They thought about this in silence.
“Then all the priests in the temples have told us lies?” the man asked again.
“Yes,” I-wan said. And when no one said anything to that, he asked them, “Can any of you point to a single time when you spent money before the gods and they gave you what you asked for?”
They thought awhile again in the way they had whenever he said something they had not heard before.
“It is true,” one of them said, a young man with crossed eyes. “At every New Year I have begged the gods to let me grow rich—and look at me, how poor I am!”
“Not even the gods can make a man rich if he is born to be poor,” a sad voice said.
“Then what is the use of them?” the cross-eyed fellow said hotly. “I’ll ask no more of them! If this revolution will make us rich we don’t need gods!”
Everyone laughed at this and they all felt merry and brave with good food in their bellies. I-wan had indeed learned already that if he wanted them to believe what he said, they believed better if he fed them first. Every time he fed them they believed more in the revolution.
“Why should he spend his money like this,” they argued, “if he is not telling us the truth? He is a good young man.”
They helped I-wan to believe, too. Every time he talked to them he came away more sure of that in which he believed, that after the revolution there would be no more trouble or sadness. Whenever he passed a beggar in the street, he gave him a penny and he thought, “A few more months and there will be no more beggars—for no one will be in need.” So that winter passed.
One night he was awakened by a noise in the house and the garden lights shone out beneath his windows and he heard his father’s voice calling loudly, “Tie him—tie him! I have already sent for the police!”
He got up quickly and drew on his robe and went out and in the hall his mother stood, too frightened to go down.
“They have caught a robber,” she gasped, “in the garden!”
He went downstairs and outside in the chilly darkness he found his father and the servants staring at a miserable ragged man who had somehow got over the high wall, a thin dark agile fellow, starved in his looks, and now afraid for his life. He was on his knees whining and crying while the gardener held him by his long hair.
“I heard him,” the gardener kept roaring bravely, “I heard the tiles on the wall clatter and one fell to the rocks below, and I said to my wife, ‘That’s more than wind can do,’ and I—”
“Have a kind heart, sir—” the man moaned. “I have not eaten for two days. I thought I would see only if I could find a little food thrown out of the kitchens. I swear I would not have entered the house.”
I-wan was about to cry, “Father, I am sure he is hungry,” but he caught the man’s eye and it had such a cast of evil and malice in it that he was aghast and he said nothing. And at that moment the police came and took the fellow to prison. He went sullenly away and as though he were used to it.
“We might have been murdered,” his father said when they were in the house again. Everybody was up now, his grandparents and the servants and Peony, and they all fell to talking together.
But I-wan went to his bed, not to sleep, but to lie wondering why the man’s eyes should have been so full of malice. He had seen a look like that before, and when he tried to think, he remembered. It had been the way I-ko looked before he went away a few days ago upon a great ship. They had gone to see him sail, and I-wan and his father had stayed on the dock until the ship had left the shore.
“I cannot trust I-ko,” his father had said. “He might leave the ship secretly and hang about the city—”
I-ko, alone on the ship and going alone to a foreign country, had looked like that caught thief, his eyes dark with malice and despair. I-wan felt confused again. What if food and plenty for all were still not enough? But he turned away from this question now as often as it came to him. He must believe that everyone would be better, somehow, after the revolution came. He must believe that Chiang Kai-shek would set everything right. It was all as simple as the difference between night and day. When the sun rose, it was day.
He and Peony did not talk again. She had withdrawn herself from him since that night and she came no more to his room when he was there. Nothing was changed except she did not come. The quilts were spread, the tea was hot, there were his favorite sweetmeats in the box, and new flowers were in the windows or on the table, but it was all done before he came. Once she passed him on the stair and leaned to him and he smelled the jasmine scent.
“Still dreaming?” she asked, her smile small and shadowy. “When will you wake?” she murmured, and went on her way.
He was not sorry he had told her, no, because she had the right to know of coming happiness, even if she would not believe in it, and he knew now his life was safe with her. She would never betray him.
Besides, the time grew short. It was already the middle of the second month, and although the mill owners did not know, the strikes were to be called in fourteen days. No one knew how far these strikes would go, because none knew how many revolutionists were in the city. But in the band each rose and told in numbers what he had done, so that if by chance there were ears in the walls, they could hear but not understand. A girl rose and said, “Of the women to whom I was assigned, sixty-three, prepared eighteen.”
This told them that in her band there were sixty-three women, of whom eighteen knew how to use a gun and had guns. For in this work there was no difference between men and women, and women were to be soldiers, too.
Two days before the strike they held their last meeting. En-lan so declared it.
“We must not meet again,” he said. “The police have grown so wary that it is not safe. Nor is it necessary. We know our way, hour by hour. If it must be that any of you need to speak to me, mark a round sun on a bit of paper and put it in my hand, and I will set a time and place. Otherwise let there be no meeting between us or any sign of recognition, until after the day. Each in his place, and on that day the whole will come to life. Until then, each goes alone.”
