Patriot

II

THE SHIP WAS MOVING slowly among small green islands, threading its way through a shimmer of bright blue water and sunshine. The air was warm and still, except for the fall of water at the prow, and in the vistas between the islands he could see flights of small Japanese fishing vessels, their sails white against the blue sky. He lay in his chair, gazing at it, empty of thought. That was the only way to endure his complete helplessness — simply not to think, not to remember.

Sometimes he felt, pushing through the emptiness, the old wish that at least he might have told En-lan — and then he summoned the emptiness to wash that away, too. There was no way whereby he could tell En-lan. En-lan perhaps was dead already. He could not even write to Peony. Peony was gone. He wondered dully when she had gone and where. He remembered so clearly his father’s unbelieving shout, “Peony gone!” Then he summoned the emptiness again to wash it all away.

All of it was gone — all the hopes they had had together. He felt a sharp remorse when he thought of the brigade. They were doubtless back again at the mill, working as they had before in their old hopelessness. They would think he was a liar after all — perhaps even that he had betrayed them. But perhaps they would only think he was dead. He hoped that was what they thought — that he was dead. He never, never wanted to see them again.

But lying in the emptiness of the sky and water, watching the dreaming islands slip by, he had come at last to cease hating his father. He had come to see it would have been impossible for him to have stayed in Shanghai, even if he had not been killed, especially if he had not been killed. To have had to go back to the old life, shorn of its plans, back to the round of school and home without the hope of anything to come, back to his grandmother and the reek of that opium — no, it could not have been. And Peony gone. They would not look for Peony in that house. No, his father would simply say, “Let her go — she is nothing but a bondmaid. Get another to take her place.”

It was all impossible to think about. He shut his eyes and his lids smarted. His heart felt crushed in his breast. There were many ways of breaking a heart. Stories were full of hearts broken by love, but what really broke a heart was taking away its dream — whatever the dream might be.

He lay in the emptiness, giving himself up. The soft sea air swept over him. He heard a sailor call a sounding somewhere, his voice musical in the silence. There was no meaning now to anything. He closed his eyes. Let nights drift over him and days pass him by.

He would have liked to stay on the ship forever, but that of course he could not. In a few minutes the ship would dock at Nagasaki, and beyond that his ticket did not go. He had his father’s written instructions and now he read them over again. Since he cared about nothing he might as well follow them. At the dock, he read in his father’s heavy writing, he would be met and taken to the home of Muraki, the merchant. “Mr. Muraki is an old friend,” his father wrote, “and he will keep you in his home. I have asked him to give you a place in his business. Of course you need not be dependent on your earnings. Let me know what you need, after you have spent what I have given you. But I want you to go to work, and when I think it is safe you may return.”

“I will never return,” I-wan said to himself in his cabin. If he could not return to such a country as he had dreamed of, then he would be an exile forever. He had no country. He closed his bag and took it and went up on deck. It was already noon, and the ship was slowing to anchor in the bay.

The land looked strange to him. A steep mountain range pressed almost to the sea, but between its foot and the shore there was a small city, stretched long and narrow. The houses were angular and squat. The tiles on their flat roofs were gleaming in the sun, but over the mountain tops a cloud hung, black and full of rain. Around the ship coal barges were beginning to flock, and short thick-bodied Japanese coolies, men and women, were stooping themselves ready to heave from shoulder to shoulder the baskets of coal. He could hear them chattering, and it did not seem strange that he could understand nothing of what they said. Nothing was strange any more — everything had already happened to him, and everything was over.

He took up his bag and followed the others along the swaying ladder down the ship’s side into a small launch. He had spoken to no one on the ship and he knew no one. Most of them were Americans, going ashore for sight-seeing. Their English he could barely understand, since he was accustomed to Miss Maitland’s sort of English, and Mr. Ranald’s. When he thought of Mr. Ranald he thought for a second of Peng Liu and how he had wanted to put Mr. Ranald’s name on the death list. That death list! A very different one had served at last. He thought dully, “It was Peng Liu who betrayed us.” Then he drew emptiness resolutely about him again. Peng Liu did not matter. Miss Maitland and Mr. Ranald were doubtless teaching their classes as usual, except that certain seats were empty…. Was En-lan dead? He would never know.

The launch was puffing through the smooth bright water. Suddenly across the sunshine a slanting rain fell, silver and cool.

“Regular Nagasaki weather,” an American voice said.

“Gives ’em the most glorious gardens in the world,” another answered.

Above them the cloud had stretched a dark arm toward the sun. In a moment it was gone and the rain stopped. The launch was at the dock now, and among them all I-wan stepped off. The land rocked a moment under his feet. He stood looking around him. Then he saw a young Japanese in western dress come to him, and he heard his voice, speaking Chinese, strongly accented, “Is it Wu I-wan?”

“Yes, if you please,” I-wan answered, “I am that humble one.”

“I am Mr. Muraki’s son,” the young man answered, “Bunji, by name. My father invites you to our house.”

He smiled, his teeth white and his eyes pleasant. He took off his hat and his stiff black hair stood up about his square face like a circular brush.

“I say,” he said suddenly, “shall we speak English? It’s easier for me, though I speak it badly, too.”

“Yes,” I-wan replied, “if you like.”

To himself he thought, climbing into a small motor car with this Bunji Muraki, that he never wanted to speak his own tongue again. He wanted to cut off his whole life and begin from this moment. He would dream no more world dreams and hope for nothing and trust no one. He would live from moment to moment, never thinking beyond. In such a mood he seated himself beside Bunji Muraki and allowed himself to be driven away.

They stopped before a thatch-roofed gate in a low brick wall. Bunji opened the door of the car and leaped out. He moved with an angular sharp precision, as if his muscles had been drilled to a count of one, two, three, four.

“We live here,” he said, his white teeth shining again in a smile. Then he reached for I-wan’s bag.

“No, don’t — I’ll take it,” I-wan said.

“No — no, I—” Bunji protested.

They ended by carrying it between them for a few steps until at the gate a stooped old man in a short-skirted cotton coat took it from them.

“He is our gardener,” Bunji said. “Let him have it.”

He led the way through a garden laid out in a landscape of miniature hills and lakes. A tiny red-varnished footbridge carried them over a stream and the path led them around a curve where at the far end they could see the house. It was a low-roofed building whose white-papered lattices gleamed through the dark-leafed flowering trees. Everything in the garden was so perfect, that it was impossible not to be diverted by it. There was not a leaf upon the moss planted under the trees, not a rock out of place in the stream tinkling in little artificial waterfalls.

“My father’s garden is quite famous,” Bunji said. He pointed ahead. “There is my father now.”

I-wan saw in the distance a slender old man in a silk kimono of silver gray, standing under an early flowering cherry tree. He had pulled a small branch downward and was looking at the buds. As they drew near he turned.

“Hah!” he said to his son, “you are here!” He spoke in Japanese. But when Bunji said, “This is our guest,” he said in a stiff old-fashioned Chinese, such as he might have learned from books, “In this little house, the son of my old friend is welcome beyond any others.”

I-wan liked this old man at once. In that other life before this emptiness fell upon him En-lan had said, “When we get our own world set right, we must fight the Japanese and get back what they have taken from us.” Ever since the Twenty-one Demands it was one’s duty to hate the Japanese and to talk of war one day to come. But he could not hate this old gentle man. His skin was a pale gold beneath his silver-white hair, but his eyes were black and young. He was so small that I-wan looked down upon him as he might a child. Who could dislike him?

“It is very kind of you to accept me. I do not deserve it,” he replied.

“Hah — your father is my friend, and all we have is yours,” Mr. Muraki said. He was still clinging to the branch. “You see,” he said, “the cherry trees are about to bloom. You have come at just the moment. In six days all Japan will be in blossom.”

“My father lives for this each spring,” Bunji said to I-wan, “and then he lives for the chrysanthemums in the autumn.”

They stood a moment, half awkwardly. Mr. Muraki was smiling a little at his son.

“Hah,” he said with his soft, indrawing breath, “you had better allow him to go in and refresh himself, Bunji.”

He nodded and turned to the tree, dismissing them.

“My father is retired,” Bunji said. He was leading the way again. “My two brothers are heads now of his business.”

“And you?” I-wan asked.

“Oh, I am a clerk there, only,” Bunji laughed. “I see to packing and billing. It is import and export business.”

They were at a wide door, and two pretty servant girls fluttered out in brightly flowered cotton kimonos. Bunji stopped and thrust out one foot. One of the girls dropped to her knees and began unlacing his leather shoe. I-wan had heard of this, and when the other knelt at his foot, he, too, tried not to feel it strange to have women there serving him. He felt his shoes drawn off and his feet slipped into soft straw slippers. Then he followed Bunji up the steps into the house. He had never seen one like it. There were many rooms, only partly shut off from each other by the white-papered lattices, which were screens. It was like stepping into a huge clean honeycomb. There was the smell of the clean matting on which they walked, the fragrance of un-painted woods. And through all the open rooms floated the airy fragrance of the garden coming into spring.

“My father likes to live entirely in the old-fashioned Japanese way,” Bunji said. “So — you see — but in your room we have put a chair. In my room, too. My married brother, Shio, however, has chairs in each room in his house in Yokohama. He is quite modern!”

Bunji laughed loudly and I-wan smiled. Within himself he still felt complete quiet. Moment by moment, that was how he wanted to live now. He found this moment amusing, but nothing could excite him, however strange.

“Here is your room,” Bunji said. “It is next to mine — see, it opens on the garden!”

He drew a latticed screen aside, and I-wan saw a small square room. There was no bed, nothing but a bamboo armchair and table and in a recess a scroll upon which was written a poem, and beneath it a branch of budding hawthorn in a green vase. There was no other decoration, until Bunji slid another screen away, and there was a corner of the garden. The wall was only a few feet away, but a dwarfed maple tree grew against it, its buds scarlet, and beneath was a small pool scarcely two feet square, and beside it a rock.

“No one will come here except the gardeners,” Bunji said. “It is quite your own. And when you are ready to sleep, clap your hands and a maidservant will spread your quilts on the mats. Our midday meal will be ready in half an hour and a maidservant will bring you water to wash yourself. I will come back.” He put out his hand in a quick foreign fashion and I-wan put out his and they shook hands.

He sat down when Bunji was gone and looked about him. The house was still. Everything was so still. He could hear the soft sibilance of distant sliding screens, and a low murmuring voice somewhere not near. The house was ordered, like the garden. There was no dust anywhere. The bit of garden seemed a part of the house. The few feet of grass were green and clipped, lying like a carpet where the polished floor of the room stopped. He felt wrapped about in peace. Life here was planned. There were lightness and clarity and absolute cleanliness, and in spite of fragility a feeling of long-settled stability. Precisely this life had been lived here for generations.

He was glad he had come. He had no plans now of his own. Perhaps he never would have again. Why plan, when hopes and plans could disappear in a night, as if they were mists? He felt very tired and he sat down on the edge of the floor, his feet upon the grass, and sat gazing at the water, his mind empty and his heart still.

At last he heard someone cough beyond the screen, and he called “Come!” and then Bunji came in wearing a soft dark silk kimono. He looked entirely another person, gentler and somehow more the son of Mr. Muraki. On his arm he carried a dark purple length of silk.

“I thought you might like to put this on,” he said.

He held up the garment and I-wan saw it was another kimono. But he did not want to put it on.

“If you will not count it rudeness,” he said, “I will put on one of my own robes.”

“Do,” Bunji replied. “I thought only to rid you of the stiff western clothes. Good for business but not for pleasure!” He laughed. Then he turned to look into the garden while I-wan put on the robe of blue silk he had brought with him. The last time he had worn a robe had been in his own home.

“Now,” he said, “I am ready.”

Bunji turned. They stood, two young men, looking alike in their darkness of hair and eyes, and yet so different. I-wan was taller by half a head than Bunji, and his body was more slender, his face more oval, his hands and feet more delicate. But Bunji’s body was the more powerful and strong.

“In reality,” Bunji said, “our clothing is not so different. What I wear is the ancient dress of your people. You wear their modern dress. Ah, I have not seen it! Is it comfortable? Yes, I see it is. It fits you closely, and the sleeves are not so wide. That is what I dislike — our wide sleeves. But of course our dress is very pretty on the girls. Wait until you see my sister. She is a moga — that is, a modern girl — at heart, but at home my father will not allow it. I, too, think she is not so pretty in western dress. Come on — you’re hungry. I’m always hungry!”

He ended everything with a laugh, this Bunji. Now he led the way to a large square room, facing the main garden. At the door he paused and bowed to his parents who were already there.

“Mother, this is I-wan,” he said.

I-wan bowed to Madame Muraki. He thought, “I have never seen anyone so beautiful.” She did not look at all like his own plump mother. She was very slight and her face was sad and her eyes were full of a strange dead patience. Yet although she was more than fifty and her pompadoured hair was gray, her face was smooth and she wore a faintly purple robe of plain heavy silk. When she bowed her little body seemed to crumple at the waist over the wide sash of deeper purple satin. Then she straightened herself like a flower after wind.

“Hah,” she breathed, “I am so glad you are come! Will you sit down? And forgive my poor English, since I shamefully never learned Chinese.”

“I hope I can learn Japanese quickly,” I-wan said. “Then I may speak in your language, Madame.”

“Hah!” she answered softly, smiling. It was assent and echo.

They sat down upon the silvery mats about a low table, facing the garden. There was no decoration in this room either, except for latticed screens and a scroll in a recess and a long low dish of narcissus in flower beneath it. The air was cool and fresh and the whole atmosphere light and quietly gay. A rosy young girl came in with a tray of bowls. No one spoke to her. She set a bowl before each of them and went away. As soon as she had gone Bunji burst into such laughter that his parents smiled.

“That is my sister,” he cried. “She is shy and she won’t eat with us today. But she will get over it.”

“Shall I speak to your sister?” I-wan asked, smiling. “Is it your custom?” To be courteous, he had not looked at the young girl.

Madame Muraki in her soft voice spoke a few words I-wan could not understand. Bunji translated, “My mother says, ‘Wait until afterwards. She will come in again.’ Her name is Tama.”

But she did not come again. Bunji laughed again when a maid brought in the next course of fish.

“Tama knew we would tell you who she was, so she doesn’t come in again.”

They laughed together then, and I-wan suddenly felt at peace. He would stop thinking. There was nothing to remember. The air in this house was clean and pure, and the light poured in everywhere, and the unpainted polished woods gave off that delicacy of fragrance in every room. It was all open and clean and everybody laughed easily as though they were untroubled.

“Can you eat our poor food?” Madame Muraki asked him.

“I like everything,” I-wan said. Then he blushed because he had spoken, perhaps, too warmly.

“Hah,” Mr. Muraki said, “that is the way the young should feel.”

Mr. and Mrs. Muraki smiled again gently and he felt himself liked. It was pleasant.

And though there was little talk, no one felt ill at ease. It was as if each person knew exactly what he should do and did it. The meal proceeded to its end of bowls of rice, dipped from a lacquered container, and then tea, and after that Madame Muraki folded herself into a bow like a butterfly closing its wings, and went away. As though he were prepared for it, Bunji looked toward his father, and Mr. Muraki said to I-wan, “Your father has written me that he wishes you to learn our business. If you like, I have planned this for you — that you spend half your time at the business. In the morning you will have a place beside Bunji. Bunji will help you. In the afternoon you may study or play.”

“I am grateful,” I-wan replied. Yes, he was very glad to have his life taken out of his own hands and planned for him, hour by hour. That was the way he wished to live now.

Mr. Muraki rose. “Then it is arranged,” he said. “If you are not happy you will tell me.” It was half question, half command, but wholly kind.

I-wan said, “But I am sure I shall be happy, sir.”

“I like all my house to be happy,” Mr. Muraki murmured. He went toward the garden, hesitated, and then he murmured again, “Those irises — they should be trimmed. They are excessive.” He stepped down upon the moss and turned the corner and was gone.

“Now,” Bunji said, his eyes shining with mischief, “Tama will come in. How shall you behave to her, I-wan? As a mobo — that is, a modern boy — or as an old-fashioned young man?”

I-wan felt half alarmed and half shy.

“What will she like?” he asked. But he could not somehow feel excited about this young girl. She had not even lifted her head when she came in.

“No, I won’t tell you,” Bunji replied. “You shall judge for yourself. Only let us be talking.”

They were silent a moment, and then Bunji exploded again into laughter.

“What shall we talk about?” he asked.

“I can’t think,” I-wan replied, unable, too, to keep from laughing at Bunji.

“Oh, how silly we are!” Bunji said, wiping his eyes. “Now, let us be dignified.”

“Will she like that?” I-wan asked. His heart was dancing, too, with the nonsense. He had not felt so pleasantly foolish since he and Peony used to tease each other long before he had ever heard the name of revolution.

“Hush,” Bunji replied. “I hear her.” He raised his voice a little and sobered his face. “The question of foreign exchange,” he began, “is in itself extremely serious. You see how it is. When we accept a large wholesale order, say from the United States, we must insure ourselves against a drop in the exchange which might nullify all profit.”

The screen slid and Tama was there, hesitating. I-wan looked up. He saw a girl in a rose-colored kimono, her feet in Japanese shoes and spotless white stockings. Around her waist was a gold brocade sash. But her hair was not done in the shining oiled Japanese pompadour. It was drawn back smoothly from her round and pink-cheeked face, and it was not oiled at all. It lay soft and straight about her head and was fastened into a knot at the neck. She bowed a crumpled butterfly bow exactly as her mother had done. Madame Muraki’s head always drooped, but after she had bowed Tama stood upright.

Then she said in English, “Bunji, please?”

“This is my sister, Tama,” Bunji said, his eyes dancing. “And this, Tama, is I-wan.”

I-wan stood up to bow. But Tama came forward, her hand outstretched.

“We shake hands, yes?” she said in a soft rushing impulsive voice. “Bunji told me you were a mobo — yes? I also like to be new, though my father does not wish it. I attend the University of Kyushu.”

He took her small firm hand in his and shook it and let it fall quickly. She did not seem shy now. But he was shy. He did not look at her face as she seated herself beside the table gracefully and felt the teapot.

“Now we will have some hot tea together,” she said cosily. “What were you saying, Bunji? I never heard you talk about exchange before!”

They all laughed again.

“You see how she is,” Bunji said to I-wan. “Only you must understand she is two girls, Tama is. Before our parents she is very proper and so shy—”

“Bunji!” she murmured. “You mustn’t—”

“And the other Tama,” Bunji said remorselessly, “is a moga, bold and brazen, liking to talk to young men at the university—”

“I’m not — I do not!” she cried. “Don’t believe him!”

“I shall believe only what you tell me yourself,” I-wan said, “no one else!”

He was charmed by this gaiety and by this pretty girl, at once blushing and natural, and for the moment he forgot everything else. He had never sat in a room like this with a young girl — except Peony, who was only a bondmaid.

“I am so lucky,” he blurted out. “I feel myself very lucky to have come to your home. I can’t tell you how unhappy I was — I thought nothing could be any good. Just this morning I thought that. And now just being in this house has made me feel happier.”

They listened with an air of delicate understanding. Tama sighed.

“I know — sometimes I also — I am quite overcome with melancholy. But not for long.”

“I should think no one could be melancholy here,” I-wan said.

He saw the other two look at each other in a common thought. Bunji answered him, his face more thoughtful than I-wan had yet seen it.

“In this house,” he said, “it is true — we are very fortunate. Don’t you think we are, Tama?”

Tama nodded. “Yes,” she agreed. Then she added, “But I think women are never so fortunate in any house as men are.”

“You are far more fortunate than most,” Bunji replied. “You are lucky to be the only daughter. You are a petted child, Tama.”

“That is why I am melancholy,” Tama said, sighing.

No one spoke for a second. Some sort of shadow, indeed, seemed to gather like a faint mist out of the air about them, something which they knew but did not tell I-wan. Then Bunji said abruptly, “I suppose, Tama, we ought to go. Akio is expecting me at the office. And I have been away all morning. Akio is my second brother,” he said, turning to I-wan.

“Ah — yes,” Tama agreed. She rose in quick acquiescence.

“There will be plenty of time for talk, because I-wan is going to live here,” Bunji went on.

“And I–I have so many questions to ask you about your great country,” Tama said to I-wan. A sort of pretty formality had fallen upon her. “We owe everything to your country, we Japanese.”

I-wan did not answer. He thought, “I don’t want to talk about my country,” but he did not say it. The shadow was palpable now. Laughter was gone. They were very formal.

“If you are ready?” Bunji said.

“Yes — but my clothes?” I-wan replied.

“I must change too,” Bunji said.

“So,” Tama assented, “until you all come home.” She made her little drooping bow and seemed to disappear rather than to depart. I-wan, watching her, thought he had never seen anything so pretty as her bow, except the spring of her head upward when she had made it.

But Bunji did not notice her. He said briskly, “Now for work!”

He seemed another person — perhaps because he did not laugh when he spoke of work.

There was no laughter in the office of Muraki and Sons. The long low cement building which carried on the work of six great curio shops in the main cities of Japan was as close to the sea as it could be, so that the docks could be near. I-wan followed Bunji into the gate and across a cemented yard.

“We have tried to persuade my father to move to Yokohama,” Bunji said, “but the most he would do was to send my eldest brother Shio. My father was born in our house, and his grandfather before him, and he will not leave this island of Kyushu. It is very inconvenient because since the largest steamers now burn oil, they don’t stop here for coal as they once did. We have almost no tourist business here, though once we had much business with the Americans. But — what can we do, my brothers and I? He will not go. So we do all the business here except the actual selling in the shops.”

They entered a door. Inside it the building was very clean and very ugly. It was all cement. On the cement floors were no mats or any covering, and the cement walls were bare except for a few maps. In a huge room twenty men worked at desks in complete silence. All were in western dress.

“Our accountants and bookkeepers,” Bunji said. “Here is my office. Your desk will be here for a while. But first I must take you to my elder brother, Akio.”

He tapped at a closed door and listened.

“Enter,” a deep voice called.

Bunji opened the door wide.

“Akio, this is Wu I-wan,” he said.

A man in Japanese dress sat at a low desk. He was the only man in the building whom I-wan had seen who was not in western business dress, except the runners in coolie garb. He looked up without smiling and nodded, and I-wan saw a strange, melancholy, intense face. The temples were sunken and the cheekbones high, and the mouth was exquisite and sad. He did not look in the least like Bunji.

“Come in, please,” he said in English. “I am sorry I cannot speak Chinese. But you will soon learn Japanese.”

His voice had resonance, as though it were full of echoes.

“I hope so, sir,” I-wan replied.

“Undoubtedly,” Akio murmured.

They stood there for a moment, uncertainly.

“Shall I — show him his desk?” Bunji asked.

“Yes, that will be best,” Akio replied. And then, as though he feared he had been discourteous, he rose and bowed. “I hope everything will be as you like it,” he said vaguely.

“I think it is already,” I-wan replied.

But Akio seemed not to hear. He sat down again, his eyes curiously without light.

“Come,” Bunji said, and they went on and he closed the door. When they were walking down the corridor again, he sighed and said in a low voice, “My brother has a trouble — he and my father do not agree. Someday when you know us better, I’ll tell you.”

I-wan did not know what to say and so he said nothing. Certainly Akio did not seem to belong in that cheerful house.

“Here is our office,” Bunji said.

They went into a square barren room, furnished with two desks and a few straight chairs. But upon one desk was a spray of hawthorn.

“That is your desk,” Bunji said. “I had it placed so you could look toward the sea.” I-wan looked and there beyond the window was the sea line, rocky and curving sharply inward. Upon the rocks were a few pines, shaped into flat and stunted shapes by the wind. “If your eye could see straight from your window,” Bunji said, “you would see your own country.”

I-wan turned away. His country never was and never would be. He had cut himself off from it.

“What are my duties?” he asked sharply. There was a pile of books upon his desk.

“They are all records,” Bunji replied. “At my father’s wish, I had them brought here for you to examine. Here is ten years’ business. If you will study them a few days you will see the principles upon which we work and how the business has expanded. My brother Akio,” he went on, “is the best business man among us. Although my eldest brother, Shio, is the titular head after my father, Akio is the most active. Shio is too much of an artist. He judges the quality of our goods and is the one who buys our antiques. Sometimes he won’t sell them — then Akio goes to see what is wrong. Well! Are you ready?”

“Yes,” I-wan said — as well this as anything.

He took off his hat and coat and sat down and opened the books. A servant brought him paper cuffs and showed him how to put them on. Bunji had them also. He was already at his desk, a shade over his eyes, an abacus in his right hand while his left traced a column of figures. His face was not smiling now. It was shrewd and intense and his lips moved as he muttered figures. I-wan had seen the abacus all his life in Shanghai shops and he knew how to use it somewhat himself. But he had never seen such skill as Bunji’s. That short thick hand moved with an amazing speed over the beads. Then with a fountain pen Bunji put down totals in thousands of yen.

I-wan took up the books before him and began to read slowly the records. At first he thought, “This will be stupid.” And then he forgot himself in the descriptions, minutely made, of all that passed through the house of Muraki — paintings and silks, fine furniture and porcelains, embroideries and ivories and filigreed silver and cloisonné, bronzes and lacquers and rugs. It was like a great fish net, this business, scattered far and drawn together with all its gathered richness into this building, the riches to be sorted and sold and sent away. He grew curious and looked rapidly through one book after the other to see the direction. The net was cast over India and China and the South Seas, and the goods flowed out again to the West, and especially to America. He read, his eyes sorting out the Chinese names he knew — Canton ivory, Canton blackwood and teak, Canton silver and jade, blue kingfisher’s feathers from Foochow, ancient Fukien paintings and images, potteries from Kiangsi and Szechuan curiosities, and scrolls from Peking, from the imperial palaces.

He was astounded. “How can they get these things?” he wondered. Who sold the imperial scrolls? They were national treasures and could not be sold. He thought, “When I know Bunji better, I will ask him.”

He felt indignant somehow. And yet he could not justly blame the house of Muraki. They paid for what they bought, even if they sold for great profit. He was about to look up the matter of profits, when Bunji said, “I-wan, it is time to go home. You have sat for three hours without getting up. Has it been interesting?”

“I forgot the time,” I-wan said.

He looked up. It was true. The lengthening rays of sunlight were shining over the sea. They walked back together and entered the garden. In the distance he saw a girl dressed in blue, standing upon a footbridge across a small pool. She was gazing into the water.

“Tama is back before us,” Bunji remarked. He called, but she did not hear. “Ah, well,” he said comfortably, “she’s dreaming about something.”

He led the way into the house and I-wan followed. His heart grew lighter again, inexplicably, and he went to his room and stretched himself out upon the mats and lay gazing into his tiny garden. Every pebble in it was perfectly placed. The little rill of water was guided over a flat rock to fall with its small exact music into the miniature pool. It was so small and yet it continued to give, in its proportion of one thing to another, the effect of a larger nature. He lay, idly thinking of it.

It was strange how in a few hours he felt he could call this place home. There was a close security here into which he longed to fit himself. It was a fairy world — not his dream, but exquisite enough if one gave up one’s own huge dreaming. And he had given up.

This room of his became a refuge to him. He thought of it pleasurably as he worked at his desk. At the end of the day he went to it and stayed there, happy and alone. He had begun to buy a few books, such books as he had never read before, poems and novels in English. In the small second-hand bookshop where he found them he never looked for such books as he and En-lan used to read. But indeed they were not there. The shopkeeper would have been afraid to sell them, since they were forbidden.

And so instead of these I-wan now read for the first time in his life stories of love and passion openly given and taken. He lay on the mats in his room, and read and paused to look out into his garden and think of what he read. There were other worlds than those he had dreamed of with En-lan. He thought of I-ko. But I-ko could not think of such love as was to be found in these books, love so pure and powerful. He was enchanted with the books.

And then, one summer’s day, not knowing why, he felt restless. He had been four months in Japan and he was used to the shape of the days. Now on this day it was almost time for the evening meal, and he rose and changed his clothing and went into the dining room.

Someone was there arranging flowers in a vase — a woman. She turned, and he saw it was Tama.

“Ah, I am too early!” he stammered in a sweat of horror. She would think he had come early on purpose to intrude himself upon her while she was alone. In all these weeks he had never come upon her alone. He backed away, awkwardly.

“No, never mind,” she said quickly. “Why should we be afraid?”

She was quite at her ease, he thought, amazed, so much more than he was. What could they talk about alone? He could think of nothing. What was in a girl’s mind? He could not imagine. He had never in his life really talked with a girl, except Peony, and he could not count Peony.

She thrust a budded fruit branch into a tall green vase and arranged it.

“How beautiful it is!” he murmured.

She took a pair of scissors and clipped off a twig or two.

“We are taught all such things, we Japanese girls,” she answered. Then she added, half pouting, “But no one teaches me the things I really want to know.”

He was about to ask her, “What things?” when a screen slid back and Mr. Muraki came in and looked at them.

“Hah!” he breathed softly, astonished.

She bowed to him, a quick half-willful little bow, and nodded at the flowers.

“Is this right, Father?” she asked.

Mr. Muraki’s face changed. He forgot his astonishment. He seized the scissors and began clipping twigs sharply while they stood and watched. When he had finished he had reduced the spreading blossoms to a design of bare branch, spare and grotesque, upon which a few flowers hung like exquisite ornaments.

“Hah!” he sighed, his eyes full of peace. “That is as it should be — no exuberance, Tama. It is the rule of art, and of life.”

It was all nothing, I-wan told himself that night when he came back to his own room again — it was less than a moment. But it had been long enough for him to feel his heart beat hard with something he had not felt before — something shy and sweet. He laughed at himself, too, when he remembered it.

“It’s those love stories,” he thought. “I read too much.”

And yet, there the content was. It stayed and it made him more nearly content to go on as he was.

Yes, this content pervaded his days and made everything pleasurable. He did not connect it with Tama, but still to know that she was part of the life in this house somehow deepened his content with it.

He seldom saw her, and never again alone, and he would not have so violated hospitality as to try to see her. She spent the whole of every day at her school, and often he and Bunji and Mr. Muraki dined alone at night. But still sometimes Madame Muraki came in, and then Tama was there, too.

And so the months moved smoothly into each other toward a year. I-wan was beginning to feel he knew this small clean city very well now, having seen it in summer and autumn, and at its most beautiful under soft, quickly melting snow. Instead of the crowded streets of Shanghai here were clean narrow roadways, following the contours of the rocky hills, winding into bridges over deep ravines, and coming out again into vistas of the islands. These roads climbed up the mountains to temples and people’s parks, or they swept downward to the sea. There were no crowds anywhere. People went their way and there was space and everything was clean.

He had to confess a good many things to himself. Certainly this country was very clean, much cleaner than his own. He saw no beggars and no very poor. Or was it that here the very poor were still clean? A cotton kimono flowered like the spring cost still only a few cents. No one looked poor and no one looked rich. Even the rich went barefoot in their wooden shoes if the day were mild. One snowy day he saw a thing he had never seen before. Two restaurant boys on bicycles speeding past knocked each other so that the dishes of food which they carried in baskets on their heads fell to the ground. He looked for them to curse and quarrel, as it would have happened anywhere. But these two bowed and drew their breath softly through their teeth.

