Pearl Buck - Patriot

But before he had time to cry his dismay, Tama said, “There, it is over. And we are alive.”

She turned her back on the ruined house. Only then did she sit down. The sea, full of wreckage, was subsiding, and now the wind was beginning once more. He felt his legs begin to tremble.

“I have seen much worse earthquakes,” Tama said. She wiped her face with her sleeve and then uncovered her bosom and began to feed her child. He sat down on the box beside her and let the maid take Jiro from him. Now that it was over sweat was pouring down his whole body. He could feel himself wet under his clothes.

“It is worse than anything I have ever seen,” he said.

“Oh, there are far worse,” she repeated.

He looked at her. She was sitting there as calmly as though the house which she loved were not in a heap behind her.

“Now what shall we do?” he asked, after a moment.

“Rest a while — and then see if my father’s house is harmed,” she said.

A man in a short blue coat came climbing up the hill and appeared among a clump of bamboos. It was a ricksha puller from her father’s house. He bowed before them.

“I have been sent,” he said, “to see how you are.”

“My father and mother?” Tama asked.

“All is safe,” he replied. “The gate house is fallen and part of the kitchen, and the garden we do not know, but the main part of the house is safe and no one was even hurt except the young mistress who was in the kitchen and was held by a beam over her thigh. But she is now resting and in less pain. The ceremonial teahouse is not touched.”

“Ah, how fortunate we are!” Tama cried.

They rose and stood for a moment and I-wan could not but turn and look at what a little while ago had been his home. Tama’s eyes followed his.

“We can easily build it again,” she said.

“Not here,” he said, not knowing why, except it seemed not safe ever to build his home here again. But Tama insisted.

“Yes, here. The sea reached for us and could not get us. It is a good place to build again.”

He was too shaken to argue it with her and he followed her, carrying Jiro, down the hill by the way the man led because the road was gone. And behind them came the maid, her arms full of whatever she thought precious enough to be taken. She had said nothing from first to last.

He never forgot that day. The safety of the Muraki house, the comfort of a roof standing over their heads and of food hot and ready to be eaten, the quiet and the kindness — these were miracle enough. But unforgettable above all was the miracle of silence — Mr. Muraki’s silence as he walked about his ruined garden where the streams had raced over broken walls and had swept over tended mossy slopes and torn them away and uprooted the dwarf trees as priceless as any curio, Bunji’s silence over his young wife’s broken thigh, Setsu’s silence in her own pain — I-wan was never to know Setsu well, but her eyes, fine eyes in a plain face, he never forgot — the silence of the people on the streets whose houses and relatives had been swept out to sea, the silence of the little clerk in his office, solitary now that his brother was dead — this silence he never forgot.

And the next day everything had begun again, the building of houses and the cleaning away of wreckage and the putting up of the torn sea walls. Everyone worked as though at an old task, often done. And Tama said, “Now that we have to build again anyway, we may as well make the house bigger.”

He was ashamed of his own question. “But if it happens again — and again?”

“That is as it will be. We can always build again,” she answered.

He had not the face to complain of anything for himself when all over the city people were going back to wreckage and ruin. And those missing who had been swept out to sea…. He was drawn again and again during those days to the part of the city which lay on the shore.

“Are you building your house again exactly where it was?” he asked an old fisherman.

The man turned small somber black eyes upon him.

“Where else?” he answered. “My father’s house was here and my grandfather’s.”

“But if the same thing happens again?” I-wan asked.

“It will happen again — we know that,” the man said.

This took on a meaning for I-wan that was far beyond what he could then express. It seemed to him he saw Tama far more clearly than he ever had before. Beneath her woman’s ways and her gaiety there was something desperate and resolute, something that had nothing to do with what she might wish to have or to do. So, beneath the playfulness of these people who knew how to enjoy as children enjoy, was also this dogged resolve which made them able to endure anything if they must.

Years later when he heard it sworn that soon the war would be over he shook his head. No, not soon, and perhaps never. These island people had been trained to vaster foes than man. They had fought earthquake, fire, and typhoon. These had been the enemies who had trained them in war. He was always proud that through it all his own two sons had not once wept or been afraid.

It was not a war. The papers made that clear. It was not to be called a war. It was, in the Emperor’s name, nothing but an incident.

Certainly it seemed not so important to I-wan as the fact that to the house built new after the earthquake two years before he had this summer added a study for himself with firm wooden walls which could not be moved away. For the last year Tama had been urging him to it, since the two little boys were growing so noisy. He should have a place, she said, of his own. And when one day he found they had taken his paste and smeared it everywhere over his desk, in the main room, while Tama was bathing herself and the maid preparing the supper, he agreed. And it was pleasant to have his own room…. Besides, the papers made little enough of the incident — a few soldiers in a quarrel at a small town in North China.

“It will not last three months,” Bunji had declared the first day.

It was this which first made I-wan pause to wonder if this incident were graver than was said. Else why so long as three months? He waited for letters from his father, but his father did not write so often as he once had. I-wan wrote asking for what his father’s opinion was, but no answer came. This seemed strange, and yet he knew that it might mean nothing.

One day the clerk in his office resigned. He was, he said, called to army service, though he was his mother’s only support now that his elder brother had died.

“What will she do?” I-wan asked.

“Mr. Muraki is so kind,” little Mr. Tanaka replied. “He gives a weekly sum to all who must leave their families without support to fight for the Emperor.”

Two young women came to fill his place, and a partition was put up between them and I-wan, so that he had after a fashion a room of his own. He had a good deal of time now. Business began to decrease. There were few shipments. This, too, made I-wan wonder. If it were only a matter of a few soldiers, then why did Chinese exporters at once cease sending their goods to Japan? Shipments came in as usual during that month. Then suddenly nothing came in. Ships came to port and went on, and there was no business for the house of Muraki. But they had great stores unsold and these continued westward to America and to Europe. I-wan busied himself in checking off inventories and arranging for packing and shipping boxes and crates of rugs and tapestries, potteries and china, furniture and scrolls, and all the confusion of the cheap and valuable which made the business.

Then one day he received a cable from his father. Afterwards it seemed strange to him that it had come to him through Bunji. But at the moment he had not had time to think of that. Bunji sent for him one morning, and when I-wan went to see why he was wanted, Bunji handed him an envelope and sat watching as he tore it open. It was from his father. “I-ko arriving seventeenth at Yokohama on S.S. Balmoral. Meet him at dock.” The seventeenth was two days away.