“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.”