The Patriot (33 page)

Why should he upset his life again? He had built it carefully, alone. Alone he had been cast out of his country and alone he had found Tama and with her built his home. His whole being clung tenaciously to this which he had made for himself. Whatever happened elsewhere, this must be kept. No one must take everything away from him again!

He put out his hand and touched Tama’s face.

“Tama!” he whispered. He wanted to hear her voice.

She woke instantly, as she always did, awake and alert.

“Yes—what is it?” she asked quickly.

“Nothing—only speak to me,” he begged her. “I have been lying awake too long, thinking.”

She reached out her arms and put them about him.

“Don’t think so much!” she begged him.

“No, I don’t want to think any more,” he answered.

They clung to each other in silence. And he, putting away thought, murmured into the sweet stifling warmth of her bosom. Whatever happened outside of this had nothing to do with him.

So peace returned. It was a month of unusual coolness and much sunshine, and each day, as soon as I-wan came home from his work, Tama and the maidservant met him at the foot of the hill with the children and they mounted a bus and went to a beach, or if it were a near one, they took rickshas and rode, and when they had played in the sea until they were tired, then they bought their supper at a small restaurant or from a passing vendor, and ate. Ganjiro lay in a hollow in the warm sand when he grew sleepy, and the maidservant watched over him. And if I-wan saw sometimes that on the way home in the darkness she still carried him on her back, he said nothing, because he knew she hoped never to do it in his sight, and this meant that Tama was trying to have no quarrel, and so he tried too, by silence at least.

Very often, more often than ever before, they all went to the Muraki house and took their evening meal in the garden. Mr. Muraki urged them to it.

“It is Jiro,” Tama said proudly. “He wants Jiro with him all the time. My mother says he thinks Jiro is far more clever than Shio’s two boys.”

It was true that Jiro was a child of greater beauty than was to be seen anywhere. He was taller than other children and he held his head proudly, and he had inherited not Tama’s blunt little hands and feet, but I-wan’s own, long and narrow and almost too delicate for a boy. Jiro’s mind, also, was full of humor and childish wit. And Mr. Muraki delighted to take his hand and walk with him alone through the garden, after they had eaten. I-wan always watched the two, the old fragile man in his soft gray robes, and the vivid upright boy springing along at his side.

When Mr. Muraki came back, his lips were always twitching and his eyes shining so that he could hardly wait until Jiro had skipped away to say, “There never was made such a boy as this. I-wan, it is proof of what I have always said—together Japanese and Chinese can make the greatest people in the world. We must unite!”

He laughed his dry old laugh, and everyone laughed and I-wan forgave him anything because of his pride in Jiro. Yes, it was a good time. Even Bunji was more as he had been to I-wan that summer. Setsu was right for him. He had begun his old rough joking again.

“Do you remember, I-wan, I always said I would marry an ugly girl? I recommend it! It makes me feel I am not so bad, and it keeps her humble. Setsu, perfect Japanese wife!”

And Setsu, blushing, laughed happily at everything Bunji said and never retorted. But they were all growing fond of Setsu, who had learned to read only with the greatest difficulty and had no higher dreams than to make her husband and his parents comfortable. Almost immediately her figure swelled with pregnancy and she entered placidly upon the long course of her life as the mother of many children.

And yet, when later I-wan looked back upon that peace, he wondered that he could have dreamed it secure. It ended in a single moment.

It was Mr. Muraki’s seventieth birthday and therefore a day to be specially observed. Shio had come from Yokohama with his wife and two sons, and there had been a great feast in the middle of the day at a hotel. There the merchants of the city had gathered to speak in praise of Mr. Muraki and to present to him a gift of a silver plate with all their names upon it, mounted on wood and set in velvet. Mr. Muraki had been pleased enough, but he was very tired too, since he seldom went out of his own home, and he had been compelled to get up and bow a great many times, and also to make a speech of thanks in return.

