The Patriot

by Pearl S. Buck

  “But nothing happened for a long time—nothing, indeed, until one day they began to fill the cell full of others. The search for revolutionists must have been very severe. Every day the cell was filled full and at every dawn it was emptied. The nights were horrible. They were afraid, at first cursing, and then as the night came near dawn they began crying and wailing. At first I used to talk to them. And it was out of this talk that I became a real revolutionist, I-wan. For they all had stories to tell me of how they had done nothing that was a greater crime than to help the poor to get more money for their work in mills or shops, or how they had helped girls to escape out of brothels into which they had been sold, or how merely they wanted to make a better country and had joined a band of patriots such as ours. I came to see that the government ought not to have imprisoned them at all. They were all young—many of them younger than you and I. And as I watched them go out to be killed I grew so full of hatred towards those who ordered their death that I swore I would revenge them if I escaped. When you came, I was already a determined revolutionist. Then I talked no more with anyone. When new ones came in I was silent. The cell grew used and filthy. But I cared for nothing. I could not sleep. Each night I, too, only waited for the dawn. Then when the cell was still dark, there would be a rattle of a key in the lock, and a round cylinder of light would be shot into our darkness. And a rough voice would call out the names one after the other of everyone—of everyone, that is, except me. Day after day I waited, sweating, my heart tight, for my name. But it was never called. I was only forgotten.

  “The cylinder of light was fastened upon one miserable creature after another. They were nearly always crying as the soldiers handcuffed them one to the other. Then they were marched down a corridor. Only I was left, and there I always stood watching them go, knowing where they went. I imagined them always, every day, crowding down the corridor, feeling the air suddenly fresh on their faces as I had not felt it in many days. But it was still dark. In the darkness hands they could not see would push them, jostling them against a hard wall. There would be a shout, a noise, a flash before their eyes. They would fall, huddled.

  “An English sentence kept springing out of my brain. ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud—’ I longed to cry out to them, to tell them something. But no one even knew what became of them. Day after day I died with them, forgotten, until you came one day with the new ones, and with you I was found.”

  I-wan, reading these pages far into the night, over and over again, could not burn them. These things En-lan had put down were a precious record. He folded the pages and put them away in his drawer, underneath some old books which his grandfather had given him and which he never read. But he could never put away what he had read. En-lan had given him a part of himself. What could he give in return? He lay awake thinking what he could give to En-lan, and he could think of nothing worthy in return, except his own blood, sworn to brotherhood.

  When he saw En-lan the next day he did not speak of what he had read. He saw En-lan was now shy, having told him much. So without speaking of it he asked him, “Will you be my blood brother?”

  At this the shyness went out of En-lan’s look, and he answered, “Yes, I will.”

  Then they went to En-lan’s room and after the old rite of blood brotherhood, they drew blood from their arms and mingled it together, and clasped their hands and took the vow. And though neither ever talked of it, the vow remained between them.

  This was how En-lan had become a secret revolutionist and I-wan with him, so that they met with these others in a deserted classroom when school was over each day…. He came out of his thoughts in this meeting to hear En-lan say, as he now stood up before them all, “We have been given the task of organizing the district of the silk mills in the northern part of the city. These are the mills for which we are responsible.”

  He read a list of names, one after the other. I-wan had only heard of them. He had never in his whole life been into those parts of Shanghai where thousands of men and women and children worked in the silk mills.

  “You, I-wan,” En-lan said, “must take the furthest section, the Ta Tuan mill, since you can hire a ricksha and need not go on foot. Those who must go on foot may take the nearer places.”

  And En-lan went on to tell them how the revolution must now be taken into the factories, so that the people who worked there might understand and prepare for the day when the government would be overthrown, and a new rule set up, the rule of the people for themselves. It was, as En-lan showed it, a true and right plan. I-wan thought of the villages in En-lan’s story—they ought to be freed from taxes and from having to grow opium. And if the people in the mills were so sorrowful as En-lan said they were, they should be helped to a better life. He was glad to do this, and he took his orders, as they all did, willingly and without reply. All over the country, in many cities, young men and women were taking such orders against the day to come, the day of hope for all….

  Peng Liu at this moment came running in. “Someone comes!” he cried.

  There was the sound of footsteps on the stair.

  “Run!” En-lan cried.

  They scattered as though the wind blew. But I-wan, even as he ran, noticed something. Peng Liu did not run. Instead he stood alone in the room as though he waited for someone. And after a moment he had come for them and, grinning, he told them it was no one—a carpenter come to change a broken windowpane. So they had gone on with their meeting, and I-wan forgot to think about Peng Liu, the more easily because Peng Liu was of a sort that everybody forgot rather than remembered—he was so small and indistinct in his looks and ways, and so seemingly harmless. None ever thought to give him any work to do except his spying, and I-wan was glad not to think of it because he did not like him.

  And indeed after this day I-wan began another life.

  “What are you so busy about?” I-ko demanded. “You are in some mischief.”

  I-wan now came home so late that several times in the last few weeks I-ko had come before him. Tonight he had met his brother on the steps. I-ko stepped out of his handsome private ricksha and gazed at I-wan with scorn.

