Pearl Buck - Patriot

“I want you for my own,” he muttered, and put his arm about her shoulder. “Stay moga, Tama. I, too, am mobo. We live apart, you and I. We don’t need any family. We are enough for each other — we will be enough for our children.”

She looked at him doubtfully. “They cannot always live just with us,” she said. “We will grow old and die.”

“But there will be a lot of them then,” he replied, “and we will teach them to be enough for each other.”

“The house will be too small for them,” she said.

“We will cut back the hill and add more rooms,” he retorted.

“It would be cheaper to move into a bigger house,” she said thoughtfully.

But he would not have this.

“No, Tama, no,” he declared. “We will never leave this house. I should feel it an evil omen to leave it.”

“Oh, and you a mobo!” she cried. “A mobo believing in omens!”

They laughed together so heartily over this nothing that at last she wiped her eyes on her sleeves and demanded of him, “What were we talking about before we grew so silly, I-wan?”

“I believe,” he said, “that you had said we are to have a child — a daughter, Tama.”

“No, never — a son, of course!” she corrected him quickly.

“I should like a small girl,” he told her.

“I shall certainly have a son,” she declared.

They were laughing and again forgetting everything.

Bunji had not yet come home. A year before there had been a disturbance in Shanghai. It was not important, the papers had said then. A renegade Chinese battalion had clashed with some Japanese soldiers.

It had not seemed important when a few days later Mr. Muraki said Bunji had been ordered to Shanghai. It did not seem important when now, a year later, Bunji was still away and Mr. Muraki said it would be summer before he came. For in the midst of this spring I-wan’s first son was born.

He had never seen before the cycle of birth. If he had been a village child as En-lan had been it would have held no mysteries. Among common people, he knew, the union of man and woman and the coming of a child were as usual as food and drink and sleep. Nothing was hidden. But in the great foreign house in which he had lived, none of these things were seen. If a slave girl conceived by accident and could not cast the child by any herbs and medicines, she was sent away, his mother declaring she would not have dogs and cats and crying children in the house. And I-wan himself was the youngest.

So he came freshly to the birth of his own child, and so it was a miracle to him. It was a miracle to see Tama at this work of hers, eating and drinking one thing and another to make the child wise, to make him strong, to make his teeth grow out straight and white, to ensure the blackness of his hair and eyes and that his skin be smooth. And yet he must not be too large to be safely born. On a certain day, when she announced his coming to her own family, she bound a girdle about herself and changed her food to keep him strong and yet small. And though I-wan wondered how she knew all these things, she hired an old midwife to help her as the time went on.

But nothing would persuade Tama to cease her work at cooking and cleaning, at sweeping, and tending the garden. She did these things until the moment of the child’s birth. “It will keep me strong,” she declared and would not spare herself. Nor would she have a doctor to help her.

“If you hear I am to die, then call a doctor,” she told I-wan, “and put it to him that he is to save me. Otherwise this midwife is good enough. I have taught her to wash her hands and to boil whatever she uses.”

He would have protested that she ought, as a moga, to use more science in the birth of their child. “After all, a midwife — the women of past ages did no better.” But she silenced him with her hands folded against his lips.

“I want our son to be born here in our home,” she pleaded with him. “If we have a doctor he will make me go into a hospital and our child will lie in a room with scores of others. I want to give birth to him here. I will take care, I-wan. I have been taught about germs, too.”

He had to yield to her then. Yes, he too would like his child born in this house.

“And when I know the time is come,” she said, “you are to go away, I-wan, where you can’t hear me. And you are not to come until I send the maidservant for you.”

“I leave you?” he cried. “But—”

She would not let him go on.

“Yes, you are to leave me,” she declared. “It is my task.”

And she would have it so. On that mild day of early summer when he rose in the morning, he saw her changed.

“It is begun!” she said. “Hurry, hurry — go away.”

“But where?” he cried, dismayed. “Where shall I go?”

“Why, to work, of course,” she answered.

“As I do any other day?” he cried, astounded. “I can’t work today!”

“Yes — yes — yes,” she answered in little gasps. “You can — you must. Don’t think — just work — as usual. Say to yourself—‘What Tama is about today is very usual. It will happen again and again. I must go on with my work.’”

“I shan’t be able to,” he declared.

“But you must, as soon as you have eaten your breakfast.”

And she served him, though he tried to make her rest, because she said it would be good for the child and make him strong if she were strong. When at last he saw that indeed he could do nothing with her, that every few minutes she turned white and held back a groan and the sweat burst out on her clear skin, he rushed off as she had commanded him to-do. She would have her own way, he perceived, forever. And he loved her and would let her have it, he thought, remembering that sweat at the edges of her dark hair and upon her nose and soft upper lip. She was always right, in herself.

And before noon the little maidservant came and told him he had a son. He left everything at once as it was and hastened as he had never in his life for any cause. Rickshas begged him to ride, but he pushed them aside.

“I can go faster on my own legs,” he shouted and they roared after him their laughter. “He goes to meet a beloved mistress,” they said.

This he could not stand. He stopped one moment to shout back at them, “I have a new-born son!” and rushed on up the narrow hill road to his house.

Madame Muraki was there and came out to meet him, her soft face flushed.

“It is a strong child,” she said. “I had none better, except perhaps Akio.”

He checked his speed and remembered to bow to her and then wished she had not spoken of the dead Akio at such a moment. It was an ill omen to speak of the dead, his mother had always said, on the day a child was born.

But when he saw the child he forgot it. He was compelled to laugh. For this son of his, with the trick the new-born have of looking for a few days like the old, looked exactly like his own grandfather, the old general. There was not a trace of Tama in his small frowning majestic face. I-wan’s own blood had prevailed.

When his son was a little more than three months old, in the midst of Tama’s enormous preparation for the Feast of the First Meal, when, as Tama explained to I-wan, the baby was to be given rice boiled in milk and also a little broth, and when everyone in the family must be invited to dine, Bunji came home.

Years later I-wan was to look on Bunji’s return as the beginning of what was to come. But on that day it seemed of no importance, except the pleasure of his presence. Tama said, “How luckily it comes about that Bunji is here for the feast!” And I-wan himself thought of it only with joy in seeing Bunji, and in showing him the child. He went himself, the morning of the feast day, to meet the ship which was to bring back the soldiers being returned from Shanghai, and waited, with Mr. Muraki, for Bunji to separate himself from the stream of brown-clad men who poured across the gangplank as soon as it was put down.