VIII

A great deal of the business was very dull, but that ensuing Friday was one of the most irksome that Jack Rhyce could remember. His hours with the Asia Friendship League had a fatuous quality that demanded every bit of his patience in order to fall into the mood of the dedicated people in the Friendship office, and still not miss a trick. He could not tell, in the space of a day, exactly how dedicated all of them were. He could get only a general picture in his mind, yet he was reasonably sure that most of them had honest intentions and felt that they were engaged in a great work. His thoughts went back a dozen times that day to the briefing the Chief had given him in Washington, on the great American strength and weakness—the persistent belief that good will and good fellowship could conquer everything.

He wished that he could make up his mind as to whether or not Mr. Harry Pender honestly shared this viewpoint, but he had to set down the whole Pender problem as unfinished business. Mr. Pender made himself so hospitable and charming that no time was left for analysis. Besides, it was a time to be very, very careful, until he had told Bill Gibson his ideas. It was a time to be naïve and to convey emphatically the utter harmlessness of himself and Ruth Bogart. It was a time to be enthusiastic but dumb, in an openhanded way. It was also a time to show by a series of skillful shadings a picture of growing attachment between himself and Miss Bogart—one of those half-furtive, half-fleeting romances between two well-meaning people that burgeoned more rapidly in the Orient than anywhere else. All these details had kept Jack Rhyce very busy.

“Of course this is only a very quick fill-in,” Mr. Pender kept saying. “You can’t really start getting your teeth into anything until Monday, Jack.”

Inevitably they had reached a first-name basis in a very few minutes.

“I can’t wait to get the bit in my teeth, Harry,” Jack Rhyce said, “and possibly to be of some help with the wonderful things you are doing here. I had no idea that you had such an inspiring picture to show me, or such lovely and artistic offices.”

“You just wait,” Harry Pender said. “These are only temporary quarters.”

Temporary or not, the Asia Friendship League occupied, already, half the floor of a postwar office building in the neighborhood of the Ginza. Mr. Pender, as the head of the Japan branch, had a truly beautiful office looking over a large section of the city, furnished with new Japanese furniture that had been adapted to the European fashion. The furniture had been designed right in the Friendship League; desks, chairs, coffee tables and everything were made by Japanese craftsmen, with authentic Japanese spirit, but also were suited to both Easterners and Westerners. A lot of leading Japanese artists and merchants had been consulted, and had been generous with their help, Mr. Pender explained, and the result had surely been worth the hours of conferences. All you had to do was to look at the lovely Oriental woods, turned out along chaste, modernistic lines, to realize that here the Friendship League had made an important good-will contribution. Its furniture was already on display in a number of Tokyo department stores; several exporters were expressing practical interest. In fact, it might very well start a new vogue, Mr. Pender said, and this was just a small example of what the Asia Friendship League was up to. The League’s motto might in one word be termed Interest. Mr. Pender did not mean financial interest, but an honest interest in the other fellow out here in the East. Well, this interest was now flowing in all sorts of directions. There was a group in the office for example, studying the new Japanese films. Then there was the sports group. And this afternoon, as Mr. Pender had said, there would be a panel discussion on writing in the conference auditorium. One of the Foundation’s own girls, Miss Kettleback, was going to deliver a lecture to some young Japanese writers on the American novel. It was amazing, Mr. Pender said, how eager these intellectuals were for American culture. Just wait—the auditorium hall would be filled half an hour before the lecture started.

There was not really time, Mr. Pender said, to give a full runover of all the projects, but there was one which was a particular pet of his—the Friendly Pen Pals. Up to this point Jack Rhyce had listened brightly, but now his interest quickened.

“What’s that again, Harry?” he asked.

“Well, it’s an idea that is purely my own,” Mr. Pender said, “and I hope you’ll play it up big in your report, Jack. You’ve heard of Pen Pals in the States and Europe? Well, it just came over me—why not do it here? Why not get a lot of these Japanese kids in school and the universities to swap ideas and news with their own age groups back home? It would seem to me to be the very essence of the cultural interchange we’re looking for, and it’s working already. You’d be surprised.”

