The fog

I

The Czar had been deposed in the opening weeks of March. Sturmer, Golitsyn and Protopopov had been arrested. The Imperial Russian family were under tragic detention in Tsarkoë-Selo Palace. On March 15 came the coalition cabinet of the revolutionists. As April began, the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates were declaring it necessary for them to control the course of the provisional government. Events were moving in seven-league boots in the land of the luckless Romanoffs. But where they were moving or what would be the state of affairs when the moving was ended, no one dared to predict.

Nathan sailed from San Francisco on the first day of April. Queer emotions played through him as the big Japanese liner, Tenyo Maru, turned its prow about, started its engines, gathered speed away from the line of handkerchiefs, cheers and tears along the dock, down the harbor, past the Presidio, followed by swarms of crying gulls out through the Golden Gate, off into the mystic West which strangely becomes the East again. Much might happen before he next saw the clock on the Market Street ferry-house tower.

As the land dropped lower behind the ship and the flocks of gulls thinned out and the arms of the Pacific opened wider and wider, a sense of vast freedom came to Nathan. Those broad ocean reaches stirred deep reactions within him. They beckoned him away from petty things. Hour after hour he walked the Tenyo’s decks or sank down in his steamer chair and dozed there, sending dream-cargoes off across the miles. Every day carried him farther from the handicap, sordidness, mediocrity, trial, pose, struggle, which had been the sum and substance of his life and environment to date. Something big and vital must transpire out in this world whence he was going. He would look for it. It was all in the epilogue of Going On.

Entering the dining saloon for lunch on April 6, he found beside his plate a copy of the little daily news sheet filled with items received by wireless.

America had declared war.

Tourist trade to the Orient had dropped to zero. Passengers aboard were people of importance, outward bound on serious business. Nathan shared his cabin with an International Y. M. C. A. official going to Siberia to open cantonment work among the Russian troops.

With his easy ability to “get along” with those of his own sex, he had become intimate with the Y. man before two days had passed. By the end of the week he knew most of the men on board and had talked textiles to a group of South Americans in the smoking room one night so intelligently that one of them had approached him next day declaring his government needed a man of Nathan’s experience and ability, and would Nathan consider a position in Bolivia when his present mission was over.

Nathan laughed, shrugging his shoulders.

He could not help feeling as he “held his own” among those of his own sex, that they minded little the talon aspect of his gnarled hands or his mutilated ear. That for Bernie! It was what a man was in his head and his heart which counted most. He began to get a perspective on himself.

Yet he hungered. He hardly spoke to a woman throughout the voyage. But this was true: for the first time in his life Nathan had day after day to dream,—to do absolutely nothing but think.

He tried to assay his mental equipment in those long, lazy days of meditation, to determine what he was best fitted to do, how to make up for lost years, whether he should go on as a salesman and make textiles his business after his return and now that he was free,—or specialize in some profession or art. His poetry? He had long ago seen enough of life to realize it would be a dreary day before he could hope to secure a living from poetry. Well enough as a hobby, perhaps. But life meant more than compilation of romantic rhymes. He felt it too late now to go to college. But it was never too late to educate himself for some profession or art. Just what should that education be? To what purpose? What did he enjoy doing best, aside from composing rhymes? Of what could he make a success because his heart would be in his work?

One night, as the great liner swung down the northern border of tropical seas, he leaned over the railing and watched the soft, warm stars. One star in particular was very luminous and close. A snatch of an old poem came to him——

The lines brought the tropic skies close. Nat’s heart sang in rhythm with the swash of the water and beat of the screw. Who was the one with whom he had built castles—Bernie? Carol? Mildred? Who?

A face in a star! Whose face? He thought for a time he could almost discern. Fancy led him to invent a face which should approximate his ideal. What was his ideal woman’s face? If he were a great painter and would put on canvas the features of his Dream Girl, what manner and type of face would he paint?