“It is my fault,” said one.

“No, no — I can’t allow that; the fault was mine,” said the other.

They stooped, each to pick up the other’s basket, and went on their way. I-wan stood astonished, never having seen such courtesy.

The truth was that already he was being won by this small country which seemed simple and ordered in all its life. He came to love everything — the nights when he slept upon a thick clean mat upon the floor, wrapped in a clean silken quilt, the mornings when he woke to the fresh smell of the sea and heard the soft shir-shir of the sliding screens. Breakfast he ate alone in his room, after he had washed himself. Then he went to the office.

In the afternoon, two or three times a week, as spring came on again, he went with Bunji to a bathhouse and they bathed in a great square pool, having first been cleansed and scrubbed in soap and water by a man who threw buckets of water upon them. In the pool there were women too, and I-wan at first could not bear this. He said to Bunji, “It couldn’t be like this in any other country.”

Bunji opened his eyes.

“Why?” he asked. “A gentleman does not look at a lady in her bath. If I should look at a woman here she would take it as an insult.”

I-wan said nothing. They were strange, these people. They must be very strong and good and far above common flesh, he thought, able to control these warm rushing feelings which somehow troubled him now more than ever, now that his old inner absorption was gone.

And yet, there was Akio. Akio came and went as quietly each day as though he did not belong in his father’s house. At the evening meal he was always there, punctilious, silent, answering only questions put to him but never speaking first. But months passed before Bunji told him about Akio.

Then he said in a calm voice, “Akio fell in love with a courtesan, and my father is angry because he wants to marry her. Akio is so stubborn — it is nearly five years since it happened. My father engaged him long ago to the daughter of a friend. So it is embarrassing to him now. But Akio will not hear of any wife but Sumie. Well, Sumie is a good woman for her place, but not to come into our home. I think my father is right. It is time for Akio to marry. But he will not. It is ridiculous….

“I tell you this,” Bunji went on, “because you must not mind if Akio is melancholy and pays no attention to you. He pays no attention to any of us. It is so strange when he is painstaking and good in the business and obedient to my father in everything else, that he will not marry.”

“Have you seen her?” I-wan asked. Love — Akio in love! Yes, Akio would be able to love as it was done in books.

“Yes,” Bunji replied. “She is good enough for her position. But I don’t know much about that. Although I am old enough I have not yet begun that sort of thing. It takes time and money. Also I am a mobo, and many mobos don’t. Perhaps I’ll marry a moga and she wouldn’t like it. Old-fashioned women don’t mind, of course.” He laughed. “That’s why my father is so angry at Akio. His betrothed is not a moga. It is a disgrace for her that Akio will not marry.”

Every time after that day when I-wan saw Akio’s quiet face and sad eyes, he thought of what Bunji had told him. He felt somehow fascinated by Akio, nearer to him, and yet further, too, for Akio was not in this world. In this house there was a strange union of rigor and relenting. Akio maintained his own way in a fashion, and was often away from home, but no one asked where he was. And there was never one moment, at least that any other eye could see, when courtesy failed between him and his father. Each yielded and did not yield and would never yield. Whatever had been said was said and needed not to be said again. Life went on as it was.

As for I-wan, even with content he could not of course fill at once the great emptiness of his inner life. Not even all the newness of his present life could do it, and there were times when he felt all his reading and dreaming only increased his inner want. I-wan was one who by nature needed to worship somewhere, and now he had nowhere to worship. His life had been filled with large things, his friendship with En-lan, his part in the revolution, his hope in Chiang Kai-shek, the leader — and all these had been taken away together. He could not even think of En-lan as alive. He searched himself superstitiously, asking himself if he had any premonitions now about En-lan. But there was nothing, and this nothing he took to mean that En-lan must be dead.

Even Peony had perhaps been swept into that death. The papers here in Nagasaki were full of stories of the purge. There were no names, only numbers. Thousands of young men and women were being killed. He belonged among them, he told himself; he too should be dead. He had been saved only by his father’s power, that power which he had so despised because it was the power of money. He had betrayed, against his will, the revolution, as he had been betrayed. What of those promises he had made to the mill workers? He could still see them back at their hopeless tasks, accepting their fate again, muttering to each other that after all they had known there was nothing for them.

There was nothing left to worship. He could be diverted upon the surface of his days by a strange country and new ways, by Bunji’s nonsense and laughter and by work and by his real happiness in this house. But there was the great inner emptiness. He did not know what to do with that. When he was alone he was faced with it. What was there to dream about any more outside of books? And what could hope mean again?

He would never, he felt, hope for anything very much for himself. He read his father’s letters with a strange sadness, as though they were written long ago by one dead. They came regularly, once a month, but nothing in them seemed real, though his father said everything was coming back to what it had been. Business was improving quickly, now that it could be sure the new government was to make no great changes. Credit was established abroad. Foreigners were anxious to make loans for reconstruction. The radicals were in full flight. Indemnities had now been arranged and paid for the few foreigners killed accidentally in the fighting at Nanking a year ago. All was being stabilized; the old peace and order would soon be restored. The family was as usual. I-ko was still in Germany. He had arranged wisely that I-ko could procure funds only through the military school he attended. His mother was lonely without her sons, but they were grateful to have them alive when so many young men were dead. His grandfather was in excellent health. Only his grandmother was disturbed because they could find no one to take Peony’s place. The servant girls were idle and impudent now. As for I-wan, he was to learn business and some day his father would intercede personally with the government to allow him to return. Only he must be sure that I-wan was first cured of his radical ideas.

He folded the letters and tore them up small and threw them away.

“I do not wish to return,” he wrote his father. “I like this country well enough.”

Well, he would be a good business man at least. At the beginning of his second year he began working all day, as Bunji did, taking only the holidays that all clerks were allowed. Mr. Muraki said one night at the dinner table, “I have written your father how well you do.” He bowed in thanks, and felt someone looking at him. Tama was there that night. Across the table she was looking at him, and now he noticed her clear black eyes. She looked away, and he went on thinking with difficulty. He did not hate his father now.

No, his father and Mr. Muraki, he was coming to see, were perhaps right. For nothing made Mr. Muraki more angry than anything at all communistic. When he saw in the papers that the government had arrested some student as a communist, he drew his breath in through his teeth. “Dreamers!” Mr. Muraki would mutter. “As if anything can be accomplished by dreams!” Perhaps he and En-lan had been wrong. And yet the thought gave I-wan no comfort. It increased rather the isolation of his spirit to distrust the reality of that upon which he had once put his life. But he could make nothing of it and at last he tried to think no more. He settled himself steadily into the pattern of his days. They made, he told himself, a sort of life.

All life, I-wan told himself now in the steady round of his days, went on as it was. If one struggled against it, it was not life that broke, but he. Sometimes in the solitude of his work or in his hours of reading and walking, for there were many solitary hours in his life in this quiet house, it seemed to him that all that had been until he came here was something he had dreamed and never done.

And his father’s letters kept coming. Everything was as it had been, his father always wrote. Chiang Kai-shek was a man of great sense and he had cut off all the revolutionists, and they would be driven into the interior and not allowed to come into the prosperous river cities, certainly not into Shanghai. The bankers, therefore, were solidly for the new government. Everything was turning out well and far better than it had been hoped, because this man Chiang, with his strange power over the people, had chosen the way of wisdom rather than of folly.

Three or four times I-wan had said to Bunji, “I ought not to live on here forever. It has been two years. I ought to find some rooms outside.” Each time Bunji cried out against this and told Mr. Muraki, so that Mr. Muraki made an opportunity to see I-wan and say in his delicate quiet fashion, “Do not leave my house. I like to have my friend’s son in my house.”

So through two winters I-wan had stayed on. He had waked many mornings to see from his warm quilts snow in his bit of garden, soft thick snow that looked scarcely cold. The sea mists kept back ice and sharp frosts, and when snow fell it clung where it lay, melting slowly underneath upon the warm earth. The paper-latticed house which was so cool in summer could be warm, too, in winter. In his room there was a sort of shallow pit sunk into the floor and into the pit was put a pot or cauldron of red coals, covered with ash, and over it a frame, and over this a thickly-stuffed quilt, and here he sat in the evenings when he and Bunji did not go out to some place for pleasure, his legs and his whole body warm and comforted. Sometimes Bunji came in and thrust his legs under the quilt, too, and they read or talked together. Sometimes in the main room where a large pot of coals was burned, they all sat under the big quilt as though around a table. Only Tama was still not often there. She had always, she said, to study, since this was her last year at the girls’ school.

But sometimes she came, and on such evenings I-wan sat quietly, much more quietly than when she was not there. He did not look her in the face, but he saw her, somehow, between his looking here and there as Mr. Muraki or Bunji talked. She never sat by him. That he knew she could not do. She sat by her mother, her eyes bright and rebellious under her quietness and her cheeks red with the warmth. He knew now she was pretty, though he dared not look at her. In all this seeming freedom there was no real freedom. He had now learned that, too. Mr. Muraki might take off his garments before them and put on others in the presence of them all. But he turned his face to the wall first and when he did this he put a curtain between himself and everyone. Maidservant or family, they all turned their own faces away from him.

So also with Tama. She came and went as she liked, or so it seemed, but now I-wan knew, with none having told him, that if by one word or movement he let it be seen that he thought her free for him to speak to or to touch, he must leave this house, where he, too, came and went freely, only as long as he took no freedom for himself.

Then in the early summer of that year Tama left school. No one spoke of it to I-wan, but there she was, always at home. In the mornings she had been used to put on a straight plain foreign dress before she went to school. Now all day long she wore her own soft Japanese dress. It had been that when I-wan came back from work she was never there, since she seldom left school before nightfall. Now she was always there when he came home, not waiting or even where he could meet her.

But he knew she was there. He saw her sometimes in the garden, cutting a branch from a flowering tree, or he saw her arranging a vase or a picture in the alcove of a room. If they met in passing, she smiled at him, he imagined, a little sadly. Certainly she looked gentler now that she went to school no more, and she was quieter than she had been. He was glad she was in the house, but he did not know why she seemed so quiet. No one said anything to him. It was as though it were taken to be none of his business whether Tama went to school or stayed at home. And it was none of his business. But he could not keep from blurting out to Bunji when they left the house together one rainy day, “Why does Tama seem changed now that she has finished school?”

Bunji, splashing through the mud, did not stop. “She is at home now,” he said carelessly, “preparing for marriage.”

“For marriage!” I-wan repeated. “Is she going to be married?”

He had not thought of Tama’s marrying. But she would be married, of course — she was almost his own age, though she looked so young.

“Oh, nothing is decided,” Bunji replied. The wind had caught his black cotton foreign umbrella and he was struggling with it. “It is our way when a girl has had enough school, to keep her at home to get ready for marriage — you know, cooking, sewing, arranging flowers, making tea, music — everything, in fact, about a house and a husband.” He jerked his umbrella down and folded it and let the rain splash in his face. “What an umbrella!” he remarked. “The old-fashioned oiled paper ones are better after all.”

“Tama is to be married?” I-wan asked, his mouth suddenly dry.

“Of course,” Bunji replied. “But not for some time. She has a great deal to learn, you know — especially about men. That’s the trouble with a moga. She doesn’t really know men. Take Sumie — now she makes Akio perfectly happy. She’s content to do it — it’s what she wants. But Tama has a lot of moga ideas — she’ll have to forget them before she’s ready to marry, my father says. She’ll take lessons, probably, from some good old retired geisha girl. It’s part of the training.”

To this I-wan listened with a horror which amazed him. What was this to him? And yet it seemed to him intolerable that Tama must give herself up to nothing but the amusing and solacing of one man, some man — what man? He now perceived that though he saw her almost never, yet she was a part of the life of this house, and so of his life. He thought of her round pretty face and pleasant ways which until now he had not known he noticed. Now he knew he noticed everything about her.

“Are you sure she isn’t — engaged?” he asked, knowing he ought not to ask it, that even Bunji would feel it ought not to be asked.

“It is not my affair,” Bunji replied. Then he turned in the street to look at I-wan. The rain was streaming down his big flat face, over his upturned collar and down his oilcloth cape. “I’ll tell you this, though, I-wan. You are like our brother. My father wants her to marry General Seki.”

Now I-wan had lived here long enough to know this General Seki. He was known to everyone on the island, for Kyushu was his native place and they were all proud of him, though no one thought of loving him. He was a man past middle age, whose wife had died two years before, and he had given her a mighty funeral. I-wan had seen the funeral procession soon after his coming. Everyone had seen it since there had never been such a procession before in the city. General Seki had been driven slowly at the head of it in a motor car, covered with rosettes and streamers of coarse cotton cloth. He sat as squat and thick as a bullfrog, his shaven head sunk into his collar, his breast covered with ribbons and decorations. Everyone stared at him, while behind him in a smaller car came a little pot carried in an old maidservant’s arms. In the pot was a handful of human ash. This had once been his faithful wife.

“I don’t think young girls should marry old fat men,” I-wan muttered, remembering all this. He felt sick. Tama learning how to amuse and care for that old fat man!

“General Seki is my father’s old friend,” Bunji replied. Then he laughed. “Don’t think about such things, I-wan!” he cried. “It does no good. Don’t let love be important — look at Akio!”

“I’m not thinking of love,” I-wan said slowly. “I’m thinking of Tama.”

And then for the first time he thought, what if they were the same thing? But it had not occurred to him really to love Tama until this moment.

He did not, of course, love her, he told himself. Had he not lived in the same house now with her for more than two years without thinking of it? Whenever he saw her he looked at her secretly to convince himself of this. All through the summer he told himself that she was too short, that her shoulders were square and her lips too full. She was not even so pretty as Peony.

No, but there was this difference. He had not wanted to touch Peony. But Tama he longed to touch. Day after day when he looked at her he forgot to see the faults of her face, her hands, her body, and he longed only to touch her. Her eyes were so pure in their clear black and white, her too full lips so red.

It seemed once he had thought of her that there was nothing else in the world about which to think. His work, a book he read, all that he did seemed useless beside this question to which he now leaped: did he love Tama? At first he let it be a matter to be balanced and weighed. He could love Tama or not love her. If he loved her, then he must ask to marry her. Marriage — that was serious. To marry Tama — but why not marry her? He never wanted to go home. He could make his home here in this pleasant country where he had been so kindly cared for. He and Tama would make a new home.

He began dreaming. Suppose it were for him that Tama was preparing? When he thought of this, everything changed. If it were for him, then of course it was quite right that Tama should leave school and learn how to cook and to place flowers with meaning and how to play the lute and how to make love to her husband. He saw, off in the clouds somewhere, a little new house and himself and Tama there.

His father would not like it at first. But then perhaps he would, since he and Mr. Muraki were old friends. Mr. Muraki was always speaking of his father. “A strong man — a fine man,” he murmured when he spoke of Mr. Wu. “The sort of man China needs — that any country needs — a friend to Japan.”

Mr. Muraki might be glad to have the son of such a man for his own son-in-law. As for Tama, he was indignant that she should even think it possible to marry General Seki. But no, of course she did not think it possible. Perhaps she did not even know of it. But the danger was that she might think it her duty. She was so strange a mixture of willfulness and duty.

All through the summer and into the autumn I-wan argued with himself. Sometimes he was sure he loved Tama and then he made up his mind firmly that he would speak to Mr. Muraki himself about Tama, in the new modern fashion, but then whenever he saw Mr. Muraki he knew he could never do this. There was such fearful dignity in that small old figure. To be too bold would be to spoil all. And how could he speak at all when he did not know Tama’s own heart? To her he might be only repulsive. He felt sometimes, staring at himself in the small mirror in his room, that he must be repulsive. His face was too long and always pale. He did not get enough exercise. He did not love to walk as Bunji did, but he must walk more. And then, shrinking from himself, he was not sure, after all, that he loved her — if she did not love him, certainly then he would not love her. But whether he would let himself love Tama or not, he thought finally, he must at least let Tama know that she ought not to marry General Seki. He would find some chance time in which at least to tell her that, and once he had told her, he would feel eased.

But such chance was not easy to find. He saw her, it had seemed, so easily, in such glimpses here and there, and yet when he tried to speak to her about a private thing, there was no privacy. Somehow a maidservant was suddenly there, or Madame Muraki seemed by chance to be passing and she stopped to speak pleasantly, and when she went she always took Tama with her, for a special need. Or he saw her when the whole family was there, and she was always the first to excuse herself.

It seemed all accident, but after weeks of trying to speak to her even a moment alone he perceived that there was no accident in all this. They did not want Tama to speak with him alone. He felt hot for a moment. Was he not to be trusted? And yet nothing was changed. Everyone was to him as ever, and he could not be sure he had not imagined they did not want him to speak to Tama.

Then one afternoon when he came in, he saw her bending over a rock at the edge of a pool in the garden. It was already cold again, and there was thin ice on the water. He went to her quickly. Now he could catch her alone. He would waste no second of time.

“I want to tell you—” he stammered. He could speak Japanese very well now—“I have been trying to tell you—”

She looked up at him, her dark eyes full of surprise, her hands still upon the stone she was arranging in the thin ice. She should not, he thought, get her hands so cold — then he was driven on by her soft direct look.

“You mustn’t marry an old man,” he whispered. “Tama, don’t, I beg you—”

Before he could say another word he saw Madame Muraki, a shawl over her shoulders, coming toward them from the house, more nearly hurrying than he had ever seen her. He was about to go away, and then he stood still. Why should he go? He was doing nothing wrong. And Tama, seeing her mother, rose and moved toward her. But she found time for one sentence before she went.

“Do you not think I shall marry whom I please?” she said. Her soft face and her soft voice were pervaded with stubbornness. And immediately happiness fell upon him like light.

He watched her join her mother and they stood talking a moment. He could hear nothing, but he saw Tama shake her head quickly once, twice, three times, about something. He went on to his room, laughing a little, and greatly comforted over nothing in particular when he came to think of it, except that he was glad Tama was stubborn.

It was a good thing to educate women. He believed in it. It made them willful. He reached his room and sat down without even taking off his hat. He smiled and remembered her face as she leaned above the pool. She was not really pretty. He could see that. She was not pretty with Peony’s invariably exquisite prettiness. There had been days, he remembered, when he had been perfectly able to see that Tama’s school clothes were not becoming in their plain colors and tight foreign fit. But now she did not wear them any more. She wore her brightly flowered robes with wide sashes, and above the silken folds her fresh colored face was as beautiful as his heart could wish. Besides, there was more than prettiness, wasn’t there, to marriage? He had heard his mother when she talked about daughters-in-law.

“Women ought to be pretty, but not too pretty,” she used to say like an oracle. “Extremes are always evil, and a woman too pretty is a curse to everyone, even to herself.”

She used to say this before I-ko again and again, for some reason which I-wan did not know. Now he could see what she meant. A man should be able to count on his wife. There was that about Tama underneath all prettiness, something he could trust — if he loved her.

Was he truly in love, or not? How did he know? He wanted to be with her — was that not love? He would like to come home and find her there — that was love, wasn’t it?

“If I could be alone with her even for one hour,” he thought, “I would know.”

But there was not the least chance of such a thing. She was like a bird fastened to a length of invisible thread, flying, it seemed, hither and thither. But there was always the length of the thread to which she was tied.

He rose abruptly and took off his hat and coat and lit his Japanese pipe. He had only recently begun to smoke a pipe. It was, he had heard Mr. Muraki say, a calming thing. He stepped down into the bit of garden outside his room and stood looking down into the basin of the small clear pool. Everything about it was fresh and neat as always. He took this for granted. But now he saw someone had scrubbed the stones since the rain last night. They had been picked up, washed, and put back again. He took one up out of its frame of thin frosty ice and looked at it. Even the underside was clean. Only a few grains of the wet sand in which it was set clung to it. He put it back carefully. In this house it would be known if so much as the position of a small stone were changed. He would wait, he decided. He would wait until he knew his own heart and Tama’s.

“I want to climb a mountain,” Bunji said suddenly on one day of spring, looking up from his desk. “Why not? We have not had a holiday since the New Year. My legs are growing soft.”

I-wan was used to these sudden moods of Bunji’s. For weeks and months Bunji worked as though there were nothing in his life but work. And then one day, without any warning, he would put down his pen and pound his desk with his fists.

“A mountain climb,” he declared in exactly the same way each time.

I-wan looked at him and smiled. It had taken a long time for him to learn to climb with Bunji even after he had made up his mind to do it. Those bowed crablike legs of Bunji’s, so ludicrous in puttees and leather boots, were able to clamber up rough mountainsides with a speed which I-wan could not reach however he tried. He grew used to seeing Bunji leaping along in his crooked fashion to pause on a rock high above him and wait.

“Tomorrow,” Bunji said decidedly, “the azaleas will be in bloom. We will go to Unzen.” He paused and grinned at I-wan and then he added as though it were nothing, “And we will take Tama with us, shall we? She used to go with me always before you came.”

I-wan felt for his pipe. He must not show excitement. If it were between his teeth he could occupy his hands with it. He could light it and seem busy with it.

“Will she come?” he asked coolly. He had lived so many months now waiting that he could control his voice, his eyes.

“I don’t know,” Bunji said. He glanced at I-wan, his eyes full of teasing. “It depends on whether she thinks it worth while.” I-wan did not answer, and Bunji went on, “That is, worth while to stand the storm afterward.”

“You mean—” I-wan could not keep from asking.

Bunji shrugged. “My father,” he said simply.

“Oh,” I-wan murmured.

“We’ll see,” Bunji said calmly. “I’ll ask her, anyway. She can do as she likes.”

He suddenly began to laugh loudly.

“Why do you laugh?” I-wan asked him, though he knew.

“Oh, for nothing,” Bunji said mischievously. “I don’t like General Seki — that’s why.”

I-wan turned his back and did not answer and began to whistle without a tune. They went back to work without speaking again. But this, I-wan thought, bending above the invoices, this must be love, this heat in his bosom. Suddenly he felt tomorrow would be intolerable if Tama did not come with them. If she did not come, he would make some excuse to Bunji that he did not feel well. He would stay in his room, and perhaps, somehow, if he were in the house with her a whole day — But she might come.

He worked steadily on. There was nothing he could do or say to make tomorrow. She would come or she would not. No, what he had in his breast was hope. He hoped with all his heart — it was foolish to hope. She would or she would not. It might rain. Rain would not stop Bunji, but it might stop a girl. He really knew very little about Tama. Was she the sort of girl who would go up a mountain whether it rained or not, if she decided to go?

He became obsessed with the possibility of rain. It seemed to him that all these three years in the Muraki house he had been only waiting for this one day, which was tomorrow. After his work he went and walked along the sea. It was from the sea that the rains came — that is, if they did not come from the mountains. He stared up at the mountains. Sea or mountains, at least now there were no clouds. He went home, for the moment calmer.

But in the night he woke convinced that he heard rain on the roof. He dashed to the edge of the garden. There was no rain. The spring moonlight filled the tiny space and what he had heard was only the ceaseless trill of the tiny waterfall, translated by his dread into rain in his dreams. He sighed enormously and went back to bed.

Yet when he saw her in the morning he felt that all the time he had known she would come. She looked sweet and familiar, as he had often seen her. She was still wearing her own dress, but it was a cotton one, flowered in blue and white like a peasant girl’s. From its crossed folds on her bosom her neck rose creamy soft, and her face was a warm rose when she saw him and her eyes were full of pleasure.

“She wants to come,” he thought, and this excited him so he could not speak. But she was calm enough after their greetings were given, and then he grew calm, too. After all, they were old friends, having lived so long in this house together.

“Where are the sticks, Bunji?” she asked. “And here is our lunch, and some cloth soles to put over our leather shoes so we won’t slip on the rocks.”

They set off, like any two brothers and a sister, and all of I-wan’s thoughts of her during the last few days seemed now foolish and unreal. She was too healthy and natural and free to be in love with him. Girls in love — he remembered against his will things I-ko had told him about girls in love. She was not thinking of him at all.

For a moment he was cast down by this. She ought not, if she loved him, to look so gay and healthy.

But it was impossible to be long cast down on such a day. The farmers were in their fields at work and called as they walked past, and children ran out to laugh at them, and the green hills were bright with sunshine.

“There has not been such a day in all these years since I came to Japan,” I-wan declared.

“There are not many such days, even in Japan,” Tama said, “nor, I think, in the world.”

It was such a day when everything they saw seemed right and beautiful and fitted to the clear windless sunshine. And they passed scene after scene like pictures, each lovelier than the last. It was still early morning, and they had passed the fields and were at the foothills. Then they reached a certain point where the road took a sudden turn inward, and there was a small stream splashing down into a pool, and in the pool a country girl stood bathing herself. She was naked, and the water was about her ankles, and she was laving herself, her long black hair knotted upon her head. I-wan saw her unexpectedly and he looked her straight in the eyes before he could stop himself. But though he was instantly ashamed for her, he saw not the slightest shame in her wide dark gaze. She looked at them in most innocent wonder and called out a spring greeting. Bunji did not speak, but Tama called back to her.

Then the girl cried, “Where are you going?”

And Tama called back, “To the hot springs!”

“It’s a fine day for that,” the girl replied.

They went on, then, and now I-wan was ashamed before Tama. But Tama said with much pleasure, “How pretty she was, standing to her ankles in the clear water and her skin all wet!”

“Yes, she was,” Bunji agreed.

Then to I-wan, this, too, became beautiful and fitted to the day, although not to be wholly comprehended.

So by noon they reached the top of the mountain, and there was an inn and in the inn the hot-spring baths. I-wan thought to himself, “If Tama bathes with us—” He thought of the pretty naked peasant girl. At that instant he found himself possessed by his imagination. It came like a rush of music heard when no music was expected, and he felt his face grow hot. He wanted Tama to bathe with them and he did not. He could not ask Bunji a word. He did not answer his chattering. Tama had waved to them and gone one way and he and Bunji another. If he should see Tama in that great pool of steaming water, so clear that it was blue, and sparkling with silvery bubbles as it flowed from the earth, it would be the most beautiful sight on earth. He wanted to see it, and he was afraid, too. Could he keep from gazing at her?

But when he and Bunji came out, scrubbed and wet, she was not there. They stepped into the pool and Bunji cried out with joy, “Did you ever feel anything like this? Aren’t you light — so light and clean?”

“It is beyond anything I have ever known,” I-wan said. They played in the water like two little boys, splashing and teasing each other. Yet inside of I-wan was nothing but intense waiting.

Tama did not come. When at last they came out and dressed themselves and went into the garden, she was there. Her face was pink and fresh and her hair wet.

“Did you have a good bath?” Bunji asked her.

“Yes,” she replied. “I had a little pool all to myself.”

Yes, that was the way it should be. I-wan was glad it had been so. He was relieved now that she had kept herself away from him. He was, after all, not a Japanese. He felt clean and strong and suddenly very happy. And yet he did not know why. There had been other days before, days when the sunshine was as bright and when he felt as well and ready to laugh. But today everything seemed more perfect than he had ever known it. The mountain air was so clear, the little inn so clean, and the old bare-legged man who was its keeper so courteous.

“Amuse yourselves, sirs,” he called, “while I make your dinner ready! Those curious rocks I carried up from the sea with my own hands.”

So while they waited for their food to be ready they ran about among the rocks in the garden, and exclaimed like children over the strange water-washed shapes. Everything was to be laughed at, the rock which the water had carved into the lines of a shrewish face, the crab in a little pool scuttling to hide when they looked at him, and especially all that Bunji said was to be laughed at. And every time Tama and I-wan laughed they looked at each other. At first their eyes met only to say, “Isn’t he absurd!” But each meeting was so pleasant that I-wan made every chance to look into her dark eyes, and he discovered that when he looked at her the day sprang again to its perfection.

Then a voice called and they went in to eat their meal. The old man had placed a low table near the edge of the room and they seated themselves about it. The old man paused.

“I have waited until you came,” he said, “to finish the decoration of the room. Look, if you please!”

He waited until their eyes were turned toward him. Then he drew back the screen. There, like a picture, was a hillside of burning maples, their rosy red soft against the clear blue sky. I-wan’s eyes leaped to meet Tama’s, and hers were waiting for him. Her eyes were not full of laughter now. They were very soft and shy. She was beautiful! He felt his heart suddenly move out of its place and the blood poured out into his cheeks. He spoke to hide it. “You must sit here, Tama,” he said, “where you can see.” He pulled the cushion to a place facing the hillside.

“I will sit wherever you say,” she replied.

He felt her docile and this made him giddy. Tama was not usually like this. She had a clear firm way of doing what she wished to do and of arranging even a small thing as she liked. But now she knelt upon the cushion. The sight of her smooth black head, bent before him as she knelt, sent I-wan into silence.

Bunji was playing the clown. He seized his chopsticks and pretended he was famished, holding his bowl and begging for food in the way that beggars do. But now I-wan could not laugh. He was trembling because of Tama. She knelt there, busying herself with the bowls and the cups, smiling, glancing up now and again at the hillside. He wanted to think of something to say, a verse to quote, or some ancient saying out of all he had learned. But he could think of nothing. His mind was empty of everything except the way Tama looked at this present moment. He said, stupidly, “Isn’t it beautiful, Tama?”

He thought, “I am so stupid she will hate me. What is the matter with me?” For all morning they had all been full of talk.

But she nodded her head quickly and joyously, and again their eyes met for a deep moment. Then she took his bowl and filled it with the hot white rice and handed it to him. He took it with both his hands and instantly the moment was full of meaning between them. He did not know what the meaning was.

“Tama—” he began. And when he said her name it seemed to him that the moment rose like a beautiful rocket into the sky and burst into a thousand stars of light. Of course it was she who made the day wonderful, it was she who could make anything wonderful! He grew grave with this discovery. He was almost afraid of it. And yet, was it not for this very certainty that he had so long waited?

All the way home Bunji bantered him.

“What’s wrong with you, I-wan? You’ve gone as quiet as an old man. Tama, the old man of the mountains has bewitched him.”

“Don’t say such things, Bunji,” Tama said. “There are really spirits in the mountains.”

They were walking quickly down the rocky steps of the path hewn into the hillside. Tama was ahead. She had kept ahead ever since they left the inn. He was watching her quickly moving feet. She put her feet down so surely with every step that she never slipped once. Bunji was always slipping on the loose stones. He wore the thick clumping soldier’s shoes that he had worn when he was in military training.

“The only good I ever got from all that drill was these shoes,” he had declared when they set forth in the morning.

“Bunji, don’t,” Tama had said. “It is the duty of every man to be ready to fight for his country.”

“I’ll never fight anybody,” Bunji said stoutly.

“You will if you must,” Tama rejoined practically. And now she said there were spirits in the mountains.

“You don’t believe that, Tama?” I-wan asked.

She turned and pushed back her tossed hair. The sun and wind had burned her face a dusky red.

“Yes, I do,” she answered.

“And you call yourself a moga!” Bunji laughed.

