The Patriot (27 page)

“But I thought your father was rich?” she inquired. “And you said he was powerful.”

He ought, he felt, to tell her that even his father’s wealth and power were perhaps not enough to protect a child born of a Japanese woman. But he could not. The words would destroy something in this quiet secure home. They would stay in her mind and hide in her heart like a disease. She would not be able to forget them, and at last she would hold them even against him. No, he could not say, loving her as he did with his whole heart, “My people hate yours, Tama”—not when together they were to unite into this child.

“I want you for my own,” he muttered, and put his arm about her shoulder. “Stay moga, Tama. I, too, am mobo. We live apart, you and I. We don’t need any family. We are enough for each other—we will be enough for our children.”

She looked at him doubtfully. “They cannot always live just with us,” she said. “We will grow old and die.”

“But there will be a lot of them then,” he replied, “and we will teach them to be enough for each other.”

“The house will be too small for them,” she said.

“We will cut back the hill and add more rooms,” he retorted.

“It would be cheaper to move into a bigger house,” she said thoughtfully.

But he would not have this.

“No, Tama, no,” he declared. “We will never leave this house. I should feel it an evil omen to leave it.”

“Oh, and you a mobo!” she cried. “A mobo believing in omens!”

They laughed together so heartily over this nothing that at last she wiped her eyes on her sleeves and demanded of him, “What were we talking about before we grew so silly, I-wan?”

“I believe,” he said, “that you had said we are to have a child—a daughter, Tama.”

“No, never—a son, of course!” she corrected him quickly.

“I should like a small girl,” he told her.

“I shall certainly have a son,” she declared.

They were laughing and again forgetting everything.

Bunji had not yet come home. A year before there had been a disturbance in Shanghai. It was not important, the papers had said then. A renegade Chinese battalion had clashed with some Japanese soldiers.

It had not seemed important when a few days later Mr. Muraki said Bunji had been ordered to Shanghai. It did not seem important when now, a year later, Bunji was still away and Mr. Muraki said it would be summer before he came. For in the midst of this spring I-wan’s first son was born.

He had never seen before the cycle of birth. If he had been a village child as En-lan had been it would have held no mysteries. Among common people, he knew, the union of man and woman and the coming of a child were as usual as food and drink and sleep. Nothing was hidden. But in the great foreign house in which he had lived, none of these things were seen. If a slave girl conceived by accident and could not cast the child by any herbs and medicines, she was sent away, his mother declaring she would not have dogs and cats and crying children in the house. And I-wan himself was the youngest.

So he came freshly to the birth of his own child, and so it was a miracle to him. It was a miracle to see Tama at this work of hers, eating and drinking one thing and another to make the child wise, to make him strong, to make his teeth grow out straight and white, to ensure the blackness of his hair and eyes and that his skin be smooth. And yet he must not be too large to be safely born. On a certain day, when she announced his coming to her own family, she bound a girdle about herself and changed her food to keep him strong and yet small. And though I-wan wondered how she knew all these things, she hired an old midwife to help her as the time went on.

But nothing would persuade Tama to cease her work at cooking and cleaning, at sweeping, and tending the garden. She did these things until the moment of the child’s birth. “It will keep me strong,” she declared and would not spare herself. Nor would she have a doctor to help her.

“If you hear I am to die, then call a doctor,” she told I-wan, “and put it to him that he is to save me. Otherwise this midwife is good enough. I have taught her to wash her hands and to boil whatever she uses.”

He would have protested that she ought, as a moga, to use more science in the birth of their child. “After all, a midwife—the women of past ages did no better.” But she silenced him with her hands folded against his lips.

“I want our son to be born here in our home,” she pleaded with him. “If we have a doctor he will make me go into a hospital and our child will lie in a room with scores of others. I want to give birth to him here. I will take care, I-wan. I have been taught about germs, too.”

He had to yield to her then. Yes, he too would like his child born in this house.

“And when I know the time is come,” she said, “you are to go away, I-wan, where you can’t hear me. And you are not to come until I send the maidservant for you.”

“I leave you?” he cried. “But—”

She would not let him go on.

