Pearl Buck - Patriot

But she did. She watched him for a moment. Then she said in her calm practical way, “See reason, my husband. Would it be reasonable to allow a young woman to marry in ignorance of what will please the man she loves? I have been taught to make your clothes, to cook the food you like, to tend your house and your children. Should I know nothing of how to love you when we are alone? But that is the heart of our life. When the heart is sound, all the body is full of health.”

But he muttered, “It is like — a courtesan.”

“Oh, no!” she said quickly, and dropped his hand. She leaped up and reached for her robe, and he saw that now it was she who was shocked. These strange differences between them! What did they mean? He remembered the first time he had seen women in a public bath and how he had been horrified and how Bunji had said so calmly that the only harm was in looking at a woman naked. He had not understood that, but he had accepted it. Now she went quite away from him. She was standing by the window, fastening her robe tightly about her, tying the wide sash fast. He could see her hands trembling over the bow. Her back was turned to him.

“It isn’t in the least — like a courtesan,” she said, her voice full of sudden weeping. “I am your wife. It is I who will bear your children.”

She took up the end of her sleeve and wiped her eyes quietly and then smoothed back her hair.

Standing there with her shoulders drooping, she was suddenly intolerably pathetic and childish to him, a child doing as she had been taught. He went over to her impulsively.

“You are to forgive me,” he said. “I command it,” he added.

Her shoulders straightened.

“You needn’t command me,” she said, without turning her head. “After all, am I not a moga? A moga resents being commanded, even by her husband. Besides — I only want to do what you like.”

He could see her lips quiver. Suddenly he wanted to laugh. This woman was dear to him, the dearest being in the world. He did not care what she was or how inexplicable her ideas and behavior. He did not care whether or not he understood her or what she thought. He only knew that his whole being accepted her.

“Come back to me,” he said with determination.

She turned her head then and her eyes stole around to his and they looked at each other. Then he saw in their deeps a smile rise like the ripple of light over water. She gazed at him a moment, and without a word, while he waited, she began loosening the sash which she had just tied so firmly about her waist.

When he let himself think apart from her it was only to build higher in his soul the wall between the world and themselves. He had cut himself off from his own country and by marrying her he had in that measure cut her off also from hers. They were two creatures separate from all others as any two must be who mate out of their own kind. Chinese and Japanese, they were foreign to each other. The blood of their ancestors had not been the same blood. Their very bones were not the same. He knew when he looked at her body and at his own that their clay had never come from the same soil. They met and mingled now for the first time. Dearly as he loved her body, close as it was to his own, it was not the same flesh. His skeleton was slender and tall, and hers was short and strong. She was not fat, but she could never be slender as he was. He loved her for the very earth quality which her body had and his had not, even as he loved her for the very simplicities at which he often laughed.

He loved her for simplicity the more because he knew complexity was his own curse. There was nothing he did which he might not have done in many different ways, but for Tama there was only one way to do everything, and she had been taught that way. Even her pride in being independent and what she called modern, it seemed to him, only in reality made her more determined to do the thing as she had been taught to do. When he teased her for this, she could not understand what he meant, as he had teased her the evening it came to him when she was setting out the dishes of their meal in their hotel room. It was the last day of the seven he had allowed himself for their wedding pleasure. The next day they were to return to Nagasaki. He was to take Bunji’s place now, Mr. Muraki had decided. Tomorrow he and Tama would be in the small house they had taken for their new home on a hillside in a suburb of the city. Tonight, therefore, was an occasion, a feast, and Tama had ordered an especial dinner, and when it came, she dragged the low table to the open screens at the end of the room which overlooked the valleys and hills and far below under the night sky the twinkling lights along the seacoast. She would let him touch nothing.

“No — no,” she explained, “please — it is I who will arrange everything, I-wan.”

He sat down then and watched her, smiling inwardly. She was so serious, so busy, and every trifle was important. All afternoon when they were wandering about the hills together she had been searching for certain flowering grasses with which she planned to make a bouquet for the feast. When they came back she spent an hour arranging them, discarding almost all she had brought, and cutting and trimming in absorbed silence the few she had chosen. But he could not deny the perfection of what she had done. A few silvery-plumed stalks, standing, it seemed, in natural growth among their own long and graceful leaves — if he had not seen the intense care with which she had placed each leaf and each stalk, he would have said she had thrust them into the square pottery vase exactly as they grew. All her effort and the art which she had been carefully taught were merely this — to make it seem not art but nature. It explained, he thought, much of Tama.

So she arranged the table and the dishes and the pot of tea, so she planned how they would sit and in what order eat the courses served them. Only when all this was done and there was nothing left to place did she suddenly laugh and clap her hands.

“Now!” she cried merrily, “Now let us be happy!”

“But you have been very happy, my Tama,” he said, laughing at her. “I have been watching you. You have been very happy arranging everything.”

She stared at him across the tiny table at which they were sitting on the soft floor mats.

“What do you mean?” she inquired. “I was only doing what should be done.”

“No, what you liked,” he said gaily. “Do you think it is necessary to do all you did? The food could have been brought in and eaten.”

“Oh, I-wan!” Her voice was full of pain. “But there is a way in which to do each thing in life — even the plainest. Why, I have been taught there is a way in which to sweep a room, that makes it more than mere sweeping, a way in which to serve tea, a way in which—”

“Moga — moga!” he cried joyously.

She stopped. “You mean — as a moga—” she faltered, “it is not necessary — I suppose,” she said very slowly. “I am really somewhat old-fashioned. It is true — I am, perhaps — more than I think.”

He had hurt her, he perceived. He had taken the joy out of all her small arrangements, and he hated himself.

“No — no,” he insisted, “I love it. I love all you do. Don’t mind my teasing you, my heart. No, I won’t tease you any more.”

“Yes, you must tease me, I-wan, if you like,” she said quickly. “I will learn to be teased.”

She was so grave that he could scarcely keep from reaching across the table for her. He would have, indeed, except that a maid was bringing in a fish. Instantly Tama forgot.

“I-wan, here is the fish!” she cried. “I chose it myself today in the pool. Now you must like it, I-wan, because it is a beautiful fish, and I myself gave the recipe at the kitchen.”