Without a doubt. The shouts were acclamations. Difficult still to distinguish from yells of fear; Kyo had heard similar shouts from a mob fleeing before a flood. The hammering of footsteps changed into a ripple, then continued: the soldiers had stopped and were starting off in another direction.
“They’ve been told that the armored train is here,” said Kyo.
Those in the train no doubt did not hear the shouts so well as they, but they could not help hearing the beating of the footsteps, transmitted by the resonance of the steel-plates.
A tremendous uproar took all three of them by surprise: with every piece, every machine-gun, every rifle, the train was firing. Katov had been in one of the Siberian armored trains; his imagination, getting the better of made him participate in the last moments of this one. The officers had given the command to fire at wil. What could they do in their turrets, a telephone in one hand, a revolver in the other? Each soldier guessed no doubt what that hammering of footsteps meant. Were they preparing to die together, or to throw themselves upon one another, in that enormous submarine which would never rise again?
The train was working itself into a frenzy. Stil firing. from every gun, shaken by its very panic, it seemed to want to tear itself from its rails, as if the desperate rage of the men it sheltered had passed into the imprisoned armor, which was also struggling. What fascinated Katov in this unbridled outburst was not the mortal intoxication into which the men of the train were sinking; it was the quivering of the rails which resisted all those roars: he made a forward movement with his arm, to prove to himself that he was not paralyzed. Thirty seconds, and the uproar ceased. Above the dull reverberation of the footsteps and the tictac of all the clocks in the shop, a rumble of heavy iron became dominant: the artillery of the revolutionary army.
Behind each steel-plate a man on the train heard that noise as the voice of death itself.
Part Three. March 27
HANKOW was close by: the to and fro movement of sampans almost covered the river. The chimneys of the arsenal became detached from the hill behind it little by little, almost invisible under their enormous smoke; through the bluish light of the spring evening the city with all its colonnaded bank buildings appeared at last through the sharp black framework of the foreground — the battleships of the Western nations. For six days Kyo had been ascending the river, without news from Shanghai.
A foreign launch whistled against the ship’s side. Kyo’s papers were in order, and he was accustomed to clandestine action. He merely took the precaution to move to the forward part of the ship.
‘What do they want?” he asked a mechanic.
“They want to know if we have rice or coal on board. We’re not allowed to bring in any.’’
“In the name of what?”
‘A pretext. If we bring coal they say nothing, but they arrange somehow to have the ship laid up in port. No way of bringing provisions to the city.”
Over there were chimneys, cranes, reservoirs-the allies of the Revolution. But Shanghai had taught Kyo what an active port was like. The one he saw before him was full of nothing but junks and torpedo-boats. He took his field-glasses: a freight-steamer, two, three.
. A few more. His was docking on the Wuchang side. He would have to take the ferry to get to Hankow.
He went ashore. On the dock an officer on duty was watching the passengers land.
“Why so few ships?” asked Kyo.
“The Companies have got everything out of sight: they’re afraid of the requisition.”
Everyone in Shanghai thought the requisition had been put into effect long before.
“When does the ferry leave?”
“Every half-hour.”
He had twenty minutes to wait. He walked about at random. The kerosene lamps were being lit inside the shops; here and there silhouettes of trees and the curved- up roof-ridges rose against the Western sky, where a light without source lingered, seeming to emanate from the sofmess of the sky itself and to blend far, far up with the serenity of the night. In the black holes of shops-notwithstanding the soldiers and the Workers’ Unions-doctors with toad-signs, dealers in herbs and monsters, public writers, casters of spells, astrologers, and fortune-tellers continued their timeless trades by the dim light which blotted out the blood-stains. The shadows melted rather than stretched on the ground, bathed in a bluish phosphorescence; the last flash of the superb evening that was being staged far away, somewhere in the infinity of worlds, of which only a reflection suffused the earth, was glowing faintly through an enormous archway surmounted by a pagoda eaten away with blackened ivy. Beyond the din of bells and phonographs and the myriad dots and patches of light, a battalion was disappearing into the darkness which had gathered in the mist over the river. Kyo went down to a yard filled with enormous stone blocks: those of the walls, leveled to the ground in sign of the liberation of China. The ferry was close by.
Another fifteen minutes on the river, watching the city rise into the evening sky. At last, Hankow.
Rickshaws were waiting on the quay, but Kyo's anxiety was too great to allow him to remain idle. He preferred to walk. The British concession which England had abandoned in January, the great world banks shut down, but not occupied. “Anguish-a strange sensation: you feel by your heart-beats that you’re not breathing easily, as if you were breathing with your heart. ” It was becoming stronger than lucidity. At the corner of a street, in the clearing of a large garden full of trees in bloom, gray in the evening mist, the chimneys of the Western manufactures appeared. No smoke. Of all the chimneys he saw, only the ones of the Arsenal were operating. Was it possible that Hankow, the city to which the Communists of the entire world were looking to save China, was on strike? The Arsenal was working; could they at least count on the Red army? He no longer dared to run. If Hankow was not what everyone believed it was, all his people were already condemned to death. May too. And himself.
At last, the building of the International Delegation.
The entire villa was lighted up. Kyo knew that Borodin was working on the top story; on the ground-floor the printing-press was running at full speed, with the clatter of an enormous ventilator in bad condition.
A guard in a rough-neck sweater examined Kyo. Taking him for a Japanese he was already pointing out to him the orderly in charge of directing strangers, when his eye fell upon the papers Kyo was handing him; he immediately led him through the crowded entrance to the section of the International in charge of Shanghai. Of the secretary who received him Kyo only knew that he had organized the first insurrections in Finland; a comrade, his hand held out across his desk, while he gave his name: Vologin. He had the plumpness of a ripe woman rather than of a man; was this impression due to the delicacy of his features, both full and ruddy, slightly Levantine in spite of his’ fair complexion, or to the long strands of hair, mrning gray, cut to be brushed back but which fell over his cheeks like stiff bands?
“Things look very bad in Shanghai,” said Kyo abruptly. “We’re headed in the wrong direction.”
His own words surprised him: his thoughts were running ahead of him. Yet his words said what he would have wanted to say: if Hankow could not bring the help that the sections were expecting from it, to give up their arms would be suicide.
Vologin, ensconced in his armchair, drew his hands up into the khaki sleeves of his uniform and bent his head a little forward.
“Still!. ” he muttered.
“First of all, what’s going on here?”
“Go on: in what respect are we pursuing the wrong policy in Shanghai? ”
“But why, why aren’t the manufacmres running?” “Wait a minute. Who are the comrades who’re protesting?”