The Patriot (6 page)

“And I could not forbear to put down, too, my longing that somehow this wonderful new learned government which Sun Yat-sen had begun, might think of some way to make it possible for my village to have a little more share in all the fine new times—if, say, the taxes were lightened somewhat, or a few country roads built—not great motor roads such as were being built about the city, but simple earthen roads they could drive an ass upon or push a wheelbarrow—or if, say, they need not grow opium—or be so taxed—

“It came to me therefore in prison that this was what had made them angry at me. This was why they called me traitor. I had never thought of it. I had written it all down, all I felt about my country. I wrote it first in our own language, and then because I was proud of it I translated it carefully into English.

“And so the authorities had seen it thus in English and grown angry with me. It came to me slowly, after much thought, that here was my crime. I had written my composition in English. They were ashamed of the things I had told of my village and my people, and they did not want the foreigners to know of taxes and opium, of famines and earthen huts. If I had only left it in Chinese, if I had not put it into English—but then I could never have dreamed of such an outcome to that one spring afternoon.

“It was not to be believed, even in the prison, morning after morning. Each morning I got up in a different mood. Every night was the same—I was desperately lonely, desperately afraid. But in the morning when the bit of sky was light, I thought, ‘This cannot happen in these new times—this is impossible—’ or I thought, ‘At worst they have simply forgotten my case. My time will come. It is not as though we had no justice these days. We have a whole new code of modern law.’ I had studied in a history class this code.

“But nothing happened for a long time—nothing, indeed, until one day they began to fill the cell full of others. The search for revolutionists must have been very severe. Every day the cell was filled full and at every dawn it was emptied. The nights were horrible. They were afraid, at first cursing, and then as the night came near dawn they began crying and wailing. At first I used to talk to them. And it was out of this talk that I became a real revolutionist, I-wan. For they all had stories to tell me of how they had done nothing that was a greater crime than to help the poor to get more money for their work in mills or shops, or how they had helped girls to escape out of brothels into which they had been sold, or how merely they wanted to make a better country and had joined a band of patriots such as ours. I came to see that the government ought not to have imprisoned them at all. They were all young—many of them younger than you and I. And as I watched them go out to be killed I grew so full of hatred towards those who ordered their death that I swore I would revenge them if I escaped. When you came, I was already a determined revolutionist. Then I talked no more with anyone. When new ones came in I was silent. The cell grew used and filthy. But I cared for nothing. I could not sleep. Each night I, too, only waited for the dawn. Then when the cell was still dark, there would be a rattle of a key in the lock, and a round cylinder of light would be shot into our darkness. And a rough voice would call out the names one after the other of everyone—of everyone, that is, except me. Day after day I waited, sweating, my heart tight, for my name. But it was never called. I was only forgotten.

“The cylinder of light was fastened upon one miserable creature after another. They were nearly always crying as the soldiers handcuffed them one to the other. Then they were marched down a corridor. Only I was left, and there I always stood watching them go, knowing where they went. I imagined them always, every day, crowding down the corridor, feeling the air suddenly fresh on their faces as I had not felt it in many days. But it was still dark. In the darkness hands they could not see would push them, jostling them against a hard wall. There would be a shout, a noise, a flash before their eyes. They would fall, huddled.

“An English sentence kept springing out of my brain. ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud—’ I longed to cry out to them, to tell them something. But no one even knew what became of them. Day after day I died with them, forgotten, until you came one day with the new ones, and with you I was found.”

I-wan, reading these pages far into the night, over and over again, could not burn them. These things En-lan had put down were a precious record. He folded the pages and put them away in his drawer, underneath some old books which his grandfather had given him and which he never read. But he could never put away what he had read. En-lan had given him a part of himself. What could he give in return? He lay awake thinking what he could give to En-lan, and he could think of nothing worthy in return, except his own blood, sworn to brotherhood.

When he saw En-lan the next day he did not speak of what he had read. He saw En-lan was now shy, having told him much. So without speaking of it he asked him, “Will you be my blood brother?”

