Mr. Cyrus Carton Todd, born in the farming district of Pennsylvania, of
English and Scotch ancestry, had, as a mere boy, gone to seek his
fortune in the West. This was not, of course, an original thing to do.
Young men and old, families and whole communities were, at this time,
streaming, like banners, out toward the alluring, unknown lands. Cyrus
chose a broad, lonely stretch of moor in the very heart of a state
sparsely settled, but not too far from the fertile Mississippi basin.
Agriculture, rather than stock-raising, had from the first been his
design. The small, hoarded patrimony went into fences, a horse, a
plough, and a great lethargic sack of seed. Quick to recognize the
advantages of new methods and new machinery, he became, before the age
of thirty, one of the successful "large farmers" of his adopted state.
He loved, with a passionate, personal love, his broad black fields. He
knew, before they ventured one slim, verdant herald to the air, the
stirring of immortal essence in his buried grain. He thrilled, sometimes
with the stinging of quick tears, when first the green prophecy ran,
like an answering cry, from furrow to swart furrow. He moved, at
harvest-time, among the hung, encrusted stalks with the deep joy of a
creator who sees his work well done. Every process was vital,--the
sowing, reaping, storing, and, last of all, the hissing of the great
gold torrents as they plunged headlong into caverns of waiting cars. His
acreage was wide, but not too wide for his heart. His great working
force of men was organized and controlled with the tact and ease of a
leader. Mrs. Todd, the daughter of an Illinois farmer, (of late she was
successfully forgetting the fact), came into his life when, as a girl of
eighteen, she had "visited" a neighbor's home. Todd was then thirty-one.
The difference in age seemed great to him, but apparently not to Susan.
She arrived in mid-autumn, at the height of a golden yield. Cyrus loved
the whole world then, and it was not difficult for the rosy girl to
secure for herself a special niche.
They were married in the following spring, when the planting was over,
and Cyrus's fields ran with an emerald fire. The farmer turned,
perforce, to contemplation of his house. Bare walls and rough pine
floors were well enough for him, but better should be found for Susan.
She assisted him in selecting the new furnishings, and then, with the
self-possession known only to a woman and a hen, entered upon her
kingdom.
Her presence, for a long while after, affected Todd as something in the
nature of a miracle. Women had borne little part in his life. The dainty
touches of ornament which his wife's quick fingers gave the little home,
the good, unheard-of things she cooked for him, the demonstrative
affection she was ever ready to bestow (for indeed she loved him
dearly), kept him in a sort of daze of unbelieving bliss. He felt that
he and life were even. Now he began to learn what money, hitherto a
neglected factor in his success, had the power to grant.
The plain cottage grew into an attractive, vine-held home. Going to his
fields each morning, after a perfect breakfast, he argued aloud to
himself, and frequently pinched his own arm to prove the brightness
true. Everything prospered. The men liked him, the dogs fawned upon him,
the horses whinnied at his voice. And then, just as he told himself he
couldn't possibly make room for another joy,--came Gwendolen.
Cyrus, when his eyes had cleared of the golden blur, drew a chair to the
bed, put his two elbows on the rim, set his face upon his hands, and
deliberately made acquaintance with his daughter. The miracle of his
wife's love, the immortality of springing seed, the awe left over from
his boyish dreams of heaven, all hid themselves in that small, pink
frame, and looked out upon him through its feeble gaze.
He wished to name her "Susan," after his wife, and, as it happened,
after his mother also. Mrs. Todd would not consider it. She desired her
child to have a "pretty" name, something high-sounding, even
sentimental, that would look well in a novel. Her thought whirred like a
distracted magnet between three euphonious points,--"Gwendolen,"
"Guinevere," and "Theodora." At Guinevere Cyrus at once took an
obstinate stand. It suggested to him guinea-hens.
"Then 'Theodora,' Cy. What is the matter with 'Theodora'?"
"It sounds like the tin tail to a fancy windmill. I can just see it
spin!" declared the anxious father.
