The Patriot (2 page)

“Come here,” his grandmother cried, “let me feel your cheeks!”

And still for compromise he bent and let her feel his cheeks with her dry old hands.

“Little meat dumpling!” she murmured.

And he endured this, too, because, after all, he had what he really wanted.

Two years later, in this fifteenth year of the republic, I-wan, without anyone of his family dreaming such a thing could be, had become one of those revolutionists whose secret groups met in every school in China. He lived two wholly separate lives, his old life as the younger son in a rich house, and this other life as a passionate young man among other such young men, dreaming of overthrowing the new republic and setting up a still newer one, since they were as rebellious against the republic as their fathers had been against the throne. Neither life had anything to do with the other. None of his schoolmates had even seen the big square house where he lived, until one day in early autumn, he stopped on his way from school at a sweet-shop near his home. When he came out again someone passed him and called his name. It was Peng Liu, one of the band of revolutionists, and the only one he did not like, though Peng Liu was of no importance. He was the son of a small shopkeeper in the city, a small mean-looking fellow with narrow eyes and a loose mouth through which he perpetually breathed with a foul breath. No one liked him, though these things, after all, he could not help.

“I-wan!” Peng Liu called. “Where are you going?”

“Home,” I-wan replied, and wished he had thought of a lie, because now Peng Liu sauntered along with him and there was nothing to do with him until they reached the big house. He made up his mind, however, that he would not ask Peng Liu to come in. Peng Liu would never understand why, though a revolutionist, he lived in this house, and he would not like him the better for seeing its luxuries. Besides, why was Peng Liu here at all? His home was far away in the Chinese part of the city. Had Peng Liu purposely followed him?

He stopped at the gate and shifted his school books. He looked about him quickly and then he glanced at the windows of the house to see if I-ko might be there watching him. He did not want I-ko to see Peng Liu. He would immediately suspect Peng Liu’s poor garments and meager, sickly face. But there was no one at the windows, and there were few people loitering in the hot sunshine of an early September afternoon in Shanghai. So he said in a low clear voice, “Until tomorrow, comrade!”

“Until tomorrow,” Peng Liu said quickly.

“Coward!” I-wan thought with scorn. “He is afraid to say comrade even when no one is near.”

But Peng Liu lingered. “Is this where you live?” he asked with wonder. He looked up at the huge square brick house with columned porticos.

“I can’t help it,” I-wan said. “My grandfather built it and my father lives with him, and naturally as yet I live with my father.”

“It’s a fine foreign house,” Peng Liu said.

But I-wan despised the humility in his voice. He thought, “Peng Liu would like to come in, but I won’t ask him. Besides, I-ko would despise him.”

“Good-by,” he repeated aloud.

“Good-by,” Peng Liu replied.

I-wan turned away sharply and ran up the marble steps and let himself quietly into the house. But he could not be quiet enough for his grandmother when she was not drowsy with opium. And because she loved him so well she tried every day not to be drowsy when he came home from school.

He was late today because of a secret meeting and because after it he had been hungry and stopped at the sweet-shop and that was why her voice was impatient when she called, “I-wan, come here! Where have you been?”

At that moment Peony came out of his grandmother’s room and took his books and his hat. She framed her soft red lips into voiceless words.

“She is very cross!”

He shrugged and frowned.

“Coming, Grandmother!” he answered. “Has I-ko come home?” he asked Peony. He waited until he saw her shake her head, and then went into his grandmother’s room.

Every day since he was six years old and starting school he had to come straight to his grandmother as soon as he reached home, and every day he hated it more. He was sullen whenever he thought of it, that this old woman was waiting for him and that he must come to her. In their secret meetings when they talked of throwing off family bondage, he had sprung to his feet and shouted, “Until we are free of our families we can never accomplish anything!” He was thinking of his own family, but especially of his grandmother.

“Here I am, Grandmother,” he said sulkily.

