“How can you know so much?” he cried.
“Ah, you don’t imagine how much more I know!” she answered proudly. “I still have scores of things I haven’t made for you.”
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.