Pearl Buck - Patriot

Yes, I-ko was dead, too, as dead as his grandmother, even though he was a young man. He was dead because he cared for nothing except himself and his own pleasures. Because of his position as the son of the president of a great modern bank, he had an easy place near his father. I-wan himself did not know of all that I-ko did. But he knew enough to know that he would never be like I-ko if he could help it.

Now he took off his dark blue school uniform and put on a long robe of soft gray-green silk. This was because his grandfather disliked to see him at home in the rough school uniform.

“When you come into my presence,” he had directed I-wan, “appear in your natural garb.”

“When I renounce them all,” I-wan thought to himself as he fastened the small buttons of twisted silk, “I will never wear anything but the uniform.” For of course in that life of revolution to which he would go, this robe would be absurd. To clamber over rocks, to march long miles among country villages, to preach on the streets to the people and tell them they ought to revolt against the rich and those who oppressed them — one could not wear a silk gown for such things. He must even change his name. No one would believe in the son of a rich Shanghai banker—

He heard a little cough and suddenly Peony put her head in at the door.

“Your grandfather asks why you delay, and your parents command you to come at once,” she announced.

“I’m coming,” he said shortly.

Her voice changed. She came into the room and went straight toward the window.

“Did you see the oleander?” she asked softly.

“Yes,” he said.

Now he was taking off his leather shoes and putting on black velvet slippers. If his grandfather heard him clacking on the floors in his school shoes he would simply have to turn around again and come back and change.

“Aren’t they beautiful with the light shining through them?” Peony asked.

He looked up. For the first time in his life he suddenly saw Peony not as Peony, the bondmaid with whom he had played and quarreled as long as he could remember. She was a pretty girl standing by those flowers. If he did not know she was only Peony, he would say she was a pretty girl.

“I didn’t look at them,” he said. And without a word he went out. Why did he now notice how Peony looked? He remembered when Peony was a small yellow-faced mite who never seemed to grow at all.

“Certainly she costs us nothing in food,” his mother always said…. No one could say Peony was yellow, now. She would never be tall, but she was not yellow.

He crossed the great square upstairs hall and he stood before a heavy walnut door opposite his own and coughed.

“Come in,” his grandfather called.

So he went in.

It was impossible to despise his grandfather as he did his grandmother. His grandfather knew many things, though, being old, he forgot much. But he would allow greater knowledge to no one. Even though I-wan perceived the absurdity of this in an old man, he continued to be a little afraid of his grandfather. When anybody said the foreigners did thus, his grandfather could always say whether they really did or not. When anyone asked him to tell something about the foreign countries, he always said, “I was in all the western countries, and each is different from the others and all are different from us — that is the chief thing.”

If pressed further he would tell of strange things he had seen. At first, fifty years ago, these things seemed stranger than they did now. A train, for instance, fifty years ago was like nothing so much as a dragon. To people listening he said, “Imagine a dragon roaring across the country, smoke pouring from its nostrils—” Now of course there were plenty of trains. Everybody in Shanghai had seen trains. The old man could say no more about them. But he maintained his dignity.

“Sit down,” his grandfather said. “What have you studied today?”

I-wan sat on the edge of his chair and began. “Sir, I studied today history, geography, English, and mathematics.”

“No military science?” his grandfather asked sharply.

“Tomorrow is science, sir,” I-wan answered.

“Military science — military science is the thing,” his grandfather said. “Now when I was in Germany I saw troops passing in review, and I received certain definite ideas. That is why I hired a German tutor for you last summer.”

I-wan sat staring at his grandfather without seeing or hearing him. He had trained himself to do this by much experience. Germany fifty years ago — what had it to do with him? He sat thinking and not thinking, his eyes following his grandfather’s thin yellow hand as it moved up and down in his white straggling beard. If he should tell Peony tonight when she came to make up his bed that he was a revolutionist — but if he told her that some day he must renounce them all, that he could never come home again, of course Peony would not see him again, either. Then she would cry. Perhaps he would not tell anybody — just not come home any more when the day of revolution broke. In the secret meeting today Liu En-Ian had said, “Next spring—”

“Now you may go,” his grandfather said kindly. “You listen well and I have great plans for you, I-wan.”

I-wan rose, bowed, and turned. At the door he bowed again. He seldom spoke in his grandfather’s room unless he must answer a question. He was always glad to get away, too. The room was full of old books and too much furniture. It was musty and unaired and smelled of an old man. His grandfather did not open the windows often. In the daytime he declared it was cooler to keep them shut and at night he feared the moist air. I-wan shut the door behind him.

“This house is full of smells,” he thought. Even Peony had a smell. She used a jasmine scent. It was too sweet and he had told her so, but she loved it and would not give it up.

“The trouble is with you,” she always insisted. “Your nose is too keen to smell. What other people like, you dislike. You make a point of it.” She said such things in her pretty voice. The words were sharp but they sounded soft….

Now he must go to his parents, and then he would be free. He knocked at another door and entered at once without waiting. Here were the two huge rooms which he knew best of all, because as a baby he had learned to walk on this smooth parquetry floor covered with heavy Chinese rugs. He knew every ornament, from the vases in the carved blackwood cabinet, which he was never allowed to touch, to the ivory balls and elephants with which he could always play as much as he liked. He still liked sometimes to take the big hollow ivory filigree ball into his hands and turn it and try to separate with his eye the seventeen different ivory balls within, each separate and turning.

His mother was sitting by the window embroidering, and his father was at a huge blackwood desk at one end of the room. He was still in the foreign dress he wore at the bank and he looked up as I-wan came in.

“Ah, you’ve seen your grandparents,” he said. “I am only just come home — I must change.” But he did not move. “Has your brother come in?” he asked.

“No, Father,” I-wan answered.

Madame Wu looked up from her satin with her soft doubting face and put out her hand to her son.

“Come here,” she said in English. She spoke English well and was proud of it. In her youth her father had kept an elderly English lady for years as her governess. “You look tired, I-wan.”

“I am tired,” he answered in English. He liked speaking English. He could leave off the long courteous phrases he had to use in Chinese. In English one could not sensibly say, “Your honorable—” and “I, the humble one—” Still his mother was very Chinese sometimes. She had certain superstitions which did not at all suit her pure English accent. All his little boyhood he went with a silver lock and chain about his neck to lock his life in. He used to pull at it in secret, but he could not break it. The silversmith had welded the last link fast around his neck.