Patriot

I

THERE LIVED IN THE city of Shanghai in the fifteenth year of the Chinese Republic and in the western year nineteen hundred and twenty-six, a rich banker whose surname was Wu, who had two sons. His family for several generations had been wealthy, and for at least three had been known in the life of the city, although in differing ways. Mr. Wu held the family’s present position because he was the head of the Great China Bank, which had branches all through central and southern China. He had as a young man gone abroad to Japan and to Europe to visit banks, and upon his return he had at once begun to build the bank which later became so powerful in the new republic.

But his father, old General Wu, had nothing to do with banks except, as a military man, to look at them hopefully in times of the war in which nevertheless he never fought. General Wu, in his youth during the late Manchu dynasty, had been sent abroad, not by his parents, who were indeed filled with terror at the idea so that his mother wept and refused food until he was allowed, by special imperial decree, to delay his going long enough to give her a grandson. Only when a red and crying child, now Mr. Wu the banker, was placed in her old arms immediately after his birth, did she allow General Wu, then an impetuous and handsome lad of eighteen, to go abroad. He was sent with several other young men, by the Emperor, during the brief years when it seemed that the dynasty would reform its old and obsolete army. But the reforms were never made. All the world knows that the strong and powerful Empress Dowager overruled her weak son, and put down his reforms, and General Wu found himself without money after less than two years in Berlin. His father sent him enough to come home, and it was at that time that the young officer perceived the importance of banks. Bankers, he decided, were the men who ruled nations, not emperors or kings, and he made up his mind forthwith that his two-year-old son should become a banker.

And he was able to do as he had decided. Before his ship reached the docks of Shanghai, his old father had died, and his mother, unable to linger after, killed herself by swallowing her jade and gold rings. General Wu, therefore, found himself at the head of the Wu family, since he was the only son, and its huge fortunes were his, as well as the ancestral houses and lands, which were not in Shanghai but far away in the inner province of Hunan.

The money was stored in curious places. Old Mr. Wu, deceased, had never understood or trusted banks. He looked upon them as a purely foreign scheme for extortion. His large sums of cash were therefore in the shape of silver shoes, which he kept in boxes under his own roof. General Wu’s first act was to deposit all these silver shoes in the vaults of various banks. His next was to use many of them in the building of a great square brick house in the French section of Shanghai, which was then the fashionable place to live. He hired a young French architect to build the house, and also to have it furnished. When it stood completed he moved his family into it, though it looked like a wealthy house in Paris and was not in the least Chinese. When his wife complained of its discomforts, such for instance as the thick carpets which meant that nothing could be dropped upon the floors, he reminded her that thousands of women in foreign countries had to put up with such discomforts. Thereafter he paid no attention to her. He lived in the house peacefully enough for forty years, while his eldest son grew up and became a banker and his other sons were born and grew up and went their ways. His daughters he never included in the number of his children, although he performed his duty and married them to well-to-do men, and having done his duty, ceased to think of them further. His eldest son continued to live with him and his aging wife in the large French house, and at the proper time was married to a well-educated young Shanghai lady, and by her he had his two sons, I-ko and I-wan.

Old General Wu was perfectly satisfied when these two grandsons were born. He had lived a peaceful life and had never been in a war nor seen a battle. But he was called General because the Emperor, long dead, had sent him to a German military school, and also because of his great wealth. Moreover, he possessed several uniforms, which he had ordered a Shanghai tailor to copy for him from the uniforms of an English general, an American admiral, and a French marshal when these officers visited Shanghai at various times and inspected the troops of their countries stationed there. Old General Wu was a handsome figure in any one of the uniforms, though the one he wore most often was a combination of them made after his own design, with an added touch of the Russian cossack. He did not, of course, wear these uniforms at home. There he wore soft old robes of heavy brocaded silks and satins and on his feet velvet shoes. But the uniforms hung in his closet and were brushed by a manservant at every change of season, when also all his medals, some of which he had bought and some of which had been presented to him by different persons who wanted money, were polished and put away again.

In this house I-ko and I-wan grew to young manhood with fair happiness, their chief trouble being only in the difference of their two natures. For I-wan had always been the favorite with the whole household, grandparents, parents, and servants. I-ko, the elder, was a pouting child, easily spoiled, who turned, it seemed naturally, to mischief and malice. But I-wan was cheerful and tender, and the same indulgence which had been so ruinous to I-ko seemed not to hurt him at all. He had reached his eighteenth year and had got into only one difficulty, which he had never had to explain to his grandparents and parents because they knew nothing about it. He had been arrested and put in jail. It is true that he remained there only one night. As soon as it became known whose son he was, the head jailer himself rushed into his cell, the sweat pouring down his face.

“Sir, forgive me for being a fool,” he cried to I-wan, who was sitting on three bricks piled one on top of the other in a corner of a crowded and filthy cell. “But why didn’t you tell me, sir, that your father is Mr. Wu, the banker, and your grandfather the old General?”

“If I deserve to go to jail, I deserve to go to jail,” I-wan replied with majesty.

He was the only one among the prisoners who wore a silk robe, and the ends were draggled with filth. A young man who was in the cell with him had asked him scornfully, “Why don’t you tuck up your wonderful robe?” He was a rough-looking young man in a government-school uniform of cheap blue cotton. I-wan himself went to a private school kept by missionaries for the sons of rich men. There they wore no uniforms, but always silk robes.

“Because I have better ones,” I-wan had replied.

It was at this moment that the jailer came in. When he heard what I-wan said, his face fell into still more alarm.

“Don’t be angry with me, young lord!” he begged. “Why, your father could have me thrown out of this pleasant jail if he liked! I am a poor man. Come out and I will hire a horse carriage and have you returned to your father unharmed. And when you reach home, plead for me, young sir, I beg you!”

I-wan would have liked to refuse proudly. But he was only eighteen and he was tired and hungry, and the cell was foul. His cellmates, moreover, were a sullen and dirty-looking group of men of different sorts and ages, and of them all only the young student in the uniform seemed good. He rose, therefore, but with dignity, and went out.

But as the frightened jailer was about to lock the iron gate again I-wan paused.

“Wait!” he commanded. “Let that student come out, also.”

“That I cannot,” the jailer said. “He is a revolutionist.”

“So am I,” I-wan declared.

It was true that he had been arrested in the foreign school as a revolutionist. Soldiers had come in and searched them as they searched all students anywhere they found them. I-wan had been walking alone and as it happened reading a book then very popular among all the students and written by a German named Karl Marx. Since he had always done as he liked, he made no secret of it when the soldiers demanded what he was reading.

“Karl Marx,” he said, scornfully, for what did soldiers know?

But to his amazement they had at once arrested him and dragged him to prison and thrown him into the cell, where he had raged all night long, at first aloud, until the other prisoners had snarled at him to be quiet so they could sleep.

“The son of the great banker Wu could never be a revolutionist,” the jailer now declared.

But I-wan stamped his foot.

“I will certainly see that you lose your job!” he shouted.

The little jailer turned a paler yellow.

“But how shall I explain?” he wailed.

“Say I commanded it,” I-wan said. “Say that I personally am responsible.”

While this was going on the young man came and stood at the door, his square strong face unmoved, but his eyes brilliant and watchful.

“Oh heaven!” the jailer wailed. “Oh mercy!”

But I-wan snatched the keys from his hand and himself opened the gate while the jailer moaned and pulled his own hair.

“You can say you know nothing about it,” I-wan said, and held the door with his body and his foot only wide enough for the young man, who came out at once and stood waiting. Then I-wan locked the gate again and gave the key back to the jailer, and he touched the young man on the arm and they walked away together, while behind them the dirty and cowed faces of the prisoners pressed against the bars.

The two young men did not speak until they had climbed into the old horse carriage which the jailer called.

“I hope, sir,” he begged of I-wan, “that you will remember my plight if I am asked—”

“Let me know,” I-wan said curtly, and gave the horse driver the number of his father’s house.

They were already in the carriage, but at this the young man turned to him.

“You must know I cannot go there.”

“Why not?” I-wan asked.

“I am really a revolutionist,” the young man declared, smiling curiously.

“Are you?” I-wan asked. “But I have always wanted to find one.”

“There are plenty of us in the university,” the young man said lightly. And then before I-wan could stop him, he had leaped from the low slowly-moving carriage. “My name,” he said quickly, “is Liu En-lan, and I thank you for freedom.” He ran then into the crowd before I-wan could lay hold upon him, but he turned once, smiled a wide bright smile, and was gone. There was nothing for I-wan to do but to go home.

When he entered the house he found he had not even been missed. Often he came in late when he went to the theater, which was his usual amusement place since he was especially fond of plays about the heroes of ancient times, such as one found in stories of good robbers, who robbed the rich and gave to the poor. Two or three times a week he went to these plays and came home near dawn and opened the door with his own key.

And in this house everyone slept late. Day after day he rose and ate his breakfast alone and went to school, having seen no one except servants. Now he went upstairs to his own room. It was exactly as it had always been. He went to the bed and tossed it as though he had slept in it. Then he took off his clothes, bathed himself and put on over his white silk undergarments a plain robe of blue silk. He had scarcely done this before there was a cough at the door, it opened, and his mother’s bondmaid, Peony, came in with tea as she did every morning.

“I am late,” she said hurriedly when she saw him already dressed. “I overslept myself.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he replied. “I am not going any more to that foreign school.”

“What now?” she asked, surprised, setting down the tray.

“I am going to the public university,” he announced.

“But that school!” she cried. “Anybody can go to it!”

“Therefore I can go,” he declared.

“Your father won’t let you,” Peony retorted, “nor your grandfather.”

“Then I won’t eat,” I-wan said with energy.

“Which means,” she said mischievously, “I must carry food in here under my coat as I have before when you wanted something. Shame, I-wan! It’s I-ko’s trick!”

They both laughed.

But that was how I-wan came to go to the National University, and how he came to know the revolutionists and to become one of them. For, surely enough, as soon as he stopped eating, his mother flew to his father and his grandmother assailed his grandfather, and within fewer than four days he was wearing a uniform exactly like the one Liu En-lan wore, except that his mother insisted that it be made of the best English broadcloth and cut by his grandfather’s tailor. On this I-wan yielded, since after all it was but a small compromise and it gave his parents and grandparents some feeling of satisfaction in their authority. “At least,” they said, examining the new uniform when he put it on, “it is very becoming to him.”

