Chapter 3

Two hours out from Yokohama, the train boy came into the coach, and with a smile as cheerful as if he were saying, "Happy New Year," announced that there was a washout in front of us and a landslide at the back of us. Would everybody please rest their honorable bones in the village while a bridge was built and a river filled in. The passengers trailed into a settlement of straw roofs, bamboo poles and acres of white and yellow lilies. I went to a quaint little inn--that was mostly out!--built over a fussy brook; and a pine tree grew right out of the side of the house. My room was furnished with four mats and a poem hung on the wall. When the policeman came in to apologize for the rudeness of the storm in delaying me, the boy who brought my bags had to step outside so that the official would have room to bow properly. I ate my supper of fish-omelet and turnip pickle served in red lacquer bowls, and drank tea out of cups as big as thimbles. Jack says Japanese teacups ought to be forbidden; in a moment of forgetfulness they could so easily slip down with the tea.

It had been many a year since I was so separated from my kind and each hour of isolation makes clearer a thing I 've never doubted, but sometimes forget, that the happiest woman is she whose every moment is taken up in being necessary to somebody; and to such, unoccupied minutes are like so many drops of lead. That, with a telegram I read telling of the increasing dangers of the plague in Manchuria, threatened to send me headlong into a spell of anxiety and the old terrible loneliness.

Happily the proprietor and his wife headed it off by asking me if I would be their guest for this evening to see the Bon Matsuri, the beautiful Festival of the Dead. On the thirteenth day of the seventh month, all the departed spirits take a holiday from Nirvana or any other seaport they happen to be in and come on a visit to their former homes to see how it fares with the living. Poor homesick spirits! Not even Heaven can compensate for the separation from beloved country and friends. As we passed along, the streets were alight with burning rushes placed at many doors to guide the spiritual excursionists. Inside, the people were praying, shrines were decorated and children in holiday dress merrily romped. Why, Mate, it was worth being a ghost just to come back and see how happy everybody was. For on this night of nights, cares and sorrows are doubly locked in a secret place and the key put carefully away. You couldn't find a coolie so heartless as to show a shadow of trouble to his ghostly relatives when they return for so brief a time to hold happy communion with the living. He may be hungry, he may be sick, but there is a brave smile of welcome on his lips for the spirits.

The crazy old temple at the foot of the mountain, glorified by a thousand lights and fluttering flags, reaped a harvest of _rins_ and _rens_ paid to the priests for paper prayers and bamboo flower-holders with which to decorate the graves. The cemetery was on the side of the hill, and every step of the way somebody stopped at a stone marker to fasten a lantern to a small fishing-pole and pin a prayer near by. This was to guide the spirit to his own particular spot.

A breeze as soft as a happy sigh came through the pines and gently rocked the lanterns. The dim figures of the worshipers moved swiftly about, as delighted as children in the shadow-pictures made by the twinkling lights, eagerly seeking out remote spots that no grave might be without its welcoming gleam. A long line of white-robed dancing girls came swaying by with clapping hands to soft-voiced chanting.

I, too, though an alien, was moved with the good-will and kindness that sung through the very air and fearlessly I would have decorated any festive ghost that happened along. I looked to see where I might lay the offering I held in my hand. My hostess plucked my sleeve and pointed to a tiny tombstone under a camellia tree. I went closer and read the English inscription, "Dorothy Dale. Aged 2 years." There was a tradition that once in the long ago a missionary and his wife lived in the village. Through an awful epidemic of cholera they stuck to their posts, nursed and cared for the people. Their only child was the price they paid for their constancy. To each generation the story had been told, and through all the years faithful watch had been kept over the little enclosure. Now it was all a-glimmer with lanterns shaped like birds and butterflies. I added my small offering and turned hotelwards reluctantly.