  “On foot!” he said. “Like a coolie! You never used to walk everywhere.” For I-wan, in spite of what En-lan had said, took pride in setting forth each day after school as the others did in his old uniform and unpolished leather shoes for the silk mill.

  He did not answer I-ko and they went up the steps side by side. He could smell the heavy musky fragrance of the oil I-ko used to smooth his long straight black hair. It was the fashion among all of I-ko’s friends to let their hair grow long to the neck and to smooth it straight from the forehead and the ears. This was because a popular young poet of the day wore his so, “The Chinese Byron,” he was called. I-ko was proud to know him and he said constantly such things as, “Tse-li and I—” “Today I said to Tse-li—” Everybody rushed to read Tse-li’s latest verse. I-wan read it also, but he could not see anything in it. There was nothing but talk about flowers and death and escape into the misted bamboo hills and always to a woman, waiting.

  “Besides, you ought not to go about alone,” I-ko scolded him. “You might be kidnaped. Anything happens now. Then it would cost a great deal to ransom you—far more than you are worth,” he added, teasingly.

  It was quite true that in the disturbed times when the breath of new revolution was everywhere this sort of thing happened. His father had hired two tall Russian guards to go with him every day in his automobile. They kept their hands upon pistols in their pockets, and I-ko’s private ricksha puller was once a soldier and he also carried a pistol in his bosom.

  “The poorer I look the better, then,” I-wan said.

  “Oh, a clever kidnaper would make sure of who you were,” I-ko said.

  They entered the house. Across the hall Peony’s face looked out from behind a curtain and disappeared. He heard his grandmother’s cracked voice cry out their names.

  “I-ko! I-wan!”

  I-ko shrugged his sh
oulders and lifted his eyebrows and did not answer.

  “I am dining with Tse-li,” he muttered. “I have no time for the old woman.”

  “Why do you call her that behind her back?” I-wan whispered fiercely.

  And then not because he wanted to, but because he hated I-ko’s flippant look, he turned aside into his grandmother’s room once more.

  But he stayed only for a moment and then went on to his own room and threw himself on his bed. Tse-li—Tse-li! What right had young men to be like Tse-li in times like these? He would ask En-lan, “Ought we not to put Hua Tse-li’s name on the death list?” He hated the young aesthete whom his brother loved.

  This death list was like a weapon to the band. They had none of them any real comprehension that it meant massacre. As yet it was only a hope of revenge against people whom now they could only hate. When anyone made them angry, a teacher or a fellow student or an official whom they could never meet but who made some foreign treaty of which they disapproved, or if they heard of one who took public money for himself, they put his name upon the death list. Peng Liu even wished to put the name of the young science teacher, who was an Englishman, upon the list because he disliked Peng Liu and made no bones of it.

  “Stand up!” he had roared at Peng Liu one day. “Don’t cringe like a filthy Hindu!” Peng Liu had not understood “cringe” or “filthy Hindu,” but he had looked up the words in the dictionary, and after that he had wanted to put the name of James Ranald on the death list. But En-lan had said with scorn, “There is no use in putting foreign names down, because naturally when the time comes all foreigners will be killed.”

  When this time would be no one knew, but by late autumn everyone in the band felt it was coming soon. The revolutionary government at Hankow was growing stronger every day, and at a certain moment Chiang Kai-shek would sweep down the Yangtse River. What would happen would happen. No one spoke of it loudly. But I-wan heard it talked about secretly and with hope in the band, and at home, scornfully, by his father. In the band En-lan explained to them that it was not enough to talk. They must take their share of the preparation. All through the city bands like theirs were getting ready.

  “Getting ready,” he had said, “means preparing the people, their minds and their bodies. We who speak the language of the people must prepare their minds. You, I-wan, because your grandfather is a general and because you have learned military drill, must now organize also a workers’ brigade in the Ta Tuan mill.”

  For a moment I-wan could not speak because he was so astonished. En-lan knew who he was and had always known. But how did he know that at home his grandfather had had him tutored by a young German officer for three summers?

  Then he shouted loudly, “I will!”

  He said no more than that, but afterwards once, when he passed En-lan alone in a corridor, he asked, “How did you know I knew military drill?”

  And En-lan grinned and answered, “I see you goose-step like no one else every day at the school drill!” and went on.

  Thus it came about that I-wan began to organize that strange secret army among the pallid men of the mills. For two months now he had been going daily to the mills. It was not easy. He was not allowed to go into the great ramshackle buildings from which poured the hot filthy stink of silkworms rotting in the steamy heat. But about the mills were many straw huts where the mill workers lived, and he loitered near them and waited for the people to come home—the men, the women, the children.

  At first he felt awkward and strange with them. He could scarcely believe these were people, these crawling, sickly creatures, coughing, blear-eyed, their hands swollen and red. It was the hands of the women and the girls which were worst. They held them out, stiff with pain. When I-wan first saw them he could not keep from blurting out, “What is the matter with your hands?”

