The House of the Misty Star by Frances Little (ereader for android TXT) 📕
- Author: Frances Little
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"Haven't any Board," she answered weakly. "I'm an Independent."
"Independent what?" I demanded.
"Independent Daughter of Hope."
Her appearance was a libel on any variety of independence and a joke on hope, but I waited for the rest of the story.
She said that the Order to which she belonged was not large. She was one of a small band of women bound by a solemn oath to go where they could and seek to help and uplift fallen humanity by living the life of the native poor. She had chosen Japan because it was "so pretty and poetical." She had worked her way across the Pacific as stewardess on a large steamer, and had landed in Hijiyama a few months before with enough cash to keep a canary bird in delicate health for a month. Her enthusiasm was high, her zeal blazed. If only her faith were strong enough to stand the test, her need for food and clothing would be supplied from somewhere. "Now," she moaned, "something has happened. Maybe my want of absolute trust brought me to it. I'm sick and hungry and I've failed. Oh! I wanted to help these sweet people; I wanted to save their dear souls."
I was skeptical as to this special brand of philanthropy, but I was touched by the grief of her disappointed hopes. I knew the particular sting. At the same time my hand twitched to shake her for going into this thing in so impractical a way. Teaching and preaching in a foreign land may include romance, but I've yet to hear where the most enthusiastic or fanatical found nourishment or inspiration on a diet of visions pure and simple. While there must be something worth while in a woman who could starve for her belief, yet in the eyes of the one before me was the look of a trusting child who would never know the practical side of life any more than she would believe in its ugliness. It was not faith she needed. It was a guardian.
"Maybe I had better die," she wailed. "Dead missionaries are far too few to prove the glory of the cause."
I suggested that live ones could glorify far more than dead ones, and told her that I was going to take her home with me and put strength into her body and a little judgment into her head, if I could.
She broke out again. "Oh, I cannot go! I must stay here! If work is denied me, maybe it is my part to starve and prove my faith by selling my soul for the highest price."
Although I was to learn that this was a favorite expression of Miss Gray's, the meaning of which she never made quite clear to me, that day it sounded like the melancholy mutterings of hunger. For scattering vapors of pessimism, and stirring up symptoms of hope, I'd pin my faith to a bowl of thick hot soup before I would a book full of sermons.
Without further argument I called to some coolies to come with a "kago," a kind of lie-down-sit-up basket swung from a pole, and in it we laid the weak, protesting woman.
The men lifted it to their shoulders and the little procession, guarded fore and aft by a policeman, moved through the sinister shadows of Flying Sparrow street to the clearer heights of "The House of the Misty Star."
Long training had strengthened, and association had verified my unshakable belief that the most essential quality of the very high calling of a missionary, is an unlimited supply of consecrated commonsense. So far, not a vestige of it had I discovered in the devotee I was taking to my home, but Jane Gray was as full of surprises as she was of sentiment.
She not only stayed in my house, but with her coming the spell of changeless days was broken. It was as if her thin hand held the charm by which my door of opportunity was flung wide, and through it I saw my garden of dreams bursting into flower.
II KISHIMOTO SAN CALLSI had always been dead set against taking a companion permanently into my home. For one reason I heeded the warning of the man who made the Japanese language. To denote "peace" he drew a picture of a roof with a woman under it. Evidently being a gentleman of experience, he expressed the word "trouble" by adding another person of the same sex to the picture without changing the size of the roof.
Then, too, there was my cash account to settle with. Ever since I'd been drawing a salary from the National Education Board of Missions, I felt like apologizing to the few feeble figures that stared accusingly at me from my small ledger, for the demands I made upon them for charity, for sickness, and for entertainment of all who knocked at my door.
My classes were always crowded, but there were times when the purses of my students were more lean than their bodies. Frequently such an one looked at me and said, "Moneys have all flewed away from my pockets. Only have vast consuming fire for learning." It being against my principle to see anybody consumed while I had a rin, there was nothing to do but make up to the Board what I had failed to collect.
These circumstances caused me to hesitate risking the peace of my household, or putting one more responsibility on my purse.
Then sweet potatoes decided me. It was a matter of history that famine, neither wide-spread nor local, ever gained a foothold where "Satsuma Emo" flourished. This year they were fatter and cheaper than ever before. I knew dozens of ways to fix them, natural and disguised; so I bought an extra supply and made up my mind to keep Jane Gray.
