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The Breath of the Gods

by Sidney McCall · English · Gutenberg #42365 · 892,123 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Breath of the Gods

Author: Sidney McCall


        
Release date: March 18, 2013 [eBook #42365]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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Transcriber's note:

      Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).

      [=o] represents a letter "o" with a macron
      (example: d[=o]dan).

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      (example: Shi--j[=u]).

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THE BREATH OF THE GODS

by

SIDNEY McCALL

Author of "Truth Dexter"







Boston
Little, Brown, and Company
1905

Copyright, 1905,
By Little, Brown, and Company.
All rights reserved

Published May, 1905

The University Press, Cambridge, U. S. A.




                    BECAUSE OF FAITH AND REVERENCE,
              AND IN SPITE OF ERRORS WHICH I KNOW TO BE
                              INEVITABLE,
                      I DARE INSCRIBE THIS BOOK TO
                            YAMATO DAMASHII




                             PREFATORY NOTE


No character in this book, belonging either to public or private life,
is taken as a whole or in part from any person. The characters are
wholly imaginary, and no incident is based on any real incident known to
the writer. Even in the descriptions of official buildings, memory is
laxly used. In the genre studies alone is realism attempted. Most, if
not all, of the questions, remarks, and speculations put into the mouths
of peasants and servants have been overheard by the writer.




                                  THE
                           BREATH OF THE GODS

                              CHAPTER ONE


The stone dwelling of Senator Cyrus C. Todd, usually as
indistinguishable from its neighbors as is one piano key from another,
presented at nine o'clock on this night of November third, nineteen
hundred and three, a claim to individuality in the excess of light
pouring from every window, from the perpendicular wink of every opening
door (opened but to close again as quickly); oozing, it would seem, from
the very pores of the pale façade, thereby giving to the great flat
rectangle of the house a phosphorescent value that set it six feet out
into the night.

The upper windows shone more brilliantly than those below. A roller
shade had been carelessly left high. Through the film of chamber
curtains heads could be seen passing. Once, there was the outflung
gesture of a slim, bare arm. Everything bespoke approaching festivity.
At this brightest window a silhouette suddenly appeared, sharp, dark,
complete. It was that of a Japanese girl with wonderfully looped and
curved coiffure, shoulders that sloped tenderly, and a small, straight
throat.

Just at this moment, on the shadowed entrance-steps below, answering
silhouettes began noiselessly to climb. These were men with thin black
legs, and strange burdens, black like themselves. They showed angles as
of gnarled roots; one, the great curved body of a gigantic spider. The
front door, opening instantly to a ring, disclosed them merely as
musicians,--Signor Marcellini of Milan and his colleagues,--bearing
basso, cello, and flutes, secure in swart cases.

The lower rooms of the house were slightly chill. Though flooded with
soft light, they were not yet fully illuminated. All doors within stood
open. It looked almost as if walls had been taken down, so long and
mysterious had grown the vistas. Through all tingled an aromatic smell,
something a little alien, like crushed herbs,--pungent, and full of
vague suggestion. Mrs. Cyrus C. Todd, flowing now down the palm-set
stairway in a purple tide of skirts, frothed with dim lace, stopped at a
switchboard half concealed in vines, sent forth a gloved, determined
hand, and in an instant the secret of the odor was revealed. The rooms,
to their farthest angles, literally exuded chrysanthemums. Senator Todd
was said to have expended five thousand dollars for these flowers alone.
Perhaps he wished to stamp in gold upon the memory of Washington this
coming-out party of his idolized, only child. The conceit was fair
enough, for Gwendolen was bright, and blonde, and golden in herself.
Statesmen and the wives of statesmen did not fail to observe that
chrysanthemums were the insignia of official Japan, and that November
third happened,--they emphasized "happened,"--to be the birthday of
Japan's beloved Emperor. These two facts, joined with the third, that
Senator Todd even now had aspirations to the Tokio mission, made a trio
of keen angles to be used as wedges for further speculation.

The walls of the lower story had been spread for the occasion with
yellow satin, upon which alternated delicate upright strokes of silver
and of white. Around, under the ceiling, grew a frieze of living
flowers. The great, coarse, woody stems crossed in a lattice-work, with
clusters of huge blossoms and green leaves breaking the angles at points
of decision possible only to a trained artist, or to a Japanese. The
white duck floor-covering spread to a border hand-painted, to match the
frieze. Where wall and canvas met, the real flowers again arose,--thick
parallel stalks of differing heights, upholding a wainscot border of
shaggy gold. Mantles were heaped with them. Japanese pots of them in
bloom alternated with conventional ferns and palms. Each electric bulb
jutted from the heart of a living flower. The very air had an amber
tone.

Overhead, invisible footsteps scurried in short flights. They sounded
feminine, young, full of excitement. "Heavens!" Miss Gwendolen de Lancy
Todd was crying, "where on earth _is_ my other glove? I am sure I just
laid it here! And my orchids! Has anybody sat on my orchids? I think
I'll have to marry the young person who sent them, though I forget now
who it was!"

"A person of the name Dodge, n'est-ce-pas?" ventured the little French
dressmaker, on her knees beside the fair white vision. Pins, retained at
the corners of her mouth, added a crushed softness to the pronunciation.
She rhymed it with "targe."

"Yes, a name like that, I believe," said Gwendolen, indifferently, and
craned her long neck over. "Mother called him some sort of a snip. Are
you certain that my dress hangs right now, Madame?"

"Oui, oui. It is perfection," declared Madame, sticking the remaining
pins into the black front of her dress.

"Then at last I am actually ready. I believe there's mother calling now.
Where did Yuki go? Oh, I see, over there by the window, as calm and cool
as if we were going to church instead of to our first ball!"

"Then all my coolness is stopping on my outsides," said the Japanese
girl, with a little incipient shrug and giggle, breaking at once into
the merriest of low laughs. She crossed the room swiftly, with an
unusual, swaying rhythm of movement. "Ah, Gwendolen, my heart it go like
yellow butterflies to be downstairs."

Gwendolen turned a radiant face to greet her. "Now isn't she a vision!"
cried the girl aloud, in fresh access of admiration for her friend.
"Madame, what do you think those French painters of yours would say to
her--Chavannes, De Monvel, Besnard,--who owe so much to Yuki's art?"

"You omit Monsieur Le Beau, who is a painter," said the little woman,
shyly. She was on good terms with the girls, and had made Yuki, as well
as Gwendolen, chic gowns with the breath of Paris upon them. "I knew
well the family of Monsieur Le Beau in France," she hurried on, seeing
the distressed flush in Yuki's face. "Non, non, Mamselles. I am a
chattering old femme. Let me look at you together before you descend the
stair." She sat back upon her heels to enjoy the picture.

"Yes," cried Gwendolen, "that's right. Take us both in." Laughingly she
drew Yuki's arm, with its long, trailing sleeve of gray, tightly within
her own. They rested together, swaying,--smiling,--Yuki's cheek still
warm with the name of Pierre Le Beau, two types as far apart as the two
sides of earth which had given them race.

Gwendolen was fair almost to the extreme of golden blondness. Her
features were small and perfectly related; her nose deliciously
interrogative at the tip. Her brows and lashes, drawn in a darker hue,
gave touches of character and distinction. She was very slender, erect,
and was poised as though she grew in the wind. The long tulle draperies
shook and stirred as if vitalized by her energy. She was all white and
gold. Her heaped-up skeins of hair, amber necklace, gloves, slippers,
and stockings gleamed with a primrose hue, and the freckles on her
orchids (poor flowers, just caught up hastily from an ignominious
corner) repeated the yellow note.

Beside her, Yuki Onda, a few inches lacking in height, impressive,
nevertheless, and held with a striking yet indefinable difference of
line, smiled out like a frail Astarte. Her pallor had an undernote of
ivory, where Gwendolen's was of pearl. Her head, with its pointed chin,
bore, like a diadem of jet,--balanced, like a regal burden,--the spread
wings of her hair. Beneath a white, low brow her eyes made almost a
continuous, gleaming line. The little nose came down, straight and firm,
with a single brush stroke. All the humanity, the tenderness, the
womanhood of her face lay in the red mouth and the small, round chin.
Her smile was startling, even pathetic, in beauty. Gwendolen had once
said, "There is sometimes something in Yuki's smile that makes me want
to fight God for her."

Yuki's robe, in deference to hours of pleading from Gwendolen and Pierre
Le Beau, was Japanese to the least detail. Mrs. Todd had protested in
vain for the "civilized" coming-out gown of white. The robe hung about
the girl in long, loose folds of cræpe, mist-gray, rising in soft
transitions from the dark band of the hem to pearl tones at the throat.
Under it were garments of heavier silk, dawn-colored, showing like
morning through thin clouds. Into the curdled substance of the cræpe,
cherry-flowers were dyed, or rather, breathed in, by a smiling, wrinkled
brown magician at the rim of Yuzen Creek,--pale shapes which glimmered
and were gone, rose to the surface and sank again, as though borne in
moving water. Besides the black note of her hair there was one strong
crash of contrast in the obi, or sash, a broad and dominating zone,
black, too, with fire-flies of gold upon it. For hair-ornaments she wore
a cluster of small pink flowers that had the look of cherry-blooms, and
a great carved ivory pin, pronged like a tuning-fork, an heirloom in her
father's family.

"Gwendo--_len_! Yu-_kee_! Come down instantly!" rose the voice of Mrs.
Todd. "You should have been down ten minutes ago."

"Ah, Madame Todd calls," exclaimed the dressmaker, scrambling to her
feet.

"But you are sure you really admire us, Madame?" challenged Gwendolen,
before she would stir.

"Oui, charmante, charmante, both are perfection apart--and a vision of
paradise together. But go, young ladies, the good mother calls again."

The spoiled child stopped for another instant, this time in the doorway.
"All right, mother. Coming this instant!" she hurled downstairs; then to
the little Frenchwoman she said, "Do not attempt to sit up, Madame. Yuki
is to stay all night, and will help me with the pins. After a glimpse at
the reception and some of the goodies below, you must hurry home to your
little Jeanne. Take plenty of bonbons with you, and I wish to send that
great bunch of daisies, with my love. All children love daisies,
n'est-ce-pas?"

At last they were off. Madame could hear Mrs. Todd, relieved, yet
petulant, scolding them the whole descending scale of the stairs. Moving
through the perfumed disorder of the room, Madame sought out the
daisies, and, with filling eyes, whispered aloud in French, "Now may the
good God be kind to that loving heart, and send to it only blessing."

Stockings, scarfs, fans, underwear,--a thousand dainty trifles must be
gathered up before the little Frenchwoman could give herself consent to
go. Madame and Miss Todd had been kind friends to the widowed exile.

Far over to one side of the room she stumbled upon a dark heap that
showed gleams of a cherry-colored lining. It emitted, as if consciously,
an aroma, subtle, faint, unforgettable, strange scented echoes of a
distant land. It was Yuki's long black "adzuma-coat," worn from the
Japanese Legation, where Baroness Kanrio and the maids had assisted her
to dress, and which, in this bright room, she had slipped laughingly to
the floor and forgotten. Madame held it out for a moment. Then she
folded and laid it softly on the foot of the bed. Her expression had
changed slightly. As if with relief, she snatched up a dressing-gown of
blue flannel, that cried "Gwendolen" from every turquoise fold.

"Gwendolen, where is your father hiding?" demanded Mrs. Todd, severely,
as the two girls reached the hall.

"Why, how should I know? Dad hasn't worried my mind. Isn't Yuki simply a
dream of spring?"

"You forget that I have admired Yuki upstairs," said the harassed
matron, and turned her back. "There's another carriage sounding as if it
wanted to stop! Every wheel goes over my nerve-centre. Cy, _Cy_--rus!
Where _is_ that wretched man? The musicians should be playing now. The
guests will pour in any instant. There is a carriage stopping! It _has_
stopped! Heavens, I shall go mad!"

"Shall Yuki and I run for the drawing-room, mother?"

"Yes, yes, dear. Right under that tallest palm. Be sure to stand ahead
of Yuki. Cyrus! Cy--_rus_! Oh, he is never anywhere when I want him."
Her wails preceded her down the hall.

"Are you looking for me, dear?" asked the senator, innocently, strolling
out in a leisurely manner from his study, where, against orders, he had
been smoking a cigar.

"_Am_ I!" panted his wife. "And you've been smoking!" But indignation
must be swept aside. "The carriages are stopping, man! Don't you hear
them? I'll be in bed for a month if I live through this night! Start up
the musicians, and join us immediately in the front drawing-room."

"Musicians,--musicians?" murmured Cyrus, looking about, "where are the
musicians?"

"Not under the hatrack, nor yet in my china-closet," cried his lady,
with angry vehemence. "Over there! Yes, there--where you saw the piano
wheeled this afternoon; behind that hedge of chrysanthemums!"

"Oh, yes, there in the duck-shooters' lodge. All right, old lady. I'll
start 'em. Don't get excited!"

Guests now streamed upstairs toward the dressing-rooms. Signor
Marcellini began his most seductive waltz; and the senator stood beside
his heaving spouse just as the first smiling acquaintance crossed the
door-sill.

"Ah, Governor! Ah, my _dear_ Mrs. Jink!" chortled Mrs. Todd. "This is
surely a good omen,--my daughter's first official congratulations to
come from you. Gwendolen, let me present Governor Jink and Mrs. Jink,
fresh from our own dear Western state. Miss Yuki Onda of Tokio, Mrs.
Jink,--Gwendolen's most intimate school-friend, and my Oriental
daughter, as I call her. Ah, Sir George! Punctuality is one of the
British virtues. Mrs. Blachouse, my daughter, Miss Todd."

The reception swung now, full and free, into the sparkling waters of
felicity. Laughter, lights, and the rustling of silken skirts on inner
mysteries of silk; music held back by the multitudinous small sounds of
human intercourse, with now and then a protesting wail from violins and
the guttural short snore of a cello! Laughter, and the clink of glasses
on metal trays, the scraping of spoons against porcelain, tinkling of
ice in fragile vessels, and incessantly the shuffle of footsteps on
soundless, unseen floors! Perfumes of dying flowers and foliage, odors
of essences, fumes of fresh-cut lemons, and of wine!

Outside, at the curbing, a continuous roar and rattling of carriages
went on. The covered entrance-way, like an elastic tent drawn out,
sheltered a thin moving stream of faces. Behind them the scrape of
wheels, stamping of horses, and vociferous bawling of drivers sent a
premonitory tingling through the blood. At intervals there came the
snort and hiss of that modern Fafnir, the automobile, followed by the
nauseating taint of gasoline.

To Gwendolen and Yuki it seemed as if the line of visitors would never
end. "Yuki, Yuki," whispered the former, "if they keep popping by like
this, each with that wooden grin, I shall certainly go into hysterics!
Did you see how nearly I broke down in the face of that last fat lady in
tight gray sleeves? She looked like a young rhinoceros in its little
sister's skin."

"I no longer perceive anybody at all," said Yuki, tranquilly. "I only
see the small duck called 'oshi-dori' bobbing down, then up, on the
Sumida River."

"Hush!" whispered Mrs. Todd, in evident excitement. "Here comes the
Russian ambassador with his entire suite. I was wondering whether he
would snub us because of the war-talk, and Yuki, and the chrysanthemums,
and the Mikado's birthday! Now, girls, smile your sweetest!"

But the good lady was given a surprise. Yuki leaned back to touch her
arm. At the look of irritated inquiry the Japanese girl said clearly,
"You must excuse me from this, dear Mrs. Todd; I cannot shake hands with
that person. If I shook, I would be the hypocrite." Without waiting for
permission or remonstrance, she turned and hurried from the direction in
which the Muscovites now approached. Mr. Todd, with hand already
extended in welcome, saw nothing of the little by-play. Gwendolen heard,
sympathized entirely with Yuki, but wisely held her peace. Mrs. Todd,
after a gasp of outraged dignity, recalled herself, perforce, for the
new greetings.

Yuki had slipped from the line quietly enough. She walked away now quite
slowly and with apparent calm. Within, she was turmoil and distress. Had
she done right? Had she offended, beyond forgiveness, her kind friends,
the Todds? But, looking from the opposite point, how could she touch,
even in social insincerity, the hand of a man whom she felt by instinct
to be a subtle enemy of her native land? This very minister was
suspected by many to be one of the strongest who urged the weak Czar
into insult and hostility. Would Mrs. Todd reprove her publicly? Would
Baron Kanrio, when he heard, defend the childish impulse?

