The Patriot (16 page)

Three or four times I-wan had said to Bunji, “I ought not to live on here forever. It has been two years. I ought to find some rooms outside.” Each time Bunji cried out against this and told Mr. Muraki, so that Mr. Muraki made an opportunity to see I-wan and say in his delicate quiet fashion, “Do not leave my house. I like to have my friend’s son in my house.”

So through two winters I-wan had stayed on. He had waked many mornings to see from his warm quilts snow in his bit of garden, soft thick snow that looked scarcely cold. The sea mists kept back ice and sharp frosts, and when snow fell it clung where it lay, melting slowly underneath upon the warm earth. The paper-latticed house which was so cool in summer could be warm, too, in winter. In his room there was a sort of shallow pit sunk into the floor and into the pit was put a pot or cauldron of red coals, covered with ash, and over it a frame, and over this a thickly-stuffed quilt, and here he sat in the evenings when he and Bunji did not go out to some place for pleasure, his legs and his whole body warm and comforted. Sometimes Bunji came in and thrust his legs under the quilt, too, and they read or talked together. Sometimes in the main room where a large pot of coals was burned, they all sat under the big quilt as though around a table. Only Tama was still not often there. She had always, she said, to study, since this was her last year at the girls’ school.

But sometimes she came, and on such evenings I-wan sat quietly, much more quietly than when she was not there. He did not look her in the face, but he saw her, somehow, between his looking here and there as Mr. Muraki or Bunji talked. She never sat by him. That he knew she could not do. She sat by her mother, her eyes bright and rebellious under her quietness and her cheeks red with the warmth. He knew now she was pretty, though he dared not look at her. In all this seeming freedom there was no real freedom. He had now learned that, too. Mr. Muraki might take off his garments before them and put on others in the presence of them all. But he turned his face to the wall first and when he did this he put a curtain between himself and everyone. Maidservant or family, they all turned their own faces away from him.

So also with Tama. She came and went as she liked, or so it seemed, but now I-wan knew, with none having told him, that if by one word or movement he let it be seen that he thought her free for him to speak to or to touch, he must leave this house, where he, too, came and went freely, only as long as he took no freedom for himself.

Then in the early summer of that year Tama left school. No one spoke of it to I-wan, but there she was, always at home. In the mornings she had been used to put on a straight plain foreign dress before she went to school. Now all day long she wore her own soft Japanese dress. It had been that when I-wan came back from work she was never there, since she seldom left school before nightfall. Now she was always there when he came home, not waiting or even where he could meet her.

But he knew she was there. He saw her sometimes in the garden, cutting a branch from a flowering tree, or he saw her arranging a vase or a picture in the alcove of a room. If they met in passing, she smiled at him, he imagined, a little sadly. Certainly she looked gentler now that she went to school no more, and she was quieter than she had been. He was glad she was in the house, but he did not know why she seemed so quiet. No one said anything to him. It was as though it were taken to be none of his business whether Tama went to school or stayed at home. And it was none of his business. But he could not keep from blurting out to Bunji when they left the house together one rainy day, “Why does Tama seem changed now that she has finished school?”

Bunji, splashing through the mud, did not stop. “She is at home now,” he said carelessly, “preparing for marriage.”

“For marriage!” I-wan repeated. “Is she going to be married?”

He had not thought of Tama’s marrying. But she would be married, of course—she was almost his own age, though she looked so young.

“Oh, nothing is decided,” Bunji replied. The wind had caught his black cotton foreign umbrella and he was struggling with it. “It is our way when a girl has had enough school, to keep her at home to get ready for marriage—you know, cooking, sewing, arranging flowers, making tea, music—everything, in fact, about a house and a husband.” He jerked his umbrella down and folded it and let the rain splash in his face. “What an umbrella!” he remarked. “The old-fashioned oiled paper ones are better after all.”

“Tama is to be married?” I-wan asked, his mouth suddenly dry.

