The Patriot (17 page)

Was he truly in love, or not? How did he know? He wanted to be with her—was that not love? He would like to come home and find her there—that was love, wasn’t it?

“If I could be alone with her even for one hour,” he thought, “I would know.”

But there was not the least chance of such a thing. She was like a bird fastened to a length of invisible thread, flying, it seemed, hither and thither. But there was always the length of the thread to which she was tied.

He rose abruptly and took off his hat and coat and lit his Japanese pipe. He had only recently begun to smoke a pipe. It was, he had heard Mr. Muraki say, a calming thing. He stepped down into the bit of garden outside his room and stood looking down into the basin of the small clear pool. Everything about it was fresh and neat as always. He took this for granted. But now he saw someone had scrubbed the stones since the rain last night. They had been picked up, washed, and put back again. He took one up out of its frame of thin frosty ice and looked at it. Even the underside was clean. Only a few grains of the wet sand in which it was set clung to it. He put it back carefully. In this house it would be known if so much as the position of a small stone were changed. He would wait, he decided. He would wait until he knew his own heart and Tama’s.

“I want to climb a mountain,” Bunji said suddenly on one day of spring, looking up from his desk. “Why not? We have not had a holiday since the New Year. My legs are growing soft.”

I-wan was used to these sudden moods of Bunji’s. For weeks and months Bunji worked as though there were nothing in his life but work. And then one day, without any warning, he would put down his pen and pound his desk with his fists.

“A mountain climb,” he declared in exactly the same way each time.

I-wan looked at him and smiled. It had taken a long time for him to learn to climb with Bunji even after he had made up his mind to do it. Those bowed crablike legs of Bunji’s, so ludicrous in puttees and leather boots, were able to clamber up rough mountainsides with a speed which I-wan could not reach however he tried. He grew used to seeing Bunji leaping along in his crooked fashion to pause on a rock high above him and wait.

“Tomorrow,” Bunji said decidedly, “the azaleas will be in bloom. We will go to Unzen.” He paused and grinned at I-wan and then he added as though it were nothing, “And we will take Tama with us, shall we? She used to go with me always before you came.”

I-wan felt for his pipe. He must not show excitement. If it were between his teeth he could occupy his hands with it. He could light it and seem busy with it.

“Will she come?” he asked coolly. He had lived so many months now waiting that he could control his voice, his eyes.

“I don’t know,” Bunji said. He glanced at I-wan, his eyes full of teasing. “It depends on whether she thinks it worth while.” I-wan did not answer, and Bunji went on, “That is, worth while to stand the storm afterward.”

“You mean—” I-wan could not keep from asking.

Bunji shrugged. “My father,” he said simply.

“Oh,” I-wan murmured.

“We’ll see,” Bunji said calmly. “I’ll ask her, anyway. She can do as she likes.”

He suddenly began to laugh loudly.

“Why do you laugh?” I-wan asked him, though he knew.

“Oh, for nothing,” Bunji said mischievously. “I don’t like General Seki—that’s why.”

I-wan turned his back and did not answer and began to whistle without a tune. They went back to work without speaking again. But this, I-wan thought, bending above the invoices, this must be love, this heat in his bosom. Suddenly he felt tomorrow would be intolerable if Tama did not come with them. If she did not come, he would make some excuse to Bunji that he did not feel well. He would stay in his room, and perhaps, somehow, if he were in the house with her a whole day—But she might come.

He worked steadily on. There was nothing he could do or say to make tomorrow. She would come or she would not. No, what he had in his breast was hope. He hoped with all his heart—it was foolish to hope. She would or she would not. It might rain. Rain would not stop Bunji, but it might stop a girl. He really knew very little about Tama. Was she the sort of girl who would go up a mountain whether it rained or not, if she decided to go?

He became obsessed with the possibility of rain. It seemed to him that all these three years in the Muraki house he had been only waiting for this one day, which was tomorrow. After his work he went and walked along the sea. It was from the sea that the rains came—that is, if they did not come from the mountains. He stared up at the mountains. Sea or mountains, at least now there were no clouds. He went home, for the moment calmer.

