“One can always find terror in himself. One only needs to look deep enough: fortunately one can act; if Moscow gives me its approval, it’s all the same to me; if Moscow disapproves, the simplest thing is to know nothing about it. I’m leaving. Do you want to stay?”
“I want to see Possoz before anything else. And you won’t be able to leave: you have no visa.”
“I’m leaving. Certainly.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. But I’m leaving. I am sure of it. It was necessary that I Tang Yen Ta, and it is necessary that I leave. Certainly I shall leave.”
Indeed, Kyo felt that Ch’en’s will in the matter played a very small role. If destiny lived somewhere, it was there tonight, by his side.
“You find it important that it should be you who carry out the plot against Chiang?”
“No. And yet I wouldn’t want to leave it to another.”
“Because you wouldn’t trust anyone else?”
“Because I don’t like the women I love to be kissed by others.”
The words opened the flood-gates to all the suffering Kyo had forgotten: he suddenly felt himself separated from Ch’en. They had reached the river. Ch’en cut the rope of one of the skiffs moored to the wharf, and pushed off. Already he was out of sight, but Kyo could hear the splashing of the oars at regular intervals above the lapping of water against the banks. He knew some terrorists. They asked no questions. They composed a group: murderous insects, they lived by their bond of union in a tragic narrow group. But Ch’en..
Pursuing his thoughts without changing his pace Kyo was heading towards the Harbor Conunission. “His boat will be stopped at the very start. ” He reached some large buildings guarded by army soldiers, ahnost empty compared to those of the International. In the hallways soldiers were sleeping or playing “thirty-six.” He found his friend without any trouble. A kindly apple-round face-the ruddy cheeks of a vine-grower, the gray drooping mustache of a Gaul warrior-khaki civilian garb. Possoz had been an anarchist-syndicalist worker in Switzerland, had gone to Russia after the war and become a Bolshevik. Kyo had known him in Peking and had confidence in him. They shook hands quietly: in Hankow any ghost was a normal visitor. “The stevedores are there,” said a soldier.
“Have them come in.”
The soldier went out. Possoz turned to Kyo:
“You observe that I’m not doing a damn thing, old feUow. When I was given the supervision of the port we estimated three hundred ships on an average: there aren’t ten. ”
The port slept beneath the open windows: no sirens, nothing but the steady lapping of water against the banks and the piles. A great ghastly light passed across the walls of the room: the searchlights of the distant gunboats were sweeping the river. A sound of footsteps.
Possoz drew his revolver from its holster, placed it on his desk.
“They’ve attacked the Red Guard with iron bars,” he said to Kyo.
“The Red Guard is armed.”
“The danger wasn’t that they would knock down the guards, old fellow, it was that the guards would pass over to their side.”
The beams from the searchlights re^turned, cast their enormous shadows upon the white inside wall, returned to the night at the very moment the stevedores were entering: four, five, six, seven. In working-blues, one of them naked to the waist. Handcuffs. A variety of faces, hard to make out in the shadow; but, in common, a glow of hatred. With them two Chinese guards, Nagan pistols at their sides. The stevedores remained as if glued to one another. Hatred, but also fear.
“The Red Guards are workers,” said Possoz in Chinese.
Silence.
“If they are guards, it’s for the Revolution, not for themselves.”
“And to eat,” said one of the stevedores.
“It’s right that the rations should go to those who fight. What do you want to do with them? Gamble for them at ‘thirty-six’?"
“Give them to everyone."
“Already there isn’t enough for a few. The government is determined to use the greatest leniency towards the proletarians, even when they are mistaken. If the Red Guard were everywhere killed off, the generals and foreigners would seize the power again as before-come, now, you know that perfectly weU. Well, then? Is that what you want?"
“Before, we used to eat."
“No," said Kyo to the workers: “before, we didn’t eat. I know-l’ve been a docker. And to die just for the sake of dying-weU, it might as well be in order to become men."
The whites of all those eyes which caught the feeble light grew imperceptibly larger; they tried to get a better look at this fellow in the sweater who had a Japanese air, who spoke with the accent of the Northern provinces, and who claimed to have been a coolie.
“Promises," answered one of them in a muffled voice.
“Yes," said another. ‘We have especially the right to go on strike and to die of starvation. My brother is in the army. Why did they kick out of his division all those who demanded the formation of soldiers’ Unions?"
He was raising his voice.
“Do you think the Russian Revolution was accomplished in a day?" asked Possoz.
“The Russians did what they wanted."
Useless to argue: al they could do was to to determine the depth of the revolt.
“The attack on the Red Guard is a counter-revolutionary act, punishable by death. You know it."
A pause.
“If we put you at liberty, what would you do?”
They looked at each other; the darkness made it impossible to see the expressions on their faces. In spite of the revolvers and the handcuffs Kyo sensed the atmosphere preparing for one of those Chinese bargainings which he had so often encountered in the Revolution.
“If we get work?” asked one of the prisoners.
“When there is any.”
“Then, in tbe meantime, if the Red Guard prevents us from eating, we shall attack the Red Guard. I hadn’t eaten for three days. Nothing at all.”
“Is it true that they eat in prison?”
“You’ll see for yourselves.”
Possoz rang without saying anything further, and the soldiers led the prisoners away.
“That’s the worst part of it,” he went on, in French this time: “they’re beginning to think that they’re fed in prison like roosters who are being fattened.”
“Why didn’t you try harder to convince them, since you had them brought up?”
Possoz shrugged his shoulders in utter discouragement.
“My dear chap, I had them brought up because I always hope they will tell me something else. And yet there are the others, the chaps who work fifteen, sixteen hours a day without coming forward with a single demand, and who’ll keep right on until we’re quiet, come what may. ”
He had just used a Swiss expression, which surprised Kyo. Possoz smiled and his teeth, like the eyes of the stevedores a minute before, glistened in the dim light, under the obscure streak of his mustache.
“You’re lucky to have kept your teeth like that, with the life one leads in the country.”
“No, my dear chap, not at alclass="underline" it’s a set I got in Changsha. Dentists don’t seem to have been affected by the Revolution. And you? You’re a delegate? What in the world are you doing here?”
Kyo explained to him, without speaking of Ch’en. Possoz was listening to him, more and more uneasy.
“All that, my dear chap, is very possible, and all the more pity. Listen-I have worked with watches for fifteen years: I know what gears are, the way they depend on one another. If you don’t have confidence in the International, mustn’t belong to the Party.”
“Half the International believes we should create the soviets.”
“There is a general line that directs us-must follow it.”
“And give up our arms! A line that leads us to fire on the proletariat is necessarily bad. When the peasants take the lands, the generals now arrange to involve a few Communist troops in the repression. Would you be willing to fire on the peasants, yes or no?”