It was a moonlit, lazy-warm May evening. They sank down to rest finally in the little park opposite the International Y. M. C. A. The great treaty port was hushed, that fantastic, pregnant, unreal hush which permeates all Nipponese cities by night, even though they know little clash of traffic by day. The hour was late. The park was deserted. Street lamps had been extinguished; the moonlight made them superfluous. The exotic shrubbery, the great yellow moon peeping over the top of a gigantic pepper-tree, the sharp, intermittent cleek of the cicadas and other night insects singing out of tune around them, now and then the light of a pink-paper lantern bobbing along on the shafts of a distant rickshaw turned that park into a Garden of Dreams.
Madelaine was clothed in a white frock, white pumps; she carried a white parasol splashed over with quaint figures in pink. Nathan wore pongee and a Panama. They had fallen into talk about the future; what each expected to do when they reached home. They sank down upon a wooden bench just off the main pathway and Nathan drew aimless marks in the powdered trap-rock with his stick.
“I suppose I should go on with my medical studies,” Madelaine observed. “But somehow—oh, dear!—they seem so colorless and prosaic now, after what has happened in Siberia. I feel I have paid my debt there. Oh, laddie, my whole life has changed so! Things that I thought so great and vital have shrunken to such inconsequence. And others which have been only vague instincts and intuitions seem to matter more than all else in the world—even its sufferings just now. I don’t believe I can explain it so you’d understand.”
But Nathan did understand.
“Madelaine,” he said slowly after a time, “I received a letter from Ted Thorne about a month ago; he’s my sales manager who sent me out here in the first place. Mosely, manager of our New York office, was killed in France. The man who took his place can’t handle the work. Ted has offered it to me. It carries ten thousand a year, now. You remember me telling you how I expected the position once, but felt I lost caste at Mrs. Mosely’s dinner party? Well, I’d like to go to New York now and try again. But—but——”
“You have a ten-thousand dollar position awaiting you? How perfectly splendid!”
“Madelaine, I can’t go back to what I left—the emptiness, the petty troubles with petty people, the groping around blindly for social cues, the—the—loneliness, Madelaine! I can’t go back to half-a-life again. Despite all the horrors of war, I’ve been happy out here!—I’ve found happiness out here. I want it to stay. It must stay! I can’t go down into the Fog. Not again. I feel I’ve gained a little hilltop. I mustn’t lose even that partial height. I can’t.”
“Nathan,” came the girl’s whisper, “do you know what you want?”
Did he know? The poet in Nathan spoke then.
“Yes,” he cried hoarsely. “I want to go on. I want to leave sordid mediocrity behind me forever. I want fine, rare, delicate, beautiful things about me. I want to live in an atmosphere of them and a home of them. I want to feed my heart and my soul upon them. I want to make them a part of me. I want to gain from life every last iota of artistry and softness and richness it has to give. I want to do my work with a song in my heart. I want every hour a golden moment and time just something to pass away. I want money and opportunity to indulge that deep and vital impulse that once prompted me to express myself in rhyme. Do I know what I want? You ask me that! Yes, I know what I want! I want all of these things. Not to imitate somebody else or because I was once a poor, distraught young colt working in an abattoir for a dollar a day. Not that! But for the sake of beautiful things and one hundred per cent. living in itself—because beauty is—next to godliness! Yes, it is! But there’s something I want more than all of that, Madelaine. I want the woman I first saw above me on a Hill Top, standing in glorious sunshine looking off across a far country. I want the good angel who saw me wounded and exhausted, struggling up from low-lying Fog, and came down to me and gave me her strength to make the Summit. I want the woman who listened to my foolish, pent-up heartache that winter’s night in far-away Irkutsk and opened her lap and told me that nothing else mattered except lack of belief in myself. I want the woman who’s been patient and ministering and inspiring in a thousand hours since—to go home with me, Madelaine—to dwell with me—in a Palace Beautiful, dear girl—whose windows look out upon Delectable Mountains. I want you, dear Madelaine! And my heart is filled with such rich, mellowed love for you that it chokes my throat. You stand for all of the things I’ve totaled, dear girl. You’re the best and biggest thing that’s ever come into my life. I want you—and I want you terribly!”