The House of the Misty Star | Page 3

street where lives sick ladys mansion.
I hastened at once to the succor of my sick countrywoman. The way led through streets obscure and ill-kept, the inhabitants covertly seeking shelter as the policemen and I approached. It was a section I knew to be the rendezvous of outcasts of this and neighboring cities. It was a place where the bravest officer never went alone. For making a last stand for the right to their pitiful sordid lives, the criminals herded together in one desperate band when danger threatened any of the brotherhood. The very stillness of the streets bespoke hidden iniquity. Every house presented a closed front. Surely, I thought, ignorance of conditions could be the only excuse for any woman of any creed choosing to live in such surroundings as these.
In the cleanest of the hovels I found Miss Gray, her middle-aged figure shrunken to the proportions of a child. There was no difficulty in finding the cause of her illness. She was half-starved. Her reason for being in that section was as senseless as it was mistaken, except to one whose heart had been fired by a passion for saving souls. After being revived by a stimulant from my emergency kit, she told me her name, which I already knew, that she was an American and her calling that of a missionary. I thought I knew every type of the profession and I was proud to call many of them my friends, but Miss Gray was an original model, peculiar in quality and indefinite in pattern.
"Does your Mission Board give you permission to live in a place or fashion like this?" I asked sternly.
"Haven't any Board," she answered weakly. "I'm an Independent."
"Independent what?" I demanded.
"Independent Daughter of Hope."
Her appearance was a libel on any variety of independence and a joke on hope, but I waited for the rest of the story.
She said that the Order to which she belonged was not large. She was one of a small band of women bound by a solemn oath to go where they could and seek to help and uplift fallen humanity by living the life of the native poor. She had chosen Japan because it was "so pretty and poetical." She had worked her way across the Pacific as stewardess on a large steamer, and had landed in Hijiyama a few months before with enough cash to keep a canary bird in delicate health for a month. Her enthusiasm was high, her zeal blazed. If only her faith were strong enough to stand the test, her need for food and clothing would be supplied from somewhere. "Now," she moaned, "something has happened. Maybe my want of absolute trust brought me to it. I'm sick and hungry and I've failed. Oh! I wanted to help these sweet people; I wanted to save their dear souls."
I was skeptical as to this special brand of philanthropy, but I was touched by the grief of her disappointed hopes. I knew the particular sting. At the same time my hand twitched to shake her for going into this thing in so impractical a way. Teaching and preaching in a foreign land may include romance, but I've yet to hear where the most enthusiastic or fanatical found nourishment or inspiration on a diet of visions pure and simple. While there must be something worth while in a woman who could starve for her belief, yet in the eyes of the one before me was the look of a trusting child who would never know the practical side of life any more than she would believe in its ugliness. It was not faith she needed. It was a guardian.
"Maybe I had better die," she wailed. "Dead missionaries are far too few to prove the glory of the cause."
I suggested that live ones could glorify far more than dead ones, and told her that I was going to take her home with me and put strength into her body and a little judgment into her head, if I could.
She broke out again. "Oh, I cannot go! I must stay here! If work is denied me, maybe it is my part to starve and prove my faith by selling my soul for the highest price."
Although I was to learn that this was a favorite expression of Miss Gray's, the meaning of which she never made quite clear to me, that day it sounded like the melancholy mutterings of hunger. For scattering vapors of pessimism, and stirring up symptoms of hope, I'd pin my faith to a bowl of thick hot soup before I would a book full of sermons.
Without further argument I called to some coolies to come with a "kago," a kind of lie-down-sit-up basket swung from a pole, and in it we laid the weak, protesting woman.
The men