My ancient host and hostess trotted along near by, eager to share all their pathetic little gaieties with me. Their lives together had about as much real comradeship as a small brown hen and a big gray owl, and they had been married sixty years! They had toiled and grown old together, but that did not mean that wifey was to walk anywhere but three feet to the rear, nor to speak except when her lord and ruler stopped talking to take a whiff of his pipe. I tried to walk behind with the old lady but she threatened to stand in one spot for the rest of the night. Then I vainly coaxed her to walk with me at her husband's side. But her face was so full of genuine horror at such disrespect that I desisted. Think, Mate, of trying to puzzle out the make-up of a nation which for the sake of a long-ago kindness will for years keep a strange baby's grave green and yet whose laws will divorce a woman for disobedience to her husband's mother and where the ancient custom of "women to heel" still holds good.

And this is the land where the Seeker came for the truth!

Sada thinks it paradise and I, as before, am sending to Jack

A heart of love for thee Blown by the summer breezes Ten thousand miles of sea.

July, 1911.

_Mate_:

There ought to be some kind of capital punishment for the woman who has nothing to do but kill time. It's an occupation that puts crimps in the soul and offers the supreme moment in which the devil may work his rabbit foot. No, I cannot settle down or hustle up to anything until I hear from Jack or you. Very soon I will be reduced to doing the one desperate thing lurking in this corner of the woods, flirting with the solitary male guest, who has a strong halt in his voice and whose knees are not on speaking terms.

Of course it is raining. If the sun gets gay and tries the bluff of being friendly, a heavy giant of a cloud rises promptly up from behind a mountain and puts him out of business. Still, why moan over the dampness? It makes the hills look like great green plush sofa-cushions and the avenues like mossy caves.

I have read till my eyes are crossed and I have written to every human I know. I have watched the giggling little maids patter up to a two-inch shrine and, flinging a word or two to Buddha, use the rest of their time to gossip. And the old lady who washes her vegetables and her clothes in the same baby-lake just outside my window amuses me for at least ten minutes. Then, Mate, for real satisfaction, I must turn to you, whose patience is elastic and enduring. It is one of my big joys that your interest and love are just the same, as in those other days when you packed me off to Japan for the good of my country and myself; and then sent Jack after me. Guess I should have stayed at home, as Jack told me, but I am glad I did not.

Though it has poured every minute I have been here, there have been bursts of sunshine inside, if not out. The other day my table boy brought me the menu and asked for an explanation of _assorted_ fruits. I told him very carefully it meant _mixed, different kinds_. He is a smart lad. He understands my Japanese! He grasped my meaning immediately, and wrote it down in a little book. This morning he came to my room and announced: "Please, Lady, some assorted guests await you in the audience chamber; one Japanese and two American persons."

I have had my first letter from Sada too, simply spilling over with youth and enthusiasm. The girl is stark mad over the fairy-landness of it all. Says her rooms are in Uncle's private house, which is in quite a different part of the garden from the tea-house. (Thank the Lord for small mercies!) She says Uncle has given her some beautiful clothes and is so good to her. I dare say. He has taken her to see a lovely old castle and wonderful temple. The streets are all pictures and the scenery is glorious! That is true, but the girl cannot live off scenery any more than a nightingale can thrive on the scent of roses. What is coming when the glamour of the scenery wears off and Uncle puts on the pressure of his will?

I have not dared to give her any suggestion of warning. She is deadly sure of her duty, so enthralled is she with the thought of service to her mother's people. If I am to help her, the shock of disillusionment must come from some other direction. The _disillusioner_ is seldom forgiven. I do not know what plans are being worked out behind Uncle's lowered eyelids. But I _do_ know his idea of duty does not include keeping such a valuable asset as a bright and beautiful niece hid away for his solitary joy. In fact, he would consider himself a neglectful and altogether unkind relative if he did not marry Sada off to the very best advantage to himself. In the name of all the Orient, what else is there to do with a _girl_, and especially one whose blood is tainted with that of the West?