“Come here,” his grandmother cried, “let me feel your cheeks!”

And still for compromise he bent and let her feel his cheeks with her dry old hands.

“Little meat dumpling!” she murmured.

And he endured this, too, because, after all, he had what he really wanted.

Two years later, in this fifteenth year of the republic, I-wan, without anyone of his family dreaming such a thing could be, had become one of those revolutionists whose secret groups met in every school in China. He lived two wholly separate lives, his old life as the younger son in a rich house, and this other life as a passionate young man among other such young men, dreaming of overthrowing the new republic and setting up a still newer one, since they were as rebellious against the republic as their fathers had been against the throne. Neither life had anything to do with the other. None of his schoolmates had even seen the big square house where he lived, until one day in early autumn, he stopped on his way from school at a sweet-shop near his home. When he came out again someone passed him and called his name. It was Peng Liu, one of the band of revolutionists, and the only one he did not like, though Peng Liu was of no importance. He was the son of a small shopkeeper in the city, a small mean-looking fellow with narrow eyes and a loose mouth through which he perpetually breathed with a foul breath. No one liked him, though these things, after all, he could not help.

“I-wan!” Peng Liu called. “Where are you going?”

“Home,” I-wan replied, and wished he had thought of a lie, because now Peng Liu sauntered along with him and there was nothing to do with him until they reached the big house. He made up his mind, however, that he would not ask Peng Liu to come in. Peng Liu would never understand why, though a revolutionist, he lived in this house, and he would not like him the better for seeing its luxuries. Besides, why was Peng Liu here at all? His home was far away in the Chinese part of the city. Had Peng Liu purposely followed him?

He stopped at the gate and shifted his school books. He looked about him quickly and then he glanced at the windows of the house to see if I-ko might be there watching him. He did not want I-ko to see Peng Liu. He would immediately suspect Peng Liu’s poor garments and meager, sickly face. But there was no one at the windows, and there were few people loitering in the hot sunshine of an early September afternoon in Shanghai. So he said in a low clear voice, “Until tomorrow, comrade!”

“Until tomorrow,” Peng Liu said quickly.

“Coward!” I-wan thought with scorn. “He is afraid to say comrade even when no one is near.”

But Peng Liu lingered. “Is this where you live?” he asked with wonder. He looked up at the huge square brick house with columned porticos.

“I can’t help it,” I-wan said. “My grandfather built it and my father lives with him, and naturally as yet I live with my father.”

“It’s a fine foreign house,” Peng Liu said.

But I-wan despised the humility in his voice. He thought, “Peng Liu would like to come in, but I won’t ask him. Besides, I-ko would despise him.”

“Good-by,” he repeated aloud.

“Good-by,” Peng Liu replied.

I-wan turned away sharply and ran up the marble steps and let himself quietly into the house. But he could not be quiet enough for his grandmother when she was not drowsy with opium. And because she loved him so well she tried every day not to be drowsy when he came home from school.

He was late today because of a secret meeting and because after it he had been hungry and stopped at the sweet-shop and that was why her voice was impatient when she called, “I-wan, come here! Where have you been?”

At that moment Peony came out of his grandmother’s room and took his books and his hat. She framed her soft red lips into voiceless words.

“She is very cross!”

He shrugged and frowned.

“Coming, Grandmother!” he answered. “Has I-ko come home?” he asked Peony. He waited until he saw her shake her head, and then went into his grandmother’s room.

Every day since he was six years old and starting school he had to come straight to his grandmother as soon as he reached home, and every day he hated it more. He was sullen whenever he thought of it, that this old woman was waiting for him and that he must come to her. In their secret meetings when they talked of throwing off family bondage, he had sprung to his feet and shouted, “Until we are free of our families we can never accomplish anything!” He was thinking of his own family, but especially of his grandmother.

“Here I am, Grandmother,” he said sulkily.

But she never noticed his sulkiness. She was sitting on the edge of the big, square couch. The lamp and pipe were ready for her use. She had only been waiting for him.

“Come here,” she said. So he went a little nearer. “Come here, so I can feel you,” she insisted.

He had to go near her, though this was what he hated most. She put out her thin long-nailed hand and took his hand in both of hers.

“Your palms are wet!” she exclaimed.

“It is very hot outside,” he said.

“You’ve been hurrying,” she scolded. “How often have I told you never to hurry? It destroys the life force.”

“I like to walk quickly,” he declared.

“It is not what you like,” she said. “You have to consider the family. You are my grandson.”

No, this was what he hated most of all, this sense that to her he was valuable only because he was her grandson, a person to carry on her family.

“I must sometimes do what I like,” he said sullenly.

She gripped his wrist suddenly between her thumb and forefinger.

“You are always doing what you like,” she said loudly. “You think of no one but yourself — it is this generation! I-ko is the same. He has not come near me all day.”

Then immediately she was afraid she had made him angry, so she reached for her comfit box with one hand, still clinging to him with the other, and gave him a candied date.

He would have liked to refuse it, but when he saw it, he felt hungry against his will. He was always hungry! So he took it, frowning, and ate it.

“There,” she said, laughing. “I don’t give these dates to anyone but you.” She began caressing his arm under his sleeve. “They are good for the blood — no one gets them but you and me. Although—” she raised her voice a little so that Peony waiting in the hall might hear, “I know that miserable girl slave steals them when I am asleep!”

“I, Mistress?” Peony’s silvery tranquil voice answered through the open door. “Never, Mistress!”

“Yes, she does,” the old woman said to him. “She steals everything she can, that girl. We’ve had her eleven years but she has no gratitude. She was only seven when we bought her and she was already a thief.”

He did not answer. He was not going to defend Peony and have his grandmother accuse him of wickedness. He had made that mistake before. He pulled his hand away.

“Grandmother, I have a whole English paper to write before tomorrow,” he said.

“Ah, yes,” she said quickly, “you mustn’t sit up too late.”

“Good night, Grandmother,” he said, bowing.

“No, not good night,” she said coaxingly. “Come in again before you sleep.”

“But you’ll be lying stupid under that stuff,” he said rudely.

“No,” she said eagerly, “no, tell me when you are coming and I will be awake for you.”

“I can’t,” he replied. “How can I say when I shall be finished with all those books?”

She sighed. Then her eyes fell on the opium pipe and she wavered.

“Well, that is true,” she murmured. She waited an instant. “Peony!” she called.

“Coming,” Peony answered.

She came into the room on quiet silk-shod feet and helped the old lady to lie down and began to prepare the lamp. I-wan had not gone.

“I put your books on your table,” she said to him.

The old lady’s eyes were already shut.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” I-wan whispered. “Pandering to her like that!”

Peony opened her black apricot-shaped eyes widely.

“I have to do what I’m told!” she said. He frowned and shook his head and marched to the door. Then he glanced back. She was stirring the sticky stuff with a tiny silver spoon. But she was not looking at it. She was waiting mischievously for him, and when she caught his glance she stuck her red tongue far out of her mouth. He slammed the door on the sight.

But there was no shutting out that sweet sick smell of opium. Upstairs in his own room he threw his windows wide but it was still no use. The evening air was windless and the smell hung through the house, faint yet penetrating. All his life he had smelled it and hated it. In an old Chinese house courtyard walls would have cut it off, perhaps, but up through these vast halls and piled stairways the ancient odor of opium crept like a miasma. It was the essence of everything I-wan hated, that stealing lethargic fragrance that in its very sweetness held something of the stink of death. The house was saturated with it. It clung in the silk hangings on the walls and in the red cushions on the chairs and couches. I-wan, pulling silk stuffed quilts about him at night in bed smelled, or imagined he did, that reek.

For that reason, he had told himself, he wanted his room bare, as bare as En-lan’s little dormitory cubicle in the university. He made Peony take down the heavy damask curtains which the French decorator, years before he was born, had draped across the windows. Every window in the house had them except now these two in his rooms. Without them the windows stretched tall and stark, and the light fell into his room like a blast of noise. Peony was always complaining about the hideousness of his room. She was always trying to soften this hard light. Today when he came in he saw at once she had been doing it again. In the window she had put a blue vase, and in that a branch of rosy-flowered oleander. For a moment he thought, “What have I to do with flowers? I’ll take them away.”

But he did not go beyond thinking. He did not want to hurt Peony’s feelings because she was the only one in this house to whom he could talk at all. And he had not made up his mind whether or not he would tell even her everything — that is, that he had joined finally that secret revolutionary band and that some day soon he must renounce all else. When he thought of renouncing this house and this life, his heart swelled and shrank too. Still, it was the only way to save the country — to cut off all this old dead life — the life of capitalism!

Yes, I-ko was dead, too, as dead as his grandmother, even though he was a young man. He was dead because he cared for nothing except himself and his own pleasures. Because of his position as the son of the president of a great modern bank, he had an easy place near his father. I-wan himself did not know of all that I-ko did. But he knew enough to know that he would never be like I-ko if he could help it.

Now he took off his dark blue school uniform and put on a long robe of soft gray-green silk. This was because his grandfather disliked to see him at home in the rough school uniform.

“When you come into my presence,” he had directed I-wan, “appear in your natural garb.”

“When I renounce them all,” I-wan thought to himself as he fastened the small buttons of twisted silk, “I will never wear anything but the uniform.” For of course in that life of revolution to which he would go, this robe would be absurd. To clamber over rocks, to march long miles among country villages, to preach on the streets to the people and tell them they ought to revolt against the rich and those who oppressed them — one could not wear a silk gown for such things. He must even change his name. No one would believe in the son of a rich Shanghai banker—

He heard a little cough and suddenly Peony put her head in at the door.

“Your grandfather asks why you delay, and your parents command you to come at once,” she announced.

“I’m coming,” he said shortly.

Her voice changed. She came into the room and went straight toward the window.

“Did you see the oleander?” she asked softly.

“Yes,” he said.

Now he was taking off his leather shoes and putting on black velvet slippers. If his grandfather heard him clacking on the floors in his school shoes he would simply have to turn around again and come back and change.

