The Patriot

by Pearl S. Buck

  “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!

  He turned, and the old man went away. But I-wan did not need him any more. He had done his work. Fate, that strange fate in which Tama always believed, had used him for the necessary moment, and had then dismissed him. I-wan, without thinking of him again, went back to the goods in the customs house. But all the time while he listened to the demands of the customs officers, while he watched clerks open the crates, and while he checked one paper after another, his mind and his heart were asking:

  “How shall I tell Tama?”

  At first, on his way home, he thought that he would simply go without telling her. He would write it all down in a letter for her to read when he was gone. Then he could explain to her in his own language, the written language which was hers also.

  He had almost persuaded himself to this when he stepped into his house. Usually she was there waiting for him in the garden or at the door. But tonight she was delayed. He was already inside, taking off his shoes, when she came running out of the kitchen, pushing back her hair as she came.

  “Oh, I am so late!” she cried. “Well, I was making something you like, and it took me such a long time.”

  When she came running up to him, her wide eyes frank and her face rosy, he knew he could never go away without telling her. And yet if he waited his heart would fail him. In the rush of the moment he seized her shoulders and began to speak.

  “Tama, I must go home—I am needed there.”

  He said it very quietly, so that he would not startle her, but her body grew still and stiff under his hands and the blood fled from her face. She did not say, “Let me go, too.” No, she knew now that he meant he must go alone.

  He hurried on. “I have been miserable all these days. I haven’t known what to do.”

  “I knew what you were thinking,” she said. Her voice was so small he could scarcely hear it.

  “But you didn’t tell me,” he retorted. “I thought you didn’t know.”

  “I didn’t want—I was so afraid—you might think it your—duty—to leave us,” she faltered. Her lips were trembling and he could not bear to see it. He pressed her face to his breast and laid his cheek on her hair.

  “I didn’t know what I ought to do until tonight,” he said. “An old man holding a little box of ashes made me see how sweet and—right—it is to die for one’s country.” He was using old words. She had never heard them, but Miss Maitland had once made them memorize those words. En-lan had argued with her, saying, “One ought not to die for one’s country, if the country is wrong. It is better to die for a cause.”

  And then Miss Maitland had seemed quite angry. She told them about a young Englishman who so loved England that he had said his dust would be forever England. En-lan had said no more, only smiled, unchanging.

  But now, holding Tama in his arms, I-wan knew that Miss Maitland was right and En-lan was wrong. It made no difference whether one’s country was right or wrong. He would never have believed he could go back and take a place under Chiang Kai-shek. But he could.

  She nodded, and took up her wide sleeve and wiped her eyes.

  “Of course you must go,” she said simply, “if you think your country needs you.”

  She swallowed once or twice and wiped her eyes again. “As a Japanese, I understand that,” she said.

  He could feel her heart beating against him, denying the calmness of her words.

  “You know—I am the same to you,” he whispered.

  She drew away from him.

  “Oh yes,” she said, “I know. This has nothing to do with us. We’ll have to plan.”

  He could see her practical mind begin to work. But at the kitchen door Miya now appeared, in distress.

  “Oku-san, now what shall I do?” she called. “It’s boiling!”

  “Oh!” Tama exclaimed. “We’ll talk later,” she told him. “After all, there’s no use in letting the fish spoil.”

  She flew toward the kitchen door.

  They talked long into the night, sitting with the screens drawn aside so that the garden lay before them and beyond it the sea. All the time Tama gazed out toward the sea. The night was not moonlit. When their eyes grew used to the darkness, they could scarcely see even the outlines of the garden, though they had put out all the lights because of the summer moths. He could not see her face except to know it was turned away from him.

  They sat on the mats, and he held her hand. It was warm and strong in his. She did not weep or protest anything. She had, he now perceived, been thinking for a long time about this, waiting for whatever must come. When he asked, “What do you think you and the children had better do?” she was quite ready.

  “Of course we can always return to my own father’s house. He is so fond of the children,” she answered.

