This case of Hara is neither extreme nor unusual. I have been face to face in this flowery kingdom with tragedies of this kind when a woman was the blameless victim of a man's caprice, and he was upheld by a law that would shame any country the sun shines on. By a single stroke of a pen through her name, on the records at the courthouse, the woman is divorced—sometimes before she knows it. Then she goes away to hide her disgrace and her broken heart—not broken because of her love for the man who has cast her off, but because, from the time she is invited to go home on a visit and her clothes are sent after her, on through life, she is marked. If she has children, the chances are that the husband retains possession of them, and she is seldom, if ever, permitted to see them.
I know your words of caution would be, Mate, not to be rash in my condemnations, to remember the defects of my own land. I am neither forgetful nor rash. I do not expect to reform the country, neither am I arguing. I am simply telling you facts.
I know, too, that some Fountain Head of knowledge will rise from the back seat and beg to state that the new civil code contains many revisions and regulates divorce. The only trouble with the new civil code is that it keeps on containing the revisions and only in theory do they get beyond the books in which they are written.
Next to my own, in my affections, stands this sunlit, flower-covered land which has given the world men and women unselfishly brave and noble. But there are a few deformities in the country's law system that need the knife of a skilled surgeon, amputating right up to the last joint; among these the divorce laws made in ancient times by the gone-to-dust but still sacred and revered ancestors. Who would give a hang for any old ancestor so cut on the bias?
I cannot write any more. I am too agitated to be entertaining.
I wrote Sada a revised version of Blue Beard that would turn that venerable gentleman gray, could he read it. Uncle will be sure to. I dare him to solve the puzzle of my fancy writing. But I made Sada San know the Prince Red Head was coming to her rescue, if the engine did not break down.
Now there is nothing to do but wait and pray there are no weak spots in Billy's backbone.
Cable just received. William is on the wing!
PEKING, CHINA, February, 1912.
Well, here we still are, my convalescent Jack and I, bottled up in the middle of a revolution, and poor, helpless little Sada San calling to me across the waters. Verily, these are strenuous days for this perplexed woman.