“Aren’t they beautiful with the light shining through them?” Peony asked.

He looked up. For the first time in his life he suddenly saw Peony not as Peony, the bondmaid with whom he had played and quarreled as long as he could remember. She was a pretty girl standing by those flowers. If he did not know she was only Peony, he would say she was a pretty girl.

“I didn’t look at them,” he said. And without a word he went out. Why did he now notice how Peony looked? He remembered when Peony was a small yellow-faced mite who never seemed to grow at all.

“Certainly she costs us nothing in food,” his mother always said…. No one could say Peony was yellow, now. She would never be tall, but she was not yellow.

He crossed the great square upstairs hall and he stood before a heavy walnut door opposite his own and coughed.

“Come in,” his grandfather called.

So he went in.

It was impossible to despise his grandfather as he did his grandmother. His grandfather knew many things, though, being old, he forgot much. But he would allow greater knowledge to no one. Even though I-wan perceived the absurdity of this in an old man, he continued to be a little afraid of his grandfather. When anybody said the foreigners did thus, his grandfather could always say whether they really did or not. When anyone asked him to tell something about the foreign countries, he always said, “I was in all the western countries, and each is different from the others and all are different from us — that is the chief thing.”

If pressed further he would tell of strange things he had seen. At first, fifty years ago, these things seemed stranger than they did now. A train, for instance, fifty years ago was like nothing so much as a dragon. To people listening he said, “Imagine a dragon roaring across the country, smoke pouring from its nostrils—” Now of course there were plenty of trains. Everybody in Shanghai had seen trains. The old man could say no more about them. But he maintained his dignity.

“Sit down,” his grandfather said. “What have you studied today?”

I-wan sat on the edge of his chair and began. “Sir, I studied today history, geography, English, and mathematics.”

“No military science?” his grandfather asked sharply.

“Tomorrow is science, sir,” I-wan answered.

“Military science — military science is the thing,” his grandfather said. “Now when I was in Germany I saw troops passing in review, and I received certain definite ideas. That is why I hired a German tutor for you last summer.”

I-wan sat staring at his grandfather without seeing or hearing him. He had trained himself to do this by much experience. Germany fifty years ago — what had it to do with him? He sat thinking and not thinking, his eyes following his grandfather’s thin yellow hand as it moved up and down in his white straggling beard. If he should tell Peony tonight when she came to make up his bed that he was a revolutionist — but if he told her that some day he must renounce them all, that he could never come home again, of course Peony would not see him again, either. Then she would cry. Perhaps he would not tell anybody — just not come home any more when the day of revolution broke. In the secret meeting today Liu En-Ian had said, “Next spring—”

“Now you may go,” his grandfather said kindly. “You listen well and I have great plans for you, I-wan.”

I-wan rose, bowed, and turned. At the door he bowed again. He seldom spoke in his grandfather’s room unless he must answer a question. He was always glad to get away, too. The room was full of old books and too much furniture. It was musty and unaired and smelled of an old man. His grandfather did not open the windows often. In the daytime he declared it was cooler to keep them shut and at night he feared the moist air. I-wan shut the door behind him.

“This house is full of smells,” he thought. Even Peony had a smell. She used a jasmine scent. It was too sweet and he had told her so, but she loved it and would not give it up.

“The trouble is with you,” she always insisted. “Your nose is too keen to smell. What other people like, you dislike. You make a point of it.” She said such things in her pretty voice. The words were sharp but they sounded soft….

Now he must go to his parents, and then he would be free. He knocked at another door and entered at once without waiting. Here were the two huge rooms which he knew best of all, because as a baby he had learned to walk on this smooth parquetry floor covered with heavy Chinese rugs. He knew every ornament, from the vases in the carved blackwood cabinet, which he was never allowed to touch, to the ivory balls and elephants with which he could always play as much as he liked. He still liked sometimes to take the big hollow ivory filigree ball into his hands and turn it and try to separate with his eye the seventeen different ivory balls within, each separate and turning.

His mother was sitting by the window embroidering, and his father was at a huge blackwood desk at one end of the room. He was still in the foreign dress he wore at the bank and he looked up as I-wan came in.

“Ah, you’ve seen your grandparents,” he said. “I am only just come home — I must change.” But he did not move. “Has your brother come in?” he asked.

“No, Father,” I-wan answered.

Madame Wu looked up from her satin with her soft doubting face and put out her hand to her son.

“Come here,” she said in English. She spoke English well and was proud of it. In her youth her father had kept an elderly English lady for years as her governess. “You look tired, I-wan.”

“I am tired,” he answered in English. He liked speaking English. He could leave off the long courteous phrases he had to use in Chinese. In English one could not sensibly say, “Your honorable—” and “I, the humble one—” Still his mother was very Chinese sometimes. She had certain superstitions which did not at all suit her pure English accent. All his little boyhood he went with a silver lock and chain about his neck to lock his life in. He used to pull at it in secret, but he could not break it. The silversmith had welded the last link fast around his neck.

“You are so late,” his mother said.

“We had a meeting after school,” he replied.

“What are these meetings?” his father asked in Chinese.

“Political meetings,” I-wan answered, still in English.

“Don’t get yourself entangled,” his father said. Now he spoke in English, too, as he did only when he wanted to be sure the servants could not understand. He spoke English fluently but badly, confusing his l’s and r’s and n’s, as he did in French and German also. “Young students can do nothing to change those in control. But those in control can cut off your heads.”

“I-wan!” his mother cried. “Promise me—”

His father went on without heeding her.

“The government is not going to hear any nonsense from boys and girls,” he said warmly. “Besides, none of you understands all that is involved in running a country. You are full of criticisms and rebellions. But what do you understand of money and banking, of foreign loans, for instance?”

“Why do we need foreign loans?” I-wan burst out. They had been talking about foreign loans this afternoon in the meeting and En-lan had got up and in the quietest way had offered his life to their cause, as a protest. Until that moment they had not understood the importance and danger of the new million-dollar loan from Japan, for which the surety was to be a certain great iron mine in the north.

“This latest loan from abroad,” En-lan had said, “is not given freely any more than any other loan. There are certain privileges that go to the foreign nation that lends us money. The students have protested to the government officials but they pay no attention to us. With your permission, I will conceal a pistol in my sleeve and shoot the Minister of Finance as he goes home for dinner with his new concubine.”

No one spoke. They were all staring at him. And he drew back his lips in a snarl, and between his shining white teeth he hissed, “His new concubine cost him ten thousand dollars! Only Ministers of Finance can keep buying new concubines!”

It was the first time one of their group had offered his life to kill an enemy. It had been done often enough elsewhere so that well-known men were doubling their bodyguards, especially since a student had broken into the office of the Minister of Foreign Affairs. That was after the twenty-one demands that Japan had made…. They broke into excited talk. But then it was decided that En-lan could not be spared yet — too much was to come.

Nevertheless what he had offered to do had made the hour intense for their cause.

“Why do we need foreign loans?” his father repeated. “Because every country in reconstruction needs foreign loans.”

He was a large man with a handsome flat-cheeked face, and he prided himself on being a modern man. Among his friends were many foreigners of all nations, but chiefly Japanese. Mr. Wu was one of those Chinese who believed in close friendship with Japan. “Asia for the Asians,” he liked to quote, after the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs had first used these words in a speech before the League of Nations.

“You cannot understand,” he now said to his son kindly, “because you are at the idealistic age. I also at twenty had certain ideals. I was a secret follower of the Young Emperor and his reforms. Most young men were. I daresay you also follow some such cult with your fellows.”

“I-ko never was like this,” his mother murmured.

“I-wan is more like me,” his father said sharply.

I-wan sat down. He did not answer his parents. Long ago he had learned that trick. It was at once filial in respect and by it he told nothing. His mother had taken up her embroidery again, and his father his pen. He did not care what his father said, he told himself, and yet — his father could so easily prick something in him with a few words, and make him feel small and young. As if the revolutionists now could be compared to whatever those young men had been under the weak Emperor! His father was busy and rich and successful now, though he had been a spoiled child, coaxed and coddled as I-ko had been when for so long he was the only son. The old servants still in the house were full of stories about his willfulness as a child. But somehow his father had not been made weak by spoiling. Instead he only continued to be opinionated and domineering and to do as he liked. I-wan knew that sometimes his parents quarreled bitterly, but he did not know about what. His mother had been a rich man’s only daughter and there were few women so well educated as she had been in her youth. But still she obeyed her husband, even though they quarreled. Everyone obeyed him, even his parents, although he made a show of yielding to them, since that was suitable.

“May I go now, Father?” I-wan asked.

“In a moment,” his father replied.

So he sat waiting, but rebellion grew hot in him.

“My father,” he thought, “has nothing to say to me, but he keeps me waiting to show that he can. He never wants to give me permission at once to go away. He wants to show his power over me.” His lips curled a little. When he renounced them all—

“Have you any plans?” his father asked suddenly in Chinese.

I-wan looked up. His father had put down his pen.

“I have been thinking for some time we ought to plan your future,” he said. “Your mother, too, has plans.”

“Twenty,” his mother said. “You are a man.”

I-wan felt himself turn scarlet. His father went on, kindly, observing his son.

“Let your mind rest,” he said. “We shall not force you or your brother in anything. We have not betrothed you and shall not. Long ago we talked of it, and we decided to leave you and I-ko free to choose your own wives.”

“Thank you, sir,” I-wan murmured.

Of course he knew they had done this. I-ko loitered in his room sometimes at night, talking of girls he knew whom he might marry if he liked. He could never decide which of these girls he wanted to marry, and sometimes he ended by laughing at himself.

“There is still no law against more than one wife,” he would say, “though the women are growing so independent they want you to promise you won’t marry anybody else! How can a man promise that?”

Nevertheless, although he had always taken his freedom for granted, for the first time now I-wan felt gratitude toward his parents. Plenty of his schoolmates were already betrothed because their parents compelled them. That also was one of the things they were to fight for — the freedom of choice in marriage. The girls, especially, were excited for this. They said over and over at the meetings, “We must have the right to marry whom we like, or not marry at all, even, if we do not wish to do so.”

“Of course,” everybody had agreed.

