Bridge for Passing

One

I REMEMBER THE DAY when I decided to make the picture in Japan, an April day a year ago, a day like this one upon which I begin the story of my return to Asia. I have always known that the return was inevitable, not a permanent return, for I am too happy in my country to live elsewhere, but a return, nevertheless. One does not live half a life in Asia without return. When it would be I did not know, nor even where it would be, or for what cause. In our changing world nothing changes more than geography. The friendly country of China, the home of my childhood and youth, is for the time being forbidden country. I refuse to call it enemy country. The people in my memory are too kind and the land too beautiful.

China is not the whole of Asia, however, in spite of being most of it. There are other countries to which I could return — Japan, India, Korea and all the rest. Japan, I suppose, is the one I know best after China. Logically, the return would be there, but when? I am not a tourist. I do not enjoy visiting a country merely to see the sights. Nor do I enjoy visiting as a special person. When I return to Japan, I told myself, it will be for a project, a piece of work, something interesting to do, something that will explain why I cannot accept all the dinner invitations, weekends, entertainments which hospitable people offer to friends. But what project? A new question was added to my where and when.

Quite unexpectedly one day it was proposed to me that I go to Japan to work with others on the filming of my book, The Big Wave. The work would be something new and therefore exciting. I am long past the conservatism and caution of youth. I have arrived at the adventuresome age and The Big Wave is an adventurous book. It involves a remote fishing village, a tidal wave, a volcano, none of which I had seen for decades, and which I hankered to see again. The questions were answered. As to where, it was Japan; as to when, it was now.

No, not quite answered, for there was my family to consider. Some of them were old and some very young, a large family spreading over generations and into ramifications. Could I, should I, leave them all at such a time? We went into family consultation. Apparently I could and should. The family doctor assured me that there was no reason to delay going. The children, grown and half grown, were hearty and healthy. And he? He was as he ever would be always now. If I waited for the final possibility, it might be years. Six months ago I could not have left him. But in the brief interval there was for me all the difference between day and night. He had slipped into a world of his own. I had not yet learned to bear what was and must ever be.

“Go,” the doctor said. “You must have a change. You have a long road ahead.”

“Go,” my responsible daughter said. “I will look after everything.”

Thus encouraged, contracts were signed and tickets bought.

The book, of course, had to be put into new form. The Big Wave is a simple story but its subject is huge. It deals with life and death and life again through a handful of human beings in a remote fishing village on the southern tip of the lovely island of Kyushu in the south of Japan. The book has always had a vigorous life of its own. It has won some awards in its field, it has been translated into many languages, but never into the strange and wonderful language of the motion picture. To use that language was in itself adventure, not words now, but human beings, moving, talking, dying with courage, living and loving with even greater courage. I am accustomed to the usual arts. I have made myself familiar with canvas and brush, with clay and stone, with instruments of music, but the motion picture is different from all these. Yet it, too, is a great art. Even when it is desecrated by cheap people and cheap material, the medium is inspiring in its potential. When artists are great enough, we shall have many great pictures. I was not under the illusion of greatness but I hoped that we could make a picture true to the people of whom I had written.

We set forth on a morning in May. Japan had been a near neighbor all during my years in China. When I was a child, if we sailed from Vancouver or San Francisco, then Japan was the last stop before Shanghai, the gateway to my Chinese home. If we sailed from Shanghai, then Japan was the first stop toward my American home. It had been, too, a country of refuge when revolutionary wars drove us out of China. I once spent many months in a small Japanese house in the mountains near Unzen, and Unzen is near the southern part of the island of Kyushu, near Obama. I had taken a motor trip in that same year around Kyushu, and had stopped briefly in Obama to bathe in the hot springs there. In mind I now saw my fishing village somewhere in that region of glorious seacoast, green mountains and smoking volcano.

“I shall recognize it the moment I see it,” I told my family. “It will be a little village hugging a rocky shore, a sandy cove between mountains, a few houses of stone behind a high sea wall. I see it as though I remembered it, although I do not know its name.”

If Japan had been near and familiar in the past, this time it seemed just outside the gates of my home in Pennsylvania. We entered a jet in New York, two hours or so away from my stone farmhouse, and were airborne in a matter of minutes. I reflected upon the incredible span of my life. Though, God willing, I have decades more to live upon this beautiful globe, yet in experience of life and peoples, I began in the middle ages. As a child I traveled by wheelbarrow, sedan chair, mule cart or in a boat pulled along a lazy canal by men walking the towpath. I was twelve years old before I saw a railway train in China and fifteen before I rode in it. Ships I knew, for there were ships on the Yangtze River to take us to Shanghai and thence across the Pacific or up the river to Kiukiang and the mountains of Lu, where we escaped the torrid summer heat of the plains. I did not see or ride in an automobile until I was in college and after that not again for years until I returned to live in my own country. Then I became a modern woman and traveled by air as a matter of course. No, wait — I once took a disheveled little airplane to shorten a journey to Rangoon. Otherwise it would have been a matter of eight days on a slow boat. And once I flew from Sweden to Copenhagen on another journey. Yes, and still again, I flew from Ceylon to Java, descending once into the wet jungle heat of Sumatra. Years later, my first trip by jet was in Europe in the incredibly swift and silent jet aircraft that flies between Copenhagen and Rome. My interest in science has kept my curiosity keen in the development of jet and rocket, and anything slower than a jet makes me impatient now — I who began my life at a speed no greater than four miles an hour by sedan chair!

When the jet lifted me from the earth to the sky that May morning in New York I confess, however, to an elation all but unique. The huge metallic bird girded itself for flight, its engines roared, the creature trembled with its own inner power. Part of the elation was perhaps a reckless awareness of my own complete helplessness as we soared into the upper air. I had committed myself to the machine. I could not escape, I could not descend. No decisions faced me, for there was no way to go but up. An old Chinese proverb says that of the thirty-six ways of escape, the best is to run away. I do not know what the other thirty-five ways are — curiously enough, I never thought to inquire in all those years in China, I suppose because the obvious answer would have been that they were unnecessary, since one can always run away. This is no longer true, however, in our modern age. When one commits one’s self to an airborne craft and the door is fastened against earth and home, there is no escape even by running away. The result is a strange sense of peace — desperate, perhaps, but peace.

Such random thoughts fluttered through my mind that morning while through the tiny window I watched the globe circle away from me. When — and if — I returned to it hours later, the wide continent of my native land and the blue stretch of the Pacific Ocean would be between me and home, although in my childhood our ship took weeks to cross that same ocean and our train another week to cross the continent. Yet this new world has never seemed strange to me. Speed has become a matter of course as well as of necessity. We floated over a sea of silvery clouds, and I settled back in my chair to work on the script of my picture.

The Hawaiian Islands are stepping stones between Asia and the United States. I remember them as islands of hope when I was a child and traveled in ships. Ten days from San Francisco to Honolulu or eight days from Yokohama to Honolulu was the expectation. But eastward or west, I was always eager to reach the islands of eternal green, where coconuts could be had for the picking and garlands of fragrant flowers were everyday greetings. Speed of aircraft has deprived us of something of the excitement of the great ship easing into dock after the long voyage and the sight of crowds of friends waiting, or even the sadness of the last moments of farewell, and friends waving from the dock as the great ship pulls its anchors aweigh for the long voyage ahead.

In our jet aircraft we came down smartly and sharply in Honolulu, not a moment late, and were met by efficient persons and taken to our hotel for the night. I had decided on the stop, not only because I wanted to see Honolulu again but particularly because I wanted to drive once more along the jagged mountains behind the city. I wanted to sees the surfboard riders glide in on the waves. Above all, I wanted to feel the atmosphere of Hawaii as a free state now in a free nation. I had a fancy that to belong to a nation, as an integral part, must mean subsidence of island discontents and grumblings — not that there was ever much grumbling in Hawaii, where the air is always warm and rain and sun fall daily on the just and the unjust alike and often at the same time. No, it would be a matter of spirit.

It was night when we came down and the moon shone on the white surf and the dark sea. The hotel was a royal one and as we crossed the immense lobby to claim our rooms and settle ourselves for sleep, men and women were still coming and going, people of various races and costumes. None was strange to me except the women tourists in Mother Hubbards, those garments devised by sensitive missionaries in the early days when, like Adam and Eve in their Eden, the Hawaiians did not know they were naked. The missionaries knew, of course, and enjoying the vagaries and waywardness of the human heart, I have sometimes wondered whether it was the early missionary men who commanded the lovely naked women to be covered, lest saints yield to the devil within us all, or whether it was the missionary women in their long skirts and sleeves and high collars who knew they could never compete with the smooth brown bodies wearing nothing except a gay bit of cloth or wisp of grass about their loins and a red flower in their waving black hair. Only God knows, and He keeps such secrets to Himself — with a smile, perhaps! Today by the whimsy of fashion the girls of Hawaii wear smart western clothes and the tourists wear flowing Mother Hubbards and again the Hawaiian women have the best of it.

The air of Hawaii is divine, no less. I lay in my comfortable bed and slept and woke to breathe in the soft pure atmosphere blown in by a gentle wind from the sea and slept again until the sun was flaming into my room. I rose then and bathed and dressed and breakfasted alone on the small terrace outside my room. The outside air was exactly that of my own body. I felt no break into heat or cold. So an unborn child must feel the sheltering waters of its first home. It is an indescribably smooth fluidity and the result is well-being, a total absence of conflict with environment.

Already there were surf riders enjoying the morning swell of the waves, and men and women in all but nothing were sauntering on the beach. And I was quite right about the spiritual change. The waiter who brought my breakfast moved with a calm and a confidence which signified an inner content. We conversed briefly on the subject after I had remarked that when I visited Honolulu before it had not been the capital of a state.

“Everything is better now,” he told me.

“How is it better?” I asked.

He shrugged expressive shoulders. “It is not a question of food or clothes or anything to hold in the hands. It is just — better altogether. Now we are belonging. Now we can speak. … Madame, the marmalade is very good — fresh orange, fresh pineapple. I advise!”

“Thank you,” I said, “and I think you are right. Everything is better.”

I reflected upon this wisdom after he had broken my egg into the cup and poured my coffee and had gone away. Exclusion is always dangerous. Inclusion is the only safety if we are to have a peaceful world, inclusion in a national commonwealth, inclusion into an international commonwealth of nations. I believe that every nation should belong to the United Nations as inescapably and irrevocably as a child is born into a family. Resignation should be impossible. If, in a fit of pettishness, the child withdraws or even runs away, he is still a member of the family. The basic relationship applies on a world scale to the family of nations. Anything basic is simple and comprehensive. It is only the simple that can be large enough to comprehend all confusions.

