Pearl Buck - Patriot

No one spoke. No one looked at I-wan. They stood just as they had been standing when they were waiting for the earthquake. Even the children, catching the knowledge of disaster, were silent. In the silence the noise of the street seemed louder than it was, for a telephone began ringing in the house without stopping a second, and they could hear that. And in another moment a maidservant came to Bunji and bowed and said, “Sir, you are wanted. It is General Seki’s office.”

Bunji turned away without a word and went in and Setsu pattered after him. And then there was the stifled sound of a woman crying. It was Tama’s little maid, sobbing into her sleeve.

“What is it, Miya?” Tama said to her sharply.

And the little maid blurted out, “My brother — he must be dead, too. He had a little meat shop there in China — where they have all been killed. But business was so bad here — there are so many shops like his — so, when the government said they would help him to have a shop in China, where he could get rich, my father told him to go.”

She sobbed aloud, and Ganjiro, seeing her weep, howled in terror. I-wan took him in his arms. But he was too dazed to comfort the child. What did this mean? He had taken the paper from Bunji’s hand and he read on. A colony of peaceful people massacred by Chinese trained and paid by Japanese to keep the peace!

“Give me the child,” Tama said. “He is still crying.”

He felt her take Ganjiro firmly away from him. And now Bunji was coming back, his face grave and cold. He did not look at I-wan. He came to his father, bowed, and said simply, “I am ordered at once to report for military duty.”

He turned and went again into the house.

No one spoke. If Mr. Muraki would only speak, or Shio, then, I-wan thought, he could say what he must somehow say, “Surely there was a reason. We Chinese do not kill people for nothing.”

We Chinese! A few moments ago he had been so closely knit into this family that he had not doubted he was one of them. But now, this silence—

“We must go home,” Tama said in a strange voice.

And then they all began to move, to bow, to say farewell — only to say farewell. There was not a word of anything else. So, therefore, how could he begin to say, “We Chinese—”

He could only follow Tama and go with his sons and the red-eyed sniffling little maid, home through the twilighted streets. Everything was quiet again. People knew what had happened. They walked along talking of it, their faces grim, their voices low. Now and again there was a short rush of noise as a bus stopped, opened its door, and let out its crowds coming home from beaches and parks, those who had not heard.

I-wan, too, did not speak. He felt people’s eyes picking him out from among all the others, noting him different, but he walked stolidly on, as though he saw nothing. Inwardly he was a confusion of shame and anger, but anger was the stronger. Now he wanted to cry out to them all, “Why do you play such injury and innocence? I tell you, we don’t kill people for play!”

But he could not simply begin to shout this in the street to people who said nothing to him and who looked away when he stared back at them.

He strode along, therefore, filling the silence with his own angry thoughts, remembering all the wrongs which Japan had done. En-lan knew them all. It was En-lan who had told them to him, over and over. Even in those days they had not seemed real to him as they did to En-lan. That was because he had never lived in the north where En-lan was, and where the Japanese had pressed the hardest, and because, too, in his father’s house he heard nothing. But now he remembered En-lan’s passionate voice, saying again and again, “They want to swallow us up as they have Korea. Sooner or later we’ll have to fight them.” The Twenty-one Demands — how angry En-lan could get over them! And it was the Japanese, he always said, who brought in opium and made it cheap so that poor people could buy it. Every now and then En-lan used to work hard at boycotts against Japanese, and then shops would be ransacked and great bonfires piled up of Japanese goods in Shanghai streets. And sometimes En-lan had been half beside himself with rage because some cowering small shopkeeper tore the labels from his Japanese merchandise and swore it to be Chinese. But somehow, mysteriously, all boycotts came to an end. And at last everything had been lost in the greater rush of the oncoming revolution. And yet even then, I-wan remembered now, as one day he climbed the stone steps to a classroom, En-lan had kept saying in his ear, “Sooner or later, after the revolution, we must rid ourselves of the Japanese.”

He wanted at least to tell Tama — to explain to Tama, indeed, above all — but she was very busy.

“Miya, you are to go home at once to your parents,” she told the little maid. “I will do everything. Don’t come tomorrow. Comfort your parents for a day or two.”

And while the little maid went away, weeping gratefully, Tama hurried at undressing the children and bathing and feeding them and putting them to bed. And when I-wan would have helped she pushed him away, though gently.

“No, I-wan, go to your study and rest yourself. I can do this quite easily.”

He heard her everywhere about the house as he sat in the darkness of his study. The light was no use to him when he wanted only to think, to argue the whole list of Japan’s wrongs to his country. Tonight, when Tama would say to him, as she must once the house was quiet and they were alone together, “I-wan, tell me how such a thing could happen”—when she said this, he would say to her—

But she said nothing. She came in after a while and touched the button by the door so that the light poured on him.

“I-wan, why are you in the dark? Come, supper is ready.”

She took his hand gently and led him away, and then all during the meal she talked, quickly and softly, not of that but only of her father and what she could remember of him when she was small and how good he was and wise.

“Even when he wanted you to marry old Seki?” I-wan put in, and wished he had not.

For she answered steadily, “Even that he did because he thought it was right.”

She met his eyes and he thought, “What is the use of speech, if they make wrong right?”

No use — no use, he told himself, and kept his own silence, too.

He could not be sure whether people were the same or not. He watched everywhere for looks flung at him secretly, for coldnesses. But it was impossible to be sure, because of this long argument he was now continually making inside himself with no one and yet somehow with everyone — that is, with Japan. In his house he came and went as usual. He knew now that Tama would never speak. Whatever she thought — but after a few days he decided that she was not thinking, even. Well, then, he argued, was this, too, sincere, or had she simply determined not to think?

He saw Bunji no more. Bunji had gone that same night. I-wan waited to be told to take his place as he had before, but no message came from Shio or Mr. Muraki. Bunji’s office remained empty, and in his own office I-wan worked exactly as he had. But there was now a great deal more work. The shipments of goods had increased again enormously. But most of them were not unpacked now in Nagasaki. They were shipped straight on to Shio in Yokohama and I-wan knew of it only because of Shio’s reports and descriptions which had to be checked and filed and catalogued. Peking, he read again and again, goods from Peking. Loot, he thought grimly, what else but loot which Mr. Muraki was buying and selling?

And yet there was nothing but the same silence about him. He could not be sure that there was any other change. The two girls on the other side of the partition were as courteous and quick to answer his call, and if he bought something the clerks in the shops were as submissive and eager as ever. No, but there was a change. People did not speak to him as easily as they used to speak in greeting or in the small talk of everyday. He felt stifled and smothered in silence, as though he were surrounded by darkness. Or was this his imagination, too, and was it simply that people were grave with their fears, and talked less gaily to each other?