Sometimes when two or three young men were alone together they discussed this determination of the girls. They agreed still that the girls were right. Nevertheless, they asked themselves, what would happen if women began to refuse to be married? It would be very embarrassing to a man to ask a young woman to marry him and have her refuse.

Once En-lan had grinned at I-wan. “Calm yourself,” he said. “Do you remember the girl who spoke loudest and longest for freedom?”

He did. She was a pretty, fiery girl from the southern province of Fukien. En-lan put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a letter and handed it to him. It was a passionate love letter, signed with her name. I-wan was amazed and secretly a little envious. “Shall you marry her?” he asked En-lan. En-lan shook his head. “Why should I marry when as a revolutionist any day I may be dead?” he asked. “Besides, she does not ask for marriage.”

It was true. The girl had written, “Only bid me come to you and I will come. We are free.”

I-wan handed the letter back to En-lan and he put it in his pocket.

“Besides,” he said again, “my parents have a wife for me at home. That is why I never go home.”

“A wife!” I-wan had cried. He was always finding out something new about this En-lan, whom he had rescued out of jail….

“But it is time we decided the direction of your education,” his father went on. “Naturally, I hope to take you into the bank with me, as I did your elder brother.”

I-wan did not answer. He would never go into the bank. How they would all hate him if he helped to make those foreign loans! He could not bear the thought of their hatred. He knew very well that upon the black list the revolutionists kept his father’s name was written down, among others of influence and wealth. He thought for a moment with passionate envy of En-lan. En-lan was a peasant’s son and proud of it.

“My father is a common man,” En-lan was fond of saying. “My mother cannot read or write.” En-lan was hard toward all who were rich. He would never understand why, though I-wan also despised capitalists, he still secretly loved his father in spite of all his rebelliousness toward him. En-lan would say in his quiet definite way, “If it were I, I would say, since he is a capitalist and an enemy he cannot be my father….”

“I shall not hurry you or force you,” his father was saying kindly. “You are my son. But when you know what you want, tell me.”

He nodded and I-wan rose. As had so often happened before, his irritation was gone. His father’s show of authority had ended in such kindness.

“Thank you, Father,” I-wan murmured.

“Where are you going?” his mother asked.

“To my room to study,” he replied.

She nodded, content to know he would be in the house, and he went out and closed the door after him. Later they would meet downstairs at the great table in the dining room to eat a dinner that would have been a feast to En-lan. But it was what they had every day.

Nevertheless, thinking of it he grew a little hungry. He would, he decided, see what was in the comfit box that Peony kept filled on his table. And the teapot would be hot in its padded case. He hastened to his room, feeling free and his own for a while. He liked the hour he had alone before dinner. He talked of study, but he never studied until after dinner. Then he hurried away, muttering that he must study, that he had so much to do. Sometimes indeed he did study, though sometimes he went straight out to the theater.

But tonight he must study. He had a long composition to write in English. It was his secret wish to excel En-lan in writing. But he never could. En-lan had a strange power of writing. Strive as he would, I-wan could never win such praise from the elderly English lady who taught them as was given to En-lan. Tonight, he thought, he would try harder than ever. Almost more than the teacher’s praise, he wanted En-lan to think well of him. And then, instead of idling, he sat down at the table and drew out his writing book. He would begin now to do his best.

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….

“So that morning I had been reading through the foreign words toward that beauty, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud.’ … Miss Maitland was saying slowly, ‘This is a poem by a great English poet, whose name was Wordsworth.’

“At this moment something struck the door and we all looked toward it. It was a flimsy door, and it burst open at once, as indeed you know it does, even in a little wind. How then could it withstand the blow of a gun? Soldiers stood there, at least twenty of them, and one shouted, ‘Where is Liu En-lan?’

“When I heard my name I stood up at once. No one said anything.

“‘Are you Liu En-lan?’ the sergeant shouted.

“‘Yes, I am,’ I answered quietly, though I was very much astonished.

“‘You are under arrest!’ the sergeant roared. ‘Come with us!’

“‘But why — why—’ I stammered, and could not talk. I could not imagine why I was arrested, nor indeed that even my name was known except to my teachers and a very few of my fellow students. ‘I think there is a mistake,’ I said to the sergeant.

“‘No mistake!’ cried the sergeant. ‘Liu En-lan of the Liu village in the province of Shensi!’

“‘That is certainly I and that is my village,’ I replied, ‘but why should I be arrested?’

“At this the sergeant grew very red in the face. ‘You dare to talk to me!’ he bellowed, and rushing to me he seized me by the collar and jerked me off my feet. I felt to my horror that my collar was torn and I would have to buy a new coat. But I had no time for anything more than the bare thought, because the sergeant was a large man and very angry. He shook me and shouted, ‘You dare — you dare!’ I wanted to fight back, but I knew it would be foolish, with all the guns of the soldiers pointed at me.

“At this Miss Maitland grew very angry. You know her small mild face, under her parted white hair — it is always gentle and proper. None of us had ever seen it otherwise. But suddenly she flew at the sergeant and grasped his arm and shook it.

“‘You stop behaving like that in my classroom!’ she said severely. ‘I say stop it — do you hear me?’

“Since she spoke in English the sergeant understood nothing that she said. He looked at her as a tomcat looks at a furious mouse.

“‘What is this foreign female saying?’ he asked me.

“‘She begs you to desist,’ I translated.

“‘Tell her you are arrested,’ he ordered.

“‘I am arrested,’ I said to Miss Maitland in English.

“‘What for?’ she demanded.

“‘I do not know,’ I replied truthfully.

“‘That’s silly!’ Miss Maitland cried. ‘Ask him, the big beast! And tell him I say he is a beast!’

“But I dared only say to the sergeant, ‘This honorable foreign lady, who is our teacher, asks why I am arrested.’

“‘Tell her it’s not her affair,’ the sergeant replied loftily.

“‘He says he is not allowed to say,’ I translated to Miss Maitland.

“‘Now that’s just too silly!’ Miss Maitland said. ‘Tell him to get out and stop interfering — tell him he can’t come arresting my students like this — I’ll speak to the British consul!’

“I hesitated.

“‘Tell him all I said!’ Miss Maitland commanded.

“‘She says,’ I began, ‘she will ask her consul to inquire—’

“The sergeant glared at Miss Maitland, but she glared back, and he turned away with dignity.

“‘I was told to arrest you,’ he said more loftily.

“‘But why?’ I now demanded for myself.

“‘Oh, what’s all this about?’ Miss Maitland cried.

“But before she could say another word the sergeant shouted to the soldiers, ‘Forward, march!’ Instantly the soldiers seized my arms and I was hustled out before anyone could help me — if, indeed, I could have been helped. The students all sat silent and still as stone, and Miss Maitland only screamed.

“I was marched down the street, and then into a great gate and thrust into the jail. I had written of this jail in my composition.

“‘We have also a model prison in our country,’ I had written. ‘It is said that prison is one of the best in the world, and American and English visitors go to see how well China treats her captives in her model prison.’

“Now I was thrust into a cell in this prison and the door was locked. It was, as a matter of fact, not uncomfortable at all. I think I must have been the first one there. It was clean — not as you saw it when hundreds had been through it. The cell was much better than most of the little earth huts in which the villagers lived in my home village, and indeed quite as good even as the tiny room I had been able to afford when I had first come to school in Shanghai, before I was given a room in the dormitory. In the cell there was a board bed, a dark blue cotton quilt, quite clean, and some bricks piled into a seat, and the small window. The house in which I had spent my childhood had no window at all. But then the door was open to the threshing floor, which was also the dooryard, so that the wide sky was always to be seen. As a small boy I sat on the high doorstep and watched my father and mother threshing wheat or beans and sifting out the chaff and husks in the strong dry winds. But the food in the prison was certainly better than what I had as a child.

“The food, in fact, was so good that I enjoyed it and when I had finished my breakfast of rice and salt fish, with a bit of bread, on the second morning, I could not believe that in such a beautiful prison I would not receive the utmost justice. Besides, I told myself, this new government was just. They would allow me to explain at the trial. Every morning I thought, ‘Today I shall be summoned.’ I had long prepared in my mind what I would say. Lying upon the board bed at night, and staring at the square of sky by day, I planned every word until it was put together something like this.

“‘Sirs, I beg you, of what am I accused? I belong to no revolutionary party.’ For at that time, I-wan, I did not. It was only afterwards that I truly was a communist. — ‘I work hard every day and I do not leave the school grounds. I have only one ambition. It is to graduate with honors, to get a good job, and to pay back debts. When that is done, I wish to establish a school in my home village. The people are very poor. The winds are dry and the crops are scanty. The earth gives barely enough food against starvation, and not always enough, so that sometimes we have famine. And the taxes are very high — military taxes, taxes on opium — all taxes. For though we can sell all our opium quite easily to the government, the government taxes us first and so heavily that it pays us only a little better to grow opium instead of grain. All these difficulties keep my people poor, so there is no money for schools. But I have always been for learning. From my childhood I have wanted to learn all that there is to know. So my people saved and pinched and gathered enough to send me to this beautiful city to school. Here I have been happy. Sirs, where is my fault?’

“I practiced saying all this and much more, as I imagined myself standing before the judges — grave, kind, intelligent men who would soon see they had made a mistake. Then I would be set free. When I went home next summer it would be a thing to tell, how I was arrested by mistake — I would tell them what a fine prison this was, how comfortable the quilt was, and how twice a day I had quite good food. Nobody ate more than twice a day in my village, and in winter when work was slack, perhaps only once a day. Then, the winter days being short, we all slept a good deal. I tried to sleep in the cell, but though it was quiet and comfortable, I could not sleep, expecting at any moment to be summoned for trial. I kept hot on the end of my tongue what I would say.

“But I was not summoned. Day followed day, and the only face I saw was that of the guard who brought me my food. To this man I cried out at last, ‘Are they not going to give me a trial?’

“‘I don’t know about such things,’ the guard replied. ‘Here is your rice.’ And he went away.

“I grew mad at last with impatience. I began to beg the guard. ‘Please find out about my trial! I beg you — I beg you!’

“But the guard only shook his head. ‘I am forbidden to speak to the prisoners,’ he said, and went away.

