The Patriot (21 page)

“Hah!” he said to Akio, smiling and showing very white teeth under his small black mustache.

Akio smiled. “This is Wu I-wan,” he said.

“Hah!” said Shio pleasantly. “My father wrote me about you. He spoke very highly. I am sorry I was busy.”

“It is nothing,” I-wan said politely.

He felt suddenly shy. Shio was really too much like Mr. Muraki.

“Will you come into the office?” Shio said.

They followed him into a square ugly room with gray cement walls and uncomfortable wooden furniture painted yellow, and the young woman poured tea for them. But there was no time to look about. Shio was unwrapping something on his desk.

“Look!” he said eagerly.

It was an ivory figure of the Chinese Goddess of Mercy. She stood two feet high, benign and exquisite, her tranquil presence diffused from quiet eyes and flowing ivory robes. She must be very old, for the ivory was creamed.

“Ah,” Akio exclaimed, “at last!”

“At last,” Shio said. He gazed at the beautiful statue. No one spoke. Then Shio said sorrowfully, “If only we could keep her! But she is to go to America with the rest. A museum has bought the collection entire.”

“The great Li collection from Peking?” Akio asked, surprised.

Shio nodded. Then he said in a lower voice, “But tell me—how is all in my father’s house?”

“Well enough,” Akio answered. He hesitated and I-wan caught his eyes looking at him as though he wished I-wan were not there. So in decency I-wan took up a newspaper that lay upon a small table near him and began to read it, so that he need not hear what Akio was now saying to Shio of family matters.

Then suddenly he heard through all he read, these words: “So now he is very angry and he says he will tell General Seki that the wedding may take place at once.”

These words I-wan heard and instantly understood. In the crash and confusion of his own being he sat staring at the ivory goddess, speechless. She stood facing them, enigmatic, benevolent, ageless, eternal. He clung to her. She was quite helpless, of course. People could do with her as they liked. But in Japan, in America, wherever she was, whatever happened to her, she would be herself, unchanged. “I am insane,” he thought, “thinking about ivory idols…. He wants the wedding at once….”

“You will go to your room first, and rest,” Shio was saying kindly.

“Yes, if I may,” I-wan said. His voice sounded thin and far off.

“Don’t hurry,” Shio replied. “Have your meal. I want to talk with my brother. Tomorrow I will show you your desk. Just now of course we are very busy. Treasures are pouring out of North China.”

What, I-wan thought, did that mean?

“This way, please,” the young woman said. He took up his bag and followed her across the street toward a long one-story gray building. This was the hostel.

“Earthquake-proof,” she said proudly.

She led him to the desk where a clerk whisked a card catalogue to his name.

“Room fifty-one,” he said.

He went to room fifty-one, and opened the door to a small cell of a room. There were a bed, a chair, a table, a washbowl stand. Floor and walls were gray cement.

He sat down heavily and put his head in his hands. He must write to Tama at once. He opened his bag and snatched out the paper and pen he had put in this morning. That quiet room seemed a thousand miles, a thousand years, away.

“Tama,” he began, “I have heard a terrible thing. Akio says—” He scribbled on and on incoherently, trying to tell her what to do—only what could he tell her? “Postpone—pretend to be ill, Tama—anything. Tama, could you run away? Think of something and write me. I can’t sleep or eat until I hear.”

He sealed it hastily, marked it for air mail, and rushed out to the desk to post it. When it was gone, he suddenly felt very faint. He must, after all, have something to eat.

He went into a restaurant and ordered a bean-curd soup and a little fish. As he waited he remembered the letter he had planned to write to Tama, when he was flying through sunshine over a blue sea. How different was the one now flying back to her, perhaps on that very plane on which he had come this morning! He felt a strange premonition that was like the memory of terror. He remembered his father bending over his bed and shaking him out of his dreams. He felt as though now, again, something had shaken him from a dream.

When he opened his eyes the next morning there was the sound of laughter in the hall outside his room. Young men were shouting with laughter. He heard them approach his door and pass, their laughter growing fainter as they went. A streetcar turned and screeched outside the window. He heard a crab vendor’s call, “Fresh crabs from the morning sea!”