Mr. Harry Pender was watching him expectantly when he finished, seemingly waiting for pleased surprise as the idea dawned, and Jack Rhyce nodded slowly. He was beginning to wonder how he had overlooked Mr. Pender in his research back in the states. The data might be in his notes at the hotel, but he could not remember the name or description, and he could not see how the Chief had overlooked him either. The idea of Pen Pals was original, and could form the basis of an excellent message center.

“There’s only one thing I don’t get,” Jack Rhyce said. “I don’t exactly see how they write to each other without a common language.”

“That’s right, Jack. That’s the difficulty,” Mr. Pender said. “I began playing around with that problem just as soon as I took over the center here, and then it came over me, just a week or two ago—why not set up a translation post right here in the League—just an informal unscrambling of the Tower of Babel, and translate the kids’ letters? It’s not so tough as you’d think. You’d be surprised at the number of Japanese around who can read or write English—and there’s unemployment for a lot of intelligentsia. The translation center kills two birds with one stone. We have two big rooms now. Would you like to see them?”

Mr. Pender pushed back his chair, but Jack Rhyce shook his head. It was better not to be overcurious, and besides, Bill Gibson knew the ground. Bill could never have missed the Friendship League for a moment, or this new man who was running it, and Bill would give the orders.

“Thanks, Harry,” Jack Rhyce said. “I would be fascinated to see this project next week because I can begin to see already what a real thought there is behind it. But right now, how about some more on the organization’s setup, before I go after the details?”

Mr. Pender nodded. “I think you’re very wise, Jack,” he said. “Take the whole thing slowly. You’ll be able to get your teeth into everything beginning Monday. Of course, our basic trouble as I see it is getting personnel out here who are imbued with the right ideas in the social sense …”

Harry Pender was a good, fast talker when he discussed the problem of personnel. As Jack Rhyce listened, occasionally nodding in agreement when a cogent point was made, he constantly made mental notes of Mr. Pender’s facial expressions and mannerisms. The type was familiar, the intellectual, professorial features, the pale skin, the brown eyes, the receding hair line. There was a fine photographic collection back in Washington of all known people in the business, and Jack Rhyce racked his memory for photographs of the Pender type, but he could make no identification. The trouble with the business recently was that new faces and new talents were continually appearing, and the photograph files were getting a year or two behind the contemporary parade.

He glanced across the office at Ruth Bogart.

“You’re getting full notes on this, aren’t you, Ruth?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “It’s very fascinating, Mr. Pender.”

His one anxiety was not to make a mistake, which might disturb the picture. That was one of the hardest things to learn—to keep things quiet.

It was late in the afternoon when entirely by accident Jack Rhyce picked up another piece of information that interested him. They had made a tour of the offices while Mr. Pender poured forth facts. The man, Jack Rhyce was thinking, must have been at some time the recipient of a Ph.D. degree, and he must have worked as an instructor, presumably in sociology in some college in the States; there was a depth and charm to his voice that fitted well with the U.S.O. Song Caravan.

“You see,” Mr. Pender was saying, “this job here is a real challenge to me, Jack. I don’t know why Chas. Harrington thought I was suitable for it. There I was, just running our settlement house on Pnompenh not six weeks ago—and along came the news that the League board had selected me for Tokyo. It’s a big jump from a little settlement house in a one-horse town to a place like this.”

“Pnompenh,” Jack Rhyce said slowly, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of Pnompenh.”

It was not true, what he had said, but this was not a time to be bright.

“I don’t blame you,” Mr. Pender said. “It’s in Cambodia, and not many people get there now; but the Cambodians are very lovable people.”

It was also an excellent place from which to communicate with China, but it was never wise to appear too interested. Jack Rhyce glanced unobstrusively at his wrist watch.

“This has been a very full and fascinating day, Harry,” he said, “and I can’t be too grateful to you for giving us all this time. But now maybe Ruth and I had better leave you and call things off until Monday, or else we’ll lose perspective. We can get a taxi, can’t we?”

“Oh, don’t do that,” Mr. Pender said. “Why don’t we all go to a real Japanese restaurant for supper, and see night life in Tokyo?”

