The Patriot (3 page)

“Sit down,” his grandfather said. “What have you studied today?”

I-wan sat on the edge of his chair and began. “Sir, I studied today history, geography, English, and mathematics.”

“No military science?” his grandfather asked sharply.

“Tomorrow is science, sir,” I-wan answered.

“Military science—military science is the thing,” his grandfather said. “Now when I was in Germany I saw troops passing in review, and I received certain definite ideas. That is why I hired a German tutor for you last summer.”

I-wan sat staring at his grandfather without seeing or hearing him. He had trained himself to do this by much experience. Germany fifty years ago—what had it to do with him? He sat thinking and not thinking, his eyes following his grandfather’s thin yellow hand as it moved up and down in his white straggling beard. If he should tell Peony tonight when she came to make up his bed that he was a revolutionist—but if he told her that some day he must renounce them all, that he could never come home again, of course Peony would not see him again, either. Then she would cry. Perhaps he would not tell anybody—just not come home any more when the day of revolution broke. In the secret meeting today Liu En-Ian had said, “Next spring—”

“Now you may go,” his grandfather said kindly. “You listen well and I have great plans for you, I-wan.”

I-wan rose, bowed, and turned. At the door he bowed again. He seldom spoke in his grandfather’s room unless he must answer a question. He was always glad to get away, too. The room was full of old books and too much furniture. It was musty and unaired and smelled of an old man. His grandfather did not open the windows often. In the daytime he declared it was cooler to keep them shut and at night he feared the moist air. I-wan shut the door behind him.

“This house is full of smells,” he thought. Even Peony had a smell. She used a jasmine scent. It was too sweet and he had told her so, but she loved it and would not give it up.

“The trouble is with you,” she always insisted. “Your nose is too keen to smell. What other people like, you dislike. You make a point of it.” She said such things in her pretty voice. The words were sharp but they sounded soft….

Now he must go to his parents, and then he would be free. He knocked at another door and entered at once without waiting. Here were the two huge rooms which he knew best of all, because as a baby he had learned to walk on this smooth parquetry floor covered with heavy Chinese rugs. He knew every ornament, from the vases in the carved blackwood cabinet, which he was never allowed to touch, to the ivory balls and elephants with which he could always play as much as he liked. He still liked sometimes to take the big hollow ivory filigree ball into his hands and turn it and try to separate with his eye the seventeen different ivory balls within, each separate and turning.

His mother was sitting by the window embroidering, and his father was at a huge blackwood desk at one end of the room. He was still in the foreign dress he wore at the bank and he looked up as I-wan came in.

“Ah, you’ve seen your grandparents,” he said. “I am only just come home—I must change.” But he did not move. “Has your brother come in?” he asked.

“No, Father,” I-wan answered.

Madame Wu looked up from her satin with her soft doubting face and put out her hand to her son.

“Come here,” she said in English. She spoke English well and was proud of it. In her youth her father had kept an elderly English lady for years as her governess. “You look tired, I-wan.”

“I am tired,” he answered in English. He liked speaking English. He could leave off the long courteous phrases he had to use in Chinese. In English one could not sensibly say, “Your honorable—” and “I, the humble one—” Still his mother was very Chinese sometimes. She had certain superstitions which did not at all suit her pure English accent. All his little boyhood he went with a silver lock and chain about his neck to lock his life in. He used to pull at it in secret, but he could not break it. The silversmith had welded the last link fast around his neck.

“You are so late,” his mother said.

“We had a meeting after school,” he replied.

“What are these meetings?” his father asked in Chinese.

“Political meetings,” I-wan answered, still in English.

“Don’t get yourself entangled,” his father said. Now he spoke in English, too, as he did only when he wanted to be sure the servants could not understand. He spoke English fluently but badly, confusing his l’s and r’s and n’s, as he did in French and German also. “Young students can do nothing to change those in control. But those in control can cut off your heads.”

“I-wan!” his mother cried. “Promise me—”

His father went on without heeding her.