“I always carried in my belt my little store of money for the term. This I still had, because when I came, although it was the rule in this prison to make the new prisoners bathe and change their clothes before going to their cells, they had let me pass, saying that the bathroom keeper had gone out that day to drink wine at his brother’s wedding feast, and so I was put straight into the cell, locked up and forgotten, and I still had my money. One day I took out my money, divided it in half, and putting one half in my hand, I said to the guard, holding it out, ‘Please inquire when I am to be tried. Here is a little small silver.’

“The guard opened his eyes very wide at this, but he took the silver, without reply. The next day he said abruptly, ‘There is to be no trial. You are a political prisoner and your crime is proved.’

“‘But I do not even know what it is!’ I cried.

“‘That I did not ask,’ the guard said.

“I tore off my belt and poured all I had into the guard’s hand.

“‘Find out what my crime is,’ I begged. ‘This is all I have.’

“When the guard went away I sat on the bed, my body tense and sweating. I should not have told the guard I had no more. Perhaps he would keep the money and do nothing, knowing there was no more to expect.

“But the guard had a good enough heart. He said to me next day, ‘I asked a guard whose brother is a scribe in the court and has to do with records, and he says you wrote something in a foreign paper where foreigners could read it that our country was poor and full of famine, and that the government taxes the people too heavily, and that they buy the opium which the farmers raise. And so the foreigners read it and laughed at us and despised us. This is your crime.’

“‘But — it is not what I said!’ I cried in horror.

“‘The record is so,’ replied the guard, and went away.

“I could not sleep at all that night. I sat up remembering every word of that composition. I had been very proud of it, and Miss Maitland had praised it greatly and had read it aloud to the class. She said, ‘This is so beautiful a piece that I wish English people could read it to see how young Chinese love their country. Liu En-lan, suppose you send it to the English newspaper for the prize competition.’

“I had felt the blood run all over my body under my skin, until I was warm with pleasure, and I had spent my spare hours for weeks copying the composition with all the corrections. Then I had sent it with a letter to the editor of the English paper. It was given the prize and the editor printed it with a note, saying, ‘It is not often that we receive so honest and thoughtful an analysis of a country as this young Chinese patriot has sent us.’ When I saw these words I was joyful with pride.”

I-wan paused in his reading. Yes, he remembered that essay. From his school also that year they had all written essays for the competition, and Liu En-lan — that had indeed been the name of the one who wrote the best. But nobody had ever heard of him and it was soon forgotten. He himself had not thought of it until this moment.

He began to read again.

“For this I was now in prison. Day followed day in an endless chain of morning and night which were different only in dark and light. I lost count of the days and the nights, so that I did not know how long I had been in prison. I had no friends and no one came to visit me. Miss Maitland tried, but she was told they had sent me home, and she believed then I was safe. She told me afterwards. And there was not even any reason to speak to the guard any more, since all my money was gone.

“I sat, therefore, hour after hour, or I stood, my face against the bars, staring at the bit of sky, and thinking over and over of what I had said in my composition…. I had written it one day in spring, a beautiful day when the winds were warm and flowers were for sale in the markets. The streets were gay and motor cars were flying back and forth, the rickshas swerving out of their way. Time and again I had stopped to watch the quick beauty of a motor car, speeding along the wide street. In the afternoon after school I had walked outside the city and I had stood looking over the miles of green country, my heart full of a strange great feeling I did not understand. It was like the ache of love — not love for a girl, for I knew no girls, but love for my country spread before me, spread so far to the north where my home was, spread here in this new modern city, spread further still to the southern seas I had never seen. And as I stood this great love began to distil itself into words. I wanted to put down all that I felt about my country. The words began to shape like drops of shining water from a glorious mist. I hurried back to my small room and began to write, word by word, what had been my vision.

“It was not easy to do this. I remember I was sweating with the effort to write exactly what I felt and saw. Night came but I did not eat. I lit a candle and wrote on by its small light. All over the city there were bright electric lights and neon signs springing out of the darkness, though I was too poor to rent a room in a house with electric lights. But this made no difference to me. I was proud that there were such lights. If I had not been working I would have been out on the streets, staring at them as I never tired of doing.

“I put the electric lights into my composition, I put the whole city, the strong new city growing out of the sea. I put in motor cars and motor trucks carrying the heavy loads that human beings had once carried. I put in the schools, the fine markets, the luscious imported fruits, the flowers from greenhouses. I smiled and put in the beauty shops where women curled their hair. I put in the fine new buildings, finer than any palaces of emperors. I put in the miles of country, the fields, the skies I had seen that afternoon, and I laid down my pen.

“When I read it over I found that it was still not all of my country. There was also my home village, my father and mother, the dry stubborn fields of the north, the desert winds, the famine we had suffered two years ago, the little earthen huts, the opium we grew instead of grain, hopeful of a little more money. But there were the taxes — the taxes which went to build the government. I put them in, too. Pondering on all these things, I did not at all feel that the taxes had not been well spent — not at all. Only I wished, as I remembered them, that the faces of my parents and of the others in the village were not quite so weathered with harsh winds, their bodies not so lean with scanty food, their hands less scarred with grubbing in cloddy earth for roots for food and fuel…. So I put all these things in also.

“And I could not forbear to put down, too, my longing that somehow this wonderful new learned government which Sun Yat-sen had begun, might think of some way to make it possible for my village to have a little more share in all the fine new times — if, say, the taxes were lightened somewhat, or a few country roads built — not great motor roads such as were being built about the city, but simple earthen roads they could drive an ass upon or push a wheelbarrow — or if, say, they need not grow opium — or be so taxed—

“It came to me therefore in prison that this was what had made them angry at me. This was why they called me traitor. I had never thought of it. I had written it all down, all I felt about my country. I wrote it first in our own language, and then because I was proud of it I translated it carefully into English.

“And so the authorities had seen it thus in English and grown angry with me. It came to me slowly, after much thought, that here was my crime. I had written my composition in English. They were ashamed of the things I had told of my village and my people, and they did not want the foreigners to know of taxes and opium, of famines and earthen huts. If I had only left it in Chinese, if I had not put it into English — but then I could never have dreamed of such an outcome to that one spring afternoon.

“It was not to be believed, even in the prison, morning after morning. Each morning I got up in a different mood. Every night was the same — I was desperately lonely, desperately afraid. But in the morning when the bit of sky was light, I thought, ‘This cannot happen in these new times — this is impossible—’ or I thought, ‘At worst they have simply forgotten my case. My time will come. It is not as though we had no justice these days. We have a whole new code of modern law.’ I had studied in a history class this code.

“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 shoulders 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. Everything 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!”

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 could 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 things.”

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.”

“You always say your sons are good,” his father now shouted at her. “Two months ago I thought something was wrong in the bank. But no, you said, I-ko is so good — I-ko could do no wrong! And so everybody knew but I–I have been made into a fool by my own son!”

He had mimicked his wife’s high soft voice, and she began to cry, and I-ko hung his head again.

“I-ko,” his grandfather commanded him, “sit down!”

I-ko sat down by the table, without looking up.

“Do you know what you have done?” his grandfather inquired. “It seems to me you do not.”

“I don’t think it’s so bad,” I-ko said in a sullen half-whisper.

His father started. “You don’t—” he began.

“Be quiet,” the old man commanded. “I am speaking. I-ko, you have taken a great deal of money that was not yours.”

I-ko did not answer at once. Then he said in the same sullen voice, “It’s not as if my father were not the president of the bank.”

I-wan saw his father set his lips without speaking.

The old man put his hand to his head.

“Do you know whose money is in the bank?” the old man inquired. “It is the money of other people — of many people. There is even government money there. People trust your father. They trusted his son.”

The room was quiet except for the old man’s stern voice.

I-wan thought, “I-ko has done this!”

“Why did you do it, I-ko?” he blurted out. “You always have money.”

He saw I-ko’s eyes steal toward him hostilely, but I-ko did not answer.

“Why did you do it?” his father suddenly bellowed at him. “We have all asked you, and I-wan asks you, too. Have I ever denied you anything? You had only to come and ask me!”

“I didn’t want to ask you,” I-ko answered, goaded.

There was silence to this. They all looked at him. He looked from one to the other of them.

“I–I—” he began. He stopped, then rushed on: “Why do you all look at me so? I–I—I didn’t take it all at once — for any one thing. Tse-li said, ‘Let’s do this — or this’—some little thing — I don’t know — and he hadn’t the money, so he said, ‘I-ko, you always have plenty of cash.’ And they all got to saying that — and I was ashamed to say I hadn’t plenty—” He was half crying again. His smooth hair was falling over his face. He turned on his father. “You — you say, why don’t I ask you — it’s because you scold me — you’re always scolding me — ever since I can remember. I–I’d rather take the money than have to ask you and have you — you yell at me, ‘Again — again!’”

“It’s true,” his mother cried at her husband. “You have always been so harsh to him!”

“And who was to save him otherwise in this house?” his father shouted at her. “A lot of women spoiling him, teaching him to cheat, to lie, by pretending to obey me when I am here! You are to blame — women like you are to blame for all the corruption in the country! Do you think I don’t know? I was a rich man’s son, too — in a house full of women and slaves!”

I-wan said not one word. He had his life elsewhere now, and though this house fell to pieces, he would not fall with it. But when his father said what he did to his mother, he thought with a sort of curiosity of him as a man, to wonder why he was not spoiled, then, as I-ko was. Something had come to save his father just as he himself had been saved by happening upon certain books and then upon En-lan and the band and the men in the mill, and through all of these upon the whole age of revolution which was to come. In a sense the revolution had already saved him.

“What can I do with you, I-ko?” his father asked. His voice changed to sadness. “What can any man do with a worthless son?”

His grandfather spoke.

“Nevertheless he is your son and my grandson, whatever he does. We must return the money. And let us send him abroad to some school where he must work and where he can leave these idle companions.”

I-ko did not speak. But I-wan could see he was waiting to hear what his father said.

“That is the best thing to do,” his mother said in her soft eager way. “No one will know — and so many young men go abroad to study now. It is exactly the thing.”

“Cover it all up — cover it all up,” his father said bitterly. “That is the way — no one need know, and so he will never learn the difference between evil and good!”

“I will never do it again,” I-ko said in a whisper. “I have learned. I will do whatever you say.”

His father rose suddenly.

