The Breath of the Gods Part 4

Chiefly because of this modest simplicity of his speech, no one suspected him of the growing pa.s.sion. 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 ill.u.s.trated article on rice culture,--in j.a.pan. 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 j.a.p!" 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.pan,--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 s.h.i.+mmering 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 cochere, 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 pa.s.sed 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 debutante, 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 a.s.sured 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 Was.h.i.+ngton. Mrs.

Todd's initial step had been to buy a good, substantial home in a fas.h.i.+onable 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 pa.s.sed 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 fas.h.i.+oned 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 pa.s.sed 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Jose 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 sc.r.a.pe 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! Was.h.i.+ngton is better for her future prospects than our dear Western home. We must try to endure Was.h.i.+ngton 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 s.h.i.+pped 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 j.a.pan. 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 apprentices.h.i.+p.

Miss Onda of Tokio (Onda Yuki-ko, the full name had been registered) arrived, as boarding inmate of the fas.h.i.+onable Was.h.i.+ngton 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 j.a.panese 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 friends.h.i.+p that the American succeeded in enticing her home. After this, the course of true love ran smooth. Each Friday night not pa.s.sed with her j.a.panese 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 pa.s.sionate, vital note of loyalty which is the keynote to j.a.panese 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 G.o.ds 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 j.a.panese minister. To be intimate with any j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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, _j.a.p_-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--Was.h.i.+ngton, 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.