He was in a frenzy of happiness. To the people who milled around him during the afternoon he talked in a stream of advice, explanation, and remonstrance. “What you’ll find here is not all foods but just the essential foods and all cheap. I buy surpluses and that means whatever is in season and therefore cheapest. For instance, last winter when the big cold in the West was freezing cattle solid, I bought ’em that way and sold beef cheap. Price of meat came down right away. The beef was good, too. Freezing made it tender.
“Now here in this market, you won’t find cucumbers in January. But you’ll find mountains of them in summer when you want to be making your pickles. And I provide recipes, too. Where do I get them? From people like you. When you make something good write in and tell me about it. Look at that pile of leaflets there — take some — take a lot and give ’em to your friends. They’ll tell you what to do with cucumbers when they’re cheap and how to make jelly out of apple peelings and what not to throw into your garbage pails. Buy cheap, and don’t waste. We could feed the world on what we throw away — yep, that’s true, too. Nobody needs to starve — not anywhere in the world!”
People listened and laughed. “You sound like a preacher!”
Clem grinned his dry sandy grin. “Maybe I am — a new gospel I preach unto you. Nobody needs to be hungry.”
It was in the midst of such harangue in the late afternoon that he saw Henrietta standing in the far corner, very quiet in her dark blue suit and hat, and holding in her hands a yellow slip of paper. He was used to telegrams from his scouts scattered over the country, announcing a glut of oranges in the Southwest or corn in Indiana or truck-garden stuff in New Jersey. Such telegrams had to be heeded immediately and so he suddenly stopped talking and wove his way through the crowds, pushing them gently with his sharp elbows.
Face to face with Henrietta, he reached for the telegram which she gave him and then he saw that it was not what he thought.
The telegram was signed by Mrs. Lane. YOUR DEAR FATHER PASSED ON LAST NIGHT. FUNERAL WILL BE THURSDAY. PROSTRATED WITH GRIEF. WILLIAM WONDERFUL. LOVE MOTHER. Instantly Clem forgot the crowds and the great success of his day. There was no spot in the huge cheap building where he could draw his beloved aside into privacy. Glass and brick pillars gave only the illusion of shelter. But he made of himself a shelter for the tears now rising slowly to her eyes.
“Hon, you go to the hotel right away. I’ll send Wong with you. He has his little tin lizzie here. He’ll put you on the train for New York. If you need anything in clothes, you can buy it there — a black dress or so. I’ll be there tomorrow. I hate to have you alone tonight without me, but you’ll not blame me for that.”
“I wish I could have seen him just once,” Henrietta murmured, wiping her eyes behind the shelter of his shoulders. She was taller than he and yet just now he managed to stand a little above her upon a collapsed cardboard box. “I ought to have made William tell me. Ruth ought to have written — no, it was my own fault.”
For she had been cool to her parents when she got home because they had gone to William and had not thought of coming to her. No one had told her how ill her father was. Even the letters from her mother had not said he might die. She might have known when she had no letter from him, except that he seldom wrote to his daughters, and always to William. And Ruth would never face the worst.
“It’s a shame,” Clem muttered. “It does seem as though your folks could have sent word.”
“I may not see him even now,” she went on. “It would be just like William to go straight on with everything, as though no one else existed.”
“You go along quick,” he advised.
Stepping back he motioned to Wong, one of the Chinese students. He was a tall slender fellow from a town near Peking.
Clem said in Chinese, too low for anyone to hear or wonder at the strange tongue, “Wong, you take Mrs. Miller please to the hotel to get her bag and then to the railway station and buy her a Pullman ticket to New York on the first train. Her honored father has just died.”
Wong had heard of the venerable Dr. Lane, the mildest of missionaries, and he clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “The day of a father’s death is worse than any yet known in a person’s life,” he said gently.
He slipped off his white coat and changed to the one he wore outside the market. In half an hour Henrietta was on the way to the station in his old Ford car. Driving nimbly between the trolley cars and the traffic, Wong tried in his courteous fashion to comfort Henrietta by all that he had heard about Dr. Lane.
“We heard even in our town that it was your honored Old One who did not fear to approach that Devil Female King, the Empress, and tell her that she did ill to favor the Boxers. Again we heard, I from my father, since I was then very young, that when she came back again to the city, pretending that no evil had been done, your honored Old One would not follow the other foreigners to her feasts. He held himself aloof. Your Old One loved the people and not the rulers.”
“I have not seen my father for all these years,” Henrietta said. “Now I shall never see him again.”
“It was for our sakes that he cut himself off even from his own country,” Wong said in a heartbroken voice.
At the station he bought her tickets and a small basket of fruit. When he had seen her into her seat, had adjusted the window shade, had said good-by, he went outside on the platform and there he stood, his hat held against his breast until the train pulled out.
Henrietta had never been in William’s new home. Since she had sent no telegram to announce her coming, she took a cab and arrived at the door of the handsome house of gray stone, which stood between two smaller ones on upper Fifth Avenue. She rang the bell and the door was opened by an English manservant.
“I am Mr. Lane’s elder sister,” she said in her somewhat cold voice.
The man looked surprised and she saw that he had not known of her existence. “Please come in, Madame.”
He ushered her into a large room and disappeared, his footsteps silenced by thick carpets. Henrietta sat down in a deep chair covered with coral-colored velvet. The room astonished her. Gray, coral, smoke blue were mingled in velvet hangings and carpets. It was a room too soft, too rich, too opulently beautiful. Candace had thus surrounded the heavy furniture William had bought and which she disliked. In the center of the room upon a round mahogany table stood a vast Chinese bowl of silver-gray pottery, crackled with deeper gray veins. It was full of pale yellow roses. This then was the way William lived. He must be monstrously rich. Or perhaps it was only the way Candace lived, and perhaps it was she who was too rich.
Henrietta reflected upon William as she had remembered him in Peking. The memory was not dimmed by the image of what he now was. A sulky, dark-browed boy, who snarled when she spoke to him! Why had he been always unhappy? At school in Chefoo he had seldom spoken to her, even when they passed in the corridors. If her mother sent a message to them both in a letter to her, she had to send it to him in a note by a Chinese servant. Ruth had been too young to go away to school and so she had never seen the worst of William, for if he was unpleasant at home he was unbearable at school.
Henrietta had a vague understanding of him, nevertheless, as she sat thoughtfully by the window of this room. William could not endure to be outdone by anyone, but at school no American could be as the English were and there William felt himself unjustly surpassed. Moreover she herself surpassed him in their studies, and she had gone to some pains as she had grown older to hide from him the marks which made him hate her, too. And why should this only brother of hers suffer so much when, had he been content with himself, he might have been very happy? A handsome boy he had been, and his mind, developing more slowly than hers, was a good and even brilliant mind, likely now to have gone far ahead of hers. His intolerable, bitter, burning pride had poisoned him to the soul, a pride begun by their foolish old Chinese amah, who because he was a boy among girls, had loved him best and praised him most and made them all worship him as the young prince of the family — a pride fostered, certainly, by being an American among Chinese. But here in America itself there were no princes.