  He had not thought of this. He had imagined their staying here until—but until when? Who knew the end of this war?
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  “It is doubtless the best thing,” he agreed unwillingly. Jiro and Ganjiro growing up in Mr. Muraki’s house! They would forget this little house he had built for them, where they had lived with him, their Chinese father.

  “You will help them—to remember me?” he asked her.

  He felt the hold of her hand strengthen.

  “Shall I be an undutiful wife because misfortune has caught us?” she replied. She went on in a rush of energy. “Am I to blame you? You are not forsaking us. I shall tell them, ‘Honor your brave father, who fights for his country!’—I-wan, may we spend a little money and have a big picture of you? I want a picture of you as you are now, before you go. Then I’ll put it where the children will see it every day, and we’ll keep flowers by it—” Her voice broke and she stopped and coughed.

  “We will do it tomorrow,” he promised.

  He thought he felt her trembling, but then after a moment she said, her voice quite calm, “Shall you need a new bag, or is the one we have good enough?”

  “I shall take very little,” he said. “I shall be wearing uniform in a few days.”

  Now indeed she was trembling, but he knew her well enough, too, to know that she would thank him most if he said nothing to break her down. So he sat smoothing her hand a little and talking on and on.

  “I suppose I had better take the next boat,” he said quietly. “There is one in four days. That will give us time for everything. I must tell your father.”

  “Let me,” she said in a smothered small voice. “Let us tell no one. I want these four days—as though you weren’t going. After you have gone, I’ll go and tell him.”

  He pondered this a moment. “It might seem ungrateful of me, Tama,” he said.

  “No,” she repeated. “No, I will tell them. Let me have my way. He will understand—the one thing he will always understand in you is what you do now.”

  “He is very kind—” I-wan began, but Tama interrupted him.

  “Any Japanese would understand it,” she said proudly.

  He would not pack his own bag until an hour before he had to go to the ship. The few days, each so long in passing, seemed nothing now that they were gone together. He had let them pass exactly as Tama wished, crossing her in nothing. Each day except the last he had worked as usual, saying nothing, but putting everything in order for the unknown who was to take his place. He had never loved this work of merchandising, and he did not mind leaving it. And yet it had bought him security and a place of his own. If he had wished, he could have stayed safely here always—if he had been able in himself to do it. But he was not able.

  On the last day, because he knew Tama wished it, he went with her to pray at the Shinto temple on the hill. He had gone with her there sometimes before, but he would never enter the shrine with her.

  “I cannot pray without belief,” he always said, “and I do not believe.”

  So she had always gone in with the children alone. It had troubled him that she took the children in, but he had let it pass, remembering that when he was small he too had gone to temples with his own mother. But when he grew older he had followed his father, who believed in no gods.

  “Gods are for women and ignorant people,” his father always said…. And in the revolution En-lan had fought bitterly against priests and temples. He had not understood even then why En-lan was so bitter against a thing which to him mattered little.

  “Religion enslaves men,” En-lan said many times in a loud voice.

  Well, I-wan had remembered this each time he waited for Tama outside the shrine, and he had wondered because here not only women and laboring people, but sober, wise-looking men in rich garments went into the shrine to pray. And at little wayside shrines men even stopped their motor cars and descended to bow and say their prayers. But still he could not believe in gods.

  Yet to please Tama on this last day he stepped into the temple and stood before the inner shrine with her and the children and stood with them while they prayed. Even little Ganjiro knew how to pray, he saw, and was astonished. His two sons—would they grow up worshiping their mother’s gods? And yet, how could he prevent this now?

  “Let them,” he thought suddenly, “if it makes them as good as she is.”

  For himself, he felt nothing even now except the precious closeness of Jiro’s hand in his, and Ganjiro’s arm hugging his leg.

  And then was the end of the last day, and the next morning came, and then the last hour. He began to put a few clothes into the bag, his extra business suit, his sleeping garments, and some books, and then Tama came in with something in her arms, something silk and blue. He did not know what it was. She shook it out and he saw it was a Chinese robe he had once worn.

