Andre Malraux - Man's Fate

Once more the sound of a foot-step: already Kyo was in the doorway.

He led Clappique into his room. A divan, a desk, a chair, blank walls: a deliberate austerity. It was hot in there; Kyo threw his coat on the divan.

“Listen,” said Clappique. “I’ve just been given a 1-little tip-you’ll be making a big mistake if you don't take it seriously: if we don’t clear out of here by tomorrow night, we’re as good as dead.”

“What’s the source of this tip? The police?”

“Bravo. Useless to tell you that I can't say anything more about it. But it’s serious. The affair of the ship is known. Lay low, and get out within forty-eight hours.” Kyo was about to say: it’s no longer an offense since we have triumphed. He said nothing. He was too well prepared for the repression of the workers' movement to be surprised. This meant that the break had come, which Clappique could not guess; and if the latter was being prosecuted it was because, the Shtmtung having been taken by the Communists, he was believed to be allied with them.

“What do you expect to do?” Clappique went on. “To think, first of all.”

“Profound idea! And have you the cash to get out?” Kyo shrugged his shoulders with a smile.

“I have no intention of getting out. Your information is none the less of the greatest importance to me,” he continued after a moment.

“No intention of getting out! You prefer to be killed?”

“Perhaps. But you want to leave, don’t you?”

“Why should I stay?”

“How much do you need?”

“Three hundred, four hundred. ”

“Perhaps I can give you part of it. I should like to help you. Don’t imagine I think I’m repaying you in this way for the service you’re doing me. ”

Clappique smiled sadly. He was not taken in by Kyo’s delicacy, but he appreciated it.

“Where will you be tonight?” Kyo continued. “Where you like.”

“No.”

“Let’s say at the Black Cat, then. I must find my few p-pennies in various ways.”

“Agreed: the dive is on the territory of the concessions, so there’ll be no Chinese police. Less danger of kidnaping than here, even: too many people. I’ll be there between eleven and eleven-thirty. But not later. I have an appointment after that. ”

Clappique turned his eyes away.

“Which I don’t want to miss. You’re sure the Cat won’t be closed?”

“Preposterous! It will be full of Chiang Kai-shek’s officers; their glorious uniforms will be intertwined in dance with the bodies of fallen ladies. In gracious garlands, I tell you! So I shall be waiting for you, while attentively contemplating this necessary spectacle until around eleven-thirty.”

“Do you think you could get more information by tonight?”

“I’ll try.”

“You might be doing me a great service. Greater than you can imagine. Am I designated by name?”

“Yes.”

“And my father?” “No. I would have warned him. He was not involved in the Shantung affair.”

Kyo knew that it wasn't the Shantung that had to be thought about, but the repression. May? Her role was too unimportant to make it necessary to question Clappique. As for his companions, if he was menaced, so were they all.

“Thanks.”

They returned together to the phcenix-room. May was saying to Gisors:

“It’s very difficult: if the Women’s Union grants divorce to mistreated women, the husbands will leave the revolutionary Union; and if we don’t grant it to them, they will lose all confidence in us. I don’t blame them. ”

“I’m afraid,” said Kyo, “it’s either too early or too late to organize.”

Clappique was leaving, without listening.

“Be munificent as usual,” he said to Gisors: “Give me your cac-tuss.”

“I have a great affection for the lad who sent it to me. Any other, gladly. ”

It was a small hairy cactus.

“Oh, well, never mind.”

“So long.”

“So. No. Perhaps. Good-by, my dear. The only man in Shanghai who does not exist-not a word: who absolutely does not exist! — salutes you.”

He went out.

May and Gisors were looking at Kyo with dismay; he immediately explained:

“He has just learned from the police that I’m on their black list; he advises me not to stir from here, except to get out within two days. Moreover, the repression is imminent. And the last troops of the First Division have left the city.”

It was the only division on which the Communists could count. Chiang Kai-shek knew it: he had ordered its general to join the front with his troops. The latter had proposed to the Communist Central Committee the arrest of Chiang Kai-shek. He had been advised to temporize, to pretend illness; he had quickly found himself faced with an ultimatum. And, not daring to fight without the consent of the Party, he had left the city, trying only to leave a few troops there. They in their turn had just left.

“They’re not yet far off,” Kyo continued; “and the division may even return if we hold the city long enough.”

The door opened again, a nose was stuck in, and a cavernous voice said: “Baron de Clappique does not exist.”

The door shut.

“Nothing from Hankow?” asked Kyo.

“Nothing.”

Since his return he had secretly been organizing combat groups against Chiang Kai-shek, like the ones he had organized against the Northerners. The International had rejected all the slogans of opposition, but accepted the maintenance of the Communist shock groups; Kyo wanted to make the new groups of militants the organizers of the masses which were now every day joining the Unions; but the official speeches of the Chinese Communist Party, the whole propaganda of union with the Kuomintang, were paralyzing him. The Military Committee alone had joined him; all the arms had not been given up, but Chiang Kai-shek was demanding this very day that the Communists surrender those stiU in their possession. A last appeal from Kyo and the Military Committee had been telegraphed to Hankow.

Old Gisors-fully informed this time-was worried. He was too much inclined to see in Marxism a kind of fatality to regard questions of tactics without suspicion. Like Kyo, he was sure that Chiang Kai-shek would attempt to crush the Communists; like Kyo he believed that the murder of the general would have struck the reaction at the point where it was most vulnerable. But he detested the plot-like character of their present activity. The death of Chiang Kai-shek, even the seizure of the Shanghai government, led only to adventure. Together with some of the members of the International, he favored the return to Canton of the Iron Army and the Communist fraction of the Kuomintang: there, backed by a revolutionary city, by an active and well- supplied arsenal, the Reds could entrench themselves and await the moment that would be propitious to a new Northern campaign, which the imminent reaction would prepare from below. The generals of Hankow, eager for lands to conquer, were less eager to venture into the south of China where the Unions, faithful to those who represented the memory of Sun Yat-sen, would have driven them to a constant and rather fruitless guerilla warfare. Instead of having to fight the Northerners, and then Chiang Kai-shek, the Red army would thus be leaving the latter the task of fighting the former. Whichever enemy the Red army would then encounter at Canton would be greatly weakened. “The donkeys are too much fascinated by their carrot,” said Gisors of the generals, “to bite us at this moment if we don’t place ourselves between it and them. ” But the majority of the Chinese Communist Party, and perhaps Moscow, judged this point of view “liquidational.”

Kyo, like his father, thought that the best policy was that of a return to Canton. He would have liked, moreover, to prepare the mass emigration of the workers, by an intensive propaganda, from Shanghai to Canton- they possessed nothing. It would be very difficult, but not impossible: the outlets for the Southern provinces being assured, the working masses would have brought a rapid industrialization to Canton. A dangerous policy for Shanghai: spinning-mill workers are more or less skilled, and to train new workers would mean forming new revolutionaries, unless the wages were raised-“an hypothesis which is excluded,” Ferral would have said, “by reason of the present state of Chinese industries.” To empty Shanghai for Canton’s benefit, like Hong Kong in 192 5. Hong Kong is five hours from Canton, and Shanghai five days: a difficult enterprise, more difficult perhaps than to let themselves be killed, but less stupid.