“The government is not going to hear any nonsense from boys and girls,” he said warmly. “Besides, none of you understands all that is involved in running a country. You are full of criticisms and rebellions. But what do you understand of money and banking, of foreign loans, for instance?”

“Why do we need foreign loans?” I-wan burst out. They had been talking about foreign loans this afternoon in the meeting and En-lan had got up and in the quietest way had offered his life to their cause, as a protest. Until that moment they had not understood the importance and danger of the new million-dollar loan from Japan, for which the surety was to be a certain great iron mine in the north.

“This latest loan from abroad,” En-lan had said, “is not given freely any more than any other loan. There are certain privileges that go to the foreign nation that lends us money. The students have protested to the government officials but they pay no attention to us. With your permission, I will conceal a pistol in my sleeve and shoot the Minister of Finance as he goes home for dinner with his new concubine.”

No one spoke. They were all staring at him. And he drew back his lips in a snarl, and between his shining white teeth he hissed, “His new concubine cost him ten thousand dollars! Only Ministers of Finance can keep buying new concubines!”

It was the first time one of their group had offered his life to kill an enemy. It had been done often enough elsewhere so that well-known men were doubling their bodyguards, especially since a student had broken into the office of the Minister of Foreign Affairs. That was after the twenty-one demands that Japan had made…. They broke into excited talk. But then it was decided that En-lan could not be spared yet—too much was to come.

Nevertheless what he had offered to do had made the hour intense for their cause.

“Why do we need foreign loans?” his father repeated. “Because every country in reconstruction needs foreign loans.”

He was a large man with a handsome flat-cheeked face, and he prided himself on being a modern man. Among his friends were many foreigners of all nations, but chiefly Japanese. Mr. Wu was one of those Chinese who believed in close friendship with Japan. “Asia for the Asians,” he liked to quote, after the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs had first used these words in a speech before the League of Nations.

“You cannot understand,” he now said to his son kindly, “because you are at the idealistic age. I also at twenty had certain ideals. I was a secret follower of the Young Emperor and his reforms. Most young men were. I daresay you also follow some such cult with your fellows.”

“I-ko never was like this,” his mother murmured.

“I-wan is more like me,” his father said sharply.

I-wan sat down. He did not answer his parents. Long ago he had learned that trick. It was at once filial in respect and by it he told nothing. His mother had taken up her embroidery again, and his father his pen. He did not care what his father said, he told himself, and yet—his father could so easily prick something in him with a few words, and make him feel small and young. As if the revolutionists now could be compared to whatever those young men had been under the weak Emperor! His father was busy and rich and successful now, though he had been a spoiled child, coaxed and coddled as I-ko had been when for so long he was the only son. The old servants still in the house were full of stories about his willfulness as a child. But somehow his father had not been made weak by spoiling. Instead he only continued to be opinionated and domineering and to do as he liked. I-wan knew that sometimes his parents quarreled bitterly, but he did not know about what. His mother had been a rich man’s only daughter and there were few women so well educated as she had been in her youth. But still she obeyed her husband, even though they quarreled. Everyone obeyed him, even his parents, although he made a show of yielding to them, since that was suitable.

“May I go now, Father?” I-wan asked.

“In a moment,” his father replied.

So he sat waiting, but rebellion grew hot in him.

“My father,” he thought, “has nothing to say to me, but he keeps me waiting to show that he can. He never wants to give me permission at once to go away. He wants to show his power over me.” His lips curled a little. When he renounced them all—

“Have you any plans?” his father asked suddenly in Chinese.

I-wan looked up. His father had put down his pen.

“I have been thinking for some time we ought to plan your future,” he said. “Your mother, too, has plans.”

“Twenty,” his mother said. “You are a man.”

I-wan felt himself turn scarlet. His father went on, kindly, observing his son.

“Let your mind rest,” he said. “We shall not force you or your brother in anything. We have not betrothed you and shall not. Long ago we talked of it, and we decided to leave you and I-ko free to choose your own wives.”

“Thank you, sir,” I-wan murmured.

