The Patriot (37 page)

I-ko was taking off his jacket.

“No,” he answered sneeringly. “That was gratitude, wasn’t it? Treated like a daughter, almost, for all those years!”

“She earned what she had,” I-wan said abruptly, remembering. He turned aside to his grandmother’s room. “I’ll go in here first,” he said.

“She won’t know you,” I-ko answered, half-way upstairs. But I-wan went on.

No, his grandmother was long past knowing anything now. She lay in the bed, a shriveled nut of a human creature, her flesh brown wrinkled leather on her skeleton as small as a child’s. She was blind, he saw. Her eyes were gray with cataracts. He called to her loudly.

“Grandmother, it is I—I-wan—come home again!”

But she could not hear him. He put out his hand and touched hers. It was cold and dry as a bird’s claw. When she felt his touch she opened her blue lips and whined a wailing cry. He dropped her hand quickly, half frightened. Could human beings become this in their uselessness? And then he heard a footstep behind him and there was his father come to find him. He had grown stouter, I-wan saw instantly; his look was quieter and his hair almost white, but his face looked the same.

“Father!” he said.

“My son!” his father replied and grasped him by the elbows. “The best thing that could have happened! Only why have you not answered my letters these last months!”

“I had no letters!” I-wan exclaimed. “And I did write!”

His father stared at him and shook his head. “I do not understand Muraki anymore,” he said. Then he let him go. “Well, you are here,” he went on. “We shall need no more letters.”

It was hard to find something to say to his father. There was so much to say.

“Your grandfather is waiting for you in his room,” his father told him.

“Grandmother doesn’t know me,” I-wan replied. He wondered if his grandfather, too—

“You’ll find him much as he was,” his father said. “He is feeble, of course. But he is sitting there dressed in his best uniform and all his medals, ready to go six hours hence. He is full of advice on the subject of the Japanese.” He stopped to laugh. “The last time I went to confer with Chiang Kai-shek in Nanking he sent a long plan of his, showing how in three months we could rid ourselves not only of the Japanese but of all foreigners!”

His father laughed again and then sighed, and they turned. The old woman began wailing as they left and Mr. Wu spoke to the servant sharply.

“Give her the stuff—get her quiet!”

“Yes—yes, sir,” the girl stuttered, hurrying.

“There is nothing to be done with the old who are like that,” his father said. They were going upstairs. “Waste—waste—” he muttered.

I-wan did not answer. He felt a change in his father. He was gentler and yet somehow stronger.

“How is my mother?” he asked.

“She is just getting up,” his father replied. “She overslept herself—the bombing last night kept her awake. She is terrified when that begins.” He stopped, his hand on the door of the old man’s room. “By the way,” he told I-wan, “when she says you are to go with her to Canton, do not say you will go. You are not to go. You are to stay here. Chiang Kai-shek has plans for you.”

He listened to this, watching his father’s face. Chiang Kai-shek, the man whom he had once to escape, who had perhaps killed En-lan! But everything was changed, so why not this?

“Very well,” he told his father steadily, and they went in.

The old general sat by the window, the sun falling across his glittering breast.

“Ah, you’ve come!” he said to I-wan, exactly as though I-wan had left only yesterday.

“Yes, Grandfather,” I-wan answered, smiling.

The old man trembled now with a slight palsy, so that all his medals jangled faintly. But he was as lordly as ever.

“Sit down, both of you,” he ordered, and they sat down. The old man reached to a table and took up a small scroll which he unrolled.

“Now, as soon as I reach Canton,” he went on pontifically, “I shall present my plans in person to Pai. The nut of the idea is this—let the Japanese have their way. They tell me ten thousand people have been killed in Shanghai. But I say there are millions of people here. So we have plenty left. Let the Japanese exhaust themselves. When they are exhausted, then we will invite them to return to their own country, not all at once, but so many each year. And, so that they will not lose face—for it is well to be courteous with the enemy—we will request the persons of other nations to return also, and since we will not be exhausted by fighting, we can, having saved all our resources, then use force if necessary!”

The old man gazed at them proudly. I-wan looked at his father. But he was looking at the old man with eyes tolerant and benign.

