Gods Men by Pearl S. Buck Read Free Book Online Page B

trees grew green and the peach trees bloomed. The festival of Clear Spring was observed with the usual joy and freedom. People strolled along the streets, the men carrying bird cages and the women their children, and over the doorways of houses were hung the mingled branches of willow green and peach pink. The Imperial Court made great holiday of the feast and the Old Empress ordered special theatricals. Outwardly the city was as calm, as stable, as it had been for hundreds of years, and yet every Chinese past childhood knew that it was not so.
    The Empress had expressed her feelings in December, when the two German missionaries had been killed in the province of Shantung. The foreign governments had demanded that the provincial governor, Yu Hsien, be removed. The palace news trickled through the city, through eunuchs and servants. Everybody heard that the Old Buddha, as they called the Empress, had at first refused to withdraw Yu Hsien. Her ministers had surrounded her, telling her the size of the foreign guns and the number of soldiers already in the foreign legations. She would not believe that foreigners could prevail against her, but she had been compelled by her ministers. Yet when she had withdrawn Yu Hsien and had appointed Yuan Shih K’ai in his place, as her ministers had recommended, she had given the huge inner province of Shansi to Yu Hsien. In a rage she had set him higher than before, and the people had laughed in rueful admiration. “Our Old Buddha,” they told each other, “our Old Buddha always has her way. She is a woman as well as ruler.” They were proud of her, though they hated her.
    The spring had never been more beautiful. The Americans in the city were reassured by the warmth of the sun, by the blossoming fruit trees, by the amiability of the crowds upon the streets. The guards sent the year before to strengthen the legations had been withdrawn again, and the murder of the missionaries had been paid for. Shansi was far enough away so that Yu Hsien, though as high a governor as before, seemed banished, and life in the wide streets went on as usual.
    Nevertheless the consuls had warned all Westerners to stay off the streets during the festival, lest some brawl arise which might make cause for fresh trouble. But the day passed in peace, and in the afternoon the foreigners came out of their compounds and walked about. In the morning the farmers had brought in fresh young greens from outside the city, turnips and radishes and onions and garlic from their new fields, and the people, surfeited with the bread and sweet potatoes of winter, ate to renew their blood. The hundreds of the poor who could not buy went outside the city gates to dig the sweet clover and shepherd’s purse to roll in their sheets of baked bread. Children played in the sunshine beside their mothers, shedding their padded coats and running about barebacked.
    Clem Miller, pursuing his daily round, felt no difference upon the streets. Since the day when William Lane had stopped the fight he had spoken to no white person outside his own family. His father, he knew, was disturbed and uneasy, but then he was always anxious lest their food be short and always trying to deny anxiety even to himself, lest perchance God, whom he yearned to believe was tender and careful of His own, be made angry by the unbelief of Paul Miller and so refuse to supply food to those who depended upon him. Clem himself had no direct experience of God. Though he prayed as he had been taught, night and morning and sometimes feverishly in between, on the chance that it might do good when their food was low or when there was no cash to pay the landlord, he was still not sure that God gave such gifts. He wondered if his father, too, was not sure and if uncertainty were the cause of his father’s uneasiness. He loved his father and felt something childlike in him and he asked no more for proof of faith, only eating the less at home. It was easier