Andre Malraux - Man's Fate

“Sir. ”

“That’s that. Settled. Classified. Get the hell out of here. How do you do, Monsieur Ferral?”

He turned round: a military face: large, regular and impersonal features, less revealing than his shoulders. “Hello, Martial. WeU?”

“To keep the railroad the government is obliged to take away thousands of men from other duties. You can’t hold out against a whole country, you have

a police like ours at your disposal. The only thing the gove^rnment can count on is the ^armored train, with its White officers. That’s serious.”

“A minority still implies a majority of imbeciles. Well, anyway. ’’

“Everything depends on the front. Here they’re going to try to revolt. It’s going to be hot for them, maybe, for they’re scarcely armed.”

Ferral could only listen and wait, which he thoroughly detested. The parleys held by the chiefs of the Anglo- Saxon and Japanese groups, himself, certain consulates, with the go-betweens who filled all the big hotels of the concessions to overflowing, still remained fruitless. This afternoon, perhaps.

Once Shanghai was in the hands of the revolutionary army, the Kuomintang would at last have to choose between democracy and Communism. Democracies are always good customers. And a company can make profits without depending on treaties. On the other hand, if the city became sovietized, the Franco-Asiatic Consortium- and with it all the French trade in Shanghai-would crumble away; Ferral was of the opinion that the powers would abandon their nationals, as England had done at Hankow. His immediate objective was to prevent the taking of the city before the arrival of the army, to make it impossible for the Communists to do anything alone.

“How many troops, Martial, in addition to the armored train?”

“Two thousand police and a brigade of infantry, Monsieur Ferral.”

“And how many revolutionaries who can do something besides talk?”

“A few hundred at the most, who are armed. … As for the others, they’re not worth considering. As there’s no military service here, they don’t know how to use a gun, don’t forget. In February there were two or three thousand of those fellows, if you count the Communists.. They’re no doubt a little more numerous now.”

But in February the gove^rnment army had not been

“How many will follow them?” Martial went on. “But you see, Monsieur Ferral, all that doesn’t get us very far. One would have to know the psychology of the chiefs. …I know that of the men pretty well. The Chinaman, you see. ”

Ferral was looking at him with an expression he had seen before-on rare occasions-and which was enough to silence him: an expression less of contempt, of irritation, than of appraisal. Ferral did not say, in his cutting and somewhat mechanical voice: “Is this going to last much longer?” But he expressed it. He could not bear to have Martial pass off information obtained from his agents as the fruit of his own perspicacity.

If Martial had dared he would have answered: “What difference does it make to you?” He was dominated by Ferral; and his relations with him had been established through orders to which he could only submit. Even as a man he felt him to be superior to himself; but he could not endure his insolent indifference, his way of reducing him to the status of a mechanism, of ignoring him whenever he wanted to speak as an individual and not merely as a transmitter of information. Members of Parliament on missions had told him about Ferral’s effectiveness at the Chamber Committees, before his fall. In the sessions he made such use of the qualities that gave his speeches their clearness and their force that his colleagues detested him more and more every year: he had a unique talent for ignoring their existence. Whereas a Jaures, a Briand, conferred upon them a personal life which, to be sure, they often did not possess, giving the illusion of appealing to each one individually, of wishing to convince them, of involving them in a complicity in which a common experience of life and men united them-Ferral, on the contrary, erected a structure of impersonal facts, and would conclude with: “In view of these conditions, gentlemen, it would thus obviously be absurd. ” He got his way by force or by money. He had not changed, Martial observed.

“And what about Hankow?” asked Ferral.

“We had reports last night. There are zzo,ooo unemployed there, enough to make a new Red army. ”

For weeks goods from three of the companies controlled by Ferral had been rotting on the sumptuous quays: the coolies refused to transport anything.

“What news of the relations between the Communists and Chiang Kai-shek?”

“Here’s his last speech,” answered Martial. “For my part, you know, I don’t believe much in speeches. "

“I believe in them. In these at least. It doesn't matter."

The telephone bell. Martial took the receiver.

“It's for you, Monsieur Ferral.”

Ferral sat down on the table.

“Hello? Yes."

“He’s holding out a club to hit you with. He is hostile to intervention, that’s obvious. It’s only a question of deciding whether it’s better to attack him as a pederast or accuse him of being bought. That’s all.”

“It being perfectly understood that he is neither. Moreover, I don’t like to have one of my collaborators believe me capable of attacking a man for a sexual deviation which he might really have. Do you take me for a moralist? Good-by.”

Martial did not dare to question him. That Ferral did not keep him posted on his plans, did not tell him what he expected about his secret conferences with the most active members of the International Chamber of Commerce, with the heads of the great associations of Chinese merchants, appeared to him both insulting and short-sighted. On the other hand, if it is annoying for a Chief of Police not to know what he is doing, it is even more annoying to lose his post. Now Ferral, born in the Republic as in the bosom of a family, his memory full of kindly faces of old gentlemen-Renan, Berthelot, Victor Hugo-the son of a great counselor-at-law, an agrege in history at twenty-seven, at twenty-nine the editor of the first collective history of France, a deputy at a very early age (favored by the epoch that had made Poincare and Barthou ministers before forty), and now President of the Franco-Asiatic Consortium-Ferral, in spite of his political downfall, possessed in Shanghai a power and a prestige at least equal to those of the French Consul-General with whom, moreover, he was on friendly terms. The Chief was therefore respectfully cordial. He handed him the speech:

“1 have spent eighteen million dollars in all, and taken six provinces, in five months. Let the malcontents look for another general-in-chief, if they wish, mho spends as little and accomplishes as much as 1. .”

“Obviously the money question would be settled by the taking of Shanghai,” said Ferral. “The customs would give him seven million dollars a month, just about what is needed to make up the army deficit. ”

“Yes. But they say that Moscow has given the political commissars orders to have their own troops beaten before Shanghai. In that case the insurrection here might end badly. ”

“Why those orders?”

“So that Chiang Kai-shek would be beaten, to destroy his prestige, and to replace him by a Communist general to whom the honor of taking Shanghai would then go. It's almost certain that the campaign against Shanghai has been undertaken without the assent of the Central Committee of Hankow. The same informers claim that the Red staff is protesting against this policy. ” Ferral was interested, though skeptical. He continued to read the speech:

“Deserted by a considerable number of its members, the Central Executive Comnittee of Hankow nevertheless is determnined to remain the supreme authority of the Kuomintang Party. . 1 know that Sun Yat-sen admitted the Conmunists as auxiliaries of the Party. I have done nothing against them, and I have often admired their energy. But now, instead of being content to remain auxiliaries, they set themselves up as masters and violently and insolently aspire to govern the Party. I warn them that I shall oppose these excessive pretensions, which go beyond what was stipulated at the time of their admission. .”