Reading the faintly stilted lines of the letter, for anything Dr. Lane wrote fell inevitably into the shape of a sermon, Clem had felt all the old realities. Yusan at sixteen was betrothed to a girl in the mission school, though the wedding was still far off. He had grown into a sober young man, over whose soul the missionary yearned. Yet Yusan refused to be Christian. Real was the memory of Yusan, the stubborn boy, growing into a young man. Real were the hours Clem had spent with him in Mr. Fong’s bare house. Real was the memory of the Peking streets, the wind-driven snows that covered the tiled roofs of house and palace in winter. Real were the fabulous summer skies. Clem remembered every detail of his childhood, the pleasure of owning sometimes three small cash with which he bought a triangular package of peanuts wrapped in handmade brown paper thick and soft like blotting paper. Real, too, was the joy of a hot sweet potato on a cold morning, bought from a vender’s little earthen oven, and real the pleasure of a crimson-hearted watermelon split upon a July day. Real were the caravans of camels padding through the dust, led by a man from Mongolia who knitted a garment as he walked, pulling from the camels the long strands of wool which they shed when the winter was ended. Real were the little apes on chains and the dancing bears, the traveling actors and the magicians and all that had made the city streets a pleasure for a wandering foreign child.
Out of the need to bring nearer to him that reality of childhood in the remote land which was still his own but which he could not claim and which did not claim him, Clem had upon an impulse written to William, whom he remembered only as he had looked that day when a Chinese lad had called his father a beggar because he trusted God for bread.
The letter Mr. Janison now brought him was, he supposed, from William. He waited, however, until it was time for his midday meal, which he made by taking a roll of stale bread and cutting off a slice of cheese and eating in the storeroom. Mr. Janison went home to noonday dinner and Bump was working on a farm, now that school was over. Clem had been firm about Bump’s going to school. He had given up the hope that some day he himself would go to a school somewhere, though not to learn ordinary things like geography and arithmetic, which he could get for himself out of books in his room at night. He wanted to learn large important matters, such as how to feed millions of people. He was obsessed with the business of food, although his own appetite was frugal. A thin, middle-sized boy, he had grown into the same kind of young man. His frame had taken on bony squareness of shoulder, leanness at the hips, without any flesh. Even the square angles of his face remained fleshless and his cheeks were hollow and his blue eyes deep set.
He had discarded the faith of his father, and said no prayers except those he spoke to his own soul. There were, he believed, only a few essentials to a good life, but they were essential to all people, and food he put first, cheap, nourishing food. Bump, for example, could not be filled. He sat sometimes watching Bump eat in the small room they lived in together. He always got a good meal for Bump at night, a stew or a hunk of boiled beef and cabbage and plenty of bread and butter. His own slender appetite soon satisfied, he enjoyed Bump’s bottomless hunger. He had provided the food and this was the pleasure he felt. Nobody had given them anything. He had worked and bought the food. He bought cheap food for it was good enough. He had no desire for fancy eatables and was stern with Bump about cake and pie. If everybody could eat his fill of good plain food, he would tell Bump, then there wouldn’t be any more trouble in the world.
He was bringing up Bump himself and by himself, sometimes ruthlessly but on the whole kindly, with the deep paternal instinct with which indeed he viewed the world, though he did not know it. His cure for a drunk coming into the store to beg on a winter’s night for a nickel to buy “a cup of coffee,” was to take a stale loaf and slice off two thick pieces and thrust a wedge of cheese between them. “Eat that and you won’t want to get drunk for a while,” he said with young authority.
In the back room, the store empty during the town’s midday meal, he now sat down on a crate and took the letter from his pocket. Without wasting time on curiosity, he tore the envelope open and was amazed at the first words. He had never had a letter from a girl, nor ever written to one. He had thought little of any girl, being busy at earning his living and rearing Bump. Now a girl had written to him.
He read the letter carefully and considered it a sensible one and read it again. She remembered Peking, too, did she? He felt excited, not because she was a girl but because she, like him, had been born in another world which nobody here knew anything about. He had learned now to live in America, but there would always be the world for him as well, and other people. He could not talk about it to Americans. They did not want to know about it. The people here were satisfied not to know about anything except what happened in their own streets.
He sat musing until he heard the tinkle of the bell that announced a customer, and then he went back into the grocery store. He would answer the letter, maybe on Sunday when he had sent Bump off to Sunday School.
Thus two weeks later, on a Thursday morning, Henrietta received the letter for which she had waited and for which she had gone herself every morning to open the door for the postman. The moment she saw it she took it and thrust it into the bosom of her apron. That day she was cleaning the attic for her grandmother, a musty place, hot under the roof and filled with dead belongings. There she returned to read Clem’s letter.
Dear Henrietta,
It was a surprise of course but I had rather maybe have a letter from you than from William. I am older than you but I know I cannot go to college on account of earning my living. I am an orphan and I have an orphan also to support. I do not even know his whole name, Bump he is called but I am sure it is not his name. He says when he was little he was thought bumptious and so people began to call him that. He cannot remember any family and so was an Aid child. I don’t know why I tell you about him. Some day I will tell you how I got him.
I am a poor letter writer not having much time but I would like you to know that I do remember Peking. It would be nice to talk with you about it as nobody here knows anything about it over there. Who knows, sometime maybe I could come to see you though not until I get Bump educated. I have a great many ideas of what I want to do when that job is done when I can think of myself and my own life.
I would enjoy hearing from you again. Yours sincerely,
Clem Miller.
Thus began the passage of letters between a small town in Ohio and a suburb of New York. Without seeing each other for two more years, boy and girl wove between them a common web of dreams. So profound was their need to dream that neither spent the time to tell the other the bare facts of their lives; Henrietta that she had graduated from the big bare public high school almost friendless because the other girls thought her too proud to join their chatter of boys and dances, and Clem that he was grinding out his youth behind a counter in a country store. These things neither considered important They were both weaving together the fabric of the past to make the fabric of the future. It was years before Henrietta learned all the simple facts of Clem’s life.
These were the facts. He had turned back that day to see Bump padding through the dust after him. That night they had slept in a barn, taking care not to rouse the farmer and his family, and from it they had set forth again in the early morning.