Pearl Buck - Patriot

“Why do you send ships of war to China?” he asked Akio aloud.

“To protect our nationals,” Akio said, and added, “At least, so we are told.”

“I am not protected here,” I-wan said, smiling.

“Ah, but you are quite safe here,” Akio said. “We treat you well — we treat everyone well—” he hesitated and went on, “that is, I sometimes think we treat everyone better than we treat ourselves. We are very harsh with ourselves, we Japanese. We are devoured by our sense of duty.”

But the words scarcely fastened themselves in I-wan’s ears. He was thinking, “How pretty she looked last night in the candlelight, holding back her hair!” It seemed to him he could think forever of the way Tama had looked.

He fell into a dreaming reverie. He did not mind going away — very much — if he could have letters from her and could pour himself out in letters to her. They would tell each other more in letters, not having the bodily nearness to distract them. In letters they could draw mind closer to mind and spirit to spirit…. The time went quickly while he dreamed like this. Almost before he knew it the plane was dropping swiftly upon a crust of shore that appeared suddenly beneath them. Then in a few minutes they were on the ground, and being hurried by sturdy blue-coated men into a much smaller plane. Almost instantly they were mounting again, but this time flying so low they could see the farmers harvesting the yellow rice in the small fields which fitted as neatly together as the pieces of a puzzle.

“This,” Akio said suddenly, “is a convertible scouting plane.”

“Why so much preparation for war?” I-wan asked.

“It is our philosophy,” Akio said.

“Do you want war?” I-wan asked curiously.

“No,” Akio answered. He hesitated, in his frequent fashion, and took off his spectacles and wiped them very clean and put them on again. “I myself am a Buddhist,” he said. “I do not believe in taking life.”

“But if you were ordered to war?” I-wan asked.

“I have not yet decided,” Akio answered. He looked so troubled that I-wan made haste to say, “There is no need to decide — it was a silly question.”

But Akio said nothing to this. And I-wan did not notice his silence. He was only making talk. Inside himself he was already planning his first letter to Tama.

If he wrote in Chinese Tama could read it, because classical Japanese and Chinese were the same, and Tama wrote beautifully — he had once seen a poem that she wrote on a fan with delicate clear strokes of a camel’s hair brush. Well, but he would not use the old stilted Chinese forms of letter writing. He would simply begin straight off, “When I was there so high, soaring up in the blue, that was only my body — my heart like a wounded bird had never left the threshold of your room.” They must write like that, straight out of themselves….

Then again the plane was drifting like a leaf to the ground, and they were over Yokohama. He was shaken out of his dreams….

Yokohama was a busy, noisy city. There was no quiet garden here, no screen-shadowed house. He had found himself hustled into a crowded bus and hurried into the city along barren ugly streets, to a mushroom-like house of gray cement blocks.

Their bags were thrown on the sidewalk and he and Akio stepped down beside them. A uniformed doorman came and picked them up.

“These are our offices,” Akio said. “Shio will be waiting for us.”

He followed Akio through the door.

“I have never seen a building like this,” he said.

“Earthquake-proof,” Akio explained. “All Yokohama is earthquake-proof now, since the great earthquake.”

They went into a bare new office. A young woman met them.

“Mr. Shio Muraki begs you to be seated,” she said, hissing a little through her prominent front teeth. She was very ugly, I-wan thought, in a plain black skirt and a white blouse like a uniform. The skirt was too short and showed her thick, curving legs in black cotton stockings and heavy wide black leather shoes. But her ugly spectacled face was earnest with her effort to please them. She said, still hissing through her teeth, “Please — he is just now talking to an American gentleman from New York.”

They sat down as though they were guests. But Akio seemed quite accustomed to this. He went on: “That year I went to America on some business, I forget — ah yes, it was on the matter of a gold lacquered screen from the palace in Peking, and the American collector in New York wanted it, among other things. So I took it over myself. My father was afraid to send so valuable a thing. And also there were reasons why he wanted me to leave Japan for a while. When I left I stood by the steamer’s rail, looking back at Yokohama.” He stopped a moment and went on. “Sumie had come to see me off. And I watched the skyline as long as I could — long after I could not see Sumie, I could see the buildings lifting themselves against the sky. There were many fine tall buildings.” He lit a cigarette and smoked a moment. “Then we had the earthquake. I hurried back. And there was no skyline at all.”

“No skyline?” I-wan repeated.

“It was all flat,” Akio said. “Every building was gone. I stared and stared, and I could not believe it. But there was nothing. Also I had not heard from Sumie — she was to wait in Yokohama.”

Akio laughed suddenly.

“But when the ship came near, I saw a small plump woman standing among the ruins of the dock. Sumie! Well, I could spare the rest!”

They laughed together.

“And immediately,” Akio went on, “everybody began to rebuild. So we have our skyline again. We know our fate, we Japanese — we are not cowards.”

The door opened. “Now, if you please,” the young woman said.

A large American man came out and behind him a small slight figure in a gray business suit. That was Shio. He looked like Mr. Muraki made young again.

“All right, Muraki,” the big American was saying in a great rumbling voice, “it’s up to you. Seventy-five thousand dollars, good U. S. money — but you take the risks of breakage.”

“There will be no breakage,” Shio’s high clear voice declared.

“Well, that’s your pidgin,” the American said. “G’by, pleasure to do business with you, ’m sure—” He put out a large red hand and Shio laid his small unwilling brown one in it for a second. When the door had shut behind the American, Shio wiped his hand, half secretly, on his handkerchief.

“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.