As time went on, Mr. Todd's political estimate of himself began to be echoed jeeringly by his opponents, and sometimes reluctantly by his friends. He had realized early enough that official exigency in Washington was his cross, his penalty, the price he was doomed to pay. The intricacies of method surprised and repelled him; the insincerity met on all sides he designated despairingly as the "San José scale" of humanity. Graft, political jobbery, the oppressions of power, sickened him. "I don't like it, Susan. I wasn't made for this sort of a harness," he complained one day to his wife. "A fellow can't walk straight or talk straight in this life; and some of these old rum-soaked bosses have actually lost the power of saying what they mean. These female lobbyists, too, they make a man ashamed to look a good wife in the face. I wish we could quit. I like politeness and manners,—I've turned off the road for a sick lizard—but I'll be ding-danged if I can grin and scrape in the evening to a man who, in that same morning's newspaper, has called me a liar and a thief!"
Mrs. Todd joined him in a sigh. "I know it's hard, dear. I realize just what you mean. There is some of it in my own career, though of course I don't expect anybody to think of me! The airs put on by these mushroom aristocrats who have pulled themselves up by their own boot-straps are enough to make one ill. But we must not think of ourselves. It's Gwennie! Washington is better for her future prospects than our dear Western home. We must try to endure Washington a little longer for her sake." Mrs. Todd made strong effort to look and feel like an impersonal martyr. She did not succeed very well. Hypocrisy had a tendency to shrivel under the keen eyes that now twinkled appreciatively upon her.
"Just so," drawled Cyrus. "For daughter's sake only we continue to sip the nauseating draught. I agree, then. I guess our inwards will not be seriously impaired." It was perhaps as near insincerity as Todd ever approached, this clinging, despite better knowledge, to uncultured forms of speech. Even in the senate he showed determination to remain a raw Westerner, rather than identify himself with that sandpapered and lacquered body of gentlemen.
His compensations for all discomfort were found in huddled, intoxicating rows on the shelves of the new Congressional Library. Here his interest in the Far East, first awakened by the garrulous Venetian, shone back from a thousand reflecting facets of new truths. He strengthened theory with fact. He knew how many car-loads of Northwestern grain, how many bales of Southern cotton were shipped annually to expanding Asiatic markets from our Pacific ports. He traced the colonial policies of Europe back to the days when adventurous Spaniards had won the timid Philippines, but, seeking further glory, had knocked in vain at the gates of Japan. China, too, the richest prize in the East, he knew to be stirring in her long sleep. He believed that her destiny, central in the future currents of trade, must become the key to the world's development. With keen eyes he watched the joints of the Siberian railway, like a giant centipede, reduplicating, joint by joint, always insidiously, toward the storm centre of the Yellow Sea.
The old Romans argued the future from the flight of a bird. It happened now to Todd that the love of one schoolgirl for another brought before him a clearer knowledge of baffling Eastern questions than had all his years of rapt apprenticeship.
Miss Onda of Tokio (Onda Yuki-ko, the full name had been registered) arrived, as boarding inmate of the fashionable Washington Academy, only a few weeks after Gwendolen. She was dainty, shrinking, friendless, and pathetically homesick. Gwendolen became her champion. With a great ruffling of wings she kept at bay the impertinent and the curious. Yuki, thankful from the first for the protection, responded more slowly to the love. The Japanese girl was by nature silent, meditative, reserved. Above all she was,—to use her schoolmates' expression—"different."
It was fully three months after the initial friendship that the American succeeded in enticing her home. After this, the course of true love ran smooth. Each Friday night not passed with her Japanese friends, the Kanrios, was spent with Gwendolen. Yuki learned to giggle, and to have secrets, and dote on fudge like any American schoolgirl. She learned to dress, too, in the American way, and to heap her soft, dry, blue-black hair into a dusky "pompadour."
From the first she was a delight to Todd. He thought of her as a strange bird of Paradise rather than a dove, sent out from the ark of her country, that floated for him, somewhere, on waters of mystery. He encouraged hesitating confidences regarding her home life. Stoically he kept from laughter when her quaint grammatical errors convulsed Gwendolen and Mrs. Todd. Through Yuki he began to suspect the passionate, vital note of loyalty which is the keynote to Japanese character.
Memories of her happy childhood seemed never far away. Before the little feet touched earth, while still warm on her nurse's back, she had been taught to drink in visual beauty. Heroism was instilled in her through toys and story-books, and through temple feasts to gods who once were men. Old age was something to be revered, almost envied,—white hairs a benediction. The American levity and callousness shown by the young to the old appeared, from the first, in Yuki's mind, and remained ever after, the chief blot upon a country otherwise beloved. Todd saw that the girl in her own land must have moved as though consciously surrounded by spirit. She said to him that, in Nippon, the air was awake and vital; that there, ever went on about men the tangling and untangling of great forces, to which, the living are as but shadows on a moving stream.
Through Yuki, too, he became a friend, even an intimate, of Baron Kanrio, the Japanese minister. To be intimate with any Japanese is a rare privilege, and Todd knew it. Many were the notable evenings spent in Kanrio's small private den, where the two men bent together over records and reports, and over maps whereon they traced with prophetic fingers the contour curves of overflowing races. The insight of the other fairly staggered Todd. Slowly the American breathed in, rather than acquired by grosser senses, something of the patient, confident loyalty to ideals,—the Japanese strength that comes with absolute spiritual unity, the power of race in the living, and, more potent still, in the dead.