Mr. Moto Omnibus

by John P. Marquand

  “Perhaps,” she said. She smiled at me and I could see gold lights dance behind the blue of her eyes. “Brave men are so apt to be children.”

  I cannot describe the way I felt. I seemed to be lost in the personality of that Russian girl, in spite of common sense and instinctive caution. “That doesn’t flatter me,” I said. “You probably come from a sophisticated world where people live on logic. You can’t help being beautiful, can you?”

  “Do you think I do?” she asked me “—Casey?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I wonder who you are, and I know that you won’t tell me.”

  Her eyes grew hard for a moment and again she had that look of someone who could go through anything untouched. She seemed about to make an indiscreet remark and then checked herself.

  “Perhaps I’m not what you think I am, altogether,” she said. “Are you what I think you are, I wonder?”

  “Does it make any difference?” I asked her. It amused me to observe how deliberately she brought the curve of the conversation back to me.

  “Your country’s done a great deal for you,” she said. “You must love it very much.”

  I rose to her suggestion almost without thinking. “My country took me when I was a kid of eighteen,” I said. “I wasn’t a bad kid, either, Sonya. It jammed me into naval aviation and put me in a plane that wasn’t fit to fly. They killed a lot of my friends, those planes that shouldn’t have left the ground at flying school. Then my country sent me to the Italian Front, and when it unsettled me for any sort of useful living, it closed the door of the navy to me because I was just a kid without real officer’s training. And now it’s left me flat in Tokyo; that’s all my country’s done for me. I’d give up my nationality any time.”

  She opened her handbag and drew out one of those long Russian cigarettes. “You’re joking, aren’t you?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, “I was never more serious in my life.”

  When I leaned forward to light her cigarette, she bent over the match and rested her fingers on mine, it seemed to me longer than was necessary, but I did not mind the touch of her fingers. “A man without a country,” she said. Her voice was genuine and sad. “I’m sorry.”

  “Well,” I said, “I can take what’s coming to me.”

  “Casey,” she asked, “do you like Japan?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Japan’s a country that deals with facts sensibly. By the way—” My attention was caught again by the artificial peach blooms and the flags in the lobby. “What’s all the excitement here today?”

  “Don’t you read the papers?” She laughed. “It’s the delegation from Manchukuo come to call on the Emperor. Do you feel as the American State Department does about Japan’s adventure in Manchukuo?” That husky voice of hers was softly, playfully caressing, but her eyes were not.

  “No,” I answered promptly, and I meant it. “If you knew my country better, you would understand that it’s characteristic of it to take a holier-than-thou-attitude. Before 1906 your people held Manchuria virtually as a colony, didn’t they? You’re Russian, aren’t you?”

  Her eyes clouded and she nodded with a hopeless, sad look which I had seen on the faces of other émigrés when their lost country was mentioned. “I thought so,” I continued. “Well, no one objected when your Czar controlled Manchuria; why should we object when Japan does? It’s against the laws of fact to keep eighty million Japanese on a few small islands. If Japan is strong enough to run it, why shouldn’t she run Manchuria?”

  She nodded and it seemed to me that my answer relieved some doubt in her. “You know a great deal of history,” she remarked, “don’t you, Casey Lee?”

  I finished my third drink before I answered, and my answer made me pleased with my own astuteness. “I know enough about history,” I said, “to understand that God and justice are on the side of the heaviest artillery.” And then I stopped. “Hello,” I said, “what’s that?”

  But I knew what the sound was. I was only asking the significance of the sound at that particular time and place. I had heard it on the Piave and in the Balkans and in Africa—the sudden thumping of a drum and the cadence of feet on a pavement—hundreds and hundreds of feet moving in unison of infantry—well-disciplined, sedulously drilled infantry. Outside of the hotel I knew that there must be at least two companies of Japanese soldiers,—short, muscular boys with conscientious, half-worried faces, in neatly fitting khaki uniforms with rifles and shining bayonets. The beat of a drum and marching feet was a common sound in Tokyo.