“Of course,” Bunji replied. “But not for some time. She has a great deal to learn, you know—especially about men. That’s the trouble with a moga. She doesn’t really know men. Take Sumie—now she makes Akio perfectly happy. She’s content to do it—it’s what she wants. But Tama has a lot of moga ideas—she’ll have to forget them before she’s ready to marry, my father says. She’ll take lessons, probably, from some good old retired geisha girl. It’s part of the training.”

To this I-wan listened with a horror which amazed him. What was this to him? And yet it seemed to him intolerable that Tama must give herself up to nothing but the amusing and solacing of one man, some man—what man? He now perceived that though he saw her almost never, yet she was a part of the life of this house, and so of his life. He thought of her round pretty face and pleasant ways which until now he had not known he noticed. Now he knew he noticed everything about her.

“Are you sure she isn’t—engaged?” he asked, knowing he ought not to ask it, that even Bunji would feel it ought not to be asked.

“It is not my affair,” Bunji replied. Then he turned in the street to look at I-wan. The rain was streaming down his big flat face, over his upturned collar and down his oilcloth cape. “I’ll tell you this, though, I-wan. You are like our brother. My father wants her to marry General Seki.”

Now I-wan had lived here long enough to know this General Seki. He was known to everyone on the island, for Kyushu was his native place and they were all proud of him, though no one thought of loving him. He was a man past middle age, whose wife had died two years before, and he had given her a mighty funeral. I-wan had seen the funeral procession soon after his coming. Everyone had seen it since there had never been such a procession before in the city. General Seki had been driven slowly at the head of it in a motor car, covered with rosettes and streamers of coarse cotton cloth. He sat as squat and thick as a bullfrog, his shaven head sunk into his collar, his breast covered with ribbons and decorations. Everyone stared at him, while behind him in a smaller car came a little pot carried in an old maidservant’s arms. In the pot was a handful of human ash. This had once been his faithful wife.

“I don’t think young girls should marry old fat men,” I-wan muttered, remembering all this. He felt sick. Tama learning how to amuse and care for that old fat man!

“General Seki is my father’s old friend,” Bunji replied. Then he laughed. “Don’t think about such things, I-wan!” he cried. “It does no good. Don’t let love be important—look at Akio!”

“I’m not thinking of love,” I-wan said slowly. “I’m thinking of Tama.”

And then for the first time he thought, what if they were the same thing? But it had not occurred to him really to love Tama until this moment.

He did not, of course, love her, he told himself. Had he not lived in the same house now with her for more than two years without thinking of it? Whenever he saw her he looked at her secretly to convince himself of this. All through the summer he told himself that she was too short, that her shoulders were square and her lips too full. She was not even so pretty as Peony.

No, but there was this difference. He had not wanted to touch Peony. But Tama he longed to touch. Day after day when he looked at her he forgot to see the faults of her face, her hands, her body, and he longed only to touch her. Her eyes were so pure in their clear black and white, her too full lips so red.

It seemed once he had thought of her that there was nothing else in the world about which to think. His work, a book he read, all that he did seemed useless beside this question to which he now leaped: did he love Tama? At first he let it be a matter to be balanced and weighed. He could love Tama or not love her. If he loved her, then he must ask to marry her. Marriage—that was serious. To marry Tama—but why not marry her? He never wanted to go home. He could make his home here in this pleasant country where he had been so kindly cared for. He and Tama would make a new home.

He began dreaming. Suppose it were for him that Tama was preparing? When he thought of this, everything changed. If it were for him, then of course it was quite right that Tama should leave school and learn how to cook and to place flowers with meaning and how to play the lute and how to make love to her husband. He saw, off in the clouds somewhere, a little new house and himself and Tama there.

His father would not like it at first. But then perhaps he would, since he and Mr. Muraki were old friends. Mr. Muraki was always speaking of his father. “A strong man—a fine man,” he murmured when he spoke of Mr. Wu. “The sort of man China needs—that any country needs—a friend to Japan.”

Mr. Muraki might be glad to have the son of such a man for his own son-in-law. As for Tama, he was indignant that she should even think it possible to marry General Seki. But no, of course she did not think it possible. Perhaps she did not even know of it. But the danger was that she might think it her duty. She was so strange a mixture of willfulness and duty.

