Free The Patriot by Pearl S. Buck Page A

had to do with their work. He sat down on the little iron cot and reaching for a bit of paper on the table, he wrote, “When do you think the day will really come?”
    “Not later than the end of the third month of the new year,” En-lan wrote in answer. Then he took the paper and lit a match and burned it to ash and blew the ash away.
    “It is moonlight—will you walk?” I-wan asked. He craved from En-lan some of his brimming sureness, and some, too, of his hardness. En-lan was hard and sure and never moved by anything. Now he nodded, rose, and put on his coat and cap of rabbit’s fur, such as the northern peasants wore. Then he took up the paper he had put under the book and folding it away from I-wan’s eyes, he burned it, also, and blew away the ash. Then they went out into the street.
    “Let us turn this way, out of the wind,” En-lan suggested. “On a night like this the wind snatches one’s words and carries them to other ears.”
    They turned down a quiet alley where they had talked before and squatted in the lee of a wall. I-wan began at once. There was that about En-lan which sifted out extra talk before it was spoken.
    “How shall I persuade my men they are worth anything?” he asked. “All my life I have lived among people who thought they were valuable and should have everything.” He paused and thought of I-ko. I-ko had never in all his life been worth anything. He had done nothing except consume food and goods, and yet I-ko thought he must have the best. “These poor,” I-wan went on, “believe somehow that they deserve to be poor. I can’t get them to see that they have any right to live. I can’t get them even to hate the rich. They simply say, ‘One is rich and one is poor—it is fate.’”
    He waited to hear En-lan’s laughter. But En-lan did not laugh. His face looked stern in the moonlight and his voice was grave when he spoke.
    “You have hit on the kernel of the matter. Our real difficulty is not with the rich. They can be killed and their riches taken from them. The trouble is with those who have been born in such poverty that they cannot hope. They will have to have something in their hands—food—money—something to feel and know they have, before they will believe.” He paused and then went on. “You are an idealist, I-wan, and that is your weakness. The poor are no better than the rich.”
    I-wan looked at him. What was this En-lan had said?
    “Then why do we work for them?” he asked.
    Now En-lan laughed.
    “Do you believe that if any of those poor were in your father’s house he would share what he had with the others? No!” En-lan shook back his rough hair. “They would be worse than your father, because your father has never had to be an animal. I-wan, prepare yourself!”
    “For what?” I-wan asked.
    “For the time when the poor get what they have never had,” En-lan said in a whisper.
    “Why?” I-wan whispered.
    “It will be worse than wild beasts,” En-lan said. “On the day when we tell them the city is theirs, they will kill not only the rich but each other. Much of what they take will be destroyed simply in the struggle to possess it. We must let them alone. It will pass.”
    “And then?” I-wan asked.
    “When it is over and they are bewildered because nothing is left, then we must come in and force them to obedience and order.”
    “Force them?” I-wan asked. “I thought everybody was to be free.”
    “Free!” En-lan echoed harshly. “Such freedom is foolishness. No one is free. We are not free, you and I. We work in a planned system. So will they. There is one man—”
    “Who?” I-wan asked. As far as this they had never gone.
    “One,” En-lan replied, “one man, a great man.”
    “Who?” I-wan asked.
    En-lan leaned to I-wan. Against his cheek I-wan felt En-lan’s fresh hot breath.
    “Chiang Kai-shek,” he said.
    It was the name of the head of the revolutionary army.
    “When he comes into this city,” En-lan’s breath