“Yes, I am,” she said. “But I believe in spirits, too.”

“Then you aren’t a moga,” Bunji insisted.

“I am — I am!” she cried, running away from them. She ran down the steps, her skirts flying, and suddenly I-wan ran after her in the rich afternoon sunlight. Behind him he could hear Bunji’s clumping footsteps. But I-wan’s feet were for this moment as swift and sure as Tama’s. He ran, gaining on her with every leap. When she saw this she stopped and turned to face him. And he ran flying past her, not able to stop, so she put out her hand and he caught it hard.

“How you two run!” Bunji panted, coming up.

They all laughed again and because they were laughing it seemed he could hold Tama’s hand for a moment. He had never touched her before. Now, though they were all laughing, he was only thinking of her hand, how it felt in his, so firm and soft. He remembered suddenly Peony, who used to slip her hand into his sometimes. Peony’s hand was not in the least like this. It was slight and narrow and thin, the palm hot and the fingers quivering. Once he had said to Peony, “Your hand makes me think of that bird I caught. It’s trembling.”

But Tama’s hand was strong and cool. When he held it, it did not fold and crumple. It held his, too. Before he could get the whole feeling of it, she drew it away and they all began to run once more. Then suddenly they were down the mountain, and there was the bus line, and they stood waiting for the bus.

“I’m hungry again,” Bunji yawned. “Oh, how my legs ache!”

“Do yours, Tama?” I-wan asked.

She shook her head. “I’m used to walking,” she said. Her voice was quiet, but she stood alert and buoyant. He could feel her brimming with a sort of private happiness.

“Have you liked this day?” he asked.

“Yes!” she answered quickly.

“It’s been the best day of my life,” he said. He waited for her to answer. Then when she said nothing, he asked, “And you?”

“I don’t know what this day has been in my life,” she said, “but it has not been like any other day.”

Before he could speak the bus came clanging around the corner and they climbed in. And then they were at home again. This was home, this house of polished unpainted wood, spreading among the pines of its garden. The lights shone pearly through the rice paper screens as they came in.

The day was ended. And yet it could never be ended. He found a letter waiting in his room. It was from his father. He did not want to read it and he put it aside. It was not for today. For today had brought him to the knowledge of himself. He loved Tama and he wanted to marry her. Now that he knew, he wondered at his stupidity and cursed his own slowness. How was it he had not known the very first moment he saw her?

“My father,” Bunji said the next day, “is angry with Tama.”

I-wan, at his desk, was still in the dream of yesterday. In the night he had waked once to hear rain pattering on the roof. Let it rain, he thought, lying in the darkness. It did not matter tonight. “She hears it, too,” he thought, and listening in deep content, he had gone to sleep. When he woke the tiny garden of his room was green and dripping with freshness. “She sees it, too,” he thought. He could scarcely wait until he saw her.

He could not ask about her. That would have been to be rude. “She is tired and sleeping,” he thought. He saw Tama, sun-flushed, asleep in the soft flowery quilts. There was still a little slanting rain when he and Bunji left the house, and a maid, bowing deeply, handed them wide umbrellas of oiled paper. The dream of yesterday still held. He must make his plans now. He must go about asking Mr. Muraki — not himself, but by someone as a go-between.

He had been pondering as he sat at his desk whether or not he should tell Bunji, when Bunji spoke. I-wan looked up, startled, at Tama’s name.

“Angry with Tama?” he repeated.

“Yes,” Bunji said. “But I expected it, you know.” The abacus was clacking under his fingers and he was jotting down figures.

“He is not pleased that she went with us yesterday,” Bunji went on. “He scolded her, too — hah, how he scolded last night!” Bunji’s eyes danced. “I can laugh this morning, but I didn’t laugh last night. He said I should know better, too.” He pursed his lips. “I know what he meant,” he added.

“What?” I-wan asked. He felt himself grow hot.

“He is determined now that Tama shall marry General Seki,” Bunji said, and added, “Seki says he will wait no longer.”

I-wan’s head began to grow dizzy.

“But she won’t marry him in a thousand years,” Bunji said gently. He rattled thousands off and put them down. “Those little ivory toys we sent to America—” he said, “fifteen thousand of them.”

“She won’t marry him?” I-wan repeated. His mouth was dry.

“Oh, it’s an old story,” Bunji said. “None of us like it. My mother doesn’t like it, even, but being an old-fashioned woman she can’t say so. She has merely postponed it time after time. When my father begins to say, ‘Now positively, we must decide this thing,’ she always thinks of something. She says, ‘Oh, I’m very busy now — all the heirlooms must be cleaned, so let us wait until next month.’ But it’s getting harder.”

“Next month!” I-wan whispered.

“Oh, Tama will never do it — she will kill herself first, of course,” Bunji said cheerfully. “We all know that, but my father won’t believe it. Under all that gentle look of his, he is so stubborn. But she is as stubborn as he, and that he can’t believe.”

Bunji opened a drawer and drew out another ledger.

“You mean — all this is going on — and you—” I-wan stammered.

“Love difficulties are very common now,” Bunji said, laughing. “In these times almost any young person has love difficulties. The old want their way — and the young want love. Only I!” He burst into fresh laughter. “I have no troubles. I am not in love.”

But I-wan could not laugh with him, for once.

“Why does this — Seki — want Tama, of all women?” he asked.

“Oh, he’s a man of power and money,” Bunji answered, clacking his abacus. “Samurai stock — like my father — Japan’s honor and all that. He wants a young wife who will give him sons. Tama is so healthy — that’s why he wants her. And my father says it will help the country — old Seki’s blood and Tama’s health. The old ones worship the country, I can tell you — and the Emperor.”

“Do you think—” I-wan began in a whisper.

“I don’t think,” Bunji said quickly. “I tell you, I-wan, I don’t think about anything. It doesn’t pay. When I was in school some of the fellows took to thinking and I never saw them again. One day soldiers marched in — they were Seki’s soldiers, too — and marched them off. Seki won’t have any thinking going on in this prefect where he lives. So I made up my mind to enjoy my life.”

I-wan thought it did not seem there could be anything under the spectacled, rather stupid-looking faces of the students he passed every day upon the streets.

“Do you mean there are revolutionists here?” he asked.

“Hush!” Bunji cried under his breath. “Don’t speak that word! Someone might hear you!”

The door was shut, but he went to it and opened it and looked out. No one was even passing.

“I don’t talk about such things,” he said hurriedly. “I don’t listen to them. I have my work to do.”

He went back and began to work determinedly and I-wan turned back to his books dazed. His thoughts whirled about in his head. He got up suddenly, trying to think of an excuse to go back to the house to see Tama — to tell her — why had he not said something more to her yesterday? But he had been so happy that he had forgotten everything else. He felt compelled to turn to Bunji. “Bunji, can I — will you help me to see her — today? I must see her—”

Bunji looked up. “Tama?” he asked. “My father ordered her to stay in her own room for three days.”

“Three days!” I-wan repeated. He could not see Tama for three days!

“Once before he made her stay in for three days,” Bunji said. “There was a time last winter she told him that she would marry Seki in order not to be disobedient to her father, but that she would stab herself afterwards. He had to believe her and he punished her because he was so angry.”

“That was the time you said she was ill,” I-wan cried. There had been such a time, he now remembered.

“Yes, that was it,” Bunji said. “Tama does not disobey in small things — only in great ones, like refusing to be Seki’s wife.”

The door opened and Akio came in. He looked tired and sad, as he almost always did.

“Here is a letter from that Paris dealer,” he said to Bunji. “He complains that the blackwood stands to the Han pottery horses were crushed in shipment. Did you pack them as I told you to do?”

“In rice straw, chopped,” Bunji said, leaping to his feet.

“I told you to wrap them first in shredded satin paper,” Akio said.

“I forgot that,” Bunji said, struck with horror.

“Ah,” Akio said, “I thought so — we must replace them. It will cost hundreds of yen.”

“I could shoot myself,” Bunji said in a low voice. “I am a perfect good-for-nothing!”

“You laugh too much,” Akio said.

He went out and shut the door. Bunji sat down and leaned his head on his hand. “I’ll never be worth anything,” he said contritely. “I’m always forgetting the important thing. Akio told me — and probably I was thinking about something else.”

“Do you think I could see Tama somehow?” I-wan asked abruptly.

Bunji stared at him.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“I must see her,” I-wan repeated.

“What for?” Bunji asked, astonished.

I-wan did not answer. He looked at Bunji steadily, feeling the blood rise up his neck, into his cheeks. Bunji stared at him.

“You don’t — you aren’t — not really—” he stammered.

“I know I am,” I-wan said.

Bunji’s mouth fell ajar. Then he began to laugh suddenly and loudly. I-wan waited.

“Why do you laugh?” he asked coldly.

“Oh — it’s funny,” Bunji gasped. “It’s very funny! Our house — a nest of love tangles — Akio — Tama — you — poor old father mixed up in it all — trying to — to — be the dictator—”

“It’s not funny,” I-wan said coldly. He waited for Bunji to be quiet.

“Well,” Bunji said, “if you want to hurry on the Seki business, try to see Tama, that’s all.”

I-wan hesitated, but Bunji’s look discouraged everything he wanted to say.

Beyond his window he could see the long roll of the sea, gray this morning under a gray sky. He would have to think…. But though he thought all day, he came to no conclusion except this — that now certainly he was in love with Tama.

They were in the dining room doing exactly what they did every night; yet it was all different because they were different toward each other. I-wan felt them different to him. Even Bunji seemed withdrawn. The night meal had been strange and quiet. Madame Muraki excused herself early. And then Akio rose to go.

“Akio, have you finished the monthly inventories?” Mr. Muraki asked sharply. He had said nothing all evening. Because the night was cool and wet he had commanded a small open brazier to be filled with coals and he sat smoking a short bamboo pipe.

“Yes, Father,” Akio said quietly. They looked at each other father and son, a long steady look. Mr. Muraki looked away.

“Very well,” he said, and Akio went out.

Then I-wan and Bunji were left alone with him. Usually I-wan liked to hear Mr. Muraki talk, or if he were quiet and did not talk, merely to see him sitting quietly as he smoked was pleasant. He had looked until now a figure of goodness. But tonight I-wan was confused by him. This gentle-looking old man had made his love a prisoner. Somewhere in this house, in her own home, Tama was locked up. No, there were no locks on these doors. The screens would be open to the garden. But for Tama they were locked by her father’s command as surely as though a bolt had been drawn. Then suddenly Mr. Muraki spoke.

“Bunji, go to your room,” he said. “I want to talk with I-wan. I have a message from his father.”

Bunji, startled, glanced at I-wan. But there was nothing he could do except to bow and go away, so I-wan was left alone with this old man. His heart began to beat swiftly.

He thought, watching the composed aging face, “I need not be afraid of him.” But he was somehow afraid. This face was so sure, so carven in determination to maintain its own life, the life it knew. It would never be aware of any other life. He had thought for a moment that he might speak directly to Mr. Muraki. Now he put this thought away. He must approach him in the ways the old man knew, or he would have no chance at all. Again he must wait. He sat motionless in silence.

“Your father is pleased with your progress,” Mr. Muraki said slowly. “I told him you were doing well.” He paused, seemingly to light his pipe again with a fragment of hot coal which he picked up with small brass tongs.

“Thank you, sir,” I-wan said.

“Your father writes me,” Mr. Muraki went on, “that there is great improvement in China. The revolutionary elements are purged. The communists are driven into the inner provinces. Order is quite restored.”

I-wan did not answer. He was not sure whether Mr. Muraki knew why his father had sent him abroad.

“Order will always prevail,” Mr. Muraki went on in his even, old voice. “It is what the young must learn — not desire, not will-fullness, not impetuous wishes for — for anything. These must be checked. There is the course of right order which must be rigidly followed—” Then in a moment he added, “—for the good of all.” He cleared his throat and said a little more loudly, “Therefore, since you have done very well, I-wan, and have learned so much here, I have decided to send you to Yokohama, to help my son Shio in our offices there. It is time you learned the rest of the business. Besides, there is a good university in Yokohama, and you may want to study a little more. You will live not in Shio’s house, but in the hostel where the other young clerks live.”

“Yes, sir,” I-wan whispered. He wanted to cry aloud, “I know what you mean — you want to send me away from Tama!” He wanted even to cry out, “Why should we not marry?”

But he could not say one word. There was such dignity in this erect old figure sitting beside the brazier that he could only murmur his assent — for the moment, his assent.

“Since I always do at once what I have decided upon at length,” Mr. Muraki said, “you will leave tomorrow. It happens that Akio is going to Yokohama on his usual monthly trip to consult with his brother. Have you ever been in an airplane?” Mr. Muraki lifted his eyebrows at I-wan.

“No, sir,” I-wan muttered. Tomorrow!

“Ah,” said Mr. Muraki, “then it will amuse you to fly. The Japanese planes are excellent. So — hah!”

His soft final ejaculation was a dismissal. He nodded, and I-wan hesitated. He should express thanks of some sort, but he could not. Thanks would choke him.

“Good night, sir,” he said.

“Good night,” Mr. Muraki said.

Outside the door Bunji was waiting for him.

“What did he say?” he inquired.

“I am to go to Yokohama,” I-wan answered. They looked at each other.

“I thought something would happen,” Bunji said. “The minute I came in tonight I knew by the feel in the house — everything was so promptly and exactly done — even the servants feel it when he is angry. Everybody is afraid of him.”

I-wan did not answer. Against his own father he could rebel. His own country was full of rebellions — children against parents, people against governors. China was used to the lawlessness and unruliness of people who loved freedom. But here not a leaf could grow in a garden where it was not wanted. Ruthless scissors snipped and trimmed the least detail to the appointed shape. He began to see that the great peace of this house, the exquisite order of everything, was the result of ruthlessness.

“What shall we do now?” Bunji asked.

“I don’t know. I can’t go to bed—”

“It’s raining, or we could walk,” Bunji said.

“I don’t care for rain,” I-wan answered despairingly. Tama would not be free until day after tomorrow. He would have to go away without seeing her.

“Put on this raincape,” Bunji said.

They put on the oilcloth capes that hung behind a screen and went out into the quiet cool rain. The cobbled streets were empty except for a servant maid gone out on an errand, a ricksha hooded against the wet. They walked down to the sea, lapping upon the cobbles. In the darkness they could hear the roar of surf against the breakwater. But it was held back and here in the harbor the sea lay as quiet as a pool.

They had said nothing, but now Bunji spoke suddenly.

“You wouldn’t think that once a tidal wave rushed over that breakwater twenty feet high and came roaring through the harbor, crushing great ships together and sweeping the little ones out to sea.”

“Can’t the breakwater hold it?” I-wan asked listlessly.

“Not when the sea really rises up,” Bunji replied. “Nothing can hold back the sea then.”

“It is hard to believe,” I-wan said dully.

They went on, seemingly without direction. I-wan felt the rain on his face. His hair was wet and he felt a trickle run down his neck. But he was thinking, “I shall probably never see her again.” He was thinking, “What will become of her?”

Bunji stopped before a small square house, set exactly in a small square garden.

“I-wan—” he began.

“Yes?” I-wan answered.

“This is Akio’s house,” Bunji said.

“Akio’s?”

“Where Sumie lives,” Bunji explained.

I-wan paused a moment in his endlessly circling thought. Akio, that mysterious man, so strange and reserved, as even as a machine, lived here.

“Would you like to go in?” Bunji asked.

“Should we?” I-wan inquired. This was nothing he had ever known. Such things were, of course, but not to be recognized.

“Oh yes,” Bunji said, shaking the rain from his cape. “I often come here. Sumie and I are quite good friends. She is a good woman. Even my mother has visited her.”

“As you like,” I-wan said, doubtfully. How would he behave before Akio? As for Sumie — old as he was, he had not seen such women as she. His father had said to him, “Stay away from such women!” That was in some trouble of I-ko’s. But he had been interested in the revolution then and had no time for anything else. And since he had come to Japan — he had not wanted Japanese women. He wanted only Tama.

Bunji was knocking at a screen. It slid back.

“Bunji, is it you?” a very soft voice asked in the darkness.

“I and my Chinese friend,” Bunji replied. A light flashed on above their heads, and I-wan saw a short plump woman, no longer young, though still very pretty, standing looking out into the rain.

“Come in, come in,” she said warmly. She drew Bunji in by the sleeve.

“Oh, how wet you are!” she exclaimed. “Oh, is this I-wan? Akio has told me. I am so glad. Now take off your capes. Oh, and your wet shoes! Are your feet wet?” She stooped when Bunji kicked off his shoes and felt his feet. “Oh, your feet are wet! I have plenty of Akio’s socks here. You must change — oh, you naughty boys!”

She was so warm, so soft, so natural that she was wholly charming. I-wan felt vaguely comforted and for the first time in the day his heart lifted. They followed her into a lighted room, dry and warm with a glowing brazier. There by the brazier, reading a newspaper, sat Akio. It was an Akio that I-wan had never seen, a cheerful Akio who looked up to say, “Bunji, come in. And you are welcome, I-wan.”

He stirred himself as though they were guests.

“Sumie, two more cups, please!”

She had gone into the other room and now her soft voice called, “Yes, yes! I am bringing everything, so impatient man!” Akio laughed. I-wan had never seen him laugh before.

In a moment she came running in, her footsteps noiseless on the deep woven mats, in her hands the wine cups, and over her arm two pairs of clean dry socks. Here in the light she was prettier than ever in her kimono of deep apricot silk, patterned with white pear blossoms. Her hair was still black and dressed in the old Japanese butterfly style. Her cheeks were round and her lips soft and red.

“Now, then, here is everything. You pour them hot sake now, Akio — don’t be slow, Akio — and change your socks at once so you won’t catch cold, the two of you.”

In a few minutes they were all sitting about the brazier sipping hot sake and feeling warm and secure and free. Yes, there was a sort of freedom within these walls, whatever it was. Akio was talking, he who never talked at home. And Bunji was listening, attentively, without laughter. Sumie rose silently and fetched a small lacquered box and took out a piece of silk embroidery and fitting a thimble ring to her finger, she sat down again a little away from them all, and sewed. Every now and again she looked at Akio and filled his cup or mended the fire.

At first I-wan could not talk for feeling this secret life into which Bunji had opened the door. The room was Japanese. There was not a single touch in it of anything new or western. It might have been the home of any middle-class Japanese man — a few books in a low case of polished wood set on the floor, a simple flowered scroll hung in the alcove and beneath it a red lily and two long leaves springing from a bottle-shaped vase. The mats on which they sat were shining clean. Akio’s paper was the only touch of disorder. He had thrown it down when he began to talk — to talk, of all things now remote to I-wan, about war.

Afterwards I-wan could not remember what Akio had said. It did not matter. The miracle was Akio himself, talking quietly and freely in this warmed and lighted room. Inside the mold which I-wan had thought of as the man Akio, was this other living man who was Akio. He said something about war and how foolish it was, and yet how men must sometimes do things which were foolish, because it was not possible for any man to judge except for himself.

“War?” Sumie’s soft voice cried. “We don’t have to fight anybody. There is always another way of doing it.”

Whenever she spoke, Akio paused to listen to what she said, and he smiled peacefully as though it did not matter what she said so long as he heard her voice.

“That’s it, Sumie,” Bunji cried. “When it comes to that, you can always do something else. But nobody will want to fight us.”

Sumie sprang to her feet and took up the sake jug.

“Now don’t please talk about such things,” she coaxed them. “It is evil to speak of them. No, not war! My grandfather was killed before I was born, in our war in China, and then we grew so poor. Even though we won such a quick victory, he was no part of it. When everybody was out on the streets to welcome the soldiers home, my grandmother stayed at home and drew the screens shut and cried and cried…. See, I will sing while you drink! It is so nice to be happy!”

So she fetched a little lute and sat down and sang in a fresh pretty voice, a song of snow on plum blossoms. “I learned it in the village where I grew up,” she said. I-wan felt quiet and good here in this house which Mr. Muraki had forbidden to be. But here it was, all the same.

They said good-by at last and he and Bunji turned homeward. All the way I-wan kept thinking of the last moment when he saw Sumie bowing at the door. He thought of her smiling simplicity, her childlike eagerness, and of Akio standing beside her, looking so different from the Akio he had known.

“It’s a shame!” he burst out to Bunji.

“Yes,” Bunji agreed, “but it can’t be helped.”

“She is good,” I-wan insisted.

“Yes,” Bunji agreed again. “We all know that. But she was not fated to be born as Akio’s wife.”

“Do you believe people are born for each other?” I-wan asked.

“Oh, yes,” Bunji said simply, “my mother says so. Not for love, of course — that is another matter. But certainly two persons are born under certain stars to be man and wife. Then their marriage is successful and good. You see, that is really Akio’s fault. He won’t marry the woman who is his fate.”

“Do you know who she is?” I-wan asked.

“Oh, yes,” Bunji replied. “It is the daughter of a friend of my father’s. Everybody says she is good and dutiful. But Akio defies his fate. My father says that will bring ill luck on us all. Oh, it was very bad at first, especially because Akio himself is good — my father was surprised at his disobedience more than at anything.”

Home again in the quiet house, they nodded good night, and I-wan went to his own room. The screens had been drawn against the night. Suddenly he felt shut in by them. He opened them. The garden was full of mist, as white and enclosing as a screen itself. It shut him in alone.

He did not know when it was during the night that he first thought of seeing Tama. He had been asleep — no, he had not really been asleep. But suddenly after long lonely hours everything seemed reasonless and foolish. Only Akio was wise in his disobedience to an old man.

“Why should I not simply go to her?” he asked himself. He sat up. Why not? If he saw Tama once, he could go more easily to Yokohama.

The moment he thought of this it became a necessity. He knew where her room was, though he had never seen it. It was on the other side of the house, beyond the rooms of her parents. He knew that Mr. Muraki dreaded the night air. They had talked about it once, and Mr. Muraki had said that the night air was poisonous, especially to the old. And Tama had cried, “As for me, I always open my screens at night!” Madame Muraki had said in her even low voice, “Hush, Tama! It is not suitable for you to talk about the night.” Tama had said to him once by chance, “Last year on my birthday my father asked me what I wanted, and I said, to have for my own the room facing the little waterfall. So I sleep and wake to the sound of the water, splashing upon rocks.”

I-wan had thought of her listening to the falling water. Now, it occurred to him, in the misty darkness he could, if he stepped into the night, be guided toward Tama by that same sound. Why not? He thought of Akio taking his own quiet determined way. And at the same instant he knew he must do it.

He rose and put on his robe and stepped into the garden. The grass was soft and wet and he trod lightly. There must be no footsteps. Mr. Muraki’s screens would be closed. So much would be safe. He crept past them, nevertheless, until he felt the corner of the house and turned to the right and stood, hidden in mists, and listened. There was the sound of the waterfall. He could hear its steady tinkling splash, and he went toward it, feeling with his hands outspread for trees and shrubs. Then he felt stones under his feet. That was the path toward the waterfall from the summer house — now he was close. The sound was clear. He reached the fall and put out his hand and felt the slight spray of it.

Now he must stand with his back to it and he would be facing Tama’s room. There was no light whatever. If she were asleep he would have to scratch a little on the lattice to waken her. But he must take great care to walk in a straight line, lest he miss the spot. What if he happened upon Mr. Muraki’s room?

He counted to himself, “One — two — three—” Now that silly goose-step would be of some use to him — goose-stepping helped one to walk in a straight line. He lifted each foot high and put it down carefully. In his excitement he laughed a little, under his breath. This was fun — dangerous fun, perhaps. He looked very silly doubtless, if Tama could see him. Lucky there was the mist! He felt his foot strike something and he put out his hand. It was the wooden edge of the narrow veranda. He felt upward with both hands, and, as he thought, the screens were open.

He was about to scratch on them a little, like a mouse, when he thought, “I’d better listen again.”

Yes, the waterfall was directly behind him. Then this was Tama’s room. He scratched on the screen softly. The night was so still he dared not call or cough.

What would Tama say? Now that he was actually standing before her door, he was doubtful of her. Suppose she would not be disobedient at all to her father? She was such a strange mixture of new and old. No one knew when Tama was old-fashioned Japanese and when she was moga.

At first he heard nothing at all. The room was so silent that it was as if no one were there. Then he heard a long sigh and the sound as of a hand flung out in the darkness upon a sleeping mat. Perhaps she was asleep. No, for he heard a wakeful little moan, a sigh again, but now made articulate.

He tapped quickly, little rhythmic taps on the wood. Then he waited a moment and tapped again. A light flickered palely behind an inner screen placed about her bed. Behind its thin silk he saw the shadow of Tama, her long hair flowing behind her. She rose from her mat on the floor and listened. He tapped again. Now she knew someone was there. He could see her shadow, undetermined, move a little away. She would be frightened perhaps.

“Tama!” he said softly, and instantly she was there, holding her long robe about her.

“I-wan!” she whispered, aghast.

“Tama,” he begged, “I had to — I am to be sent to Yokohama — tomorrow, Tama! I don’t know when I’ll come back. Bunji told me your father was angry with you. How can I go away like that?”

“But you — my father would send you back to China if he found you!”

“He won’t find me,” I-wan urged her. “Tama, please — help me!”

“Help you?”

“Don’t be Japanese, Tama — let’s just be us, you and me — such good friends! Didn’t we have a good time on the hills? That was only yesterday.”

“Yes — yes — we did—”

“Tama, I went to see Akio tonight — with Bunji — Akio and Sumie. I never admired Akio so much before. It is brave of him to love Sumie like that. People ought to be brave when they know they are right.”

Tama was holding back her hair in one hand. She stood, staring at him, listening, in her rose-colored sleeping robe.

“Is it — I don’t know if—” she began.

“I won’t come in,” I-wan said quickly. “I’ll stay here. But come to the edge of the garden close to me, so we can talk a little. Please — I am going away tomorrow!”

She did not answer. Instead she made one swift movement and blew out the candle.

“I am afraid someone will see you,” she whispered. Then he heard her beside him. She was sitting on the edge of the veranda floor. When he put out his hand he could feel her shoulder.

“Tama!” he whispered. His heart began to beat hard. He longed to put out his arms and hold her close to him. But she shrank away and he did not dare.

“Sit down beside me,” her voice said, so softly he could barely hear it. “No, I-wan, please — a little away from me. I–I-wan, if anyone hears us something terrible would happen to me. You must hurry.”

“Yes, I will,” I-wan promised.

It was true. If they were discovered, the penalty would be fearful. Once, even in China, he had heard his grandfather say that a sister of his was killed by her father’s orders because she was found with her lover — innocently enough, in a garden, talking. And Mr. Muraki was sterner than anyone in China. “Tama,” he said quickly. “About General Seki. You wouldn’t ever give up, would you?”

“Never!” she said stoutly. He was sitting beside her now, and his shoulder touched hers again.

“I couldn’t bear it, Tama. I’ll come back, somehow. You’ll see.”

“I shall be here,” she whispered.

“Don’t — you know — marry anybody—” he begged. He wanted to say “Only marry me,” but he could not.

It was so enormous a thing to say. They were so young, and there was so much against them. And this was against all lawfulness.

After a moment he heard her little whisper at his ear.

“I don’t want to marry anybody.”

He felt such happiness rush over him at this that he could scarcely sit still beside her. He leaned to her ear.

“Isn’t it wonderful there is this mist?” he said, choking a little. “It’s like a curtain to hide us.”

“A good spirit sent it,” Tama whispered back.

“Will you let me write to you?” he asked. “I have so much to say. No, but how — where shall I send letters to you?”

“To Sumie,” she answered. “Sumie will keep them for me. I go there sometimes.” She said it as quickly as though she had thought of this before.

“How it all fits together!” he cried joyously. “I never thought tonight why I went there to Sumie’s. I had planned nothing!”

“It is fate,” she said solemnly. “There is a fate for us.”

“I wonder what it is,” he answered.

“We cannot know,” said Tama, “but it is waiting for us.”

He wanted to cry out, “I know what it is! It is that we shall love each other!” But he could not.

He had never in his life spoken that word aloud, or indeed heard it spoken with the meaning of the love which he now felt born in his heart. This was so new a thing, so deep and huge in him, that he could not speak of it in the haste of this dangerous moment. There must be time to tell of it. It was not a word to crowd between second and second.

“We can’t hurry fate,” she went on, “and we can’t avoid it.”

“Do you believe, too, in — in two people being born to — to marry?” he asked, stammering.

“Yes,” she whispered.

They were silent. In the darkness they sat, only shoulder touching shoulder. He felt a little shiver down his arm and into his hand and he moved his hand and it touched hers; their hands sprang together.

“Now you must go,” she said, hurrying. “I will write to you, too, as soon as you tell me where — and we will meet again — if it is our fate.”

“It is our fate!” he said firmly.

Their hands clung a little longer. Then she sprang up and a second later there was the sound of the screens sliding softly into place. Alone he fumbled his way into the mist.

Well, he could go now, even to Yokohama…. He was so excited he could never sleep. He would lie awake and think of her…. Instantly he was asleep.

He was in the airplane with Akio. They left Nagasaki in a big tri-motored plane. As soon as the inland sea was crossed, Akio said, they would change to a small plane. The big one was only for safety over the water. From it he now looked down on the island of Kyushu.

“Tama is there,” he thought, gazing down into its greenness.

The mists were all gone this morning. He had waked from deep and pleasant sleep to find sunlight streaming into his room. Last night he had stolen through the mists to Tama, the heaven-sent mists. This morning they needed no mists. Everything was clear between them.

Akio was peering down through glasses.

“See that line of gray buildings and forts,” he remarked, handing I-wan the glasses. Looking down, I-wan saw a dotted line of forts facing east and south and west. He laughed.

“You seem to expect enemies from everywhere,” he exclaimed.

“When a nation is the smaller among larger ones,” Akio said, “it must be ready on all sides.”

“Surely you don’t expect war!” I-wan exclaimed.

“I suppose,” Akio said, hesitating, “we Japanese always expect war.” His face grew serious. “At least we have been so taught.”

I-wan was scarcely listening. He was searching the island with the glasses to see if he could find the house. People could still be seen — suppose he saw her in the garden! But no, the plane was mounting swiftly across the sea. Tama was there, hidden on the green island, like a jewel, the jewel of his heart. He gave the glasses back to Akio.

Akio was pleasant this morning. Neither of them spoke of the evening before, and yet because of it they knew each other as they had not. Akio was really talkative. I-wan, not wanting to talk, sat back in his seat by the small window, listening and gazing down at the brilliant blue sea. They were so high now that a great ship seemed to crawl like a snail on the surface of the sea, its wake like a tail behind it. Akio looked through the glasses eagerly.

“That is a warship,” he announced, “a Japanese ship going westward — probably to China,” he added.

“To my country?” I-wan asked idly. It seemed now a thing of no importance that once En-lan had exclaimed bitterly, “Why should foreign gunboats come into our waters? We send no such ships abroad.”

“We have no such ships,” I-wan had felt compelled to say honestly to En-lan.

“That’s not the point,” En-lan had argued. “We wouldn’t if we had them.”