“Get out of my sight,” he said to I-ko, not loudly, but his voice low and cold. “Put your things together. You will go to Germany — go to a military school and let them see what they can do with you. I will have your ticket bought, or you will spend the money.”

“Yes, that’s right,” the old man agreed, “that’s best. The Germans will teach him.”

“Get away from me,” his father said to I-ko.

Without speaking, I-ko turned away and went out. They heard him cross the hall and the door of his room opened and shut.

In this room nothing was said. Then his grandfather struck a match, lit his cigar at last, and smoked a moment. Until he spoke no one would speak.

“I will go to bed,” he said, and he rose to his feet.

“Let me go with you,” his son said.

“No,” the old man replied. “I can go alone—”

When the door shut behind him, I-wan’s father turned to his mother.

“Will you retire?” he asked.

And she knew he meant she must, so she rose, wiping her eyes, and went into the next room.

Then I-wan was left alone with his father. He had risen while his grandfather and mother left the room.

“Sit down,” his father said. So he sat down, and his father looked at him.

“Will you take your elder brother’s place?” he asked abruptly. He had a small toy in his hand, a paperweight made like a pagoda, and he played with it restlessly. I-wan’s eyes moved to his father’s strong smooth hands. They were powerful hands, though the flesh on them was as soft as Peony’s cheek.

He felt his father near as he had never done before. He felt the depths of his father’s disappointment in I-ko, and that now he needed comfort. He thought, “I wish I could tell my father everything.” But the fear that hangs between the generations would not allow him. He could not forget that his father was the same man he had always been, and that if he did not like a thing he could not comprehend it, however good and right it was. So I-wan held back his desire to confide in him, but still he could not wholly refuse his father. So he said, “Will you let me tell you, Father, at the end of the school year?”

Before then, he thought, it will be another world.

His father stared at him and nodded.

“Let it be, then,” he said. “Now you go away, too. I don’t know why men want sons now-a-days. In the past men had sons for their old age, so that they could be sure of care. But no one can hope for such care now from the young.”

He rose and without looking at I-wan, he also went into the other room. And I-wan, left alone, went back to his own room. His father, whom he had thought of always as a proud man, satisfied and able to have anything he liked, he now saw was neither proud nor satisfied, nor had he what he wanted. He thought, puzzling, “It still is not enough to feed men and give them enough money for all their needs.” The men in the mill wanted only food and shelter secure, and they would be happy. No, but plenty of people had these things and they were not happy. How would the revolution help these? Pondering this, he opened the door to his own room and Peony sat there by his table, waiting. Her pretty oval face was solemn.

“What is it?” she whispered. “Has I-ko killed someone?”

“No,” he answered, “not that.”

“Then what?” she urged him. “I know it is something wicked. Your grandmother kept weeping. She said your father was going to beat I-ko to death.”

“Of course not,” I-wan said scornfully. “But he is to be sent abroad.”

“Sent abroad!” Peony cried joyfully. “At once!”

I-wan nodded.

“Then he did kill someone!” Peony cried. “I am sure he did!”

“No, he didn’t,” I-wan said. “He took some money.”

“From the bank?” she exclaimed.

“Yes,” I-wan said. “Why do you hate him so much?”

“I can’t tell you,” she said. “I don’t want to tell you. You can’t imagine how hard it has been to be a slave in this house — with I-ko growing up — and always at home — not away at school.”

She turned her head away.

“You haven’t been treated as a slave,” I-wan said.

“You don’t know!” she cried with passion. “You don’t know anything about me!”

And to his astonishment she put her face in her hands and began to weep in great loud sobs.

He stood helpless, watching her.

“Don’t cry, Peony,” he said, “I beg you not to cry.”

But she cried through her sobs, “I have been only a slave — an old woman telling me to do this and to do that — getting me up in the night to rub her old sticks of legs, and to make her opium ready. I’m so sick of that smell—”

“Do you hate that smell, too?” he asked.

“Yes,” she sobbed. “I run into my room so sick — but I have to come back again to it — and your mother at me—”

“Why?” I-wan asked. He began to see a whole life going on in this house of which he had not been aware.

Peony stopped crying. “Because of I-ko,” she said in a low angry voice. “She says I must do what I-ko wants — who am I, she says, but a slave?”

“My mother said that?” I-wan stared at her and felt his heart begin to thump in a slow thick beat.

She nodded.

“But you haven’t?” I-wan demanded.

She shook her head.

“I’ve thought of eating some of the opium and killing myself,” she said. “I’ve often thought of it. Because what have I to live for, I-wan? I’m not a servant, to be happy among servants. I’ve been taught to be something more — but still not enough to be free. I suppose you think I ought to be grateful your mother let me learn to read and write when you did. I used to be grateful, but I’m not now. I wish I had been left ignorant if I am not to — be any better than this. Then I could have married — someone lowly — and been content. It’s so wrong!” she cried. “It’s so wicked to let people know there are good things in life and then deny them!”

He could not say a word. Peony had been living like this for years and he did not know it! He thought she was happy and well-treated. That she had to serve them was only, he had thought, what she should do in return. But now he saw what she meant. She was not free. This house where she had plenty to eat and silk robes to wear was still only a prison. He thought, “She needs the revolution, too, to set her free.”

In that moment he made up his mind that he would tell Peony everything.

“Peony—” he began. His heart was beating like a clock now, very fast.

She looked at him.

“I want to tell you something,” he went on.

“Yes?” she asked. “What is it?”

“Peony, have you ever heard of the revolution?”

“Of course I have,” she said. “It’s not a good thing. I’ve heard your father talk about it. He said revolutionists are like bandits.”

“No, they’re not!” he exclaimed.

“How do you know?” she asked.

Now he would tell her, straight out.

“Because I am one of them.”

They looked at each other, and neither moved.

“I-wan!” she whispered.

He nodded.

“If your father knew! He would think you were more wicked than I-ko!”

This struck him. “I believe he would,” he agreed.

“You must never tell him,” she exclaimed. “Oh, I wish you hadn’t told me! I feel as if you had put your life into my hands. I-wan, you will be killed! Why did you?”

And then he began to tell her everything, how in books he first discovered that men’s minds had thought and dreamed of a new world. He told her of En-lan and of the band and of the mills. She listened to everything without a movement or a word. And he talked to her as he had never talked to anyone, not even to En-lan, because he had no shyness before Peony. But the strange thing was that he spoke not only to her but to himself. He was giving shape as he talked to all his faith in what was to come, and to all his hope of it.

“When is all this to happen?” Peony interrupted him.

“Soon,” he whispered, “as soon as Chiang Kai-shek comes.”

She stared at him a moment. Then she shrugged her shoulders.

“I don’t believe it,” she declared.

“You don’t believe — Peony!” he cried. “I tell you it’s true.”

“I know you think it’s true,” she retorted, “but you’re only a boy. I don’t believe people will do things for other people for nothing. And all your revolutionists — what are they but people like everybody else?”

“You don’t know them,” he insisted. “You’ve only known people like — like my family. Naturally you think everybody is selfish. But that’s because they’re capitalists.”

“I don’t know what you mean by capitalists,” she said, pouting. “I know this, though, that when people have money they don’t mind giving some of it away, but whoever heard of poor people being unselfish? They want everything then for themselves.”

“But you don’t understand,” he cried at her. “There won’t be any rich and poor!”

“Oh, don’t be silly!” she answered.

He was so angry with her he wanted to slap her cheek.

“I wish I hadn’t told you,” he said shortly. “I told you to make you happy — and let you know soon you will be free. There won’t be any slaves after Chiang Kai-shek comes.”

“Oh, him!” she said, and laughed. “He’s only a man, isn’t he?” Then she was sad again. “No,” she went on, “where would I go if I were free? I don’t know anything except this house. Where could I find shelter? No, if I have been born to be a slave, I am a slave.”

It was the old hopelessness of the mill workers, coming from Peony’s red lips as she sat, a little satin-clothed figure, there in his chair. Her pretty hands with jade and gold rings were playing with the things on his desk. Was all the world hopeless except himself and those like him? He was clouded with a sort of sadness, watching her hands. It came to him again that there was more to all this revolution than merely feeding and clothing the poor. There was much more. What answer, for instance, could he give to Peony, when she asked him where she would find shelter if she were free? He could not say because he did not know.

“I suppose,” he said aloud, hesitating, “that food will be given to everyone somehow. Certainly in the revolution no one will be allowed to starve. Things have to be organized, of course.”

She did not answer. When she spoke again he was not in the least prepared for what she said. She looked up brightly, as though she had forgotten herself, and she said, her voice cosy and warm and full of interest, “Tell me about that En-lan — is he handsome?”

He was too disgusted to answer. To think of En-lan thus was to insult him. Girls — why did anyone think a girl could hold anything in her mind? Peony was not fit for revolution. She was as she said, born to be a slave — thinking about nothing but—

“I don’t know,” he answered curtly. He got up suddenly. “I want to sleep, Peony. It must be nearly dawn.”

She rose, hiding a small graceful yawn behind the back of her hand, her painted rosy palm turned outward. She had not understood the importance of anything he had told her. And it was true that he had put his life in her hands.

But she leaned forward and touched his cheek with her finger.

“Don’t think I shall forget what you have said,” she told him. “I never forget anything you ever say. I lock it all up in me and take it out only when I am alone, to see and to think about. It’s all I have — Oh, but, I-wan, you won’t let them catch you!” She locked her hands together tightly.

“No, of course not,” he answered and relented a little toward her. “Besides, it’s only a little while.”

“I have no faith in all that revolution,” she broke in. “It only frightens me. I wish you hadn’t told me — except that — it helps me understand something.”

“What?” he asked. There was another look now in her face, a look of stillness.

“It helps me to understand you,” she said, “and why your heart is not to be touched.” She waited a moment. Then she said, “You are like a young priest, I-wan. I saw that when you were telling me. It explains — everything.”

She was at the door now and she smiled at him, a flicker of a smile.

“Good night,” she said, and closed the door between them.

He had not the least idea what she meant, and he forgot it instantly, because it could not be important.

