“You are not a bandit!” she exclaimed in some terror.
“No — I am someone worse for you. My father was a foreigner, like your priest.”
“Is it true?” she exclaimed. She strained her eyes and then put up her hand to feel his face.
“It is true,” he said, “and my father and mother and my sisters were killed as the priest was killed and I go to the sea to find a ship to take me to my own country.”
“Pitiful — pitiful,” she murmured. “You are not very old. You are not yet grown.”
“No,” Clem said. “But I am alone, and so I am glad that you met with me.”
“It was the amulet,” she said. “Heaven saw us two lonely ones walking the same road and brought us together.”
“Grandmother,” he went on, “you cannot see my eyes, but they are not black as the priest’s eyes were.”
“Are they not?” she asked surprised. “What color are they, then?”
“Blue,” he told her.
“Blue?” she echoed. “But only wild beasts have blue eyes.”
“So have many of my people,” he said.
She shuddered. “Ah, I have heard that foreigners are like wild beasts!”
“My father was not,” Clem replied, “and my mother was very gentle. You would have liked her.”
“Did she speak our tongue?”
“Yes,” Clem said, and found that he could not tell more of his mother.
“Ai-ya,” the old woman sighed. “There is too much evil everywhere.”
“Grandmother,” Clem began again.
“I like to hear you call me so,” the old woman said. “I shall never have a grandson, since my sons are dead.”
“Will you help me?” Clem asked.
“Surely will I,” she replied.
And so he told her his plan and she listened, nodding. “A half-blind old woman leading a blind grandson,” she repeated.
“We can go to the village inn there and sleep under a roof. I have slept every night in the canes, and two nights it rained.”
“I have some money,” she said, fumbling in her waist.
“I also,” Clem said. “Let us spend mine first.”
“No, mine.”
“But mine, Grandmother, because when I get to my own country it will be no use to me.”
She was diverted by this. “How can money be no use?”
“We have a different coin,” he replied.
They began to walk again and planned as they went. Far from being stupid as he had thought her, she was shrewd and planned as well as he did. All her life she had been the wife of a small poor man compelled to evade the country police and tax gatherers and she knew how to seem what she was not and to hide what she was.
An hour later Clem was walking down the village street with her, his eyes shut, holding in his hand one end of a stick the other end of which she held. She led the way to the inn on the single street and asked for two places on the sleeping platform for herself and her grandson, and the innkeeper gave them without more questions than such men usually ask of those they have not seen before. The old woman told a simple story, much of it true, how her husband and son were both dead together of the same disease and how she had left only this grandson and they were returning to her old city where she had been reared and where she might find her daughter married to the ironsmith.
“What is his name?” the innkeeper asked.
“He is named Liu the Big,” the old woman said.
A traveler spoke up at this and said, “There is an ironsmith surnamed Liu who lives inside the east gate of that city and he forged me an iron for a wheel of my cart, when I came westward through there. He has the finger off one hand.”
“It is he,” the old woman said. “He lost the finger when he was testing a razor he had ground. It went through his finger like flame through snow.”
Clem passed the night lying among the travelers on a wide bed of brick overlaid with straw and slept in spite of the garlic-laden air because for the while he felt safe again.
Nights and days Clem spent thus, always as the grandson of the old woman, and each day she grew more fond of him. She told him many curious tales of her early childhood and she asked him closely about his own people and why he was here instead of in the land where he belonged and marveled that he knew nothing at all of his ancestors.
“You foreigners,” she said one day, “you grow mad with god-fever. There is something demon in your gods that they drive you so. Our gods are reasonable. They ask of us only a few good works. But for your gods good works are not enough. They must be praised and told they are the only gods and all others are false.”
She laughed and said cheerfully, “Heaven is full of gods, even as the earth is full of people, and some are good and some are evil and there is no great One Over All.”
Clem did not argue with her. There was no faith left in him except a small new faith in the goodness of a few people. Mr. Fong and his wife had been good to him and so now was this old woman good, and he listened to her as they walked over the miles, side by side unless they came among people when he took the end of the stick she held and pretended to be blind. From her lips he learned a sort of coarse wisdom as he went, and he measured it against what he had learned before and found it true. Thus, the old woman said, the great fault with Heaven and whatever gods there were was that they had not arranged that food could fall every night from the sky, enough for everybody to eat so that there could be no cause for quarrel.
“If the belly is full,” she said, “if we could know that it would always be full, men would be idle and laugh and play games like children, and then we would have peace and happiness.”
These words, Clem thought, were the wisest he had ever heard. If his father had needed to take no thought for food, then his faith might have been perfect. Assured of food, his father could have preached and prayed and become a saint.
Thus talking and thinking, sleeping in inns at night, Clem and the old woman reached the city where she must stop. He had noticed for a day or two that she seemed in an ill humor, muttering often to herself. “Well, why should I not?” this she asked herself. Or she said, “Who cares whether I—,” or “My daughter does not know if I live.”
Before they got into the city, on an afternoon after a thunderstorm during which they had taken refuge in a wayside temple where there were gods but no priests, the old woman came out with what she had been muttering to herself.
“Grandson, I ought to go to the coast with you. What will you do if I leave you? Some rascal will see your eyes and think to gain glory with the Empress and he will kill you and take your head to the capital to show for prize money.”
Clem refused at once such kindness. “Grandmother, you are old and tired. You told me yesterday that your feet were swollen.”
They made an argument out of it for a while and at last the old woman said, “Come with me at least to the door of my. daughter’s house. We will see what Big Liu says.”
To this Clem consented, and when they came to the city the old woman would not enter until just before the gates closed so that people could not see them clearly. As night fell they joined the last people crowding to get inside the gate and walking quietly along mingled with the people, they came to the house of Liu the ironsmith.
Clem’s first sight of the ironsmith all but overcame him. The forge was open to the street, and there the mighty man stood, his legs apart, his right arm uplifted and holding a great iron hammer, his left hand grasping thick tongs which held a red hot piece of metal. Upon this metal he beat with the hammer and the fiery sparks flew into the night with every blow. The ironsmith was black with smoke and his lips were drawn back from his teeth so that they showed very white, and so white, too, were the whites of his eyes, above which were fierce black brows.