I-wan, remembering, half-dreaming, thought, “I wonder if we would. I wonder if having them would make us want to use them.”

“Why do you send ships of war to China?” he asked Akio aloud.

“To protect our nationals,” Akio said, and added, “At least, so we are told.”

“I am not protected here,” I-wan said, smiling.

“Ah, but you are quite safe here,” Akio said. “We treat you well — we treat everyone well—” he hesitated and went on, “that is, I sometimes think we treat everyone better than we treat ourselves. We are very harsh with ourselves, we Japanese. We are devoured by our sense of duty.”

But the words scarcely fastened themselves in I-wan’s ears. He was thinking, “How pretty she looked last night in the candlelight, holding back her hair!” It seemed to him he could think forever of the way Tama had looked.

He fell into a dreaming reverie. He did not mind going away — very much — if he could have letters from her and could pour himself out in letters to her. They would tell each other more in letters, not having the bodily nearness to distract them. In letters they could draw mind closer to mind and spirit to spirit…. The time went quickly while he dreamed like this. Almost before he knew it the plane was dropping swiftly upon a crust of shore that appeared suddenly beneath them. Then in a few minutes they were on the ground, and being hurried by sturdy blue-coated men into a much smaller plane. Almost instantly they were mounting again, but this time flying so low they could see the farmers harvesting the yellow rice in the small fields which fitted as neatly together as the pieces of a puzzle.

“This,” Akio said suddenly, “is a convertible scouting plane.”

“Why so much preparation for war?” I-wan asked.

“It is our philosophy,” Akio said.

“Do you want war?” I-wan asked curiously.

“No,” Akio answered. He hesitated, in his frequent fashion, and took off his spectacles and wiped them very clean and put them on again. “I myself am a Buddhist,” he said. “I do not believe in taking life.”

“But if you were ordered to war?” I-wan asked.

“I have not yet decided,” Akio answered. He looked so troubled that I-wan made haste to say, “There is no need to decide — it was a silly question.”

But Akio said nothing to this. And I-wan did not notice his silence. He was only making talk. Inside himself he was already planning his first letter to Tama.

If he wrote in Chinese Tama could read it, because classical Japanese and Chinese were the same, and Tama wrote beautifully — he had once seen a poem that she wrote on a fan with delicate clear strokes of a camel’s hair brush. Well, but he would not use the old stilted Chinese forms of letter writing. He would simply begin straight off, “When I was there so high, soaring up in the blue, that was only my body — my heart like a wounded bird had never left the threshold of your room.” They must write like that, straight out of themselves….

Then again the plane was drifting like a leaf to the ground, and they were over Yokohama. He was shaken out of his dreams….

Yokohama was a busy, noisy city. There was no quiet garden here, no screen-shadowed house. He had found himself hustled into a crowded bus and hurried into the city along barren ugly streets, to a mushroom-like house of gray cement blocks.

Their bags were thrown on the sidewalk and he and Akio stepped down beside them. A uniformed doorman came and picked them up.

“These are our offices,” Akio said. “Shio will be waiting for us.”

He followed Akio through the door.

“I have never seen a building like this,” he said.

“Earthquake-proof,” Akio explained. “All Yokohama is earthquake-proof now, since the great earthquake.”

They went into a bare new office. A young woman met them.

“Mr. Shio Muraki begs you to be seated,” she said, hissing a little through her prominent front teeth. She was very ugly, I-wan thought, in a plain black skirt and a white blouse like a uniform. The skirt was too short and showed her thick, curving legs in black cotton stockings and heavy wide black leather shoes. But her ugly spectacled face was earnest with her effort to please them. She said, still hissing through her teeth, “Please — he is just now talking to an American gentleman from New York.”

They sat down as though they were guests. But Akio seemed quite accustomed to this. He went on: “That year I went to America on some business, I forget — ah yes, it was on the matter of a gold lacquered screen from the palace in Peking, and the American collector in New York wanted it, among other things. So I took it over myself. My father was afraid to send so valuable a thing. And also there were reasons why he wanted me to leave Japan for a while. When I left I stood by the steamer’s rail, looking back at Yokohama.” He stopped a moment and went on. “Sumie had come to see me off. And I watched the skyline as long as I could — long after I could not see Sumie, I could see the buildings lifting themselves against the sky. There were many fine tall buildings.” He lit a cigarette and smoked a moment. “Then we had the earthquake. I hurried back. And there was no skyline at all.”

“No skyline?” I-wan repeated.

“It was all flat,” Akio said. “Every building was gone. I stared and stared, and I could not believe it. But there was nothing. Also I had not heard from Sumie — she was to wait in Yokohama.”

Akio laughed suddenly.

“But when the ship came near, I saw a small plump woman standing among the ruins of the dock. Sumie! Well, I could spare the rest!”

They laughed together.

“And immediately,” Akio went on, “everybody began to rebuild. So we have our skyline again. We know our fate, we Japanese — we are not cowards.”

The door opened. “Now, if you please,” the young woman said.

A large American man came out and behind him a small slight figure in a gray business suit. That was Shio. He looked like Mr. Muraki made young again.

“All right, Muraki,” the big American was saying in a great rumbling voice, “it’s up to you. Seventy-five thousand dollars, good U. S. money — but you take the risks of breakage.”

“There will be no breakage,” Shio’s high clear voice declared.

“Well, that’s your pidgin,” the American said. “G’by, pleasure to do business with you, ’m sure—” He put out a large red hand and Shio laid his small unwilling brown one in it for a second. When the door had shut behind the American, Shio wiped his hand, half secretly, on his handkerchief.

“Hah!” he said to Akio, smiling and showing very white teeth under his small black mustache.

Akio smiled. “This is Wu I-wan,” he said.

“Hah!” said Shio pleasantly. “My father wrote me about you. He spoke very highly. I am sorry I was busy.”

“It is nothing,” I-wan said politely.

He felt suddenly shy. Shio was really too much like Mr. Muraki.

“Will you come into the office?” Shio said.

They followed him into a square ugly room with gray cement walls and uncomfortable wooden furniture painted yellow, and the young woman poured tea for them. But there was no time to look about. Shio was unwrapping something on his desk.

“Look!” he said eagerly.

It was an ivory figure of the Chinese Goddess of Mercy. She stood two feet high, benign and exquisite, her tranquil presence diffused from quiet eyes and flowing ivory robes. She must be very old, for the ivory was creamed.

“Ah,” Akio exclaimed, “at last!”

“At last,” Shio said. He gazed at the beautiful statue. No one spoke. Then Shio said sorrowfully, “If only we could keep her! But she is to go to America with the rest. A museum has bought the collection entire.”

“The great Li collection from Peking?” Akio asked, surprised.

Shio nodded. Then he said in a lower voice, “But tell me — how is all in my father’s house?”

“Well enough,” Akio answered. He hesitated and I-wan caught his eyes looking at him as though he wished I-wan were not there. So in decency I-wan took up a newspaper that lay upon a small table near him and began to read it, so that he need not hear what Akio was now saying to Shio of family matters.

Then suddenly he heard through all he read, these words: “So now he is very angry and he says he will tell General Seki that the wedding may take place at once.”

These words I-wan heard and instantly understood. In the crash and confusion of his own being he sat staring at the ivory goddess, speechless. She stood facing them, enigmatic, benevolent, ageless, eternal. He clung to her. She was quite helpless, of course. People could do with her as they liked. But in Japan, in America, wherever she was, whatever happened to her, she would be herself, unchanged. “I am insane,” he thought, “thinking about ivory idols…. He wants the wedding at once….”

“You will go to your room first, and rest,” Shio was saying kindly.

“Yes, if I may,” I-wan said. His voice sounded thin and far off.

“Don’t hurry,” Shio replied. “Have your meal. I want to talk with my brother. Tomorrow I will show you your desk. Just now of course we are very busy. Treasures are pouring out of North China.”

What, I-wan thought, did that mean?

“This way, please,” the young woman said. He took up his bag and followed her across the street toward a long one-story gray building. This was the hostel.

“Earthquake-proof,” she said proudly.

She led him to the desk where a clerk whisked a card catalogue to his name.

“Room fifty-one,” he said.

He went to room fifty-one, and opened the door to a small cell of a room. There were a bed, a chair, a table, a washbowl stand. Floor and walls were gray cement.

He sat down heavily and put his head in his hands. He must write to Tama at once. He opened his bag and snatched out the paper and pen he had put in this morning. That quiet room seemed a thousand miles, a thousand years, away.

“Tama,” he began, “I have heard a terrible thing. Akio says—” He scribbled on and on incoherently, trying to tell her what to do — only what could he tell her? “Postpone — pretend to be ill, Tama — anything. Tama, could you run away? Think of something and write me. I can’t sleep or eat until I hear.”

He sealed it hastily, marked it for air mail, and rushed out to the desk to post it. When it was gone, he suddenly felt very faint. He must, after all, have something to eat.

He went into a restaurant and ordered a bean-curd soup and a little fish. As he waited he remembered the letter he had planned to write to Tama, when he was flying through sunshine over a blue sea. How different was the one now flying back to her, perhaps on that very plane on which he had come this morning! He felt a strange premonition that was like the memory of terror. He remembered his father bending over his bed and shaking him out of his dreams. He felt as though now, again, something had shaken him from a dream.

When he opened his eyes the next morning there was the sound of laughter in the hall outside his room. Young men were shouting with laughter. He heard them approach his door and pass, their laughter growing fainter as they went. A streetcar turned and screeched outside the window. He heard a crab vendor’s call, “Fresh crabs from the morning sea!”

He lay a moment, remembering the mood in which he had fallen asleep. His fears had woven themselves into broken dreams in which he and Tama seemed always about to meet, and yet he never found her. It was all not true, fears or dreams. Everything was going to be all right. He could trust her — that soft stubbornness of hers.

The sun falling through the bamboo curtains was making little dancing waves of light on the wall. He leaped out of bed. He was going to work so hard that Shio would tell Mr. Muraki how good he was, and then perhaps Mr. Muraki would let him marry Tama. Well, his own grandfather might say he would rather his son married a Chinese, but then he had often heard his father say that China and Japan should be allies and friends. He laughed silently as he brushed his hair carefully before the mirror. He agreed with his father!

Tama would have his letter today. Perhaps she would not expect so immediate a letter and would not go at once to Sumie? He paused, his hand on the door, framing mentally a possible telegram. No, it was impossible. He would trust to her going at once to Sumie to tell her there would be letters. He could trust Tama.

He went on to his restaurant breakfast almost blithely. If she answered also by airplane, he might have a letter tomorrow. He ate rice gruel and an egg and salted vegetables and drank a glass of American malted milk without knowing what he ate or drank, then rose and paid his bill and crossed the street to the Muraki building.

The door of Shio’s office was open and I-wan stood before it and coughed slightly.

“Come in!” Shio answered. His voice was so exactly like Mr. Muraki’s that I-wan felt a little daunted. But he went in. Shio was at his desk already, a small, intensely neat figure with spectacles and a close stiff black mustache. He looked a straight militant little man until one saw his eyes. Behind the heavy lenses his eyes were, for a Japanese, unusually large, and their gaze was as naive and mild as a child’s. The militancy was all on the surface and because he had gone to military school, as every Japanese man had to do.

“Good morning,” he said kindly. “If you will follow my secretary, she will show you your office. And please check the lists you will find there against the bills of lading of the shipments we expect today from China. Later, if you please, help to unpack the articles and check again. If there is any uncertainty, call upon me for help. I am glad to give it. When all is unpacked, I myself will come and examine everything.”

“Thank you, sir,” I-wan murmured. This little man was so calmly full of authority, in spite of his childlike eyes, that one’s instinct was to obey him. Shio touched a bell, and the bowlegged girl in her black skirt and white blouse appeared, and I-wan followed her into a square hall where ten clerks bent over their desks.

“Here, if you please,” the girl said in a smiling hissing whisper. She paused by a desk near the window and, bowing slightly, went away.

I-wan found himself looking down into a wide clean treeless street, edged with squat houses and open shops. Beyond was the brilliant blue harbor, where ships lay resting. Around him in this room no one moved. There was absolute silence. As he looked he met hasty secret glances from the corners of eyes turned for an instant in his direction. He felt suddenly for the first time a stranger in Japan, and that he missed Bunji very much.

Here he knew no one. The heads were all studiously bent now. No one moved except to open a drawer or reach for a pen. There was the atmosphere of a rigid discipline. He hesitated a moment, then felt his gaze caught toward a door. It was open, and a man stood there watching him. “Have you your assignment, Mr. Wu?” he called.

“Yes, sir,” I-wan replied.

“Hah!” the man said.

It was a command to work, and I-wan opened the folder before him. Not a head in the room had moved.

When he came to his room three days later he found Tama’s letter.

“Wait,” she said, “we must wait. It will be made clear to us what our fate is.”

Yes, but what of her father’s haste to marry her, he thought impatiently. His eyes raced ahead. “My mother knows how to delay what she does not like,” Tama wrote. “She has delayed this many times and she will again — and again, until—” Madame Muraki, so silent and scarcely seen — it was strange to think it was she upon whom he and Tama depended. And yet when he thought of it, he felt reassured. Tama was not alone in her father’s house.

He wrote to her throughout the long year, often impatiently, sometimes angrily, and sometimes, in the long gray winter’s days, in the apathy of delay and discouragement. He knew that she could not always get his letters when they reached Sumie. Sometimes, she told him, there were five or six waiting before she found a chance to go to Akio’s house and then she had to wait until night to read them. But her letters were always the same. They were short, even when his were long, but they carried always the same steady words. “It will be made clear to us what our fate is. And my mother still delays.”

Well, he must learn to be content with delay, he told himself…. That year in Yokohama was the longest of his life.

For hours he had stood checking with a pencil the things which the clerks drew carefully out of the sawdust and rice straw — potteries and ivories, carved agate and rose quartz, crystal and cloisonné, carved blackwood and redwood, and silver, inlaid with the sky-blue feathers of the kingfisher bird. But he paid no heed to anything.

All through the spring and the summer he had forced himself to be content with delay, but now in this first month of early autumn he was miserably anxious again about Tama.

He had not simply imagined that her letters had grown careful. It was more than that. Last week she had told him to write less often and less freely. What did that mean except that she was afraid and uncertain — that she was changed? He had remembered then that she had never said that she would surely marry him, whatever happened, and he had decided desperately that he would wait no longer for Tama’s “fate.” He must know why she had changed to him. And instantly he had sat down and written her all his fears and had begged her to tell her father everything and let him come. He had told her that he would wait four days for her answer. This was the fourth day. If tonight there were no letter he would leave for Kyushu tomorrow. And now he could scarcely wait until the hands of his watch crept to six, and yet he dreaded to know the hour was there.

The door opened and Shio came in.

On great tables put there the treasures stood. Shio went over them in an ecstasy.

“Hah—” he whispered tenderly, “hah — all this—”

His small stubby fingers touched as delicately as a breath one thing after another. He knew everything, murmuring as he went. “This now, is Sung white — and this is a green they never made so well as in the Ming — and yes, I see it — the white jade landscape — ah, I have tried for ten years to get that!” He seized upon a lump of jade carved into the likeness of a snowy mountain. He was laughing and half tearful with joy. “It’s here!” he cried. “I cannot tell you what it means! I will not sell it to any American, even if he offers a million for it! It shall stay here in Japan! Such things belong in Japan. It is only we who appreciate them—”

I-wan watched, astounded. Why, Shio was like a man half mad! He was caressing the mass of jade, muttering and grunting. It was revolting, I-wan thought to himself, horrible! Suddenly a question cracked across his mind again like a whip. Where had these things come from?

He stood a moment, then he turned and silently and quickly he went out of the warehouse. He brushed his way through the crowds of clerks leaving for their buses. Everybody was laughing and merry as they put away office coats and slipped off paper cuffs. But he went on swiftly, entered the hostel and went down the hall and opened the door of his room…. If there were a letter it would be on the table.

It was not there, he saw instantly. But, peacefully asleep on his bed, he saw Bunji.

His first thought was to shout, “Bunji! What are you doing here?” But he checked the cry. He had never taken any thought before of how Bunji looked. He knew Bunji was not handsome. Bunji himself made fun of his looks.

“I look like the clown in a street show, of course,” he always said cheerfully. “Well, what of that? I don’t have to worry about that — all the mogas will not love me — so I can have a peaceful life.” He always declared he would marry the ugliest girl he could find, since being still uglier himself, he would make her happy in feeling she was beautiful by comparison. Nobody needed to think how Bunji looked when he was laughing and joking, because he was always a pleasant sight in spite of his thick flat nose that was bridgeless and his small bright eyes and big smiling mouth.

But now for many months I-wan had not seen him. And he had never seen him asleep. Bunji gravely asleep was someone else. His face looked low-browed and the jaw was too heavy and the mouth was thick. Now I-wan could see — Bunji was very Japanese. His body was squat and his arms long and his hands short and powerful. Even his feet, without shoes now, looked short and thick except for the prehensile Japanese toes. I-wan had heard children on the streets of Shanghai call after a Japanese, “Monkey — monkey!” The word came to his mind now. But Bunji opened his eyes, stared, and leaped up, laughing.

“I-wan!” he shouted.

“Why are you here?” I-wan asked quietly. He was forcing himself to think, “This is the same Bunji.”

Bunji was yawning loudly and rubbing his eyes with his fists.

“I don’t know,” he said cheerfully. “All I know is Akio and I were told to report at Tokyo at army headquarters. We got here too late to go on tonight. So I said, ‘I’ll go and find that old I-wan and we’ll have fun once more together.’”

“Where is Akio?” I-wan asked.

“Oh, of course Sumie came, too, and they are somewhere together, I suppose, looking at Fuji-san under the moon or something like that!” Bunji laughed. “You know them! Besides, they love Fuji. Every summer they make a trip together up Fuji—”

“Why should Tokyo headquarters send for you?” I-wan asked.

Bunji was putting on his shoes.

“That’s what I shall ask them,” he said cheerfully. “Every year or so we reserve officers have to go and get registered in case of war — generals are like old grannies, always thinking about war.”

He was on his feet now, brushing his hands through his stiff hair.

“Yokohama has good geisha dancing,” he roared. “Come on, I-wan! After all, it’s months since we met!”

I-wan thought a moment. Bunji could tell him of Tama….

“I’m coming,” he answered.

The theater was bright with lanterns and the seats were full of gaily dressed people, placidly eating sweets and staring at the brilliant stage, their faces serene with pleasure. It was an ancient dance, full of stateliness and pomp and historic meaning which I-wan could not understand. But everybody else seemed to understand it. When it was over there were cries and shouts of praise. Bunji leaned back, beaming and perspiring with his pleasure.

“I never saw it done so well,” he cried. “Ah, that little Haru San — the one in the middle — she is famous! Everybody knows her. I have heard of her and never seen her.”

“I did not listen too well,” I-wan confessed.

Everybody was talking and laughing and moving about until the curtain rose again.

“It is the story of how the daughter of a great samurai disguised herself as a man and led her father’s armies out in his place,” Bunji explained. “She takes the enemy general captive, you see, and falls in love. Her heart bids her spare his life. The struggle is terrible. But her country prevails and she kills him with her father’s sword. Then, seeing him dead, she kills herself.” Bunji wiped his face which instantly burst out into fresh perspiration in his excitement. “It’s beautiful—” He sighed and looked about him. “It is a famous play. Everybody knows it, but still they want to see it over and over—” His round absurd face grew suddenly shy. “If I had any courage,” he said, “I would ask to see that little Haru San — and tell her — how I — how I—”

“Why don’t you?” I-wan said, smiling.

Bunji turned red.

“I know my own face,” he said humbly. “I wouldn’t ask her to look at it.”

I-wan burst into a laugh. Monkey or not, it was impossible not to like this Bunji. And in this return of affection he walked back with Bunji and asked him what he had wanted to ask all evening and had not, because the strangeness of the day separated him somehow from everyone.

“Bunji,” he said as soon as they were in his room again, “what of Tama?”

He stood by the table waiting. And Bunji sat down on the bed and looked at him honestly.

“I’ll tell you,” he began. He fumbled in his coat pocket. “Well, there’s a letter she gave me, but she said, ‘Don’t give it to I-wan until you tell him everything first.’” Bunji pulled out a long narrow envelope scattered over with the tracing of delicate pink blossoms which I-wan now knew so well. He put out his hand, but Bunji drew back.

“She said—” he began doggedly.

“I’ll only hold it,” I-wan said hastily. “I promise!” he added to the doubt on Bunji’s face.

“We-ell,” Bunji agreed. He gave it to I-wan and watched him a second. Then he cleared his throat. “It’s this way with Tama,” he began. I-wan, waiting, bit back his need to hasten him. This Bunji was so slow it would be dawn before he got to any point.

“Let’s see,” Bunji was saying very slowly and thoughtfully, “two days ago she seemed just as usual. She arranged fresh flowers and dusted the rooms. Well, then, when she was alone with me she told me to tell Akio to tell Sumie that she would come to see Sumie just before twilight. So she went to see Sumie. I don’t know why, except that something was between them…. But that was afterwards.”

“After what?” I-wan groaned.

“After General Seki came to see my father,” Bunji said.

“He came to see your father?” I-wan cried.

Bunji nodded. “And my father called her into the room and they talked to her and talked to her. I was late myself that night because I had gone to see an American film called — let me see, what was it called?—”

“Ah, in Heaven’s name!” I-wan groaned.

“No,” Bunji said brightly, “you are right — it doesn’t matter, though I can think of it if I give myself to it — a pretty girl, and a robber in her bedroom, who she finds afterwards is a man she once knew and they marry — it was — Well, about Tama — when I came home the light was still on where they were talking to her. So—”

“Had she my letter then?” I-wan broke in.

Bunji stared at him, his eyes blinking questions. But I-wan had no time to explain now. He tore Tama’s letter open.

“I didn’t say—” Bunji began.

“I can’t wait,” I-wan replied grimly.

“Well, I was about finished,” Bunji said amiably. He threw himself back on the bed. “All these tangles of love—” he began to laugh.

But I-wan did not hear him. His eyes were eating up the words on the patterned paper.

“I-wan, I said to you I wanted to marry no one,” Tama wrote. “But my father has told me there is going to be war with China. And so everything is changed. Even my mother says that now it is my duty to marry General Seki, since he has to go to fight for our country. She delays it no more. And I see my duty. It is fate. Tama.”

She had brushed out a word before her name. But he knew what it was. “Your Tama,” she had written. Then she had brushed away the word “your.” Duty! It was like a drug, a poison in them all. But if Madame Muraki — he must not waste a moment.

“Will the train or the plane get me there first?” he demanded of Bunji.

Bunji sat up.

“Where?” he asked.

“To Kyushu,” I-wan cried.

Bunji shook his head. “My father won’t let you see her,” he said pityingly.

“I’ll see her somehow,” I-wan swore.

“Well,” Bunji said, hesitating, “the night train has gone, and of course the plane is quicker than the morning train, if it goes. But there’s the chance of storm or something.”

I-wan threw open the window. There were no clouds and the moonlight was clear and still over the city.

“You can see Fuji-san!” Bunji exclaimed.

“I’ll go on the plane tomorrow,” I-wan decided. Only there was the rest of this night to be passed somehow!

“I shall sleep,” Bunji said with firmness.

“Then you may have my bed,” I-wan replied. “I can’t sleep.”

He sat down by the table and put his head on his arms. What could he do — what could he do?

“I would help you if I could,” Bunji said comfortably, “but then I have to report tomorrow.”

“The through plane doesn’t go until noon,” I-wan muttered.

“No,” Bunji agreed. “Well, if Shio doesn’t want me for anything, I might go back with you after I have registered. If you wanted to write a letter or something, then, if you haven’t been able to see her, I could give it to her.”

“Yes!” I-wan cried, looking up, “that is a good thought. Bunji, how good a friend you are to me!”

“Hah!” Bunji answered. “Well — yes — I like you, you know.” He laughed and began to undress.

But I-wan had already found paper and pen. He would see Tama, of course — but in case he could not find an immediate way, Bunji could give her this letter. He wrote on and on into the night, begging, pleading, pouring out his love.

“Even if our countries should go to war, my Tama,” he wrote over and over, “it has nothing to do with us. You and I, we are ourselves. We belong to each other. It is an accident that governments—” He felt no loyalty to that government now in China — it was not his!

To the sound of Bunji’s steady deep breathing he wrote everything to Tama. Then for a long time he sat reading all he had written. When he folded the pages at last the moon had gone, and it was the dark before dawn. He turned off the light and lay down, dressed as he was, beside Bunji, and fell asleep as a man stumbles exhausted and falls into a well.

He waked the instant Bunji moved.

“What time is it?” Bunji asked thickly. Sunlight was streaming into the room.

I-wan looked dazed at the watch still on his wrist. “Half-past-eight,” he answered.

Bunji leaped across him.

“Akio and I must catch the train at nine!” he shouted. He began flinging on his clothes and dashing to the water basin; he laved the running water over his face and head.

“It’s a long way,” he sputtered. “I’ll have to buy a bit of something and eat it on the train as I go.”

He brushed up his spiky hair as he talked. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he promised. “If Shio doesn’t want me, I’ll go—” He was knotting his tie crookedly and buttoning his coat and searching for his hat, all at the same time. Now he was at the door. “So — hah!” he grinned and was gone.

And I-wan got up slowly, still exhausted in spite of sleep, and undressed and washed himself and put on fresh garments. Then he sat down and read carefully again Tama’s letter and his to her. Then exactly as though the day were like the one before, he went to the restaurant and ate and then went to the warehouse.

The great jade piece which Shio had so caressed was gone. Shio had taken it, doubtless, to his own home. He felt suddenly angry, as though he himself had lost a treasure. But he worked doggedly, checking and rechecking. Nothing now mattered except the one thing — could he reach Tama in time, and having reached her, could he persuade her …? Then, it occurred to him, persuade her to what? What would he tell Tama she must do? Where could he take her? He paused, in his hands a twist of the root of an old cherry tree, carved and polished and stained into the appearance of an ancient impish face. When he looked down at it, it seemed to peer up at him with the mocking eyes of a merry and cynical old man. Where in the world was there a place for Tama and him …?

Then before he could answer, he heard someone crying and shouting for him. It was Bunji. He burst into the door, his eyes wild and his face twisted with weeping.

“I-wan,” he gasped, “Shio — where is Shio?”

“I haven’t seen him,” I-wan said, frightened. The old man dropped from his hand, “Bunji — don’t — what—”

“Akio—” Bunji sobbed. “Akio — Akio—”

He held out a sheet of paper to I-wan. Upon it was written in Akio’s fine neat brush strokes:

“To my father and to my brothers, this: I have considered well this step which I now take. I know why I am called to register myself again as a soldier. We are to be sent to China to fight. But there is nothing in life for which I care to fight. Especially I wish to have no part in killing innocent people of any race. Yet it is not possible to refuse the Emperor when he commands except by the one means which I now take. When this comes to your hands, I shall have given my body to Fuji-san. And with me now, as ever, is Sumie.”

“When — when—” I-wan stammered. “When I reached the station to get my free ticket,” Bunji sobbed, “when I had declared my name, they said this had been left for me. So I took it and read it, and when I burst out weeping — an officer took it and read it — he was so angry — he said — he said Akio was a traitor — and he had no right to — to kill himself at a time when — when the Emperor needs men—” Bunji’s tears were streaming down his face.

“Does Shio know?” I-wan asked in a low voice.

Bunji shook his head.

“Come,” said I-wan. He put out his hand and took Bunji’s, and felt Bunji’s short wide fist clutch his own slender hand. Then without a word they went to Shio’s office. He was there at his desk. Before he could do more than lift his head to look up, I-wan put Akio’s letter before him. He read it, his eyes blinking, his face changing from surprise to consternation, to a quivering understanding. Then he put the paper down.

“I always knew Akio would do this some day,” he said quietly. “He was so continually poised between life and death. Death seemed as sweet as life—” he paused and swallowed. “When we were children — if anything went wrong — he used to — want to die.” They were all silent. Then Shio said heavily, “Bunji, you must go home at once. I must see if — there is anything to find of their bodies. Sometimes they — people — don’t leap clear of the rocks into the crater—”

“I cannot,” Bunji said. “I am to report for duty this afternoon. I was given these few hours only—”

They looked at him, startled.

“I must sail in three days,” Bunji said simply, “to Manchuria—”

They stood there, not knowing what to say to each other.

“As a Japanese,” Bunji said thickly, “I have to go.”

“I know,” I-wan said slowly, “I understand that.”

He turned to Shio. Even now he had thought of something.

“If you will trust me,” he said, “I will go in Bunji’s place to your father.” He had a strange sense now of an arranging fate. What if indeed there were such a thing?

“Then go,” Shio said. “And tell my father not to be too angry with Akio.”

So death opened the door for him to Tama.

She sat there on her knees, quietly, a little behind her parents, while he told them what had happened. Mr. Muraki had received him first alone. When he had heard, when he had read the letter, he said nothing for a while. He folded the letter carefully into a small square and put it in the pocket of his sleeve. Then he said, “Let my daughter and her mother be called.”

So I-wan went out and found a maidservant and told her. Then he went back into the room where Mr. Muraki sat. He had not moved. He did not speak as I-wan sat down.

In a few moments the door opened and Madame Muraki came in. I-wan rose, without looking up. It would not be courteous to look, and he stood turning a little away. But he knew, he could feel, that Tama was in the room. Then he could see from under his lowered lids the edge of her blue kimono upon the floor. At least she was here!

“Sit down,” Mr. Muraki said.

So they all sat down. And Mr. Muraki drew out of his sleeve Akio’s letter. He paused a moment, his teeth clenching and the muscles working in his jaws. Then he began to read, quietly and clearly, what Akio had written. When he had finished he folded the letter again and put it in his sleeve. They sat in silence. Once I-wan heard a sob, instantly choked. But he knew it was Tama. He looked up quickly. She was biting her lips and her hands were folded tightly together. Madame Muraki sat rigidly, her tears flowing down her face. She took up her sleeve and wiped her eyes, but she said nothing.

“For a son disobedient to his Emperor and to his father,” Mr. Muraki said in the same still voice in which he had been reading, “there can be no mourning. Let there be none, therefore, in my house.”

His hands, lying palms upward on his knees, were trembling a little, and he coughed. “That is all,” he added. Then he turned to I-wan. “You will want to sleep a night before you return,” he said. “Your room is as usual.”

“Thank you, sir,” I-wan murmured.

Beneath all this repressed sorrow his heart suddenly began to beat wildly. He knew the path now to the waterfall that splashed outside Tama’s door. There was no need for his letter now.

“If you will excuse us, sir,” Madame Muraki said faintly.

Mr. Muraki nodded, and I-wan rose again. He lifted his eyelids quickly, once. He met Tama’s eyes, wet with tears, and yet imploring and full of warmth, and he knew she expected him.

