Authors: Pearl S. Buck
The dusty rooms were full of tables and at these tables were many young men drawing plans and measuring lines upon paper and some were coloring very brightly the roofs and cornices they drew, and even though the rooms were so old and ruined, they were full of life from these young men and their plans.
Then their chief called aloud and one came running, and he said in a lordly way, “Bring the plans for the new seat of government!” When these were brought he unrolled them before Yuan, and there were pictured very high noble buildings indeed, built of the old bricks, and set in large new lines, and from every roof flew the new flag of the revolution. There were the streets pictured forth, too, the trees green on either side, the people, very richly dressed, men and women together, walking by the sides of the streets, and in the streets there were no caravans of asses or wheelbarrows or rickshas, or any such humble vehicles as were to be seen now, but only great motor cars colored brightly in red and blue and green and filled with rich folk. Nor was there any beggar pictured.
Yuan, looking at the plans, could not but find them very beautiful. He said, entranced, “When can it be finished?”
The young chief answered certainly, “Within five years! Everything is moving quickly now.”
Five years! It was nothing. Yuan in his dingy room again, musing, looked about upon the streets where as yet there was no such building as he had seen planned. No, and there were no trees and no rich people, and the poor still were brawling and struggling. But he thought to himself that five years were nothing. It was as good as done. That night he wrote to Mei-ling what was planned, and when he set it down and told in all detail what the picture of the new city was to be, more than ever it seemed as good as done, since all the plans were clearly made, so that the very colors of the roofs were planned in tiles of bright blue, and the trees planned and painted full of leaf, and he remembered there was even a fountain running before a statue of a certain hero in the revolution. Without knowing it he wrote thus to Mei-ling, as if all were finished, “There is a noble hall—there is a great gate—there are trees beside a wide street—”
It was the same in many other things also. Young men who were physicians learned in the foreign ways of cutting diseases out of people’s bodies and who scorned the old doctoring of their fathers, planned great hospitals, and others planned great schools where all the children of the country folk even might be taught, so that in the whole land there would be no one who could not read and write, and some sat and planned new laws to govern other people, and these laws were written down in every detail, and prisons were planned for those who disobeyed them. And there were yet others who planned new books to be written in a free new way of writing, and full of the new free sort of love between men and women everywhere.
Among all the planning there was a new sort of lord of war who planned new armies and new ships of war and new ways of warfare and some day he planned a great new war to show the world his nation was now mighty as any, and this one was Yuan’s old tutor, who was afterward his captain, and now general over Meng, to whose army Meng had escaped secretly when Yuan was betrayed to prison.
Now Yuan was uneasy when he knew Meng’s general was this man, and he wished it could have been another, for he did not know how much the general would remember against him. Yet he did not dare to refuse him either when he commanded Meng to bring his cousin to him.
So on a certain day Yuan went with Meng, and though he kept his face straight and calm, his heart was doubtful.
Yet when he had walked through a gate at which guards stood, very cleanly and bravely dressed, their guns shining and ready in their hands and through courts cleaned and ordered, and when he went into a room and saw the general there, sitting at a table, he need not have been afraid. In a moment Yuan saw this old tutor of his would not call to speech any old grievance against him. He was older than when Yuan saw him last, and now a known and famous leader of the armies, and although his face was not smiling or easy or lenient, yet it was not an angry face. When Yuan came in he did not rise but nodded his head towards a seat, and when Yuan sat edgewise on it, for he had once been this man’s pupil, he saw the two sharp eyes he remembered gazing from behind the foreign spectacles, and the harsh voice he remembered, which was not unkind nevertheless, asked him abruptly, “So now you have joined us, after all?”
Yuan nodded and as simply as he used to speak when he was a child he said, “My father pushed me to it,” and he told his story.
Then the general asked again, looking at him very keenly, “But still you do not love the army? With all I taught you, you are not a soldier?”
Yuan in a little of his old confusion hesitated and then decided willfully he would be bold and not fear this man and he said, “I hate war still, but I can do my share in other ways.”
“What?” the general asked, and Yuan replied, “I shall teach in the new great school here for the present, for I have need to earn, and then I shall see how the road opens.”
