Gods Men (59 page)

The big man in the White House was dead and a little man had taken his place. Clem went to see him immediately to preach for the last time his human gospel of food for the starving. The little man twinkled and smiled and took time to describe the United Nations plan for world food and somehow sent Clem away thinking that he had converted a President of the United States, but nothing happened.

In the spring Clem had talked of going to the San Francisco Conference to explain about how the starving people of the world must be fed if things were to go right. The Communists mustn't be the ones to get the upper hand, but they would unless people had food to eat.

Henrietta had persuaded him against going. She knew now that people even in New Point were laughing at Clem. He was called crazy, a fanatic, nobody listened to a man who had spent his life on one idea.

She hated people because they were laughing at Clem. She drew him into their house, kept him busy, worked with him on his formula, anything to shield him from the cruel laughter of people who were not fit to tie his shoelaces.

On this summer morning when she was getting the breakfast dishes washed he sat reading the paper in the kitchen. Suddenly she heard him cry out.

“Hon!”

“Yes, Clem?”

“We've lost the war!”

“What on earth do you mean? The war is over.”

She left the dishpan, her hands soapy wet, and stood reading over his shoulder.

“We've said we ain't going to help the subject peoples. It's the beginning of a third World War.”

“Oh Clem, it's not as bad as that!”

“It is. They're all looking at San Francisco and what we've said there can't be unsaid. ‘There comes a tide in the affairs of men …' ”

He got up abruptly and went downstairs into his laboratory and she went on washing the dishes.

It was not until March, 1950 that Clem went to see William for the third and last time. By then so much of what he had foreseen had already come to pass that he thought he could convince William. Surely now he would believe that Clem was right. The Communists were ruling China and people were starving again by the tens of millions. Yusan was able to get word out about it. Old Mr. and Mrs. Fong were dead. Yusan was the head of the family. Peking was full of Russians all giving advice. Meanwhile Manchurian food was being traded for machinery.

“If America could get food to us—” Yusan wrote. The letter was on one tiny slip of paper in a small filthy envelope without a stamp. Mr. Kwok, now the head of a prosperous restaurant in New York, had brought it himself to Clem, and Clem had gone back with him to New York without telling Henrietta that he had made up his mind to go to William for the last time and beg him to tell the Americans that maybe they could still save China and the world if they would only understand. …

Three days later Henrietta saw Clem coming up the brick path to the house, dragging his pasteboard suitcase. He could not reach the door. She saw him crumple upon the walk and she ran outdoors and lifted him up.

He had not fainted, he was conscious.

“My legs just gave up, hon,” he whispered.

“You get in here and go to bed and stay there,” she cried, fierce with love.

But nobody could keep him in bed. He would not go to the hospital yet, he told Dr. Wood. Now more than ever he must finish his formula, now that William wouldn't listen to him. So Henrietta heard how Clem had gone to William and how been denied.

“I'm just tired for once,” Clem said.

He was up again in a few days and at his formula again, experimenting over the gas ring with a mixture of dried milk and beans, fortified with minerals and shredded potato. Henrietta did not cross him in anything now. There was no use in pretending that he was not ill, but she was helpless. Clem would not have the doctor.

It became a race. He almost stopped eating and drinking and she kept at his side a cup of tea into which she slipped a beaten egg and a little sugar. He drank this slowly, a sip now and then, and so sustained his life.

By summer they both saw he could not win. One morning he was struggling to get out of bed. His nightshirt fell away from his neck, hollowed into triangular cavities. His ears looked enormous, his eyes were sick.

“Clem,” she cried. “You've got to think of me for once.” It was her last appeal.

“Don't I think of you, hon?”

The strength was gone even from his voice. It sounded empty and ghostlike.

“You aren't getting up,” she said. “You're staying right there until I can get Doctor Wood.”

He sank back on the pillow, trying to smile. “You've got me—down,” he whispered.

She made haste then to the telephone, and found the doctor at his breakfast.

“I'll come as soon as I—”

“No, you'll come now,” she shrieked. “You'll come right now, without one moment's delay! I think he's dying.”

She flew back to the bedside, the wide old-fashioned double bed where they had slept side by side in the years since she had given up everything to be his wife. He was lying just as she had left him but when she came in he opened his eyes drowsily and smiled.

“The doctor is coming right over, Clem. Don't go to sleep.”

“No—I don't want to.”

They stayed in silence for a moment, she holding one of his bony hands between hers. No use wasting his strength in talk!

But he began to talk. “Hon—the formula as far as I've gone—”

“Please, Clem.”

“Let me tell you—it's all written down on that little pad in the upper right hand pigeonhole of my old desk. Hon—if I can't finish it—”

“Of course you can finish it, Clem. You just won't rest long enough. I'm going to take you to California, that's what I'm going to do. …”

She was talking to keep him quiet and he knew it. As soon as she paused he began again.

“I think I've made a mistake using the dried milk, hon. There'll be people in China, for instance, who won't like the taste of milk. I don't know why I didn't think of that before. I ought to have, growing up in China—”

He stopped suddenly and looked at her in terror. “Hon—hon—” He was gasping.

“Clem, what is it?”

“The most awful pain here—” He locked his hands across his belly, and sweat burst from him and poured down his face.

“Oh, Clem, what shall I—”

But it was not necessary for her to do anything. He dropped away into unconsciousness.

Three hours later in the hospital in Dayton, Dr. Wood came out of the operating room. Henrietta had been sitting motionless for more than an hour, refusing to expect either good or ill. Her years with Clem, being his shadow, had taught her how to wait, not thinking, not impatient, letting her mind busy itself with the surface her eyes presented to her, the people coming and going, the bowl of flowers on the table, the branches of a tree outside the window.

“I imagine you are half prepared for what I must tell you, Mrs. Miller,” Dr. Wood said.

