University of Virginia Library

III.

“Of what are you thinking, Sakura?” asked her aunt. “Your face looks positively tragic.”

The girl sat up with a slight shiver.

“Oh,” she said, with that curious directness which some of her acquaintances found so quaint and attractive and others so disconcerting, “I was thinking about Japan—and my childhood there. Do you know, Aunt Margaret, I think, to the expatriate, the land of his birth must always be rose- colored in his dreams.”

“I insist,” said her aunt, stiffly, “that you are not an expatriate in any sense of the word. It is absurd to consider yourself anything but American.”

The girl's long dark eyes narrowed slightly, but she ignored her aunt's assertion, and continued dreamily.

“To me, Japan looms dimly in my mind as a sort of fairyland of happiness—all flowers and smiles! It is when people are wronging Japan, I know how deeply I love her!”

“The memories of childhood are always gilded,” said her aunt, tartly.

“Yes,” said Sakura eagerly, “they are gilded—our memories of childhood, and isn't it good they are? Oh, it's the one really beautiful, innocent part of our lives that we can always look back upon without the least shadow of regret— isn't it, dear Aunt Margaret?”

“Your present period of life is happy—innocent, is it not, Sakura?”

“I don't know! I don't know!” cried the girl, restlessly clasping and unclasping her hands, the vague sound of tears in her voice. “Sometimes such—such terrible emotions come over me. I want to hurt—to injure people!”

“Now, Sakura, I know exactly what is troubling you. You are reading all that rubbish in the papers about the possibility of war with Japan. Even if it does come, you have nothing to fear!”

“Fear!” She turned bodily around in her seat, her eyes wide, blazing at her aunt. “You think me capable of—”

“Why not? I would be if I were of your nationality. But as I said, you have nothing to fear, because no one here regards you as Japanese, and if you will only listen to Lieutenant—”

The girl came quickly to her feet.

“D-don't speak of him, even. Don't! I cannot even—now!”

She began pulling on her gloves, as if about to make her departure. There was a flush of fever in her cheeks. Her eyes were unnaturally bright. In the restlessness of her mood she had come to her aunt's house to see her younger cousins, and found her aunt home alone.

“If you take my advice,” said the older lady, with rough kindliness in her tone, “you will do away with all this Japanese hysteria. Your duty is to the man you love, first of all!”

“Is it, though?” asked the girl in a suffocating voice. “Is it? In my father's country we turn instinctively first to the authors of our being. They should come first, by every natural law, and yet—and yet. Oh! how account for this treacherous impulse in us that makes us desert—betray- -our parent for the stranger whom we love!”

“Desert! Betray! You are impossible, Sakura! In what way, pray, will you betray your father in marrying Lieutenant Burrows?”

“Father does not wish it. He has made—other plans for me,” she said, piteously.

“And you, raised and bred as you have been in this twentieth-century, enlightened, civilized country, would submit to a low and degrading oriental arrangement of that sort? Do you wish me to believe that?”

“No, no!” cried the girl wildly. “That is not what I meant, but in refusing my father's wishes, can I—dare I do the other thing?”

“Why not? Did he not himself dare likewise—once?”

Sakura turned pearly white.

“My mother!” she said faintly, and covered her face with her little shaking hands.

Her aunt put an affectionate arm about her, but she still spoke severely.

“Yes, your mother, dear. He married her in spite of the disapproval of all her own and his family. And he took her to his home. What a martyrdom!”

The girl shook her head mutely, but her aunt continued inexorab1y.

“It was, indeed. Why, no American girl can realize what it is to marry a Japanese of title and be taken back to his antagonistic relatives—for they always are antagonistic beneath their surface of insincere smiles. Your mother's case is a distinct example.”

“My honorable grandparents loved my mother,” Sakura said, in a passionate voice that trembled with her effort to control it. “They tried to—to be kind to her. They simply did not understand, nor did she. How could they? But I—I understand, Aunt Margaret, for I am of both countries— daughter of both lands!”

“It was an unfortunate situation all around,” said her aunt. “From the first her parents and I predicted what would happen. There she was, a spoiled, proud American girl, thrust down in the midst of a family whose whole thought and life were centered in an ancient oriental civilization. Why, she never even stepped into the streets, or drove abroad in her palanquin, or whatever they call it, but a dozen officious relatives dogged her footsteps. They expected her to become as they were, because, forsooth, she was a woman, and therefore should adopt her husband's mode of life. She wore their dress, ate their food, though it nauseated, and then—then—why your Japanese grandmother actually

suggested that she blacken her teeth in signal that she was married, that youth was behind her, and her aim should be to repel, not attract, other men who might see her!”

“She was very—old my grandmother!” said Sakura softly, “and she was of the ancient school, Aunt Margaret. But she was good, good! How can I tell you how good she was? You do not want to know—you would not believe if I told you. And yet—sometimes, I close my eyes, and I feel the touch of her withered old fingers about my face again. She is stroking my cheek—oh, so softly, so sweetly; and now she is twisting my hair—it always distressed her because it curled so rebelliously about my face, as a child—and trying to confine it in the conventional topknot, and mother would pull it down when she saw me, and grandmother would roll it up again, patiently and persistently. I never understood— then, but now—”

“Your mother was distinctly in the right,” said her aunt, stiffly. “When she left your grandmother's home, how could she know that in Japan that would be regarded as a scandal? Her husband accompanied her. What absurd rule was that which made a wife take up her residence in the house of her husband's parents? No free-born girl of the slightest spirit could have endured it.”

“Yet—I think my mother was happier in my grandparents' shiro[2] than in the new house, Aunt Margaret.”

“That was because your father and his relatives made her feel as if she were a criminal. I think the only reason your father finally brought her back to America was because he realized that her presence in Japan could only bring pain and havoc in his parents' household.”

Sakura went quickly to her father's defense.

“No, you wrong him, Aunt Margaret. He brought her back because she was unhappy, and he stayed here throughout all these years, when I know he longed to return to Japan. When mother died, he seemed to take it so for granted that I would return with him, and I think that was the cruelest blow of all—that I should fail him—when he needed me most!”

“When it came to a flat choice between Japan and America,” said her aunt didactically, “you naturally chose America.”

“It wasn't that,” cried the girl, sharply. A scarlet stain rose to her cheeks and brow, tingeing her neck, even. “Aunt Margaret,” she said, “I—I—had met—Tony!”