Jack Rhyce glanced at Ruth Bogart and shook his head.

“Let’s make it sometime next week,” he said. “I think Ruth’s still tired from the trip. Aren’t you, Ruth?”

“Well, yes,” she said. “I am a little, Jack.”

“I’ll just take her for a walk along the Ginza,” Jack Rhyce said. “I can find my way all right, thanks, Harry. I’m curious to see the Ginza. It was quite a shambles back in ’47.”

Mr. Pender smiled at them as they moved toward his office door.

“You won’t recognize it now,” he said. “It’s everything it used to be, and more so. Well—” his smile grew broader and more tolerant—“have fun, kids, but come back to school on Monday.”

The offices of the Friendship League had been air-conditioned, so that the heat on the street outside made one catch one’s breath.

“That office and that damned Aloha shirt,” she said.

“It was a fresh one since yesterday,” he told her. “The fish were red yesterday. They were blue today. Did you notice?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I’m a dumb girl, but I noticed quite a lot besides the fish.”

“How much else?” he asked.

“Enough to know we’d better be careful,” she told him.

“That’s why we’re walking down the Ginza,” he said. “If anyone’s tailing us … I agree, we’ll have to be damn careful.”

Every large city in the world was bound to have a characteristic street or square, and Jack Rhyce had seen enough of these to make intelligent comparisons. It seemed to him that the Ginza was the most vital of them all; it best expressed the Geist—he had to use a German word—of the people who had made it, although it was not a beautiful street, any more than Broadway was beautiful. The only civic decoration connected with it were the willows on either side of the thoroughfare that were peculiar to the Ginza district. He did not know what they symbolized. Perhaps they were supposed to illustrate the old saying of the supple tree bending before the wind, and perhaps they delivered a quiet, reassuring message of patience and of waiting to the crowds that thronged past them. It was a tawdry street, but very gay, with all the resilience and adaptability of its sidewalk trees. There were huge department stores, and smaller shops filled with garish, highly colored Japanese goods. There were motion picture houses displaying the latest Hollywood films as well as Japanese-made pictures. There were beer halls, cabarets and billboards, jewelry and cultured pearls. There was something for everyone on the Ginza. Though many of its shops had the impermanent construction which he associated with a Western mining town, the whole combination was a tribute to the indomitable spirit of a people anxious to be in the front rank of what was perhaps erroneously known as progress. The startling vigor of Japan was reflected in the burgeoning of manufactured articles that ran from celluloid and plastic toys up to vacuum cleaners and electric refrigerators. And where was Japan going to sell this glittering and sometimes meretricious output? This was one of the world’s new, restive questions, and the world’s future might be hanging on the answer. The motion picture houses, the beer halls and the cabarets with their beckoning invitations in English also showed the versatility of Japan. It was too early for the neon signs, but once they were turned on, the Ginza would be another Broadway, a center of national aspirations. Actually it was more significant than New York’s Broadway of the present, because Broadway was tired, worldly-wise and cynical, whereas the Ginza was full of a naïve, unfaltering hope. Now and then you could believe that you were on Broadway except for the Japanese features and the voices speaking a strange tongue, and the Japanese characters above the shops.

“It’s a little spooky here, isn’t it?” Ruth Bogart said.

“How do you mean?” he asked. “There aren’t spooks around at four in the afternoon.”

“I mean, it’s half home, and half not,” Ruth Bogart said. “I wonder whether the Japanese feel any more at home here than we do.”

It was one of those interesting thoughts that could never be answered, and it showed that she was not anybody’s fool. The truth was, he was thinking, he was growing too interested in her reactions, but it was pleasant to turn his attention to her after a difficult day.

“The beer halls are air-conditioned,” he said. “Would you like to go in and have some beer and listen to some jazz?”

“No, thanks,” she answered. “Let’s walk. It’s hot as hell, but I like to see the show. It isn’t like Piccadilly, is it?”

“No,” he said, “it isn’t like anywhere else. Would you like some raw fish and rice? There must be some good sushi places down the side streets.”

“Not raw fish,” she said, “and don’t try to be an informative guide using words for local color. To hell with the sushi places. Let’s just walk along.”