But in the night he woke convinced that he heard rain on the roof. He dashed to the edge of the garden. There was no rain. The spring moonlight filled the tiny space and what he had heard was only the ceaseless trill of the tiny waterfall, translated by his dread into rain in his dreams. He sighed enormously and went back to bed.

Yet when he saw her in the morning he felt that all the time he had known she would come. She looked sweet and familiar, as he had often seen her. She was still wearing her own dress, but it was a cotton one, flowered in blue and white like a peasant girl’s. From its crossed folds on her bosom her neck rose creamy soft, and her face was a warm rose when she saw him and her eyes were full of pleasure.

“She wants to come,” he thought, and this excited him so he could not speak. But she was calm enough after their greetings were given, and then he grew calm, too. After all, they were old friends, having lived so long in this house together.

“Where are the sticks, Bunji?” she asked. “And here is our lunch, and some cloth soles to put over our leather shoes so we won’t slip on the rocks.”

They set off, like any two brothers and a sister, and all of I-wan’s thoughts of her during the last few days seemed now foolish and unreal. She was too healthy and natural and free to be in love with him. Girls in love—he remembered against his will things I-ko had told him about girls in love. She was not thinking of him at all.

For a moment he was cast down by this. She ought not, if she loved him, to look so gay and healthy.

But it was impossible to be long cast down on such a day. The farmers were in their fields at work and called as they walked past, and children ran out to laugh at them, and the green hills were bright with sunshine.

“There has not been such a day in all these years since I came to Japan,” I-wan declared.

“There are not many such days, even in Japan,” Tama said, “nor, I think, in the world.”

It was such a day when everything they saw seemed right and beautiful and fitted to the clear windless sunshine. And they passed scene after scene like pictures, each lovelier than the last. It was still early morning, and they had passed the fields and were at the foothills. Then they reached a certain point where the road took a sudden turn inward, and there was a small stream splashing down into a pool, and in the pool a country girl stood bathing herself. She was naked, and the water was about her ankles, and she was laving herself, her long black hair knotted upon her head. I-wan saw her unexpectedly and he looked her straight in the eyes before he could stop himself. But though he was instantly ashamed for her, he saw not the slightest shame in her wide dark gaze. She looked at them in most innocent wonder and called out a spring greeting. Bunji did not speak, but Tama called back to her.

Then the girl cried, “Where are you going?”

And Tama called back, “To the hot springs!”

“It’s a fine day for that,” the girl replied.

They went on, then, and now I-wan was ashamed before Tama. But Tama said with much pleasure, “How pretty she was, standing to her ankles in the clear water and her skin all wet!”

“Yes, she was,” Bunji agreed.

Then to I-wan, this, too, became beautiful and fitted to the day, although not to be wholly comprehended.

So by noon they reached the top of the mountain, and there was an inn and in the inn the hot-spring baths. I-wan thought to himself, “If Tama bathes with us—” He thought of the pretty naked peasant girl. At that instant he found himself possessed by his imagination. It came like a rush of music heard when no music was expected, and he felt his face grow hot. He wanted Tama to bathe with them and he did not. He could not ask Bunji a word. He did not answer his chattering. Tama had waved to them and gone one way and he and Bunji another. If he should see Tama in that great pool of steaming water, so clear that it was blue, and sparkling with silvery bubbles as it flowed from the earth, it would be the most beautiful sight on earth. He wanted to see it, and he was afraid, too. Could he keep from gazing at her?

But when he and Bunji came out, scrubbed and wet, she was not there. They stepped into the pool and Bunji cried out with joy, “Did you ever feel anything like this? Aren’t you light—so light and clean?”

“It is beyond anything I have ever known,” I-wan said. They played in the water like two little boys, splashing and teasing each other. Yet inside of I-wan was nothing but intense waiting.

Tama did not come. When at last they came out and dressed themselves and went into the garden, she was there. Her face was pink and fresh and her hair wet.

“Did you have a good bath?” Bunji asked her.

“Yes,” she replied. “I had a little pool all to myself.”