But the next day in their English class, where he and En-lan sat side by side, En-lan had drawn a round sun on his notebook, and under it had written an hour. So he had gone to En-lan’s room, and En-lan had opened the door. When he came in En-lan said, “I am more afraid of you than the others. I want to warn you especially, in that house of yours, to say nothing to anyone. These last days are the most dangerous. And your father is powerful. All our lives depend on secrecy.”
“I?” I-wan asked impetuously. “But I—”
En-lan said, “You are so innocent—you tell without knowing it. You do not know how to conceal.”
He was about to deny this when he remembered that it was true. He had told Peony. He stared at En-lan, his mouth open.
“You have already done it,” En-lan remarked. “I see it in your face. Come with me into the open, where we can talk.”
So they had gone out on the streets and seeming to buy peanuts and sweets, to stop and watch a wandering actor’s show, to laugh at some children, En-lan questioned him at such moments as no one was close, and he drew out of him everything about Peony and what he had told her.
He had never seen En-lan so angry.
“A woman and a slave!” En-lan muttered, his voice low, but his eyes like a tiger’s. “Was there ever such a silly as you!”
“But I tell you, you don’t know Peony,” I-wan said eagerly. “She is like my sister.” He hesitated, then stammered, “Why—why, she—she loves me!”
“She isn’t your sister,” En-lan said, “and it is the worse that she loves you. She will want to hurt you—because you don’t love her—even though she kills you.”
“Peony is not like that,” I-wan protested.
En-lan said nothing for a while. Then he sighed. “Well, it is done!” And after a while he said again, “I cannot rest. I am responsible for you all. Can you send this girl to meet me
somewhere, so that I can see what she is and threaten her into silence?”
“I don’t know,” I-wan stammered. “I don’t think she would—I think she would be ashamed to come to meet you.”
“A slave?” En-lan asked scornfully.
“She isn’t just a slave,” I-wan said. “We’ve not treated her like a slave.”
“Ask her,” En-lan said. And again he said, “It is more than your life, remember. We might all be seized and killed.”
It was true that not a day passed now that there were not those whom the police seized and killed as revolutionists. Their names were not published and people did not hear of them. But from schools and from homes young men and women were marched away by police and by soldiers appearing suddenly and demanding them, and they were never seen again, nor could anyone save them after they were taken.
“I will ask her,” I-wan had said.
But Peony did not come near him that night and when he sent for her, she returned word by the servant that his grandmother needed her.
The next day the general strike was declared. In his home I-wan at the breakfast table heard his father roar out over his newspaper.
“What next? The silk mills are closed!”
I-wan put down his chopsticks. His father went on reading aloud, furiously, his eyebrows frowning over his eyes.
“In the Ta Tuan mills, three hundred workers on strike. In the Ling I mills, four hundred and twenty-five. In the Sung Ren mills—” he banged the paper with his fist. “We have money in every one of them! What is the government thinking of to allow this? It’s the students—they have been fomenting this!”
“The government doesn’t kill enough of them,” his grandfather remarked.
“What is this communism?” his mother asked. “I never used to hear of it. Is it some kind of foreign religion?”
Peony, bringing in a bowl of hot eggs in broth, faltered and spilled a little of the broth.
“Careless child!” his grandmother scolded her, “You grow more careless every day!”
I-wan met Peony’s eyes, full of terror and meaning, and smiled at her. He must give her En-lan’s message. Now he watched for a chance to speak to her secretly. His father had risen from the breakfast table without finishing his food.
“I must get to my office,” he exclaimed. “How do I know? It may be I shall find the whole place upset. At any rate, we must stir up the government. I for one shall refuse the new loan to the Ministry of Education if they cannot control the students better.”
“Will you not have a little more hot tea?” Peony asked, coming to his side with the teapot in her hand. He went on talking without answering her.
“Wait until that Chiang Kai-shek gets here!” he cried.
I-wan looked up. Peony went around the table and filled each bowl with hot tea.
“What do you mean?” I-wan asked.
His father laughed harshly, drank his tea, and pushed his chair back and went out.
“As if they could do anything to Chiang!” I-wan thought, ardently. Chiang was afraid of no one. He had driven his victorious way up from the south, a man full of the power of his own integrity. “As if he cared for bankers!” I-wan thought proudly. Then he remembered Peony again. He had for the moment forgotten her. But she had gone and when he went about the house he could not find her. He heard her voice in the kitchen at last. He looked in. She was there, stooping over a basket full of fish a vendor had brought in.
“Peony!” he said.
She looked up.
“Where is my school cap?” He had not been able to find it and had not looked very far, needing excuse to see her.
But she looked back to the fish. “On the third hook in your closet,” she said.
He could think of nothing else and so he had to go on to school In the English class he shook his head slightly at En-lan.