I do not love surfboard riding. The sea and I are not enemies, but we are, let us say, wary friends. I have had encounters with an angry sea, and even with a friendly sea, friendly in the way that a lion can be friendly, felling a man with a playful pat.

Once, on an August day in Martha’s Vineyard, he and I were swimming in the surf. There had been a storm a few days before and though the sky was blue that morning, the sea was rolling in on magnificent waves.

“Take my hand,” he said, “we’ll be strong enough together.”

We were not strong enough, even together. The sea caught us in its huge paws, we were swept off our feet, swept out and out until we were choking and blinded and half drowned. Still hand in hand, we were thrown down at last upon the sand and so escaped. What I remember was the total helplessness of those moments in the wave, when we were at the merciless disposal of insensate power. We walked up the beach in silence, he and I, grateful for life and wanting no more of the sea that day.

I had no inclination, therefore, to go surfboarding alone in Honolulu.

Nor is it any use for me to imagine that I can enjoy myself in a crowd. Autograph hunters are everywhere in the world, and not liking to appear ungracious, it is best for me to be solitary. Alone, therefore, I enjoyed my terrace and the view of sea and mountain. I read the local newspapers, always an aid to understanding, and let the day slip past me until luncheon with friends and a drive in an open Jeep around the islands. Waikiki is for tourists, and it is only when one leaves it that one sees the other beaches, sheltered in coves, where the people who live in Honolulu, or nearby, gather their families to play and picnic. The road is excellent and it hugs a gorgeous shoreline. We stopped often as we drove to watch the crash of heavy surf against the black rocks of ancient lava and again, as in so many times in my life, I lingered to marvel and to admire the strange steep cliffs of those dark and abrupt mountains facing the sea. It is incredible that human beings could climb those upright shafts of lava rock, or that there are caves and crevices between them. Yet men in other ages have so climbed and into the caves and crevices they carried canoes and boats to become the tombs of their famous sea captains. Today other men climb to bring down the vessels again and clean them of ancient dust and put them into museums. I was reminded of Norway and the great ships in museums there which also were the tombs of the men of the sea. Here in Hawaii the feat seems incredible because of the smooth steepness of the clifflike mountains.

It was dark when we went back to the hotel and the evening newspaper carried headlines of a vast earthquake in Chile. I read of the disaster and grieved for those whose lives were lost.

Chile! I remembered that the Downwind Expedition of the recent International Geophysical Year had carried by ship, in its Pacific under-ocean exploration, a device that, bound to the ocean floor, could measure the heat flow from inner earth to the Pacific floor. On the Easter Island rise the heat flow increased sharply. Easter Island and Sala y Gomez, both Chilean, are the result of this rise. And just off the western coast of Chile itself there is a long deep trench, its bottom sharply narrow, a compensation for the Andes, but produced probably by a creeping river of cold material flowing out from the center of the ocean and pushing its way under the rocky continental mass. A strange silent underworld, this ocean bed, a violent world when catastrophe takes place in the conflict between fire and water, heat and cold.

Chile seemed far away from the pleasant islands of Hawaii and I turned to the demands of the evening. We were to have dinner in the night club across the street, and thither we went to enjoy Hawaiian food and music and dances. The dances made me laugh again and again. They were not only beautiful — they were also subtle and gay, satires on life. One dance, given ostensibly in memory of the first missionaries, was especially humorous. A lovely slender brown girl came on the stage. She wore a white old-fashioned western dress of embroidered muslin, not a Mother Hubbard but the sort of dress the wife of a missionary might have worn a hundred years ago, high neck, long sleeves, narrowed at the waist, full-skirted to the floor with a ruffled train. The girl was the picture of sweet innocence, her long black hair smoothly combed into a knot at her nape. The only touch of color, except her full red lips, was a scarlet hibiscus flower behind her left ear and this flower made me suspicious. In a few minutes my suspicions were confirmed and I was in helpless laughter. For this girl, this innocent island maiden, enveloped from head to foot in white, performed a dance so fraught with all the wiles of woman enticing man that Eve herself, had she seen it, would have wanted lessons. Within the white encasement the beautiful brown body curved and quivered in sensual joy, not primitive, for such joy is eternal, renewing itself in every generation of man and woman, a dance of love.

The subdued light of the lanterns fell on the circle of watching faces, each absorbed in its own dream, its private memory or unfulfilled desire. When it was over there was silence, a long sigh, then thunderous applause. The lovely girl smiled and bowed and went away and though we clapped until our palms burned, she would not return.

The master of ceremonies had prefaced each event with a pleasant rattle of conversation and several times during the evening he had mentioned a tidal wave. He had said, tossing it off as a joke, that perhaps we would all enjoy the excitement of a tidal wave and therefore he had ordered one as an added attraction for the evening. None of us took this seriously until now as we woke again to reality, and he began to prattle again of the tidal wave. Suddenly I heard sharply and clearly what he said. He was not announcing a tidal wave, he was warning us of its approach.

I rose at once with my companion and left the room and crossed the street to the hotel. There all was confusion. Guests were being sent to the upper floors and streets facing the sea were barricaded. What to do! We looked at one another in consternation. Our jet was scheduled to fly at an hour after midnight. It was now just short of eleven o’clock. If life and its crises have taught me anything it is to proceed with the schedule until it becomes impossible. We proceeded by rushing to our rooms, packing our bags and taking the last available taxicab to the airport.

The airport in Honolulu, as everyone knows, is on a narrow peninsula of land just above sea level. When we arrived it was alarmingly empty. A few employees stood staring at the horizon and the cabman was in haste to be paid off. In a few minutes we found ourselves alone in the big waiting room, and were escorted by a gloomy attendant to an upper floor and a comfortable club room, empty except for a frightened hostess behind the lunch counter. She welcomed us without enthusiasm, poured coffee and then walked to the big window and stared into the darkness over the sea. We sat down on the couch and listened, perforce, to the blaring of the radio fixed into the ceiling above our heads. It was playing jazz but every other moment or two the music broke and an inexorable voice announced that the tidal wave had reached another island and that the height was mounting. In a few minutes it would strike Hilo at an estimated height of over sixty feet. We also learned that the wave was a result of the earthquake in Chile. There is a continental connection under the ocean between that deep trench off Chile and the islands of the Pacific. Strange symbolism this, by which an earthquake in one hemisphere produces a tidal wave in the other!

My meditation was interrupted by the sudden disappearance of the hostess. She had returned to the counter, murmuring something about her husband and three children. Would they be alarmed when she did not come home at midnight as usual? We could not answer her question and neither could she and without another word, even so much as good-by or good night, she left us and was not to be seen again.

We sat on in the vast room. Jazz faded away at midnight and there was only the voice, announcing the onrushing tidal wave. We considered our fate, whatever it was to be, and conversation ceased. Aircraft had been removed from the field, the voice told us, and all flights were canceled. Roads to the hotel were closed. The silence over the city was ominous. We became part of the silence. There was nothing to be done except to wait.

Suddenly at one o’clock sharp the door opened. A breathless young man shouted to us to come at once to the airfield. Our jet would take off in the next few minutes. Yes, the luggage was all on. We seized our handbags and tore after him. The jet was there, we were pushed aboard, and faster than I have ever seen a jet rise into the sky we rose. At exactly the moment we left the earth the radio announced the arrival of the tidal wave.

Mounting into the sky, I was reminded of death itself. The hours of anxiety preceding, the final instant of departure, the inescapable separation from earth and all we had known, the ascent into unknown spaces — is this not the experience of death? There is one difference. From the final flight there is no return. For us there was the hope of return to beautiful Japan.

Yet before we could arrive on earth again, the tidal wave had struck. Rushing through the upper air, we learned by radio that traveling westward, it had already reached Japan. It had traveled more swiftly than our jet to strike with cruel force upon the northeastern shores. The people were warned by the government and could not believe. In their experience, earthquake and tidal wave came as companions. They could not comprehend that an earthquake in Chile might mean a tidal wave on their shores. What strange coincidence, that we were to arrive in Japan at this very moment to make a picture called The Big Wave!

“How did you manage it?” the reporters demanded at the airport in Tokyo. “Who is your publicity man?”

They were joking, of course, and we had no publicity man, but it was true that we came riding in upon the publicity of the huge tidal wave. I was grieved that my return to Asia must be upon a storm. I was helpless except to express sympathy for those who had suffered.

I had expected a quiet arrival in Tokyo in other ways. The hour was between two and three after midnight and I could not imagine anyone at the airport to meet me. I thought of one or two business associates, a few friends, perhaps, then a quick ride through dark streets to the old Imperial Hotel, and a bath and bed. It had been a long flight, after all. Sometime in the night we had come down on Wake Island for refueling but it had not seemed important. Outside the window I saw only a cluster of flat buildings and men scurrying here and there, about their business. It might have been anywhere in the middle of the night. Tokyo was another matter.

“I’m glad we are arriving at such a ghastly hour,” I had said. “There can’t be anyone to meet us.”

“Don’t be too sure,” my companion had retorted.

The great aircraft had trembled as it descended and the lights of Tokyo glittered out of the darkness.

“I am right,” I had said. “There is no one here.”

A man in a white uniform had stepped forward, “Are you—”

“Yes, we are,” I said.

“Then welcome to Japan,” he said. “I am with Japan Airlines. This way, please. … Just a moment, please … photographers and reporters.”

We paused. Lights focused us in the darkness and cameras snapped. Reporters crowded around us with questions and exclamations about the tidal wave.

“Thank you,” the man said when we showed signs of exhaustion. “Your friends are waiting for you.”

Waiting for us? We were speeded through customs, and our friends overwhelmed us indeed with greetings and flowers.

How did I feel? In a way as though I had come home after a long absence and in a way as though I had come to a new and foreign country. The smiling faces, the warm voices, sometimes the eyes brimming with tears, these claimed me for their own. Men and women I had known as young in my own youth were there looking as changed as I do, and with them were children and grandchildren like mine at home, the boys in western clothes, the girls in their formal kimono.

“My daughters rose at one o’clock so that they could wear kimono to welcome you,” a friend said proudly.

I know how long it takes to put on kimono properly and make the suitable coiffeur. The girls were beautiful and I was glad they and others wore kimono to make me feel at home when I arrived, at least. When I lived in Japan before the war, all my women friends wore kimono. The most modern and liberal had perhaps one western suit or dress, but this was unusual and not much approved. Now Japanese women wear western dress every day and always except for the few formal occasions of life when they put on their kimono, and many of them own only one kimono and some none at all. There are exceptions, of course. Old women wear kimono and certain distinguished women, even in business, wear kimono always. My special friend wears kimono because it is becoming to her. She has reached the position and the age when she can wear what she likes.

