Mr. Fong inclined his head. He was so much older than Clem that he knew he could say anything to him. Meanwhile nothing Clem said impressed him. Yusan listened with deference, since in this case he was the younger man, but he had no wish to take the part which Clem wanted to put upon him.
“I shall certainly see that my own family is fed, and such others as are dependent upon us. It would be foolish to go further.” This was Yusan’s conclusion. He went about these days from shop to house in perpetual readiness to hear a small loud cry from the three rooms which were his home under this roof, and he was impervious, in his generation, to the cries of others.
Clem, walking with Henrietta one afternoon upon the city wall, a vantage which gave them a wide view over the roofs of houses and the green trees of the courtyards, paused to gaze down into the vast square of the city. The palace roofs were brilliant under the sun of autumn and the temple roofs were royal blue. “I guess Yusan doesn’t get my ideas,” he said sadly enough to arrest Henrietta’s wandering attention.
“Oh well,” she replied for comfort, “there aren’t any very hungry people around. Maybe that’s why. Even the beggars are fat.”
She loved Clem with the entire force of her nature but she had never shared his sense of mission. For that, too, she must perhaps thank this city where she had spent her childhood and where she had learned early that women were of little value. It was a lesson to be learned soon, for it needed to be lifelong. Nothing in America had taught her more or differently. She was useful to Clem, and as long as he needed her, her life had meaning.
“I wish I could see Sun Yatsen,” Clem said suddenly. “I believe he’d understand what I’m talking about.”
“Who knows where he is?” Henrietta asked.
Clem paused for thought. “I believe Yusan knows.”
“Then ask him,” Henrietta suggested.
Instead Clem decided to ask Mr. Fong. He did not believe that there were secrets between this father and son.
Mr. Fong received the question with calm.
“The time is not ripe for Sun Yatsen’s return,” he said.
“Where is he, then?” Clem demanded.
“Perhaps in Europe, perhaps in Malaya,” Mr. Fong said. “He is gathering his powers.”
“At least he is not in China?”
“Certainly he is not in China,” Mr. Fong said firmly.
Clem said no more. The atmosphere in Peking was one of waiting, neither anxious nor tense. Empire had gone, in all but name, and the people did not know what came next. But they were at peace. They had never been dependent upon rulers and governments. Within themselves they had the knowledge of self-discipline. Fathers commanded sons, and sons did not rebel. All was in order, and would remain in order so long as the relationship held between the generations. Meanwhile the people lived and enjoyed their life.
Clem’s early mood of unusual relaxation changed to restlessness. The peace of the Fong household began to weigh on him. The grandchild was born, fortunately a son, and Yusan was immediately absorbed in fatherhood. Old Mr. Fong relapsed into being a contented grandfather. Although Clem and his wife were welcome to stay the rest of their lives, they were becoming merely members of the family.
The end of the visit came on the day when Mr. Fong and Yusan hired four rikshas and took Clem and Henrietta outside the city walls to the graves upon the hills. The visit had been many times postponed, Mr. Fong saying that Clem must not be disturbed by sorrow until his digestion was sound. Suddenly he had decided upon the day, and Yusan had so told Clem on the night before.
“Elder Brother, my father has prepared the visit to your family tombs. Tomorrow, if you are willing?”
“I am ready,” Clem said.
So they had set out, and an hour’s ride had brought them before two tall, peaked graves. Clem stood with bowed head while Mr. Fong and Yusan thrust sticks of incense into the ground and lit them and Henrietta picked wild flowers and laid them upon the weedy sod. There was no other prayer. Clem took Henrietta’s hand and they stood together for a few minutes, he remembering with sad gravity what was long gone, and she comforting him.
When the moments were over they got into their rikshas again, and when Clem got back he went aside with Mr. Fong and tried to tell him his gratitude.
“You have kept the graves of my parents as though they were your own family,” Clem said.
“Are not all under Heaven one family?” Mr. Fong replied.
Nevertheless he perceived thereafter Clem’s restlessness. One day he invited Clem to come into his private office, a small square room behind the shop, with enclosed shelves upon which were the old account books of five hundred years of Fong shopkeepers.
Mr. Fong closed the door carefully and motioned Clem to a seat. Then he opened a drawer of his desk and took out a slip of paper upon which an address was brushed in Chinese characters.
“Go to this place,” Mr. Fong said. “You will find the one you seek. Give him my name to send you in, and if he asks for further proof, describe this room. He has sat upon that very chair where you sit.”
Clem looked at the paper. It bore an address in San Francisco.
“You had better go at once,” Mr. Fong said. “He comes back soon. Something will happen this very month here in this city. Whether it fails or succeeds he will come back. If it is successful he will take power. If it fails, he must come to comfort his followers.”
Clem got up. “Thank you, Elder Brother,” he said to Mr. Fong. “I hope I can repay you for your faith. I hope he’ll listen to me.”
The next day he left Peking, Henrietta with him, but not yet understanding why he must go away so quickly.
“I’ll tell you, hon,” Clem said. “I’ll tell you as soon as I have time.”
There was time only when Clem was imprisoned by the sea. In Shanghai he spent money like the rich man he was that he might get berths upon an Empress ship leaving the dawn after they had arrived. He could haggle over the price of an overcoat and he had never worn a custom-made suit in his life, but when it was a matter of getting what he wanted, money was only made to be used. They caught the ship and Clem, studying timetables, planned the swiftest route from Vancouver to San Francisco. The English ship was still the most swift.
“One of these days we’ll fly, hon,” Clem said to Henrietta. “Before I die, that will surely be.”
“We’ll fly in heaven, I suppose,” Henrietta said now with her small smile.
“Long before that,” Clem said. “It’ll be a sorry thing for many if they have to wait for heaven!”
At last, almost reluctantly, on the second day out, he told Henrietta why it was he wanted to see that man, Sun Yatsen.
“He’s going to get China, see, hon? I can feel it in my bones. The people there are just waiting for somebody to save them and he has risen out of nowhere, the way savior men always do. They come up out of the earth, see? They get an idea, a big idea — just one is enough. He’s got the idea of giving the Chinese people their own government. Well, he’ll do it if he can get them to believe in him. People got to have faith, hon. He’s got to have faith, too. Everybody who does anything has got to have faith in a big idea. So I’m going to him and I’m going to say, look, if you give the people food, they’ll believe in you. Now how are you going to give your people food? Some men do it one way, some another, but nobody ever got people to follow him without giving them food. People have got to be fed. Remember Jesus and the loaves and fishes.”
He was standing against the rail, his back to the sea, and Henrietta was lying on the long chair he had lugged here by a lifeboat on the highest deck, away from everybody as she liked to be. By squinting a little she gazed at his face, and imagined that the bright sea shone through his eye sockets, so blue were his eyes this day. The color of his eyes was a barometer of the measure of his hope. When he was on the crest of a new hope, his eyes were sea blue, and when he was cast down, as sometimes he was, they were almost gray.