In the springtime a Japanese house is a fairy-like thing, with only
top and bottom of straw and a few upholding posts to give it a look of
substance.
Yuki Chan's house was typical. The paper screens were carefully put
away during the day, that the breezes might play unobstructed through
the house. At night the heavy wooden doors were fitted into grooves
and served not only to keep out the night air, but also the evil
spirits that come abroad when the great sun ceases watching.
Binding the whole was a narrow porch, showing a floor polished like a
mirror from the slipping and sliding of generations of feet. Yuki Chan
first learned to know her face in its reflections and, alas! by the
same method had learned the saucy fascination of sticking out her
small pink tongue.
On the side of the porch toward the plum-tree the child found her
father and mother waiting. The two old people sat on gay cushions with
hands folded and feet crossed. Their festal attire bore the marks of a
once careless luxury, but now shabbiness tried to hide itself under
the bravery of tinsel, where once had been pure gold.
Each year the struggle of obsolete methods of business and the
intricacies of progress plowed the furrows a little deeper in the
man's face, and when his eyes, that in youth had blazed with ambition,
grew wistful and troubled, he dropped them that his wife might not
see.
But what silence could hide from this frail woman any mood of the man
she had served with mind and body and soul these many years? When she
came to him as a shy bride on trial, she knew no such word as love.
Duty was her entire vocabulary, and she asked nothing and gave all.
Many little souls had come to her, with hands all crimped and pink,
like new-blown cherry-leaves, only to close their eyes and pass out to
the good god Jizo, who is always waiting to help little children
across the river of death.
In years gone by, night after night sleep had flown before the terror
that another woman would be brought into the house that the family
name might not die out. Silently she would slip out to the little
shrine and pour out passionate words of prayer that just one little
soul might be permitted to live.
No matter how long the night, nor how bitter the struggle, morning
always found her bright and cheerful, bending every effort to invent
new diversions for her husband. She labored to anticipate every wish,
and even though she did without, she provided him the best of comfort.
Working far into the night, secretly disposing of her small personal
treasures, acquiescing in his most trivial statements, she planned
that no slightest gap in the domestic arrangement should suggest
itself to him.
The woman worked and prayed and waited. Then she triumphed. In the
wake of a great snow-storm came the longed-for child, and they called
her Yuki, after the snow that had brought them their wish. Hand in
hand with Yuki Chan came love, and bound the hearts of the man and
woman with ties of a desire fulfilled. From that time to this love had
prevailed, and as Yuki Chan climbed on the porch, besmirching its
shining surface with her muddy little feet, that had been guiltless of
sandals all day, the faces of the two old people lighted up with
sudden joy.
Yuki Chan looked ruefully at the muddy prints she had made and
realized that she had been a most impolite little girl. Remembering
her recent resolve, she sought the eyes in which she had never seen
any light for her save that of love. She drew close, and reaching down
took her mother's hand, hard and cracked by labor, and laying her
cheek against it said, with a voice sure of forgiveness and sweet
desire for atonement:
"Go men nasai."
The mother, with a courtly but playful air, granted her pardon with a
low salutation. Then with a rush of affection that no convention could
stem, she folded the child to her heart and lived another moment of
supreme joy.
The father sat by, making no comment, his eyes bright and twinkling.
Then he suggested that their Majesties, the dolls, had been waiting
long on the shelf. Was it not time they were receiving a visit?
The years of toil were telling on both father and mother, but they
daily refreshed themselves at the overbrimming fountain of Yuki Chan's
youth, and now, as they each took one of her hands to go in to see the
dolls, they were so gay that the child suggested that instead of
walking they should do the new one-two-three-hop she had learned at
the kindergarten.
It was unheard-of conduct, but it was for Yuki Chan, and father and
mother stumped along, cheered on by the small girl who was trying to
keep time, but was breathless through sheer excess of happiness.
There was nothing in the room to impede their progress. No chairs with
treacherous legs to trip over, no beds, nor tables with sharp corners
--nothing whatever but the matting, soft and thick, where Yuki Chan had
practised all the gymnastics of childhood unbruised and unharmed.
