The Patriot (38 page)

“His own!” I-wan said scornfully.

“One rule,” his father repeated sternly. “It was far better than to allow such a civil war as would have ruined us and left the country empty for the Japanese to come into and take.”

“Do you mean,” I-wan said slowly, “that as long ago as that—ten years ago—he foresaw this day and began to unite the country for it?”

He had forgotten all about Peony now. He was thinking only of this man whom he had hated with such sobbing passionate bitterness on that day, the man whom he had always in his heart called traitor because he betrayed the revolution. But now, what if indeed he had seen more than any of them?

His father was nodding his head.

“I believe he sees everything,” he said, “and that he can do anything. He is a very great man.”

But he could not somehow so easily accept what his father said. He remembered certain things which he had read in Japanese newspapers.

“His opportunism led him in evil ways sometimes,” he said.

“That was before he was what he is now,” his father retorted. “The test of a man’s greatness is in whether he can see the evil in his own ways and change.”

“He would be really nothing but a warlord in other times,” I-wan broke in. “He has the mind and the ways of a warlord. He always settles everything by force.”

“He settles it, though,” his father said equably.

“And then all his wives—” I-wan began.

He looked up from his bowl to feel his father’s eyes on him somewhat coldly.

“I shall not discuss that with you,” he said with dignity. “What woman a man chooses is his own business. When your brother came home with—Frieda—your mother cried until I had to call in doctors. She moaned that we should have married I-ko by force before he went away. I told her the principle we chose was right. That our son is a fool has nothing to do with it.”

He paused, frowning. I-wan saw him tolerating grimly the white woman in his house. His father looked up and caught his eyes.

“How is it with your Japanese wife?” he asked kindly. “I have said nothing of her. Japanese women make excellent wives. They know their place. I did not mind when you married her. And this war really has nothing to do with such things. Only stupid and ignorant persons would confuse a human relationship with a matter of state.”

He was so grateful for his father’s kindness that he wanted to tell him everything about Tama.

“She is so good,” he said. “I never saw such a good woman—careful in everything she does. I can’t think of her as Japanese—to me she is only herself, the mother of my sons.”

“Yes—yes,” his father mused, as though he were thinking about something else. “Well now, how shall you write to each other? It will be difficult if it is known you receive Japanese letters. But at my office, naturally it will not be noticed. Tell her to address them to me. And you send your letters to me and I will send them on to her. In these times when the young are suspicious and easily angered, you might be assassinated if it were thought you sent and received such letters.”

He had not thought of this. “Thank you, Father,” he said. “But is it dangerous for you?”

“Oh, they all know me. I’m safe enough,” his father said. “Besides, no one dares to kill me. Chiang would make trouble. And everybody is afraid of him.”

They were back to this man again.

“Marriage—” his father was saying positively, “well, his old wives were no use to him so he took a new one who could be of use. Not all have the courage for it!” He laughed silently and drank what was left of his tea and drew a letter from his inner pocket. “Let me see,” he said, scanning it, “two days from now you are to meet him. These are his orders.”

His father said these words, “his orders,” with such pleasure that rebellion stirred once more in I-wan.

“You are surely very changed,” he said with a little malice. “Have I not heard that Chiang believes in a god—the Christian God? If he is sincere in it, how can you trust him?”

A slow smile spread upon his father’s square face.

“Oh, he is always sincere,” he said.

And then I-wan, for the first time in his life, heard his father make a joke.

“He is doubtless using the Christians’ God, too,” he said. “He is such a man!”

He stood for the first time before this man who had once cut off his life and had exiled him, in a fashion, to another world. Yet it was he who now called him back again.

He had never been in any presence so potent, not even in En-lan’s. Had he lived, En-lan might one day have been as strong, as controlled, as full of disciplined power as this man now was. But in I-wan’s memory he lived as a hot-hearted boy.

“Sit down,” Chiang Kai-shek said.

He sat down upon one of the three straight-backed chairs in the room and waited. She had told him—this man’s beautiful, foreign-looking wife, who had been the one to meet him first—that he spoke no other language than his own.

