Pearl Buck - Patriot

“It was his foreign wife — I shall send her back to her own country,” his father now said slowly. “It was she who was always making him despise his own people. From the very first moment she came, nothing was good enough for her. She did not like the food or the way we lived. Nothing we have was so good as what she had in her own country. And she laughed at our soldiers and she always said to I-ko that the Japanese were better, until he began to believe there was no use trying to fight them. So — I suppose”—his father’s voice dropped—“he thought since Canton was doomed to fall, he might as well—” He looked up at Chiang haggardly. “I don’t defend him,” he said in a whisper.

Chiang had let him speak on, and while he spoke his grave face took on a sort of stern kindness. Now he said, “We have understood each other.”

I-wan saw his father nod. And at that moment he knew he loved his father as he never had before….

“Go out now,” Chiang was saying to his father. “Rest yourself a little while. I want to talk to your son.”

His father rose and bowed, and they waited while he went out. Then when they were alone suddenly Chiang changed. All the mildness in his face was gone. He turned on I-wan his full stern black gaze.

“You I have used,” he said. “I had planned to use you again.” He paused. “But you are married to a Japanese,” he added sharply.

I-wan jumped a little in spite of himself. This man knew everything. But he was ready.

“Yes, I am,” he answered.

“If you are your father’s son, you are also brother to a traitor,” Chiang said. His voice was harsh enough now and there was not a hint of kindness in his face. “How do I know what you are?”

“There is no way for me to tell you,” I-wan retorted. He could be afraid of this man, but he would not be.

“Will you give up your Japanese wife?” Chiang demanded.

“At your command?” I-wan asked.

Chiang did not answer, but he did not move his eyes from I-wan’s face.

“No,” I-wan said quietly. And then after a moment he said, “I left my wife and my children to come back and fight. I am fighting. When peace comes, I shall bring them here. My sons are Chinese. And — she — their mother — is loyal to me.”

“It will be a long time before peace comes,” Chiang said.

“I know that,” I-wan said.

“This city will be in ruins, too,” Chiang said. He looked about the room and then out of the window, where roof touched roof in the crowded city. “This city and many others, perhaps. When peace comes there may be no cities left.”

“There will be land,” I-wan replied…. Now he understood why his father had said, ‘The lands will be yours and your sons’.”

“Yes, there will be land,” Chiang repeated. And then with one of those vivid changes which I-wan had now learned to expect of him, he said, “What sort of woman is your wife?”

For answer I-wan took from his pocket Tama’s last two letters, which he had not destroyed because they had come just before he left and he wanted to read them again. He opened them and spread them before Chiang.

They were simple letters, written in Tama’s fine clear handwriting. She had not returned to her father’s house because when I-wan was gone she found she could not. So now these letters were full of small things such as how a certain tree had grown in the garden and how the chrysanthemums they had planted together were in bloom again and how a storm from the sea had torn the paper in the lattice to the west, and she and Jiro had mended it, and how big the boys grew and how she told them their father was a hero and that he fought for his country, which was theirs too, and that he must think of them as waiting for the future when they would all be united again. They were, indeed, nothing but the letters which any wife would write to her husband whom she loved and who was at the front in any war.

He watched Chiang’s face while he read them. But he could tell nothing from it, and he waited while Chiang folded the letters and put them into the envelopes, slowly as though he were thinking of something. Then he handed them back to I-wan.

“And now — is there anything you wish?” he demanded.

“Only to have a few days with my father,” I-wan replied quickly. “We will visit our ancestral lands together, which we have never seen.”

“And then?” Chiang demanded again.

“To return to my place in the army,” I-wan replied.

“Granted!” Chiang exclaimed. He turned away and struck the bell on his desk and the door opened and his wife came in and I-wan knew himself dismissed. He rose and bowed, but Chiang was not looking at him.

“Where is that map of the new road to Burma?” he was asking her as though she had not been away from him. “I had my hand on it a moment ago.”

“Here it is,” she said, laughing at him a little, “here under your hand!”

And I-wan went out with these words in his ears. The new road to Burma! Was that finished already? He had heard it was being made — thousands of men and women were making it. Well, it was a strange way to fight a war, perhaps, to make a great road westward while the enemy bombed the east! But it was their way. What if the real country his sons would know was this new inner China, looking not seaward but across the mountains to India? Who knew? But who knew anything?

And he went to find his father.