Now the weary, half-closed eyes of the Tojin-san were seeing other
faces, his mind travelling backward over other scenes, very far away. He
saw a great, green campus, overshadowed by towering elms. Bright-eyed,
white-skinned boys were singing huskily as they swept across the lawns
into the tall stone buildings, which seemed to smile at them with
maternal indulgence. The Tojin-san was seated at a desk, looking across
at that sea of boyish faces. Strange how they had repulsed him; how he
had even felt a bitterness that was almost hatred for them in that other
time and place! And now! Now he caught himself thinking of them with a
tenderness which almost stifled.
Then the jaded mind of the Tojin-san wandered out into another scene of
the past, and out of a longer, darker memory a woman’s cold, unsmiling
face mocked him.
“Marry you!” she had cried, and not even her native courtesy could
suppress the note of horror in her voice. “Oh—h!” she had cried out,
covering her eyes shudderingly, “if you could but—see—yourself!”
The Tojin-san had indeed seen himself that night. Glaring back at him in
a tragic grimness his own fearful face had looked at him from the
mirror. Not that he had not known the blight upon him; but he had been
dull, stupid, slow to realize its full horror.
Time was when the Tojin-san was as other men, smooth-skinned,
level-eyed, very good to look upon. But in a God and Man forsaken little
town crushed between the mountains and the sea, a young and ardent
doctor of long ago had given himself up to a sublime heroism. Shoulder
to shoulder with a few—one or two only beside himself—they had fought
the plague of smallpox. From this fight the Tojin-san had emerged
marked! With the optimism and blindness of youth, however, he had gone
back to the woman he loved, and she had struck at him!
There is a Japanese proverb which says: “The tongue three inches long
can kill a man six feet tall.” The Tojin-san thought of this now. A
woman’s tongue, the mere brutal smiting of her words, had wrought a
curious effect upon his entire life. From that time on he had avoided
women as he had not a vile plague. He led the life of an ascetic,
wrapped in his books and sciences, making few friends, avoiding others,
with the sensitive fear upon him that the whole world avoided and shrank
also from him. And while still a young man—under forty—they had named
him “Old Grind” at the university.
Then upon him suddenly had come a new upheaval, a pent-up, passionate
longing to break away from the dull hopeless treadmill to which he
seemed bound.
“Old Grind!” So age was to be clapped upon him while the vital fires of
youth still throbbed in an agony in his blood. There was a new life, an
exhilarating, more inspiring life to be led, out in that old-new world
across the seas! It beckoned to those of adventurous souls and those who
were weary of a drowsy, torpid existence, wherein hope of a new dawn had
vanished beyond memory. The Tojin-san panted for this new life. He
wanted to swing his arms in a wilder world, to breathe less vitiated
air, to feel himself _alive_ again! He had made of himself, for half a
lifetime, a mummy for the sake of a woman he had not even really loved.
It was fantastic!
Out of this curious rebellion against Fate which had swept upon him like
a tidal wave, the Tojin-san had broken his bonds.
He was in the strange wild land he had yearned for, strange faces peered
at him askance, and strange gods mocked him from their temples with
their sphinx-like impenetrability. And he crouched, shivering, over a
kotatsu in a great, historical yashiki, cold and empty as a very
mausoleum, and the strong man within him recognized and fought the
weakness come upon him—the aching, longing, praying, for the mere sight
of a white, familiar face!
So still was the night, even the glide of a gaki (spirit) across the
cracking snow without must have been heard. A breeze just trembled
through the frost-incrusted bough of a camphor-tree, and it bristled and
broke, the twigs snapping and bouncing down on the frozen ground
beneath.
Something crept out of the shadows of the woods at the foot of the
mountains, leaped like a fawn across the wide arm of the castle moat,
and slid over the grounds between it and the shiro Matsuhaira. An army
of crows which lodged in the attic of a dilapidated ruin of what had
once been a go-down (treasure-house) suddenly began to flap their wings,
calling to each other querulously and making short, futile, terrified
flights. A rat fled from the go-down interior and scuttled across to the
kitchen in the rear of the mansion, and the Tojin-san raised a startled
face, listening to a new sound.
It was as if one without were tapping or scratching ever so faintly upon
the amado (winter walls). He did not move, but fastened his gaze upon
the point whence he had fancied the sound proceeded. Now it came from
another direction and tapped lightly, timidly again, as a child might
have done.
The Tojin-san came to his feet with a bound. He flung wide the screens
of his chamber, now on this side, now on that, and now those opening
upon the grounds. Not a soul was visible. Nothing but the white, still
snow, glittering like silver under the moon-rays. He looked up at the
outjutting eaves, felt along them with his hand, though a curious
instinct told him insistently that the touch upon his screens had been
intelligent and human. Slowly he drew them into place again, and, as he
did so, a voice, low as a sigh, called to him across the bleak snow:
“To-o—jin-san! To-o-o-jin—san! To-o-o-jin—san! To-o-o—!”
Tojin-san! That was the name he had heard everywhere. The one they had
given him. Some one was calling him, wanted him, needed him, perhaps!
It was a step only down to the gardens below. He took it at a leap,
crossed the intervening lawn and plunged into the wooded grove beyond.
On and on he followed the sound of the voice, still sighing across to
him, now pleading, now wistful, now wild and now—mocking, with the tone
of a teasing sprite which laughed through a veil of tears.
Suddenly he stopped, white-lipped. He had been within a step of the but
half-frozen moat. One more, and he would have plunged into it. A
shuddering sense of horror, of shock, seized him, and held him there
rooted to the spot, bewildered, stunned, his ears still strained
listening to the drifting voice, which had vanished across the heights
and lost itself in the white looming shadows of the mountains.
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[Illustration]
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