Patriot

by Pearl S. Buck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Where did you get it?” he asked.

  His father stared at him sternly.

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

  I-wan felt his body grow weak.

  “Chiang Kai-shek—” he faltered.

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

  “But Nanking—” I-wan stammered.

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

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

  “I saw him yesterday,” his father said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  His father leaped up and seized him by the arm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  PART TWO

  II

  THE SHIP WAS MOVING slowly among small green islands, threading its way through a shimmer of bright blue water and sunshine. The air was warm and still, except for the fall of water at the prow, and in the vistas between the islands he could see flights of small Japanese fishing vessels, their sails white against the blue sky. He lay in his chair, gazing at it, empty of thought. That was the only way to endure his complete helplessness—simply not to think, not to remember.

  Sometimes he felt, pushing through the emptiness, the old wish that at least he might have told En-lan—and then he summoned the emptiness to wash that away, too. There was no way whereby he could tell En-lan. En-lan perhaps was dead already. He could not even write to Peony. Peony was gone. He wondered dully when she had gone and where. He remembered so clearly his father’s unbelieving shout, “Peony gone!” Then he summoned the emptiness again to wash it all away.

  All of it was gone—all the hopes they had had together. He felt a sharp remorse when he thought of the brigade. They were doubtless back again at the mill, working as they had before in their old hopelessness. They would think he was a liar after all—perhaps even that he had betrayed them. But perhaps they would only think he was dead. He hoped that was what they thought—that he was dead. He never, never wanted to see them again.

  But lying in the emptiness of the sky and water, watching the dreaming islands slip by, he had come at last to cease hating his father. He had come to see it would have been impossible for him to have stayed in Shanghai, even if he had not been killed, especially if he had not been killed. To have had to go back to the old life, shorn of its plans, back to the round of school and home without the hope of anything to come, back to his grandmother and the reek of that opium—no, it could not have been. And Peony gone. They would not look for Peony in that house. No, his father would simply say, “Let her go—she is nothing but a bondmaid. Get another to take her place.”

  It was all impossible to think about. He shut his eyes and his lids smarted. His heart felt crushed in his breast. There were many ways of breaking a heart. Stories were full of hearts broken by love, but what really broke a heart was taking away its dream—whatever the dream might be.

  He lay in the emptiness, giving himself up. The soft sea air swept over him. He heard a sailor call a sounding somewhere, his voice musical in the silence. There was no meaning now to anything. He closed his eyes. Let nights drift over him and days pass him by.

  He would have liked to stay on the ship forever, but that of course he could not. In a few minutes the ship would dock at Nagasaki, and beyond that his ticket did not go. He had his father’s written instructions and now he read them over again. Since he cared about nothing he might as well follow them. At the dock, he read in his father’s heavy writing, he would be met and taken to the home of Muraki, the merchant. “Mr. Muraki is an old friend,” his father wrote, “and he will keep you in his home. I have asked him to give you a place in his business. Of course you need not be dependent on your earni
ngs. Let me know what you need, after you have spent what I have given you. But I want you to go to work, and when I think it is safe you may return.”

  “I will never return,” I-wan said to himself in his cabin. If he could not return to such a country as he had dreamed of, then he would be an exile forever. He had no country. He closed his bag and took it and went up on deck. It was already noon, and the ship was slowing to anchor in the bay.

  The land looked strange to him. A steep mountain range pressed almost to the sea, but between its foot and the shore there was a small city, stretched long and narrow. The houses were angular and squat. The tiles on their flat roofs were gleaming in the sun, but over the mountain tops a cloud hung, black and full of rain. Around the ship coal barges were beginning to flock, and short thick-bodied Japanese coolies, men and women, were stooping themselves ready to heave from shoulder to shoulder the baskets of coal. He could hear them chattering, and it did not seem strange that he could understand nothing of what they said. Nothing was strange any more—everything had already happened to him, and everything was over.

  He took up his bag and followed the others along the swaying ladder down the ship’s side into a small launch. He had spoken to no one on the ship and he knew no one. Most of them were Americans, going ashore for sight-seeing. Their English he could barely understand, since he was accustomed to Miss Maitland’s sort of English, and Mr. Ranald’s. When he thought of Mr. Ranald he thought for a second of Peng Liu and how he had wanted to put Mr. Ranald’s name on the death list. That death list! A very different one had served at last. He thought dully, “It was Peng Liu who betrayed us.” Then he drew emptiness resolutely about him again. Peng Liu did not matter. Miss Maitland and Mr. Ranald were doubtless teaching their classes as usual, except that certain seats were empty…. Was En-lan dead? He would never know.

  The launch was puffing through the smooth bright water. Suddenly across the sunshine a slanting rain fell, silver and cool.

  “Regular Nagasaki weather,” an American voice said.

  “Gives ’em the most glorious gardens in the world,” another answered.

  Above them the cloud had stretched a dark arm toward the sun. In a moment it was gone and the rain stopped. The launch was at the dock now, and among them all I-wan stepped off. The land rocked a moment under his feet. He stood looking around him. Then he saw a young Japanese in western dress come to him, and he heard his voice, speaking Chinese, strongly accented, “Is it Wu I-wan?”

  “Yes, if you please,” I-wan answered, “I am that humble one.”

  “I am Mr. Muraki’s son,” the young man answered, “Bunji, by name. My father invites you to our house.”

  He smiled, his teeth white and his eyes pleasant. He took off his hat and his stiff black hair stood up about his square face like a circular brush.

  “I say,” he said suddenly, “shall we speak English? It’s easier for me, though I speak it badly, too.”

  “Yes,” I-wan replied, “if you like.”

