The door was at a distance, the. balcony was nearer; but it was from the balcony that the shadow loomed.
Although Ch’en did not believe in spirits, he was paralyzed, unable to turn round. He jumped: mewing! Half relieved, he dared to look: it was an alley-cat. Its eyes riveted on him, it stalked through the window on noiseless paws. As the shadow advanced, an uncontrollable rage shook Ch’en-not against the creature itself, but against its presence. Nothing living must venture into the wild region where he was thrown: whatever Y,d seen him hold this dagger prevented him from returning to the world of men. He opened the razor, took a step forward: the creature fled by way of the balcony. Ch’en pursued it. … He found himself suddenly facing Shanghai.
In his anguish the night seemed to whirl like an enormous smoke-cloud shot with sparks; slowly it settled into immobility, as his breathing grew less violent in the cooler outside air. Between the tattered clouds, the stars resumed their endless course. A siren moaned, and then became lost in the poignant serenity. Below, far down, the midnight lights, reflected through a yellow mist by the wet macadam, by the pale streaks of rails, shimmered with the life of men who do not kill. Those were millions of lives, and all now rejected his; but what was their wretched condemnation beside death, which was withdrawing from him, which seemed to flow away from his body in long draughts, like the other’s blood? All that expanse of darkness, now motionless, now quivering with sparks, was life, like the river, like the invisible sea in the distance-the sea.
Breathing at last to the very depth of his lungs, he seemed to be returning to that life with infinite gratitude — ready to weep, as much upset as he had been a few moments before. “Imust get away. ” He remained, watching the stir of the cars, of the passers-by running beneath him in the lighted street, as a blind man who has recovered his sight looks, as a starved man eats. Avidly, with an unquenchable thirst for life, he would have liked to touch those bodies. A siren filled the whole horizon, beyond the river: the relief of the night workers, at the arsenal. Stupid workers, coming to manufacture the firearms destined to kill those who were fighting for them! Would this illuminated city remain possessed like a field of battle, its millions hired for death, like a herd of cattle, to the war-lords and to Western commerce? His act of murder was equal to incalculable hours of work in the arsenals of China. The insurrection which would give Shanghai over to the revolutionary troops was imminent. Yet the insurrectionists did not possess two hundred guns. Their first act was to be the disarming of the police for the purpose of arming their own troops. But if they obtained the guns (almost three hundred) which this go- between, the dead man, had negotiated to sell to the government, they doubled their chances of success. In the last ten minutes, however, Ch’en had not even given it a thought.
And he had not yet taken the paper for which he had killed this man. He went back into the room, as he would have returned to a prison. The clothes were hanging at the foot of the bed, under the mosquito-netting. He searched the pockets. A handkerchief, cigarettes. No wallet. The room remained the same: the mosquito- net, the blank walls, the clear rectangle of light; murder changes nothing. He slipped his hand under the pillow, shutting his eyes. He felt the wallet, very small, like a purse. In shame or horror-for the light weight of the head through the pillow was even more disturbing- he opened his eyes: no blood on the bolster, and the man did not look atail dead. Would he have to kill again then? But already his glance, encountering the white eyes, the blood on the sheets, reassured him. To ransack the wallet he withdrew towards the light, which came from a restaurant filled with gamblers. He found the document, kept the wallet, crossed the room almost on the run, locked the door with a double tum, put the key in his pocket. At the end of the hotel corridor-he made an effort to slow his pace-no lift. Should he ring? He walked down. On the floor below, that of the dance- hall, the bar and the billiard-room, ten or more persons were waiting for the lift which was just stopping. He followed them in. “The dancing-girl in red is damned good-looking!” said the man next to in English, a slightly drunk Burman or Siamese. Ch’en had the simultaneous impulse to hit him in the face to make him stop, and to hug him because he was alive. Instead of answering he mumbled incoherently; the other tapped him on the shoulder with a knowing air. “He thinks I’m drunk too. But the man started to open his mouth again. “I don’t know any foreign languages,” said Ch’en in Pekingese. The other kept silent and, intrigued, looked at this young man who had no collar, but who was wearing a sweater of fine wool. Ch’en was facing the mirror in the lift. The murder left no trace upon his face. His features-more Mongolian than Chinese, sharp cheekbones, a very flat nose but with a slight ridge, like a beak-had not changed, expressed nothing but fatigue; even to his solid shoulders, his thick good-natured lips, on which nothing unusual seemed to weigh; only his arm, sticky when he bent it, and hot. The lift stopped. He went out with the group.
He bought a bottle of mineral water, and called a taxi, a closed car, in which he bathed his arm and bandaged
it with a handkerchief. The deserted rails and the puddles from the afternoon showers shone feebly. They reflected the glowing sky. Without knowing why, Ch’en looked up: how much nearer the sky had been a while back, when he had discovered the stars! He was getting farther away from it as his anguish subsided, as he returned to the world of men. At the end of the street the machine-gun cars, almost as gray as the puddles, the bright streaks of bayonets carried by silent shadows: the post, the boundary of the French concession; the taxi went no farther. Ch’en showed his false passport identifying him as an electrician employed on the concession. The inspector looked at the paper casually (“What I have just done obviously doesn’t show”) and let him pass. Before him, at a right angle, the Avenue of the Two Republics, the limit of the Chinese city.
Isolation and silence. From here the rumbling waves carrying all the noises of the greatest city of China sounded infinitely remote, like sounds issuing from the bottom of a well-all the turmoil of war, and the last nervous agitations of a multitude that will not sleep. But it was far in the distance that men lived; here nothing remained of the world but night, to which Ch’en instinctively attuned himself as to a sudden friendship: this nocturnal, anxious world was not opposed to murder. A world from which men had disappeared, a world without end; would daylight ever return upon those crumbling tiles, upon all those narrow streets at the end of which a lantern lighted a windowless wall, a nest of telegraph wires? There was a world of murder, and it held him with a kind of warmth. No life, no presence, no nearby sound, not even the cry of the petty merchants, not even the stray dogs.
At last, a squalid shop: Lu Yu Hman H^^elrich,
Phonographs. Now to return among men.. He waited a few minutes without freeing himself entirely, knocked finally at a shutter. The door opened almost immediately: a shop full of records arranged with care, having vaguely the look of a poor library; the room back of the shop, large, bare, and four comrades in shirtsleeves.
The shutting of the door caused the lamp to swing back and forth: the faces disappeared, reappeared: to the left, quite round, Lu Yu Hsiian; Hemmelrich, who looked like a boxer gone to seed, with his shaved head, broken nose, and protruding shoulders. In back, in the shadow, Katov. To the right, Kyo Gisors; in passing over his head the lamp accentuated the drooping comers of his mouth; as it swung away it displaced the shadows and his half-breed face appeared almost European. The oscillations of the lamp became shorter and shorter: Kyo’s two faces reappeared by turns, less and less different from each other.