Pearl Buck - Patriot

“Do you call it play?” En-lan shouted.

At that moment a buffoon had come out of the laughing crowd and had dug his thumb into the chained man’s eye and his eye burst and streamed out. The man screamed once. Then he bit his lip and was silent. But in the bright air sweat ran shining down his face.

“You can’t deny these men everything,” En-lan said coldly as he watched. “Think what other soldiers have if they are victorious — extra food, money, wine to drink, loot! But our men throw their lives away every day, and yet they eat the same poor food and we have no money to give them and there is no loot. They are simple men — they must have something.”

“Not such degrading play as this!” I-wan retorted. “This is the play of savages!”

“Well, so they are savages,” En-lan replied in a reasonable voice. His brilliant eyes hardened a little now as he looked at I-wan. “Are you still the dreamer, I-wan? Do you still believe the poor will be better than the rich? I hate the rich, but the poor are not gods. They are only children. And at least what they do is done openly.”

I-wan groaned and came into the room and leaned his arm against the wall and hid his face. He felt sick.

“You are too squeamish,” En-lan told him after a moment and kindly enough. “You should have been hardened as I was. I killed pigs when I was a small child and in a famine I helped my father kill our ox for food, and I saw my mother kill a girl she bore. And I grew up on bandits and what they did. I saw men’s noses slit and their eyes gouged and their ears gone and their backs flayed, and as long as I can remember a dead man was nothing. Why should I care for a Japanese?”

I-wan straightened himself, wiped his face, and sat down. “It is not only that a Japanese is a man also,” he said. “It is that I am ashamed to see Chinese do such things.”

“Do you forget what the Japanese did at Nanking?” En-lan asked angrily. “Nothing we can do will be enough revenge!”

“I know. I don’t excuse them,” I-wan replied doggedly. “But I say, if the Japanese are like that, it is not my business — but it is my business if my own people also…”

“Oh, the patriot!” En-lan broke in. “Oh, what a patriot! I-wan, you are a fool. I say it plainly. When you have been through what I have—”

“The more I see of it, the more I shall hate it!” I-wan said violently.

“Then you had better go somewhere else, where it is not to be seen,” En-lan declared. “Perhaps you would like to join the benevolent work of the Japanese and become one of the puppet governors—”

When I-wan heard En-lan say this, he suddenly felt an anger rise in him that lifted him from his feet. Upon its power he leaped forward and fell upon En-lan and En-lan, not being prepared, fell under him upon the beaten ground of the floor, and they struggled together as though they were two boys instead of men. Each held the other with both hands by the hair of his crown and shook as hard as he could, and thus Peony found them at this moment. She had been asleep in the other room and their voices had awakened her and now she came at them shrieking and pulling and scolding.

“Oh shameful! Oh, I-wan, how can you — En-lan, you foolish—” And then she opened her mouth and bit one hand and then another until they let go. They scrambled to their feet and wrung their hands with pain.

“I’m bleeding,” En-lan accused her.

“So you should bleed,” Peony answered him.

I-wan drew out his handkerchief and wrapped his own bleeding hand and said nothing.

“Now, what is your quarrel?” Peony demanded.

En-lan laughed suddenly.

“I called him a patriot and he fell on me!”

“No, now, truly, En-lan!” she exclaimed. “I-wan is not so foolish.”

“It was about the prisoners,” I-wan said suddenly.

“What prisoners?” Peony asked.

They looked, but while they had been quarreling the man had been taken away.

“He is dead,” I-wan said abruptly.

“Then why quarrel over him?” Peony coaxed them.

“There will be more tomorrow,” I-wan said.

“I-wan wants them all gently killed,” En-lan broke in. “And I say the men must have some pleasure out of their hard lives.”

“And I say,” I-wan retorted, “that we ought to teach them something better.”

He looked at Peony. “En-lan says I am soft,” he said. “But you were a child in my father’s house, too. Am I right or wrong?”

He would not care what she said, he thought. He knew he was right.

“But Peony was a slave,” En-lan said sharply. “A slave in a rich man’s house has to suffer—”

“Yes, but still I-wan is right,” Peony said slowly. “It is not good for our men, En-lan. I know what he means. Sometimes when his grandmother used to — to burn me with her pipe”—she glanced at I-wan and flushed a little and went on quietly—“I remember I used to say to her in my heart, ‘But it is you who are cruel and wicked and mean — it is not I. I have only a bit of aching flesh on my arm, but you have become wicked!’”

“Did she do that?” I-wan asked in a low voice. She pulled up her sleeve and he saw on her thin upper arm deep round scars, many scars running in together.

“You never told me,” he whispered.

“I couldn’t tell — anyone,” she said mournfully. “I don’t know why — except it seemed to make me a real slave and so I hid it.”

“You should have told me,” I-wan said. He wanted suddenly to weep with anger. “I hate every torture!”

“I also,” Peony said simply. She drew down her sleeve and turned to En-lan. “I-wan is right,” she told him.

“Perhaps he is,” En-lan agreed. It was impossible to tell from his face how much he had inwardly yielded. But from that day on I-wan at least saw no more torture.

It was soon after this that I-wan began to perfect a plan which for a long time he had been musing upon in his mind. It had begun many months before, when it had occurred to him to imagine what he would do if some day when he led his men in a secret attack, one of those whom he must kill or see killed should happen to be Bunji? He put the thought away as soon as it came. There was so little chance that this would happen that he could think of it as no chance.

And yet there was enough chance left so that he never looked from ambush at Japanese upon a road where he was hidden or through an open door suddenly upon men surprised without taking his first quick look to see that none of the faces was Bunji’s face. No, and he never killed a man from behind, lest the man be Bunji, and if a man tried to make his escape and he had not seen his face, he let him go…. Yet he had heard nothing of Bunji. Tama never told him where he was, if indeed she knew herself. She only wrote that he was still alive and well, and that his little son was walking now, and that Setsu longed to have her second child. But who knew when that would be? This war was endless in spite of all the times set for it to end… And as long as he knew Bunji was alive, I-wan was afraid.

He knew, of course, what he would do if Bunji were among the ones they captured. He would help him to escape. That he had decided long ago when first he had thought of it, so that if it happened he would be ready. But first he would talk with Bunji and explain to him the evil of this war which his people made upon I-wan’s people. For I-wan had talked to many prisoners and he now knew that they were not told why they had to leave their homes and families and die in such hundreds and thousands. And he found very often the letters and writings in the pockets of those dead, and he read them that he might know what they thought and felt before they died. And always they said the same thing, that this was a righteous and necessary war which they fought to save their own homes and their own country. And I-wan longed to say to them, “We do not want your country and you have nothing you need to save yourselves from with us, so why have you died?” But they were dead.