The Patriot (42 page)

At last one day I-wan went in a mighty rage to find En-lan.

“Do you allow this?” he demanded.

“What?” En-lan replied. He was sitting in a room examining upon a map a certain road where that night they planned to make attack.

“Look out of the door!” I-wan cried. And En-lan rose and came to the open door and looked out.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Do you see nothing?” I-wan asked him fiercely.

“No, I see nothing,” En-lan said deliberately, “unless you mean the men at play.”

“Do you call it play?” En-lan shouted.

At that moment a buffoon had come out of the laughing crowd and had dug his thumb into the chained man’s eye and his eye burst and streamed out. The man screamed once. Then he bit his lip and was silent. But in the bright air sweat ran shining down his face.

“You can’t deny these men everything,” En-lan said coldly as he watched. “Think what other soldiers have if they are victorious—extra food, money, wine to drink, loot! But our men throw their lives away every day, and yet they eat the same poor food and we have no money to give them and there is no loot. They are simple men—they must have something.”

“Not such degrading play as this!” I-wan retorted. “This is the play of savages!”

“Well, so they are savages,” En-lan replied in a reasonable voice. His brilliant eyes hardened a little now as he looked at I-wan. “Are you still the dreamer, I-wan? Do you still believe the poor will be better than the rich? I hate the rich, but the poor are not gods. They are only children. And at least what they do is done openly.”

I-wan groaned and came into the room and leaned his arm against the wall and hid his face. He felt sick.

“You are too squeamish,” En-lan told him after a moment and kindly enough. “You should have been hardened as I was. I killed pigs when I was a small child and in a famine I helped my father kill our ox for food, and I saw my mother kill a girl she bore. And I grew up on bandits and what they did. I saw men’s noses slit and their eyes gouged and their ears gone and their backs flayed, and as long as I can remember a dead man was nothing. Why should I care for a Japanese?”

I-wan straightened himself, wiped his face, and sat down. “It is not only that a Japanese is a man also,” he said. “It is that I am ashamed to see Chinese do such things.”

“Do you forget what the Japanese did at Nanking?” En-lan asked angrily. “Nothing we can do will be enough revenge!”

“I know. I don’t excuse them,” I-wan replied doggedly. “But I say, if the Japanese are like that, it is not my business—but it is my business if my own people also…”

“Oh, the patriot!” En-lan broke in. “Oh, what a patriot! I-wan, you are a fool. I say it plainly. When you have been through what I have—”

“The more I see of it, the more I shall hate it!” I-wan said violently.

“Then you had better go somewhere else, where it is not to be seen,” En-lan declared. “Perhaps you would like to join the benevolent work of the Japanese and become one of the puppet governors—”

When I-wan heard En-lan say this, he suddenly felt an anger rise in him that lifted him from his feet. Upon its power he leaped forward and fell upon En-lan and En-lan, not being prepared, fell under him upon the beaten ground of the floor, and they struggled together as though they were two boys instead of men. Each held the other with both hands by the hair of his crown and shook as hard as he could, and thus Peony found them at this moment. She had been asleep in the other room and their voices had awakened her and now she came at them shrieking and pulling and scolding.

“Oh shameful! Oh, I-wan, how can you—En-lan, you foolish—” And then she opened her mouth and bit one hand and then another until they let go. They scrambled to their feet and wrung their hands with pain.

“I’m bleeding,” En-lan accused her.

“So you should bleed,” Peony answered him.

I-wan drew out his handkerchief and wrapped his own bleeding hand and said nothing.

“Now, what is your quarrel?” Peony demanded.

En-lan laughed suddenly.

“I called him a patriot and he fell on me!”

“No, now, truly, En-lan!” she exclaimed. “I-wan is not so foolish.”

“It was about the prisoners,” I-wan said suddenly.

“What prisoners?” Peony asked.

They looked, but while they had been quarreling the man had been taken away.

“He is dead,” I-wan said abruptly.

“Then why quarrel over him?” Peony coaxed them.

“There will be more tomorrow,” I-wan said.

“I-wan wants them all gently killed,” En-lan broke in. “And I say the men must have some pleasure out of their hard lives.”

