Preparations for an unexpectedly early start kept the Todd family in a
condition of strained excitement. When the tension did relax (Mrs. Todd
had more than once warned them), they would all probably shoot off into
eternity, mere dull bits of leaden weight, as from a boy's rubber sling.
Yet in these days the good lady had little time for speculations,
whether mournful or the reverse. She, Gwendolen, and Yuki began at once
a round of shopping and dressmaking. Officious lady friends who had
lived or visited in Japan hastened to tell of certain articles necessary
to the civilized female which, absolutely, were not to be procured in
Japan. At first Mrs. Todd hearkened eagerly, and made lists for future
shopping; but she invariably lost the lists, and, after the first week,
began to notice that some particular item declared by one gesticulating
visitor to be unpurchasable west of San Francisco, would, by the next,
be named as a thing produced in full perfection only by Yokohama
cobblers, jewellers, cabinet-makers, tanners, or tailors, as the case
might be.
Much in the same manner, whereas one matron declared the Japanese
servant a fiend, laden with an accumulation of domestic vices from the
days of Pharaoh down, the next would congratulate Mrs. Todd on being
about to enter upon an experience rare to this hemisphere,--perfect
service, intelligently and cheerfully given.
The pleasant home on M street was abandoned, the occupants moving to a
hotel. This was done that Mrs. Todd might personally supervise the
packing and storing of furnishings grown dear through pleasant
association. More than one stealthy tear plashed on an unresponsive
packing-case.
Gwendolen's brimming joy gave room for but one regret. That lived and
died in a single glance, as she saw her grand piano, ignominiously
tilted, pathetically legless, carried past her through the wide front
door, and down to the waiting hearse of a van.
Mrs. Todd went to bed, during this strenuous period, immediately after
dinner. She urged her daughter to follow the good example and get
"rested" for struggles to come. But "No," said Gwendolen, laughing.
"There will be plenty of time to rest when I'm old. I can't waste life
now!"
Many of the girl's evening hours were devoted to Mr. Dodge and what he
was pleased to term "Lessons in Japanese." When Yuki and Pierre were
present,--Yuki now resided permanently at the Japanese Legation,--the
Oriental listener would often need to bury a crimsoning face in crumpled
sleeves to hide her mirth. Mr. Dodge's vocabulary was large, especially
in the way of amorous and complimentary phrases, but his syntax and his
pronunciation were things new on this planet. Pierre laughed too, with a
superiority born of Yuki's private instruction. Gwendolen stoutly
defended her professor, saying that his way of speaking the language
sounded easier and more natural than Yuki's own.
Mr. Dodge, by one of those fortuitous happenings that lay, for him, like
pebbles, in every chosen path, had found that he would be compelled to
return to his post of duty by the same steamer on which the Todds were
to sail. When he made this bold announcement, accompanied by a
triumphant side-glance at Gwendolen, the girl was surprised to feel her
heart give a warning throb. Despite her skill in the game and her
audacity, she began to realize that in this young person she had
probably met her equal. She rallied quickly in the face of danger.
Exhilaration took the place of fear. She knew she was in for a good
fight, and began at once to employ her other admirers in the way of
Indian clubs and dumb-bells. Dodge very properly went home to South
Carolina a few weeks before sailing, and did not return to Washington
until the time of final departure.
If Yuki trembled at thought of her long days on an enchanted voyage,
with Pierre for closest comrade, her new strength, born of Hagané,
smiled down the apprehension. Not only would she refuse to yield to that
beloved one a deeper pledge, but, if possible, she would win back from
him the half-troth already given. She longed to return to her country,
to her people, free of obligation. Her reverence demanded it. She should
belong only to herself and them. So should she have a clearer road in
which to approach the subject of a foreign marriage. Pierre, as yet,
refused to see this vital point. He must be made to see. On those long
balmy evenings on the ship, with the moon's sweet influence to help her,
yes,--she could convince him,--she would triumph!