  She understood my question. “The Manchukuo envoys are coming back from their audience,” she said, and then she rose. “Have you had enough to drink before lunch?” she inquired politely. “It seems to me you have. Perhaps we’d better go.”

  Once I was on my feet, I felt the effect of my three double whiskies. I felt comfortable and nonchalant and friendly with the world, aware that people were looking at me, aware that I was walking beside the best-looking girl in the hotel.

  “Wait!” I heard Sonya say beside me. “The party is coming in.”

  The steps to the hotel door were lined with officers and government officials, each one of whom seemed to know his place. I was tall enough to look over their heads. An old Chinese gentleman was walking up the steps, straight and active, though he must have been well in his seventies. He wore the long black gown of China with a blue vest over it. His face was a scholar’s, benign and calm.

  “It is Premier Cheng of Manchukuo,” I heard Sonya say. “He has followed the Emperor Pu Yi through his exile.”

  The old man, rising tall and a little bent above his escort of Japanese, seemed to me to have more dignity than anyone in that gathering. His native dress stood out, simple and suitable among the Europeanized uniforms and the cutaway coats and silk hats. He was the only one who seemed genuine—a man with an ideal who looked a trifle sad. I moved toward the door again.

  “Wait,” said Sonya, “you cannot go out now.”

  “Why not?” I asked and began to push my way through the crowd.

  “Wait!” said Sonya again more sharply.

  But before I heard her, I had shoved against a man in khaki uniform who turned around quickly. I saw by his insignia that he was a captain of cavalry. A short man, with a square copper-colored face.

  “No, no!” he said and pushed me on the chest.

  Before I thought of the consequences, I took him by the shoulders and spun him out of the way. I must have been rougher than I intended, for he gave an indignant cry, and his voice caused half a dozen other officers to gather angrily around me. “Get out of the way!” I said. “I’m going out this door.” Then I saw that Sonya was beside me, speaking quickly to one of the officers in Japanese.

  She had opened her handbag and was holding a signet ring in her hand which I thought I had seen somewhere before. It came over me abruptly where I had seen it: it had been on Mr. Moto’s finger that other afternoon. Either the ring or her explanation had an immediate effect. The officer whom I had treated rudely bowed to me jerkily and Sonya and I walked calmly out the door of the hotel. As we stood in the cool spring air, a motor moved through the porte-cochere, obviously not one of the usual public cabs, but a more expensive car driven by a man in dark livery.

  “Get in,” said Sonya. “I know a perfect place to go to lunch.” And I climbed in beside her. She was speaking in Japanese to the chauffeur, in sharp staccato phrases. Then she leaned back contentedly and I could smell again the perfume of gardenias. She seemed perfectly at home in that car. “We will go to a teahouse,” she said, “and have lunch, just you and me.”

  “Sonya,” I said, “you’re a very remarkable girl.”

  “Oh, no,” she said, “but I like you, Casey. I think you’re very nice.”

  I did not answer. Whether it was true or not, I was pleased that she liked me, but I still had sense enough to know what she was by then. The ring had told me. It revealed, among other things, that I had never asked her to lunch and that s
he was a Japanese spy. Not that the idea shocked me. Instead, it pleased me. She was a Japanese spy and I was no one—footloose and entirely on my own, being speeded through Tokyo in a limousine.

  “Sonya,” I said, “I don’t care where we’re going as long as you come along.”

  She laughed and touched my hand for a moment. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “Isn’t Tokyo beautiful in spring?”

  I did not answer. As a matter of fact, I did not think that Tokyo was wholly beautiful. The new Tokyo of the earthquake was entirely European. We were passing the marble facades of buildings which seemed to have been reared yesterday and which might have been part of Europe—as alien to that land as I was. It was a confusing, dreamlike place and the people on the streets seemed to share that confusion in their mixture of Japanese and European clothes. The motors and the tramcars and the bicycles shared it. The people of Tokyo seemed trying hard to be something which they were not; and everything was change and chaos—everything except the green parks on the right and the ancient black wall and moat of another age which surrounded the mystery of the Imperial Palace Grounds, where roofs and rock pines jutted out unobtainably against the sky.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said, “as long as you’re here, Sonya.”

