University of Virginia Library

18. Chapter XVIII

His confidence in his wife restored, Tyrrell tried to make amends to her for his seeming defection. To her somewhat fearful questions touching his visit to her mother he replied briefly that he had learned she had spoken the truth. Omi was her brother. He wished, however, that she had told him about her brother long ago. It might have saved all this misunderstanding. However, he did not pursue the subject. His wife's family was not one he felt he was likely ever to be attracted by, and he determined to remove his wife as far as possible from any future intimacy with them.

It was a few days later that Spring-morning begged permission to travel to Saseho, where a military hospital was maintained. She said she wished to take flowers and other gifts to the soldiers.

Her husband, though he felt he was keenly sympathetic with her over this

supposed brother, refused, though not without some little feeling of compunction.

He considered his wife's health delicate. She certainly appeared very languid and pale at this time, and he determined that she should not be further excited by reminders of the war. He admired this passionate patriotism the Japanese had always exhibited, but now that he was experiencing some of its effects in his own house, he could not banish a certain feeling of irritation. Moreover, he experienced toward this unknown soldier-brother of Spring- morning's a positive aversion which was half jealousy, half admiration. He begrudged sharing his wife's heart with even this absent brother. He believed she had idealized Omi beyond his actual deserts, and her sensitiveness upon the subject—she repelled every effort on his part to induce her to talk about her brother—added to his rancor. A request for a description of the young man brought the fevered response that he was like all heroes—“too grade to make a speak about. His face shining like the sun—Ah! like those gods!” So she fervently asserted.

His refusal to permit her to go to Saseho was received in a sullen silence by Spring-morning. She did not urge him; she simply turned away from him.

He told her then, roughly, the reason why he would not permit her to go to the military hospital. He did not wish her upset. She was permitting this war to trouble her more than was necessary, and he intended now within a week or so to wind up his affairs in Japan and take her at once with him to America.

She turned slowly about at this and her wide eyes looked calmly at her husband. In them he saw, or fancied he did, such a mournful look of pain and resignation that he cried out roughly:

“I thought you wished to go. You said so when we were in Zuiganjii.”

“I lig go still!” she said, in a low voice. “But now— it is all change wiz me, Eijin-san. Me? I cannot now leave theese Japan!”

He said doggedly and wrathfully:

“You may as well make up your mind to this. You are going with me.”

Her moods, he told himself, were getting upon his nerves, and for the first time he left her angrily.

Smoking for a time under the stars, he reviewed the various occurrences of recent days which had tended to aggravate and alienate him from his wife. Things had not continued as ideally as he had believed. Spring-morning had not proved the angel-mate he so ardently believed her to be in those blissful early days of their honeymoon. He felt his estrangement from his mother, and it seemed to him that Spring-morning should make the first overture of peace with the older lady. This she had stubbornly refused to do, insisting that the Okusama would repulse her, did she go to her, however humbly, for the girl had never forgotten that last interview with her husband's mother, when the latter had pulled her bodily from the arms of the Eijin-san.

Jamison felt, moreover, that, as Spring-morning was the cause of the estrangement from his mother, she should make some effort to atone to him for this. He was very much in love with her, but lately her moods were becoming quite beyond the understanding of an ordinary mortal, and, confound it, he sometimes wished his wife had been born in his own country; then she would not cherish such fantastic and preposterous notions concerning Japanese honor and soldiers, etc.

Even while he turned the matter over in his mind, she came from the house and on to the little balcony where he sat alone. Stealing softly up behind him, she put arms suddenly about his neck, and her fragrant, soft little cheek came pressing against his own.

There was something so pathetic, so eloquent and moving in this simple act of contrition, as it were, that Jamison impulsively drew her around to his knee. She slipped from there to the floor suddenly and hid her face against him. Without a moment's hesitation, somewhat roughly indeed he forcibly lifted her face upward, and found she was crying again. It seemed to him he surprised her crying constantly in these

days, and because she had not confided to him the cause of her tears, they irritated him rather than aroused his sympathy.

“Now what am I going to do with you?” he complained. “Such a foolish, silly little girl—always crying, and about nothing! Nothing in the world! Why should you cry like this, sweetheart?”

“I got do so,” she said faintly. “Oh, I got do those cry, Eijin-san!”

“Got? Why?”

“Bi-cause—sup-pose I—I soon nod god eny longer you, Eijin-san, for my hosban'? You got sail those west oceans. I kinnod do. Alas, me, I got stay ad Japan!”

“You have, heh? Well, we'll soon see about that,” he growled. “I guess a wife's place is with her husband—even in Japan!”

She drew away from him at that, and stared at him with eyes that had become very wide and dark with excitement.

“Alas, thas—true!” she said, in a whisper. “Wife—got stay wiz her hosban' even ad Japan. Me—I got—go—wiz—my hosband! Excuse me, Eijin-san!”