A greater one than Kanrio would soon be here. In the agitation of the
moment she had forgotten that tremendous fact. Prince Hagané, her
father's feudal lord, or daimyo, often called the "Living War-God of
Japan," was to come, for a few moments, to this reception, and partly
because of her. A Japanese, no matter how great, seldom neglects the
privileges of humanity. Yuki's parents had written that the Prince was
to see her, and deliver news. What would he say now,--what would her
father say,--if told of this rude and un-Japanese yielding to a personal
distaste? "Yet," muttered Yuki to herself, through small clenched teeth,
"even should Lord Hagané himself command me, I think I would not touch
that Russian's hand."

Moving forward slowly, but always in a straight line, she came full
against a small white surface on a level with her face, a thing
shield-shaped, and framed in black. It did not move aside for her, as
similar white patches, vaguely seen, had done. Brought up suddenly, she
realized it to be a shirt-front, and presumably behind the shirt-front
there must be a living man.

"Oh, beg pardon!" she faltered, shrinking back. "I begs much pardons,
sir."

Two eager hands caught her own. A gay, low voice said, laughing, "I have
watched your coming. I willed it. How straight you sped, you beautiful,
strange bird!"

But Yuki, dazed for the moment, did not answer. She panted slightly, and
tried to draw her hands away.

"I have waited here, by the conservatory door. You must be tired with
standing. Come in with me, and rest."

Still unable to command herself, she let the speaker lead her into the
warm shadows. She hoped he had not seen her rudeness to the Russian
minister. Mrs. Todd swept round an angry glance just in time to see them
disappear.

Pierre Le Beau found a sheltered seat, and gently, yet in a masterful
way, forced her down beside him.

"Oh, Yuki, but you are beautiful to-night! Was I not mad enough with
love without this new gray snare of mist, these blossoms drifting along
an irresistible tide? It is a lifetime since I have seen you."

The beating of the girl's heart slowly slackened. "The lifetime of a
flower, then," she said, smiling upward. "It was but last night, you
know, when we all work so hard with the decorators and the
chrysanthemums."

"Last century!" he laughed. "I really exist only in the moments when I
am with you. All else are dungeon hours, locked with your last
'Good-bye.' Do not shrink from me now, darling. Let me hold you in my
arms once this wonderful night."

"My hair you will disarrange, and others notice," she pleaded, holding
him back with one white hand. "And, dear Pierre, you rumples my mind
more than my hair. I must be calm to-night, and cheerful with many. I am
the débutante."

"You are hard to win," said Pierre, "but I believe I like it so. Your
Japanese etiquette is a thorny hedge. More than once I've torn my soul
upon it. Ah, but even that could not keep me quite away. You struggled
hard, you elf of pearl and mist, but at last you said you loved
me,--that you wished to be my wife."

He brushed away the hand and caught her. She gave a little shuddering
movement in his arms. "That was a terrible, bold thing for a girl of the
samurai class to say. My heart shake a finger at me yet, that I have
confessed so immodest a thought. I should hereafter be very circumspect
with you, to pay for that bad thing!"

"Circumspect!" laughed Pierre. "Yes, we shall both be circumspect like
this,--and this!" She wrenched herself from his kisses, and stood
upright in the narrow path. "No, Pierre; I mean it. Please do not do
such things, or my frightened spirit never will return. I must go to
Mrs. Todd; I fear she is angered."

"Angered,--with you?" asked Pierre, arrested by the sincerity of the
girl's protest. Yuki turned her head away. Suddenly he recalled the
Russian minister's approach, and connected it with Yuki's flight. He
stared at her averted countenance. "Yuki, did you leave your
friends,--would you offend them,--rather than greet the Russian
ambassador?"

"Yes," whispered Yuki, trembling.

The radiance of Pierre's face went out, his head sank. "So that was the
reason. You would not touch a Russian! As you know, my mother is a
Russian."

"Oh, it is not _all_ Russians! Do not think that I would wound you. Many
are good. Mr. Tolstoi, Mr. Wittee, your honored mother, too, I am sure.
They hate, as we, the tyrants that wish to crush the people, and to
bring on this cruel, unjust war. I saw the petals of our Emperor's
flowers shrivel as he passed them by! I, too, would have shrivelled,--my
soul would have turned black,--at his breath."

"No war will come!" cried Pierre, vehemently. "I have told you this
before. I know it from the inside. There will be no war. Your country
will not face Imperial Russia!"

"If those bad ones push us just too far,--if they delay replies, and
provoke us just a little more,--Nippon will fight, and I think that God
will let us win!"

"Your Christian God must side with Russia. He cannot aid a nation that
does not believe in him!" Pierre's eyes held curiosity and a challenge.

Yuki turned slowly to him, answered the look with sombre brooding, and
then stared upward to where close moisture of the high glass dome curved
space into a frosted shell. "Perhaps, though," she said, pausing between
each word, "the Christian God--believe--in--_us_!"

Before his surprise found vent her mood and tone had changed. "But, no,
no, Pierre; we talk no more of tragic things this night, not of war, and
hate, and destiny. It is our ball, Monsieur Pierre Marie Le Beau,--I
begs you to remember that. And me and Gwendolen are now in society. I am
in society,--is it not nice? Come, let us return to society at once."
She caught his arm, laughing, and tried to urge him from the bench.

"You witch of moods!" said Pierre. "Are other Japanese girls like you?
When I hold you closest, then do you seem most far away. I seize you in
a thousand tantalizing forms, only to fear, each time, that never yet
have I seen the real Yuki. Ah! take me to your land, my love, and make
me one with it. What do I care for war, for Russia, even for France, if
once I could believe you entirely my own? You know I am fighting hard to
sail with you next spring. The French ambassador here gives me much
hope, and in France my relatives are working."

"Yes, yes, we shall go together on that great ship," said Yuki,
soothingly, "and together we shall seek my dear parents, and ask them
for our happiness."

Pierre's face lighted. "But you will be true to me no matter whether
they give consent or not?" he cried. "Swear it, Yuki."

"I will be true to you, Pierre," said Yuki. "You wish to hear that many
times, do you not? But I cannot say I will marry you without their
consent. But they are kind--they must like you, Pierre." She flushed
delicately. "We--we will make them to say '_yes_,' Pierre."

Still the young man hesitated. "This condition that you hold so
stubbornly is our menace," he began. "I don't urge you to marry me at
once, without their good wishes, only to promise that, after trying in
every way to gain them, you will take your life into your own hands and
come to me."

"Why do we fret and worry about such things so far away? You will take
from me all joy of our party. Will you not return to the room with me?"

"No," said Pierre, seizing a hand in his, "I shall hold you until this
is a bit more clear. No, Yuki--"

"Yuki,--Yuki!" came a cautious voice, an echo, it seemed, to Pierre's
last word. "Where are you? Mother has sent me here. Prince Hagané asked
for you. She says to come at once."

"Let my hand go. I must hurry. It is Prince Hagané," whispered Yuki,
and, slipping deftly from Pierre, she hurried to join her friend. He
followed quickly, stopped in the doorway, and stood there, scowling.

The crowd had thinned. He could see the heads and shoulders of the two
girls moving and whispering together as they sped. Beyond them,
surrounded by his suite of glittering officials, Spanish-looking men in
broadcloth and gold lace, rose the dark, impressive figure of Prince
Hagané. He was in the dull silken robes of his own land, unornamented
but for a single decoration,--the highest that a Japanese subject, not a
prince of the blood, had ever received.

Pierre's first thought was an inconsequent one of childish irritation
that the man bore no marks of age. On the other hand, no one could have
thought him young. The massive features, bronze in tone, and set in a
sort of aquiline rigidity, the conscious, kingly poise of head and
throat rising from deep brawny shoulders, the stiff black hair, touched
evenly throughout with gray, had none of them the color of youth. Yet
beside him youth looked tame, and old age withered. This man was on the
very summit of life, the central point of storms, rather than their
object. His deep-set eyes gazed now far beyond to the future, then back
into the past, with equal certainty of vision.

Such was the great man Hagané--"Ko-shaku Hagané," feudal, not imperial,
prince; a title signifying the highest rank attainable by a subject not
descended from the gods. Native ballads called him the "Right Arm and
the Left Ear" of the Emperor. Woodcuts of his splendid, ugly head, set
by country farmers within household shrines, proclaimed him the Living
War-God of Nippon. His victories and innovations at the time of the
Chinese struggle had spread his fame through two worlds.

As Yuki and Gwendolen drew near, Mrs. Todd first perceived them. "Here
they are. Present me first, Cyrus,--then Gwendolen, then Yuki," the
matron gave whispered command. Hagané responded to the first two
greetings with unsmiling courtesy, offering a perfunctory extension of
his thick hand.

"Now, your Highness," said Todd, his thin, jovial voice carrying easily
to where Pierre stood, "here's somebody that will look more natural.
Step up, Yuki-ko. You aren't afraid!"

Hagané had already fixed keen eyes upon the girl. His hands fell to his
sides. A faint smile, merely a gleam on metal, hurried across his face.
Pierre saw his lips move. Yuki went closer, hesitated, gained courage,
and looked up into the broad face. Pierre saw Mrs. Todd and Gwendolen
exchange smiling glances. Todd threw back his head to laugh. The smile
returned to Hagané, unexpected, intensified, brilliant, as if a new day
had broken. Pierre winced. He saw Yuki sway again,--put forth two white
hands, falter, then sink suddenly prone, her palms outspread, her white
forehead on the floor, her whole slim, crouching body topped by the
great black burden of the sash, instinct with reverence not far from
adoration.

Hagané lifted her immediately, his smile deepening. Mrs. Todd turned
away, embarrassed. The small ripple of excitement in the onlookers died;
but Pierre, with angry eyes, sought Yuki, and drew her slightly to one
side.

"When you are my wife there will be no such ridiculous kow-towing," he
said.

"Who is your friend, Yuki?" asked the great man, stepping
condescendingly near.

She performed the introduction well, speaking in English without a
tremor of the low voice.

"Ah," said Hagané, speaking also in English, "I am recently from the
country of Monsieur, which, I do not mistake in conjecturing, is France?
Perhaps you are a visitor here, like myself." He put out the great hand,
and after an imperceptible hesitation Pierre thrust his own within it.
The grasp turned him pale.

"Your Highness is correct in both surmises," he answered stiffly; "I am
of France, and I am a visitor. At an early date I anticipate the
pleasure of being in your Highness's country."

"Indeed? Pray remind me of this meeting when you arrive, Monsieur. Shall
you sail soon?"

"Not for many months, I fear," said the Frenchman. "But I shall
certainly avail myself of your kind suggestion."

Yuki's eyes were urging him to go. The girl herself could not have told
why she felt apprehension in the proximity of these two men. Hagané had
never been antagonistic to foreigners, and she knew that, in Japan, she
and Pierre could not have another friend so powerful. Yet she was
uneasy.

Pierre, with a last bow, went. The little episode stirred him. The
thought rushed through him, too, that here was possibly an invincible
friend. He would make the most of it. Even Yuki's abject obeisance,
which before had stung him, shone now in the light of desirable
dependence on the great man's word. Let him, Pierre, secure his
appointment, and, with Hagané his friend, the old gods might shake their
heads and growl in vain.

He went into the street. The long rooms had suddenly grown too small for
his aspirations. One friendly cigarette was smoked, and then another.
Life seemed a jolly thing, that hour, to Pierre.




                              CHAPTER TWO


Hagané's entrance had broken the receiving line. He became at once the
personage, the dominating influence. Guests moved about now, or gathered
into little social groups at will. The long apartment filled evenly, a
third to the ceiling, with a shifting surface of triangles which were
shoulders,--white shoulders, black shoulders, pink shoulders, sometimes
a military pair of gold-lace shoulders, each pair surmounted by a head.
The rooms, emptying ever, were ever filling, as in some well-constructed
drinking-fountain,--the very walls soaked in the hum and timbre of human
voices.

Gwendolen, freed from the thralls of official hostess-ship, gathered to
herself young men in passage, as a spray of scented golden-rod gathers
bees. She had a smile for all, a witty retort, or an insinuating
whisper, followed by a provocative look. Old maids, and mothers with
unattractive daughters, were wont to call Gwendolen a heartless
coquette. As for the coquetry, it was indefensible; as to the heart,
young men held varying opinions with regard to that coveted article.

The social atmosphere, charged with evanescent gayety, intoxicated her.
She felt like a flower held under the surface of champagne. Through all
the glamour spread a tincture of chrysanthemums. Ever after--sometimes
in lands very far away from Washington--the odor of these blossoms had
power to bring before her, as in an illuminated vision, the yellow
walls, the moving heads, and, clearest of all, the slender, mist-gray
figure of Yuki Onda; the delicate, happy face under the great loops of
blue-black hair.

As Gwendolen talked and strolled, promising a dance to one, refusing it
to another, with unreasoning caprice and the manner of a young empress,
her hazel eyes, under their long lashes, shot more than once an
undetected glance to a certain corner where, beside a pedestal of
drooping fern, stood a lonely guest. This person was young, good to look
at in a buoyant, breezy sort of way, and of the sex which (alas, yet
beyond contesting!) most keenly interested the fair observer. After such
glances she usually fell to fondling her sheaf of orchids, and once
pressed it up against her face. At this the brown eyes in the corner
gleamed, and took on the alertness of a terrier whose master snaps a
playful finger.

Mrs. Todd became solicitous that her guest of honor should be fed, but
hesitated to ask him for fear that her "foreign food" might prove
unpalatable. This apprehension was finally confided on tiptoe to her
lord. "Heavens! Susan," said the unfeeling mate, with the twinkle which
she dreaded, "do you suppose a Japanese commissary department has been
trotting beside him through Asia, Europe, Boston, and New York? Set him
before a mess of caviare, lobster à la Newburg, and extra dry, and see
what he does to it. Where did Gwendolen go?"

"She's over there by the punch-bowl, I believe," responded Mrs. Todd, in
absent-minded fashion. The good lady still hung, ponderously vague,
between her husband's opinion of Hagané's gastronomic culture and her
own half-solaced fears.

Todd craned his neck over the crowd. "Oh, there she is, just by the
punch-table. The young men are thicker than fleas on a candy kitten.
Wonder whether it's Gwennie or the punch."

"A little of both, I presume," said Mrs. Todd, austerely. She often
found her spouse unsympathetic.

"I don't blame 'em then,--dinged if I do," cried he, with a joyful,
premonitory lurch. A firm hand clutched him.

"I'm going for the prince now. He is talking to Yuki. Shall I send her
away? She looks as she did on confirmation day, the little idiot. The
way these Japanese worship their country and each other is simply
ridiculous. What do you think about keeping her with me and the prince,
Cy?"

Todd glanced at Yuki. His face softened. She had indeed an upraised,
glorified look, as if a beatified vision instead of a very solid living
man leaned down to her words.

"Keep her, by all means. She'll know how to wait on her bronze idol,"
said he, lightly, and dived into the crowd.

Apart from Yuki, Mrs. Todd found unexpected solution in her task of
feeding the lion. His private secretary, Mr. Hirai, was not merely an
Oxford graduate, but an accomplished man of the world. He made
everything easy. At the hostess's first hint of invitation the Japanese
started in a solid body toward the supper-rooms. Several ladies who had
met members of the party in Boston or New York adhered, smiling, to the
moving group. Yuki fell back with the secretary, and began chattering to
him in Japanese, her dark eyes slowly turning to stars, her pale cheeks
kindling into rosy fire. All of the company centred about Hagané, as
thoughts centre about a master will. The occasion which Mrs. Todd
dreaded proved to her one of the pleasantest incidents of the whole
successful affair. Hagané, in his enjoyment of the delicate fare,
entirely justified his host's prophecy. The true hostess is never quite
so happy as when she sees her guests enjoying the good things which she,
through anxious hours, has been solicitous in providing.

Meantime Mr. Todd had reached his daughter. The young men drew back a
little in deference to the age and relationship of the intruder, but did
not get beyond range of allurement.

