University of Virginia Library

25. Chapter XXV

For many days, Spring-morning lay weak and only half conscious upon her bed. Then came a time when she awoke in the night and piercingly called for her mother.

Jamison started out frantically, dumbly hoping still to find Madame Yamada in the little house where first he had seen Spring-morning, and too stupefied to realize that it was her own mother, that vague little mother who had bound her inexorably at her birth to Omi, the son of her friend, that the girl was calling for.

Upon his return from his fruitless quest, he was met halfway down the street by Ume. She was running like a distracted little shadow up and down the street, vainly seeking the master, after whom the Okusama had hurriedly sent her. As his tall form, in the dim light of the breaking day, appeared at the end of the narrow street, Ume dropped on her knees in the middle of the road and beat her head despairingly upon the ground. Her shrill, wailing cries, oddly like those of a dog crying in the night, rang through the deserted streets, and shutters and doors were hastily opened. Lights were lit and faces appeared at casement and door. Presently the little

street began to fill with the hurrying friendly neighbors of the white man who lived in their midst.

It needed no words of the weeping Ume to tell her master the truth. His little Japanese wife was dead.

The problem that had troubled him so bitterly since the return of Omi was solved now for him forever. His pride, the disenchantment, which despite his overwhelming pity for her had remained, his cynical vision of this people he had loved- -what of it now?

Somewhere in the street there was heard the soft muffled beating of a little Buddhist drum, and a child put its chubby, warm little hand into his. A young girl, a friend of Spring-morning's, preceded him, sobbing softly, into the house.

There all was very still. On the lower floor, all alone in the ozashiki, in her old place by the shoji, where she had been wont to sit and watch with condemning eyes the passing throngs, was the Okusama. How bitterly she had hated Spring-morning! It was strange that Jamison should think of this now, as he moved uncertainly in the half-darkened room toward her; yet he felt no resentment or bitterness at the thought, only a nameless sadness.

She started to her feet, and threw her arms about him, murmuring her sorrow, and for a moment he let her cry there against his breast. Then suddenly he drew himself up stiffly, his nerves tingling electrically, as, his head lifted, his ears strained alertly, he listened to that strange new sound in his house, the tremulous, feeble, fearfully appealing cry of a new soul! It moved him as nothing in his life had ever done before, this seeking, weird cry of which he was the creator!