I-wan choked.
“It’s not true,” he muttered. “Some mistake—”
“No mistake,” Hideyoshi said briskly. “Every paper has the same story. Everybody is laughing. It is as good as a Japanese victory. Now the English and Americans will see how foolish the Chinese are. The Chinese are so kind — they help their enemies and kill their own people!”
“Then you admit the Japanese are killing the Chinese?” I-wan demanded.
“We can no longer endure their insults,” Mr. Hideyoshi replied, pursing his lips. “You must know that we have been very patient. Boycotts, prejudices, attacks from mobs, assassinations unpunished — we have endured all these for years at the hands of the Chinese. Now our Emperor is determined to put an end to Chinese animosity. We shall fight until all anti-Japanese feeling is stamped out and the Chinese are ready to co-operate with us.”
I-wan stared at him, not believing what he heard.
“You mean,” he repeated, “you will kill us and bomb our cities — and — and — rape our women — until we learn to love you?”
Now it was he who burst into loud laughter. He could not control his laughter.
“I am to love you, you say! Mr. Hideyoshi, I must love you, because you — you—”
Mr. Hideyoshi looked bewildered. “Not you as an individual,” he broke in. “Besides, we look upon you as a Japanese. You have been here so long and you are married to a Japanese lady—”
I-wan’s laughter stopped as though it had been chopped off.
“What’s the matter?” Mr. Hideyoshi asked, seeing his face.
“Nothing,” I-wan answered. “I see — all in a moment — there’s nothing to laugh at.” He bowed quickly and went back to his own office and sat down. He felt choked again and his head began to throb with the old pain. He pulled out a drawer and drew forth some folders and pretended to begin work. But he could do nothing.
“We look upon you as a Japanese,” Mr. Hideyoshi had said. Once En-lan had written down, in the way he had of writing down everything, a history of what Japan had done in China. It was a long list, reaching back, I-wan now remembered, into his grandfather’s time. There were forced concessions of land and trade, there were loans made to bandit warlords in the name of government for securities of valuable mines, there was the seizure of Kiaochow and the Twenty-one Demands. He had been a little boy when he himself could first remember, but his nurse had taken him out to see the parades then made against Japan. The flags, he remembered, were beautiful, but he had been frightened at a great poster showing a large cruel Japanese swallowing many small and helpless Chinese, and he had cried so that his nurse took him home again. But for a night or two he had had bad dreams and had screamed himself awake, so that they had let Peony move a little bamboo bed into his room and sleep near him. How therefore could he be a Japanese now? Tama had not touched really that inner self which was he…. No, Tama and everyone else now remained outside of him.
Two days later there was fresh news in the papers. Mr. Hideyoshi put his head in the door of I-wan’s office.
“We are doing our own bombing in Shanghai now,” he remarked, all his teeth glistening in a grin. “Did you see the Osaka Mainichi today?”
I-wan stared at him steadily without answering. He wanted to kill this man. This man he wanted to smash, to crush, as one crushed a beetle! Mr. Hideyoshi, seeing his look, shut the door hastily.
And yet it was not hatred which brought I-wan at last to that moment when suddenly, as clearly and simply as though he had been told, he knew what he had to do. It was something deeper in him than hatred could ever be.
Seven days after this was a day when a ship came in from China, and it was I-wan’s duty to meet it and receive into the customs warehouse on the jetty the merchandise it brought for the house of Muraki. It was a strange sight he saw as he stood watching the unloading of that ship. The carefully packed crates of goods marked Muraki were as nothing compared to other goods being set down upon the docks. These were not curios and fine things, but the common things which people use every day. They were, for the most part, unpacked, as though they had been put hastily upon the ship, and if there was now and then a heavy old desk or a carved chair, there were to be seen far more often beds and tables and stoves of foreign metals and shapes, pianos and pictures and bedding and electric refrigerators, music boxes and carpets and cushions and velvet curtains and all such things as well-to-do Chinese delighted to have in their homes in Shanghai, such things, indeed, as might easily have come out of his own father’s house. He looked at the stuff, half expecting to see something he knew, but he did not. And for everything there was someone to expect it and claim it.
“Now I know there is real war,” he thought grimly. “This is loot and nothing else. These things have been in people’s homes.”
And yet in the midst of his rising fury he was stopped. For there was something else on this ship, too. When all else had been unloaded, and he stayed in his anger to see it all, he saw many small wooden boxes begin to be brought off. Each had a name written in letters upon its top. And these, too, were expected. A man stood to call each name, and as he called, a little group of persons came forward and received a box and all of these people were in deepest mourning. And instantly I-wan knew that the boxes held the ashes of those who had been killed in battle.
He had somehow thought only of Chinese being killed. Now he knew how foolish he was. These people, too, must suffer. He stood, watching and silent, as each small box was received preciously and carried away. There was no sound of loud weeping. People even smiled as they received their dead. They had been taught to smile when those they loved died in battle. But down their faces their tears streamed.
He stood, forgetting who he was, pressing nearer and nearer, until now he became aware that he was so close that the eyes of many fell upon him as they wept. They must have known him for what he was, a Chinese, and yet their looks were not of hatred but only of pure sorrow. And he fell back a little when he saw this. It could not have been so in his own country, he thought unwillingly. No, his people were not so disciplined to sorrow as these. Their sorrow would have overflowed into wailing and cursing.
He moved back again, half ashamed, and knocked against an old man standing alone, a box wrapped in his arms as though it were his child. And I-wan, looking inadvertently into his eyes, saw such patient sorrow that he could not but stammer something about his wonder that there was such patience and no sign of hatred. And to this the old man answered gently, “Why should we hate you? You had nothing to do with this. And besides, our people are taught to suffer gladly for our country.” The tears burst from his eyes as he said this, but he only clutched the box more firmly and said, his old voice shaking, “Yes — I rejoice — my only son—”
And this old man uttering these words brought light to I-wan. The dusk, the silence, in which he had been living broke and was gone. He was at that instant recalled to his old self. Yes, to that old self which had been he in the days when he dreamed of his country and lived to make her what he dreamed. How these people loved their country! The love of country which he saw shining in this old man’s face — it was the most beautiful love in the world. How small and selfish was the love of one creature for another! There was a love infinitely larger, a love into which he wanted to throw his whole self. Had he not known such love?
… “I-wan, you are like a priest,” Peony had said…. He longed suddenly to lose himself and all his doubts in great sacrifice. He had never been so happy, he now thought, as he had been in those old days with En-lan — no, not even with Tama, and with all her ministering to him. He was one who was happiest when he ministered. This was his nature, only he had not known it. It had taken the suffering of other people to show it to him. In his own country how many suffered now!