But she never noticed his sulkiness. She was sitting on the edge of the big, square couch. The lamp and pipe were ready for her use. She had only been waiting for him.

“Come here,” she said. So he went a little nearer. “Come here, so I can feel you,” she insisted.

He had to go near her, though this was what he hated most. She put out her thin long-nailed hand and took his hand in both of hers.

“Your palms are wet!” she exclaimed.

“It is very hot outside,” he said.

“You’ve been hurrying,” she scolded. “How often have I told you never to hurry? It destroys the life force.”

“I like to walk quickly,” he declared.

“It is not what you like,” she said. “You have to consider the family. You are my grandson.”

No, this was what he hated most of all, this sense that to her he was valuable only because he was her grandson, a person to carry on her family.

“I must sometimes do what I like,” he said sullenly.

She gripped his wrist suddenly between her thumb and forefinger.

“You are always doing what you like,” she said loudly. “You think of no one but yourself—it is this generation! I-ko is the same. He has not come near me all day.”

Then immediately she was afraid she had made him angry, so she reached for her comfit box with one hand, still clinging to him with the other, and gave him a candied date.

He would have liked to refuse it, but when he saw it, he felt hungry against his will. He was always hungry! So he took it, frowning, and ate it.

“There,” she said, laughing. “I don’t give these dates to anyone but you.” She began caressing his arm under his sleeve. “They are good for the blood—no one gets them but you and me. Although—” she raised her voice a little so that Peony waiting in the hall might hear, “I know that miserable girl slave steals them when I am asleep!”

“I, Mistress?” Peony’s silvery tranquil voice answered through the open door. “Never, Mistress!”

“Yes, she does,” the old woman said to him. “She steals everything she can, that girl. We’ve had her eleven years but she has no gratitude. She was only seven when we bought her and she was already a thief.”

He did not answer. He was not going to defend Peony and have his grandmother accuse him of wickedness. He had made that mistake before. He pulled his hand away.

“Grandmother, I have a whole English paper to write before tomorrow,” he said.

“Ah, yes,” she said quickly, “you mustn’t sit up too late.”

“Good night, Grandmother,” he said, bowing.

“No, not good night,” she said coaxingly. “Come in again before you sleep.”

“But you’ll be lying stupid under that stuff,” he said rudely.

“No,” she said eagerly, “no, tell me when you are coming and I will be awake for you.”

“I can’t,” he replied. “How can I say when I shall be finished with all those books?”

She sighed. Then her eyes fell on the opium pipe and she wavered.

“Well, that is true,” she murmured. She waited an instant. “Peony!” she called.

“Coming,” Peony answered.

She came into the room on quiet silk-shod feet and helped the old lady to lie down and began to prepare the lamp. I-wan had not gone.

“I put your books on your table,” she said to him.

The old lady’s eyes were already shut.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” I-wan whispered. “Pandering to her like that!”

Peony opened her black apricot-shaped eyes widely.

“I have to do what I’m told!” she said. He frowned and shook his head and marched to the door. Then he glanced back. She was stirring the sticky stuff with a tiny silver spoon. But she was not looking at it. She was waiting mischievously for him, and when she caught his glance she stuck her red tongue far out of her mouth. He slammed the door on the sight.

But there was no shutting out that sweet sick smell of opium. Upstairs in his own room he threw his windows wide but it was still no use. The evening air was windless and the smell hung through the house, faint yet penetrating. All his life he had smelled it and hated it. In an old Chinese house courtyard walls would have cut it off, perhaps, but up through these vast halls and piled stairways the ancient odor of opium crept like a miasma. It was the essence of everything I-wan hated, that stealing lethargic fragrance that in its very sweetness held something of the stink of death. The house was saturated with it. It clung in the silk hangings on the walls and in the red cushions on the chairs and couches. I-wan, pulling silk stuffed quilts about him at night in bed smelled, or imagined he did, that reek.

