“But where?” he cried, dismayed. “Where shall I go?”
“Why, to work, of course,” she answered.
“As I do any other day?” he cried, astounded. “I can’t work today!”
“Yes — yes — yes,” she answered in little gasps. “You can — you must. Don’t think — just work — as usual. Say to yourself—‘What Tama is about today is very usual. It will happen again and again. I must go on with my work.’”
“I shan’t be able to,” he declared.
“But you must, as soon as you have eaten your breakfast.”
And she served him, though he tried to make her rest, because she said it would be good for the child and make him strong if she were strong. When at last he saw that indeed he could do nothing with her, that every few minutes she turned white and held back a groan and the sweat burst out on her clear skin, he rushed off as she had commanded him to-do. She would have her own way, he perceived, forever. And he loved her and would let her have it, he thought, remembering that sweat at the edges of her dark hair and upon her nose and soft upper lip. She was always right, in herself.
And before noon the little maidservant came and told him he had a son. He left everything at once as it was and hastened as he had never in his life for any cause. Rickshas begged him to ride, but he pushed them aside.
“I can go faster on my own legs,” he shouted and they roared after him their laughter. “He goes to meet a beloved mistress,” they said.
This he could not stand. He stopped one moment to shout back at them, “I have a new-born son!” and rushed on up the narrow hill road to his house.
Madame Muraki was there and came out to meet him, her soft face flushed.
“It is a strong child,” she said. “I had none better, except perhaps Akio.”
He checked his speed and remembered to bow to her and then wished she had not spoken of the dead Akio at such a moment. It was an ill omen to speak of the dead, his mother had always said, on the day a child was born.
But when he saw the child he forgot it. He was compelled to laugh. For this son of his, with the trick the new-born have of looking for a few days like the old, looked exactly like his own grandfather, the old general. There was not a trace of Tama in his small frowning majestic face. I-wan’s own blood had prevailed.
When his son was a little more than three months old, in the midst of Tama’s enormous preparation for the Feast of the First Meal, when, as Tama explained to I-wan, the baby was to be given rice boiled in milk and also a little broth, and when everyone in the family must be invited to dine, Bunji came home.
Years later I-wan was to look on Bunji’s return as the beginning of what was to come. But on that day it seemed of no importance, except the pleasure of his presence. Tama said, “How luckily it comes about that Bunji is here for the feast!” And I-wan himself thought of it only with joy in seeing Bunji, and in showing him the child. He went himself, the morning of the feast day, to meet the ship which was to bring back the soldiers being returned from Shanghai, and waited, with Mr. Muraki, for Bunji to separate himself from the stream of brown-clad men who poured across the gangplank as soon as it was put down.
Bunji was among the last. They saw him before he saw them. They saw him pause, as though he were bewildered, as he stepped upon the shore, and he did not hear I-wan’s shout. He started away and was about to go on with the others when I-wan ran after him and caught him by the shoulder, shouting to him, “Bunji, where are you going? We are here.”
Bunji turned, and I-wan saw instantly that the many months of being a soldier had changed him. It was not merely that I-wan had never seen him in uniform with his bowed legs in puttees. Bunji’s face was changed. It was no longer an open tranquil youthful face. It had hardened and his big mouth, which had only been laughing and somewhat shapeless before, now seemed coarsened and even cruel.
But he laughed when he saw I-wan, with something of his old laughter.
“I was about to keep on with those fellows I have been with so long,” he exclaimed.
“Your father is here, waiting,” I-wan said, “and you are to come to my home today for our son’s feast.”
“So!” Bunji exclaimed. He went with I-wan and met his father, bowed and laughed and shouted, “But I must bathe, I-wan, and dress myself. I haven’t had a good bath since I left home.”
“Everything is waiting for you,” Mr. Muraki said. He was very quiet, but his eyes never moved from his son. They all climbed into a waiting taxicab.
“And so you and Tama have a son,” Bunji said.
“As like my grandfather as a small photograph,” I-wan said. “You will laugh when you see him — though he is less like than at first. I confess, when I first saw my son, my impulse was to put a Chinese general’s uniform on him and hang a medal on his breast. I felt I owed it to him.”
Mr. Muraki smiled dimly and Bunji laughed as though he knew I-wan expected it. Then he said with sharpness, “A Japanese general’s uniform will one day be more suitable, I suppose.”
I-wan did not answer. He looked at Bunji, not knowing whether he meant to tease him or whether he was in earnest — to tease, he decided, after a moment.
Everything was the same about Bunji, I-wan thought, still not having answered him, except something completely changed within him. He talked, he laughed, he moved as he always did. But the old Bunji had seemed to be showing himself as he was. Now when he talked, he seemed to be thinking of something else. And even his laughter seemed only a surface stir as though beneath it there was gloom.
But nothing could be said of this now. I-wan went with them to the gate of Mr. Muraki’s house, and there they parted.
“We meet in less than an hour,” he said.
“At two o’clock,” Mr. Muraki agreed.
But Bunji said nothing. He seemed still thinking of something else.
In the midst of the crowded hotel room while the feast wore on, Bunji said very little, though he sat beside I-wan. The rite of feeding the child had taken place, and all had gone as it should. Everyone had admired the small boy, and especially when he sturdily refused to swallow the strange food thrust into his mouth and spat it out again upon his new silken robe and burst into a roar of weeping. He wore a boy’s coat for the first time, and his head had been freshly shaved, bald in a circle at the top, and then a fringe of straight soft black hair. Bunji, watching him, turned to I-wan.
“I would know he was not Japanese,” he said.
“Yes, that’s evident,” I-wan answered.
It was at this moment that he caught Bunji’s look, fixed on him with a strange and secret hostility. He was astonished, as though Bunji had drawn a dagger against him. But he could say nothing in this room full of murmuring and admiring people. He withdrew his eyes and moved a little away from Bunji and tried to imagine why Bunji should have changed to him.
Had something happened between Bunji and his own father in Shanghai? Yet so far as he knew they had never met. He had written to his father and given him the name of Bunji’s regiment and station. But his father had written to him that it was not safe to receive Japanese callers. There was a band of young men who had organized themselves for assassinations, and they had only recently killed another banker for seeming to be friendly with a Japanese captain. To Mr. Muraki he wrote regretting that an illness prevented him from returning the kindness shown to I-wan. But he hoped, in time to come, when mutual understanding increased — and Mr. Muraki had replied saying that between them, at least, now that they were united in their grandson, all was understood.
Tama had said, opening her eyes, “Why doesn’t your father like Bunji?”
And I-wan had hastened to say, “How can he dislike him when he has never seen him?”