The Patriot

by Pearl S. Buck

  Instantly the older men had gone back to their huts, choosing the miseries they knew. But seventeen young men remained and with these I-wan began his brigade. But even they were doubtful until one day I-wan gave them each a gun. For plans were growing quickly real, as autumn grew into winter. To a certain shop whose master had been bribed, a certain number of guns was sent for their band, not all at once, but ten by ten. And I-wan had claimed eighteen, one for himself and one for each of his seventeen young men. He gave them by night one by one, here into a hut and there into a hut, and they were hidden in the piles of straw upon which the people slept and under the rags of their garments. One by one he taught his men how to shoot, meeting them far outside the city in the fields. If anyone asked them what they did, they said they were hunters.

  On the piece of open ground they had marched without their guns. But it was different now when they marched. They had new strength because each thought of the weapon he now had been given. And I-wan came and went secretly at night through the gate in the garden. He had bribed the gardener, and the gardener laughed and gave him another key.

  “You are like I-ko, too!” he said. “Ah-ha, young sir!”

  I-wan smiled. Let the old man think he was going out to pretty girls and flower-houses as I-ko did!

  Each worked blindly in his own place through that autumn and the winter. En-lan knew what every one in the band did, but beyond that he, too, knew nothing, except that all through the city there were bands like theirs, each doing its allotted work. Somewhere there were those who knew the whole, but where they were or who they were, no one knew. I-wan felt himself part of a great secret body, through which the life blood flowed, whose heart they could all feel beating, whose brain directed, and yet they knew no more.

  All that had seemed real in his life before now became of no importance. His family he scarcely thought about, knowing the day now inevitable when he must renounce them all and say nothing when their names were called for death. Much of the time he felt strong enough for this. When he was working, when he was caught up into that secret life force and felt himself a part of the great specific energy which was to heal all the troubles of the people, he thought, “Why should I save alive even my father when I know that he would condemn men like En-lan to death if he knew them? Even me—he would condemn me.” For this was now a time when a deeper unity than blood united. Blood could divide now, when men were dividing themselves into these two parts between which there is no bridge, those who stay in the ways they know and those who must go on to other ways. And coming and going, with every day he felt this deeper cleavage. Sometimes in the winter night, in the silence of his bed, with the curtains drawn, he lay imagining. And then he felt as though the great ocean were beginning to divide slowly and inevitably, from the bottom. Though the surface was still unmoved, in the deeps, among hidden caves and watery foundations, a bottomless fissure was growing which would one day be a bridgeless chasm between these two kinds of people. It would not be race against race. No, it would be something else. For Mr. Ranald and Miss Maitland would not be with white people on one side. Mr. Ranald and his father and his grandfather would be on one side, and he and En-lan and Miss Maitland on the other. I-ko would be with his father, because he would feel safer there, and his mother and his grandmother. And little creatures like Peony—it was only chance where they would be when the moment struck, whether with him on his side or with another. East and west, they would all be mingled together on the two sides of the chasm.

  He would be with En-lan, and with them would be all these others, the ones in his band and the ones he did not know in other bands. And with them would be all the poor, the peasants and the workers in mills and apprentices in trades and shops—from all over the world other young men, too, and young women, whose language they could not understand, but whose hearts and purposes were one with his and En-lan’s. When there was to be such brotherhood as this, why should he cling to a few whose blood he shared by chance? The old ways were gone. And from such meditation I-wan rose to every day like a sword drawn from its scabbard and he compelled the young men in his brigade to his own spirit.

  Through the winter, in spite of cold winds and frequent rain, this brigade had now grown to thirty-seven men. He knew them each by name and he knew where their huts were in the mass of huts which lay like scales of huge fish around the mills. At first they had all looked alike to him. All were so pale and fleshless, and their faces so same with their black hollow eyes and haggard mouths. Even the stories they told him seemed the same. For though they were born in many parts of the country, still the same causes had driven them here—the wars and famines, the many taxes of greedy and unjust rulers—there was nothing new. When one man said, “I was the youngest son of a farmer with less than two acres of land, so how could I be fed? The others could not stop eating because I was born—” it was in essence the story they all told. They drifted seaward, following the river, and at its mouth Shanghai was spread like a net. When they reached Shanghai there was the sea, and one could go no further. So they came into the mills.

  When I-wan heard what their wage was and how they worked from before dawn until long after the winter dark had fallen, so that until summer they could not see the sun, he cursed in anger. “We will change that!” he shouted.

  Then one of them said, “Why should they pay us more when there are so many clamoring even for what we have? It is not reasonable.”

  This also was what he had to fight, this gentleness they all had in them. They were rough in speech and not one of them could read or write and their ways were as simple as the beasts’, so that when nature needed, a man turned where he stood and took relief. But they would have been abashed and humble before any rich man, not from fear so much as from their own timidness because they thought the gods had not made them equal to him. I-wan struggled to break down this gentleness.

  “You are as good as any man!” he shouted at them. “You have the right to all that any man has!”

  To this they laughed amiably and replied so peaceably that I-wan gnashed his teeth at them.

