Gods Men by Pearl S. Buck

to declare himself not hungry, and he filled himself on the sweetmeats that were always on the table when he went to teach Mr. Fong’s eldest son at the bookshop.
    For Mr. Fong, observing the American boy’s thin body and hollowed cheeks, had taken pity. He said to Mrs. Fong, the mother of his children, “See how the young foreigner eats up the sweets! He does not get enough food. Put some small meat rolls in the dish tomorrow, and boil eggs and peel them and set them on the table.”
    Mrs. Fong was a Buddhist and ate neither meat nor eggs herself, but she did not believe that foreigners would go to heaven anyhow, and since she would gain merit for her soul by feeding one who could make no return, she obeyed her husband. Each day, therefore, Clem found some sort of hearty food waiting, and his pupil Yusan urged him to eat, having been so bidden by his mother. Clem ate, thinking that perhaps this also was God’s provision. Yet it was hard to believe that God used heathen to perform his mercies. In confusion he believed and did not believe, and meanwhile his growing body would have starved without the food.
    No one spoke to him of the Empress and her whims or of the demands now of Italy as well as Germany. Italy was a place of which he had never heard except that Christopher Columbus had come from there. No one told him either of the warships steaming into Chinese harbors from Britain, Germany and France. His world was in the dust of Peking, and when he dreamed it was of a farm in a place called Pennsylvania. How big Pennsylvania was he did not know, except that it was more than a city. He had learned when he was quite little not to ask his parents about it because it made them both sad and sometimes his mother wept.
    The festival ended. One spring day followed another and May passed into June. People were eating big yellow apricots and one morning Mrs. Fong set a dish of them on the table.
    â€œEat these, little brother,” she bade Clem. “They cleanse the blood.”
    He ate two and against his sense of decency hid two in his pockets to give his sisters when he went home after the lesson. These he bade them eat in secret, lest their father discover in Mrs. Fong a new source for food and go there to beg in God’s name. Ever since he had heard William Lane’s voice of scorn Clem could not think of his father asking a Chinese for food. Yet when he saw the eagerness with which his younger sisters seized the fruit he brought home to them, he could not refrain the next day from hiding a few cakes in his pockets and then two of the meat rolls. It was a sort of stealing, his ready conscience told him, and was it better to thieve than beg, and was he not worse than his father? “At least I do not take the food in the name of God,” he told himself, and continued to take it.
    But guilt made him anxious one morning when Mr. Fong came into the sunlit brick-floored room. Mr. Fong sat down and drew his rusty black silk gown up over his knees. He was a tall man, a native of the city, and his smooth face was egg-shaped. Today, since it was warm, he had taken off his black cap. He had been freshly shaved and his queue was combed and braided with a black silk cord.
    â€œEh,” he began, looking at Clem. “I have something to say to you, Little Brother.”
    â€œWhat is it, Elder Uncle?” Clem asked, and was much afraid.
    â€œWhile I talk, you eat,” Mr. Fong said kindly. He clapped his hands at his eldest son, looking at him with always fond eyes. “Yusan, you go away and play somewhere.”
    Yusan, pleased to be free, tied his book in a blue cotton square, thrust it in a drawer and left the room.
    â€œDrink some tea,” Mr. Fong said to Clem. “What I am about to say does not mean that I am angry.”
    Clem could neither eat nor drink upon these words. What would he do if kind Mr. Fong wanted him to come no more? There would be an end of books and food.
    Mr.