Patriot

III

HE KNEW THE MOMENT his feet felt the ground beneath them that this was not at all the country he had left. Still less was this the country which he and En-lan had dreamed of making in those days.

The Bund was crowded with distracted people rushing toward boats and docks. Rickshas rolled past him, piled high with cheap furniture and bedding. Men and women clutched their crying children and shouted at the sweating pullers as they ran. Motor cars loaded with trunks and lacquered boxes and fine carved furniture and satin-garbed people, silent and white-faced, rushed by. Farther away, toward the north of the city, there was a dark mass of something which was not cloud.

“Is there a fire?” he asked I-ko immediately, pointing to this mass.

He had sent a radio from the ship telling of his coming, and here was I-ko to meet him. He was glad I-ko was alone and that the German was not with him. I-ko stepped out of his father’s great American car and was now standing very handsome in a new uniform of dark blue cloth. He turned to speak to the White Russian chauffeur, who answered with a sharp salute.

Then he answered I-wan’s question. “You must grow used to that. There is a fire every hour somewhere,” he said.

On the dock I-wan’s cabinmate stood diffidently to one side. He had come out very cheerfully to tell I-wan good-by, since he went on to Hong Kong. I-wan had taken a great liking to this strange little American-Chinese. But Jackie Lim, seeing I-ko in his magnificence, was now abashed. He seemed to shrink still further inside his garments.

“I-ko, this is Mr. Lim, from America, who is come back to fight,” I-wan said.

Lim put his hand out at once. But I-ko, bowing slightly, pretended not to see it, and Jackie Lim put his hand in his pocket and giggled. Upon his flat nose a sweat broke out.

“Write to me, Lim,” I-wan said, throwing an angry look at I-ko. “Tell me how you find your grandfather and let me know what regiment you join.”

“Sure,” Jackie said, grinning. “I’m not much of a hand at writing, but I guess I can do that.”

They shook hands, and Jackie went back on board, and I-wan, stepping into the car, saw him staring earnestly at the shore, his face solemn.

“A good man,” he told I-ko. “He’s going home for the first time to see his old grandfather in Canton. Then he will enlist as a soldier, simply to fight.”

I-ko must understand the heroic quality in this foolish-looking fellow. But I-ko only said impatiently, “There are plenty like him — too many! Fools, full of enthusiasm and nothing else! They have almost ruined us, I-wan — well-meaning fools! They’ve dropped bombs on our own men, and yesterday they bombed an American ship — oh, by accident, of course, thinking it was Japanese — as if we hadn’t trouble enough, without having to read and answer American protests and paying thousands of dollars out in indemnities! I tell you, I haven’t found any reason to be proud of being a Chinese since I came home!”

I-ko’s handsome profile stared coldly ahead. Had his German wife, I-wan thought, helped to make him ashamed? I-ko leaned over and shut the glass partition behind the chauffeur, and went on. “The truth is, I-wan, the Japanese have beaten us on every point. In the air we can’t cope with them. Our air force is nothing — rotten to the heart — and a woman at the head of it!” He gave a snort of laughter. “It’s ridiculous! What other country has a woman at the head of the national air force? I don’t care if it is the great Madame Chiang! What does she know about aviation? I’m glad to go to Canton.”

“Are you going to Canton?” I-wan asked. There was, he perceived, a great deal that he did not know.

“Yes, we’re all going, except Father. Frieda went three weeks ago. She disliked living here. Foreign women,” I-ko said complacently, “are very sensitive.” I-wan wanted to laugh. That woman sensitive! But he was glad he need not see her, at least. “As for me,” I-ko was saying, “I am to take a post in Canton under General Pai — Chiang’s orders. And it is not safe here any more for the old ones. I take them with me tonight, though of course they will not live with us. Frieda finds them difficult — as they are. I agree with her entirely.”

The car stopped to let a stream of rickshas pass.

“I suppose these people are all running away,” I-wan remarked…. If I-ko agreed with her there must have been trouble in his father’s house. But he would not ask of that.

“No use staying to be bombed by both sides,” I-ko returned.

They did not speak while the car swerved in and out among the crowded streets. I-ko asked him nothing, either, and I-wan had, he felt, nothing to tell I-ko. He sat in silence, thinking, and looking out of the window. This was much worse than he had imagined. They were passing through streets of charred and roofless buildings. He forgot the German woman.

“Tell me exactly what is happening,” he said to I-ko.

I-ko shrugged his epaulets slightly. What sort of uniform was this he wore, I-wan wondered. Not a common soldier’s, certainly!

“Exactly what you see,” I-ko said contemptuously. “People are running hither and thither and everything is going to ruin. There is no organization anywhere. Nothing is ready. Chiang sits up there in the capital at Nanking like a spider in the middle of a net. Only he catches no flies!” I-ko laughed harshly at his own words.

“But surely he plans something,” I-wan said anxiously.

“I have seen no plans,” I-ko replied. “When I left Germany I thought of course I was returning to an organized national army. What do I find? Hordes of untrained men, each separate horde obeying its own little head — no national conception of any kind! Obey? They don’t even obey their own generals! There is no discipline. A band of men rush out on their own impulse to attack the Japanese army when it is not the time to attack, when nothing is ready at the rear to support such an attack, when it is a foolish waste of men and ammunition — then everybody gets excited and calls them heroes!”

I-ko’s clear pale face grew suddenly flushed with pink.

“It seems strange to hear you speak of discipline,” I-wan remarked.

“I’ve learned what it means,” I-ko said shortly. He went on after a moment. “Of course the Japanese army’s efficiency is simply because of its discipline. They learned from the Germans, too.” And then after another moment he added again, “We’ll not only never win — we’ve lost already.”

I-wan said nothing. He knew perfectly what I-ko meant. He knew these people of his! It was true that they never believed the worst would happen. And if it did, they believed then that nothing could avert it. They had not prepared for this, he knew. But he would not believe they could lose.

Above them three planes suddenly appeared. I-ko shouted to the chauffeur through the speaking tube. The chauffeur drew up to the curb and waited. The planes began to swerve downward, roaring. And then I-wan saw for the first time bombs dropping. They shone long and silver in the sunshine as they drifted downward into the Chinese city. It was impossible to be afraid of them. And yet after each disappeared there was a second of silence, then explosion and a cloud of smoke and dust rose in the distance. The planes mounted again and flew west.

“Go on now,” I-ko commanded the chauffeur.

They went on. Neither he nor I-ko spoke. How many people had been killed in these few minutes? Suddenly, before he could think, they were at the door he remembered so well. He went up the steps at I-ko’s side feeling strange but somehow not afraid. He would have to see people dead, perhaps, before he could be afraid of bombs.

“Everything is in confusion,” I-ko told him brusquely. He rang the bell. “The old lady is so nearly dead I doubt she lasts the trip,” he added impatiently.

Then the door opened. And immediately I-wan smelled the old sickish sweetness of his grandmother’s opium, and with it all memory rushed over him again. A maid stood at her open door, stirring the stuff in a small bowl with a tiny silver spoon. She stared at I-wan. She was not in the least like Peony, whose place she had taken, this high-cheeked, coarse-faced country girl. Peony! He had not thought of her even in coming home. But now it seemed she must be here with all else.

“Was anything ever heard of Peony?” he asked I-ko.

I-ko was taking off his jacket.

“No,” he answered sneeringly. “That was gratitude, wasn’t it? Treated like a daughter, almost, for all those years!”

“She earned what she had,” I-wan said abruptly, remembering. He turned aside to his grandmother’s room. “I’ll go in here first,” he said.

“She won’t know you,” I-ko answered, half-way upstairs. But I-wan went on.

No, his grandmother was long past knowing anything now. She lay in the bed, a shriveled nut of a human creature, her flesh brown wrinkled leather on her skeleton as small as a child’s. She was blind, he saw. Her eyes were gray with cataracts. He called to her loudly.

“Grandmother, it is I–I-wan — come home again!”

But she could not hear him. He put out his hand and touched hers. It was cold and dry as a bird’s claw. When she felt his touch she opened her blue lips and whined a wailing cry. He dropped her hand quickly, half frightened. Could human beings become this in their uselessness? And then he heard a footstep behind him and there was his father come to find him. He had grown stouter, I-wan saw instantly; his look was quieter and his hair almost white, but his face looked the same.

“Father!” he said.

“My son!” his father replied and grasped him by the elbows. “The best thing that could have happened! Only why have you not answered my letters these last months!”

“I had no letters!” I-wan exclaimed. “And I did write!”

His father stared at him and shook his head. “I do not understand Muraki anymore,” he said. Then he let him go. “Well, you are here,” he went on. “We shall need no more letters.”

It was hard to find something to say to his father. There was so much to say.

“Your grandfather is waiting for you in his room,” his father told him.

“Grandmother doesn’t know me,” I-wan replied. He wondered if his grandfather, too—

“You’ll find him much as he was,” his father said. “He is feeble, of course. But he is sitting there dressed in his best uniform and all his medals, ready to go six hours hence. He is full of advice on the subject of the Japanese.” He stopped to laugh. “The last time I went to confer with Chiang Kai-shek in Nanking he sent a long plan of his, showing how in three months we could rid ourselves not only of the Japanese but of all foreigners!”

His father laughed again and then sighed, and they turned. The old woman began wailing as they left and Mr. Wu spoke to the servant sharply.

“Give her the stuff — get her quiet!”

“Yes — yes, sir,” the girl stuttered, hurrying.

“There is nothing to be done with the old who are like that,” his father said. They were going upstairs. “Waste — waste—” he muttered.

I-wan did not answer. He felt a change in his father. He was gentler and yet somehow stronger.

“How is my mother?” he asked.

“She is just getting up,” his father replied. “She overslept herself — the bombing last night kept her awake. She is terrified when that begins.” He stopped, his hand on the door of the old man’s room. “By the way,” he told I-wan, “when she says you are to go with her to Canton, do not say you will go. You are not to go. You are to stay here. Chiang Kai-shek has plans for you.”

He listened to this, watching his father’s face. Chiang Kai-shek, the man whom he had once to escape, who had perhaps killed En-lan! But everything was changed, so why not this?

“Very well,” he told his father steadily, and they went in.

The old general sat by the window, the sun falling across his glittering breast.

“Ah, you’ve come!” he said to I-wan, exactly as though I-wan had left only yesterday.

“Yes, Grandfather,” I-wan answered, smiling.

The old man trembled now with a slight palsy, so that all his medals jangled faintly. But he was as lordly as ever.

“Sit down, both of you,” he ordered, and they sat down. The old man reached to a table and took up a small scroll which he unrolled.

“Now, as soon as I reach Canton,” he went on pontifically, “I shall present my plans in person to Pai. The nut of the idea is this — let the Japanese have their way. They tell me ten thousand people have been killed in Shanghai. But I say there are millions of people here. So we have plenty left. Let the Japanese exhaust themselves. When they are exhausted, then we will invite them to return to their own country, not all at once, but so many each year. And, so that they will not lose face — for it is well to be courteous with the enemy — we will request the persons of other nations to return also, and since we will not be exhausted by fighting, we can, having saved all our resources, then use force if necessary!”

The old man gazed at them proudly. I-wan looked at his father. But he was looking at the old man with eyes tolerant and benign.

“What do you think of it, I-wan?” the old man demanded.

“It is perhaps a little hard on the people now being killed,” I-wan said cautiously. How was it possible for generations to recede from each other to such distances!

