The Patriot (4 page)

He was getting very sleepy. He looked at his clock. It was nearly midnight and he had only just finished his English composition. He read it over and thought well of it, though of course it would come back dotted with red marks. Miss Maitland would correct it in many unforeseen places. But it was good. He had chosen as his subject the story of Sun Yat-sen, and he had told it well. He had decided pleasurably to read it again, when he heard a soft movement about his bed. But he did not look up. It was only Peony unrolling the quilts and bringing in hot tea to set beside his bed. Then he felt her standing beside him, and he felt what he had felt before, her hand on his shoulder and her cheek against his hair. Suddenly he remembered how she had looked standing against the oleanders in the late afternoon. He moved away from her, growling at her, “How long will you use that disgusting perfume?”

“Forever,” she said pertly, “and forever—because I like it. Don’t study any more! You must be finished. It is time you went to bed.”

“You know nothing about what I have to do,” he said.

“If you are not yet finished, then you are stupid,” she retorted. She touched his cheek with her soft and scented palm. “And I know you are not stupid,” she said.

He felt his heart beat suddenly once, twice, and he was disturbed. For years they had been playmates. He knew, and she knew, too, that she was a bondmaid and allowed in the house to be more than that only because they were all fond of her and had petted her, especially since his sisters died. But indeed between the two of them there had been something like being brother and sister. They never spoke of her being a bondmaid. He did not think of it because he was so used to her and she did not speak of it. But for the last few months something else was beginning between them, something he wanted and hated. It was this way she had of putting her hand on his shoulder and her cheek on his hair. Some night he would stretch out his own arm and put it around her, though he did not want to do it. He had never done it, but he had thought of it, and he was ashamed. If he had not belonged to the band he would have done it, perhaps.

Besides, he did not want to be like I-ko. I-ko was forever teasing Peony, touching her cheek and seizing her hand and putting his arm about her. Whenever he did this, Peony flung herself away from him. Once she had scratched him, four long scratches down both his cheeks, so that for several days he could not go out because everyone knows that when a man has four long parallel scratches down both his cheeks, a woman’s two hands have done it. There was trouble in the house because of it. Madame Wu spoke alone to Peony, and his father spoke to I-ko. And Peony came into I-wan’s room and cried and said, “I hate your brother I-ko! He has always been wicked.”

I-wan did not ask how I-ko was wicked. He did not want to know. He had felt a faint prickling in his spine and he had said solemnly, “I will never be wicked to you, Peony.”

She had sobbed awhile, and sighed, and then she looked up at him and smiled.

“You don’t know how to be wicked,” she had said….

So now he was ashamed when he felt pleased at her touch on him, and he drew away from her.

“You don’t like me any more now that you are grown up,” she murmured.

“Yes, I do,” he said loudly, “exactly as I always have.”

“I’m so lonely,” she whispered.

He rose, slamming his composition book shut.

“You go away,” he said. “I don’t want you here any more when I am going to bed, Peony.”

He made his voice surly because he was afraid of her. He was afraid she would cry or be angry with him because she had always helped him get ready for bed and then had drawn the bed curtains and put out the light.

“Open the windows,” he had always commanded her.

In summer she obeyed, but in winter she begged him,
“
Not tonight—it’s so cold.”

“If you don’t open them, I’ll get up myself after you are gone,” he called out of the quilts.

So she had to open them, summer and winter…. He turned his back to her now so he need not see her face when it was hurt. But he heard her laugh, and he turned around quickly. She was not hurt at all. She was smiling, her eyes teasing, her voice gay.

“You are too big,” she said, “you are a man now—so you don’t want me here any more, little I-wan! A big grown man!”