While Senator Todd made his own few preparations, talked with all manner
of congressmen on the ever-present topic of the threatened Far Eastern
conflict, or reasoned with brother senators who decried so
unconventional a thing as resignation from their august midst,--Pierre
harassed the French Legation for confirmation of an appointment almost
given, yet now, at the last, tantalizingly withheld. After insistent
efforts, the best that he could gain was assurance that, in Tokio
itself, in the hands of Count Ronsard, the present French minister, he
would almost surely find his credentials waiting. Pierre, at his
princess-mother's instigation had written personally to this Count
Ronsard. "An old, dear friend of ours, mon fils," wrote Madame Olga.
"Quite close, I assure you. He will be felicitated to offer what he
can."
Pierre and Yuki in their many talks had come to believe that an assured
diplomatic position in Tokio would greatly strengthen their chances for
an early marriage. Their young ardors were to blow the drowsy coals of
French and Japanese friendship. Their lives must have an influence for
good! At such times the future glowed with a heavenly dawn. Pierre, ever
since his arrival in Washington, little less than a year ago, had been a
special favorite with Mrs. Todd. In the first place, he was a joy only
to look upon, having personal beauty to a degree almost irritating in a
man. He possessed, also, that subtler and rarer power called "charm." A
great factor in his success was unfailing courtesy toward elderly women.
He knew well the might of the chaperon. He cared little for men in any
country, and the aggressive American he found peculiarly unattractive.
But a woman, no matter what her age, race, or weight, was still a woman.
Middleaged sighs fed his vanity equally with the giggling of débutantes
in their first snare. He was not a Don Juan, far from it,--but a
pleasure-loving, life-loving boy, who had never been refused a thing he
wanted, and never intended to grudge himself a moment's delight that
could be honorably enjoyed. His ideas of this honor,--it may be well to
add,--were French. At different stages in his short career, Pierre had
been or tried to be, in turn, a hermit, an atheist, a Roman Catholic
priest like Francis of Assisi, an actor of old French classics, a poet,
and an artist of the Chavannes school. With him one passion burned
supreme. One fuse must disappear before a new one could be lighted. He
had met Yuki first in the Todd drawing-rooms, on one of those Friday
evenings allotted to the schoolgirls for receiving friends. She chanced
to be wearing full Japanese attire of a soft, cloudy blue, a sash
brocaded in silver ferns, and a cluster of the gold-colored "icho"
berries drooping in her blue-black hair. As his eyes fell upon her,
Pierre's past visions went to cold ash. All the poetry, the mysticism,
the intellectuality, the exaggeration of discarded hopes flared now into
a single new white flame of adoration.
December came. Christmas festivities impinged on the travellers' routine
of preparations. Days which, at first, Gwendolen had declared
interminable, accelerated strangely in progress, like round stones
started down a gradual slope. During that last crowded week, Todd had
his final, most important interview with the President and the Secretary
of State. He was urged to impart with absolute freedom his personal
opinions of the coming struggle, and its probable outcome for the world.
In return he was given full and satisfactory instructions. He left the
executive mansion strengthened in purpose, and clarified in his own
beliefs.
At the station, on the morning of departure, an unexpectedly large crowd
gathered to say "Farewell." Prominent were the Kanrios and their
diplomatic suite. Gwendolen's youthful friends of both sexes advanced
like an animated flower-garden, so profuse were the bouquets. The French
ambassador also was there. A Russian attaché insisted upon kissing
Pierre good-bye.
The two drawing-rooms of the sleeper "Nurino" were so heaped with dulcet
offerings that the legitimate occupants--hurrying in to the warning cry
of "Buo-o-o-ord!"--were forced to seek temporary accommodation in the
open car.
"Why! It's just like setting off for anywhere!" cried Gwendolen, a
little blankly, as the train drew out through acrid smoke, and old
familiar landmarks began their flight backward, to the city.
"Who cares about the setting off? It's the roosting on, that counts!"
carolled the optimistic Dodge.
