“Isn’t that what wives are supposed to do?”
“Not mine!”
He looked at her fondly and she flushed. She had learned now that she would never hear the words of love that women crave from men. Clem did not know them. She doubted if he had ever read a book wherein they were contained. But she did not miss them for she had never had them, either. She knew very well that Clem was the only person who had ever loved her, and of his love she was sure, not by words but by his very presence whenever he came near. The transparency of his being was such that love shone through him like light. It shone upon her now as he sat looking at her, half smiling. She saw memory in his eyes.
“Remember that brown Chinese bread we used to have in Peking, hon? The kind they baked on the inside of the charcoal ovens, slapped against the side, and sprinkled with sesame seeds?”
“Yes, I remember … the flat ones. …”
“Yes.”
“What about it, Clem?”
“I don’t know. I get a hankering sometimes to taste it again. What say we go back, hon?”
“To China, Clem?”
“Just for a look around. I might forget what used to be if I saw what Peking is like now.”
He looked white and tired and her heart felt faint. Why did she always have that premonition, undefined, unreasonable, that she was stronger than he, more indestructible, more lasting? No flame like his burned within her, and she was not consumed.
“It would be good to go back, Clem.”
“Think so, hon? Well, we’ll see.”
He got up with his usual alertness and the premonition was gone. There was no reason to think — anything! But when he was gone she sat thinking and idle. Yes, she remembered the loaves of sesame bread hot from the oven of the old one-eyed vender. She had often slipped through the unguarded back gate and creeping beside the wall of the mission compound, she had waited, hidden by a clump of dwarf bamboo at the end of the wall. She could hear even now the vender’s high call as he came down the street, always at the same hour, that hungry midmorning hour on Saturday when she and Ruth were supposed to be doing their lessons for Monday. He always looked behind the bamboos for her and grinned when he saw her, his jaws altogether toothless.
“Hot ones,” she always said.
“Do I not know?” he retorted, and reaching down into the little earthen oven he peeled the bread cakes, two of them, from the sides. His hands were always filthy. Flour and dough blackened by smoke clung in their cracks and his nails were black claws, but she would not think of that in her hunger for the bread. She paid him two pennies and ran back into the compound, the cakes under her jumper. Ruth would not eat them because his hands were dirty and so she ate them herself, the flavor delicious, the sesame seeds nutlike in their delicacy. Clem had eaten that bread, too, but William never had. Like Ruth, William would have thought of the man’s dirty hands, but she and Clem thought of the bread, hot from the coals. It was good bread.
She rose and began to clear the table. What Clem was doing was as simple as what the old vender did. Two cakes of bread, for a penny apiece; the old vender made it and went about selling it. If it was good enough people bought it, that was all. Not only bread, either! If anything was good enough and cheap enough, people wanted it. That was all. What Clem was doing was simple and tremendous, so simple that people did not think he was doing anything, and so tremendous they would not have believed it had they known. Only when they saw the finished thing, the bread, the meat, the food, standing there ready to be bought, cheap and good, would they believe. And believing they still would not understand.
Sometimes at night Clem wanted to read the Bible. They did not go to church and neither of them said their prayers unless they felt like it. But sometimes he wanted to read aloud to her. The night before, when they were in bed, he had lighted the lamp and taken up the small old Bible he kept on the shelf under the bedside table. He turned to the place where Jesus had taken the loaves and fishes and had fed everybody that was hungry, and he read it slowly, almost as if to himself, while she listened. When he had read of the baskets of crumbs that were filled he closed the book and lay back on the pillow, his hands behind his head, his eyes fixed on the ceiling.
“That’s what I aim to do,” he had said. “In my own way, of course. But I like to read once in a while of how somebody else did it. We have the same idea — feed the hungry. I’ve got to find some way of making food cheaper, hon. I wish I could make it free. There ought to be a way for a starving man to get food without paying for it. There must be a way.”
When the table was cleared, the dishes washed, she sat down again to her sewing. The afternoon sun shone down on the quiet street. It was as peaceful and permanent a scene as a woman could look upon, and millions of women looked out upon just such quiet streets in small towns all over America. They would expect to spend their lives there, rearing their children, caring for their grandchildren. But Henrietta, lifting her eyes, knew that for her the street was only a moment’s scene. Clem wanted her to go with him, and there was no end to a road once he had set his feet upon it.
Clem was master now in the store. He had bought out Mr. Janison after he and Henrietta were married, and Bump, too, was a full partner. Clem was immensely proud of Bump and, since he was a college graduate, Clem treated him with something like reverence. It was a miracle to Clem to see that the lost child had become a serious, spectacled young man, honest and painfully hard working — though unfortunately without a sense of humor. Bump listened to everything Clem said, and to his nonsense as well as to his commands, to his dreams as well as to his calculations, he gave the same intense attention. He gave his advice when Clem asked for it, which was often, and tried not to be hurt when Clem did not take it. Clem was an individual of deepest dye, and in his way a selfishly unselfish man. He paid no heed whatever to any schemes for the benefit of mankind except his own. He was convinced more than ever that any government would fail unless people were first given a steady diet of full meals, but given this diet almost any government would do, and he preached this as a gospel.
With Bump at his side, always with a pad and pencil, Clem toured the country in one of the earliest of the Ford cars. In villages and out-of-the-way places, wherever crops rotted because the railroads could not serve the farmers, he found ways of conveying the foods by hack, by wagon, and as time went on by truck to railways or to markets. His markets he established anywhere there were people and food near enough to be brought together. Travelers came upon huge, hideously cheap structures in the midst of the tents of migrant workers as well as in the slums of great cities. Some of the structures were permanent, some were immense corrugated tin shacks, made to be taken away when people moved on.
In spite of himself, Clem was beginning to make money. He looked at Bump with a lifted right brow one day and threw half a dozen checks at him across the big pine table in the back room of the store, where he made his head office.
“More stuff for the bank, Bump. I’ll have to begin thinking of ways to spend it. All I need ahead is enough to start the next market, but it keeps rolling in. Guess I’ll have to begin on the rest of the world.”
In this instant an old smoldering homesickness sprang into flame. With money piling up he could go to China at last. He had no wish to stay there. He wanted merely to go back to walk again the dusty streets, to enter again Mr. Fong’s house, and to see for himself the graves of his parents and sisters. For Yusan, reviving his English, had written to him long ago the Mr. Fong had gone secretly for the dead bodies and had buried them outside the city in his own family cemetery upon one of the western hills. Upon two heavy Chinese coffins, in each of which was a child with a parent, Mr. Fong had sealed the lids, had lied to the guards at the city gate, and pretended that the dead were his brother and his wife, stricken together of a contagious fever, he had put the wounded bodies into the earth. Could Clem see for himself not only the graves of his dead, but also the faces of the living people friendly again and cheerful as he remembered them, then some secret load of which he never allowed himself to think might roll away. He would be homesick no more for any other country. But he could not go without Henrietta. He could hop into his Ford, rebuilt to his order so that it would survive equally well the hill roads in West Virginia and the sands in Nebraska, and he could leave her for weeks, so long as they were on the same soil. But he could not contemplate the ocean between them.