“It is funny,” he agreed. “It’s darned funny. I can’t explain it. There’s some sort of magic hidden in the golden rule — I can’t explain it any other way.”
Upon this conversation, which had become entirely repulsive to William, Mrs. Lane now entered, followed by Jeremy and Ruth. Behind them came Henrietta with her hat on, ready for the train. William rose. “Let us take our places,” he said quietly. “Mother, please sit at my right. Ruth at my left, Jeremy at Candace’s right and Henrietta next. Your place, Clem.”
When they were all seated William lifted his head and fixed his eyes on a point above Candace’s head at the end of the long lace-spread table. She saw that there was something he wanted to say to them.
“It has not been our habit in this house to have grace before meals. Perhaps we have grown careless. But from this day on, in memory of my father. “I will say grace at meals in my house.”
His eyes fell and for an instant Candace’s caught them. He saw love and pity rush into tears and he bent his head to avoid the sight.
“Dear William,” his mother whispered, and put out her hand to him. But he did not pause to look at Candace or touch his mother’s hand. He bent his head and began to pray in a tense low voice:
“Our Father, for the food that Thou hast given us, receive our thanks. Bless this food to our use and us to Thy Kingdom, Amen.”
It was the grace that his father had used throughout the years of his missionary life.
8
CLEM BIDED HIS TIME. His faith, fulfilling itself by his steady success, was only embattled when he met with opposition. He was amazed when he discovered those who would have laughed at him had he failed but who were angered by him when he did not fail, and who attacked him finally for undermining their own markets. These were the consolidated groceries and food companies, the chain stores which were beginning to form a net over the whole country. They declared that they, too, were selling to the people cheap and good food, and they began their warfare by insidious advertising against Clem’s wares, saying that cheap surplus foods were not guaranteed foods and carried in them the germs of disease and decay. Buy only our packaged foods, they screamed, buy foods only with our seal upon them.
“We must get some big lawyers,” Bump told Clem. During the war he had served as a food expert, and had won a medal for saving the nation millions of dollars in food, buying where experience with Clem had taught him to buy and buying, too, with Clem’s help. Somewhat reluctantly, when the war was over, he had married a German girl, Frieda Altmann, with whom he had fallen in love while he was overseas and they now had two fat children who looked, he often felt, entirely German. Nevertheless his Frieda was good and a fine cook and she adored Clem, whom she considered a god, and she was humble before Henrietta, whom she loved with enthusiasm. But Frieda did all things with enthusiasm.
Clem had only to be driven into a corner to become cool and aggressive. He hired two clever lawyers, Beltham and Black of Dayton, and entered into the private war which was to last as long as he lived.
For Clem himself the world war had been an atavism which could not be understood. Europe he knew little and his inclination was to think of it as a small and diverting piece of ground which included England. He had run over there, as he put it, the summer before the war, Henrietta, of course going with him. He still refused to allow an ocean between them. A few weeks in England had sufficed.
“Can’t tell these people anything,” he said to Henrietta. “They think I have only one idea. Well, that’s all I need. If an idea is big enough a man don’t need but one.”
He surveyed the tidy farms and smooth green hills of England with something like cynicism. “I seem to see India behind all this,” he said. “I see Egypt and the Middle East. Sometime we got to go and take a look at India, hon, and see the green hills there and the fat people. All these beef roasts and steaks and legs of mutton!”
In Europe he looked for hunger and found little. Instead he found prudence and habitual scarcity. The French threw nothing away and this he approved. A fish head belonged on the dish and not in the garbage can.
“There is no sweeter meat than the cheeks of a carp,” Mrs. Fong used to tell him in Peking and he had never forgotten.
The farms in Denmark were Clem’s delight. He visited them without introduction, appearing at a barn door while Henrietta lingered in the road outside. Sometimes he called her, sometimes he did not. One morning he beckoned to her fiercely.
“Come here, hon — this fellow has an idea!”
She looked into the wide barn door and there in the shadowy depths she saw the Danish farmer painting the walls. Pots of paint, green and sky blue, stood on the floor of beaten earth and with a large brush, not of a housepainter but of an artist, the farmer was painting the walls with scenes of green meadows and running water under blue skies.
When he saw their admiration and surprise, he grinned and spoke to them with a few words of the English he had learned in folk school.
“For wintar,” he explained. “Make cows happy. Grass nice, thinking summer.”
“Ain’t that smart?” Clem asked, turning to Henrietta. “He knows the cows get bored in the winter locked up in the barn and so he wants to make them happy. Good fellow!” He clapped the thick-bodied farmer on the back. “Nice idea! Bet they give more milk, too.”
They began a conversation of gestures and a dozen or so words. Clem picked up languages quickly and he carried small pocket dictionaries everywhere. From the Dane he learned that it was hard to export as much butter as they had to England, because English farmers had their own butter. Yet Denmark needed more coal, English coal, which was going instead to Italy to buy fresh fruit. If the new refrigerator cars really began to run in large numbers, then Denmark would have even less coal.
Clem became concerned in the perennial question of distribution.
The monstrous folly of starvation anywhere in the world impressed him day and night. Food was abundant upon the land and in the sea. However many people were born and lived, there was more food than they could possibly eat. In America he saw apples rotting in orchards; corn used for fuel; granaries filled with wheat so that public money must buy still more, build still more granaries; eggs spoiling for lack of consumers; potatoes fed to beasts; fish made into fertilizers. Denmark had only butter to sell, but Americans had too much butter and would not buy. Argentine beef sold for pennies a pound because there was too much meat. The same story was everywhere in the world of starving people and rotting plenty.
“There has got to be some sort of over-all,” Clem said thoughtfully. “Not government, either — but what?” He had absorbed from the Chinese a deep distrust of government. Men in power, he had once declared, became more than men. They fancied themselves gods. Henrietta had laughed when he said this. She did not often laugh, and when she did he always wanted to know why. “Sometimes you act a little like God, yourself,” she had replied.
He was inexplicably hurt. “No — no — don’t say that, hon! Maybe like a father. Only like a father, though.”
She was learning to sheathe her bluntness because she did not always know what could hurt him. He went about so shining in his hopefulness, so childlike in his goodness, so impregnable in his devotion, that it seemed nothing could hurt him. Then she found that she alone could do the damage. Opposition from others, their laughter, their disbelief, he could and did ignore or accept as persecution by evil. But she whom he loved, who loved him, could pierce his bright armor and bring tears to his eyes. The first time she saw the tears she had wept with shame, had sworn to herself that she would never laugh at him, never caution him, never show doubt — nay, more, she would never feel doubt. The one sin she could commit, she told herself, was to hurt Clem.