All through the summer and into the autumn I-wan argued with himself. Sometimes he was sure he loved Tama and then he made up his mind firmly that he would speak to Mr. Muraki himself about Tama, in the new modern fashion, but then whenever he saw Mr. Muraki he knew he could never do this. There was such fearful dignity in that small old figure. To be too bold would be to spoil all. And how could he speak at all when he did not know Tama’s own heart? To her he might be only repulsive. He felt sometimes, staring at himself in the small mirror in his room, that he must be repulsive. His face was too long and always pale. He did not get enough exercise. He did not love to walk as Bunji did, but he must walk more. And then, shrinking from himself, he was not sure, after all, that he loved her—if she did not love him, certainly then he would not love her. But whether he would let himself love Tama or not, he thought finally, he must at least let Tama know that she ought not to marry General Seki. He would find some chance time in which at least to tell her that, and once he had told her, he would feel eased.

But such chance was not easy to find. He saw her, it had seemed, so easily, in such glimpses here and there, and yet when he tried to speak to her about a private thing, there was no privacy. Somehow a maidservant was suddenly there, or Madame Muraki seemed by chance to be passing and she stopped to speak pleasantly, and when she went she always took Tama with her, for a special need. Or he saw her when the whole family was there, and she was always the first to excuse herself.

It seemed all accident, but after weeks of trying to speak to her even a moment alone he perceived that there was no accident in all this. They did not want Tama to speak with him alone. He felt hot for a moment. Was he not to be trusted? And yet nothing was changed. Everyone was to him as ever, and he could not be sure he had not imagined they did not want him to speak to Tama.

Then one afternoon when he came in, he saw her bending over a rock at the edge of a pool in the garden. It was already cold again, and there was thin ice on the water. He went to her quickly. Now he could catch her alone. He would waste no second of time.

“I want to tell you—” he stammered. He could speak Japanese very well now—“I have been trying to tell you—”

She looked up at him, her dark eyes full of surprise, her hands still upon the stone she was arranging in the thin ice. She should not, he thought, get her hands so cold—then he was driven on by her soft direct look.

“You mustn’t marry an old man,” he whispered. “Tama, don’t, I beg you—”

Before he could say another word he saw Madame Muraki, a shawl over her shoulders, coming toward them from the house, more nearly hurrying than he had ever seen her. He was about to go away, and then he stood still. Why should he go? He was doing nothing wrong. And Tama, seeing her mother, rose and moved toward her. But she found time for one sentence before she went.

“Do you not think I shall marry whom I please?” she said. Her soft face and her soft voice were pervaded with stubbornness. And immediately happiness fell upon him like light.

He watched her join her mother and they stood talking a moment. He could hear nothing, but he saw Tama shake her head quickly once, twice, three times, about something. He went on to his room, laughing a little, and greatly comforted over nothing in particular when he came to think of it, except that he was glad Tama was stubborn.

It was a good thing to educate women. He believed in it. It made them willful. He reached his room and sat down without even taking off his hat. He smiled and remembered her face as she leaned above the pool. She was not really pretty. He could see that. She was not pretty with Peony’s invariably exquisite prettiness. There had been days, he remembered, when he had been perfectly able to see that Tama’s school clothes were not becoming in their plain colors and tight foreign fit. But now she did not wear them any more. She wore her brightly flowered robes with wide sashes, and above the silken folds her fresh colored face was as beautiful as his heart could wish. Besides, there was more than prettiness, wasn’t there, to marriage? He had heard his mother when she talked about daughters-in-law.

“Women ought to be pretty, but not too pretty,” she used to say like an oracle. “Extremes are always evil, and a woman too pretty is a curse to everyone, even to herself.”

She used to say this before I-ko again and again, for some reason which I-wan did not know. Now he could see what she meant. A man should be able to count on his wife. There was that about Tama underneath all prettiness, something he could trust—if he loved her.