Pearl Buck - Patriot

He would be with En-lan, and with them would be all these others, the ones in his band and the ones he did not know in other bands. And with them would be all the poor, the peasants and the workers in mills and apprentices in trades and shops — from all over the world other young men, too, and young women, whose language they could not understand, but whose hearts and purposes were one with his and En-lan’s. When there was to be such brotherhood as this, why should he cling to a few whose blood he shared by chance? The old ways were gone. And from such meditation I-wan rose to every day like a sword drawn from its scabbard and he compelled the young men in his brigade to his own spirit.

Through the winter, in spite of cold winds and frequent rain, this brigade had now grown to thirty-seven men. He knew them each by name and he knew where their huts were in the mass of huts which lay like scales of huge fish around the mills. At first they had all looked alike to him. All were so pale and fleshless, and their faces so same with their black hollow eyes and haggard mouths. Even the stories they told him seemed the same. For though they were born in many parts of the country, still the same causes had driven them here — the wars and famines, the many taxes of greedy and unjust rulers — there was nothing new. When one man said, “I was the youngest son of a farmer with less than two acres of land, so how could I be fed? The others could not stop eating because I was born—” it was in essence the story they all told. They drifted seaward, following the river, and at its mouth Shanghai was spread like a net. When they reached Shanghai there was the sea, and one could go no further. So they came into the mills.

When I-wan heard what their wage was and how they worked from before dawn until long after the winter dark had fallen, so that until summer they could not see the sun, he cursed in anger. “We will change that!” he shouted.

Then one of them said, “Why should they pay us more when there are so many clamoring even for what we have? It is not reasonable.”

This also was what he had to fight, this gentleness they all had in them. They were rough in speech and not one of them could read or write and their ways were as simple as the beasts’, so that when nature needed, a man turned where he stood and took relief. But they would have been abashed and humble before any rich man, not from fear so much as from their own timidness because they thought the gods had not made them equal to him. I-wan struggled to break down this gentleness.

“You are as good as any man!” he shouted at them. “You have the right to all that any man has!”

To this they laughed amiably and replied so peaceably that I-wan gnashed his teeth at them.

“It is your kindness to say so,” they said courteously, “because we know we are nothing.”

Yet he could not keep from loving them because they were so faithful in their trying to learn from him. They had to steal the time to come to learn from him, two or three coming at a time, and the others filling in their places for an hour or two in the mill. They tried hard, and by the end of the winter they could march together and each one could shoot well enough. With his own money I-wan had bought cartridges for them to practice with, and they were fair marksmen. Then, though they were proud of this, like children they longed for uniforms to wear. They fingered the rough stuff of his uniform and asked, “Shall we some day wear warm cloth like this?”

“Yes,” he said, “that I promise you. You shall all wear warm clothes and eat all you want.”

They clustered about him that night in the cold winter’s moonlight. He was ashamed that he had put on his greatcoat. He wished he had not, so that he might have been cold, too. He stood there, warm and well clad, his belly full of food such as they had never seen and which he ate every day, and he felt tears hot in his eyes. Their eyes were a little hopeful now, sometimes, when he spoke. But their wistful faces broke his heart, and the wind fluttered their cotton rags and pierced to his own bones. He cried in himself, “If my father’s house were mine, I would open the doors and take them in!” Then he thought, “It would be no use. They would come in and come in until there was no room to stand, and still they would be coming, millions of them.” No, if all the houses of the rich were opened it would not be enough, he thought, for all these poor. The poor filled the earth.

“When shall it be?” a man asked. I-wan knew him well, a poor coughing young fellow who had not long to live. It would not be soon enough for him, however soon it was.

“Soon,” he said, “very soon. Perhaps in the spring.”

No, the only thing that could save them was the world made new for them, a world made for the poor and not the rich — a world whose laws were for the little man, whose houses were for him, whose whole thought and shape was for him, so that there could be no rich and strong to prey upon him.

“Don’t stay here longer,” he said to them. “Go to your beds.”

“When you speak,” a voice said out of a shadow, “we feel warmer and as though we had eaten something.”

“Good night — good night,” he cried. He could bear no more — his heart was too full, and he turned away.

That night, late as it was, he felt it impossible to go straight from their want to the plenty and waste of his own home. He strode through the cold, half-empty streets of this part of the city toward the school. He would go and talk awhile with En-lan.

He found En-lan alone in his cubicle, not studying, but reading a sheet of closely written writing. When I-wan came in he put this under a book.

“Come in,” he said. “Why are you so gloomy?”

En-lan was never gloomy. His black eyes were bright and he looked as though he could scarcely keep from laughter. Indeed, in these days he made excuse to laugh at anything, as though he were so brimming with inner pleasure that it must overflow.

“I have come back from—” I-wan paused. They never spoke aloud anything that had to do with their work. He sat down on the little iron cot and reaching for a bit of paper on the table, he wrote, “When do you think the day will really come?”

“Not later than the end of the third month of the new year,” En-lan wrote in answer. Then he took the paper and lit a match and burned it to ash and blew the ash away.

“It is moonlight — will you walk?” I-wan asked. He craved from En-lan some of his brimming sureness, and some, too, of his hardness. En-lan was hard and sure and never moved by anything. Now he nodded, rose, and put on his coat and cap of rabbit’s fur, such as the northern peasants wore. Then he took up the paper he had put under the book and folding it away from I-wan’s eyes, he burned it, also, and blew away the ash. Then they went out into the street.

“Let us turn this way, out of the wind,” En-lan suggested. “On a night like this the wind snatches one’s words and carries them to other ears.”

They turned down a quiet alley where they had talked before and squatted in the lee of a wall. I-wan began at once. There was that about En-lan which sifted out extra talk before it was spoken.

“How shall I persuade my men they are worth anything?” he asked. “All my life I have lived among people who thought they were valuable and should have everything.” He paused and thought of I-ko. I-ko had never in all his life been worth anything. He had done nothing except consume food and goods, and yet I-ko thought he must have the best. “These poor,” I-wan went on, “believe somehow that they deserve to be poor. I can’t get them to see that they have any right to live. I can’t get them even to hate the rich. They simply say, ‘One is rich and one is poor — it is fate.’”