He stood at a little after midnight at her door, and shrinking out of the moonlight into the shadow of the heavy overhanging eaves, he scratched his little tune upon the lattice. Instantly it slid back. She was there. He saw her face, pale in the shadow of the edge of moonlight. She put her fingers on his lips for silence and he smelled the fragrance of a rose perfume. He stood, not moving, scarcely breathing, feeling only her.

“Come into the shadows of the veranda.”

Her whisper was lighter than the flutter of a hummingbird’s wing. Silently he stepped from the moss to the mat she pulled forward to catch the sound of his footstep. They stood, face to face, gazing at each other, speechless. Then he put out his arms to her. He had never in his life put out his arms to hold a woman. He did not know a woman’s shape or form. But he held her to him, wondering in the midst of love that a woman’s body could lean like this against his own, and being so different could yet fit against him and be a part of him. They stood together, motionless.

Then she drew away.

“Oh!” she cried softly. “And I said, ‘I won’t — if he comes — I won’t see him.’”

“I would have found you,” he said solemnly. “You are not safe from me — anywhere.”

“No, don’t, I-wan.”

“Yes, I will, Tama!”

“Do you know — there is to be war?”

“Never between us!”

“I can’t — I can’t — but there is no help for us. I must do my duty.”

“You never thought it was your duty before — to — to — marry an old man whom you hate!” he whispered hotly.

“No, but now everything is different. In war Japanese men fight and Japanese women bear sons,” she pleaded.

“Tama — you a modern girl!” he scolded her.

“No, but it’s true — what else can we do?”

He held her more tightly. His heart was beating fearfully, so that his breast ached.

“No,” he said thickly, “not you. You and I are going to run away — somewhere where there are no wars — where no one can find us — where it won’t matter that I am Chinese and you are Japanese!”

“There is no such place in the world,” she moaned.

“There is — there is—” he promised her. “Only promise me — you won’t marry him. I’ll plan everything — and tell you—”

There was the sound of a footstep. A twig broke. They clung together in instant terror. They saw Mr. Muraki turn the corner of the house. Tama clutched I-wan’s arms and pulled him silently into her room. They stood behind the drawn screens, scarcely twenty feet from him. For he had paused before the waterfall and stood there, his head bent. They could see his hair shining in the moonlight. In his hand he held a spray of white crape myrtle flowers which he had broken as he passed the tree. He stood so long their bodies were tense with waiting. Then he stooped and laid the myrtle in the pool beneath the waterfall. They heard him sigh and saw him turn away and walk on feebly into the further garden.

But they dared not linger. I-wan stooped to Tama’s cheek. It smelled as fresh as an apricot, and felt as downy smooth beneath his.

“Promise!” he whispered.

“Oh,” she breathed, “you must go!”

“Promise only to wait!” he begged. “At least until we find out whether there really is, to be war or not. It may be nothing.”

He felt her lips move upon his cheek, soft and warm.

“Go — go,” she whispered, “I hear something.”

He slipped out into the moonlight and darted to his room. Surely, he thought, surely there were islands in the sea, far from any wars and troubles that other people made! He lay tense on his bed. Surely there were such islands! And then he remembered that she had not promised.

“This,” Mr. Muraki was saying, “is General Seki.” I-wan had eaten his breakfast alone the next morning, and afterwards, not knowing what part of his still unformed plans should come first, he had gone into the room which the family called the modern parlor. He still preferred chairs to sit upon rather than mats, and in this room there were large stiff foreign chairs, upholstered in bright green plush. Years ago, before the main offices had been moved to Yokohama, Mr. Muraki had seen the room in a department store and had bought it entire, in order to have a place in which he could entertain American and European customers. It was seldom used now, and there I-wan had sometimes gone when he wished to read or to be alone in this house of sliding screens, since the room had walls and doors in the western fashion.

He had scarcely sat down this morning, however, and lit a cigarette, when the door opened suddenly and he saw Mr. Muraki and behind him a thick short figure in uniform. I-wan leaped to his feet. And Mr. Muraki looked astonished for one instant. I-wan bowed. All his blood seemed in one second to rush to his brain to whirl there in a frenzy, leaving his body cold and weak.

“This,” Mr. Muraki said to General Seki, “is the son of the Chinese banker, Wu Yung Hsin.”

General Seki nodded his head sharply at I-wan.

“I was just going, sir,” I-wan said to Mr. Muraki.

“No,” General Seki answered. “You will stay.” He sat down with difficulty in his stiff new uniform and his sword clanked against the chair.

“As you please,” Mr. Muraki murmured to General Seki.

So I-wan could only sit down uncomfortably upon the edge of a straight wooden chair. From the tumult in his brain certain thoughts began to sort themselves. This disgusting, thick-necked man! He looked strangely like a turtle, his neckless, bullet head sunk into his big collar. He had a square, flat-surfaced face and a short brush of gray mustache. Yet he did not look old, I-wan thought, cursing him. He looked, though not young, vigorous and harsh and domineering.

“It may be you can give me some information,” General Seki said, turning to him. “Can you tell me in what cities in Manchuria your father’s bank has branches?”

Instantly I-wan thought, “I will tell him nothing.” He remembered now that he had heard En-lan say once that Japanese were always asking questions and trying to find out even small things that were apparently of no use. But this was stupid, to think he—

“I don’t know,” he said.

“It seems strange you don’t know,” General Seki said, after a second’s pause. He stared at I-wan hard. “But it does not matter. I have the information at my headquarters. I merely asked as a detail in discussing plans with Mr. Muraki. Perhaps then you can tell me how far, in hours, Peking is from Harbin?”

“I have spent most of my life in Shanghai,” I-wan answered.

A small purple vein began to beat in General Seki’s forehead. He turned to Mr. Muraki and spoke in a loud voice.

“Let the plan stay as I have said. It will not be a real war — three weeks will be enough to crush a few rebellious Chinese. There is too little time now — I leave at once. But when I come I will take a holiday”—he paused to grin hideously—“it will be the happiest of my life.”

I-wan sat staring at this man. He began to feel that General Seki wanted to punish him because he was a Chinese, or at least to frighten him. In his heart a furious anger began to burn. Suddenly his head felt clear and cool. Three weeks would be enough, would it? A few minutes ago he would have said it would be impossible for him to hate Japan. But now he had found something in Japan to hate — it was this man, this militarist, this arrogant, overbearing, ambitious overlord sitting before him, who wanted to marry Tama.

“You expect no resistance?” he asked quietly.

“If there is resistance from the Chinese,” General Seki said haughtily, “we will begin bombing—”

All the hatred of which he was capable rushed to I-wan’s heart. He stood up. The important thing was not his hatred — it was that there would be no war.

He turned suddenly and walked, a little unsteadily, out of the room and shut the door. Outside he stood a moment. He felt sick and short-breathed. Yet his head was perfectly clear. He must find Tama and tell her that Seki himself had said it would not be a real war.

A maid passed bearing an oblong bowl of freshly arranged flowers.

“Where is Tama-san?” he demanded.

She looked at him, surprised. “In the east veranda, sir,” she answered, “arranging the flowers.”

He had never been in the inner parts of this house, for it was not customary for the men to go there. But now he went east through the kitchen. And there beyond, upon a small square veranda, he found Tama alone, flowers and grasses heaped on the table before her. She was choosing a handful of silvery grass to put in a vase with the red spider lilies, but when she saw him she stopped.

“I-wan, you—” she began.

But he broke out ahead of her. “Tama,” he cried, “he is horrible!”

She stood there clutching the silver grasses. He saw her eyes sicken.

“Yes, he is horrible,” she whispered. “I saw him yesterday, after I had said—”

“There is to be no war!” he broke in. “Seki says there will be no war!” He told her what he had heard and then he thought of his father and used him shamelessly. “Men like my father — they will never allow a war with Japan. And my father has power, Tama — enormous power — money—”

He felt a faint reminiscent rising of old gorge in him. How En-lan would have despised him for such an argument! En-lan would never be able, either, to understand how he felt about this Japanese girl, how he loved her. En-lan would not understand how anyone could love a Japanese.

“Of course, if there is no war—” Tama said, slowly, “then everything is changed. If it is only my father, trying to force me—”

“I swear there will be no war!” he exclaimed.

The maidservants were beginning to flutter about them, seeming to be busy about sweeping and dusting. “Shall I help you, lady?” one piped, and then another.

He looked at them grimly.

“They make me think of wasps,” he told Tama. “They are determined not to leave us alone. But I shall not leave you until I know you are safe — in yourself, I mean. For I know if you make up your mind—”

She looked at him steadily, her dark eyes large. She was very pale. In his agitation he had not noticed this until now.

“If there is to be no war,” she said, “of course I will not marry him.”

So at last he had her promise!

“Then I shall ask your father for you,” he said gravely. “Count upon that. I shall be as old-fashioned as he likes. I’ll find a go-between and make the proper presents. You will hear nothing until it is all arranged.”

She put the silver grasses to her cheek and said nothing. He bowed, looked deeply into her eyes, and went away. When he turned back once to see her, she was surrounded zealously by the maidservants, and in the garden he saw Madame Muraki, hurrying so fast her robes seemed to weave about her as she glided. But he did not care. All that needed to be said was said.

With no further farewells and seeing no one, he left the house and returned to Yokohama.

At last the newspapers declared and it was cried upon the streets that there would be no war in Manchuria. As he had guessed, “arrangements,” the papers said, would be made. The League of Nations had been invoked. That meant the government — that was Chiang Kai-shek — did not want to fight. He could see his father behind this, manipulating peace.

He turned his thoughts away — no use thinking of those things which he could not control or change! Peace! Peace for him meant only Tama — Tama and long happy quiet years together. He was glad now that he had not come to love Tama quickly or impulsively, but slowly through four years of acquaintance and friendship and love. He had had time to face everything in that marriage before it took place. Now when it came, as it must, with this peace, it would be eternal. He would live his own sort of life apart, working, studying, enjoying, he and Tama together, years of individual peace and fulfillment. Let the nations take care of themselves. In such a world an intelligent being had no hope of life unless he enclosed himself in a small world of his own making.

He said nothing to anyone, but he went about his private plans, sure of Tama. He had already found an old professional matchmaker and now he went to him, and for a fee the man agreed eagerly to go to Mr. Muraki and put forth I-wan’s request.

“But your photograph!” the old man cried.

I-wan was about to say, “They know how I look.” Then he was silent. Let it all proceed according to custom. In seeming conformity a man was safe. He had had enough of rebellions. They had brought him nothing. He went out and had a picture taken and when it was finished — and he paid to have it quickly done — he gave it to the old man. There was nothing unusual about his pictured face, he thought. He looked pale and solemn and commonplace in his western clothes, and the Japanese photographer, trying to improve him, had retouched his features and given them a curious Japanese look. His eyes seemed to stare and his mouth was drawn out of its real likeness, but these things did not matter.

“And I will bring you back her picture, too,” the old man said slyly.

“No need,” I-wan replied quickly, “I have seen her.”

“No, but a picture is your due,” the old man insisted. “Besides, you can look at it as long as you like. That’s better than peeping at her.”

He was making a great show of justice to be done his client, and I-wan smiled and let it pass and went away.

No war! Life fell out wryly enough, he thought, walking along the gay, narrow streets. He stopped and bought a newspaper and read it as he strolled along. But he could make nothing of it. He knew by now that the papers said only what men like General Seki wanted them to say. There were headlines here about renegade battalions, bandits that were creating disturbances because they would not surrender to the Japanese. If En-lan were alive, he would have been among them. But doubtless he was dead. Because of these bandits, the paper said, the Japanese had only with difficulty restored order and safety for their nationals. It was impossible to know what those words meant — order and safety!

At least, they meant peace, and above everything now he wanted peace and the things of peace. He wanted Tama to be his wife, to make his home. He was done with all causes. When it was all settled he would write to his father. He tossed the newspaper away and the wind caught it merrily as though it were a kite and rushed it flying and crackling down the street.

He did not expect an old man to move quickly, and he waited for a while, therefore, in some patience. In the night when he awoke and lay thinking, the darkness oppressed him and he feared that he had been too hopeful and that Tama was not so sure as he had counted. But when day came he remembered again how sure she had looked when he left her. He felt an enormous stability in her. There was none of Peony’s light waywardness and teasing. If Tama said she would do a thing he could be sure of it. Duty she would do, as she would have married General Seki, for she had been trained to do her duty. Yet she was not like an old-fashioned Japanese woman who gave blind obedience to the man over her. The same stubbornness which could carry Tama one way, could carry her away from it, too, if she thought it right. He trusted her and was comforted and went quietly about his work.

New shipments came in every day and others went out. He grew hardened to seeing boxes unpacked and pouring out all sorts of Chinese treasures. He grew used to Shio hovering over everything and choosing what he wanted to keep. Shio’s instinct never failed him. Whatever was priceless he kept.

“Those white men,” he explained to I-wan, half apologetically, “do not know the difference between what is merely rare and what is unique and perfect. I will keep in Japan that which is perfect. Here it belongs, and here is its home. In times to come, all that is perfect in the world will find its home with us. No one values beauty as we do.”

I-wan did not answer. He never answered Shio. It was true that he had never seen any one eat and drink beauty as Shio did. He did seem actually to feed upon the porcelains and the ivories, the paintings and the tapestries which he loved. When he was tired, and he was easily tired, for he worked long hours and ate little and was a small thin man by nature, if he sat for a while caressing a jade or a smooth pottery bowl or a bottle vase, a sort of peace came over him and he looked stronger, as though he had been fed. In the palm of his hand he held continually a piece of old white jade, oily smooth with long handling and as warm as flesh. When he sat counting and muttering over his figures, he leaned his cheek upon the hand holding this jade. He said it kept his head from aching.

I-wan, looking at him with a new curiosity now, saw nothing in his pallid face of Tama’s round cheeks and healthy looks. Yet they were of one blood, and he must call Shio brother, and something of Shio would go into his children, perhaps. Well, he was a harmless man, at least, and if he went dazed with beauty, there were others who went dazed for less. This whole country was a little mad for beauty, I-wan thought. Men so poor they ate a handful of cold rice for a meal found a few cents somehow to buy a flower pot and seeds to plant. Tama would keep his house beautiful with flowers, too, because she had been taught that a room was empty if it held no flowers.

It was not until the eighteenth day of the next month that the old matchmaker came back, and I-wan was beginning to lie half his nights awake, wondering what had gone wrong. He had all but decided to go himself and see, when suddenly one night when he went to his room he found the old man there in the one big chair, smoking his pipe peacefully enough.

“Hah!” he said when I-wan came in, and rose and bowed.

“Where have you been?” I-wan cried impetuously.

“At my business,” the old man answered serenely, “at my business. There has been a good deal of it. There was the old suitor—” he nodded. “He had to be arranged. But the young woman managed that very well. The father objected, you see, on the grounds of offense to the old suitor. But she managed it.”

“How?” I-wan demanded.

“By saying she would kill herself,” the old man answered, without excitement. “Yes, and she went at once to it. I saw her. She said it, and then she took a knife she had ready in her girdle and drew it across her wrists before our eyes—”

“No!” I-wan cried.

The old man nodded profoundly. “Across one wrist and then she prepared to do it to the other, and the mother wept and fainted, and her father bade her wait. She stood, the blood rushing out of her arm and soaking into the mat.”

He relished telling the tale, but I-wan could not speak for horror.

“And her mother came to herself and moaned something about her having no children left. I thought you said there were sons?”

“One is newly dead,” I-wan said, “and one, the youngest next to her, is gone to China in the army.”

“So!” the old man answered, his mouth open with interest. “Then the father said, ‘Wait, we will talk it over.’ So I waited, and by arranging another young girl for the old suitor, which I did, the daughter of a baron in a prefecture near Kyoto, who was glad to have a general for a son-in-law, and their daughter’s fiancé had run away last month and married a moga, causing such shame as cannot be wiped away, and after all the wedding garments were prepared, and they were casting about for some way to save them. So in their extremity it was sent from heaven to get a general, however old and fat. So I thought of them and arranged it. So what with one thing and another, it all went together, and you are to go not to the house, but to the hotel that is on the sea at the south side of the city, and there meet with the family, and talk and take tea together, as the custom is. Then the wedding day will be set, soon, as the custom is, also, and the thing is as good as done.”

“But her wrist?” I-wan asked. He could not forget Tama’s wrist, bleeding.

“It was bad,” the old man admitted. “And yet, I think she knew that only shedding her own blood would make them yield. The old man had been stubborn until then. But when she did that, he saw she was more stubborn than he…. Well, now that it is as good as done, I will advise you. Hasten to make her way yours, before she knows it, for when a woman is stubborn, the ocean itself is not so sure as her own will.”

He coughed and took a bit of paper out of his sleeve and spat into it neatly and laid it under the table where it would be swept away by a servant. Then he sat waiting for what remained of his fee.

I-wan laughed and rose to give it to him. “I will give you as much again on the day of the wedding,” he said.

The old man took the money and folded it small and put it into his belt.

“You Chinese,” he said, “you never look beyond tomorrow. But tomorrow is only the beginning of time. And a wedding is only the beginning of marriage. Ah, yes, so it is.”

He rose, coughing and nodding, and went away. It was all nothing to him. He made his living by such things, and in this case it was merely his luck that the young girl was willing to kill herself to marry the young man.

But after he had gone I-wan began packing his best clothes quickly. Tomorrow morning he would go to Shio and ask leave of absence and tell him why he went. He could not imagine Shio caring half as much as he would if he found a piece of old jade. Nevertheless he must consider Shio as his elder brother and give him his due courtesy. He wanted to do all that he should do for Tama’s sake — Tama, who was willing to die for him!

For Tama’s sake he went through the formal party at the hotel, where as though he were a stranger he met Mr. Muraki and Madame Muraki, also, dressed as he had never seen them in stiff dark formal robes of thick silk. With them were friends and relatives he had never seen, and among them for one moment was Tama, a Tama whom also he had never seen. Her hair was brushed and oiled in the old Japanese fashion, and her face was painted red and white. When she bowed she smiled the vacant empty smile of the well-taught Japanese virgin, and he did not know what to say to her. Only when he caught the look of her eyes once, when she swept up her lashes, was he comforted. They were bright and shining and full of laughter.

“We will go through with the play,” they seemed to tell him, laughing.

So he went through with it for her. Even when Mr. Muraki decreed that they must wait for a letter from his father giving consent, I-wan said nothing. For he was sure of the consent. His father would be eager enough now to show his friendship for Japan. He would reason that after all I-wan remained Chinese, and that a woman, Japanese or not, was of little matter, and Tama’s chief importance was as a daughter-in-law and not as a Japanese.

The letter, when it came, was as I-wan thought it would be. Mr. Wu wrote to Mr. Muraki that he was honored to deepen the new peace between the two countries. “We ought,” he wrote, “to bind these two brother countries together, and what better way than this?”

To I-wan he wrote, “There are no better trained women in the world than the Japanese. They are docile, humble, obedient, home-keeping. You will have a good family life. When a little more time has passed, bring her to us to see. But not yet — the people here have an unreasoning hatred against Japan because of the recent troubles. But the common people are always ignorant and mistaken. The Manchurian situation will be adjusted reasonably. Nevertheless, wait a little while before bringing back a Japanese wife to China.”

I-wan smiled as he folded his father’s letter. He did not want to go back with or without Tama. Certainly he would not go back without her.

For Tama’s sake he had waited without seeing her again until the wedding day, which was appointed as soon as his father’s letter came. And then he went to his wedding, held in the same hotel where the betrothal had been acknowledged. Here in strange cold formal rooms, half Japanese, half foreign, he found the same people waiting. And soon Mr. Muraki came and Madame Muraki and Shio and with him a small quiet gray-toned woman who was his wife, and at last Tama. They drank the mingled wines and obeyed the rules which the old matchmaker set for them.

He felt inexplicably lonely for a little while, though Tama was at his side. But this was the silent painted Tama he did not know, and not for weeks had he heard her voice or seen her as she was. He had to tell himself even as he felt her stiff silk-covered shoulder touch his as they stood together, that indeed it was she and that only by obeying the old rules had he won her. For Mr. Muraki would never have wanted him for a son-in-law if he had taken his own way and married Tama as he would like to have married her, simply and quietly and as though it were their own marriage. No, marriage belonged to a family.

When it was over he looked about at them all, these small grave courteous people behind Mr. Muraki and Madame Muraki, aunts and uncles and cousins, all staring at him and smiling anxiously and shyly. They looked alike, he thought. Even Tama looked like them just now, he thought. He had, he felt suddenly, married not Tama, but Japan. He felt in some strange sickening fashion that he had betrayed something or someone, somehow. Then he heard the old matchmaker at his elbow.

“If you will now change your garments,” the old man said in his matter-of-fact way, “the bride will be ready. The automobile is at the door.”

This recalled him. He had decided, he remembered, that they would go into the mountains to the small hotel by the hot spring, and there he and Tama would spend the first week of their marriage. He had forgotten in his daze of the moment what lay ahead. Now he turned, instantly restored to himself. The wedding was over. When he and Tama were alone at last, their marriage would really begin. He forgot everything in this thought and rushed to the room in the hotel, where upon the bed he had carefully spread out only this morning before he dressed for the ceremony the new dark blue foreign suit he had bought. It was the fashion for a bridegroom to wear western clothes. Everything was new, even the red silk tie which lay beside it. He hurried into it and taking his new hat, rushed downstairs. Tama was waiting for him. He found her in the closed and curtained automobile. Someone had opened the door in time for him to leap inside, and then the door slammed and the car started with a great jerk and they were thrown at each other. She laughed, and when he heard her laughter everything turned in that instant warm and real.

“Tama!” he cried.

She had washed the red and white paint from her face, and her hair was drawn smoothly back again, and she had on a plain dark green dress and leather shoes.

“Do you know me?” she asked, still laughing. Here was her own face, rosy and brown and pretty in the old way.

He put out his arms, speechless, and she came into them and for the second time he felt the shape of her, strong, a little square but still slender, in his arms. She was more real than anything in life. That was her quality, a strong reality. She had no perfume even upon her. He put his cheek against her and smelled the faint smell of clean soap-washed flesh, and from her hair a piny smell of the wood oil with which it had been brushed.

“Tama,” he whispered, half suffocated with happiness, “are we married?”

She nodded. He felt the strong quick nod of her head.

“Yes, of course,” she said in her pleasant practical voice.

He did not answer. In his arms he felt the affirmation suddenly run over her body, a quiver through her blood.

“Now I-wan,” Tama was saying sternly, “it is necessary in our marriage that you always remember this — I am a moga.”

He laughed and she turned on him with mischief bright in her eyes. “You don’t believe me?” she demanded.

“Yes — yes, I do,” he said quickly. “I believe anything about you.”

“Ah,” she said, “that is a good beginning.”

He laughed again as he lay on the bed watching her. She was combing out her long black hair. It was still slightly wet from the bath they had taken in the pool of the hot springs, though she had coiled it up on her head to keep it dry. But they had laughed and played and splashed each other so much.

Now they were back in their rooms and he had sent the bathmaid away impatiently so that he could be alone with Tama. He knew the maids were all laughing at him, but he did not care. He had tipped them well to keep other bathers waiting until he and Tama had finished. He had not told her, but he had made up his mind before they went in that Tama was never to bathe in any other presence than his own. He was Chinese and he would not have it.

She was standing now, quite naked, as she brushed out her long hair. It was an innocent nakedness, he could see, as innocent as had been that peasant girl’s the day they had climbed the mountain with Bunji. It was as if she were unconscious of any difference in being covered or not. He felt vaguely jealous of this innocence. It was too childish. He could not endure the thought that she might have stood like this even before servant maids. But it was impossible to explain this to her. He knew by instinct that she would not understand.

“Let me see your wrist,” he said suddenly.

She came over to him and held out her wrist. Upon it was the long scar, still red. He laid his cheek upon it.

“Do mogas often cut their wrists to get their own way?” he asked. If ever he grew impatient with Tama — though it was impossible — but if he ever did, he would only need to see this wrist of hers.

“It was what my father understood best,” she said quietly. “When I did that he knew I meant what I said — that I would marry you.”

This was sweet enough, he thought, to fill a man’s heart. But he wanted more.

“And even if there had been a war,” he said, coaxing her, “you would have married me — I know you would.”

He looked up at her, still holding the wrist, to see her eyes when she acknowledged it.

But she shook her head, her eyes too candid not to be believed.

“No, I wouldn’t, I-wan,” she said. “If there had been a war I would have married General Seki. Don’t you know I said I would?”

He could not believe even her eyes.

“I can’t believe you,” he said.

“Then you still don’t understand,” she replied quickly. “If there had been a war, I-wan, I would not have belonged to myself, but to my country. In times of war everyone belongs to the country.”

“Old Seki isn’t the country,” he said with scorn.

He still held her wrist, but he felt strangely that it was different. Why had she cut it? A moment ago it had seemed pathetic and wonderful to see this red line across its amber smoothness.

“He is a very great general,” she said simply. “The Emperor trusts him.”

When she said “The Emperor,” it was as though she spoke of all the gods. He felt suddenly again jealous of something he did not understand.

“You must love only me,” he cried. He dropped her wrist and sitting up, he put his arms about her waist as she stood by him. Under his cheek he felt her firm soft belly and he could hear her heart.

“I do love only you,” she answered quietly. She took his head in her hands. “I shall always love you.”

“Then why do you say ‘if there had been war—’” He wanted her to say that this closeness would have been theirs, inevitably, though the world divided beneath them.

“That would have had nothing to do with my loving you,” she said. She was touching his hair softly. “I-wan, see — as a Japanese, if it is my duty—”

“Hush!” he cried. He did not want to hear her talk about duty.

“I am your duty,” he muttered, “I–I! You have no other!”

He seized her wrist again and moved his tongue along the scar, feeling its slight roughness with all his being.

“Don’t talk,” he whispered, “don’t let us talk.”

He wanted nothing except to feel. In feeling there was no division between them. Their blood flowed together in the same rhythm, to the same desire. That was the essential between man and woman — that only. She obeyed, saying nothing, but by delicate touches and movements accommodating herself to him. Suddenly after a few moments he drew back at a movement of her hand, half shocked. It occurred to him that it was strange, surely, for a young girl only newly married to know how to do such a thing. He drew back, stammering.

“What did you say?” she asked.

“I said, how do — you know — to do that?”

She looked up at him from where she lay, her eyes full of pure and innocent surprise.

“But I was taught, of course,” she exclaimed, “by a very good old geisha. My mother hired her to teach me.”

She was so guileless, so innocent in her sophistication, that he was fascinated and horrified together. He sat up for a moment, struggling with himself, not knowing which was the stronger in him.

“But what is it, I-wan?” Tama asked.

“Your — realism,” he managed to say. “It’s — it frightens me.”

He thought, “She will not know what I am talking about.”

But she did. She watched him for a moment. Then she said in her calm practical way, “See reason, my husband. Would it be reasonable to allow a young woman to marry in ignorance of what will please the man she loves? I have been taught to make your clothes, to cook the food you like, to tend your house and your children. Should I know nothing of how to love you when we are alone? But that is the heart of our life. When the heart is sound, all the body is full of health.”

But he muttered, “It is like — a courtesan.”

“Oh, no!” she said quickly, and dropped his hand. She leaped up and reached for her robe, and he saw that now it was she who was shocked. These strange differences between them! What did they mean? He remembered the first time he had seen women in a public bath and how he had been horrified and how Bunji had said so calmly that the only harm was in looking at a woman naked. He had not understood that, but he had accepted it. Now she went quite away from him. She was standing by the window, fastening her robe tightly about her, tying the wide sash fast. He could see her hands trembling over the bow. Her back was turned to him.

“It isn’t in the least — like a courtesan,” she said, her voice full of sudden weeping. “I am your wife. It is I who will bear your children.”

She took up the end of her sleeve and wiped her eyes quietly and then smoothed back her hair.

Standing there with her shoulders drooping, she was suddenly intolerably pathetic and childish to him, a child doing as she had been taught. He went over to her impulsively.

“You are to forgive me,” he said. “I command it,” he added.

Her shoulders straightened.

“You needn’t command me,” she said, without turning her head. “After all, am I not a moga? A moga resents being commanded, even by her husband. Besides — I only want to do what you like.”

He could see her lips quiver. Suddenly he wanted to laugh. This woman was dear to him, the dearest being in the world. He did not care what she was or how inexplicable her ideas and behavior. He did not care whether or not he understood her or what she thought. He only knew that his whole being accepted her.

“Come back to me,” he said with determination.

She turned her head then and her eyes stole around to his and they looked at each other. Then he saw in their deeps a smile rise like the ripple of light over water. She gazed at him a moment, and without a word, while he waited, she began loosening the sash which she had just tied so firmly about her waist.

When he let himself think apart from her it was only to build higher in his soul the wall between the world and themselves. He had cut himself off from his own country and by marrying her he had in that measure cut her off also from hers. They were two creatures separate from all others as any two must be who mate out of their own kind. Chinese and Japanese, they were foreign to each other. The blood of their ancestors had not been the same blood. Their very bones were not the same. He knew when he looked at her body and at his own that their clay had never come from the same soil. They met and mingled now for the first time. Dearly as he loved her body, close as it was to his own, it was not the same flesh. His skeleton was slender and tall, and hers was short and strong. She was not fat, but she could never be slender as he was. He loved her for the very earth quality which her body had and his had not, even as he loved her for the very simplicities at which he often laughed.

He loved her for simplicity the more because he knew complexity was his own curse. There was nothing he did which he might not have done in many different ways, but for Tama there was only one way to do everything, and she had been taught that way. Even her pride in being independent and what she called modern, it seemed to him, only in reality made her more determined to do the thing as she had been taught to do. When he teased her for this, she could not understand what he meant, as he had teased her the evening it came to him when she was setting out the dishes of their meal in their hotel room. It was the last day of the seven he had allowed himself for their wedding pleasure. The next day they were to return to Nagasaki. He was to take Bunji’s place now, Mr. Muraki had decided. Tomorrow he and Tama would be in the small house they had taken for their new home on a hillside in a suburb of the city. Tonight, therefore, was an occasion, a feast, and Tama had ordered an especial dinner, and when it came, she dragged the low table to the open screens at the end of the room which overlooked the valleys and hills and far below under the night sky the twinkling lights along the seacoast. She would let him touch nothing.

“No — no,” she explained, “please — it is I who will arrange everything, I-wan.”

He sat down then and watched her, smiling inwardly. She was so serious, so busy, and every trifle was important. All afternoon when they were wandering about the hills together she had been searching for certain flowering grasses with which she planned to make a bouquet for the feast. When they came back she spent an hour arranging them, discarding almost all she had brought, and cutting and trimming in absorbed silence the few she had chosen. But he could not deny the perfection of what she had done. A few silvery-plumed stalks, standing, it seemed, in natural growth among their own long and graceful leaves — if he had not seen the intense care with which she had placed each leaf and each stalk, he would have said she had thrust them into the square pottery vase exactly as they grew. All her effort and the art which she had been carefully taught were merely this — to make it seem not art but nature. It explained, he thought, much of Tama.

