Mr. Moto Omnibus

by John P. Marquand

  “That’s true,” he said. “We don’t know much about each other, do we? And maybe you’re right. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

  “Then go ahead and be yourself,” she said. “Say anything, but for heaven’s sake let’s be ourselves. For instance, say something about Japan that isn’t a free lecture. Just go ahead and say something.”

  Her mood, it struck him, was the same as his had been before he had fallen asleep. He understood exactly what she meant, and it saddened him that it was an effort to do what she asked. Instinctive caution was all around him. He had been in the business too long.

  “Well,” he said, “I suppose childhood is an impressionable age. Even if you can’t remember the details, they are all back in your mind somewhere. I haven’t been back to Japan since I was five, except for a few days in the Occupation, but it’s all familiar. I can feel at home in it because I used to go to the mission school. I used to play with the gardener’s boy.” He paused and cleared his throat. “Is that the conversational line you wanted?”

  “Yes,” she said, “it is, and it’s the first time you’ve been natural since I’ve seen you. Now I know quite a lot about you, but you don’t know anything about me.”

  “No,” he said, “but you don’t have to tell me, Ruth.”

  “But aren’t you curious about me?” she asked. “Guess what I was outside? Aren’t you curious enough to guess?”

  He was surprised that she asked the question because girls in the business seldom cared to talk about their pasts. It was a safe bet they all had them, and rather lurid ones, or they would not have been in the business. There was always some tragedy of love, or a broken home, or some hate or some frustration that was requited by the business. As his glance met hers, and as she raised her eyebrows slightly, he honestly preferred to take her as she was, without knowing any more.

  “Why, yes,” he said, “I could make an educated guess about you, but I don’t know that you’d like it.”

  Her glance met his again, and then shifted.

  “You’re such a damn pro—aren’t you?” she asked—“you know everything.”

  He was sorry to detect an undertone of antagonism in what she said. Antagonism, or clash of personality, would seriously interfere with their working smoothly together. He knew that she must be tired by the trip, and by Bill Gibson’s hurried call, and by the Japanese; the appearance of Mr. Pender in the dented Chevrolet did not help to soothe one’s nerves. The truth was that neither of them did know anything about the other, and in his opinion it was better that way, when working with a woman in the business. It was better to keep things on an impersonal basis, if possible, and not to quarrel or be unkind; but the strain of the day had told on him, too. Otherwise, he would not have been led further into the conversation.

  “I’m sorry if I’ve displeased you,” he said. “I’ve got a lot on my mind, you know. Of course I don’t know everything, but maybe I’ve been around more than you have, and I’ve been acquainted with a lot of girls in the business—some good and some not. I know how they look and how they act, and I’ve often had to check their backgrounds. Naturally I can make an educated guess about you. Naturally I’ve made one to myself already.”

  He was sorry to notice that her face had flushed.

  “So you think I’m just another tramp,” she said. “Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  “No,” he said, “I’m not trying to tell you anything. There’s no cause for you to lose your temper, Ruth.”

  “I’m not losing my temper,” she answered. He knew this was not true. “But I do think if two people are going to work together they understand each other better if they know something about each other, and if they’re friends and not acquaintances. Suppose you tell me what you think you know about me, and I’ll tell you if you’re right.”

  “Why don’t we keep what we think about each other to ourselves?” he said. “It might save a lot of trouble, but if you want it your way, I’ll go along.”

  There was no use antagonizing her just when work was starting, but she had challenged his professional pride.

  “If you stay in this racket,” he said, “as long as I’ve been in it, you’ll naturally learn to notice things about people, and not let them get on your nerves. You’ll get further if you just sit quietly and look. All right, if you want the professor to give you an analysis—in the first place, you’re not in the tramp class, and you never will be. You’re too well bred. You have too much background and character to be a tramp.”

  “That’s nice to know,” she answered. “Go ahead, what else?”

  He was no longer reluctant to go ahead. He had finally become interested in his ideas. If he had any gifts, his best had always been analysis of people.

  “Now most girls in your position,” he said, “always tell the same story. All of them are always born of wealthy parents, usually living on Southern plantations. Then along came a business failure, or else they married an undesirable man. The undesirable man is usually correct—but in your case the rest of it is true. You come from an excellent background. You were brought up in a large American city, but I can’t tell which, from your accent. Upper-class accents are reasonably interchangeable.”

  “Go ahead,” she said. “What else?”

  “You never spent all the year in the city.” He had forgotten Tokyo. He was always interested in blocking out a character. “You spent a lot of your time, while you were growing up, in the country—a riding country, but not the West. You schooled and jumped horses once.”

  There was a flicker of interest in her glance.

  “What made you make that guess?” she asked.

  “Your posture,” he said, “but mainly your hands. You have beautiful hands, but they are strong above the average. They are riding hands.”

  “All right,” she said. “You hit that one. Go ahead.”

  “All right,” he said, “if you’ll excuse my being personal. One or two things you said on this trip make me think you’ve been used to attention, and expect a good deal from people. You should, because you’re exceedingly good-looking.”

  “Why, thanks,” she said.