But now the general grew restless, and he looked at a foreign clock that was on his desk, as though his interest was no more in Yuan if he were not a soldier, and so Yuan rose, and waited while the general said to Meng, “Have you the plans made for the new encampment? The new military law calls for an increase of men levied from each province, and the new contingents come in a month from today.”
At this Meng struck his heels together, for he had not sat in his general’s presence, and he saluted sharply and he said in a very clear proud voice, “The plans are made, my general, and await your seal, and then they will be carried out.”
So was the brief meeting over and Yuan, for all his old distaste which rose up in him strongly as he passed between many soldiers who now filed in from grounds where they had been practicing their ways of war, yet could not but see these men were different from his father’s lounging, laughing followers. These were all young, so young that half at least were less than twenty. And they did not laugh. The Tiger’s men were always full of brawling and of laughter, and when they straggled home to rest after practice they pushed each other in rude trickery and shouted and made jokes, so that the courts were full of rough merriment. Daily in his youth Yuan knew the hours for meals because he heard guffaws and curses and loud laughter outside his inner court where he lived with his father. But these young men came back silently, and their footsteps were in such solemn unison the sound was like a great single footstep. There was no laughter. Yuan walked past them, soldier after soldier, and he saw their faces, all young, all simple and all grave. These were the new armies.
That night he wrote to Mei-ling, “They looked too young to be soldiers and their faces were the faces of country boys.” Then he thought awhile, remembering their faces, and he wrote again, “Yet they had a certain soldier’s look. You do not know it, for you have not lived as I have. I mean their faces were simple, so simple that I knew, looking at them, they can kill as simply as they eat their food,—a simplicity fearful as death.”
In this new city Yuan now found his own life and share. He opened at last his box of books and placed them in some shelves he bought. There were also the foreign seeds he had grown to fruition in the foreign country. He looked at them doubtfully, each kind still sealed in its packet, questioning himself how they would grow if he planted them in this darker heavier earth. Then he tore one packet open and shook the seeds into his palm. They lay in his hand, large, golden, waiting grains of wheat. He must find a bit of land in which to try them.
Now he was caught in a wheel of days and weeks and months, each following swiftly after the last. His days were spent in the school. In the morning he went to the buildings, some new, some old. The new buildings were gaunt grey halls, foreign-shaped, built too quickly of cement and slender iron rods, and already flaking into pieces, but Yuan had his classrooms in an old building, and since the building was old the leaders of that school would not so much as mend a broken window. The autumn drew out long and warm and golden, and at first Yuan said nothing when a door hung cracked with age and would not close. But autumn became sharp with winter and the eleventh month howled in on the wings of a mighty wind from the northwest deserts, and fine yellow sands sifted through every break. Yuan, wrapped in his greatcoat, stood before his shivering pupils and corrected their ill-written essays and with the sandy wind blowing through his hair he set upon the blackboard rules for them on writing poetry. But it was nearly useless, for all their minds were bent on huddling in their clothes, which were for many too scanty in spite of their huddling.
First Yuan made report of it by letter to his head, an official who spent five weeks out of seven in the great coastal city, but to such letters the man paid no heed, for he had many offices and his chief work was to collect all his salaries. Then Yuan grew angry and he went himself to the high head of the school and he told the plight of his students, how the glass was broken in the windows, and how there were boards so cracked in the wooden floors the fierce wind came up between their feet, and how doors would not close.
But the high head, who had many duties, said impatiently, “Bear it awhile—bear it awhile! Such money as we have must go to making new—not patching up the useless old!” These were the same words to be heard everywhere in that city.
Now Yuan thought the words rightly enough said, and he could dream of a new hall and fine warm rooms sealed against the cold, yet here were these days, and every day colder than the last as the winter deepened. If Yuan could have done it he would have taken his own wage and hired a carpenter and made the one room closed against the winter. For after a while he came to like this work he did and he felt a sort of love for these young boys he taught. They were not often rich, for the rich sent their sons to private colleges where they had foreign teachers everywhere and fires in the school houses to keep them warm and good food every day. But to this school, which was public and opened by the new state, there were no fees, and here sons of little merchants came, and sons of ill-paid teachers of the old classics and a few bright village boys who hoped to be more than their fathers were upon the land. They were all young and poorly clad and not well fed, and Yuan loved them for they were eager and strained to understand what he taught them, though very often they did not, for although some knew more and some less, still all knew too little. Yes, looking at their pale faces and eager watching eyes, Yuan wished he had the money to mend their schoolroom.