"It's come, little girl," he whispered, with eyes as young and bright as
hers. "It came by wire just a few minutes ago. It's here!" He tapped
significantly at the left side of his coat.

"The appointment? Oh! does mother know?"

"Not yet," admitted the senator, with the look of an urchin caught
stealing jam. "Perhaps we'd better--"

"You bet we'd better!" She threw back her head and laughed the merriest
laugh in all the world. Then she ran her sparkling eyes about the circle
of withdrawn, boyish faces. "You must excuse me; dad has a secret, and
that means insanity for me if I can't hear it at once. You wouldn't have
me go mad--now, would you?--before the first waltz plays!"

"Certainly not!" laughed the chorus.

"But, Miss Gwendolen," ventured a bold swain, "how about that first
waltz? For whom are you keeping it?"

"Well," said the girl, pausing, and letting shy archness possess her
downcast lids, "I did not want to tell you, but since you force me to
it,--I am keeping the first waltz for--mother!"

With another laugh, full of bright mockery, she caught her father's arm,
and hurried him away. The excitement of the past hour was nothing to
what she now felt. Chattering, sparkling, laughing, tossing,
gesticulating at times with her sheaf of flowers, she was a slim
fountain of youth, with a noon-day sun above it. "You really have the
appointment!" she cried to him, when they were well out of hearing. "I
knew you must get it, though the President certainly took his time. And
we shall sail next spring with Yuki! What! we go _before_ next spring?
Oh, how perfectly delicious! And mother doesn't know? Now, dad, I am
surprised at you! You must be sure to let mother know first, or her
feelings will be hurt. Oh, aren't we a pair of rascals, dad? Such nice
rascals! I do like ourselves,--now don't you, dad?"

Pierre Le Beau had, a few moments before, abandoned his lonely
sentinelship at the conservatory door; but, in the corner where the fern
stood, the sturdier watcher, brown of face and square of shoulder, held
a tenacious post. A deflection of visual lenses (though to outward
appearance his eyes seemed clear enough) kept him from beholding more
than one person in the crowded rooms. If she had been aware of the
silent challenge, her knowledge was cleverly concealed. Yet now, on her
father's arm, she drifted steadily, though with seeming unconsciousness,
toward that special nook. The watcher put a hand on a Roman chair beside
him, suggestively unoccupied.

Abreast of the little group,--the gold chair, great fern, and dim
inhabitant--Gwendolen stopped. A smile went forth that lit the shadows,
as she said quite clearly, "Thank you, I believe I will. I should like
to get a bit of a rest before dancing."

Senator Cyrus C. Todd did not lack intuition. "Ah, there's Skimmer. Very
chap I wanted to see!" he mumbled to himself, and hurried off in an
opposite direction.

He of the brown eyes leaned confidently down. "You chose my flowers!" he
vaunted.

Exultation was not the most desirable note to adopt with Gwendolen. She
answered nothing for a moment. She was busy adjusting herself to an
"unconscious" pose, as perfect as the bold lines of the chair and her
own graceful figure could combine to produce. She looked down upon the
orchids with a thoughtful, pensive gaze, then slowly upward to the
speaker. "Ah, was it then--you--who sent them?"

"Yes; didn't you know? Was it too cheeky, having met you but a glorious
once?"

No reply. Gwendolen lifted the flowers and brushed her soft lips across
them. Her companion drew himself erect among the drooping green shadows
of the fern, swallowed hard, and asked, in a chastened voice, "Did that
bloomin' blot of a florist forget to put my card in, after all I said?"

Gwendolen's upraised eyes were now those of a commiserating dove. "I'm
sorry, but I did not see any card among the flowers."

The fern had a short ague and stood still. "I'll take a surgeon along
when I go to see that florist."

"I wouldn't," said the girl, pityingly. "It was the loveliest sheaf I
ever saw. He deserves something better than broken bones for arranging
it."

"Yes, they were jolly. They must have pleased you," said the young man,
with a wintry gleam of resignation. "I was bent on finding something
that really looked like you. I went all over Washington, New York, and
Philadelphia in person. But I was so careful of the card! I told the
foo--the man, over and over again, to be sure and enclose it. It was
printed out in full,--'T. Caraway Dodge, First Secretary of American
Legation, Tokio, Japan.'"

"You think you have found something that looks just like me?" asked the
girl, slowly, ignoring the latter half of his speech. Her face was full
of deprecating interest. She daintily drew forth a single strange
blossom, and held it, poised for contrast, against the dark leaves of
the fern. Thus detached, it bore an unfortunate resemblance to a ghostly
spider.

"Oh, not stuck off on a cork, like that!" cried the tortured donor. "All
in a lump, don't you know,--beaten up like the whites of eggs, with
gold-dust sprinkled over, and parsley around the edges!"

"All in a lump--beaten up like eggs--parsley around the edges," began
Gwendolen, gravely, when suddenly she tripped and fell against her own
laughter. Her pretty shoulders quaked. She bent far over for control,
and tried to hide the treacherous mirth.

But Dodge had seen enough for him. "By Jiminy! you've been jollying me
all the time! And I swallowed it like a bloomin' oyster!" He came around
to the front, drew up a stool, flung himself upon it, and looked up with
grins that bespoke a renewed zest for life. "Now honest, Miss Todd, you
owe me something for this. Didn't you know who sent them? Didn't you
really find that card in the box?"

"No, I didn't--honest--but--m-mother did!" confessed Gwendolen, now
half-stifled with laughter.

"And you didn't resent it? And you thought them pretty from the very
first moment?" cried the youth, on a high note of satisfaction. He
reached up now boldly, took the single flower from her hand, pinched off
the end of a long fern-leaf to back it, and deliberately arranged
himself a button-hole.

Gwendolen wiped the tears of merriment from her bright eyes. "Pretty?"
she echoed. "It is too tame a word. I thought them a dream,--an
inspiration,--a visual ecstasy!"

"Yes, I said they were like you," returned the impudent Dodge, as well
as he could for the distorted countenance bent above the process of
pinning in his flower. "There," he said, anent this finished operation,
"it's in. I think it becomes me. I didn't run my finger to the bone but
once. Now tell me what ma-_ma_ thought of the flowers and the card?"

In spite of her usual self-possession, the girl was stricken dumb. To
add to her confusion, a deep embarrassing blush rose relentlessly to her
throat and face, and would not be banished.

"You won't repeat it!" cried the terrible youth. "You don't dare
to,--but I will. Mama said,--lifting her lorgnettes (here he
deliberately mimicked the air of a middle-aged grande dame),--'T.
Caraway Dodge! Who is T. Caraway Dodge? Oh, I see,--a snip of an
attaché!'"

A look into the stupefied face above him showed that his bold guess had
been true. Intoxicated by success, he ventured another toss.

"If you say the word, I come pretty near repeating your answer."

Behind the astonishment, then the consternation of the girl's face, a
harder something flashed. She was not accustomed to have the lead so
rudely taken. This young person must be disposed of on the instant. His
impudence would have given points to Jonah's gourd. She now rose to her
feet, held her chin unnecessarily high, and, with the air of a young
Lady Macbeth, drawled out,--"I will spare you the trouble, Mr. T.
Caraway Dodge. Much as I dislike to be rude, the words I said were
these--" She paused. Dodge rose too. The brown eyes and the hazel were
nearly on a level. He was laughing. "Well?" he reminded at length.

His unconsciousness of offence gave the last flare to her indignation.

"I said to those present, 'The sending of so costly a bouquet by Mr.
Dodge is a little--er--pushing, and the sender must be told so; but
since, by accident,--the flowers just happen to suit my gown--'"

"Nonsense!" laughed the rash Dodge, "you never talked that way in your
life, unless you deliberately made it up. That's your stunt now, of
course. Any one could see it. What is more likely, you said--what I
planned for you to say was,--'Oh, here are the flowers I have been
waiting for! I think I'll have to marry the person who sent me
these!--There's the music of the first waltz! It's a peach! Come,--you
haven't promised it, have you? Everybody is waiting for the hostess to
begin. Let us start the ball rolling!"

In sheer incapacity to resist, a weakness wrought of a benumbing
conflict of anger, mirth, and amazement, Gwendolen leaned to him,--and
her débutante ball opened with her, joyous, whirling in the arms of Mr.
T. Caraway Dodge.

After this initial favor, he was rigidly, even scornfully, ignored; but
little cared Dodge for that. He had had his day. The impetus given could
carry him smiling on through hours of cold neglect. He was determined to
be the gayest of that circling round of joy, and succeeded. Stout
matrons, lean old maids, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Peruvian,
Pole,--just so it wore skirts and could move its feet, all were food for
his new mill of ecstasy.

Gwendolen danced oftenest with Pierre. He was literally a perfect
dancer, and to-night he said that the champagne all went to his heels.
Yuki, in her decorous Japanese draperies, wound about by stiff brocades,
did not attempt foreign dancing.

Hagané and the older members of the suite left early. Hirai, the
secretary, remained, evidently charmed by the long eyes of his young
countrywoman. During the time she was not talking to him or Pierre, Yuki
remained near Mrs. Todd, delighting the soberer friends who came to
speak with them by her beauty and intelligence. In the pleasure of
seeing this enjoyment of her Oriental protégé, Mrs. Todd forgot to scold
about the affair of the Russian minister, and made only one remark about
Yuki's undignified and un-American "kow-tow" to the prince.

"I was just pushed down, Mrs. Todd," protested Yuki, earnestly. "Some
hand from my own land pressed me before I knew. So was I taught to greet
our feudal daimyo when I was the very little girl; so all in Nippon, of
old customs, greet him now. I will try never again to do such a thing in
America."

"Well, well, that's all right!" said the matron, patting her slim
shoulder. "You are a good little girl, if you did kow-tow. There's
Gwendolen with Pierre again! Doesn't she look well to-night?"

"Well!" echoed Yuki, as her eyes followed the flying shapes.
"'Well' is so faint a little word. To me Gwendolen looks
beautiful,--beautiful--like the Sun Goddess in our land. She is like a
bush of yama-buki in the wind! I never saw nobody at all so beautiful as
our Gwendolen!"

"And to think she must give up this brilliant social success, and go to
a heathen country for four years!" mused Mrs. Todd, gloomily. She had,
of course, been told the great news.

If Yuki heard the muttered words, she did not show resentment. The smile
of intense affection had not left her face as she said aloud: "Anywhere
that Gwendolen goes, I think she will find happiness. She has in her
eyes the light of a happy karma. Evil and sorrow cannot stay with her
long."

"Well, and what of you, my little Japanese daughter?" asked Mrs. Todd,
touched by the unselfish words.

"Oh, me!" said Yuki, becoming instantly grave. "I do not think about my
karma,--each person cannot see his own, or know of it; it clings about
him too close. But if I should think--No, I cannot! I am afraid! Ah,
here comes back the sunshine. It is Gwendolen, fanning! Ah, so hot a
little sunshine is Gwendolen! Sit here, and let me make the fan go fast
for you, Gwendolen,--your wrists--your throat--that will make coolness
quicker than just your face!"

Both girls laughed now, and talked together; Pierre joined them; Dodge
ventured near; the senator came up. It was a sparkling group, with the
centre always Gwendolen; yet even to Mrs. Todd's unimaginative eyes, the
loneliness of the little gray figure, the strange blue-black hair, and
pointed, faintly tinted face, struck a note of mystery,--of something
very near to sadness.




                            CHAPTER THREE


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!"




                            CHAPTER FOUR


The Todd household slept until late the morning after the party. Next to
the efficient hirelings,--those ball-bearing sockets of domestic
ease,--the senator himself was first to awake.

He came slowly into the day, as though passing from a fair garden into
one more fair. That sense of some great good, new-garnered, and in the
warm sweet haze of sleep not quite recalled, caressed his smiling lips.
In spite of dalliance, the shining consciousness drew near. His
appointment had been given! Ah, that was the new glory! He was in
effect, at that instant, "Envoy Extraordinary and Minister
Plenipotentiary" to a Wonderland! It was not the honor that thrilled
him, but the opportunity. He would have a niche near the breathing heart
of that strange country. Proving himself worthy, he might go deeper,
drinking at that spiritual fountain of eternal youth.

Lying now on his rich, canopied bed, with all the luxury of modern
Occidental life heaped close, Todd told himself that, because of the
success, he was all the more a soul, an individual, with better things
to seek. He scorned to be a pampered animal, possessed by its
possessions. He envied anew the clean, sweet poverty of the samurai's
code.

He was now at that elevation in life where past events take proper
place, as in a landscape, and vistas begin. Yesterday was his fiftieth
year. By another coincidence--those clashings of star-beams in his
career--his birthday fell on that of the Japanese Emperor.

Looking back now, he could see where streams of tendency, taking rise in
boyhood, had worked steadily, though through seeming deviations, towards
this one great tide of purpose. His lonely interest in rice-culture had
been a hidden spring; his coming to Washington, where Japan's
development was a living topic instead of a solitary reader's dream, a
winding stream of fate. Yuki herself was a deep well of inspiration. Now
at last had come his opportunity to serve, in one life-giving effort,
his own beloved country,--and Japan. The future widened for him into a
deep harbor where great fleets of achievement might find safe anchorage.

Yuki entered for the ten o'clock breakfast in full street costume. At
Mrs. Todd's lifted eyebrows of inquiry, Gwendolen, who was just behind
her friend, explained.

"She has an appointment at eleven with her Hindoo idol. Baron Kanrio
said last night that dad was to go too. Yuki thought she might be
allowed to accompany him, if she were very good."

"Of course!" said the senator, heartily. "Glad to have her. Prince
Hagané gave me the date, eleven, A. M., but he didn't mention Yuki."

"Oh, how could you think it?" drawled saucy Gwendolen. "She's only a
girl. He wouldn't notice a girl."

"It rather looks as if he _had_ noticed her," retorted Mr. Todd. "A
definite appointment! They say his daily average of callers is about two
hundred."

"It is only for my father's sake. He will give me a message," explained
Yuki, hastily. "Gwendolen is right. So great a man do not think much of
girls."

"Humph," said Gwendolen, "that doesn't go! He stared at you as if you
were a candied cherry-petal, and he wanted to swallow you at a gulp.
Pierre Le Beau saw it, too. Heavens, how he scowled! A regular Medusa! I
expect all the chrysanthemums are turned to yellow onyx by his glare."

Yuki gave a start, and then flushed with painful intensity. "Please!
Please!" she was beginning, when Mrs. Todd unconsciously interrupted
with an exclamation of delight.

After her methodical pouring of the coffee, the good lady had plunged
into the morning papers. "Ah, Gwendolen, these notices are
splendid!--better than I could have hoped. Society reporters are usually
so touchy and carping!"

"There was one youthful Mr. Dooley that I made sure of," said Gwendolen,
calmly, as she cracked an egg. "I had the orchestra strike up 'Call me
thine own!' while I took him to a corner and plied him with Louis
Roederer, Carte Blanche!"

Little Yuki and the senator drove off together. Each had things to think
of, though not much to say. The carriage bowled smoothly along asphalt
thoroughfares. At close intervals small parks were passed, some round,
some angular, but all like emeralds in a web of silver-tinted streets.
Now and then the great meerschaum-colored dome of the Capitol came into
sudden view, with its suggestion of purpose and of majesty.

The girl's neat fawn-tinted dress was now supplemented by furs, and a
wide hat of brown velvet, with a silver chain about the crown, and
nodding feathers. Her hair, puffed round her face in recent fashion,
completed the Americanizing of her attire. From the dainty gloves,
thrust deep into her muff, to the soft brown boots, she was modern,
chic, Occidental.

At the Japanese Legation, both Baron Kanrio and the prince's secretary,
Hirai, were awaiting them. The eyes of the latter shone with eagerness
at sight of his young compatriot. Kanrio sent them, chattering already
of Japan, into the drawing-room to await Yuki's summons. With a slight
gesture he beckoned to Todd, and they went together along the hall to
the well-known den.

Hagané sat in it, alone. The disposition of the few stiff chairs bespoke
recent visitors. The library table, covered with green leather, had maps
upon it, letters and papers, besides a Japanese smoking outfit and a
tray with tea and some small cups.

As they entered, the great man slowly rose. He wore again his plain dark
native robes. In the relentless daylight he appeared older, more sallow,
and at the same time more impressive. His hand-grasp for the senator was
cordiality itself. His deep eyes lighted pleasantly, as he said,
"Welcome, your Excellency!"

