Our little household has been very much upset this week by the death of our cook. The funeral took place last night at seven o'clock from the lodge house at the gate. The shadows made on the paper screens as they prepared him for burial, told an uncanny story. The lack of delicacy, the coarseness, the total disregard for the dignity of death were all pictured on the doors. I stood in the chapel and watched with a sick heart. After they had crowded the poor old body into a sitting position in a sort of square tub, they brought it out to the coolies who were to carry it to the temple, and afterward to the crematory. The lanterns flickered with an unsteady light, making grotesque figures that seemed to dance in fiendish glee on the grass. The men laughed and chattered, and at last shouldered their burden and trotted off as merrily as if they were going to a matsuri. I never before felt the cruelty of heathenism so keenly. No punishment in the next world can equal the things they miss in this life by a lack of belief in a personal God.
It must be very beautiful at home about this time. The beech trees are all green and gold, and the maples are blazing. I am thinking too about the shadows on the old ice-house. I know every one of them by heart, and they often come to haunt me as do many other shadows of the sad, sad past.
HIROSHIMA, December, 1903.
God bless you honey, I've got a holiday and I've sworn vengeance on anyone who comes to my door until I have written my Christmas letters. I wish I was a doctor and a trained nurse, and a scholar, a magician, a philosopher and a saint all combined. I need them in my business.
I have spent this merry Christmas season, chasing from pillow to post with bandages, hot water bags, poultices and bottles. We have had a regular hospital. All the Christmas money I had saved to buy presents for home went in Cod Liver Oil, and Miss Lessing, bless her soul, is doing without a coat for the same purpose. When you see a girl struggling for what little education she can get, and know what sacrifices are being made for it, you just hate your frumpery old finery, and you want to convert everything you possess into cash to help her. All the teachers are doing without fires in their rooms this winter, and it is rather chillsome to go to bed cold and wake up next morning in the same condition. When I get home to a furnace-heated house and have cream in my coffee, I shall feel too dissipated to be respectable!
We have not been able to get a new cook since our old one died, and the fact must have gotten abroad, for all the floating brethren and sisters in Japan have been to see us! Y.M.C.A.'s, W.C.T.U.'s, A.W.B.M.'s and X.Y.Z.'s have sifted in, and we have to sit up and be Marthas and Marys all at the same time!
Sometimes I want to get my hat and run and run until I get to another planet. But I am not made of the stuff that runs, and I have the satisfaction of knowing that I have stuck to my post. If sacrificing self, and knocking longings in the head, and smashing heart-aches right and left, do not pass me through the Golden Gate, then I'll sue Peter for damages.
It's snowing to-day, but the old Earth is making about as poor a bluff at being Christmasy as I am. The leaves are all on the trees, many flowers are in bloom, and the scarlet geraniums are warm enough to melt the snow flakes.