next fireside chat and this would please Indians by the millions as well as Chinese. If you would say you believe in the freedom of peoples but say it now, within this week, which is a time of crisis we don’t know anything about over here, it would mean everything. Next month would be too late. They are all waiting.”

Clem had bought his first radio especially to hear the President, but he did not say one word about India or the freedom of the peoples in his next fireside talk. The famous voice came richly over the wires. “My friends …” but it didn’t reach as far as China or India or Indonesia. Clem listened to the last rousing words and shut off the radio and was gloomy for so long that Henrietta was worried. She and Clem were no longer young and she wished that he could stop his world-worrying. Other people would have to take over and if they didn’t, it could not be helped. Clem’s stomach had been better after the depression but this second World War was making it worse again.

When she said something like this to Clem he would not listen to her. “I’m used to my stomach by now, hon. It hasn’t won out on me yet.”

“You haven’t won out either, Clem,” she said sharply. “It’s a continual struggle and you know it.”

He grinned at her, although there was nothing cheerful to grin about. Pearl Harbor had done him as much damage internally as it had done the Hawaiian Islands and he did not dare to tell Henrietta that all his old symptoms had returned, and that he was afraid to eat.

When America had finally swung into war he offered himself as a supercook and was actually put in charge of the mess halls and kitchens of barracks near Dayton. While the war went on and he still continued his long-distance education of the White House, conducted without any response whatever, Clem made some thousands of American boys happy by excellent food and pleasant dining halls where they were allowed to smoke and where cages of singing canaries brightened up their meals. Outside the dining room Clem made the administration furious by the economies he suggested and even put into force so that his regiments, as he called them, became notorious or longed for, depending upon whether a man was brass or buttons.

Clem himself considered it piddling. He was marking time until the end of the war when he intended to marshal all his theories into one vast gospel and present them to the White House and then to the nations. He had long ago forgotten William’s rebuff and he remembered now only the grace and kindness of William’s wife, and he dreamed secretly without telling Henrietta that after the war was over he would go back to William, not this time to advocate a theory but with a formula in his hand, a formula for a food so cheap that until the world got its distribution fixed up, people could still be kept from starving.

He set up a small laboratory in the basement of the house and with Henrietta to help him with her knowledge of chemistry refurbished and brought up to date with some new books, he began to work with the best soybeans he could get, the beans that Chinese farmers grew for their own food. Clem planted these seeds and tended them like hothouse asparagus, and as the war continued his harvests grew until he had enough soybean meal to make real experiments possible. He and Henrietta ate one formula after another, and studied seasoning and spoilage.