Besides, he was never sure she would understand if he told her. She had been taught so great a terror of the word revolution that whenever he had thought of telling her about himself, and he longed to tell her everything, he was afraid to do it, even though he now perceived he had never been a true revolutionist, as En-lan had been.
For En-lan was one of those who are born to be in rebellion somewhere and anywhere. If it had not been in his own country, it would have been abroad. In revolution he found his only satisfaction and peace. He did not love the people for whom he fought. He only loved the fight. But I-wan had loved the people more than the fight, and he perceived this in himself, that in his heart he hated fighting. It was more true, he reasoned, to tell Tama nothing and let her see him only as he now was, because this was he more than that I-wan had been who had gone with En-lan. He had never even told her why he had not taken her to his home.
“Shall we go to your home now?” she asked. “I-wan, why are you silent? Don’t you want the child?”
She had taken alarm at his uncertain looks, and he made haste to assure her.
“Of course I want the child!” he exclaimed. “I have thought a hundred times of this moment. No, I shall not take you home.”
“Why not?” she persisted. “It would be suitable for me to meet my father-in-law and my mother-in-law.”
“I thought you were a moga!” he retorted, trying to make his voice gay. “I thought modern girls didn’t want to meet their mothers-in-law.”
“I am moga, I-wan,” she declared. It always made him want to smile to hear this favorite declaration of hers. But now he would not even smile lest she be hurt. He was learning that this little Japanese wife of his did not like him to laugh at her.
“But there are some things which are only right,” he finished for her.
“How did you guess my words?” she asked.
He might have answered, “Because I have heard you say them before.” But this also he had learned not to say. Instead he said, “It is what you think, isn’t it?”
“Yes, and especially now,” she replied very gravely. And after an instant’s pause she went on, “When a woman is to have a child, it is strange, but her moga feelings are quieted. She thinks instead of old ways and of how she can protect the child. She thinks of family.”
“My family cannot protect him, I think,” he said in a low voice.
“But I thought your father was rich?” she inquired. “And you said he was powerful.”
He ought, he felt, to tell her that even his father’s wealth and power were perhaps not enough to protect a child born of a Japanese woman. But he could not. The words would destroy something in this quiet secure home. They would stay in her mind and hide in her heart like a disease. She would not be able to forget them, and at last she would hold them even against him. No, he could not say, loving her as he did with his whole heart, “My people hate yours, Tama”—not when together they were to unite into this child.
“I want you for my own,” he muttered, and put his arm about her shoulder. “Stay moga, Tama. I, too, am mobo. We live apart, you and I. We don’t need any family. We are enough for each other — we will be enough for our children.”
She looked at him doubtfully. “They cannot always live just with us,” she said. “We will grow old and die.”
“But there will be a lot of them then,” he replied, “and we will teach them to be enough for each other.”
“The house will be too small for them,” she said.
“We will cut back the hill and add more rooms,” he retorted.
“It would be cheaper to move into a bigger house,” she said thoughtfully.
But he would not have this.
“No, Tama, no,” he declared. “We will never leave this house. I should feel it an evil omen to leave it.”
“Oh, and you a mobo!” she cried. “A mobo believing in omens!”
They laughed together so heartily over this nothing that at last she wiped her eyes on her sleeves and demanded of him, “What were we talking about before we grew so silly, I-wan?”
“I believe,” he said, “that you had said we are to have a child — a daughter, Tama.”
“No, never — a son, of course!” she corrected him quickly.
“I should like a small girl,” he told her.
“I shall certainly have a son,” she declared.
They were laughing and again forgetting everything.
Bunji had not yet come home. A year before there had been a disturbance in Shanghai. It was not important, the papers had said then. A renegade Chinese battalion had clashed with some Japanese soldiers.
It had not seemed important when a few days later Mr. Muraki said Bunji had been ordered to Shanghai. It did not seem important when now, a year later, Bunji was still away and Mr. Muraki said it would be summer before he came. For in the midst of this spring I-wan’s first son was born.
He had never seen before the cycle of birth. If he had been a village child as En-lan had been it would have held no mysteries. Among common people, he knew, the union of man and woman and the coming of a child were as usual as food and drink and sleep. Nothing was hidden. But in the great foreign house in which he had lived, none of these things were seen. If a slave girl conceived by accident and could not cast the child by any herbs and medicines, she was sent away, his mother declaring she would not have dogs and cats and crying children in the house. And I-wan himself was the youngest.
So he came freshly to the birth of his own child, and so it was a miracle to him. It was a miracle to see Tama at this work of hers, eating and drinking one thing and another to make the child wise, to make him strong, to make his teeth grow out straight and white, to ensure the blackness of his hair and eyes and that his skin be smooth. And yet he must not be too large to be safely born. On a certain day, when she announced his coming to her own family, she bound a girdle about herself and changed her food to keep him strong and yet small. And though I-wan wondered how she knew all these things, she hired an old midwife to help her as the time went on.
But nothing would persuade Tama to cease her work at cooking and cleaning, at sweeping, and tending the garden. She did these things until the moment of the child’s birth. “It will keep me strong,” she declared and would not spare herself. Nor would she have a doctor to help her.
“If you hear I am to die, then call a doctor,” she told I-wan, “and put it to him that he is to save me. Otherwise this midwife is good enough. I have taught her to wash her hands and to boil whatever she uses.”
He would have protested that she ought, as a moga, to use more science in the birth of their child. “After all, a midwife — the women of past ages did no better.” But she silenced him with her hands folded against his lips.
“I want our son to be born here in our home,” she pleaded with him. “If we have a doctor he will make me go into a hospital and our child will lie in a room with scores of others. I want to give birth to him here. I will take care, I-wan. I have been taught about germs, too.”
He had to yield to her then. Yes, he too would like his child born in this house.
“And when I know the time is come,” she said, “you are to go away, I-wan, where you can’t hear me. And you are not to come until I send the maidservant for you.”
“I leave you?” he cried. “But—”
She would not let him go on.
“Yes, you are to leave me,” she declared. “It is my task.”
And she would have it so. On that mild day of early summer when he rose in the morning, he saw her changed.
“It is begun!” she said. “Hurry, hurry — go away.”