Todd started, and then flushed like a boy, at the title. Kanrio grinned
with delight.

"Oh--er--beg pardon; but it's the first time. Rather knocked me off my
pins. Thanks, your Highness! I feel it a good omen to have it come from
you."

"Shall we be seated?" asked Hagané.

"Gomen--nasai," (excuse me) murmured Kanrio, with a gesture. He removed
the soiled cups from the table to the top of a low bookcase, then rang
for fresh cups and a new pot of tea. He and Hagané took a few sips,
Japanese fashion; Todd declined.

"I understand, your Excellency, that your appointment as envoy to our
small island has come the very recent time?"

"Only last night, your Highness." Todd's eyes met in unembarrassed
candor those of Hagané. "Of course I've worked for it. My heart was set
on it. The Baron here has been an inspiration!"

"My dear sir, don't trouble to recall my unimportant service,"
deprecated Kanrio.

"I understand," said Hagané, slowly, "that for some time you have
honored our--country--with your studious--interest. If it is not
impertinence, may I venture to inquire what--circumstances,
what--a--unfamiliar categories--first stung your thought to the pursuit
of Far Eastern knowledge?" He spoke very slowly, slurring neither vowel
nor consonant, and choosing, it would seem, from a rich vocabulary.
Nevertheless he pieced the words together with a slight effort.

Todd knitted his brows, not in lack of understanding, but from desire to
answer definitely and concisely the comprehensive question.

Hagané may have mistaken the silence, for he added immediately, "My
English is--stiff,--not well--manoeuvred. My meanings perhaps become
involved. Shall not Baron Kanrio stand as--interpreter--for my heavy
thought?"

"No, no," said Todd, eagerly. "Do not think it, your Highness! I
understand perfectly. Your very misuse of some of our slippery old
timeworn words is illuminating. It was your question that made me pause,
not your way of putting it."

"My dear sir," protested Hagané, "I desire you to feel no obligations to
answer. I intended, perhaps, a thinner meaning than your own mind has
seized. Was it Japanese Art, as with Frenchmen? Statistics, Sociology,
Political Economy?" Todd noted the greater ease with which these
abstract and philosophic terms were employed.

"None of these, your Highness,--and yet all! My study--you will think me
presumptuous, I fear,--might not be called less than--the ultimate
destiny of your race!"

Hagané's smouldering eyes leaped into sudden fire. He looked down
quickly, as if to deny the flame. Todd felt the air stir and tingle with
a new vibration.

"Yes, your Excellency, we are attempting to employ valuable hints from
various representative governments of your enlightened West," said he,
conventionally.

"Hints!" echoed Todd; "that is just the wonder of you! They are hints in
reality, thoughts to be absorbed only just so far as you need them, and
the rest chucked. You don't stick them on like plaster to cover up a
mediæval birthmark. You have quite as much to give as we, and you know
it. Haven't I watched and studied, with Kanrio here to coach? You
Japanese alone can combine the best of the two civilizations. You can
best fuse the experience, character, insight, humanity--of both
long-suffering hemispheres. We Americans are just ourselves; but you are
we, and all the rest of it! That's why your old gods set you on the
fighting line. You are a whole laboratory experiment in sociology, all
to yourselves!"

"I perceive that you have been thinking carefully upon us," said Hagané,
still conventional, contained; but his one upward look, instantly
withdrawn, had the "swish" of a scythe.

"It isn't all admiration, you know!" exclaimed Todd, with an
impulsiveness far more flattering than reserve. "You have made, it seems
to me, some thundering bad mistakes,--like the dropping of Port Arthur
at the first growl of that bear, Russia. But you've got your second wind
all right. You Japanese know, better than any American or Englishman,
that Russian preponderance in China means a walled continent of tyranny,
the gates guarded by Greek fire. If you conquer, your best interests are
at one with the progress of an enlightened twentieth-century world. Now,
your Highness, deny it if you can!" He leaned back, his thin face aglow.
Hagané apparently had difficulty in keeping eyes upon the table.

"You--er--pass through the waving branches," said he, very slowly, "and
cleave to the heart of the tree. So only are the rings of epochs
counted. Do others of your countrymen think thus?"

"Well," said Todd, "to be honest, I judge that most of my countrymen
would prefer sitting on the bough, stealing apples, rather than counting
concentric rings. I guess love of the East must have been born with me."

"Interesting, interesting!" murmured Hagané. "And yet, your Excellency,
though indigenous, something must have fed the growth. Every development
possess, I think, allotted kind of nourishment."

"Oh, events contributed, I presume. Now and then things turned up just
when they were wanted." Todd was surprised at his own ease in the great
man's presence. He drew inspiration, not awe, from the intelligent eyes
and slow, suggestive smile. "Yes, things _came_! I planted your
Forty-Seven Ronin into my biggest field of wheat! And my old mule,
Kuranosuké, did me better work than any span of horses. Then, your
Highness, the baron here--oh, you needn't shake your finger,
Baron!--pointed me to heavenly manna; and the child Yuki, my daughter's
friend, led me into paths that adult eyes could never have seen."

Hagané crushed the red ash of his cigarette, and leaned farther back in
his chair. The expression of his face altered slightly,--softened, one
might say, were it not still so impressive. If waves of strength and
influence had flowed from him before, they ebbed now, leaving
consciousness a little thin and dry. Yet all three men smiled faintly,
as at a pleasant thought.

"Ah, little Onda Yuki-ko, the child of my old kerai."

"It is a term meaning 'feudal retainer,'" put in Kanrio, amiably, to Mr.
Todd.

"Yes," went on Hagané, "I was encouraged last night to see her so strong
to look at, and so--pardon vulgarity, your Excellency,--so inoffensive
to the eye in personal appearance."

Todd flung back his head and laughed outright. "Inoffensive--that's a
good one! Why, your Highness, Yuki is quoted as a beauty here in
Washington. Artists beg to paint her, and swell photographers to pose.
If she intended casting in her lot with us, she could have the pick and
choice of half the young bloods here." He sent a merry glance to Kanrio,
as for corroboration, but was met by a stare so blank, so baffling, that
his smile faded.

The prince was carefully, very carefully, lighting a fresh cigarette.
"Pardonnez moi!" he mumbled, between coaxing, initial puffs. "It is I
who am the stupidity! 'Pick and choice,--young bloods'--I fear I do not
quite--er--apprehend."

"Your Highness," Kanrio broke in, "Mr. Todd speaks in the idiomatic
phrases of society. He desired to transmit the impression that Miss Onda
is thought to be beautiful."

"Ah, is that it? And--young bloods?"

"Young men, I should have said. Pardon my slang. Merely young men, your
Highness," explained Cyrus, feeling suddenly quite ill at ease.

"Ah, yes," muttered Hagané to himself. "I have a recollection. Last
night--" he broke off. His voice was higher and a little careless, as he
asked of Todd, directly, "Is Onda Yuki-ko to sail with your family?"

"Yes. She had not intended returning till next spring. She wanted to
take an extra course in French or something. But she wouldn't stay
behind, now that we are going. She and my daughter are like sisters."
Todd rose, muttering words to the effect that he had trespassed too
long. Hagané rose also. Todd felt resentful, though he could have
assigned no definite cause. "Good-morning, your Highness, or, as Miss
Yuki has taught me to say, 'Sayonara'! I thank you for the honor of this
interview."

The word "Sayonara" brought Hagané sharply to himself. "The thanks
belong not to me, Excellency," he smiled and stretched out a powerful
hand. "Seldom do I so deeply enjoy a conversation with one met for the
first time. I consider that Nippon, and our-Sacred Emperor"--(he paused,
and the two Japanese bowed deeply,) "are to receive the congratulation."

Power and purpose thrilled in his hand-clasp. Todd tingled anew with it.
"What a man! What a bottled genius hauled up from a sea of fate!" he
said to Kanrio, as they descended the stairs.

"Prince Sanétomo is one who does his duty," admitted Kanrio, in an
impassive tone.

Hirai accompanied Yuki to the office door. They went a little slowly,
considering the rank of the summoner, and talked hurriedly in the
hall-ways, each reluctant to release a topic so dear. There had been not
only Japan and childhood to gloat upon, but, already, reference could be
made to a past,--twelve hours old. "Do you remember," and "As you were
saying last evening," are potent introductory clauses. Both young people
had been born in Tokio, and though unnamed to each other before, soon
established unity of class, training, inherited ideals, and childish
experiences. The secretary had often heard of Sir Onda Tetsujo, Yuki's
father, a knight of the old school, famed for his stern rectitude and
his loyalty to a vanished past. With some hesitation Hirai ventured to
suggest that he should consider it a privilege to be allowed to call
upon Sir Tetsujo and his lady, in their Tokio home. Yuki urged this
eagerly. She could send by the younger man messages that seemed too
trivial for transmission through Prince Hagané. "Yes, yes,--please call
upon them--d[=o]-zo! They will receive you so happily. Ah, and to think
that you will see them long, long before I can come! You will reach
Nippon before the maples have quite burned themselves away, or Fuji
lowered upon her opal cone the full white robe of winter. How am I to
endure the waiting? I wish I were to start with the suite of Prince
Hagané to-morrow!"

Hirai's fine face echoed this sentiment vividly, but he refrained from
speech. He was a correct young man, and had no intention of presuming on
the young girl's veneer of Americanism. He left her at the door. It had
to her fancy, now, the feeling of a shrine, a Shinto temple, approached
through paths of childish memories. She lifted one gloved hand to knock,
and her lips twitched at the clamorous instinct to raise both hands, rub
the palms together, and clap thrice as before a deity. She controlled
herself, however, shaking her head a little wistfully, and murmuring as
to a voice, "No, though my soul still is Nipponese, I have become a
Christian. I am half American, too. I must remember." She gave now a
sharp, determined rap.

"O-idé!" boomed a deep voice from within. Yuki's knees melted. Whatever
the rest of her, they were evidently not American. She entered with
downcast eyes.

Hagané did not seem to recognize her. He looked hard, and asked, "Is
this Onda Yuki-ko?"

She lifted the brim of her hat, and let shy eyes rest upon him. "Your
Highness, it is Yuki, a worthless young acquaintance with whom you spoke
last night." She used the Japanese language, with the full complement of
honorifics.

"An odd eventuation," said the other, dryly. "I thought to summon the
child of my old kerai, the maiden of last evening,--and, behold, a
small, pert shade from the Avenue de l'Opéra!"

"It does not augustly displease your Highness?" murmured the girl, not
understanding his full meaning.

"Not at all. It may even prove valuable for Nippon, and Tetsujo could
wish no more. But be seated, child. I have scanty moments to dole you,
and there are messages."

"Lord," murmured Yuki, seating herself on the hard chair indicated, "it
is too much for you to burden your exalted memory for my insignificant
satisfaction."

Hagané ignored the deprecating whisper. Taking a seat deliberately, he
began, "At the Shimbashi station of Yedo, where, since many notable
officers were to accompany me, a great crowd of well-wishers thronged to
say farewell, I soon discerned the dark face and the proud head of your
father, Onda Tetsujo."

He paused, smiling slightly. The girl said nothing, only bent forward a
little, her face full of unconscious excitement.

"Close behind him, gentle, clinging, self-effacing, as a good wife
should always be, I saw--"

Yuki, forgetting her breeding, fairly snatched the words from his mouth.
"My mother,--I know, Lord, it was my dear mother! And the old nurse
Suzumé, was she there?"

"There was, indeed, a female something that incessantly bowed, and drew
breath with a ferocity that drowned the hissing of the engine. Has that
the air of Suzumé?"

"Yes, yes, her very self. Oh, how can I wait to get back home! Ten
weeks, Lord, before I am to start!"

"The words uttered by your parents were these,--I may not recall the
exact terms, but I have their purpose clear. First, Iriya said: 'Tell to
our child that empty hearts and a cheerless home ache through this night
of absence, for her coming.' Her soft eyes touched my heart, though men
call me stern. Ere I could bow assent, your father Tetsujo--ah ha! that
old kerai, the unreconstructed feudal knight!--pushed rudely past, and
cried to me, 'Taint memory with no such puerile demand, my Lord! Say to
the girl that hearts and aches are nothing. As long as I have yen to
forward, let her remain until she is fitted, though a woman, to be of
some slight service to her land. I pray you, Lord, to judge of her.
Should she need to stay full ten years longer, I would not repine. I
have no son. She is the substitute. Empty hearts, aching nights, bah!
Crumbling barley sugar of a weak spirit! Midzu-amé in a human jar! Good
Iriya, my wife, I advise you to cease your prayers before concessive
deities, and learn to worship more sincerely our God of War. He is to be
the flaming incarnation of this epoch!'"

"I can see--I hear them both," said Yuki. "My father is right,--though
the tears that must have stung my mother's eyes do now sting mine. Lord,
shall you think me fit to go to such a father? I have done what the
Americans call--graduate. I have even received prizes for good study."

"Do they offer prizes here for doing duty? An immoral practice,
especially for the young,--instilling envy, cupidity. But it concerns me
not. Your question, Yuki,--are you fitted to return? I cannot give
myself time to be satisfied entirely with the fitness; but, for other
reasons, I am well aware that it is time for you to return. His
Excellency, Mr. Todd, spoke of the first of the New Year. I wish it were
to-morrow."

"Lord," faltered the girl, "are your august utterances heavy with
reproof? Have you charges of misconduct against me?" Her guilty heart
ran, as a thief for a hidden treasure, to the thought of Pierre Le Beau
and the half-troth her weakness had allowed him to secure. The next
words of the great man relieved her strangely.

"Nay, nay, little one, I have heard of no wrong. Look not so fearful;
one would think me Emma-O, the Lord of Hell, in the flesh. My thought
was chiefly that, just now, even your present acquirements might serve
Nippon."

"Ah, it is of war you hint! Here, many believe that it will not come. Is
it to come, Lord?" She had drawn very close. Hagané perceived, as one
looking at a picture, the exquisite balance of features in the pointed
oval face, the pale width of brow under clouds of dusty hair, the
refinement, the trembling sensitiveness of lips and chin. His eyes held
a certain keen, inscrutable intentness of regard. The corners now
wrinkled slightly with a smile.

"A nightingale studies not with a maker of swords," he said slowly. "Yet
may the nightingale's note give warning where the sword could not avail.
What one has not heard, cannot be told. It is a time when the whispering
of leaves is to be shunned, and the fall of the petals counted."

Yuki caught her underlip between her teeth to steady its trembling.
Again she felt reproved, though nothing could be kinder than the great
man's voice.

"Four years," he mused aloud, "four years! Small space of time to us who
are on the heights,--but to the young, still wandering happily on
flowered-covered slopes, it is long, quite long. Ah, little Yuki, it is
but yesterday that you came, as a child, to my Tabata villa. You clung
timidly, at first, to Tetsujo's hand; but the serving-maids soon won you
to the air. After that, at my request, Tetsujo brought you often. You
were a scarlet poppy turned loose in that dim old garden. My eye would
follow you through passages of the good Tetsujo's somewhat prosy
discourse. You used to perch upon the gray rocks of the pond, and fish
for hours, throwing back the small wriggling bits of gold as soon as
caught. Do you remember, Yuki?"

"Yes, Lord, well do I remember," said Yuki, her mouth trembling into
laughter. The self-consciousness faded. He knew that it would be so. It
was for this that he had contrived the long speech of reminiscence.
"Once," she went on shyly, "once, into that pond I fell, screaming with
terror to think that certainly, now, all the goldfish would make haste
to bite their enemy."

"Their best revenge, I take it, was in the cold you caught," laughed the
prince.

"Nay, Highness," said she, gravely, "no cold at all did I acquire. The
maid-servants and thy divine, pitying princess rescued me. They changed
my worthless garments, and urged upon me much hot tea and a small, sweet
powder. Indeed, but for the trouble my clumsiness occasioned, I enjoyed
more the falling into that august pond than the fishing beside it."

Hagané smiled a little abstractedly. He did not laugh again. He turned
to the table and smoothed the corners of a document. "The villa has no
princess now, my child. In my many houses I come and go alone."

Yuki looked upon the floor. "My spirit is poisoned by your sorrow, Lord.
Forgive my great rudeness in mentioning. I did not know."

