Andre Malraux - Man's Fate

“The arsenal is surrounded" said Ferral. “All the governmental cantonments have been taken. The revolutionary army will be in Shanghai tomorrow. The matter has to be settled now. Mark my word. As a result of the Communist propaganda, numerous lands have been taken away from their proprietors; Chiang Kai-shek must either accept this fact or give orders to put to death those who have taken them. The Red government of Hankow cannot accept such orders.”

“He will temporize.”

“You know what happened to the stocks of the English companies after the taking of the English concession of Hankow. You know what your situation will be when lands, no matter what they are, have been legally tom from their owners. Chiang Kai-shek knows, and says he is obliged to break now. Wil you help him, yes or no?”

Liu spat, his head sunk into his shoulders. He shut his eyes, opened them again, looked at Ferral with the sly eyes of an old usurer:

“How much?”

“Fifty million dollars.”

He spat again.

“Just from us?”

“Yes.”

He shut his eyes once more. Above the splitting noise of the firing, shots from the armored train could be heard at minute intervals.

If Liu’s friends made up their minds to help Chiang, it would still be necessary to fight; if they did not decide, Communism would no doubt triumph in China. “This is one of the moments when the world’s destiny hangs in the balance. ” thought Ferral, with a pride in which there was both exaltation and indifference. His eyes did not leave his interlocutor. The old man, his eyes shut, seemed to be asleep; but on the backs of his hands the blue, corded veins quivered like nerves. “A personal argument might be necessary,” thought Ferral.

“Chiang Kai-shek,” he said, “cannot let his officers be despoiled. And the Communists are determined to assassinate him. He knows it.”

It had been rumored for several days, but Ferral doubted it.

“How much time have we?” asked Liu. And immediately, with one eye shut, the other open, cunning on the right, shamefaced on the left:

“Are you sure he won’t take the money without exe^ cuting his promises?”

“There is also our money, and there is no question of promises. He cannot do otherwise. And mark my word: it’s not because you pay him that he is going to destroy the Communists: it’s because he is going to destroy the Communists that you pay him.”

“I shall call my friends together.”

Ferral knew the Chinese custom, and the influence of the one who speaks.

“What will be your advice?”

“Chiang Kai-shek may be beaten by the people of Hankow. There are two hundred thousand unemployed there.”

“If we don’t help him he surely be beaten.”

“Fifty million. … It is … a great deal. ”

He finally looked straight at Ferral.

“Less than you will be obliged to give a Communist government.”

The telephone.

“The armored train has been cut off,” Ferral went on. “Even if the government wants to recall troops from the front, it is now powerless.”

He held out his hand.

Liu shook it, left the room. From the vast window full of shreds of clouds Ferral watched the car disappear, the roar of the motor drowning out the voUeys for a moment. Even if he were victor, the state of his enterprises would perhaps oblige him to ask for help from the French government which so often refused it, which had just refused it to the Industrial Bank of China; but today he was among those through whom the fate of Shanghai was being decided. All the economic forces, almost all the consulates were playing the same game as he: Liu would pay. The armored train was still firing. Yes, for the first time, there was an organization on the

other side. He would like to know the men who were directing it. To have them shot, too.

The evening of war was vanishing into the night. Below, lights were appearing, and the invisible river was drawing to itself, as always, what little life remained in the city. It came from Hankow, that river. Liu was right, and Ferral knew it: there lay the danger. There the Red army was being formed. There the Communists dominated. Since the revolutionaries, like a snow-plow, had thro^ off the Northerners, all the Left dreamed of that promised land: the home of the Revolution was in the greenish shadow of those foundries, of those arsenals, even before it had taken them; now it possessed them and those wretched marchers who were disappearing out of sight in the slimy mist where the lanterns became more and more numerous were all advancing in the same direction as the river, as if they too had all come from Hankow with their ravaged faces-omens driven towards him by the menacing night.

Eleven o'clock. Since Liu’s departure, before and after dinner, conferences with guild-master, bankers, directors of insurance companies and river transports, importers, heads of spinning mills. Al of them depended in some measure upon the Ferral group or upon one of the foreign groups that had linked their policy to that of the Franco-Asiatic Consortium: Ferral was not counting on Liu alone. Shanghai, the living heart of China, pulsated with the passage of everything that made it live; from the remotest countrysides-most of the farm-lands depended upon the banks-blood-vessels flowed like the canals towards the capital where the destiny of China was being decided. The firing continued. Nothing to do now but wait.

In the next room Valerie was lying in bed. Although she had been his mistress for a week, he had made no pretense of loving her: she would have smiled with an insolent knowing air. Nor had she revealed herself to him-perhaps for the same reason. The difficulties which beset his present life drove him into eroticism, not into love. He realized he was no longer young, and tried to convince himself that his legend made up for it. He was Ferral, and he knew women. So well, in fact, that he did not believe a word of what he told himself. He remembered Valerie saying, one day when he had spoken to her of one of his friends, an intelligent invalid, some of whose mistresses had aroused his envy: “There is nothing more appealing in a man than a combination of strength and weakness.” No one can be adequately explained by his life, he firmly believed, and he remembered these words better than all the things she had confided to him about hers.

This wealthy woman, who ran a large dressmaking establishment, was not mercenary (not yet at least). She claimed that many women achieved their sexual excitement by appearing naked before a man of their choice, and that this was fully effective only once. Was she thinking of herself? Yet it was the third time she went to bed with him. He sensed in her a pride akin to his own. “Men have travels, women have lovers,” she had said the day before. Did he please her, as he did so many women, by the contrast between his hardness and his attentiveness to her? He was not unaware that in this game he was involving what was most essential to him in life-his pride. This was not without danger with a partner who could say: “No man can speak of women, dear, because no man understands that every new makeup, every new dress, every new lover brings forth a new soul. ’’-with the appropriate smile.

He entered the room. She smiled at him from the bed, her waved hair falling in a thick mass over the round on which her head rested.

Smiles gave her that animation, both intense and abandoned, which pleasure gives. Valerie’s relaxed expression was softly melancholy, and Ferral recalled that the first time he had seen her he had said she had a blurred face-a face which matched the softness of her gray eyes. But whenever coquetry came into play the smile which half opened her curved mouth, at the corners more than at the center, harmonizing in an unexpected way with her waved masses of short hair and her eyes which at such moments grew less tender, gave her in spite of the fine regularity of her features a puzzling expression, like that of a cat wanting to be petted. Ferral was fond of animals, like all those whose pride is too great to adjust itself to men; cats especially.