But I-wan had been gently reared and he had no great bitterness to remember. All the things he had once thought bitter now seemed small. In his childhood he had hated his grandmother. Yet when she died in the second month of this year and her body had been encoffined and put in a temple to wait for peace, since these were no times for the display of a great funeral, I-wan wondered then that he had grown so bitter over the smell of her opium and had not remembered rather that she loved him most tenderly and steadfastly and had always coaxed him when he was sullen.
So this was another difference between him and En-lan, now that they lived together day upon day in such closeness. It was about the killing of the prisoners they took. Sometimes it came almost to open quarrel, and then Peony must come between them to scold them and explain them to each other.
“You, En-lan, are too stubborn in your own mind! You are stubborn like an ox. And I-wan, you are stubborn too, but you are stubborn as a swift willful horse who has been fed too daintily and never known anything but a golden bridle. Now, ox, do not ask horse to become ox, and, horse, remember he is ox!”
But about this one thing not even Peony could make them laugh or agree.
It had been a habit of En-lan’s men, when I-wan came, to kill all the men they captured except a few — some who, they thought, looked the strangest or who were young and troublesome and did not yield, or those for whom, for one reason or another, it seemed quick death was too easy. Very often they brought these back with them and then by slow merry ways they made them die. First they locked them in cages or chained them to a tree and let any who liked come and see them and spit upon them or prod them with pitchforks or hold blazing torches to their fingers and toes, or any such things as amuse common folk who have an enemy at their mercy.
At last one day I-wan went in a mighty rage to find En-lan.
“Do you allow this?” he demanded.
“What?” En-lan replied. He was sitting in a room examining upon a map a certain road where that night they planned to make attack.
“Look out of the door!” I-wan cried. And En-lan rose and came to the open door and looked out.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Do you see nothing?” I-wan asked him fiercely.
“No, I see nothing,” En-lan said deliberately, “unless you mean the men at play.”
“Do you call it play?” En-lan shouted.
At that moment a buffoon had come out of the laughing crowd and had dug his thumb into the chained man’s eye and his eye burst and streamed out. The man screamed once. Then he bit his lip and was silent. But in the bright air sweat ran shining down his face.
“You can’t deny these men everything,” En-lan said coldly as he watched. “Think what other soldiers have if they are victorious — extra food, money, wine to drink, loot! But our men throw their lives away every day, and yet they eat the same poor food and we have no money to give them and there is no loot. They are simple men — they must have something.”
“Not such degrading play as this!” I-wan retorted. “This is the play of savages!”
“Well, so they are savages,” En-lan replied in a reasonable voice. His brilliant eyes hardened a little now as he looked at I-wan. “Are you still the dreamer, I-wan? Do you still believe the poor will be better than the rich? I hate the rich, but the poor are not gods. They are only children. And at least what they do is done openly.”
I-wan groaned and came into the room and leaned his arm against the wall and hid his face. He felt sick.
“You are too squeamish,” En-lan told him after a moment and kindly enough. “You should have been hardened as I was. I killed pigs when I was a small child and in a famine I helped my father kill our ox for food, and I saw my mother kill a girl she bore. And I grew up on bandits and what they did. I saw men’s noses slit and their eyes gouged and their ears gone and their backs flayed, and as long as I can remember a dead man was nothing. Why should I care for a Japanese?”
I-wan straightened himself, wiped his face, and sat down. “It is not only that a Japanese is a man also,” he said. “It is that I am ashamed to see Chinese do such things.”
“Do you forget what the Japanese did at Nanking?” En-lan asked angrily. “Nothing we can do will be enough revenge!”
“I know. I don’t excuse them,” I-wan replied doggedly. “But I say, if the Japanese are like that, it is not my business — but it is my business if my own people also…”
“Oh, the patriot!” En-lan broke in. “Oh, what a patriot! I-wan, you are a fool. I say it plainly. When you have been through what I have—”
“The more I see of it, the more I shall hate it!” I-wan said violently.
“Then you had better go somewhere else, where it is not to be seen,” En-lan declared. “Perhaps you would like to join the benevolent work of the Japanese and become one of the puppet governors—”
When I-wan heard En-lan say this, he suddenly felt an anger rise in him that lifted him from his feet. Upon its power he leaped forward and fell upon En-lan and En-lan, not being prepared, fell under him upon the beaten ground of the floor, and they struggled together as though they were two boys instead of men. Each held the other with both hands by the hair of his crown and shook as hard as he could, and thus Peony found them at this moment. She had been asleep in the other room and their voices had awakened her and now she came at them shrieking and pulling and scolding.
“Oh shameful! Oh, I-wan, how can you — En-lan, you foolish—” And then she opened her mouth and bit one hand and then another until they let go. They scrambled to their feet and wrung their hands with pain.
“I’m bleeding,” En-lan accused her.
“So you should bleed,” Peony answered him.
I-wan drew out his handkerchief and wrapped his own bleeding hand and said nothing.
“Now, what is your quarrel?” Peony demanded.
En-lan laughed suddenly.
“I called him a patriot and he fell on me!”
“No, now, truly, En-lan!” she exclaimed. “I-wan is not so foolish.”
“It was about the prisoners,” I-wan said suddenly.
“What prisoners?” Peony asked.
They looked, but while they had been quarreling the man had been taken away.
“He is dead,” I-wan said abruptly.
“Then why quarrel over him?” Peony coaxed them.
“There will be more tomorrow,” I-wan said.
“I-wan wants them all gently killed,” En-lan broke in. “And I say the men must have some pleasure out of their hard lives.”
“And I say,” I-wan retorted, “that we ought to teach them something better.”
He looked at Peony. “En-lan says I am soft,” he said. “But you were a child in my father’s house, too. Am I right or wrong?”
He would not care what she said, he thought. He knew he was right.
“But Peony was a slave,” En-lan said sharply. “A slave in a rich man’s house has to suffer—”
“Yes, but still I-wan is right,” Peony said slowly. “It is not good for our men, En-lan. I know what he means. Sometimes when his grandmother used to — to burn me with her pipe”—she glanced at I-wan and flushed a little and went on quietly—“I remember I used to say to her in my heart, ‘But it is you who are cruel and wicked and mean — it is not I. I have only a bit of aching flesh on my arm, but you have become wicked!’”