“And I say,” I-wan retorted, “that we ought to teach them something better.”

He looked at Peony. “En-lan says I am soft,” he said. “But you were a child in my father’s house, too. Am I right or wrong?”

He would not care what she said, he thought. He knew he was right.

“But Peony was a slave,” En-lan said sharply. “A slave in a rich man’s house has to suffer—”

“Yes, but still I-wan is right,” Peony said slowly. “It is not good for our men, En-lan. I know what he means. Sometimes when his grandmother used to—to burn me with her pipe”—she glanced at I-wan and flushed a little and went on quietly—“I remember I used to say to her in my heart, ‘But it is you who are cruel and wicked and mean—it is not I. I have only a bit of aching flesh on my arm, but you have become wicked!’”

“Did she do that?” I-wan asked in a low voice. She pulled up her sleeve and he saw on her thin upper arm deep round scars, many scars running in together.

“You never told me,” he whispered.

“I couldn’t tell—anyone,” she said mournfully. “I don’t know why—except it seemed to make me a real slave and so I hid it.”

“You should have told me,” I-wan said. He wanted suddenly to weep with anger. “I hate every torture!”

“I also,” Peony said simply. She drew down her sleeve and turned to En-lan. “I-wan is right,” she told him.

“Perhaps he is,” En-lan agreed. It was impossible to tell from his face how much he had inwardly yielded. But from that day on I-wan at least saw no more torture.

It was soon after this that I-wan began to perfect a plan which for a long time he had been musing upon in his mind. It had begun many months before, when it had occurred to him to imagine what he would do if some day when he led his men in a secret attack, one of those whom he must kill or see killed should happen to be Bunji? He put the thought away as soon as it came. There was so little chance that this would happen that he could think of it as no chance.

And yet there was enough chance left so that he never looked from ambush at Japanese upon a road where he was hidden or through an open door suddenly upon men surprised without taking his first quick look to see that none of the faces was Bunji’s face. No, and he never killed a man from behind, lest the man be Bunji, and if a man tried to make his escape and he had not seen his face, he let him go…. Yet he had heard nothing of Bunji. Tama never told him where he was, if indeed she knew herself. She only wrote that he was still alive and well, and that his little son was walking now, and that Setsu longed to have her second child. But who knew when that would be? This war was endless in spite of all the times set for it to end… And as long as he knew Bunji was alive, I-wan was afraid.

He knew, of course, what he would do if Bunji were among the ones they captured. He would help him to escape. That he had decided long ago when first he had thought of it, so that if it happened he would be ready. But first he would talk with Bunji and explain to him the evil of this war which his people made upon I-wan’s people. For I-wan had talked to many prisoners and he now knew that they were not told why they had to leave their homes and families and die in such hundreds and thousands. And he found very often the letters and writings in the pockets of those dead, and he read them that he might know what they thought and felt before they died. And always they said the same thing, that this was a righteous and necessary war which they fought to save their own homes and their own country. And I-wan longed to say to them, “We do not want your country and you have nothing you need to save yourselves from with us, so why have you died?” But they were dead.

And then he thought of how the men used to bring back many living prisoners until En-lan put a stop to it for mercy’s sake after Peony had showed them her burns, and he thought, “Why should we not teach these prisoners the truth and treat them kindly and send them back to their own army, to spread knowledge of the truth among their fellows?”

He went to En-lan with this plan, not being sure at all what En-lan would think of it, and if he would not say again that he was too soft. But En-lan, when he had heard it, seized it at once as a good clever plan.

“It makes a man’s arm slack if he does not believe in what he does,” he said. “And if we can spread doubt among them and make them distrust their leaders, it is a clever thing to do.”

The more En-lan thought of it, the more he liked it. He clapped his hand against I-wan’s and laughed and cried, “It’s as good as capturing a trainload of guns—well, I will say that skull of yours has something in it, I-wan!”