Twenty-one days the strike was to be held, that he knew. And the twenty-first day was the day. The city went on its seeming usual way, but nothing was the same. Everyone made his face calm and all came and went as usual, but the strikes spread into newspaper offices, into great shops and business places. The working people were gay, for from somewhere they were being given money, and for the first time since they were children they could go out by day to the amusement places and see all the wonders of animals trained to do tricks and foreign moving pictures and all such things they had only heard of before. By night they loitered about tea houses and gambling dens. I-wan could scarcely gather together his brigade. In these days when he himself was in such a pitch of waiting that he could not sleep except in bits and snatches through the nights, these men he had taught were children freed from their tasks. They were idle all day, but at night he could not get them together. They came, a few of them at a time, and when he asked where the others were they laughed and pointed to the city.
“We have all been seeing what we have never seen,” one said.
“As for me,” another said, “I don’t care if nothing better than this comes to me. Do you know what I saw today? Three monkeys, dressed like little men! I laughed until my stomach turned on me.”
He could not get them to listen to him, and there was nothing for him except to go home, still to wait. He was so helpless with them that he grew afraid lest at the time when all must come together they would refuse to come. So one day he made the sign to En-lan and En-lan met him on the green spot on the campus, but at an hour when most students were in classes, and I-wan told him, “I don’t know what is the matter with my brigade. Ever since they have not had to work they have been like silly children.”
Then he went on and told him how they seemed to have forgotten the revolution. En-lan only laughed at him.
“What did I say? You are an idealist,” he answered. “You know nothing at all, I-wan. Do you think that people who have had to work all their lives will not play when they can? Let them alone. There will be no order anyway on that day. It will come like a great storm—no one can tell its size or shape or what the destruction will be. It is only afterwards that we can begin to think of order.” Then he said, his voice lower, “What about that girl? One word now in these last few days and we are all lost.”
“I have had no chance—” I-wan began.
“Make it—make it—” En-lan said imperiously. “What right have you to risk our lives?”
He went on, leaving I-wan there to go home again.
And again there was nothing for I-wan to do except to wait. The air was restless with new spring, too, and waiting was the harder. He entered the house and his grandmother called and he went into her room listlessly and stood there.
“What is it, Grandmother?” he said as he always did.
“Where have you been?” Her thin old voice was exactly as it had always been, everything was as it had always been, and yet he felt it all as insubstantial as a dream from which he was about to wake.
“At school,” he answered.
His grandmother coughed, and then she began to complain as though he had not spoken.
“This pain in my joints grows worse every day. I can’t walk. But nobody cares. They just leave me here—nobody cares about me. What is the use of having sons and grandsons? You don’t care whether I live or die.”
He thought, “En-lan would laugh at her and say, ‘You’re right, we don’t care.’”
But he lacked some hardness that En-lan had. He said gently, “Yes, we do, Grandmother.”
She stared at him a moment longer. Then she put out her hand.
“Let me feel your hand, little I-wan.”
So though he hated it he put out his hand once more and she took it in both her old claws.
“Such a warm young hand,” she murmured.
He could not bear her touch and yet he knew, in his too quick imagination, for a moment, what it might be to be old and lonely and feel one’s body growing cold and feeble and eager to cling to someone warm and young. And he could not pull himself away from her, though he longe
d to leave her.
“You don’t want me to die, do you?” she murmured.
“No,” he said. And yet he knew it did not matter if she died. All old people had to die, to make room for the young, and it seemed right to him that this should be.
At this thought of death he did pull his hand away.
“I have to go and study, Grandmother,” he said as he always did. He could not bear this smell, this room closed against the spring outside.
But when he turned and rushed to the door and opened it, there outside he met Peony, bringing in a bowl of soup for his grandmother. And he remembered.
“Peony,” he said, “come to my room tonight. I have something to tell you.”
She looked at him and nodded and went on.
He said to her, “Of course I know that you would not go out to meet him.”
Peony was stooping about his bed, unfolding the quilts adroitly and smoothing the sleeping mat while she listened. Now she took a silk cloth out of a drawer and began dusting the table.
“Did you tell him I wouldn’t come?” she asked without stopping.
“Yes, I did,” I-wan said. He sat in his foreign easy chair. In the whole house only the beds were Chinese, and that was because his grandfather said he could not sleep wallowing in springs and feathers as the foreigners did. He wanted firm boards beneath his body and a wooden pillow under his head.
“No, I wouldn’t tell anybody what you told me,” Peony said, and then added after a moment, “but I think I will see him.”
I-wan stared at her. The edges of her mouth were curled and her eyes were full of mischief.
“Why?” he asked.
“Oh, because,” she said, flicking her cloth about his books. “Maybe,” she added, “I want to see for myself all this revolution you’ve been talking about—or maybe it is only that I want something new to happen. Nothing happens to me here in this house.”
He felt a strange confusion in himself. Peony was a girl in his family and she should not go out to meet a strange man. It was against tradition. And yet was not tradition what they were all against? He had a moment’s flying doubt of himself. When the revolution really fell upon this house would he be strong enough not to lift his hand? He thrust this away from him.