The Patriot (29 page)

“I tell you, don’t I?” Bunji retorted, “You are stupid, I-wan. That is because you are Chinese. All Chinese are stupid.”

I-wan felt his anger rise, and put it down again. Bunji was drunk.

“Stupid and cowards,” Bunji said loudly against the blare of the music. “We routed them as though we ran about in play. We gave them money to go away, and most of them went. The rest we routed. They all ran—you should have seen them run!” Bunji laughed, tears still wet on his cheeks. He shook his head and tried to pour whisky into his cup. But now he was not able to find it, and I-wan did not help him. He watched Bunji while he searched for the small white cup.

“Hah, at least I know where my mouth is!” he said, and stood up, and put the bottle to his lips. When he set it down, he was sobbing again.

“Still it was the captain’s fault. You see, I had seen the men at it night and day. I tell you, I-wan,”—he leaned toward I-wan, twitching and sobbing—“war twists a man too high. He needs everything strong—wine, much food, many women. He has to have everything heaped up. That is because of the noise of the cannon in his head all the time—and then, he may be dead in an hour—in a minute—no time for anything but the things he can snatch.” Bunji was in such earnest he seemed almost to have sobered himself with his earnestness. “At first I thought it was horrible—you know—the men snatching at women everywhere—young and old—I said to the captain, ‘Shall we allow this?’ He said, ‘We must—if we want them to fight tomorrow.’ You see, he was my superior officer. So what could I say? I looked away from the men and watched him only. I said, ‘So long as he does not—’”

He was beginning to shake again.

“So, I-wan, I ask you, why did he do it, too? I saw it, myself—he had them bring a woman into his tent. She was crying and fighting, but he went at her, not caring—I was crazy. I ran out into the street—I—the first woman I saw—a child—say twelve—though perhaps she was only ten—or perhaps fifteen—she might have been only small for her age—I dragged her into an alley.” He was shuddering and shaking and staring at I-wan as he talked. “All the time I knew I didn’t want to do it—but I had to go on—you see that? It was the captain’s fault, you see that, I-wan? Her fault, also. She screamed so. She screamed out that I was so ugly—monkey, she called me! I said, ‘Be quiet,’ and she kept on screaming and struggling. So I said, ‘Be quiet, or I will have to kill you.’ I warned her, you see. But she was not quiet. So—afterwards—I killed her.” He was weeping and weeping. “You see, I-wan? And only when she lay dead it occurred to me—she did not understand what I said—I spoke in Japanese—without thinking—I didn’t think in time—how could I not have thought of it? That is my fault in the matter, I-wan.”

He sprawled over the table, sobbing. A few people looked at him, and looked away again, and the curtain of noisy music kept them from hearing him.

I-wan sat perfectly still, dazed, sick, seeing everything that Bunji had told him.

This, then, was how they had behaved in China. His father had told him none of it. But then his father’s letters had been very few then, and such letters as had come had had more lines than ever blocked out by the Japanese censors. And the newspapers had said that the Emperor’s army had behaved with perfect order! He had believed it, he a Chinese! He despised himself. He rose.

“Come home, Bunji,” he said. And stooping, he put his arms about Bunji’s slack body and lifted him to his feet and helped him to the street. Then he called a ricksha, and putting Bunji, now sound asleep, into it, he walked at his side to the gate of Mr. Muraki’s house. The old gateman was there, and he told him, “See if you can get your young master to his room unseen.”

The old man nodded, and I-wan went on to his house.

A turmoil filled him. What had really happened in his own country? How much did he not know? What was the truth? He had been so absorbed in his own marriage that he had simply let it be that there was no war and so he could marry Tama. But he was a Chinese.

He mounted the steep rocky steps from the street to his home and Tama ran out to meet him, Jiro in her arms. She looked wonderfully fresh and pretty, her hair newly brushed, and her skin like the cheek of an apricot.

“We are just bathed, Jiro and I,” she announced, “and we have on new kimonos—that is, Jiro’s is all new and mine has new sleeves—and I bought such beautiful chrysanthemums—the man said you had sent him, and I said, ‘What is the token?’ He said, ‘A Chinese gentleman,’ and I said, ‘I am not married to all the Chinese gentlemen in Nagasaki,’ and he said, ‘Ah, he told me to look at him, and I saw a small mole by the hair of his left temple,’ and I said, ‘Right!’”