Yes, that was the way it should be. I-wan was glad it had been so. He was relieved now that she had kept herself away from him. He was, after all, not a Japanese. He felt clean and strong and suddenly very happy. And yet he did not know why. There had been other days before, days when the sunshine was as bright and when he felt as well and ready to laugh. But today everything seemed more perfect than he had ever known it. The mountain air was so clear, the little inn so clean, and the old bare-legged man who was its keeper so courteous.

“Amuse yourselves, sirs,” he called, “while I make your dinner ready! Those curious rocks I carried up from the sea with my own hands.”

So while they waited for their food to be ready they ran about among the rocks in the garden, and exclaimed like children over the strange water-washed shapes. Everything was to be laughed at, the rock which the water had carved into the lines of a shrewish face, the crab in a little pool scuttling to hide when they looked at him, and especially all that Bunji said was to be laughed at. And every time Tama and I-wan laughed they looked at each other. At first their eyes met only to say, “Isn’t he absurd!” But each meeting was so pleasant that I-wan made every chance to look into her dark eyes, and he discovered that when he looked at her the day sprang again to its perfection.

Then a voice called and they went in to eat their meal. The old man had placed a low table near the edge of the room and they seated themselves about it. The old man paused.

“I have waited until you came,” he said, “to finish the decoration of the room. Look, if you please!”

He waited until their eyes were turned toward him. Then he drew back the screen. There, like a picture, was a hillside of burning maples, their rosy red soft against the clear blue sky. I-wan’s eyes leaped to meet Tama’s, and hers were waiting for him. Her eyes were not full of laughter now. They were very soft and shy. She was beautiful! He felt his heart suddenly move out of its place and the blood poured out into his cheeks. He spoke to hide it. “You must sit here, Tama,” he said, “where you can see.” He pulled the cushion to a place facing the hillside.

“I will sit wherever you say,” she replied.

He felt her docile and this made him giddy. Tama was not usually like this. She had a clear firm way of doing what she wished to do and of arranging even a small thing as she liked. But now she knelt upon the cushion. The sight of her smooth black head, bent before him as she knelt, sent I-wan into silence.

Bunji was playing the clown. He seized his chopsticks and pretended he was famished, holding his bowl and begging for food in the way that beggars do. But now I-wan could not laugh. He was trembling because of Tama. She knelt there, busying herself with the bowls and the cups, smiling, glancing up now and again at the hillside. He wanted to think of something to say, a verse to quote, or some ancient saying out of all he had learned. But he could think of nothing. His mind was empty of everything except the way Tama looked at this present moment. He said, stupidly, “Isn’t it beautiful, Tama?”

He thought, “I am so stupid she will hate me. What is the matter with me?” For all morning they had all been full of talk.

But she nodded her head quickly and joyously, and again their eyes met for a deep moment. Then she took his bowl and filled it with the hot white rice and handed it to him. He took it with both his hands and instantly the moment was full of meaning between them. He did not know what the meaning was.

“Tama—” he began. And when he said her name it seemed to him that the moment rose like a beautiful rocket into the sky and burst into a thousand stars of light. Of course it was she who made the day wonderful, it was she who could make anything wonderful! He grew grave with this discovery. He was almost afraid of it. And yet, was it not for this very certainty that he had so long waited?

All the way home Bunji bantered him.

“What’s wrong with you, I-wan? You’ve gone as quiet as an old man. Tama, the old man of the mountains has bewitched him.”

“Don’t say such things, Bunji,” Tama said. “There are really spirits in the mountains.”

They were walking quickly down the rocky steps of the path hewn into the hillside. Tama was ahead. She had kept ahead ever since they left the inn. He was watching her quickly moving feet. She put her feet down so surely with every step that she never slipped once. Bunji was always slipping on the loose stones. He wore the thick clumping soldier’s shoes that he had worn when he was in military training.

“The only good I ever got from all that drill was these shoes,” he had declared when they set forth in the morning.

“Bunji, don’t,” Tama had said. “It is the duty of every man to be ready to fight for his country.”