In the afternoon at his own house, therefore, there were no guests, and since it was very hot, as though a storm were coming, Bunji had told the servants to draw back all the screens, so that though they sat under the roof, on all sides except one the great room was open to the garden, now full of a soft late sunshine. The children played together in the brook that ran near the house, and their elders sat and watched them quietly. Mr. Muraki smoked his pipe, and Shio sat smoothing his piece of jade, and Madame Muraki simply knelt in the still motionless way she did when nothing was wanted. Only Bunji came and went, bustling to see to a servant or to shout to a child.

I-wan, sitting beside Tama, was silent too, enjoying the hour and thinking of Mr. Muraki’s life, which had been in a fashion spread before him in this day—a good and honorable life, spent in its own unchanging ways. He looked at the old man and wondered if now at seventy he was satisfied with what he had had. It was hard to believe that Mr. Muraki had ever wanted anything else.

It was exactly at the moment when Ganjiro slipped and fell into the water and burst into a loud cry that the noise in the street began. I-wan remembered that, for in the confusion of rushing to lift Ganjiro out of the water, it seemed that the child was making all the noise. But in a second Ganjiro’s crying was lost in the shouting from outside the gate, and Bunji was roaring, “What is the matter—what is the matter?” And Shio was shrieking, “Is it an earthquake? Has anyone felt anything?” And Tama had come running out to I-wan and the children, and they all stood there together, waiting to feel the earth move beneath their feet.

But the earth did not move. Around them in the garden everything was as it had been, the water sliding over the rocks, the sun sinking, its long shadowy rays underneath the trees upon the moss-green ground. Then they saw the old gardener running to them, in his hand a newspaper, the great black letters scarcely dry upon it. Bunji seized it from his hand and they crowded around it. It was easy enough to read. In a moment they knew what had happened.

Three hundred Japanese—men, women, and children—had been killed by Chinese soldiers in a little town near Peking…. In revenge, the great headlines shouted, in barbarous revenge for the peaceful policing of Peking by Japanese soldiers!

No one spoke. No one looked at I-wan. They stood just as they had been standing when they were waiting for the earthquake. Even the children, catching the knowledge of disaster, were silent. In the silence the noise of the street seemed louder than it was, for a telephone began ringing in the house without stopping a second, and they could hear that. And in another moment a maidservant came to Bunji and bowed and said, “Sir, you are wanted. It is General Seki’s office.”

Bunji turned away without a word and went in and Setsu pattered after him. And then there was the stifled sound of a woman crying. It was Tama’s little maid, sobbing into her sleeve.

“What is it, Miya?” Tama said to her sharply.

And the little maid blurted out, “My brother—he must be dead, too. He had a little meat shop there in China—where they have all been killed. But business was so bad here—there are so many shops like his—so, when the government said they would help him to have a shop in China, where he could get rich, my father told him to go.”

She sobbed aloud, and Ganjiro, seeing her weep, howled in terror. I-wan took him in his arms. But he was too dazed to comfort the child. What did this mean? He had taken the paper from Bunji’s hand and he read on. A colony of peaceful people massacred by Chinese trained and paid by Japanese to keep the peace!

“Give me the child,” Tama said. “He is still crying.”

He felt her take Ganjiro firmly away from him. And now Bunji was coming back, his face grave and cold. He did not look at I-wan. He came to his father, bowed, and said simply, “I am ordered at once to report for military duty.”

He turned and went again into the house.

No one spoke. If Mr. Muraki would only speak, or Shio, then, I-wan thought, he could say what he must somehow say, “Surely there was a reason. We Chinese do not kill people for nothing.”

We Chinese! A few moments ago he had been so closely knit into this family that he had not doubted he was one of them. But now, this silence—

“We must go home,” Tama said in a strange voice.

And then they all began to move, to bow, to say farewell—only to say farewell. There was not a word of anything else. So, therefore, how could he begin to say, “We Chinese—”

He could only follow Tama and go with his sons and the red-eyed sniffling little maid, home through the twilighted streets. Everything was quiet again. People knew what had happened. They walked along talking of it, their faces grim, their voices low. Now and again there was a short rush of noise as a bus stopped, opened its door, and let out its crowds coming home from beaches and parks, those who had not heard.

