The Patriot by Pearl S. Buck Page B

together his brigade. In these days when he himself was in such a pitch of waiting that he could not sleep except in bits and snatches through the nights, these men he had taught were children freed from their tasks. They were idle all day, but at night he could not get them together. They came, a few of them at a time, and when he asked where the others were they laughed and pointed to the city.
    “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