He rushed at her and pushed her to the door and she clung to his hands, laughing and laughing. He pushed her out of the door at last, though her soft hands clung to his like something sticky. There, he had her off! He pulled the door sharply shut and turned the key. Then he stood and listened. There was not a sound. He put his hand to the key to turn it back and see if she were there. Then he drew away. Of course she was there, teasing him, waiting in silence. He would not open the door. He turned and walked loudly across the floor and began to undress himself. When he was washed and ready for bed he went to the window and noisily threw it wide. If she were there, she would hear that. He had an inner wave of desire to go and look to see if she were there. But if she were she would come in. And he was afraid of her if she came in. He had vowed himself to his country. Besides, he would not be like I-ko.

He sprang into bed and drew the curtains, and he smelled again that faint sweet odor of the opium. He hated it instantly, and in his hatred he forgot Peony. He would not, he thought, drifting away into sleep at last, have to endure it forever.

The band was meeting in the English classroom. It was the safest room because the university always gave the foreign teachers the poorest rooms in a small old building at a distant corner of the campus. It was a two-story building and there was only one stairway. It was Peng Liu’s duty to loiter at the head of the stairs as though he were waiting for someone. But in reality he was guarding the stair. He was good at being a spy. His little eyes saw everything and he could pretend stupidity and ignorance so naturally that anyone would be deceived. If anyone came up, he would call out a loud greeting, and the others would hear it through the open transom of the door of the English room, which was opposite, and immediately they would scatter through two other doors into other classrooms, where they would be studying in little groups and couples and alone. But so far no one had ever come up the stairs, even though they had been meeting now for nearly two years and had become part of many others like themselves in the National Brotherhood of Patriots. That was what they called themselves since the government announced that all communists would be shot. They were not communists, therefore, but patriots.

“They can scarcely shoot patriots,” En-lan had said, grinning his wide peasant grin. “When the revolution comes, everything will be different. We shall then kill everybody else.”

In this room I-wan knew them all, and yet really he knew none of them, except En-lan. That is, he knew every one of these twenty-three faces, nine of them girls, and he knew their names. But except for Peng Liu and En-lan, whether they were rich or poor, or who they were, he could not tell. They had not known each other until they had begun to gather here in this room. When I-wan had first come there were only eleven, and only two of them girls. Where these others had come from he did not know, except that when a new one entered it was the rule that he stand up and announce himself and then someone among those already known would stand up also and vouch for him that he was not a spy.

It was through En-lan that he had come here. When he came to this university he found En-lan at once, and En-lan had told him of the brotherhood, and had vouched for him. I-wan was grateful and he asked him afterwards, “How can you vouch for me when you do not know more about me than my father’s name?”

“I do know you,” En-lan had replied. “I know what you did for me.”

“You don’t care whose son I am?” I-wan had asked.

“What does it matter whose son you are?” En-lan had answered. “I know you are the sort of fellow who ought to be with us.”

And yet, although none of these twenty-three persons was among I-wan’s old friends, nor were any of them like those sons of the rich who had been his schoolmates once, he felt when he came into this room that here were those to whom he belonged. Whether they knew who he was or not, he did not care. He even preferred that they did not know. He felt ashamed before them that he was the son of the banker Wu, who was one of the richest men in Shanghai. When I-wan saw a small hole torn in his uniform or a button gone, he let it be, so that he could look as poor as any of them and he purposely tumbled his smooth black hair so that it would look more like En-lan’s dry tough hair, browned by the dusty winds and the sun of the northern deserts.

It seemed to him that here alone in his world was life, eager and good. In his home no one thought of anyone else outside the family. Each person did what he liked for himself, his only other regard being the family. No one looked to see what was happening to people outside. I-wan had not either, until he found the book by Karl Marx which had sent him to prison. And yet he could never be sorry he had been in prison, because that was where he had found En-lan….

“Why were you in prison?” he had asked En-lan when they had come to know each other. He knew by now a curious thing about En-lan. When there was something he wished known he wrote it down instead of talking about it. He talked slowly and hunted for words, but he wrote easily and with plenty of words. So now, as often, he did not at once answer I-wan.