He drew a short, impatient sigh. "The princess resides again with her
own people in Choshiu. But these matters have interest for none but me.
Hark, is that not the hour of noon now striking? I must dismiss you."
She rose instantly at his words. He followed with more deliberation. She
turned to the door, then wavered back to him, distressed evidently by
thoughts she shrank from voicing.

"Speak, child," he said kindly, "no mad haste is necessary. Say what you
will."

Still she moved soundless lips. In some inexplicable way she had fallen
short. It was not only that she felt she had not reached his highest
expectations, but, more definitely, she had failed to reach her own. Her
acquired Americanism crackled on her, like a useless husk. She thirsted
for new strength. Before her stood one able to give it, yet she could
find no words to ask. "It is ten--weeks before I can start home, Lord,"
she managed at last to articulate. "I am only a girl, but I would die
for Nippon, for my Emperor. What--what--" Again she faltered.

Hagané took a small hand in his own and smiled reassurance. "Only the
very young and inexperienced think it necessary to state willingness to
die for a country. Give me the coming thought."

"In these last weeks what can I do,--what can I suffer,--how shall I
pray,--that I may make myself worthy of return?"

The smile on the overhung dark face saddened into a look far tenderer
than smiling. Yuki felt virtue, like a fluid, rush through her from his
touch. "Keep always to the thought that you are Nipponese,--that you
guard, in yourself, an immortal spirit, powerful for good or ill. Let
not the tendrils of your outreaching soul cling to alien ideals, for, if
so, each in the twining means a wrench and a scar, and the unscarred
soul is sweeter to the gods. Think nothing of the body,--of personal
desires, of personal reward. Say to yourself always, 'It is enough to be
a Nipponese.'"

Yuki was already stilled and comforted. "Lord," she said, lifting brave
eyes, "I think it true that the lowliest among us, through
self-striving, may become a god. My little spark of light has slept
until this moment. I can never again be quite the same girl who came
into this room. I will curve the memory of your words about my spirit,
as one shields his candle from a wind."

"In Nippon I see you next, my Yuki. And now, 'Sayonara,' till that
time."

"Sayonara," whispered Yuki, and hurried out into a new day.




                            CHAPTER FIVE


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!




                            CHAPTER SIX


The first days of any voyage are admirable in proportion as little, or
nothing, is said of them. In this, as in other phases of human
intercourse, delicacy lies in restraint rather than in eloquence. Thus
is the bloom of society preserved.

Mr. Dodge, the self-confident, the experienced, the ubiquitous, was
first to "show up." The outer reefs of the California coast do not tend
toward placidity. Even Dodge did not care to count the hours since he
had begun to feel "sleepy" and had sought his cabin.

Mr. Todd next met the sun. To be more accurate, it was a fog, where only
a small bright spot, rubbed as in the centre of a tarnished tray,
indicated our chief luminary. Todd's cap was pulled very low, his ulster
collar very high. His hands disappeared utterly into large pockets. He
walked with the jerky directness of a marionette toward the
smoking-room.

On the third day, when the sun actually shone and the pewter sky was
undergoing a gradual transformation into blue enamel, Mr. Todd was
able to sit on deck,--he still remained noticeably near the
smoking-room,--and to enjoy unprintable yarns from fellow-smokers.
Missionary children began to gambol around the promenade deck, and over
the feet of swathed and flaccid mortals, lately exhumed, all with the
blinking regard of insects suddenly disclosed beneath a garden stone.
Dodge, for a wonder, was not in sight. Mr. Todd had his back toward the
main-deck exit from the salon, when one of the group about him thumped a
knee, stared up, crying, "By G--, look at that!" and called loudly upon
his Maker to witness that the sight was fair.

Out to the deck had blown a golden apparition,--a tall, slim girl with
yellow hair crushed under a wide and most unsailor-like hat of yellow
sea-poppies. Her skirts and the rest of her were silken browns and
yellows. She made straight for the group, rustling like a small eddy in
a heap of autumn-leaves. Todd turned a few inches. At the expression on
his face a third convive nudged the speaker. "Oh, er--beg ten thousand
pardons--didn't have an idea--" mumbled the crimson one.

"Neither did I," said Todd, enigmatically, as he rose.

"Oh, dearest of dads," they heard a fresh voice cry. "Now isn't this a
world with the top off? I feel like a bunk caterpillar turned into a
butterfly."

Pierre followed his three emancipated comrades, immediately after
"tiffin," as the midday meal hereafter must be called. He was, as usual,
immaculate in attire, but bore an air of citric melancholy.

Next arose, in all her might, Mrs. Cyrus Carton Todd. In her aggressive
costume of starched piqué, fortified by gold lorgnettes and an air
carefully adapted from certain acknowledged "grandes dames" of
Washington, she took immediate possession of the Captain, the best deck
chair, and the passenger list. As wife of a senator and lady of the new
American minister to Japan, she was accepted at once, without demur,
reigning Empress of the voyage.

Sportive infants, oblivious of comfortably extended limbs of lesser
mortals, skirted those of Mrs. Todd. Silent Chinese "boys," dispensing
beef-tea and gruel, swung pigtails aside from her austere garments.

Of the party Yuki alone now abode in the mysterious seclusion of her
stateroom.

Before sunset, on that third afternoon, the sea, to use the Captain's
expression, quieted into a "bloomin' mill-pond." White birds fluttered
incessantly about the stern of the ship, sometimes sinking to the waves
for an unstable rest, or rising to visit, in one great silver swoop, the
startled and delighted passenger deck.

Pierre found a chair beside his chaperon. He moved it a confidential
three inches nearer before asking, "Will she not be able to come up
sometime before to-morrow? This is perfect."

"She has commissioned me to say that she will try to make the effort
this evening, after our dinner; that is, if--" here she shook a playful
finger--"_if_ I will play propriety, and any kindly disposed person
could be found to assist her upstairs."

"Ah! I'll go down now, and take seat upon her doormat," cried Pierre, in
his excitement.

"The Chinese coolie might spill chicken broth upon you."

The day waned slowly. Passengers were beginning already their
postprandial walks. Mrs. Todd nodded patronizingly to one and then to
another.

"Madame," began Pierre, with his caressing look, "you have been almost
as a mother--a good, indulgent mother--to me in that big land of yours.
You will continue to be my very good friend in Japan, will you not?"

"Why, silly boy, of course I will," she cried. "Have not I always been
your friend and Yuki's,--even to the point of what Cyrus called
'entangling alliances'?"

"It is because of its preciousness that I want to hear you say it, dear
Mrs. Todd. After all, I am ignorant of Japan, and of what social
phantoms Yuki and I may have to fight. But with your championship, I am
strong, invincible!" He gave her fat hand just the most delicate of
pressures. It might have been the touch of a devoted son; it might, had
Mrs. Todd been twenty years younger, have been--well, almost anything.
His dark, impassioned eyes, the color of new-opened violets, hung on her
kindly face.

If fault could be found with Pierre, it would be in excess of beauty.
From the old blood of France he had received refinement, poise,
delicacy,--the throbbing of purple veins in temples as satin-smooth as
young leaves, and thin nostrils that shivered at every passing gust of
emotion. From the more barbaric, vivid Russian mother had come depth of
coloring, the flash of sudden animation, deep blue in the eyes, and gold
in the hair. Yet with all its fairness the face was not effeminate. One
could think of it, without offence, in the armor of a young crusader, or
even behind the mediæval visor of a robber-baron. There might be a hint
of cruelty behind the wet crimson of the perfect mouth. To Yuki that
face was the epitome of all earthly beauty. Before it, the artist in her
knelt, in adoration.

Shortly after twilight came the reverberating clamor of the first
dinner-gong. Mrs. Todd and her feminine satellites had agreed to
"dress." Mrs. Todd had never made acquaintance with a décolleté gown
until her entrance into Washington, not so many years before. Now she
was wont to declare loudly that she could not really enjoy her evening
meal in covered shoulders,--a statement which always brought the
twinkles to Todd's eyes. He openly loathed his "tombstone shirt-front;"
but Gwendolen, of a later and more favored generation, wore her pretty
low-cut frocks as unconsciously as a flower wears its sheath.

Pierre sat through the interminable courses, scarcely knowing what he
ate or to whom he spoke. His thoughts were all with Yuki. He was to see
her again after three endless days! The little cool, slim palm would
lie, perhaps, in his. He would hear her voice, as different from these
chattering table women all around him as is the sound of running water
to the whirr of machines. The past ten days of journeying--though indeed
they had not been for a moment entirely alone--left a delicious aroma of
familiarity, almost of married friendship. What hours the future was to
hold for them in Japan, in Europe, in India!

Mrs. Todd's half-teasing voice drew him back from the dear reverie.
"Come, Mister Le Beau, dinner is over at last. I noticed that you ate
nothing. The Captain has been telling us the most delightful jokes. But
we must not forget our promise to Miss Onda. Gwendolen, dear, will you
go on deck and see that a chair is made ready for the poor child?" The
speaker had been rising ponderously. She turned again to the Captain.
"These Japanese are always wretched sailors, I am told."

"No good, any of them!" corroborated the Captain, with emphasis. "The
sight of a floral anchor at a landlubber's funeral is enough to make
them ill."

"I wonder how it will be with their admirals before the Russian navy,"
mused Todd, with pensive eyes on a blue-gowned Chinese steward.

"It wouldn't matter either way," sneered the Captain. "No fight is going
to come off! I've known these Yokohama Japs for seventeen years, Mr.
Todd. A bad lot! They are just trying a game of bluff borrowed from--no
offence, gentlemen--from America." The Captain was a Liverpool
Englishman.

"Just so!" grinned Dodge, "the kind of bluff that works,--recipe handed
down by one G. Washington."

Pierre and Mrs. Todd approached Yuki's cabin. She heard them, and
tottered to the entrance of the tiny passage. Her face shone ghastly
white above the square black collar of her adzuma-coat. Pierre instantly
drew her arm within his own. She clung to him helplessly for an instant,
then, with an obvious effort, rallied and stood erect.

"There, there, now, keep to Pierre's arm," encouraged Mrs. Todd, with
the smile of a patron deity. "If you'll promise to be good, I'll go
ahead and not look around." She preceded them slowly along the passage.
Her décolleté back loomed, in the dim light, like the half of a large,
round cheese.

Yuki, once safely on deck, tucked lovingly among soft rugs and pillows
by Gwendolen, found little indeed to say. Mrs. Todd gave orders, before
sweeping off to her game of bridge whist, that Yuki must not be teased
into talking, but must lie still, and let the night air and the breeze
refresh her. Pierre, of course, remained by her side. He cared little
though the whole ship knew that he loved the Japanese girl and longed to
make her his wife. Dodge and Gwendolen had affairs of their own to
settle, and disappeared around the other side. Gradually the deck was
deserted by all but Pierre and his companion. He secured a small hand in
his own. The girl was too languid, or perhaps too blissful, to demur.

"Oh, to be seasick is most unpleasantest thing of all!" she whispered
once, with a short but very genuine shudder. "I shall never cross back
on this water,--never, never! The little bed downstairs it seem like a
grave, and one wish hard that it was truly a grave."

After another long silence, broken only by whispered sentences from
Pierre, she pointed to a constellation. "How nice and kind the stars are
to come out here with us, so far from home! That cluster is exactly the
same one I used to watch from my little room at school. When I see it in
Japan, and count the stars to be sure all have followed, it will be
stranger feeling yet."

"Darling," said Pierre, "sometime we are to carry that little shining
group the whole way round the world with us,--when you are my wife."

The great ship rose softly and sank again, as if breathing. The stars
stared in, unwinking. Yuki's face was deepening in sweet content. Every
shiver of the engine, every angry hurtling of the insulted waters,
thrust them consciously nearer to Japan.

Roughening waves, toward the night of the fourth day, indicated,
according to the Captain, approach to the Hawaiian Islands. He added,
"If any one is keen enough on it to get up at daybreak, he will see the
first outlying peaks."

Todd, in a passion of romantic interest that was part of the whole
marvellous epic, climbed to the deck before dawn. The stars, he fancied,
looked coldly upon him, as if they resented his presence at their coming
defeat. He leaned far over, watching waves that lapped the sides of the
ship in a strange rhythm. Under the brightening day he stared across an
ocean apparently as eternal and infinite as space, that stretched, he
knew, north and south beyond him, twelve thousand miles of unbroken
liquid desert from pole to pole. And yet through the centuries, this
perilous waste had been crossed from oasis to island oasis by the frail
canoes of men;--dark Polynesian painted savages with marvellous powers
of carving and inlaying, who had left traces of their coming from New
Zealand to Alaska, and through the Philippines to Japan. He pictured the
advent of that first dusky Ulysses who, in feathered armor and a Greek
helmet carved from a cinnamon-tree, had here, ages before, terminated
his thousand-mile wanderings from a forgotten South. All this had now
become a new world for Todd's own light-haired Saxon race to fall heir
to, stepping-stones in its inevitable stride to the teeming coasts of
Asia.

Yuki, too, in such excitement that she could barely stop to dress, had
been staring out of the port-hole of her stateroom since an early hour.
If one of the great birds swooping incessantly along the sides of the
ship had paused to look, he would have seen a small face, white as
himself, fitted into the round brass frame. She was there before dawn
had quickened under the sea. The mystery and the first unspeakable
shiver of a newly created day had been hers. "'And God moved upon the
face of the waters,'" whispered reverent Oriental lips. She saw the
first dark triangle of land glide toward her through the thinning
darkness,--the shimmer of rose and green on half-veiled slopes, the
gradual lighting up of tapering peaks,--and then, the full orchestration
of the risen sun.

She reached the deck to find not only Mr. Todd, but the greater number
of the passengers, assembled to watch the gorgeous spectacle from the
entrance of Honolulu Bay. Night had rolled up from the sleepy town, and
surged in great sails of pearl-tinted cloud up dark blue-green gullies
of the hills. Red scars of volcanic slopes burned through the morning,
whole peaks seemed incandescent, and terraced gardens, cleared from
lower mists, stood outlined in reflected orange light.

A few moments more, and the iridescent pageant vanished. Down on the
shore, rude wharves and freight-sheds and cheap, new-painted boat-houses
stared out impertinently. Back of the harbor front the little town
nestled prettily enough in its setting of tropic greens, and half-way up
the volcanic cliffs patches of tilled fields or clumps of forest-trees
relieved the sandy wastes. At intervals a tall white house among its
palms shone out like a child's block, half imbedded in moss.

As the ship touched the dock, and the company broke up to watch the
native boys diving for coppers, Mrs. Todd gathered her clan together for
a holiday on shore. Yuki had decided to wear a white American gown.
Gwendolen also was in white, like a great lily. Dodge showed up in
spotless duck and a pith helmet; Pierre wore immaculate flannels; while
Mrs. Todd, in the stiffest of skirts, the thinnest of lawn waists, and a
white linen Alpine hat a trifle too small, looked unfortunately like a
perfume bottle with a white leather top.

They walked in radiant single-file down the gangway, the faces of all
three women changing to sudden blankness at the appalling rigidity of
earth, after recent days on a swaying deck. "I--I--don't believe I can
walk at all, just yet," said Mrs. Todd, and reached out for her natural
protector. In an instant Dodge had whistled up two cabriolets driven by
sleepy-eyed Kanakas in California hats. At the market, a low
Spanish-looking edifice with no walls, Mrs. Todd insisted upon getting
out. Some one on the ship had told her to be sure to see the market; and
this the conscientious traveller intended to do, though the very peaks
above them seemed to rock and leap with subconscious friskiness. Here
thronged a mingled race, both buyers and sellers,--English, Japanese,
Chinese, Hawaiians, and Yankees. All the vegetable stands were owned by
Chinese, all the fruit by Kanakas. Dodge insisted on the fact as
eloquent of racial tendencies. In this magic climate the growth of
vegetables is accompanied by an even more fervid growth of weeds, and so
requires patient vigilance. Fruit, on the other hand, cultivates itself.
"All the lordly Hawaiian has to do," said Dodge, "is to stand or sit
under the tree, and let it fall into his lap." Gwendolen took the value
from this last remark by indicating a heap of horny "jackfruit,"--a
thing the shape and size of a watermelon, which grows out of the trunk,
apparently, of live oaks, and asking, scornfully, how much Kanaka would
be left when one of those had fallen.

