And it was indeed this that made Gisors suffer. If Kyo went in for killing, that was his role. And if not, it didn’t matter: what Kyo did was well done. But he was appalled by this sudden sensation, this certainty of the fatality of murder, an intoxication as terrible as his own was innocent. He felt how inadequately he had brought to Ch’en the relief which he sought, how solitary murder is-how great a distance was growing, by virtue of this torment, between himself and Kyo. For the first time, the phrase he had so often repeated, “There is no knowledge of beings,” attached itself in his mind to the face of his son.
As for Ch’en, did he really know him? He did not at all believe that memories enable one to understand men. There was Ch’en’s early education, which had been religious; when he had begun to be interested in the adolescent orphan-his parents had been killed in the pillage of Kalgan-Ch’en, insolent and taciturn, had just come from the Lutheran college. He had been the pupil of a consumptive intellectual who had reached pastorship late in life, and who was struggling patiently at the age of fifty to overcome, by charity, an intense religious anxiety. Obsessed by the shame of the body which tormented Saint Augustine, of the degraded body in which one must live with Christ-through horror of the ritual civilization of China which surrounded him and made the appeal of the true religious life even more imperious — this pastor had worked out in his anguished mind his own image of Luther, on which he would occasionally hold forth to Gisors: “There is life only in God; but man, through sin, is degraded to such a point, so irremediably sullied, that to attain God is a kind of sacrilege. Whence Christ, whence his eternal crucifixion.” Which left grace, that is to say limitless love or terror, according to the strength or weakness of hope; and this terror was a new sin. Which also left charity; but charity does not always suffice to dispel anguish.
The pastor had become attached to Ch’en. He had no suspicion that the uncle in charge of Ch’en had sent him to the missionaries only in order that he might learn English and French, and had put him on his guard against their teaching, especially against the idea of hell which the Confucian mistrusted. The child, who learned to know Christ, and not Satan or God-the pastor’s experience had taught him that men never become converted except to mediators-gave himself over to love with the wholeheartedness which he brought to everything he did. But the respect of the schoolboy for his master was sufficiently strong-the only thing which China had deeply instilled in ^m-for the pastor’s anguish to be communicated to him, in spite of the love he had been taught; and a hell was disclosed to him, more terrible and more convincing than the one he had been supposedly forewarned against.
The uncle returned. Appalled when he found^what his nephew had become, he manifested a delicate satisfaction, sent little jade and crystal trees to the director, to the pastor, to several others; a week later he sent for Ch’en to come home and, the following week, sent him to the University of Peking.
Gisors, still rolling his imaginary cigarette, his halfopen mouth expressing the bewilderment of one deep in thought, made an effort to recall the adolescent as he had been at that time. But how could one separate him, isolate him from the person he had become? “I think of his religious spirit because Kyo has never had any, and at this moment every profound difference between them reassures me. Why do I have the impression of knowing him better than my son?” It was because he saw more clearly the way in which he had modified him; this essential modification-fczs work-was precise, with well-defined limits, and there was nothing about men that he knew better than what he had given to them.
No sooner had he observed Ch’en than he had understood that this adolescent was incapable of living by an ideology which did not immediately become transformed into action. As he was devoid of charity, a religious calling could lead him only to contemplation or the inner life; but he hated contemplation, and would only have dreamt of an apostleship, for which precisely his absence of charity disqualified him. In order to live he therefore needed first of all to escape from his Christianity. (From half-confidences, it seemed that the acquaintance of prostitutes and students had made him overcome the only sin that had always been stronger than Ch’en’s will-power, masturbation; and with it, a constantly recurring feeling of anxiety and degradation.) When his new master had opposed Christianity, not with arguments, but with other forms of greamess, faith had sifted through Ch’en’s fingers, imperceptibly, without crisis, like sand. His faith had detached him from China, accustomed him to isolate himself from the world instead of submitting to it; and he had understood through Gisors that everything had happened as if this period of his life had been merely an initiation in the sense of heroism: what good is a soul, if there is neither God nor Christ?
At this point Gisors’ train of thought brought him back to his son, who had never been exposed to Christianity but whose Japanese education (Kyo had lived in Japan from his eighth to his seventeenth year) had also imposed the conviction that ideas were not to be thought, but lived. Kyo had chosen action, in a grave and premeditated way, as others choose a military career, or the sea: he left his father, lived in Canton, in Tientsin, the life of day-laborers and coolies, in order to organize the syndicates. Ch’en-his uncle, taken as hostage at the capture of Swatow, and unable to pay his ransom, had been executed-had found himself without money, provided only with worthless diplomas, with his twenty- four years and with China before him. He was a truck- driver when the Northern routes were dangerous, then an assistant chemist, then nothing. Everything had pushed him into political activity: the hope of a different world, the possibility of eating, though wretchedly (he was naturally austere, perhaps through pride), the gratification of his hatreds, his mind, his character. This activity gave a meaning to his solitude.
But with Kyo everything was simpler. The heroic sense had given him a kind of discipline, not a kind of justification of life. He was not restless. His life had a meaning, and he knew what it was: to give to each of these men whom famine, at this very moment, was killing off like a slow plague, the sense of his own dignity. He belonged with them: they had the same enemies. A half-breed, an outcast, despised by the white men and even more by the white women, Kyo had not tried to win them: he had sought and had found his own kind. “There is no possible dignity, no real life for a man who works twelve hours a day without knowing why he works.” That work would have to take on a meaning, become a faith. Individual problems existed for Kyo only in his private life.
All this Gisors knew. “And yet, if Kyo were to enter and tell me, like Ch’en a while ago: ‘It is I who killed Tang Yen Ta,’ I would think, ‘I knew it.’ All the possibilities within him echo in me with such force that, whatever he might tell me, I would think, ‘I knew it. ’ ” Through the window he looked out at the motionless and indifferent night. “But if I really knew it, and not in this uncertain and appalling fashion, I would save him.” A painful affirmation, of which he did not believe a word. What confidence did he have in his own mind?
Since Kyo’s departure his mind had served only to justify his son’s activity, an activity which at that time was obscurely beginning somewhere in Central China or in the Southern provinces (often, for three months on end, he did not even know where). If the restless students felt his intelligence ready to help them, reaching out to them with so much warmth and insight, it was not, as the idiots of Peking then believed, because he found amusement in living vicariously in lives from which his age separated him: it was because in all those dramas that were so much alike he recognized that of his son. When he showed his students, almost all of them petty bourgeois, that they must ally themselves either with the military chiefs or with the proletariat, when he told those who had chosen: “Marxism is not a doctrine, it is a will. For the proletariat and those who belong with them-you-it is the will to know themselves, to feel themselves as proletarians, and to conquer as such; you must be Marxists not in order to be right, but in order to conquer without betraying yourselves,”-when he told them this he was talking to Kyo, he was defending him. And, if he knew that it was not Kyo’s incisive mind answering him when, after those lectures, he found his room filled with white flowers from the students, according to the Chinese custom, at least he knew that these hands that were preparing to kill by bringing him camelias would tomorrow press those of his son, who would need them. That was why strength of character attracted him so much, why he had become attached to Ch’en. But, at the time when he had become attached to him, had he foreseen this rainy night when the young man, speaking of blood that had hardly coagulated, would come to him and say: “It’s not only horror that I feel. ”?