Following the Gleam: Youth and Revolution

I

I WAS not, to begin with, a ‘sympathizer’ in Hankow. It was part of the middle-class dilettante view of life that I had half adopted to accept experience of this kind much as the translated experiences of art (a play or a poem) are accepted, and to value them, what is more, as separate parts of a continuous process of education. To the dilettante the Chinese Revolution might have been of interest as an exciting spectacle, like a new ballet of Diaghilieff’s, and of value as a contribution to his own education, like the acquirement of a new language. By 1927, after constant exposure to the atmosphere of London and Paris, such ways of receiving experience, although not natural to me, had ceased to be altogether alien, and it was in some such frame of mind as that of your plain seeker-after-curiosity that I first went to Hankow.

There were, however, important differences. One — and a very curious one, at that — was the rapidity with which the purely intellectual and sensational dilettantism of Paris and London slipped away from me the moment I abandoned its geographical centres of influence. Something of the frame of mind (the view of experience) did remain, but the attitudes, tastes, even the vocabulary and the manners, evaporated as soon as I got on a boat.

The point is, it seems to me, rather important, and indicates a characteristic of the time which was not peculiar to me alone. Paris and London appeared to have a powerful dilettante influence on a whole levée of young people, of all nations, who came to maturity in the years just after the war. The influence was partly through intimidation: the dictators of taste, of ideas, of manners, were older and wiser, presumably, than we, and they spoke, almost professionally, for what is called ‘youth.’ The ‘youth’ of Paris and London (in fact already middleaged) pursued novelty, admired innovation no matter what form it happened to take, and indulged in all the rapid changes to which dilettante taste is forced to fly to maintain its high temperature. But if my own course of development is at all typical, — and subsequent political and social movements indicate that it must have been at least rather usual, — the youth of the 1920’s actually wanted a more direct experience of reality, at whatever cost in violence or discomfort, than was to be found in the fanciful, nervous art and ideas of the period. The desire, to which I have referred more than once, for a sense of relationship to the world system could never be satisfied with a society in which art, life, and manners were regulated by caprice.

To Hankow, then, I brought the mind and character of an American bourgeois, twenty-seven years old, who had divided his adult years between actual events — the living history of the time — and the preoccupations of personal taste. In these preoccupations, which had assumed greater importance in the last two years, influences of a powerful order had deflected what must originally have been a nature of considerable vigor and simplicity into channels where it was not wholly at ease. The character of the American bourgeois — let us call him Mr. X — had been tinged with the color of his surroundings, had taken on some of the flavor of Paris and London, and disengaged, no doubt, a light aroma of decay. The American character is not made to withstand, over long periods of time, the influence of older cultures in their most self-conscious and virulent forms. Our Mr. X was almost — and could, in time, have become—a dilettante. That is, he already possessed by nature, and had fertilized by experience, those tastes by which a man could live through sensation alone. Books, pictures, music, and the satisfaction of physical appetites constituted this world of sensation, and although it had always existed in some degree for our Mr. X, as it exists for everybody, it had only recently shown signs of taking over the whole of his life.

He was preserved, then and afterward, from this fate. Aside from any possible reasons that might be sought in deeper regions of the personality, he was preserved by two rather obvious circumstances. The first was that he had no money at all except what he could earn. The second was that, independently of the first, he wanted (why, God alone knows) to ‘write’ — that is, to put into words whatever he could learn about the mysterious transaction of living. His attitude toward work was neither consistent nor serious; he was capable of writing the most undisguised ‘ piffle’ to make money when he needed it; but he did possess, at the core, a determination to do some little work of which he need not be ashamed before he was finished. These two circumstances fought against the world of sensation at every point. A man who has to earn his living cannot spend his whole time, or even much of it, in pursuit of the experiences in art and life that might yield sensation; and a man who wants to do good work at some time or other can only learn how to do it by working.

The second circumstance was, of course, the really powerful combatant. Money, in the world in which Mr. X lived, could be come by in various ways. For instance, it was not wholly impossible (however unlikely) that somebody might die and leave him a million dollars. But, even with a million dollars in pocket and all the pleasures of the world at hand for the taking, he would still have been harassed by the thought that his time, the most precious and the most precarious of his possessions, evaporated with terrifying speed; that he had done nothing with it, was doing nothing with it; and that he must learn how to light the light before darkness descended.