The train pulled steadily, now, for the South. After much disagreement
and discussion, and the bending of yellow, black, and brown heads over
countless railroad folders,--each with its own route in a pulsing artery
of red,--they had decided for a southern tour. No one of the party
except Dodge, who, if one chose to believe him, held acquaintance with
all corners of the globe, had been lower than the Potomac River. Mrs.
Todd remembered an aunt, native of New Orleans. The aunt had died long
since, but the city remained. They were to have a glimpse of the Gulf
Coast, and at least two days in the sleepy, picturesque, yet hugely
prosperous Crescent City.
The month was January, in most places a bad month for weather; but in
this opening of the year 1904 the South was apparently bent upon
justifying its conventional adjective of "sunny." The little party left
Washington in a scourge of sleet and a pall of gray; it reached New
Orleans to find the whole city, creole alleys traced three centuries ago
and broad avenues of later wealth, alike glorified,--"paved with
afternoon." Scarcely a gulf breeze stirred. The levees by the muddy
river lay like saurians, with turpentine and sugar barrels and bursting
cotton bales upon their backs, in lieu of scales. In city gardens,
palm-trees stood at "present arms" of glossy rectitude. Pansies,
daisies, and other small bedding flowers bloomed in the open air. Potted
ferns or crotons stood about on broad galleries, or upon the shell-white
walks bordering emerald lawns.
Gwendolen declared it a delusion, a mirage, deliberately planned for
their entanglement. Yuki admitted that even Japan could not offer so
tropic a feast to the eye in January. Mrs. Todd found her greatest
satisfaction in "doing" the place. Dodge, of course, was cicerone. He
led them to the old French market and gave them a strange, steaming
elixir, brewed in huge copper vats and misnamed mere "coffee." He knew
the small lair called "Beguet's," where alone on earth, he solemnly
affirmed, real breakfasts were to be procured. He hired a box at the
French Opera for Sunday night.
"Sunday!" Mrs. Todd gasped, with upraised hands and eyes.
"Sunday!" echoed Yuki, less vociferously, but with a corresponding air
of pained astonishment.
"Certainement!" ejaculated Pierre, who was beginning to feel at home.
"It is transplanted Paris. Why not Sunday night, better than another?
All persons have been to mass, except our naughty selves. The piety of
the others may chance to include us. God is good! Allons! The opera is
Faust, with the full ballet and music. Time means little here! Vive New
Orleans!" After a laughing glance into Mrs. Todd's still dubious
countenance he whispered, insinuatingly, "It is never to be known in
Washington or--Tokio--dear Madame."
In the end he carried his point and his party. Never had he been in such
spirits. Yuki could scarcely keep her eyes from his radiant face. Mr.
Todd declared him a mineral spring that had just blown its way through a
boulder. He stopped turbaned mammies or wondering children on the
banquets,--which in New Orleans means sidewalks,--that he might elicit,
by his correct Parisian French, answers in the delicious native patois.
At each success he hugged himself anew.
"Ç'est ça, même! Mo pas geignin l'argent pour butin çi lalà!" he
murmured ecstatically. "Geignin plein!" Passing the cathedral, Pierre
asked of a lounging, large-hipped negress: "Est-ce qu'il y à la messe à
la Cathédrale demain?" to receive the impudent answer:
"Sainte Pitie! Est-çe que vous croire que le va levé apres so' bon diner
au poisson pou' vini donner nous autres la sainte messe? Bon Dieu la
Sainte Vierge! Ha! Ha!"
"Holy Mother! But it is French, en glacé,--crushed, with the cream
swimming and the flavor heightened!"
Todd alone stared out across the dim, majestic river through De Soto's
eyes. He tried to feel himself the man, to prophesy as that seer had
prophesied. The great city and the long levees were builded in that
vanished mind, before the first adobe brick was moulded, or the first
dark cedar hewn. Now in himself, as Todd the new American minister, he
felt the country of his dreams creep nearer, lured by the magnet of the
Panama Canal. Within his own life, should God be pleased to spare him to
a fair old age, new craft would thread the Mississippi delta, small
merchantmen at first, and sailing vessels, each with the banner of the
red sun on its mast. Asiatic labor, silent, skilful, insidious, would
contest for preeminence with the saturnine Dago, the "cayjin," the
Quadroon, and the established African.
