Kuroki’s army landed there on the March night early in the war when the ice, as if by magic, ground out toward China. Oiled torches spiked to rafts bobbed on the chill stream, and the winches of blacker transports creaked and whistled to the snowy shore. From the holds swung aloft rice and fodder and knock-kneed, shaggy ponies. Impish guards of the Mikado in red and green, privates in long coats and spectacles, sprang forth rigidly on land. No noise, no fuss; the brown invasion of Asia was furtively begun. The long barracks were ready, and they that had watched Jap coolie sappers a-building them—beer and sweet-cake sellers from the islands, pioneers in the new westward hegira—sat proud and bland that night in their paper-slat doors. Meanwhile, from his desert of filth and thatched mud huts all about, crouched cousin Korean in the darkness, unsurprised and cynical, smoking a yard-long bamboo pipe as he dropped soft syllables of philosophy on the vanity of effort, and with disdain drew his wadded white robes closer.
Even when the red sun flag fluttered darkly up its pole, no cheers followed. But from a hill overlooking the town an oath arose.
“Damn these Japs, damn their mustard bellies,” growled Captain Cyrus Brewster, chewing a stogie on the porch of his lonely bungalow.
Isolated on his hill, the captain was just such a Yankee, thin-nosed, blue-eyed and muffin-mouthed but with an imperishable look of youth for all his curled gray hair, as you might find in a bungalow with a flag-pole in front were you wrecked, for instance, off Patagonia; which is to say he was an iconoclast, and hated the world. He shipped from Chinnampo two million dollars a year in bullion from a gold mine near the Yalu River, for which he was “agent;” passed white men’s food and chemicals through the custom-house, and swore at coolies loading them on the light-draught junks he ran to the head of navigation on the Tai-Dong, whence carts trundled to the mines.
But worse than the world he hated the Japanese, for they militantly coveted for barrack joists the only pine grove in the region, which adorned his homestead. They could not seize the land without stirring diplomatic mud, since the captain had bought his stake from the Russians, who had eked it from Seoul in ’96, when the Jap ambassador burned the old Empress in kerosene, and her son fled to the Slav legation. Therefore the Islanders had threatened eviction, with smiles and insults; dickered blandly with bows, lies, and tissue documents inkily fly-tracked, as the captain repulsed them with a fist blow on the table, and cable blanks inscribed with fiery messages to Washington, which he never sent.
“War news?” he’d exclaim to missionaries bound up river. “Don’t ask me, by crotch! I don’t bother the monkeys in their damned town, and they don’t come up here to me.”
Thus being pro-Russian and a truly brave man, Brewster felt he must vindicate his notions in action. Having heard that a Cossack captain near Wonsan on the west coast would be pleased to know how many men and rice sacks landed with Kuroki, he let a young Russian travel, dressed as a Japanese, on his junks between the lines. This fellow’s name was Davydoff, a machinist, who patriotically had quit the mine when the war broke out, but being lame could not enlist. In disguise, he traveled by the name of Ikeda. I do not know how the captain squared with his conscience in abetting a spy, but that Yankee defect is an over-worked myth, anyhow; and a world malevolent enough to land a man, aged fifty, alone in Korea, with a past like an erasure in a pirate’s log, should grant indulgence.
This very hour tonight he awaited Ikeda, erst Davydoff. Now through his night glass he searched the river, now the silent town distorted by no flickering camp-fires, the torches, dying into iridescence, revealed the black Tai-Dong as a covert serpent stealing across a world numb and indifferent in white age. “Like them yeller oriental hearts, that river,” he muttered, nodding at the stream, “reaching out acrost the world fer us white men’s sceptres, learnin’ to smile whiles they suffer. Oh, they’ll get the sceptres.” You see, the captain believed firmly in the Yellow Peril. Soon he turned toward the angled thatches of the town, and a white painted gable far from the barracks caught his eye.
His sharp features softened with recollection. “I see yer hev yer schoolhouse lit, young missy,” he murmured. “Night school. Workin’ overtime civilizin’ Koreans.” For first the invaders had built the barracks, then the school—copying the white man’s way in lifting a yellow burden—which to the captain menaced a right regeneration of Korea. The brown people thus handled the surest civilizing weapons of the white, who were sealed meanwhile further north in their fortresses of privilege and prejudice; so the bungalow on the hill and the schoolhouse among the huts symbolized the passing of Asia.
“Karin San’s there,” mused the captain, and a vision of the white clad Korean boys with long hair parted in the middle, the girls in green silk tunics, their snub noses buried in books of English and Japanese, uprose before him as he had seen them through the doorway, repeating the alphabet in unison, on a day he had passed the schoolhouse. Then Karin San had bowed low on the threshold, saying, “It is a beautiful day, You-think-yes? I am Karin-San-the-school-teacher-of-English,” and a big red pin had fallen from the shiny convolutions of her oiled hair, as she bowed so low. “Great Christopher!” the captain had gasped; the same dizziness now touched his breast as he watched.