“Nonsense!” his grandfather said loudly. “In the first place, they are already used to famine and to wars, though on a smaller scale. In the second place, even if every Japanese moved into our country we would only feel it as we might some extra flies. Our country is too vast to be conquered, especially by such a small one. And besides, our people can grow used to anything.”

His voice was definite, as though he expected no answer. So I-wan gave him none.

The old man suddenly thought of something else.

“I’ve lost one of my medals,” he said to his son. His voice was now wholly different. It was childishly complaining.

“Which one?” Mr. Wu inquired. He went to the velvet-lined case where the old general kept his medals hung upon hooks and opened it.

“It was the one I had made in gold plate,” the old man said, “after the one the Italian ambassador wore — don’t you remember? Why, it was less than ten years ago I had it made — it was one of my new ones! A servant has stolen it. He must be found and dismissed.”

Mr. Wu did not answer. He thrust two fingers behind the velvet.

“Here it is,” he said. “I feel it, but I can’t get it.”

“Let me,” I-wan said. He rose and thrust his fingers down, which, being longer, could just catch the ribbon of the medal and bring it up.

“That’s it — that’s it!” the old man crowed. “Give it to me. This is its place — here by the one with the eagle. I was going to show it especially to Pai when I went south. It would be well if he copied it for his officers.”

They left him, laughing, and then out in the hall a door opened, and here was I-wan’s mother. She cried out when she saw him.

“I-wan, you are come!”

“Yes, Mother,” he answered. He saw she had changed very much, being now very fat. Her small pretty features were almost entirely lost in her face. But she seized his hands and smelled them as she used to do when he was a child, and he thought of her as she had seemed to him then, beautiful and wise and far stronger than he. He used to run to her then and hide in her bosom. Now she was even a little repulsive to him. He had grown so far beyond her that he saw her from the terrible distance of his own maturity and knew that there was neither wisdom nor refuge in her any longer for him. It made him sad. Would Jiro some day feel so to him? … Only her voice was unchanged, sweet and rushing.

“Now, I-wan,” she was saying, “do not unpack your trunks. You are to come on with us tonight to Canton. It is fearful here. We are bombed every day and every night. Your father will not come. I’ve cried and cried — but when did he ever hear me? So you are to come and be with me. I-ko — oh, I-ko is lost to me. Oh, that woman! But I must have someone. I can’t take care of these two old things alone.”

“You are taking all the servants except two,” Mr. Wu reminded her.

“But servants must be looked after!” Madame Wu cried.

“I cannot go, Mother,” I-wan said plainly. Much better to speak plainly and at once! “I came home to fight, Mother.”

Her small underlip, still as red as a girl’s, trembled.

“You are just like your father,” she said, “so stubborn!”

She was about to weep, but at that moment a servant came out with her arms full of furs.

“Shall we take these, Mistress, or shall we leave them?”

“Surely we will be back by winter — leave them,” Madame Wu said.

“Take them,” Mr. Wu said.

“I haven’t enough boxes,” Madame Wu wailed.

“Buy what you need,” Mr. Wu said.

“Oh — it’s such worry,” Madame Wu said distractedly. She turned back into her room, forgetting everything else.

I-wan turned to his father. “I think I will go to my own room now and refresh myself.”

He wanted suddenly to be alone. His father nodded and he went on to his own door. And I-wan opened the door to the old familiar place.

It seemed at first as though Peony must be there. It had been strange not to see her anywhere about the rooms, and not to see her here was strangest of all. But there was no touch of her, anywhere. The windows stretched tall and bare, and there were no flowers in them. And on his table there was no pot of hot tea. Everything was clean enough, except for a surface of light dust. No one had come here this morning as Peony would have done to make all fresh before his coming. The bed, the books, the cushions on the chairs, everything had the still and unused look of a room long empty. It would be difficult, he felt, to make this room his own again — he had been so young when last he left it. He had thought once that he would leave it to be destroyed in the revolution. But it was still here — perhaps to be destroyed finally by a Japanese bomb! Who knew the end of such things? Not he, at least.

Then he remembered something else. Long ago En-lan had written his own story for him to read, and he had thrust it far into the back of this drawer, behind his copy books. He opened the drawer quickly and thrust in his hand. It was not there now. No one had touched the books or this drawer and it was full of dust. But the sheets of folded paper were gone. Someone had taken them. Was it in that way that they — the band — were discovered? He felt sweat begin to break out on his forehead. Had his father somehow — but his father never came into this room. And Peony only took care of his things. Surely it could not have been Peony — he sat down, feeling a little sick. Surely it could not have been Peony who had betrayed them all — Peony, whom he had told! He could not rid himself of this fear, once it had come to him. It kept him sleepless half the night though he told himself over and over again that whatever had happened was now finished.

In the evening it had rained, and all the way to the ship his mother had kept saying, “I prayed for rain. I paid the gods well for this rain!”

Yes, his father was changed. He had said nothing when she spoke of gods, though once he would have been impatient with her. They had all gone together to the boat and Mr. Wu had given tickets and money to I-ko. The house was very silent when they entered it again, and his father looked too tired to talk.

“We will have a quiet night since the clouds hide the moon,” he told I-wan. “There will be no raids tonight — let us sleep while we can.” He had gone to his room and I-wan to his.

But even after he was in the comfort of his own bed, I-wan had kept thinking of Peony — weighing and questioning what she could have done. If Peony had betrayed them, then he would be guilty of En-lan’s death. And yet even now he could not but trust her, though no one knew her, not even he. But he had not forgotten her. Somehow he had kept her in his memory, though he had not thought of her, either, in all his years with Tama…. Yes, he had thought of her once. On his wedding night he had thought of Peony long enough to be glad that he had never loved her or allowed himself to receive her love. But this he could not tell Tama, and so to Tama he had never even mentioned Peony’s name. And yet Peony was something to him, too — he did not know what — perhaps only the memory of a fragrance and nothing more. Nevertheless she was enough so that he wanted to know that she could not have betrayed En-lan.

At their breakfast he put it to his father, therefore, trying to speak calmly as though it were no great matter:

“I have often wondered how it was you found out about our band, years ago. It is so long gone that now I can ask.”

“Chiang Kai-shek told me,” his father replied.

“Chiang Kai-shek!” I-wan repeated, half stupefied. “How did he know?”

“He knows everything,” his father said drily. “We had had much talk together in private during those days and in return for his promised rule of law and order and expulsion of the communists, I promised loans, as he should need them, of sums we agreed upon. Then one day he sent for me in great urgency. I went and he saw me alone. He showed me your name on a list of communists to be executed. I did not believe it — I swore it was a mistake — and he sent for a classmate of yours who, for a sum of money set as a trap, had given in a list of names — and yours was one.”

“Was he named Peng Liu?” I-wan demanded eagerly.

“I don’t know,” his father said. He looked disgusted as he remembered. “He was a cringing yellow-faced boy who said his father kept a small shop.”

“That was Peng Liu!” I-wan broke in. “So it was he! Where is he now?”

Then it was not Peony! It was not his fault now if En-lan were dead—

“Dead,” his father said calmly. “He was given his money and then executed.”

“But why executed if—” I-wan began.

“Chiang despises traitors,” his father replied.

“How could he offer a bribe and then blame the man who takes it?” I-wan asked indignantly.

“He can,” his father replied. “You have to understand that. He is a hard man, but a true one. He uses everyone, and sweeps away those whom he cannot trust enough to use again.”

“An opportunist!” I-wan retorted.

“All wise men are opportunists,” his father replied. “It is only fools who will not change when times change. But within himself the man never changes.”

His father leaned forward and tapped the table between them with his long fingernails.

“I-wan, I tell you he is the only one who will save us now from the Japanese. I tell you he will do it. He has made up his mind since he came back from Sian, and he will never cease until he has succeeded. See how he has driven back the communists! They are hidden in the farthest corner of the northwest. Year after year he drove them back, determined to bring the country under one rule.”

“His own!” I-wan said scornfully.

“One rule,” his father repeated sternly. “It was far better than to allow such a civil war as would have ruined us and left the country empty for the Japanese to come into and take.”

“Do you mean,” I-wan said slowly, “that as long ago as that — ten years ago — he foresaw this day and began to unite the country for it?”

He had forgotten all about Peony now. He was thinking only of this man whom he had hated with such sobbing passionate bitterness on that day, the man whom he had always in his heart called traitor because he betrayed the revolution. But now, what if indeed he had seen more than any of them?

His father was nodding his head.

“I believe he sees everything,” he said, “and that he can do anything. He is a very great man.”

But he could not somehow so easily accept what his father said. He remembered certain things which he had read in Japanese newspapers.

“His opportunism led him in evil ways sometimes,” he said.

“That was before he was what he is now,” his father retorted. “The test of a man’s greatness is in whether he can see the evil in his own ways and change.”

“He would be really nothing but a warlord in other times,” I-wan broke in. “He has the mind and the ways of a warlord. He always settles everything by force.”

“He settles it, though,” his father said equably.

“And then all his wives—” I-wan began.

He looked up from his bowl to feel his father’s eyes on him somewhat coldly.

“I shall not discuss that with you,” he said with dignity. “What woman a man chooses is his own business. When your brother came home with — Frieda — your mother cried until I had to call in doctors. She moaned that we should have married I-ko by force before he went away. I told her the principle we chose was right. That our son is a fool has nothing to do with it.”

He paused, frowning. I-wan saw him tolerating grimly the white woman in his house. His father looked up and caught his eyes.

“How is it with your Japanese wife?” he asked kindly. “I have said nothing of her. Japanese women make excellent wives. They know their place. I did not mind when you married her. And this war really has nothing to do with such things. Only stupid and ignorant persons would confuse a human relationship with a matter of state.”

He was so grateful for his father’s kindness that he wanted to tell him everything about Tama.

“She is so good,” he said. “I never saw such a good woman — careful in everything she does. I can’t think of her as Japanese — to me she is only herself, the mother of my sons.”

“Yes — yes,” his father mused, as though he were thinking about something else. “Well now, how shall you write to each other? It will be difficult if it is known you receive Japanese letters. But at my office, naturally it will not be noticed. Tell her to address them to me. And you send your letters to me and I will send them on to her. In these times when the young are suspicious and easily angered, you might be assassinated if it were thought you sent and received such letters.”

He had not thought of this. “Thank you, Father,” he said. “But is it dangerous for you?”

“Oh, they all know me. I’m safe enough,” his father said. “Besides, no one dares to kill me. Chiang would make trouble. And everybody is afraid of him.”

They were back to this man again.

“Marriage—” his father was saying positively, “well, his old wives were no use to him so he took a new one who could be of use. Not all have the courage for it!” He laughed silently and drank what was left of his tea and drew a letter from his inner pocket. “Let me see,” he said, scanning it, “two days from now you are to meet him. These are his orders.”

His father said these words, “his orders,” with such pleasure that rebellion stirred once more in I-wan.

“You are surely very changed,” he said with a little malice. “Have I not heard that Chiang believes in a god — the Christian God? If he is sincere in it, how can you trust him?”

A slow smile spread upon his father’s square face.

“Oh, he is always sincere,” he said.

And then I-wan, for the first time in his life, heard his father make a joke.

“He is doubtless using the Christians’ God, too,” he said. “He is such a man!”

He stood for the first time before this man who had once cut off his life and had exiled him, in a fashion, to another world. Yet it was he who now called him back again.

