It had been said of Mr. Cyrus C. Todd that one might recognize him
for an American half a mile away. The alertness, buoyancy, and
self-confidence of a growing nation had expression through him. He held
himself like a flagstaff from which waved the Stars and Stripes. To-day
the bright invisible folds clung about him like a shroud. He felt the
weight of tears upon them, tears that soon must be shed. Look where he
would, no door of escape for Yuki opened. After all it was so much more
Hagané's affair and Pierre's and even Ronsard's! But what comfort would
this reply bring to Gwendolen? Ah, there was the pang! Gwendolen, who
had known no sister but this frail bit of pearl and moonlight that held
so deep a soul! Todd's head sagged between his shoulders. His step lost
firmness. He was a man aged, to outward appearance, ten years in a day.
An inspiring bit of news had come during that forenoon from Manchuria.
The land-engagements by which Russia was to restore her prestige lost at
sea, and inflict a terrible retribution on her audacious enemies, had
begun, and Japan, as on sea, was victor. At another time Todd would have
rejoiced with the nation. Now the whole campaign became to his fevered
imagination a colossal Juggernaut destined to crush one little girl,--a
wheel of fate (karma, Yuki would have termed it) on which a white moth
should be broken.
Todd seldom gave himself over to self-communion, yet those long days in
the bright loneliness of his wheat-fields had once bred the habit. An
ominous and most mysterious factor in his thought was a sense of
pre-knowledge, of a relentless inevitability, of the desirability, even,
of the sacrifice. The thing came, like a predestined growth, from the
soil of necessity. "Joint knit to joint expands the full formed fate."
As if, indeed, some ghostly counsellor leaned to him, the event, from
which his human, his conventional selves recoiled, shuddering, seemed to
his spirit a thing designed, not cruelly, by the Gods themselves. Yet to
think of Yuki--his little Yuki--dead with her youth folded like helpless
wings about her! The man groaned and stumbled in his path, as, weeks
before, Pierre Le Beau, dazed with a more ignoble grief, had groaned and
stumbled on these very stones.
The day was Friday, the hour approaching five of the afternoon. Little
girls in brilliant-colored kimonos played ball, or hop-scotch, or
hide-and-seek around the corners of the streets. Solemn-looking babies,
with a mat of black hair tipped to the backs of otherwise smoothly
shaven heads, loitered, engrossed apparently in Zen meditation, in the
vicinity of their elders. The clothes of these pygmy abbots being wadded
both in front and back, one, in his abstraction, toppling over, might
regain his equilibrium with a single bound, like round-bottomed toys
that always stand on end. Infants of a size smaller had warm swallows'
nests slung from the backs of elder sisters. These living burdens made
no difference at all in the freedom of sports, or in the slumbers of
those carried. In hop-scotch, the heads of the babes went up and down
with each hop, until the slender necks should have snapped. But, no,
babies were meant to pass most of their existence in this manner, and
being Japanese, they took it philosophically. Sun, wind, or even a light
snow might fall on the upturned faces, and sleep still line the swallow
nest.
Schoolboys, in little squads, passed at intervals. Some among them must
have been of the very lot who had once informed Pierre of the meaning of
"Ikusa!" Many wore the foreign school uniform of dark-blue woollen cloth
made into scanty trousers and "bob" jackets. With this outfit went,
inevitably, coarse leather shoes. Other students had been to their homes
to change the regulation school garb for the more comfortable wadded
kimono, held in place by soft white girdles in endless yards of cloth,
and completed with Japanese geta or clogs. All alike wore dark-blue
military caps with the names of their school across the front in Chinese
ideographs of gold. Their faces were smooth and brown; their eyes like
dark jewels. They looked fearlessly upon the tall American. A few lifted
their caps lightly, in token of respect, but many more stared, and often
turned away with an independence very close upon audacity. Todd, in
spite of his troubled reverie, was beguiled into smiling at them. Few
indeed responded to his pleasant look. It savored to them of
condescension. Abreast with a small battalion of young swaggerers, Todd,
for an experiment, said distinctly, "Banzai Nippon!" The boys stood as
if electrified. Todd pointed to his button of the Order of the Rising
Sun. Suddenly caps and voices went high in air. "Banzai Nippon! Banzai
Nippon!" they shouted. They crowded now about the minister, their faces
all smiles, the mistrust vanished. They examined his button eagerly,
then his watch-charm, his necktie, pin, and signet-ring.
