“Still dreaming?” she asked, her smile small and shadowy. “When will you wake?” she murmured, and went on her way.
He was not sorry he had told her, no, because she had the right to know of coming happiness, even if she would not believe in it, and he knew now his life was safe with her. She would never betray him.
Besides, the time grew short. It was already the middle of the second month, and although the mill owners did not know, the strikes were to be called in fourteen days. No one knew how far these strikes would go, because none knew how many revolutionists were in the city. But in the band each rose and told in numbers what he had done, so that if by chance there were ears in the walls, they could hear but not understand. A girl rose and said, “Of the women to whom I was assigned, sixty-three, prepared eighteen.”
This told them that in her band there were sixty-three women, of whom eighteen knew how to use a gun and had guns. For in this work there was no difference between men and women, and women were to be soldiers, too.
Two days before the strike they held their last meeting. En-lan so declared it.
“We must not meet again,” he said. “The police have grown so wary that it is not safe. Nor is it necessary. We know our way, hour by hour. If it must be that any of you need to speak to me, mark a round sun on a bit of paper and put it in my hand, and I will set a time and place. Otherwise let there be no meeting between us or any sign of recognition, until after the day. Each in his place, and on that day the whole will come to life. Until then, each goes alone.”
But the next day in their English class, where he and En-lan sat side by side, En-lan had drawn a round sun on his notebook, and under it had written an hour. So he had gone to En-lan’s room, and En-lan had opened the door. When he came in En-lan said, “I am more afraid of you than the others. I want to warn you especially, in that house of yours, to say nothing to anyone. These last days are the most dangerous. And your father is powerful. All our lives depend on secrecy.”
“I?” I-wan asked impetuously. “But I—”
En-lan said, “You are so innocent — you tell without knowing it. You do not know how to conceal.”
He was about to deny this when he remembered that it was true. He had told Peony. He stared at En-lan, his mouth open.
“You have already done it,” En-lan remarked. “I see it in your face. Come with me into the open, where we can talk.”
So they had gone out on the streets and seeming to buy peanuts and sweets, to stop and watch a wandering actor’s show, to laugh at some children, En-lan questioned him at such moments as no one was close, and he drew out of him everything about Peony and what he had told her.
He had never seen En-lan so angry.
“A woman and a slave!” En-lan muttered, his voice low, but his eyes like a tiger’s. “Was there ever such a silly as you!”
“But I tell you, you don’t know Peony,” I-wan said eagerly. “She is like my sister.” He hesitated, then stammered, “Why — why, she — she loves me!”
“She isn’t your sister,” En-lan said, “and it is the worse that she loves you. She will want to hurt you — because you don’t love her — even though she kills you.”
“Peony is not like that,” I-wan protested.
En-lan said nothing for a while. Then he sighed. “Well, it is done!” And after a while he said again, “I cannot rest. I am responsible for you all. Can you send this girl to meet me somewhere, so that I can see what she is and threaten her into silence?”
“I don’t know,” I-wan stammered. “I don’t think she would — I think she would be ashamed to come to meet you.”
“A slave?” En-lan asked scornfully.
“She isn’t just a slave,” I-wan said. “We’ve not treated her like a slave.”
“Ask her,” En-lan said. And again he said, “It is more than your life, remember. We might all be seized and killed.”
It was true that not a day passed now that there were not those whom the police seized and killed as revolutionists. Their names were not published and people did not hear of them. But from schools and from homes young men and women were marched away by police and by soldiers appearing suddenly and demanding them, and they were never seen again, nor could anyone save them after they were taken.
“I will ask her,” I-wan had said.
But Peony did not come near him that night and when he sent for her, she returned word by the servant that his grandmother needed her.
The next day the general strike was declared. In his home I-wan at the breakfast table heard his father roar out over his newspaper.
“What next? The silk mills are closed!”
I-wan put down his chopsticks. His father went on reading aloud, furiously, his eyebrows frowning over his eyes.
“In the Ta Tuan mills, three hundred workers on strike. In the Ling I mills, four hundred and twenty-five. In the Sung Ren mills—” he banged the paper with his fist. “We have money in every one of them! What is the government thinking of to allow this? It’s the students — they have been fomenting this!”
“The government doesn’t kill enough of them,” his grandfather remarked.
“What is this communism?” his mother asked. “I never used to hear of it. Is it some kind of foreign religion?”
Peony, bringing in a bowl of hot eggs in broth, faltered and spilled a little of the broth.
“Careless child!” his grandmother scolded her, “You grow more careless every day!”
I-wan met Peony’s eyes, full of terror and meaning, and smiled at her. He must give her En-lan’s message. Now he watched for a chance to speak to her secretly. His father had risen from the breakfast table without finishing his food.
“I must get to my office,” he exclaimed. “How do I know? It may be I shall find the whole place upset. At any rate, we must stir up the government. I for one shall refuse the new loan to the Ministry of Education if they cannot control the students better.”
“Will you not have a little more hot tea?” Peony asked, coming to his side with the teapot in her hand. He went on talking without answering her.
“Wait until that Chiang Kai-shek gets here!” he cried.
I-wan looked up. Peony went around the table and filled each bowl with hot tea.
“What do you mean?” I-wan asked.
His father laughed harshly, drank his tea, and pushed his chair back and went out.
“As if they could do anything to Chiang!” I-wan thought, ardently. Chiang was afraid of no one. He had driven his victorious way up from the south, a man full of the power of his own integrity. “As if he cared for bankers!” I-wan thought proudly. Then he remembered Peony again. He had for the moment forgotten her. But she had gone and when he went about the house he could not find her. He heard her voice in the kitchen at last. He looked in. She was there, stooping over a basket full of fish a vendor had brought in.
“Peony!” he said.
She looked up.
“Where is my school cap?” He had not been able to find it and had not looked very far, needing excuse to see her.
But she looked back to the fish. “On the third hook in your closet,” she said.
He could think of nothing else and so he had to go on to school In the English class he shook his head slightly at En-lan.
Twenty-one days the strike was to be held, that he knew. And the twenty-first day was the day. The city went on its seeming usual way, but nothing was the same. Everyone made his face calm and all came and went as usual, but the strikes spread into newspaper offices, into great shops and business places. The working people were gay, for from somewhere they were being given money, and for the first time since they were children they could go out by day to the amusement places and see all the wonders of animals trained to do tricks and foreign moving pictures and all such things they had only heard of before. By night they loitered about tea houses and gambling dens. I-wan could scarcely gather together his brigade. In these days when he himself was in such a pitch of waiting that he could not sleep except in bits and snatches through the nights, these men he had taught were children freed from their tasks. They were idle all day, but at night he could not get them together. They came, a few of them at a time, and when he asked where the others were they laughed and pointed to the city.