He had never been in any presence so potent, not even in En-lan’s. Had he lived, En-lan might one day have been as strong, as controlled, as full of disciplined power as this man now was. But in I-wan’s memory he lived as a hot-hearted boy.

“Sit down,” Chiang Kai-shek said.

He sat down upon one of the three straight-backed chairs in the room and waited. She had told him — this man’s beautiful, foreign-looking wife, who had been the one to meet him first — that he spoke no other language than his own.

“Be prepared, please,” she told him, her voice so much softer than her handsome face, “do not use any English words. There are many young men who find their own language not enough and they put in English words and it makes him very angry. He always says, ‘What — isn’t Chinese enough for them?’” She had smiled a very little.

“I will be careful he had answered.

How, he thought now, waiting, did this man feel toward his wife? She wore Chinese dress and her black hair was brushed smoothly back into an old-fashioned knot. But even in the few moments she had talked, I-wan had perceived that in a hundred ways she was not Chinese. Her big black eyes shone and sparkled, her soft voice was frank, and all her movements, though graceful and controlled, were free. She was a woman who would do as she liked. I-ko had laughed because she was the head of the nation’s air force. But she could be the head of anything — except, perhaps, of this man!

Chiang Kai-shek lifted his eyes and stared at I-wan. He had been reading a long document, which he had then signed and sealed. When his eyes were downcast, one said his mouth was the strength of his face, a mouth beautiful by nature and stern by will. But when one saw the eyes one forgot the mouth. This straight black gaze commanded attention.

“Your father is my friend,” Chiang said. I-wan bowed a little and met these eyes fully and waited. They did not waver. “I have this letter,” Chiang went on, his voice very quiet and somewhat cold. “It is of the greatest importance. This must be delivered to a certain officer in the communist army in the Northwest and from his hand into the hand of the other two generals in command of that army.”

“I understand that,” I-wan replied. But then he understood nothing else. Why should Chiang be sending documents to the men he had been pursuing so bitterly that many of them were dead because of him and the others driven into that corner of the Northwest? There was no time to wonder. He must listen. This man would never repeat, never explain, never say one word too much. Therefore not one word was to be lost.

“I choose you because your father promises me you are to be trusted. But if you are not, you will suffer as any other traitor does. He understands that. So must you. A plane is ready for you. You are to leave at once.”

“One moment, Excellency,” I-wan said. “Am I to bring back an answer?”

“The plane will wait to bring you back,” Chiang replied. He struck a bell on the desk. The door opened at the sound.

I-wan rose and as by instinct saluted, the old stiff salute his German tutor had given him.

“You’ve had military training?” Chiang asked sharply. “I thought only your brother had been abroad.”

“I have been only in Japan,” I-wan said.

“Military training there?” Chiang asked again.

“No — it was before that,” I-wan replied.

Chiang banged the bell with the flat of his hand and the door shut again. I-wan remained standing before him.

“They tell me Japan is on the edge of a collapse,” he said abruptly. “Is it true?”

“No,” I-wan replied. “It is not true.”

“Business is good?” Chiang asked sharply.

“Yes,” I-wan replied, remembering the busy Japanese streets.

“I am told the people do not want war — is that true?” Chiang prodded him with his brilliant eyes.

I-wan replied steadily, “The people want whatever they are told to want.”

“They are loyal to their government?”

“Completely.”

“Do they still worship their Emperor?”

“Yes.”

Chiang stirred and sighed and for the first time moved his eyes from I-wan’s. He picked up his jade seal and looked at it.

“Then they’ve been lying to me — the people around me,” he remarked. “It will be a long war.”

“It must be a long war,” I-wan replied. And then remembering Hideyoshi, he added, “It will be our strength if we realize it from the first and plan for it. The enemy”—that was Hideyoshi — not Tama and his little sons, who belonged to him alone—“the enemy think it will be a short war.”

Chiang’s eyes shot at him again.

“Do they? How long?”

“They said at first three months — now, a year,” I-wan replied. “But I think it will be many years,” he added. Outside he heard the drone of an airplane’s engine. But Chiang still held him.

“That means — we must plan our war after theirs is finished,” he said. He was looking at the seal again. I-wan did not answer. “That means let them spend while we save. That means save what is essential to our national life — not cities, not people. We have those to spare.”

I-wan, waiting, caught these words, “Not cities, not people.” These were not to be saved. There was something else. Was there, then, a way to fight a war and seeming to lose, yet win?

The door opened and Madame Chiang was there.

“The plane is waiting,” she told her husband. “Had he not better go now so that the landing will not be in darkness?”

“Yes — go,” Chiang commanded him. And whatever he meant was left unsaid.

Flying over the handful of islands which was Japan had been nothing like this. He felt proudly that such a country as this was security against any victory. Hour after hour they drove across the sky over the solid mainland of China. Here was a country! They sank to follow a thousand miles of broad yellow river flowing through green lands and pallid deserts, they rose to scale ranges of mountains whose crests were barren in cold. Impassable country! Once he had been ashamed when he read in a Japanese newspaper that there were no good roads beyond the seacoast in China—“a backward country,” it said, “which the Chinese have done nothing to develop.” Yes, so backward that there were no roads now by which an enemy could enter! There was only the sky that was open. Through the sky alone was the passage to be had. And yet, how could even bombs from the sky destroy a country as vast as this!

He remembered something. In the two days before he left for Nanking he had gone with his father over the whole city of Shanghai to see what had befallen it. Devastation enough, he had thought. In increasing silence and desperation they had gone from one place to another, seeing ruins everywhere. But on the edge of the city they found a farmer planting green cabbages, squatting calmly on his heels as he worked. His house was gone. A shed of mats rudely put together told that. They had stopped a moment to watch him, and then because something needed to be said in greeting, his father said, “It is too bad that your house is gone, too.”

The farmer looked up and grinned and wiped his face with the blue cotton scarf across his shoulders. He pointed his chin toward a deep hole at the edge of the field. It was full of water.

“That’s where it was,” he told them cheerfully. “A good house my great-grandfather built! But never mind — none of us were killed. We were all out working. And as I told my wife when we saw the water coming up into it, ‘Well, we always wanted a pond and now we have it!’”

He roared out a laugh, and they had laughed too, and had gone home somehow cheered. Ruins had lost their meaning. He thought of it again and again.

All day the plane roared across the sky. The pilot was a young American, with whom I-wan had had no chance to talk. Madame Chiang had introduced them quickly, as the plane was ready to take off. “This is Denny MacGurk, Mr. Wu.”

“Pleased to meet you,” the American had said and had swung into his seat. And then Madame Chiang had handed them each a little bag.

“Your noon meal,” she told them.

He had not thought of its being noon until he saw Denny MacGurk eating with one hand while he steered. Then he opened the bag. Ham between layers of foreign bread, a brown creamy foreign sweet, and an apple — he had never eaten this food, but high up in the cold clear air it was good. MacGurk turned and nodded at him and shouted something which the wind tore to pieces before he could catch it, but he nodded as though he had heard. Why, he wondered, should this American boy be here, driving a plane for a Chinese general? But he had heard it said often enough in the Muraki business that none could understand Americans.And so he sat through the long afternoon until dusk, when the plane drifted down an aisle of cloud into a valley and dropped into a shaven field outside a village. Instantly it was surrounded by soldiers and then by a staring, pushing crowd of children and villagers. MacGurk leaped out, and I-wan, behind him, clambered out of his seat.

“We’ll sleep here and start at dawn and finish the trip after noon,” MacGurk said. Then he said in the pleasantest voice, “Say, tell these tin soldiers it’s their high monkey-monk’s plane, will you, and that I’ll lick the guts out of any of ’em that touches it? Tell ’em to watch the kids.” He locked up as much as he could, and I-wan, translating, told the soldiers, “It is the Generalissimo’s plane on official business, and it rests on your bodies tonight.”

“Yes!” they shouted, saluting, and as he followed MacGurk he heard them roaring at the awed crowd, “Put your fingers on it and see what falls upon you, you children of turtles! Your mother! Breathe on it even, and see what happens!”

“I guess it’s safe,” MacGurk said, grinning. “Gosh, but I’m stiff! And there’ll be only a board to sleep on tonight,” he grumbled, “and nothing but noodles to eat. Oh hell, if there aren’t too many lice, I guess I can sleep on anything!”

I-wan did not answer. He tried to smile, but it seemed somehow his fault that there was nothing but a country inn here.

“Ever been in the U. S. A.?” MacGurk asked abruptly as they walked along, side by side. Under their feet clouds of dust rose and spread, dry and alkaline, into their nostrils.

“No, I never have,” I-wan said, and added diffidently, “It must be a very pleasant country.”

“God’s own,” MacGurk said fervently, and then gave I-wan a great grin. “Why in the heck I can’t stay in it, I don’t know. But every time I go home I hanker to get away from it. I’m the damnedest—”

They laughed and marched through the deep cool gate of the earthen wall around the village. At their heels followed a procession of staring children and idle people. But MacGurk seemed used to them. He strode on into the doorway of an inn and then into a courtyard. The innkeeper rushed out to meet him, chattering with pleasure, and, seizing his hand, shook it up and down.

“Hello, you old son-of-a-gun,” MacGurk greeted him, and turned to I-wan. “I don’t understand a word he jabbers at me every time, but I’ve taught him to shake hands like a white man. It kind of makes me feel at home when I drop in here to spend the night.”

But to I-wan the innkeeper was bowing again and again.

“Come in, my lord, come in and drink tea, and wash yourselves and rest.”

He looked at I-wan and seemed ashamed.

“This white man,” he told I-wan a moment later, when he himself brought tea and MacGurk was in the next room, “he is of course a little—” he tapped his head and sighed. “But I humor him — I always humor him!”

“A good heart,” I-wan replied, not wanting to laugh.

“Oh yes, he has a very good heart,” the innkeeper agreed. And seeing the size of the coin I-wan laid in his hand, he grew instantly zealous and rushed at the crowd standing at the door, staring in to see what was going on.

“Be gone — be gone!” he shouted. “Isn’t this a man? Have you never seen a human being before?”

The crowd fell back and he slammed and barred the door made of rough planks.

“You must excuse them, my lord,” he told I-wan. “They like to see foreigners. What country do you come from, sir?”

“But I am Chinese,” I-wan said in surprise.

“Are you, sir?” the old man exclaimed. His wrinkled face was lively with his wonder. “Now I wouldn’t have known it — your clothes—”

“Many Chinese wear western clothes,” I-wan said. He felt somehow a little hurt.

“But your speech—” the old man began.

“It’s Chinese, isn’t it?” I-wan demanded.

“Well, I understand what you mean, but each word you say is not quite right,” the old man replied. Then lest he offend a good customer, he added quickly, “But I’ve heard there are many Chinese — and some are tall and some are short — that I know, being an innkeeper here for forty years. And now, do you eat meat or not, sir? I have good vegetable dishes, otherwise.”

“I eat meat,” I-wan replied shortly. He was still a little angry.

And he stayed a little angry, if for nothing else than that he could not complain. “We Chinese—” the old innkeeper kept saying, as he served them, “we Chinese are not so particular as the white men. It let my heart down, I do assure you, sir, when you said you were Chinese. Now this white man”—he tapped his head again over MacGurk’s red head—“he roars when his meat is tough, so I must chop it fine for him, like a baby, and put an extra quilt on his bed, and such a noise if it has a little small insect or two in it, such as we Chinese know must live, too. Do not insects also have their life, I ask him? But he never understands a word I say.”

