I
It was cherry-blossom time in Japan.
Not only had the war ended in precisely the way the war should end, but Nathan and Madelaine had lived through that horrible winter of 1918-1919 in the typhus pest house that was Siberia and come through unscathed.
It had been an overwhelming revelation to Nathan of the woman he was growing to love with all the untwisted, unleashed, latent forces that were best within him during the horror days of that winter. Cool, poised, positive, Madelaine had never flinched, never complained, never shirked the most terrible and revolting of situations. For two months she had lain down to sleep each night in a medical train side-tracked but fifty feet from carloads of frozen corpses piled like billets of wood on freight trains in the forty-below-zero weather, waiting wholesale interment far outside the city in the spring.
Nathan had been obliged to leave her in January. The central Siberian Government at Omsk had fallen. The Czechs were departing for home. Steadily and deadly, the bloody hand of the Lenine Government was reaching out for crazed jurisdiction over all the Russias. Nathan made the long trip out to Vladivostok and remained there helping to wind up the post-war activities of the Red Triangle. Then he went down to Japan. From January to the last of April he did not hear from the girl, and there were nights when fear that she had succumbed to the typhus tortured him so that the furrows in his cheeks and forehead were like saber scars.
But the nightmare ended. He had gone down to Tsuruga to meet her. A typhoon had churned the Japan Sea to a two-day fury. She had been ill. With a stab of compassion Nathan beheld how weak and spent she was. They dined in the little European restaurant on the second floor of the ticket building at the length of the wharf.
“And you succeeded in getting sailings?” asked Madelaine.
“On the Siberia Maru for the twenty-first. We’ve almost ten days to rest and look around Japan. I’m sorry you look so tired. You need the holiday!”
“How glorious it will be to get back to God’s country,” the girl returned, “where there’s law and order and cleanliness and decency. Where you can address a stranger on the street,” she laughed, “and have him understand you at once!”
After lunch they had taken kurumas across Tsuruga City to the station where the train was being made up for Yokohama. Gradually Madelaine recovered her buoyancy of heart, shutting away thought of the Siberian horror which no panacea in the world but time could cure. In fact, there were periods in the reaction when she was almost childish in her effort to live now only for the present and the future. All that day they had followed the great northern sweep of the Inland Sea whose colors and vistas were like a painting on a Japanese screen. They had reached Yokohama at seven o’clock.
They were like lovers on their honeymoon already. They changed into civilian clothes. In the next few days they visited Tokio, Nikko, Fujiyama, the Great Buddha and Torii at Kamakura.
It was cherry-blossom time now in Japan. And in cherry-blossom time in Japan came that night when Nathan asked the Girl-Without-a-Name to take his own and be his wife.