“Yes, you are to leave me,” she declared. “It is my task.”

And she would have it so. On that mild day of early summer when he rose in the morning, he saw her changed.

“It is begun!” she said. “Hurry, hurry—go away.”

“But where?” he cried, dismayed. “Where shall I go?”

“Why, to work, of course,” she answered.

“As I do any other day?” he cried, astounded. “I can’t work today!”

“Yes—yes—yes,” she answered in little gasps. “You can—you must. Don’t think—just work—as usual. Say to yourself—‘What Tama is about today is very usual. It will happen again and again. I must go on with my work.’”

“I shan’t be able to,” he declared.

“But you must, as soon as you have eaten your breakfast.”

And she served him, though he tried to make her rest, because she said it would be good for the child and make him strong if she were strong. When at last he saw that indeed he could do nothing with her, that every few minutes she turned white and held back a groan and the sweat burst out on her clear skin, he rushed off as she had commanded him to-do. She would have her own way, he perceived, forever. And he loved her and would let her have it, he thought, remembering that sweat at the edges of her dark hair and upon her nose and soft upper lip. She was always right, in herself.

And before noon the little maidservant came and told him he had a son. He left everything at once as it was and hastened as he had never in his life for any cause. Rickshas begged him to ride, but he pushed them aside.

“I can go faster on my own legs,” he shouted and they roared after him their laughter. “He goes to meet a beloved mistress,” they said.

This he could not stand. He stopped one moment to shout back at them, “I have a new-born son!” and rushed on up the narrow hill road to his house.

Madame Muraki was there and came out to meet him, her soft face flushed.

“It is a strong child,” she said. “I had none better, except perhaps Akio.”

He checked his speed and remembered to bow to her and then wished she had not spoken of the dead Akio at such a moment. It was an ill omen to speak of the dead, his mother had always said, on the day a child was born.

But when he saw the child he forgot it. He was compelled to laugh. For this son of his, with the trick the new-born have of looking for a few days like the old, looked exactly like his own grandfather, the old general. There was not a trace of Tama in his small frowning majestic face. I-wan’s own blood had prevailed.

When his son was a little more than three months old, in the midst of Tama’s enormous preparation for the Feast of the First Meal, when, as Tama explained to I-wan, the baby was to be given rice boiled in milk and also a little broth, and when everyone in the family must be invited to dine, Bunji came home.

Years later I-wan was to look on Bunji’s return as the beginning of what was to come. But on that day it seemed of no importance, except the pleasure of his presence. Tama said, “How luckily it comes about that Bunji is here for the feast!” And I-wan himself thought of it only with joy in seeing Bunji, and in showing him the child. He went himself, the morning of the feast day, to meet the ship which was to bring back the soldiers being returned from Shanghai, and waited, with Mr. Muraki, for Bunji to separate himself from the stream of brown-clad men who poured across the gangplank as soon as it was put down.

Bunji was among the last. They saw him before he saw them. They saw him pause, as though he were bewildered, as he stepped upon the shore, and he did not hear I-wan’s shout. He started away and was about to go on with the others when I-wan ran after him and caught him by the shoulder, shouting to him, “Bunji, where are you going? We are here.”

Bunji turned, and I-wan saw instantly that the many months of being a soldier had changed him. It was not merely that I-wan had never seen him in uniform with his bowed legs in puttees. Bunji’s face was changed. It was no longer an open tranquil youthful face. It had hardened and his big mouth, which had only been laughing and somewhat shapeless before, now seemed coarsened and even cruel.

But he laughed when he saw I-wan, with something of his old laughter.

“I was about to keep on with those fellows I have been with so long,” he exclaimed.

“Your father is here, waiting,” I-wan said, “and you are to come to my home today for our son’s feast.”

“So!” Bunji exclaimed. He went with I-wan and met his father, bowed and laughed and shouted, “But I must bathe, I-wan, and dress myself. I haven’t had a good bath since I left home.”

“Everything is waiting for you,” Mr. Muraki said. He was very quiet, but his eyes never moved from his son. They all climbed into a waiting taxicab.

