Pearl Buck - Patriot

For the first thing En-lan had decreed was that they should leave the village where they were and approach the enemy lines. They were to go not as an army but simply as farming people, some one day, some another, to return to their lands despoiled by the enemy.

“Those lands,” En-lan told I-wan grimly one night, as they sat over maps in En-lan’s room, “I know them well.” He put his finger on a certain spot. “Do you remember what I used to tell you about my village?”

“Yes,” I-wan replied, “I do remember.”

“Here it is,” En-lan said and stared down at it. “Its name is still here. But it is gone. Not a soul is alive in it. The walls of its houses are ruined and its streets are scorched earth. I have one brother alive, perhaps — I don’t know. But a Japanese garrison fell upon them in revenge after Tungchow.”

He was silent a moment, and I-wan did not speak either. What could be said?

“I used to think I would surely go back some day and start a school,” En-lan said slowly. And after a while he said again, “I never repaid them while they lived for what they gave me. But I will repay them now, when they are dead.”

Peony had been sitting upon a bench mending an old uniform of En-lan’s. Now she put down her sewing and rose and came over to En-lan and took the map from his hand.

“It is time for you to go to bed,” she said. “You know you need your early sleep, because the dawn awakes you.”

His mood changed at once. “I’ll always be a farmer boy,” he told I-wan, smiling a little. “Any cock can rouse me.”

And I-wan, seeing the deep passion between these two, felt his own longing creep over him like a mist. For weeks he lived as though this were the only life he had ever had, and then suddenly, as if his name were called by her voice, he longed for Tama. Over and over again at such times he wanted to tell En-lan and Peony about her. But he could not. He could not be sure that they would understand. En-lan was as implacable as ever. The old calmness with which he once had told I-wan that he ought no longer to own his father, was in him still. He was ruthless in his simplicity. “How,” he would ask I-wan, “can you love a Japanese?” And yet I-wan knew that he loved Tama and would always love her and she belonged to no country, but only to him.

Once he thought he might tell Peony alone. He had had that day a letter from Tama, sent as all his letters from her were sent, under an official seal from his father. This day Tama’s letter had been long and full of what the children said and did. Jiro was beginning school. She had bought him a brown cloth school-bag for his books and a little uniform and a cap, such as the other boys wore. “But at home,” she wrote, “I teach him, too. We put flowers before your picture every day, and every day I explain to them how brave you are and how beautiful a country China is and how we belong to China — do I not belong to you, and they to us?”

Yes, since he was gone, she had written so “… we belong to China—”

On the day he had this letter he had been eaten up with loneliness for them. It was a day of unusual quietness. En-lan had commanded rest for them all, for the enemy were changing their position on a certain sector which he wished to attack. And I-wan found Peony sitting with her constant sewing on the sunny side of the farmhouse where they were quartered. And suddenly he wanted to tell her about Tama. Still some caution held him back. So he began, “Did you never have a son, Peony?”

She looked up at him. In the sharp sunlight he saw how her delicate skin was beginning to crack in small fine wrinkles, and her hair, which once she kept so smooth with fragrant oils, now looked brown and dried with the wind. But she was still pretty and still young. Peony, he thought, could not be more than thirty.

“I had two children,” she said. She dropped her eyes to her sewing. “I was very ill with the last — I seem never to have any more now.” She went on sewing. Then she said. “And why should I not tell you? You-are my brother. The first — my son — I lost by a dysentery. It is not a good life for a small child — our life. We have been driven so much. And his food and water changed too often. He was five, though — I kept him as long as that. And then suddenly he died in a day. And we buried him on a hillside in Kiangsi. It is so far south from here I shall never see his grave again, I think.” She shook her head but she did not weep. “And the little one,” she went on, “that was a girl. It was so long before she came I thought there would never be another. But En-lan doesn’t believe in gods, you know, so I had nothing to pray to for a child. And then on the Long March, I conceived.”

She paused, bit her thread, and went on. “Well, I hoped the Long March would be ended before she was born. But no — we kept climbing over those high mountains and down the rocky roads and over the deserts. I wasn’t sick, but I had to walk all the time or ride a horse. That was worse. The roads were so bad — and sometimes there were no roads. Ah, I was glad then your father wouldn’t let my feet be bound! Well, so the child was born very small and thin — and a girl. But we were still marching, so what could we do with her? I gave her to a good farmer’s wife and left some money for her and I told her I would come back.”

Peony bent her head down close to her sewing. “But that was three years ago…. Sometimes I can’t be sure if I remember the place, or how the woman looked. And her name was only Wang….”

“Did En-lan let this happen?” I-wan exclaimed.

She looked up at him. “You know him,” she said simply.

He could say nothing. He knew En-lan. He would demand everything of Peony, too. It came to him for the first time that perhaps Peony would have liked a home, a little house like Tama’s, set upon a hill, and a garden.

“Are you sorry you followed him that day?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Without him, what would I have been?” she asked. Then she looked at the sun. “It’s late,” she exclaimed. She put her needle into a bit of cloth securely and folded it up and buttoned it into the pocket of her uniform.

“Needles are very precious now. I wish I had all the ones I used to lose so carelessly.” She rose as she spoke. “I must go and get his supper,” she said cheerfully.

He watched her walk away. She was very graceful still, but so thin. She would not live to be old in this life. But if it were En-lan’s life she wanted it. No, he decided, he would not tell her about Tama. She would tell En-lan anything if she thought he ought to know. She would think only of En-lan. He could not entrust Tama to her now.

Each fought in this war as he was able. Elsewhere in the country there were armies uniformed and manned and trained by foreign officers. But here where I-wan had chosen to make his present life there was no such thing. These men could not have borne it. They drew near to the enemy, so near that less than a day’s easy walking would bring them into lost territory. There were no headquarters, seemingly, and no head to these scattering men. En-lan lived in a village, looking like any farmer. And around him were other farmers and petty tradesmen and fuel cutters and men who hired themselves out to other men and all that multitude of small people who have nothing to do with war in any country and who care for nothing except to feed themselves and their children. Then from nowhere a band of dark fierce banditry swept by night into a town held by the enemy and killed the garrison to the last man and the next day a foray of angry Japanese searched the countryside in revenge. But these small folk knew nothing and had seen nothing. With the innocent eyes of eternal children they gazed at their enemies and laughed.