  To himself he thought, climbing into a small motor car with this Bunji Muraki, that he never wanted to speak his own tongue again. He wanted to cut off his whole life and begin from this moment. He would dream no more world dreams and hope for nothing and trust no one. He would live from moment to moment, never thinking beyond. In such a mood he seated himself beside Bunji Muraki and allowed himself to be driven away.

  They stopped before a thatch-roofed gate in a low brick wall. Bunji opened the door of the car and leaped out. He moved with an angular sharp precision, as if his muscles had been drilled to a count of one, two, three, four.

  “We live here,” he said, his white teeth shining again in a smile. Then he reached for I-wan’s bag.

  “No, don’t—I’ll take it,” I-wan said.

  “No—no, I—” Bunji protested.

  They ended by carrying it between them for a few steps until at the gate a stooped old man in a short-skirted cotton coat took it from them.

  “He is our gardener,” Bunji said. “Let him have it.”

  He led the way through a garden laid out in a landscape of miniature hills and lakes. A tiny red-varnished footbridge carried them over a stream and the path led them around a curve where at the far end they could see the house. It was a low-roofed building whose white-papered lattices gleamed through the dark-leafed flowering trees. Everything in the garden was so perfect, that it was impossible not to be diverted by it. There was not a leaf upon the moss planted under the trees, not a rock out of place in the stream tinkling in little artificial waterfalls.

  “My father’s garden is quite famous,” Bunji said. He pointed ahead. “There is my father now.”

  I-wan saw in the distance a slender old man in a silk kimono of silver gray, standing under an early flowering cherry tree. He had pulled a small branch downward and was looking at the buds. As they drew near he turned.

  “Hah!” he said to his son, “you are here!” He spoke in Japanese. But when Bunji said, “This is our guest,” he said in a stiff old-fashioned Chinese, such as he might have learned from books, “In this little house, the son of my old friend is welcome beyond any others.”

  I-wan liked this old man at once. In that other life before this emptiness fell upon him En-lan had said, “When we get our own world set right, we must fight the Japanese and get back what they have taken from us.” Ever since the Twenty-one Demands it was one’s duty to hate the Japanese and to talk of war one day to come. But he could not hate this old gentle man. His skin was a pale gold beneath his silver-white hair, but his eyes were black and young. He was so small that I-wan looked down upon him as he might a child. Who could dislike him?

  “It is very kind of you to accept me. I do not deserve it,” he replied.

  “Hah—your father is my friend, and all we have is yours,” Mr. Muraki said. He was still clinging to the branch. “You see,” he said, “the cherry trees are about to bloom. You have come at just the moment. In six days all Japan will be in blossom.”

  “My father lives for this each spring,” Bunji said to I-wan, “and then he lives for the chrysanthemums in the autumn.”

  They stood a moment, half awkwardly. Mr. Muraki was smiling a little at his son.

  “Hah,” he said with his soft, indrawing breath, “you had better allow him to go in and refresh himself, Bunji.”

  He nodded and turned to the tree, dismissing them.

  “My father is retired,” Bunji said. He was leading the way again. “My two brothers are heads now of his business.”

  “And you?” I-wan asked.

  “Oh, I am a clerk there, only,” Bunji laughed. “I see to packing and billing. It is import and export business.”

  They were at a wide door, and two pretty servant girls fluttered out in brightly flowered cotton kimonos. Bunji stopped and thrust out one foot. One of the girls dropped to her knees and began unlacing his leather shoe. I-wan had heard of this, and when the other knelt at his foot, he, too, tried not to feel it strange to have women there serving him. He felt his shoes drawn off and his feet slipped into soft straw slippers. Then he followed Bunji up the steps into the house. He had never seen one like it. There were many rooms, only partly shut off from each other by the white-papered lattices, which were screens. It was like stepping into a huge clean honeycomb. There was the smell of the clean matting on which they walked, the fragrance of un-painted woods. And through all the open rooms floated the airy fragrance of the garden coming into spring.

  “My father likes to live entirely in the old-fashioned Japanese way,” Bunji said. “So—you see—but in your room we have put a chair. In my room, too. My married brother, Shio, however, has chairs in each room in his house in Yokohama. He is quite modern!”

  Bunji laughed loudly and I-wan smiled. Within himself he still felt complete quiet. Moment by moment, that was how he wanted to live now. He found this moment amusing, but nothing could excite him, however strange.

  “Here is your room,” Bunji said. “It i
s next to mine—see, it opens on the garden!”

  He drew a latticed screen aside, and I-wan saw a small square room. There was no bed, nothing but a bamboo armchair and table and in a recess a scroll upon which was written a poem, and beneath it a branch of budding hawthorn in a green vase. There was no other decoration, until Bunji slid another screen away, and there was a corner of the garden. The wall was only a few feet away, but a dwarfed maple tree grew against it, its buds scarlet, and beneath was a small pool scarcely two feet square, and beside it a rock.

  “No one will come here except the gardeners,” Bunji said. “It is quite your own. And when you are ready to sleep, clap your hands and a maidservant will spread your quilts on the mats. Our midday meal will be ready in half an hour and a maidservant will bring you water to wash yourself. I will come back.” He put out his hand in a quick foreign fashion and I-wan put out his and they shook hands.

  He sat down when Bunji was gone and looked about him. The house was still. Everything was so still. He could hear the soft sibilance of distant sliding screens, and a low murmuring voice somewhere not near. The house was ordered, like the garden. There was no dust anywhere. The bit of garden seemed a part of the house. The few feet of grass were green and clipped, lying like a carpet where the polished floor of the room stopped. He felt wrapped about in peace. Life here was planned. There were lightness and clarity and absolute cleanliness, and in spite of fragility a feeling of long-settled stability. Precisely this life had been lived here for generations.