Free Gods Men by Pearl S. Buck Page B

and gasping, down the hutung to the small gate. He would have to knock; he was too weary to try to climb the wall. Ah, the gate was open! He stopped, bewildered, and then saw something bright in the dust of the threshold at his feet. It was blood, brightly red, curling at the edges in the dust. A new more desperate terror fell upon him. He could not think. He ran through the gate and into the meager courtyard. The paper-latticed doors of the little central room were swinging to and fro, and he pushed his way through them.
    There he stopped. Upon the rough brick floor his father lay, resting in his own blood which flowed slowly from a great gash in his throat, so deep that the head was half severed. His arms were flung wide, his legs outspread. Upon the quiet face, though bled white, he saw his father’s old sweet smile, the greeting he gave to all alike who entered this house, to strangers and to his own, and now to his son. Under the half closed lids the blue eyes seemed watching. Clem gazed down at his father, unable to cry out. He knew. He had often seen the dead. In winter people froze upon the streets, beggars, refugees from famine, a witless child, a runaway slave, an unwanted newborn girl. But this was his father.
    He choked, his breath would not come up, and he tried to scream. It was well for him that no sound came, for in the silence he might have been heard, and those who had gone might have come back. He gave a great leap across his father’s feet and ran into the other room where his mother’s bed was. There he saw the other three, his mother, his two sisters. They were huddled into the back of the big Chinese bed, the two children clinging to their mother, but they had not escaped. The same thick sword that had cut his father’s throat had rolled the heads from the children. Only his mother’s long blonde hair hid what had been done to her, and it was bloodied a bright scarlet.
    He stood staring, his mouth dried, his eyes bulging from their sockets. He could not cry, he could not move. There was no refuge to which he could flee. Where in this whole city could he find a hole in which to hide? He thought for one instant of William Lane and the security of that solid house enclosed behind walls. The next instant he knew that there was no safety there. The dead might be lying on those floors, too. No, his own kind could not save him.
    He turned and ran as he had come along the high walls of the alleys, by lonely passage’s away from the main streets back again to Mr. Fong’s house.
    In the central room behind the shop Mr. Fong was sitting in silence with his wife and their children. News had flown around the city from the Imperial Palace that two Germans had fired on innocent Chinese people and that a brave Chinese soldier had taken revenge by killing one of the Germans and wounding the other. Mr. Fong doubted the story but did not know how to find out the truth.
    â€œThe wind blows and the grass must bend,” he told Mrs. Fong. “We will remain silent within our own doors.”
    He was troubled in mind because his eldest son could speak English and he feared that it might cause his death. Not only foreigners were to be killed. The Old Buddha had commanded today at dawn, at her early audience in the palace, that all who had eaten of the foreign religion and all who could speak foreign languages were also to be killed.
    Mr. Fong had just finished quarreling with his wife, and this was another reason for the silence of the family. The quarrel, built upon the terror of what was taking place in the city, of which rumors were flying everywhere, had been over the very matter of the eldest son speaking English.
    â€œI told you not to let our Yusan learn the foreign tongue,” Mrs. Fong had said in a loud whisper. Sweat was running down the sides of her face by her ears. Though she fanned herself constantly with her palm leaf fan nothing dried her sweat this day.
    â€œWho could