"But the sentiment! It means 'gift of God,'" pleaded Mrs. Todd, in the
voice she usually kept for church.
"Shucks! She don't need a label, 'made in heaven,'" said Cy. "Nobody 'd
take her as coming up from the other place. Why, if she dropped there
now, she'd put out flames like a hand extinguisher,--the blessed
cheraphim!"
"Well, 'Gwendolen,' then. Surely you can't find any such ridiculous
objections to 'Gwendolen.'" The young wife now was plainly on the verge
of tears.
"It's fancy and high-falutin' for my taste," said honest Cyrus, "but
it's not so bad as those others. If you want it, have it! I can't stand
out against you, darling. I can call her 'daughter' when I'm tired."
So Gwendolen she was christened, and in time Cyrus became not only
reconciled, but actually proud of the pretty name, saying that it
sounded yellow, like her hair.
In earlier years of struggle,--pleasant stress it had always been--Cyrus
Todd, in the wide, lonely life of the prairie, had become a reader of
books. His pious English mother had not died before transmitting to her
boy her veneration for the great souls of the past. Among his very few
possessions, brought originally from Pennsylvania, were three
books;--Shakespeare, the Bible, and, strangely enough, a copy of Marco
Polo. During the days of poverty these three formed his sole, incessant
reading. Afterward he bought more books, generally bound garbage-heaps
of literature, perpetrated in rich boards, and disseminated by strenuous
agents who urged to purchase with a glibness unknown to any since
Beelzebub. A few good books came to him, generally by a fortuitous
mischance. Imitating his neighbors, he sent in subscriptions to the
"Western Farmer's Evangel" and "The Horn of Plenty." He read everything,
bad or good, keeping new words and phrases strictly out of his daily
vocabulary. His time had not yet come for mental segregation.
Chiefly because of this modest simplicity of his speech, no one
suspected him of the growing passion. Never was a figure less scholarly
to view. His keen eyes of bluish green, with their trick of closing
slightly from underneath when interested, seemed to look out toward
horizons of actual experience, rather than along those shadowy vistas
down which the pilgrim band of thinkers moves. His limbs, loosely hung,
were made for striding over furrows. His mouth, thin-lipped and
straight, sensitive at the corners to any hint of humor or of pathos,
showed early lines of shrewdness and self-restraint. Never a great
talker, he was, as a listener, an inspiration. His silences in
conversation were not of the brooding, introspective kind in which one
seems to be planning his own next remark, but of deep and intelligent
interest in what his companion was saying. He was alert, practical,
interested in many things, sympathetic with many views.
Within the badly printed pages of the "Farmer's Evangel" he found his
first clue to the outer world. This was an illustrated article on rice
culture,--in Japan. Before he had turned the first column he felt the
threads of destiny pull.
"Them little chaps is all right, I guess," he remarked aloud, at the top
of the second column.
"No red rust on Johnny Jap!" he murmured admiringly, at the third.
With the fourth and last strip of reading, mated to a pictured group of
Chinese coolies flailing rye, he let the paper fall and his soul go
straying.
The descriptions of Japanese method and result were bald enough and full
of error. Beneath them, as through a tangled undergrowth, he saw
reality. Joining this new knowledge to remembered tales of Marco Polo,
an electric spark flashed out. Old Marco was not a mere romancer, then,
fellow of Sinbad and Munchausen, but a speaker of truths! There existed
still, somewhere on earth, those marvellous countries with old, old
cultures stored for us with prophecy, and a crowded generation through
which must still run the living sap. If one went west, always west, to
the edge of a great water, beyond that water he would reach Japan,--as
once Columbus cut the sands of Hispaniola. At that first moment came
into Todd's mind, half dreamily, though not the less imperishable
because of shimmering mist, a determination to travel, some day, to that
Far East, and see for himself what Marco Polo must have seen.
Todd, after his marriage, continued to grow rich. The pretty cottage was
abandoned for a great house near "town." It had hallways, a porte
cochére, and a huge billiard-room which none but the cat ever visited.
