Pearl Buck - Patriot

He stood for the first time before this man who had once cut off his life and had exiled him, in a fashion, to another world. Yet it was he who now called him back again.

He had never been in any presence so potent, not even in En-lan’s. Had he lived, En-lan might one day have been as strong, as controlled, as full of disciplined power as this man now was. But in I-wan’s memory he lived as a hot-hearted boy.

“Sit down,” Chiang Kai-shek said.

He sat down upon one of the three straight-backed chairs in the room and waited. She had told him — this man’s beautiful, foreign-looking wife, who had been the one to meet him first — that he spoke no other language than his own.

“Be prepared, please,” she told him, her voice so much softer than her handsome face, “do not use any English words. There are many young men who find their own language not enough and they put in English words and it makes him very angry. He always says, ‘What — isn’t Chinese enough for them?’” She had smiled a very little.

“I will be careful he had answered.

How, he thought now, waiting, did this man feel toward his wife? She wore Chinese dress and her black hair was brushed smoothly back into an old-fashioned knot. But even in the few moments she had talked, I-wan had perceived that in a hundred ways she was not Chinese. Her big black eyes shone and sparkled, her soft voice was frank, and all her movements, though graceful and controlled, were free. She was a woman who would do as she liked. I-ko had laughed because she was the head of the nation’s air force. But she could be the head of anything — except, perhaps, of this man!

Chiang Kai-shek lifted his eyes and stared at I-wan. He had been reading a long document, which he had then signed and sealed. When his eyes were downcast, one said his mouth was the strength of his face, a mouth beautiful by nature and stern by will. But when one saw the eyes one forgot the mouth. This straight black gaze commanded attention.

“Your father is my friend,” Chiang said. I-wan bowed a little and met these eyes fully and waited. They did not waver. “I have this letter,” Chiang went on, his voice very quiet and somewhat cold. “It is of the greatest importance. This must be delivered to a certain officer in the communist army in the Northwest and from his hand into the hand of the other two generals in command of that army.”

“I understand that,” I-wan replied. But then he understood nothing else. Why should Chiang be sending documents to the men he had been pursuing so bitterly that many of them were dead because of him and the others driven into that corner of the Northwest? There was no time to wonder. He must listen. This man would never repeat, never explain, never say one word too much. Therefore not one word was to be lost.

“I choose you because your father promises me you are to be trusted. But if you are not, you will suffer as any other traitor does. He understands that. So must you. A plane is ready for you. You are to leave at once.”

“One moment, Excellency,” I-wan said. “Am I to bring back an answer?”

“The plane will wait to bring you back,” Chiang replied. He struck a bell on the desk. The door opened at the sound.

I-wan rose and as by instinct saluted, the old stiff salute his German tutor had given him.

“You’ve had military training?” Chiang asked sharply. “I thought only your brother had been abroad.”

“I have been only in Japan,” I-wan said.

“Military training there?” Chiang asked again.

“No — it was before that,” I-wan replied.

Chiang banged the bell with the flat of his hand and the door shut again. I-wan remained standing before him.

“They tell me Japan is on the edge of a collapse,” he said abruptly. “Is it true?”

“No,” I-wan replied. “It is not true.”

“Business is good?” Chiang asked sharply.

“Yes,” I-wan replied, remembering the busy Japanese streets.

“I am told the people do not want war — is that true?” Chiang prodded him with his brilliant eyes.

I-wan replied steadily, “The people want whatever they are told to want.”

“They are loyal to their government?”

“Completely.”

“Do they still worship their Emperor?”

“Yes.”

Chiang stirred and sighed and for the first time moved his eyes from I-wan’s. He picked up his jade seal and looked at it.

“Then they’ve been lying to me — the people around me,” he remarked. “It will be a long war.”

“It must be a long war,” I-wan replied. And then remembering Hideyoshi, he added, “It will be our strength if we realize it from the first and plan for it. The enemy”—that was Hideyoshi — not Tama and his little sons, who belonged to him alone—“the enemy think it will be a short war.”

Chiang’s eyes shot at him again.

“Do they? How long?”

“They said at first three months — now, a year,” I-wan replied. “But I think it will be many years,” he added. Outside he heard the drone of an airplane’s engine. But Chiang still held him.

“That means — we must plan our war after theirs is finished,” he said. He was looking at the seal again. I-wan did not answer. “That means let them spend while we save. That means save what is essential to our national life — not cities, not people. We have those to spare.”

I-wan, waiting, caught these words, “Not cities, not people.” These were not to be saved. There was something else. Was there, then, a way to fight a war and seeming to lose, yet win?

The door opened and Madame Chiang was there.

“The plane is waiting,” she told her husband. “Had he not better go now so that the landing will not be in darkness?”

“Yes — go,” Chiang commanded him. And whatever he meant was left unsaid.

Flying over the handful of islands which was Japan had been nothing like this. He felt proudly that such a country as this was security against any victory. Hour after hour they drove across the sky over the solid mainland of China. Here was a country! They sank to follow a thousand miles of broad yellow river flowing through green lands and pallid deserts, they rose to scale ranges of mountains whose crests were barren in cold. Impassable country! Once he had been ashamed when he read in a Japanese newspaper that there were no good roads beyond the seacoast in China—“a backward country,” it said, “which the Chinese have done nothing to develop.” Yes, so backward that there were no roads now by which an enemy could enter! There was only the sky that was open. Through the sky alone was the passage to be had. And yet, how could even bombs from the sky destroy a country as vast as this!

He remembered something. In the two days before he left for Nanking he had gone with his father over the whole city of Shanghai to see what had befallen it. Devastation enough, he had thought. In increasing silence and desperation they had gone from one place to another, seeing ruins everywhere. But on the edge of the city they found a farmer planting green cabbages, squatting calmly on his heels as he worked. His house was gone. A shed of mats rudely put together told that. They had stopped a moment to watch him, and then because something needed to be said in greeting, his father said, “It is too bad that your house is gone, too.”

The farmer looked up and grinned and wiped his face with the blue cotton scarf across his shoulders. He pointed his chin toward a deep hole at the edge of the field. It was full of water.

“That’s where it was,” he told them cheerfully. “A good house my great-grandfather built! But never mind — none of us were killed. We were all out working. And as I told my wife when we saw the water coming up into it, ‘Well, we always wanted a pond and now we have it!’”