“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.