II
He had not meant to ask her to be his wife, not then. But the night before they sailed he had gone with her on a last walk about Yokohama, their final contact with the quaint, droll, beautiful empire of cloisonné, and iris, of weird distances and romantic shrines, of—well, just Japan.
It was a moonlit, lazy-warm May evening. They sank down to rest finally in the little park opposite the International Y. M. C. A. The great treaty port was hushed, that fantastic, pregnant, unreal hush which permeates all Nipponese cities by night, even though they know little clash of traffic by day. The hour was late. The park was deserted. Street lamps had been extinguished; the moonlight made them superfluous. The exotic shrubbery, the great yellow moon peeping over the top of a gigantic pepper-tree, the sharp, intermittent cleek of the cicadas and other night insects singing out of tune around them, now and then the light of a pink-paper lantern bobbing along on the shafts of a distant rickshaw turned that park into a Garden of Dreams.
Madelaine was clothed in a white frock, white pumps; she carried a white parasol splashed over with quaint figures in pink. Nathan wore pongee and a Panama. They had fallen into talk about the future; what each expected to do when they reached home. They sank down upon a wooden bench just off the main pathway and Nathan drew aimless marks in the powdered trap-rock with his stick.
“I suppose I should go on with my medical studies,” Madelaine observed. “But somehow—oh, dear!—they seem so colorless and prosaic now, after what has happened in Siberia. I feel I have paid my debt there. Oh, laddie, my whole life has changed so! Things that I thought so great and vital have shrunken to such inconsequence. And others which have been only vague instincts and intuitions seem to matter more than all else in the world—even its sufferings just now. I don’t believe I can explain it so you’d understand.”
But Nathan did understand.
“Madelaine,” he said slowly after a time, “I received a letter from Ted Thorne about a month ago; he’s my sales manager who sent me out here in the first place. Mosely, manager of our New York office, was killed in France. The man who took his place can’t handle the work. Ted has offered it to me. It carries ten thousand a year, now. You remember me telling you how I expected the position once, but felt I lost caste at Mrs. Mosely’s dinner party? Well, I’d like to go to New York now and try again. But—but——”
“You have a ten-thousand dollar position awaiting you? How perfectly splendid!”
“Madelaine, I can’t go back to what I left—the emptiness, the petty troubles with petty people, the groping around blindly for social cues, the—the—loneliness, Madelaine! I can’t go back to half-a-life again. Despite all the horrors of war, I’ve been happy out here!—I’ve found happiness out here. I want it to stay. It must stay! I can’t go down into the Fog. Not again. I feel I’ve gained a little hilltop. I mustn’t lose even that partial height. I can’t.”
“Nathan,” came the girl’s whisper, “do you know what you want?”
Did he know? The poet in Nathan spoke then.
“Yes,” he cried hoarsely. “I want to go on. I want to leave sordid mediocrity behind me forever. I want fine, rare, delicate, beautiful things about me. I want to live in an atmosphere of them and a home of them. I want to feed my heart and my soul upon them. I want to make them a part of me. I want to gain from life every last iota of artistry and softness and richness it has to give. I want to do my work with a song in my heart. I want every hour a golden moment and time just something to pass away. I want money and opportunity to indulge that deep and vital impulse that once prompted me to express myself in rhyme. Do I know what I want? You ask me that! Yes, I know what I want! I want all of these things. Not to imitate somebody else or because I was once a poor, distraught young colt working in an abattoir for a dollar a day. Not that! But for the sake of beautiful things and one hundred per cent. living in itself—because beauty is—next to godliness! Yes, it is! But there’s something I want more than all of that, Madelaine. I want the woman I first saw above me on a Hill Top, standing in glorious sunshine looking off across a far country. I want the good angel who saw me wounded and exhausted, struggling up from low-lying Fog, and came down to me and gave me her strength to make the Summit. I want the woman who listened to my foolish, pent-up heartache that winter’s night in far-away Irkutsk and opened her lap and told me that nothing else mattered except lack of belief in myself. I want the woman who’s been patient and ministering and inspiring in a thousand hours since—to go home with me, Madelaine—to dwell with me—in a Palace Beautiful, dear girl—whose windows look out upon Delectable Mountains. I want you, dear Madelaine! And my heart is filled with such rich, mellowed love for you that it chokes my throat. You stand for all of the things I’ve totaled, dear girl. You’re the best and biggest thing that’s ever come into my life. I want you—and I want you terribly!”
A pause. An insect cheeping somewhere under boxwood.
“Then why don’t you take me, foolish boy?” Woman Beautiful laughed softly.
Hushed Japanese night, the moon riding hazily above the rakish branches of eucalyptus now, cicadas singing on into eternity, paper lanterns bobbing far across elfin dark! They stood amid the trillion blossoms of cherry trees whose petals sifted all around them, and Nathan knew for the first time in twenty-nine barren, heart-breaking years, the sensation of a real woman’s soft arms about his neck and the sweet, scented, delicate impress of a real woman’s kiss upon his lips, returning his caress with a warmth and a tenderness that fused his heart and his soul and made them as one forever.
The white parasol was lying on the bench. No one was left in the park but themselves. The moonlight was again shining into a woman’s face as they stood there for an instant and Nathan held her close. But she was not weakly flaccid in his embrace. Her body thrilled to his.
“Dear lad,” she said in a faint whisper, “I’ve waited a dreary time for your strong arms around me and your hard-shaven cheek close to mine. Oh, I don’t mean merely since the Great Noon-time in Siberia. Years before that, dear lad, years and years! Sunlit days, gray days, rainy afternoons, empty twilights, nights when I wanted to sob in the darkness—I thought of you and wondered where you were, and what you were doing, and if in your heart there was a little lonely ache likewise. I wondered how badly you needed me, dear lad, even as I needed you. For my heart ached for Romance, too, until it almost seemed I’d accept my disappointment and believe it had passed me by. But God is good. You’re getting only a little orphaned girl, dear lad, found under a haycock on the edge of a wood. But she loves you—loves you a bit terribly—she has always loved you—loved you even before she knew your name, or where you were, or what the sound of your voice was like. You are her life and her world henceforth. She, too, has found her Other Half and her heart will never greet the sunshine coming across the hill tops in the morning without a song springing to her lips and tears to her eyes. It has been a bitter wait, dear lad, and the way has not always seemed clear. But the end of the trek—it is sweet, very sweet. We will go back, we will go home. And all the beautiful things you have wanted, that I can help you get—they shall come to you. All the artistry and softness and richness I can help bring to you shall surround you. You shall do your work with a song in your heart also. Every hour shall be a golden moment. Time shall be a thing only to pass away. Oh, Nathan dear, I’m the happiest of women. We’ll go home with the morrow. Together we will go home and dwell—in a Palace Beautiful—whose windows look out on Delectable Mountains, indeed!”
“To-morrow—at two o’clock—home!”
“Home!” she repeated. “Oh, Nathan!”