Pearl Buck - Patriot

Did she sleep? He could not tell, since she was able to lie so still, sleeping or awake. He lay, touching her shoulder and thigh and foot. They were so close. Were they not close here in their own house? She moved toward him a little and he felt her hands take his hand and hold it to her bosom. And with her touch he knew. Her flesh, her sweet and intimate flesh, was changed to him. No, it was he who had changed. Tenderness poured into him, but there was no final desire. And in the very way she held his hand, so tenderly, too tenderly, he knew that she too had felt the same death strike across her heart. She too now wanted no more children. Out of the past something long dead had reached out, the will of their ancestors, and had pulled them apart.

“Ganjiro has a cold,” Tama said to him next day. “I had better stay by him tonight.”

She was moving her sleeping things out of his room into the room where Ganjiro now slept with his older brother. Tonight, she said — but he knew she meant every night. There could be no more passion between them.

But he only said, “Is he feverish?”

“A little,” Tama replied.

He took her wooden pillow into the other room and her mirror and the tiny chest of drawers which held the combs and pins for her hairdressing. He would never be angry again with her, he knew. All day long she had been so pitifully kind, so tender that his heart ached. For he knew that such tenderness was a chasm between them. There was no way to bridge it, to find each other’s real being. Whatever happened now, their tenderness would not fail. They were caught and held in it as in an amber.

He grew, as days went on, increasingly lonely. Sometimes he imagined that even Jiro and the little one drew away from him as though they disliked him. Then he told himself this could not be. It was simply that he was too solemn. But indeed his life he found more difficult every day. There had been not one letter from his father or from I-ko. Impossible to believe that I-ko at least had not written! He did not want to read the newspapers because he did not believe them. And yet if he did not read them he heard nothing.

One morning when he went to work he had been sent for to Bunji’s office and there at Bunji’s desk sat a young man whom instantly he knew he hated.

“I am Mr. Hideyoshi,” the young man announced briskly. “I am promoted from submanager in the Yokohama office to this post.” He grinned. “Unfortunately my eyes are bad, or I should be fighting for my country in China…. Sit down.”

He motioned to a chair and I-wan bowed slightly and sat down. Last time Bunji went away it was he who had been manager. But Shio had sent this man to work here — perhaps to watch him.

“Have you seen the paper this morning?” Mr. Hideyoshi burst into loud laughter.

“No, I have not,” I-wan said quietly. He was already full of hatred against this man.

“Read it, then!” The man flung the paper toward him. “It is really too funny.”

I-wan looked at the front page. There was a great deal about — why, about Shanghai! He had not looked at the papers for several days. No, but what were the Japanese doing now in Shanghai? He read hastily down the column. What was this? Laughter, laughter because of a mistake—

“The Chinese Help Japan!” he read. “Chinese Aviator Bombs Shanghai!” Laughter — laughter — down the page he followed hideous laughter! A young Chinese aviator had mistaken his aim upon a Japanese target and had dropped his bombs into a crowded street. “Hundreds of People Killed—”

No, but this was some Japanese trick! He read racing on — no, it was true — incredible, shameful, true. Here were the details, too true to be disbelieved. He knew the street. He had been upon it more times than he could count, and it was always full of people surging about the shops, buying, or simply staring at the show…. Here was the picture of it now, badly printed on the cheap Japanese paper, but still to be recognized, though the walls were fallen into twisted steel and crushed concrete, and bodies hung where they were caught.

He looked up to see Hideyoshi’s laughing face.

“Hah, you are reading about it! Terrible — but still very funny!” He laughed again. “To drop bombs on their own people — it’s funny, is it not?”

I-wan choked.

“It’s not true,” he muttered. “Some mistake—”

“No mistake,” Hideyoshi said briskly. “Every paper has the same story. Everybody is laughing. It is as good as a Japanese victory. Now the English and Americans will see how foolish the Chinese are. The Chinese are so kind — they help their enemies and kill their own people!”

“Then you admit the Japanese are killing the Chinese?” I-wan demanded.

“We can no longer endure their insults,” Mr. Hideyoshi replied, pursing his lips. “You must know that we have been very patient. Boycotts, prejudices, attacks from mobs, assassinations unpunished — we have endured all these for years at the hands of the Chinese. Now our Emperor is determined to put an end to Chinese animosity. We shall fight until all anti-Japanese feeling is stamped out and the Chinese are ready to co-operate with us.”

I-wan stared at him, not believing what he heard.

“You mean,” he repeated, “you will kill us and bomb our cities — and — and — rape our women — until we learn to love you?”

Now it was he who burst into loud laughter. He could not control his laughter.

“I am to love you, you say! Mr. Hideyoshi, I must love you, because you — you—”

Mr. Hideyoshi looked bewildered. “Not you as an individual,” he broke in. “Besides, we look upon you as a Japanese. You have been here so long and you are married to a Japanese lady—”

I-wan’s laughter stopped as though it had been chopped off.

“What’s the matter?” Mr. Hideyoshi asked, seeing his face.

“Nothing,” I-wan answered. “I see — all in a moment — there’s nothing to laugh at.” He bowed quickly and went back to his own office and sat down. He felt choked again and his head began to throb with the old pain. He pulled out a drawer and drew forth some folders and pretended to begin work. But he could do nothing.

“We look upon you as a Japanese,” Mr. Hideyoshi had said. Once En-lan had written down, in the way he had of writing down everything, a history of what Japan had done in China. It was a long list, reaching back, I-wan now remembered, into his grandfather’s time. There were forced concessions of land and trade, there were loans made to bandit warlords in the name of government for securities of valuable mines, there was the seizure of Kiaochow and the Twenty-one Demands. He had been a little boy when he himself could first remember, but his nurse had taken him out to see the parades then made against Japan. The flags, he remembered, were beautiful, but he had been frightened at a great poster showing a large cruel Japanese swallowing many small and helpless Chinese, and he had cried so that his nurse took him home again. But for a night or two he had had bad dreams and had screamed himself awake, so that they had let Peony move a little bamboo bed into his room and sleep near him. How therefore could he be a Japanese now? Tama had not touched really that inner self which was he…. No, Tama and everyone else now remained outside of him.

Two days later there was fresh news in the papers. Mr. Hideyoshi put his head in the door of I-wan’s office.

“We are doing our own bombing in Shanghai now,” he remarked, all his teeth glistening in a grin. “Did you see the Osaka Mainichi today?”

I-wan stared at him steadily without answering. He wanted to kill this man. This man he wanted to smash, to crush, as one crushed a beetle! Mr. Hideyoshi, seeing his look, shut the door hastily.