He was a kindly middle-aged man, so obviously a small-town doctor that anybody could have guessed what he was. His strength was in knowing what he did not know and when he had seen Clem's ash-white face upon the pillow this morning he had simply said briskly, “We'll get this fellow straight to the city hospital,” and had sent for the ambulance.

While it screamed its way through the roads to Dayton he had sat beside Clem, with Henrietta near, and had said nothing at all. In the hospital he had taken Clem immediately into the operating room, and had stayed with him while a young surgeon operated.

“I have not prepared myself,” Henrietta said quietly. “I have only waited.”

“He has no stomach left,” Dr. Wood said gently. This strong woman's face looking at his made him feel that it was no use holding back one iota of truth. “He should have been operated on long ago. An old condition, he's a worrier, of course—and it's turned suddenly malignant.”

“Not a worrier, exactly,” Henrietta murmured. Her heart had stopped beating for a long tight moment and now began again very hard. “He simply takes the whole world as his own responsibility. He starves with every hungry man, woman, and child, he crucifies himself every day.”

“Too bad,” Dr. Wood said. “That sort of thing is no use, you know. One man can't do it all. I suppose you told him so often enough.”

“No, thank God, I never did,” Henrietta got up.

“They won't want you just now—”

“I'll just go anyway,” Henrietta said. “They can't keep me away from him.”

She did not stop to ask how long Clem would live. However long it was, she would stay with him and never leave him, not for a night, not for an hour, never at all. She walked into the door from which Dr. Wood had come, and nobody stopped her. …

Clem lived for not quite a week. She was not sure that he knew she was there all the time but she stayed with him just the same. He might come to himself in spite of what the doctors and nurses said.

“It's really impossible, Mrs. Miller,” the night nurse said. “He's so drugged, you know, to keep him from pain. He must have suffered terribly for a long time.”

“He never said he did,” Henrietta replied. Was it possible that Clem had suffered without telling her? It was possible. He would have been afraid that she would stop him before his work was done, in that fearful race he was running. How could she not have seen it? She had seen it, of course, in the tightness in his look, his staying himself to lean upon his hands on the table, hanging upon his shoulders as though they were a rack—a cross, she told herself. She kept thinking of Clem upon a cross. Plenty of people thought him a fool, a fanatic, and so he was, to them. But she knew his heart. He could not be other than what he was. He had been shaped by his parents, from their simple minds and tender hearts, from their believing faith, their fantastic folly, their awful death. The hunger of his own childhood he had made into the hunger of the world.

“Hon,” he had often said, and she would hear those words in whatever realm his soul must dwell, “Hon, you can't preach to people until you've fed them. I'll feed them and let others do the preaching.”

It was like him to choose the harder part. Anybody could preach.

“You must eat something, Mrs. Miller,” they said to her.

So she ate whatever it was they brought, as much as she could, at least. Clem would want her to eat, and if he could drag himself out of the darkness where he slept he would tell her, “You eat, now, hon.”

They fed him through his veins. There was nothing left of his stomach. “The surgeon could scarcely sew it together again,” the nurse told her. “It was like a piece of rotted rubber. How he ever kept up!”

“He always had strength from somewhere,” Henrietta said.

“Didn't you know?” the nurse inquired. She told the other nurses that Mrs. Miller was a queer, heavy sort of woman. You didn't know what she was thinking about.

“I never felt I could interfere with him,” Henrietta said.

“Stupid,” the nurse told the others, for wouldn't a sensible woman have made a man get himself examined, if she cared about him? She might have saved his life.

“I suppose I could have saved his life,” Henrietta said slowly. “But I understood him so well. I knew there were things he cared for much more than life. So I couldn't interfere.”

This was as much as she ever said.

“I'd say she didn't give a hoot for him,” the nurse told the others, “except anybody can see the way she sits there that she's dying with him. There won't be anything alive in her after he's gone.”

Clem died at two o'clock one night. He never came back to consciousness. Henrietta would not allow it. Dr. Wood came several times a day and that evening he was there about ten o'clock, and he told her that Clem would not live through the night.

“If you want me to, Mrs. Miller, I can leave off the hypodermic and he'll come back to himself enough to know you, maybe.”

“In pain?”

“I'm afraid so.”

No use bringing Clem back in pain; that would be selfish. One moment was nothing in comparison to the years that she had lived with him and the years that she must live without him. She shook her head. The doctor gave the hypodermic himself and went away.

Clem died quietly. She knew the instant of his going. She had sat in her usual place, not stirring, had refused at midnight a cup of beef broth the nurse brought in and took away again. Soon after midnight she felt the sense of approaching death as clearly as though she too must partake of it. With every moment that passed she felt a strange oppression growing upon her. At two o'clock it was there, and she knew it. Her flesh received the blow, her heart the arrest. His hand lay in hers, light and cold, and she leaned upon the bed, her face near his. No use touching his lips. A kiss was no communication now. Better to remember the living acts of love that once had been between them than to take into her endless memory the last unanswered gift. He had been a perfect lover, not frequent, never pressing, but sweet and courteous to her. Direct and sometimes brusque he had been in daily life, too busy to think of her often, and yet she knew he kept her always with him as he kept his own soul. Yet there were the rare times, the hours when he made love to her, each perfect because he won her anew, never persuading, leading and never compelling, flesh meeting and always more than flesh—and when it was over his tender gratitude.

“Thanks, hon. You make love very sweet.”

She would never hear those words again! She had not thought of that. The tears which had not come came now, slow and hot.

“I'm afraid it's the last, Mrs. Miller,” the nurse said. She was standing at the other side of the bed, her fingers on Clem's pulse.

Henrietta stood up. Her heart was beating so fast again that she was dizzy. Her knees were trembling.