It must have been the name that made me take that little house on the
hilltop. It was mostly view, but the title--supplemented by the very low
rent--suggested the first line of a beautiful poem.
Nobody knows who began the custom or when, but for unknown years a
night-light had been kept burning in a battered old bronze lantern swung
just over my front door. Through the early morning mists the low white
building itself seemed made of dreams; but the tiny flame, slipping
beyond the low curving eaves, shone far at sea and by its light the
Japanese sailors, coming around the rocky Tongue of Dragons point in
their old junks, steered for home and rest. To them it was a welcome
beacon. They called the place "The House of the Misty Star."
In it for thirty years I have toiled and taught and dreamed. From it I
have watched the ships of mighty nations pass--some on errands of peace;
some to change the map of the world. Through its casements I have seen
God's glory in the sunsets and the tenderness of His love in the dawns.
The pink hills of the spring and the crimson of the autumn have come and
gone, and through the carved portals that mark the entrance to my home
have drifted the flotsam and jetsam of the world. They have come for
shelter, for food, for curiosity and sometimes because they must, till I
have earned my title clear as step-mother-in-law to half the waifs and
strays of the Orient.
Once it was a Chinese general, seeking safety from a mob. Then it was a
fierce-looking Russian suspected as a spy and, when searched, found to
be a frightened girl, seeking her sweetheart among the prisoners of war.
The high, the low, the meek, and the impertinent, lost babies, begging
pilgrims and tailless cats--all sooner or later have found their way
through my gates and out again, barely touching the outer edges of my
home life. But things never really began to happen to me, I mean things
that actually counted, until Jane Gray came. After that it looked as if
they were never going to stop.
You see I'd lived about fifty-eight years of solid monotony, broken only
by the novelty of coming to Japan as a school teacher thirty years
before and, although my soul yearned for the chance to indulge in the
frills of romance, opportunity to do so was about the only thing that
failed to knock at my door. From the time I heard the name of Ursula
Priscilla Jenkins and knew it belonged to me, I can recall but one
beautiful memory of my childhood. It is the face of my mother in its
frame of poke bonnet and pink roses, as she leaned over to kiss me
good-by. I never saw her again, nor my father. Yellow fever laid heavy
tribute upon our southern United States. I was the only one left in the
big house on the plantation, and my old black nurse was the sole
survivor in the servants' quarters. She took me to an orphan asylum in a
straggly little southern town where everything from river banks to
complexions was mud color.
Bareness and spareness were the rule, and when the tall, bony, woman
manager stood near the yellow-brown partition, it took keen eyes to tell
just where her face left off and the plaster began. She did not believe
in education. But I was born with ideas of my own and a goodly share of
ambition. I learned to read by secretly borrowing from the wharf master
a newspaper or an occasional magazine which sometimes strayed off a
river packet. Then I paid for a four years' course at a neighboring
semi-college by working and by serving the other students. I did
everything--from polishing their shoes to studying their lessons for
them; it earned me many a penny and a varied knowledge of human nature.
But nothing ever happened to me as it did to the other girls. I never
had a holiday; I was never sick; I never went to a circus; and I never
even had a proposal.
One night I went to church and heard a missionary from Japan speak. My
goodness! how that man could say words! His appeal for workers to go to
the Flowery Kingdom was as convincing as the hump on his nose, as
irresistible as the fire in his eyes. The combination ended in my coming
as a teacher to the eager Nipponese, who were all athirst for English.
Japan I knew was a country all by itself, and not a slice off of China;
that it raised rice, kimonos and heathen. Otherwise it was only a place
on the map. Whatever the new country might hold, at least, I thought,
it would open a door that would lead me far away from the drab world in
which I lived.
My appointment led me to the little city of Hijiyama, overlooking the
magical Inland Sea. It is swung in the cleft of a mountain like a
clustered jewel tucked in the folds of a giant velvet robe. It is a
place of crumbling castles and lotus-filled moats. Here progress
hesitated before the defiant breath of the ancient gods. For centuries a
city of content, whispers of greater things finally reached the
listening ears of eager youth, fired ambition, demanded things foreign,
especially the English language, and I came in on this great wave.
I found near contentment and sober joy in my work and my beautiful old
garden. But deep down in my heart I was waiting, ever waiting, for
something to happen--something big, stirring, and tremendous, something
romantic and poetical; but it never did. Year after year I wore the
groove of my life deeper, but never slipped out of it, and one day was
so like another it was hard to believe that even a night separated them.
Then without the slightest warning the change came. One day in my mail I
found a letter from a student which read as follows:
O! Most Respected Teacher.
How it was our great pleasure to write your noble personage.
When I triumphed to my native home after speaking last lesson
before your honorable face, my knowledge was informed by
rumors of gossip that in most hateful place in city of
Hijiyama was American lady. She wear name of Miss Jaygray. Who
have affliction of kind heart and very bad health. Also she
have white hair and no medicine. Street she live in have also
Japanese gentlemans what kill and steal and even lie. Very bad
for lady who have nice thought for gentlemans, and speak many
words about Christians God. Now not one word can she speak.