The boat swayed on in the starlit dark. Above it, lights of God looked down their mighty passwords over the waters. Stygian smoke furled from great funnels and dropped a billowy screen across their phosphorescent wake. A happy laugh floated out a sharply defined door from the ladies lounging room up forward.

A face in a star! Whose face?

Nathan thought of a woman he had seen in Springfield one night—the night of the Harvard-Pennsylvania boat race—before he had gone to his hotel to get that awful wire about little Mary’s going away—a girl sitting across a snowy-white table from a man in dinner clothes,—a girl raised just above him—with features he had never quite forgotten, they were so fine and tender and cameo-rare.

If he were a painter, he believed he would try to sketch that woman’s face as something very like his Dream Girl. He wondered who she had been—her name? The fellow’s wife probably. Strange how things stick in the back of a man’s mind at times.

A face in a star, indeed!

Happily, new scenes and clean, free horizons were taking pressure from head and brain. The world with which he had battled was drawing off in increasingly better perspective. He was humbly thankful.

He awoke one morning to find the engine’s heart-throb stopped and the vessel strangely quiet. Glancing out his stateroom porthole in the hush of dawn, he beheld a mountain sky line weirdly close. They had approached Hawaii and Honolulu during the night. Dense, tropical vapor clouded the mauve mountain summits. The city was almost hidden in foliage. A molten sun came up while he was breakfasting. About ten o’clock he went ashore.

The narrow, low-roofed streets with queer souvenir shops; the native, comic-opera policemen at intersections of traffic; picturesque brown men with hatbands and collars wreathed with flowers; quaint Japanese women with brilliant sun-shades,—among them Nathan felt like a schoolboy off on his first vacation.

II

Many features of that voyage supplied “atmosphere” which Nathan will never forget. Laughing forenoons swashing through shimmering waves; schools of flying fish winging low above the whitecaps like dragon flies, to flip from sight as one watched them; children playing on the after-deck and a kiddie-car always left for peripatetics to stumble over; soft sea breezes wafting through velvet-covered saloons; a wisp of smoke on the far horizon where another steamer passed; the sun going aslant down the sky and making a shadow ship that sailed into flaming carmine with them; nights of laughter and music; dancing under Japanese lanterns; the close, hot confines of narrow white stateroom passages faintly scented with bilge,—one grows to love a ship which has carried one in safety over thousands of watery miles.

And his father had known all this, three years before.

His first sight of Japan came about eleven o’clock the morning of the seventeenth day at sea. A hatless young missionary in white duck, China bound, came around the southern side of the promenade deck with field-glass case swinging from one shoulder.

“Japan ahead!” he cried. “Just sighted Fujiyama!” Then Nathan noted that the deck where he had been reading was deserted.

On the opposite side of the ship, up forward, passengers were telescoped against the rail. It was some time before Nathan discerned the great, weird, snow-white cone, high and vague in the clouds, guarding the portals of the East, though no shore was visible yet. But the shore loomed quickly after that, though the mountain outline faded.

During lunch he glanced through the dining-room port-holes to see low, sandy coast slipping past on the north, as though the liner had entered an inland river. A chalk-white lighthouse on which the sun dazzled—gray, jagged cliffs against the northern horizon—boats hugging the beach; they were at the mouth of Tokio Bay. They would dock at Yokohama late that afternoon.

And when the vessel veered sharply northward, in the ensuing two-hour ride up that bay, with the smoke pall of Yokohama hanging in the sky ahead and weird, thatched-cottage, dwarf-pine, deep-bowered shores gliding away on east and west, the man’s heart beat with pardonable excitement. In a handful of hours he might meet his father.

It would be a dramatic meeting, not without a trace of pride on the part of the son.

It was a wonderful ride up to Yokohama. The sunshine was dazzling. The mazarine water was a-shimmer with whitecaps and spectrums. A bizarre touch was given that seascape by scores of sampans, native fishing boats, with long rudders and leg-o’-mutton sails, that worked so close to the incoming leviathan as to disclose their contents,—fish poles, nets, discarded clothing, coils of rope.