Each moment, westward from the city, held a novelty and a delight. The
sugar-fields of Louisiana, stretching for leaden-colored miles, and soon
to be pierced by myriad tiny spears of awakening green, appeared to Yuki
a giant sort of rice-field from her own land.
"If it were cut up into many small piece, all of different shape and
size, with little crooked baby-levees binding the edges,--it would be
exacterlee the winter rice-fields of Nippon."
Sometimes, in an island of higher ground, the white-columned house of a
sugar-planter gleamed, and near it rose mammoth live oaks, huge tumuli
of green, the underbranches swaying with grizzled moss. In the open
country, such trees crouched low above stealthy creeks, or blotted
widening lagoons.
While in the city, they had read and heard of recent heavy rains to the
West, flooding a wide agricultural district. On the borderland of Texas,
they knew they had reached the threatened fields. Cypress, magnolia,
sweet gum, and bay trees stood knee deep in a sea of dull chrome,
churned from roads of clay. It seemed a lake of yellow onyx. Between the
trunks writhed a tropical disorder of vines, palmetto, and undergrowth.
In wide, clear spaces, drifting fence rails or half-submerged buildings
told of ruin already accomplished. Now the whole unstable sea was
covered by a carpet of the floating "water-hyacinth," which, in later
months, was to turn the bayous and lagoons into veins of amethyst. It
seemed incredible to the little party, staring solemnly from train
windows, that they were in temperate America at all. Every floating spar
of wood became an alligator's head, every springing tuft of white swamp
flower a meditative stork.
Night fell swiftly upon the watery forest, sucked down into it as to a
familiar lair. With the next morning, the world had changed to a dry
desert, above which arched an unrelated sky.
"Can we really be on the same planet?" asked Gwendolen; "or in the
night, did this little measuring-worm of a train reach up and pull
itself to Mars?"
Before, behind, everywhere, stretched spaces of exhausted gray sand,
rising now and again into nerveless hills. For vegetation were set
innumerable rosettes of the spiked yucca, with small heaps of the
prickly pear, a cactus bush built up of fleshy bulbs, leaf out of leaf,
like inflated green coral. On some of the thorny ridges perched
star-like, yellow blooms. On others were stuck thick, purple fingers,
known politely by the name of "figs." Dodge remarked sententiously that
it was a very interesting plant; though, by raisers of cattle, not
considered desirable. "Stock won't eat it a little bit," he explained
cherubically. "Get stickers into their noses."
"Do you call that thing a plant?" cried Gwendolen, pointing. "It may
grow, but it is no more a plant than a canary is a crab."
Dodge smiled again, the irritating smile of the well-informed. "Wait
till to-morrow in Arizona, if you want to know how it feels to be struck
dumb."
Gwendolen tossed her head. Her tendency during these initial days was to
overact indifference.
"I rather think I shall not undergo the humiliation of incapacity to
speak! Life heretofore has brought no crises in which I could not
command a fairly adequate linguistic expression of my visual
experiences."
"Whew,--how did you remember it all?" said Dodge under his breath. Yuki
turned her intense face from the window. At sight of the absorbed,
half-dazed expression, Gwendolen gave a little laugh, crying, "Here is
one already nearing the borders of silence! That is Yuki's way. When she
begins to feel things, she draws back in her shell, and puts sealing-wax
on the door. What is it now, Yuki,--lack of English,--that keeps you so
dumb?"
"No, not exacterlee," said Yuki, flushing a little at the turning of all
eyes. "I have not good English, of course; but I could not say to myself
all that I see, even in Nipponese. When too many new thing come, it is
like fat people trying to squeeze together through a door,--all get
mashed, and none come through."
Dodge gazed at the speaker in quizzical admiration. "Miss Onda, I long
for a phonograph record. That is a masterly exposition of a profound
psychological truth!"
