“Your excellency, though he live a million honorable years, could not estimate the augustly degraded chagrin experienced by my exalted Prince in my humble and servile person.”
So spoke the Daimio’s high officer, through the interpreter, Genji Negato.
The American held his shaking hands over the replenished kotatsu as the Daimio’s officer, hastily summoned by the guard, set himself the distasteful task of explaining to him the existence of the fox-woman.
A fox-woman, so he explained solemnly, was a female human being into whose body the soul of a fox had entered. In Japanese mythology the fox occupies an important position, and the fox-woman is a creature greatly to be feared. Her face and form, so said the Japanese, were of a marvellous whiteness and a beauty so dazzling that a mortal must cover his eyes to escape blindness. Her hair resembled the sun-rays, so bright and glittering its color and effect. Gifted with this beauty of face and form, but devoid of soul, she had but one ruling and controlling ambition. She spent her days and nights lurking about the mountain passes, behind and within rocks and caves, luring men—aye, and women and children, too!—to destruction.
Something in the half-skeptical smile on the taciturn face of the Tojin-san stopped the officer’s recital. His expression became troubled, revealing a sensitive pride unduly wounded. Plainly the foreign Sensei looked upon his explanations in the light of a fairy-tale.
“Your excellency disbelieves our legend of the fox-woman?” he queried courteously.
“Legends,” said the Tojin-san slowly, “belong to literature, and are tales to charm and beguile adults and deceive children. In the West we no longer heed them. We name them superstitions, and we’ve burned out our superstitions as we did our witches in the early days.”
The Japanese sat up stiffly, and in the chilly room he waved his fan regularly to and fro.
“You deny the existence of spirits in the West?”
“At least we do not create them out of our fancy or thought,” said the American gravely.