Behind the friendly crowd that night with its flowers and photographers, I was aware of Tokyo itself. I knew how severely it had been bombed in the war, and that now it was rebuilt, new and prosperous, a symbol perhaps of the Japan that was strange to me. Yet even the people who came to greet me seemed changed for the better, I thought. The old stiff formality was somehow gone. I heard ready laughter, not the old polite laughter, but spontaneous and real. Everyone talked freely and without fear. That was new. The sweet courtesy remained, but life and good spirits bubbled through, as though an ancient restraint had been removed. This was my first impression that night, and I shall speak of it again and again because it was expressed everywhere and in many ways.

Meanwhile the photographers were patiently following us at every step. Japanese photographers are indefatigable, philosophical, incredibly agile. They do not demand smiles or pleasant postures. Their cameras click incessantly where-ever one is and whatever one is doing. They flew about in the night like fireflies, and we were photographed continuously, embanked in flowers and encircled by friends. We moved en masse at last into waiting cars and were driven at breakneck speed to the Imperial Hotel. I do not know why it is that I have never been terrified by Japanese drivers, They dash through unmarked streets and packed crowds, shouting and warning, and yet they do not have accidents or at least I have not seen accidents. It all seemed natural enough, reminding me of other days, years ago, when I was driven in just such fashion through streets or along the edges of cliffs, up and down mountains or above the sea and roaring surf. Perhaps lack of fear is simply because in Asia I relax into Oriental acceptance and realize there is practically nothing I can do about anything.

We arrived finally and alive at the Imperial Hotel, that haven where Japan meets the world with her own grace and style, combined with an amazing amount of comfort and good service, and an hour later we were asleep in air-conditioned rooms, surrounded by flowers in Japanese baskets.

Yet for a long time I could not sleep. Memory went to work and pictures passed through my mind. The first was the vivid face of my mother, brown hair, brown skin, brown eyes. We were sitting on the wide veranda of our house in China. I was perhaps seven, a barefoot child with long yellow hair, sitting on the floor before her, hugging my knees and listening. She was telling me the story of my sister, who died before I was born.

“On the Yellow Sea,” my mother said, “between Japan and China. We had gone to Japan for the summer, to the mountains behind Nagasaki. It was before we found Kuling, in the Lu mountains of Kiangsi, here in China. It was so hot in the Yangtze Valley that I was afraid for the two children. We had a lovely summer in Japan — the air was cool and healthy up on those mountains. I wanted to stay until October, but your father said he had to be back in September. I shouldn’t have listened to him, but I always did. We came back on a Japanese steamship — the Hiroshima Maru—and the baby fell ill. I don’t know what it was — a high fever and a dysentery. She was only six months old and not strong. And I am always so seasick — I couldn’t even hold her. Your father tried to take care of me. And so old Dr. Martin walked up and down the deck with the baby in his arms. I’ll never forget how he looked — so tall and straight and the little baby in his arms.”

Here her eyes always filled with tears and I always wept because she did and crept to her side. She held out her hand to me and I clasped it in both mine.

“Then what?” I begged.

“Well, you know, dear. She died in his arms. I was lying in a steamer chair so sick! It was a breathlessly hot night, and there was an old moon, sinking into the sea. And suddenly I saw him stop and look down into the baby’s face. And I — knew.”

I felt her hand against my cheek, and I longed to comfort her and did comfort her, I suppose, in my childish way. For the story usually ended by her wiping her eyes and saying briskly, “Now let’s have a little music before we go to bed,” or perhaps she suggested an orange or a mango or a piece of pomelo.

What a volatile thing is memory! When I thought of pomelo, I remembered the delight of that sweet and juicy fruit, a relative of grapefruit but infinitely better in every way, the skin easily detached, the sections free from one another and the flavor superb. In comparison, grapefruit is a little bag of sour water and yielding that only grudgingly. I determined to find pomelo again in Japan, for I had never seen it in my own country.

From my mother’s lips, then, I first heard the names of Japanese cities, and saw in my mind’s eye, the scenes of mountain and seashore. And my little dead sister was buried in the Christian cemetery in Shanghai, as I knew, for I saw her name with the three others of our family’s children, later to be born in China, and to die there, and this before I myself was born in my grandfather’s colonial home in West Virginia.

I was nine years old when I first saw Japan for myself, and it was on my first visit to my own country. Our ship stopped at Nagasaki, a Canadian liner, for my father was convinced that only the English really knew how to make a ship and sail it and only an English captain could be trusted to control his crew properly. The city of Nagasaki is a seaport and in those days a small one, a cluster of houses clinging to the shore and pushed close by the high mountains behind. The people there speak a dialect and my father would not let me learn even a few words of it because, he said, it was not a pure Japanese and it was important that the very first words in any foreign language be learned with a perfect accent. He was himself an accomplished linguist and I always obeyed him. It would not have occurred to me to do otherwise. As for the name of Hiroshima, it remained for me the name of the Japanese ship upon which my baby sister died until years later, decades later, when it became the city of the dead, after the bomb fell.

The lobby of the Imperial Hotel is the place where anyone meets anyone from anywhere in the world. I descended there the next morning in an elevator whose operator was a beautiful Japanese girl in kimono. When I walked into the lobby I was approached by a pleasant-faced American woman.

“You look familiar to me,” she said. “I am from Ohio. Do I know your name?”

I smiled and shook my head. She smiled and went on. The next instant my hands were caught in a warm grasp, and there before me was an old friend from India.

“Fancy seeing you here,” he shouted. “Why aren’t you in New Delhi? Our guest room there is waiting for you.”

We sat down and exchanged promises and he told me the news of his family, his pretty young wife, much younger than he and married to him against her family’s wish, because he is old enough to be her father. But she is a determined young woman and they have been happy together and, to his immense pride, she has given him two sons. He took their pictures from his wallet as he told me about them, and I saw the family standing in their beautiful tropical garden. Ismaya was lovely in her sari, a composed and well-organized young woman, her two little boys clinging to her hands and my friend behind them, tall and handsome and white-haired.

“I look like their grandfather, do I not,” he said proudly, “but let me tell you, nevertheless, I advise parents to have children when they are old. My house will never be empty. I shall leave it before my children do, and when I am gone they will comfort their mother.”

My Japanese secretary was at my elbow. She bowed, smiled placatingly and reminded me.

“Please, now is time for press conference. Everybody waiting.”

Press conference! In Japan this is a formal and even formidable event, and so it proved for us. The day was hot, May in Tokyo is always hot. We gathered in a large room where a long table stretched across one end. Behind the table chairs were arranged in a row, and we took our places, not hit and miss, but in carefully arranged protocol. First we discussed who was to sit at the table. Then we discussed how we were to sit.

I have been in many press conferences, but there was a peculiar excitement about this one. The big room was crowded with reporters from all papers and magazines — more than seventy. Photographers were numerous but they stood quietly waiting, their cameras poised.

As usual in Japan, the press conference began with speeches from selected persons. In our case, it had been agreed that I was to make a few brief remarks as introduction. What I said was simply that I was happy to be in Japan again, grateful to them for their kindness on my last visit and ready to report progress on our project, The Big Wave, a story of Japan. I said that we were pleased to be able to tell them that one of their own companies was co-producing with us, and that I had asked the head of that company to make the formal announcement.

While this was going on the usual pretty girls were serving us glasses of cold tea. A great innovation, this cold tea, influence of the West, certainly, for I did not remember anything but hot tea in earlier days. In the humid heat the cold tea was a blessing. The press sat by submissively without tea, listening closely. Questions are not allowed until speeches are over.

The speech in this case was a notable one. The film executive was well-known and highly respected. He was a man on the young side of middle age, of a calm disposition, complete assurance, and pleasant warmth. I do not understand Japanese, but the speech went on at some length. I wondered what he was saying, for he is usually a man of few words. Our translator told us afterward and privately what had been said. How could I keep from being moved? It was a beautiful speech in which he said that his company felt honored to be part of the picture The Big Wave. He said that once he himself had thought, some years ago, of making the book into a picture for he read it at a time of deep depression of mind, when Japan stood before the world for the first time in her proud history a defeated nation. He himself did not know how to recover his own spirits. One day he found this little book and he read it. He felt the author wished to convey through it a communication of hope to the Japanese people, a belief that as they had lived through centuries with the constant possibility of destruction through tidal waves and earthquake, and indeed had often suffered tragically from such natural catastrophes, only to survive each with renewed courage and strength, so again they would survive even defeat. Now, through peculiar coincidence, he had the opportunity in taking part, on behalf of his company, in the making of the film version of the story. Therefore he announced at this press conference that his company had joined the Americans as co-producers of The Big Wave.

I listened with gratitude to life. It is the highest reward when a writer hears that a book, written in doubt and solitude, has reached a human heart with a deeper meaning than even the writer had been aware of, as she wrote. It is the something extra, the unexpected return. Many questions followed the speech. They related to production, where the location was, who were to be the actors, and so on. We were not ready yet to announce the actors, for we had many candidates to hear and to see. Negotiations had been going on for weeks with certain stars, and only one was decided upon. We were resolute, we tried to be good-humored in parrying all efforts to extract information about the cast. Suddenly, as we were about to disperse, word came in that negotiations had been successful in regard to one star. We could announce that the well-known Japanese actor, Sessue Hayakawa, would take the role of Old Gentleman in The Big Wave.

Upon this the press departed, except for an English reporter, who had not understood Japanese. I spent a few minutes with her, and with one or two other ones who had some special request.

Then everyone was gone and I was alone again. This was the changeless pattern of my days since he had ceased to be himself — a crowd of people, and then no one. I missed him now and especially because he would have enjoyed this press conference. He had presided over many press conferences for me, in many parts of the world, the first one when I came from China, shy and frightened enough to determine in my secret mind that whatever lay ahead, I would not allow my life to be changed. It was changed, of course, the moment he met me in Montreal. I had come by sea and train from Shanghai and although I knew him somewhat through his letters — he wrote the most charming and articulate letters I had ever read — I saw him for the first time, sun-browned and with eyes of a startling blue. I was speechless with my habitual shyness but he was completely at ease, which he always was, everywhere and with anyone, a happy attribute for me, when the next day I faced the formidable press in New York. He knew the reporters, however, and they knew him, for he had begun his professional life as a newspaperman, and they liked him. He set us all at ease, and I found myself answering their questions frankly. Too frankly, he told me afterward with amusement, for when I was asked my age it did not occur to me not to tell it, since in China every year was considered an added honor.