The town itself, in its spidery focus of busy railways, had not existed
when Cyrus first came. He had often strolled, whistling, through future
business blocks, and over smoking breweries.
The Todds "grew up," as they termed it, with the place, Cyrus specially
clinging with tenacious loyalty to the state which had made the
background of so much happiness. As Gwendolen passed from a golden
childhood into a maidenhood no less bright, Mrs. Todd was heard to
murmur reluctantly mild objurgations against the "rawness" of the West,
its unconventionality, and lack of true culture.
At fourteen, Gwendolen was not only precocious in school-work and music,
but her beauty promised to be of so unusual and unmistakable a type that
Mrs. Todd took fond alarm, and declared that the child must go at once
to New York, where she could be decently "finished." Gwendolen protested
and wept. She had her father's happy heart, and thought that nothing
could be quite so near perfection as their life at home. Mrs. Todd,
secure in her conviction, proved inexorable. Cyrus was appealed to, and
something in the dejected look of his face gave his wife a thrill of
triumph. She soon prevailed, and Todd, in person, prepared to lead his
one lamb to the sacrificial altar of "society."
He left her on the brown-stone doorstep in New York, his heart far
heavier than her own. The gay metropolis had no attractions then. He
took the next train home, tasting his first real sorrow since his
mother's death. He felt cold and chill at the thought of the big home
emptied now of his idol.
Mrs. Todd met him, not with the expected torrent of tears, but with a
face red and twitching in excitement. The leading political party of his
state had "split," and he, the farmer, Cyrus Todd, was to be run for
United States senator. This strange news proved indeed an antidote for
melancholy. In less than an hour he had been into town, and learned for
himself how the "land lay." Two candidates, well matched, with equal
backing, had just been declared by a great uprising of conservative
voters utterly unsatisfactory. Todd was asked to be the dark horse. He
would have turned from the proposition flattered and abashed, with the
one remark that he "wasn't the cut of cloth for a politician," but
ambition had begun to work like a fever in the veins of Mrs. Todd.
Already the magnate of her small community, she wished to test her
powers in the capital itself. She knew that Gwendolen was to be a
beauty, and recognized the potency of an attractive débutante, allied to
a rich father and an aspiring mama. The longest letter ever penned by
her fat hand now sped to Gwendolen. Her arguments were good, though
turgidly expressed. Gwendolen took fire. In a tumult of violet-tinted
letters, chokingly perfumed, she assured her father that the school in
which she now languished was a cheerless jail. She said that the plain
fare, particularly the raw beef, choked her, and that the rooms were
kept so hot that soon she must go into consumption. Above all, she was
dying by inches so far away from her "dear, precious, darling, angelic
dad!" It was this last representation that won. Todd gave in his name,
made a few public speeches that surprised him more than his friends by
their humor, sparkle, and good sense, and with little further effort
received the nomination.
For more than four years, now, the Todds had lived in Washington. Mrs.
Todd's initial step had been to buy a good, substantial home in a
fashionable neighborhood. She soon realized that she was not to dominate
society; but, after a few months of sulking, she adjusted herself
comfortably to the new conditions, and enjoyed her life thoroughly.
Gwendolen was put to the best private school in the city. She could be
at home now, in the evenings, to play her father "those tinkly,
skee-daddly pieces" which he liked. No homely melodies for Senator Todd!
His childhood was passed without them, and they bore no tender
recollections. Chopin, and an occasional rag-time bit, stirred his
veins. Gwendolen's music-master had kept to himself hopes that, in the
girl, he might have a brilliant result;--her parents had neither the
knowledge nor the insight to perceive it for themselves.
Gwendolen was fashioned for brilliant playing. Elemental or sombre music
baffled her. She played with laughter, sometimes with fire,--by
preference in the full light of the sun. Through Tschaikowsky's broken
rainbows she passed like a spirit. Beethoven, in his glad moods, seemed
a mirror in which she saw herself. Chopin as a sentimentalist she
despised, even while she thrilled to his unearthly delicacy of phrasing.
