As long as she lived she would not forgive William because he was angry when he found that she had married Clem. She had written to Ruth, after all, and at first Ruth had not dared to tell William the whole truth. She had let William think the marriage had not yet taken place and he tried to stop it, thinking it still only an engagement. He had actually cabled to Peking to his mother. When she opened the cable from her mother forbidding her too late to marry Clem, she had known it was William’s doing.
“That ignorant fellow!” William had called Clem, and Ruth had told her.
Even Ruth was sorry. “I wish you’d told us, Henrietta. It wasn’t kind. He isn’t suitable for you. You won’t be able to bring him to William’s house.”
“I shall never want to go to William’s house.” That was what she had answered. She would never be afraid of William, however many newspapers he had. Clem was so innocent, so good. He did not like her to say anything against William.
“He’s your brother, hon — it would be nice if you could be friends.” That was all Clem said.
When she told him how William felt about their marriage, Clem only looked solemn. “He don’t understand, hon. People are apt to make mistakes when they don’t understand.” She could not persuade him to anger.
She had written to her parents herself, a vehement letter declaring her independence and Clem’s goodness, and her father had replied, mildly astonished at the fuss. “I don’t see why you should not marry Clem Miller. I should be sorry to see you in the circumstances of his father, but nowadays nobody lives by faith alone.”
Her mother had been surprisingly amiable, sending as a wedding present a tablecloth of grass linen embroidered by the Chinese convent nuns. Henrietta guessed shrewdly that her mother did not really care whom she married.
As for Clem, he wistfully admired William’s success.
“If William could get interested in my food idea, now, how we could go! He could set people thinking and then things would begin to happen.”
“He doesn’t want them to think,” Henrietta said quickly.
“Oh now, now!” Clem said.
The clock struck six and up and down the street the supper bells rang. She rose to look at the roast and potatoes in the oven and to cut bread and set out milk. Clem would be home soon and he would want to eat and get back to the store. She moved slowly, with a heavy grace of which she was unconscious. Her immobile face, grave under the braids of her dark hair, seldom changed its expression. Now that she was with Clem her eyes were finer than ever, large, and deep, set under her clear brows; yet at times they held a look of inner bewilderment as though she were uncertain of something, herself perhaps, or perhaps the world. It was no small bewilderment thus revealed but one as vague and large as her mind, as though she did not know what to think of human existence.
The door in the narrow hall opened sharply and then shut, and the atmosphere of the house changed. Clem had come in.
“Hon, you there?” It was his greeting although he knew she was always there.
“I’m here,” she replied. Her voice was big and deep. He came to the kitchen, his light step quick moving. Their eyes met, she standing by the stove with a pot holder in her hand, and he crossing to the sink to wash. He washed as he did everything, with nervous speed and thoroughness, and he dried his face and hair and hands on a brown huck towel that hung on the wall. Then he came to her and kissed her cheek. He was not quite as tall as she was.
“Food ready?”
“I am just dishing up.”
He never spoke of a meal but always of food. He sat down to the roast she set before him and began to carve it neatly and with the same speed with which he did all else. Two slices cut thin he arranged on a plate for her, put a browned potato beside them, and handed the plate to her. Then he cut his own slice, smaller and even thinner.
“Can’t you eat a little more, Clem?” Henrietta asked.
“Don’t dare tonight, hon. I have a man waiting for me over there.”
“You didn’t want to bring him home?”
“No. I was afraid we’d talk business all through our food and my stomach would turn on me again. I want a little peace, just with you.”
She sat in silence, helping him to raw tomatoes and then to lima beans. Then she helped herself. Neither spoke while they ate. She was used to this and liked it because she knew that in her silence he found rest. They were in communion, sitting here alone at their table. When he was rested he would begin to talk. He ate too fast but she did not remind him of it. She knew him better than she knew herself. He was made of taut wire and quicksilver and electricity. Whatever he did she must not lay one featherweight of reproach upon him. Sometimes she tortured herself with the fear that he would die young, worn out before his time by the enormous scheme he had undertaken, out she knew that she could not prevent anything. He must go his own way because for him there was no other, and she must follow.
In this country which was her own, she still continued to feel a stranger and her only security was Clem. Everything else here was different from Peking and her childhood and she would not have known how to live without him. When sometimes in the night she tried to tell him this he listened until she had finished. Then he always said the same thing, “Folks are the same anywhere, you’ll find, hon.”
But they were not. Nobody in America was like the Chinese she had known in Peking. She could not talk to anybody in New Point about — well, life! They talked here about things and she cared nothing about things. “All under Heaven …” that was the way old Mrs. Huang used to begin conversation when she went over to the Huang hutung.
She looked at Clem and smiled. “Do you remember how the Chinese loved to begin by saying, ‘All under Heaven’?”
“And go on to talk about everything under heaven!”
“Yes — you remember, too.”
“I wish I didn’t have to hurry, hon, but I do.”
“I know, I don’t know why I thought of that.”
They were silent again while he cleaned his plate and she pondered the ways of men and the things for which they sacrificed themselves. William, sitting in his splendid offices in New York, was a slave to a scheme as much as Clem was, and yet how differently and with what opposite purpose! She could not have devoted herself to Clem had he wanted to be rich for power. He did not think of money except as something to further his purpose, a purpose so enormous that she would have been afraid to tell anyone what it was, lest they think him mad. But she knew he was not mad.
Clem put down his knife and fork. “Well, what’s for dessert?”
“Stewed apples. I would have made a pie but you said last time—”
“Pie won’t leave me alone after I’ve eaten it. I can’t be bothered with something rarin’ in my stomach when I’ve got work to do.”
She rose, changed the plates, and brought the fruit. He ate it in a few bites, got up and threw himself in a deep rocking chair, and closed his eyes. For ten minutes he would sleep.
She sat motionless, not moving to clear the table or take up her sewing. She had learned to sit thus that his sleep might not be disturbed by any sound. His hearing was so sharp that the slightest movement or whisper could wake him. But she did not mind sitting and watching him while he slept. They were so close, so nearly one, that his sleep seemed to rest her, too. Only her mind wandered, vaguely awake.
He opened his eyes as suddenly as he had closed them, and getting up he came back to his seat at the table facing her.
“Hon, I feel I’m wasting you.”
She could not answer this, not knowing what he meant.
“Here I have married me a fine wife, college educated, and all she does is to cook my meals and darn my socks!”