His natural ease made him an excellent chairman, and he was the chairman of an amazing variety of organizations. How often have I not sat in such gatherings and watched him while he, seemingly without effort, allowed every dissident voice to speak, every argument to be heard, and then quietly and in a few words gathered the consensus of opinion into a lucid resolution! He had the rare gift of creating order out of disorder, an editorial gift. But beyond that he had the gift of human understanding which enabled him to select the essential from the nonessential and find points of agreement among those who disagreed.

The little secretary was at my elbow again.

“We have time to go to the old Meiji shrine before you must go to the office and I want you to see it, please, first,” she told me. “Tokyo is too new, because of bombing, but Meiji shrine is old and you will feel better to see it.”

She summoned a cab and we were whisked through the city, so changed that I would not have known it, new and busy and not beautiful. The palace, however, remained as it was, untouched, and I saw its curved roofs rising, as of old, behind the moated stone walls. Then we entered the Meiji shrine and into the ancient peace. I wandered about the paths, Sumiko tactfully quiet at my side, and came to rest beside the lake. It is as it was when I was a child standing there with my Japanese nurse. The same fat carp, enormous in size, moved lazily among the water lilies, and I told Sumiko this.

“Not the same, please,” she said in reply. “In the war many hungry people coming here by night to catch carp and eat them.”

I maintained however that some of them were the same. Otherwise even in many years they could not have grown so big.

“Perhaps,” she said politely. “Anyhow it is time we will be going, office waiting, doubtless.”

We walked to the gate and entered another breakneck taxicab and were whirled to the offices of the big Japanese motion picture company.

Here I pause for a brief interlude.

The most astonishing aspect of new Japan is the Japanese woman. My first Japanese friend was the wife of an Englishman, who lived in a big house on the mountainside near my childhood home in China. I must have known other Japanese women in our goings to and comings from Japan, but none made as deep an impression upon my memory as the lady in the Englishman’s house, and this, I think, because I saw her only as she passed by in her sedan chair, borne by four uniformed bearers. She wore kimono always, and her hair was brushed in the high lacquered coiffeur of the ladies of ancient Japan. Her face was powdered white, and her onyx eyes gazed blankly ahead of her until she saw me standing in the dust of the road. In summer she held a small parasol, white silk painted with cherry blossoms, and in winter she wore a brocaded coat over her kimono. We exchanged looks, hers sad and incurious until she smiled at me, and mine wide with wonder and admiration because she was beautiful. A beautiful woman, a handsome man, a pretty child, are sources of joy, merely for the eyes, if for nothing else. It was as this that I remembered her, and because of the smile, somehow as my friend.

In later years I knew more intimately as friend an occasional Japanese woman. She seemed, whoever she was, always remote, somewhat sad, overburdened with duty, and this was true whether she was the wife of a farmer, or of a man of wealth and position. One had always to cross a barrier, disappointment with life, it might be, if not a personal sorrow, before one could reach the inner woman. Perhaps she was never to be reached. Her voice soft and gentle, her demeanor modest and considerate of others, she wore silence as a garment and unless addressed directly she seemed to merge herself with the background.

None of this is true now. The old-fashioned woman, or so it seems to me, has simply disappeared from Japan. Men are very little changed either in appearance or behavior. But women? I cannot describe in one day or one place the extraordinary differences I found in Japanese women. Let me approach the subject gradually, through the individual women I came to know while we made the picture.

Therefore we had no sooner stepped into the offices of the big Japanese motion picture company than I was astounded by what I saw. In other years I would have been greeted by a young man, secretary and assistant to those above. The office would have been staffed by young men. Now, however, it was staffed by young women, all in smart western clothes, and several of them speaking good English. I had the impression, too, that all of them were efficient and pretty. One of them came forward when we appeared and she was certainly very pretty. Her hair was cut short and curled — and let me say here and now, and say again and again, probably, how I deplore the permanent wave in Japan. The smooth straight black hair which was once the glory of Japanese women is now usually cut short and tortured into tightly curled wiglike shapes. Worst of all, it is fashionable, especially for actresses as I was to discover, to dye the black hair a rusty brown. The natural sheen is lost and the muddy color dulls the light cream of the complexion, once so beautiful. Somehow that rusty brown makes the dark eyes ineffective, too, although the Japanese women have the latest in eye make-up and face-powders, liquid or dry or paste.

These modern looks are nothing, however, compared to the modern behavior. Gone is the modest downcast gaze, gone the delicate reserve, gone the indirect approach to men. Instead bold looks, frank speech, a frankly sexual attack on any available man, with preference for the too susceptible American, is the rule of the day.

I am getting ahead of my story. I did not learn all this at once when I entered the offices of the big Japanese film company. What I saw was a bevy of pretty women, neat, composed, efficient, outgoing and apparently indestructibly young, and one of them led us to the inner office. I confess that it was reassuring to see my special friend sitting behind a very modern desk, to be sure, but dressed in a silver gray silk kimono and a pale pink obi. She rose to meet us, bowing deeply with all the old-fashioned grace. Her English is perfect, and I knew she spoke French and German and Italian as well, for part of her work is travel in European countries for Japanese films. There is really nothing old-fashioned about her except her dress. She has a full partnership with her husband and two other associates, both men, in the business. They defer to her wisdom and efficiency and judgment, although I did hear occasional subterranean grumbles from the production manager, to the effect that she was “getting very high these days.” Since he was a bachelor, however, in itself reprehensible in Japan for a man over fifty, I did not take him seriously.

The office was a handsome one, modern to the last chair, but a fine old painting hung on the wall and some excellent calligraphy. My friend invited us to be seated, and two or three of the pretty young women brought green tea in Japanese bowls. We sipped and made small talk. She invited me to come and spend a weekend at her country home in Kamakura. I accepted, and of that I shall tell more later. We did not stay long, for it is never good manners in Japan to stay too long on a first call. In fifteen minutes or so, the pretty young woman directed us to the office of the head of the company, a handsome tall man, neither young nor old.

He sat behind his desk and when we entered he rose, bowed and invited us to be seated around a wide long table. He did not speak much English, and his secretary, another pretty young woman, translated for him and for us. He was an intelligent man, as one could see from his fine cultivated face, and a man of the world, assured, self-confident, courteous. The room, as are most offices and business rooms in Japan, was well-designed and sparely but excellently furnished with modern furniture, calm in atmosphere. We sat down at the table in comfortable leather chairs and another pretty girl or two brought us fresh tea. While the men talked through the pretty girl interpreter, I examined the room. On the wall near us, at the end of the room, hung three impressive oil portraits, founders of the company, I was told. These were the only pictures except that, on the opposite walls, as I next observed, there hung a large calendar, whereon was imprinted in poster style the lively form of a bathing beauty in full color, an engaging object upon which the eyes of the three solemn gentlemen, though deceased, still seemed to be fixed. I wondered, laughing inwardly, if one of the neat and pretty girls had hung her counterpart there with humorous intent.

Meanwhile the conversation was proceeding briskly. It was obvious that our host understood English perfectly, but the pretty girl interpreted for him just the same, and with a lively dignity. He obviously relied on her good sense as well as on her competence. What does the Japanese man think of this new woman? I made up my mind to find out somehow, some day. As for her, she appeared to be extremely useful as well as ornamental and, above all, she seemed to be happy. Her ancient sadness was gone. Tragedy had left her, and if what had taken its place was not exactly comedy, it was something vivacious and delightful.

In an amazingly short time the details of our co-operation were fixed — if anything can be said to be fixed in the fluidities and exigencies of film making. The amenities, at least, over, this head of a great triangular company invited us to meet with the remaining third, the production manager. We knew then that we had reached the ultimate, the practical, the man with whom we must deal again and again. To meet him, however, would not be possible until after the weekend, for it was the end of the day, and the day the last of the working week. The weekend in Japanese society has become as important an event as in the most Western country. Nothing could be done until it was over. It was the ideal time to accept the invitation from my friend.

Not far from the huge and modern city of Tokyo is the quiet town of Kamakura. It is famous in Japanese history but famous now because it is the home of some of Japan’s best-known writers. My friend’s husband was in Europe but she herself came for me in her comfortable and chauffeured car. We drove through the crowded city and the spreading suburbs into the country. It was a sunny afternoon in August, but we did not know it was sunny until we got out of the city because of the smog, which is the same anywhere, and in Tokyo it can be rich and thick, and was that day.

I greatly enjoyed the drive, nevertheless, not only because it gave me the opportunity to see the general outlines of the amazing new Tokyo, at least in one direction, but also because I found that I could really talk with the equally amazing new Japanese woman at my side. She remained beautifully Japanese in her gray silk kimono, her hair smooth, her face amiable and composed, but her mind was cosmopolitan and sophisticated in the true sense of the word. She could and did remain herself anywhere in the world, at ease in any capital. I am accustomed to cosmopolitan and sophisticated women in many countries, but my friend has an unusual and individual quality. One could never mistake her for any but a Japanese, and yet this national saturation of birth and education is only the medium through which she communicates a universal experience and with wisdom and charm. A rose is a rose anywhere in the world, and yet in a Japanese room, arranged in a Japanese vase in a Japanese tokonoma, the rose becomes somehow Japanese. That is my friend.

I asked hundreds of questions, I fear, and was delighted by her frank and informed replies. Two hours slipped past like minutes.

“I have invited some of our writers to meet you,” she told me at last. “We will have dinner at a famous inn.”

When we arrived at Kamakura, the sun had already set and we went directly to the inn. The car stopped at some distance away, however, and we walked along a narrow footpath, far from the main street of Kamakura. At the end of the path we entered a wooden gate and stepping stones led us from there across a garden to a wide lawn, lit by stone lanterns. The low roofs of the buildings nestled beneath great trees, climbing the abrupt slopes of a mountain behind the inn.

We were late and the guests were waiting for us, a few of Japan’s best-loved writers. They all wore dark Japanese kimono, and they sat on a long stone bench, sipping tea. I was introduced to them, one by one, and recognized especially Mr. Kawabata and Jiro Osaragi. Mr. Kawabata is president of the P.E.N. Club of Japan, and had just returned, on the same jet with me, from a visit to North and South America. Since I had never met him, I did not know who he was. He sat just across the aisle from me and I had kept looking at him from time to time.

“That is certainly a great man of Japan,” I murmured to my seat mate.

He was not tall and his bones were delicately fine. The eyes, however, revealed the man. They were large, dark, and so lit with intelligence that they were indeed windows through which one looked into a sensitive and brilliant mind.

