The Patriot (40 page)

He dropped his hands now and held them lightly clasped. It was En-lan’s strength that without movement, merely by the power of his voice and his words, he held men silent and subdued to him. I-wan felt it, all the old power, but infinitely deeper and more perfected.

“But we remembered who the real enemy is. It is not he. We said to you then, ‘If he could so relentlessly pursue us year after year, he can thus pursue our enemy.’ We said to him,
‘
Will you fight Japan?’ He said, ‘Until I die.’ So we let him go.”

Now they could feel what was coming. Now they knew this mounting rising terrible power coming out of En-lan meant he would demand sacrifice from them. His eyes began to burn, his voice grew deep, he held himself higher. Their eyes were fixed upon him.

“Today he is the only one who can lead us on to war. There is no other.”

But now they stirred. “You! You! You!” This word began to break from the crowd here and there. But En-lan caught it and tossed it away.

“No, not I! I am a communist. This nation will not follow any communist! And Japan would use us still more as an excuse for war—‘China is communist,’ they say already! No, we must serve our own country, not the enemy.”

They fell silent. What he said was true. What would he say next?

“There is only one who can save us all,” he said. “He who has seemed to be our enemy. If we come under his flag—not he under ours, but we under his—what can our enemies say? Before the whole world we shall be a united people, fighting together!”

I-wan, staring at En-lan, was sobbing within himself. This fellow, this magnificent man—demanding of his people this supreme self-denial—telling them they must subdue themselves now to one who had so persecuted them—who but En-lan could have made so huge a demand!

“Forget yourselves!” he commanded them. “Remember only that you are Chinese!”

Not a sound, not a word! Peony at his side was smoothing with her fingers the dust upon the ground and writing two characters—“China.”

“Those who will, let them raise the right hand!” En-lan commanded.

Up came their right hands—hundreds of hands.

“Those who are not willing!” En-lan demanded again. His blazing eyes dared them.

Not a hand dared. He dropped his head and turned away, and slowly, as though from dreaming, the people began to struggle up, some to walk away, some to stand talking.

But it was over. They had done what En-lan wanted them to do. I-wan saw him stride across the court to his own room. And Peony rose quickly to follow him.

“He is always tired for a little while after such a thing,” she whispered. “Something goes out of him.” She hurried toward the court.

And I-wan, after a moment, went out toward the field, where MacGurk was oiling the plane. The daze of the past hour was still upon him, as bright as a dream. When he stood again before Chiang, he would say, “Let me go back.” Yes, he must come back. Somehow En-lan made this his country, even as he had done in those other days.

“When shall we go?” he asked MacGurk.

“Four o’clock in the morning,” MacGurk answered. He nodded toward the dispersing crowd. “Get what he wanted?”

“Yes,” I-wan said.

“Great fellow,” MacGurk remarked. “Almost as great as the big chief—not quite, though. So I stick by the biggest one.”

“I’ll be here at four, then,” I-wan said at last, not knowing what other answer to make to this. Well, he would say to Chiang, “That is where I can serve you best.” And there was no reason for delay. He could be back within five days, if Chiang were willing.

“O-kay,” MacGurk replied, and began to whistle through his teeth while he polished the wings.

Sometimes everything except this life he now lived seemed an imagination, years which he had dreamed in his sleep. Days and weeks went by when he did not think once of Tama or the children, when indeed it seemed as though he and En-lan had always worked together like this, as though they were two hands, driven by the same brain. Day upon day they talked of nothing but of the plan of war which they were now following. This army was a flexible, tireless machine. They drove it night and day, a little council of men at its heart. With him En-lan had two others, men whose stories I-wan never knew whole, but whose brains he came to know as he knew his own.

They had to make war with nothing. Chiang Kai-shek had told them there was nothing. When he could give them money he would. But his own armies were only a little more than half-equipped. And he must keep always enough money ready to buy loyalty from the warlords and their armies. There were only a few whom he could be sure of without money.

“I must be able always to pay more than the Japanese.” He had told I-wan this calmly, while I-wan felt his own heart angry in his breast.