  “You had this on the first time I saw you,” she said, smiling so sadly he could not bear to see such smiling.

  “I haven’t worn it for years,” he said.

  “Now you may want it again,” she replied.

  She folded it carefully, sleeve to sleeve, and put it in his bag.

  He felt her, as he had felt her all these four days, as close to him as his own body. He knew continually what she thought and what she wanted and how near she was at every moment to weeping. But he knew that she had set for herself the goal of not weeping until he was gone. She would smile at him while he was here and until he could see her face no more. And he helped her, for he knew if she failed in this she would be ashamed and suffer for it always, thinking she had not achieved the perfection of self-control she should for his sake. They had gone through the hours so close together, and yet they had not touched more than each the other’s hand.

  So it came to the last moment of all. In the harbor the ship’s funnel was beginning to smoke. Its engines were being fired. The ship was to sail at noon.

  “I must go now, Tama,” he said quietly.

  They had agreed three days ago that he would go alone and that the children were not to know. Only Tama knew. They went together, hand in hand, to the garden where the little boys played. They were making a dam of small stones across the narrow brook, and they did not look up. He could hear their voices, Jiro’s commanding as it always did and Ganjiro’s answering with questions.

  For one moment he felt that he could not do what he had planned.

  “I shall send for you and the children,” he said to Tama. “As soon as I can do it, you shall all come.”

  But Tama shook her head.

  “When shall we be wanted?” she said.

  Her words, her voice, her quiet fatal eyes, recalled him and swept him out of this moment again into the vaster hour where their individual lives were now lost.

  “I must go,” he said quickly.

  He seized her in his arms, pressed his cheek against hers, looked at her once, and in her face saw eternity between them.

  He stepped upon the ship’s deck and at the same instant the gangplank began to move upward.

  “Another minute and you’d have been left, my fine feller,” a rough American voice said, but he did not answer. He walked toward the stern of the ship where the second class was and found the number of his cabin. The small room was empty, but his cabinmate’s luggage was already there, spread upon the lower berth. He flung his own bag into the upper berth and then went out. Doors were open along the corridor and everywhere he heard the unfamiliar sounds of his own tongue.

  But he went up the stairs to the deck again and stood watching the hills. Now the ship was moving steadily away from the dock. In a few moments they would be leaving the harbor. He searched the slope of the hill nearest the sea. Yes, there it was, his little house—and the square of green softer than the surrounding green was the garden. And now he could see the spot of color that was Tama. He could not see her face, and yet he could feel her eyes straining to see him. A tiny spot of bright orange moved across the green to stand beside her. That was Jiro—his son.

  And then suddenly, if he could have done it, I-wan would have leaped into the sea to rush back to them. That
little house—there, it seemed to him at this moment, there was his true home where Tama stood. Why had he left her? What if he followed again what he had once followed before, a mirage which he had thought was his country? She would be weeping, now—he felt his throat thicken with tears.

  “Hello,” an American voice said.

  He started a little and looked down into a square, pleasant, ugly face at his shoulder. It was not an American, but a Chinese, wearing, it is true, an American suit of dark blue striped with white. It was too big for him and he looked up cheerfully out of a bluish-white celluloid collar much too big.

  “I’m in the laundry business in Seattle,” the man said with a bright American smile. “I guess I’m your cabinmate—Cantonese, named Lim—Jackie—born in U. S. A. though—third generation—though my old granddad went back to Canton when he was sixty. I can’t speak my own language. But I figure I can fight without talking. I’m going home to fight the Japs.”

  “So am I,” I-wan said quickly.

  The man held out his hand.

  “Put it there,” he said heartily. And I-wan felt a firm dexterous small hand seize his.

  The mists of longing cleared from his brain. When he looked at the hillside again, he could see nothing. The ship had turned and was headed for the open sea.

  PART THREE

  III

  HE KNEW THE MOMENT his feet felt the ground beneath them that this was not at all the country he had left. Still less was this the country which he and En-lan had dreamed of making in those days.