Mr. X was thus, through no effort of his own, and indeed almost automatically, protected against the worst results of his own laziness and selfindulgence. But he was lazy and selfindulgent, just the same. He preferred the line of least resistance, avoided conclusions that might be troublesome to himself, and was tending, more and more, to treat the whole of the visible universe as a kind of catering firm employed in his service. The mind he directed upon people and things in China, and upon the whole drama of revolution, had been originally a good one, acquisitive, perceptive, retentive, but it was softened and discolored beneath later influences, which constantly suggested that fundamental questions were not worth bothering about. The shock of general reality was what he needed, and he was about to receive it — a seismic disturbance of greater intensity and duration than he would have believed possible a few months before.

So much for Mr. X — tiresome fellow!

II

Misselwitz of the New York Times was staying at the American Consulate.

‘One thing you ought to do right away,’ he said, ‘is to go and see Mrs. Prohme.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘You know — you must have heard something about her. Red-headed gal, spitfire, mad as a hatter, complete Bolshevik. Works for Borodin.’

‘Oh, yes, I remember. Somebody told me about her. American.’

‘Yeah — American. But I don’t know if she still has a passport. There was some talk about her giving up her nationality. You can’t pay any attention to what she says, — she’s the wildest Bolshevik in town, — but she’s a nice girl, anyway, and you’ll enjoy talking to her. I kid her along all the time, but she does n’t seem to mind. She can laugh, anyway, and that’s more than most of these people can do.’

‘O. K., let’s go see her now.’

This conversation must have taken place early in May, soon after my arrival in Hankow; but it was so casual, and led to an event of such seeming inconsequence, that it was not even mentioned in my daybook. I remember it, however, far better than I do many of the circumstances that seemed worthy of careful recording. Misselwitz — ‘Missi’ — led the way down a shaded side street in the Concession to a low building that served as the editorial office of the People’s Tribune, the official newspaper of the Hankow government. It appeared in two daily editions, one in Chinese and one in English, and I had already had the pleasure of reading some copies of it.

‘Bill Prohme, her husband,’ Missi went on, ‘is another wild one — gets excited and shouts at you. He’s in Shanghai now, I think. Fine Bolshevik pair. You ought to hear the way the navy people talk about ’em!’

‘Are they Communists, do you mean ? ’

‘Oh, sure — must be. Of course they say they’re not, but you can tell. Everybody that’s got anything to do with this government is a Red, whether they admit it or not.’

We reached the office just as Mrs. Prohme was coming out, and she stopped to talk to us on the step.

‘Hello, Missi,’ she said, laughing at him, ‘what’s the matter now? More outrages to report?’

‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘We just came round to get a little dose of propaganda. Any news? ’

He introduced me, and we walked down the street with her. She was on her way home to dinner, and it was neither the time nor the place for any kind of serious conversation. She was slight, not very tall, with short redgold hair and a frivolous, turned-up nose. Her eyes were of the kind the anthropologists call ‘mixed,’ and could actually change color with the changes of light, or even with changes of mood. Her voice, fresh, cool, and very American, sounded as if it had secret rivulets of laughter running underneath it all the time, ready to come to the surface without warning. All in all, she was most unlike my idea of a ‘wild Bolshevik,’ and I told her so. She laughed. I had never heard anybody laugh as she did — it was the gayest, most unselfconscious sound in the world. You might have thought that it did not come from a person at all, but from some impulse of gayety in the air.

‘You’ve been listening to Missi,’she said. ‘Don’t believe anything Missi says about us. He thinks everybody in Hankow eats bourgeois babies for breakfast. As a matter of fact, I’m not sure what people mean when they say “Bolshevik” in this place. It seems to me a Bolshevik is anybody that does n’t want to make coolies out of the Chinese.’

‘That’s true enough,’ said I. ‘In Shanghai they all thought I was a Bolshevik because I talked to some Chinese, and went to Nanking.’