She grew steadily, yet remained unconscious of the increasing power. She
only knew that, in certain moods, it was almost a necessity to play, and
that people liked to hear her.
As time went on, Mr. Todd's political estimate of himself began to be
echoed jeeringly by his opponents, and sometimes reluctantly by his
friends. He had realized early enough that official exigency in
Washington was his cross, his penalty, the price he was doomed to pay.
The intricacies of method surprised and repelled him; the insincerity
met on all sides he designated despairingly as the "San José scale" of
humanity. Graft, political jobbery, the oppressions of power, sickened
him. "I don't like it, Susan. I wasn't made for this sort of a harness,"
he complained one day to his wife. "A fellow can't walk straight or talk
straight in this life; and some of these old rum-soaked bosses have
actually lost the power of saying what they mean. These female
lobbyists, too, they make a man ashamed to look a good wife in the face.
I wish we could quit. I like politeness and manners,--I've turned off
the road for a sick lizard--but I'll be ding-danged if I can grin and
scrape in the evening to a man who, in that same morning's newspaper,
has called me a liar and a thief!"
Mrs. Todd joined him in a sigh. "I know it's hard, dear. I realize just
what you mean. There is some of it in my own career, though of course I
don't expect anybody to think of _me_! The airs put on by these mushroom
aristocrats who have pulled themselves up by their own boot-straps are
enough to make one ill. But we must not think of ourselves. It's
Gwennie! Washington is better for her future prospects than our dear
Western home. We must try to endure Washington a little longer for her
sake." Mrs. Todd made strong effort to look and feel like an impersonal
martyr. She did not succeed very well. Hypocrisy had a tendency to
shrivel under the keen eyes that now twinkled appreciatively upon her.
"Just so," drawled Cyrus. "For daughter's sake only we continue to sip
the nauseating draught. I agree, then. I guess our inwards will not be
seriously impaired." It was perhaps as near insincerity as Todd ever
approached, this clinging, despite better knowledge, to uncultured forms
of speech. Even in the senate he showed determination to remain a raw
Westerner, rather than identify himself with that sandpapered and
lacquered body of gentlemen.
His compensations for all discomfort were found in huddled, intoxicating
rows on the shelves of the new Congressional Library. Here his interest
in the Far East, first awakened by the garrulous Venetian, shone back
from a thousand reflecting facets of new truths. He strengthened theory
with fact. He knew how many car-loads of Northwestern grain, how many
bales of Southern cotton were shipped annually to expanding Asiatic
markets from our Pacific ports. He traced the colonial policies of
Europe back to the days when adventurous Spaniards had won the timid
Philippines, but, seeking further glory, had knocked in vain at the
gates of Japan. China, too, the richest prize in the East, he knew to be
stirring in her long sleep. He believed that her destiny, central in the
future currents of trade, must become the key to the world's
development. With keen eyes he watched the joints of the Siberian
railway, like a giant centipede, reduplicating, joint by joint, always
insidiously, toward the storm centre of the Yellow Sea.
The old Romans argued the future from the flight of a bird. It happened
now to Todd that the love of one schoolgirl for another brought before
him a clearer knowledge of baffling Eastern questions than had all his
years of rapt apprenticeship.
Miss Onda of Tokio (Onda Yuki-ko, the full name had been registered)
arrived, as boarding inmate of the fashionable Washington Academy, only
a few weeks after Gwendolen. She was dainty, shrinking, friendless, and
pathetically homesick. Gwendolen became her champion. With a great
ruffling of wings she kept at bay the impertinent and the curious. Yuki,
thankful from the first for the protection, responded more slowly to the
love. The Japanese girl was by nature silent, meditative, reserved.
Above all she was,--to use her schoolmates' expression--"different."
