“Did she do that?” I-wan asked in a low voice. She pulled up her sleeve and he saw on her thin upper arm deep round scars, many scars running in together.
“You never told me,” he whispered.
“I couldn’t tell — anyone,” she said mournfully. “I don’t know why — except it seemed to make me a real slave and so I hid it.”
“You should have told me,” I-wan said. He wanted suddenly to weep with anger. “I hate every torture!”
“I also,” Peony said simply. She drew down her sleeve and turned to En-lan. “I-wan is right,” she told him.
“Perhaps he is,” En-lan agreed. It was impossible to tell from his face how much he had inwardly yielded. But from that day on I-wan at least saw no more torture.
It was soon after this that I-wan began to perfect a plan which for a long time he had been musing upon in his mind. It had begun many months before, when it had occurred to him to imagine what he would do if some day when he led his men in a secret attack, one of those whom he must kill or see killed should happen to be Bunji? He put the thought away as soon as it came. There was so little chance that this would happen that he could think of it as no chance.
And yet there was enough chance left so that he never looked from ambush at Japanese upon a road where he was hidden or through an open door suddenly upon men surprised without taking his first quick look to see that none of the faces was Bunji’s face. No, and he never killed a man from behind, lest the man be Bunji, and if a man tried to make his escape and he had not seen his face, he let him go…. Yet he had heard nothing of Bunji. Tama never told him where he was, if indeed she knew herself. She only wrote that he was still alive and well, and that his little son was walking now, and that Setsu longed to have her second child. But who knew when that would be? This war was endless in spite of all the times set for it to end… And as long as he knew Bunji was alive, I-wan was afraid.
He knew, of course, what he would do if Bunji were among the ones they captured. He would help him to escape. That he had decided long ago when first he had thought of it, so that if it happened he would be ready. But first he would talk with Bunji and explain to him the evil of this war which his people made upon I-wan’s people. For I-wan had talked to many prisoners and he now knew that they were not told why they had to leave their homes and families and die in such hundreds and thousands. And he found very often the letters and writings in the pockets of those dead, and he read them that he might know what they thought and felt before they died. And always they said the same thing, that this was a righteous and necessary war which they fought to save their own homes and their own country. And I-wan longed to say to them, “We do not want your country and you have nothing you need to save yourselves from with us, so why have you died?” But they were dead.
And then he thought of how the men used to bring back many living prisoners until En-lan put a stop to it for mercy’s sake after Peony had showed them her burns, and he thought, “Why should we not teach these prisoners the truth and treat them kindly and send them back to their own army, to spread knowledge of the truth among their fellows?”
He went to En-lan with this plan, not being sure at all what En-lan would think of it, and if he would not say again that he was too soft. But En-lan, when he had heard it, seized it at once as a good clever plan.
“It makes a man’s arm slack if he does not believe in what he does,” he said. “And if we can spread doubt among them and make them distrust their leaders, it is a clever thing to do.”
The more En-lan thought of it, the more he liked it. He clapped his hand against I-wan’s and laughed and cried, “It’s as good as capturing a trainload of guns — well, I will say that skull of yours has something in it, I-wan!”
Somewhere or other, I-wan knew, his idea and En-lan’s idea of the same thing did not quite hit together. But he let it go. If the thing were accomplished, the end was served. And the men, when En-lan explained it to them, were pleased with what they thought was such clever trickiness, and so the thing was done. And thereafter a certain number of prisoners were taken alive and fed and given courtesy and kindness and “educated,” as En-lan said, for a week or two, and set free again, looking, every man thus freed, so bewildered at what had happened to him that he was wholly dumb and did not know what came next.
But for Bunji it was no use after all. In the autumn I-wan had a letter from Tama and in it she was all grief and mourning. Bunji had been killed in the fighting at Taierhchwang. I-wan, after he had read and burned her letter as he must all her letters, sat awhile in his own room in great sorrow, remembering Bunji as he had known him when first he went to the Muraki house. How warm a heart had been his, and how merry! If there had been no war, how long and happy a life would have been his desert! But war had soon spoiled him. He was too simple for the strain and cruelty of war, and it had broken him…. And so all I-wan’s fears of meeting him were useless. And all Setsu’s hopes were useless, too. She would never have a second son.
One day in the autumn I-wan received a telegram from Chiang Kai-shek, commanding him to come to him, and saying that MacGurk would be there to fetch him the next day if the storm then raging had abated. I-wan took this message to En-lan and they looked at it together and put their two minds on it and could imagine nothing for a cause. At last they decided it could, at least, have nothing to do with the state, since if there had been an official reason, the message would not have come to him alone.
“Unless, of course,” En-lan said, “he is displeased with something and wants you for a messenger.”
But this seemed not true, either, for only a few days before this they had all rejoiced because without expecting it, they had received from Chiang a present of money and enough to buy winter clothes for the men who were most ragged. It must be, I-wan thought in himself, something of his own private self. His mind flew always to Tama. It might be that Chiang wanted to test him concerning his Japanese wife. For one moment I-wan thought, “What if he demands that I give her up?”
Well, he would not, he knew. What he could do or what he would say beyond that, the moment must tell him when it came. At least that he had come back to his country and was here fighting should count for the truth of anything he said. But what was between him and Tama belonged to the past and to the future. The present he had given to his country. But to none would he promise that future which none could know.
Thus encouraging himself he tied up his extra clothes in a piece of square cloth as farmers do, and was ready on the landing field when MacGurk came for him.
“You ready?” MacGurk bawled at him over the side of the plane.
“Quite ready,” I-wan replied.
“Well, we’ll hop off again then in about twenty minutes,” MacGurk said, and leaped out of the plane. He took off his cap and beat the dust out of it. “Gosh, it’s a trick making this run now — nothing like as easy as it was when the chief was in Nanking! The air from Hankow here is full of holes and I fell in every one of ’em.” They were walking toward the farmhouses which were En-lan’s camp. “I’ll take a swallow of tea and a cigarette and then we’ll be off. Lots of daylight yet,” MacGurk went on.
They sat down at an outdoor table of the village teashop and the old woman whose husband kept the place came and wiped off the table with a black rag and then blew into the teacups to rid them of dust and prepared to wipe them also. But MacGurk stopped her with a roar.