“And so you and Tama have a son,” Bunji said.

“As like my grandfather as a small photograph,” I-wan said. “You will laugh when you see him—though he is less like than at first. I confess, when I first saw my son, my impulse was to put a Chinese general’s uniform on him and hang a medal on his breast. I felt I owed it to him.”

Mr. Muraki smiled dimly and Bunji laughed as though he knew I-wan expected it. Then he said with sharpness, “A Japanese general’s uniform will one day be more suitable, I suppose.”

I-wan did not answer. He looked at Bunji, not knowing whether he meant to tease him or whether he was in earnest—to tease, he decided, after a moment.

Everything was the same about Bunji, I-wan thought, still not having answered him, except something completely changed within him. He talked, he laughed, he moved as he always did. But the old Bunji had seemed to be showing himself as he was. Now when he talked, he seemed to be thinking of something else. And even his laughter seemed only a surface stir as though beneath it there was gloom.

But nothing could be said of this now. I-wan went with them to the gate of Mr. Muraki’s house, and there they parted.

“We meet in less than an hour,” he said.

“At two o’clock,” Mr. Muraki agreed.

But Bunji said nothing. He seemed still thinking of something else.

In the midst of the crowded hotel room while the feast wore on, Bunji said very little, though he sat beside I-wan. The rite of feeding the child had taken place, and all had gone as it should. Everyone had admired the small boy, and especially when he sturdily refused to swallow the strange food thrust into his mouth and spat it out again upon his new silken robe and burst into a roar of weeping. He wore a boy’s coat for the first time, and his head had been freshly shaved, bald in a circle at the top, and then a fringe of straight soft black hair. Bunji, watching him, turned to I-wan.

“I would know he was not Japanese,” he said.

“Yes, that’s evident,” I-wan answered.

It was at this moment that he caught Bunji’s look, fixed on him with a strange and secret hostility. He was astonished, as though Bunji had drawn a dagger against him. But he could say nothing in this room full of murmuring and admiring people. He withdrew his eyes and moved a little away from Bunji and tried to imagine why Bunji should have changed to him.

Had something happened between Bunji and his own father in Shanghai? Yet so far as he knew they had never met. He had written to his father and given him the name of Bunji’s regiment and station. But his father had written to him that it was not safe to receive Japanese callers. There was a band of young men who had organized themselves for assassinations, and they had only recently killed another banker for seeming to be friendly with a Japanese captain. To Mr. Muraki he wrote regretting that an illness prevented him from returning the kindness shown to I-wan. But he hoped, in time to come, when mutual understanding increased—and Mr. Muraki had replied saying that between them, at least, now that they were united in their grandson, all was understood.

Tama had said, opening her eyes, “Why doesn’t your father like Bunji?”

And I-wan had hastened to say, “How can he dislike him when he has never seen him?”

“I don’t know,” she answered, staring at him thoughtfully, as she nursed the baby at her full young bosom.

“Neither do I,” I-wan said, and before she could speak again he had knelt beside her and put his arms about them both. “You make me completely happy,” he whispered. And she had taken up his hand and laid her cheek in its palm and forgotten what she had asked.

He could not talk to Bunji here or today—it was not suitable—but he would talk with him and know what Bunji meant. He gave himself determinedly to being the host, deferring to the elder guests, and especially to Mr. Muraki at the head of the table and to Madame Muraki. Everyone was gay and full of courtesy, and Tama had seen to the dishes and busied herself with directions to the hotel cook for each one, and to look at them all on this late summer afternoon it seemed that none of them had any thought beyond the pleasure of eating and drinking and looking at the baby, who slept peacefully in his nest upon the maidservant’s back.

“He sleeps like a Japanese, at least,” Bunji said once to I-wan.

“How—what do you mean?” I-wan paused to ask.

Bunji nodded at the child’s bobbing head.

“We can sleep anywhere, we Japanese, because we begin like that. We can sleep in noise and movement and any confusion. We can sleep even in the midst of cannon firing, if we are off duty for a few moments. It is the secret of our endurance in war.”