"A-rr-e you the A-mer-i-kan?" asked one, in rheumatic English.
"Yes," answered Todd. "I am the new American minister,--A-mer-i-ca no
K[=o]shi." This was one of the few Japanese phrases he had acquired.
"Banzai Nippon! Banzai Nippon!" came the renewed shout. "American good
friend to Nip-pon--yes?" asked another lad.
"Huh! We all same lick off Russia's boots," growled a surly youth.
"Well, I hope you do,--though you mustn't say I said it!" laughed Todd.
"Good-bye! Good-bye! You are fine boys!"
"Good-bye! Good-bye, sirr!" called out the boys after him, with caps in
hand. It is to be regretted that most of them said, "Gooroo-bye-roo!"
but the sentiment, at least, was faultless.
Todd, looking back to them, wondered whether there were any incipient
Togos, Kurokis, and Haganés among the striplings. He sighed. The
untarnished enthusiasms of youth are always saddening,--though very
precious. One of the boys looked like Yuki. The likeness led him back,
like a jailer, to his dark cell of meditation.
"What am I to say to Gwendolen?" was now his despairing cry. Gwendolen's
eager questions, Gwendolen's clear eyes,--they would soon be
torture-irons. She knew enough of the situation to have a right to all,
yet how on earth was he to tell of a thing which no one had stated to
himself,--a fleck of terrible certainty drifting to his gaze from Yuki's
soul? Now a revulsion against the whole morbid situation flooded his
being. He felt as he had sometimes felt in dreams when a horrible thing
crept near, and he, though half-conscious that it was only a dream,
still sub-consciously must endure the pangs of reality until he could
wrench himself awake. Perhaps this also might prove a phantasm of the
night! He snatched at the delusion. The voices of young children, the
whirr of the low red sun through fleeting jinrikisha wheels, the gentle,
restraining touch upon his hand of falling petals, jeered softly at the
self-deceiver.
The city streets shortened now to purple vistas. Across from the
smouldering west a single planet, isolated by its own brightness,
preened itself with feathers of light. Todd's thoughts moved on like the
shadow-pictures of a revolving lantern. Each was a silhouette, black,
angular, menacing. If Yuki had indeed held Hagané inert, if an impulse
of love, even of pity for a sick man, had prevented the instant
regaining of such a paper, naturally she must get it back, though at the
price of her life. But what did the babbling sick boy mean by saying
that he had offered to return the paper to Hagané, if only Yuki would be
forgiven, and that both as with one voice had refused? Here was the knot
that pulled.
Hagané did not hate or scorn his young wife; Todd would stake his honor
on that point. Never had a human countenance shone with deeper
tenderness than that which Hagané had turned on Yuki within a few
moments, too, of her wrongdoing. The more urgently she had insisted upon
fulfilling the bargain, the brighter the faith in her that Hagané's eyes
had betrayed. Yuki's secret was plain enough. She was to die by her own
hand, giving her hostage of a soul to Hagané, the body of her death to
Pierre. Both she and Hagané had been assiduous to use the one term
"body." Todd could understand this much, but what was Hagané's hidden
source of light? Here conjecture failed. If Yuki's death were the only
possible way of redeeming the paper, all motives would be plain; but
Pierre said that he had offered to restore it. This was a great thing
for Pierre to have done. Todd's heart ached for the poor, weak, tortured
boy, so soon to be overwhelmed in an iridescent wreck of his own making.
Yuki was to die! This one thing alone was terrible enough. His weary
thought went on in a creaking treadmill. To Hagané the mere fact of
death would, of course, be less terrible and less important. Mere animal
existence, for its own sake, no matter how pleasant the surroundings, is
scorned by a true Japanese. They have other lives to live, even on this
old planet. They are to come again, soothed and strengthened by the few
years of interval, each in the fresh, new body of a little child. In
such tender blossoms of their own race they re-enter a world from which,
smiling or shivering, as karma may have tended, they departed.