But he had not. Even his wage was not paid to him regularly, for those above him were given their pay first, and if the moneys were not enough that month, or if some had been stopped for another cause, for army or for a new house for some official, or if some stuck in a private pocket, then Yuan and the newer teachers must wait in what patience they could. And Yuan was not patient, for he longed to be free of his debt to his uncle. At least he could be free of one debt. He wrote and told Wang the Merchant, “As for your sons, I can do nothing for them. I have no power here. It is all I can do to hold my own place. But I will send you half of what I earn until all is paid my father borrowed. Only I will not be responsible for your sons.” So he cast off in these new times at least so much of the bondage of blood kin.
Therefore he dared not use his money for his pupils. To Mei-ling he wrote of it, and how he wished he could mend the room, and how cold the winter drew down, but he did not know what to do. She answered quickly that one time, “Why do you not take them out of that old useless house into some warm court? If it does not rain or snow, take them out into the sun.”
Yuan, holding her letter in his hand, wondered he had not thought of this, for the winters were dry and there were many sunny days, and after that for many days he taught his pupils in a sunny place he found, where two walls met into a corner between two buildings. If some laughed in passing he let them laugh, for the sun was warm. He could not but love Mei-ling the more because so swiftly she had thought of a small simple thing to do before the new building was made. Then this swiftness taught him something. She always answered him more quickly when he put a question to her of a thing he did not know what to do about, and he grew cunning and poured out all his perplexities. She would not answer if he spoke of love, but she answered eagerly if he spoke of trouble, and soon letters flew back and forth between these two as thick as leaves blown by the autumn winds.
There was another way Yuan found to make blood warm these cold days of coming winter, and it was by labor on the land and by planting the foreign seeds in the land. He must in this school teach many things, for the teachers were not enough for all those young who wanted to learn. Everywhere great new schools were opened to teach every new foreign thing which had not been taught before, and the young crowded into the schools to learn, and there were not to be found teachers enough to teach them all they craved to know in these new days. Since Yuan, therefore, had been to foreign parts, he was given some honor and urged to teach everything he knew, and among the things he taught was the new way of planting and tending of seeds. A piece of land was given him outside the city wall, and near a little hamlet, and thither he led his pupils, forming them like a small army into fours, and he marched through the city streets at their head, but instead of guns he bought hoes for them, and these they carried over their shoulders. The people who passed stared to see them, and many paused in their business to stare and call out in wonder, “What sort of a new thing is this?” And Yuan heard one man shout, a very honest dull fellow who pulled a ricksha, “Well, I see a new thing every day in this city now, but this is the newest thing I ever did see, to go to war with hoes!”
Then Yuan grinned to hear this and he answered, “It is the newest army of the revolution!”
The conceit pleased him, too, as he swung along in the winter sunshine. This was truly a sort of army, the only sort of army he would ever lead, an army of young men who went out to sow seed on the land. As he walked he set his feet down in the old rhythm he learned in his childhood from his father’s armies, although he did not know he did it, and his footsteps rang so loudly and clearly that the ragged marching of his followers began to shape evenly and to his pace. Soon the rhythm of their marching set a rhythm moving in his blood, and when they had passed through the dark old city gate, where the mossy bricks gave echo to their steps, and were come into the country, this rhythm began in Yuan’s mind to shape into short sharp words. For very long this had not happened to him. It was as though he had gone through a confusion and now work made him tranquil again and made his soul come clear and distil itself into a verse. Breathless he waited for the words and as they came he caught them in the old remembered delight of the few days in the earthen house. And they came clear, three living lines, but he lacked the fourth. In sudden uneasy haste, for the road was nearly ended and the land in sight, he tried to force it and then it would not come at all.