At this the shyness went out of En-lan’s look, and he answered, “Yes, I will.”

Then they went to En-lan’s room and after the old rite of blood brotherhood, they drew blood from their arms and mingled it together, and clasped their hands and took the vow. And though neither ever talked of it, the vow remained between them.

This was how En-lan had become a secret revolutionist and I-wan with him, so that they met with these others in a deserted classroom when school was over each day…. He came out of his thoughts in this meeting to hear En-lan say, as he now stood up before them all, “We have been given the task of organizing the district of the silk mills in the northern part of the city. These are the mills for which we are responsible.”

He read a list of names, one after the other. I-wan had only heard of them. He had never in his whole life been into those parts of Shanghai where thousands of men and women and children worked in the silk mills.

“You, I-wan,” En-lan said, “must take the furthest section, the Ta Tuan mill, since you can hire a ricksha and need not go on foot. Those who must go on foot may take the nearer places.”

And En-lan went on to tell them how the revolution must now be taken into the factories, so that the people who worked there might understand and prepare for the day when the government would be overthrown, and a new rule set up, the rule of the people for themselves. It was, as En-lan showed it, a true and right plan. I-wan thought of the villages in En-lan’s story—they ought to be freed from taxes and from having to grow opium. And if the people in the mills were so sorrowful as En-lan said they were, they should be helped to a better life. He was glad to do this, and he took his orders, as they all did, willingly and without reply. All over the country, in many cities, young men and women were taking such orders against the day to come, the day of hope for all….

Peng Liu at this moment came running in. “Someone comes!” he cried.

There was the sound of footsteps on the stair.

“Run!” En-lan cried.

They scattered as though the wind blew. But I-wan, even as he ran, noticed something. Peng Liu did not run. Instead he stood alone in the room as though he waited for someone. And after a moment he had come for them and, grinning, he told them it was no one—a carpenter come to change a broken windowpane. So they had gone on with their meeting, and I-wan forgot to think about Peng Liu, the more easily because Peng Liu was of a sort that everybody forgot rather than remembered—he was so small and indistinct in his looks and ways, and so seemingly harmless. None ever thought to give him any work to do except his spying, and I-wan was glad not to think of it because he did not like him.

And indeed after this day I-wan began another life.

“What are you so busy about?” I-ko demanded. “You are in some mischief.”

I-wan now came home so late that several times in the last few weeks I-ko had come before him. Tonight he had met his brother on the steps. I-ko stepped out of his handsome private ricksha and gazed at I-wan with scorn.

“On foot!” he said. “Like a coolie! You never used to walk everywhere.” For I-wan, in spite of what En-lan had said, took pride in setting forth each day after school as the others did in his old uniform and unpolished leather shoes for the silk mill.

He did not answer I-ko and they went up the steps side by side. He could smell the heavy musky fragrance of the oil I-ko used to smooth his long straight black hair. It was the fashion among all of I-ko’s friends to let their hair grow long to the neck and to smooth it straight from the forehead and the ears. This was because a popular young poet of the day wore his so, “The Chinese Byron,” he was called. I-ko was proud to know him and he said constantly such things as, “Tse-li and I—” “Today I said to Tse-li—” Everybody rushed to read Tse-li’s latest verse. I-wan read it also, but he could not see anything in it. There was nothing but talk about flowers and death and escape into the misted bamboo hills and always to a woman, waiting.

“Besides, you ought not to go about alone,” I-ko scolded him. “You might be kidnaped. Anything happens now. Then it would cost a great deal to ransom you—far more than you are worth,” he added, teasingly.

It was quite true that in the disturbed times when the breath of new revolution was everywhere this sort of thing happened. His father had hired two tall Russian guards to go with him every day in his automobile. They kept their hands upon pistols in their pockets, and I-ko’s private ricksha puller was once a soldier and he also carried a pistol in his bosom.

“The poorer I look the better, then,” I-wan said.