So she arranged the table and the dishes and the pot of tea, so she planned how they would sit and in what order eat the courses served them. Only when all this was done and there was nothing left to place did she suddenly laugh and clap her hands.

“Now!” she cried merrily, “Now let us be happy!”

“But you have been very happy, my Tama,” he said, laughing at her. “I have been watching you. You have been very happy arranging everything.”

She stared at him across the tiny table at which they were sitting on the soft floor mats.

“What do you mean?” she inquired. “I was only doing what should be done.”

“No, what you liked,” he said gaily. “Do you think it is necessary to do all you did? The food could have been brought in and eaten.”

“Oh, I-wan!” Her voice was full of pain. “But there is a way in which to do each thing in life — even the plainest. Why, I have been taught there is a way in which to sweep a room, that makes it more than mere sweeping, a way in which to serve tea, a way in which—”

“Moga — moga!” he cried joyously.

She stopped. “You mean — as a moga—” she faltered, “it is not necessary — I suppose,” she said very slowly. “I am really somewhat old-fashioned. It is true — I am, perhaps — more than I think.”

He had hurt her, he perceived. He had taken the joy out of all her small arrangements, and he hated himself.

“No — no,” he insisted, “I love it. I love all you do. Don’t mind my teasing you, my heart. No, I won’t tease you any more.”

“Yes, you must tease me, I-wan, if you like,” she said quickly. “I will learn to be teased.”

She was so grave that he could scarcely keep from reaching across the table for her. He would have, indeed, except that a maid was bringing in a fish. Instantly Tama forgot.

“I-wan, here is the fish!” she cried. “I chose it myself today in the pool. Now you must like it, I-wan, because it is a beautiful fish, and I myself gave the recipe at the kitchen.”

“I shall like it,” he promised, “and it is beautiful.”

She separated the fish with a pair of silver chopsticks and he held out his bowl for her to fill and she filled it and he took it and looked at her.

“I take whatever you give me,” he said.

She blushed and he saw, or thought he saw, alarm in her eyes.

“But you know I want to give you only what you want,” she said.

“Yes, I know,” he said. He must, he perceived, make his way delicately with this young wife of his. She was old and new, child and woman together. He must treat her as each and all together.

In a moment she was laughing at him. Then they spoke of Bunji and of how he would have enjoyed such a feast as they were having, and how out of all the world they would have minded him less than any other. Where he was they did not know, except now somewhere in China. And then Tama said, “Tell me about China. Is it like our country?”

I-wan shook his head first, and then said, “Yes, it is — no, I don’t know. No, it is not like.” He thought of the strong racial difference between Tama’s body and his own. That difference went into mind and thinking and feeling. They would hurt each other again and again because of that difference.

He waited for Tama to ask him more. But she did not. Instead she rose and put out all the lights except one. The maid had taken the last dishes and left them fresh tea, and Tama brought her bowl and sat beside him at ease, now that the feast was over. She had forgotten China and whether it was like what she knew or not.

Instead she was gazing out across the mountains, her whole look one of peace and pleasure. His eyes went with her and for a moment they were silent. And in the silence all differences faded and they were simply together, man and wife. This union of man and woman — it was the deepest in life — deeper than race and ancestry. He was not afraid of his marriage. He would give himself to it, for it was his only world. He had no world into which he could take her, but he would enter as far as he could into her world. But the real world would be the new world which they would make. A new world — he put the phrase away with the shock of old pain. No, nothing so important and large as a new world. What he and Tama would make would be a small secure place, large enough only for themselves and their children. Their children would be like them, without a country of their own. They would need the more the small close security of home. It occurred to him now, for the first time, that his children might not thank him for being their father. They might even have preferred an old Japanese general. In Shanghai, he remembered, there were certain people, born of mixed blood, who were nothing. But that was white blood and yellow — intolerable mixture. His children and Tama’s would at least not look as those did.

“Tama!” he cried, “what are you thinking about?”

It seemed to him suddenly necessary to hear her voice.

“I am thinking of our house,” she answered peacefully. “I am thinking of how I shall arrange everything.”

“Ah, I wish we need never go down from this mountain!” he cried with passion. “It has been so safe and so quiet — we have been alone together as though there were no one else in the world.”

It seemed to him at this moment that the whole world lay in turmoil about this one peaceful spot where they sat alone in the stillness of evening.

“Oh, I wouldn’t like to live all the time on top of a mountain,” Tama said. “It is too difficult.”

“Difficult?” he repeated.

“Yes,” she said, “to get meat and vegetables and charcoal and all the things we need every day.”

“Ah,” he said, thoughtfully, “of course it would be difficult.”

The things of every day — they had not occurred to him.

The days ran after each other so quickly that before he could lay hold of one to treasure it another had come. They went nowhere, except he to his work, now again in his old office, but alone since Bunji was gone. From it he hurried back to Tama in their small clean house. And day followed day, and month slipped into month, and they wanted no change, he because it was such sweet change to have this house and this woman for his own, and she because surely Tama was the goddess of everyday things. He thought, “I have never known her really until now.”

For now he perceived that it was in doing her everyday tasks that she seemed most free. When they had been together on the mountain she had been, he thought, perfect — a little more than perfect, he had sometimes felt, as though she had set for herself a pattern of what she would be at such a time and had faithfully followed the pattern. But now in her eagerness and in her being so busy in making the house as she wanted it, she forgot to keep her hair always smooth and her sash straight and uncrumpled. Instead she ran about in a cotton kimono girdled with a strip of the same cloth instead of a sash, and she tied back her long sleeves in the way the small maidservant did, and her hair was loosened, and more than half the time when he came home those first days to his noon meal she had a smudge on her nose or her cheek from the charcoals upon which she cooked his dinner.

There was always a good dinner for him. She was a zealous cook because, he found, she loved cooking. A soup, different each day, and two dishes at least, awaited him. And each dish was a surprise. She made great excitement over lifting the cover and disclosing a boned fish or tiny balls of meat or chicken steamed to tenderness and hid under a sauce of fresh bean curd smoothed into a gravy.

“How can you know so much?” he cried.

“Ah, you don’t imagine how much more I know!” she answered proudly. “I still have scores of things I haven’t made for you.”

He had always thought eating was of no importance. And since he had lived alone he had taken a sort of pride in eating anyhow, as if in an unconscious expiation for the wastefulness of his father’s house. Often he sat down in a cheap restaurant to a bowl of noodles in meat broth, such as a ricksha puller might eat also, and he thought, doggedly, “It is good enough for anyone.”

But this was better. Tama was frugal enough to satisfy him. She cooked enough to make him well fed, and yet there was no waste. It amused him to see her calculate, with a pretty frown, how much the small maidservant would need. In his father’s house the servants robbed the stores and no one heeded it. He liked to think that in his house Tama’s careful hands measured and took account. He thought sometimes of En-lan, and he wished that En-lan could see him now. There was nothing to be ashamed of now in his home, before rich or poor.

This small house set upon a terraced corner of the hill beyond the city came to be to I-wan the place of perfection in the world. It was so plain, so clean, so quiet. The floors were covered with silvery white mats, and the walls were latticed paper screens that were drawn back and thrown into one great space for the day’s living. But at night they were drawn together again and made small, cosy, separate rooms, one for his books, where he might read and study and smoke a pipe while Tama finished the evening meal, and one where he and Tama slept together the deep secure sleep of those eternally in love with each other. And around the house was a small uneven garden where he and Tama worked and planted on Sundays and where Mr. Muraki came and sat and gave them endless advice.

And beyond was the sea.

“The sea,” Mr. Muraki murmured after long pondering, “the garden must be shaped to the sea. The sea is the scene set for it. It must, therefore, lead the eyes beyond its own confines toward that horizon.”

He came Sunday after Sunday up the rocky winding street which led up the hill to their house, and with him they laid the garden, plant by plant, rock by rock. In these peaceful hours it was hard to remember that this happily excited old man was that stern one who had ordered no mourning for his dead son, the one who had been ready to give up his only daughter. But in this old man there was this gentleness and all that other sternness, too. There was no reconciling them. They were only to be accepted, as everything was to be accepted. To his accustomed hands they left the final trimming away of the branches and old shrubberies. And his hands with their old delicate ruthlessness cut and cut again, until I-wan in a panic thought, “There will be nothing left. After all, it is a very small garden.”

But when it was finished it appeared that Mr. Muraki was right. He had left what was essential. And only now indeed could they see what was essential. For he had so cut and shaped that the trees looked gnarled and bent with a strange beauty as though the sea itself had disciplined them to these shapes.

“Come here,” Mr. Muraki said, his face all shining with sweat and excitement. “Come here to the house.”

They stood with him, then, where the screens were drawn back in the house. Before them the garden lay like a path, and at the end of it the trees divided as if the winds had driven them apart to make a gate forever open to the sea.

It was autumn so quickly that I-wan could not believe it. But one morning when they rose Tama said, “There was frost last night.” When he went to work she came into the garden with him and it was true that the grass blades were edged with frost, and the moisture around the stones had frozen into silver sprays. When he came home in the late afternoon he found her again in the garden sweeping the first fallen leaves.

“Is it autumn?” he asked unbelievingly.

She nodded joyously. Her cheeks were red with her work in the sharp pure air, and she looked younger than ever — especially when suddenly she thought of something and looked indignant.

“The chrysanthemum heads are showing their colors,” she said. “Two of them are not the right color.”

These chrysanthemums they had planted together from pots they had bought from a vendor a month ago. There were six of them, which was as much as they could put into a corner of their garden. She took his hand and pulled him over to see.

“Those two — they are common yellow ones,” she said, “and we wanted all red and gold.”

“I suppose he had too many,” he said, smiling at her indignation.

“If I ever see him,” she said vigorously, “I shall make him pay us back.”

She began sweeping again as she spoke.

“I am sure you will,” he answered laughing. “Wait until I get a broom.”

He went into their small kitchen and found a broom and they were sweeping together, when suddenly she stopped and sat down to rest on the bamboo bench.

“Are you already tired?” he asked, and was surprised when she nodded her head. It was not like Tama ever to tire.

“Are you well?” he asked again.

“Very well,” she replied.

He kept on at his sweeping, looking up now and then to see her. Each time she was gazing out across the quiet evening ocean.

“What do you see?” he asked at last and went to her to see what she saw.

“I wish I knew your parents,” she said suddenly. “I wish I knew what your family is and how your home looks over there.” She pointed across the ocean.

He had not thought of his parents in months. After his marriage he had written to them and had sent them a picture of himself and Tama in their wedding garments, and his father had written back courteously. His mother never wrote letters but she had sent presents of silk and embroidered satins. Tama had admired them and kept them now put away with their precious scrolls and paintings which had been given them at their wedding.

Now he seemed suddenly to see, far across that water shining in the twilight, the great square house in which he had grown from a child. He could almost smell the odor of it, that odor which used to be waiting for him as he opened the door when he came home from school, compounded of his grandmother’s opium and the old smell of long hung curtains and deep dusty carpets and polished old woods. He breathed in this clean ocean air to cleanse that other from his memory.

“Why do you want to see them?” he asked her.

“Because,” she answered solemnly, “I am about to become truly one of your family.”

At first he could not understand what she meant.

“I mean,” she said, seeing this in his eyes, “that until now I have belonged only to you. I have been a part of you. But I am going to have a child. To us that means that I shall belong altogether to your family and no more to my own.”

He had thought sometimes in the night of this moment. They had never spoken of it. He had been shy of speaking of it, and she had seemed to think only of their life together.

He had wondered, “How will she tell me?” For he had thought a good deal about his own sons, and even whether or not he wanted any sons. Daughters mattered less. He could marry them to good young Japanese men. But if he had sons, would they not be Chinese? And how could he explain to them why they were not living in their own country? There were times when he was afraid of his own unborn sons. And now Tama, when she told him there would be a child, spoke first of his family. He had told her very little about them and nothing of why his father had sent him away. None of his past, it seemed to him, had anything to do with her.

Besides, he was never sure she would understand if he told her. She had been taught so great a terror of the word revolution that whenever he had thought of telling her about himself, and he longed to tell her everything, he was afraid to do it, even though he now perceived he had never been a true revolutionist, as En-lan had been.

For En-lan was one of those who are born to be in rebellion somewhere and anywhere. If it had not been in his own country, it would have been abroad. In revolution he found his only satisfaction and peace. He did not love the people for whom he fought. He only loved the fight. But I-wan had loved the people more than the fight, and he perceived this in himself, that in his heart he hated fighting. It was more true, he reasoned, to tell Tama nothing and let her see him only as he now was, because this was he more than that I-wan had been who had gone with En-lan. He had never even told her why he had not taken her to his home.

“Shall we go to your home now?” she asked. “I-wan, why are you silent? Don’t you want the child?”

She had taken alarm at his uncertain looks, and he made haste to assure her.

“Of course I want the child!” he exclaimed. “I have thought a hundred times of this moment. No, I shall not take you home.”

“Why not?” she persisted. “It would be suitable for me to meet my father-in-law and my mother-in-law.”

“I thought you were a moga!” he retorted, trying to make his voice gay. “I thought modern girls didn’t want to meet their mothers-in-law.”

“I am moga, I-wan,” she declared. It always made him want to smile to hear this favorite declaration of hers. But now he would not even smile lest she be hurt. He was learning that this little Japanese wife of his did not like him to laugh at her.

“But there are some things which are only right,” he finished for her.

“How did you guess my words?” she asked.

He might have answered, “Because I have heard you say them before.” But this also he had learned not to say. Instead he said, “It is what you think, isn’t it?”

“Yes, and especially now,” she replied very gravely. And after an instant’s pause she went on, “When a woman is to have a child, it is strange, but her moga feelings are quieted. She thinks instead of old ways and of how she can protect the child. She thinks of family.”

“My family cannot protect him, I think,” he said in a low voice.

“But I thought your father was rich?” she inquired. “And you said he was powerful.”

He ought, he felt, to tell her that even his father’s wealth and power were perhaps not enough to protect a child born of a Japanese woman. But he could not. The words would destroy something in this quiet secure home. They would stay in her mind and hide in her heart like a disease. She would not be able to forget them, and at last she would hold them even against him. No, he could not say, loving her as he did with his whole heart, “My people hate yours, Tama”—not when together they were to unite into this child.

“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.

Bunji was among the last. They saw him before he saw them. They saw him pause, as though he were bewildered, as he stepped upon the shore, and he did not hear I-wan’s shout. He started away and was about to go on with the others when I-wan ran after him and caught him by the shoulder, shouting to him, “Bunji, where are you going? We are here.”

Bunji turned, and I-wan saw instantly that the many months of being a soldier had changed him. It was not merely that I-wan had never seen him in uniform with his bowed legs in puttees. Bunji’s face was changed. It was no longer an open tranquil youthful face. It had hardened and his big mouth, which had only been laughing and somewhat shapeless before, now seemed coarsened and even cruel.

But he laughed when he saw I-wan, with something of his old laughter.

“I was about to keep on with those fellows I have been with so long,” he exclaimed.

“Your father is here, waiting,” I-wan said, “and you are to come to my home today for our son’s feast.”

“So!” Bunji exclaimed. He went with I-wan and met his father, bowed and laughed and shouted, “But I must bathe, I-wan, and dress myself. I haven’t had a good bath since I left home.”

“Everything is waiting for you,” Mr. Muraki said. He was very quiet, but his eyes never moved from his son. They all climbed into a waiting taxicab.

“And so you and Tama have a son,” Bunji said.

“As like my grandfather as a small photograph,” I-wan said. “You will laugh when you see him — though he is less like than at first. I confess, when I first saw my son, my impulse was to put a Chinese general’s uniform on him and hang a medal on his breast. I felt I owed it to him.”

Mr. Muraki smiled dimly and Bunji laughed as though he knew I-wan expected it. Then he said with sharpness, “A Japanese general’s uniform will one day be more suitable, I suppose.”

I-wan did not answer. He looked at Bunji, not knowing whether he meant to tease him or whether he was in earnest — to tease, he decided, after a moment.

Everything was the same about Bunji, I-wan thought, still not having answered him, except something completely changed within him. He talked, he laughed, he moved as he always did. But the old Bunji had seemed to be showing himself as he was. Now when he talked, he seemed to be thinking of something else. And even his laughter seemed only a surface stir as though beneath it there was gloom.

But nothing could be said of this now. I-wan went with them to the gate of Mr. Muraki’s house, and there they parted.

“We meet in less than an hour,” he said.

“At two o’clock,” Mr. Muraki agreed.

But Bunji said nothing. He seemed still thinking of something else.

In the midst of the crowded hotel room while the feast wore on, Bunji said very little, though he sat beside I-wan. The rite of feeding the child had taken place, and all had gone as it should. Everyone had admired the small boy, and especially when he sturdily refused to swallow the strange food thrust into his mouth and spat it out again upon his new silken robe and burst into a roar of weeping. He wore a boy’s coat for the first time, and his head had been freshly shaved, bald in a circle at the top, and then a fringe of straight soft black hair. Bunji, watching him, turned to I-wan.

“I would know he was not Japanese,” he said.

“Yes, that’s evident,” I-wan answered.

It was at this moment that he caught Bunji’s look, fixed on him with a strange and secret hostility. He was astonished, as though Bunji had drawn a dagger against him. But he could say nothing in this room full of murmuring and admiring people. He withdrew his eyes and moved a little away from Bunji and tried to imagine why Bunji should have changed to him.

Had something happened between Bunji and his own father in Shanghai? Yet so far as he knew they had never met. He had written to his father and given him the name of Bunji’s regiment and station. But his father had written to him that it was not safe to receive Japanese callers. There was a band of young men who had organized themselves for assassinations, and they had only recently killed another banker for seeming to be friendly with a Japanese captain. To Mr. Muraki he wrote regretting that an illness prevented him from returning the kindness shown to I-wan. But he hoped, in time to come, when mutual understanding increased — and Mr. Muraki had replied saying that between them, at least, now that they were united in their grandson, all was understood.

Tama had said, opening her eyes, “Why doesn’t your father like Bunji?”

And I-wan had hastened to say, “How can he dislike him when he has never seen him?”

“I don’t know,” she answered, staring at him thoughtfully, as she nursed the baby at her full young bosom.

“Neither do I,” I-wan said, and before she could speak again he had knelt beside her and put his arms about them both. “You make me completely happy,” he whispered. And she had taken up his hand and laid her cheek in its palm and forgotten what she had asked.

He could not talk to Bunji here or today — it was not suitable — but he would talk with him and know what Bunji meant. He gave himself determinedly to being the host, deferring to the elder guests, and especially to Mr. Muraki at the head of the table and to Madame Muraki. Everyone was gay and full of courtesy, and Tama had seen to the dishes and busied herself with directions to the hotel cook for each one, and to look at them all on this late summer afternoon it seemed that none of them had any thought beyond the pleasure of eating and drinking and looking at the baby, who slept peacefully in his nest upon the maidservant’s back.

“He sleeps like a Japanese, at least,” Bunji said once to I-wan.

“How — what do you mean?” I-wan paused to ask.

Bunji nodded at the child’s bobbing head.

“We can sleep anywhere, we Japanese, because we begin like that. We can sleep in noise and movement and any confusion. We can sleep even in the midst of cannon firing, if we are off duty for a few moments. It is the secret of our endurance in war.”

I-wan looked at the peaceful innocent face of his small son. His eyes were closed and his little mouth was pouted and rosy.

“He doesn’t look as though he were being trained for war,” he said, laughing.

But Bunji was sipping his wine gravely and he did not answer. And I-wan felt suddenly alone, as though he had been separated from everyone. He was conscious for the first time in the day that after all he was different from all of them, even indeed from his son.

He could not, he found, immediately ask Bunji what was changed in him. In the first place he was not sure, after a few days had passed, that Bunji was aware of change. Then also it was impossible to assume the old relationship until Mr. Muraki had made it clear who was to be the head in the office. I-wan had resigned from his own place, in order to make this decision easier, and yet he was, he felt foolishly, somewhat hurt when Mr. Muraki accepted it and placed Bunji over him, and gave him only the second place. Their salaries were so nearly the same, it is true, that I-wan could not complain of that. His was not decreased, but Bunji was given a little more.

And I-wan, again he felt foolishly, was the more hurt because at home Tama accepted this as a matter to be expected.

“Father is very kind not to give us any less now that Bunji has returned,” she said.

It was impossible for I-wan to tell her that it was difficult for him to take the lower place now and to have to ask Bunji if such and such were the right order to give and to see the clerks begin to go to Bunji instead of to him. But most difficult of all was still to perceive the change in Bunji himself. Where once he had been careless and easy to please, he was now become meticulous and careful of every detail of I-wan’s work. Once he rebuked I-wan sharply for not overseeing himself the packing of a consignment of cheap dishes to be shipped to a great New York department store. I-wan made himself smile. But he could not forbear saying, “You yourself have done worse, Bunji. I seem to remember Akio complaining of that.”

“The army has educated me,” Bunji retorted, and turned to his own office. He had wanted an office alone, and I-wan had been moved into another room with two clerks. It was not so easy to see Bunji as it had been.

But indeed this change in Bunji, manifest in many ways, became a great hurt to I-wan. His only resource was to go home more steadfastly as the months passed to find refuge in Tama and in their small son. In her bustling and busy care of them both he found his comfort. She had the genius of reality. By her warm matter-of-fact ways and her ready speech and quick response to his least need, she made him feel rooted and secure and able each morning to go out to his work. Through her he had union with life and people. Her people were his because she was his and made all that was hers his. She could so tell the story of the small happenings of the day while he had been gone that through her very telling he felt close to life and near to people, though in reality he knew almost no one.

And then there were all the things which the growing child did. He had been given the name of Jojiro, and they called him Jiro. He knew his name already, and Tama complained proudly that he was troublesome because he was wanting to creep too early and that meant he would want to walk before he was a year old and he must not, and it would take someone’s whole time to keep him from it, and he would cry when he was prevented because he was so willful he went into a rage if he were denied anything.

“That’s because you are a Chinese, Jiro,” I-wan told his son, who at that moment was sitting erect upon the mat, chewing at the large dog of papier-mâché which had been given him as the guardian of all his dreams while he slept.

“Is that what is wrong with him?” Tama cried, and then seeing what he was doing, she shrieked and snatched the dog away. “No Japanese child would eat up his guardian dog, at least!” she cried, while Jiro wept with all his might.

No, I-wan was never lonely in his home. For that matter, it was difficult to put a name to any moment when he was treated less well by anyone than he had been before. The people on the street were as courteous to him as ever. When he went into a shop to buy cigarettes for himself or a toy for Jiro, the shopkeeper was as eager as ever to please him. Why, then, did he feel that the courtesy was not quite what it had been? It was not the courtesy, he imagined, at least, which people gave to each other, but that which they gave to a guest. He was not sure whether even this was true, any more than he could be sure that it was quite true that Mr. Muraki was more withdrawn than he had been. Once he mentioned this to Tama, and she said robustly, “I-wan, you are always too ready to imagine. Father is growing old, that is all, and age cools him as it does everyone. He forgets me, too.”

He accepted this, and yet as time went on he still felt a change. He examined himself, then, to discover what it was he really felt, and decided that it was altogether Bunji who made the difference, and the only thing to cure it was to tell him so. For it was necessary to I-wan to feel about him the support of those who liked him and were faithful to him. He wished sometimes now that he had made other friends outside the Muraki family. But he had not, beyond a few men to whom he spoke a few words when he met them at a cafe or a theater. To them all, he knew, he was known as Mr. Muraki’s son-in-law. It now occurred to him that after Mr. Muraki died, if life went on as it was, he would be known merely as Bunji Muraki’s brother-in-law. It would not be pleasant unless Bunji went back to being his old self.

Then he put these thoughts aside and went doggedly on with his work. He had made his place here, and as the world was now, it would not be easy to do it again. He must bear with Bunji. And he learned to do this.

And when he came home and saw Jiro walking and heard him begin to talk and when Tama began to fret because now Jiro was past a year old and it was time she had another child, so that he laughed at her impatience to be about her business, then it seemed nothing was really too hard to bear in the daytime, if it brought him this at night.

Bunji, before he went to the army, was a youth who could drink scarcely a cup of wine without growing dizzy from it and wanting to sleep. But now he was able to drink a great deal and liked to do so. More than once he had come back to the office after his midday meal, his temples red, to shout out his commands and to laugh too loudly. On one of these days he thrust his head into I-wan’s room.

“There you are!” he roared. “Working like an old man! What has Tama done to you? You used to be a companion, but now you are nothing but Tama’s husband!”

Bunji bellowed out a laugh and the two clerks made themselves busy over their desks as if they saw and heard nothing.

“I am also Jiro’s father,” I-wan said, smiling a little, and looking up from his desk.

“A man is always someone’s father, sooner or later,” Bunji retorted. “Come, stop work, I-wan.”

“To do what?” I-wan inquired.

“Come out with me to a café,” Bunji said. “No more work — you may also stop work,” he declared to the two clerks. They rose instantly and bowed and remained standing. I-wan said nothing. He knew that as soon as Bunji went away they would return to work until five o’clock, which was the proper end to their day. But, it occurred to him, here might be his good chance to talk deeply with Bunji and to discover what had come to change him. He rose therefore and put on his hat.

“I will come,” he said. He nodded at the two clerks, who perfectly understood that he was humoring the son of the proprietor of the business, and then walked with Bunji out into the street.

It was autumn, and vendors were carrying on poles across their shoulders baskets of potted chrysanthemums of every size and color. Two years ago when he and Tama were first married they had bought them to plant in a corner of their garden, and now they had spread until this year they were a knot of color. Mr. Muraki looked at them and disapproved. He said, “There should be no temporary distraction of flowers in a garden.” But Tama wanted them and so they had been kept. At this moment I-wan saw a vendor carrying an especial flower which she loved, whose petals were red and gold together, and he stopped and said to the man, “Do you know the road which winds up the west side of the mountain from the city?”

The man nodded vehemently.

“Go up until on the right you see a small house roofed in green tiles which looks out between two great pines to the sea, and go in and tell the mistress her husband sent you.”

“How will she know I saw you?” the man asked shrewdly.

“Look at me,” I-wan replied. “Tell her how I look — and say also, if she doubts, that I am a Chinese.”

“So,” the man said wondering, “you are a Chinese! But you look much like us. I have never seen a Chinese before. But of course everyone has heard of them.”

He looked as though he were long of wind, and I-wan nodded to dismiss him and went on with Bunji.

“I suppose Tama is an obedient wife now and no longer a moga,” Bunji said, half sneering as he spoke. “I suppose she will buy the flowers like a good Japanese wife.”

“She won’t buy them if she doesn’t want them at his price,” I-wan said reasonably. Bunji was just drunk enough so he must not mind what he said.

“You Chinese!” Bunji said scornfully. “Hah, you Chinese!” He shook his head largely.

They were passing a small cafe now with a few outdoor tables and chairs, and he sat down heavily at a table and slapped the metal top so that it sounded like a tin drum. A thin-faced girl ran out.

“Beer!” Bunji shouted. “I suppose you can drink beer?” he inquired of I-wan.

“Certainly,” I-wan replied.

“Beer for one,” Bunji cried to the girl. “For me, whisky.”

“So—” the girl whispered.

“At once!”

She disappeared.

“I hate the English, so I drink their whisky,” Bunji explained when she was gone.

“You used not to drink much,” I-wan replied.

“Oh, so,” Bunji retorted, “yes, I used to be a very good boy, didn’t I? Well, now I am better. I know how to drink and I know other things also.”

The street was quiet in the afternoon sun, but it was a small street. Across it a woman bathing her child looked up curiously.

“Let us go inside,” I-wan suggested. “That woman is listening to you.”

“Women,” Bunji declared in a loud Voice, “are all fools.” He laughed senselessly, rose, stumbled, and would have fallen if I-wan had not caught him. They went into the little cafe and sat down in a corner and the girl came with bottles and cups. I-wan paid her and gave her an extra coin.

“Turn on the phonograph as long as it will last for that, and when it is used, come to me again and I will add another to it,” he said. In a moment the room was full of scraping noisy music, and no one could hear Bunji except I-wan. I-wan began to sip his beer and Bunji poured himself whisky and drank it by mouthfuls.

“Nevertheless, I am going to be married,” he announced to I-wan.

“Have you so decided?” I-wan inquired politely.

“Yes,” Bunji declared, “it is the only thing. Poor Akio!” he sighed and shook his head. “He never learned that all women are alike.”

I-wan did not answer and he hiccoughed once and repeated, “Women are alike, I say!”

“I don’t know women,” I-wan replied.

“It is not necessary to know women,” Bunji repeated. “I tell you, they are alike!”

I-wan did not reply to this. It was, after all, he thought, a waste of time to talk to Bunji drunk and growing more drunk.

“So,” Bunji went on, “I invite you to my wedding. Who is the bride? I don’t know, I don’t care. I told my father yesterday, ‘It is time I married. Please get me a wife.’ That is what I said, ‘Get me a wife.’ He said, ‘Who?’ I said, ‘Any woman, any at all. They are all alike.’”

Bunji glared at I-wan, poured his glass full of whisky, spilling it and drinking it together, as I-wan looked away. He had seen men in Japan drunk often enough, farmers along the roadside roaring their way home from the markets, half their day’s profits burning in their bellies and their brains, young men in restaurants and old men even. He had grown used to a sight he had never seen in his own country, where men drank while they ate, without drunkenness. Even though they drank more than men did here, they were not so easily disturbed by it. Perhaps their natures were in greater equilibrium.

Suddenly, to his surprise, he saw Bunji begin to sob. Bunji sat upright, his face working hideously and the tears rolling down his cheeks.

“I swear I didn’t want to do it,” he sobbed. “Why did I do it then?”

This he inquired of I-wan in a broken and piteous voice. I-wan was wholly bewildered, having an instant before seen him shouting and boisterous. “What did you do?” he asked.

“They were all doing it, you understand,” Bunji said. He leaned forward and put his head in his hands. “That is — all except the captain of my regiment. You understand, I was lieutenant. I kept my eyes on the captain. I said—”

He was fumbling for his glass, found it and swallowed a mouthful and coughed and shook his head and shuddered.

“Tell me, I-wan,” he whispered. “Have I drunk enough, do you think?”

“More than enough,” I-wan replied gravely.

“Ah, there you are wrong!” Bunji cried in triumph. “I drink until I see the tables begin to circle in the air. Then I know it is enough. But they are still in place. So — I must keep on.” He sighed, and drank again. “What was I telling you?” he asked abruptly.

“You said you kept your eyes on the captain,” I-wan re minded him.

“I did,” Bunji said eagerly. His thick lips were trembling constantly, and a twitch began to jerk his left eye. “The men, you see, I considered beneath me. After all, my father is a man of wealth. And influence. General Seki — is my friend. Through him — I was lieutenant. So I said, ‘I am not a common soldier.’ I was right, wasn’t I?” he demanded angrily of I-wan.

“Perfectly,” I-wan replied, not knowing what all this was about.

“So when the men did it, I said it had nothing to do with me. I said, ‘Their common nature compels them—’ wasn’t I right? So long as the captain didn’t, I didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?” I-wan asked.

