Pearl Buck - Patriot

But such chance was not easy to find. He saw her, it had seemed, so easily, in such glimpses here and there, and yet when he tried to speak to her about a private thing, there was no privacy. Somehow a maidservant was suddenly there, or Madame Muraki seemed by chance to be passing and she stopped to speak pleasantly, and when she went she always took Tama with her, for a special need. Or he saw her when the whole family was there, and she was always the first to excuse herself.

It seemed all accident, but after weeks of trying to speak to her even a moment alone he perceived that there was no accident in all this. They did not want Tama to speak with him alone. He felt hot for a moment. Was he not to be trusted? And yet nothing was changed. Everyone was to him as ever, and he could not be sure he had not imagined they did not want him to speak to Tama.

Then one afternoon when he came in, he saw her bending over a rock at the edge of a pool in the garden. It was already cold again, and there was thin ice on the water. He went to her quickly. Now he could catch her alone. He would waste no second of time.

“I want to tell you—” he stammered. He could speak Japanese very well now—“I have been trying to tell you—”

She looked up at him, her dark eyes full of surprise, her hands still upon the stone she was arranging in the thin ice. She should not, he thought, get her hands so cold — then he was driven on by her soft direct look.

“You mustn’t marry an old man,” he whispered. “Tama, don’t, I beg you—”

Before he could say another word he saw Madame Muraki, a shawl over her shoulders, coming toward them from the house, more nearly hurrying than he had ever seen her. He was about to go away, and then he stood still. Why should he go? He was doing nothing wrong. And Tama, seeing her mother, rose and moved toward her. But she found time for one sentence before she went.

“Do you not think I shall marry whom I please?” she said. Her soft face and her soft voice were pervaded with stubbornness. And immediately happiness fell upon him like light.

He watched her join her mother and they stood talking a moment. He could hear nothing, but he saw Tama shake her head quickly once, twice, three times, about something. He went on to his room, laughing a little, and greatly comforted over nothing in particular when he came to think of it, except that he was glad Tama was stubborn.

It was a good thing to educate women. He believed in it. It made them willful. He reached his room and sat down without even taking off his hat. He smiled and remembered her face as she leaned above the pool. She was not really pretty. He could see that. She was not pretty with Peony’s invariably exquisite prettiness. There had been days, he remembered, when he had been perfectly able to see that Tama’s school clothes were not becoming in their plain colors and tight foreign fit. But now she did not wear them any more. She wore her brightly flowered robes with wide sashes, and above the silken folds her fresh colored face was as beautiful as his heart could wish. Besides, there was more than prettiness, wasn’t there, to marriage? He had heard his mother when she talked about daughters-in-law.

“Women ought to be pretty, but not too pretty,” she used to say like an oracle. “Extremes are always evil, and a woman too pretty is a curse to everyone, even to herself.”

She used to say this before I-ko again and again, for some reason which I-wan did not know. Now he could see what she meant. A man should be able to count on his wife. There was that about Tama underneath all prettiness, something he could trust — if he loved her.

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?