For that reason, he had told himself, he wanted his room bare, as bare as En-lan’s little dormitory cubicle in the university. He made Peony take down the heavy damask curtains which the French decorator, years before he was born, had draped across the windows. Every window in the house had them except now these two in his rooms. Without them the windows stretched tall and stark, and the light fell into his room like a blast of noise. Peony was always complaining about the hideousness of his room. She was always trying to soften this hard light. Today when he came in he saw at once she had been doing it again. In the window she had put a blue vase, and in that a branch of rosy-flowered oleander. For a moment he thought, “What have I to do with flowers? I’ll take them away.”

But he did not go beyond thinking. He did not want to hurt Peony’s feelings because she was the only one in this house to whom he could talk at all. And he had not made up his mind whether or not he would tell even her everything—that is, that he had joined finally that secret revolutionary band and that some day soon he must renounce all else. When he thought of renouncing this house and this life, his heart swelled and shrank too. Still, it was the only way to save the country—to cut off all this old dead life—the life of capitalism!

Yes, I-ko was dead, too, as dead as his grandmother, even though he was a young man. He was dead because he cared for nothing except himself and his own pleasures. Because of his position as the son of the president of a great modern bank, he had an easy place near his father. I-wan himself did not know of all that I-ko did. But he knew enough to know that he would never be like I-ko if he could help it.

Now he took off his dark blue school uniform and put on a long robe of soft gray-green silk. This was because his grandfather disliked to see him at home in the rough school uniform.

“When you come into my presence,” he had directed I-wan, “appear in your natural garb.”

“When I renounce them all,” I-wan thought to himself as he fastened the small buttons of twisted silk, “I will never wear anything but the uniform.” For of course in that life of revolution to which he would go, this robe would be absurd. To clamber over rocks, to march long miles among country villages, to preach on the streets to the people and tell them they ought to revolt against the rich and those who oppressed them—one could not wear a silk gown for such things. He must even change his name. No one would believe in the son of a rich Shanghai banker—

He heard a little cough and suddenly Peony put her head in at the door.

“Your grandfather asks why you delay, and your parents command you to come at once,” she announced.

“I’m coming,” he said shortly.

Her voice changed. She came into the room and went straight toward the window.

“Did you see the oleander?” she asked softly.

“Yes,” he said.

Now he was taking off his leather shoes and putting on black velvet slippers. If his grandfather heard him clacking on the floors in his school shoes he would simply have to turn around again and come back and change.

“Aren’t they beautiful with the light shining through them?” Peony asked.

He looked up. For the first time in his life he suddenly saw Peony not as Peony, the bondmaid with whom he had played and quarreled as long as he could remember. She was a pretty girl standing by those flowers. If he did not know she was only Peony, he would say she was a pretty girl.

“I didn’t look at them,” he said. And without a word he went out. Why did he now notice how Peony looked? He remembered when Peony was a small yellow-faced mite who never seemed to grow at all.

“Certainly she costs us nothing in food,” his mother always said…. No one could say Peony was yellow, now. She would never be tall, but she was not yellow.

He crossed the great square upstairs hall and he stood before a heavy walnut door opposite his own and coughed.

“Come in,” his grandfather called.

So he went in.

It was impossible to despise his grandfather as he did his grandmother. His grandfather knew many things, though, being old, he forgot much. But he would allow greater knowledge to no one. Even though I-wan perceived the absurdity of this in an old man, he continued to be a little afraid of his grandfather. When anybody said the foreigners did thus, his grandfather could always say whether they really did or not. When anyone asked him to tell something about the foreign countries, he always said, “I was in all the western countries, and each is different from the others and all are different from us—that is the chief thing.”

If pressed further he would tell of strange things he had seen. At first, fifty years ago, these things seemed stranger than they did now. A train, for instance, fifty years ago was like nothing so much as a dragon. To people listening he said, “Imagine a dragon roaring across the country, smoke pouring from its nostrils—” Now of course there were plenty of trains. Everybody in Shanghai had seen trains. The old man could say no more about them. But he maintained his dignity.