“Someday they’ll see I’m right, hon,” he told her. “They” were the powers, those who did not believe in his faith, the greedy, the selfish, the politicians, the small-minded. He did not hate, neither did he despise. Instead he was possessed by a vast patience, a mighty omniscience. He could wait.
Meanwhile he worked. He decided to open his largest and cheapest market in Dayton. Each of his markets had its own peculiar name. This one he called “People’s Choice.”
“I don’t want a chain name,” Clem said when Bump spoke of the advantages of a chain of markets all called by the same name. “I want people to think the markets are theirs. Each one must be different, suited to a town and its folks.”
People’s Choice was his first city market and he built it outside the city where land was cheap, at the end of a trolley line.
On the opening day Henrietta had come to help. Clem had lured thousands of people by his announcement of free foods on this first day. By ten o’clock the trolley cars were crowded beyond control and well-fed people were struggling to reach counters where loaves of bread, pounds of cake, and baskets of fruit were waiting to be given away. The day was clear and cool and through the great glass windows the sun poured over stacked counters and heaped bins. Clem had devised an effect at once modern and old-fashioned. Apples were piled upon the floor in corners, and bananas hung from the ceiling.
“Help yourselves, folks,” Clem shouted cheerfully. “Take a pumpkin home and make yourselves a pie. Here’s old-fashioned molasses — dip it up, folks! It’s bottling that makes it come high — five cents a dipper, folks! I bought it in N’Orleans for you — by the barrel, folks — and plenty. Here’s bread — take a loaf, and here’s butter from Wisconsin — straight from the farmers, and that’s why I can afford to give it away today. Tomorrow you’ll pay less for it than you pay in any store in the city. If anybody is hungry he can have a loaf free. Give and it shall be given unto you. Don’t take it if you’re not hungry, but if you’re hungry and can’t pay for it, we’ll always give it to you. No caviar here, folks, no fancy notions, just plain food straight from the people who raise it.”
In and out among the surging, staring people he wove his way, alert, smiling, his sandy head held high, his small blue eyes snapping and twinkling and seeing everything at once. He wore overalls of denim like his clerks, or “hands” as he called them, and his hands were men from anywhere, two Chinese boys who were working their way through college, a Negro he had seen in Louisiana and liked, Swedish farm boys from Minnesota. He had picked his men and trained them himself, saying that clerks from other stores were no good to him.
His business was unorthodox and filled with risk, and when a man became fearful because of small children and a nervous wife, he let him go and found the boys, the young who dared to be reckless. He would send Bump overnight to California or Florida to buy up carloads of cheap oranges, to West Virginia to sweep up a harvest of turnips that were overloading the market, to Massachusetts to bid for a haul of fish that threatened to bring down the price on New York markets. Wherever there was unwanted food, food about to be thrown away, as Maine farmers were about to throw away half their crop of potatoes last summer, Clem or Bump was there. Clem trusted no other to buy for him, since in the narrow margin of buying and selling lay his profits and in his profits was his ability to expand his markets and his faith. His heritage from his father was an invincible belief in goodness, not in the goodness of God to which his father had so persistently trusted, but in the goodness of man. Clem believed more profoundly than ever that with his stomach full any man preferred to be good. Therefore the task of the righteous, of whom Clem considered himself one, was to see that everybody had food.
In his hours of dreaming, for he did no work on Sunday and his markets were rigidly locked on that day, he gave himself up to still more huge fantasies about feeding all the hungry in the world. There in his ugly little house in New Point, Ohio, where he lived in complete happiness with Henrietta, he saw the people in China and India someday crowding to his markets. His failure with Sun Yatsen in San Francisco, his conviction of future success made his dreams the richer and more real.
He recalled the long journey he had made on foot from Peking to the sea. The old agony of the moment when he saw his parents and sisters murdered had softened and dimmed. Instead he remembered the winding cobbled roads of the country that tied the villages together, the dusty footpaths on either side of the cobbles, the fields green with new wheat in spring, with the tall sorghum corn in summer. Someday in those Chinese villages and market towns his foods would stand displayed.
People’s Choice promised, even this first day, to be instantly successful and Clem saw himself growing still richer. According to any rules he should not be getting so rich. He had no desire to be a millionaire like William, and he was almost ashamed of his mounting bank accounts. But he never gave money away. Some deep prejudice against organized charity, against packaged religions and vague idealism, made him keep his hands in his pockets. He gave to any man or woman or child who wore a ragged coat or who needed a doctor, and a few words scribbled on a torn scrap of paper or an old envelope provided food from his nearest market for anyone, from a hungry college student to a passing drunk or a springtime tramp. But he gave no large checks to soliciting treasurers and college presidents, and the churches, even of his home town, had come to look for no more from him than ten dollars dropped into the collection box at Christmas.
Bump, that cautious and careful young man, mindful of his college degree in economics and business management, warned him that sooner or later the organized food interests would attack him.
“You can’t go on underselling them without their trying to get your hide,” Bump warned. His relationship to Clem remained nebulous, profound though unexpressed. Clem was too young to be his foster father and he had never offered to be his brother. Bump was shrewd and he recognized in Clem a genius inexplicable. It was comprised of a daring that was absurd, a naïveté that was laughable, an ignorance that was almost illiterate, and out of daring, naïveté, and ignorance Clem succeeded in all he did. He had found a formula so simple that only a man as simple as himself could have proved it valid.
He declared it to gaping, staring thousands at noon this day of the opening of his new market. Six trumpeters, hired for the occasion, blew a frightful blast as the hour struck noon. The crowd, transfixed, paused to turn their heads toward the source of noise, and there in the center of the glittering brass, set upon a sort of balcony of boards rigged with ropes, they saw Clem in his overalls, with a megaphone.
“Folks!” he shouted. “This is more than just a market. It is a sign of what I believe in, a manifestation of my faith. ‘Faith is the evidence of things hoped for,’ the Bible says, and ‘the evidence of things unseen.’ Well, my hope is to see no more hunger, anywhere in the world. Food is the most important thing in the world. Food is one of a trinity with air and water. If I were President of the United States, which otherwise I am glad I am not, I would make bread and meat, milk and eggs, fruit and vegetables free to everybody. Then we would have no more war. It would be cheaper to feed people free like that than it would be to have a war, like what may come out of Asia someday if somebody don’t do something, because the people are starving.”
The people stood motionless, listening and wondering if he were mad. He took a deep breath and began again.
“Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe in charity, nor do we have to have the government doing this kind of thing. I’m not president, don’t expect to be, don’t want to be. But I’m doing what I can here, and you see it, don’t you? If it’s good, if it helps you, then all I ask is for you to believe in the idea. Thank you, folks — that’s all. And let me tell you that you’ll find free box lunches packed and ready for you down at the south end of the market. Ice cream is free for everybody, so’s milk and soda pop. Have a good time, folks!”