Yokohama’s smoke drew closer. It was ten minutes of five and the sun was beginning to sink over the city’s western hills, when the mighty engines stopped at last and the soul of the ship delivered her bulk to fretty little tugs that finally worked her up against her dock. The pilings creaked with the shock. The hawsers tightened.

The voyage was ended. Nathan had reached Japan!

As a dozen half-naked coolies pulled and groaned and jabbered and cried, getting the high gang-plank raised, handkerchiefs waved on the dock. Friends recognized friends. Relatives called joyously to relatives.

The bulk of the crowd on shore were Japanese,—ludicrous old men in black nightshirts and wooden sandals, heads shaded with cheap straw hats, baggy umbrellas clutched by their middles; somber-clad, high-coiffured Japanese women surrounded by slathers of babies; here and there the figure of a “foreigner” in pongee, a white face anxiously seeking the lines of humans high above, along the rail.

Nathan looked for his father. At any moment he might meet him.

He eventually descended the gang-plank stairs, down into the seething, joyous, jabbering, gesticulating mob, in through the long, shadowed dock-house, out into a circular front yard where bowler-hatted rickshaw men sat on the shafts of their vehicles and waited for fares, beckoning and honking now frantically.

Nathan stored his bags in one vehicle and stepped up into another. The lean, sweating, diminutive draysters received instructions; shafts were raised; the high-wheeled, rubber-tired little carriages crunched away over powdered trap-rock, out into a hard gravel street, fresh sprinkled, off toward the hotel in the cool of that wonderful afternoon.

Japan! Spotless streets flanked by high stucco walls or buildings with shuttered windows—a bit of old London, somehow—a group of boys in gingham playing ball—half a dozen in “bathing suits” riding bicycles, despite clumsy wooden sandals—rickshaws trotting noiselessly in groups of two or three, the sinking sun glinting on bright steel-wire wheel spokes—a street corner with a far vista of tiny dragon-scrolled shops—three nude men washing after their day’s labors at a public horse trough.

Southward along The Bund the rickshaws rolled along the side of quiet Tokio Bay, in the sunset; then came the long, low, red front and cool porticos of The Grand Hotel—much confusion about procuring Japanese money to pay the kuruma men. The sea trip was ended.

Nathan looked around the big lobby. Any one might suddenly turn out to be his father. But he saw no Johnathan.

Nathan followed the Japanese boy upstairs to his room,—a great airy chamber facing the east and—home!

He forgot his father temporarily in the ensuing irritations of Chinese tradesmen continually knocking at his door,—pongee suit-makers, boot-makers, guides for the city in the day and week following. He liked Japan.

III

Wiley was strolling about the lobby when Nathan came down for dinner. Wiley was the Y. man who had shared Nat’s cabin. They dined together. Afterward they explored Yokohama in the warm summer evening.

Through dank, clean-smelling side streets their silent kuruma, or rickshaw men, trotted them,—in and out of moonlight and shadow, past tradesmen’s shops where the tradesman’s family sprawled on shining-matted rooms in the rear, a single electric droplight hanging from the low, polished ceiling, across a canal, northwestward where lights glowed and music played, and Theater Street reveled in illumination and bunting and laughter.

Laughter, laughter! Everywhere was laughter. The land was saturated with it. Old men laughed, young men laughed, women laughed, children shrieked continually. Everybody seemed gloriously happy.

Wiley and Nathan left their kuruma and walked the length of Theater Street, with its bizarre shops, exotic music, peanut whistles, shuffling geta; they went to a Japanese movie and sat on floor cushions while a “lecturer” talked the film as it unreeled; they bought “ice cream,”—scraped ice with fruit juice spilled upon it; three times they narrowly “dodged” being run into geisha houses.

Nathan retired to bed finally with a little twinge of disappointment. He had not met his father.

He went to the Consulate promptly next morning.

“Forge?” repeated the consul. “Came out three years ago, you say? I’ll have one of the boys look back over the books. But I don’t know any Johnathan Forge living here in the country at present.”

