CHAPTER II

She awoke on a great soft bed that seemed to her wondering eyes as large as a room. She was sunk in a veritable nest of down, and, sitting up, she put out a little cautious hand and felt and punched the great pillow to reassure herself as to its reality. There was a vague question trembling in the girl's mind as to whether she might not, in fact, have escaped from Hirata through the same medium as her adored mother, and was now being wafted on a snowy cloud along the eternal road to Nirvanna.

Then the small statue like figure at the foot of the great mahogany bed moved. Memory flooded the girl. She thought of her mother, and a sob of anguish escaped her. Crowding upon the mother came the memory of that delirious moment upon the rope, when feeling that her mother's spirit was animating her body, she had faced the revellers. Followed the shivering thought of Hirata--the lash upon her shoulder, its sting paining so that the mere recollection caused her face to blanch with terror, dissipated by the memory of what had followed. Again she felt the exciting thrill of that long flight through the night on the shoulder of the strange young barbarian. He had burst into the room like a veritable god from the heavens, and it was impossible to think of him otherwise than some mighty spirit which the gods had sent to rescue and save the unworthy child of the dancer. In an instant, she was out of bed, her quick glance searching the big room, as if somewhere within it her benefactor was. She was still in her sadly ragged tights, the red welt showing where the silk had been split by the whip of Hirata.

The maid approached and wrapped the girl in one of her own kimonas. She was a silent tongued, still faced woman, who spoke not at all as she swiftly robed her charge. A servant in the household of the Americans, she had been summoned in the night to attend the strange new visitor. Goto, the house boy, had explained to Hatsu that the girl was a dancer from a neighbouring teahouse, whom his young masters had kidnapped. She was a great prize, jealously to be guarded, whispered the awed and gossiping Goto. Hatsu at first had her doubts on this score, for no dancer or teahouse maiden within her knowledge had ever worn hair of such a colour nor had skin which was bleached as that of the dead. Hatsu had discovered her charge in a sleep of complete exhaustion, her soft fair hair tossed about her on the pillow like that of a child.

Now as the maid removed the tawdry tights, and arrayed the strange girl in a respectable kimona, she recognised that those shapely and supple limbs could only be the peculiar heritage of a dancer and performer. A warmth radiated lovingly through her hands as she dressed the young creature confided to her charge. It had never been the lot of Hatsu to serve one as beautiful as this girl, and there was something of maternal pride in her as she fell to her task. There was necessity for haste, for the "Mr. American sirs" were assembled in the main room awaiting her. Hatsu's task completed, she took the girl by the sleeve, and led her into the big living room, where were her friends.

Even in the long loose robes of the elderly maid, she appeared but a child, with her short hair curling about her face, and her frankly questioning eyes turning from one to the other. There was an expression of mingled appeal and childish delight in that expressive look that she turned upon them ere she knelt on the floor. She made her obeisances with art and grace, as a true apprentice of her mother. Indeed, her head ceased not to bob till a laughing young voice broke the spell of silence that her advent had caused with:

"Cut it out, kid! We want to have a look at you. Want to see what sort of prize we pulled in the dark."

Promptly, obediently she rested back upon her heels, her two small hands resting flatly on her knees. She turned her face archly, as if inviting inspection, much to the entertainment of the now charmed circle. The apprentice of the House of a Thousand Joys upheld the prestige of her mother's charm. Even the thin, elderly man, with the bright glasses over which he seemed to peer with an evidently critical and appraising air, softened visibly before that mingled look of naïve appeal and glowing youth. The glasses were blinked from the nose, and dangled by their gold string. He approached nearer to the girl, again put on his glasses, and subjected her through them to a searching scrutiny, his trained eye resting longer upon the shining hair of the girl. The glasses blinked off again at the unabashed wide smile of confidence in those extraordinary eyes; he cleared his throat, prepared to deliver an opinion and diagnosis upon the particular species before his glass. Before he could speak, Jerry broke in belligerently.

"First of all, let's get this thing clear. She's not going to be handed back to that blanketty blank baboon. I'm responsible for her, and I'm going to see that she gets a square deal from this time on."