Now I was looking through them again and with instant recognition.

“It was you — on the jet!” I cried.

He smiled. “I knew you but you didn’t know me.”

“I know you now,” I declared. “I have read your books. I know you went to South America. And — forgive me — I knew when I looked at you that day that you were — somebody.”

He laughed at my stupidity, and I admired in my heart his delicately carved features, the firm ivory skin, and the shock of gray hair. He is sixty-two years old and his heavy silk kimono completed his air of an aristocrat. Yet he is also very lively and modern. When I commended, later in the evening, the excellent service on the Japan Airlines he looked mischievous and wagged his head.

“But,” he said, “I have a complaint. The hostesses I do not always find very pretty!”

We laughed and my friend explained amicably that this famous writer attracts young girls and therefore is a connoisseur.

We sat for an hour, admiring the moon and enjoying cool fruit juice. The conversation was in English or in Japanese translated for my benefit. Most of the writers did not speak English. Then we were summoned, and we sauntered into the restaurant, took off our shoes at the entrance and walked into a large room, open on two sides to the garden. There to the breeze of a big electric fan, we talked or rested now and then in peaceful silence. I sat beside Jiro Osaragi and my friend translated for us. I had just finished reading for the second time his tender novel, Homecoming, a book almost feminine in its grace and subtlety. It was difficult to imagine it written by this tall strong handsome man in middle age. Certainly he was not in the least feminine. But the combination of delicacy and strength, of tenderness and cruelty, is usual in the work of Japanese writers, and is perhaps inherent in Japanese nature.

While we talked, one dish after another was served. It was the season of sea trout, the first good season in a long time, I was told, for sea trout have been destroyed in recent years in some fashion not clear to me, perhaps by atomic waters. At any rate, it was evidently a delicacy now. The trout were served individually roasted on hot stones instead of on plates, each fish placed as though it were swimming on the ocean bed. A line of salt symbolized the beach, a bit of cedar twig the seaweed. It was too exquisite to eat, but we ate and found it delicious. When it was taken away, there came next a length of green bamboo, split, and steamed inside was the tender flesh of young quail. And so on until the end of the meal and we went back to the garden again. There in an open mat shed we had “genghis khan,” a Mongol dish of thin sliced beef and vegetables broiled on a charcoal brazier, the forerunner, I daresay, of modern sukiyaki. Properly it should be prepared and eaten outdoors, as we did, in memory of nomad Mongol life. But let me not go into this matter of delicacies, for there is no end to the ingenuity and imagination of the Japanese in culinary matters. The evening passed, too soon the hour of separation arrived. We said our farewells and went our way.

My friend’s house is a large one, a combination of ancient and modern Japanese architecture, set in a huge garden and surrounded by a stone wall. As we entered I caught a glimpse of a big living room furnished with western chairs and couches and next to it a room in the Japanese manner. It was too late to linger, however, and I was taken to an upstairs room where a mattress and spotless sheet and pillow were laid on tatami on the floor. She showed me the private bath, felt of a thermos teapot to see if it were hot, and bade me a kind good night.

When we had parted I slid back the shoji and found beyond it a wide veranda overlooking the beautiful garden, just now drenched in golden light from the moon, a light so brilliant that it dimmed the lamps in the stone lanterns. The scene was one of ineffable and eternal peace, the moon riding high over the treetops as it had for unnumbered years. God send that we may watch it ride the same path across the sky for centuries ahead! And yet I was reminded that it was the same moon which only recently had all but led our world to final catastrophe. A great radar, set to catch the slightest unusual outburst of energy anywhere in the world, reported one night that such an outburst was taking place. Alerts flew around the globe. Distance is no problem to transmission, and in two seconds retaliation orders could have been sent and received. Just in time there came a frantic message for delay. What had happened? The full moon had risen and somewhere a bemused young man had neglected to record its rise and thus explain the outburst of energy. Just in time the orders were not sent and the human race was saved.

I turned from the moon and went to bed. The ancient lanterns burned in the gardens all night and the crickets sang while I slept.

In the morning my friend declared that I must see the famous Kamakura shrine. We left the house after a late breakfast and were driven to this ancient shrine, built in the period of the Meiji, some hundred and fifty years ago. It was Sunday and a crowd of sightseers was already there. Young Japan sauntered about, boy and girl, hand in hand, to my astonishment — shades of old Japan! — or side by side, with lunch baskets. Country folk had come into town and the elders walked sedately, here woman still a few paces behind man.

When we approached the great entrance pavilion of fine cedar wood, however, we found a commotion. A television film was in the process of being made. Men dressed in the ancient garb of shogun and daimyo were fencing and fighting in an historical play. We joined the watching crowd. Just as the director, a harried young man wearing dark glasses in the best Hollywood style, had shouted “Action!”—just as the cameras were about to click — action stopped. Into the medieval scene a youth on a bicycle came wheeling down the hill from the shrine. There were loud yells from the director, frantic also in the best Hollywood style, as he warned the young cyclist to take to the woods. The boy obeyed in alarm, and the warriors took their places again and plunged into battle. Alas, at this moment a horde of school children burst into view. Yells again, the children were pushed into the woods, and once more we returned to the past. So it went. There was something symbolic about it, old and new, and one felt the combination everywhere in Japan — new wine in old bottles.

The big living room in that beautiful Japanese house, furnished in western style, is for the family, I discovered when we returned. The Japanese living room was for my friend’s mother, now eighty years old. She sat on the floor upon a cushion, her legs folded flat beneath her. Upon a low table before her were her precious possessions, her books, a vase of flowers, her little green parrot in a cage. She could herself have stepped out of centuries past. Yet she was entirely happy in the comfortable modern Japanese home. She was in the family, the center of it, welcome and warm, but she herself was old Japan. Something old and something new again!

The day spent itself in pleasant peace, in conversation and explanation of the garden and library. I rode back to Tokyo alone in the evening in the comfortable, air-conditioned, made-in-Japan car and reflected upon the weekend. One small incident stayed above all others in my mind. In the quiet luxurious house there was a younger sister, gentle and unobtrusive and no longer young. I had refrained from asking questions about her. It was none of my business why she was there. She was helpful, she was content. But my inveterate, uncontrollable, insatiable novelist’s curiosity got the better of me just before I left. I really am on terms of good friendship with this Japanese family, but I felt compelled to begin with an apology.

“I am ashamed to ask so many questions,” I told my friend. “Yet if I do not ask, how shall I know?”

“Ask whatever you like,” she told me kindly.

I asked, “Please, has your younger sister never married? It is so unusual.”

There was an instant’s hesitation on that calm older sister’s face. Then she answered. “She did marry once, twenty years ago. He was a good man — an old friend … Four days after the wedding she came home.”

I waited and hoped that I would not ask another question. But no, it came rushing to my lips. “Why did she come home?”

The elder sister answered quite simply. “We don’t know. We have never liked to ask.”

I asked no more questions. Twenty years and they do not like to ask! The answer revealed the exquisite reticence of an entire people … No, not new wine in old bottles. Reverse the metaphor — old wine in new bottles. The difference is subtle but profound.

The next morning we met by appointment the production manager. He is an important figure in any film company, but in that Japanese company he held the position of prime minister. Everything was referred to him, miracles were expected, and all yeas and nays from the top came through him.

On Monday morning, then, very hot, we were ushered into his office by a pretty girl. We beheld a huge Japanese man in shirt sleeves with wild hair, wild eyes, heavy jowls, a pursed mouth, a loud voice. He was bellowing into one telephone while three other telephones in various parts of the room were occupied by three pretty girls, each speaking from his dictation but in soft pretty voices. He rolled his huge fiery eyes at us but did not acknowledge us otherwise, except by an imperious wave of his enormous hand bidding us to be seated. We sat down in low chairs around a low table and a pretty girl served tea while we waited. He broke off the conversation at last with a fierce bellow and came to greet us, all cordiality and kindness and impatience and a certain air of desperation, which later we learned was his habitual mood.

He put aside formalities and spoke with apparent frankness — certainly frankness of the moment. I make this qualification, for I have learned even in my own country that the charming and disarming frankness of the permanent citizens of the theater world does not necessarily convey what is commonly called truth. Truth in the theater may be strictly momentary and confined within the limits of hope, expectation, or even possibly, intention. The production manager therefore belonged strictly to the theater world. He spoke in Japanese, his interpreter one of the pretty young women educated in the United States, who softened what he said without destroying its force. She was very skillful. But we did not yet really know him. That day he merely said, looking harassed, that he would do everything he could to help us, asking us only one favor. We were to allow him to arrange financial matters with the cast. Japanese film companies, he told us, were not very favorable to co-producing American pictures. Americans paid absurd salaries and made actors discontented and unruly afterward when dealing with their own Japanese companies. He banged his big fist on the table. Witness, he roared, what had happened in Italy! It must not happen in Japan! We promised, and took our leave.

Now that we had met all the important persons, programing was the next task. In making a motion picture film, programing is as important as the assembling of input material for a computing machine. All the necessary ingredients must be provided at once and in such order that the proper result is assured. Thus we had not only to consider the arrangements with our co-operating Japanese film company, but we had at the same time to think of finding locations for the filming as well as choosing actors and composer and cameraman and all the et ceteras that go into the vast complexity of a film. Now that our picture is finished, I find that I have a great deal more respect for all motion pictures, even the bad ones, than I had before. However unsatisfactory they may be from the artistic viewpoint, immense pain and effort, many disappointments and much agony went into their making, not to mention weariness of mind and body. To make a film is big business.

While the production manager was fulfilling his promises about helping us to find our cast, we decided to set to work on locations. Seacoast, fisherman’s house, farmhouse, a gentleman’s home and a live volcano were the sets we needed. Landscape and incident would enrich the story that was to be lived in these sets. There was also to be the tidal wave but more of that later.

We went into consultation as to what we should do first, now that preliminary contacts had been made, and we decided upon finding locations and especially the volcano. We hoped to find everything near Tokyo if possible, for the studios are in Tokyo. Privately I had no such hope, for in my memory I saw a little village set in a wide cove beside the sea, the terraced hillside of a farm above it, and somewhere near it Old Gentleman’s house. Such a landscape was not, I was sure, to be found near Tokyo. The volcano, however, was another matter. The strange black island of Oshima is not far away from that city — only a few hours by shaky little coastal steamer, and forty-five minutes by air. We decided on the ship, still hoping that as we sailed along the indented shores we might discover a fishing village to which we could return. The ocean was likely to be rough, as we were told, and certainly the ship was small. It was a clean little ship, however, and when we went aboard it was already filled with touring school children and their teachers.