The books were searched. There was no record.

“Then he couldn’t have come here under that name,” Nathan was informed. “Was there any reason why he should have employed a different one?”

Nathan shrugged his shoulders.

“It doesn’t matter,” he observed.

He did not find his father.

IV

He was sitting in one of the big windows of the southern portico looking out over Tokio Bay, ten days later, when Wiley caught sight of him and came abruptly over.

Wiley was in khaki,—a bright new uniform. On his left sleeve glowed a heavy scarlet triangle.

“I’m off to-morrow, Nathan,” he cried. “How goes it? Found your goods yet?”

“Yes,” replied Nathan. “Found them in a fine mess! All smashed together in a godown over in Tsuruga, on the other side the island. They’d been held up because of broken crates and lack of tonnage—to carry them up across the Japan Sea.”

“What are you going to do with them?”

“Sell them to the Japanese Government. To thunder with the Russians! In another year they won’t have cash enough to buy their own propaganda newspapers.”

“Nat, they’re going to have a draft at home!”

“I’ve heard about it.”

“Listen, old man; why don’t you dodge it by kicking into this thing with me? You can’t enlist out here; there’s only the Regulars down at Manila and they’re not taking volunteers. If you wait for the draft, it’ll mean going way back to Vermont, being sent to camp, maybe not getting into the scrap at all. You’re out here now, just a few hundred miles from real war. Enlist in the Red Triangle and come on through to Moscow with me. I’m going straight across Siberia. Man, it’s the chance of your life. We’ll be in the thick of it within a week.”

“But I’ve got to wait for an answer to my cable first, Dick. That much is due my employers.”

“If you really mean it, Nat, I’ll delay my departure so we can go up together.”

Nathan really meant it. Wiley delayed his departure.

V

Far back in America and up in Vermont five weeks later, Ted Thorne called me on the telephone at the newspaper office.

“Just got a long letter from Nathan, Bill!” he cried. “And what do you suppose that darned son-of-a-gun has gone to work and done? He not only found our goods and took ’em in charge, but he’s engineered a sale to the Japanese Government for twenty-two cents per garment more than we ever dreamed of getting from the Russians. And by the living Jehoshaphat, he’s got his money!”

“That’s bully, Ted. I always thought Nat had the stuff in him, if he only had a chance. What’s he going to do now—come home?”

“No, that’s why I called you up—thought you’d like to know. He wants to join the American Red Triangle and plunge into the heart of Russia.”

“Well, you’re going to let him, aren’t you?”

“Holy Moses! Do you think I’d try to stop him? But believe me, he’s going to have some job with us if he ever comes home!”

VI

Nathan and his friend Wiley sailed into the Golden Horn Bay at Vladivostok on a drizzly morning, the first day of the following July. The steamer was the perky little Pensa of the Russian Volunteer Fleet.

Against a great arch of murky sky on the three hills to the northward lay the bizarre city—huge, gaunt, towering, ponderous, mosque-domed—Siberia!

To meet the Pensa and tie it up along the wharf with maximum clumsiness and confusion were a mob of men who resembled the foreigners below the railroad yards back home in Paris, who once had beer delivered to them regularly on Saturday afternoons and got into fights Sundays.

Nathan and his friend had come into a nation of them, the land of Whiskers, Vodka and “Nichevo!” which translated into plain United States means “I should worry!” He was in a khaki uniform and a military cap. On his sleeve was a flaming scarlet triangle.

“Dick,” he cried, as he stood with his companion in the lee of a deck-house to escape the rain, “there’s adventure!” Nat made a gesture at Vladivostok and what lay in its mystic hills behind.

“You said a mouthful!” returned Wiley. “And us for it!”

Nat left the ship and went down among the vile-smelling crowd on the wharf. The crowd enveloped himself and Wiley.

Enveloped them, I say.

For one solid year, in so far as his relatives and friends back home were concerned, Nathan Forge vanished from the face of the earth.

Siberia!