Well, Mate, my thoughts grew so thick on the subject I nearly suffocated. I went for a walk and ran right into a cavalcade of donkeys, jinrickshas and chairs, headed by the Seeker and Dolly, who has also annexed the little Maharajah.

They had been up to Chuzenji--and Chuzenji I would have you know is lovely enough, with its emerald lake and rainbow mists, to start a man's tongue to love-making whether he will or not. And so surely as it is raining, something has happened. Dolly was as gay as a day-old butterfly and smiled as if a curly-headed Cupid had tickled her with a wing-feather. The Seeker was deadly solemn. Possibly the aftermath of his impetuosity.

Oh, well! there is no telling what wonders can be worked by incurable youthfulness and treasures laid up in a trust company.

The little Prince, with every pocket and his handkerchief full of small images of Buddha which he was collecting, asked at once for Sada. His heart was in his eyes, but there is no use tampering with a to-be-incarnation by encouraging worldly thoughts. So I said I had not seen her since we landed. They were due on board the _Siberia_ in Yokohama to-night on their way to China. I waved them good wishes and went on, amused and not a little troubled. Worried over Sada, hungry for Jack, lonesome for you. I passed one of the gorgeous blue, green and yellow gates, at the entrance of a temple. On one side is carved a distorted figure, that looks like a cross between an elephant and a buzzard. It is called "Baku, the eater of evil dreams." My word! but I could furnish him a feast that would give him the fanciest case of indigestion he ever knew!

Mate, you would have to see Nikko, with its majestic cryptomarias, sheltering the red and gold lacquer temples; you would have to feel the mystery of the gray-green avenues, and have its holy silences fall like a benediction upon a restless spirit, to realize what healing for soul and body is in the very air, to understand why I joyfully loitered for two hours and came back sane and hungry, but wet as a fish.

Write me about the only man, the kiddies and your own blessed happy self.

I agree with Charity. "Ef you want to spile a valuable wife, tu'n her loose in a patch of idlesomeness."

STILL AT NIKKO, August, 1911.

You beloved girl, I have heard from Jack and my heart is singing a ragtime tune of joy and thanksgiving. How he laughed at me for being too foolishly lonesome to stay in America without him. Oh, these, men! Does he forget he raged once upon a time, when he was in America without me? As long as I am here though, he wants me to have as good a time as possible. Do anything I want, and--blessed trusting man!--buy anything I see that will fit in the little house at home.

Can you believe it? After a fierce battle the sun won out this morning, and even the blind would know by the dancing feel of the air that it was a glorious day. At eight o'clock, when the little maids went up to the shrine, happy as kittens let out for a romp, they forgot even to look Buddha-ward and took up their worship time in playing tag. The old woman who uses the five-foot lake as the family wash-tub, brought out all her clothes, the grand-baby, and the snub-nosed poodle that wears a red bib, to celebrate the sunshine by a carnival of washing.

I could not stand four walls a minute longer. I am down in the garden writing you, in a tea-house made with three fishing-poles and a bunch of straw. It is covered with pink morning-glories as big as coffee cups.

It has been three weeks since my last letter and I know your interest in Jack and germs is almost as great as mine. Jack has been in Peking. He thinks the revolution of the Chinese against the Manchu Government is going to be something far more serious this time than a flutter of fans and a sputter of shooting-crackers. The long-suffering worm with the head of a dragon is going to turn, and when it does, there will not be a Manchu left to tell the pig tale.

Jack is in Mukden now, where he is about to lose his mind with joy over the prospect of looking straight in the eye--if it has one--this wicked old germ with a new label, and telling it what he thinks. The technical terms he gives are as paralyzing as a Russian name spelled backwards.