School children are the darlings of Japan, as anyone can see. They are all dressed in western clothes nowadays and from the smallest village and the most ancient, one sees at eight o’clock in the morning bevies of smartly dressed little boys and girls, all spotlessly clean, each with a knapsack and a thermos, wending their way to school. On holidays or special days they proceed in the same spotless state to various famous places, always in order and apparently very happy.

On the little steamer that day the crowd of school children was appallingly large, and the ship sank far below the water-line. No one seemed afraid, however, and since the day was fine and the sea bright with whitecaps, I decided to cast fear aside and enjoy the brief voyage. We skirted the superbly beautiful coastline all morning without seeing a village that looked possible, and drew up at last at a wide dock and found ourselves in the port. We were to spend the night and return in the morning ship, and we went at once to the hotel. It was a large place, a summer hotel, a little on the shabby side as most summer hotels are inclined to be anywhere, and I found to my embarrassment that I had been assigned to the Emperor’s suite. The cordial innkeeper assured me that the Emperor and Empress had occupied it only the week before and had found it so comfortable that they had not wanted to get up for breakfast, which put me in such awe that I begged for a less exalted room. We then engaged a car and were driven around the island and to the volcano.

Oshima is black. I thought of the song that King Solomon sang to his dark love. “Thou art dark, but comely.” So it is with Oshima. The entire island is the overflow of the volcano, and this means that the soil is lava, crushed by time and weather. There are no farms but the valleys and lower hillsides are green with wild camellias. When they are in bloom in early spring the island is transformed into a bower, famous in all Japan. The livelihood of the people depends, however, not upon the flowers but upon the oil extracted from their seed pods. Camellia oil — how luxurious it sounds! Actually it is a thin liquid, as clear as water and as scentless. It is used for everything from cookery to hair oil.

A few fishing villages cling to the coast of the island and the population is small because of the poverty of the land. The coastline is wild and I stopped the car often so that I might enjoy the fearful beauty of high white surf crashing against the ebony-black cliffs.

The roads were rough and we were glad to give up our search at last and go to the volcano itself. All day I had seen it smoking and steaming above us and rolling out its clouds of sulphur-yellow gas, an awesome sight. When we reached its base we were really appalled. The mountains were smooth and black and completely devoid of grass or even of camellia trees. Smoke and gas and steam had killed everything for hundreds of square miles and the gaunt mountains encircling the volcano raised their black crests against the sky. So may the moon look when the first astronaut descends and like an astronaut I felt, so incredible did it seem that this could be our Earth. Nor could we approach the crater, not at least upon this journey. The winding road, I was told, was seven to ten miles long, and one must ride horseback. Scores of horses stood saddled and waiting with their eager owners. It was not necessary for us, however, to climb the volcano to know that we had found what we were looking for. I stood for a long time on top of a bare black hill at the foot of the volcano and saw the setting sun redden the swirling white steam until it looked like flames of living fire. Here we would come later with our actors and cameramen and crew. We would climb to the top of the crater and take the scene of our little hero, Yukio, the farmer’s son, as he stands looking down into the center of our globe.

And shall I ever forget, before we returned to Tokyo, we saw unexpectedly, that afternoon, the snowy cone of Mount Fuji, rising above the clouds and halfway up the sky. Visitors in Japan may stay for months and not see Fuji. It is entirely by chance and the grace of God whether the sacred mountain appears before human eyes. We were driving on a hillside road in the middle of the afternoon, the sky was turbulent with clouds, and while I dreamed of the vision I dared not hope. Suddenly I saw it, the perfect crest, white against a field of sudden blue sky. A few, a very few, famous sights are better than the rumor of their beauty. The Taj Mahal is one of these and Fuji is another. We stopped for three and a half minutes to gaze in delight and awe. Then clouds hid again the majestic shape.

I opened my eyes in Tokyo the next morning at five o’clock, widely awake, totally aware. I had been summoned in some way, not by a voice or at least I did not hear a voice. I was simply conscious somehow of having been summoned. The room was neither dark nor light. Night had ended but dawn was not yet come. I lay motionless in my bed, listening, waiting, convinced that someone was trying to reach me. Slowly the impression faded away and I was alone again, yet not as before. There was still something to come. I must be ready for it.

At quarter to six o’clock the telephone rang. I knew immediately what the message would be.

“Overseas call, please,” a voice said. “From the United States, please, Pennsylvania calling — are you ready?”

“I am waiting for it,” I said. I knew now that I had been waiting for an hour.

“Stand by, please,” the voice said.

I had been standing by for an hour and I continued. In seven minutes, my watch on the table under my eyes, my daughter’s voice came to me over the thousands of miles of land and sea between us.

“Mother?”

“Yes, darling.”

“I have to tell you something. Are you ready?”

“Yes, darling.”

“Mother.” The clear brave young voice faltered and went on resolutely. “Mother, Dad left us this morning in his sleep.”

“I thought that was what you had to tell me.”

“How did you know?”

“I just — knew.”

“Will you come home?”

“Today — on the first jet.”

“We’ll meet you in New York.”

“I’ll cable as soon as I know the flight.”

“Everybody has come home. We’re all here. We’ll take care of everything until you come.”

“I know.”

We exchanged the few private words, heart spoke to heart, and I hung up. For a moment there was the longing, oh, that I had never left, oh, that I could have been there when he went. I put it aside. I had discussed this very moment thoroughly with our family physician. Years ago he had said in answer to my question, “It may be many years away, it may be tomorrow. You must continue to live exactly as you have. His heart is strong, his digestion is perfect — I think he will live a long time. But remember, whenever it comes, however it comes, you can have done nothing to prevent it. Even I could not, though I might be sitting at his side.”

He had hesitated, then continued. “The brain is severely damaged. Of course you must expect a total change in personality — we don’t know—”

That brilliant brain, responding so quickly to my every thought — yes, there had been a change in personality. The man I knew so well, the wise companion, became someone else, a trusting child, a gentle helpless infant, whom no one could help loving. We were fortunate, even so. When the brain fails and only the body is left, it is true that there is sometimes a terrifying change in the personality. The Chinese believe the human being has three souls and seven earthly spirits. When the souls depart, only the earthly spirits are left, the person becomes evil and cruel in unpredictable ways. It was not so with him. His earthly spirits were all of a piece with his three souls. He continued what he had always been: lovable, patient, unwilling to cause trouble, as always, except that slowly there ceased to be communication. Language was lost, eyesight failed, the brain ceased to live except in sleep.

It was too early to wake anyone with the news and there was no one, in any case, who could have shared my thoughts or my memories. How quickly, in one instant, years of happy life become only memories! The long slow preparation of the past seven years was now complete. The day I had dreaded had come. The final loneliness was here.

There was no concealing the news. Someone in the telephone office told someone else. Within an hour the telephone was ringing and friends were at my door. None of it seemed near or real. I heard their voices asking. I heard my own replies. Yes, it is true and I must get the first jet home. No seats were available but again friends managed to get one for me. Someone gave up his place when he heard. But the first jet was to leave at midnight and I had the whole day to live through somehow. The kindness, the rising sympathy, became too much to bear. I knew that I must get out of the city, into the country, away from telephones, and where no one could knock on my door.

At that moment Miki said, “Come to my house for the day.”

Miki, my friend, lives about two hours from Tokyo. A good train service takes one there swiftly and in comfort — Japanese trains are excellent — but we went in her car. When we reached the little town near which she lives, we drove straight through to the foot of a steep hill that is not quite a mountain, and the gate opened to admit us.

“From here up you will have to walk,” Miki said briskly.

There was comfort in that confident, practical voice, relief in knowing that Miki would conduct herself exactly as though I had merely come to spend an ordinary day. I had never, as a matter of fact, seen her home. She had been to my home in Pennsylvania more than once. I knew about her work for the half-American children born in Japan. She is unique among Japanese women. Why do I say Japanese? She is simply unique. I have never known a woman like her. She is modern to the last cell of her brain, but her blood is ancient and highborn Japanese. She belongs to one of the great families of Japan and her husband has held many honored posts. She has lived in Europe and she visits the United States once or twice a year. She wears western dress because she can move more freely in it, but anywhere in the world she could only be Japanese. She laughs at her own looks and calls herself “pumpkin-face,” and it is true her face is round, but she is handsome and her eyes are lively and her air that of a person accustomed to being listened to. Her own story as she tells it herself is something like this:

One day, during the most rigorous period of the war, she entered a train to go to the country and hunt for food. The train was crowded, and she took the last seat. As she sat down a bundle fell into her lap from the baggage rack above her head. It was wrapped in newspaper and the papers were loose. She unwrapped it in order to wrap it again more tightly and there before her horrified eyes was a little newborn baby boy. He was dead. At that moment military police came into the car to search for black marketeers. They saw what she had on her lap and immediately arrested her for trying to dispose of a dead child. They thought the child was hers. She had a bad few minutes until an old farmer spoke up for her.

“It is not her child. A young woman came in and put that bundle up on the rack and went away again.”

The police were finally convinced and she was saved. But, as she tells it, she never forgot that little dead baby. “I feel the weight of that dead baby on my knees forever,” she always says.

Days later, as she was walking in her beautiful garden in the early morning, she noticed something moving under a big bush. It was, she thought, a rabbit. She stooped to see whether it was injured, and discovered a tiny baby. Some desperate young mother had left it there. She drew the child out and took him to the house and cared for him. From then on she has devoted herself to the half-American children born in Japan. What began with a small dead body has grown into a great living work for thousands of children, born of Japanese mothers and fathered by American men, black and white. She has organized an adoption agency of her own and has placed more than a thousand half-American orphans with American parents in the United States. The children are still being born and she is still placing them. But many of them live with her and will continue in her home until they are grown and able to take care of themselves.

On that day as I climbed the hill I heard their voices from above, shouting, laughing, screaming in play. The path, winding among great trees, was paved with stone, and stone steps led up the steepest slopes. The day was beautifully mild and the sunshine fell between the tree trunks upon the moss-covered earth. Far below us the village houses clustered together, their roofs of thatch and tile. I walked slowly, I remember, my usually strong energies sapped from within. I asked questions and heard her answers and all the time I was far away from everyone and near to none. It was as though I were suspended, weightless, in space. Mind and heart were numb, I realized suddenly that she was talking and I did not know what she had said.

“How many children have you here, Miki?” I asked, merely to have something to say.

“One hundred and forty-eight,” she told me. She was walking at her habitual brisk speed and she stopped, waiting for me to catch up.

