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.<
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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 we
nt 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.
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