Half skipping, half hopping, and wholly undone with laughter and
exertion, the three at last reached the place where, for six years,
offerings had been made for the gift of the child who stood to these
two for love.
Arranged in the best room in the house, on five long red-covered
shelves, were dolls. Big dolls and little dolls, thin ones and fat
ones, each one to represent some royal man or woman of the long ago,
and dressed in a fashion of a time almost forgotten. There was Jimmu
Tenno, the first real emperor. His hair was done in a curious fashion
and his dress was of a wonderful brocade, while his hands clasped two
fierce-looking swords. There was Jingo, too, who had won fame and
lasting honor by her wonderful fighting, and was so great she had to
sit by the emperors and look down on the other empresses. Such a lot
of them! Some worthy to be remembered every day in the year, others
the more quickly forgotten the better.
Yuki Chan knew them all by heart, and she lingered before those she
liked and quickly passed those she did not care for. She could not be
rude to an emperor, even though he had been dead hundreds of years.
She was really not very afraid of the greatness of the old doll men
and women who sat on the shelf, still it was well to be careful about
handling them. She might be turned into a lizard or a snake, just as
the old lodge-keeper had said.
But her delight was in the miniature toilet articles of solid silver,
costly gold lacquer, and porcelain, so tiny, so beautifully carved
they must have meant the eyesight of some workman, only too glad to
shut out the sunlight forever if he might produce just one perfect
thing.
The things, however, that made Yuki Chan clap her hands and the
nesting birds perk up their heads at the sound of her clear, sweet
laugh were the funny little lacquer carts in which the royalty was
supposed to ride, drawn by impossible fat bullocks, so bow-legged that
their curves formed a big round O. Yuki Chan made her red lips into
the same shape, and called her mother to look.
She pretended to feed the dolls with real food and wine, and actually
played with the five court musicians, because they were partly
servants and it did not matter.
Her tongue ran in ceaseless chatter. Her father and mother hovered
around her, repeating the history of all those wonderful people. Yuki
Chan listened very little, so concerned was she with her own comments,
until she happened to see an anxious look creep into her mother's
eyes. It was something every little girl must know, and if Yuki Chan's
honorable ears refused to open, how would she learn? Then Yuki Chan
nestled close, and gave little pats of love and tried to listen. THE
shadows of the bamboo grew long and slim as the sun kissed them good
night. The sails skimmed homeward on a silver sea as the west covered
its rosy pink in a veil of deepest blue. The young birds in the old
plum-tree did not stir at the loving touch of the mother who, with a
soft bill, searched and sought for the lost one. The plum-blossoms
lingered yet for a night as the air had grown chill.
Within the house Yuki Chan, still dressed, lay on the floor, weary
with the wonders of the day. Her mother took from a small inclosure
beneath a shelf many soft comforts with which she arranged the child's
bed. Yuki Chan, talking all the time in a low monotone, tried to
unravel a tangle in her mind of birds and cats and dolls. It was all
getting unmanageable and very hazy, when her mother gathered her into
her arms, and quickly casting aside her two garments laid her gently
in a bath of caressing warmth. A moment more and the little maiden lay
like a rose-leaf in her bed.
The night-lamp made shadowy ghosts of all it touched, and one gleam of
light, escaping the paper shade, hung like an aureole above the head
of Yuki Chan's mother as she knelt with clasped hands before the
Buddha on the shelf.
Her moving lips had only one refrain: "The child, the child, the
child."
Yuki Chan watched the play of the light in the half-dark room. What
funny things those shadows made, and, strangely enough, one more
wonderful than all the rest grew into the shape of the boy, and his
lips were saying, "Be good."
Then Yuki Chan lost herself in a mist of drowsiness, and her mother
sat by, and kept time with her hand as she chanted rather than sang:
"Sleep, little one, sleep.
The sparrows are nodding.
Beneath the deep willow-trees
The night-lamp is burning.
Thy mother is watching,
Sleep, little one, sleep."