She spoke a country dialect which Clem understood, for its roots were the same language he had heard in Peking and so he said, “Grandmother, I am not afraid of you. What harm can we do each other?”
She laughed at nothing as country women will. “You cannot do me any harm,” she said in a voice very fresh for such a wrinkled face. “Thirty years ago perhaps but not now! Where are you going?”
She fell into pace beside him and he slowed his step. It would be well for him to be seen with this old woman. He might be taken for her grandson. “I am going east,” he said.
“How is it you are alone?” she asked.
He had tried to keep the dangerous blue of his eyes away from her, but when he stole a look at her, he saw that he need not take care. She had cataracts on both eyes, not heavy as yet, but filmed enough to see no more of him than his vague outlines.
“My father died in Peking,” he said truthfully, “and I am going to find my grandfather.”
“Where is your grandfather?” she asked.
“To the east,” he replied.
“I am going eastward, too,” she said. “Let us go together.”
“How far east?” he asked with caution.
She named a small city at the edge of the province.
“How is it you are alone?” he asked in his turn.
“I have no son,” she replied. “Therefore I have no daughter-in-law. But I have a daughter who is married to an ironsmith in the city and I go there to ask for charity. My old man, her father, died last week and I sold the house. We had two thirds of an acre of land. Had I a son I would have stayed on the land. But my fate is evil. My twin sons died together in one day when they were less than a year old.”
She sighed and loosened her collar as though she could not breathe and so her wrinkled neck was bare. Clem saw around it a dirty string on which hung an amulet.
“What is it you wear on your neck, Grandmother?” he asked.
She laughed again, this time half ashamed. “How do I know what it is?” she retorted.
“Where did you get it?” Clem asked.
“Why do you want to know?” the old woman asked suspiciously.
Now the amulet was a strange one for a Chinese woman to wear. It was a small brass crucifix wrapped around with coarse black thread.
“It looks Christian,” Clem said.
The old woman gave him a frightened look. “How does a boy like you know what is Christian?” she demanded, and she buttoned her coat.
“Are you a Christian?” Clem asked softly.
The old woman began to curse. “Why should I be a Christian? The Christians are bad. Our Old Buddha is killing them. You come from Peking; you ought to know that.”
“The cross is good,” Clem said in a whisper.
She stopped in the middle of the road and heard this. “Do you say it is good?” she asked.
“My father believed the cross was good,” Clem said.
“Was your father one of Them?”
Now Clem decided to risk his life. “Yes, and he is dead. They killed him.” All this he said without her knowing that he was not Chinese.
He saw her mobile wrinkled face grow kind. “Let us sit down,” she told him. “But first look east and west and see if there is anyone in sight.”
No one was in sight. The hot noonday sun poured down upon the dusty road.
“Have you eaten?” the old woman asked.
He had been walking for four days and his store of bread was gone. He had still some of the dried mustard wrapped in the cotton kerchief. “I have not eaten,” he said.
“Then we will eat together,” the old woman told him. “I have some loaves here. I made them this morning.”
“I have some dried mustard leaves,” Clem said.
They shared their food and the old woman prattled on. “I asked Heaven to let me meet with someone who could help me on the road. I had not walked above half the time between sunrise and noon when you came. This is because of the amulet.”
“Why do you say Heaven instead of God?” Clem asked.
“It is the same,” the old woman said easily. “The priest said I need not call the name of a foreign god. I may say Heaven as I always have.”
“What priest?” Clem asked.
“I can never remember his name.”
“A foreigner?”
“Foreign, but with black hair and eyes like ours,” the old woman said. “He wore a long robe and he had a big silver cross on his breast. He prayed in a foreign tongue.”
Catholic, Clem thought. “What did this priest say the amulet meant?” he asked.
The old woman laughed. “He told me but I cannot remember. It means good, though — nothing but good.” She looked so cheerful as she chewed the steamed bread, the sun shining on her wrinkled face, that she seemed to feel no pain at being alone.
“Did he teach you no prayers?” Clem asked.
“He did teach me prayers, but I could not remember them. So he bade me say my old O-mi-to-fu that I used to say to our Kwanyin, only when I say it I am to hold the amulet in my hand, so, and that makes the prayer go to the right place in Heaven.”
Wise priest, Clem thought, to use the old prayers for the new god! He had a moment’s mild uncensuring cynicism. Prayers and faith seemed dream stuff now that his father was dead.
The old woman was still talking. “He is dead, that piteous priest. If he had been alive I would have gone to find him. He lived in a courtyard near his own temple — not a temple, you understand, of our Buddha. There were gods in it, a man hanging on a wooden shape — bleeding, he was. I asked, ‘Why does this man bleed?’ and the priest said, ‘Evil men killed him.’ There was also a lady god like the Kwanyin, but with only two hands. She had white skin and I asked the priest if she were a foreigner and he said no, it was only that the image was made in some outer country where the people are white-skinned, but if the image had been made here the lady would have skin like ours, for this is her virtue that wherever she is, she looks like the people there. The man on the cross was her son, and I said why did she not hide him from the evil men and the priest said she could not. He was a willful son and he went where he would, I suppose.”
“How is it that the priest is dead?” Clem asked with foreboding.
The old woman answered still cheerfully. “He was cut in pieces by swordsmen and they fed the pieces to the dogs and the dogs sickened and so they said he was evil. I dared not tell them that I knew he was not evil. It was the day after my old man died and I had no one to protect me.”
They sat in the sun, finished now with their meal, and Clem hearing of the priest’s dreadful end felt shadows of his own fall upon him. “Come,” he said, “let us get on our way, Grandmother.”
He decided that he would keep his secret to himself. Yet as the day went on a good plan came to him. He could pretend to be blind, keep his blue eyes closed, feel his way, act as the old woman’s grandson, and so they could walk all day more quickly and safely than by night. Then too he could use the money which Mr. Fong had given him, which until now he dared not use at an inn. Yet to make the pretense it was needful to tell the old woman who he was and she was so simple that he could not make up his mind whether he dared to trust his life into her hands.
When night drew near and a village showed itself in a distant cluster of lights, he thought he could tell her. He knew by now that she was good and only what she said she was, and if he were with her he might keep her awake to danger. If by chance she betrayed him as not Chinese, then he must make his escape as best he could.
So before they came to the village he took her aside, much to her bewilderment, for she did not know why he plucked her sleeve. Behind a large date tree, where he could see on all sides, he told her.
“Grandmother, you have been honest with me, but I have not told you who I am.”