One hundred and forty-eight! They were scattered everywhere in the fine old Japanese buildings and gardens of Miki’s ancestral home. She has built some modern houses, too, utilitarian for school and dormitories. In one of the dormitories I saw two little girls absorbed in the care of a rabbit and some field mice. The children were allowed to have their pets near them and each child had a special place for his own private possessions. Most orphanages are sad places but somehow Miki had made her huge establishment a home instead of an orphanage. About half of the children, I noticed, were the children of Negro fathers. The proportion born is, of course, much lower, but most of the half-white children have been adopted, and only a few of the half-Negro ones, for the simple reason that few Negro couples can afford the cost of adoption.

We wandered about the grounds, stopping here and there to look at some special point of interest. Miki’s great delight is the school, and she was working hard now for her senior high school building. She had been engaged in a neck-and-neck race for the last ten years on this business of school, keeping just ahead of her children. We looked at all the schoolrooms, I remember, and I noticed on each door a small map in bronze. Upon examination, each map proved to be that of a State in the United States, and Miki answered my question.

“Each year I go to your country and concentrate my appeal on one State. When the people there give me enough money for one more schoolroom I come back and add it to my school building. Then in thanks I put on the door a map of the State and on the map is engraved my appreciation to the people of the State.”

“But your maps are so different in relative size from the reality,” I said. “Rhode Island, for example, is quite big here, though actually it is our smallest state.”

She opened another door while I spoke and I looked into a tiny room, not much larger than a closet and much too small for a schoolroom. A storage space, possibly? On the door was a map no bigger than the palm of my hand. It expressed appreciation to the people of Texas!

Miki laughed at my astonishment. “Texas people like to keep their money for Texas,” she said frankly. “I thank them just the same for what they gave me for their half-Texan children, but you see Texas is very small here in our school house.”

There was not the slightest resentment in Miki’s cheerful voice. It expressed merely an acceptance of people as she finds them. She continued to lead the way amiably through the clean kitchens and the dining rooms. The children took care of themselves to a large degree, and everywhere children were helping, chattering and laughing as they worked. She made a few corrections here and there and the children listened with attention but without fear. When she speaks it is firmly and to the point and she is not sentimental. I thought I observed a secret fondness, however, for what she calls “my naughty boy” or “my naughty girl.” It is true that she appreciates, even enjoys, the mischief that expressed itself as often here as anywhere. She explained that she herself had been “a naughty girl” when she was small and now she laughs and at the same time administers the necessary scolding or punishment. She is not afraid of her children and they know she has them all in her heart. She herself sleeps, I discovered, in a room with the naughtiest and the newest.

“Sometimes a naughty boy wants to run away,” she told me. “He is used to wild freedom on the streets. When I think he will try to run away, I tie a strong string around his ankle that he cannot untie, and the other string to my own ankle. If he runs in the night I wake and catch him.”

Her greatest pride is in her theater and this she kept until the last as a final treat. Miki is an actress born, there is no doubt of it. Whatever she does is dramatic and strong. She admits that she loves the theater above all else. Therefore in the center of the place which is her life, she has created a beautiful little theater, modern and convenient, and here the children present plays and dances.

“After luncheon,” she promised, “my children will sing and dance for you.”

Yes, the morning which loomed ahead of me in centuries had already passed. The sun had climbed to zenith, and the gong was ringing for the children. They threw down their games and ran to the dining room. I had not once forgotten that I am alone in the world, but somehow the eternal knowledge had not penetrated deeply enough to me. All day Miki had been showing me life, she had made me walk from one center of life to another. And now, before we ourselves went to luncheon, she had one more gift of life for me.

“We will look at the babies,” she said.

We walked to the end of the garden and there, in a sunny house built for babies, we saw them, the tiny babies newly born, the little ones learning to sit up and to walk. Kind women were caring for them and the babies clung to them. It comforted me to see how the babies turned away from me, a stranger, to those who cared for them. Too often I have visited orphanages where the children ran to strangers and clung to us when we left.

“They will all go for adoption,” Miki said, “except this little one who is mentally retarded. I shall have to think of something for him. … This little girl goes to New York. This boy is leaving next week for San Francisco. I am taking them myself — eleven babies to their new American parents. I fly over North Pole.”

I looked at each little one closely and with love. They are always beautiful children, these who carry the East and the West in their veins. Kipling forgot about them when he said there could be no meeting of East and West. They have always met, as true hearts must meet, in love if not in politics. It is love that brings human beings together, many kinds of love, but only love. I left the little children with reluctance, for they brought me deep comfort. Love is stronger than hate and life is stronger than death.

We walked back through the gardens now in full sunshine, and came to an enormous Japanese house, built of aged wood, and open along one full side to what had once been a fine Japanese garden but was now a dusty bare baseball field. A group of boys had eaten their food in a hurry and were back on the field with bats and balls. We circled them and entered the house, taking off our shoes on the lowest step. From thence it was only one more step into Miki’s beautiful big living room. It has the same cosmopolitan mixture of East and West that Miki herself has. At one end of the room deep satin-covered couches, somewhat worn, made a hospitable circle. Handsome old screens stood at various places and the walls were covered with ancient scrolls and modern photographs. At the far end of the room was a low dining table, long and wide, and two polished antique cabinets.

“I know you like Chinese food,” Miki told me as we came in. “So I have therefore invited a Chinese general, my old friend, and best restaurateur in Tokyo, to provide our luncheon.”

The General appeared from a distant corner of the room and presented himself, an extremely handsome man, white-haired and looking fit and slim. It is quite usual for Chinese generals, euphemistically retired, to become restaurateurs in the capitals of foreign countries. They are men of taste, but also, perhaps, they have prudently kept with them their own private cooks on the theory that if a man is assured of fine cookery he can endure anything, including defeat in battle. It may even be that the thought of his good cook has helped a general to stop fighting before dinner. Not all generals remain as slim as General Wang, however.

I wish I could convey the exquisite tact of my hostess and of my fellow guests during the delicious Chinese meal. Each of them knew what had happened to me, and yet no one spoke of it. They did not, on the other hand, pretend to a false cheerfulness. They talked with quiet interest of various subjects, skillfully rousing my attention if I sank too long into silence, distracting me by pleasant interchange which demanded response, and urging me to try one delicacy after another, not out of appetite, of which they knew I had none, but as a courtesy to the cook who would be hurt if I did not eat. Once, I remember, I heard a telephone ring but it was to be postponed, apparently, until the meal was over. I do not remember what the dishes were. I cannot recall what the conversation was about. I listened and smiled and made what I think were suitable replies, and was upheld not by what was being said, but by that strong atmosphere of complete understanding never put into words. I do remember that a beautiful Japanese woman, her gray hair in a modern Italian haircut, sat at one end of the table. She wore a satin-soft, red kimono and spoke excellent English. I remember that she said she had just returned from Paris, and that she was Miki’s sister-in-law.

I remember, too, that a vigorous baseball game went on while we ate, and I heard again and again the sharp click of bat against ball, the sounds of running feet, screams and clapping hands. In the midst of all this Miki kept a lively eye on the game and every now and again she shouted instructions or approval.

When the meal was over, Miki told me a call had come for me from overseas. She went with me then into a small room and closed the door and handed me the receiver. Across the thousands of miles of earth and sea I heard my daughter’s voice again as clearly as though she were in the next room.

“Mother, we have planned everything but we want to know if you approve. The service will be day after tomorrow and our own minister, of course, will take charge. We thought it would be best to have it in the library because he loved that room, you know. He could — the casket could be set in front of the fireplace — and nobody there except the people from the farm and the house — and the nurses who took care of him — and all of us. Then we’ll take him to the family cemetery — no flowers, we thought, but asking people to give the money to Welcome House.”

The children had planned everything as I would have done and now it remained only for me to get home quickly. I said yes, yes, yes, over and over again and gave my love and thanks to them all. Then when I had hung up the receiver, it was suddenly all too much. For the first time I let myself feel, and acknowledge, that it had all been too much from that day, seven years ago, in a sunny park in Sheridan, Wyoming, when the first blow had fallen. Such a little blow it had seemed at the time — no more than a mild heat stroke, we thought. We had planned for several years to take a family summer trip through the West, to Yellowstone Park and then into Oregon and Washington. It had been a comfortable and happy time, all of us in a big air-conditioned car, driven by our tried and true chauffeur. “The trip will be good for him,” our family doctor had said, “if he does not do the driving.”

So it had seemed, until that sunny day. The next day we were to go on to Yellowstone. The next day, instead, he and I stayed in a pleasant ranch house while the children went on and came back and we all went home, still thinking it was nothing, but that we had better go home, at any rate to be near our own doctor. The Sheridan doctor had not been quite sure it was a heat stroke. Later we knew it was not. But he seemed as well as ever, as vigorous, still carrying on his busy life in the New York offices and in the country office at home.

I hid my face with my hands when I put up the receiver and struggled with myself. And Miki, with that delicacy so natural to Asia, ancient and accustomed to human sorrow, sat beside me in silence, not putting forth her hand to touch me, knowing that all comfort was vain, except the comfort of a friend sitting quietly beside me. I struggled through and wiped my eyes and Miki rose.

“The children are waiting for us,” she said.

Those were her words, but what she really said was that I must live and begin now to live. Death must not interrupt life. There were others waiting for us. I followed her out of the small room and she led me to the theater.

The audience was the older children, the staff and ourselves. The entertainment was dancing and music, the music a jazz band and folk singing. What interested me was the children. They were strikingly beautiful, without exception, and obviously talented. The girls in kimono did Japanese dances with fans and flowers in the ancient style. The jazz band was made up of boys, many of them half-Negro, and they were handsome indeed.

I confess on that day, when I sat looking at Miki’s children and listening to them, it seemed to me that I could never smile again. Yet the children brought me their own comfort and in love and determination I decided that, insofar as I was able, I would help Miki to find families for them.

The afternoon came to an end. It was time to go back to Tokyo and time to go home. Miki refused to leave me until the last moment.

The jet took off at midnight. Friends came to see me off and their kindness and affection wrapped me around. But they had to return to their own lives and I had mine to face, and there was a certain comfort in being at last among strangers, to whom I need make no response. I found my seat, fastened my belt and leaned back and closed my eyes. It was the first moment that I had been totally alone since the moment that morning when the world had changed. Long ago, when I knew my child was to be permanently retarded, I learned that there are two kinds of sorrow, one which can be assuaged and one which cannot be assuaged. This one was different, yet alike in that it, too, was not to be assuaged. Nevertheless, years ago I had learned the technique of acceptance. The first step is simply to yield one’s self to the situation. It is a process of the spirit but it begins with body. There, belted into my seat while the aircraft rose into the black sky of night, I consciously yielded my body, muscle by muscle, bone by bone. I ceased to resist, I ceased to struggle. Let come what would, I could do nothing to change what had already happened. The aircraft contained me, controlled me, and isolated me.