  “I’m a man,” he answered. “It’s obvious; but I don’t think I’ve been influenced by it.”

  “And, believe me, I haven’t tried to influence you,” she said. “And don’t worry. I won’t. So you think I was spoiled, do you? All right, I was, by the family and the servants.”

  “I’d also guess that you’re an only child,” he said. “That’s only an educated guess. I’d say your father had great personal charm. Drinkers do, and I’m afraid he was a drunk: I’ve noticed how your expression changes every time I pick up my glass. You loved him and he disappointed you—so you were disillusioned by the father image. He died, I imagine, while you were away at a fashionable boarding school. Your mother married again, and you were on the loose with an independent income—a bright, popular girl. You went to college, and I’ll bet it was nearer to Bryn Mawr than Goucher. You fell in love, and the boy friend left you flat. He wasn’t killed in Korea or anything. He left you flat.”

  “What makes you say that?” she asked.

  “From the way you act with a man,” he said. “You don’t trust men. Then you met the Chief. The Chief’s good at spotting material, and he found that you were a natural at the business. You were rattling around loose, just the way I was when the Chief found me, and that’s about all.”

  When he had finished he knew he had been very close to being right, from the cool, suspicious way in which she looked at him.

  “Just how did you happen to see my file?” she asked. “I thought those things were confidential.”

  He shook his head slowly.

  “No file,” he said. “I’ve only found out about you by minding my own business, watching you. You asked for it.”

  She was looking at him with a new respect. At least her antagonism had gone. Suddenly she smiled at him, and he knew that they were frie
nds.

  “You make me feel naked,” she said, “or like the tattooed woman in the circus. I didn’t know I had everything written on me in fine print. Actually, in case you want to know, we owned a place in Virginia. In fact, I own it still.”

  “Now, listen,” he said, “you don’t have to tell me anything more about yourself. It doesn’t help the general situation, and we shouldn’t be talking like this. It’s too dangerous, Ruth.”

  She shook her head in an exasperated way.

  “You’re always damn careful, aren’t you?” she said. “How do you mean—too dangerous?”

  “When you get talking this way you get interested,” he said. “It’s dangerous to get interested, or like anyone too much in the business, Ruth. You might have to ditch me, or I might have to ditch you tomorrow. You know that.”

  His hand rested on her shoulder, and she had not moved away, and he was right that it was dangerous.

  “Well, thank heaven you have a human side,” she said. “And I’m glad we’ve talked this way, and to hell with the business until tomorrow.” She brushed his hand off and stood up. “Look, we haven’t had anything to eat. Call for a room waiter since everything’s so modern at the Imperial Hotel, and these eggs are cold, and everything. And I have another flask in my suitcase. After all, you’re supposed to be crazy about me, Jack.”

  He was right that the whole thing was dangerous. He knew all the rules about women and emotional involvement. He knew that he was at least coming very close to breaking several of them, but he had never realized that the prospect could be so pleasant. For a moment or two, at any rate, he felt he was himself again, exactly as he had been on the outside. It was a transient sensation, but at the same time, it was a revelation, because he had never believed that clocks turned back.

  “Let’s save your flask for some other time,” he said. “I’m having a good time without it. In fact—”

  He stopped because his training was back with him. “In fact, what?” she asked.

  That twinge of caution was gone when he looked at her. He knew he was saying what a great many others had said before him, and yet he did not care.

  “Maybe it won’t hurt if we took a little time off,” he said.

  8

  A GREAT deal of the business was very dull, but that ensuing Friday was one of the most irksome that Jack Rhyce could remember. His hours with the Asia Friendship League had a fatuous quality that demanded every bit of his patience in order to fall into the mood of the dedicated people in the Friendship office, and still not miss a trick. He could not tell, in the space of a day, exactly how dedicated all of them were. He could get only a general picture in his mind, yet he was reasonably sure that most of them had honest intentions and felt that they were engaged in a great work. His thoughts went back a dozen times that day to the briefing the Chief had given him in Washington, on the great American strength and weakness—the persistent belief that good will and good fellowship could conquer everything.

  He wished that he could make up his mind as to whether or not Mr. Harry Pender honestly shared this viewpoint, but he had to set down the whole Pender problem as unfinished business. Mr. Pender made himself so hospitable and charming that no time was left for analysis. Besides, it was a time to be very, very careful, until he had told Bill Gibson his ideas. It was a time to be naive and to convey emphatically the utter harmlessness of himself and Ruth Bogart. It was a time to be enthusiastic but dumb, in an open-handed way. It was also a time to show by a series of skillful shadings a picture of growing attachment between himself and Miss Bogart—one of those half-furtive, half-fleeting romances between two well-meaning people that burgeoned more rapidly in the Orient than anywhere else. All these details had kept Jack Rhyce very busy.

  “Of course this is only a very quick fill-in,” Mr. Pender kept saying. “You can’t really start getting your teeth into anything until Monday, Jack.”

  Inevitably they had reached a first-name basis in a very few minutes.

