And now this school began to be the great pastime of Yuan’s days, for he truly did love learning. He bought his great heap of new books and held them piled beneath his arms, and he bought pencils and at last he proudly bought a foreign pen such as all the other students had, and fastened it upon his coat’s edge, and he laid aside forever his old brush, except when he wrote to his father once a month.
All the books were magic to Yuan. He turned their clean, unknown pages eagerly, and he longed to print each word upon his mind, and learn and learn for very love of learning. He rose at dawn if he could wake and read his books, and he memorized the things he did not understand; whole pages he put to his memory like this. And when he had eaten his early breakfast — solitary, because neither Ai-lan nor his mother rose as soon as he did on school days, he rushed off, walking through the still half-empty streets and was the first to reach his classrooms always. And if a teacher came a little early, too, then Yuan took it as a chance for learning and he overcame his shyness and put what questions that he could. If sometimes a teacher did not come at all, then Yuan did not, as the common students did, rejoice in an hour for holiday. No, rather he took it as a loss he could not happily bear, and spent the hour in studying what the teacher might have taught.
This learning was the sweetest pastime therefore to Yuan. He could not learn enough of history of all the countries of the world, of foreign stories and of verses, of studies of the flesh of beasts; most of all he loved to study the inner shapes of leaves and seeds and roots of plants, to know how the rain and sun can mold the soil, to learn when to plant a certain crop, and how select its seeds, and how increase its harvest. All this and much more did Yuan learn. He begrudged himself the time for food and sleep except that his great lad’s body was always hungry, too, and needing food and sleep. But this the lady mother watched, and while she said nothing, yet she watched him, although he scarcely knew it, and she saw to it that certain dishes which he loved were often set before him.
He saw his cousins often, too, and they were daily more a part of Yuan’s life, for Sheng was in a classroom with him, and often had his verses or his writing read aloud and praised. At such times Yuan looked with humble envy at him, and wished his verses were as smoothly rhymed, although Sheng looked down most modestly and pretended it was nothing to him to be praised. And he might have been believed, except that on his pretty mouth a little smile of pride sat very often and betrayed him when he did not know it. As for Yuan, at this time he wrote very little verse, because he lived too occupied for any dreaming, and if he did write, the words came roughly and he could not make them grouped and as they used to be. It seemed to him that his thoughts were too big for him, unshaped, not easily to be grasped and caught into a form of words. Even when he smoothed and polished and wrote them over many times, his old scholar teacher often said, “It interests me, it is fair enough, but I do not catch just what you mean.”
Thus he paused one day when Yuan had written a poem about a seed, and Yuan could not say what his meaning was exactly, either, and he stammered out, “I meant — I think I meant to say that in the seed, in that last atom of the seed, when it is cast into the ground, there is an instant, a place perhaps, when seed becomes no longer matter, but a sort of spirit, an energy, a kind of life, a moment between spirit and material, and if we could catch that transmuting instant, when the seed begins to grow, understand the change—”
“Ah, yes,” the teacher said, doubtfully. A kindly, aged man he was who kept his spectacles low on his nose and stared across them now at Yuan. He had taught so many years he knew exactly what he wanted and so what was right, and now he laid Yuan’s verses down and he pushed his spectacles and said half-thinkingly, and picking up the next paper, “Not very clear, I fear, in your mind. … Now, here’s a better one, called ‘A Walk on a Summer’s Day’—very nice — I’ll read it.” It was Sheng’s verse for that day.
Yuan fell to silence and kept his thoughts to himself, listening. He envied Sheng his pretty, swiftly running thoughts and pure rhymes; yet it was not bitter envy, either, but very humble and admiring envy, even as Yuan loved secretly his cousin’s handsome looks, so much more clearly handsome than his own.
Yet Yuan never knew Sheng’s self, for with all his smiling courteous seeming openness, none ever knew Sheng well. He could give anywhere the gentlest words of praise and kindness, but though he spoke often and easily, yet what he said never told his inner thought. Sometimes he came to Yuan and said, “Let us go and see a picture today after school — there is a very good foreign picture at the Great World Theatre,” yet when they both had walked there together and sat three hours through and come away again, and though Yuan had liked being with his cousin, still when he thought of it he could not remember that Sheng had said anything. He only could remember in the dim theatre Sheng’s smiling face and his shining, strangely oval eyes. Only once Sheng said of Meng and his cause, “I am not one of them — I never shall be a revolutionist. I love my life too well, and I love only beauty. I am moved only by beauty. I have no wish to die in any cause. Some day I shall sail across the sea, and if it is more beautiful there than here, it may be I shall never come back again — how do I know? I have no wish to suffer for the common people. They are filthy and they smell of garlic. Let them die. Who will miss them?”
This he said in the most tranquil pleasantness while they sat in the gilded theatre and looked about upon the well-dressed men and women there, all eating cakes and nuts and smoking foreign cigarettes, and he might have been the voice of all of them speaking. Yet though Yuan liked his cousin very well, he could not but feel a coldness in him at the calmness of these words, “Let them die.” For Yuan still did hate death, and though at this time in his life the poor were not near him, he did not want them to die, nevertheless.
But these words of Sheng’s that day prompted Yuan to ask another time more concerning Meng. Meng and Yuan had not talked very often together, but they played on one side of the game of ball, and Yuan liked the fierceness of Meng’s thrust and leaping. Meng had the hardest tightest body of them all. Most of the young men were pale and slackly hung and they wore too many clothes they did not take off easily, so that they ran anyhow as children do, and fumbled at the ball, or threw it sidewise as a girl might, or kicked it mildly so that it rolled along the ground and stopped very soon. But Meng sprang at the ball as though it were his enemy and he kicked it with his hard leather-shod foot, and up it soared and came down with a great bound and flew up again, and all his body hardened at the play, and Yuan liked this as well as he liked Sheng’s beauty.
So one day he asked of Sheng, “How do you know Meng is a revolutionist?” and Sheng answered, “Because he tells me so. He has always told me something of what he does, and I am the only one he tells, I think. I live in a little fear for him, too, sometimes. I dare not tell my father or my mother, nor my eldest brother even, what he does, for I know they would accuse him, and he is so fiery and so angry in his nature that he would run away forever. He trusts me now and tells me very much and so I know what he is doing, although I know there are secrets that he will not tell, for he has taken some wild oath of patriotism, and he has cut his arm and let his blood and written down his oath in blood, I know.”
“And are there many of these revolutionists among our schoolmates?” Yuan asked, somewhat troubled, for he had thought that here he was safe enough, and now it seemed he was not safe, for this was the very thing his comrades in the school of war did, and still he did not want to join them.