The girl's eyes widened as she looked steadily at the kindling face of the young man, whom she was more than ever assured was a special instrument of the gods. Professor Barrowes cleared his throat noisily again, and holding his glasses in his hand, punctuated and emphasised his remarks:

"Young gentlemen, I suggest that we put the matter in the hands of Mr. Blumenthal, our consul here at Nagasaki. I do not know--I will not express--my opinion of what our rights are in the matter--er as to whether we have in fact broken some law of Japan in--er--thus forcibly bringing the--ah--young lady to our home. I am inclined to think that we are about to experience trouble--considerable trouble I should say--with this man Hirata. If my memory serves me right, I recall hearing or reading somewhere that a master of such a house has certain property right in these--er--young--ah--ladies."

"That may be true," admitted the especial agent of the gods. "Suppose she is owned by this man. I'll bet that Japan is not so dashed mediæval in its laws, that it permits a chimpanzee like that to beat and ill-use even a slave, and anyway, we'll give him all that's coming to him if he tries to take her from us."

"He'll have his hands danged full trying!"

The girl's champion this time was the youthful one of the bone ribbed glasses. Looking at him very gravely, she perceived his amazing youth, despite the wise spectacles that had at first deceived her. There was that about him that made her feel he was very near to her own age, which numbered less than fifteen years. Across the intervening space between them, hazily the girl thought, what a charming playmate the boy of the bone ribbed glasses would make. She would have liked to run through the temple gardens with him, and hide in the cavities of the fantastic rocks, where Japanese children loved to play, and where the wistful eyes of the solitary little apprentice of the House of a Thousand Joys had often longingly and enviously watched them. Her new friend she was to know as "Monty." He had a fine long name with a junior on the end of it also, but it took many years before she knew her friends by other than the appellations assigned to them by each other.

Now the elderly man--perhaps he was the father, thought the girl on the mat--was again speaking in that emphatic tone of authority.

"Now my young friends, we have come to Japan with a view to studying the country and people, and to avail ourselves of such pleasures as the country affords to its tourists, etc., and, I may point out, that it was no part of our programme or itinerary to take upon ourselves the responsibility and burden, I may say, of----"

"Have--a heart!"

The big slow voice came from the very fat young man, whose melancholy expression belied the popular conception of the comical element associated with those blessed with excessive flesh. "Jinx," as his chums called him, was the scion of a house of vast wealth and fame, and it was no fault of his that his heritage had been rich also in fat, flesh and bone. But now the girl's first friend, with that manner of the natural leader among men, had again taken matters into his own evidently competent hands.

"I say, Jinx, suppose you beat it over to the consul's and get what advice and dope you can from him. Tell him we purpose carrying the case to Washington and so forth. And you, Monty and Bobs, skin over to the teahouse and scare the guts out of that chimpanzee. Hire a bunch of Japs and cops to help along with the noise. Give him the scare of his life. Tell him she--she is--dying--at her last gasp and----"

(Surely the object of their concern understood the English language, for just then several unexpected dimples sprang abroad, and the little row of white teeth showed that smile that was her heritage from her mother.)

"Tell him," went on Jerry, a bit unevenly, deviated from his single track of thought by that most engaging and surprising smile--"that we'll have him boiled in oil or lava or some other Japanese concoction. Toddle along, old dears, or that fellow with the face supporting the Darwinian theory will get ahead of us with the police."

"What's your hurry?" growled Jinx, his sentimental gaze resting fascinatedly upon the girl on the floor.

The young man Jerry had referred to as Bobs now suggested that there was a possibility that the girl was deaf and dumb, in view of the fact that she had not spoken once. This alarming suggestion created ludicrous consternation.

"Where's that dictionary, confound it!" Jerry sought the elusive book in sundry portions of his clothing, and then appealed to the oracle of the party.

"I suggest," said Professor Barrowes didactically, "that you try the--ah--young lady--with the common Japanese greeting. I believe you all have learned it by now."

Promptly there issued from four American mouths the musical morning greeting of the Japanese, reminiscent to them of a well known State productive of presidents.

"O--hi--o!"

