He could not deny this. She read a great deal so that, she said, she would have something to talk about with him when he came home, “so I won’t be only a stupid old-fashioned Japanese wife,” she said.
“Nevertheless, you cannot go,” he said firmly. He did not often so command her. She looked at him across the table. Then, Jiro still in her arms, she rose and came over to him and put Jiro on his lap.
“Jiro,” she said, “tell your father what I told you today.”
Jiro, struck with shyness, looked from one face to the other.
“Say, ‘My mother says in the spring, if the gods permit’—only I know there are no gods, of course, I-wan, but I like to say it at such times—‘in the spring I am to have a little brother.’”
“Tama!” he cried.
She nodded. “Yes, and yes, and you mustn’t leave us now, I-wan. If something should happen — and I have such a superstition, I-wan. I know it is silly — but I look at the ocean so much and I feel it must never come between us. It wants to come between us, I-wan. I feel it — and if you leave me now, I shall be afraid that it will spoil the child. He will sicken in me and die.”
He looked at her uncertainly.
“Wait until we can all go together,” she begged him. “Not you alone — never without us!”
She seized his arm and clung to it and Jiro began to cry with fright.
“Hush, Jiro,” he said, and he put his other arm around Tama. After all, why should he go? What could he do, anyway, if he found out the truth. What had happened had happened. Tama was crying now, too, against his shoulder.
“Hush, you two,” he scolded them. “Was ever a man so beset by his family?” He put his arms around them both and locked his hands together behind them and rocked them back and forth gently.
“There,” he soothed them, “stop your tears. I am not going. Tama, be quiet. You are terrifying the child.”
She sobbed more softly and more softly until she was quiet, and then Jiro was quiet, too. And I-wan sat rocking them gently to and fro. This was his world, here in his arms.
And the next day Bunji remembered nothing, or, at most, nothing except a fear that he had said more than he should. He came in late, looking pale and tired, but trying to be jaunty in his old way. I-wan saw him pass his door, but he had no wish to speak first and he let him pass. Then at noon when the clerks were away eating their meal, Bunji came and stood in the door and said to I-wan with a sort of coaxing, half frank, half ashamed, “I was drunk yesterday, wasn’t I?”
“You were,” I-wan replied, looking up.
“I talked a great deal — what did I talk about?”
He saw that Bunji did not remember, and he was at once relieved of the burden of such confidence between them.
“You said you were going to be married,” he replied.
“Is that all?” Bunji said. “So I am. I am going to be married in the old way, I-wan. I shall look at many pictures of young women of suitable age and family, put my finger on one, and tell my father, ‘That one!’”
He laughed and I-wan smiled and said nothing.
“I will announce the wedding day,” Bunji declared. “It will be soon. I can’t have your son too far ahead of mine.”
“Sons,” I-wan corrected him.
“What — another!” Bunji cried.
I-wan nodded.
“Good Tama!” Bunji exclaimed. “Hah, the mogas still do very well, don’t they?”
“Excellently,” I-wan replied.
“A boy, eh?” Bunji asked.
“Tama says so,” I-wan answered. “She thinks she knows.”
“Then she knows,” Bunji rejoined. “At least, the child itself will have to prove her wrong before she will believe it. Well, I shall choose a milder woman.”
“I am well suited,” I-wan answered.
Bunji nodded, and went away.
I-wan sat thinking a moment longer. He was greatly relieved that Bunji did not know what he had told. He had seen behind a curtain drawn for a moment from Bunji’s memory. He knew that if Bunji had been conscious he would never have drawn that curtain. But he would never tell Bunji what he had done. Yet nothing could ever be quite the same again, now that he knew. He was different today from what he had been. He had, for instance, wanted daughters, but now since yesterday he wanted only sons. Tama had said to him this morning, “I feel the child in me is a boy. We will hang two paper carp over the house at the Festival of Sons when this one comes!”
“Good!” he had said.
Sons would follow their father some day, but daughters must be left behind.
The birth of Ganjiro, his second son, the Festival of Sons, and the earthquake, were all one confusion forever after in his mind. They happened together in the middle of the next spring after Bunji’s wedding, that strange wedding, which took place so quickly and informally in the Japanese fashion to which I-wan could never become accustomed. It was simply one of the differences between his own country and this, that in one a marriage ceremony lasted for days, and here it was soon finished. Bunji himself behaved as though it were nothing, and the little Setsu Hajima whom he married looked like millions of other little Japanese women behind her bravely painted face. And once married Bunji never mentioned her. In a few days it seemed as though she had always been in the Muraki house. One forgot that she had not always been there, and now that she was come one forgot that she was there.
And then, less than a month later, Ganjiro was born. He had been born in the middle of the day, in the most easy and tranquil fashion, without I-wan’s knowing anything about it. He had bade Tama and Jiro good-by on a morning late in April, when the last of the cherry blossom petals were floating down in the garden. The streets were wet with a sudden rain, and the sky was as he loved it best, clear blue behind huge soft white clouds billowing up from the ocean. The trees and leaves were green in every garden, and people on the street looked happy and content in the mild damp air. There was a deep sweetness in this life of the people and he felt it and valued it. Human beings liked each other and showed it in their courtesies. It occurred to I-wan as he walked along in April sunshine that in these streets he had never seen an old face unhappy or a child angry because he was beaten. He loved these people willingly and unwillingly, too. He grew nearer them, and yet more alone.
Bunji, since he had married Setsu, was nearer and yet further away than he had been. He had immediately given up his drinking, although on his wedding day he had been very drunk. But none ever saw him drunk now. And certainly he played the lordly husband over stocky plain Setsu, who did not so much as sit in his presence. In these days Bunji was given to loud opinions on foreign policy, especially the policy of Japan in China, where he insisted the communists were again seizing the control. I-wan had listened to a great deal of this the night before, when he and Tama had dined at Bunji’s new house.
“Sooner or later we shall have to put them down,” Bunji had declared.
Well, he had learned not to answer Bunji. It was no use. Besides, he did not believe what he said. Men like his own banker father owned China and they hated the communists. And had not the Japanese papers reported again and again the rout of Chinese communists by their own government? Bunji was growing middle-aged with prejudices. He dismissed such things from his mind and entered his office as usual. He had hoped, at the new year, for an advancement, at least in his salary, but there had been none. Mr. Muraki explained at the annual new year’s feast for his employees that there could be no increase in salary this year because of an unexpected and heavy rise in taxes, in order to strengthen the Emperor’s army defenses by sea and land. He had only to say “The Emperor,” and all was accepted — that is, by everyone except I-wan. He felt no loyalty to this sacred emperor, and it was not in him any more to worship anything.