Part 1 (1/2)
The House of the Misty Star.
by Fannie Caldwell Macaulay.
I
ENTER JANE GRAY
It must have been the name that made me take that little house on the hilltop. It was mostly view, but the t.i.tle--supplemented by the very low rent--suggested the first line of a beautiful poem.
n.o.body knows who began the custom or when, but for unknown years a night-light had been kept burning in a battered old bronze lantern swung just over my front door. Through the early morning mists the low white building itself seemed made of dreams; but the tiny flame, slipping beyond the low curving eaves, shone far at sea and by its light the j.a.panese sailors, coming around the rocky Tongue of Dragons point in their old junks, steered for home and rest. To them it was a welcome beacon. They called the place ”The House of the Misty Star.”
In it for thirty years I have toiled and taught and dreamed. From it I have watched the s.h.i.+ps of mighty nations pa.s.s--some on errands of peace; some to change the map of the world. Through its cas.e.m.e.nts I have seen G.o.d's glory in the sunsets and the tenderness of His love in the dawns.
The pink hills of the spring and the crimson of the autumn have come and gone, and through the carved portals that mark the entrance to my home have drifted the flotsam and jetsam of the world. They have come for shelter, for food, for curiosity and sometimes because they must, till I have earned my t.i.tle clear as step-mother-in-law to half the waifs and strays of the Orient.
Once it was a Chinese general, seeking safety from a mob. Then it was a fierce-looking Russian suspected as a spy and, when searched, found to be a frightened girl, seeking her sweetheart among the prisoners of war.
The high, the low, the meek, and the impertinent, lost babies, begging pilgrims and tailless cats--all sooner or later have found their way through my gates and out again, barely touching the outer edges of my home life. But things never really began to happen to me, I mean things that actually counted, until Jane Gray came. After that it looked as if they were never going to stop.
You see I'd lived about fifty-eight years of solid monotony, broken only by the novelty of coming to j.a.pan as a school teacher thirty years before and, although my soul yearned for the chance to indulge in the frills of romance, opportunity to do so was about the only thing that failed to knock at my door. From the time I heard the name of Ursula Priscilla Jenkins and knew it belonged to me, I can recall but one beautiful memory of my childhood. It is the face of my mother in its frame of poke bonnet and pink roses, as she leaned over to kiss me good-by. I never saw her again, nor my father. Yellow fever laid heavy tribute upon our southern United States. I was the only one left in the big house on the plantation, and my old black nurse was the sole survivor in the servants' quarters. She took me to an orphan asylum in a straggly little southern town where everything from river banks to complexions was mud color.
Bareness and spareness were the rule, and when the tall, bony, woman manager stood near the yellow-brown part.i.tion, it took keen eyes to tell just where her face left off and the plaster began. She did not believe in education. But I was born with ideas of my own and a goodly share of ambition. I learned to read by secretly borrowing from the wharf master a newspaper or an occasional magazine which sometimes strayed off a river packet. Then I paid for a four years' course at a neighboring semi-college by working and by serving the other students. I did everything--from polis.h.i.+ng their shoes to studying their lessons for them; it earned me many a penny and a varied knowledge of human nature.
But nothing ever happened to me as it did to the other girls. I never had a holiday; I was never sick; I never went to a circus; and I never even had a proposal.
One night I went to church and heard a missionary from j.a.pan speak. My goodness! how that man could say words! His appeal for workers to go to the Flowery Kingdom was as convincing as the hump on his nose, as irresistible as the fire in his eyes. The combination ended in my coming as a teacher to the eager Nipponese, who were all athirst for English.
j.a.pan I knew was a country all by itself, and not a slice off of China; that it raised rice, kimonos and heathen. Otherwise it was only a place on the map. Whatever the new country might hold, at least, I thought, it would open a door that would lead me far away from the drab world in which I lived.
My appointment led me to the little city of Hijiyama, overlooking the magical Inland Sea. It is swung in the cleft of a mountain like a cl.u.s.tered jewel tucked in the folds of a giant velvet robe. It is a place of crumbling castles and lotus-filled moats. Here progress hesitated before the defiant breath of the ancient G.o.ds. For centuries a city of content, whispers of greater things finally reached the listening ears of eager youth, fired ambition, demanded things foreign, especially the English language, and I came in on this great wave.
I found near contentment and sober joy in my work and my beautiful old garden. But deep down in my heart I was waiting, ever waiting, for something to happen--something big, stirring, and tremendous, something romantic and poetical; but it never did. Year after year I wore the groove of my life deeper, but never slipped out of it, and one day was so like another it was hard to believe that even a night separated them.
Then without the slightest warning the change came. One day in my mail I found a letter from a student which read as follows:
O! Most Respected Teacher.
How it was our great pleasure to write your n.o.ble personage.
When I triumphed to my native home after speaking last lesson before your honorable face, my knowledge was informed by rumors of gossip that in most hateful place in city of Hijiyama was American lady. She wear name of Miss Jaygray. Who have affliction of kind heart and very bad health. Also she have white hair and no medicine. Street she live in have also j.a.panese gentlemans what kill and steal and even lie. Very bad for lady who have nice thought for gentlemans, and speak many words about Christians G.o.d. Now not one word can she speak.
Her sicker too great. Your great country say ”Unions is strong and we stand together till divided by falling out.” Please union with lady countryman and also divide. She very tired. I think little hungry too.
Yours verily TAKATA.
(Some little more.) Go down House of Flying-Sparrow Street and discover Tube-Rose Lane. There maybe you see policeman. He whistle his two partner. Hand in hand they show you bad gentlemens street where lives sick ladys mansion.
I hastened at once to the succor of my sick countrywoman. The way led through streets obscure and ill-kept, the inhabitants covertly seeking shelter as the policemen and I approached. It was a section I knew to be the rendezvous of outcasts of this and neighboring cities. It was a place where the bravest officer never went alone. For making a last stand for the right to their pitiful sordid lives, the criminals herded together in one desperate band when danger threatened any of the brotherhood. The very stillness of the streets bespoke hidden iniquity.
Every house presented a closed front. Surely, I thought, ignorance of conditions could be the only excuse for any woman of any creed choosing to live in such surroundings as these.
In the cleanest of the hovels I found Miss Gray, her middle-aged figure shrunken to the proportions of a child. There was no difficulty in finding the cause of her illness. She was half-starved. Her reason for being in that section was as senseless as it was mistaken, except to one whose heart had been fired by a pa.s.sion for saving souls. After being revived by a stimulant from my emergency kit, she told me her name, which I already knew, that she was an American and her calling that of a missionary. I thought I knew every type of the profession and I was proud to call many of them my friends, but Miss Gray was an original model, peculiar in quality and indefinite in pattern.