He lay a moment, remembering the mood in which he had fallen asleep. His fears had woven themselves into broken dreams in which he and Tama seemed always about to meet, and yet he never found her. It was all not true, fears or dreams. Everything was going to be all right. He could trust her—that soft stubbornness of hers.

The sun falling through the bamboo curtains was making little dancing waves of light on the wall. He leaped out of bed. He was going to work so hard that Shio would tell Mr. Muraki how good he was, and then perhaps Mr. Muraki would let him marry Tama. Well, his own grandfather might say he would rather his son married a Chinese, but then he had often heard his father say that China and Japan should be allies and friends. He laughed silently as he brushed his hair carefully before the mirror. He agreed with his father!

Tama would have his letter today. Perhaps she would not expect so immediate a letter and would not go at once to Sumie? He paused, his hand on the door, framing mentally a possible telegram. No, it was impossible. He would trust to her going at once to Sumie to tell her there would be letters. He could trust Tama.

He went on to his restaurant breakfast almost blithely. If she answered also by airplane, he might have a letter tomorrow. He ate rice gruel and an egg and salted vegetables and drank a glass of American malted milk without knowing what he ate or drank, then rose and paid his bill and crossed the street to the Muraki building.

The door of Shio’s office was open and I-wan stood before it and coughed slightly.

“Come in!” Shio answered. His voice was so exactly like Mr. Muraki’s that I-wan felt a little daunted. But he went in. Shio was at his desk already, a small, intensely neat figure with spectacles and a close stiff black mustache. He looked a straight militant little man until one saw his eyes. Behind the heavy lenses his eyes were, for a Japanese, unusually large, and their gaze was as naive and mild as a child’s. The militancy was all on the surface and because he had gone to military school, as every Japanese man had to do.

“Good morning,” he said kindly. “If you will follow my secretary, she will show you your office. And please check the lists you will find there against the bills of lading of the shipments we expect today from China. Later, if you please, help to unpack the articles and check again. If there is any uncertainty, call upon me for help. I am glad to give it. When all is unpacked, I myself will come and examine everything.”

“Thank you, sir,” I-wan murmured. This little man was so calmly full of authority, in spite of his childlike eyes, that one’s instinct was to obey him. Shio touched a bell, and the bowlegged girl in her black skirt and white blouse appeared, and I-wan followed her into a square hall where ten clerks bent over their desks.

“Here, if you please,” the girl said in a smiling hissing whisper. She paused by a desk near the window and, bowing slightly, went away.

I-wan found himself looking down into a wide clean treeless street, edged with squat houses and open shops. Beyond was the brilliant blue harbor, where ships lay resting. Around him in this room no one moved. There was absolute silence. As he looked he met hasty secret glances from the corners of eyes turned for an instant in his direction. He felt suddenly for the first time a stranger in Japan, and that he missed Bunji very much.

Here he knew no one. The heads were all studiously bent now. No one moved except to open a drawer or reach for a pen. There was the atmosphere of a rigid discipline. He hesitated a moment, then felt his gaze caught toward a door. It was open, and a man stood there watching him. “Have you your assignment, Mr. Wu?” he called.

“Yes, sir,” I-wan replied.

“Hah!” the man said.

It was a command to work, and I-wan opened the folder before him. Not a head in the room had moved.

When he came to his room three days later he found Tama’s letter.

“Wait,” she said, “we must wait. It will be made clear to us what our fate is.”

Yes, but what of her father’s haste to marry her, he thought impatiently. His eyes raced ahead. “My mother knows how to delay what she does not like,” Tama wrote. “She has delayed this many times and she will again—and again, until—” Madame Muraki, so silent and scarcely seen—it was strange to think it was she upon whom he and Tama depended. And yet when he thought of it, he felt reassured. Tama was not alone in her father’s house.

He wrote to her throughout the long year, often impatiently, sometimes angrily, and sometimes, in the long gray winter’s days, in the apathy of delay and discouragement. He knew that she could not always get his letters when they reached Sumie. Sometimes, she told him, there were five or six waiting before she found a chance to go to Akio’s house and then she had to wait until night to read them. But her letters were always the same. They were short, even when his were long, but they carried always the same steady words. “It will be made clear to us what our fate is. And my mother still delays.”