What Peony had said, that he was like a young priest, he really did not hear, even when she said it, because he was so centered on what he was telling her. If he had comprehended it he would have been angered, for it was part of the plan that all priests should be driven out of the temples, since they deceived the people. I-wan had tried to drive them out of the minds of the men whom he taught. Whenever they said, as the poor will say anywhere, “Heaven will protect us,” he cried out, “Heaven will never protect you, because there is no heaven!”

The first time he said this not one of them answered him. It was a holiday, the three days’ holiday of the New Year, which is given even to the poor, and they had met together in an open field beyond the town. I-wan had taken his own money and bought tea and New Year’s cakes for them at a country tea house, and then they had come away where there were no walls.

“What is that above us, then, if there is no heaven?” a man asked, and he pointed to the sky.

“Air — and cloud,” I-wan answered.

“And beyond that?” the man persisted.

“Nothing,” I-wan answered.

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 longed 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.

“I will tell En-lan tomorrow I was wrong,” he said stiffly. “He will appoint an hour and a place.”

“Why not here?” she asked. “Why should your schoolmate not come here? And why should I not serve you tea? Isn’t that my business?”

He did not answer. En-lan here! He had never thought of bringing any of his schoolmates here. Peng Liu once had come to the gate and he had not wanted him to enter. Since that day, too, Peng Liu had not liked him as well as before and they had seen little of each other. That Peng Liu, there was something mean in him. Everybody felt it, and En-lan gave him no authority, and yet no one could dismiss him from the band. So he came and went with them and they avoided him. Why should one poor man’s son be such a small mean creature and another poor man’s son be fearless and good like En-lan? But there was also the meanness of I-ko, who was a rich man’s son. They had had one letter from I-ko, complaining because he hated the sea and had got only so far as Bombay. He asked permission to stay in Bombay, but his father had cabled him, “Proceed to Germany. Funds forwarded there.” So I-ko had gone on to where those funds were. Whenever he thought of meanness such as Peng Liu’s he thought also of I-ko. There was something alike in those two.

Into these thoughts Peony broke.

“You never did tell me whether this En-lan was handsome or not.”

“I don’t know,” I-wan said shortly. He thought, “How foolish I was to tell her everything!”

“Ah, well, I shall see for myself,” Peony said.

She went out singing a little under her breath, and he said to himself again, “She is not thinking of the revolution at all.” He wished more than ever that he had never said anything to her. But it was this endless waiting that made everything seem wrong to him.

Nevertheless the next day, so that he might not bear the weight of the chance, he took advantage of a moment after a class when they copied an assignment together from a bulletin board, to tell En-lan what Peony had said.

En-lan listened and went on copying as though he did not hear.

“At least she is not stupid,” he said. Then he smiled, “I have never seen the inside of a rich man’s house. And after the revolution there will be no more of them to see.” He went on copying. “So, I will meet you at the gate at four o’clock. As she says, there is nothing remarkable in going to visit a schoolmate. That was clever of a slave to say.” He closed his book. “There, I am finished!” and went down the hall.

All day I-wan was uncomfortable. And now, when they came to his home, he was very uncomfortable. En-lan’s bright dark eyes were looking at everything quietly and fully. He had put on a clean school uniform and he had smoothed his hair and thrust a blue cotton handkerchief in his pocket. The uniform had shrunk a little and left his strong wrists bare and two buttons across his chest would not fasten so that his blue shirt showed. But it also was clean. Inside the door he paused and looked down at the thick red carpet.

“Am I to step on this?” he asked.

I-wan laughed. “It is foolish, but so you can,” he replied. He felt nervous and afraid of what En-lan would think of everything.

“If I had it I would sleep under it,” En-lan said. Nevertheless he stepped upon the carpet.

I-wan had told Peony that morning, “If I bring him home today, you are to manage so my grandmother does not make me come into her room.”

Peony had managed, for no sound came from his grandmother’s room. She was sleeping, doubtless, under her opium. He could smell it. En-lan sniffed.

“That here!” he remarked amiably. “I used to smell it in my village.”

“Did they use it there, too?” I-wan asked, surprised. He thought, somehow, that farmers only sold this opium for food.

“Didn’t I tell you rich and poor were alike?” En-lan said calmly.

They were going upstairs now. I-wan had told Peony, “If I bring him home today, manage it so I need not go to my grandfather’s room or my parents’—”

No one called and he led the way straight to his own room and En-lan followed.

“Now!” I-wan said, shutting the door. “Here we are free. You can say anything you like. The servants never come here unless I ring for them. And Peony will bring us tea herself in a little while.” He spoke quickly because he felt so ill at ease with En-lan here. He was ashamed of all that he had.

En-lan did not answer. He stood on the edge of bare floor, looking around the room.

“This is the place you come from every day!” he exclaimed.

I-wan could not bear the amazement in his face.

“I am used to it — I never think of it,” he stammered.

“My father’s whole house could go in this room,” En-lan said. Then he stepped to the carpet. “I should always feel it was wrong to walk on this,” he said. He stared down at the heavy fabric, blue and velvet beneath his feet. “How much does this cost?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I-wan muttered. “I didn’t buy it — it’s been here always.

He turned away and took off his coat and cap. But En-lan kept staring about him.

“Is that your bed?” he asked.

“Yes,” I-wan said.

“I never saw such a bed,” En-lan whispered. “I never saw anything like this — all that silk stuff — what is it for?”

“Curtains,” I-wan said shortly. Then he cried, “I can’t help it! I was born into this house. I don’t know anything else.”

En-lan sat down on a small chair and put his hands on his knees.

“I’m not blaming you,” he said slowly. “I am asking myself — if I had been born into this — would I ever have run away and joined the revolution? I don’t know. I can’t imagine any life except my own — having to work bitterly hard and not having enough to eat. If I’d been you — I don’t know.” He looked at I-wan. “I-wan, I think more of you than before.”

“Oh, no,” I-wan said, abashed. “It’s — I’m used to this — your life seems more interesting to me than this—”

“You have by birth what we are fighting for,” En-lan said. “Why, then, do you fight?”

I-wan had never thought of this before. Did he have everything? Why was he fighting, indeed?

“You have everything—” En-lan repeated, “everything!”

“I feel uncomfortable,” I-wan said. “I can’t tell you how I feel. When I am with my brigade I wish I could bring them here. But I don’t think they would like it here, either. Do you like it, En-lan?”

They looked around the room. For the first time I-wan saw it as a kind of life, and not a place in which to sleep and work.

“I don’t know,” En-lan said slowly. “It’s beautiful, but I don’t know. This thing soft under my feet all the time — it feels wrong. But then, I’m not born to it.”

“Do you wish you were?” I-wan pressed him.

En-lan did not answer for a moment. Then he shook his head.

“No,” he said firmly. “No. I am glad I was born as I was. What would I do here? I like to take off my coat and to spit on the floor.”

It was like a door shut in I-wan’s face. He felt suddenly cut off somehow from En-lan and from all for whom En-lan stood. He felt as a child feels shut into a garden alone when outside in the dusty open street other children are shouting and screaming in living play. But before he could speak the door opened and Peony came in with a tray of steaming bowls. She did not look up. She went to the table, and cleaning one end of it of books and papers, she set out bowls and chopsticks and between them a dish of small pork dumplings and another of balls of rice flour in a syrup of brown sugar.

“I thought you and your friend might like these,” she said in a quiet voice.

I-wan had not expected this of her, and he said gratefully, “Thank you, Peony.” Then turning to En-lan he said, “This is Peony, of whom I told you.” And to Peony he said, “This is En-lan.”

They looked at each other. Then En-lan rose to his feet and stood, twisting his cap round and round, and suddenly Peony said to him, her voice very silvery and cool, “You need not rise to me. I am not one of the family. I am only a bondmaid.”

“As for that,” En-lan said, “I am only a peasant’s son. I have never even been in a house like this before.”

They looked at each other and I-wan felt himself more than ever the lonely child shut into the garden.

“You thought I might tell on you,” Peony said, slowly, “but I will never tell.”

And En-lan answered, his voice as low and slow as hers, “I don’t know why I thought you might tell — except I didn’t know you.”

Then Peony recalled herself. She looked away from him and she said to I-wan in her usual voice, “I-wan, you must eat while the dishes are hot. Sit down, both of you.”

“But,” En-lan said merrily, “why not the three of us?”

Now in all the years Peony had been in the house she had never eaten with I-wan. He had never thought of such a thing, and it was a surprise to him now, and Peony saw it was. She said quickly, “Oh, I am used to serving and not sitting.”

“I won’t sit down,” En-lan argued warmly, “unless we sit down together. In the revolution there is no such thing as one to be served and the other to serve, eh, I-wan? We are all equal!”

A light came into I-wan’s mind. How had he not thought of this before? He had been dreaming of revolution outside and he had not known how to make it come here in his own room. He forced away a foolish shyness he suddenly felt toward Peony.

“Yes, Peony,” he said, “sit down with us. Why not?”

So wavering between them, looking at one and the other of them, she grew as pink as her name flower. She said to I-wan, “And what if your father and mother should come to the door and see me sitting down with you? We couldn’t cry revolution to them!”

En-lan strode to the door and turned the key.

“Sit down,” he commanded her.

So she sat down across from them, her face still pink, and she began, a little stiff and grave, to serve their bowls full of the pork dumplings.

“So,” En-lan said, looking at them cheerfully, “how pleasant this is! I am hungry as a starved dog!”

I-wan was shy for a few minutes more and he struggled with this curious strangeness toward Peony, whom he had never seen sit down at a table with him. Then he forgot it. And he forgot his being the lonely child, for they were all eating together, and he was hungry, too. And Peony, daintily touching her chopsticks to this bit and that, let them eat for a little while. Then she leaned toward En-lan.

“Tell me,” she said to him gravely, “more about this revolution. I want to believe in it.”

So En-lan began, and listening, to him, and seeing Peony’s face as she listened, I-wan thought, “I believe in it, too — more than ever.”

It seemed come already, here in this room.

When En-lan was gone, Peony sat down again for a moment.

“You never made it plain to me what it was all about,” she said.

“You wouldn’t believe me,” he retorted.

She laughed. “Perhaps I didn’t. It’s hard to believe such big things coming out of a boy one knew when he was small. But that En-lan — he makes you believe it.” She mused a moment, her face changing with her thoughts. He could not read it and he felt vaguely jealous.

