 | Chapter V Miss Spring Morning |  |
5. Chapter V
A maid announced a caller, Miss Edith Latimer. She was in the room before her name was pronounced, a tall, hearty, fresh-colored young woman, with a fine, attractive face, and a personality that fairly radiated health and abounding spirits.
“Hello!” was Jamison Tyrrell's cordial greeting, as he shook the large, shapely hand the girl extended.
“It's your mother I want to see,” she exclaimed, almost breathlessly. “Good gracious, it's like walking through a maze--a circus--to go down a Yokohama street to-day. I declare I've been literally treading on little people-- little babies, little dogs and little cats, and little everything all day. Have you a fan? Thanks. Now wait till I cool off a bit.”
She opened the fan with a wide swing, and began fanning herself vigorously, talking, despite her request for them to “wait a bit,” as rapidly as she fanned.
“Oh, Mrs. Tyrrell, I have the loveliest little girl I want to interest you in. You needn't smile, Jamison, for she is not this time a geisha girl nor the deserted spouse of one of our fair countrymen. Now I know that you are going to help me, aren't you, Mrs. Tyrrell?”
The latter put on her glasses and beamed through them at Edith, who was a great favorite with her.
“Certainly, if I can, dear, but you know I don't share your or Jamy's enthusiasm in regard to the Japanese.”
“Oh, well, she's going to make you change your opinion. Wait till you see her. Her name is Spring-morning. Isn't that lovely--Haru-no, they say in Japanese, and I wish you could see the perfectly beautiful embroidery work that child can do--better than yours even, and that's saying a lot, isn't it?”
A little flush swept over the thin cheeks of the older woman. She fingered her favorite work, then held it up.
“What do you think of this?”
“Very pretty, but nothing to what Spring-morning can do.”
“And who is she, my dear?”
“I'll tell you! She's a poor little thing who was trying to make a living her herself and a disagreeable old relative--grandmother or something. Father Daly discovered her trying to sell sea-shells to his congregation last Sunday after mass. Of all things! Sea-shells! Entering into competition with some nice little Japanese women he'd induced to peddle those little Catholic talismans they sent us from America. That was Spring-morning's idea, however, of earning a living in Yokohama. Well, naturally, dear good old Father Daly stopped a moment gently to reprove her, when all of a sudden she dropped right down at his feet, her precious sea-shells scattering about her. He thought she was kow- towing, but when she did not move, he stooped to see what the trouble was, and there she was in a perfectly dead faint.
“Well, the tale was soon told. She hadn't eaten a bite for three whole days--not a single bit. Just think of that-- starving--a young, lovely girl, here in this big, rich city. She said they had come recently from the country and she had brought the shells with her, hoping to sell enough to make a livelihood for herself and ‘elderly relative.’ We-ell, Father Daly, naturally, brought her to me, and I'm going the rounds of my friends to see if I can't find her a home of some sort. I've seen the ‘elderly relative,’ you see, and she is perfectly unspeakable--horrible--and I'm going to move heaven and earth to get Spring-morning away from her.”
“Why, I hate even to think of some of the horrible things that wicked old woman hinted Spring-morning ought to do for a livelihood.”
She turned a pair of winning eyes upon Mrs. Tyrrell, who responded with only a slight relaxing of her somewhat forbidding expression.
“Now, dear, can't you make a place for her here in this big house?”
“I may be able to,” said Mrs. Tyrrell, running her needle thoughtfully in and out of her emery strawberry. “I am not at all satisfied with Ume. Look at that screen. It has been mended twice already this month; yet only this morning I caught that girl deliberately poking another hole into it, simply for the purpose of spying upon us, though goodness knows what good it does her to hear what we have to say, for she cannot understand a word of English. So I've decided to discharge Ume without references, and if your little friend--”
“But no,” interrupted Edith quickly. “Spring-morning is not strong enough for that kind of work; besides, she is too refined and sweet for menial work. You need some one here to- -well--” She looked about the formally and precisely arranged room, with its heavy pieces of Western furniture, which Mrs. Tyrrell had herself brought from America, and to the amazement of her son planted firmly in his cherished ozashiki[6], until then scrupulously bare and unfurnished, in the Japanese style. Edith surveyed the room, not critically, but appraisingly, as if she saw the possibilities of its being made at least tolerably sightly through the offices of her protégée; then turning to Mrs. Tyrrell, she nodded her bright head emphatically. “That's it. You need some one here to lend a touch of beauty to your house.”
This statement brought a snort of amazed laughter from Jamison, and his mother protested in that indulgent tone she always used toward her favorite.
“Then, too,” went on the girl, in her forceful way, determined to carry her purpose through, “there's all sorts of ways you can make her useful, invaluable to you. Besides the sewing, I forgot to tell you that she is a most wonderful little masseuse. You ask Mrs. Splint. She had a splitting headache. Said she felt as if the top of her head was just about to blow off--you know, one of those headaches we foreigners get in Japan till we're used to the atmosphere. Well, there sat that little thing in the room, patiently embroidering, and looking for all the world like a little Japanese angel or saint--you can't imagine how pretty Spring-morning is--positively the prettiest girl in Japan, I tell you. Well, she said to Mrs. Splint: ‘Led me toach ad you head’--her accent is too cute!--And she got up, put her little soft fingers on Gertrude's head, and as true as I am sitting here now, the pain seemed literally to be lifted out of Gertie's head, and before she knew it she had dropped sound asleep.”
