The Patriot

by Pearl S. Buck

  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.