Her sicker too great. Your great country say "Unions is strong
and we stand together till divided by falling out." Please
union with lady countryman and also divide. She very tired. I
think little hungry too.
Yours verily
TAKATA.
(Some little more.) Go down House of Flying-Sparrow Street and
discover Tube-Rose Lane. There maybe you see policeman. He
whistle his two partner. Hand in hand they show you bad
gentlemens street where lives sick ladys mansion.
I hastened at once to the succor of my sick countrywoman. The way led
through streets obscure and ill-kept, the inhabitants covertly seeking
shelter as the policemen and I approached. It was a section I knew to
be the rendezvous of outcasts of this and neighboring cities. It was a
place where the bravest officer never went alone. For making a last
stand for the right to their pitiful sordid lives, the criminals herded
together in one desperate band when danger threatened any of the
brotherhood. The very stillness of the streets bespoke hidden iniquity.
Every house presented a closed front. Surely, I thought, ignorance of
conditions could be the only excuse for any woman of any creed choosing
to live in such surroundings as these.
In the cleanest of the hovels I found Miss Gray, her middle-aged figure
shrunken to the proportions of a child. There was no difficulty in
finding the cause of her illness. She was half-starved. Her reason for
being in that section was as senseless as it was mistaken, except to one
whose heart had been fired by a passion for saving souls. After being
revived by a stimulant from my emergency kit, she told me her name,
which I already knew, that she was an American and her calling that of a
missionary. I thought I knew every type of the profession and I was
proud to call many of them my friends, but Miss Gray was an original
model, peculiar in quality and indefinite in pattern.
"Does your Mission Board give you permission to live in a place or
fashion like this?" I asked sternly.
"Haven't any Board," she answered weakly. "I'm an Independent."
"Independent what?" I demanded.
"Independent Daughter of Hope."
Her appearance was a libel on any variety of independence and a joke on
hope, but I waited for the rest of the story.
She said that the Order to which she belonged was not large. She was one
of a small band of women bound by a solemn oath to go where they could
and seek to help and uplift fallen humanity by living the life of the
native poor. She had chosen Japan because it was "so pretty and
poetical." She had worked her way across the Pacific as stewardess on a
large steamer, and had landed in Hijiyama a few months before with
enough cash to keep a canary bird in delicate health for a month. Her
enthusiasm was high, her zeal blazed. If only her faith were strong
enough to stand the test, her need for food and clothing would be
supplied from somewhere. "Now," she moaned, "something has happened.
Maybe my want of absolute trust brought me to it. I'm sick and hungry
and I've failed. Oh! I wanted to help these sweet people; I wanted to
save their dear souls."
I was skeptical as to this special brand of philanthropy, but I was
touched by the grief of her disappointed hopes. I knew the particular
sting. At the same time my hand twitched to shake her for going into
this thing in so impractical a way. Teaching and preaching in a foreign
land may include romance, but I've yet to hear where the most
enthusiastic or fanatical found nourishment or inspiration on a diet of
visions pure and simple. While there must be something worth while in a
woman who could starve for her belief, yet in the eyes of the one before
me was the look of a trusting child who would never know the practical
side of life any more than she would believe in its ugliness. It was not
faith she needed. It was a guardian.
"Maybe I had better die," she wailed. "Dead missionaries are far too few
to prove the glory of the cause."
I suggested that live ones could glorify far more than dead ones, and
told her that I was going to take her home with me and put strength into
her body and a little judgment into her head, if I could.
She broke out again. "Oh, I cannot go! I must stay here! If work is
denied me, maybe it is my part to starve and prove my faith by selling
my soul for the highest price."
Although I was to learn that this was a favorite expression of Miss
Gray's, the meaning of which she never made quite clear to me, that day
it sounded like the melancholy mutterings of hunger. For scattering
vapors of pessimism, and stirring up symptoms of hope, I'd pin my faith
to a bowl of thick hot soup before I would a book full of sermons.
Without further argument I called to some coolies to come with a "kago,"
a kind of lie-down-sit-up basket swung from a pole, and in it we laid
the weak, protesting woman.
The men lifted it to their shoulders and the little procession, guarded
fore and aft by a policeman, moved through the sinister shadows of
Flying Sparrow street to the clearer heights of "The House of the Misty
Star."
Long training had strengthened, and association had verified my
unshakable belief that the most essential quality of the very high
calling of a missionary, is an unlimited supply of consecrated
commonsense. So far, not a vestige of it had I discovered in the devotee
I was taking to my home, but Jane Gray was as full of surprises as
she was of sentiment.
[Illustration: Through the sinister shadows of Flying Sparrow Street]
She not only stayed in my house, but with her coming the spell of
changeless days was broken. It was as if her thin hand held the charm by
which my door of opportunity was flung wide, and through it I saw my
garden of dreams bursting into flower.