She laughed and Jiro laughed and I-wan smiled.

“You are tired!” she exclaimed.

“Very tired,” he admitted. No, he would not tell Tama what Bunji had said. It was not for her to hear. It was a Bunji she did not know and could not know. Besides, it was all not clear to him yet.

“Sit down,” Tama begged him.

He sat down and she drew off his leather shoes and then his socks and rubbed his feet with her smooth strong hands. There was ease and rest in her very touch.

“Now your coat, and here is a kimono, and your bath is ready,” she murmured. “And I will see to everything and you are only to rest. Jiro will be so good and so quiet and not trouble you.”

Jiro, sitting on the floor, was staring at all this with large eyes.

He let her do everything, seizing the excuse of his weariness to say nothing, to do nothing, except to think and think of what Bunji had told him. Routed armies, bombs, raped women—he had heard nothing of these. Had there been no punishment, no reprisals? He longed with sudden impatience to go home and see for himself what the truth had been. He remembered fragments of old hatreds—people on the streets spitting at Japanese and calling them dwarfs and monkeys, the demands of Japanese officials in the northern provinces, En-lan saying over and over, “And when the revolution is over we must fight the Japanese.” But the revolution had never come and he had put away with it everything else that had never come to pass.

He could, he thought at last, soothed in the hot water of the deep wooden bath, go home alone even for a few days and find out. He had more than half a mind to do it. He rose and wiped himself, his flesh soft and warm, and even the tension of his mind relaxed. It would be easy enough to go home. He ought to go and see.

At the supper table while Tama leaned over him to fill his bowl, he looked up at her.

“I think I must go home for a little while,” he said.

She put down the bowl.

“We will go, too,” she cried joyfully. “Jiro and I, we will see your home.”

He shook his head. “No, only I,” he said. “It might not be safe for you.”

“But why?” she asked, wondering at him. She had Jiro on her knee now and was feeding him with her chopsticks.

“There was fighting at Shanghai, you know, not many months ago,” he said carefully. “I am not sure of the temper of the people toward Japan.”

“Oh, but the Chinese people like us,” she declared eagerly. “I do assure you, I-wan, I see it in all the papers that the common people run out to welcome our soldiers. They have been so oppressed by their own officials and armies, the papers say. I read the papers every day, you know, I-wan—more than you do.”

He could not deny this. She read a great deal so that, she said, she would have something to talk about with him when he came home, “so I won’t be only a stupid old-fashioned Japanese wife,” she said.

“Nevertheless, you cannot go,” he said firmly. He did not often so command her. She looked at him across the table. Then, Jiro still in her arms, she rose and came over to him and put Jiro on his lap.

“Jiro,” she said, “tell your father what I told you today.”

Jiro, struck with shyness, looked from one face to the other.

“Say, ‘My mother says in the spring, if the gods permit’—only I know there are no gods, of course, I-wan, but I like to say it at such times—‘in the spring I am to have a little brother.’”

“Tama!” he cried.

She nodded. “Yes, and yes, and you mustn’t leave us now, I-wan. If something should happen—and I have such a superstition, I-wan. I know it is silly—but I look at the ocean so much and I feel it must never come between us. It wants to come between us, I-wan. I feel it—and if you leave me now, I shall be afraid that it will spoil the child. He will sicken in me and die.”

He looked at her uncertainly.

“Wait until we can all go together,” she begged him. “Not you alone—never without us!”

She seized his arm and clung to it and Jiro began to cry with fright.

“Hush, Jiro,” he said, and he put his other arm around Tama. After all, why should he go? What could he do, anyway, if he found out the truth. What had happened had happened. Tama was crying now, too, against his shoulder.

“Hush, you two,” he scolded them. “Was ever a man so beset by his family?” He put his arms around them both and locked his hands together behind them and rocked them back and forth gently.

“There,” he soothed them, “stop your tears. I am not going. Tama, be quiet. You are terrifying the child.”

She sobbed more softly and more softly until she was quiet, and then Jiro was quiet, too. And I-wan sat rocking them gently to and fro. This was his world, here in his arms.