  “It is your kindness to say so,” they said courteously, “because we know we are nothing.”

  Yet he could not keep from loving them because they were so faithful in their trying to learn from him. They had to steal the time to come to learn from him, two or three coming at a time, and the others filling in their places for an hour or two in the mill. They tried hard, and by the end of the winter they could march together and each one could shoot well enough. With his own money I-wan had bought cartridges for them to practice with, and they were fair marksmen. Then, though they were proud of this, like children they longed for uniforms to wear. They fingered the rough stuff of his uniform and asked, “Shall we some day wear warm cloth like this?”

  “Yes,” he said, “that I promise you. You shall all wear warm clothes and eat all you want.”

  They clustered about him that night in the cold winter’s moonlight. He was ashamed that he had put on his greatcoat. He wished he had not, so that he might have been cold, too. He stood there, warm and well clad, his belly full of food such as they had never seen and which he ate every day, and he felt tears hot in his eyes. Their eyes were a little hopeful now, sometimes, when he spoke. But their wistful faces broke his heart, and the wind fluttered their cotton rags and pierced to his own bones. He cried in himself, “If my father’s house were mine, I would open the doors and take them in!” Then he thought, “It would be no use. They would come in and come in until there was no room to stand, and still they would be coming, millions of them.” No, if all the houses of the rich were opened it would not be enough, he thought, for all these poor. The poor filled the earth.

  “When shall it be?” a man asked. I-wan knew him well, a poor coughing young fellow who had not long to live. It would not be soon enough for him, however soon it was.

  “Soon,” he said, “very soon. Perhaps in the spring.”

  No, the only thing that co
uld save them was the world made new for them, a world made for the poor and not the rich—a world whose laws were for the little man, whose houses were for him, whose whole thought and shape was for him, so that there could be no rich and strong to prey upon him.

  “Don’t stay here longer,” he said to them. “Go to your beds.”

  “When you speak,” a voice said out of a shadow, “we feel warmer and as though we had eaten something.”

  “Good night—good night,” he cried. He could bear no more—his heart was too full, and he turned away.

  That night, late as it was, he felt it impossible to go straight from their want to the plenty and waste of his own home. He strode through the cold, half-empty streets of this part of the city toward the school. He would go and talk awhile with En-lan.

  He found En-lan alone in his cubicle, not studying, but reading a sheet of closely written writing. When I-wan came in he put this under a book.

  “Come in,” he said. “Why are you so gloomy?”

  En-lan was never gloomy. His black eyes were bright and he looked as though he could scarcely keep from laughter. Indeed, in these days he made excuse to laugh at anything, as though he were so brimming with inner pleasure that it must overflow.

  “I have come back from—” I-wan paused. They never spoke aloud anything that had to do with their work. He sat down on the little iron cot and reaching for a bit of paper on the table, he wrote, “When do you think the day will really come?”

  “Not later than the end of the third month of the new year,” En-lan wrote in answer. Then he took the paper and lit a match and burned it to ash and blew the ash away.

  “It is moonlight—will you walk?” I-wan asked. He craved from En-lan some of his brimming sureness, and some, too, of his hardness. En-lan was hard and sure and never moved by anything. Now he nodded, rose, and put on his coat and cap of rabbit’s fur, such as the northern peasants wore. Then he took up the paper he had put under the book and folding it away from I-wan’s eyes, he burned it, also, and blew away the ash. Then they went out into the street.

  “Let us turn this way, out of the wind,” En-lan suggested. “On a night like this the wind snatches one’s words and carries them to other ears.”

  They turned down a quiet alley where they had talked before and squatted in the lee of a wall. I-wan began at once. There was that about En-lan which sifted out extra talk before it was spoken.

  “How shall I persuade my men they are worth anything?” he asked. “All my life I have lived among people who thought they were valuable and should have everything.” He paused and thought of I-ko. I-ko had never in all his life been worth anything. He had done nothing except consume food and goods, and yet I-ko thought he must have the best. “These poor,” I-wan went on, “believe somehow that they deserve to be poor. I can’t get them to see that they have any right to live. I can’t get them even to hate the rich. They simply say, ‘One is rich and one is poor—it is fate.’”

  He waited to hear En-lan’s laughter. But En-lan did not laugh. His face looked stern in the moonlight and his voice was grave when he spoke.

  “You have hit on the kernel of the matter. Our real difficulty is not with the rich. They can be killed and their riches taken from them. The trouble is with those who have been born in such poverty that they cannot hope. They will have to have something in their hands—food—money—something to feel and know they have, before they will believe.” He paused and then went on. “You are an idealist, I-wan, and that is your weakness. The poor are no better than the rich.”

  I-wan looked at him. What was this En-lan had said?

  “Then why do we work for them?” he asked.

  Now En-lan laughed.

  “Do you believe that if any of those poor were in your father’s house he would share what he had with the others? No!” En-lan shook back his rough hair. “They would be worse than your father, because your father has never had to be an animal. I-wan, prepare yourself!”

  “For what?” I-wan asked.

  “For the time when the poor get what they have never had,” En-lan said in a whisper.

