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—”