Well, he must learn to be content with delay, he told himself…. That year in Yokohama was the longest of his life.

For hours he had stood checking with a pencil the things which the clerks drew carefully out of the sawdust and rice straw—potteries and ivories, carved agate and rose quartz, crystal and cloisonné, carved blackwood and redwood, and silver, inlaid with the sky-blue feathers of the kingfisher bird. But he paid no heed to anything.

All through the spring and the summer he had forced himself to be content with delay, but now in this first month of early autumn he was miserably anxious again about Tama.

He had not simply imagined that her letters had grown careful. It was more than that. Last week she had told him to write less often and less freely. What did that mean except that she was afraid and uncertain—that she was changed? He had remembered then that she had never said that she would surely marry him, whatever happened, and he had decided desperately that he would wait no longer for Tama’s “fate.” He must know why she had changed to him. And instantly he had sat down and written her all his fears and had begged her to tell her father everything and let him come. He had told her that he would wait four days for her answer. This was the fourth day. If tonight there were no letter he would leave for Kyushu tomorrow. And now he could scarcely wait until the hands of his watch crept to six, and yet he dreaded to know the hour was there.

The door opened and Shio came in.

On great tables put there the treasures stood. Shio went over them in an ecstasy.

“Hah—” he whispered tenderly, “hah—all this—”

His small stubby fingers touched as delicately as a breath one thing after another. He knew everything, murmuring as he went. “This now, is Sung white—and this is a green they never made so well as in the Ming—and yes, I see it—the white jade landscape—ah, I have tried for ten years to get that!” He seized upon a lump of jade carved into the likeness of a snowy mountain. He was laughing and half tearful with joy. “It’s here!” he cried. “I cannot tell you what it means! I will not sell it to any American, even if he offers a million for it! It shall stay here in Japan! Such things belong in Japan. It is only we who appreciate them—”

I-wan watched, astounded. Why, Shio was like a man half mad! He was caressing the mass of jade, muttering and grunting. It was revolting, I-wan thought to himself, horrible! Suddenly a question cracked across his mind again like a whip. Where had these things come from?

He stood a moment, then he turned and silently and quickly he went out of the warehouse. He brushed his way through the crowds of clerks leaving for their buses. Everybody was laughing and merry as they put away office coats and slipped off paper cuffs. But he went on swiftly, entered the hostel and went down the hall and opened the door of his room…. If there were a letter it would be on the table.

It was not there, he saw instantly. But, peacefully asleep on his bed, he saw Bunji.

His first thought was to shout, “Bunji! What are you doing here?” But he checked the cry. He had never taken any thought before of how Bunji looked. He knew Bunji was not handsome. Bunji himself made fun of his looks.

“I look like the clown in a street show, of course,” he always said cheerfully. “Well, what of that? I don’t have to worry about that—all the mogas will not love me—so I can have a peaceful life.” He always declared he would marry the ugliest girl he could find, since being still uglier himself, he would make her happy in feeling she was beautiful by comparison. Nobody needed to think how Bunji looked when he was laughing and joking, because he was always a pleasant sight in spite of his thick flat nose that was bridgeless and his small bright eyes and big smiling mouth.

But now for many months I-wan had not seen him. And he had never seen him asleep. Bunji gravely asleep was someone else. His face looked low-browed and the jaw was too heavy and the mouth was thick. Now I-wan could see—Bunji was very Japanese. His body was squat and his arms long and his hands short and powerful. Even his feet, without shoes now, looked short and thick except for the prehensile Japanese toes. I-wan had heard children on the streets of Shanghai call after a Japanese, “Monkey—monkey!” The word came to his mind now. But Bunji opened his eyes, stared, and leaped up, laughing.

“I-wan!” he shouted.

“Why are you here?” I-wan asked quietly. He was forcing himself to think, “This is the same Bunji.”

Bunji was yawning loudly and rubbing his eyes with his fists.