It was true the meat was tough and the bed of boards stretched upon two heaps of dried clay was very hard, and in the night I-wan felt something creeping over his skin. He leaped up and shook himself and was about to shout out. Then he lit the small oil lamp and lay down again.

“We Chinese—” the old innkeeper had said.

But the night was over at last and they were up in the air again and MacGurk’s stubby profile was set toward the Northwest. They were going over mountains now, long reaches of barren clay-colored mountains. The roads were deep ruts across the land and ahead lay a mirage. I-wan had not known the trees and waters he seemed to see were a mirage until hour passed into hour and they came to no trees and no lakes. Their noon meal today was cold steamed-bread rolls filled with garlic which they had bought at the inn and stuffed into their pockets — different enough from the white foreign bread wrapped in clean white paper which Madame Chiang had given them. This bread was gray and solid and the garlic was strong. But it stayed hunger.

And then in the middle of the afternoon MacGurk suddenly shut off the engine and the plane began drifting slantwise to the earth.

“There it is!” he shouted.

And looking down, I-wan saw a square-walled village set like a block upon the plain. Outside were fields and inside the courts of houses there were trees growing thick and low. Down the plane drifted. And from the fields blue-clad figures shouted and dropped their hoes and came running to meet it.

“You’re in the heart of the Reds!” MacGurk shouted at him and then grinned. “They’re just like anybody else,” he remarked. The plane bumped gently along the earth. “Fact is, I kinda like ’em. This one you’re goin’ to see is a swell guy. The madame said I was to lead you straight to him. C’m on!” They climbed out and again he was following MacGurk.

He had so completely believed that En-lan must be dead. He had always thought of him as dead. So then, how could he believe what he now saw? They had come into the village gate and just inside was a gateway into a court, full of laughing men. This they had crossed and then they entered this plain mud-walled earth-floored room. There was a man sitting at the un-painted table. He looked up. It was En-lan. They stared at each other, doubting. Ten years lay between them — ten years of time and all else. But it was En-lan. I-wan knew him instantly.

“This fellow Wu’s got a letter from my chief,” MacGurk was saying. “I don’t mind telling you now I’m here, I’m glad I am. I didn’t tell you, Wu, but I have these”—he drew out two pistols from his pockets—“and orders to shoot if anybody bothered us. But I picked our place last night. I know that old son-of-a-gun.”

But they were not listening to him. They were staring at each other.

“It is not you, I-wan,” En-lan said slowly.

“It is I,” I-wan replied, “but how can I believe it is you?”

They drew nearer. Now they were feeling each other’s shoulders and arms, now they were clasping hands — yes, this was En-lan’s hand, but it was bigger, harder, stronger than it had once been.

“Where did you go?” En-lan demanded. “I never heard a word of you. Peony came running to our meeting place, but where were you? We waited until the last moment, every second expecting you.”

“Say, you two know each other, I guess,” MacGurk broke in. “I guess I’ll just go and get to work on the plane. It’ll need some cleaning and fixing if we’re to start back in the morning.”

They did not see or hear him.

“Peony!” I-wan repeated, stupefied. “Is that where she went?”

“She’s here,” En-lan said. “Sit down. How can we ever get everything told between us?”

He clapped his hands and a young boy in khaki uniform came to the door.

“Call the inner one to come here,” he ordered.

“Is Peony — are you—” I-wan stammered.

“Married?” En-lan said. “For ten years!”

“For ten years — you two have been together! But why didn’t you write me?”

“We did — and signed false names, hoping you would know who we were.”

“But I never had letters!” I-wan exclaimed.

“They were sent to your home,” En-lan replied.

“I suppose my father was afraid to send them on,” I-wan said when he had thought a moment. Yes, his father would be clever enough to know them dangerous letters!

“And you — why should you not write?” En-lan asked.

“I believed you dead,” I-wan answered. “And how could I know where Peony was?”

They looked at each other again, measuring, examining, trying to see behind the men they now were, the boys they had been. I-wan thought, “Can I tell him about Tama?”

“And you — what about you?” En-lan demanded. “You are married — you have sons?”

“Yes,” I-wan said. He longed to tell En-lan everything, how clever Jiro was and how Ganjiro — but no, it was better not to tell about Tama, better to keep her secret and safe.

“Yes, I have two sons,” he said simply.

And then suddenly he heard a quick running step he knew and there was Peony rushing in. But Peony? This slender woman in a boy’s uniform, a soldier’s cap on her short hair, no rouge on her lips, no powder on her brown skin, no jasmine scent — and her hand, seizing his, so hard and firm, this was not Peony’s hand that used to tremble like a bird!

“I-wan — I-wan — I-wan,” she was crying. She pushed off her cap and it fell to the floor and he saw this was Peony. But she was no longer the pretty, melancholy, willful girl he had known. This Peony was En-lan’s wife. I-wan sat down.

“My legs are trembling,” he confessed. “I can’t understand everything at once.”

He had been like a man asleep, he now perceived. All these years, while he had been making a life with Tama, that old life of his which he had thought cut off and ended had been going on like this!

“How did this come about?” he demanded. “How could you pretend to me, Peony, that you despised the revolutionists?”

“I didn’t despise him!” Peony thrust her pretty chin toward En-lan. Her large apricot-shaped eyes grew shy. Now that he looked at them I-wan saw her eyes were not changed at all.

“But you didn’t know him!” I-wan exclaimed. “You had only seen him once!”

En-lan suddenly began to roar with laughter, and Peony’s face turned pink. “I knew him a little — before I saw him,” she confessed.

“Go on,” En-lan commanded her. “Tell all your wickedness!”

“Well, I was cleaning your table drawers one day—” Peony went on very slowly.

“I missed something the other day from that table drawer,” I-wan said, and he began to laugh, too.

“She found my story, that I had written — you remember, I-wan?” En-lan cried. “She stole it and read it — and made up her mind then and there.”

Peony sat down on the edge of a chair. She was biting the edge of her red lip.

“It was my business to keep your table drawers neat, I-wan.” Her eyes were full of demure hidden laughter.

“Oh yes, of course,” I-wan agreed.

They laughed together. It seemed to I-wan he had never had better and more happy laughter. Then suddenly he remembered why he was here at all. He exclaimed to En-lan. “This Chiang who separated us has brought us together again! I am sent with this. You are to give it into the hands of the ones who are with you.”

And he pulled the sealed letter from his inner pocket and gave it to En-lan.

“I have been expecting this — but not you,” En-lan replied. “And I must not delay it. They are waiting for it. But wait for me here.”

He took the letter and went away.

And I-wan, left alone with Peony, looked at her and she looked at him, and then in a moment she began to ask of his parents and his grandparents and he told her and he put in as though it were simply family news that now I-ko was married too, but he did not say to a white woman, for why need he tell that? And still his instinct kept him back from telling about Tama.

She listened to it all and while she listened he saw her face grow more what he remembered it, though still the ten years lay more heavily upon her than they did upon En-lan.

And then in a little while En-lan came back. His whole look was grave and yet alive and he said to Peony, in a solemn voice, “What I said would come to pass has come. Chiang wants union!”

She gave a cry of joy and I-wan saw there was more between these two than love.

“Ai, I told you, Peony, he’s a great man — yes, he’s right!” En-lan said. “Well, now, somehow I have to make my soldiers see it — they won’t want to do it at once. Each of us is to talk to his own division. There’ll have to be a meeting. I’ll make them see it.”

He was looking at Peony, asking for her agreement, for her approval. She nodded.

“Shall I go and tell them to strike the gong for meeting?” she asked.

“Yes, tell them,” En-lan commanded. “No, wait — say in half an hour. I-wan must refresh himself. And I must be alone for a while.”

“He still writes everything down before he speaks it,” Peony explained.

He sat upon the dry baked earth of the drill ground. Beside him sat Peony. And helter-skelter, anyhow, and as they liked, sat men and women, but all young, around them. The hard and brilliant northern sunlight fell upon brown burned faces. It was difficult to know which were men and which women. But all these faces were upturned to hear En-lan, who stood so near that he could put out his hand and touch him. He felt strangely carried back into his boyhood. But then, in those days, En-lan had spoken to twenty or so, and now there were these hundreds. How had he done this? Somehow, while he had been thinking him dead, En-lan had been building this — this country; somehow, in spite of endless fighting he was here, strong and alive, and with him all these. En-lan’s voice, clear and carrying through the still air, was saying:

“You know what we did. Six years ago we declared war upon Japan. They laughed at us. Then three years afterwards we made our Long March. Our feet were torn and we were starved and many of us died. But we knew even then who was the real enemy. Though Chiang Kai-shek had pressed us and driven us backward over thousands of miles, we knew there was an enemy greater than he.” He raised his voice. “Our enemy was Japan, who even then was attacking our people!”

He paused, and a low roar went up from the people. He put up his hand in an old gesture which pulled at I-wan’s heart, he remembered it so well.

“What I tell you, you know. Not many months ago Chiang Kai-shek was kidnaped in Sian. We held him there — in our hand.”

En-lan held out his strong rough hand, cupped.

“We might have closed it — thus.” He closed his hand. “Then Chiang Kai-shek would have been no more. He who fought us so bitterly, for so many years, was here in our hand.” He opened his hand again and stared into it. Over the whole multitude there was not a sound. Breathless they gazed at En-lan. He looked up, over his hand. “There were those of you who said, ‘Kill him — kill him!’ If your leaders had heeded you”—En-lan’s thumb went down—“he would have been dead in an hour. You blamed us then, because we did not move. You blamed us bitterly because he lived and returned safely to his home. Some of you still are angry because today he is still alive.”

He dropped his hands now and held them lightly clasped. It was En-lan’s strength that without movement, merely by the power of his voice and his words, he held men silent and subdued to him. I-wan felt it, all the old power, but infinitely deeper and more perfected.

“But we remembered who the real enemy is. It is not he. We said to you then, ‘If he could so relentlessly pursue us year after year, he can thus pursue our enemy.’ We said to him, ‘Will you fight Japan?’ He said, ‘Until I die.’ So we let him go.”

Now they could feel what was coming. Now they knew this mounting rising terrible power coming out of En-lan meant he would demand sacrifice from them. His eyes began to burn, his voice grew deep, he held himself higher. Their eyes were fixed upon him.

“Today he is the only one who can lead us on to war. There is no other.”

But now they stirred. “You! You! You!” This word began to break from the crowd here and there. But En-lan caught it and tossed it away.

“No, not I! I am a communist. This nation will not follow any communist! And Japan would use us still more as an excuse for war—‘China is communist,’ they say already! No, we must serve our own country, not the enemy.”

They fell silent. What he said was true. What would he say next?

“There is only one who can save us all,” he said. “He who has seemed to be our enemy. If we come under his flag — not he under ours, but we under his — what can our enemies say? Before the whole world we shall be a united people, fighting together!”

I-wan, staring at En-lan, was sobbing within himself. This fellow, this magnificent man — demanding of his people this supreme self-denial — telling them they must subdue themselves now to one who had so persecuted them — who but En-lan could have made so huge a demand!

“Forget yourselves!” he commanded them. “Remember only that you are Chinese!”

Not a sound, not a word! Peony at his side was smoothing with her fingers the dust upon the ground and writing two characters—“China.”

“Those who will, let them raise the right hand!” En-lan commanded.

