He tapped quickly, little rhythmic taps on the wood. Then he waited a moment and tapped again. A light flickered palely behind an inner screen placed about her bed. Behind its thin silk he saw the shadow of Tama, her long hair flowing behind her. She rose from her mat on the floor and listened. He tapped again. Now she knew someone was there. He could see her shadow, undetermined, move a little away. She would be frightened perhaps.
“Tama!” he said softly, and instantly she was there, holding her long robe about her.
“I-wan!” she whispered, aghast.
“Tama,” he begged, “I had to—I am to be sent to Yokohama—tomorrow, Tama! I don’t know when I’ll come back. Bunji told me your father was angry with you. How can I go away like that?”
“But you—my father would send you back to China if he found you!”
“He won’t find me,” I-wan urged her. “Tama, please—help me!”
“Help you?”
“Don’t be Japanese, Tama—let’s just be us, you and me—such good friends! Didn’t we have a good time on the hills? That was only yesterday.”
“Yes—yes—we did—”
“Tama, I went to see Akio tonight—with Bunji—Akio and Sumie. I never admired Akio so much before. It is brave of him to love Sumie like that. People ought to be brave when they know they are right.”
Tama was holding back her hair in one hand. She stood, staring at him, listening, in her rose-colored sleeping robe.
“Is it—I don’t know if—” she began.
“I won’t come in,” I-wan said quickly. “I’ll stay here. But come to the edge of the garden close to me, so we can talk a little. Please—I am going away tomorrow!”
She did not answer. Instead she made one swift movement and blew out the candle.
“I am afraid someone will see you,” she whispered. Then he heard her beside him. She was sitting on the edge of the veranda floor. When he put out his hand he could feel her shoulder.
“Tama!” he whispered. His heart began to beat hard. He longed to put out his arms and hold her close to him. But she shrank away and he did not dare.
“Sit down beside me,” her voice said, so softly he could barely hear it. “No, I-wan, please—a little away from me. I—I-wan, if anyone hears us something terrible would happen to me. You must hurry.”
“Yes, I will,” I-wan promised.
It was true. If they were discovered, the penalty would be fearful. Once, even in China, he had heard his grandfather say that a sister of his was killed by her father’s orders because she was found with her lover—innocently enough, in a garden, talking. And Mr. Muraki was sterner than anyone in China. “Tama,” he said quickly. “About General Seki. You wouldn’t ever give up, would you?”
“Never!” she said stoutly. He was sitting beside her now, and his shoulder touched hers again.
“I couldn’t bear it, Tama. I’ll come back, somehow. You’ll see.”
“I shall be here,” she whispered.
“Don’t—you know—marry anybody—” he begged. He wanted to say “Only marry me,” but he could not.
It was so enormous a thing to say. They were so young, and there was so much against them. And this was against all lawfulness.
After a moment he heard her little whisper at his ear.
“I don’t want to marry anybody.”
He felt such happiness rush over him at this that he could scarcely sit still beside her. He leaned to her ear.
“Isn’t it wonderful there is this mist?” he said, choking a little. “It’s like a curtain to hide us.”
“A good spirit sent it,” Tama whispered back.
“Will you let me write to you?” he asked. “I have so much to say. No, but how—where shall I send letters to you?”
“To Sumie,” she answered. “Sumie will keep them for me. I go there sometimes.” She said it as quickly as though she had thought of this before.
“How it all fits together!” he cried joyously. “I never thought tonight why I went there to Sumie’s. I had planned nothing!”
“It is fate,” she said solemnly. “There is a fate for us.”
“I wonder what it is,” he answered.
“We cannot know,” said Tama, “but it is waiting for us.”
He wanted to cry out, “I know what it is! It is that we shall love each other!” But he could not.
He had never in his life spoken that word aloud, or indeed heard it spoken with the meaning of the love which he now felt born in his heart. This was so new a thing, so deep and huge in him, that he could not speak of it in the haste of this dangerous moment. There must be time to tell of it. It was not a word to crowd between second and second.