Yuki cast a laughing, half-pathetic glance toward Pierre. "Is it very
bad names that he is calling me, M. Le Beau?"
In spite of Gwendolen's hyperbolic boast, Arizona, next day, came
near to fulfilling Dodge's prophecy. The world stretched bigger and
broader, as though here, instead of at the Arctic poles, the
"flattening-like-an-orange" of our globe took place. The sky,
immeasurably remote and tangibly arched, was a thin crystal dome
soldered to earth by the lead-line of the horizon. The red sand was hot
to look at. The hills, though of vaster proportions, had more of
helplessness and degeneracy in their sprawling curves. Yucca grew very
closely now, marching up and down the slopes like fierce explosive
little soldiers with bayonets too long for them. The objectionable
prickly pears vanished. In their places rose a stranger order of being,
cacti in tangled bunches, as of green serpents, sometimes with the
licking red tongue of a blossom,--hunched woolly lambs of growth on
high, thin stilts of shaggy black,--huge green melons, ribbed, spiked,
and lazy, that seemed strangely at ease on their burning couches of
sand. Far off, against the rim of nothingness, dry, blue mountain shapes
emerged, mere tissue filaments of hue. And now, as part of the unreal
perspective, giant cacti rose, at first no more than scratches and
cross-marks on a window-pane, but coming steadily close. The first that
flashed, tall, stark, and tangible, into the very faces of those who
watched, brought small exclamations of wonder and distaste. It passed
instantaneously, fleeing backward into nothingness,--a herald to
proclaim the coming horde. In a few moments, imagination, the sunshine,
and the day became mere mediums for the aggressive race. This scorched
eternity was made for them. Isolated and defiant, their laws were to
themselves. It seemed a deliberate assumption that they should mock
reality, taking on the evil forms of crucifix, gallows, skeleton-trees,
and mile-posts, where nothing but a famished death was to be pointed.
The desert might have been a vast sea-bottom, set with grim coral trees
and hardened polyps.
"They are a race of evil spirits, petrified," whispered Gwendolen. "I
feel their sinister association with our human life. See what shapes
they have chosen!"
"Yes," said Yuki in return, and caught Gwendolen's hand as if for
comfort. "You are right, Gwendolen. I think it is a Buddhist hell of
trees."
"But what could cause this doom to befall an innocent tree, little
sister?"
"It must be evil karma," said Yuki, with wide yet shrinking eyes upon
the desert. "Perhaps a tree where a blameless man was hanged, perhaps
the tree of a martyr's sacrifice,--perhaps even,--" here her voice fell
to an intense and dramatic whisper which chilled her listeners while it
stirred them, "perhaps that terrible--terrible tree whereon
our--Saviour--See--see! now, over there--there--where on top of a hill
three great crosses, the middle one so great and black and high,--is it
not Gethsemane?" She pointed with a shaking finger, unable to utter
more.
"Come, Yuki, do not look--I forbid it!" cried Pierre, vehemently. In a
moment, with a shudder, he added, "Albrecht Dürer might have dreamed
them in a nightmare, had he killed his own child and slept afterward!
Mother of God! I shall look no more!"
"Nor I either, Pierre," cried Mrs. Todd, in great relief. "You are right
to correct Yuki,--she does have such morbid fancies. I've heard her tell
stories of ghosts, and incarnations, and those scary things that would
make the flesh creep on your bones. Thank heaven, this day is nearly
done! Ugh! See how the lengthening shadows spread them on the sand!"
Deliberately she pulled down the small window-shade, leaned back, and
closed her eyes.
"What's the matter, dear? Are you faint?" asked Mr. Todd, bending over
her.
"No, but I'm thirsty. Ring for some lemonades, Cy. This dust has made my
throat as dry as a lime-burner's wig!"
Gwendolen rose. "Well, you can have your lemonades, but I am going to
watch the desert until night drives down the last black cactus-peg. It's
a thing to remember!"
"Voilà! It's a thing to forget," challenged Pierre. "Nay, Yuki-ko, you
must not follow. Tears are on your cheeks. Stay here, and let us talk of
your beautiful land, forgetting the harsh ugliness outside."