Up came their right hands — hundreds of hands.

“Those who are not willing!” En-lan demanded again. His blazing eyes dared them.

Not a hand dared. He dropped his head and turned away, and slowly, as though from dreaming, the people began to struggle up, some to walk away, some to stand talking.

But it was over. They had done what En-lan wanted them to do. I-wan saw him stride across the court to his own room. And Peony rose quickly to follow him.

“He is always tired for a little while after such a thing,” she whispered. “Something goes out of him.” She hurried toward the court.

And I-wan, after a moment, went out toward the field, where MacGurk was oiling the plane. The daze of the past hour was still upon him, as bright as a dream. When he stood again before Chiang, he would say, “Let me go back.” Yes, he must come back. Somehow En-lan made this his country, even as he had done in those other days.

“When shall we go?” he asked MacGurk.

“Four o’clock in the morning,” MacGurk answered. He nodded toward the dispersing crowd. “Get what he wanted?”

“Yes,” I-wan said.

“Great fellow,” MacGurk remarked. “Almost as great as the big chief — not quite, though. So I stick by the biggest one.”

“I’ll be here at four, then,” I-wan said at last, not knowing what other answer to make to this. Well, he would say to Chiang, “That is where I can serve you best.” And there was no reason for delay. He could be back within five days, if Chiang were willing.

“O-kay,” MacGurk replied, and began to whistle through his teeth while he polished the wings.

Sometimes everything except this life he now lived seemed an imagination, years which he had dreamed in his sleep. Days and weeks went by when he did not think once of Tama or the children, when indeed it seemed as though he and En-lan had always worked together like this, as though they were two hands, driven by the same brain. Day upon day they talked of nothing but of the plan of war which they were now following. This army was a flexible, tireless machine. They drove it night and day, a little council of men at its heart. With him En-lan had two others, men whose stories I-wan never knew whole, but whose brains he came to know as he knew his own.

They had to make war with nothing. Chiang Kai-shek had told them there was nothing. When he could give them money he would. But his own armies were only a little more than half-equipped. And he must keep always enough money ready to buy loyalty from the warlords and their armies. There were only a few whom he could be sure of without money.

“I must be able always to pay more than the Japanese.” He had told I-wan this calmly, while I-wan felt his own heart angry in his breast.

“Are there truly Chinese who even now can be bought?” he had cried. He did not believe it.

But Chiang Kai-shek had said, “I know them. They cannot be changed, and I must use them as they are.”

Yes, I-wan thought grudgingly, perhaps MacGurk was right. En-lan was not so great as Chiang Kai-shek. Nevertheless he belonged with En-lan and so he had gone back to him.

“We do not need money,” En-lan said, and then corrected himself. “Well, we do need it, but we can do without it. We have fought a war for years without it, and we will go on as we have been.”

And this, I-wan soon found, was by the old hide-and-seek of the guerillas. There was not one of these soldiers of En-lan’s who did not know how to fight with anything he had in his hand. If they had only twenty machine guns, they seemed to have a hundred. If they had no guns, they fought with old-fashioned spears and knives or they threw javelins or even slung stones from ambush. They did not scorn the single death of even the least of the enemy, although they could kill a hundred so swiftly that it seemed nothing. And all this they did, not massed together in the solid marching regiments the enemy had, but in small scattered handfuls of men here and there and everywhere, hidden in trees and ambushed in caves and working among the farming people with hoes in their hands and pistols and knives under their blue cotton shirts.

For the first thing En-lan had decreed was that they should leave the village where they were and approach the enemy lines. They were to go not as an army but simply as farming people, some one day, some another, to return to their lands despoiled by the enemy.

“Those lands,” En-lan told I-wan grimly one night, as they sat over maps in En-lan’s room, “I know them well.” He put his finger on a certain spot. “Do you remember what I used to tell you about my village?”

“Yes,” I-wan replied, “I do remember.”

“Here it is,” En-lan said and stared down at it. “Its name is still here. But it is gone. Not a soul is alive in it. The walls of its houses are ruined and its streets are scorched earth. I have one brother alive, perhaps — I don’t know. But a Japanese garrison fell upon them in revenge after Tungchow.”

He was silent a moment, and I-wan did not speak either. What could be said?

“I used to think I would surely go back some day and start a school,” En-lan said slowly. And after a while he said again, “I never repaid them while they lived for what they gave me. But I will repay them now, when they are dead.”

Peony had been sitting upon a bench mending an old uniform of En-lan’s. Now she put down her sewing and rose and came over to En-lan and took the map from his hand.

“It is time for you to go to bed,” she said. “You know you need your early sleep, because the dawn awakes you.”

His mood changed at once. “I’ll always be a farmer boy,” he told I-wan, smiling a little. “Any cock can rouse me.”

And I-wan, seeing the deep passion between these two, felt his own longing creep over him like a mist. For weeks he lived as though this were the only life he had ever had, and then suddenly, as if his name were called by her voice, he longed for Tama. Over and over again at such times he wanted to tell En-lan and Peony about her. But he could not. He could not be sure that they would understand. En-lan was as implacable as ever. The old calmness with which he once had told I-wan that he ought no longer to own his father, was in him still. He was ruthless in his simplicity. “How,” he would ask I-wan, “can you love a Japanese?” And yet I-wan knew that he loved Tama and would always love her and she belonged to no country, but only to him.

Once he thought he might tell Peony alone. He had had that day a letter from Tama, sent as all his letters from her were sent, under an official seal from his father. This day Tama’s letter had been long and full of what the children said and did. Jiro was beginning school. She had bought him a brown cloth school-bag for his books and a little uniform and a cap, such as the other boys wore. “But at home,” she wrote, “I teach him, too. We put flowers before your picture every day, and every day I explain to them how brave you are and how beautiful a country China is and how we belong to China — do I not belong to you, and they to us?”

Yes, since he was gone, she had written so “… we belong to China—”

On the day he had this letter he had been eaten up with loneliness for them. It was a day of unusual quietness. En-lan had commanded rest for them all, for the enemy were changing their position on a certain sector which he wished to attack. And I-wan found Peony sitting with her constant sewing on the sunny side of the farmhouse where they were quartered. And suddenly he wanted to tell her about Tama. Still some caution held him back. So he began, “Did you never have a son, Peony?”

She looked up at him. In the sharp sunlight he saw how her delicate skin was beginning to crack in small fine wrinkles, and her hair, which once she kept so smooth with fragrant oils, now looked brown and dried with the wind. But she was still pretty and still young. Peony, he thought, could not be more than thirty.

“I had two children,” she said. She dropped her eyes to her sewing. “I was very ill with the last — I seem never to have any more now.” She went on sewing. Then she said. “And why should I not tell you? You-are my brother. The first — my son — I lost by a dysentery. It is not a good life for a small child — our life. We have been driven so much. And his food and water changed too often. He was five, though — I kept him as long as that. And then suddenly he died in a day. And we buried him on a hillside in Kiangsi. It is so far south from here I shall never see his grave again, I think.” She shook her head but she did not weep. “And the little one,” she went on, “that was a girl. It was so long before she came I thought there would never be another. But En-lan doesn’t believe in gods, you know, so I had nothing to pray to for a child. And then on the Long March, I conceived.”

She paused, bit her thread, and went on. “Well, I hoped the Long March would be ended before she was born. But no — we kept climbing over those high mountains and down the rocky roads and over the deserts. I wasn’t sick, but I had to walk all the time or ride a horse. That was worse. The roads were so bad — and sometimes there were no roads. Ah, I was glad then your father wouldn’t let my feet be bound! Well, so the child was born very small and thin — and a girl. But we were still marching, so what could we do with her? I gave her to a good farmer’s wife and left some money for her and I told her I would come back.”

Peony bent her head down close to her sewing. “But that was three years ago…. Sometimes I can’t be sure if I remember the place, or how the woman looked. And her name was only Wang….”

“Did En-lan let this happen?” I-wan exclaimed.

She looked up at him. “You know him,” she said simply.

He could say nothing. He knew En-lan. He would demand everything of Peony, too. It came to him for the first time that perhaps Peony would have liked a home, a little house like Tama’s, set upon a hill, and a garden.

“Are you sorry you followed him that day?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Without him, what would I have been?” she asked. Then she looked at the sun. “It’s late,” she exclaimed. She put her needle into a bit of cloth securely and folded it up and buttoned it into the pocket of her uniform.

“Needles are very precious now. I wish I had all the ones I used to lose so carelessly.” She rose as she spoke. “I must go and get his supper,” she said cheerfully.

He watched her walk away. She was very graceful still, but so thin. She would not live to be old in this life. But if it were En-lan’s life she wanted it. No, he decided, he would not tell her about Tama. She would tell En-lan anything if she thought he ought to know. She would think only of En-lan. He could not entrust Tama to her now.

Each fought in this war as he was able. Elsewhere in the country there were armies uniformed and manned and trained by foreign officers. But here where I-wan had chosen to make his present life there was no such thing. These men could not have borne it. They drew near to the enemy, so near that less than a day’s easy walking would bring them into lost territory. There were no headquarters, seemingly, and no head to these scattering men. En-lan lived in a village, looking like any farmer. And around him were other farmers and petty tradesmen and fuel cutters and men who hired themselves out to other men and all that multitude of small people who have nothing to do with war in any country and who care for nothing except to feed themselves and their children. Then from nowhere a band of dark fierce banditry swept by night into a town held by the enemy and killed the garrison to the last man and the next day a foray of angry Japanese searched the countryside in revenge. But these small folk knew nothing and had seen nothing. With the innocent eyes of eternal children they gazed at their enemies and laughed.

“Why should we be those who killed you?” they cried, one and another. “We don’t care who rules us, only let us tend our fields and do our business. We hate our rulers. They are all evil and we are eaten up with their taxes. Why should we fight for them? If you will rule us better than they, why, welcome!”

Then Japanese looked at Japanese and wagged their heads and went away, believing, and wrote long reports to their upper officers that the country folk welcomed their coming and thanked them and wanted their rule. In Tama’s letters I-wan read that the papers told this and she was glad because surely that meant the war would soon be over and she could come to him with the children.

He could not tell her the truth, that the innocent-seeming country men were En-lan’s soldiers and some of them his own men whom he taught and who taught him. For in this strange army there was no high and no low. If a man had something he knew, he taught those who did not know. They ate what they needed of the same food and wore the same kind of garments and no one had more money than another. It was the sort of life his father could never have lived. But that was neither for nor against his father. For I-wan was not now the boy he had been when he weighed in such pain whether or not he must give his father up. He was a man now and he knew that not all men can live the same life. For some poverty is sweet because it is full of freedom. But there are men who hate such freedom and his father was one of these.

And even for himself I-wan no longer felt this way of En-lan’s was the only way. En-lan would choose it until he died. He would never have a home of his own, goods he owned, or children to inherit. He was one to make a war somehow if there were not war already at hand. There would always be something wrong he had sworn himself to right. But I-wan now discovered that he himself was not so. When he had been a boy in his father’s house the imagination of such freedom had seemed the best life he could live. But though he would never have been satisfied if for a while he had not lived it as he did now, yet he became sure as the days went on that it was not enough for the making of a whole nation. These men did now the work for which they were made. But what would they be when the war was over? They would hate any rule as much as they hated their enemy today.

He argued long with En-lan over this.

“What will they be when the war is over?” En-lan repeated. “Why, what they are now — simple honest brave men, and I had rather they ruled over me and made my laws than any other men.”