“We can’t hurry fate,” she went on, “and we can’t avoid it.”
“Do you believe, too, in—in two people being born to—to marry?” he asked, stammering.
“Yes,” she whispered.
They were silent. In the darkness they sat, only shoulder touching shoulder. He felt a little shiver down his arm and into his hand and he moved his hand and it touched hers; their hands sprang together.
“Now you must go,” she said, hurrying. “I will write to you, too, as soon as you tell me where—and we will meet again—if it is our fate.”
“It is our fate!” he said firmly.
Their hands clung a little longer. Then she sprang up and a second later there was the sound of the screens sliding softly into place. Alone he fumbled his way into the mist.
Well, he could go now, even to Yokohama…. He was so excited he could never sleep. He would lie awake and think of her…. Instantly he was asleep.
He was in the airplane with Akio. They left Nagasaki in a big tri-motored plane. As soon as the inland sea was crossed, Akio said, they would change to a small plane. The big one was only for safety over the water. From it he now looked down on the island of Kyushu.
“Tama is there,” he thought, gazing down into its greenness.
The mists were all gone this morning. He had waked from deep and pleasant sleep to find sunlight streaming into his room. Last night he had stolen through the mists to Tama, the heaven-sent mists. This morning they needed no mists. Everything was clear between them.
Akio was peering down through glasses.
“See that line of gray buildings and forts,” he remarked, handing I-wan the glasses. Looking down, I-wan saw a dotted line of forts facing east and south and west. He laughed.
“You seem to expect enemies from everywhere,” he exclaimed.
“When a nation is the smaller among larger ones,” Akio said, “it must be ready on all sides.”
“Surely you don’t expect war!” I-wan exclaimed.
“I suppose,” Akio said, hesitating, “we Japanese always expect war.” His face grew serious. “At least we have been so taught.”
I-wan was scarcely listening. He was searching the island with the glasses to see if he could find the house. People could still be seen—suppose he saw her in the garden! But no, the plane was mounting swiftly across the sea. Tama was there, hidden on the green island, like a jewel, the jewel of his heart. He gave the glasses back to Akio.
Akio was pleasant this morning. Neither of them spoke of the evening before, and yet because of it they knew each other as they had not. Akio was really talkative. I-wan, not wanting to talk, sat back in his seat by the small window, listening and gazing down at the brilliant blue sea. They were so high now that a great ship seemed to crawl like a snail on the surface of the sea, its wake like a tail behind it. Akio looked through the glasses eagerly.
“That is a warship,” he announced, “a Japanese ship going westward—probably to China,” he added.
“To my country?” I-wan asked idly. It seemed now a thing of no importance that once En-lan had exclaimed bitterly, “Why should foreign gunboats come into our waters? We send no such ships abroad.”
“We have no such ships,” I-wan had felt compelled to say honestly to En-lan.
??
?That’s not the point,” En-lan had argued. “We wouldn’t if we had them.”
I-wan, remembering, half-dreaming, thought, “I wonder if we would. I wonder if having them would make us want to use them.”
“Why do you send ships of war to China?” he asked Akio aloud.
“To protect our nationals,” Akio said, and added, “At least, so we are told.”
“I am not protected here,” I-wan said, smiling.
“Ah, but you are quite safe here,” Akio said. “We treat you well—we treat everyone well—” he hesitated and went on, “that is, I sometimes think we treat everyone better than we treat ourselves. We are very harsh with ourselves, we Japanese. We are devoured by our sense of duty.”
But the words scarcely fastened themselves in I-wan’s ears. He was thinking, “How pretty she looked last night in the candlelight, holding back her hair!” It seemed to him he could think forever of the way Tama had looked.