  3

  THE DRIVE was a long one, through streets of factories and through densely populated sections of crowded wooden bungalows, lightly, impermanently constructed, as though solider homes were not worth building in the face of the earthquakes that so frequently visit those islands. More recent experiments with steel and concrete, such as had risen in that part of Tokyo which had been destroyed in the earthquake disaster of 1923, might mean a general rebuilding of Japanese cities; but until this slow process was completed, I could understand Japan’s sensitiveness to any enemy threat from the air. A sight of those unpainted matchboxes of dwellings, with hardly air space between them—and our motor moved through street after street—explained why Japan watched with unconcealed misgivings the construction of our airplane carriers and the development of Chinese and Russian aviation. A few incendiary bombs were all that would be needed to bring about almost unimaginable disaster, and I had been told that the inflammability of Osaka and other great industrial nerve centers of the Empire was even more pronounced.

  Sonya has told the driver where to go and finally, after perhaps twenty minutes, the car stopped at the entrance to one of those narrow alleys where the Japan of the Shoguns meets the life of a modern aspiring nation.

  “We must walk here,” she said, as we got out. The alley was a twisting, flagged street which wound between the low facades of shops and houses.

  I think those small streets will always be fascinating to a foreigner. They seem perfect and yet so fragile that a gust of wind might blow them out to sea: tiny, sliding, latticed paper windows, balconies with potted dwarf trees standing on them; minute provision and hardware shops, the flash of flowered kimonos and the clatter of wooden shoes. The alley which we traversed seemed as harmless as an illustration in a tale for children. I remember thinking that it had the same naive quality of Germany before the war—of something not to be taken wholly seriously.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  Sonya smiled. “Are you impatient walking?” she asked. “It’s so pleasant here. You and I seem like something in the book of the English writer named Swift. ‘Gulliver’s Travels’, isn’t it? We are going to a teahouse where we can have sukiaki. The management is expecting us.”

  As she finished speaking, she pointed to an unpainted wooden wall of a building larger than the others. “It’s here,” she said, and she pushed open a gate. Once inside the wall we were in one of those miniature gardens which represent an art so completely mastered by Japan.

  Sonya and I were standing, two giants in a countryside where ponds and streams and plains and mountains rose in contours around us hardly ever above the knee. We looked upon dwarfed fir trees, the tallest not above two feet, with green lawns beneath them. Among the mosses by the pools all sorts of small flowering plants were bending over the water, and goldfish were swimming beneath the surface, peculiar breeds of goldfish whose propagation had been carried on through centuries. That small yard gave us all the perspective and vista of a huge garden, all condensed into the space of a European room. A door at the end of the walk had opened already, and three women in kimonos came out, smiling and bowing. Being familiar with the habits of such places, I sat down on the step leading to the house and took off my shoes and thrust my toes into a pair of slippers which one of the girls handed me, while Sonya did the same.

  “It’s like playing dolls,” she said. “Did you ever play dolls, Casey? I used to at Odessa, long ago.”

  “No,” I answered, “only soldiers, Sonya.”

  “Dolls are better,” she said. “We might put on kimonos, do you think?” She spoke to the eldest of the three women, and the two girls brought out kimonos.