“I could show you quite a lot if I wanted to use the language,” he said.

“I’d say we’re seeing enough the way it is,” she said. “I wouldn’t say we had a tail on us. Would you?”

“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t. Between us we should have spotted one by now.”

She smiled at him, and he smiled back because he shared her temporary relief.

“Then let’s go back to the hotel and have a drink in the bar,” she said. “And you can make eyes at me in front of the bar boys and the barflies, just to build the cover, darling—just to build the cover. They have an air-conditioned bar at the hotel. Did you know it?”

“We’ll go there pretty soon,” he said, “but there’s one place I’d like to take you first. It’s quite a distance, but we can get a taxi!”

“Oh, no,” she said, “not any more sights today. I never did like sights.”

“It won’t take long,” he told her, “and perhaps we can pick up some ideas.”

Along the Ginza it was simple enough to find a taxi driver who could speak a little English.

“Street with all the bookstores.” Jack Rhyce said. He took a paper from his pocket and pretended to read the name of the district from it, with a clumsy pronunciation.

“Bookstores?” she said, as soon as the cab had started on its way. “For heaven’s sake, why bookstores?”

“You’ll be surprised,” he said, “at how many people are reading in Japan.”

There were districts in every city where dealers in new and secondhand books congregated, but few were larger than the book street in Tokyo. The bookshops extended for block after block, and, like Ginza, they offered a little bit of everything. The wide-open doorways leading to the brightly lighted interiors displayed stacks of new paper-backed editions, translations from all over the world, the classical literature of Japan, and current fiction. Also older works were displayed in the show windows—books of art, court ceremonial and religious writings—but the books in English were more provocative than any. There was, for instance, in one shop window, a handsome set of leather volumes on the birds of northern Britain, published some years before Perry had anchored off Japan; an early set of the Waverley novels; a handsome edition of Emerson’s essays; a book on navigation dated 1810; and The Parent’s Assistant by Maria Edgeworth. These timeworn volumes each had its untold and unknown story of its ending in an Oriental bookstall. You could not help wondering who had first brought them to Japan. Had they been owned once by someone in the British Embassy, or by an American missionary, or had they come from the library of a once rich Japanese, impoverished by the war? No one would ever know the answer any more than one could guess who would eventually read them. The past, the present and the future were all implicit in the bookstores.

Most of them were filled with customers, many of whom were reading as much of a volume as possible in the hope of getting the gist of it before they had to buy, but no one disturbed the furtive readers. No one interrupted Ruth Bogart or Jack Rhyce either, as they moved from shop to shop. The displays of periodicals were what interested him most, particularly the large numbers that dealt with Russia and Red China. These—some in Russian, some in English, some in Japanese—were crude but effective projections of American formats. Except for some scurrilous pictures of Uncle Sam and heavily armed gentlemen with dollar signs on their waistcoats who whipped starving workers into factories, everyone was happy in the pictures. Fat Chinese peasants were smilingly learning to read. Farmers were proudly operating tractors. Soldiers carrying the Freedom Flag of the Hammer and Sickle gave candy to little children.

“You see,” he said, “how it rounds out the picture of the day?”

“Yes, naturally I see,” she said, taking his arm and pressing it urgently. “But let’s go. We shouldn’t have come here.”

“Why not?” he asked her. “What’s the hurry?”

“Buy some cheap American magazine,” she said, “and get out of here.”

He did not ask her again what the matter was until they stood on the curb waving to a taxi.

“We’re in the clear,” he said. “There was nothing queer in any of those shops.”

She shook her head impatiently.

“No,” she said, “but we are. We were the only foreigners and everyone remembers foreigners. Where would you keep a lookout for new operators? Put yourself in their position, Jack.”

He felt deeply mortified that he had not thought of her point himself. Too many small mistakes too often added up to something fatal, and there was no way of knowing how great a margin of error they possessed. A taxi had halted.

“There are some people looking at us,” she said.

“What sort?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she answered. “Little men.”

“But, darling,” he said, and he laughed loudly. Then he put his arm through hers and took her hand. At least he could leave the impression of love and dalliance if anyone was watching. “This country is full of little men. Insufficient food in infancy—and the large intestine of a Japanese is two feet longer than that of his opposite number in Europe. Did you know that?”