He fell into a dreaming reverie. He did not mind going away—very much—if he could have letters from her and could pour himself out in letters to her. They would tell each other more in letters, not having the bodily nearness to distract them. In letters they could draw mind closer to mind and spirit to spirit…. The time went quickly while he dreamed like this. Almost before he knew it the plane was dropping swiftly upon a crust of shore that appeared suddenly beneath them. Then in a few minutes they were on the ground, and being hurried by sturdy blue-coated men into a much smaller plane. Almost instantly they were mounting again, but this time flying so low they could see the farmers harvesting the yellow rice in the small fields which fitted as neatly together as the pieces of a puzzle.
“This,” Akio said suddenly, “is a convertible scouting plane.”
“Why so much preparation for war?” I-wan asked.
“It is our philosophy,” Akio said.
“Do you want war?” I-wan asked curiously.
“No,” Akio answered. He hesitated, in his frequent fashion, and took off his spectacles and wiped them very clean and put them on again. “I myself am a Buddhist,” he said. “I do not believe in taking life.”
“But if you were ordered to war?” I-wan asked.
“I have not yet decided,” Akio answered. He looked so troubled that I-wan made haste to say, “There is no need to decide—it was a silly question.”
But Akio said nothing to this. And I-wan did not notice his silence. He was only making talk. Inside himself he was already planning his first letter to Tama.
If he wrote in Chinese Tama could read it, because classical Japanese and Chinese were the same, and Tama wrote beautifully—he had once seen a poem that she wrote on a fan with delicate clear strokes of a camel’s hair brush. Well, but he would not use the old stilted Chinese forms of letter writing. He would simply begin straight off, “When I was there so high, soaring up in the blue, that was only my body—my heart like a wounded bird had never left the threshold of your room.” They must write like that, straight out of themselves….
Then again the plane was drifting like a leaf to the ground, and they were over Yokohama. He was shaken out of his dreams….
Yokohama was a busy, noisy city. There was no quiet garden here, no screen-shadowed house. He had found himself hustled into a crowded bus and hurried into the city along barren ugly streets, to a mushroom-like house of gray cement blocks.
Their bags were thrown on the sidewalk and he and Akio stepped down beside them. A uniformed doorman came and picked them up.
“These are our offices,” Akio said. “Shio will be waiting for us.”
He followed Akio through the door.
“I have never seen a building like this,” he said.
“Earthquake-proof,” Akio explained. “All Yokohama is earthquake-proof now, since the great earthquake.”
They went into a bare new office. A young woman met them.
“Mr. Shio Muraki begs you to be seated,” she said, hissing a little through her prominent front teeth. She was very ugly, I-wan thought, in a plain black skirt and a white blouse like a uniform. The skirt was too short and showed her thick, curving legs in black cotton stockings and heavy wide black leather shoes. But her ugly spectacled face was earnest with her effort to please them. She said, still hissing through her teeth, “Please—he is just now talking to an American gentleman from New York.”
They sat down as though they were guests. But Akio seemed quite accustomed to this. He went on: “That year I went to America on some business, I forget—ah yes, it was on the matter of a gold lacquered screen from the palace in Peking, and the American collector in New York wanted it, among other things. So I took it over myself. My father was afraid to send so valuable a thing. And also there were reasons why he wanted me to leave Japan for a while. When I left I stood by the steamer’s rail, looking back at Yokohama.” He stopped a moment and went on. “Sumie had come to see me off. And I watched the skyline as long as I could—long after I could not see Sumie, I could see the buildings lifting themselves against the sky. There were many fine tall buildings.” He lit a cigarette and smoked a moment. “Then we had the earthquake. I hurried back. And there was no skyline at all.”
“No skyline?” I-wan repeated.
“It was all flat,” Akio said. “Every building was gone. I stared and stared, and I could not believe it. But there was nothing. Also I had not heard from Sumie—she was to wait in Yokohama.”
Akio laughed suddenly.