Of course he knew they had done this. I-ko loitered in his room sometimes at night, talking of girls he knew whom he might marry if he liked. He could never decide which of these girls he wanted to marry, and sometimes he ended by laughing at himself.

“There is still no law against more than one wife,” he would say, “though the women are growing so independent they want you to promise you won’t marry anybody else! How can a man promise that?”

Nevertheless, although he had always taken his freedom for granted, for the first time now I-wan felt gratitude toward his parents. Plenty of his schoolmates were already betrothed because their parents compelled them. That also was one of the things they were to fight for—the freedom of choice in marriage. The girls, especially, were excited for this. They said over and over at the meetings, “We must have the right to marry whom we like, or not marry at all, even, if we do not wish to do so.”

“Of course,” everybody had agreed.

Sometimes when two or three young men were alone together they discussed this determination of the girls. They agreed still that the girls were right. Nevertheless, they asked themselves, what would happen if women began to refuse to be married? It would be very embarrassing to a man to ask a young woman to marry him and have her refuse.

Once En-lan had grinned at I-wan. “Calm yourself,” he said. “Do you remember the girl who spoke loudest and longest for freedom?”

He did. She was a pretty, fiery girl from the southern province of Fukien. En-lan put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a letter and handed it to him. It was a passionate love letter, signed with her name. I-wan was amazed and secretly a little envious. “Shall you marry her?” he asked En-lan. En-lan shook his head. “Why should I marry when as a revolutionist any day I may be dead?” he asked. “Besides, she does not ask for marriage.”

It was true. The girl had written, “Only bid me come to you and I will come. We are free.”

I-wan handed the letter back to En-lan and he put it in his pocket.

“Besides,” he said again, “my parents have a wife for me at home. That is why I never go home.”

“A wife!” I-wan had cried. He was always finding out something new about this En-lan, whom he had rescued out of jail….

“But it is time we decided the direction of your education,” his father went on. “Naturally, I hope to take you into the bank with me, as I did your elder brother.”

I-wan did not answer. He would never go into the bank. How they would all hate him if he helped to make those foreign loans! He could not bear the thought of their hatred. He knew very well that upon the black list the revolutionists kept his father’s name was written down, among others of influence and wealth. He thought for a moment with passionate envy of En-lan. En-lan was a peasant’s son and proud of it.

“My father is a common man,” En-lan was fond of saying. “My mother cannot read or write.” En-lan was hard toward all who were rich. He would never understand why, though I-wan also despised capitalists, he still secretly loved his father in spite of all his rebelliousness toward him. En-lan would say in his quiet definite way, “If it were I, I would say, since he is a capitalist and an enemy he cannot be my father….”

“I shall not hurry you or force you,” his father was saying kindly. “You are my son. But when you know what you want, tell me.”

He nodded and I-wan rose. As had so often happened before, his irritation was gone. His father’s show of authority had ended in such kindness.

“Thank you, Father,” I-wan murmured.

“Where are you going?” his mother asked.

“To my room to study,” he replied.

She nodded, content to know he would be in the house, and he went out and closed the door after him. Later they would meet downstairs at the great table in the dining room to eat a dinner that would have been a feast to En-lan. But it was what they had every day.

Nevertheless, thinking of it he grew a little hungry. He would, he decided, see what was in the comfit box that Peony kept filled on his table. And the teapot would be hot in its padded case. He hastened to his room, feeling free and his own for a while. He liked the hour he had alone before dinner. He talked of study, but he never studied until after dinner. Then he hurried away, muttering that he must study, that he had so much to do. Sometimes indeed he did study, though sometimes he went straight out to the theater.

But tonight he must study. He had a long composition to write in English. It was his secret wish to excel En-lan in writing. But he never could. En-lan had a strange power of writing. Strive as he would, I-wan could never win such praise from the elderly English lady who taught them as was given to En-lan. Tonight, he thought, he would try harder than ever. Almost more than the teacher’s praise, he wanted En-lan to think well of him. And then, instead of idling, he sat down at the table and drew out his writing book. He would begin now to do his best.