“Be prepared, please,” she told him, her voice so much softer than her handsome face, “do not use any English words. There are many young men who find their own language not enough and they put in English words and it makes him very angry. He always says, ‘What—isn’t Chinese enough for them?’” She had smiled a very little.

“I will be careful he had answered.

How, he thought now, waiting, did this man feel toward his wife? She wore Chinese dress and her black hair was brushed smoothly back into an old-fashioned knot. But even in the few moments she had talked, I-wan had perceived that in a hundred ways she was not Chinese. Her big black eyes shone and sparkled, her soft voice was frank, and all her movements, though graceful and controlled, were free. She was a woman who would do as she liked. I-ko had laughed because she was the head of the nation’s air force. But she could be the head of anything—except, perhaps, of this man!

Chiang Kai-shek lifted his eyes and stared at I-wan. He had been reading a long document, which he had then signed and sealed. When his eyes were downcast, one said his mouth was the strength of his face, a mouth beautiful by nature and stern by will. But when one saw the eyes one forgot the mouth. This straight black gaze commanded attention.

“Your father is my friend,” Chiang said. I-wan bowed a little and met these eyes fully and waited. They did not waver. “I have this letter,” Chiang went on, his voice very quiet and somewhat cold. “It is of the greatest importance. This must be delivered to a certain officer in the communist army in the Northwest and from his hand into the hand of the other two generals in command of that army.”

“I understand that,” I-wan replied. But then he understood nothing else. Why should Chiang be sending documents to the men he had been pursuing so bitterly that many of them were dead because of him and the others driven into that corner of the Northwest? There was no time to wonder. He must listen. This man would never repeat, never explain, never say one word too much. Therefore not one word was to be lost.

“I choose you because your father promises me you are to be trusted. But if you are not, you will suffer as any other traitor does. He understands that. So must you. A plane is ready for you. You are to leave at once.”

“One moment, Excellency,” I-wan said. “Am I to bring back an answer?”

“The plane will wait to bring you back,” Chiang replied. He struck a bell on the desk. The door opened at the sound.

I-wan rose and as by instinct saluted, the old stiff salute his German tutor had given him.

“You’ve had military training?” Chiang asked sharply. “I thought only your brother had been abroad.”

“I have been only in Japan,” I-wan said.

“Military training there?” Chiang asked again.

“No—it was before that,” I-wan replied.

Chiang banged the bell with the flat of his hand and the door shut again. I-wan remained standing before him.

“They tell me Japan is on the edge of a collapse,” he said abruptly. “Is it true?”

“No,” I-wan replied. “It is not true.”

“Business is good?” Chiang asked sharply.

“Yes,” I-wan replied, remembering the busy Japanese streets.

“I am told the people do not want war—is that true?” Chiang prodded him with his brilliant eyes.

I-wan replied steadily, “The people want whatever they are told to want.”

“They are loyal to their government?”

“Completely.”

“Do they still worship their Emperor?”

“Yes.”

Chiang stirred and sighed and for the first time moved his eyes from I-wan’s. He picked up his jade seal and looked at it.

“Then they’ve been lying to me—the people around me,” he remarked. “It will be a long war.”

“It must be a long war,” I-wan replied. And then remembering Hideyoshi, he added, “It will be our strength if we realize it from the first and plan for it. The enemy”—that was Hideyoshi—not Tama and his little sons, who belonged to him alone—“the enemy think it will be a short war.”

Chiang’s eyes shot at him again.

“Do they? How long?”

“They said at first three months—now, a year,” I-wan replied. “But I think it will be many years,” he added. Outside he heard the drone of an airplane’s engine. But Chiang still held him.

“That means—we must plan our war after theirs is finished,” he said. He was looking at the seal again. I-wan did not answer. “That means let them spend while we save. That means save what is essential to our national life—not cities, not people. We have those to spare.”

I-wan, waiting, caught these words, “Not cities, not people.” These were not to be saved. There was something else. Was there, then, a way to fight a war and seeming to lose, yet win?