It was fully three months after the initial friendship that the American
succeeded in enticing her home. After this, the course of true love ran
smooth. Each Friday night not passed with her Japanese friends, the
Kanrios, was spent with Gwendolen. Yuki learned to giggle, and to have
secrets, and dote on fudge like any American schoolgirl. She learned to
dress, too, in the American way, and to heap her soft, dry, blue-black
hair into a dusky "pompadour."
From the first she was a delight to Todd. He thought of her as a strange
bird of Paradise rather than a dove, sent out from the ark of her
country, that floated for him, somewhere, on waters of mystery. He
encouraged hesitating confidences regarding her home life. Stoically he
kept from laughter when her quaint grammatical errors convulsed
Gwendolen and Mrs. Todd. Through Yuki he began to suspect the
passionate, vital note of loyalty which is the keynote to Japanese
character.
Memories of her happy childhood seemed never far away. Before the little
feet touched earth, while still warm on her nurse's back, she had been
taught to drink in visual beauty. Heroism was instilled in her through
toys and story-books, and through temple feasts to gods who once were
men. Old age was something to be revered, almost envied,--white hairs a
benediction. The American levity and callousness shown by the young to
the old appeared, from the first, in Yuki's mind, and remained ever
after, the chief blot upon a country otherwise beloved. Todd saw that
the girl in her own land must have moved as though consciously
surrounded by spirit. She said to him that, in Nippon, the air was awake
and vital; that there, ever went on about men the tangling and
untangling of great forces, to which, the living are as but shadows on a
moving stream.
Through Yuki, too, he became a friend, even an intimate, of Baron
Kanrio, the Japanese minister. To be intimate with any Japanese is a
rare privilege, and Todd knew it. Many were the notable evenings spent
in Kanrio's small private den, where the two men bent together over
records and reports, and over maps whereon they traced with prophetic
fingers the contour curves of overflowing races. The insight of the
other fairly staggered Todd. Slowly the American breathed in, rather
than acquired by grosser senses, something of the patient, confident
loyalty to ideals,--the Japanese strength that comes with absolute
spiritual unity, the power of race in the living, and, more potent
still, in the dead.
Late in the afternoon of a bright March day, the fourth and last of
Gwendolen's school years in Washington, Mrs. Todd sat alone at a front
window of her handsome bedchamber, looking out dreamily into thickening
dusk. The day was Friday. Yuki and Gwendolen giggled over a chafing-dish
of fudge in a room across the hall. Merry laughter, more often from
Gwendolen, rang through the house, trailing pleasant echoes.
Mrs. Todd seldom sat alone, and seldom indulged in revery. Now, however,
she consciously caressed the reflection that, apart from an obstinate
increase of flesh, she had not a trouble in the world. She was proud of
her husband, proud of her daughter, pleased with herself. Her mind held
no regrets, her closet no skeletons. A familiar step on the sidewalk
caused her to look down. The senator was returning early from the
library. She smiled with wifely comprehension at the pose of the
down-bent head, at the hands thrust, Western fashion, to the full depths
of new, English trousers. "Cy has something on his mind," she murmured.
"He's coming to hunt me up and get it off."
She heard him banging one downstairs door after the other, then running,
with the lightness of a boy, up the stairway. His tone expressed relief
at seeing her dark shadow-bulk against the window-frame. "Susan! That
you?"
"Yes. You are early, dear. Shall I ring for lights?"
"No--no," cried the other hastily. "I'm a little tired--that's all--and
a little--excited. This warm dusk just suits me. It's fine to talk in."
After saying this, he remained so long wordless that Mrs. Todd's
curiosity urged the question. "Was it anything definite that you had to
say?"
"Definite! It's worse than definite. It's colossal!"
"Say it quick, then. I'll be on pins and needles till you do."
"Well, to put it briefly--our U. S. minister at Tokio, _Jap_-an,--Evans,
you know,--Brunt Evans of Illinois,--well, Evans is on the point of
resigning because of ill health,--and if I want the appointment--if I
really try,--"
"Yes--yes--don't stop!"