“Are there truly Chinese who even now can be bought?” he had cried. He did not believe it.

But Chiang Kai-shek had said, “I know them. They cannot be changed, and I must use them as they are.”

Yes, I-wan thought grudgingly, perhaps MacGurk was right. En-lan was not so great as Chiang Kai-shek. Nevertheless he belonged with En-lan and so he had gone back to him.

“We do not need money,” En-lan said, and then corrected himself. “Well, we do need it, but we can do without it. We have fought a war for years without it, and we will go on as we have been.”

And this, I-wan soon found, was by the old hide-and-seek of the guerillas. There was not one of these soldiers of En-lan’s who did not know how to fight with anything he had in his hand. If they had only twenty machine guns, they seemed to have a hundred. If they had no guns, they fought with old-fashioned spears and knives or they threw javelins or even slung stones from ambush. They did not scorn the single death of even the least of the enemy, although they could kill a hundred so swiftly that it seemed nothing. And all this they did, not massed together in the solid marching regiments the enemy had, but in small scattered handfuls of men here and there and everywhere, hidden in trees and ambushed in caves and working among the farming people with hoes in their hands and pistols and knives under their blue cotton shirts.

For the first thing En-lan had decreed was that they should leave the village where they were and approach the enemy lines. They were to go not as an army but simply as farming people, some one day, some another, to return to their lands despoiled by the enemy.

“Those lands,” En-lan told I-wan grimly one night, as they sat over maps in En-lan’s room, “I know them well.” He put his finger on a certain spot. “Do you remember what I used to tell you about my village?”

“Yes,” I-wan replied, “I do remember.”

“Here it is,” En-lan said and stared down at it. “Its name is still here. But it is gone. Not a soul is alive in it. The walls of its houses are ruined and its streets are scorched earth. I have one brother alive, perhaps—I don’t know. But a Japanese garrison fell upon them in revenge after Tungchow.”

He was silent a moment, and I-wan did not speak either. What could be said?

“I used to think I would surely go back some day and start a school,” En-lan said slowly. And after a while he said again, “I never repaid them while they lived for what they gave me. But I will repay them now, when they are dead.”

Peony had been sitting upon a bench mending an old uniform of En-lan’s. Now she put down her sewing and rose and came over to En-lan and took the map from his hand.

“It is time for you to go to bed,” she said. “You know you need your early sleep, because the dawn awakes you.”

His mood changed at once. “I’ll always be a farmer boy,” he told I-wan, smiling a little. “Any cock can rouse me.”

And I-wan, seeing the deep passion between these two, felt his own longing creep over him like a mist. For weeks he lived as though this were the only life he had ever had, and then suddenly, as if his name were called by her voice, he longed for Tama. Over and over again at such times he wanted to tell En-lan and Peony about her. But he could not. He could not be sure that they would understand. En-lan was as implacable as ever. The old calmness with which he once had told I-wan that he ought no longer to own his father, was in him still. He was ruthless in his simplicity. “How,” he would ask I-wan, “can you love a Japanese?” And yet I-wan knew that he loved Tama and would always love her and she belonged to no country, but only to him.

Once he thought he might tell Peony alone. He had had that day a letter from Tama, sent as all his letters from her were sent, under an official seal from his father. This day Tama’s letter had been long and full of what the children said and did. Jiro was beginning school. She had bought him a brown cloth school-bag for his books and a little uniform and a cap, such as the other boys wore. “But at home,” she wrote, “I teach him, too. We put flowers before your picture every day, and every day I explain to them how brave you are and how beautiful a country China is and how we belong to China—do I not belong to you, and they to us?”

Yes, since he was gone, she had written so “… we belong to China—”

On the day he had this letter he had been eaten up with loneliness for them. It was a day of unusual quietness. En-lan had commanded rest for them all, for the enemy were changing their position on a certain sector which he wished to attack. And I-wan found Peony sitting with her constant sewing on the sunny side of the farmhouse where they were quartered. And suddenly he wanted to tell her about Tama. Still some caution held him back. So he began, “Did you never have a son, Peony?”