And the next day Bunji remembered nothing, or, at most, nothing except a fear that he had said more than he should. He came in late, looking pale and tired, but trying to be jaunty in his old way. I-wan saw him pass his door, but he had no wish to speak first and he let him pass. Then at noon when the clerks were away eating their meal, Bunji came and stood in the door and said to I-wan with a sort of coaxing, half frank, half ashamed, “I was drunk yesterday, wasn’t I?”

“You were,” I-wan replied, looking up.

“I talked a great deal—what did I talk about?”

He saw that Bunji did not remember, and he was at once relieved of the burden of such confidence between them.

“You said you were going to be married,” he replied.

“Is that all?” Bunji said. “So I am. I am going to be married in the old way, I-wan. I shall look at many pictures of young women of suitable age and family, put my finger on one, and tell my father, ‘That one!’”

He laughed and I-wan smiled and said nothing.

“I will announce the wedding day,” Bunji declared. “It will be soon. I can’t have your son too far ahead of mine.”

“Sons,” I-wan corrected him.

“What—another!” Bunji cried.

I-wan nodded.

“Good Tama!” Bunji exclaimed. “Hah, the mogas still do very well, don’t they?”

“Excellently,” I-wan replied.

“A boy, eh?” Bunji asked.

“Tama says so,” I-wan answered. “She thinks she knows.”

“Then she knows,” Bunji rejoined. “At least, the child itself will have to prove her wrong before she will believe it. Well, I shall choose a milder woman.”

“I am well suited,” I-wan answered.

Bunji nodded, and went away.

I-wan sat thinking a moment longer. He was greatly relieved that Bunji did not know what he had told. He had seen behind a curtain drawn for a moment from Bunji’s memory. He knew that if Bunji had been conscious he would never have drawn that curtain. But he would never tell Bunji what he had done. Yet nothing could ever be quite the same again, now that he knew. He was different today from what he had been. He had, for instance, wanted daughters, but now since yesterday he wanted only sons. Tama had said to him this morning, “I feel the child in me is a boy. We will hang two paper carp over the house at the Festival of Sons when this one comes!”

“Good!” he had said.

Sons would follow their father some day, but daughters must be left behind.

The birth of Ganjiro, his second son, the Festival of Sons, and the earthquake, were all one confusion forever after in his mind. They happened together in the middle of the next spring after Bunji’s wedding, that strange wedding, which took place so quickly and informally in the Japanese fashion to which I-wan could never become accustomed. It was simply one of the differences between his own country and this, that in one a marriage ceremony lasted for days, and here it was soon finished. Bunji himself behaved as though it were nothing, and the little Setsu Hajima whom he married looked like millions of other little Japanese women behind her bravely painted face. And once married Bunji never mentioned her. In a few days it seemed as though she had always been in the Muraki house. One forgot that she had not always been there, and now that she was come one forgot that she was there.

And then, less than a month later, Ganjiro was born. He had been born in the middle of the day, in the most easy and tranquil fashion, without I-wan’s knowing anything about it. He had bade Tama and Jiro good-by on a morning late in April, when the last of the cherry blossom petals were floating down in the garden. The streets were wet with a sudden rain, and the sky was as he loved it best, clear blue behind huge soft white clouds billowing up from the ocean. The trees and leaves were green in every garden, and people on the street looked happy and content in the mild damp air. There was a deep sweetness in this life of the people and he felt it and valued it. Human beings liked each other and showed it in their courtesies. It occurred to I-wan as he walked along in April sunshine that in these streets he had never seen an old face unhappy or a child angry because he was beaten. He loved these people willingly and unwillingly, too. He grew nearer them, and yet more alone.

Bunji, since he had married Setsu, was nearer and yet further away than he had been. He had immediately given up his drinking, although on his wedding day he had been very drunk. But none ever saw him drunk now. And certainly he played the lordly husband over stocky plain Setsu, who did not so much as sit in his presence. In these days Bunji was given to loud opinions on foreign policy, especially the policy of Japan in China, where he insisted the communists were again seizing the control. I-wan had listened to a great deal of this the night before, when he and Tama had dined at Bunji’s new house.

“Sooner or later we shall have to put them down,” Bunji had declared.