The fish dealers' department gleamed with iridescent color. Shrimps and
crabs seemed fashioned in Favrille glass. Lobsters wore polka-dots of
blue. None of these crustacea had claws, but whether deprived of them by
man or nature was never ascertained.

As they drove up the narrow avenues, the unique mixture of the
population became more apparent. Chinese evidently formed the inferior
caste of laborer, content with a daily wage. Cleverer Japanese bustled
about newly opened shops of foreign wares, or hung out professional
signs of doctor, lawyer, or notary public. The Yankee strolled about
with a half-disdainful glance; but the lordliest was not so proud as the
ragged sons of Kamehameha, who, preëmpting shady nooks in doorways,
stared disapprovingly on the passer-by. In the grounds of the former
"palace," members of a present legislature lolled on the green, and
nibbled peanuts. Pert Kanaka girls, in New York shirt-waists and
automobile veils, minced by the side of fat mamas in Mother Hubbard
gowns, generally of red, with huge ruffles about the yoke.

"Stop, Cy! Tell the man to stop. There's a druggist! I have several
things to get!"

"And look! next to it a book-store advertising the latest novels,"
supplemented Gwendolen. "Doesn't that seem a joke? We must get some. I
see souvenirs, and photographs, and--"

"I'll tell you what we'd better do. You women-folks get out and shop. Le
Beau will stick to Yuki, I guess; while Dodge and I take this carriage
around to the post-office,--I've heard there was one,--and try to find
out the latest news about the war," cried Mr. Todd.

In a quarter of an hour they were back, breathless. "War's coming, and
it's coming soon!" panted the senator.

"Yes, that's the ticket. Japan has called, and Russia must show her hand
or crawfish," supplemented Dodge.

"But not really, really--yet _begun_?" whispered Yuki, who had turned
very pale.

"What _does_ the young man mean?" asked Mrs. Todd, anxiously, of her
spouse. "I can't believe in irresponsible war rumors. I _sha'n't_
believe them. Why, only two days before we left Washington, Prince
Breakitoff assured me solemnly that the difficulty would never be
allowed to reach the point of war."

Mr. Todd winked toward his secretary. "Well," he said solemnly, "Prince
Breakitoff ought to know more about the facts of the case than a
Hawaiian newspaper."

"He certainly _ought_ to," said Dodge, ambiguously.

"War! Who dares to hint of war?" cried Pierre. "Look at this sky above
us, and that tangle of sun and shower dragging rainbow echoes across a
peacock-colored bay! Who could be found to fight on such an earth? Do
you not say so, too, my Yuki?"

Yuki started slightly, and hesitated, as if to form her words. Before
she could speak, Dodge had interrupted: "As long as we are so close,
would you-all mind walking one more block on foot? The prettiest sight
in the town is just to the left of that jutting brick wall down there."
He pointed. Mrs. Todd was off. Yuki slipped in close to Gwendolen, and
clung to her friend's arm. She did not want to think, just now, of war.
Past new American shops they went, ice-cream "parlors," dry-goods
displays of underwear,--"marked down" sales, of course,--and windows of
ready-made gowns on insipid waxen dummies. Dodge had taken a few feet in
advance. He now turned sharply, facing into a narrow street, one of the
old native thoroughfares, bordered by walls of brick and stone where
moss spread and dampness oozed. On an absurdly narrow pavement squatted
a row of fat and shapeless beings, presumably women, half buried in
wreaths and coils of strange flowers.

"Behold the far-famed lei sellers of Hawaii!" announced Dodge, with an
histrionic gesture.

"I see no hens," said Mrs. Todd, through raised lorgnettes.

"These are a different brand of lei," explained Dodge, without a smile;
"flower-wreaths that are to the hat of the Hawaiian dandy what an orchid
or a gardenia is to the button-hole of a Fifth Avenue sport."

The sellers had sprung instantly into kneeling postures, all as if
pulled by a single wire. Brown arms went forth, like those of crabs,
flower hung. "Lei, lei, Honolulu lei! Prettie flower! Prettie ladees!
Dollar--Fufty cents! Here, ladee, prettie lei, twunty-fi' cents!"

"Offer a quarter for three, and see them hustle," said Dodge.

"Oh, what visions of beauty!" breathed Gwendolen, and flung down silver
coin at random. "See, ropes of carnations! Pink oleanders threaded into
regular cables! And oh, the lovely yellow things,--my color,--golden
acacias, I believe. I shall loop myself like an East Indian idol in
these fragrant necklaces. And what are those purple things, and those?
Why, why, I don't know the others at all. I thought I was friends with
every flower. They smell like heaven!"

"Frangipani, ylang-ylang, stephanotis, plumaria, acacia," rattled Dodge,
in the tone and manner of a professional guide.

"What a delightful courier you would make, Mr. Dodge!" cried saucy
Gwendolen. "I think I'll bespeak your services, now, for my wedding
journey."

"I'm jolly well apt to be along on that particular trip, you
know," retorted the young man, with such cool assurance that all
laughed--except Mrs. Todd. That good lady had begun to view, with some
apprehension, the over-confident tactics of the attaché. Gwendolen,
after an unsuccessful attempt to stare him "down," bent flushed cheeks
and laughing eyes to the flowers. "We must all wear _lei_, of course,"
she cried, a trifle unsteadily. "It's positively the only thing to do on
such a day! Yuki, pink carnations will be ravishing on your little white
sailor-hat, and also, by a happy coincidence, on Pierre's new Panama.
Dad, you and mother must have this divine stephanotis, mixed with a
little smilax, for a green old age. Just think of buying strung
stephanotis by the yard! And, Mr. Dodge,--last and not least, Mr. T.
Caraway Dodge!--" Mockingly she caught up a string of magenta-colored
"bachelor buttons," and would have offered them with a curtsey; but
already Dodge had carefully wound his helmet in coils of acacia flowers
until it had become, in shape and size, an old-fashioned beehive made of
gold.

This time she presented her back squarely. The others withheld laughter
until they should have read the expression on the chaperon's face. But
she, oblivious apparently of this new bit of daring, had lorgnettes at
her eyes, and was studying carefully a closely written list,--a
composite of suggestions, made up for her by admiring ship friends.
"Punch Bowl Crater, The Bishop Museum, Banana Plantations, Waki-ki
Beach,--note colors on the shoals,--House where R. L. Stevenson
resided," she was murmuring, as though to fix each in her memory.
Suddenly she looked up. "Cyrus, the carriages! I doubt whether we can
get them all in, but I intend to do my best."

"Mother!" began Gwendolen, in a note of protest. Yuki was smiling, and
Pierre also. As long as they were together, nothing else mattered. The
countenance of Dodge, however, had an acrobatic fall from elation to
horrified disappointment. At sight of this, Gwendolen actually glittered
mischief.

"Certainly, mother dear," she hastened to answer. "Let us take
everything in,--even a little more, if possible. We all need our minds
improved,--and some of us our manners!" Dodge, darting a look into her
face, found only trustful innocence. The carriages had arrived. With
great ostentation he assisted Mrs. Todd into her place. "I think I shall
be able to supply one or two interesting spots not down on that list,"
he suggested, with a tentative look at the empty cushion beside her.
"Claus Spreckels' house, the Infirmary, the Honolulu University with
miles of hedges made up of volcanic stone overgrown with night-blooming
cereus--you mustn't miss that!" Dodge's eyes and his smile were
frankness embalmed and irradiated. Mrs. Todd perforce smiled in reply.
"Jump in," she said cordially. "You're quite a treasure in travelling,
Mr. Dodge."

Gwendolen meekly took a rear seat by her father. As she pressed lovingly
against him, sending upward the tiniest little teased smile of
discomfiture, his face broke into merry wrinkles. "I think you've found
your match this time, little girl," he whispered.

"You just wait," nodded the oracular Gwendolen.

                               * * * * *

It is a memorable experience, analogous to nothing else in the world,
that landing, for one iridescent day, in the Pacific's mid-ocean,
throwing one's fancies and one's heart into strange tropic scenes, and
then returning at nightfall, like tired, happy children, to the great
old mother-nursery of the ship.

By the next morning, not even a cloud on that horizon from which we are
fleeing betrays the hiding-place of land. At once the island takes
proper place as a vision, a mirage of the imagination, where souls of
certain privileged beings have met, and are henceforth bound in a unity
of mystic comradeship. After such a day, Pacific passengers turn to one
another with kindlier smiles, the whole ship changes into one heaving
picnic party, old Time himself joins in the holiday, and personal
dislikes, brought on board, are flung to the waves. That most of these
animosities, like the Biblical bread, return to the owners after not so
many days, need not affect present hilarity.

As may be supposed, Gwendolen and her closest attendant, Dodge, were
small whirling centres in the round of gay diversions. The conventional
deck-games were started, and a terminating three days of competitive
skill, with prizes bought at Honolulu and marked with the name of the
ship and date of voyage, duly announced. Revelry was to culminate in a
grand "fancy dress ball," the night before landing, a prize being given
to the costumer who showed most skill in fashioning his or her attire
from things procurable on board ship, and in carrying out the character
assumed. In order to waste no more time upon this function, it may be
stated that Mr. T. Caraway Dodge as "Dandy Jim,"--with painted purple
rings on a dress shirt and a "claw-hammer" coat a size too small, ebony
countenance, lips like two flaming sausages caught loosely at the ends,
and a wig fashioned from the hair of his bunk mattress,--sang and
cake-walked himself straight to the prize, while defeated contestants
rent night with applause and acclamation.

From the smoking-room an incessant clinking, as of fairy castanets,
fretted the ears of feminine curiosity. Mr. Todd explained that it was
merely the sound of checkers and chessmen rattling to the shiver of the
ship's screw.

The sun came up each morning, small and round, like a mandarin orange;
expanded himself into a blinding deity; and at evening went down again,
a blood-red orange, into the sea. The days he brought were long and
golden, but not long enough for all the practising of bull-board,
quoits, shuffle-board, and deck tennis. Each morning, after breakfast,
certain acrobatic performances, free of charge, were held. Bag-punching
was the children's favorite. One could count on an audience there, of
upturned faces, wide-eyed and solemn with admiration. Some of the
passengers saw fit to attach pedometers, and walk an incredible number
of miles each day.

In the evening, Mrs. Todd and bridge whist reigned supreme. The Captain
proved to be a player; so, to his present anguish, was Dodge. Gwendolen
took an elfish delight in luring this young man to a table, under
pretence of desiring to be his partner, and then, at the last moment,
slipping in a foreordained substitute; after which she sped off,
carolling, to a moonlit deck. Once there, the fuming and impotent Dodge
recognized only too clearly what she would do. At least a dozen new
acquaintances of the other sex had been made thus far by Gwendolen. It
was her wont to dispense Emersonian philosophy and delicately portioned
encouragement to those who were fortunate enough to secure her
companionship. There was a young Dutch merchant on his way to coffee
plantations in Java, very blond and fierce as to mustachios, and mild in
the eyes. A Chicago representative, on his way to sell to Eastern
potentates his particular make of automobile, had already needed, to
quote Gwendolen's own, words, "a slight slackening of speed."

An English "leftenant" returning to South Africa, carried with him his
own marvellous outfit for the making of afternoon tea, backed by a
mammoth English plum-cake in a tin box. He was one to be propitiated,
especially toward eight bells on an afternoon.

An Austrian viscount posed as the slayer of jungle beasts. "Beeg gam,"
he called them. He doted upon seeing this timid and shrinking maid cower
beneath the bloody wonder of his yarns. No one before had inspired such
thrilling denouements as Mees Todd. He recognized her at once for his
affinity, and on the night before landing condescended to tell her so.
The shock was rude, but he deserved what he got.

Pierre and Yuki joined in these several amusements and occupations
during the morning and afternoon hours, both being much petted and
nattered by the ladies of the ship, as beau ideals of young lovers. In
the evenings, on the balmy deck, they were left to themselves. Wonderful
talks grew between them,--whispers, sometimes, that the jealous wind
tore from their lips before the last word came. Yuki had not won back
the half-troth given, nor, on the other hand, had Pierre gained more.

Often their talk was of impersonal things. The young man delighted to
draw from Yuki quaint phrases of comment, and hints of the Oriental
imagery with which her fancy thrilled. She told him the story of the
stars, Vega and Aquilla, called in her land the Herd-Boy and the
Weaver-Girl; how, for some fault, committed before this little earth was
made, they could cross the milky stream of Heaven, and meet, but one
night in a year.

When he pointed to a flock of flying fish skimming in a blue and silver
phantasy above a turquoise floor, she called them the souls of birds
that had flown too far from land, and been drowned at sea.

Within a few days of landing, a certain change, perceptible, it may be,
only to the most sensitive, crept into the elements of air and water,
and tinged even the up-piling clouds. Yuki stared now, for long moments,
in silence, toward that hidden bank of the West. Pierre felt a change in
her; but when he questioned, she laughed a little nervously, and said it
was merely the outer edge of Nippon's "aura." Undoubtedly she was
restless, a little moody, a trifle excited, and touched, at times, with
brooding thoughts. She dreaded the opening with Pierre of topics which,
all along, she had tried to avoid. Yet now, so close to home, she must
make stronger efforts to free herself.

One afternoon at sundown, when the great reverberating "dressing gong"
had sent most of the ladies below-stairs, Pierre, hurrying up to Yuki,
where, for a half-hour past she had sat alone in a far corner of the
deck looking outward, leaned and said:

"This promises to be the most wonderful sunset of all. It may be our
last. The Captain has just told me that, with good luck, we sight land
to-morrow. Do you dare come out with me to the very prow of the ship?"

"Yes, I dares," smiled Yuki, rising instantly. "I have wished often to
go to that small, lonely point of ship." As they started, he caught up a
discarded wrap. "The wind is fresher there," he said.

In a few moments she remarked, in a slightly embarrassed tone, "That
will be a very good place to say--something."

Pierre made no reply. He also had been thinking of it as an excellent
place in which to say--something.

Together, in silence, they made way over the aerial bridge that connects
the triangular front deck with the main one; moving over the heads of
steerage passengers, principally Chinese, who squatted in the sunken
square to breathe in what they could of the cool, evening breeze. The
sun was setting,--"a polished copper gong like that ship one which makes
much noise," said Yuki. It sank, clear-cut and very round, just at that
point of the horizon where Nippon might be thought to lie.

Pierre placed the girl in the small angle at the peak. An arm was
stretched behind her, and a hand clung to the rail, to protect them
both. He leaned forward until his cheek almost pressed against her own.
The soft incessant rush of wind blew her heavy hair back from a forehead
spiritually pure and white. Her long, delicately modelled nose and small
curved chin made a cameo against the blue-gray stone of dusk. Pierre,
watching her intently, saw the last red ray of the sun quiver on her
lips. The little hands were raised, as if unconsciously, and clapped
thrice, very softly.

"Are you praying to your sun-god, little Christian Yuki?"

"Oh, no, indeed," said Yuki, quickly. "It is not prayer as we Christians
call praying; it is only just our Japanese way of thanking Sun San for
his great beauty, and the much good he does flowers, and people, and
everything. In Japan we often thanks things just for being beautiful."
She smiled up confidingly into his face. Her little hands, now lowered,
flecked the rail like bits of white foam.

"Then I should pray to you, my darling, for in all this world never was
anything more beautiful."

She made no effort to answer this, not even by her usual small,
deprecating smile and shake of the head. The necessity of what she was
to say, blotted from those first moments by visual beauty, now came
heavily back to her. She steadied herself, turning slightly to see his
face.

"Pierre, trust me a little more. Give back that promise,--the promise
you won from my weakness. It holds me from my path like a thorn. Our
cause will be better without it."

Pierre started, and looked at the girl incredulously. "Have you let me
lead you here deliberately to ask me such a thing?"

"Do not admit anger to your thought, dear Pierre," she pleaded. "I must
have said some time. I should have said to you long before this; but we
have been so--happy."

"Yes," said Pierre, doggedly. "We have been happy; and I intend that we
shall be happier still. That promise is all I have to hold you by. I'd
draw it tighter if I could."

"You will not understand,--you will not try to understand me," said the
girl, in a despairing voice. "Such promise given is disrespect to my
parents, particularly to my father. If you do not release, I must tell
to him, of course. It will be bad for you and me. Can you not trust me?
Oh, Pierre, for love's sake, release--!"