The little missionary thrived in her new environment as would a drooping plant freshly potted. As she grew stronger, she hinted at trying once again to live in her old quarters, that she might fast and work and pray for her sinners. I promptly suppressed any plans in that direction.
After all, I had been a lonelier woman than I realized, and Jane was like a kitten with a bell around its neck—one grows used to its playing about the house and misses it when gone. She also resembled a fixed star in her belief that she had been divinely appointed to carry a message of hope to the vilest of earth, and I felt that the same power had charged me with the responsibility of impressing her with a measure of commonsense.
So we compromised for a while at least. She would stay with me, and I would not interfere with her work in the crime section, nor give way to remarks on the subject.
I was sure the conditions in the Quarter would prove impossible, but as some people cannot be convinced unless permitted to draw their own diagram of failure, it was best for her to try when she was able to make the effort.
The making of an extra room in a Japanese house is only a matter of shifting a paper screen or so into a ready-made groove. It took me some time to decide whether I should screen off Jane in the corner that commanded a full view of the wonderful sea, or at the end where by sliding open the paper doors she could step at once into the fairy land of my garden.
Jane decided it herself. I discovered her stretched in an old wheel-chair before the open doors, looking into the sun-flooded greenery of the garden, and heard her softly repeating,
In a land
Where only dreams come true,
And flutes of memory waken
Longings forgotten."
Any one who felt that way about my garden had a right to live close to it.
In half an hour Jane was established. My enthusiasm waned a bit the next day when I found all the pigeons in the neighborhood fluttering about the open door, fearlessly perching on the invalid's lap and shoulders while she fed them high-priced rice and dainty bits of dearly-bought chicken.
I dispersed the pigeons with a flap of my apron and with forced mildness protested. "I'm obliged to ask you to be less generous. The price of rice is higher than those pigeons can fly and, as for chicken, it's about ten sen a feather. There's abundant food for you; but we cannot afford to feed all the fowls of the air."
"Oh! dear Miss Jenkins, I couldn't drive them away. The cunning things! Every coo they uttered sounded like a love word."
I hoped it was the patient's physical weakness, and not a part of her nature.
I could not possibly survive a steady diet of emotion so tender that it bubbled over at the flutter of a pigeon's wing.
I'd brought it on myself, however, and I was determined to share my home and my life with Jane Gray. Sentimental and visionary as she was, with the funny little twist in her tongue, the poor excuse of a body seemed the last place power of any kind would choose for a habitation. I was not disposed to attribute the supernatural to my companion, but from the day of her arrival unusual events popped up to speak for themselves.
A nearby volcano, asleep for half a century, blew off its cap, covering land and sea with ashes and fiery lava. All my pink roses bloomed weeks earlier than they had any business to, and for the first time in years my old gardener got drunk. Between dashes of cold water on his head he tearfully wailed my unexpressed sentiments, in part:
"Too many damfooly things happen all same time. Evil spirit get loose. Sake help me fight. Me nice boy. Me ve'y good boy but I no like foreign devil what is."
Then one day, about a month after my family had been enlarged, I had just wheeled my newly acquired responsibility out in the garden to sun when Kishimoto San called. He often came for consultation. While his chief interest in life was to keep Hijiyama strictly Japanese and rigidly Buddhist, he was also superintendent of schools for his district and educational matters gave us a common interest. However, the late afternoon was an unusual hour for him to appear and one glance at his face showed trouble of a personal nature had drawn heavy lines in his mask of calmness. I had known Kishimoto San for twenty years. Part of him I could read like a primer; the other part was a sealed volume to which I doubt if even Buddha had the key. Sometimes when he was calling I wished Gabriel would appear in my doorway and announce the end of the world to see, if without omitting a syllable, Kishimoto would keep on to the end of the last phrase in the greeting prescribed for the occasion.
The ceremony off his mind, he sat silent, unresponsive to the openings I tried to make for a beginning. Not till I had exhausted small talk of current events and asked after his family in particular instead of his ancestors in general, did his tongue loosen.
Then the floodgates of his pent-up emotion opened and forth poured a torrent of anger, disappointment, and outraged pride. I had never before seen a man so shaken, but then I hadn't seen many, much less one with the red blood of Daimyos in his veins. He was a man whose soul
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