Pearl Buck - Patriot

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.”

He could say nothing more, feeling sick at the sight of the raw swollen flesh. That first day he went home having done nothing. When he entered his home he thought, “There is one smell worse than the opium in this house — it is the smell of the silk mill.”

And that night he had said to Peony, “Let me smell that scent of yours.”

She brushed her scented palm across his cheeks and his eyes.

“It is sweet, after all,” he murmured.

She put her palm upon his lips, and for a moment he did not move. Her small clean fragrant hand was grateful to him.

“It’s like a flower — your hand—” he murmured.

He did not love Peony at all. He knew now he did not love her, and would never love her, but hers was a girl’s hand, delicate and sweet, and its fragrance and softness stood to him for a moment for some delicacy and sweetness to come sometime to him, as to all young men, though from another hand than Peony’s. He longed for it a moment vaguely, then put the thought away from him. There was no place for any girl even in his mind. He must use his mind only for the people.