“But when the ship came near, I saw a small plump woman standing among the ruins of the dock. Sumie! Well, I could spare the rest!”
They laughed together.
“And immediately,” Akio went on, “everybody began to rebuild. So we have our skyline again. We know our fate, we Japanese—we are not cowards.”
The door opened. “Now, if you please,” the young woman said.
A large American man came out and behind him a small slight figure in a gray business suit. That was Shio. He looked like Mr. Muraki made young again.
“All right, Muraki,” the big American was saying in a great rumbling voice, “it’s up to you. Seventy-five thousand dollars, good U. S. money—but you take the risks of breakage.”
“There will be no breakage,” Shio’s high clear voice declared.
“Well, that’s your pidgin,” the American said. “G’by, pleasure to do business with you, ’m sure—” He put out a large red hand and Shio laid his small unwilling brown one in it for a second. When the door had shut behind the American, Shio wiped his hand, half secretly, on his handkerchief.
“Hah!” he said to Akio, smiling and showing very white teeth under his small black mustache.
Akio smiled. “This is Wu I-wan,” he said.
“Hah!” said Shio pleasantly. “My father wrote me about you. He spoke very highly. I am sorry I was busy.”
“It is nothing,” I-wan said politely.
He felt suddenly shy. Shio was really too much like Mr. Muraki.
“Will you come into the office?” Shio said.
They followed him into a square ugly room with gray cement walls and uncomfortable wooden furniture painted yellow, and the young woman poured tea for them. But there was no time to look about. Shio was unwrapping something on his desk.
“Look!” he said eagerly.
It was an ivory figure of the Chinese Goddess of Mercy. She stood two feet high, benign and exquisite, her tranquil presence diffused from quiet eyes and flowing ivory robes. She must be very old, for the ivory was creamed.
“Ah,” Akio exclaimed, “at last!”
“At last,” Shio said. He gazed at the beautiful statue. No one spoke. Then Shio said sorrowfully, “If only we could keep her! But she is to go to America with the rest. A museum has bought the collection entire.”
“The great Li collection from Peking?” Akio asked, surprised.
Shio nodded. Then he said in a lower voice, “But tell me—how is all in my father’s house?”
“Well enough,?
?? Akio answered. He hesitated and I-wan caught his eyes looking at him as though he wished I-wan were not there. So in decency I-wan took up a newspaper that lay upon a small table near him and began to read it, so that he need not hear what Akio was now saying to Shio of family matters.
Then suddenly he heard through all he read, these words: “So now he is very angry and he says he will tell General Seki that the wedding may take place at once.”
These words I-wan heard and instantly understood. In the crash and confusion of his own being he sat staring at the ivory goddess, speechless. She stood facing them, enigmatic, benevolent, ageless, eternal. He clung to her. She was quite helpless, of course. People could do with her as they liked. But in Japan, in America, wherever she was, whatever happened to her, she would be herself, unchanged. “I am insane,” he thought, “thinking about ivory idols…. He wants the wedding at once….”
“You will go to your room first, and rest,” Shio was saying kindly.
“Yes, if I may,” I-wan said. His voice sounded thin and far off.
“Don’t hurry,” Shio replied. “Have your meal. I want to talk with my brother. Tomorrow I will show you your desk. Just now of course we are very busy. Treasures are pouring out of North China.”
What, I-wan thought, did that mean?
“This way, please,” the young woman said. He took up his bag and followed her across the street toward a long one-story gray building. This was the hostel.
“Earthquake-proof,” she said proudly.
She led him to the desk where a clerk whisked a card catalogue to his name.
“Room fifty-one,” he said.
He went to room fifty-one, and opened the door to a small cell of a room. There were a bed, a chair, a table, a washbowl stand. Floor and walls were gray cement.
He sat down heavily and put his head in his hands. He must write to Tama at once. He opened his bag and snatched out the paper and pen he had put in this morning. That quiet room seemed a thousand miles, a thousand years, away.