xii INSIDE SIAN 179
Commander") "should never have gone to Nanking.
That was unnecessary; and very dangerous for
him."
Miao came back from his bath, radiant; he was
very fond of Lintung. "I once spent a month here,"
he told me, "in exile. Marshal Chang said he didn't
want to see me again because I looked like a Japanese.
So I took a month's holiday at the hot springs."
He seemed to have spent most of his time in Sian
either in high favour or in banishment: he showed
me a tower on the walls of Sian where he had once
been imprisoned for several weeks. I could under-
stand that some of his wilder schemes might have
come amiss, if put forward at the wrong moment.
But his passionate anti-Japanism, it seemed, could
always redeem him in the eyes of the Young Marshal.
They were very young, these three North-easterners
who had planned the arrest of a "dictator." And they
had very much enjoyed it all. "You know," Ying
whispered to me, as though it were almost high
treason to mention it, "the only time Chiang ever
smiled, in those first three days, was when they
brought him back his false teeth!" Miao and Ying
were pure intellectuals; Sun was a soldier who only
two years before had been a raw young officer with
Chang Hsueh-liang at Hankow. But they all had
a quality of enthusiasm and selflessness that had
obviously had its effect on their young commander,
and I could understand their power to influence him.
What they could not face, as the next few weeks were
to show, was the depressing interlude of endless
negotiations, the whole elaborate business of Chinese
bargaining, that followed the release of Chiang Kai-
shek. And this was perhaps a pity.