  “I can’t wait to get the bit in my teeth, Harry,” Jack Rhyce said, “and possibly to be of some help with the wonderful things you are doing here. I had no idea that you had such an inspiring picture to show me, or such lovely and artistic offices.”

  “You just wait,” Harry Pender said. “These are only temporary quarters.”

  Temporary or not, the Asia Friendship League occupied, already, half the floor of a postwar office building in the neighborhood of the Ginza. Mr. Pender, as the head of the Japan branch, had a truly beautiful office overlooking a large section of the city, furnished with new Japanese furniture that had been adapted to the European fashion. The furniture had been designed right in the Friendship League; desks, chairs, coffee tables and everything were made by Japanese craftsmen, with authentic Japanese spirit, but also were suited to both Easterners and Westerners. A lot of leading Japanese artists and merchants had been consulted, and had been generous with their help, Mr. Pender explained, and the result had surely been worth the hours of conferences. All you had to do was to look at the lovely Oriental woods, turned out along chaste, modernistic lines, to realize that here the Friendship League had made an important good-will contribution. Its furniture was already on display in a number of Tokyo department stores; several exporters were expressing practical interest. In fact, it might very well start a new vogue, Mr. Pender said, and this was just a small example of what the Asia Friendship League was up to. The League’s motto might in one word be termed Interest. Mr. Pender did not mean financial interest, but an honest interest in the other fellow out here in the East. Well, this interest was now flowing in all sorts of directions. There was a group in the office, for example, studying the new Japanese films. Then there was the sports group. And this afternoon, as Mr. Pender had said, there would be a panel discussion on writing in the conference auditorium. One of the Foundation’s own girls, Miss Kettleback, was going to deliver a lecture to some young Japanese writers on the American novel. It was amazing, Mr. Pender said, how eager these intellectuals were for American culture. Just wait—the auditorium hall would be filled half an hour before the lecture started.

  There was not really time, Mr. Pender said, to give a full runover of all the projects, but there was one which was a particular pet of his—the Friendly Pen Pals. Up to this point Jack Rhyce had listened brightly, but now his interest quickened.

  “What’s that again, Harry?” he asked.

  “Well, it’s an idea that is purely my own,” Mr. Pender said, “and I hope you’ll play it up big in your report, Jack. You’ve heard of Pen Pals in the States and Europe? Well, it just came over me—why not do it here? Why not get a lot of these Japanese kids in school and the universities to swap ideas and news with their own age groups back home? It would seem to me to be the very essence of the cultural interchange we’re looking for, and it’s working already. You’d be surprised.”

  Mr. Harry Pender was watching him expectantly when he finished, seemingly waiting for pleased surprise as the idea dawned, and Jack Rhyce nodded slowly. He was beginning to wonder how he had overlooked Mr. Pender in his research back in the states. The data might be in his notes at the hotel, but he could not remember the name or description, and he could not see how the Chief had overlooked him either. The idea of Pen Pals was original, and could form the basis of an excellent message center.

  “There’s only one thing I don’t get,” Jack Rhyce said. “I don’t exactly see how they write to each other without a common language.”

  “That’s right, Jack. That’s the difficulty,” Mr. Pender said. “I began playing around with that problem just as soon as I took over the center here, and then it came over me, just a week or two ago—why not set up a translation post right here in the League—just an informal unscrambling of the Tower of Babel, and translate the kids’ letters? It’s not so tough as you’d think. You’d be surprised at the number of Japanese around who can read or write English—and there’s unemployment for a lot of intelligentsia. T
he translation center kills two birds with one stone. We have two big rooms now. Would you like to see them?”

  Mr. Pender pushed back his chair, but Jack Rhyce shook his head. It was better not to be overcurious, and, besides, Bill Gibson knew the ground. Bill could never have missed the Friendship League for a moment, or this new man who was running it, and Bill would give the orders.

  “Thanks, Harry,” Jack Rhyce said. “I would be fascinated to see this project next week because I can begin to see already what a real thought there is behind it. But right now, how about some more on the organization’s setup, before I go after the details?”

  Mr. Pender nodded. “I think you’re very wise, Jack,” he said. “Take the whole thing slowly. You’ll be able to get your teeth into everything beginning Monday. Of course, our basic trouble as I see it is getting personnel out here who are imbued with the right ideas in the social sense . . . ”

  Harry Pender was a good, fast talker when he discussed the problem of personnel. As Jack Rhyce listened, occasionally nodding in agreement when a cogent point was made, he constantly made mental notes of Mr. Pender’s facial expressions and mannerisms. The type was familiar, the intellectual, professorial features, the pale skin, the brown eyes, the receding hair line. There was a fine photographic collection back in Washington of all known people in the business, and Jack Rhyce racked his memory for photographs of the Pender type, but he could make no identification. The trouble with the business recently was that new faces and new talents were continually appearing, and the photograph files were getting a year or two behind the contemporary parade.

  He glanced across the office at Ruth Bogart.

  “You’re getting full notes on this, aren’t you, Ruth?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “It’s really fascinating, Mr. Pender.”

  His one anxiety was not to make a mistake, which might disturb the picture. That was one of the hardest things to learn—to keep things quiet.