I-wan, too, did not speak. He felt people’s eyes picking him out from among all the others, noting him different, but he walked stolidly on, as though he saw nothing. Inwardly he was a confusion of shame and anger, but anger was the stronger. Now he wanted to cry out to them all, “Why do you play such injury and innocence? I tell you, we don’t kill people for play!”

But he could not simply begin to shout this in the street to people who said nothing to him and who looked away when he stared back at them.

He strode along, therefore, filling the silence with his own angry thoughts, remembering all the wrongs which Japan had done. En-lan knew them all. It was En-lan who had told them to him, over and over. Even in those days they had not seemed real to him as they did to En-lan. That was because he had never lived in the north where En-lan was, and where the Japanese had pressed the hardest, and because, too, in his father’s house he heard nothing. But now he remembered En-lan’s passionate voice, saying again and again, “They want to swallow us up as they have Korea. Sooner or later we’ll have to fight them.” The Twenty-one Demands—how angry En-lan could get over them! And it was the Japanese, he always said, who brought in opium and made it cheap so that poor people could buy it. Every now and then En-lan used to work hard at boycotts against Japanese, and then shops would be ransacked and great bonfires piled up of Japanese goods in Shanghai streets. And sometimes En-lan had been half beside himself with rage because some cowering small shopkeeper tore the labels from his Japanese merchandise and swore it to be Chinese. But somehow, mysteriously, all boycotts came to an end. And at last everything had been lost in the greater rush of the oncoming revolution. And yet even then, I-wan remembered now, as one day he climbed the stone steps to a classroom, En-lan had kept saying in his ear, “Sooner or later, after the revolution, we must rid ourselves of the Japanese.”

He wanted at least to tell Tama—to explain to Tama, indeed, above all—but she was very busy.

“Miya, you are to go home at once to your parents,” she told the little maid. “I will do everything. Don’t come tomorrow. Comfort your parents for a day or two.”

And while the little maid went away, weeping gratefully, Tama hurried at undressing the children and bathing and feeding them and putting them to bed. And when I-wan would have helped she pushed him away, though gently.

“No, I-wan, go to your study and rest yourself. I can do this quite easily.”

He heard her everywhere about the house as he sat in the darkness of his study. The light was no use to him when he wanted only to think, to argue the whole list of Japan’s wrongs to his country. Tonight, when Tama would say to him, as she must once the house was quiet and they were alone together, “I-wan, tell me how such a thing could happen”—when she said this, he would say to her—

But she said nothing. She came in after a while and touched the button by the door so that the light poured on him.

“I-wan, why are you in the dark? Come, supper is ready.”

She took his hand gently and led him away, and then all during the meal she talked, quickly and softly, not of that but only of her father and what she could remember of him when she was small and how good he was and wise.

“Even when he wanted you to marry old Seki?” I-wan put in, and wished he had not.

For she answered steadily, “Even that he did because he thought it was right.”

She met his eyes and he thought, “What is the use of speech, if they make wrong right?”

No use—no use, he told himself, and kept his own silence, too.

He could not be sure whether people were the same or not. He watched everywhere for looks flung at him secretly, for coldnesses. But it was impossible to be sure, because of this long argument he was now continually making inside himself with no one and yet somehow with everyone—that is, with Japan. In his house he came and went as usual. He knew now that Tama would never speak. Whatever she thought—but after a few days he decided that she was not thinking, even. Well, then, he argued, was this, too, sincere, or had she simply determined not to think?

He saw Bunji no more. Bunji had gone that same night. I-wan waited to be told to take his place as he had before, but no message came from Shio or Mr. Muraki. Bunji’s office remained empty, and in his own office I-wan worked exactly as he had. But there was now a great deal more work. The shipments of goods had increased again enormously. But most of them were not unpacked now in Nagasaki. They were shipped straight on to Shio in Yokohama and I-wan knew of it only because of Shio’s reports and descriptions which had to be checked and filed and catalogued. Peking, he read again and again, goods from Peking. Loot, he thought grimly, what else but loot which Mr. Muraki was buying and selling?