“I don’t know,” she answered, staring at him thoughtfully, as she nursed the baby at her full young bosom.
“Neither do I,” I-wan said, and before she could speak again he had knelt beside her and put his arms about them both. “You make me completely happy,” he whispered. And she had taken up his hand and laid her cheek in its palm and forgotten what she had asked.
He could not talk to Bunji here or today — it was not suitable — but he would talk with him and know what Bunji meant. He gave himself determinedly to being the host, deferring to the elder guests, and especially to Mr. Muraki at the head of the table and to Madame Muraki. Everyone was gay and full of courtesy, and Tama had seen to the dishes and busied herself with directions to the hotel cook for each one, and to look at them all on this late summer afternoon it seemed that none of them had any thought beyond the pleasure of eating and drinking and looking at the baby, who slept peacefully in his nest upon the maidservant’s back.
“He sleeps like a Japanese, at least,” Bunji said once to I-wan.
“How — what do you mean?” I-wan paused to ask.
Bunji nodded at the child’s bobbing head.
“We can sleep anywhere, we Japanese, because we begin like that. We can sleep in noise and movement and any confusion. We can sleep even in the midst of cannon firing, if we are off duty for a few moments. It is the secret of our endurance in war.”
I-wan looked at the peaceful innocent face of his small son. His eyes were closed and his little mouth was pouted and rosy.
“He doesn’t look as though he were being trained for war,” he said, laughing.
But Bunji was sipping his wine gravely and he did not answer. And I-wan felt suddenly alone, as though he had been separated from everyone. He was conscious for the first time in the day that after all he was different from all of them, even indeed from his son.
He could not, he found, immediately ask Bunji what was changed in him. In the first place he was not sure, after a few days had passed, that Bunji was aware of change. Then also it was impossible to assume the old relationship until Mr. Muraki had made it clear who was to be the head in the office. I-wan had resigned from his own place, in order to make this decision easier, and yet he was, he felt foolishly, somewhat hurt when Mr. Muraki accepted it and placed Bunji over him, and gave him only the second place. Their salaries were so nearly the same, it is true, that I-wan could not complain of that. His was not decreased, but Bunji was given a little more.
And I-wan, again he felt foolishly, was the more hurt because at home Tama accepted this as a matter to be expected.
“Father is very kind not to give us any less now that Bunji has returned,” she said.
It was impossible for I-wan to tell her that it was difficult for him to take the lower place now and to have to ask Bunji if such and such were the right order to give and to see the clerks begin to go to Bunji instead of to him. But most difficult of all was still to perceive the change in Bunji himself. Where once he had been careless and easy to please, he was now become meticulous and careful of every detail of I-wan’s work. Once he rebuked I-wan sharply for not overseeing himself the packing of a consignment of cheap dishes to be shipped to a great New York department store. I-wan made himself smile. But he could not forbear saying, “You yourself have done worse, Bunji. I seem to remember Akio complaining of that.”
“The army has educated me,” Bunji retorted, and turned to his own office. He had wanted an office alone, and I-wan had been moved into another room with two clerks. It was not so easy to see Bunji as it had been.
But indeed this change in Bunji, manifest in many ways, became a great hurt to I-wan. His only resource was to go home more steadfastly as the months passed to find refuge in Tama and in their small son. In her bustling and busy care of them both he found his comfort. She had the genius of reality. By her warm matter-of-fact ways and her ready speech and quick response to his least need, she made him feel rooted and secure and able each morning to go out to his work. Through her he had union with life and people. Her people were his because she was his and made all that was hers his. She could so tell the story of the small happenings of the day while he had been gone that through her very telling he felt close to life and near to people, though in reality he knew almost no one.
And then there were all the things which the growing child did. He had been given the name of Jojiro, and they called him Jiro. He knew his name already, and Tama complained proudly that he was troublesome because he was wanting to creep too early and that meant he would want to walk before he was a year old and he must not, and it would take someone’s whole time to keep him from it, and he would cry when he was prevented because he was so willful he went into a rage if he were denied anything.
“That’s because you are a Chinese, Jiro,” I-wan told his son, who at that moment was sitting erect upon the mat, chewing at the large dog of papier-mâché which had been given him as the guardian of all his dreams while he slept.
“Is that what is wrong with him?” Tama cried, and then seeing what he was doing, she shrieked and snatched the dog away. “No Japanese child would eat up his guardian dog, at least!” she cried, while Jiro wept with all his might.
No, I-wan was never lonely in his home. For that matter, it was difficult to put a name to any moment when he was treated less well by anyone than he had been before. The people on the street were as courteous to him as ever. When he went into a shop to buy cigarettes for himself or a toy for Jiro, the shopkeeper was as eager as ever to please him. Why, then, did he feel that the courtesy was not quite what it had been? It was not the courtesy, he imagined, at least, which people gave to each other, but that which they gave to a guest. He was not sure whether even this was true, any more than he could be sure that it was quite true that Mr. Muraki was more withdrawn than he had been. Once he mentioned this to Tama, and she said robustly, “I-wan, you are always too ready to imagine. Father is growing old, that is all, and age cools him as it does everyone. He forgets me, too.”
He accepted this, and yet as time went on he still felt a change. He examined himself, then, to discover what it was he really felt, and decided that it was altogether Bunji who made the difference, and the only thing to cure it was to tell him so. For it was necessary to I-wan to feel about him the support of those who liked him and were faithful to him. He wished sometimes now that he had made other friends outside the Muraki family. But he had not, beyond a few men to whom he spoke a few words when he met them at a cafe or a theater. To them all, he knew, he was known as Mr. Muraki’s son-in-law. It now occurred to him that after Mr. Muraki died, if life went on as it was, he would be known merely as Bunji Muraki’s brother-in-law. It would not be pleasant unless Bunji went back to being his old self.
Then he put these thoughts aside and went doggedly on with his work. He had made his place here, and as the world was now, it would not be easy to do it again. He must bear with Bunji. And he learned to do this.
And when he came home and saw Jiro walking and heard him begin to talk and when Tama began to fret because now Jiro was past a year old and it was time she had another child, so that he laughed at her impatience to be about her business, then it seemed nothing was really too hard to bear in the daytime, if it brought him this at night.
Bunji, before he went to the army, was a youth who could drink scarcely a cup of wine without growing dizzy from it and wanting to sleep. But now he was able to drink a great deal and liked to do so. More than once he had come back to the office after his midday meal, his temples red, to shout out his commands and to laugh too loudly. On one of these days he thrust his head into I-wan’s room.