She inspected me for the first time with sudden gravity — the kind of gravity in which there lurks a faint suggestion of suppressed laughter. I was shaved within an inch of my life, and was dressed in the white uniform of the foreigner in China.

‘No,’ she said soberly, ‘you flatter yourself. I don’t believe anybody could possibly think that you were a Bolshevik.’

‘You ought to be glad I’m not,’ said I. ‘If I were I could n’t get anything printed in an American paper about your revolution, and as it is, I do.’

‘I know,’ she said, reflectively. ‘You’re what they call “fair to both sides.” You sit on the fence and say, “On the other hand.” How’s the weather up there? Is it a nice fence?’

‘It’s comfortable,’ I said, ‘and I get a good view. How do you like it down there where you are? You don’t see much, do you?’

‘Oh, I’m all right,’ she said. ‘I can see over the fence if I try hard. But it’s more interesting down here where the stuff is growing. I don’t care about the view, anyway; I’ve seen it.’

III

This kind of sparring was not uncharacteristic of our talk even when I knew her much better. In the begining of our acquaintance it was almost inevitable, for she could see at a glance all that I have been at such pains to explain in the preceding section — the character of Mr. X, the American bourgeois as modified by Paris and London, with a goodish but lazy mind. She could see it at once, not only because it was to some degree apparent to anybody, but because her acquaintance with the original material of the character was so exact and complete that its discolorations and the subsequent shapes to which it had conformed became immediately obvious. She could easily, perhaps too easily, consign me to the pigeonhole where many of her own friends and relations belonged. She was from Chicago, had been educated at the University of Illinois, and must have known hundreds of our contemporaries of the same general social, economic, and intellectual stamp as myself. Her instinctive attack or defense took the form of a quizzical flippancy, as it might with a contemporary (a brother or friend) known years ago in Illinois, who had, since the days of remembered acquaintance, gone off in an opposing direction and acquired a set of ideas that she could now regard as idiosyncratic.

Exactly the same thing was true, of course, on my side of the argument. She was the kind of girl I had known all my life, but she had, by the direction she had taken, acquired a purpose and point of view that did not seem to me to belong to her. From the first I was conscious of a great puzzle, the puzzle of why she was doing this particular thing at the particular point of the world’s compass. The easiest suggestion for a solution was that she was a romantic idealist, to whom a ‘cause’ was a necessity — any cause. Nobody, after one glance at her, could have supposed her to be animated by ordinary selfish reasons. Her sincerity floated over her like a banner. The hunger for a cause — that was it: the kind of thing that made so many nice American girls go out and get themselves cracked over the head by policemen during the suffragist campaigns. Some of the same nice girls, now that they had the vote, were busy with other causes, getting prohibition either repealed or enforced, getting prisons reformed, or organizing the local ball for charity in their own home town. It must have taken a peculiarly insatiable cause-hunger to bring a girl like this into the exact middle of the Chinese Revolution, but, except for the difference in degree, it was the same motive as that which caused ladies to spend a day or two in the suffrage jail in Washington and then come out and write books with titles like “Jailed for Freedom.’ Perhaps Mrs. Prohme, too, would write a book about her work in China — an excited volume in large print, with pictures, called ‘Up from Canton’ or ‘China in Travail.’

These assumptions, however frivolous, — and nobody knows better than I how grotesquely frivolous they were, — controlled my mind in the earlier stages of our acquaintance, and had their complement in similar assumptions on her part. She had, in a sort of way, ‘known me all her life’; not only that, but I was an American newspaper man from Paris (that is, the worst kind), and she could not take me seriously. She was obliged to assume, from what experience had taught her, that it was useless to expect a rational and unshrinking examination of any subject from such a person as myself. Neither of us was willing, therefore, to risk an attempt at discussion of the central reality toward which we were both unescapably magnetized: she because she already knew, or thought she knew, where it was, and did not believe me capable of the drastic enterprise of reaching it; I because I was profoundly uncertain, and did not realize that the obscure necessity was felt in the same way by anybody else. There was a basis of perfect and complete misunderstanding, with a superstructure of familiarity (sameness of culture, social and economic identity, Illinois, Illinois!); and as a result we could only throw our whole relationship into a key of casual but sustained flippancy. Sometimes the flippancy wore thin, but it seldom broke down altogether. The most important conversation in my life — in the true sense, the only conversation I have ever had — began, and for months continued, as a kind of joke.