“Hypnotism,” said Jamison briefly.
“I don't know about that,” said his mother thoughtfully. “You know the Japanese have a great reputation for massaging. I've often wanted to hire one of them, but most of the masseuses here in Yokohama are such horrible- looking old crones, and I felt a positive repulsion at permitting them to touch me. Now if Edith's friend can really do such things, she would be invaluable to me. You cannot imagine how terribly I suffer with neuralgia, and pains all down this side and--”
“Oh,” broke in Edith, “give her a trial then, dear. She'll prove a regular little ‘medicine-woman’ for you.”
“I will, then,” said Mrs. Tyrrell, “--though,” she added uneasily, “I wish she could also do Ume's work. I declare I cannot get used to the unquenchable curiosity of these Japanese maids. It's almost impossible for us even to bathe without espionage. I had to have carpenters build a wall about our bathroom, especially to keep out the maids while we are bathing. You never heard of such immodest officiousness.”
The young people exchanged amused glances, and Jamison, grinning broadly, put in:
“The time after Mamma's first bath, she counted--how many holes in the fusuma[7], Mamma?”
Jamison threw back his head and burst out laughing, while Edith turned her shoulder slightly from Mrs. Tyrrell to conceal her own mirth. Mrs. Tyrrell did not see at all that the matter was in the nature of a joke, and she regarded her son very disapprovingly as he shook with laughter.
“She cleared out every servant on the place,” he croaked, “and all because the poor little critters were interested in our honorable white skin. Our baths were accompanied always by an orchestra (unseen but felt behind the screens) of tittering and admiring, exclamatory whispers of astonishment.”
“It is nothing to laugh about,” said his mother severely, “and I am quite sure I don't know how you managed about such things before I came out here.”
A deep silence here ensued, during which Jamison, his back turned to the two women, his shoulders shaking, looked down into the little garden below, fronting the open and quite crowded street. There he saw, modestly bathing in the little pond, totally oblivious of and indifferent to the scores of passers-by, equally indifferent to her, the aforesaid guilty Ume, clad merely in the human form divine-- and this despite the fact that the Okusama (as they called her in the house) herself had fashioned certain voluminous garments suitable for respectable maids to wear when taking their daily baths.
“Well, I'll be off then,” said Edith, “and you're an angel of light. Good-bye, Jamison.”
She held out a vigorous hand, first to the mother and then to the son. For a moment the young man retained her hand.
“Do you know, Edith,” he said with fine conviction, “that you strike me as being at present just about the finest thing in Japan?”
“Oh, stop it, silly! You know you don't mean half you say. Everyone knows you've kissed the blarney stone of those kingly ancestors of yours.”
Nevertheless, she flushed with pleasure at his words, nor did her bright eyes evade the warm glance of admiration the young man turned upon her.
“It's true, all-right-o! But what's your hurry? Don't you want to see the result of my hard day's toil?”
“Of course I do.” She was glad of the excuse to stay longer. Her friendship with Jamison Tyrrell dated many years back, and Edith could scarcely remember a time when she had not been willing to look at Jamison's wonderful work, or linger to listen to his chaffing flattery.
He put the sketches into her hands, and she turned them over with exclamations of approval and enthusiasm.
“They're really bully--fine. Oh, what a genre subject! Lovely! But”--she was holding up a sketch toward him now, and her face had a curious expression--“but where on earth did you get--this?”
It was a sketch of a motley block of dilapidated dwellings in some street in the poorest part of Yokohama--a little, faded, rickety streak of miserable houses, seeming to lean against each other as for support, yet with their blue slanting roofs, curiously picturesque and quaint. But there was something else that lent a particular distinction to the picture. In the midst of the squalid little block, in a casement on the second floor of the poorest of the houses, there showed a young girl's exquisite but tragic face. She was leaning on her clasped hands, her eyes wide and frightened, fixed in some sad day-dream.
For some reason the artist's face had turned grave, and picking up the sketch, he looked at it for a moment without speaking.
“Well?” prompted Edith, watching his face narrowly. “You haven't answered me. Who is--the girl?”
“Oh--I don't know,” he answered slowly. “I wish I did. She interests me. I sketched her down in the quarter to-day. She's rather good--I think.”
“She posed for you?” asked Miss Latimer quietly. She was drawing on her gloves slowly now, very carefully smoothing the soft kid over her fingers, but watching Jamison's face all the while, her own brows slightly drawn.
“Oh, no. I caught her--just like that.” His eyes half closed, as he ex-
“It's queer, but I have a feeling as if--this girl's face were familiar--as if I'd met this little girl somewhere before. I feel that--I know her.”
