CHAPTER TWELVE
Prosper Ronsard, the French minister to Tokio, had formed very early in life the ambition to be a Far Eastern diplomat. His way to the goal was made in regular steps of enjoyment. First there had been Morocco, scarcely more to him now than a far-off memory of yellow sands and white cubes of houses, both emphasized, at effective intervals, by theatrical groups of palms. Then came Cairo,—gay entrancing Cairo! His life there held experiences that old age might lick its chops over. Leaving all else aside, the one flame-tree near his hotel window in Cairo would have burned that memory deep. Then there were French Siam, Tonquin, Nagasaki, and, at last, Tokio.
The hot blood of the East flowed now, as native, in Ronsard's veins; but the keen, calculating, questioning judgment of the European statesman kept cool tenure of his brain. In Tokio he found all past Eastern trickery to be useless chaff. Here were no inferior Orientals to browbeat, threaten, or cajole. From Tonquin to Nagasaki he had crossed more than the Yellow Sea; he had sailed over three submerged centuries and landed on a green cliff. Here, in Japan, were men with reasons as clear as his own, and methods that often proved themselves more effective. In the mission to Tokio he soon realized that his full ambition had been won. Every faculty, trained through long apprenticeship, was here needed; and it was part of his intelligence that at times he realized them all as insufficient. That span of "Mysterious Asia" stretched between Algiers and Tonquin, brilliant and pleasurable indeed, was, from the diplomatic standpoint, a mere dank subway coming up at the central station, Tokio.
The fascinations of the East, potent as they were, could not quite wean the Parisian from love of his native home. Visits to France were made with strict regularity. It was his wont to declare, and with much show of verity, that the perpetual resident of Paris could never know its real charm. To live there always, paying bills, meeting disappointments, enduring illnesses with the inartistic accompaniments of medicine boxes and physicians, was like having an inexhaustible supply of one's favorite vintage kept in a water-cooler on the back gallery. Ronsard had the true sensualist's gift of extracting flavors.
On these home visits he was eagerly sought after by his friends and club fellows, and by the more intelligent among fashionable women. In this latter category shone pre-eminent the widowed Princess Olga Le Beau. Rumor often had it that his next return to the East would be brightened by the wedded companionship of this lady, but each time Rumor hid her face.
The princess had married while yet a schoolgirl. Pierre, her only child, was born within the year of the marriage. Before the boy was ten, his father, Gaston Le Beau, died by accident. Slander called it suicide, and hinted that the princess was the cause. Nothing, however, could have been more decorous or more becoming than the mourning of the princess. As slowly she came back to the world of fashion, Pierre was sent away to England to be educated. A growing stripling of a boy is a fatal gauge to his mother's waning youth. He was seldom pressed to come home during the holidays, Princess Olga preferring to visit him in England (a country which she loathed), or sometimes to take small tours with him through infrequented parts of Europe.
After his very creditable career at an English university, she urged him tenderly further to improve his mind by travel, and hinted that she would prefer a diplomatic career for him. As she spoke, she was thinking of Ronsard, but doubtless had her reasons for not mentioning him. It was not until the young man's year of residence in America, and his own choice of Tokio as a place at which to open his diplomatic primer, that the power of this intimate family friend had been invoked. As we have seen, Princess Olga gave the name, by letter, to her son. Pierre wrote promptly, but the hastened departure of the Todds, and his determination to sail with them and Yuki, would have given him no time to receive a long and thoughtful answer, even had such been written.
Count Ronsard's motto, more or less rigidly adhered to in dealings with his own sex, was "never to write a letter or to destroy one." Knowing that the young man was soon to appear, he calmly waited the event. In official life the French minister was, of course, designated by the simple republican title of "Monsieur." With his friends, the old aristocratic "Count" was permitted and enjoyed. To have slipped Pierre into a second, third, or fourth secretaryship would have been a simple matter. Count Ronsard, however, wisely determined to judge the character of the applicant before admitting him into the bachelor comradeship of the Legation. This square white residence, set in the midst of a fine, walled, daimyo garden left over from feudal days, had never, during the count's long term of service, known feminine sway. High orgies, balls, and state dinners were held there in plenty, but the only women who appeared at them were invited guests or hired geisha. The master of the house carried his bachelor fancy so far that he insisted upon a similar undetached state being preserved by his subordinates.