In a day's time this fearful thing wipes out entire families and villages. It has simply ravaged northern Manchuria and the country about. Jack says so deadly are the effects of these germs in the air that if a man walking along the street happens to breathe in one, he is a corpse on the spot before he is through swallowing. The remains are gathered up by men wearing shrouds and net masks, and the peaceful Oriental who was not doing a thing hut attending strictly to his own business, is soon reduced to ashes. All because of a pesky microbe with a surplus of energy.

You know perfectly well, Mate, Jack does not speak in this frivolous manner of his beloved work. The interpretation is wholly mine. But I dare not be serious over it. I must push any thought of his danger to the further ends of nowhere.

Jack thinks the native doctors have put up a brave fight, but so far the laugh has been all on the side of the frisky germ.

It blasts everything it touches and is most fastidious. Nobody can blame it for choosing as its nesting-place the little soft furred Siberian marmots, which the Chinese hunt for their skin. If only the hunters could be given a dip in a sulphur vat before they lay them down to sleep in the unspeakable inns with their spoils wrapped around them, the chance for infection would not be so great. Of course the bare suggestion of a bath might prove more fatal than the plague, for oftener than not the hunters are used only as a method of travel by the merry microbe and are immune from the effects. Of course Jack has all sorts of theories as to why this is so. But did you ever see a scientist who didn't have a workable theory for everything from the wrong end of a carpet-tack to the evolution of a June bug?

From the hunters and their spoils the disease spreads and their path southwards can be traced by desolated villages and piles of bones.

Jack tells me he is garbed in a long white robe effect (I hope he won't grow wings), with a good-sized mosquito net on a frame over his head and face. He works in heavy gloves. Mouth and nose being the favorite point of attack, everybody who ventures out wears over this part of the face a curiously shaped shield, whose firm look says, "No admittance here." But all the same, that germ from Siberia is a wily thief and steals lives by the thousands, in spite of all precautions.

Jack is as enthusiastic over the fight against the scourge as a college boy over football. His letter has so many big technical words in it, I had to pay excess postage.

I 've read his letter twice, but to save me I cannot find any suggestion of the remotest possibility of my coming nearer. Yes, I know I said Japan only. But way down in the cellar of my heart I _hoped_ he would say nearer.

What a happy day it has been. Here is your letter, just come. The priests up at the temple have asked me to see the ceremony of offering food to the spirits, in the holy of holies.

There is not time for me to add another word to this letter. What a dear you are, to love while you lecture me. What you say is all true. A woman's place _is_ in her home. But just now out of the East, I 've had a call to play silent partner to science and while it 's a lonesome sport, at least it 's far more entertaining than caring for a husbandless house. Anyhow I am sending you a hug and a thousand kisses for the babies.

SHOJI LAKE, August, 1911.

Mate, think of the loveliest landscape picture you ever saw, put me in it and you will know where I am. With some friends from Honolulu and a darling old man--observe I say _old_!--from Colorado, we started two days ago, to walk around the base of Fuji. Everything went splendidly till a typhoon hit us amidships and sent us careening, blind, battered and soaked into this red and white refuge of a hotel, that clings to the side of a mountain like a woodpecker to a telephone pole. I have seen storms, but the worst I ever saw was a playful summer breeze compared with the magnificent fury of this wind that snapped great trees in two as if they had been young bean-poles, and whipped the usually peaceful lake into raging waves that swept through a gorge and greedily licked up a whole village.

Our path was high up, but right over the water. Sometimes we were crawling on all fours. Mostly we were flying just where the wind listed. If a tree got in our way as we flew, so much the worse for us. It is funny now, but it was not at the time! Seriously, I was in immediate peril of being blown to glory _via_ the fierce green foam below. My Colorado Irishman is not only a darling, but a hero. Once I slipped, and stopped rolling only when some faithful pines were too stubborn to let go.