“Well enough for you,” I-wan retorted. “But you are one of them.”

“Are you not?” En-lan broke in.

“Yes, I am now, too,” I-wan argued, a little impatiently — En-lan saw slowly sometimes! — “But you and I do not make up a nation. A nation today is not a simple society of simple men. It is a great machine and men must know many things to make it perform its service to the people.”

“We do well enough, don’t we?” En-lan exclaimed. “We are fed, we are clothed, justice is done to all. And we are free. These are what men require.”

“But not all they require—” These words were on I-wan’s tongue, but he did not say them. He saw that En-lan was as he was made and that he was one who saw no further than what he himself believed. In his youth En-lan had taken for this belief certain dreams and ideas and then he had not changed. His whole life until now had been spent in making them actual. He had made for himself a sort of world, a kind of nation such as he believed was right. All his life until he died would be spent in this struggle to perfect the same dream.

But I-wan’s dream had changed. The more he lived among these men, the more he lived with En-lan, the more he perceived that what was changed in him was the dream, the perception of what he wanted his country to be. He knew now he did not want to be ruled by these men, honest though they were. Their simplicities were not enough. Honesty and simplicity, surely, were not essential companions! If they were, then honesty was not wide enough. It must be made wider.

He began to ponder very much on these matters. Who, after this war, would make his country and how must its laws be made and what must these laws be? He saw now that En-lan could never be a ruler over that which he could not understand. Enlightenment and knowledge, order and grace, these were things life must have, too, but En-lan would never know it…. And it came into I-wan’s mind that Tama had somehow changed him. She had taught him to love order and right behavior and grace in everyday acts. He had the ten years with her forever in his being. Yes, and though it was bitter to know it, he had the ten years of his life in Japan in his being, too. He was too honest within himself not to see that the people there were more secure than the people were here in his own country. They lived more secure because they lived in order. He dared not say to En-lan that there was anything good in the enemy, for En-lan would not have believed he could be loyal to his own and yet find good in his enemy. But I-wan knew himself and knew that he loved his own country none the less when he saw that its people were too poor and that the freedom they loved had ceased to be freedom when because of it they went in bondage to hunger and flood and fear of robbers and of wars between mischievous and lawless men. He pondered much on what the moment was when freedom and security came nearest to being the same.

And that he thought of such things showed him what he had become as a man. He knew now he could never follow En-lan to the end as once he could have done. To the end of each day, yes, and to the end of this war, yes. But beyond that there must be a new world again. What it would be he did not know now, and then he gave over thinking so far and he thought no farther than to the time when he could bring his wife and children home.

In the days of that long winter when they waited for spring to come and the maize and the kaoliang to grow high enough for ambush by day, he would dream how when the war was over he would bring Tama and the children across the sea and how they would find their home. Where would it be? He considered his vast country. Well, the sunshine of the north, the cool summers and bright cold winters — these were full of health. But there was the rich and fertile beauty of the mid-country, and the fruits and flowers of the south. Tama would love the flowers. It was not easy to choose from such a country where his sons could best grow into their manhood. He thought of all the fine cities where they might live, Hangchow and Soochow, Nanking and Hankow.

And then the enemy began to take those cities, one by one. In the late autumn Shanghai had been yielded. His father wrote him of desperate, useless fighting, of wounded men who were too many to be tended. And Soochow was lost and in early winter Hangchow was no longer theirs — the heavenly city of Hangchow, where when he was a child he had gone with his father and mother for holidays in spring and autumn.

Somehow all this time while the enemy marched inland he had not believed that Nanking could be seized because Chiang Kai-shek was there. He smiled at his own superstition concerning this man. He was as bad as his father, who would believe in no gods, but believed in Chiang as though he were a god! And then they heard Nanking, too, was lost. For a day the men could do nothing but sit and mourn and wonder if now were not the time for them to withdraw to themselves as they were before, and only by holding a great feast and gathering them all together to hear him speak to them could En-lan make them bold again against the enemy.

“What are cities to us?” he shouted to them when they were full of meat and wine. “What is Nanking to us? We have had nothing from Nanking — we shall not know it is lost! And if we withdraw now and the enemy win, must we not fight them alone later? And if we stay by and win, and we shall win, will not the country then be ours?”

With all the old magic of his brilliant eyes and deep voice and simple speech always to be understood by any man, En-lan drew them back once more and they fought on. And I-wan could not deny that magic, but he knew that when the war was over and men needed not so much to be led to battle as to the daily building of a great new nation, the magic would not hold. No, in that day En-lan himself perhaps would grow weary of patience and work and go away to be his old self somewhere and start another revolution. But now he had his use.

And under his magic after this, each time a city fell to the enemy and with it the region where it was, the men went more firmly to their hidden vicious warfare. They made no great battles, there was no open victory nor vanquishment, but the drain upon the enemy was like the bleeding of a secret wound. Nothing was told, no one knew, and newspapers printed nothing, but one night a hundred men were swept clean from an enemy post in a country town and another night a bridge fell and the river swallowed up half a regiment, or a train was wrecked, or mines were hidden in the dust of a country road and exploded beneath the wheels of an enemy truck, or a strange fire broke out in an enemy camp, or a shipment of rifles was taken or a gun captured from the Japanese who were left dead where it had stood, or a dike was broken and a flood seized the enemy.

This was the sort of warfare they knew how to make, these men of En-lan’s. And it was the wisest way to fight, I-wan became sure. For when he read in his father’s letters how in the south the Chinese armies fell, he grew sick while he read. They would do anything they were told to do, they were so brave, his father wrote. When they were told to march in the open in ranks against the enemy, then they marched, though only to fall before the machine guns of the enemy like wheat beneath the scythe. The more he thought of this the more I-wan could not bear it, and he wished that Chiang would give over trying to fight as the foreigners fight and go back to these old ways of their own which En-lan had learned so well to use.

One day his father wrote for the first time as though he were fearful of the end. “Our men have nothing but courage. They go into battle as good as empty-handed, with little popping hand guns to stand before machines. All our best young men are already gone. We cannot train them fast enough for such massacre.”

He went to En-lan with his father’s letter and showed it to him and asked him, “Will you go to Chiang and explain our way of fighting and persuade him to it?”

They talked for a long while. En-lan was not willing at first, for he suspected there might still be those who wanted to kill him.

“Why do you not go for me?” he asked I-wan. “You are always safe, being your father’s son!”

“Chiang would not listen to me,” I-wan replied quietly, ignoring En-lan’s hidden taunt against his father, “but he knows what a foe you are!”

En-lan laughed and gave in then, and I-wan telegraphed his father, who arranged it that MacGurk came to fetch En-lan. They had one moment of laughter together, when suddenly En-lan, who had never feared anything in his life, was now afraid to go up in the air, but I-wan’s laughter drove him and he was gone. I-wan watched the plane rise and lose itself in the sky. Those two meeting thus, he thought to himself — what a thing it would be to see!

And I-wan was right. When En-lan had been back a few days — and he came back without delay, shouting that he could not endure that city for another hour — Chiang announced everywhere that hereafter the Chinese armies would fight not after the western ways they did not know, but after their own ancient ways. When the enemy advanced, they would retreat. When the enemy retreated, they would advance. When the enemy did not expect it, they would attack. They would never again meet the enemy in pitched battle as western armies did.

When this pronouncement was made it seemed as though every Chinese took heart again. If this war could be fought as they knew how to fight, they would win. And I-wan took his own private comfort in the knowledge that fewer would die uselessly now. In the future, he thought grimly, they must make armies to match any in the world, armies and navies and thousands of airplanes of every sort. But now they must make shift as they could to save themselves.

For in their way of fighting he and En-lan lost almost no men. It was counted as a fault if a man lost his life, that is, a clumsiness somewhere that ought not to have been. But steadily they counted the lives of their enemies taken day after day.

Now peace between En-lan and I-wan grew to be an uncertain thing, and more and more as time went on, especially as the maize and kaoliang grew high enough for ambush and the men went out every day for warfare. When they killed their enemy I-wan said nothing, but they brought back prisoners — and upon this En-lan and I-wan could not agree. In his own way in this, too, I-wan had grown beyond En-lan, who must always remain something of what he was born. It seemed En-lan could never forget his poor childhood and the famines which he had seen and the hardships he had suffered. He held mankind responsible for all he had suffered, and though he loved his own loyally, he hated all who were not like him and therefore not his own. If a man were not poor he hated him and was ready to kill him. And to him every Japanese was something less than man.

But I-wan had been gently reared and he had no great bitterness to remember. All the things he had once thought bitter now seemed small. In his childhood he had hated his grandmother. Yet when she died in the second month of this year and her body had been encoffined and put in a temple to wait for peace, since these were no times for the display of a great funeral, I-wan wondered then that he had grown so bitter over the smell of her opium and had not remembered rather that she loved him most tenderly and steadfastly and had always coaxed him when he was sullen.

So this was another difference between him and En-lan, now that they lived together day upon day in such closeness. It was about the killing of the prisoners they took. Sometimes it came almost to open quarrel, and then Peony must come between them to scold them and explain them to each other.

“You, En-lan, are too stubborn in your own mind! You are stubborn like an ox. And I-wan, you are stubborn too, but you are stubborn as a swift willful horse who has been fed too daintily and never known anything but a golden bridle. Now, ox, do not ask horse to become ox, and, horse, remember he is ox!”

But about this one thing not even Peony could make them laugh or agree.

It had been a habit of En-lan’s men, when I-wan came, to kill all the men they captured except a few — some who, they thought, looked the strangest or who were young and troublesome and did not yield, or those for whom, for one reason or another, it seemed quick death was too easy. Very often they brought these back with them and then by slow merry ways they made them die. First they locked them in cages or chained them to a tree and let any who liked come and see them and spit upon them or prod them with pitchforks or hold blazing torches to their fingers and toes, or any such things as amuse common folk who have an enemy at their mercy.

At last one day I-wan went in a mighty rage to find En-lan.

“Do you allow this?” he demanded.

“What?” En-lan replied. He was sitting in a room examining upon a map a certain road where that night they planned to make attack.

“Look out of the door!” I-wan cried. And En-lan rose and came to the open door and looked out.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Do you see nothing?” I-wan asked him fiercely.

“No, I see nothing,” En-lan said deliberately, “unless you mean the men at play.”

“Do you call it play?” En-lan shouted.

At that moment a buffoon had come out of the laughing crowd and had dug his thumb into the chained man’s eye and his eye burst and streamed out. The man screamed once. Then he bit his lip and was silent. But in the bright air sweat ran shining down his face.

“You can’t deny these men everything,” En-lan said coldly as he watched. “Think what other soldiers have if they are victorious — extra food, money, wine to drink, loot! But our men throw their lives away every day, and yet they eat the same poor food and we have no money to give them and there is no loot. They are simple men — they must have something.”

“Not such degrading play as this!” I-wan retorted. “This is the play of savages!”

“Well, so they are savages,” En-lan replied in a reasonable voice. His brilliant eyes hardened a little now as he looked at I-wan. “Are you still the dreamer, I-wan? Do you still believe the poor will be better than the rich? I hate the rich, but the poor are not gods. They are only children. And at least what they do is done openly.”

I-wan groaned and came into the room and leaned his arm against the wall and hid his face. He felt sick.