IV

There remains to this day a huge body of opinion that misunderstands altogether the situation of the Chinese Revolution. To this body of opinion, chronically theoretical and almost romantic, the Chinese Revolution seems always to have been an ideal quantity. Trotsky, Radek, and many of the Russians thought it was a beautiful example of their own theories, and were disappointed when it did not take the course indicated by them; the missionaries, the British and American Liberals, and in a general way the high-minded idealists of the world, thought it was a great national movement of the traditional nineteenthcentury type, to which they owed support but not comprehension. The Liberals in general hoped that the tendencies represented by Hankow and Nanking — in reality exact opposites — might combine for the benefit of a peaceful, united, and strong China. That this peaceful, united, and strong China was a chimæra did not keep them from cherishing the notion, and, as is usual with Liberals, they allowed the wish to father a good many of their thoughts. They were talking about ‘united China’ in glowing accents at a time when twelve separate independent governments existed in the territory shown on standard maps as belonging to the Chinese Republic.

It may be worth while to tabulate these governments for the sake of precision, and to show how foolish the talk of ‘united China’ was and is under the war-lord system. The twelve were: Yunnan, Szechuen, Sinkiang, Kweichow (all four remote and completely independent provinces), Honan (ruled by Feng Yu-hsiang), Shansi (ruled by Yen Hsi-shan), the countries of Tibet and Mongolia, which had been used to their independence for so many years that they no longer considered themselves parts of China, and the more pretentious governments established in Peking, Nanking, Hankow, and Canton. To these a thirteenth, Manchuria, might be added, for the Manchurian provinces were administered as a separate territory under the disguised tutelage of the Japanese. Some other provinces acknowledged special foreign influences; thus Shantung gave a special position to the Japanese, and Yunnan to the French. A freakish type of government, without a legal name or a parallel in other countries, was set up by the foreign concessions in the Yangtze River cities, in Tientsin, and the Peking Legation Quarter. There were also a number of military and naval strongholds that belonged outright to the foreigners — Hongkong to the British, Kowloon to the French, Kiaochow to the Japanese. And — the final absurdity — every inch of ground, every stick and stone to which a foreigner could possibly lay claim in any part of China, was foreign soil, to be treated exactly as if it were a little bit of France, England, or the United States, miraculously transported through the air and dumped down in the midst of the Chinese.

Weakened, divided, half colonized and overborne by the foreigner, China could not be regarded as an independent country, and was not so regarded by anybody but the purely theoretical idealists. Practical men, whether they worked for the Standard Oil Company or for the Chinese Communists, had to recognize the fact that the huge territory called China on the maps was in reality a hotchpotch of colonies, protectorates, autonomous feudal states, and principalities, in which no step could be taken without consulting the special local forms of a general disease defined in the language of Sun Yat-sen as ‘foreign imperialism.’ In the unutterable confusion to which Chinese political life had been reduced by the quarrels of the military leaders from 1911 to 1927, one element alone was stable: the power, wealth, greed, and susceptibility of the foreigner. And the greatest stronghold of the foreigner, the channel of his wealth and the highroad of his power, was the fatal Yangtze-kiang.

I have presented this analysis of the revolutionary situation at Hankow in 1927 as my own, and have no desire to dodge responsibility for it; the facts do not seem to me to yield any other analysis. Subsequent events have proved that the view here put forward, in which the struggle between the revolution (represented by Hankow) and the counter-revolution (represented by Nanking) is seen as a fundamental antagonism, was the correct view. When the Hankow government was destroyed, the elements it represented ‘went underground,’ as revolutionists say, only to emerge again, tough and obstinate, in the various Communist and semi-Communist movements that have attacked Nanking ever since. The Red China of which Hankow symbolized the hope was not strong enough to come into being in 1927 against the combined forces of Chiang Kai-shek’s counter-revolution and the foreign navies, but it was too strong to be permanently crushed. If a historical parallel to the Chinese Revolution in 1927 must be sought, it can be found not where Trotsky and Radek strove to place it, in the Russian Revolution of 1917, — and certainly not where American missionary and Liberal opinion strove to place it, in the American Revolution of 1776, — but in a far more suggestive episode of Red hope and defeat, the Russian Revolution of 1905.

