Divorce!
Kent read the letter over again, carefully, , for his thoughts would not concentrate on the sentences. He had to force himself to bring his mind on them. The letters from Isabel had shown , every evidence of having been written as a matter of duty in their , one a month; they had been cold even; but he had never for a moment suspected that she would, suddenly, without leaving room for discussion, thus make the end bluntly, finally.
She wrote that the petition had been filed in court. The grounds were desertion. The summons would probably be in the same mail. Desertion. It struck him as wantonly treachery. He had been careful always to send her the regular allowance which they had agreed upon before he left for Japan, and even more. He could certainly show in court—— Still, what was the use? He would not contest the case. If she wanted divorce, well, let her have it. A man was a fool who would try to hold a woman against her desire. And then, after all, why should he care? His affection for her had long since dissipated. The that absence makes the heart grow fonder—he had more than believed that it might work out—but it had not in his case, nor, evidently, in hers either. He had no cause to object. On the contrary, she was giving him his freedom. It was the logical thing, after all.
Now, if that had come a year ago, before Sylvia[Pg 95] had left Tokyo? Isabel must even then have considered divorce. She had probably done so even before he left America. Why could she not have done it then, when he and Sylvia—— Would she have married him? Plainly, she had liked him, but this other? Still, there would have been a chance. And now, now when opportunity had finally come, it was so absurdly . He had no means of reaching Sylvia. She had disappeared , had gone as if she had vanished into space. No one appeared to know where she might be. Evidently she had wished to disassociate herself from Tokyo, to every thread that might connect her with Japan. He had written a couple of times on chance clews. She had been seen by some one somewhere along the upper Yangtze. A note in the personal column of a Hongkong paper showed that she had gone from that place to Macao. Report had it that she had visited Singapore. He had written each time, but nothing had ever come of it. So he had given up thought of her, forced himself to that chapter out of his life, to consider it a definitely closed incident. Now, it was too late. Even if he knew where to find her, what would she say should he up to her the moment he was free. One could never know how a woman might take things. And then she would by this time have found new friends, might be engaged, married, for all he might know. No, even if he might find her, should she have been placed out of his reach through some other man, that, he knew, must hurt him like the devil. It would reopen, grievously lacerate the old wound which seemed now to have all but healed. After all, he had come to appreciate, enjoy in recent months his safety from emotional . One risked too much, paid too heavily for the of infatuation. He would remain safe.
So that phase of the situation was disposed of. He would allow himself to consider it no more. Now for the other phases.
He lit his pipe and leaned back to think it over, to reason it out. Logically he should be pleased; but he could not make himself feel so. It was an ugly word, "desertion"; of being a scoundrel. Still, of course, divorces were common things, and every one knew that the law required, for some obscure reason, that the grounds must always be clothed in terms implying disgrace of some kind. Well, let it go.
Still, he was oddly dissatisfied. He tried to his feelings. Gradually, as he smoked, it came to him that what he resented was the suddenness of entire change in his status of life, the necessity for making new adjustments. He would now be alone, under a changed moral code, a different mode of life. Still, he was being made free. What he lost was, of course, only obligations. To blazes with the entire business!
He the letter and threw it out of the window . He would be rid of the whole thing, like that; would write her to go ahead. It was the end. Undoubtedly he would soon find himself pleased, as he should be, that a relation had been which there could be no possible reason to continue.
"Kent-san."
It was a woman's voice, low, clear. He looked about, startled out of his thoughts. There she was, across the , in her window, his geisha neighbor. Through the bamboo bars she was holding out to him something white. He recognized the crumpled letter. What a grotesquery of fate that his divorce announcement should, eccentrically, cause his acquaintance with this woman, this professional in the arts of affection, whom he had heretofore known only mutely,[Pg 97] through her formal courtesy of a smile when she had happened to meet his eye from her window.
"It came right in through the window. It frightened me. It hit me right on the head." She was laughing, but her eyes asked for explanation. Of course—one did not throw things through windows, even at geisha.
"Pardon me. I was angry. It was bad news. My wife in America is seeking divorce." He caught himself. It was stupid to plump it out to an utter stranger; but the idea had filled his mind, had dominated him so entirely that the words had slipped without thinking.
"O kinodoku sama, I am so sorry." The smiling face became a mask of polite regret. "Do you love her?"
The amazing frankness of the Orient in intimately personal matters in contrast to its where the West is frank!
"No, I don't care a bit." As he he felt with surprised satisfaction that he really did not care, that his was fading. Evidently it did him good to get this thing out of his system, to speak out about it, even to this new-found geisha friend. It was not so incongruous, after all. Was she not supposed to be an expert in matters of the heart.
Her serious expression vanished instantly. She laughed. They did really laugh like " silver bells," some of these Japanese girls. "Then you will find another woman. Ah, but here in Japan, what will you do? Here we have only the kitanai Japanese girls."
"Kitanai," "unclean," used in the sense of "unworthy" as the Japanese always speaks, perfunctorily, of what is his own. The unjustness of the phrase bewildered him for the moment, as he thought for words to express indignant refutation, protest that[Pg 98] the Japanese girl was, of course, the very opposite of "kitanai."
He started to answer. The of a voice came to him from the unseen background of the girl's room. The face of an old woman appeared behind her.
