“We have all been seeing what we have never seen,” one said.
“As for me,” another said, “I don’t care if nothing better than this comes to me. Do you know what I saw today? Three monkeys, dressed like little men! I laughed until my stomach turned on me.”
He could not get them to listen to him, and there was nothing for him except to go home, still to wait. He was so helpless with them that he grew afraid lest at the time when all must come together they would refuse to come. So one day he made the sign to En-lan and En-lan met him on the green spot on the campus, but at an hour when most students were in classes, and I-wan told him, “I don’t know what is the matter with my brigade. Ever since they have not had to work they have been like silly children.”
Then he went on and told him how they seemed to have forgotten the revolution. En-lan only laughed at him.
“What did I say? You are an idealist,” he answered. “You know nothing at all, I-wan. Do you think that people who have had to work all their lives will not play when they can? Let them alone. There will be no order anyway on that day. It will come like a great storm — no one can tell its size or shape or what the destruction will be. It is only afterwards that we can begin to think of order.” Then he said, his voice lower, “What about that girl? One word now in these last few days and we are all lost.”
“I have had no chance—” I-wan began.
“Make it — make it—” En-lan said imperiously. “What right have you to risk our lives?”
He went on, leaving I-wan there to go home again.
And again there was nothing for I-wan to do except to wait. The air was restless with new spring, too, and waiting was the harder. He entered the house and his grandmother called and he went into her room listlessly and stood there.
“What is it, Grandmother?” he said as he always did.
“Where have you been?” Her thin old voice was exactly as it had always been, everything was as it had always been, and yet he felt it all as insubstantial as a dream from which he was about to wake.
“At school,” he answered.
His grandmother coughed, and then she began to complain as though he had not spoken.
“This pain in my joints grows worse every day. I can’t walk. But nobody cares. They just leave me here — nobody cares about me. What is the use of having sons and grandsons? You don’t care whether I live or die.”
He thought, “En-lan would laugh at her and say, ‘You’re right, we don’t care.’”
But he lacked some hardness that En-lan had. He said gently, “Yes, we do, Grandmother.”
She stared at him a moment longer. Then she put out her hand.
“Let me feel your hand, little I-wan.”
So though he hated it he put out his hand once more and she took it in both her old claws.
“Such a warm young hand,” she murmured.
He could not bear her touch and yet he knew, in his too quick imagination, for a moment, what it might be to be old and lonely and feel one’s body growing cold and feeble and eager to cling to someone warm and young. And he could not pull himself away from her, though he longed to leave her.
“You don’t want me to die, do you?” she murmured.
“No,” he said. And yet he knew it did not matter if she died. All old people had to die, to make room for the young, and it seemed right to him that this should be.
At this thought of death he did pull his hand away.
“I have to go and study, Grandmother,” he said as he always did. He could not bear this smell, this room closed against the spring outside.
But when he turned and rushed to the door and opened it, there outside he met Peony, bringing in a bowl of soup for his grandmother. And he remembered.
“Peony,” he said, “come to my room tonight. I have something to tell you.”
She looked at him and nodded and went on.
He said to her, “Of course I know that you would not go out to meet him.”
Peony was stooping about his bed, unfolding the quilts adroitly and smoothing the sleeping mat while she listened. Now she took a silk cloth out of a drawer and began dusting the table.
“Did you tell him I wouldn’t come?” she asked without stopping.
“Yes, I did,” I-wan said. He sat in his foreign easy chair. In the whole house only the beds were Chinese, and that was because his grandfather said he could not sleep wallowing in springs and feathers as the foreigners did. He wanted firm boards beneath his body and a wooden pillow under his head.
“No, I wouldn’t tell anybody what you told me,” Peony said, and then added after a moment, “but I think I will see him.”
I-wan stared at her. The edges of her mouth were curled and her eyes were full of mischief.
“Why?” he asked.
“Oh, because,” she said, flicking her cloth about his books. “Maybe,” she added, “I want to see for myself all this revolution you’ve been talking about — or maybe it is only that I want something new to happen. Nothing happens to me here in this house.”
He felt a strange confusion in himself. Peony was a girl in his family and she should not go out to meet a strange man. It was against tradition. And yet was not tradition what they were all against? He had a moment’s flying doubt of himself. When the revolution really fell upon this house would he be strong enough not to lift his hand? He thrust this away from him.
“I will tell En-lan tomorrow I was wrong,” he said stiffly. “He will appoint an hour and a place.”
“Why not here?” she asked. “Why should your schoolmate not come here? And why should I not serve you tea? Isn’t that my business?”
He did not answer. En-lan here! He had never thought of bringing any of his schoolmates here. Peng Liu once had come to the gate and he had not wanted him to enter. Since that day, too, Peng Liu had not liked him as well as before and they had seen little of each other. That Peng Liu, there was something mean in him. Everybody felt it, and En-lan gave him no authority, and yet no one could dismiss him from the band. So he came and went with them and they avoided him. Why should one poor man’s son be such a small mean creature and another poor man’s son be fearless and good like En-lan? But there was also the meanness of I-ko, who was a rich man’s son. They had had one letter from I-ko, complaining because he hated the sea and had got only so far as Bombay. He asked permission to stay in Bombay, but his father had cabled him, “Proceed to Germany. Funds forwarded there.” So I-ko had gone on to where those funds were. Whenever he thought of meanness such as Peng Liu’s he thought also of I-ko. There was something alike in those two.
Into these thoughts Peony broke.
“You never did tell me whether this En-lan was handsome or not.”
“I don’t know,” I-wan said shortly. He thought, “How foolish I was to tell her everything!”
“Ah, well, I shall see for myself,” Peony said.
She went out singing a little under her breath, and he said to himself again, “She is not thinking of the revolution at all.” He wished more than ever that he had never said anything to her. But it was this endless waiting that made everything seem wrong to him.