Part 21 (1/2)

That city interests me deeply, as yet the spiritual centre of the West, whose voice still influences the politics of Central Europe.

In May I shall be at the Paris Salon and cross over to London in the early part of June.

It snows every day in Vienna and I spend my time mostly with the old doctors of the University. Their talks on philosophy and science are indeed interesting, but somehow or other I don't feel the delight I had in your society in New York. Why?

July 12, 1887.

MY DEAR MISS KELLOGG:

I am very glad to hear that you are in Europe. My duties in London end this week and I have decided to start for Munich next morning, thence to Dresden and Berlin. I am thus looking forward to the great pleasure of meeting you again and gathering fragrance from your conversation. Mrs. Gilder wrote to me that you were not quite well since your tour in the West and my anxiety mingles with my hopes. The atmosphere of English civilisation weighs heavily on me and I am longing to be away. It seems that civilisation does not agree with a member of an Eastern barbaric tribe. My conception of music has been gradually changing. The Ninth Symphony has revolutionised it. Where is the future of music to be?

Many questions crowd on me and I am impatient to lay them before you at Carlsbad. Will you allow me to do so?

BERLIN. KAISERHAUF, July 24th.

MY DEAR MISS KELLOGG:

The Spirit of Unrest chases me northward. Dresden glided dimly before me. Holbein was a disappointment. The Sistine Madonna was divine beyond my expectation. I saw Raphael in his purity and was delighted. None of his pictures is so inspired as this. Still my thoughts wandered amid these grand creations. They flitted past in a shower of colours and shadows and I have drifted hither through the hazy forests of Heine and the troubled grey of Millet's twilight....

To me your friends.h.i.+p is the boat that bears me proudly home. I wait with pleasure any line you may send me there. Wis.h.i.+ng every good to you, I remain yours respectfully.

KAISERHAUF, July 28th, 1887.

MY DEAR MISS KELLOGG:

Ten thousand thanks for your kind letter. My address in j.a.pan is Monbusho, Tokio, and if you will write to me there I shall be so happy! The task which I have imposed upon myself--the preserving of historical continuity and internal development, etc.,--has to work very slowly. I must be patient and cautious. Still I shall be delighted to confide to you from time to time how I am getting on with my dream if you will allow me to do so. You say that you have a hope of finding what you long for in Buddhism. Surely your lotus must be opening to the dawn. European philosophy has reached to a point where no advance is possible except through mysticism. Yet they ignore the hidden truths on limited scientific grounds. The Berlin University has thus been forced to return to Kant and begin afresh. They have destroyed but have no power to construct, and they never will if they refuse to _see_ more into themselves....

Hoping you the best and the brightest, I am

Yours faithfully,

OKAKURA KAKUDZO.

And so I come to one of all these who was really a ”sincere admirer,”

and a faithful lover, although I never knew him. It is a difficult incident to write of, for I feel that it holds some of the deepest elements of sentiment and of tragedy with which I ever came in touch.

I was singing in Boston when a man sent me a message saying that he was connected with a newspaper and had something of great importance about which he wanted to see me. He furthermore said that he wished to see me alone. It was an extraordinary request and, at first, I refused. I suspected a subterfuge--a wager, or something humiliating of that sort.

But he persisted, sending yet another message to the effect that he had something to communicate to me which was of an essentially personal nature. Finally I consented to grant him the interview and, as he had requested, I saw him alone.

He was just back from the front where he had been war correspondent during the heart of the Civil War, and he told me that he had a letter to give to me from a soldier in his division who had been shot. The soldier was mortally wounded when the reporter found him. He was lying at the foot of a tree at the point of death, and the correspondent asked if he could take any last messages for him to friends or relatives. The soldier asked him to write down a message to take to a woman whom he had loved for four years, but who did not know of his love.

”Tell her,” he said, speaking with great difficulty, ”that I would not try even to meet her; but that I have loved her, before G.o.d, as well as any man ever loved a woman.” He asked the reporter to feel inside his uniform for the woman's picture. ”It is Miss Kellogg,” he added, just before he died. ”You--don't think that she will be offended if I send her this message--now--do you?”

He asked the correspondent to draw his sabre and cut off a lock of hair to send to me, and the reporter wrote down the message on the only sc.r.a.ps of paper at his disposal--torn bits scribbled over with reports of the enemy's movements, and the names of other dead soldiers whose people must be notified when the battle was over. And then the soldier--my soldier--died; and the correspondent left him the picture and came away.

The scribbled message and the lock of hair he put into my hands, saying:

”He was very much worried lest you would think him presumptuous. I told him that I was sure you would not.”

I was weeping as he spoke, and so he left me.