And yet, when later I-wan looked back upon that peace, he wondered that he could have dreamed it secure. It ended in a single moment.
It was Mr. Muraki’s seventieth birthday and therefore a day to be specially observed. Shio had come from Yokohama with his wife and two sons, and there had been a great feast in the middle of the day at a hotel. There the merchants of the city had gathered to speak in praise of Mr. Muraki and to present to him a gift of a silver plate with all their names upon it, mounted on wood and set in velvet. Mr. Muraki had been pleased enough, but he was very tired too, since he seldom went out of his own home, and he had been compelled to get up and bow a great many times, and also to make a speech of thanks in return.
In the afternoon at his own house, therefore, there were no guests, and since it was very hot, as though a storm were coming, Bunji had told the servants to draw back all the screens, so that though they sat under the roof, on all sides except one the great room was open to the garden, now full of a soft late sunshine. The children played together in the brook that ran near the house, and their elders sat and watched them quietly. Mr. Muraki smoked his pipe, and Shio sat smoothing his piece of jade, and Madame Muraki simply knelt in the still motionless way she did when nothing was wanted. Only Bunji came and went, bustling to see to a servant or to shout to a child.
I-wan, sitting beside Tama, was silent too, enjoying the hour and thinking of Mr. Muraki’s life, which had been in a fashion spread before him in this day — a good and honorable life, spent in its own unchanging ways. He looked at the old man and wondered if now at seventy he was satisfied with what he had had. It was hard to believe that Mr. Muraki had ever wanted anything else.
It was exactly at the moment when Ganjiro slipped and fell into the water and burst into a loud cry that the noise in the street began. I-wan remembered that, for in the confusion of rushing to lift Ganjiro out of the water, it seemed that the child was making all the noise. But in a second Ganjiro’s crying was lost in the shouting from outside the gate, and Bunji was roaring, “What is the matter — what is the matter?” And Shio was shrieking, “Is it an earthquake? Has anyone felt anything?” And Tama had come running out to I-wan and the children, and they all stood there together, waiting to feel the earth move beneath their feet.
But the earth did not move. Around them in the garden everything was as it had been, the water sliding over the rocks, the sun sinking, its long shadowy rays underneath the trees upon the moss-green ground. Then they saw the old gardener running to them, in his hand a newspaper, the great black letters scarcely dry upon it. Bunji seized it from his hand and they crowded around it. It was easy enough to read. In a moment they knew what had happened.
Three hundred Japanese — men, women, and children — had been killed by Chinese soldiers in a little town near Peking…. In revenge, the great headlines shouted, in barbarous revenge for the peaceful policing of Peking by Japanese soldiers!
No one spoke. No one looked at I-wan. They stood just as they had been standing when they were waiting for the earthquake. Even the children, catching the knowledge of disaster, were silent. In the silence the noise of the street seemed louder than it was, for a telephone began ringing in the house without stopping a second, and they could hear that. And in another moment a maidservant came to Bunji and bowed and said, “Sir, you are wanted. It is General Seki’s office.”
Bunji turned away without a word and went in and Setsu pattered after him. And then there was the stifled sound of a woman crying. It was Tama’s little maid, sobbing into her sleeve.
“What is it, Miya?” Tama said to her sharply.
And the little maid blurted out, “My brother — he must be dead, too. He had a little meat shop there in China — where they have all been killed. But business was so bad here — there are so many shops like his — so, when the government said they would help him to have a shop in China, where he could get rich, my father told him to go.”
She sobbed aloud, and Ganjiro, seeing her weep, howled in terror. I-wan took him in his arms. But he was too dazed to comfort the child. What did this mean? He had taken the paper from Bunji’s hand and he read on. A colony of peaceful people massacred by Chinese trained and paid by Japanese to keep the peace!
“Give me the child,” Tama said. “He is still crying.”
He felt her take Ganjiro firmly away from him. And now Bunji was coming back, his face grave and cold. He did not look at I-wan. He came to his father, bowed, and said simply, “I am ordered at once to report for military duty.”
He turned and went again into the house.
No one spoke. If Mr. Muraki would only speak, or Shio, then, I-wan thought, he could say what he must somehow say, “Surely there was a reason. We Chinese do not kill people for nothing.”
We Chinese! A few moments ago he had been so closely knit into this family that he had not doubted he was one of them. But now, this silence—
“We must go home,” Tama said in a strange voice.
And then they all began to move, to bow, to say farewell — only to say farewell. There was not a word of anything else. So, therefore, how could he begin to say, “We Chinese—”
He could only follow Tama and go with his sons and the red-eyed sniffling little maid, home through the twilighted streets. Everything was quiet again. People knew what had happened. They walked along talking of it, their faces grim, their voices low. Now and again there was a short rush of noise as a bus stopped, opened its door, and let out its crowds coming home from beaches and parks, those who had not heard.
I-wan, too, did not speak. He felt people’s eyes picking him out from among all the others, noting him different, but he walked stolidly on, as though he saw nothing. Inwardly he was a confusion of shame and anger, but anger was the stronger. Now he wanted to cry out to them all, “Why do you play such injury and innocence? I tell you, we don’t kill people for play!”
But he could not simply begin to shout this in the street to people who said nothing to him and who looked away when he stared back at them.
He strode along, therefore, filling the silence with his own angry thoughts, remembering all the wrongs which Japan had done. En-lan knew them all. It was En-lan who had told them to him, over and over. Even in those days they had not seemed real to him as they did to En-lan. That was because he had never lived in the north where En-lan was, and where the Japanese had pressed the hardest, and because, too, in his father’s house he heard nothing. But now he remembered En-lan’s passionate voice, saying again and again, “They want to swallow us up as they have Korea. Sooner or later we’ll have to fight them.” The Twenty-one Demands — how angry En-lan could get over them! And it was the Japanese, he always said, who brought in opium and made it cheap so that poor people could buy it. Every now and then En-lan used to work hard at boycotts against Japanese, and then shops would be ransacked and great bonfires piled up of Japanese goods in Shanghai streets. And sometimes En-lan had been half beside himself with rage because some cowering small shopkeeper tore the labels from his Japanese merchandise and swore it to be Chinese. But somehow, mysteriously, all boycotts came to an end. And at last everything had been lost in the greater rush of the oncoming revolution. And yet even then, I-wan remembered now, as one day he climbed the stone steps to a classroom, En-lan had kept saying in his ear, “Sooner or later, after the revolution, we must rid ourselves of the Japanese.”
He wanted at least to tell Tama — to explain to Tama, indeed, above all — but she was very busy.