“No,” she said. “How fascinating!” But she leaned against him and laughed up at him applaudingly.

When they were in the taxicab he put his arm around her. As Bill Gibson had said, there was safety in sex. They had only been two people in love looking for a copy of Hollywood True Romances.

“Oh, Jack,” she said, and she giggled.

The taxi driver, if anyone asked him, would remember.

“Honey,” he said, “I’ll get you a nice cool drink in that nice cool bar. Frankly, I can’t wait.”

But she had been right. He had been a fool to be examining Red literature in Tokyo.

The bar of the Imperial Hotel was aggressively modern and so over-air-conditioned that Jack Rhyce felt for a moment that they were locked inside a refrigerator. They sat next to a sealed plate-glass window that looked out on a small Japanese garden containing a marble bust of an elderly man in the top half of a frock coat. Nearly all the tables were filled, some with prosperous Japanese businessmen, but most with rather weary-looking Europeans who appeared as peculiarly assorted as the English books they had seen exposed for sale. People were looking at them with the friendly curiosity with which foreigners in the Orient regard new strangers. There was nothing professional about anyone there, nothing technically disturbing. It was becoming easier and easier to appear conspicuously interested in Ruth Bogart.

“What would you like, sweet?” he asked, when the bar boy came to the table.

“Scotch on the rocks, darling,” she said.

They gazed at each other fatuously for a while after the bar boy left, and then they both begun to laugh, and it was the first time in several weeks that he had been genuinely amused.

“Did you know, sweet,” he said, “that rats are very adaptable creatures?”

“Why no, darling,” she answered, “but what makes you think of rats?”

“The extreme coldness of this room,” he said. “Once when I was crossing the ocean, the ship’s captain asked me to a cocktail party. Have you ever been to a ship’s captain’s cocktail party?”

“Yes, darling,” she said. “That’s one reason why I travel by air.”

“Well, this was a very nice ship’s captain,” Jack Rhyce said, “and he told an anecdote about a rat. It seems that this rat was locked up by mistake in the ship’s refrigerator. He stayed there for four weeks and he didn’t freeze to death. When they caught him he had a coat as heavy as mink. That’s why I say rats are adaptable.”

“Is there any moral to that story?” she asked.

“No,” he said, “no. It’s just an off-the-record story.”

“Well,” she said, “it’s the first off-the-record story you’ve ever told to date.”

“Yes,” he said, “that’s so. I’m afraid you’re a bad influence on me.”

“I hope I am,” she said. “I really do, and I hope you’ll tell some more.”

He realized that he was happy, and happiness was such a rare sensation that he was suspicious of it, but the more he examined his mood, the more certain he was that it was genuine. He could discover no particular reason for it, and he did not particularly care. He only knew that it was something that made the whole day worth while.

“You know,” he said, “I think you’re a pretty clever girl.”

“Why, thanks a lot,” she said. “Coming from you, I must be.”

The mood had not left him yet. He could even enjoy looking at the bust of the old man in the garden.

“In fact, maybe you are smarter than I am,” he said. “You were right about those bookstores.”

“I like to have you wrong sometimes,” she said. “It shows that maybe you are human.”

“Why, thanks a lot,” he said, “but believe me, it’s better not to be.”

She smiled at him, ironically, but very pleasantly.

“You remind me of a poem of Whittier’s,” she said.

“What poem?” he asked.

“About the boy and the girl at the schoolhouse,” she said. “‘I’m sorry that I spelt the word: I hate to go above you, because,’—the brown eyes lower fell,—‘Because, you see, I love you!’”

“Yes,” he said, “but I don’t like what comes later. Dear girl! the grasses on her grave Have forty years been growing.”

“I don’t like that either,” she said, “and I wish you hadn’t brought it up.”

But even so, nothing changed his mood.

“You know,” he said, “I don’t see why we shouldn’t have a nice time going there tomorrow.”

When she smiled at him again, it was exactly as though they were on the outside.

“Please,” she said, “please let’s, Jack.”