  I took off my coat and put one on. Then one of the women pattered before us, leading the way along a matting-covered corridor and pushed aside a sliding door, smiling. We both of us kicked off our slippers and entered a private room which was already arranged for us. The furnishings were as simple as a room in ancient Sparta and as fragile as a painting on a fan. A table not more than two feet high was in the center of the room, with a cushion on the floor on either side of it. A charcoal brazier was burning at one end of the table and saucers of meat and chopped green vegetables and soybean oil were standing near it,—the component parts of that informal Japanese dish, as delicious as anything I have ever eaten, called sukiaki. At one end of the table, sliding paper windows opened on a balcony that looked out on a similar small garden. Opposite the balcony at the other end of the room there was a recess in the wall that held the only decorations,—a single porcelain figure of a god standing in a teakwood holder with a scroll painting of cherry blossoms behind him. At a lower level in the niche was a vase of flowers meticulously and perfectly arranged according to the careful dictates of the flower art in Japan. That was all; otherwise the room was bare.

  I sat on the floor at one side of the table and Sonya sat on the other side. One of the serving girls in her flowered kimono, with her hair done like a Japanese doll’s, knelt at the doorway, then bowed and entered and took her place at the charcoal brazier, filling the cooking utensil with the ingredients of the meal. It all made a pleasant sizzling sound of cooking and there was a smell of things to eat above the acrid smell of charcoal. A second girl, kneeling at the foot of the table, placed two tiny cups before us and filled them with hot sake wine.

  “Here’s looking at you, Sonya,” I said and tossed off my cup, which the girl refilled immediately. There was a heady quality about that heated wine of Japan. Though it is taken in minute quantities, the cup is always full and one is apt to forget the amount one consumes.

  “I hope you like it here,” said Sonya.

  I told her that I liked it, and I did. Her watchfulness and preoccupation seemed to have left her as she sat there on the floor by the little table. She seemed to have thrown off care with that volatile habit of Russians. She was a hostess who had brought me to a quiet place to be shared by herself and me. Her long lashes half drooped over her violet eyes and her red lips twisted in playful interrogation.

  “Why don’t you sit here beside me?” I asked.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “It isn’t proper now. Later, perhaps, when the servants leave.” We were each handed a green bowl with the yolk of a raw egg in the bottom and then the meal was ready. We reached toward the brazier with chopsticks for bits of the meat and vegetables.

  I was aware that a certain pretense between us had been dropped. We had both of us accepted the fact that I had not asked Sonya to lunch but that Sonya had asked me, and she must have understood that I knew well enough that she had asked me for some definite reasons. I was perfectly content to watch her and to drink cup after cup of the sake wine while I waited for her to lead the conversatio
n. Her first remark was almost banal.

  “Here we are,” she said, “you and I.”

  I nodded and answered, “That’s my good luck, I think, and I haven’t had much luck for quite a while.” I saw that she was watching me, but not suspiciously; rather as any woman might watch a man in whom she took an interest.

  “It seems strange, doesn’t it,” she remarked, “that you and I, Casey Lee, should be in this foreign room so far from any place that either of us knows? It’s such a small inoffensive room—don’t you think? And yet it represents the culture of two thousand years. It is a part of the beliefs and life of one of the most powerful nations in the world.”

  “Yes,” I said, “go on—if you don’t mind my staring at you, Sonya.”

  “No, I don’t mind,” she said. “Your eyes are kind. The eyes of most Americans are kind. Your life has been so secure—is that the reason? But there is no security here. Have you felt it? It’s a nervous place—Japan.

  Her words did not interest me as much as the huskiness in her voice and the lights that kept dancing in her eyes. Her eyes seemed to be asking me wordless questions. Probably we were each wondering about the other as we talked.

  “Yes,” I said, “Japan is very nervous. Well?”

  “Perhaps she has a right to be nervous,” she said. “Perhaps it is a state of mind. I wonder. Japan is very proud.”

  “I don’t see what there is to be nervous about,” I said.

  She laughed.

  “Haven’t you ever felt that fate, that everything, was conspiring against you? I’ve felt that way sometimes.”

  “I wonder if you feel that way now?” I asked her.

  Her eyes grew hard for a moment. “Never mind about me,” she said. “Japan feels that the world is conspiring against her. It makes no difference whether she is right or wrong if she has that conviction, and she may be right. On one side, of her is the United States—”