Young William Lane, leaning back in his mother’s private riksha, perceived a short quarter of a mile ahead a knot of people. This in a Peking street meant some sort of disturbance. Possibly it meant only amusement. The people of the imperial city, accustomed to pleasure, were never too busy to pause for an hour or two and watch whatever passed, from the entourage of a court lady on her way to the Summer Palace to the tumbles of a trained bear and the antics of a shivering monkey. Since the season was spring it might now be a troupe of street actors, fresh from their winter in the south.
William leaned forward. “Lao Li, what is yonder?” he asked the riksha puller.
His Chinese was pure and somewhat academic, although he was only seventeen. Actually he was not proud of speaking good Chinese. It revealed too clearly that he was the son of a missionary. At the English boarding school in Chefoo where he spent most of the year, the aristocrats among the boys were the sons of diplomats and businessmen and they were careful to show no knowledge of the language of the natives. Among white people in China missionaries were distinctly low class. At school, William spoke pidgin English to the servants and pretended he did not understand them when they replied in Chinese. Now, however, he was at home for the Easter holidays, and since he had been born and had grown up in Peking, no pretense was possible.
“Something strange, Young Master,” Lao Li replied. He snatched his cotton jacket from his shoulders as he ran and wiped the sweat from his face. Foreigners were heavy — this young master, for example, though still growing, was already heavier than a man. He could remember when he had pulled him as a child. The years passed. He dared not slacken his pace. A riksha puller must not grow old. A steady job in a white man’s family could not be lost, however heavy the children were.
He snatched at a hope for rest. “Shall I not stop so that you can see for yourself?”
William’s haughty head was high. “What do I care what street people look at?”
“I only asked,” Lao Li muttered.
He tried to quicken his pace as he drew near to the crowd and then William’s shout startled him so that he nearly fell between the shafts.
“Stop!”
William, seated high, could look over the heads of the people. In the center of the crowd he saw a horrible sight. A white boy was locked in struggle with a Chinese boy. The onlookers were not laughing. They were intensely quiet.
“Let me down,” William said imperiously.
Lao Li lowered the shafts and William stepped over them and strode through the people.
“Let me pass,” he said to them in the same haughty voice. The Chinese parted mutely before him until he reached the center. There in silence the two boys were struggling together, the brown face, the white face, equally grim.
“Stop it, you,” William said loudly in English.
The white boy turned. “What business is it of yours?” he demanded. He was small and pale, his frame undernourished, and his gray cotton garments, shrunken by many washings, clung to his bones. Nevertheless there was a certain toughness in his square face, and under his sand-colored hair his eyes were a bright blue.
“Of course it is my business,” William retorted. He felt his own contrast. His English tweed suit had been made by an excellent Chinese tailor, and his shoes were polished every night by the house coolie — his boots, as he had learned to call them at school. To his horror, he saw that the other boy wore Chinese cloth shoes, ragged at the toes.
“It is degrading for a foreign chap to fight a Chinese,” he said severely. “It makes them look down on all of us. You have no right to behave in such a way as to bring discredit on us.”
The pale boy blinked rapidly and clenched his fists. “I’ll fight anybody I like!” His voice was high and ringing.
“Then I’ll have you reported to the Consul,” William declared. He allowed his somewhat cold eyes to travel slowly up and down the boy’s slight figure. “Who are you, anyway? I’ve never seen you before.”
“I’m Clem Miller.”
A faint movement of William’s lips was not a smile. “You mean the Faith Mission Miller?”
“Yes.” The bright blue eyes dared William’s scorn.
“In that case—” William shrugged his handsome shoulders. He turned as though to go and then paused. “Still, as an American, you might think of the honor of your country.”
“My father says the world is our country.”
To William Lane, the son of an Episcopal missionary, an aristocrat of the church, nothing could have been more sickening than this remark. He wheeled upon the pale boy. “As if it could be! You’re American no matter what you do, worse luck for the rest of us! What are you fighting this Chinese boy for?”
“He said my father was a beggar.”
“So he is, in a way,” William said.
“He is not!” Clem retorted. He clenched his fists again and began to whirl them toward William’s face.
William took one step backward. “Don’t be a fool, you! You know as well as I do that your father’s got no proper mission board behind him, no salary or anything.”
“We’ve got God!” Clem said in a loud clear voice.
William sneered. “You call it God? My mother says it’s begging. She says whenever your food’s gone your father comes around and tells us so. He tells everybody you have nothing to eat, but the Lord will provide. Actually who does provide? Well, my mother, for instance! We can’t see Americans starve. It would make us lose face before the Chinese.”
He felt a small strong fist just under his chin, and against all his sense of what was decent for a gentleman, he kicked out with his right foot. His shoe was of excellent leather, sharp at the edge of the sole, and it caught Clem under the knee cap with such pain that he dropped into the thick dust. William did not stop to see what happened next. He turned and strode through the waiting crowd again and took his seat in the riksha.
“Go on,” he said to Lao Li.
Behind his back the crowd murmured. Hands were put out to lift up the fallen boy, and the Chinese lad forgot the quarrel.
“That big American boy ought to die,” he declared. “You are the same kind of people, both from outside the seas. You should be brothers.”
Clem did not reply. After a few seconds of intense pain he limped away.
“Foreigners have bad tempers,” the crowd murmured. “They are very fierce. You see how they are, even with each other.”
A few turned upon the Chinese boy with advice. “You son of Han, be careful next time. Naturally a human being does not like to hear his father called a beggar, even though he is one.”
“We were really talking about the foreign god,” the boy explained. “His father asked my father for one of our loaves. He said they had no bread and my father being a baker, he said that the foreign god had told him to come to our house. My father gave him three loaves and the foreigner said his god always provided. But I said, ‘How is it he does not provide from among your own people?’ This foreign boy was with his father and he heard me say these words, and he told me to follow him, and when we were alone he began to hit me, as you saw.”
To this the crowd listened with interest and there was a division of opinion. Some thought the boy had spoken well enough and others said that silence was better than any speech where foreigners were concerned.
“Nevertheless,” said one man, who by his long robe was a scholar, “it is strange that the Jesus people are all rich except this one family who live among our poor.”
“Who can understand foreigners? There are too many of them here,” a butcher said. He carried yards of pig entrails looped over his bare arm, and they had begun to stink faintly in the sun and reminded him that he should be on his way. Slowly the crowd parted, and soon there were only the footsteps in the dust to tell of the scuffle.