“Mrs. Lodge, perhaps you’d like to know. As I was coming home today—”
He told the story well and was sensible enough to be modest and merciful toward the ill-dressed boy whom he had publicly reproved. When he had finished he was rewarded.
“I am glad you helped him, William,” Mrs. Lodge said.
“That was Christian of you — and brotherly. ‘Unto the least of these,’ our dear Lord tells us—”
“Thank you, Mrs. Lodge,” William said.
Clem Miller had walked away from the crowd as quickly as he could. He would have liked to run, but his clumsy cloth shoes and his sore knee made this impossible. What he remembered about William Lane were his shoes, those strong and well-fitting shapes of brown leather, protecting the tenderness of soles and the ends of toes. A good kick from such a shoe would leave its proper mark.
“Yet it will never be I who have American shoes,” he muttered.
His articulate thoughts were always in Chinese, not the fluid tonal Chinese of Peking, but the scavenger Chinese, the guttural coolie vernacular of treaty ports where boat people lived. His first home had been on a boat, for his father, anxious to follow in the exact footsteps of Jesus, had preached from the waters of the dirty Whangpoo in Shanghai to those who gathered upon the shores to listen. There had been more staring than listening, and respectable Christians had come by night to reproach his parents for bringing shame upon them by such beggarly behavior.
They still lived like beggars. Clem, scuffling through the Peking dust, could not deny the accusation which William had made. He had looked more than once through the gate of the compound in which William lived, and by the standards of those who made their homes in big houses of gray brick, roofed with palace tiles of blue and green, the four rooms in a Chinese alley, where he lived with his parents and his sisters, were beggarly. His mother, uncomplaining and of a clinging faith, had nevertheless refused to live on the boat any more after the baby Arthur had fallen overboard into the river and been drowned.
There had been long argument over it between his parents. “Mary, it will look as though you couldn’t trust God no more, because of trial,” Paul Miller had told his weeping wife.
She had tried to stop her sobs with a bit of ragged handkerchief at her lips. “I do trust. It’s only I can’t look at the water now.”
Arthur’s little body had not been returned. They had searched the banks day after day, but the river had clutched the child deep in its tangled currents. So after weeks they had given up this search and had come north to Peking. Paul Miller had taken to God the matter of the dollars necessary for third-class train fare, and then he had gone to the other Shanghai missionaries to bid them farewell, as brothers in Christ. They had responded with sudden generosity by collecting a purse for him, and the missionary women had met together and packed a box of clothing for Mrs. Miller and the children.
“See how the Lord provides when we trust him!” Thus his father had cried out, his mild blue eyes wet with grateful tears.
“Clem, your father is right,” his mother said, “we’ve always been provided for, though sometimes God tests our faith.”
Clem had not answered. At this period of his life he was in a profound confusion he dared not face, even alone. The world was divided into the rich who had food and the poor who had not, and though he had been told often of the camel’s eye through which the rich would find it hard to enter heaven, yet God seemed indulgent to them and strangely careless of the poor. The poor Chinese, for example, the starving ones, God who saw all things must also see them, but if so He kept silent.
Pondering upon the silence of God, Clem himself grew increasingly silent. There were times when he longed to leave his family and strike out alone across the golden plains, to make for the coast, to find a ship and get a job that would see him across the Pacific to the fabulous land where his parents had been born. Once there he would go straight across on foot to his grandfather’s farm in Pennsylvania.
Yet he could not leave his pitiful family, though now past his fifteenth birthday, and he troubled himself much about his future. Such thoughts he kept to himself, knowing that were he to speak of them, his parents, incorrigible in their faith, would only bid him put his trust in God. That was well enough, but who was going to teach him Latin and mathematics and English grammar? He had bought a few old English textbooks in a Chinese secondhand book shop, paying for them by teaching English to the bookseller’s ten-year-old son. These books he studied alone, but he felt sorely the need of a teacher. And he could not beg. Though he ate the food his parents somehow got, he could not ask of the prosperous missionaries anything for himself. Today, on the way home from Mr. Fong’s bookshop, he had seen his father at the baker’s, and then had come the fight, after his father had gone on.
Otherwise the day had been fine, though the evening air was now laced with a cold wind from the northwest. He loved the city at this hour. The people were kind enough to him, even though he had fought that one impudent boy. He was sorry for it now. From how the boy looked at it, he had been right. The Miller family, though they trusted in God, were beggars.
He entered the door of his home with so bitter a look upon his face that his mother, setting the square Chinese table with bowls and chopsticks for supper, stopped to look at him. Pottery bowls and bamboo chopsticks were cheaper than plates and knives and forks.
“What’s wrong with you, son?” Her voice was childishly sweet and her face was still round and youthful. Her hair, once of the softest red gold, was now a sandy gray. In spite of his adolescent doubts of her he loved her, so soft was she, so tender to him and to them all.
For the moment, nevertheless, he hardened his heart and blurted his thoughts. “Mama, somehow I’m beginning to see it, we’re really beggars.”
She leaned on the table upon her outspread hands. “Why, Clem!”
He went on unwillingly, hardening himself still more. “A Chinese boy called us beggars, and I lit into him. Now don’t look at me like that, Mama. William Lane came by at that moment, and he — he helped me to stop. But he thought the boy was right.”
“I tremble for you, darling. If we lose our faith, we have nothing left.”
“I want more faith, Mama.” His brain, honest yet agile, was seeking proof at last.
“I don’t see how Papa could show more faith, Clem. He never wavered, even when we lost little Artie. He sustained me.”
Her voice broke, and her full small mouth quivered. The tears, always waiting like her smile, ran from her golden brown eyes.
“He could have more faith,” Clem said.
“But how, dear?”
“If he wouldn’t go and tell people when the bread is gone — at least if he wouldn’t tell the missionaries.”
He lifted his eyes to hers, and to his amazement he saw clear terror. Her round cheeks, always pale, turned greenish. She did not deceive him, and for this his love clung to her always. She held out her hands in a coaxing gesture, and when he did not move, she came to him and knelt beside the bamboo stool upon which he sat, her face level with his.
“Son, dear, what you’re saying I’ve said, too, in my own heart, often.”
“Then why don’t you tell Papa?” he demanded. He could not understand why it was that though he loved her so much he no longer wished to touch her or be touched by her. He dreaded a caress.