The door opened and Madame Chiang was there.

“The plane is waiting,” she told her husband. “Had he not better go now so that the landing will not be in darkness?”

“Yes—go,” Chiang commanded him. And whatever he meant was left unsaid.

Flying over the handful of islands which was Japan had been nothing like this. He felt proudly that such a country as this was security against any victory. Hour after hour they drove across the sky over the solid mainland of China. Here was a country! They sank to follow a thousand miles of broad yellow river flowing through green lands and pallid deserts, they rose to scale ranges of mountains whose crests were barren in cold. Impassable country! Once he had been ashamed when he read in a Japanese newspaper that there were no good roads beyond the seacoast in China—“a backward country,” it said, “which the Chinese have done nothing to develop.” Yes, so backward that there were no roads now by which an enemy could enter! There was only the sky that was open. Through the sky alone was the passage to be had. And yet, how could even bombs from the sky destroy a country as vast as this!

He remembered something. In the two days before he left for Nanking he had gone with his father over the whole city of Shanghai to see what had befallen it. Devastation enough, he had thought. In increasing silence and desperation they had gone from one place to another, seeing ruins everywhere. But on the edge of the city they found a farmer planting green cabbages, squatting calmly on his heels as he worked. His house was gone. A shed of mats rudely put together told that. They had stopped a moment to watch him, and then because something needed to be said in greeting, his father said, “It is too bad that your house is gone, too.”

The farmer looked up and grinned and wiped his face with the blue cotton scarf across his shoulders. He pointed his chin toward a deep hole at the edge of the field. It was full of water.

“That’s where it was,” he told them cheerfully. “A good house my great-grandfather built! But never mind—none of us were killed. We were all out working. And as I told my wife when we saw the water coming up into it, ‘Well, we always wanted a pond and now we have it!’”

He roared out a laugh, and they had laughed too, and had gone home somehow cheered. Ruins had lost their meaning. He thought of it again and again.

All day the plane roared across the sky. The pilot was a young American, with whom I-wan had had no chance to talk. Madame Chiang had introduced them quickly, as the plane was ready to take off. “This is Denny MacGurk, Mr. Wu.”

“Pleased to meet you,” the American had said and had swung into his seat. And then Madame Chiang had handed them each a little bag.

“Your noon meal,” she told them.

He had not thought of its being noon until he saw Denny MacGurk eating with one hand while he steered. Then he opened the bag. Ham between layers of foreign bread, a brown creamy foreign sweet, and an apple—he had never eaten this food, but high up in the cold clear air it was good. MacGurk turned and nodded at him and shouted something which the wind tore to pieces before he could catch it, but he nodded as though he had heard. Why, he wondered, should this American boy be here, driving a plane for a Chinese general? But he had heard it said often enough in the Muraki business that none could understand Americans.And so he sat through the long afternoon until dusk, when the plane drifted down an aisle of cloud into a valley and dropped into a shaven field outside a village. Instantly it was surrounded by soldiers and then by a staring, pushing crowd of children and villagers. MacGurk leaped out, and I-wan, behind him, clambered out of his seat.

“We’ll sleep here and start at dawn and finish the trip after noon,” MacGurk said. Then he said in the pleasantest voice, “Say, tell these tin soldiers it’s their high monkey-monk’s plane, will you, and that I’ll lick the guts out of any of ’em that touches it? Tell ’em to watch the kids.” He locked up as much as he could, and I-wan, translating, told the soldiers, “It is the Generalissimo’s plane on official business, and it rests on your bodies tonight.”

“Yes!” they shouted, saluting, and as he followed MacGurk he heard them roaring at the awed crowd, “Put your fingers on it and see what falls upon you, you children of turtles! Your mother! Breathe on it even, and see what happens!”

“I guess it’s safe,” MacGurk said, grinning. “Gosh, but I’m stiff! And there’ll be only a board to sleep on tonight,” he grumbled, “and nothing but noodles to eat. Oh hell, if there aren’t too many lice, I guess I can sleep on anything!”