So she arranged the table and the dishes and the pot of tea, so she planned how they would sit and in what order eat the courses served them. Only when all this was done and there was nothing left to place did she suddenly laugh and clap her hands.
“Now!” she cried merrily, “Now let us be happy!”
“But you have been very happy, my Tama,” he said, laughing at her. “I have been watching you. You have been very happy arranging everything.”
She stared at him across the tiny table at which they were sitting on the soft floor mats.
“What do you mean?” she inquired. “I was only doing what should be done.”
“No, what you liked,” he said gaily. “Do you think it is necessary to do all you did? The food could have been brought in and eaten.”
“Oh, I-wan!” Her voice was full of pain. “But there is a way in which to do each thing in life — even the plainest. Why, I have been taught there is a way in which to sweep a room, that makes it more than mere sweeping, a way in which to serve tea, a way in which—”
“Moga — moga!” he cried joyously.
She stopped. “You mean — as a moga—” she faltered, “it is not necessary — I suppose,” she said very slowly. “I am really somewhat old-fashioned. It is true — I am, perhaps — more than I think.”
He had hurt her, he perceived. He had taken the joy out of all her small arrangements, and he hated himself.
“No — no,” he insisted, “I love it. I love all you do. Don’t mind my teasing you, my heart. No, I won’t tease you any more.”
“Yes, you must tease me, I-wan, if you like,” she said quickly. “I will learn to be teased.”
She was so grave that he could scarcely keep from reaching across the table for her. He would have, indeed, except that a maid was bringing in a fish. Instantly Tama forgot.
“I-wan, here is the fish!” she cried. “I chose it myself today in the pool. Now you must like it, I-wan, because it is a beautiful fish, and I myself gave the recipe at the kitchen.”
“I shall like it,” he promised, “and it is beautiful.”
She separated the fish with a pair of silver chopsticks and he held out his bowl for her to fill and she filled it and he took it and looked at her.
“I take whatever you give me,” he said.
She blushed and he saw, or thought he saw, alarm in her eyes.
“But you know I want to give you only what you want,” she said.
“Yes, I know,” he said. He must, he perceived, make his way delicately with this young wife of his. She was old and new, child and woman together. He must treat her as each and all together.
In a moment she was laughing at him. Then they spoke of Bunji and of how he would have enjoyed such a feast as they were having, and how out of all the world they would have minded him less than any other. Where he was they did not know, except now somewhere in China. And then Tama said, “Tell me about China. Is it like our country?”
I-wan shook his head first, and then said, “Yes, it is — no, I don’t know. No, it is not like.” He thought of the strong racial difference between Tama’s body and his own. That difference went into mind and thinking and feeling. They would hurt each other again and again because of that difference.
He waited for Tama to ask him more. But she did not. Instead she rose and put out all the lights except one. The maid had taken the last dishes and left them fresh tea, and Tama brought her bowl and sat beside him at ease, now that the feast was over. She had forgotten China and whether it was like what she knew or not.
Instead she was gazing out across the mountains, her whole look one of peace and pleasure. His eyes went with her and for a moment they were silent. And in the silence all differences faded and they were simply together, man and wife. This union of man and woman — it was the deepest in life — deeper than race and ancestry. He was not afraid of his marriage. He would give himself to it, for it was his only world. He had no world into which he could take her, but he would enter as far as he could into her world. But the real world would be the new world which they would make. A new world — he put the phrase away with the shock of old pain. No, nothing so important and large as a new world. What he and Tama would make would be a small secure place, large enough only for themselves and their children. Their children would be like them, without a country of their own. They would need the more the small close security of home. It occurred to him now, for the first time, that his children might not thank him for being their father. They might even have preferred an old Japanese general. In Shanghai, he remembered, there were certain people, born of mixed blood, who were nothing. But that was white blood and yellow — intolerable mixture. His children and Tama’s would at least not look as those did.
“Tama!” he cried, “what are you thinking about?”
It seemed to him suddenly necessary to hear her voice.
“I am thinking of our house,” she answered peacefully. “I am thinking of how I shall arrange everything.”
“Ah, I wish we need never go down from this mountain!” he cried with passion. “It has been so safe and so quiet — we have been alone together as though there were no one else in the world.”
It seemed to him at this moment that the whole world lay in turmoil about this one peaceful spot where they sat alone in the stillness of evening.
“Oh, I wouldn’t like to live all the time on top of a mountain,” Tama said. “It is too difficult.”
“Difficult?” he repeated.
“Yes,” she said, “to get meat and vegetables and charcoal and all the things we need every day.”
“Ah,” he said, thoughtfully, “of course it would be difficult.”
The things of every day — they had not occurred to him.
The days ran after each other so quickly that before he could lay hold of one to treasure it another had come. They went nowhere, except he to his work, now again in his old office, but alone since Bunji was gone. From it he hurried back to Tama in their small clean house. And day followed day, and month slipped into month, and they wanted no change, he because it was such sweet change to have this house and this woman for his own, and she because surely Tama was the goddess of everyday things. He thought, “I have never known her really until now.”
For now he perceived that it was in doing her everyday tasks that she seemed most free. When they had been together on the mountain she had been, he thought, perfect — a little more than perfect, he had sometimes felt, as though she had set for herself a pattern of what she would be at such a time and had faithfully followed the pattern. But now in her eagerness and in her being so busy in making the house as she wanted it, she forgot to keep her hair always smooth and her sash straight and uncrumpled. Instead she ran about in a cotton kimono girdled with a strip of the same cloth instead of a sash, and she tied back her long sleeves in the way the small maidservant did, and her hair was loosened, and more than half the time when he came home those first days to his noon meal she had a smudge on her nose or her cheek from the charcoals upon which she cooked his dinner.
There was always a good dinner for him. She was a zealous cook because, he found, she loved cooking. A soup, different each day, and two dishes at least, awaited him. And each dish was a surprise. She made great excitement over lifting the cover and disclosing a boned fish or tiny balls of meat or chicken steamed to tenderness and hid under a sauce of fresh bean curd smoothed into a gravy.