“I’m glad you believe, anyhow, Peony,” he said. “Now we can talk together. It won’t be so hard to wait.”

She rose. “Meanwhile I must go on as I always have,” she said. “Your grandmother will be waking.”

She collected the bowls.

“How he ate!” she said. “I like to see a young man so hearty.”

“Come back,” he begged her. “I want to talk some more.”

For when they talked it was all real and inevitable and nothing could hold back what was to come. But she shook her head. “No — not tonight,” she said firmly.

Nothing could stop the marching of that triumphant figure of Chiang Kai-shek. He had left Hankow and was proceeding down the river with his great army. Kiukiang, Anking, Wuhu — the cities on its bank fell like fruits into his hands. Shanghai grew hot with expectation and fear. The people on the streets were arrogant and noisy. Ricksha pullers idled and would not hire their vehicles and vendors did not care whether they sold anything or not. They threw dice on the sidewalks and played all day.

“Why should we work when Chiang Kai-shek is coming?” they said.

It was as gay as a festival. Even in I-wan’s home the servants grew impudent and careless. They were away for hours and when Madame Wu scolded them they said, “We have joined the union and we can do as we please.”

She complained to I-wan’s father and he said, “It is the same thing everywhere. But it can’t go on — we won’t have it.”

“How can you help it, Father?” I-wan asked. He was a little ashamed, as a matter of fact, because he too was inwardly astonished and even indignant when the dinner was not ready, although he knew that servants also must have their rights in the revolution, and indeed months ago he had listened to the plans for this very union of which they now spoke.

“This sort of thing cannot be tolerated,” his father replied shortly. “How can a nation prosper if its ignorant people are allowed to do as they like?”

He wanted to argue with his father. But he felt Peony touch his shoulder, warning him.

It was like the coming of a storm. There was the disturbance among the people like the first rufflings of the wind over the country and sea, and then there was the intense waiting stillness. Again I-wan felt shut off from everyone. The schools of the city suddenly declared a holiday at the mayor’s demand in order that students could be dispersed and could not hold meetings. The strike continued at the mills. En-lan had told I-wan to go there no more until he had the command, because they were all being watched. There was nothing for him to do except to wait in this quiet house and garden. But he could feel the end of waiting near. Now he was glad that Peony knew. They could talk sometimes, here and there, when no one was by. When a city fell and the news was cried in the streets and printed across newspapers, he looked at her triumphantly.

But he could never be quite sure how Peony felt. One day he asked her outright. She had come into the garden, where everything was breaking into bud. He had gone to look at a hawthorn flowering.

“Are you a real revolutionist, Peony?” he asked her quietly, fingering a budding branch.

“I don’t know,” she answered. “I shall wait and see how it is.” She put out her hand and touched a red blossom.

“No, but what do you believe?” he urged her. “You must believe in right or wrong.”

“I am not a priest like you,” she said. “You believe in Chiang Kai-shek as though he were a god. I know he is a man.”

“No, I don’t,” he denied. “I don’t believe in any gods. But I believe in the revolution.”

“The revolution is still only what people do,” she replied. “If they do well, then I am one of them.”

He knew she was wrong. It was wrong to measure one’s belief by what people did. A thing was right or wrong in itself. But he could not forget what she had said. That night before he slept he locked his door and from a secret place in his desk he drew out a picture he had once cut from a magazine. It was a picture of the young Chiang Kai-shek. He sat looking at it. It did look a little like En-lan. It was a face at once bold and kind, harsh and dreaming. “I don’t worship him,” he thought, “but I believe in him.”

They all believed, thousands of young men and women intellectuals, thousands of men and women who were ignorant and poor. It had been a long time since they had anything in which they could believe and hope. Since the last corrupt dynasty had died in Peking, the people had had nothing. And the young, especially, had had nothing since Sun Yat-sen had died. Before he could become known to them he was only a memory. Therefore all their hopes fastened upon this young leader of the revolutionary army.

And now there was only one last great city to capture before he entered Shanghai. It was the ancient city of Nanking where once the Ming Emperors had ruled in such power and such glory and where they were buried. Everybody waited for Nanking to fall. The gates were locked in the great walls and the government soldiers were holding the city. But it would fall. For within the walls it too was honeycombed with people who wanted the revolution.

I-wan lived these last days in a sort of ecstasy, full of an excitement which was both pain and joy. There was the knowledge that everything he did was for the last time. He knew exactly what was to happen. As soon as the news came of Chiang’s victory he was to leave this house, never to return to it. He was to join En-lan and all the others at the revolutionary headquarters, to report for duty. He told Peony one night, whispering to her in his room. She listened steadily. She was different these days. He liked her better than he ever had. She did not touch him or tease him or arouse in him that warm sweet discomfort of which he was afraid. She was quiet and busy and he was not disturbed by her presence.

“You must come with me, Peony,” he told her at last.

“Tell me the name of the place,” she said. “Perhaps—”

So he wrote down the place and she looked at it. Then he burned the bit of paper.

“I do not promise,” she said. “I promise nothing.”

But she had seen the writing. And he knew she never forgot anything.

Of the moment of his own leaving he thought continually. He wanted to be sure to get away at the instant, so that he need not be here when the people were loosed. He knew now he did not want to see them here. Sometimes in the night he woke and then he lay awake and trembling, tempted to warn his father. But whenever he prepared to warn him he was held back because he knew his father would demand to know everything and then En-lan and the others would be lost. So he had to keep silence, though it was the hardest thing to keep.

And then one night, after three days of this intense waiting, the news flew into the city. Nanking had fallen. He went early to bed so that he need not hear his father’s talk, but it was impossible to sleep. This was his last night in this house. Tomorrow he would be he did not know where. And tossing on his bed, he made up his mind at last — or half made it up — before he went — no, he would leave it to Peony — he would tell her if she went she was to warn his parents and let them escape. Nothing could happen before noon. Twelve o’clock was the hour set for proclaiming the revolution. Between dawn, when he would leave this house, and noon, they could escape. He struggled a moment in himself. Was it betraying the revolution to warn them? But if Peony warned them and not he? Long after midnight he fell into a shallow half-dreaming sleep. In a few hours….

He was awakened before dawn by his father, shaking him by the shoulder. He opened his eyes and there was his father’s face, black and white in the shadows, above him.

“Get up!” his father said. His voice was so cold that I-wan woke instantly.

“Get into your clothes,” his father commanded him.

I-wan got up. “What is it?” he asked. “What is the matter?”

“Stupid, foolish boy,” his father cried. “Wicked, deceitful boy!” I-wan did not answer. From his childhood he had feared his father and loved him, too. I-ko had only feared him. But I-wan knew that his father was good and he had tried always to obey him, even when his grandmother or a servant said, “Never mind — your father isn’t at home.”

“What is it, Father?” he repeated. But he knew.

His father drew a paper from his breast. It was a long sheet, folded over and over. He handed it to I-wan. Upon it were hundreds of names. I-wan read them, one after the other. They were clustered under titles of schools. He saw the name of his school, and under it En-lan’s name, and his own and the names of all the band. No, one was lacking — Peng Liu’s name. He remembered suddenly that he had not seen Peng Liu for a long time. He had been sick, he sent word, and unable to come to their meetings. Then somebody said he had left school and gone home because he had no more money. And no one cared, because no one had liked him. But his name — it was not here!

“Do you know what this is?” his father asked him.

“Yes,” I-wan said. He was telling himself that he had done nothing of which he need be ashamed. He would not be afraid. He handed the paper back to his father.

“Where did you get it?” he asked.

His father stared at him sternly.

“That does not matter,” he replied. “Dress yourself quickly. At any moment soldiers may be here to seize you. Chiang Kai-shek has come.”

I-wan felt his body grow weak.

“Chiang Kai-shek—” he faltered.

“He is here in the city,” his father repeated. “He was here yesterday.”

“But Nanking—” I-wan stammered.

“He left Nanking to his subordinates,” his father said. “He himself came straight to Shanghai. I tell you, dress yourself!”

“I can’t — how do you know, Father?” I-wan asked. His heart was thumping in his side. How did his father know all about Chiang Kai-shek? He could not know—

“I saw him yesterday,” his father said.

A terror darted into I-wan’s mind like a thread of lightning. His father and Chiang Kai-shek—

“He met with us — with all the bankers,” his father went on in quick short jerks. “We told him Shanghai must not be disturbed — our businesses — if he wants money, that is, to go on with his government. Will you dress yourself, or do you want to be killed?”

“He never agreed!” I-wan stammered. How could he get word to En-lan — to his friends — to everybody who—?

“Of course he agreed,” his father replied. “The man is no fool. I was impressed by him — clever and strong and reasonable. Everything is arranged. He is to purge the city of the communists.”

The blood which had drained away from I-wan’s heart now rushed back. He felt suddenly strong and furiously angry.

“He has betrayed us,” he said loudly, and then he turned away from his father and began to sob wildly. “All of us he has betrayed — we who believed in him!” He snatched at his clothes. “I must get out and find them all — find En-lan — they’ll all be killed!”

His father leaped up and seized him by the arm.

“You are going nowhere except straight to the docks — to a ship for Japan,” he declared. “The car is waiting — ready—”

“I won’t go,” I-wan sobbed. He wished he could stop sobbing — it was childish.

“You will!” his father whispered fiercely. “You are going at once. It is not only you — it is the family. I gave my personal word that if they would erase your name from the list you would leave the country today.”

He stared at his father and felt as though he were choked.

“You are making me into a traitor!” he cried. He was struggling, but his father held him. He could feel his father’s fingers like steel clamps on his shoulders.

“You are already a traitor,” his father retorted. “The government has condemned all communists to death. The revolution is to be purged. They have thousands of names—”

The room turned slowly before I-wan’s eyes. He saw his father’s black eyes in the midst of it, staring at him. It was all meaningless — everything was meaningless.

“Peony! “he heard his father shout, “come here quickly, Peony!”

His body was so loose he could not hold it together. He fell into his father’s arms.

“Where is Peony?” His father’s voice bellowed around him in waves of noise. And like an echo he heard a servant’s voice screaming, “She’s gone! We can’t find her — Peony’s gone!”