“Oh, a clever kidnaper would make sure of who you were,” I-ko said.

They entered the house. Across the hall Peony’s face looked out from behind a curtain and disappeared. He heard his grandmother’s cracked voice cry out their names.

“I-ko! I-wan!”

I-ko shrugged his shoulders and lifted his eyebrows and did not answer.

“I am dining with Tse-li,” he muttered. “I have no time for the old woman.”

“Why do you call her that behind her back?” I-wan whispered fiercely.

And then not because he wanted to, but because he hated I-ko’s flippant look, he turned aside into his grandmother’s room once more.

But he stayed only for a moment and then went on to his own room and threw himself on his bed. Tse-li—Tse-li! What right had young men to be like Tse-li in times like these? He would ask En-lan, “Ought we not to put Hua Tse-li’s name on the death list?” He hated the young aesthete whom his brother loved.

This death list was like a weapon to the band. They had none of them any real comprehension that it meant massacre. As yet it was only a hope of revenge against people whom now they could only hate. When anyone made them angry, a teacher or a fellow student or an official whom they could never meet but who made some foreign treaty of which they disapproved, or if they heard of one who took public money for himself, they put his name upon the death list. Peng Liu even wished to put the name of the young science teacher, who was an Englishman, upon the list because he disliked Peng Liu and made no bones of it.

“Stand up!” he had roared at Peng Liu one day. “Don’t cringe like a filthy Hindu!” Peng Liu had not understood “cringe” or “filthy Hindu,” but he had looked up the words in the dictionary, and after that he had wanted to put the name of James Ranald on the death list. But En-lan had said with scorn, “There is no use in putting foreign names down, because naturally when the time comes all foreigners will be killed.”

When this time would be no one knew, but by late autumn everyone in the band felt it was coming soon. The revolutionary government at Hankow was growing stronger every day, and at a certain moment Chiang Kai-shek would sweep down the Yangtse River. What would happen would happen. No one spoke of it loudly. But I-wan heard it talked about secretly and with hope in the band, and at home, scornfully, by his father. In the band En-lan explained to them that it was not enough to talk. They must take their share of the preparation. All through the city bands like theirs were getting ready.

“Getting ready,” he had said, “means preparing the people, their minds and their bodies. We who speak the language of the people must prepare their minds. You, I-wan, because your grandfather is a general and because you have learned military drill, must now organize also a workers’ brigade in the Ta Tuan mill.”

For a moment I-wan could not speak because he was so astonished. En-lan knew who he was and had always known. But how did he know that at home his grandfather had had him tutored by a young German officer for three summers?

Then he shouted loudly, “I will!”

He said no more than that, but afterwards once, when he passed En-lan alone in a corridor, he asked, “How did you know I knew military drill?”

And En-lan grinned and answered, “I see you goose-step like no one else every day at the school drill!” and went on.

Thus it came about that I-wan began to organize that strange secret army among the pallid men of the mills. For two months now he had been going daily to the mills. It was not easy. He was not allowed to go into the great ramshackle buildings from which poured the hot filthy stink of silkworms rotting in the steamy heat. But about the mills were many straw huts where the mill workers lived, and he loitered near them and waited for the people to come home—the men, the women, the children.

At first he felt awkward and strange with them. He could scarcely believe these were people, these crawling, sickly creatures, coughing, blear-eyed, their hands swollen and red. It was the hands of the women and the girls which were worst. They held them out, stiff with pain. When I-wan first saw them he could not keep from blurting out, “What is the matter with your hands?”

It was a young girl who answered, a slight child who looked less than twelve. She spoke in a mild, pleasant voice.

“It is the hot water.”

“Hot water?” he asked.

An old woman broke in. “The cocoons must be put in very hot water, young sir, to kill the worms and to soften the silk, and we must take them out with our hands and find the end of the silk the worm has spun, so the cocoon can be unwound. The water is kept hot by foreign electricity and so our hands are like this.”