“I suppose,” he said aloud, hesitating, “that food will be given to everyone somehow. Certainly in the revolution no one will be allowed to starve. Things have to be organized, of course.”
She did not answer. When she spoke again he was not in the least prepared for what she said. She looked up brightly, as though she had forgotten herself, and she said, her voice cosy and warm and full of interest, “Tell me about that En-lan — is he handsome?”
He was too disgusted to answer. To think of En-lan thus was to insult him. Girls — why did anyone think a girl could hold anything in her mind? Peony was not fit for revolution. She was as she said, born to be a slave — thinking about nothing but—
“I don’t know,” he answered curtly. He got up suddenly. “I want to sleep, Peony. It must be nearly dawn.”
She rose, hiding a small graceful yawn behind the back of her hand, her painted rosy palm turned outward. She had not understood the importance of anything he had told her. And it was true that he had put his life in her hands.
But she leaned forward and touched his cheek with her finger.
“Don’t think I shall forget what you have said,” she told him. “I never forget anything you ever say. I lock it all up in me and take it out only when I am alone, to see and to think about. It’s all I have — Oh, but, I-wan, you won’t let them catch you!” She locked her hands together tightly.
“No, of course not,” he answered and relented a little toward her. “Besides, it’s only a little while.”
“I have no faith in all that revolution,” she broke in. “It only frightens me. I wish you hadn’t told me — except that — it helps me understand something.”
“What?” he asked. There was another look now in her face, a look of stillness.
“It helps me to understand you,” she said, “and why your heart is not to be touched.” She waited a moment. Then she said, “You are like a young priest, I-wan. I saw that when you were telling me. It explains — everything.”
She was at the door now and she smiled at him, a flicker of a smile.
“Good night,” she said, and closed the door between them.
He had not the least idea what she meant, and he forgot it instantly, because it could not be important.
What Peony had said, that he was like a young priest, he really did not hear, even when she said it, because he was so centered on what he was telling her. If he had comprehended it he would have been angered, for it was part of the plan that all priests should be driven out of the temples, since they deceived the people. I-wan had tried to drive them out of the minds of the men whom he taught. Whenever they said, as the poor will say anywhere, “Heaven will protect us,” he cried out, “Heaven will never protect you, because there is no heaven!”
The first time he said this not one of them answered him. It was a holiday, the three days’ holiday of the New Year, which is given even to the poor, and they had met together in an open field beyond the town. I-wan had taken his own money and bought tea and New Year’s cakes for them at a country tea house, and then they had come away where there were no walls.
“What is that above us, then, if there is no heaven?” a man asked, and he pointed to the sky.
“Air — and cloud,” I-wan answered.
“And beyond that?” the man persisted.
“Nothing,” I-wan answered.
They thought about this in silence.
“Then all the priests in the temples have told us lies?” the man asked again.
“Yes,” I-wan said. And when no one said anything to that, he asked them, “Can any of you point to a single time when you spent money before the gods and they gave you what you asked for?”
They thought awhile again in the way they had whenever he said something they had not heard before.
“It is true,” one of them said, a young man with crossed eyes. “At every New Year I have begged the gods to let me grow rich — and look at me, how poor I am!”
“Not even the gods can make a man rich if he is born to be poor,” a sad voice said.
“Then what is the use of them?” the cross-eyed fellow said hotly. “I’ll ask no more of them! If this revolution will make us rich we don’t need gods!”
Everyone laughed at this and they all felt merry and brave with good food in their bellies. I-wan had indeed learned already that if he wanted them to believe what he said, they believed better if he fed them first. Every time he fed them they believed more in the revolution.
“Why should he spend his money like this,” they argued, “if he is not telling us the truth? He is a good young man.”
They helped I-wan to believe, too. Every time he talked to them he came away more sure of that in which he believed, that after the revolution there would be no more trouble or sadness. Whenever he passed a beggar in the street, he gave him a penny and he thought, “A few more months and there will be no more beggars — for no one will be in need.” So that winter passed.
One night he was awakened by a noise in the house and the garden lights shone out beneath his windows and he heard his father’s voice calling loudly, “Tie him — tie him! I have already sent for the police!”
He got up quickly and drew on his robe and went out and in the hall his mother stood, too frightened to go down.
“They have caught a robber,” she gasped, “in the garden!”
He went downstairs and outside in the chilly darkness he found his father and the servants staring at a miserable ragged man who had somehow got over the high wall, a thin dark agile fellow, starved in his looks, and now afraid for his life. He was on his knees whining and crying while the gardener held him by his long hair.
“I heard him,” the gardener kept roaring bravely, “I heard the tiles on the wall clatter and one fell to the rocks below, and I said to my wife, ‘That’s more than wind can do,’ and I—”
“Have a kind heart, sir—” the man moaned. “I have not eaten for two days. I thought I would see only if I could find a little food thrown out of the kitchens. I swear I would not have entered the house.”
I-wan was about to cry, “Father, I am sure he is hungry,” but he caught the man’s eye and it had such a cast of evil and malice in it that he was aghast and he said nothing. And at that moment the police came and took the fellow to prison. He went sullenly away and as though he were used to it.
“We might have been murdered,” his father said when they were in the house again. Everybody was up now, his grandparents and the servants and Peony, and they all fell to talking together.
But I-wan went to his bed, not to sleep, but to lie wondering why the man’s eyes should have been so full of malice. He had seen a look like that before, and when he tried to think, he remembered. It had been the way I-ko looked before he went away a few days ago upon a great ship. They had gone to see him sail, and I-wan and his father had stayed on the dock until the ship had left the shore.
“I cannot trust I-ko,” his father had said. “He might leave the ship secretly and hang about the city—”
I-ko, alone on the ship and going alone to a foreign country, had looked like that caught thief, his eyes dark with malice and despair. I-wan felt confused again. What if food and plenty for all were still not enough? But he turned away from this question now as often as it came to him. He must believe that everyone would be better, somehow, after the revolution came. He must believe that Chiang Kai-shek would set everything right. It was all as simple as the difference between night and day. When the sun rose, it was day.
He and Peony did not talk again. She had withdrawn herself from him since that night and she came no more to his room when he was there. Nothing was changed except she did not come. The quilts were spread, the tea was hot, there were his favorite sweetmeats in the box, and new flowers were in the windows or on the table, but it was all done before he came. Once she passed him on the stair and leaned to him and he smelled the jasmine scent.