“You are too squeamish,” En-lan told him after a moment and kindly enough. “You should have been hardened as I was. I killed pigs when I was a small child and in a famine I helped my father kill our ox for food, and I saw my mother kill a girl she bore. And I grew up on bandits and what they did. I saw men’s noses slit and their eyes gouged and their ears gone and their backs flayed, and as long as I can remember a dead man was nothing. Why should I care for a Japanese?”

I-wan straightened himself, wiped his face, and sat down. “It is not only that a Japanese is a man also,” he said. “It is that I am ashamed to see Chinese do such things.”

“Do you forget what the Japanese did at Nanking?” En-lan asked angrily. “Nothing we can do will be enough revenge!”

“I know. I don’t excuse them,” I-wan replied doggedly. “But I say, if the Japanese are like that, it is not my business — but it is my business if my own people also…”

“Oh, the patriot!” En-lan broke in. “Oh, what a patriot! I-wan, you are a fool. I say it plainly. When you have been through what I have—”

“The more I see of it, the more I shall hate it!” I-wan said violently.

“Then you had better go somewhere else, where it is not to be seen,” En-lan declared. “Perhaps you would like to join the benevolent work of the Japanese and become one of the puppet governors—”

When I-wan heard En-lan say this, he suddenly felt an anger rise in him that lifted him from his feet. Upon its power he leaped forward and fell upon En-lan and En-lan, not being prepared, fell under him upon the beaten ground of the floor, and they struggled together as though they were two boys instead of men. Each held the other with both hands by the hair of his crown and shook as hard as he could, and thus Peony found them at this moment. She had been asleep in the other room and their voices had awakened her and now she came at them shrieking and pulling and scolding.

“Oh shameful! Oh, I-wan, how can you — En-lan, you foolish—” And then she opened her mouth and bit one hand and then another until they let go. They scrambled to their feet and wrung their hands with pain.

“I’m bleeding,” En-lan accused her.

“So you should bleed,” Peony answered him.

I-wan drew out his handkerchief and wrapped his own bleeding hand and said nothing.

“Now, what is your quarrel?” Peony demanded.

En-lan laughed suddenly.

“I called him a patriot and he fell on me!”

“No, now, truly, En-lan!” she exclaimed. “I-wan is not so foolish.”

“It was about the prisoners,” I-wan said suddenly.

“What prisoners?” Peony asked.

They looked, but while they had been quarreling the man had been taken away.

“He is dead,” I-wan said abruptly.

“Then why quarrel over him?” Peony coaxed them.

“There will be more tomorrow,” I-wan said.

“I-wan wants them all gently killed,” En-lan broke in. “And I say the men must have some pleasure out of their hard lives.”

“And I say,” I-wan retorted, “that we ought to teach them something better.”

He looked at Peony. “En-lan says I am soft,” he said. “But you were a child in my father’s house, too. Am I right or wrong?”

He would not care what she said, he thought. He knew he was right.

“But Peony was a slave,” En-lan said sharply. “A slave in a rich man’s house has to suffer—”

“Yes, but still I-wan is right,” Peony said slowly. “It is not good for our men, En-lan. I know what he means. Sometimes when his grandmother used to — to burn me with her pipe”—she glanced at I-wan and flushed a little and went on quietly—“I remember I used to say to her in my heart, ‘But it is you who are cruel and wicked and mean — it is not I. I have only a bit of aching flesh on my arm, but you have become wicked!’”

“Did she do that?” I-wan asked in a low voice. She pulled up her sleeve and he saw on her thin upper arm deep round scars, many scars running in together.

“You never told me,” he whispered.

“I couldn’t tell — anyone,” she said mournfully. “I don’t know why — except it seemed to make me a real slave and so I hid it.”

“You should have told me,” I-wan said. He wanted suddenly to weep with anger. “I hate every torture!”

“I also,” Peony said simply. She drew down her sleeve and turned to En-lan. “I-wan is right,” she told him.

“Perhaps he is,” En-lan agreed. It was impossible to tell from his face how much he had inwardly yielded. But from that day on I-wan at least saw no more torture.

It was soon after this that I-wan began to perfect a plan which for a long time he had been musing upon in his mind. It had begun many months before, when it had occurred to him to imagine what he would do if some day when he led his men in a secret attack, one of those whom he must kill or see killed should happen to be Bunji? He put the thought away as soon as it came. There was so little chance that this would happen that he could think of it as no chance.

And yet there was enough chance left so that he never looked from ambush at Japanese upon a road where he was hidden or through an open door suddenly upon men surprised without taking his first quick look to see that none of the faces was Bunji’s face. No, and he never killed a man from behind, lest the man be Bunji, and if a man tried to make his escape and he had not seen his face, he let him go…. Yet he had heard nothing of Bunji. Tama never told him where he was, if indeed she knew herself. She only wrote that he was still alive and well, and that his little son was walking now, and that Setsu longed to have her second child. But who knew when that would be? This war was endless in spite of all the times set for it to end… And as long as he knew Bunji was alive, I-wan was afraid.

He knew, of course, what he would do if Bunji were among the ones they captured. He would help him to escape. That he had decided long ago when first he had thought of it, so that if it happened he would be ready. But first he would talk with Bunji and explain to him the evil of this war which his people made upon I-wan’s people. For I-wan had talked to many prisoners and he now knew that they were not told why they had to leave their homes and families and die in such hundreds and thousands. And he found very often the letters and writings in the pockets of those dead, and he read them that he might know what they thought and felt before they died. And always they said the same thing, that this was a righteous and necessary war which they fought to save their own homes and their own country. And I-wan longed to say to them, “We do not want your country and you have nothing you need to save yourselves from with us, so why have you died?” But they were dead.

And then he thought of how the men used to bring back many living prisoners until En-lan put a stop to it for mercy’s sake after Peony had showed them her burns, and he thought, “Why should we not teach these prisoners the truth and treat them kindly and send them back to their own army, to spread knowledge of the truth among their fellows?”

He went to En-lan with this plan, not being sure at all what En-lan would think of it, and if he would not say again that he was too soft. But En-lan, when he had heard it, seized it at once as a good clever plan.

“It makes a man’s arm slack if he does not believe in what he does,” he said. “And if we can spread doubt among them and make them distrust their leaders, it is a clever thing to do.”

The more En-lan thought of it, the more he liked it. He clapped his hand against I-wan’s and laughed and cried, “It’s as good as capturing a trainload of guns — well, I will say that skull of yours has something in it, I-wan!”

Somewhere or other, I-wan knew, his idea and En-lan’s idea of the same thing did not quite hit together. But he let it go. If the thing were accomplished, the end was served. And the men, when En-lan explained it to them, were pleased with what they thought was such clever trickiness, and so the thing was done. And thereafter a certain number of prisoners were taken alive and fed and given courtesy and kindness and “educated,” as En-lan said, for a week or two, and set free again, looking, every man thus freed, so bewildered at what had happened to him that he was wholly dumb and did not know what came next.

But for Bunji it was no use after all. In the autumn I-wan had a letter from Tama and in it she was all grief and mourning. Bunji had been killed in the fighting at Taierhchwang. I-wan, after he had read and burned her letter as he must all her letters, sat awhile in his own room in great sorrow, remembering Bunji as he had known him when first he went to the Muraki house. How warm a heart had been his, and how merry! If there had been no war, how long and happy a life would have been his desert! But war had soon spoiled him. He was too simple for the strain and cruelty of war, and it had broken him…. And so all I-wan’s fears of meeting him were useless. And all Setsu’s hopes were useless, too. She would never have a second son.

One day in the autumn I-wan received a telegram from Chiang Kai-shek, commanding him to come to him, and saying that MacGurk would be there to fetch him the next day if the storm then raging had abated. I-wan took this message to En-lan and they looked at it together and put their two minds on it and could imagine nothing for a cause. At last they decided it could, at least, have nothing to do with the state, since if there had been an official reason, the message would not have come to him alone.

“Unless, of course,” En-lan said, “he is displeased with something and wants you for a messenger.”

But this seemed not true, either, for only a few days before this they had all rejoiced because without expecting it, they had received from Chiang a present of money and enough to buy winter clothes for the men who were most ragged. It must be, I-wan thought in himself, something of his own private self. His mind flew always to Tama. It might be that Chiang wanted to test him concerning his Japanese wife. For one moment I-wan thought, “What if he demands that I give her up?”

Well, he would not, he knew. What he could do or what he would say beyond that, the moment must tell him when it came. At least that he had come back to his country and was here fighting should count for the truth of anything he said. But what was between him and Tama belonged to the past and to the future. The present he had given to his country. But to none would he promise that future which none could know.

Thus encouraging himself he tied up his extra clothes in a piece of square cloth as farmers do, and was ready on the landing field when MacGurk came for him.

“You ready?” MacGurk bawled at him over the side of the plane.

“Quite ready,” I-wan replied.

“Well, we’ll hop off again then in about twenty minutes,” MacGurk said, and leaped out of the plane. He took off his cap and beat the dust out of it. “Gosh, it’s a trick making this run now — nothing like as easy as it was when the chief was in Nanking! The air from Hankow here is full of holes and I fell in every one of ’em.” They were walking toward the farmhouses which were En-lan’s camp. “I’ll take a swallow of tea and a cigarette and then we’ll be off. Lots of daylight yet,” MacGurk went on.

They sat down at an outdoor table of the village teashop and the old woman whose husband kept the place came and wiped off the table with a black rag and then blew into the teacups to rid them of dust and prepared to wipe them also. But MacGurk stopped her with a roar.

“Here, lay off that cleaning, will you?” He turned on I-wan. “Tell her I want ’em dirty! Sa-ay! I can do my hop-skip-and-jump between bullets all right, but germs is something else again!”

He stared at the old woman in mock anger while I-wan told her to leave the bowls, and when he saw her cower before his gaze he broke into a grin. “Never mind, old lady,” he told her. “I wash ’em myself anyway.” And he poured some of the boiling tea into the bowls, threw the tea on the ground, and then filling his bowl and I-wan’s, he blew the hot tea loudly and supped it.

“Will you never learn any of our language so that you can make your own complaints?” I-wan asked him in good humor.

“Naw — don’t need it,” MacGurk replied. “If I yell loud enough and say it over a coupla times and stare at ’em hard they see what I mean pretty quick. I don’t have much time, anyway.”

In a little while they were back in the plane and now I-wan saw still more of his country than he had ever seen. Mountains rolled their curling length beneath, and clouds coiled and covered them or left them bare. But I-wan could not put his mind to enjoyment of beauty. He was eaten up with wondering why he was called to this meeting.

He had never been in Hankow before. Time and again when he was a child his father used to say that some time soon they must return to Hunan to visit the ancient lands of the family, from which they still received rents, and I-wan knew that the city of Hankow on one side of the Yangtse River and the city of Wuchang on the other were like pillars to the gate which opened to the vast territories of the inner provinces. Somewhere within them lay his family’s inherited lands which even his grandfather had never seen, planted and harvested by generations of farmers who rented the fields from father to son, and who sent their rent moneys as they might have sent tribute to an unknown emperor. But who they were I-wan did not know. And indeed he had never thought of them except when his father said, “The rents are good this year.” Or he said, “The lands have paid us nothing these two years, what with a flood last year and the bandits very bad this year still.” But everything was the same in his father’s house whatever the year was.