Returning, they are dazed, a little wistful, a little timorous, yet
grateful for the new chance. Believing that great sorrow and great
temptation come always from the deeds of a previous existence, they meet
them bravely, carrying their own burdens, clear in determination to
retrieve that past, and mark out for the future a straighter and a
higher way. The gentle Amida, Kwannon of Mercy, Jizo with the tender
smile,--all may help them. Fudo Sama, immovable in a torment of flame,
Monju, Aizen, and the old Shinto Gods may give them strength; but each
human soul has wrapped in itself the power of growth and of decay. So,
mounting, striving, failing, reconquering, at last the pilgrim may
approach that shining mystery the world calls "Nirvana,"--that glare of
glory where the soul is swallowed up in light, and so passes on to new
realms of a radiance so ineffable that human thought falls helpless and
blind before it.
He had heard Yuki tell all this to Gwendolen before the days of her
Christian conversion. His listening had been more eager than he cared to
show. Gwendolen had voiced his thought, as she replied, with a long sigh
of wonder, "It does seem reasonable. So many things that we have to
guess at are explained by this thing you call reincarnation. Love at
first sight, sudden aversions, family tendencies, that queer feeling of
having been in a new place many times before--I think I'll turn
Buddhist, Yuki; but don't hint it to mama."
Yuki had become a Christian. She believed her early religious training
to have passed forever. She was sincere and earnest in the new faith.
Her face turned, as by a gentle instinct, to the Star of Bethlehem. All
that she professed, she believed truly and without question. Yet this
life of hers was, after all, but a flower sprung from an eternal stem,
whose roots were packed, burrowed, and buried deep in centuries of
Eastern mysticism. She had drawn her convictions from her mother's
breast, while, to belief of the tender nurse, ancestral spirits hovered
and smiled above them both. She had breathed it in each year at Bon
Matsuri, the Festival of the Dead, when little boats, laden with prayer
and incense and the warmth of human food, went forth to comfort the
souls of those who had died at sea, when each hillside cemetery stirred
with the soft clashing of ghostly lanterns, luminous in a spectral
ether, when little steaming cups of tea, and flowers, and children's
toys, were offered to the dead ghost-people. Here were the
meeting-places of the living and the dead. Here the two worlds answered,
face to face, as reflections in still water. Yuki, in those childish
days, no more doubted that hordes of spirits moved about her, lifting
her hair, creeping into her sleeve, reaching even to the shelter of her
faithful heart, than, later, in America she had doubted the presence of
her human schoolmates, sitting in rows before wooden desks.
And now, above the blood-wet battlefields, the spirits of the great
heroes of the past, worshipped by generations of the Japanese faithful,
were hovering, to test, by their supreme standards of valor and
endurance, the gray hosts of new aspirants for immortality. Yuki would
feel that they were her judges also.
And the gentle Gods would be near,--Kwannon, Jizo, Amida--standing in
great shining nebulæ of faith on the rim of night.
These sweeter visions passed, and the dark monitor in Todd's brain set
him the task of fathoming Pierre's deed. The boy had stolen. Contempt
swept from the thinker's mind its late compassion. Illness alone might
partially excuse it; but in delirium, as in drunkenness, the latent
impulse often shows itself. And Pierre, a young French dandy, a thief,
expected to make, that night, such a woman as the Princess Hagané
utterly his own. Yuki had probably saved his life at the expense of
hers. His grateful reward would be to defame her. Then why would Hagané
not take her back? Was she unworthy, simply through the act of saving
Pierre, or was there a lower reason? No--no--no--the man cried out to
himself. Yuki could not be evil. If Hagané believed it of her, he could
not have so smiled; he had the look of a high-priest bent upon a beloved
penitent. And that Ronsard should have believed,--a man who could speak
and understand the Japanese language, who had lived among the people for
eleven years! Having faced another blank wall, Todd turned.
He fell now to wondering in what way Yuki would choose to die. The long
strain began to tell on him. Morbid thoughts and fancies assailed him.
He almost gloated over the anticipation of Pierre's agony when he should
be paid his price. But how would Yuki die? Would she be alone, or Hagané
with her? Would her hand or his deal the final blow--give Death his
first sweet sip of her? The two would be together; yes, it must be so;
and the scene, unwitnessed though it was, one of unrivalled heroism, the
silent speech of two Gods alone on a cloudy mountain-top. And what was
he to say to Gwendolen!
The treadmill creaked again, and registered the notch of another empty
revolution. Now Todd shook himself and raised his eyes to see how far he
had come. Not a hundred yards ahead of him began the slope of Azabu.