  “Why?” I-wan whispered.

  “It will be worse than wild beasts,” En-lan said. “On the day when we tell them the city is theirs, they will kill not only the rich but each other. Much of what they take will be destroyed simply in the struggle to possess it. We must let them alone. It will pass.”

  “And then?” I-wan asked.

  “When it is over and they are bewildered because nothing is left, then we must come in and force them to obedience and order.”

  “Force them?” I-wan asked. “I thought everybody was to be free.”

  “Free!” En-lan echoed harshly. “Such freedom is foolishness. No one is free. We are not free, you and I. We work in a planned system. So will they. There is one man—”

  “Who?” I-wan asked. As far as this they had never gone.

  “One,” En-lan replied, “one man, a great man.”

  “Who?” I-wan asked.

  En-lan leaned to I-wan. Against his cheek I-wan felt En-lan’s fresh hot breath.

  “Chiang Kai-shek,” he said.

  It was the name of the head of the revolutionary army.

  “When he comes into this city,” En-lan’s breath was swift against I-wan’s ear—“it will be the day. The plans are made. In twenty days the general strike is to be declared. It will give the workers time to meet and to complete the final organization. They will fight from within while he attacks from without. It was written on that paper I burned—secret orders. All that we have been working for is coming together now—the end for which all has been planned—a new country—our country!”

  They sat shivering a little from the cold night and their own heat within. The moon was setting and the walls threw black shadows over the alley so that they sat in darkness. But it was nothing—this present darkness. They did not see it. They were gazing into the brightness of what was to come, into that day when all that was now wrong should be made right. I-wan could see it all—the victorious army of the good. It was now gathered, already waiting.

  He had seen a picture of Chiang Kai-shek in his plain revolutionary uniform. At the time he had thought, “He looks a little like En-lan.” There was the same bold clear look in his eyes that En-lan had, the same strong peasant face. Now as he thought, his wandering idealism gathered about this figure. A man like that, so young and strong and full of noble power, leading the army of the young and strong…. He drew in his breath and was choked by something—tears or laughter. He stood up abruptly.

  “I am glad you told me that,” he said. “I shall work harder now. We will be ready.”

  En-lan did not answer. He rose and they walked hand in hand down the alley.

  “How soft your hand is!” En-lan said curiously. “You’ve never done any work, have you?”

  “No,” I-wan answered. He was ashamed, feeling En-lan’s hard hand in his, and after a moment he pulled his away. “But I’m strong enough,” he added.

  At the school gate he left En-lan and turned homeward. It was strange how heavy-hearted he had gone to En-lan and how light his heart now was. En-lan could always do that for him. The trouble with him, he thought, was that he let himself be lost in the present moment, and En-lan never did. To En-lan a moment was but a moment, and only the future was real. En-lan opened the doors of the present and showed him what was ahead and what they were working for together. He could think now of those creatures blown in the cold wind and feel pity for them and not agony.

  “Poor things,” he thought. “I am glad they will have their freedom for a while, at least, to take what they like.”

  He let himself in at the garden gate and entered the house and went upstairs. It would be strange when these sumptuous rooms were full of the poor, tearing at the curtains, dragging the rugs away, snatching and pulling. Would he mind?

  “No,” he told himself stoutly. “Why should I? I have never cared for such thing
s.”

  And then he heard someone weeping. He listened. It was I-ko, crying like a boy. There was a light shining through the transom of his grandfather’s door. Before he could wonder, he saw the door of his own room open, and Peony came out silently.

  “I have been waiting for you,” she said in a low voice. “You are to go at once to your grandfather. I-ko has done something wicked.”

  It was like coming into a cage again to enter this room of his grandfather. It was hot and close. They were all there except his grandmother. His mother was weeping softly, her round face swollen and her cheeks trembling. His grandfather sat erect in his large chair, holding one of the cigars he loved between his thumb and finger. But he was not smoking. I-ko was standing by the table, leaning on his hands, his neck bent, his head hanging. Before I-wan opened the door he had heard his father shouting. But when he came in the voice stopped. They all looked at him except I-ko, who did not move. But his father began again at once, as soon as he saw I-wan.

  “It’s you—you, too—where have you been? It’s long past midnight. But I don’t know why I expect better of my younger son than of my elder! Where have you been?”

  “To see a schoolmate,” I-wan answered. He could see I-ko. Now that his father’s attention was not on him, I-ko took his handkerchief and wiped his eyes and blew his nose. I-wan felt in the midst of his disgust a sort of pity for his elder brother. It was horrible that a young man should be so weak and whimpering. Somehow I-ko had been made into a useless being, but it was not altogether I-ko’s fault. He would keep his father’s attention a little longer to help I-ko.

  “The moon is so bright,” he said. “My friend left his room in the dormitory with me and we went out into the street.”

  “Don’t tell me you ended at that!” his father shouted.

  “We talked awhile and then he went back and I came home,” I-wan said quietly.

  “I think you ought to believe I-wan,” his mother said in her sudden hurried way. “You should believe I-wan, because he is a good boy.”