Nevertheless, as he rode through the streets of Hankow to be taken to the house where Chiang Kai-shek was, he looked at all the people and listened to their language. He could understand what they said, but it was different in its cadence from En-lan’s language, and altogether different from his own Shanghai speech. Yet they were all one people and he was one with them. He thought very often and deeply of these differences among his own people. Tama’s people were close to each other in every thought. But his were not. When this war was over which now united them for the first time in all their history, then what could they find still to unite them? He asked himself this question very often, thinking, too, somewhat of himself and En-Ian. This war held them together still. But after it was over, what would there be, unless memory held? But human memory never held. There must be something else, as strong as war, as necessary as defense against an enemy.

He was lost in his pondering on the future as he was so often now, when suddenly the car in which he was sitting stopped with a jerk before a common brick house and the driver motioned with his thumb that they had reached their place. I-wan got out alone, since MacGurk had stayed to mend a fault in his engine, and he rang a bell at the door. It was opened by a servant in a white gown, and the servant expected him, for he bowed and took I-wan into a small side room and asked him to sit down for a few minutes. He went away and I-wan sat waiting. There was nothing in this room to hold his interest, since the furniture was plain and usual, and so he was about to fall to his thinking again when the door opened and his father came in. I-wan stood up at once, greatly astonished.

“Sit down,” his father said.

They sat down and then I-wan saw his father looked very tired and much thinner than he was when I-wan saw him last year.

“Are you not well, Father?” he asked. The more he looked at his father, the more anxious he felt. He had never seen his father like this. All of his old energy and stubbornness seemed gone. He sat there as though it would be an effort to rise again.

“I am as well as any can be now,” his father replied. And then he said, “This war is killing us all in one way or another. I have just had letters from Nanking.” He paused, and then went on, “In my way I had helped to make that new city. We made great loans there for the capital. I was proud of it. Well, it is gone.”

“You mean — completely destroyed?” I-wan asked in a low voice. He remembered that before he went to see Chiang there his father had told him to look at this great new building and that one, and to see the fine new streets which had been made from the winding narrow streets of the ancient city. And they were beautiful. Everyone was proud to see them there.

“What is not ruined belongs to the enemy,” his father said. Then he leaned forward and put his hands on his knees and whispered to I-wan, “But what sickens me and makes me afraid is not men dead and houses in ruins, but this — that on every street opium is for sale openly! They want to ruin those who are still alive, too.”

And to I-wan’s horror he saw tears come into his father’s eyes and begin to roll down his cheeks, and his father did not wipe them away but he let them roll down. And I-wan could not bear to see it, and yet he did not know what to say, so he looked down and said nothing…. He had heard of this opium. Nothing else so angered En-lan as the opium they found ready for sale when they took back a town from the enemy.

“I weep for much,” his father said at last, half in apology, and then he took the ends of his long sleeves and wiped his eyes, one and then the other. And then he said, pleadingly, “I-wan, can you take a few days from your life and go with me to see the lands? Some day they will be yours and your sons’. I shall never live there, but it may be you will live there with your children.”

Looking back upon this later, I-wan remembered that even then he thought it strange his father said nothing of I-ko, but only, “The lands will be yours.”

“I should like to go,” he said.

“It may be the only China left will be in these inner provinces,” his father went on. “Who can tell? But something must come from what is happening to us — the people who have fled here from the lost coastal provinces — the schools moved here. Last week I gave my name to a loan of many thousands of dollars for an iron works to be moved from Hankow inland.”

“Is Chiang not to defend Hankow?” he asked.

His father shook his head.

“Canton was abandoned yesterday. In a few days Hankow, too, will fall,” he said. “Well, I hope Chiang is right—” His father sighed. “If he is not right, then we are lost indeed.”

He sat silent for a moment, and I-wan wondered if it could be that he did not believe so perfectly as he had in Chiang? Canton gone, and then Hankow …? And at that moment the door opened and there was Chiang Kai-shek’s wife. They rose and she nodded a little to them and said in her quiet soft voice, “The Generalissimo is ready for you,” and she led them across a room and into the room where Chiang sat.

He rose when they entered. I-wan had not seen him stand before. He looked taller now than he was, being straight and very thin. He did not speak and they sat down together and his wife felt of the teapot and then poured tea into their bowls. Everything she did was done with such a smoothness and grace that eyes could not but follow her to see the curve of her neck and the turn of her head and the swift accurate gestures of her hands. She looked at her husband and he looked at her and nodded, and then she went away and shut the door quietly.

Now they were alone with him and I-wan lifted his eyes to him to inquire of him what he wanted.

“I have sent for you for two reasons,” Chiang Kai-shek said without any “greeting or beginning. “The first reason is to tell you of the death of your elder brother.”

This he said in an even strong voice and when he had said it, he waited a moment for I-wan to comprehend it…. He could not comprehend it, indeed. I-ko dead! He felt his blood leave his head and then rush back into it, burning hot. He looked at his father. But he was sitting there in his seat, his head drooped and his eyes looking downward.

“You knew this, Father?” he said in a thick voice.

His father nodded. “Yesterday,” he whispered.

“You will want to know how he died,” Chiang Kai-shek said abruptly. He took up a letter from the desk and gave it to I-wan. It was badly written upon a dirty piece of paper, and it was in penciled English. There was no name upon it but what it said was plain enough. It gave a list of names of men, five men, who had been seen in secret meeting with certain of the enemy. And I-ko’s name was third.

I-wan looked up to Chiang’s eyes again.

“But why should my brother—” he was not able to go beyond this.

“There was a plot,” Chiang said harshly, and yet no more harshly than he said anything, “and the enemy promised your brother a high place in the government they will set up.” He nodded toward the letter, which I-wan put back upon the desk before him. “I had that by messenger fourteen days ago. It was not the first news I had had. But I sent for this man who did not write his name here, but who gave it by mouth to the man who, on foot and by any way he could, came to me with it. I sent for him. When he came he said his name was Lim and that he knew you and your brother. He hated your brother for some cause or other.” Chiang paused. “Well, I use men’s hate.” He paused again, and then went on. “This gave me proof that your brother was a traitor. I ordered him executed with the others.”

These words I-wan listened to one by one, knowing the end while he listened, and fearing it, too. But he sat on, looking at Chiang’s face.

“How could that — how could that — that man—” he began to stammer in a hoarse voice. It seemed horrible to him that Jackie Lim, to whom he had been kind, should be the one to spy out I-ko.

But Chiang said quickly, “Do not blame him. He is an honest man. But he is very simple. It made him angry to hear what was gossiped everywhere among the common soldiers, that some of their officers took bribes, and, being simple, when he heard it he examined into it and he was brave enough to report it to me direct. He has lived in America where, he said, men do not fear those who rule them.”

“Where is he now?” I-wan demanded.

“I sent him back to fight,” Chiang replied. “I don’t know what became of him.”

There was nothing then to be said. His father sat without moving. I-wan breathed one deep breath and straightened his shoulders. He tried not to see all the pictures of I-ko that his memory now brought before his eyes — I-ko playing with him in the garden when they were very small and he thought his elder brother beautiful and strong, I-ko willful at being denied something and flinging himself to the ground to weep and kick his legs, I-ko a handsome young man…. How did I-ko meet his death? Was he brave and silent, or was the spoiled child the real I-ko to the last? Impossible to know — he did not want to know.

“It was his foreign wife — I shall send her back to her own country,” his father now said slowly. “It was she who was always making him despise his own people. From the very first moment she came, nothing was good enough for her. She did not like the food or the way we lived. Nothing we have was so good as what she had in her own country. And she laughed at our soldiers and she always said to I-ko that the Japanese were better, until he began to believe there was no use trying to fight them. So — I suppose”—his father’s voice dropped—“he thought since Canton was doomed to fall, he might as well—” He looked up at Chiang haggardly. “I don’t defend him,” he said in a whisper.

Chiang had let him speak on, and while he spoke his grave face took on a sort of stern kindness. Now he said, “We have understood each other.”

I-wan saw his father nod. And at that moment he knew he loved his father as he never had before….

“Go out now,” Chiang was saying to his father. “Rest yourself a little while. I want to talk to your son.”

His father rose and bowed, and they waited while he went out. Then when they were alone suddenly Chiang changed. All the mildness in his face was gone. He turned on I-wan his full stern black gaze.

“You I have used,” he said. “I had planned to use you again.” He paused. “But you are married to a Japanese,” he added sharply.

I-wan jumped a little in spite of himself. This man knew everything. But he was ready.

“Yes, I am,” he answered.

“If you are your father’s son, you are also brother to a traitor,” Chiang said. His voice was harsh enough now and there was not a hint of kindness in his face. “How do I know what you are?”

“There is no way for me to tell you,” I-wan retorted. He could be afraid of this man, but he would not be.

“Will you give up your Japanese wife?” Chiang demanded.

“At your command?” I-wan asked.

Chiang did not answer, but he did not move his eyes from I-wan’s face.

“No,” I-wan said quietly. And then after a moment he said, “I left my wife and my children to come back and fight. I am fighting. When peace comes, I shall bring them here. My sons are Chinese. And — she — their mother — is loyal to me.”

“It will be a long time before peace comes,” Chiang said.

“I know that,” I-wan said.

“This city will be in ruins, too,” Chiang said. He looked about the room and then out of the window, where roof touched roof in the crowded city. “This city and many others, perhaps. When peace comes there may be no cities left.”

“There will be land,” I-wan replied…. Now he understood why his father had said, ‘The lands will be yours and your sons’.”

“Yes, there will be land,” Chiang repeated. And then with one of those vivid changes which I-wan had now learned to expect of him, he said, “What sort of woman is your wife?”

For answer I-wan took from his pocket Tama’s last two letters, which he had not destroyed because they had come just before he left and he wanted to read them again. He opened them and spread them before Chiang.

They were simple letters, written in Tama’s fine clear handwriting. She had not returned to her father’s house because when I-wan was gone she found she could not. So now these letters were full of small things such as how a certain tree had grown in the garden and how the chrysanthemums they had planted together were in bloom again and how a storm from the sea had torn the paper in the lattice to the west, and she and Jiro had mended it, and how big the boys grew and how she told them their father was a hero and that he fought for his country, which was theirs too, and that he must think of them as waiting for the future when they would all be united again. They were, indeed, nothing but the letters which any wife would write to her husband whom she loved and who was at the front in any war.

He watched Chiang’s face while he read them. But he could tell nothing from it, and he waited while Chiang folded the letters and put them into the envelopes, slowly as though he were thinking of something. Then he handed them back to I-wan.

“And now — is there anything you wish?” he demanded.

“Only to have a few days with my father,” I-wan replied quickly. “We will visit our ancestral lands together, which we have never seen.”

“And then?” Chiang demanded again.

“To return to my place in the army,” I-wan replied.

“Granted!” Chiang exclaimed. He turned away and struck the bell on his desk and the door opened and his wife came in and I-wan knew himself dismissed. He rose and bowed, but Chiang was not looking at him.

“Where is that map of the new road to Burma?” he was asking her as though she had not been away from him. “I had my hand on it a moment ago.”

“Here it is,” she said, laughing at him a little, “here under your hand!”

And I-wan went out with these words in his ears. The new road to Burma! Was that finished already? He had heard it was being made — thousands of men and women were making it. Well, it was a strange way to fight a war, perhaps, to make a great road westward while the enemy bombed the east! But it was their way. What if the real country his sons would know was this new inner China, looking not seaward but across the mountains to India? Who knew? But who knew anything?

And he went to find his father.