Blackening swiftly against the copper sky loomed the great Japanese
entrance to his Legation. Evidently he must decide swiftly what to tell
or not to tell his daughter. He thought of Dodge. Dodge knew the
Japanese better than he; maybe he knew girls better. In the breaking of
the news to Gwendolen he might be of great help. Then the tiny flicker
of comfort died. Dodge and Gwendolen were playing at being enemies. They
scarcely spoke. It was a lover's quarrel, Todd supposed, for Dodge
certainly loved her; and the sudden friendship, on the girl's part, of a
successful rival betrayed clearly her sentiments. Lovers' quarrels were
well enough in their way; but why should this have come just now when
Dodge could be of use?
He drew a sigh that racked the meagre frame, and started up the slope.
"Kuruma, Dan-na San! Rick-shaw,--Dan-na San?" cried a group of coolies
who had a little station at the base of the hill. Their accents were
persuasive, even plaintive. They moved forward in a body, the empty
black vehicles (inseparable from them as shells from snails) rattling
behind them. They clamored like crows.
"No, I don't want you. No, I say, I-I-yé! Go back," he cried, and waved
them off, with some irritation at their persistence.
The smooth gravelled driveway of the hill might have been a trough of
viscid red clay, to judge from the slow and dragging steps of the one
who now ascended it. The rejected coolies, staring up from the street
level, assured one another that the tall foreigner was both sick and
stingy. For the latter fault they hoped he would fall down before
reaching the top of the hill. Then they would run to him, and charge a
yen apiece for picking him up. They began to ascend, stealthily, like
human vultures.
The dark spot of his ascending head could scarcely have been seen
through the opened gate, when, in a whirl of rustling skirts, Gwendolen
came down upon him. "I cannot tell her," he muttered between clenched
teeth, as she came. "I shall die. She must not know what I believe!"
Gwendolen did not reproach him for being late, though he had thought her
first words would be a playful chiding. She did not speak at all, only
took his arm, pressed it lovingly with her own, and with cheek sometimes
laid for an instant against his shoulder made the rest of the ascent
with him. The tenderness, the consideration of her manner, touched him
profoundly. He looked down into her face, white and fair even in the
dying light. She smiled up at him. He saw a new beauty, a hint of new
strength in her. For a moment his harassed sense clutched the
impossible. Maybe good news of Yuki had come to her!
"What is it, child? You look different? What has happened?"
She gave a low little laugh, and did not answer. They had nearly reached
the gate. In the great shadow a smaller shadow stepped out to join them.
Gwendolen put out a white hand and drew it near. "This is what has
happened, father--" she whispered. "We are--friends again."
"Friends?" echoed Todd; "you and Mr. Dodge,--thank God!"
"Friends!" came Dodge's pleasant voice; "well I rather guess not!"
"Gwendolen," said her father, drawing her close, "is this true?"
She clung to him, crying just a little in her excitement. "Yes, dad, if
you are willing--if it will not make you unhappy. He has talked with
me,--of the other thing; he has comforted me,--though he believes it to
be, oh, so terrible! Are you--willing, dearest father?"
Todd put an arm around each, pressing the brown and the golden heads
close. "I wish it of all things," he said. "Dodge is an American and a
gentleman; nothing is better than that. Just now this--happiness of
yours is a gift of God, for I bring nothing joyous."
"Tell us everything," pleaded Gwendolen. "I can stand anything now; my
heart couldn't break with you one side of it, and h-him the other."
Dodge went around to his side.
"I--I--guess it would be safer to tell it in the private office," said
Todd, beginning to fumble for a handkerchief. "To tell you the truth,
Gwen,--I'd really like--if you don't mind, my dears,--to turn woman and
have one good cry."
"Come on," said Gwendolen; "I'll cry with you. I am so mi-mi-miserable
and hap-hap-happy, I just can't--" She broke off in tears.
"I'm in!" said Dodge, pulling out his handkerchief.
Laughing and crying together, with arms around one another, they went in
at the tall gate and to the ambassador's little den.
In the big house, in the drawing-room, Mrs. Stunt and Madame Todd
exchanged mild confidences and cooking recipes. The latter had refused
for once to discuss the affairs either of Pierre or Madame Hagané.
And so the night came in.