“I tell you, don’t I?” Bunji retorted, “You are stupid, I-wan. That is because you are Chinese. All Chinese are stupid.”

I-wan felt his anger rise, and put it down again. Bunji was drunk.

“Stupid and cowards,” Bunji said loudly against the blare of the music. “We routed them as though we ran about in play. We gave them money to go away, and most of them went. The rest we routed. They all ran — you should have seen them run!” Bunji laughed, tears still wet on his cheeks. He shook his head and tried to pour whisky into his cup. But now he was not able to find it, and I-wan did not help him. He watched Bunji while he searched for the small white cup.

“Hah, at least I know where my mouth is!” he said, and stood up, and put the bottle to his lips. When he set it down, he was sobbing again.

“Still it was the captain’s fault. You see, I had seen the men at it night and day. I tell you, I-wan,”—he leaned toward I-wan, twitching and sobbing—“war twists a man too high. He needs everything strong — wine, much food, many women. He has to have everything heaped up. That is because of the noise of the cannon in his head all the time — and then, he may be dead in an hour — in a minute — no time for anything but the things he can snatch.” Bunji was in such earnest he seemed almost to have sobered himself with his earnestness. “At first I thought it was horrible — you know — the men snatching at women everywhere — young and old — I said to the captain, ‘Shall we allow this?’ He said, ‘We must — if we want them to fight tomorrow.’ You see, he was my superior officer. So what could I say? I looked away from the men and watched him only. I said, ‘So long as he does not—’”

He was beginning to shake again.

“So, I-wan, I ask you, why did he do it, too? I saw it, myself — he had them bring a woman into his tent. She was crying and fighting, but he went at her, not caring — I was crazy. I ran out into the street — I—the first woman I saw — a child — say twelve — though perhaps she was only ten — or perhaps fifteen — she might have been only small for her age — I dragged her into an alley.” He was shuddering and shaking and staring at I-wan as he talked. “All the time I knew I didn’t want to do it — but I had to go on — you see that? It was the captain’s fault, you see that, I-wan? Her fault, also. She screamed so. She screamed out that I was so ugly — monkey, she called me! I said, ‘Be quiet,’ and she kept on screaming and struggling. So I said, ‘Be quiet, or I will have to kill you.’ I warned her, you see. But she was not quiet. So — afterwards — I killed her.” He was weeping and weeping. “You see, I-wan? And only when she lay dead it occurred to me — she did not understand what I said — I spoke in Japanese — without thinking — I didn’t think in time — how could I not have thought of it? That is my fault in the matter, I-wan.”

He sprawled over the table, sobbing. A few people looked at him, and looked away again, and the curtain of noisy music kept them from hearing him.

I-wan sat perfectly still, dazed, sick, seeing everything that Bunji had told him.

This, then, was how they had behaved in China. His father had told him none of it. But then his father’s letters had been very few then, and such letters as had come had had more lines than ever blocked out by the Japanese censors. And the newspapers had said that the Emperor’s army had behaved with perfect order! He had believed it, he a Chinese! He despised himself. He rose.

“Come home, Bunji,” he said. And stooping, he put his arms about Bunji’s slack body and lifted him to his feet and helped him to the street. Then he called a ricksha, and putting Bunji, now sound asleep, into it, he walked at his side to the gate of Mr. Muraki’s house. The old gateman was there, and he told him, “See if you can get your young master to his room unseen.”

The old man nodded, and I-wan went on to his house.

A turmoil filled him. What had really happened in his own country? How much did he not know? What was the truth? He had been so absorbed in his own marriage that he had simply let it be that there was no war and so he could marry Tama. But he was a Chinese.

He mounted the steep rocky steps from the street to his home and Tama ran out to meet him, Jiro in her arms. She looked wonderfully fresh and pretty, her hair newly brushed, and her skin like the cheek of an apricot.

“We are just bathed, Jiro and I,” she announced, “and we have on new kimonos — that is, Jiro’s is all new and mine has new sleeves — and I bought such beautiful chrysanthemums — the man said you had sent him, and I said, ‘What is the token?’ He said, ‘A Chinese gentleman,’ and I said, ‘I am not married to all the Chinese gentlemen in Nagasaki,’ and he said, ‘Ah, he told me to look at him, and I saw a small mole by the hair of his left temple,’ and I said, ‘Right!’”

She laughed and Jiro laughed and I-wan smiled.

“You are tired!” she exclaimed.

“Very tired,” he admitted. No, he would not tell Tama what Bunji had said. It was not for her to hear. It was a Bunji she did not know and could not know. Besides, it was all not clear to him yet.

“Sit down,” Tama begged him.

He sat down and she drew off his leather shoes and then his socks and rubbed his feet with her smooth strong hands. There was ease and rest in her very touch.

“Now your coat, and here is a kimono, and your bath is ready,” she murmured. “And I will see to everything and you are only to rest. Jiro will be so good and so quiet and not trouble you.”

Jiro, sitting on the floor, was staring at all this with large eyes.

He let her do everything, seizing the excuse of his weariness to say nothing, to do nothing, except to think and think of what Bunji had told him. Routed armies, bombs, raped women — he had heard nothing of these. Had there been no punishment, no reprisals? He longed with sudden impatience to go home and see for himself what the truth had been. He remembered fragments of old hatreds — people on the streets spitting at Japanese and calling them dwarfs and monkeys, the demands of Japanese officials in the northern provinces, En-lan saying over and over, “And when the revolution is over we must fight the Japanese.” But the revolution had never come and he had put away with it everything else that had never come to pass.

He could, he thought at last, soothed in the hot water of the deep wooden bath, go home alone even for a few days and find out. He had more than half a mind to do it. He rose and wiped himself, his flesh soft and warm, and even the tension of his mind relaxed. It would be easy enough to go home. He ought to go and see.

At the supper table while Tama leaned over him to fill his bowl, he looked up at her.

“I think I must go home for a little while,” he said.

She put down the bowl.

“We will go, too,” she cried joyfully. “Jiro and I, we will see your home.”

He shook his head. “No, only I,” he said. “It might not be safe for you.”

“But why?” she asked, wondering at him. She had Jiro on her knee now and was feeding him with her chopsticks.

“There was fighting at Shanghai, you know, not many months ago,” he said carefully. “I am not sure of the temper of the people toward Japan.”

“Oh, but the Chinese people like us,” she declared eagerly. “I do assure you, I-wan, I see it in all the papers that the common people run out to welcome our soldiers. They have been so oppressed by their own officials and armies, the papers say. I read the papers every day, you know, I-wan — more than you do.”

He could not deny this. She read a great deal so that, she said, she would have something to talk about with him when he came home, “so I won’t be only a stupid old-fashioned Japanese wife,” she said.

“Nevertheless, you cannot go,” he said firmly. He did not often so command her. She looked at him across the table. Then, Jiro still in her arms, she rose and came over to him and put Jiro on his lap.

“Jiro,” she said, “tell your father what I told you today.”

Jiro, struck with shyness, looked from one face to the other.

“Say, ‘My mother says in the spring, if the gods permit’—only I know there are no gods, of course, I-wan, but I like to say it at such times—‘in the spring I am to have a little brother.’”

“Tama!” he cried.

She nodded. “Yes, and yes, and you mustn’t leave us now, I-wan. If something should happen — and I have such a superstition, I-wan. I know it is silly — but I look at the ocean so much and I feel it must never come between us. It wants to come between us, I-wan. I feel it — and if you leave me now, I shall be afraid that it will spoil the child. He will sicken in me and die.”

He looked at her uncertainly.

“Wait until we can all go together,” she begged him. “Not you alone — never without us!”

She seized his arm and clung to it and Jiro began to cry with fright.

“Hush, Jiro,” he said, and he put his other arm around Tama. After all, why should he go? What could he do, anyway, if he found out the truth. What had happened had happened. Tama was crying now, too, against his shoulder.

“Hush, you two,” he scolded them. “Was ever a man so beset by his family?” He put his arms around them both and locked his hands together behind them and rocked them back and forth gently.

“There,” he soothed them, “stop your tears. I am not going. Tama, be quiet. You are terrifying the child.”

She sobbed more softly and more softly until she was quiet, and then Jiro was quiet, too. And I-wan sat rocking them gently to and fro. This was his world, here in his arms.

And the next day Bunji remembered nothing, or, at most, nothing except a fear that he had said more than he should. He came in late, looking pale and tired, but trying to be jaunty in his old way. I-wan saw him pass his door, but he had no wish to speak first and he let him pass. Then at noon when the clerks were away eating their meal, Bunji came and stood in the door and said to I-wan with a sort of coaxing, half frank, half ashamed, “I was drunk yesterday, wasn’t I?”

“You were,” I-wan replied, looking up.

“I talked a great deal — what did I talk about?”

He saw that Bunji did not remember, and he was at once relieved of the burden of such confidence between them.

“You said you were going to be married,” he replied.

“Is that all?” Bunji said. “So I am. I am going to be married in the old way, I-wan. I shall look at many pictures of young women of suitable age and family, put my finger on one, and tell my father, ‘That one!’”

He laughed and I-wan smiled and said nothing.

“I will announce the wedding day,” Bunji declared. “It will be soon. I can’t have your son too far ahead of mine.”

“Sons,” I-wan corrected him.

“What — another!” Bunji cried.

I-wan nodded.

“Good Tama!” Bunji exclaimed. “Hah, the mogas still do very well, don’t they?”

“Excellently,” I-wan replied.

“A boy, eh?” Bunji asked.

“Tama says so,” I-wan answered. “She thinks she knows.”

“Then she knows,” Bunji rejoined. “At least, the child itself will have to prove her wrong before she will believe it. Well, I shall choose a milder woman.”

“I am well suited,” I-wan answered.

Bunji nodded, and went away.

I-wan sat thinking a moment longer. He was greatly relieved that Bunji did not know what he had told. He had seen behind a curtain drawn for a moment from Bunji’s memory. He knew that if Bunji had been conscious he would never have drawn that curtain. But he would never tell Bunji what he had done. Yet nothing could ever be quite the same again, now that he knew. He was different today from what he had been. He had, for instance, wanted daughters, but now since yesterday he wanted only sons. Tama had said to him this morning, “I feel the child in me is a boy. We will hang two paper carp over the house at the Festival of Sons when this one comes!”

“Good!” he had said.

Sons would follow their father some day, but daughters must be left behind.

The birth of Ganjiro, his second son, the Festival of Sons, and the earthquake, were all one confusion forever after in his mind. They happened together in the middle of the next spring after Bunji’s wedding, that strange wedding, which took place so quickly and informally in the Japanese fashion to which I-wan could never become accustomed. It was simply one of the differences between his own country and this, that in one a marriage ceremony lasted for days, and here it was soon finished. Bunji himself behaved as though it were nothing, and the little Setsu Hajima whom he married looked like millions of other little Japanese women behind her bravely painted face. And once married Bunji never mentioned her. In a few days it seemed as though she had always been in the Muraki house. One forgot that she had not always been there, and now that she was come one forgot that she was there.

And then, less than a month later, Ganjiro was born. He had been born in the middle of the day, in the most easy and tranquil fashion, without I-wan’s knowing anything about it. He had bade Tama and Jiro good-by on a morning late in April, when the last of the cherry blossom petals were floating down in the garden. The streets were wet with a sudden rain, and the sky was as he loved it best, clear blue behind huge soft white clouds billowing up from the ocean. The trees and leaves were green in every garden, and people on the street looked happy and content in the mild damp air. There was a deep sweetness in this life of the people and he felt it and valued it. Human beings liked each other and showed it in their courtesies. It occurred to I-wan as he walked along in April sunshine that in these streets he had never seen an old face unhappy or a child angry because he was beaten. He loved these people willingly and unwillingly, too. He grew nearer them, and yet more alone.

Bunji, since he had married Setsu, was nearer and yet further away than he had been. He had immediately given up his drinking, although on his wedding day he had been very drunk. But none ever saw him drunk now. And certainly he played the lordly husband over stocky plain Setsu, who did not so much as sit in his presence. In these days Bunji was given to loud opinions on foreign policy, especially the policy of Japan in China, where he insisted the communists were again seizing the control. I-wan had listened to a great deal of this the night before, when he and Tama had dined at Bunji’s new house.

“Sooner or later we shall have to put them down,” Bunji had declared.

Well, he had learned not to answer Bunji. It was no use. Besides, he did not believe what he said. Men like his own banker father owned China and they hated the communists. And had not the Japanese papers reported again and again the rout of Chinese communists by their own government? Bunji was growing middle-aged with prejudices. He dismissed such things from his mind and entered his office as usual. He had hoped, at the new year, for an advancement, at least in his salary, but there had been none. Mr. Muraki explained at the annual new year’s feast for his employees that there could be no increase in salary this year because of an unexpected and heavy rise in taxes, in order to strengthen the Emperor’s army defenses by sea and land. He had only to say “The Emperor,” and all was accepted — that is, by everyone except I-wan. He felt no loyalty to this sacred emperor, and it was not in him any more to worship anything.

He sighed a little as he sat down. When the second child came, Tama would have to twist her wits to make the money stretch over him, too. His own father had not sent him any money for a long time, and he did not like to ask unless he were in need. Why, he wondered, did the Emperor want more defenses now that Japan definitely possessed Manchuria? The military party, probably, growing in power — but he cared nothing for Japanese politics, or indeed any politics since the League of Nations had let Japan do as she liked. Politics he had put behind him as a waste even to think about.

He had worked nearly the morning through on classifying the inventory of goods held still unsold, when the maidservant who had come running in to call him to Jiro’s birth now appeared, serene and demure, having stopped to brush her hair and put on a fresh kimono and clean white cotton socks.

“Well, what is it?” he said, looking up at her, surprised.

“Honorable, I am to tell you Ganjiro’s come.”

“What do you say?” He leaped up and seized his hat.

“He is here, very fat and so healthy,” she beamed on him. It was lucky to be the bearer of such good news. The two clerks were bowing and hissing softly through their teeth with pleasure.

“Just before the Festival of Sons!” the maid said, laughing.

He went off at once, stopping only to put his head in at Bunji’s door and say, “My second son is come and I am going home.” He took pride in saying it coolly as though every day he had a son. “What?” Bunji roared. But he went on, only nodding to affirm it.

He did not let himself hurry along the street, and he listened to the maid’s chatter as she clacked along behind him. “It was as sudden as today’s sun and rain. One moment Oku-san was as well as you are, sir. The next, she said, ‘I feel changed — it’s beginning.’ I ran for the midwife, and soon as she came the child arrived, sound and so handsome. And Oku-san said, ‘If this is all the trouble of having a son, I can do it any time.’” She laughed heartily at her mistress and was very proud of her.

And indeed there was nothing unusual in the house. The smell of the food which Tama had been cooking before she lay down was fragrant, and he was hungry when he smelled it.

“I’ll have your dinner when you want it, sir,” the servant said, and knelt to take off his shoes.

“In half an hour,” he replied.

Behind screens he found Tama on her bed holding Ganjiro in her arms and Jiro, now able to run, much astonished beside her. I-wan could not believe she had done with the birth. She was not even pale. She lay on the soft mattress spread on the mats and looked up at him mischievously as though it had all been a trick. In a corner of the darkened enclosure the midwife was hastily putting away something.

“Tama!” he whispered.

“Here we all are,” she answered. “It is a boy, as I said.”

“So!” he answered. He scarcely knew what to say. Jiro’s birth had been a tremendous event. But this boy had come tranquilly into the world. At this rate, he thought, in a few years the house would be full.

“I wanted it all over before the Festival of Sons,” Tama said proudly.

“So you arranged it,” he replied.

And she laughed.

“Go on and have your dinner — it is carp, too, today. That’s another lucky omen.”

“Shall I not stay home this afternoon?” he inquired.

“What would I do with you?” she asked. “I shall sleep and Jiro will play in the garden with the maid. That is all.”

So he had eaten his excellent dinner and gone back to work. Tama was one of those fortunate women, he thought, who breathe out health with every act. Nothing was too hard for her to do. And with all else she found time, too, to be free of everything when he came home. Long ago he had ceased to wonder at anything she knew. He expected her to know everything. He had come to take for granted that his house was always neat and the flowers fresh every day, and the food delicately prepared and Jiro’s face always clean and happy. Whatever came, he could never be sorry he had married Tama. If sometimes he felt himself yearning beyond her for some sort of spiritual stir which had nothing to do with her, he put his discontent away. He wanted nothing to do with dreams if Tama were the reality.

On the Festival of Sons they went nowhere, since Tama’s days of uncleanness after birth were not yet over. Ganjiro was less than a month old. But she made great preparation for the day. Over the house that morning he had helped her to raise the two paper carps, which were the symbol of the day, a big black and white one with gold eyes for Jiro and a small red one for Ganjiro.

It was a fair day on the fifth day of the fifth month of the sun year, and Jiro was shouting as the wind blew the carp. There was an extraordinary wind blowing in from the sea that day. Tama had taken Jiro up in her arms, and then I-wan took him, saying, “He is too heavy for you yet, Tama.”

“Hold him up, then, so he can see,” she had replied. They had stood looking at the carp, the wind tearing at their garments.

“A home with sons,” Tama said proudly.

He did not answer her. It occurred to him at this moment that his sons were growing up with festivals he had never known as a child. Tama loved festivals and made the most of every one. He remembered his own joy over the new year and over the Dragon Festival and the Festival of Spring — all days Jiro and the little one would never know. After all it was the woman who shaped the life of the house.

“So, Jiro,” Tama was saying to the child, “remember, the carp means boy — because it swims upstream against the current, in the cold mountain streams.”

It was at that moment he saw, or imagined he saw the pole from which the carp flew, sway. At the same instant the wind, which had all morning been growing higher, fell utterly quiet. He and Tama with one movement looked out to sea. It looked strange and dark and swollen. There was a low deep roar, whether from the sea or from inside the earth they could not tell.

“Tama!” he cried, frightened.

“Earthquake,” she said. Her voice was small and quiet and her face went white.

He had learned to take tremors of the earth as nothing, an earthquake as a matter of constant possibility, and yet he had never seen a great one. Sometimes in the night he and Tama had awakened to feel a shudder beneath their mattress and dust falling on their faces from the ceiling, and to hear the crack of beams and wood. Tama always got up and dressed and waited in watchful silence. He knew that all over the city in every house people waited like that, helpless and yet prepared. But each time the earth had subsided. Today, though, there had been this fierce wind.

Now she ran toward the house, but the maid was already running out with Ganjiro in her arms. From the house behind her came sudden creaks and then loud cracks. There was no doubt that the pole bearing the carp was now swaying with something that was not wind.

The maid, without a word, thrust the baby into his arms also and ran back into the house. Tama came out with the drawers and boxes into which their clothing was folded, and in a moment the maidservant followed, her arms full.

“Where shall I put these children?” I-wan gasped. “I must help.”

“Please — stay with them,” Tama replied, quietly.

He wondered at these two women, they were both so quiet. It was as though they had rehearsed many times the thing which they now did. Back and forth they went until in a very few minutes in the open space about them were all their chief possessions. There were not many. Their most precious things, the best of their scrolls, some fine pottery Mr. Muraki had given them, jewelry that I-wan had given Tama when they were married, the silks his mother had sent, she had put into a warehouse in the city, built for safety in earthquakes.

“Where shall we go?” he asked her when at last she stood beside him and reached for the baby.

“Where can we go?” she asked simply. “There is no escape when the earth heaves.”

They stood, waiting, their faces to the sea. He held Jiro hard. But Jiro was not crying. He, too, was looking at the swollen ocean. And then Tama gave one moan of horror and put her hand to her mouth. The sea was gathering near the horizon into one great wave, no, not so much a wave, as a tide, a great bank of water, stretching across the surface of the ocean. There was no crest upon the wave. It was simply there, immense and dark, lifting against the sky.

“It can’t reach us,” Tama whispered.

“It will cover the lower city,” he answered, and felt his gorge rise in him to make him sick. But he could not turn his head away. On it came, seeming motionless and as though it were simply swelling more huge. But in reality it was rolling toward the shore at greatest speed, gathering the waters with it as it came. Far below them they could see people running out of their houses and climbing the hills everywhere — away from the sea.

“It always comes quickly,” Tama said.

He had never seen her like this — so still. He did not know whether or not she was afraid. He wanted to run, to escape somehow, but she held him there.

Then the wave struck. There was still no crest until the instant when it crashed with such a roar as shook the whole island. Then it broke and surged in a mass of foam. Houses and streets disappeared. The whole sea seemed to have rushed in.

“This may sweep as far as my father’s house,” Tama said in a low voice.

They watched. And more horrible than the onward rush was this next thing, this outward backward moving of the same tide, which seemed to suck out to sea in its enormous flood houses, people, trees, everything it could reach. The whole island indeed seemed to be moving out to sea.

I-wan groaned and buried his face in Jiro’s shoulder. And at that instant the earth shook under his feet. He heard rocks crashing down the hillside and he put out his arm for Tama. Even at this moment her body was firm and strong.

“Our rock will not move,” she said. “That is only loose rock. And there are the fields above us — not rocks.”

It was true. Above them lay a valley running almost to the top of the mountain and because a small stream ran through it, it had been terraced for rice fields on both sides.

He felt once more the sickening unsteadiness of the earth swaying beneath him.

“The wave is coming again,” Tama said, “but it will not be so great.”

He heard it strike, this time a lesser roar, but he did not look up. Jiro clung to him, his arms about his father’s head. Still he did not cry, and the small child was sleeping. I-wan remembered how Bunji had spoken of Japanese sleep, how nothing waked them, used as they were to noise and movement in babyhood, upon their mothers’ backs.

There was a soft slithering sound, a loud cracking of falling wood, and the sound of tearing paper. He looked up. With surprisingly little noise and less dust the house had fallen into a heap.

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.

“Your brother is coming?” Bunji asked.

“How did you know?” I-wan asked surprised.

“My father wishes to send a present to your father, if your brother will be so kind,” Bunji replied obliquely.

“How did Mr. Muraki know?” I-wan asked.

“He received the cablegram, of course,” Bunji said calmly. “It was sent to the house and he read it.”

“Why?” I-wan asked.

“To know whether it was important, of course,” Bunji answered as if surprised.

I-wan was about to retort, “But it was my cablegram!” but this would be rude toward Mr. Muraki, who perhaps had no sense of wrong done. So instead he said, “Please thank Mr. Muraki.”

Did he imagine Bunji was watching him strangely?

“I suppose it is necessary for you to go,” he continued.

“Certainly I feel it is,” I-wan replied firmly.

He had been half thinking as he stood there that he might take Tama and the boys to show them off to one of his own family. Now, going out of Bunji’s office, he decided against it. He had better meet I-ko alone.

He stood craning his head to watch as the ship came into the harbor with the smooth slow grace of a great swan. He did not run instantly to the gangway. He suddenly felt very shy of I-ko. They had never been close. I-ko was too much older. And I-wan remembered still that Peony had hated him for things of which she would never speak. That hatred had long made I-wan feel that I-ko was mysteriously evil, so he could not love him, even yet. And now there were these years in Germany. Who knew what they had done to him? Still, he was excited, too, at the thought of seeing his brother. For the first time he felt he had been a long time away from home. While the ship docked he stared at the row of people along the ship’s rail, recognizing no one.

Then he saw I-ko coming down the gangplank. He could not believe this upright cleanly-cut figure was that I-ko who had gone away, the slender slouching young man with thin peevish lips, who could pout like a child when he was denied and even weep to get his own way. What had Germany done to I-ko? He saw I-wan and shouted, and now I-wan saw a straight upright man, a head higher than the swarming Japanese about him, a hard-looking man with a firm mouth and haughty eyes and a foreign bearing. Behind him was a white woman dressed in some sort of shining green silk, her arms bare to the shoulder, but I-wan did not look at her. There were other men and women coming down the gangway.

He went up to I-ko shyly and put out his hand.

“I-ko,” he said.

“I-wan!” I-ko cried, and then he seized the arm of the white woman behind him. “Frieda,” he said to her, in German, “here is my brother.”

This I-wan heard. He remembered a little of the German he had learned long ago from the tutor his grandfather had hired for him. But who this woman was he did not understand. He looked at her and at once hated her. She was young but already too fat and her cheeks were too red. Her eyes were a hard bright blue above these red cheeks, and her hair under a green hat was yellow. She put out a hand covered in a yellow leather glove.

“Ach, it is so wonderful to see you!” she cried in a loud voice. I-wan felt her seize his hand in a sharp upward German clasp, and then to his horror he saw her lean forward and upon his cheek he felt her painted lips. “Brother I-wan!” she said and giggled.

“This is my wife, I-wan,” I-ko said haughtily. “Her name is Frieda von Reichausen, and her father is a German military officer of high standing.”

His voice, his eyes fixed upon I-wan, were daring I-wan to say anything. There was nothing to be said, I-wan thought. If they were married, what could be said? He merely bowed, therefore. But within himself questions were whirling. Did their father know? What would their mother say? How could this stout, hard young woman fit into their family? Why had I-ko done this? And then he remembered Tama, whom all these years he had not wanted to take home. If he should ever say a word of disapproval to I-ko, would not I-ko say at once that at least he had not married a Japanese? And yet Tama — he knew by instinct that this woman was not fit to stand beside Tama!

“We are only bride and groom,” she was saying. “Everything is so wonderful!” And again she giggled, her eyes arch upon him.

He thought, “I must not look at I-ko. She is so silly he will be ashamed of her before me.”

Something, he felt, must be said quickly to help I-ko. They were standing on the dock waiting awkwardly for nothing, and people swept against them as they hurried to and fro. And yet what could he say? He was still dazed. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face and secretly rubbed his cheek, lest her red lips had left a stain on him.

“I-ko,” he said at last, “I scarcely knew you.” He spoke in Chinese and his tongue felt stiff and strange. Not for years had he spoken his own language. And now he was glad to speak it because it shut out this foreign woman.

I-ko looked pleased.

“No, I am changed,” he replied. “In fact am I not improved?”

“You look — much older,” I-wan said diffidently.

“Oh, I am a man now,” I-ko replied, smiling slightly. “I am very grateful to my father. I hated Germany for the first year and then liked it. I-wan, where can we talk? I have much to say — and the ship’s stay is very short. They are staying one hour instead of four.”

“But can’t you wait over a few days and take another ship?” I-wan asked politely. What would he do if I-ko accepted — with her!

I-ko shook his head. “There is no time,” he answered. “It is imperative that I get home. Where can we go?”

“I suppose we could go to that little restaurant,” I-wan said, doubtfully. A small restaurant was near the dock and it had a few outdoor tables. I-ko nodded his head vigorously.

“Yes, that will do,” he decided. “Come, Frieda!” he called in German. He strode across the street ahead of I-wan, his shoulders set square, and when they sat down he beckoned imperiously for a waiter. Behind them she came. They sat down and I-wan at once felt the stare of people — a white woman with two Chinese men! But I-ko seemed not to notice.

“Beer,” I-ko said to the waiter, and scarcely waiting a moment, he leaned toward I-wan.

“I-wan,” he said, “you cannot stay here. You must come home at once.” He spoke in Chinese and he paid no heed to his wife. But she seemed used to this and while they talked she sat looking about her with hard and curious eyes. If she cared that other people wondered at her she made no sign of it.

“But — but—,” I-wan stammered, meeting I-ko’s look. He drew back a little. I-ko’s face was almost menacing. “I — it is impossible — my family—”

“Can it be you, too, don’t know?” I-ko exclaimed.

“Know what?” I-wan asked. The old premonition had him by the throat and his mouth went suddenly dry.

“Haven’t you heard?” I-ko cried.

“I haven’t heard anything,” I-wan faltered.

“The Japanese are going to take Peking!” I-ko whispered.

“Peking!” I-wan repeated stupidly.

“Has there been nothing told even about that?” I-ko exclaimed. Around them Japanese were sitting at the small tables, talking and laughing, and drinking tea and wine. Above them the sky was blue, without a cloud. There were women in bright kimonos, and at one side sat a little group of Americans, having tea with an officer from the ship. And beside them the German woman sat, her plump elbows on the table. She had already drunk her beer, and now she sat eating small cakes.

“It was just troop movements, they said,” I-wan replied, looking away from her. No, but perhaps he had missed something. He did not always read the papers these days. He dreaded them. And Tama never spoke of such things. No, rather it was as if together they did not speak of them. But he could not tell I-ko this.

But I-ko was hurrying on. “Father foresaw everything weeks ago and cabled me. The Generalissimo wants me to come home. The army is being reorganized on a huge scale. There will be war! We will resist to the end. At last it has been decided!”

I-wan could scarcely comprehend what I-ko was saying in his low hurried whispering Chinese.

“But — no one knows — anything here,” he stammered. He felt as though his breath had been driven out of him. “There hasn’t been much in the papers — people are just going on — some mention of a little difficulty, but not—”

“These people!” I-ko said contemptuously. “The ones at the top don’t tell them anything. I tell you, I-wan, mobilization has begun. It’s going to be the greatest war of our history. I-wan, come home with me!”

“Now?” I-wan cried.

“Now!” I-ko said strongly. “I have money for your passage. We can get your ticket on the ship, if need be. Father told me—”

“But my family—” I-wan began.

“There are no claims on you now but this one,” I-ko insisted. “You have no obligations to any Japanese except to hate them forever!” I-ko’s teeth shone in a dramatic snarl, as white as a fox’s teeth. Even at this moment, while they stared at each other, I-wan could stop to remember that I-ko loved to be dramatic, and this made him the more cautious.

… Tama, I-wan was saying to himself, Tama was a Japanese and he loved her. She seemed more than ever gentle and faithful and good, now that I-ko had — had married such a one as this. He could not leave Tama. He would have to think what to do.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “I can’t see why — why should there be war? We aren’t enemies—”

“We are enemies!” I-ko answered firmly. “Where have you been, I-wan, not to know that this war has been hurrying upon us for months — years? Have you heard of the outrage at Lukow-chiao?”

“The papers said it would be amicably settled,” I-wan said.

“Settled! By the loss of Peking?” I-ko asked passionately.

“I tell you, they — they didn’t say it was like that,” I-wan stammered.

“Has your marriage made you Japanese, too?” I-ko demanded.

“No — no—” I-wan said quickly. “No — only it is so quick — I haven’t known — I have had no letters from home.” Why did he not retort, “Are you German?” But he did not want to hear I-ko say, “At least my wife is not a Japanese!”

“How do you know?” I-ko interrupted him. “Letters don’t get through here unread. I am sure Father did tell you and you never had the letters. He cabled me that he couldn’t understand why you wrote as you did, and that I was to stop and see what was wrong.”

“Mr. Muraki told me he had heard my father was taking a journey into Szechuan to see about organizing a branch bank!” I-wan exclaimed. “So I thought the letters were delayed.”

“There is not one Japanese you can trust!” I-ko declared. “Come, I-wan!”

They talked far longer than they knew, with long silences between.