  It was a young girl who answered, a slight child who looked less than twelve. She spoke in a mild, pleasant voice.

  “It is the hot water.”

  “Hot water?” he asked.

  An old woman broke in. “The cocoons must be put in very hot water, young sir, to kill the worms and to soften the silk, and we must take them out with our hands and find the end of the silk the worm has spun, so the cocoon can be unwound. The water is kept hot by foreign electricity and so our hands are like this.”

  He could say nothing more, feeling sick at the sight of the raw swollen flesh. That first day he went home having done nothing. When he entered his home he thought, “There is one smell worse than the opium in this house—it is the smell of the silk mill.”

  And that night he had said to Peony, “Let me smell that scent of yours.”

  She brushed her scented palm across his cheeks and his eyes.

  “It is sweet, after all,” he murmured.

  She put her palm upon his lips, and for a moment he did not move. Her small clean fragrant hand was grateful to him.

  “It’s like a flower—your hand—” he murmured.

  He did not love Peony at all. He knew now he did not love her, and would never love her, but hers was a girl’s hand, delicate and sweet, and its fragrance and softness stood to him for a moment for some delicacy and sweetness to come sometime to him, as to all young men, though from another hand than Peony’s. He longed for it a moment vaguely, then put the thought away from him. There was no place for any girl even in his mind. He must use his mind only for the people.

  But how could Peony know this, and how could he tell her?

  She leaned against him delicately and he allowed it, and he felt her heart beat against his shoulder as he sat at his desk with his books. And in a moment he was not thinking of her, nor of anything except again the people he had seen for the first time that afternoon. They were more real to him than any girl’s hand, even than Peony’s.

  “You are not going to bed yet?” Peony asked him. Since the night when he had locked her out of his room she had come in early with his tea, and gone away again. He shook his head.

  “Don’t sit up,” she coaxed him. “You work so hard—and you don’t need to work. You aren’t a poor man’s son.”

  “I can’t sleep,” he said. He thought, “That is why I can’t sleep—because I am a rich man’s son.” He wished it were tomorrow, so that he could go again and somehow help those people.

  “Go away,” he told Peony, “I must work.”

  She went away then, sighing, not teasing him as she usually did. At the door she waited. But he did not look at her, and so she left him. When she was gone, he pushed his books aside and went to the window and stood a long time staring out into the night-filled garden. He knew every foot of the garden. It was a place famous for its beauty. His grandfather and his father had put much money into its making. Huge rocks from the far north beyond Peking had been brought to it, strange and fantastic, and colored pebbles from the hill of the Blue Porcelain Pagoda near Nanking were scattered over winding paths between them. There were streams and bridges and a lake, summerhouses and small boats. And around it all was a wall so high that even from his window he could not see over it. There was no gate from the garden except a small postern gate for the gardener, who lived just outside. He kept it locked and he only carried the key.

  “That’s the way I’ve lived,” I-wan thought, “in the garden with the wall around.”

  And gazing into that silent darkness he determined that he would put away all thought of anything for himself and learn only of the people in the mill.

  Soon there was nothing he did not know about the life of these mill workers. From all over China they had drained down to Shanghai. Out of famine and poverty and civil war, they had come here. Their lot was no better except that now they barely escaped starvation and there were at least no soldiers to maraud them. They lived, somehow, in their huts.

  How to help these people now became I-wan’s chief life. At school he studied barely enough to escape reproof, and at home he took care to do quickly what he must in order to escape without notice. Eve
rything was becoming a dream except these people.

  He could do very little for them, and when he discovered this they possessed him more than ever. For they were at once so grateful to him and yet so hopeless. He crouched under their miserable matsheds with them in the cold late autumn rain. They looked at each other and at him and shook their heads, and a man said, “You speak out of your heart’s goodness, and yet it is no use. No one can help us. The truth is, there is no other way for us to get even our poor food. Who wants us? No one, anywhere. Who cares whether we live or die, or has ever cared?”

  “Then you yourselves must care,” he told them.

  “What can we do?” they said. “We can do nothing—and we know it.”

  Little by little he began to try to teach them they were of some worth.

  “You must be strong enough to hope,” he told them. “To have no hope is to give up tomorrow as well as today.”

  But it was a long time before he could persuade them there was any reason even for hope that there would ever be anything better. Bit by bit, over weeks, he persuaded a few men to come to an open place beyond the huts, where not many people passed, and there he began to teach them the military drill which he had himself been taught. They shuffled their heavy feet and hung their heads shamefaced, but he compelled them and scolded them.

  “Hold up your heads!” he commanded them. “Some day you will have to fight for yourselves.”

  By now he had explained to them often the whole plan of the days to come, how the revolutionary army would sweep down the river, how there would be a general strike declared in all the mills—everywhere they were working for that strike—and in each place there must be a workers’ brigade, men who could march and shoot and be ready to attack from within while the revolutionary army attacked from without. They listened, doubting everything.

  “We are like men who flee from a dragon to find a tiger in the path,” one said.

  In the end I-wan had cried, “Let only the men who believe what I say, stay to learn!”