“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.