The effect on the girl was instantaneous. She arose with grace to her feet, put her two small hands on her two small knees, bobbed up and down half a dozen times, and then with that white row of pearls revealed in an irresistible smile, she returned:

"Goog--a--morning!"

There was a swelling of chests at this. Pride in their protégé aroused them to enthusiastic expressions.

"Can you beat it?"

"Did you hear her?"

"She's a cute kid."

And from Monty:

"I could have told you from the first that a girl with hair and eyes like that wouldn't be chattering any monkey speech."

Thereupon the girl, uttered another jewel in English, which called forth not merely approbation, but loud and continuous applause, laughter, and fists clapped into hands. Said the girl:

"I speag those mos' bes' Angleesh ad Japan!"

"I'll say you do," agreed Monty with enthusiasm.

"Gosh!" said Jinx sadly. "She's the cutest kid _I've_ ever seen."

"How old are you?" Jerry put the question gently, touched, despite the merriment her words had occasioned, by something forlorn in the little figure on the mat before them, so evidently anxious to please them.

"How ole?" Her expressive face showed evidence of deep regret at having to admit the humiliating fact that her years numbered but fourteen and ten months. She was careful to add the ten months to the sum of her years.

"And what's your name?"

"I are got two names."

"We all have that--Christian and surname we call 'em. What's yours?"

"I are got Angleesh name--Fleese. You know those name?" she inquired anxiously. "Thas Angleesh name."

"Fleese! Fleese!" Not one of them but wanted to assure her that "Fleese" was a well known name in the English tongue, but even Professor Barrowes, an authority on the roots of all names, found "Fleese" a new one. She was evidently disappointed, and said in a slightly depressed voice:

"I are sawry you do not know thad Angleesh name. My father are give me those name."

"I have it! I have it!" Bobs, who had been scribbling something on paper, and repeating it with several accents, shouted that the name the girl meant was undoubtedly "Phyllis," and at that she nodded her head so vigorously, overjoyed that he threw back his head and burst into laughter, which was loudly and most joyously and ingenuously entered into by "Phyllis" also.

"So that's your name--Phyllis," said Jerry. "You _are_ English then?"

She shook her head, sighing with regret.

"No, I sawry for those. I _lig'_ be Angleesh. Thas nize be Angleesh; but me, I are not those. Also I are got Japanese name. It are Sunlight. My mother----" Her face became instantly serious as she mentioned her mother, and bowed her head to the floor reverently. "My honourable mother have give me that Japanese name--Sunlight, but my father are change those name. He are call me--Sunny. This whad he call me when he go away----" Her voice trailed off forlornly, hurt by a memory that went back to her fifth year.

They wanted to see her smile again, and Jerry cried enthusiastically:

"Sunny! Sunny! What a corking little name! It sounds just like you look. We'll call you that too--Sunny."

Now Professor Barrowes, too long in the background, came to the fore with precision. He had been scratching upon a pad of paper a number of questions he purposed to put to Sunny, as she was henceforth to be known to her friends.

"I have a few questions I desire to ask the young--ah--lady, if you have no objection. I consider it advisable for us to ascertain what we properly can about the history of Miss--er--Sunny--and so, if you will allow me."

He cleared his throat, referred to the paper in his hand and propounded the first question as follows:

"Question number one: Are you a white or a Japanese girl?"

Answer from Sunny:

"I are white on my face and my honourable body, but I are Japanese on my honourable insides."

Muffled mirth followed this reply, and Professor Barrowes having both blown his nose and cleared his throat applied his glasses to his nose but was obliged to wait a while before resuming, and then:

"Question number two: Who were or are your parents? Japanese or white people?"

Sunny, her cheeks very red and her eyes very bright:

"Aexcuse me. I are god no parents or ancestors on those worl'. I sawry. I miserable girl wizout no ancestor."

"Question number three: You had parents. You remember them. What nationality was your mother? I believe Madame Many Smiles was merely her professional pseudonym. I have heard her variously described as white, partly white, half caste. What was she--a white woman or a Japanese?"

Sunny was thinking of that radiant little mother as last she had seen her in the brilliant dancing robes of the dead geisha. The questions were touching the throbbing cords of a memory that pierced. Over the sweet young face a shadow crept.

