“Well,” Clem said briskly, dismissing the revolutionist. “I guess he has to learn in his own way. Now, Yusan, here’s my idea—”
He caught a certain quizzical look in Yusan’s dark and narrow eyes and he grinned. “Don’t you get me mixed up with Sun! I’ll give you my ideas but I don’t insist on anything. You do what you like with them. My ideas are a gift. Take them or leave them.”
“Elder Brother, I accept the gift,” Yusan said.
Neither of them looked out of the window at the lovely French landscapes that fled past one after the other. Night fell and they approached the war sector and they did not see that beauty had ended and the barrenness of death was about them. From the train they got into a truck and drove through the night over roads once smooth and now rutted with shell holes. This in turn gave way to rough bare ground and so they came to their destination. Clem walked into a barrack filled with homesick Chinese men, not one of whom could read or write or even speak with the people around him. In the dim light they lay on army cots and listened to one man who played a wailing village tune upon a two-stringed violin he had brought from home.
“Brothers!” Yusan cried above the music. “Here is the Elder Brother of whom I have told you!”
They got up from their cots, the fiddler stopped his wail, and the lantern lights were turned up. Clem saw himself surrounded by the familiar faces, the brown, good faces, the honest eyes, of Chinese villagers. He felt again the old love, paternal perhaps, but grateful and rich with faith. These were the good, these were the simple, these were the plain of the earth. He began to speak to them:
“Brothers, when I heard you were here, I feared lest you might be suffering, and so I have come to see if your life is good and what can be done to help you if it is not good.”
“He left his home,” Yusan put in. “He came a long way over the sea and he can be trusted. I have known him since my childhood.”
The men were silent, their hungry eyes fixed upon Clem.
“Are you well fed?” Clem asked.
The men looked at one of their number, a young strong fellow with a square fresh face. He spoke for them:
“We are well fed but with foreign food. We are treated kindly enough. Our sorrow is that we cannot write to our families or read what they have written to us. We can neither read nor write.”
“The letters can be read to you,” Clem said. “Letters can also be written for you.”
The young man looked at his fellows and began again. “Why we are here we do not know. Is our country also at war?”
“In a way, yes,” Clem replied. “That is, China has declared war against the Germans.”
“We do not know the Germans,” the young man said “Which men are they?”
Clem felt his old sickness of the heart. “None of us know our enemies. I also do not know a single German. Let us not think of them. Let us only think of ways to make your life better.”
For how could he or anyone explain to these men why there was a war and why they had left their homes and families and come here to dig trenches for white men to hide themselves in while they killed other white men? Who could explain such things to anyone? The world was full of discontent and because people were hungry and afraid they followed one little leader and another, hoping somewhere to find plenty, and peace for themselves and their children, even as these men had been willing to come so far, not because they believed in what they did, but that their families at home might receive each month some money wherewith to buy food.
Clem spent most of that night talking with the men, asking them questions, too, and writing down their answers. He spent the next days with Yusan planning, and a full month he spent getting what he needed to fulfill those plans from officers who considered him mad. But Clem was used now to men who thought him mad and he paid no heed to what they thought of him, spending his energy instead on getting them to do what he needed to have done until in sheer angry impatience they yielded and cursed him and wanted him gone.
By the end of the month he had helped Yusan to set up a school where the men could learn to read and write, if they wished, and he set up an office, with two Chinese from Paris, to read the men’s letters from home and write in reply. He set up also a small shop, to be supplied regularly from Paris with Chinese foods and sweets and tea. Once a week he planned a night of amusement, a place where the Chinese could hear their own music, could eat their own sweetmeats and drink tea together, and see Chinese plays and Western pictures. He hired a Chinese cook who was given a license to vend his own wares and make his living thereby. He established Yusan in all this, and in his first moment of leisure he discovered that he was homesick for Henrietta and could no longer endure his absence from her, although he had scarcely thought of her for the whole month, even as he had not once thought of himself.
He bade Yusan good-by then, took a ship for home, and reached his house on a Saturday afternoon, so white and spent that Henrietta cried out at the sight of him as he entered the picket gate.
She was at home, as she was now as much as she could be, for she expected Clem at any moment, though he had not said he was coming. Her own longing for him reached across the sea and yearned for him with such intensity that she could divine, or she felt she could, the time when he would be coming.
“Oh Clem!” she cried at the front door.
“Hon—”
They fell into each other’s arms. He felt her sturdy body and she was frightened at the thinness of his shoulder blades under her embrace.
“You’ve worked yourself to skin and bones!” she cried with terrified love.
“I’ll be all right after a few days at home. My stomach went back on me a couple of weeks ago.”
They parted, their hands still clinging, and she led him in, made him sit down, and restrained herself from fussing over him, which he could not endure.
“I’ll make you a cup of tea. Can you eat an egg?”
“I could eat a beefsteak, now,” Clem said. He looked around the shabby room fondly. “I guess I was crazy to go away, hon! Now that I’m back it seems crazy. But I had to go, and I’m not sorry. How’s tricks?”
“Don’t talk about tricks!” Henrietta retorted. “You rest yourself, Clem, do you hear me?”
“Why, hon, you aren’t mad at me, are you?” His face was amazed. She had never been cross with him before.
To his further amazement now she began to weep! Standing there by the kitchen door, she took up the edge of her apron and wiped her eyes. “Of course I’m not mad,” she sobbed. “I’m just scared, that’s all! Clem, if anything happened to you — if you should die — I wouldn’t know what to do. Being without you just these weeks — I’m all upset—”
“Great guns,” Clem muttered. He got up and went to her and put his arms around her again. “I’m not going to die, hon. I wouldn’t think of such a thing.”
She put her head on his shoulder and he stood quietly supporting her, loving her and not telling her how he really felt. He was not going to die, but he felt tired to the bone. The sight and the memory of those dark honest bewildered faces in France never left him for a moment. Nor were they all. In the fields of France there were such faces, and the same faces were here in the fields of Ohio, upon the streets of villages and in the slums of cities, not all honest and many far from good, and yet with the same confusion and bewilderment. And most dreadful of all, they were upon the fields of battle, and they lay dead in the mud of death. No, he must not die, but he was tired enough to die. Nobody knew what he was trying to say; not even those whom he wanted to save could understand.