She looked up at him. In the sharp sunlight he saw how her delicate skin was beginning to crack in small fine wrinkles, and her hair, which once she kept so smooth with fragrant oils, now looked brown and dried with the wind. But she was still pretty and still young. Peony, he thought, could not be more than thirty.

“I had two children,” she said. She dropped her eyes to her sewing. “I was very ill with the last—I seem never to have any more now.” She went on sewing. Then she said. “And why should I not tell you? You-are my brother. The first—my son—I lost by a dysentery. It is not a good life for a small child—our life. We have been driven so much. And his food and water changed too often. He was five, though—I kept him as long as that. And then suddenly he died in a day. And we buried him on a hillside in Kiangsi. It is so far south from here I shall never see his grave again, I think.” She shook her head but she did not weep. “And the little one,” she went on, “that was a girl. It was so long before she came I thought there would never be another. But En-lan doesn’t believe in gods, you know, so I had nothing to pray to for a child. And then on the Long March, I conceived.”

She paused, bit her thread, and went on. “Well, I hoped the Long March would be ended before she was born. But no—we kept climbing over those high mountains and down the rocky roads and over the deserts. I wasn’t sick, but I had to walk all the time or ride a horse. That was worse. The roads were so bad—and sometimes there were no roads. Ah, I was glad then your father wouldn’t let my feet be bound! Well, so the child was born very small and thin—and a girl. But we were still marching, so what could we do with her? I gave her to a good farmer’s wife and left some money for her and I told her I would come back.”

Peony bent her head down close to her sewing. “But that was three years ago…. Sometimes I can’t be sure if I remember the place, or how the woman looked. And her name was only Wang….”

“Did En-lan let this happen?” I-wan exclaimed.

She looked up at him. “You know him,” she said simply.

He could say nothing. He knew En-lan. He would demand everything of Peony, too. It came to him for the first time that perhaps Peony would have liked a home, a little house like Tama’s, set upon a hill, and a garden.

“Are you sorry you followed him that day?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Without him, what would I have been?” she asked. Then she looked at the sun. “It’s late,” she exclaimed. She put her needle into a bit of cloth securely and folded it up and buttoned it into the pocket of her uniform.

“Needles are very precious now. I wish I had all the ones I used to lose so carelessly.” She rose as she spoke. “I must go and get his supper,” she said cheerfully.

He watched her walk away. She was very graceful still, but so thin. She would not live to be old in this life. But if it were En-lan’s life she wanted it. No, he decided, he would not tell her about Tama. She would tell En-lan anything if she thought he ought to know. She would think only of En-lan. He could not entrust Tama to her now.

Each fought in this war as he was able. Elsewhere in the country there were armies uniformed and manned and trained by foreign officers. But here where I-wan had chosen to make his present life there was no such thing. These men could not have borne it. They drew near to the enemy, so near that less than a day’s easy walking would bring them into lost territory. There were no headquarters, seemingly, and no head to these scattering men. En-lan lived in a village, looking like any farmer. And around him were other farmers and petty tradesmen and fuel cutters and men who hired themselves out to other men and all that multitude of small people who have nothing to do with war in any country and who care for nothing except to feed themselves and their children. Then from nowhere a band of dark fierce banditry swept by night into a town held by the enemy and killed the garrison to the last man and the next day a foray of angry Japanese searched the countryside in revenge. But these small folk knew nothing and had seen nothing. With the innocent eyes of eternal children they gazed at their enemies and laughed.

“Why should we be those who killed you?” they cried, one and another. “We don’t care who rules us, only let us tend our fields and do our business. We hate our rulers. They are all evil and we are eaten up with their taxes. Why should we fight for them? If you will rule us better than they, why, welcome!”

Then Japanese looked at Japanese and wagged their heads and went away, believing, and wrote long reports to their upper officers that the country folk welcomed their coming and thanked them and wanted their rule. In Tama’s letters I-wan read that the papers told this and she was glad because surely that meant the war would soon be over and she could come to him with the children.