"My m-mother," said Sunny softly, "are god two bloods ad her insides. Her father are Lussian gentleman and her mother are Japanese."

"And your father?"

A far-away look came into the girl's eyes as she searched painfully back into that past that held such sharply bright and poignantly sad memories of the father she had known such a little time. She no longer saw the eager young faces about her, or the kindly one of the man who questioned her. Sunny was looking out before her across the years into that beautiful past, wherein among the cherry blossoms she had wandered with her father. It was he who had changed her Japanese name of Sunlight to "Sunny." A psychologist might have found in this somewhat to redeem him from his sins against his child and her mother, for surely the name revealed a softness of the heart which his subsequent conduct might have led a sceptical world to doubt. Moreover, the first language of her baby lips was that of her father, and for five years she knew no other tongue. She thought of him always as of some gay figure in a bright dream that fled away suddenly into the cruel years that followed. There had been days of real terror and fear, when Sunny and her mother had taken the long trail of the mendicant, and knew what it was to feel hunger and cold and the chilly hand of charity. The mere memory of those days set the girl shivering, for it seemed such a short time since when she and that dearest mother crouched outside houses that, lighted within, shone warmly, like gaudy paper lanterns in the night; of still darker days of discomfort and misery, when they had hidden in bush, bramble and in dark woods beyond the paths of men. There had been a period of sweet rest and refuge in a mountain temple. There everything had appealed to the imaginative child. Tinkling bells and whirring wings of a thousand doves, whose home was in gilded loft and spire; bald heads of murmuring bonzes; waving sleeves of the visiting priestesses, dancing before the shrine to please the gods; the weary pilgrims who climbed to the mountain's heart to throw their prayers in the lap of the peaceful Buddha. A hermitage in a still wood, where an old, old nun, with gentle feeble voice, crooned over her rosary. All this was as a song that lingers in one's ears long after the melody has passed--a memory that stung with its very sweetness. Even here the fugitives were not permitted to linger for long.

Pursuing shadows haunted her mother's footsteps and sent her speeding ever on. She told her child that the shadows menaced their safety. They had come from across the west ocean, said the mother. They were barbarian thieves of the night, whose mission was to separate mother from child, and because separation from her mother spelled for little Sunny a doom more awful than death itself, she was wont to smother back her child's cries in her sleeve, and bravely and silently push onward. So for a period of time of which neither mother nor child took reckoning the days of their vagabondage passed.

Then came a night when they skirted the edges of a city of many lights; lights that hung like stars in the sky; lights that swung over the intricate canals that ran into streets in and out of the city; harbour lights from great ships that steamed into the port; the countless little lights of junks and fisher boats, and the merry lights that shone warmly inside the pretty paper houses that bespoke home and rest to the outcasts. And they came to a brilliantly lighted garden, where on long poles and lines the lanterns were strung, and within the gates they heard the chattering of the drum, and the sweet tinkle of the samisen. Here at the gates of the House of a Thousand Joys the mother touched the gongs. A man with a lantern in his hand came down to the gates, and as the woman spoke, he raised the light till it revealed that delicate face, whose loveliness neither pain nor privation nor time nor even death had ravaged.

After that, the story of the geisha was well known. Her career had been an exceptional one in that port of many teahouses. From the night of her début to the night of her death the renown of Madame Many Smiles had been undimmed.

Sunny, looking out before her, in a sad study, that caught her up into the web of the vanished years, could only shake her head dumbly at her questioner, as he pressed her:

"Your father--you have not answered me?"

"I kinnod speag about my--father. I sawry, honourable sir," and suddenly the child's face drooped forward as if she humbly bowed, but the young men watching her saw the tears that dropped on her clasped hands.

Exclamations of pity and wrath burst from them impetuously.

"We've no right to question her like this," declared Jerry Hammond hotly. "It's not of any consequence who her people are. She's got us now. We'll take care of her from this time forth." At that Sunny again raised her head, and right through her tears she smiled up at Jerry. It made him think of an April shower, the soft rain falling through the sunlight.