"Mother, I _want_ it!" cried the man, in a tone she had not heard him
use for years. "You know how I've always felt about that country! I want
the appointment as I have never wanted anything since I got you!" His
thin hands twitched, his eyes pleaded. He might have been a schoolboy
begging for the treasure of a gun, a horse, a holiday.
"To give up--Washington, and live in that strange land!" whispered Mrs.
Todd, as though fear touched her.
"It needn't be but for a matter of four years, mother."
"Is there not talk of war with Russia?"
"Yes, and that's my chief reason for wanting to go."
"Do you realize that Gwendolen, our only child, is to graduate this
June, and formally come out next season?"
"Yes, and that's my chief reason for wanting to stay."
Mrs. Todd pressed her lips together. A suspicious gleam came to her pale
eyes. "This is the work of Yuki Onda! You both are infatuated about that
girl."
"My dear Susan, how utterly unjust! Yuki has no more political influence
than our cook. She doesn't dream of this possibility, she or Gwendolen
either. You are the only one besides myself to hear."
"The girls will be wild when they are told. Gwendolen will be mad to go!
Society, flattery, success, a great catch,--all I have worked for--will
be nothing!" Todd wisely kept silence. Mrs. Todd rose unsteadily to her
feet. "There is no doubt that you all will be frantic to go--all three
of you--without a thought for me." Seizing each side of the parted
curtain, she stood, as at a tent door, staring out into a blackening
sky.
"You'll be a big gun out there, Mrs. Cyrus Carton Todd," wheedled a low
voice. "Bigger, in some ways, than you'll ever get to be over here.
Those foreign embassies are bargain-counters of dukes and princes. The
American globe-trotters will be so many kneeling pilgrims at your
shrine."
Mrs. Todd stared on. Slowly upon the night, as upon a transparency,
luminous letters began to form. "Mrs. Todd, the stately and
distinguished consort of Minister Cyrus Carton Todd, Envoy Extraordinary
and Minister Plenipotentiary from the United States to Japan. Miss
Gwendolen de Lancy Todd, a famous Washington beauty, now in her first
season." Beneath the words appeared, as in a phosphorescent mist, a
long, long dining-table, rich with the beauty of lace, cut glass,
silver, and flowers; while ringed about it leaned and laughed her
guests,--famous men and women of two worlds, members of old nobilities,
native princes, and, perhaps, even visitors of blood royal, for who, in
these days, would slight an invitation from the representative of
earth's greatest republic?
Senator Todd pensively regarded the scallops of his wife's uplifted
profile. "You'd make a stunning figure in a court dress, mother."
She wheeled fiercely upon him. "You are sure Gwendolen suspects
nothing?"
"Sure. And if you take it like this, dear, she need never know that the
chance was offered."
His companion gave a small, irrepressible sob. In an instant the long
arms were about her. "Now, Susie, don't you be losing any sleep over
this. I won't take a step unless you give the word."
Dreading his tenderness more than any argument, she pushed him away half
laughing, half crying, "No--no--go on with you! I won't be
honey-fuggled! I know your ways. It has come upon me rather sudden, and
I haven't caught my breath! But you might as well tell Gwennie and be
done with it! I couldn't keep such a secret from her, even if you could.
It's too b-big! And she'll be just wy-wy-wild to go!" The last sentence
was a wail.
"Forget it, mother! Drat the whole thing! Let it vanish!" urged Cyrus.
"No!" she cried instantly, and shook her head with vehemence. "I can't
accept the sacrifice."
"Do you agree, then, for me to--to--try?" asked Todd, fighting down a
desperate joy.
"No-o" she hesitated, "not exactly agree, either; only I'm not willing
to take upon myself to stop the whole thing here at the beginning. I'm
not the Lord! Maybe this is planned out by higher powers; and then,
besides," she added with a gleam of hope, "maybe you won't get it, after
all!"
Todd's face bore a curious expression. His under lids closed slightly.
"No," he repeated slowly, "maybe I won't get it, after all. But it's
only fair to tell you that, if I am turned loose to try, I'm going to
try like--hell!"