Somewhere or other, I-wan knew, his idea and En-lan’s idea of the same thing did not quite hit together. But he let it go. If the thing were accomplished, the end was served. And the men, when En-lan explained it to them, were pleased with what they thought was such clever trickiness, and so the thing was done. And thereafter a certain number of prisoners were taken alive and fed and given courtesy and kindness and “educated,” as En-lan said, for a week or two, and set free again, looking, every man thus freed, so bewildered at what had happened to him that he was wholly dumb and did not know what came next.

But for Bunji it was no use after all. In the autumn I-wan had a letter from Tama and in it she was all grief and mourning. Bunji had been killed in the fighting at Taierhchwang. I-wan, after he had read and burned her letter as he must all her letters, sat awhile in his own room in great sorrow, remembering Bunji as he had known him when first he went to the Muraki house. How warm a heart had been his, and how merry! If there had been no war, how long and happy a life would have been his desert! But war had soon spoiled him. He was too simple for the strain and cruelty of war, and it had broken him…. And so all I-wan’s fears of meeting him were useless. And all Setsu’s hopes were useless, too. She would never have a second son.

One day in the autumn I-wan received a telegram from Chiang Kai-shek, commanding him to come to him, and saying that MacGurk would be there to fetch him the next day if the storm then raging had abated. I-wan took this message to En-lan and they looked at it together and put their two minds on it and could imagine nothing for a cause. At last they decided it could, at least, have nothing to do with the state, since if there had been an official reason, the message would not have come to him alone.

“Unless, of course,” En-lan said, “he is displeased with something and wants you for a messenger.”

But this seemed not true, either, for only a few days before this they had all rejoiced because without expecting it, they had received from Chiang a present of money and enough to buy winter clothes for the men who were most ragged. It must be, I-wan thought in himself, something of his own private self. His mind flew always to Tama. It might be that Chiang wanted to test him concerning his Japanese wife. For one moment I-wan thought, “What if he demands that I give her up?”

Well, he would not, he knew. What he could do or what he would say beyond that, the moment must tell him when it came. At least that he had come back to his country and was here fighting should count for the truth of anything he said. But what was between him and Tama belonged to the past and to the future. The present he had given to his country. But to none would he promise that future which none could know.

Thus encouraging himself he tied up his extra clothes in a piece of square cloth as farmers do, and was ready on the landing field when MacGurk came for him.

“You ready?” MacGurk bawled at him over the side of the plane.

“Quite ready,” I-wan replied.

“Well, we’ll hop off again then in about twenty minutes,” MacGurk said, and leaped out of the plane. He took off his cap and beat the dust out of it. “Gosh, it’s a trick making this run now—nothing like as easy as it was when the chief was in Nanking! The air from Hankow here is full of holes and I fell in every one of ’em.” They were walking toward the farmhouses which were En-lan’s camp. “I’ll take a swallow of tea and a cigarette and then we’ll be off. Lots of daylight yet,” MacGurk went on.

They sat down at an outdoor table of the village teashop and the old woman whose husband kept the place came and wiped off the table with a black rag and then blew into the teacups to rid them of dust and prepared to wipe them also. But MacGurk stopped her with a roar.

“Here, lay off that cleaning, will you?” He turned on I-wan. “Tell her I want ’em dirty! Sa-ay! I can do my hop-skip-and-jump between bullets all right, but germs is something else again!”

He stared at the old woman in mock anger while I-wan told her to leave the bowls, and when he saw her cower before his gaze he broke into a grin. “Never mind, old lady,” he told her. “I wash ’em myself anyway.” And he poured some of the boiling tea into the bowls, threw the tea on the ground, and then filling his bowl and I-wan’s, he blew the hot tea loudly and supped it.

“Will you never learn any of our language so that you can make your own complaints?” I-wan asked him in good humor.

“Naw—don’t need it,” MacGurk replied. “If I yell loud enough and say it over a coupla times and stare at ’em hard they see what I mean pretty quick. I don’t have much time, anyway.”

In a little while they were back in the plane and now I-wan saw still more of his country than he had ever seen. Mountains rolled their curling length beneath, and clouds coiled and covered them or left them bare. But I-wan could not put his mind to enjoyment of beauty. He was eaten up with wondering why he was called to this meeting.