V

The analysis, I say, is mine; but it also happens to coincide at many points with the view taken by Borodin, and it would be ridiculous to deny that Borodin’s cool, unhurried mind shed light on a good many subjects for me. I saw him frequently in Hankow. As I knew him better, and overcame the feelings of insignificance and frivolity that had originally oppressed me in his presence, I was able to discuss anything with him. Later on, when he was sick in bed with a serious attack of malaria, I used to go to see him every day; and although the conversation during these visits ranged over a wide field, involving many subjects that had nothing to do with the Chinese Revolution, the intellectual resources he displayed were at all times those of a trained Bolshevik — his cast of mind was Leninist. Whether he was discussing a new book (Elmer Gantry was one that aroused his interest just then) or an old political theory, reminiscing or analyzing, telling a story or advancing a hypothesis, he took ‘the long view.’ I had never before examined such a mind at close quarters, and there is no doubt that I was profoundly impressed by its clarity and consistency.

But I do not believe that the influence of Borodin shaped any of my opinions; I was too old and too independent to accept other people’s ideas about phenomena that I could easily observe for myself. What did happen was something a little more complicated. In Borodin I found an older, better disciplined, better trained, and more experienced intelligence than my own: it had already traversed regions that still lay before me. Sometimes Borodin was able to disentangle a principle from the confusion of external events and show it to me; sometimes he was able to point out a historical direction or a prevailing tendency. He never made the slightest attempt to impose his opinions — often, indeed, he talked as if I were not in the room. He was concerned with the truth, and his object in conversation was to extract and demonstrate it. If, therefore, I found every conversation with him illuminating, and approached, in the end, more nearly to his view of the Chinese Revolution than to any other, it was not because of any personal influence he exercised, but because the truth, for me, lay on his side.

The Chinese revolutionists impressed me often by their self-abnegation, their willingness to endure and to persevere, their loyalty to ideas that meant life to China even though they might mean death to the individual. But no single Chinese revolutionist ever set my mind on new paths, as I believe Borodin did. One reason was that I never met the intellectual leaders of the Chinese Revolution. Sun Yat-sen died three years before I went to China, and his written works seemed to me to lack logic — to lack, above all, a genuinely long view. He was perhaps too deep in the battle to be able to see it as a whole, and until the end of his life he appeared to believe in a number of uneconomic and illogical propositions (industrialization without class warfare, for instance). The other great revolutionist of modern China, Li Ta-chao, founder and head of the Chinese Communist Party, was strangled to death by the reactionaries in Peking before I had been in China a month. The leaders I did know all professed to follow the teachings either of Sun Yat-sen or of Li Ta-chao, with, occasionally, a Confucian or a Christian coloration. Some of them were admirable in character, like Madame Sun Yat-sen; others were striking or picturesque, like Wang Ching-wei, the type of the fiery, romantic revolutionary; still others engaged my personal liking and respect, like T. V. Soong; but it happened that I never met a Chinese intellectual who could put his view of history into terms of absolute truth as Borodin did.

Even so, it was not Borodin alone, but the Chinese Revolution with Borodin as its interpreter, that gave me my first perception of the spirit of revolution in general. Borodin alone, talking in a vacuum, would have been merely a Communist intellectual. It was in his relation to the whole mass movement in China, the immense and complicated disturbance of which he was temporarily both the directing genius and the interpreter, that he acquired grandeur. His calm may have been a native characteristic, but it seemed singularly noble in the midst of confusion and danger; his political theory may have been as simple as geometry (they taught it, after all, at the Lenin Institute in Moscow), but it seemed profound and irrefragable when it was seen to support the weight of otherwise meaningless events. He exemplified in his own person, and pointed out in the phenomena around him, the peculiar qualities of intellectual consistency, social philosophy, selflessness, and determination that combine to form something I have called (for lack of a more exact term) the revolutionary spirit.