“What do you think of it, I-wan?” the old man demanded.

“It is perhaps a little hard on the people now being killed,” I-wan said cautiously. How was it possible for generations to recede from each other to such distances!

“Nonsense!” his grandfather said loudly. “In the first place, they are already used to famine and to wars, though on a smaller scale. In the second place, even if every Japanese moved into our country we would only feel it as we might some extra flies. Our country is too vast to be conquered, especially by such a small one. And besides, our people can grow used to anything.”

His voice was definite, as though he expected no answer. So I-wan gave him none.

The old man suddenly thought of something else.

“I’ve lost one of my medals,” he said to his son. His voice was now wholly different. It was childishly complaining.

“Which one?” Mr. Wu inquired. He went to the velvet-lined case where the old general kept his medals hung upon hooks and opened it.

“It was the one I had made in gold plate,” the old man said, “after the one the Italian ambassador wore—don’t you remember? Why, it was less than ten years ago I had it made—it was one of my new ones! A servant has stolen it. He must be found and dismissed.”

Mr. Wu did not answer. He thrust two fingers behind the velvet.

“Here it is,” he said. “I feel it, but I can’t get it.”

“Let me,” I-wan said. He rose and thrust his fingers down, which, being longer, could just catch the ribbon of the medal and bring it up.

“That’s it—that’s it!” the old man crowed. “Give it to me. This is its place—here by the one with the eagle. I was going to show it especially to Pai when I went south. It would be well if he copied it for his officers.”

They left him, laughing, and then out in the hall a door opened, and here was I-wan’s mother. She cried out when she saw him.

“I-wan, you are come!”

“Yes, Mother,” he answered. He saw she had changed very much, being now very fat. Her small pretty features were almost entirely lost in her face. But she seized his hands and smelled them as she used to do when he was a child, and he thought of her as she had seemed to him then, beautiful and wise and far stronger than he. He used to run to her then and hide in her bosom. Now she was even a little repulsive to him. He had grown so far beyond her that he saw her from the terrible distance of his own maturity and knew that there was neither wisdom nor refuge in her any longer for him. It made him sad. Would Jiro some day feel so to him? … Only her voice was unchanged, sweet and rushing.

“Now, I-wan,” she was saying, “do not unpack your trunks. You are to come on with us tonight to Canton. It is fearful here. We are bombed every day and every night. Your father will not come. I’ve cried and cried—but when did he ever hear me? So you are to come and be with me. I-ko—oh, I-ko is lost to me. Oh, that woman! But I must have someone. I can’t take care of these two old things alone.”

“You are taking all the servants except two,” Mr. Wu reminded her.

“But servants must be looked after!” Madame Wu cried.

“I cannot go, Mother,” I-wan said plainly. Much better to speak plainly and at once! “I came home to fight, Mother.”

Her small underlip, still as red as a girl’s, trembled.

“You are just like your father,” she said, “so stubborn!”

She was about to weep, but at that moment a servant came out with her arms full of furs.

“Shall we take these, Mistress, or shall we leave them?”

“Surely we will be back by winter—leave them,” Madame Wu said.

“Take them,” Mr. Wu said.

“I haven’t enough boxes,” Madame Wu wailed.

“Buy what you need,” Mr. Wu said.

“Oh—it’s such worry,” Madame Wu said distractedly. She turned back into her room, forgetting everything else.

I-wan turned to his father. “I think I will go to my own room now and refresh myself.”

He wanted suddenly to be alone. His father nodded and he went on to his own door. And I-wan opened the door to the old familiar place.

It seemed at first as though Peony must be there. It had been strange not to see her anywhere about the rooms, and not to see her here was strangest of all. But there was no touch of her, anywhere. The windows stretched tall and bare, and there were no flowers in them. And on his table there was no pot of hot tea. Everything was clean enough, except for a surface of light dust. No one had come here this morning as Peony would have done to make all fresh before his coming. The bed, the books, the cushions on the chairs, everything had the still and unused look of a room long empty. It would be difficult, he felt, to make this room his own again—he had been so young when last he left it. He had thought once that he would leave it to be destroyed in the revolution. But it was still here—perhaps to be destroyed finally by a Japanese bomb! Who knew the end of such things? Not he, at least.

