The stream was out of sight of the house, hidden by a spinney of young sycamore trees, the children of a mighty old sycamore whose roots drove through the hillside to the sources of water. Behind this wall of tender green, Clem stripped himself and plunged into the water, this morning almost winter cold. Above him the hills rose gently, the woods green but flecked with the occasional gold of autumn. The sky was beautiful, a softer blue than Chinese skies and more often various with white and moving clouds.
Yet where, Clem often asked himself, were the people upon this land, and how could it be that a house full of children at the mercy of a man and woman, ignorant and brutish, remained unknown and unsought? In China it would not have been possible for an old man’s house to have been unvisited, or to have been sold after his death in so summary a fashion. He had asked Pop Berger once who had sold the house and had been told that it went for unpaid taxes. But why were the taxes not paid by some kinsman? How had it come to pass that his old grandfather had been so solitary, even though his son had gone so far? And why, and why, and this was the supreme question, never to be answered, had his father left his home and the aging man to go across the sea to a country he had never seen, where the people spoke a tongue strange to him, and there try to tell of a god unwanted and unknown? None of these questions could be answered. What Pop had said was true. There was no one who knew of his existence.
Clem stepped out of the small cold pool and dried himself by stripping the water from his body with his hands and then by waving his arms and jumping up and down. In spite of poor food he was healthy and his blood rushed to his skin with heat and soon he put on his clothes and climbed the hill to the house. Pop Berger was already out at the barn, and Clem went in; without greeting he took a small stool and a pail and began to milk a brindled cow.
At first, accustomed by the Chinese to greeting anyone he met, he had tried to greet the man and the woman and the children when he first saw them in the morning. Then he perceived that this only surprised them and that it roused their contempt because they thought he was acting with some sort of pretense. He learned to keep his peace and to proceed in silence to work for food.
This morning there was none of the usual dawdling and shouting. Pop Berger harnessed the wagon early and began piling into it the few bags of grain he wanted to sell, and some baskets of apples. He left all the milking to Clem, and stamped away into the kitchen to eat and to dress himself. There the woman, too, made haste, eating and dressing, and within the hour the pair were ready to be gone, leaving the dishes and the house to the two girls.
“You, Clem!” Pop Berger shouted from the wagon seat. “You can git the manure cleaned out today. Don’t forget the chickens. Tim can do whatever you tell him. I told him a’ready to lissen to what you sayed.”
“And I’ve left the food you’re to eat in the pantry, and that’s all anybody is to have. Don’t open no jars or nothin’!” Mom shouted.
Clem had come out of the barn and he nodded, standing very straight, his arms folded as he watched them drive off. He wondered that he did not hate them and yet he did not. They were what they were through no fault of their own, their ignorance was bestial but innocent and their cruelty was the fruit of ignorance. He had seen degenerate cruelty sometimes in the streets of Peking. There the people knew, there they had been taught what humanity was, and when they violated what they knew, the evil was immense. But these two, this man and this woman, had never been taught anything. They functioned as crudely as animals. Where had they come from, he often wondered, and were the others all like them? There were no neighbors near, and he had no one with whom to compare them.
He finished milking the cows and carried the milk into the springhouse, where it would be cool. Then he went into the kitchen to find food. There, as usual when the man and woman were gone, nothing was being done. The bare table was littered with dirty dishes. Mamie and Jen sat beside it, silent and motionless in dreadful weariness. Tim slumped in Pop Berger’s ragged easy chair. Bump was still eating, walking softly about the table, picking crumbs.
“Got breakfast for me, Mamie?” Clem asked.
She nodded toward the stove and he opened the oven door, took out a bowl of hominy, and sat down at the end of the table.
He looked at them, one and the other. Tim’s lack luster eyes, agate brown, held less expression than a dog’s and his mouth, always open, showed a strange big tongue bulging against his teeth. His body, long and thin, a collection of ill-assorted bones, folded itself into ungainly shapes. Mamie was small, a colorless creature not to be remembered for anything. Jen might die. The springs of life were already dead in her. She did not grow.
“Come here,” he said to Bump. “I don’t want all this. Finish it, if you like.”
He held out his bowl and Bump snatched it, went behind the stove on the woodpile, and sat down in his hiding place. Often the woman lifted the poker and drove him out of it, but today he could enjoy it.
“Listen to me, all of you,” Clem said, leaning on the table.
They turned their faces toward him.
“How would you like to go away from here?” He spoke clearly and definitely, for he had learned that only so did they heed him. Accustomed to the loud voices of the man and woman they seemed to hear nothing else.
“Where?” Tim asked after a pause.
“I don’t know — run away, find something better.”
“Where would we sleep?” Mamie asked.
“We’d take a blanket apiece, sleep by a haystack somewhere until we got ourselves a house, or some rooms.”
“What would we eat?” she asked again.
“I’d work and get money and buy something. Tim could work, too. Maybe you could find a job helping in a house.”
He had expected some sort of excitement, even a little joy, but there was neither. They continued to stare at him, their eyes still dull. Jen said nothing, as though she had not heard. She seemed half asleep, or perhaps even ill.
“Jen, are you sick?” Clem asked.
She lifted her large, pale blue eyes to his face, looking not quite at his eyes, but perhaps at his mouth. She shook her head. “Awful tired,” she whispered.
“Too tired to come with us — out into the sunshine, Jen? We could stop and rest after we had got a few miles away.”
She shook her head again.
“If Jen don’t go, I won’t neither,” Mamie said.
“I ain’t goin’,” Tim said.
Clem started at them. “But you don’t like it here,” he urged. “They’re mean to you. You don’t get enough to eat.”
“We’re only Aid children,” Tim said. “If we went somewheres else it would be just like it is here.”
“You wouldn’t be Aid children,” Clem declared. “I’d fix things.”
“We’ll always be Aid children,” Tim repeated. “Once you’re Aid you can’t do nothin’ about it.”
Clem was suddenly angry. “Then I’ll leave you here. I’ve made up my mind to go and go I shall. You can tell them when they get home tonight. Say I’ve gone and I’m not coming back ever. They needn’t look for me.”
They stared at him, Jen’s eyes spilling with tears. “Where you goin’?” Tim asked in a weak voice.
“Back where I came from,” Clem said recklessly. He longed unutterably to get back somehow to Mr. Fong’s house in the familiar streets of Peking, which he had not known he loved. That was impossible, but to leave this house was possible. For the moment anger quenched his conscience. He had given them their chance and they would not take it. He had said he would take the burden of them on his own back, though he was no kin of theirs, and they had refused him even this hard way to his own freedom. Now he would think only of himself.