He, too, leaned over, and pulled down a shade. Yuki made a slight motion
of protest, then submitted. "Yes, let us talk of the umé-flowers," she
whispered. "They are the first."
Gwendolen had taken a seat to herself at the far end of the open
compartment. Here, alone, she watched the red sands smoulder into gray.
For a brief half-hour the plant shadows stretched elastically into a
network of black. Suddenly they sank, as water, into the sand. The
upright stalks themselves began to waver and lose shape. An instant more
and they would have vanished like their shadows; but now, in the western
sky, just where the heated disc of copper had been lowered, an aftermath
of glory mocked the night. The cactus forms, against the gleam, acquired
new menace and fresh exaggeration. The brightness shut down quickly,
like a box-lid, and a universe of stars sprang out. Tangled in their
beams, again loomed up the cacti.
"Fair maid, thy summons to the lemonade!" said Dodge, close behind her.
"By Jove! I almost committed a rhyme! Fair maid,--lemonade,--good
combination, think I'll write it on my cuff."
At last the girl turned from her desert.
Next day, to the outspoken satisfaction of Mrs. Todd, aridity had begun
to retreat before civilization. Even the small spot called Yuma seemed,
with its station garden of green, a bit of Paradise. Before reaching it,
Dodge had carefully printed a large notice, using the top of one of
Gwendolen's florist boxes. This he hung in full view of all, at the end
of the car.
"We approach YUMA. No puns aloud. First offence, one bottle. Second
offence, five bottles. Third offence, a whole case. By Order of the
General Manager."
The few other travellers destined for the long California journey were,
by this time, all on friendly terms. No one could have resisted the
combined gayeties of Gwendolen, Dodge, and Pierre Le Beau. Yuki, though
less responsive, was, as usual, an object both of interest and
admiration.
In lower California Mrs. Todd averred that at last she was in America.
The trip up the coast, with glimpses of Narragansett surf springing up
in dazzling whiteness between rows of eucalyptus, pepper, and live-oak
trees, or over the roofs of tiled adobe houses, could not turn her from
the belief.
Near San Jose, cottages peered out from arching vines of rose. Gwendolen
was distressed and surprised to find that roses, here, did not bloom
continuously, and always in abundance. "They must show like glaciers,
when they do come," she admitted.
With San Francisco, modern life, society, stress, began, anew. Old
acquaintances sent in cards. Gwendolen began a whole volume of new
admirers, while Yuki, with Pierre as escort, found certain Japanese
friends and acquaintances, one the child of an old family servant of her
father's house.
To many thousands of voyagers, San Francisco is but a stopping place, a
bird-rest for preening. As a fact it is a city which possesses an
unusual share of individuality, of "atmosphere," in the sense that
writers use. No where else are to be seen such gray and wind-swept
streets, where houses stand sidewise, as if mounting flights of stairs,
the parlor windows of one house looking through the chimney-pots of its
neighbor. Nowhere else are perched palaces like those of San Francisco,
or a growth, as huge and strange in its exotic coloring, as Chinatown.
The great, round, shimmering bay and Golden Gate are as a loom, and
ships of the harbor, shuttles weaving together the nations of East and
West.
On sailing day, new friends and new flowers gave the little party of the
Todds "bon voyage."
"If New Orleans is a transplanted Paris, this is a Tschaikowsky
Symphonie Orientale translated into terms of American life," said
Pierre.
Slowly the city turned from a city to a patch of lichen on a rock. Queer
little ditches, which they knew for streets, showed lines of
perpendicular-crawling beetles, which they recognized to be whizzing
electric cars. They watched it all eagerly, leaning far along the stern
rail of the ship.
Then the sea winds caught them, screaming a welcome into shrinking ears.
The white, attendant sea-gulls laughed in harsh appreciation of the
antics of the wind. The ocean lifted, and strove, and pounded his cosmic
greeting; and,--and,--well--there was a good stewardess on board!