Then he remembered something else. Long ago En-lan had written his own story for him to read, and he had thrust it far into the back of this drawer, behind his copy books. He opened the drawer quickly and thrust in his hand. It was not there now. No one had touched the books or this drawer and it was full of dust. But the sheets of folded paper were gone. Someone had taken them. Was it in that way that they—the band—were discovered? He felt sweat begin to break out on his forehead. Had his father somehow—but his father never came into this room. And Peony only took care of his things. Surely it could not have been Peony—he sat down, feeling a little sick. Surely it could not have been Peony who had betrayed them all—Peony, whom he had told! He could not rid himself of this fear, once it had come to him. It kept him sleepless half the night though he told himself over and over again that whatever had happened was now finished.

In the evening it had rained, and all the way to the ship his mother had kept saying, “I prayed for rain. I paid the gods well for this rain!”

Yes, his father was changed. He had said nothing when she spoke of gods, though once he would have been impatient with her. They had all gone together to the boat and Mr. Wu had given tickets and money to I-ko. The house was very silent when they entered it again, and his father looked too tired to talk.

“We will have a quiet night since the clouds hide the moon,” he told I-wan. “There will be no raids tonight—let us sleep while we can.” He had gone to his room and I-wan to his.

But even after he was in the comfort of his own bed, I-wan had kept thinking of Peony—weighing and questioning what she could have done. If Peony had betrayed them, then he would be guilty of En-lan’s death. And yet even now he could not but trust her, though no one knew her, not even he. But he had not forgotten her. Somehow he had kept her in his memory, though he had not thought of her, either, in all his years with Tama…. Yes, he had thought of her once. On his wedding night he had thought of Peony long enough to be glad that he had never loved her or allowed himself to receive her love. But this he could not tell Tama, and so to Tama he had never even mentioned Peony’s name. And yet Peony was something to him, too—he did not know what—perhaps only the memory of a fragrance and nothing more. Nevertheless she was enough so that he wanted to know that she could not have betrayed En-lan.

At their breakfast he put it to his father, therefore, trying to speak calmly as though it were no great matter:

“I have often wondered how it was you found out about our band, years ago. It is so long gone that now I can ask.”

“Chiang Kai-shek told me,” his father replied.

“Chiang Kai-shek!” I-wan repeated, half stupefied. “How did he know?”

“He knows everything,” his father said drily. “We had had much talk together in private during those days and in return for his promised rule of law and order and expulsion of the communists, I promised loans, as he should need them, of sums we agreed upon. Then one day he sent for me in great urgency. I went and he saw me alone. He showed me your name on a list of communists to be executed. I did not believe it—I swore it was a mistake—and he sent for a classmate of yours who, for a sum of money set as a trap, had given in a list of names—and yours was one.”

“Was he named Peng Liu?” I-wan demanded eagerly.

“I don’t know,” his father said. He looked disgusted as he remembered. “He was a cringing yellow-faced boy who said his father kept a small shop.”

“That was Peng Liu!” I-wan broke in. “So it was he! Where is he now?”

Then it was not Peony! It was not his fault now if En-lan were dead—

“Dead,” his father said calmly. “He was given his money and then executed.”

“But why executed if—” I-wan began.

“Chiang despises traitors,” his father replied.

“How could he offer a bribe and then blame the man who takes it?” I-wan asked indignantly.

“He can,” his father replied. “You have to understand that. He is a hard man, but a true one. He uses everyone, and sweeps away those whom he cannot trust enough to use again.”

“An opportunist!” I-wan retorted.

“All wise men are opportunists,” his father replied. “It is only fools who will not change when times change. But within himself the man never changes.”

His father leaned forward and tapped the table between them with his long fingernails.

“I-wan, I tell you he is the only one who will save us now from the Japanese. I tell you he will do it. He has made up his mind since he came back from Sian, and he will never cease until he has succeeded. See how he has driven back the communists! They are hidden in the farthest corner of the northwest. Year after year he drove them back, determined to bring the country under one rule.”