Pearl Buck - Patriot

“And why is the baby strapped like that to the maid’s back when he can walk? His legs will be as short and crooked as Bunji’s.”

Here she was indignant.

“I-wan, I beg you — not in the presence of Jiro. And it is a good way to care for a little child. He is warm and safe while he sleeps. The even temperature of her body keeps him from catching cold.”

“Put him in his bed — I won’t have him strapped like that,” he insisted.

He saw in her eyes that he was indeed being unreasonable. She sighed and then smiled.

“Of course, you are very tired,” she said gently. “A whole night on the train! Jiro, go away until I call you.”

“I am not tired,” I-wan retorted.

Nevertheless he said no more. Perhaps he was unreasonable. Certainly it astonished him to find in himself a feeling that today it would be a pleasure to be able to quarrel with Tama. But it was impossible to quarrel with her. She would not answer him. She went quietly about to placate him, and then she went away for a few minutes as though to give him time to recover himself. He could almost imagine that she withdrew to remember what she had been taught to do when a man, her husband, is irritable. In the past when she had so considered him, invariably she came back with a flower or a sweetmeat or a pot of freshly brewed tea, to make him feel her especial attention. He had always been ashamed of his rare moods of ill-temper. But today he felt irritated with this very seeming pliability of hers, which made allowance for everything he did, and yet, he knew, yielded nothing to any change.

He ate his meal in silence, full of such thoughts, yet hating himself, too. For Tama was not changed. She was what she had always been, the same fresh, naïve, happy creature, the same compound of childishness and sophistication, the same confusion of old and new. And her only fault was that she always did faithfully what she had been taught to do. It occurred to him suddenly that this was true of every Japanese — each one did as he was told to do. But whose was the final command? The spirit of the people, fostered by — what? The Emperor? He had often seen the pictures of the Emperor and Empress. They were in the sacred shrines of every schoolhouse and public building — two doll-like immobile creatures. No, they too did only as they were told. It now seemed to him that the whole nation was trained in the same mold. And into this mold would go also his own two sons!

He rose abruptly. He must get to his office. Then he could not find his hat. And Tama had left the room a moment before.

“Where is my hat?” he demanded of the maid, who came in with tea.

The baby was no longer on her back. At his voice she looked frightened as though she did not know what to expect.

“Hah!” she breathed distractedly, and began running about hunting for the hat in absurd places. He grew impatient.

“My hat, Tama!” he shouted. She came in quickly, Ganjiro in her arms, crying.

“Ah, your hat!” she cried. “Where can it be?”

Behind her came Jiro, strutting along, the hat on his head. Tama snatched it.

“Oh, bad boy!” she cried. “To take your father’s good hat!”

“Leave him alone,” I-wan ordered, putting the hat on his head. “I am glad if he shows a little independence.”

Tama did not answer. She gave the crying child to the maid and motioned her away, and followed I-wan to the door, a smile on her lips. I-wan thought, “She has been taught to present a smiling face to her husband when he leaves home,” and hated himself.

“Good-by, Tama,” he said, more kindly. And he hated himself more when her eyes grew bright with relief. “I’ll be back a little late, perhaps,” he added.

“Yes, of course,” she agreed. She stood, her smile fixed, as long as he could see her.

What happened when he was gone? He had never thought before to ask himself. Did she take the smile from her face and put it away until he returned? Probably Ganjiro was already again strapped to the maid’s back! For the first time it occurred to him that he really knew nothing at all of what went on in his own house.

Long after Tama was asleep that night he lay awake, his head still throbbing. For an hour she had massaged it delicately and firmly, her fingers seeming scarcely to touch his skin, and yet he could feel their tips, manipulating the nerves.

“You know everything, I think,” he said after a long silence.

“Are you better?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

In a little while the pain was back again, exactly as it had been. But he did not tell her. She had done what she could. It was not her fault that the pain was deeper than she could reach. It had its roots somewhere down in his soul, he thought. He had not thought about his soul for a long time. Tama had made his body wonderfully comfortable. Long ago he had accepted everything from her of such comfort. Even tonight, before she put her neck into the hollowed curve of her wooden pillow, she made sure, in her own delicate fashion, that he wanted nothing more of her.

“You are tired?” she bent over him so closely that he caught her body’s fragrance.

“Too tired for anything but sleep,” he answered.

She touched his cheeks with the palms of her hands and then stretched herself out beside him so quietly he hardly felt her there.

Did she, he wondered, really have no will of her own? But as a girl she had had, he thought. And what was that deep steady persistence in her except the solidity of will? And yet, as he pondered it, he perceived it was less her own will, her individual will, than it was something else — not tradition, because she was not slavish to tradition — her education in a girls’ school had broken that. No, it was something else. He felt it in them all — in her parents and in Bunji and in Shio. And in Akio it had driven him to his death, and it had made as simple a creature as Sumie willing to die. It was some solidarity of instinct which he did not understand because he had never seen it until he came here. Certainly it was not in his own family or in his people. Even in that youthful band which En-lan had led the solidarity had been based upon recognized intellectual convictions, rather than upon any natural instincts. Did his sons have it? He brought before his mind Jiro’s small compact round face. Impossible to know! But why should he think it was not there? Tama would give with her blood that which was also indestructible in her own being.

This meant, then, that what was most indestructible in his sons’ souls was Japanese, even as Tama was Japanese. He felt suddenly as far from this woman sleeping at his side as though he had never seen her. She lay as she always did, asleep in perfect silence. He could not hear her so much as breathe. He turned and tossed and flung himself about in sleep. But Tama’s body never moved. When in the morning she rose even her hair was not disturbed. So she had been taught to control herself, awake or asleep.

They were all controlled. From that strange immobile center of their being there went out this complete command over the whole. Nothing could break it down. He remembered the earthquake. No one had been afraid. No one had complained. And yet an eye far less sensitive than his could perceive their intense inner suffering…. Yet had not Bunji lost control? That was what happened. If the control broke, they turned into beasts — even Bunji, the best of them. Bunji was still the best of them, because he hated and feared what he had done and hid it even from himself, so that even to himself he could never be quite the same again.

And Tama, if she broke …? By the light of the small night light he looked at her placid sleeping face. Ganjiro slept on the other side of her, as all Japanese babies slept with their mothers. She had been horrified when he said, “Why not let him sleep with the maid?”