Clem Miller, pursuing his daily round, felt no difference upon the streets. Since the day when William Lane had stopped the fight he had spoken to no white person outside his own family. His father, he knew, was disturbed and uneasy, but then he was always anxious lest their food be short and always trying to deny anxiety even to himself, lest perchance God, whom he yearned to believe was tender and careful of His own, be made angry by the unbelief of Paul Miller and so refuse to supply food to those who depended upon him. Clem himself had no direct experience of God. Though he prayed as he had been taught, night and morning and sometimes feverishly in between, on the chance that it might do good when their food was low or when there was no cash to pay the landlord, he was still not sure that God gave such gifts. He wondered if his father, too, was not sure and if uncertainty were the cause of his father’s uneasiness. He loved his father and felt something childlike in him and he asked no more for proof of faith, only eating the less at home. It was easier to declare himself not hungry, and he filled himself on the sweetmeats that were always on the table when he went to teach Mr. Fong’s eldest son at the bookshop.
For Mr. Fong, observing the American boy’s thin body and hollowed cheeks, had taken pity. He said to Mrs. Fong, the mother of his children, “See how the young foreigner eats up the sweets! He does not get enough food. Put some small meat rolls in the dish tomorrow, and boil eggs and peel them and set them on the table.”
Mrs. Fong was a Buddhist and ate neither meat nor eggs herself, but she did not believe that foreigners would go to heaven anyhow, and since she would gain merit for her soul by feeding one who could make no return, she obeyed her husband. Each day, therefore, Clem found some sort of hearty food waiting, and his pupil Yusan urged him to eat, having been so bidden by his mother. Clem ate, thinking that perhaps this also was God’s provision. Yet it was hard to believe that God used heathen to perform his mercies. In confusion he believed and did not believe, and meanwhile his growing body would have starved without the food.
No one spoke to him of the Empress and her whims or of the demands now of Italy as well as Germany. Italy was a place of which he had never heard except that Christopher Columbus had come from there. No one told him either of the warships steaming into Chinese harbors from Britain, Germany and France. His world was in the dust of Peking, and when he dreamed it was of a farm in a place called Pennsylvania. How big Pennsylvania was he did not know, except that it was more than a city. He had learned when he was quite little not to ask his parents about it because it made them both sad and sometimes his mother wept.
The festival ended. One spring day followed another and May passed into June. People were eating big yellow apricots and one morning Mrs. Fong set a dish of them on the table.
“Eat these, little brother,” she bade Clem. “They cleanse the blood.”
He ate two and against his sense of decency hid two in his pockets to give his sisters when he went home after the lesson. These he bade them eat in secret, lest their father discover in Mrs. Fong a new source for food and go there to beg in God’s name. Ever since he had heard William Lane’s voice of scorn Clem could not think of his father asking a Chinese for food. Yet when he saw the eagerness with which his younger sisters seized the fruit he brought home to them, he could not refrain the next day from hiding a few cakes in his pockets and then two of the meat rolls. It was a sort of stealing, his ready conscience told him, and was it better to thieve than beg, and was he not worse than his father? “At least I do not take the food in the name of God,” he told himself, and continued to take it.
But guilt made him anxious one morning when Mr. Fong came into the sunlit brick-floored room. Mr. Fong sat down and drew his rusty black silk gown up over his knees. He was a tall man, a native of the city, and his smooth face was egg-shaped. Today, since it was warm, he had taken off his black cap. He had been freshly shaved and his queue was combed and braided with a black silk cord.
“Eh,” he began, looking at Clem. “I have something to say to you, Little Brother.”
“What is it, Elder Uncle?” Clem asked, and was much afraid.
“While I talk, you eat,” Mr. Fong said kindly. He clapped his hands at his eldest son, looking at him with always fond eyes. “Yusan, you go away and play somewhere.”
Yusan, pleased to be free, tied his book in a blue cotton square, thrust it in a drawer and left the room.
“Drink some tea,” Mr. Fong said to Clem. “What I am about to say does not mean that I am angry.”
Clem could neither eat nor drink upon these words. What would he do if kind Mr. Fong wanted him to come no more? There would be an end of books and food.
Mr. Fong got up and shut the door and drew the wooden bar across it. Then he sat himself down so near to Clem that his voice could pass into his ear.
“The Old Empress is about to command that all foreigners leave our city — even our country.” These were the horrifying words Clem now heard.
“But why?” he gasped.
“Hush — do you know nothing? Has your father not been told? You must go quickly or—” Mr. Fong drew his hand across his throat.
“What have they done?” Clem demanded. It did not occur to him for the moment that he himself was a foreigner, and the word “they” came to his tongue instead of “we.”
That his parents were foreign, he well knew. They were foreign even to him, whose birth and whose memories were only of the Chinese earth. They had no money to go away. But where could they hide? Who would dare to take them in? He could not believe that the proud missionaries would shelter them, nor could he ask Mr. Fong to risk the lives of his own family.
Meanwhile he felt cold and his knees began to tremble.
Mr. Fong cleared his throat, stroked his bare chin and began again his guttural whisper. “The foreign governments, you understand, are cutting up our country like a melon. This piece is for the Ying people, this piece is for the Teh people, this piece is for I-Ta-Lee, this for the wild Ruh people to the north.”
“My parents are Americans,” Clem urged.
Mr. Fong rolled his head around rapidly on his shoulders. “Your Mei people I know. They do not slice with a knife, but they come after the slices are cut and they say to us, ‘Since you have sliced to these other peoples, we too must be given some gift.’ True, true, you Mei people are better. You are against slicing, but you also wish gifts.”
“I have heard nothing,” Clem said doggedly.
“There is no time to tell you everything now,” Mr. Fong said. “Listen to this one word, Little Brother. Go home and tell your parents to flee to Shanghai. The times are bad. Do not delay lest the way be closed. I have a relative who works in the palace. I fear what is about to happen.”
“My father will not go,” Clem said sadly. “He believes in God.”
“This is no time to believe in God,” Mr. Fong replied in a sensible voice. “Tell him to save his family first.”
He rose, and opening the drawer he removed the blue cotton square from his son’s book and filled it with cakes and fruit. “Take this with you. Remember I do not hate you. If I dared I would ask your family here. But it would do them no good and my family would only be killed with them. We have been warned. Come no more, Little Brother, alas!”
So saying he thrust Clem out of a small back door. Clem found himself in an alleyway. On the street it seemed impossible to believe that doom hung over the city. It was a morning as mild as summer. The people of the city had risen from their beds, had washed themselves, had eaten, had set their faces to seem the same as on any other day. Clem had as usual left home very early, before the shops had taken down their boards, for Mr. Fong believed that the human brain was most active at sunrise. Often when Clem hurried on his way he met straggling rows of sleepy schoolboys, their books wrapped in blue cotton squares under their arms, already on their way to school. This morning, he remembered now, he had met none, and had wondered that he was so early.