That spirit was abroad in Hankow from the time the Cantonese armies entered the city until the collapse of the revolutionary government on July 5. It was to be seen in Chinese and Russians, Left Kuomintang organizers and Communists, workmen, students, and agitators — not in all of them, of course, but in a large enough number to confirm the existence of something new in the confusion of China. There were Communist students, sometimes of rich or at least prosperous families, who became coolies so as to be able to organize the coolies for revolution. There were educated Chinese girls who risked death in the effort to tell the workers and peasants who their real enemies were. One of these girls — we all knew her in Hankow — was disemboweled by Chiang Kai-shek’s soldiers on June 21 in Hangchow for saying that the Nanking war lord did not represent the party or principles of Sun Yat-sen. Her intestines were taken out and wrapped around her body while she was still alive. Girls and boys were beheaded for saying what they believed; men were hung up in wooden cages to die of hunger and thirst, or were broken on the rack. Little Phyllis Li, the seventeen-year-old daughter of the hero Li Ta-chao, was tortured by Chang Tso-lin’s men for three days and three nights before they mercifully strangled her, and in the whole time she told them nothing.

The horrors of the counter-revolution were not unexpected: these young Chinese knew what awaited them, and went ahead just the same. Their faith in revolution as the only possible hope for China was so complete that they were willing to die a hundred deaths in its service. At a time when Chiang Kai-shek was butchering the Left Kuomintang and Communist organizers throughout his domain, the volunteers at Hankow who wanted to go and agitate among the war lord’s subjects were more than the labor committees could use. The impulse that made such revolutionists offer their lives for the cause was not a suicidal, neurotic yearning for Nirvana, as it might have been in similar crises in India or Japan. Such varieties of mystic ardor were, so far as I ever saw or heard, unknown to China. The Chinese operated on a colder and purer conviction, the belief that courageous sacrifice in the service of an idea was the best means of propagating that idea among those who still refused to believe. The individual was, as so often in China, sacrificed to the race, and the young men and girls died for generations unborn.

VI

The ardent but impersonal devotion to which I have applied the name ‘ revolutionary spirit ’ was apparent in many characters and incidents in Hankow, and I have named only a few of them. There was one other, more important to me, as it turned out, than all the rest, a more significant and memorable example of that spirit than any in my experience. I mean Rayna Prohme.

The flippancy in which our acquaintance had begun continued for weeks, but before long I began to have an uneasy feeling that my judgment of her character had been ludicrously inaccurate. I made a number of small discoveries that shook my first ideas. She had no enthusiasm for causes in general, had never been the kind of romantical busybody I had at first assumed her to be. She had had a sound education in economics and sociology; her interest in social revolution had been aroused at an age when I was still learning new steps in the fox trot. She had already acquired a rather remarkable revolutionary past in the service of the Kuomintang, and she enjoyed, in the spring of 1927, the confidence of a large number of Chinese Left leaders. She not only edited the official newspaper, but had a general consultative usefulness to the Hankow régime in matters of propaganda designed to appeal to foreigners. Borodin, Madame Sun Yat-sen, Eugene Chen, and Sun Fo treated her opinions with respect. I still could not quite take her seriously as a revolutionist, — it was like expecting me to believe my cousin Cecilia, with whom I grew up, had suddenly turned into a Red, — but I had to concede that this revolutionary phase, however temporary it might be, was an interesting and unexpected development in the character of a charming American girl.

I fell into the habit of going to see her every day, and as I knew her better I came to depend heavily on that daily visit for many things — not only, that is, for the pleasure of conversation with somebody who so thoroughly spoke my own language, and not only for the delight of her high spirits, the refreshment of her laughter, but also for the daily necessities of my job as a journalist, to learn the news and to learn, as far as possible, what the news meant. For a peculiarity of Rayna Prohme’s, as I found out, was her ingrained dislike of lying. She was a very bad liar indeed, and although it was often a part of her duty to make things appear in a somewhat artificial light, her natural candor was such that she did not succeed in doing so — at least with me. I could always tell when she was saying something she did not herself believe; her looks gave her away. She took her instructions from Borodin and Chen, of course, and although Borodin had a high respect for the truth, and avoided deviations from it as scrupulously as anybody I have ever known in public life, the same could never have been said of Mr. Chen. Consequently, for purposes of propaganda, Rayna Prohme was often obliged to write and say things her own candor resented. The official newspaper contained these statements, but she could never make them convincingly enough in conversation. After a bit she gave up attempting to give me official versions of anything, and either told the plain truth or else confessed, with a wry smile, that she could say nothing. It was no small thing, in a place like Hankow and a profession like mine, to know somebody in whom I could believe without reserve.

