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.