Edith was snapping closed the buttons on her gloves. She smiled brightly up at her friend.
“Some other re-incarnation,” she said lightly. “Who can tell?”
He looked at her sharply.
“No, no. I didn't mean that. I have the curious feeling that I've seen her somewhere here in Japan--fairly recently. Yet I cannot place her at all. Her face--haunts me, almost,” he added with a somewhat lame laugh.
“I'll tell you who she is,” said Edith. “She's Spring- morning, the girl I've been telling you about. Possibly you've seen her with me.”
“Spring-morning? Is that her name?” He looked eagerly from the picture to Edith, enchanted with some discovery he fancied he had made.
“By Jove! how the name becomes her, doesn't it? She is like a spring morning, isn't she?” And he held the picture off at arm's length for Edith's scrutiny.
Edith nodded her head.
“Yes, she is. And now I'm off--in earnest, this time. Good-bye.”
“But wait a bit, Edith. Perhaps you can tell me something about her--where she came from--who she is? You see I'm anxious to place her--to find out where I've seen her before.”
“I've told you exactly everything I know about her,” said Edith coldly, “and now, as she's coming here to work for your mother, possibly you will get all the much-desired information directly from her. Good-bye, all.”
Jamison Tyrrell stood in thought for some time after Edith had gone, his thumb and forefinger absently fingering his lower lip, after an abstracted habit he had when preoccupied.
His mother, who had missed not a word of his colloquy with Edith, had come quietly to his side. Her glasses were on firmly, and she was looking down at the picture that lay now on the top of the little heap of sketches.
“Did you notice anything peculiar about Edith's manner just now?” he asked his mother suddenly.
Mrs. Tyrrell turned somewhat unwillingly from the sketch. She looked up quietly into her boy's face, and there was in her face a strange, dawning expression of vague alarm. Her voice, however, was unusually gentle.
“You say sometimes, dear, that I'm accustomed to see things through my glasses. Don't you think you too are--a little--blind?”
“Why, what do you mean, Mother?”
“I mean--Edith!”
“What about her?”
“She loves you, my son.”
“What utter nonsense.”
He almost shoved his mother aside at the thought, and from his frowning face, it was plain that he was not pleased.
“What preposterous notions you do get at times! Now, for heaven's sake don't suggest any such thing to Edith, too. Why, it's a crazy idea! She's no more in love with me than I am with her.”
His mother looked at him without speaking, and he began turning over his sketches, muttering to himself crossly:
“Rubbish--preposterous nonsense! Why, she isn't my kind of girl at all. We're jolly good friends--nothing more.”
“What is your ‘kind of girl’?” asked his mother quietly.
“Oh--I don't know. Something dainty and quaint and unusual--and--and--”
He had stopped speaking, and his mother, going nearer to his side, saw that he was looking at the picture of a miserable block of poor little houses, from the window of one of which a young girl's face seemed to glow, like a star.
“Is that--is that--Spring-morning?” she asked, and involuntarily was conscious that the quaver in her voice betrayed the strange agitation which had seized upon her and seemed to stifle her. Her son looked up, and something in the expression of his eyes deepened her sudden fright. She caught him by the shoulders in an almost frantic embrace.
“Mother!” He stood up, upsetting all the sketches upon the floor.
“Now, of all the unutterably--Now look here: what's the matter with you? Aren't you ashamed to talk to your son like that?”
Half roughly, half with affectionate humor, he chided her.
“Well, but Jamy, the sudden notion just came to me--and I think it came to Edith, too, and--and--well, I just couldn't bear the mere thought. Why, do you know, dear, I declare, in spite of my promise to Edith, I cannot now take that girl into our house.”
“Mother!” he cried sternly. “You cannot refuse to. Do you mean to tell me that because of some crazy notion like that you'd refuse to help a poor little helpless girl who's never done you or anyone else any harm, and whose very poverty shows her purity and goodness and--”
His mother's mouth formed in a thin, firm line.
“She may be a perfect angel,” said she, “but she is not coming to live in my house, Jamy.”
“Oh, very well, if that's the way you do things!”
There was a new expression on his face now, almost ugly, as he picked up his hat and looked at his mother.
“Edith says this little girl is on the verge of starvation, and that her--relative is trying to drive her to worse than that. I knew she was in trouble when I looked at her to-day. Anyone could have seen it. Now, if after promising to help her, you won't--I will!”
“Jamy!” She followed him to the door. “What are you going to do?”
“I'm going to see her. I'm going to engage her to work for me--as a model.”
“No--Jamy!”
“Yes, Mother,”--very firmly. “I must have girls for such work, and she will be an excellent subject, apart from the fact that she needs work.”
“But, Jamy, you can't work with a girl like that--as your model. I couldn't b-bear it. It isn't right--”
But he shook her hand off from his arm with an exclamation of impatience, and he went out into the street, though the shadows of approaching twilight had already begun to fall, and the streets had taken on the appearance of desertion.
| Chapter V Miss Spring Morning | |