Bill Prohme, her husband, returned to Hankow after I had been there a week or so, but we did not hit it off as well as might have been expected. His violent revolutionary enthusiasm resented my bourgeois lethargy, my innumerable changes of white silk clothes, my Scotch whiskey and Egyptian cigarettes. In turn I disliked his excitability, his incapacity to argue any subject through in a calm and logical manner; I suspected that his revolutionary convictions were not sufficiently grounded in economic and social science — that he was an emotional Red, if a Red at all; and that his presence in China in his present rôle was due to the accident of his marriage to Rayna Prohme. Partly for these reasons, and partly because his absences and illnesses made our meetings rather infrequent, I never knew him well in Hankow. It was only long after I had left China and Russia that I learned to respect his intelligence and value his friendship. During the period with which this chapter deals, he was a rather shadowy figure to me, and his name does not appear anywhere in the notes I put into my useful daybook.

Bill’s resentment of the visiting bourgeois was eclipsed by that of Rayna’s assistant, Mrs. Mitchell, an American woman journalist who regarded every moment I spent in the office of the People’s Tribune as a calamity. Under these circumstances a more sensitive subject might have stayed away, but I did n’t. The daily conversations with Rayna Prohme had become such a necessity that when a day passed without my seeing her at all (as happened twice when she was ill), it left an extraordinary feeling of blankness and malaise. This being so, it is strange to remember, and stranger still to record, that I never understood her importance to me until months later. I was as stupid as Monsieur Jourdain with his prose; I had already passed under the most powerful and significant personal influence to which I have ever been subjected, but I did not know it.

VII

Hankow, then, — to sum up, — was a marvelous revolutionary spectacle, in which the courage and the devotion of the Chinese agitators, the skill of the Russians, the high hope and frenzied determination of the workers, and the individual splendor of characters like those of Madame Sun Yatsen, Borodin, and Rayna Prohme, combined to give me a glimpse into a new world. In its spirit, at least, if not in its accomplishment, it was the world of Lenin. That the dead bones of economics and sociology could be animated with such thrilling and irresistible life was something I would never have believed six months before in Paris, when the principal event of the century had seemed to be the anniversary performances of Pelléas et Mélisande at the Opéra-Comique.

But although this glimpse into the world of Lenin did supply an almost electrical thrill, and the characters of the spectacle aroused my sincerest admiration, I still did not surrender to the logic of their being. It seemed to me that the whole revolutionary system of thought reposed upon a number of assumptions that defied proof. This became very apparent when the fundamental question of revolution was put into the form of a simple syllogism, like this: —

The only part of such a syllogism that needed no defense was the major term, ‘desirable.’ The major premise, although probable enough, could not possibly be proved because models for a controlled egalitarian economy did not exist, even in Russia. The minor premise was equally shaky; it might be true or not, but it was not susceptible of proof. The conclusion, therefore, had to be taken on faith, or (at best) as the result of two probabilities.

The logic of revolution can be put into other and more persuasive syllogisms than this; indeed, at a later time, Rayna Prohme and I used to spend hours trying to get the fundamental question into its barest and simplest terms; but during the Hankow period the syllogism I have given seemed to me the correct one, and no matter how much my sympathy and admiration were engaged on the side of the revolutionaries, I could not share their conviction. As I have said, the one indisputable thing was the major term ‘desirable’ — something was desirable, something was certainly desirable in a world of misrule; something that could bring order out of chaos had to be found if the human race was to justify its pretense of intelligence. But whether or no the desirable something was revolution did not seem to me susceptible of proof, and the revolutionary spectacles that moved me most deeply were still only that and nothing more.

(To be concluded)