Pearl Buck - Patriot

Even Peony had perhaps been swept into that death. The papers here in Nagasaki were full of stories of the purge. There were no names, only numbers. Thousands of young men and women were being killed. He belonged among them, he told himself; he too should be dead. He had been saved only by his father’s power, that power which he had so despised because it was the power of money. He had betrayed, against his will, the revolution, as he had been betrayed. What of those promises he had made to the mill workers? He could still see them back at their hopeless tasks, accepting their fate again, muttering to each other that after all they had known there was nothing for them.

There was nothing left to worship. He could be diverted upon the surface of his days by a strange country and new ways, by Bunji’s nonsense and laughter and by work and by his real happiness in this house. But there was the great inner emptiness. He did not know what to do with that. When he was alone he was faced with it. What was there to dream about any more outside of books? And what could hope mean again?

He would never, he felt, hope for anything very much for himself. He read his father’s letters with a strange sadness, as though they were written long ago by one dead. They came regularly, once a month, but nothing in them seemed real, though his father said everything was coming back to what it had been. Business was improving quickly, now that it could be sure the new government was to make no great changes. Credit was established abroad. Foreigners were anxious to make loans for reconstruction. The radicals were in full flight. Indemnities had now been arranged and paid for the few foreigners killed accidentally in the fighting at Nanking a year ago. All was being stabilized; the old peace and order would soon be restored. The family was as usual. I-ko was still in Germany. He had arranged wisely that I-ko could procure funds only through the military school he attended. His mother was lonely without her sons, but they were grateful to have them alive when so many young men were dead. His grandfather was in excellent health. Only his grandmother was disturbed because they could find no one to take Peony’s place. The servant girls were idle and impudent now. As for I-wan, he was to learn business and some day his father would intercede personally with the government to allow him to return. Only he must be sure that I-wan was first cured of his radical ideas.

He folded the letters and tore them up small and threw them away.

“I do not wish to return,” he wrote his father. “I like this country well enough.”

Well, he would be a good business man at least. At the beginning of his second year he began working all day, as Bunji did, taking only the holidays that all clerks were allowed. Mr. Muraki said one night at the dinner table, “I have written your father how well you do.” He bowed in thanks, and felt someone looking at him. Tama was there that night. Across the table she was looking at him, and now he noticed her clear black eyes. She looked away, and he went on thinking with difficulty. He did not hate his father now.

No, his father and Mr. Muraki, he was coming to see, were perhaps right. For nothing made Mr. Muraki more angry than anything at all communistic. When he saw in the papers that the government had arrested some student as a communist, he drew his breath in through his teeth. “Dreamers!” Mr. Muraki would mutter. “As if anything can be accomplished by dreams!” Perhaps he and En-lan had been wrong. And yet the thought gave I-wan no comfort. It increased rather the isolation of his spirit to distrust the reality of that upon which he had once put his life. But he could make nothing of it and at last he tried to think no more. He settled himself steadily into the pattern of his days. They made, he told himself, a sort of life.

All life, I-wan told himself now in the steady round of his days, went on as it was. If one struggled against it, it was not life that broke, but he. Sometimes in the solitude of his work or in his hours of reading and walking, for there were many solitary hours in his life in this quiet house, it seemed to him that all that had been until he came here was something he had dreamed and never done.

And his father’s letters kept coming. Everything was as it had been, his father always wrote. Chiang Kai-shek was a man of great sense and he had cut off all the revolutionists, and they would be driven into the interior and not allowed to come into the prosperous river cities, certainly not into Shanghai. The bankers, therefore, were solidly for the new government. Everything was turning out well and far better than it had been hoped, because this man Chiang, with his strange power over the people, had chosen the way of wisdom rather than of folly.

Three or four times I-wan had said to Bunji, “I ought not to live on here forever. It has been two years. I ought to find some rooms outside.” Each time Bunji cried out against this and told Mr. Muraki, so that Mr. Muraki made an opportunity to see I-wan and say in his delicate quiet fashion, “Do not leave my house. I like to have my friend’s son in my house.”

So through two winters I-wan had stayed on. He had waked many mornings to see from his warm quilts snow in his bit of garden, soft thick snow that looked scarcely cold. The sea mists kept back ice and sharp frosts, and when snow fell it clung where it lay, melting slowly underneath upon the warm earth. The paper-latticed house which was so cool in summer could be warm, too, in winter. In his room there was a sort of shallow pit sunk into the floor and into the pit was put a pot or cauldron of red coals, covered with ash, and over it a frame, and over this a thickly-stuffed quilt, and here he sat in the evenings when he and Bunji did not go out to some place for pleasure, his legs and his whole body warm and comforted. Sometimes Bunji came in and thrust his legs under the quilt, too, and they read or talked together. Sometimes in the main room where a large pot of coals was burned, they all sat under the big quilt as though around a table. Only Tama was still not often there. She had always, she said, to study, since this was her last year at the girls’ school.

But sometimes she came, and on such evenings I-wan sat quietly, much more quietly than when she was not there. He did not look her in the face, but he saw her, somehow, between his looking here and there as Mr. Muraki or Bunji talked. She never sat by him. That he knew she could not do. She sat by her mother, her eyes bright and rebellious under her quietness and her cheeks red with the warmth. He knew now she was pretty, though he dared not look at her. In all this seeming freedom there was no real freedom. He had now learned that, too. Mr. Muraki might take off his garments before them and put on others in the presence of them all. But he turned his face to the wall first and when he did this he put a curtain between himself and everyone. Maidservant or family, they all turned their own faces away from him.

So also with Tama. She came and went as she liked, or so it seemed, but now I-wan knew, with none having told him, that if by one word or movement he let it be seen that he thought her free for him to speak to or to touch, he must leave this house, where he, too, came and went freely, only as long as he took no freedom for himself.

Then in the early summer of that year Tama left school. No one spoke of it to I-wan, but there she was, always at home. In the mornings she had been used to put on a straight plain foreign dress before she went to school. Now all day long she wore her own soft Japanese dress. It had been that when I-wan came back from work she was never there, since she seldom left school before nightfall. Now she was always there when he came home, not waiting or even where he could meet her.