Andre Malraux - Man's Fate

“A man who’s reached the point where he doesn’t give a damn about anything, if he really comes across d’votion, sacrifice, anything of that sort, he’s done for.”

“No fooling! Then what does he do?”

“Becomes a sadist,” answered Katov, looking at him quietly.

“Sadism with pins,” he went on, “is rare; with words, far from rare. But if the woman is abs’lutely submissive, if she can survive it. I knew a fellow who took and gambled the money which his woman had saved up for years to go to the san’torium. A matter of life or death. He lost it. (In such cases you always lose.) He came home all in pieces, abs’lutely broken up like you now. She watched him come over to her bed. She understood right away, you see. And then, what? She tried to console him. ”

“Easier,” said Hemmelrich slowly, “to console others than to console yourself. ” And, suddenly raising his eyes:

“Were you the fellow?”

“That’ll do!” Katov banged the counter with his fist. “If it was me, I’d say so.” But his anger fell immediately. “I haven’t gone that far, and it isn’t necess’ry to go that far. … If you believe in nothing, especially because you believe in nothing, you’re forced to believe in the virtues of the heart when you come across them, no doubt about it. And that’s what you’re doing. If it hadn’t been for the woman and the kid you would have gone, I know you would. Well, then?”

“And as we live only for those virtues of the heart, they get the better of you. Well, if you’ve always got to be licked, it might as well be them. But all that’s absurd. It’s not a matter of being right. I can’t stand the idea of having put Ch’en out, and I couldn’t have stood to have kept him.”

“We can only ask the comrades to do what they can. I want comrades, and not saints. No confidence in saints. ”

“Is it true that you voluntarily went with the fellows to the lead-mines?"

“I was in the camp," said Katov, embarrassed: “the mines or the camp, it’s all the same thing. "

“All the same thing! That’s not true."

“What do you know about it?"

“It’s not true! And you would have kept Ch'en."

“I have no children. "

“I have a feeling it would be less. hard for me, even the idea that they’ll him, if he wasn’t sick. I. I’m dumb. It’s true I’m dumb. And I guess I’m not much of a worker either. I feel like a lamp-post that everything free in the world comes and pisses on.”

He pointed once again to the floor above with a movement of his flat face, for the child was crying again. Katov did not dare to say: “Death wil free you." It was death that had freed him. Since Hemmelrich had begun to speak, the memory of his wife stood between them. Having re^turned from Siberia without hope, beaten, his medical studies shattered, and having become a factory worker, convinced that he would die before seeing the Revolution, he had sadly proved to himself that he still possessed a remnant of life by treating a little working- girl who loved him with deliberate brutality. But hardly had she become resigned to the pains he inflicted on her than he had been suddenly struck by the overwhelming quality of the tendeme^ of a creature who could share his suffering in spite of his brutality. From that moment he had lived only for her, continuing his revolutionary activity through habit, but carrying into it the obsession of the limitless tenderness hidden in the heart of that slightly feeble-minded girl: for hours he would cares her hair, and they would lie in bed together for days on end. She had died, and since then. That, in any case, stood between Hemmelrich and himself. Not enough.

Through words, he could do almost nothing; but beyond words there were the things which gestures, looks, mere presence were capable of expressing. He knew from experience that the worst suffering is in the solitude which accompanies it. To express it also gives relief; but few words come less readily to men’s tongues than those of their deep griefs. To express himself badly, or to lie, would give Hemmelrich a fresh impulse to despise himself: he suffered above all from himself. Katov looked at him without focusing his eyes on him, sadly-it struck him once more how few and awkward the expressions of manly affection are:

“You must understand without my saying anything,” he said. “There is nothing to say.”

Hemmelrich raised his hand, let it fall again heavily, as though he had to choose only between the distress and the absurdity of his life. But he remained standing before Katov, deeply moved.

“Soon I shall be able to leave and continue looking for Ch’en,” Katov was thinking.

“The money was delivered yesterday,” said Ferral to the colonel, who this time was wearing a uniform. “How do we stand?”

“The Military Governor has sent a lengthy note to General Chiang Kai-shek to ask what he should do in the eventuality of an uprising.”

“He wants to be covered?”

The colonel looked at Ferral over the white spot in 208

his eye, answered merely: “Here is the translati-on.”

Ferral read the document.

“I even have the answer,” said the colonel.

He handed him a photograph: above Chiang Kai- shek’s signature, two characters.

“Which means?”

“The firing-squad.”

Ferral looked up at the map of Shanghai on the wall, with large red patches which designated the masses of workers and wretches-the same ones. “Three thousand men of the syndical guards,” he was thinking, “perhaps three hundred thousand back of them; but will they dare to budge? On the other side, Chiang Kai-shek and the army. ”

“He will begin by having the Communist chiefs shot before any uprising?”

“Certainly. There will be no uprising: the Communists are practically disarmed and Chiang Kai-shek has his troops. The First Division is at the front: it was the only dangerous one.”

“Thank you. Good-by.”

Ferral was going to Valerie’s. A “boy” was waiting for him beside the chauffeur, with a blackbird in a gilded cage on his knees. Valerie had begged Ferral to bring her this bird. As soon as his car had started off, he pulled a letter from his pocket and reread it. What he had been fearing for a month was happening: his American credits were about to be cut off.

The orders from the. General Government of IndoChina no longer sufficed to keep in operation the factories created for a market which was to have expanded from month to month and which now was shrinking from day to day: the industrial enterprises of the Consortium showed a large deficit. The stock prices, main- rained in Paris by Ferral’s banks and the French financial groups which were associated with them, and bolstered up by the inflation, had been steadily dropping since the stabilization of the franc. But the banks of the Consortium derived their only strength from the profits on its plantations-especially its rubber plantations. The Stevenson Plan 1 had raised the price of rubber from 16 cents to $1.12. Ferral, who by virtue of his rubber plantations in Indo-China was a producer, had benefited by the rise without having to restrict his production, since his was not a British enterprise. And the American banks, knowing from experience how much the Plan was costing the United States, the principal consumer, had been eager to open credits guaranteed by the plantations. But the native production of the Dutch Indies, the menace of American plantations in the Philippines, Brazil and Liberia were now leading to the fall of the rubber price; the American banks were thus withdrawing their credits for the same reasons that had induced them to grant them. Ferral was hit all at once by the crash of the only raw material that sustained him-he had been given credits, he had speculated, not on the value of his production but on that of the plantations themselves-by the stabilization of the franc, which brought about the devaluation of all his stocks (a major portion of which were held by his own banks bent on controlling the market) and by the cancellation of his American credits. And he was fully aware that, as soon as this cancellation became known, all the speculators in New York and Paris would take a short position on his stocks; a position that was