"I was just calling at the shaved-ice man," said the girl, over her shoulder. "But he didn't hear me. He has gone." Evidently the elder woman, probably a sort of duenna, had asked her what she was doing. He admired her instant wit. She smiled at him hurriedly, surreptitiously. He caught the odd charm of the of her long almond eye. Then the shoji closed.
Well! A bizarre episode. But a charming one. He was in a happy frame of mind. It was a good . Evidently he was not so badly hurt, when a pretty face could so easily his resentment. Divorce; it was only proper that his marriage be ended, an unsatisfactory chapter. Let the thing take its course.
He to place the letter in a drawer where he kept things which he wished to remain unseen by the unknown one who periodically his desk. He had left it open purposely, and at the top he had placed a layer of old papers, which must have been seen often by the intruder, and which could no longer his curiosity. Below the papers he kept the other things, his wife's letters mainly, and then Kimiko-san's . He had been surprised to receive them in the mail, a few days after their first dance in Tsurumi. It had amused him that she had taken him thus literally. It was dangerous to be with Japanese girls; they were likely to take things to the letter. But he had been pleased at the possession, at having this dainty, unique souvenir of a incident of his life in Japan.
He was surprised to find that the had evidently been there. The had not worked. The[Pg 99] slippers were not in the position where he had left them. Still, it made little difference. He would take them home. The would amuse Jun-san.
Jun-san was intensely interested, pleaded that he tell her from whom he had obtained them. He always enjoyed seeing her in her gay moods; she was generally so serious, almost . He had planned to bring about this air of gayety, that he might, as had been the case when he was chatting with his geisha neighbor, forget unpleasant thoughts. But it failed. The humor dissipated. The serious thoughts . He could see that Karsten noticed his preoccupation. The idea came to him to tell Karsten all about it, talk it out with him. It would do him good; one always reasoned more clearly when one placed one's thoughts in words to another; and then Karsten had been known in San Francisco as a man with unusual experience with women, had had the reputation of being an expert, in those days, in such matters.
So after dinner, when they were sitting upstairs, as usual, looking over the blaze of the geisha quarter below, he told him. "It is not so much that I care," he concluded. "There was no longer such a thing as affection—on either side. But I can't help feeling a vague sense of trouble, of unrest. I am fairly commonplace. I don't give much thought to self-analysis and that sort of thing. I was married; it was a state of affairs, a condition. I had become used to it. It governed my relations to women. I followed the traditional moral code of marriage, gave no thought to such matters. It was plain sailing; I played the game with my wife; there could be no other women; it was an easy frame of mind. And now it seems as if suddenly I am at sea without sailing orders, as if I were captain of a ship in mid-ocean and suddenly find that I have no compass course, no destination. And,[Pg 100] of course, one must have one, must decide where one is going. You would say that it makes no difference, that as I have not seen my wife for a year or more, the thing is the same. But it isn't. I am bewildered by a feeling that my status is utterly different, cataclysmically changed. I am like a life prisoner who has without warning been taken out of a cell where he has lain for years, passively, without need of thought of what he should do with life, and who is then suddenly placed in the midst of the sunlit city. He feels he is free, must do something, wants to do something, but somehow, oddly, misses the quiet impassivity, the lack of responsibility of his cell. I know that there is no reason why I shouldn't live to-morrow as I did yesterday, but the fact is that for some reason it seems impossible. There is the sense of an entirely new condition of life which overwhelms me, and I want to, I feel I must respond to it, in some way, but—I know I talk like a fool. I am hanged if I can explain coherently—but I wish I knew what I want to do."
"I think you are doing the best thing just now," said Karsten. "Talk it out of your system. After all, it is a thing you will eventually decide for yourself, gradually. You need be in no hurry. I know just how you feel. You know I was divorced, too. Only in my case another woman, whom I cared for, threw me over at the same time. I went through the same thing. I don't pretend to be able to give advice. In such matters a man must act on his own. But, since we have come to the intimate things in our lives, I don't mind telling you how I fared. One may profit from the foolishness of others."
He smoked silently for a while, evidently his thoughts. "My marriage turned out just like yours," he began suddenly. "There was no reason[Pg 101] why it shouldn't have turned out well, only it didn't. We simply grew tired of each other, for the usual reason, too much intimate daily contact. When one sees every day, morning after morning, a woman in a gown, with her hair down, going through the process of elaborating her attractions, careless of one's presence, it takes the out of the illusion. A man shaving, seen every morning, can hardly be an inspiring spectacle. Crudely put, that was about all there was to it. Came the divorce. It was the only reasonable thing. I felt that I should be pleased, but, just like you, I felt bewildered, that I had lost my bearings.
"I drifted for a while, but I was , nervous, febrile; felt that I should have done with women, but the very fact that I had my liberty, that I could do as I pleased, kept running in my mind. It gave me no rest. I had no moral . You know I am a Dane. The family is one of these old tradition-ridden that you find in Europe. Everything must be governed by set by people who have been dead for ages. In my tribe the woman element has always been predominant. When I was still in school my uncles impressed on me the family code—never touch a friend's wife or his daughter, and never cause a woman regret. Simple, isn't it? If such things worked............