I wag many feet below the reach of any arm. In a twinkling, my friend had stripped the kimono off the baggage coolie's back, and made a lasso with which he pulled me up. Then shocked to a standstill by the shortcomings of the coolie's birthday suit, he snatched off his coat and gave it to him, with a dollar. Such a procession of bedraggled and exhausted pleasure-seekers as we were, when three men stood behind our hotel door and opened it just wide enough to haul us in. But hot baths and boiling tea revived us and soon we were as merry as any people can be who have just escaped annihilation.

The typhoon passed as suddenly as it came, and now the world--or at least this part of it--is as glowing and beautiful as if freshly tinted by the Master Hand.

A moment ago I looked up to see my rescuer gazing out of the window. I asked, "How do you feel, Mr. Carson?" His voice trembled when he answered: "Lady, I feel glorified, satisfied and nigh about petrified. Look at that!"

Below lay Shoji, its shimmering waters rimmed with velvety green. Every raindrop on the pines was a prism; the mountain a brocade of blossom. To the right Fuji, the graceful, ever lovely Fuji; capricious as a coquette and bewitching in her mystery, with a thumbnail moon over her peak, like a silver tiara on the head of a proud beauty; at her base the last fleecy clouds of the day, gathered like worshipers at the feet of some holy saint.

The man's face shone. For forty years he had worked at harness-making, always with the vision before him that some day he might take this trip around the world. He has the soul of an artist, which has been half starved in the narrow environment of his small town life. Cannot you imagine the mad revel of his soul in this pictureland?

He is going to Mukden. Of course I told him all about Jack's work. The old fellow, he must be all of seventy, was thrilled. I am going to give him a letter to Jack. Also to some friends in Peking; they will be good to him. If anybody deserves a merry-go-round sort of a holiday, he does. Think of sewing on saddles and bridles all these years, when his heart was withering for beauty!

I am glad of your eager interest in Sada. How like you! Never too absorbed in your own life to share other people's joys and sorrows and festivities.

If your wise head evolves a plan of action, send by wireless, for if I read aright her message received to-day, the time is fast coming when the red lights of danger will be flashing. I will quote: "Last night Uncle asked me to sing to some people who were giving a dinner at the tea-house. I put on my loveliest kimono and a hair-dresser did my hair in the old Japanese style and stuck a red rose at the side. For the first time I went into that beautiful, _beautiful_ place my Uncle calls "the Flower Blooming" tea-house. It was more like a fairy palace. How the girls, who live there, laughed at my guitar. They had never seen one before. How they whispered over the color of my eyes. Said they matched my kimono, and they tittered over my clumsiness in sitting on the floor. But I forgot everything when the door slid open and I looked into the most wonderful dream-garden that ever was, and people everywhere. I finished singing, there was clapping and loud _banzais_. I looked up and realized there were only men at this dinner and I never saw so many bottles in all my life. I felt very strange and so far away from dear Susan West. After I had sung once more I started back to my home. Uncle met me. I told him I was going to bed. For the first time he was cross and ordered me back to the play place, where I was to stay until he came for me. There never was anything so lovely as the green and pink garden and the lily-shaped lights, and the flowers; and such _pretty_ girls who knew just what to do. But I cannot understand the men who come here. When dear old Billy"--thank heaven she says _dear_ Billy!--"talks I know just what he means. But these men use so many words Susan never taught me, and laugh so loud when they say them.

"There was one man named Hara whose clothes were simply gorgeous. The girls say he is very rich, and a great friend of Uncle's! He may have money, but he is not over-burdened with manners. He can out-stare an owl."

There was more. But that is enough to show me Uncle's hand as plainly as if I were a palmist. If nothing happens to prevent, the man promises to do what thousands of his kind have done before: regardless of obstacles and consequences marry the girl off to the highest bidder; rid himself of all responsibility and make a profit at the same time. From his point of view it is the only thing to do. He would be the most astonished uncle in Mikado-land if anybody suggested to him that Sada had any rights or feelings in the matter. He would tell you that as Sada's only male relative, custom gave him the right to dispose of her as he saw fit, and custom is law and there is nothing back of _that_!