Whenever they fell silent the German woman asked a question about something she saw. Once she exclaimed, “Ach, so — see the funny little people — they are so little, the Japs, are they not?”

Whatever she said it was I-ko who answered her and not I-wan. He scarcely heard her. He sat thinking and trying to realize what I-ko had told him had happened. The afternoon deepened and the sun was half-way to the sea. The hour was gone. The German woman was yawning. They rose, and she sauntered ahead of them to the ship.

The Americans were getting up now, too. Their clear, sharp voices carried across the tables as they talked to each other, oblivious to everyone else. Two of them were going with the officer, and the others were staying. A pretty girl cried, “Be careful, you two, in Shanghai! Red, take your hat off, when the air raids begin, so they can see your flaming top and know you’re not a Chinaman!”

A red-haired young man laughed.

“So long, Mollie! Sorry you aren’t coming, but I guess it’s no place for girls just now.”

The ship’s whistle roared in warning.

“Do you hear them?” I-ko demanded. “Everybody knows, I tell you, except these stupid common people in Japan. I-wan, hundreds of people have been killed — and it will only grow worse. Our whole country has to wake up — we have to fight as we’ve never fought!”

They were walking now to the ship. I-ko stopped.

“Will you come?” he demanded.

“I can’t,” I-wan said. “Not now — not like this—”

“Why not?”

“I can’t just — leave them — Mr. and Mrs. Muraki — they have been good to me—”

“They’re Japanese,” I-ko reminded him in a whisper.

“They’ve been good to me,” I-wan repeated.

“Then I tell you this,” I-ko retorted. “As your elder brother speaking for our father, you are to come as soon as you can. That means days, I-wan — not weeks. And hours are better than days, I tell you.”

The crew was busy on the decks. The passengers were mounting the gangplank.

“Hours,” I-ko repeated. “Of all countries, you cannot stay in Japan. It’s — indecent!” He put a hand hard on I-wan’s shoulder and shook it a little. “Good-by, then — for a few days only. Meanwhile, I will write you at once the truth about all I see.”

I-wan did not answer. He stood watching while the ship began to edge away from the shore. From the deck he saw I-ko’s wife wave her yellow-gloved hand. He took off his hat and bowed. The ship moved, turned south, and then west … He had asked I-ko nothing, and I-ko had told him nothing. They were further apart than ever.

He returned to his home by train that same night. When he entered the house in the morning Tama came to meet him with soft welcoming cries and they walked together along the garden path. He thought with fresh disgust today of I-ko’s wife. And yet it came to him how Japanese Tama looked. In the old days of her girlhood he had not thought of her as looking very Japanese in her school clothes and her leather shoes. She seemed then only a young girl.

“You wear kimono and geta now all the time,” he said abruptly.

She gave him a laugh soft with apology.

“Do you mind? They are so comfortable!”

He could not say he minded, since until now he had not noticed. Certainly the bright orange-flowered kimono was very becoming to her apricot skin and dark eyes. At the door she dropped to her knees as though she were his serving maid and untied his shoes and took them off and then slipped over his feet the loose cloth house slippers always ready. He had protested often at this service until she had persuaded him that it was a way of expressing her love for him.

“I do it for no one else,” she insisted.

So he had grown used to it, and indeed there had come to be a sweet intimacy in the sight of her dark head bent before him. Today he thought, “But no other woman would ever do it.”

At that moment Jiro came running to meet him. “Where is Ganjiro?” he asked him, for the two were always together.

“Asleep,” Jiro replied.

Tama had continued to make Jiro wholly Japanese in his dress and looks, and even in the way she brushed his hair. I-wan said abruptly, “Jiro’s feet are beginning to turn in from wearing geta. Get him some leather shoes, Tama.”

“Before he goes to school?” she looked up in surprise. “But they are so expensive.”

“I don’t care,” he returned. “Get them.”

She did not answer, but he could see in the way she hushed Jiro’s exclamations of joy that she did not approve of this. And then he caught sight of the maid crossing the room toward the kitchen with Ganjiro asleep on her back. And he, knowing Tama would think him only more unreasonable, went on.

“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?”

“But how can a maid know if anything is wrong with him?” she had exclaimed.

And it was true that through her blood she seemed able to feel the slightest change in the child, so that if he were to fall ill, she knew it days before, and tended him.

He forced himself to lie still, though every muscle longed to twitch and move. But her quiet compelled him to control, since in its completeness the slightest noise or movement was magnified. And at last he seemed to feel something emanate from her still body into his, as though only through quiet could he perceive her. His restlessness subsided and he lay more easily. And after a while over his mind sleep crept like a comforting warmth. The stir in his brain drowsed until only the unsleeping inner centers were awake, and then his thoughts moved in the deep slow circles of the body.

Why should he upset his life again? He had built it carefully, alone. Alone he had been cast out of his country and alone he had found Tama and with her built his home. His whole being clung tenaciously to this which he had made for himself. Whatever happened elsewhere, this must be kept. No one must take everything away from him again!

He put out his hand and touched Tama’s face.

“Tama!” he whispered. He wanted to hear her voice.

She woke instantly, as she always did, awake and alert.

“Yes — what is it?” she asked quickly.

“Nothing — only speak to me,” he begged her. “I have been lying awake too long, thinking.”

She reached out her arms and put them about him.

“Don’t think so much!” she begged him.

“No, I don’t want to think any more,” he answered.

They clung to each other in silence. And he, putting away thought, murmured into the sweet stifling warmth of her bosom. Whatever happened outside of this had nothing to do with him.

So peace returned. It was a month of unusual coolness and much sunshine, and each day, as soon as I-wan came home from his work, Tama and the maidservant met him at the foot of the hill with the children and they mounted a bus and went to a beach, or if it were a near one, they took rickshas and rode, and when they had played in the sea until they were tired, then they bought their supper at a small restaurant or from a passing vendor, and ate. Ganjiro lay in a hollow in the warm sand when he grew sleepy, and the maidservant watched over him. And if I-wan saw sometimes that on the way home in the darkness she still carried him on her back, he said nothing, because he knew she hoped never to do it in his sight, and this meant that Tama was trying to have no quarrel, and so he tried too, by silence at least.

Very often, more often than ever before, they all went to the Muraki house and took their evening meal in the garden. Mr. Muraki urged them to it.

“It is Jiro,” Tama said proudly. “He wants Jiro with him all the time. My mother says he thinks Jiro is far more clever than Shio’s two boys.”

It was true that Jiro was a child of greater beauty than was to be seen anywhere. He was taller than other children and he held his head proudly, and he had inherited not Tama’s blunt little hands and feet, but I-wan’s own, long and narrow and almost too delicate for a boy. Jiro’s mind, also, was full of humor and childish wit. And Mr. Muraki delighted to take his hand and walk with him alone through the garden, after they had eaten. I-wan always watched the two, the old fragile man in his soft gray robes, and the vivid upright boy springing along at his side.

When Mr. Muraki came back, his lips were always twitching and his eyes shining so that he could hardly wait until Jiro had skipped away to say, “There never was made such a boy as this. I-wan, it is proof of what I have always said — together Japanese and Chinese can make the greatest people in the world. We must unite!”

He laughed his dry old laugh, and everyone laughed and I-wan forgave him anything because of his pride in Jiro. Yes, it was a good time. Even Bunji was more as he had been to I-wan that summer. Setsu was right for him. He had begun his old rough joking again.

“Do you remember, I-wan, I always said I would marry an ugly girl? I recommend it! It makes me feel I am not so bad, and it keeps her humble. Setsu, perfect Japanese wife!”

And Setsu, blushing, laughed happily at everything Bunji said and never retorted. But they were all growing fond of Setsu, who had learned to read only with the greatest difficulty and had no higher dreams than to make her husband and his parents comfortable. Almost immediately her figure swelled with pregnancy and she entered placidly upon the long course of her life as the mother of many children.

And yet, when later I-wan looked back upon that peace, he wondered that he could have dreamed it secure. It ended in a single moment.

It was Mr. Muraki’s seventieth birthday and therefore a day to be specially observed. Shio had come from Yokohama with his wife and two sons, and there had been a great feast in the middle of the day at a hotel. There the merchants of the city had gathered to speak in praise of Mr. Muraki and to present to him a gift of a silver plate with all their names upon it, mounted on wood and set in velvet. Mr. Muraki had been pleased enough, but he was very tired too, since he seldom went out of his own home, and he had been compelled to get up and bow a great many times, and also to make a speech of thanks in return.

In the afternoon at his own house, therefore, there were no guests, and since it was very hot, as though a storm were coming, Bunji had told the servants to draw back all the screens, so that though they sat under the roof, on all sides except one the great room was open to the garden, now full of a soft late sunshine. The children played together in the brook that ran near the house, and their elders sat and watched them quietly. Mr. Muraki smoked his pipe, and Shio sat smoothing his piece of jade, and Madame Muraki simply knelt in the still motionless way she did when nothing was wanted. Only Bunji came and went, bustling to see to a servant or to shout to a child.

I-wan, sitting beside Tama, was silent too, enjoying the hour and thinking of Mr. Muraki’s life, which had been in a fashion spread before him in this day — a good and honorable life, spent in its own unchanging ways. He looked at the old man and wondered if now at seventy he was satisfied with what he had had. It was hard to believe that Mr. Muraki had ever wanted anything else.

It was exactly at the moment when Ganjiro slipped and fell into the water and burst into a loud cry that the noise in the street began. I-wan remembered that, for in the confusion of rushing to lift Ganjiro out of the water, it seemed that the child was making all the noise. But in a second Ganjiro’s crying was lost in the shouting from outside the gate, and Bunji was roaring, “What is the matter — what is the matter?” And Shio was shrieking, “Is it an earthquake? Has anyone felt anything?” And Tama had come running out to I-wan and the children, and they all stood there together, waiting to feel the earth move beneath their feet.

But the earth did not move. Around them in the garden everything was as it had been, the water sliding over the rocks, the sun sinking, its long shadowy rays underneath the trees upon the moss-green ground. Then they saw the old gardener running to them, in his hand a newspaper, the great black letters scarcely dry upon it. Bunji seized it from his hand and they crowded around it. It was easy enough to read. In a moment they knew what had happened.

Three hundred Japanese — men, women, and children — had been killed by Chinese soldiers in a little town near Peking…. In revenge, the great headlines shouted, in barbarous revenge for the peaceful policing of Peking by Japanese soldiers!

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?

He could not tell. And yet in this silence all his life faded into unreality. The tangible things which he had made for himself, his home and his marriage, his children and his place in the world, escaped him. The only reality now became this long constant argument in himself with Japan. For when he argued he seemed to see opposing him not Tama or Bunji or any Japanese, but a vague unknown Japan. He could not connect with that Japan this pretty city in which he lived, or these green hills and the islanded sea whose beauty he endlessly enjoyed.

And in his house Tama was more careful than ever for his comfort. Without planning it so, they now went out no more. One day he said, “Shall we take the children to the park?”

She shook her head. “They are quite happy at home,” she replied. “Why should we trouble to take them?”

She smiled at him. But after she had left the room it occurred to him, “Does she suffer among her own people because she is married to me?”

He could not ask her. If she did so surfer, if he knew it, then the very rock under his life would be shaken.

Outside his window he heard Jiro’s high sweet voice demanding, “Why does Miya cry, Mother? When you don’t see her, she is always crying and crying.”

He heard Tama’s quiet voice. “Her brother has been killed, Jiro.”

“Who killed him, Mother?” Jiro’s voice was lively with fresh interest.

“Chinese soldiers, in China,” Tama replied.

“Then they are bad!” Jiro’s voice came full of indignation.

And hearing it, I-wan was angry with Tama. Why could she not have said simply, “The man is dead!”? He leaned from his window and saw her watering plants in the garden and beside her was Jiro with his own small watering pot.

“Tama!” he said severely. “How can the child understand!”

At his voice she looked up, and he felt her look, long and sorrowful, fixed upon him. Instantly she became real for him. He wanted to explain to her — But now Jiro was watching a yellow and brown butterfly hovering over the wet flowers. The child had forgotten.

He sat down again to his book. But he must explain to Tama tonight — only, explain what? Three hundred innocent people dead — that she knew and would not forget. To anything he said she would, in silence, hold that answer. He sat, not reading, his book in his hand. In Shanghai, he remembered, there used to be a great many Japanese. No one paid any heed to them — there were all sorts of people in Shanghai, people of every nation. And yet somehow it seemed to him that he remembered the Japanese now more clearly than any others because they were so wholly themselves. They remained as they had come, Japanese. And wherever they lived, the houses they made and the gardens they made became bits of Japan, as though they so loved their own country that wherever they were they must still be there…. And yet, he knew his own people. They did not kill for play. The Japanese had done something — something new, to make them so angry. This he must tell Tama. He sat, thinking how to tell her.

And then she called to him to come into the garden, and he went out. The children were in bed and Miya had gone home. They were quite alone and together they walked up and down the sanded path which Mr. Muraki had put at the edge of the garden toward the sea. They looked out over the night-dark sea. This now was the time when he must speak. He must speak, but first he must break down her silence — by something, by anything.

“Were the children good today?” he asked her.

“Very good,” she replied tranquilly.

“I hope you understand why I spoke as I did about Jiro,” he went on.

“Oh yes,” she said quickly, and added, “but children don’t remember.”

Was there more in these words than she meant him to know? He tried to see her face, but all its outlines were lost in the dusk. He saw only a whiteness under her black hair. He must go on, then.

“You know, Tama, I feel so strongly — we must wait until we have the whole truth. I have written to my father, and I, myself, feel I will not decide until his letter comes.”

“Decide?” Her white face turned to him quickly.

“I mean, judge,” he said.

She turned her face toward the sea again without answering.

“You know this, Tama,” he insisted. And when still she did not answer he grew angry.

“Tama!” he cried.

Then at last she spoke.

“What has it to do with us?” she said.

No, but she was evading him. Inside herself she was thinking, feeling, he was sure of it — perhaps against him. He must reach her.

“I must feel you think there may have been cause,” he maintained.

And now she replied instantly, as though this answer had long been ready.

“What does it matter what I think when I am your wife?”

No, but this was what any Japanese wife might say. It was retreat — retreat from him, what else?

“Don’t be a — a Japanese woman!” he shouted.

Her voice came through the darkness.

“But I am a Japanese woman!”

Her voice was gentle with all its usual sweetness, and yet he felt her there at his side as unyielding and as inexorable, as impenetrable as the very night itself.

“The truth is you have already made up your mind,” he said roughly. He must beat against her somehow — somehow break her to pieces! “You believe, without any reason, that my people could simply massacre like savages — you don’t know us. If you think that, you have no understanding of me. We have suffered for years while you Japanese have been stealing our land, our trade—” He was being unjust enough himself, making her stand for Japan. But, having begun to talk aloud at last, he could not stop. “No, I know what happened. Our soldiers, when they saw Peking captured — and under an enemy flag — they could not bear it after everything else. We’ve held ourselves back all these years—”

She flew at him. She was shaking his arm.

“And who,” she demanded, “killed Japanese in Nanking on March the twenty-seventh, in nineteen hundred and twenty-seven, and who killed Japanese in Shanghai in nineteen hundred and thirty-two?”

“You have held it all these years — against me!” he cried.

But she shook her head.

“No — but against your people!”

“But I am they — to you!” He was angry enough to kill her, he thought — and then he remembered that a moment ago he had made her stand for Japan. Her voice reached toward him sadly.

“Am I to you — one of those — who ought to be killed?”

There was nothing of the Japanese about her now. They were two people speaking across the infinite difference of race. And then suddenly he felt her rush into his arms. Her arms were about his neck and she was sobbing on his shoulder. She was broken, at last. But he felt no triumph. She had broken without yielding.

“Hush — you will waken the children,” he whispered. In the stillness of the garden her weeping was loud, and Jiro woke easily. And how could they explain to him this weeping, he thought sadly. In himself he felt weak and tired, now that anger had flown. He smoothed her head.

“You are right,” he said. “The truth — whatever it is — has nothing to do with us.”

He clung to her and felt her cling to him, closer and more close, in fierce determined love.

… And yet, though each desired above all this union, in the midst of their passion in the night before they slept, his desire died. He wanted her — and then could not take her. She waited a moment. Then she whispered, “What is it?”

He could not answer because he did not know. He lay, himself surprised, and said nothing at all, his arms still about her. He was helpless and ashamed — but speechless. And after a little while, without pressing him, she withdrew herself and straightened her garments and arranged herself for sleep.

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.

And yet it was not hatred which brought I-wan at last to that moment when suddenly, as clearly and simply as though he had been told, he knew what he had to do. It was something deeper in him than hatred could ever be.

Seven days after this was a day when a ship came in from China, and it was I-wan’s duty to meet it and receive into the customs warehouse on the jetty the merchandise it brought for the house of Muraki. It was a strange sight he saw as he stood watching the unloading of that ship. The carefully packed crates of goods marked Muraki were as nothing compared to other goods being set down upon the docks. These were not curios and fine things, but the common things which people use every day. They were, for the most part, unpacked, as though they had been put hastily upon the ship, and if there was now and then a heavy old desk or a carved chair, there were to be seen far more often beds and tables and stoves of foreign metals and shapes, pianos and pictures and bedding and electric refrigerators, music boxes and carpets and cushions and velvet curtains and all such things as well-to-do Chinese delighted to have in their homes in Shanghai, such things, indeed, as might easily have come out of his own father’s house. He looked at the stuff, half expecting to see something he knew, but he did not. And for everything there was someone to expect it and claim it.

“Now I know there is real war,” he thought grimly. “This is loot and nothing else. These things have been in people’s homes.”

And yet in the midst of his rising fury he was stopped. For there was something else on this ship, too. When all else had been unloaded, and he stayed in his anger to see it all, he saw many small wooden boxes begin to be brought off. Each had a name written in letters upon its top. And these, too, were expected. A man stood to call each name, and as he called, a little group of persons came forward and received a box and all of these people were in deepest mourning. And instantly I-wan knew that the boxes held the ashes of those who had been killed in battle.

He had somehow thought only of Chinese being killed. Now he knew how foolish he was. These people, too, must suffer. He stood, watching and silent, as each small box was received preciously and carried away. There was no sound of loud weeping. People even smiled as they received their dead. They had been taught to smile when those they loved died in battle. But down their faces their tears streamed.

He stood, forgetting who he was, pressing nearer and nearer, until now he became aware that he was so close that the eyes of many fell upon him as they wept. They must have known him for what he was, a Chinese, and yet their looks were not of hatred but only of pure sorrow. And he fell back a little when he saw this. It could not have been so in his own country, he thought unwillingly. No, his people were not so disciplined to sorrow as these. Their sorrow would have overflowed into wailing and cursing.

He moved back again, half ashamed, and knocked against an old man standing alone, a box wrapped in his arms as though it were his child. And I-wan, looking inadvertently into his eyes, saw such patient sorrow that he could not but stammer something about his wonder that there was such patience and no sign of hatred. And to this the old man answered gently, “Why should we hate you? You had nothing to do with this. And besides, our people are taught to suffer gladly for our country.” The tears burst from his eyes as he said this, but he only clutched the box more firmly and said, his old voice shaking, “Yes — I rejoice — my only son—”

And this old man uttering these words brought light to I-wan. The dusk, the silence, in which he had been living broke and was gone. He was at that instant recalled to his old self. Yes, to that old self which had been he in the days when he dreamed of his country and lived to make her what he dreamed. How these people loved their country! The love of country which he saw shining in this old man’s face — it was the most beautiful love in the world. How small and selfish was the love of one creature for another! There was a love infinitely larger, a love into which he wanted to throw his whole self. Had he not known such love?

… “I-wan, you are like a priest,” Peony had said…. He longed suddenly to lose himself and all his doubts in great sacrifice. He had never been so happy, he now thought, as he had been in those old days with En-lan — no, not even with Tama, and with all her ministering to him. He was one who was happiest when he ministered. This was his nature, only he had not known it. It had taken the suffering of other people to show it to him. In his own country how many suffered now!

He turned, and the old man went away. But I-wan did not need him any more. He had done his work. Fate, that strange fate in which Tama always believed, had used him for the necessary moment, and had then dismissed him. I-wan, without thinking of him again, went back to the goods in the customs house. But all the time while he listened to the demands of the customs officers, while he watched clerks open the crates, and while he checked one paper after another, his mind and his heart were asking:

“How shall I tell Tama?”

At first, on his way home, he thought that he would simply go without telling her. He would write it all down in a letter for her to read when he was gone. Then he could explain to her in his own language, the written language which was hers also.

He had almost persuaded himself to this when he stepped into his house. Usually she was there waiting for him in the garden or at the door. But tonight she was delayed. He was already inside, taking off his shoes, when she came running out of the kitchen, pushing back her hair as she came.

“Oh, I am so late!” she cried. “Well, I was making something you like, and it took me such a long time.”

When she came running up to him, her wide eyes frank and her face rosy, he knew he could never go away without telling her. And yet if he waited his heart would fail him. In the rush of the moment he seized her shoulders and began to speak.

“Tama, I must go home — I am needed there.”

He said it very quietly, so that he would not startle her, but her body grew still and stiff under his hands and the blood fled from her face. She did not say, “Let me go, too.” No, she knew now that he meant he must go alone.

He hurried on. “I have been miserable all these days. I haven’t known what to do.”

“I knew what you were thinking,” she said. Her voice was so small he could scarcely hear it.

“But you didn’t tell me,” he retorted. “I thought you didn’t know.”

“I didn’t want — I was so afraid — you might think it your — duty — to leave us,” she faltered. Her lips were trembling and he could not bear to see it. He pressed her face to his breast and laid his cheek on her hair.

“I didn’t know what I ought to do until tonight,” he said. “An old man holding a little box of ashes made me see how sweet and — right — it is to die for one’s country.” He was using old words. She had never heard them, but Miss Maitland had once made them memorize those words. En-lan had argued with her, saying, “One ought not to die for one’s country, if the country is wrong. It is better to die for a cause.”

And then Miss Maitland had seemed quite angry. She told them about a young Englishman who so loved England that he had said his dust would be forever England. En-lan had said no more, only smiled, unchanging.

But now, holding Tama in his arms, I-wan knew that Miss Maitland was right and En-lan was wrong. It made no difference whether one’s country was right or wrong. He would never have believed he could go back and take a place under Chiang Kai-shek. But he could.

She nodded, and took up her wide sleeve and wiped her eyes.

“Of course you must go,” she said simply, “if you think your country needs you.”

She swallowed once or twice and wiped her eyes again. “As a Japanese, I understand that,” she said.

He could feel her heart beating against him, denying the calmness of her words.

“You know — I am the same to you,” he whispered.

She drew away from him.

“Oh yes,” she said, “I know. This has nothing to do with us. We’ll have to plan.”

He could see her practical mind begin to work. But at the kitchen door Miya now appeared, in distress.

“Oku-san, now what shall I do?” she called. “It’s boiling!”

“Oh!” Tama exclaimed. “We’ll talk later,” she told him. “After all, there’s no use in letting the fish spoil.”

She flew toward the kitchen door.

They talked long into the night, sitting with the screens drawn aside so that the garden lay before them and beyond it the sea. All the time Tama gazed out toward the sea. The night was not moonlit. When their eyes grew used to the darkness, they could scarcely see even the outlines of the garden, though they had put out all the lights because of the summer moths. He could not see her face except to know it was turned away from him.

They sat on the mats, and he held her hand. It was warm and strong in his. She did not weep or protest anything. She had, he now perceived, been thinking for a long time about this, waiting for whatever must come. When he asked, “What do you think you and the children had better do?” she was quite ready.

“Of course we can always return to my own father’s house. He is so fond of the children,” she answered.

He had not thought of this. He had imagined their staying here until — but until when? Who knew the end of this war?

“It is doubtless the best thing,” he agreed unwillingly. Jiro and Ganjiro growing up in Mr. Muraki’s house! They would forget this little house he had built for them, where they had lived with him, their Chinese father.

“You will help them — to remember me?” he asked her.

He felt the hold of her hand strengthen.

“Shall I be an undutiful wife because misfortune has caught us?” she replied. She went on in a rush of energy. “Am I to blame you? You are not forsaking us. I shall tell them, ‘Honor your brave father, who fights for his country!’—I-wan, may we spend a little money and have a big picture of you? I want a picture of you as you are now, before you go. Then I’ll put it where the children will see it every day, and we’ll keep flowers by it—” Her voice broke and she stopped and coughed.

“We will do it tomorrow,” he promised.

He thought he felt her trembling, but then after a moment she said, her voice quite calm, “Shall you need a new bag, or is the one we have good enough?”

“I shall take very little,” he said. “I shall be wearing uniform in a few days.”

Now indeed she was trembling, but he knew her well enough, too, to know that she would thank him most if he said nothing to break her down. So he sat smoothing her hand a little and talking on and on.

“I suppose I had better take the next boat,” he said quietly. “There is one in four days. That will give us time for everything. I must tell your father.”

“Let me,” she said in a smothered small voice. “Let us tell no one. I want these four days — as though you weren’t going. After you have gone, I’ll go and tell him.”

He pondered this a moment. “It might seem ungrateful of me, Tama,” he said.

“No,” she repeated. “No, I will tell them. Let me have my way. He will understand — the one thing he will always understand in you is what you do now.”

“He is very kind—” I-wan began, but Tama interrupted him.

“Any Japanese would understand it,” she said proudly.

He would not pack his own bag until an hour before he had to go to the ship. The few days, each so long in passing, seemed nothing now that they were gone together. He had let them pass exactly as Tama wished, crossing her in nothing. Each day except the last he had worked as usual, saying nothing, but putting everything in order for the unknown who was to take his place. He had never loved this work of merchandising, and he did not mind leaving it. And yet it had bought him security and a place of his own. If he had wished, he could have stayed safely here always — if he had been able in himself to do it. But he was not able.

On the last day, because he knew Tama wished it, he went with her to pray at the Shinto temple on the hill. He had gone with her there sometimes before, but he would never enter the shrine with her.

“I cannot pray without belief,” he always said, “and I do not believe.”

So she had always gone in with the children alone. It had troubled him that she took the children in, but he had let it pass, remembering that when he was small he too had gone to temples with his own mother. But when he grew older he had followed his father, who believed in no gods.

“Gods are for women and ignorant people,” his father always said…. And in the revolution En-lan had fought bitterly against priests and temples. He had not understood even then why En-lan was so bitter against a thing which to him mattered little.

“Religion enslaves men,” En-lan said many times in a loud voice.

Well, I-wan had remembered this each time he waited for Tama outside the shrine, and he had wondered because here not only women and laboring people, but sober, wise-looking men in rich garments went into the shrine to pray. And at little wayside shrines men even stopped their motor cars and descended to bow and say their prayers. But still he could not believe in gods.

Yet to please Tama on this last day he stepped into the temple and stood before the inner shrine with her and the children and stood with them while they prayed. Even little Ganjiro knew how to pray, he saw, and was astonished. His two sons — would they grow up worshiping their mother’s gods? And yet, how could he prevent this now?

“Let them,” he thought suddenly, “if it makes them as good as she is.”

For himself, he felt nothing even now except the precious closeness of Jiro’s hand in his, and Ganjiro’s arm hugging his leg.

And then was the end of the last day, and the next morning came, and then the last hour. He began to put a few clothes into the bag, his extra business suit, his sleeping garments, and some books, and then Tama came in with something in her arms, something silk and blue. He did not know what it was. She shook it out and he saw it was a Chinese robe he had once worn.

“You had this on the first time I saw you,” she said, smiling so sadly he could not bear to see such smiling.

“I haven’t worn it for years,” he said.

“Now you may want it again,” she replied.

She folded it carefully, sleeve to sleeve, and put it in his bag.

He felt her, as he had felt her all these four days, as close to him as his own body. He knew continually what she thought and what she wanted and how near she was at every moment to weeping. But he knew that she had set for herself the goal of not weeping until he was gone. She would smile at him while he was here and until he could see her face no more. And he helped her, for he knew if she failed in this she would be ashamed and suffer for it always, thinking she had not achieved the perfection of self-control she should for his sake. They had gone through the hours so close together, and yet they had not touched more than each the other’s hand.

So it came to the last moment of all. In the harbor the ship’s funnel was beginning to smoke. Its engines were being fired. The ship was to sail at noon.

“I must go now, Tama,” he said quietly.

They had agreed three days ago that he would go alone and that the children were not to know. Only Tama knew. They went together, hand in hand, to the garden where the little boys played. They were making a dam of small stones across the narrow brook, and they did not look up. He could hear their voices, Jiro’s commanding as it always did and Ganjiro’s answering with questions.

For one moment he felt that he could not do what he had planned.

“I shall send for you and the children,” he said to Tama. “As soon as I can do it, you shall all come.”

But Tama shook her head.

“When shall we be wanted?” she said.

Her words, her voice, her quiet fatal eyes, recalled him and swept him out of this moment again into the vaster hour where their individual lives were now lost.

“I must go,” he said quickly.

He seized her in his arms, pressed his cheek against hers, looked at her once, and in her face saw eternity between them.

He stepped upon the ship’s deck and at the same instant the gangplank began to move upward.

“Another minute and you’d have been left, my fine feller,” a rough American voice said, but he did not answer. He walked toward the stern of the ship where the second class was and found the number of his cabin. The small room was empty, but his cabinmate’s luggage was already there, spread upon the lower berth. He flung his own bag into the upper berth and then went out. Doors were open along the corridor and everywhere he heard the unfamiliar sounds of his own tongue.

But he went up the stairs to the deck again and stood watching the hills. Now the ship was moving steadily away from the dock. In a few moments they would be leaving the harbor. He searched the slope of the hill nearest the sea. Yes, there it was, his little house — and the square of green softer than the surrounding green was the garden. And now he could see the spot of color that was Tama. He could not see her face, and yet he could feel her eyes straining to see him. A tiny spot of bright orange moved across the green to stand beside her. That was Jiro — his son.

And then suddenly, if he could have done it, I-wan would have leaped into the sea to rush back to them. That little house — there, it seemed to him at this moment, there was his true home where Tama stood. Why had he left her? What if he followed again what he had once followed before, a mirage which he had thought was his country? She would be weeping, now — he felt his throat thicken with tears.

“Hello,” an American voice said.

He started a little and looked down into a square, pleasant, ugly face at his shoulder. It was not an American, but a Chinese, wearing, it is true, an American suit of dark blue striped with white. It was too big for him and he looked up cheerfully out of a bluish-white celluloid collar much too big.

“I’m in the laundry business in Seattle,” the man said with a bright American smile. “I guess I’m your cabinmate — Cantonese, named Lim — Jackie — born in U. S. A. though — third generation — though my old granddad went back to Canton when he was sixty. I can’t speak my own language. But I figure I can fight without talking. I’m going home to fight the Japs.”

“So am I,” I-wan said quickly.

The man held out his hand.

“Put it there,” he said heartily. And I-wan felt a firm dexterous small hand seize his.

The mists of longing cleared from his brain. When he looked at the hillside again, he could see nothing. The ship had turned and was headed for the open sea.