"Release you!" he interrupted wildly. "This is my answer. It is for
love's sake that I hold you, and will hold." He seized her in his arms,
and held her with cruel strength. The night had come in fast. He did not
care that the watchman by the tall, straight mast might see them. No one
could hear the wind-driven, hurrying words. "This is my answer. I hold
thus all you have given,--and more. You are sincere, I believe, but
mistaken. A weak yielding on my part would make your parents, and
perhaps yourself, despise me. I keep what I have, I say, and I demand
still more. You must be true to me, no matter what occurs!"

"Pierre, Pierre, you trample on your own hope, though you will not see
it! To release me generously is your own best way!"

"You are the self-deceived," cried Pierre. "Pledge yourself irrevocably.
Then only are we strong."

In the western sky an orange strip of day remained. A single bird, black
against the glow, flew screaming across it, beating curved wings in the
wind. "He will not see at all," whispered Yuki, as if to the bird.

"Oh, dearest, you cannot know in your calm, innocent heart the scourge
of a love like mine! I hunger for you, I thirst! Sobbing, I dream of
you, and I wake to new tears that you are still so far away. In pity, in
mere mercy to human suffering, say that no other man shall marry you.
Say this much at least, that if prejudice and war hold us apart awhile,
you will be true to me until we can seek some new road to happiness!"

"Do I not know,--do I not know?" she shivered, in answer to the first
part of his speech. "Every day my heart is torn to small pieces, all of
different size and shape. I do not understand how in sleep they come
together once more. You are not lonely in that human suffering."

"Oh, you love me!" cried the man. "And on this voyage you love me as you
had not done before! Is it not true?"

"It is true," sobbed Yuki.

"Mine is not love," said Pierre, again holding her fast; "it is hell,--a
raging hell of ecstasies! Oh, kiss me, Yuki; give me your lips before I
die of joy! Now swear,--swear,--that no word but my own,--no
circumstance but death, can loose you from me!"

"You torture like the old monks," she panted. "Oh, do not make me say!"

"I command you, Yuki," he persisted, feeling new strength
as she faltered. "It is my right. We belong to each other.
Promise,--promise,--promise,--nothing but death or my word to loose
you!" He kissed her again and again, like a madman, pressing his lips
down upon hers, catching her hands to kiss, devouring her eyes, cheeks,
forehead, hair; while the girl, beaten down by the whirlwind, made no
effort to resist.

Pierre took the long white ivory pin from her hair, and split it,
thrusting the smaller portion into his coat, and returning that, with
the ornament still attached, to her hair.

"I take this pledge, Yuki," he cried. "You have told me that it binds to
the death a Japanese lover. We are bound. I hold you by a tangible bond.
The next shall be a small, bright circle on this little hand. Give me
the promise, Yuki,--no need to struggle now. Give it me!"

"Kwannon protect me," gasped the girl; "I promise!"

A sudden vacuum fell. Pierre's breath was hard to recapture. He thought
that Yuki had fainted, for her trembling had stopped. He shook one
shoulder and bent down to gaze into her set, white face. Her eyes were
wide open, and held two stars. She moved her lips now, and leaned far
outward, gazing intently, as if watching the flight of an unseen thing.

"Yuki, Yuki, what is it,--what do you see?" he cried, in terror.

"My soul! I think a small soul fled!" All at once she collapsed into
unconsciousness. As Pierre lifted her, he shook springing tears away,
and bit his quivering lips as he muttered,--"I feel as if I tortured a
child; but she does not realize our perils. Her fast promise is our only
hope. Thank God that I could win it!"




                            CHAPTER SEVEN


The nearness of land as yet invisible gave to the ship next morning that
access of animation noted in the approach to Hawaii, and in the
day-distant interval from the Golden Gate.

Most of the passengers, scorning to notice a few rough waves, buzzed or
moved in groups about the deck. Games were put away. Marine glasses and
kodaks came into vogue. Gwendolen's bright eyes, with a pair equally
alert and bright beside them, strained vision for the first land. The
increase of motion, however slight, served to excuse Yuki's absence. Two
persons only assigned a different reason,--her roommate, Gwendolen, and
her fiancé, Pierre Le Beau.

Pierre had not breakfasted in the salon,--a fact noted by Gwendolen. He
came to the upper deck very late, and lacked his usual eager look.
Gwendolen saw him instantly. Making some excuse to the group about her,
she went to him, saying in her direct, disconcerting way,--"What have
you done to my Yuki-ko? She did not sleep all night, and I am sure she
was crying! To cry is an unknown thing for Yuki."

Pierre met her indignation with pathetic sweetness. He smiled. It was
difficult to be harsh with Pierre. He looked past her to the shining
water. "If Yuki did not speak of her feeling, should I, even though I
knew?" he asked, with the extreme of gentleness.

Gwendolen flushed under the implied rebuke. Her purpose, however, was
not turned aside. "Yuki is a person whose confidence or whose love
should not be forced. From what I know of you both, I believe you coaxed
and persuaded her, last night, into some new pledge that her own heart
shrank from giving. If this is true, allow me to tell you that you have
made a fatal error, Pierre Marie Le Beau."

Pierre wheeled to the sea. It was as well that she could not see his
face. No longer gentle, it flared into a cruel anger. His sole answer
was the slightest, most exasperating of shrugs.

Gwendolen saw these signs of irritation, and cried to herself, "Halt."
With a laugh that was quite successful for its kind she exclaimed,
"Come, Pierre, we must not quarrel just because we both love Yuki. I
know I seem rude, but I became Yuki's champion at school, and the habit
clings. Forgive me for Yuki's sake."

He took the slim, outstretched hand and kissed it, but allowed himself
no further words. The girl felt baffled and uncomfortable. She recalled
a saying of her father's, "Free speech is a luxury possible only to
those whose opinions mean nothing." She felt herself herded with that
undesirable class.

"Well, I must get back to them," she cried, nodding in the direction of
the group lately deserted. "I promised them I'd come back at once."

"Is Yuki indisposed this morning?" asked Pierre. "May I not expect her
on deck?"

His tone was condescending. Gwendolen writhed under it. "She'll be up in
half an hour, I guess," she gave answer, and hurried away, rubbing the
back of her hand against her dress as she went.

Dodge made room for her at the rail. She wedged herself in place with a
sigh of content. "Look hard, now!" whispered her companion. "The others
haven't a hint. Yes, right out there in front, _hard_!"

Gwendolen stared obediently. Surely there was something strange,
prophetic on that far blue rim. "Is it--oh, can it be--that little
roughened thread in the warp and woof of blue--is it--Japan?"

The rumor spun about the ship,--was caught up in
whispers,--tangled,--tossed on to the next group. "Japan,--some one has
seen Japan!"

Men, with feet very much apart, steadied themselves behind beetle-like
marine glasses. "By Jove, there she is!" The waves outside fawned and
bounded in answering excitement. Dolphins leaped high in air. A whole
fleet of "Portuguese men-o'-war" rose to the surface and scurried on
before them as if leading a swifter way.

"I shall simply pass away with ecstasy!" cried Gwendolen. "Oh, why
doesn't Yuki come? Look, Mr. Dodge; I believe I see sails--away off
there, between us and the phantom land!"

"Doubtless a squad of detached fishing-smacks," said Dodge, with that
courier-like precision which seemed part of him on land or in sight of
land.

"Oh! oh! oh!" shrieked she, jumping up and down like a child. "We are
rushing straight for one. It has a square sail laced across the slits
with white shoestrings. Oh, we are going to run it down!"

"My _dear_!" remonstrated Mrs. Todd at the girl's impetuous manner. Her
own kindly face beamed.

"Not on your life," said Dodge the Oracle. "They know how to look out
for number one. You just watch 'em." Even as he spoke the small skiff
darted impudently into the very shadow of their looming bulk, and sped
off again like a swallow. Two impassive brown faces lifted for an
instant from the great shining heap of bonito in the bottom of the boat,
and were lowered.

"Not much floral-anchor business about those two, eh, Captain?" asked
Mr. Todd, genially, of that magnate, as he strolled toward them.

"I admit the coast population to be amphibious," laughed the Captain,
"but you can't make admirals out of fishermen. Miss Gwendolen, it will
soon be time to look for Few-ji."

"Oh, oh!" cried Gwendolen again. She was made up, this morning, of
wind-tossed golden hair and expletives. "Certainly no one ever saw it,
truly, at such a distance!"

"I have," boasted Dodge. "On a clear day I've seen the thing a hundred
miles off, when it looked like a little white tee on a blue golf links,
don't you know."

"Golf links!" echoed Gwendolen. "What an unworthy simile!"

"Why not links?--first-class thing, a good links! Don't you play, Miss
Todd?"

"No," answered Gwendolen, truthfully, "I don't play, but I like to pose,
the costumes are so utterly fetching; and I dote on standing with my
driver behind me, like girls in illustrated picture papers."

She turned to search the shimmering horizon for the vision it would not
yield. "Oh, where is that mountain! I wish Yuki would come. It might
appear directly for Yuki-ko."

"Here is Yuki," said the low, strange voice that could have belonged to
no other.

Gwendolen seized her. "Good-morning, Miss Onda," smiled Dodge. "Now we
are all fit. Kindly invoke your enchanted summit to our wondering gaze.
I have been told that it was bad luck to land after a long journey
without a glimpse of Fuji-san."

"I think the bad luck for only Nipponese," said Yuki.

"And the good luck too, I presume, if it turns that way? How
inhospitable!"

"Yes, I think so. The good luck and the bad luck," was Yuki's serious
reply.

Pierre, strolling at the rear end of the passenger deck, must have seen
Yuki. He made no sign, however, and continued to stroll alone, smoking
cigarettes, with a pleasant look or reply for any chance acquaintance,
but a mind evidently involved in its own problems.

Neither of the girls saw him. They leaned together now upon the rail.
Gwendolen had an arm about her friend. Together they stared out toward
the land. Dodge had been called away. Mr. and Mrs. Todd were seated, the
former carefully counting out bills for various "tips" soon to be
distributed. The schoolmates were practically alone.

The land showed clearly now its hill and rock formation. Layer after
layer, set upright from the sea, vanished into hazy distance. Promontory
after promontory tapered down at the far point to a surf-beaten line of
rocks. Farther peaks rose in tones of blue,--some thin as water, others
rich and dark, like great gentians. On the nearer hills, forests and
shaven spots of green appeared. The water around them shone and stirred
with sails, the square-laced sails of junks. Bronze-colored boatmen,
scantily clad, stood on the swaying edge of a boat and shaded their eyes
to peer upward at the strange, white-faced "seiyo-jin." Among the junks,
sailless sampan, propelled by one crooked oar, tumbled like queer
sea-beetles with a single jointed leg.

"Gwendolen," said Yuki, in a very low voice, "do you see a long, green
patch, like moss, over on that brown slope?"

"Yes; I was thinking it looked like curled parsley."

"That is really a forest,--quite a big little forest,--made of sugi, and
camphor, and camellia trees. Listen; I thought then that I heard the
deep sound of a bell!"

"I hear nothing but water and the wind."

"It was the temple bell," insisted Yuki. "And now, dear, look more
close. Do you not see, right on the edge of beach, a small red
something?"

"Why, yes; there is a little square of red like the framework of a
door."

"It is torii,--red torii, or sacred gate; and beyond that gate are many,
many stone steps leading up to the temple. Ah! such steps as those,--so
quiet, so deep, so still! They lead the heart up before ever the clumsy
feet have climbed."

                               * * * * *

A little steam launch, bearing the flag of the rising sun, came puffing
and squealing toward them. The ship's steps were lowered. Grave, correct
Japanese officers took possession. Their news was astounding. War's
breath already heated the land. The Japanese minister at St. Petersburg
even then made preparation for instant departure, and his Russian
colleague in Yedo did the same. The severance of diplomatic relations
between the countries meant, of course, no less than a declaration of
war.

From the moment of hearing this, neither Mr. Todd nor his secretary had
a thought for anything besides,--no, not even for pretty Gwendolen, who,
for a while, sulked alone, then, seeing it useless, sought consolation
in engaging herself to all the unmarried male passengers, one after the
other, and most of the ship's officers, irrespective of connubial ties.

Pierre and Yuki had met, neither looking with entire frankness into the
eyes of the other. To Yuki the promise given meant a haircloth shirt
beneath her robe of gladness, a stone dragging her back from flight. To
Pierre it was, in all sincerity, their one substantial pledge of future
happiness. He was the man. It was for him to judge, not Yuki; and he
believed the very reluctance with which she gave the word, a proof of
its necessity. It was characteristic of both that no reference was made
to the subject most vital in their thoughts. Yuki watched with apparent
composure the slow approach to Yokohama Bay, Awa's cone-shaped masses,
and the long, green northern coast fading into eastern haze. Fuji had
not shone for them,--in spite of a cloudless day. "It sometimes went
away like that," Yuki had assured the disappointed ones. "Children
thought that it went visiting to the gardens of the gods."

The harbor channel was free. The ship went slowly, majestically, like a
great deliberate swan, sheer to the stone steps of the wharf. Yuki's
reserve faltered. "My people,--oh, my dear people! I think I see their
faces in that waiting crowd!" they heard her whisper. She stretched out
her arms. A sob choked in her throat. Four years,--four long, long
years, and yet how familiar the look of her native land! The little
wind-bent pines along the stone dyke had not changed a leaf. Those long,
waiting rows of empty jinrikishas might hold one that had been waiting
for her through an hour of shopping in the foreign stores of Yokohama.
And, oh, the dear welcoming friends there on the steps!

Their party was the first to cross the platform of the lowered flight of
stairs. Yuki touched the first stone step, and gazed eagerly above her.
Yes, that was her mother, that gentlest, sweetest, most beautiful face
among them all! Behind her stood Onda Tetsujo, Yuki's father, with his
plain blue robes, and gray, nobly poised head.

"Mother! Okkasan,--Shibaraku!" (How long the absence!) cried the girl,
with a broken note of rapture in her voice. Bounding up the steps, she
clasped and was clasped again by the slender gray figure. Tetsujo drew
back, a fleeting look of perplexity in his face. He had not recognized
Yuki, thus seen, for the first time, in her perfectly adapted foreign
garments; but Iriya had known, from the moment her eyes caught the small
brown-clad figure at the rail. The mother in her swept away, for the
instant, high barriers of Japanese etiquette. She clung to her child,
fondling her, pressing trembling lips to the soft young cheeks, and
murmuring, "My baby,--my little one,--my treasure, who has come back to
me!"

A moment later they had drawn apart, both with wet eyes and quivering
lips, and small, bashful side-looks of love; for such public
demonstration is practically unknown among samurai women. Already these
two were a little ashamed of it. Tetsujo realized at last that it was
his daughter, but, because of her strange conduct, wore still an
uncomprehending wrinkle between his heavy brows.

The Todd party, Pierre and Mr. T. Caraway Dodge included, came
hesitatingly near. The Japanese crowd drew back, some in distaste, some
in politeness, some because their own friends had arrived, and there was
no longer a reason for staying. Yuki, with a hand on Gwendolen's arm,
began the introductions. When it came to the two young men, she
hesitated slightly. Her father's deep, keen eyes rested on the faces
first of one, then of the other. The two names, as she hurried them
over, were practically unintelligible.

Kind-hearted Mrs. Todd, observing Yuki's embarrassment and feeling that
she had at least a hint as to its cause, rushed gallantly into the
breech. Her efforts centred on shrinking Mrs. Onda. "Are you really
Yuki's mother?" she demanded in a loud, playful voice. "You look to me
like her sister. I wouldn't believe, unless I were told, that you had
more than five years between you."

Yuki threw a glance of gratitude toward the speaker. "Mother, Mrs. Todd
says that you appear augustly young to be indeed the daughter of a big
girl like me."

Iriya flushed and bowed, looking more than ever like her daughter. She
answered in Japanese, "Please honorably to thank the lady for her
compliment, but acquaint her with the fact that I am already lamentably
old. On my next birthday I shall be thirty-nine."