Then he said, “I will write it down.”

A few days later he handed I-wan some sheets of paper torn out of his English composition book.

“Read it in your own room,” he told I-wan, “and then burn it up.”

I-wan, alone that very night in his room, read these pages, and this is what En-lan wrote:

“I-wan:

“When you came into the prison I had already been there seventy-three days, and it was as though I had been there for ten years in that cell. If I pressed my face against the bars of the small window, I could just see a triangle of sky above the prison wall—nothing more. It was not a large bit of sky. It seemed to me about the size of the three-cornered piece of black cloth which my mother always wore tied over her head to keep the dust of the deserts out of her hair. I have already told you my village is in the far north, and the bitter winds from the Gobi sweep down laden with yellow sand. Some day, the old men have always said, the village will be covered with sand, and people will be buried, their flesh drying without decay in the intense dryness of the sand and the wind.

“Standing thus, my face pressed against the prison bars, staring at my bit of sky, I gave up hope. It came to me at last, a few days before your coming, that perhaps I would never lie dry and clean in death in the sands of my village. No, my body might fall in the prison yard, full of bullets, and I would be thrown into the warm soft rich earth of this half-foreign southern city. And in my village they would never know what had become of me or why I did not come home any more.

“The village has always been too far for me to go home at New Year or at any time except in summer. And even in summer I walk a good deal of the way, because train fare, even in the coolie cars where there are no seats, is more than I could pay. But in those years before my parents married me to the woman I shall never see, I always felt I must go home because I had so much to tell them. Everybody in the village, every one of the twenty-six families, is kin to me, and everybody has given what he was able to pay my school bills. If there was no money, the women of the family made me shoes or socks or a coat.

“I would not for anything have told them that after a few months I did not wear these things, because the smart students of the modern city laughed at me. I did not mind this so much because I laughed, too. I could see I looked funny in the long, too loose robes of blue cotton and in the clumsy northern shoes. For of course I knew the women had said to each other, ‘We had better cut them plenty big. He might grow taller, and with all the good food in the south he will certainly be fatter.’ So they cut them far too large for me, since I grew neither taller nor fatter. But I could not bear the laughter for their sakes.

“So I found a pawnshop where ricksha pullers and poor men stopped to buy clothing, and because my things were made of such stout home-woven stuffs and so strongly sewed, I sold easily and the pawnshop keeper gave me a fair price. With this I bought myself the blue cotton uniforms, such as many of the students wore who liked to be patriotic. I wore one when I went to prison.

“You asked me, I-wan, how I came to be in prison. It is a simple story. One day soldiers came into our English classroom and they shouted my name. I was reading a poem by an English poet. I could not understand it very well, but I felt through the dimness of foreign words that there was beauty. It began, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud—’

“I had been studying English for three years. At home in the village they all crowded around me in the summer evenings and begged me, ‘Speak some English for us to hear!’ So I would say slowly and clearly, ‘My name is Liu En-lan. How do you do. I am very well, thank you.’ Everyone listened in silence, and when I stopped they burst into laughter and they laughed until tears ran down their cheeks. ‘It sounds like hens cackling,’ they said. ‘Now tell us what it means.’ And they listened again while I told them, admiring me for all I knew.

“And my old uncle, Liu Ih, the oldest man in the village, always nodded his head and sucked his pipe and said, ‘I knew we made no mistake when we let him go to school. No one from this village has ever gone to school, but times are changed. He will bring honor to us all. He will get a fine government job with all this English and pay us all back—with interest.’ ‘Yes, I will,’ I always promised. I gazed around at their faces, and I loved them greatly as they looked at me, their eyes innocent and wistful in their lined dark faces. At their feet stood little children, staring at me in wonder and in silence, to whom I knew I was a hero. When I was graduated with honors, I would get the fine job and do everything for them. I would hire a good teacher and all the children should go to school….