He picked up a message from the table. Kyo had not yet noticed his ecclesiastical hands. “Why didn’t he have him come up right away?" he wondered.
“A very serious matter. . (Vologin was reading the message.) They all say ‘a very serious matter’. "
“Is he here?"
“Wasn’t he supposed to come? They’re all the same: They almost always change their minds. He’s been here for-in fact-two or three hours: your boat was delayed considerably."
He telephoned the order to have Ch’en sent up. He didn’t like interviews with terrorists, whom he considered narrow, arrogant and lacking in political sense.
“Matters were even worse in Leningrad,” he said, “when Yudenich was before the city, and we managed to pull through just the same. ”
Ch’en entered, also wearing a sweater, passed before Kyo, sat down facing Vologin. The noise of the printing-press alone filled the silence. In the large window at a right angle to the desk the darkness, now complete, separated the profiles of the two men. Ch’en, his elbows on the desk, his chin in his hands-stubborn, tense-did not move. “Man’s complete impenetrability takes on something inhuman,” thought Kyo as he looked at ^rn. “Is it because we easily feel a sense of contact through our weaknesses?. ” Once he had got past his surprise he judged it inevitable that Ch’en should be here, that he should have come to affirm his decision himself (for he did not imagine that he would argue). On the other side of the rectangle of starry night stood Vologin, strands of his forelock falling over his face, his fat hands crossed on his chest, also waiting.
“Did he teU you?” asked Ch’en, indicating Kyo with a motion of his head.
“You know what the International thinks of terrorist acts,” Vologin answered. “I’m not going to make you- in short, a speech on that subject.”
“The present case is special. Chiang Kai-shek alone is sufciently popular and sufficiently strong to hold the bourgeoisie united against us. Do you oppose this execution, yes or no?”
He remained motionless, leaning on the desk with his elbows, his chin in his hands. Kyo knew the argument had no essential validity for Ch’en, even though he had come here. Destruction alone could put him in accord with himself.
“It’s not up to the International to approve your plan.” Vologin spoke in a matter of fact tone. “Moreover, even from your point of view. ” Ch’en still did not move “. is the moment, in short, well chosen?”
“You prefer to wait until Chiang has had our people murdered?”
“He will make decrees and nothing more. His son is in Moscow, don’t forget. And there’s also this: a number of Galen’s Russian officers have not been able to leave Chiang’s staff. They will be tortured if he is killed. Neither Galen nor the Russian staff will countenance it. ”
The question has apparently been discussed right here, thought Kyo. There was something indescribably futile and hollow in this discussion, which made him uneasy: he found Vologin singularly more determined when he ordered the arms to be given up than when he spoke of the murder of Chiang Kai-shek.
“If the Russian officers are tortured,” said Ch’en, “it can’t be helped. I also will be tortured. Of no interest. The millions of Chinese are surely worth fifteen Russian officers. Good. And Chiang will abandon his son.”
“What do you know about it?”
“And you? You undoubtedly won’t even dare to him.”
“Undoubtedly he loves his son less than himself,” said Kyo. “And if he does not try to crush us he is lost. If he does not stop peasant activity his own officers will leave him. So I’m afraid he’ll abandon the boy, after obtaining a few promises from the European consuls or some other such farce. And the whole petty bourgeoisie which you want to rally, Vologin, will follow him the day he disarms us: it will be on the side of force. I know them.”
140
“Remains to be proved. And there isn’t only Shanghai.”
“You say you’re dying of starvation. Once Shanghai has been lost, where will you get provisions? Feng Yu Hsiang separates you from Mongolia, and he will betray you if we are crushed. Therefore, nothing by the Yangtee, nothing from Russia. Do you think the peasants to whom you’ve promised the program of the Kuomintang (rw: nty-five per cent reduction in farm-rents, no joking- Oh, but really, no joking!) will die of hunger in order to feed the Red army? You’ll put yourself in the power of the Kuomintang even more completely than you are now. To undertake to fight against Chiang now, with real revolutionary slogans, with the backing of the peasants and the Shanghai proletariat, is risky but not impossible: the First Division is almost entirely Communist, from the general down, and will fight with us. And you say we’ve kept half the arms. Not to try is simply to wait placidly to have our throats cut.”
“The Kuomintang is there. We haven’t made it. It’s there. And stronger than we are, for the time being. We can destroy it from below by introducing into it all the Communist elements we have at our disposal. An immense majority of its members are extremists.”
“You know as well as I do that numbers are nothing in a democracy against the ruling apparatus.”
“We are demonstrating that the Kuomintang can be used by using it. Not by argument. For two years we have used it unceasingly. Every month, every day.”
“As long as you have accepted its aims; not once when it was a question of its accepting yours. You have led it to accept gifts which it was dying to get: officers, volunteers, money, propaganda. The soldiers’ soviets, the peasant unions-that’s another matter.”
“What about the exclusion of the anti-Communist elements?”
“Chiang Kai-shek didn’t yet have Shanghai in his power."
“Before a month is up we’ll have him outlawed by the Central Committee of the Kuomintang.”
“After he has crushed us. What difference can it make to those generals of the Central Committee whether the Communist militants are killed or not? They’ll be just that much ahead! Don’t you think-really-that the obsession with economic fatality is preventing the Chinese Communist Party, and perhaps Moscow, from seeing the elementary necessity which is under our very noses?”
“That is opportunism.”
“Very well! According to you Lenin shouldn’t have used the parceling of lands as a slogan (for that matter it was featured much more prominently in the program of the socialist-revolutionaries, who didn’t have the remotest idea of how to apply it, than in the prograi of the bolsheviks). The parceling of lands was the establishment of petty property; therefore he should have advocated, not parceling, but immediate collectivization — the sovkhozes. Since he was successful you can see that it was a question of tactics. For us also it’s only a question of tactics! You’re losing control of the masses. ”
“Do you imagine Lenin kept it from February to October?”
“He lost it at moments. But he was always with them, moving in the same direction. As for you, your slogans go against the current. It’s not a matter of a mere sidestep, but of directions which will become more and more divergent. To act on the masses as you expect to do, you would have to be in power. That doesn’t happen to be the case.”
“.Al this is beside the point,” said Ch’en.
“You won’t stop the activity of the peasants,” Kyo answered. “At the present moment we Communists are issuing to the masses orders which they can consider only as betrayals. Do you think they will understand your waiting slogans?”
“Even if I were a coolie in the Shanghai port I would think that obedience to the Party is the only logical at- titude-in short-of a militant Communist. And that all the arms must be given up.”
Ch’en got up:
“It’s not through obedience that men go out of their way to get killed-nor through obedience that they ^il. Except cowards.”
Vologin shrugged his shoulders.