Tetsujo, having accomplished his share of stiff bows,--not forgetting an
extra one for the new American minister,--said to his daughter, "My
child, we are indeed happy to welcome you. Now thank your good friends
in my name. Suitable presents shall be sent them. We must depart for
Yedo." He moved one finger toward three waiting jinrikisha men near-by,
and the vehicles, like magic, stood beside him.

"Now, already it must be 'Sayonara.' My father desires me to go," said
Yuki, and smiled a little tremulously from one foreign face to another.
These farewells at the end of a long and pleasant journey are never
careless things to say. "Of course I will see all--every one--very
soon!"

"Yuki! Why, we never thought of this. You mustn't leave us so!" cried
Gwendolen, in consternation.

"No!" added Pierre, with more vehemence. "It isn't to be thought of.
Tell your father that we are counting on you for the day." He stepped
close to her. Yuki instinctively shrank. The puzzled look came again to
the face of Tetsujo.

"Be careful, Pierre! Look at his face! You will make a false move at the
start," came Gwendolen's whisper.

"Do you expect me to stand here patiently and see her carried away? Non!
Mon Dieu, it was to have been the consecrating day of our lives! I do
not give it up. I will try speaking myself with her father."

"Gwendolen is right. Do not speak!" panted Yuki.

But Pierre was not one to relinquish bliss so easily. No move seemed to
him quite as undesirable as the one about to take place. Facing the
astonished samurai, he began a series of bows which he fondly conceived
to embody the finer points of both French and Japanese etiquette.

"Monsieur Onda,--Onda San," he commenced eagerly, "Miss Yuki must not
go. Ikimasen! Stay here with friends,--tomodachi. She can go your
house--afternoon. Please do not take her now."

Onda looked blankly and in silence upon the antics of the strange
creature. Not one gleam of comprehension enlivened his fixed gaze.

"Here, man, let me get to him," said Dodge, thrusting himself in front
of Pierre. "I'll translate what you are trying to say, though it isn't a
particle of use. Shall I go on?"

"Merci."

Speaking slowly, in fairly good Japanese, Dodge said, "We having hoped
to enjoy the company of your daughter on this first day of landing, I am
requested to entreat your august permission to allow her to remain. If
you and your wife will join our party also, we shall feel honored by
your condescension." "Never told a bigger lie in my life!" was his
mental note after this last remark.

Tetsujo replied by the courtesy of a stiff bow. With no further glance
or word for the speaker, he stepped up into his jinrikisha, and once
seated, said to Yuki, "Reply to the speech of the foreigner, my child."

"I am to go with my parents, of course," said Yuki, nervously. "I wish
it. I did not know you were planning so sure for me to remain. I must go
now, at once, but will see you as soon as I may, to-morrow, or perhaps
this very afternoon."

Iriya had bowed to the foreigners and entered her jinrikisha immediately
after Tetsujo. Yuki now climbed into the remaining one, neither Dodge
nor Pierre retaining enough self-possession to assist her. The three
coolies caught up the shafts for starting.

"Here, stop, stop!" cried Gwendolen, springing forward. "Yuki, we don't
even know your Tokio address!"

Tetsujo gave a gesture and a "cluck." The coolies sprang into action.

"Ko-ishikawa, Kobinata, Shi--j[=u]--" trailed off Yuki's voice into the
rattling of the streets.

"The ogre! I'll catch the next train for Tokio," cried Pierre.

"Better stay with us and see about your baggage, Pierre," said Mr. Todd,
speaking for the first time. "The girl should go with her people, and
you know it."

"But, poor boy," said Mrs. Todd, soothingly, her hand touching his arm,
"I know how he has counted on seeing the sights with Yuki."

                               * * * * *

Onda Tetsujo's spoken order had been "stenshun!" (station), for so have
the Japanese incorporated our familiar word. A train was just leaving
for Yedo. Three second-class tickets were bought, and the kuruma-men
overpaid and dismissed. Had they been merely "paid," a later train would
have been taken.

The short encounter on the Yokohama pier evidently remained in the
master's mind as a most disagreeable impression. While in no sense a
stupid man, the quality of Onda's intellect was torpid rather than
alert. Things came to him slowly, and remained long.

It happened that their train was a "local," stopping at all the
small intermediate stations. Between Yokohama and the next
stop,--Kanagawa,--not a word was spoken. Yuki felt bewildered, dazed,
distressed. What had happened? What was spoiling her home-coming? The
promise was not all, for here were her parents, moody and ill at ease,
and they as yet knew nothing of her pledge. Surely the few injudicious
words Pierre tried to speak should not have wrought all this. Poor
Pierre, with his hurt blue eyes and outstretched hand of longing! Well,
the American girls used to say that true love never did run smooth. Here
she gave a sigh so deep that Iriya started. All three gazed heavily from
the windows, only half seeing the villages sweep past, and the wide,
gleaming rice-fields in their winter flood, and the long edge of Yedo
Bay set with pines, and flecked with shining sails. The gaudy fluttering
of small banners above the tea booths of Kawasaki brought a momentary
light of pleasure into the girl's eyes. It died down as quickly. Her
father's averted face clouded her sun. Yet unconsciously the charm and
the glamour of the country was stealing back. At Omori, perhaps the most
beautiful of these suburban villages, their compartment, being toward
the rear of the train, stopped, it would seem, in the very midst of a
grove of "umé" flowers, just coming into bloom. It is an old orchard,
knowing many generations of loving care. It is trimmed and tended for
beauty alone, the small sour fruit called by foreigners "plums" being
uneatable, and no more to the Japanese marketer than are "rose-apples"
to us. The trees, set close together so that tips of branches met, were
entirely leafless, and frosted over with a delicate lichen growth. On
this silver filigree of boughs the blossoms shone, white, crimson, or
pink,--translucent gems of flowers. The odor, stealing softly to Yuki in
little throbs, smote her as with an ecstasy of remembrance. There is no
subtler necromancer than perfume. Through it the past may be
reconstructed, dead love quiver into life, and sorrow, often more
precious than joy itself, steal back like a loving ghost.

Yuki seemed to wake suddenly, as from a troubled sleep. "Why," she cried
to herself, "I am at home again! This is Japan!" She sat upright now,
eager and vivid, looking from one window to another, a new brightness in
her face. The locomotive, which had been restlessly inactive for a few
moments past, gave a long, shrill whistle, drew itself together, and
prepared for another run. Just as the wheels were turning, a broad-faced
woman of the peasant class, with a fat baby on her back, a toddler of
two years led by one hand, and a pair of squawking geese held in the
other, wriggled herself through the turnstile and waved the shrieking
fowls, as signal for the train to stop. The gatekeeper, clutching after
her, seized a limb of the sleeping infant. Instantly a human scream
added to the clamor of the geese. Heads were thrust from car
windows,--the guard, dropping the infant's leg, seized its mother by the
sash. He chanced to be a small man, she an unusually large woman. As a
consequence she dragged him after her. At this sight a train official,
leaning as far outward as he could for laughing, signalled the engineer
to "back." The victorious one hurled herself and her living burdens into
an already overcrowded third-class car. A place was made for her, not
without many exclamations, such as "Domo! Osoi!" (It is late.)
"Kodomo-san itai ka!" (Is Mr. Baby hurt?) and a few gruff sounds of "Iya
desu yo!" (How disagreeable!) The locomotive, as if conscious of a good
deed, tooted more loudly than before, and made another start.

Yuki sparkled with delight. "Think of a train official doing that in
America!" she laughed aloud.

Iriya's answering smile was pathetic in its quickness of response. She
moved closer, pressing against Yuki's smart, foreign shoulder. The two
began to watch, like happy children, the passing scenes.

Tetsujo drew forth his pipe and smoked himself into serenity. He
listened now to what the women said. There were other passengers, of
course, but Tetsujo and his companions had preëmpted a little corner
in the rear. Iriya spoke of old Suzumé, who was waiting so impatiently
at home to see her charge,--of little Maru San, a distant connection
of Suzumé, who, since Yuki's departure, had been employed as
maid-of-all-work about the house. Messages of welcome from friends and
relatives were given. At the last, dropping her voice impressively,
Iriya spoke of the coming war. "It is inevitable," she said. "Prince
Hagané informed Tetsujo only this morning. There can be no doubt."

The old scenes, the old interests, glowed anew in the girl's heart.
Really they had never left it, but, like certain writing, illegible
except in warmth, the pictures slept until the breath of her own land
awaked them. She had a strange sense of being slowly turned back to a
child. In an English fairy-book a certain Alice could grow tall or short
at will by nibbling at a magic mushroom. There had always been magic
mushrooms in the East, long, long before that book was written,--strange
mountain growths which are the only food of the ghost deer that attend
the genii of the forest. Perhaps the little brown sembei which she had
just bought at Omori from an insistent peddler was, in reality, a scrap
of an enchanted mushroom. Perhaps she was really turning back into the
little Japanese Yuki who had never been to America at all, who had never
known a foreign lover, or given a promise which her reason told her to
refuse. Her heart stopped beating for an instant. She took a second bite
of sembei. Again the trouble faded. Yes, surely, it was a magic
mushroom.

Now merry talk flowed from her smiling lips. Tetsujo moved nearer. She
called him "Chichi Sama," as in baby days, and her mother "Haha San."

The train made its final stop. A torrent of blue-robed occupants poured
out from every car. The sound of wooden clogs upon the concrete floor
was like innumerable hollow shells scraped, lip down, upon an empty box.
Yuki's heart swept in with the throng. She loved the noise, the bare
station, the hissing car, the very dust of the travellers' feet. Tetsujo
and Iriya exchanged glances behind her back, and smiled. Their eyes
said, "This is our dear one,--our own; not an American changeling, but
the daughter for whom we have been yearning."




                            CHAPTER EIGHT


From the square, gray platform of Shimbashi station, terraced by stone
steps, hung with tiled eaves, and surrounded by a swarming school of
black jinrikishas, each with a chattering, gesticulating, blue-clad
human horse before it, one dives at will into the iridescent life of
modern Yedo. Regarded as a city, it is little more than a collection of
villages carelessly swept together; little communities where the same
streets catch up altered names; districts with opposing trades,
antagonistic feast-days, and rival deities.

Tanners preëmpt an unsavory ward. Shoemakers claim for themselves a
network of small streets. The dry-goods merchants command an avenue.
Pipe-sellers, wine-merchants, tobacconists, book-sellers, marketmen,
carpenters,--each guild tends to make a centre for itself. Perhaps, as
one consequence of this segregation, Tokio becomes the stronghold of
street peddlers. It matters little to the housewife that the nearest
market is four miles away, when sections of that market, strapped to
boyish shoulders, go crying past her gate with the punctuality of
planets. Tokio is a place where circulating libraries literally
circulate; where perambulating oil-shops fill lamps on the patron's
kitchen step or in the glass frame at his gate, and then stop to light
them; where the tailor finishes a quilt or an overcoat on the bedroom
floor, and the hair-dresser needs no local habitation.

In a great semicircle crowded near the Red Gate of the Imperial
University, live and study and brawl and bluster the students,--the
future Nogis, Togos, Kurokis, Saigos, Itos, and Oyamas of their
race,--now no more than restless young spirits in a recognized democracy
of their own. Some of them cook their own meals and patch their own
faded hakama,--a species of heroism to make death on a battlefield grow
tame. Others "board" in one of the long, barn-like dormitories, or in a
convenient cheap lodging-house, often three and four in a room, at the
enormous rate of fifty cents a week. Poverty seems to them admirable,
nothing whatever to be ashamed of. The Japanese youth of the samurai
class is bred to a distaste of bodily luxury. Should one of their number
show a leaning toward soft cushions and rich food, the others ridicule
him, call him "O Sharé Sama," the Tokio equivalent of "Dandy," and say
that his soul grows fat.

Yuki sped through all, breathless with the wonder of home-returning. The
three jinrikishas, Tetsujo, of course, in the lead, went one after the
other in a straight line, as though on an invisible track. Whether in a
lane four feet wide, or in an avenue two hundred, this goose-like manner
of procedure never changed. Old familiar street-corners, familiar pines,
changed shop fronts, appealed to the girl with a sense of reality. Her
eyes filled and her heart beat faster as she caught her first glimpse,
after four years, of towering moated walls where crawled the "Dragon
Pines" of Iyemitsu, and of the high dark roof now sheltering her beloved
ruler.

Beyond the palace and its moats came foreignized Yedo. Sidewalks were
here, though pedestrians still preferred the middle of the street,
turning aside good-naturedly at the warning "Hek! hek!" of approaching
vehicles. The streets, conspicuously broad, were paved with concrete or
with stone. On every side rose buildings just completed, of brick and
stone, or great steel frames for other edifices. It might have been
Connecticut. The sidewalk trees, set rigidly in hollowed concrete
basins, refused to grow in Japanese fashion, and had the poise of elms.
Down centres of these streets horse-cars jangled. Work was already
started on the superseding electric line. Yuki observed it all with
conscious pride, yet her eyes brightened with new eagerness as another
quick turn plunged them once more into the heart of feudal Yedo.

The streets narrowed now to lanes, bordered on each side with
shops,--mere open booths,--flung wide to the dim rear plaster wall.
Shelves holding various wares came down sheer to the matted floor. In
the middle of the space generally sat the master, while skirmishing
about, sometimes in a gloomy slit of a passage to the rear, sometimes up
or down stepladder-like stairs to a crouching upper story, could be seen
the small apprentices, or kozo. The life of the Japanese kozo forms a
literature to itself; but this is not the place to begin it. These were
the narrow streets Yuki had longed for. Here were the shop signs
swinging wonderful tones of blue, dark crimson, and white, here the
great gold Chinese ideograph, sprawling across long banners.

In a sort of pause between districts came a hint of suburbs, and,
winding through it, Little Pebble River. A river is never more
mysterious than when carrying its deep secrets through a busy town. This
one, the Koishikawa, dominated the section through which it passed,
giving its own name, and establishing certain small industries of
dyeing, grinding, fishing, and boating possible nowhere else in Yedo,
until the great central artery of the Sumida is reached. Cherry-trees
joined finger-tips above the Koishikawa,--real grass crept down its
banks to trail finger in the hurrying tide.

It was all beautiful, all real, all familiar. From afar the clanging of
beaten metal smote the ears. Yuki remembered that the main bridge led
almost to the great gate of the Arsenal. A moment later it came into
view. Tall chimneys pulsed black worlds of smoke, and corrugated roofs
scowled above spiked, enclosing walls. At every gate stood a sentry-box
and a soldier in blue uniform.

"A mighty noise, young lady!" volunteered Yuki's jinrikisha man, in a
hoarse shout. He nodded his head toward the clamor, and then looked
backward to bestow on her a confidential grin. In the river, just in
front of the arsenal, great muddy barges were poled in and
beached,--with loads of coal and copper, iron and wood.

"Yes, indeed, it is a terrible noise," answered Yuki politely. "They
must be very busy behind those walls." She sighed heavily, but her sigh
was lost in the roar of flame. The fact that her country was at that
very moment on the verge of war with Russia, perhaps with France
also,--with France, Pierre's country!--was one of those thoughts she was
trying to keep away.

"They work with double force by lamp and by sun," boasted the jinrikisha
man, when they had passed the most deafening uproar. "Oh, but the
Russians think us children to be cheated and lied to! But we are
preparing a lesson for the cowardly bears,--we do not fear them! Look, O
Jo San!" He chuckled loudly, and without relaxing his wonderful
mechanical trot or falling an inch behind the pace of the two preceding
kuruma, unwrapped from his wrist the inevitable twisted tenugui, or hand
towel. Keeping one end under his palm, he let the rest stream backward,
like a flag. Instead of the usual bird, flower, or landscape etching in
indigo blue, the pattern represented a fleet of Japanese war-ships in
full engagement with the Russian navy. Under the water-level great
communities of deep-sea fish looked expectantly upward, chop-sticks and
rice-bowls in their fins. A few Russian sailors, the first of a gorging
repast, had commenced to sink downward. The eyes of the fish were
admirable in their expression of calm certainty. Thus, before the firing
of Togo's first challenge, did the Tokio populace enjoy prophetic
visions.

Beyond the arsenal, and its huddled concourse of working-men's houses
waiting just without the walls, the Koishikawa took a more definite turn
to the north. The Onda party, following it, came soon to a region of
green lanes and pleasant gardens. The clamor of metal-workers died away.
One knew that birds lived in the groves. Before them the highland of th

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