In a curious way spirit must sometimes follow body, just as at other times spirit leads. Now as the body yielded itself to the will, the spirit found it easier also to yield to the same command. Life can be inexorable but death is always inexorable. The next step is to recognize inexorability. The past becomes static. It is history and the facts of history cannot be changed. What has been done is done. One can learn from the past, one can treasure the past, but it cannot be changed. Twenty-five years had been lived in happiness, but they were lived. The End had been written. One does not go on writing a book after those two words have finished it. Another book has to be begun.

It cannot begin at once. There has to be time for total relaxation, total recognition of inexorability, total realization that the life of the past is over. Only then can new strength be summoned. I doubt even that it can be summoned. It has to grow from the very sources of the being into a new will to live. As far as the will could go that night, as the jet darted its way among cloud and stars, it was only to command the body to yield and the spirit to withdraw. At last I slept.

I looked at my watch. It was three o’clock in the morning. Time was meaningless in this swift flight and the sky was already light. I had left Tokyo the night before, Sunday, but I would reach New York on Monday morning, after another day and night of living, if not of time. I was beginning to understand the relativity of time to space and speed. What miracle that Einstein was born in coincidence with the practical experience of jets and rockets in space! My mind, unable as yet to face the profound change in my own life, explored the meaning of eternity, time without beginning and without end. Whatever exists now, has always existed and always will, the universal and eternal law only that of change. And yet change can be frightening. If death is only a change, then what is the change? He knew and I did not. At a moment in his sleep he had died. He was at one instant alive and at the next instant dead. That is, at one instant he had been this, and at the next instant that, the same and yet different.

Where is he now?

Einstein proved to us that mass is interchangeable with energy. This sentence, so simply written, resulted in the awakening of my own mind to the new age. It was more than an awakening of the mind. It was the conversion of my soul, the clarification of my spirit, the unification of my whole being. I had a new conception of death, a new approach to life. Like Saul of Tarsus, I was proceeding on my way when a light broke upon me, a burning illumination that changed my course. This equation, which Einstein crystallized into a few brief symbols, is the key to our universe and doubtless to many more beyond. What was once mass can become energy, is potential energy even while it is mass. Is this the scientific proof of what we call soul?

While the heart bled in private, my mind turned and twisted itself in searching. I reflected upon the miracle of the magic machines, the computors, the thinking mechanism expressed in concrete material. They are built upon the principle of the human brain, but the brain is infinitely more complex, the nodes infinitely more numerous. The brain can create new ideas, the machines cannot, as yet. Nevertheless the principle is the same. We know how to build brains in crude materials, if not in human stuff.

True, there are two schools of thought among the scientists who create the machines. Some believe the machines can be developed into true brains, equal to the human brain and in a few ways even surpassing it. A human brain, for example, would need a lifetime in which to arrive at certain astronomical mathematical conclusions. The machine, given the necessary input, can reach the conclusions in minutes. Other scientists, however, believe that the machine can never duplicate the human brain. There is, they maintain, an element in the human brain, a will, an awareness, a conscience — call it soul, or whatever — which cannot be expressed through the material of a machine.

I hope the second school is nearer the truth. I must believe it is, for if we are only machines, our mass merely flesh instead of metal, then when the mass decays — ah, but wait! Mass cannot be lost, it can only be changed. Changed into what? That is what we must know, will know, some day. And I am encouraged in this faith, for we do know that in this unbelievable universe in which we live, there are no absolutes. Even parallel lines, reaching into infinity, meet somewhere yonder.

Where are you? Do you know I am here high above the earth? Are you here, too? How quickly does the change come? Does the energy you now are transpose itself instantly to some other place? Do you live beyond the barriers of airless space? We are out of communication—

Communication — this is now to be thought of, wondered about, investigated. There is a heavy cordon of deadly radioactivity encircling the earth, the only exits at the two poles. Are those exits for a special purpose? It is incredible that we can no longer communicate. When he was here we often laughed because our thoughts broke into identical words, the same thoughts at the same moment. Yet he was skeptical of any notion of the supernatural. Although he had warm compassion, complete integrity, and unfailing moral conviction, he would not allow the hopes and premises of religion. He insisted on complete independence as a human being.

“We know nothing of the future,” he said. “I shan’t fool myself or allow myself to be fooled.”

“But not knowing doesn’t mean there is nothing to be known,” I said.

“Whatever there is,” he retorted, “I shall know in due course — or not know, because I shall cease to be.”

That was the great argument between us, Hamlet’s question asked in universal terms. Are we to be or not to be? He said we are not to be. I denied such positive belief. How could we say no, when we did not know that yes was impossible? Now he knows and I do not.

It is rather unfair of you. I thought we would always know together. You might find a way of telling me. Are you or are you not?

I pressed the question into the night and then withdrew it in a panic. I really do not want to know the truth. If he exists it will make the waiting alone intolerable. And I cannot bear to know that he does not exist. Let me wait until I find out for myself, through experience. If I am right, my first words to him as I step over will be spoken in love and triumph.

“Here I am. Now we know.”

Until then I continue as we were before, he doubting, I believing. Yes, I think I still believe, although I have not yet discovered how to know. Faith, the saints have told us through the ages; possibility, the scientists are saying today, because so much we once thought impossible is now possible. Saints and scientists—

The light of dawn that permeates a jet aircraft is wonderfully beautiful. We were flying into the sunrise, into a fountain of light, glorious and majestic, rising over the curved edge of the globe. People woke and stirred and gazed out of the small windows. There was a fragrance of coffee in the air, a spick-and-span hostess was alert and ready with fruit juice. At my side a passenger rose and sauntered down the aisle. I had not been aware of the presence of this stranger all night, and yet I knew he was there. Sooner or later we would speak, but I had sheltered myself in the darkness. Now day had begun, the first day of my new and solitary life. It did not matter how many people surrounded me, within myself would be, from now on, a permanent solitude. What did this mean? What could it mean? It remained to be discovered. I must not insist upon knowing everything at once. Long ago I had learned that if one is to be patient with others, one must also be patient with one’s self.

I did not learn this lesson all at once. I was often impatient with myself, and with myself above all others, until I realized, I think through the practice of music, that learning is a day-by-day process. One can work fourteen hours solidly on memorizing a Beethoven sonata for a single performance, but this learning is not permanent. To hold the music forever in one’s mental grasp, it must also be absorbed spiritually — that is to say, it must become a part of one’s being over a period of time and through continuing practice. What I had to discover about solitude, what I had to learn about its use, its meaning, was only to be acquired through daily life and new experience. Going to the theater alone, for example, had taken effort when he was no longer able to go with me. We loved the theater, he and I, and some of our happiest hours were spent there. To laugh together through a Gilbert and Sullivan evening — well, he loved Gilbert and Sullivan and could play and sing those operettas by the hour, and all our children knew the songs. I had to learn to enjoy them, for they were foreign to me. But we were eclectic and enjoyed theater, whatever it was, indignant only when a play was so obviously tripe that it was a desecration of a noble and ancient art. He would certainly have been disappointed with me, not to say disgusted, if I had given up theater because I must go alone. Flashes of this sort of incidental perception broke irrelevantly into my mind, and I put them off. Day by day was the way I had long ago learned to live and today was here, thousands of feet above the earth, enclosed in this swiftly moving silver shell, surrounded by people I had never seen before and probably never would see again.

There is a comfort at once superficial and organic in the necessities of washing and clothing the body, in eating and drinking. It seemed to me when I faced the mirror that never again would I care about how I looked, since I would never again hear his words of appreciation and praise. I knew of course that I could not trust him for truth on that score. He was too generous, and no one else could possibly see me as he did. I did not for a moment believe I was at all what he said I was. As a woman, nevertheless, I liked to hear even what I knew could not be true and so long as he believed it, what did it matter?

Was this same face the one I had been compelled to look at for so many years? I was another person, and the face must belong to someone else. Nevertheless I washed and made it up as usual and took the habitual care with my long hair. That hair! Even as a little girl it was my bane, always long and soft and tangled. In those days it was honey yellow and my mother would not cut it, and she coaxed me when I cried and praised me when she had combed it out and tied a ribbon about my head. She made curls when I was small and then long braids and I longed for the day when I was grown up and could cut it all off and I did, as soon as I could, and then let it grow again because he wanted it long. Now I could cut it again, since he would never see it, and then knew at the same moment that I never would cut it, although its length was silver instead of gold. Without caring in the least, my hands did their habitual task and I could not believe, when I looked in the mirror, that I looked the same, after all, but I did.

When I returned to my seat, the stewardess gave me breakfast and I could smell the coffee and bacon and toast. Though the spirit was remote and took no part in any of this, the body performed as usual. O cruel flesh!

And everyone in the jet was awake now and I knew no one and no one knew me, for which I was grateful. The stewardess took the breakfast tray away at last, half-finished, and I tried to read a Japanese novel and then put it away. I did not want a love story or even a story of human beings and I opened my dressing case and took from it a thin book, Science and Human Values, by J. Bronowski. This book I read all morning, my mind working sharply apart from my individual life.

Whether our work is art or science or the daily work of society, it is only the form in which we explore our experience which is different; the need to explore remains the same. That is why, at the bottom, the society of scientists is more important than their discoveries. What science has to teach here is not its techniques but its spirit; the irresistible need to explore. … For this is the lesson of science, that the concept is more profound than the laws and the act of judging more critical than the judgment. In a book I wrote about poetry I said:

“Poetry does not move us to be just or unjust, in itself. It moves us to thoughts in whose light justice and injustice are seen in fearful sharpness of outline.”

What is true of poetry is true of all creative thought. And what I said then of one value is true of all human values. The values by which we are to survive are no rules for just and unjust conduct but are those deeper illuminations in whose light justice and injustice, good and evil, means and ends, are seen in fearful sharpness of outline.

Here the book ended and I closed it, and was grateful for a thinking mind that spoke to mind. How grateful indeed am I to my scholarly parents, those two who from my earliest years taught me by their example to find release and courage and strength in the use of the mind! Whatever the individual sorrow and however absolute the individual solitude, the mind, trained in use and by use, continues to explore. I carried within my skull my own implement. I need not, I must not, retreat or pause or cease to grow because I walk my way alone.

A strange peace, warm and alive, flowed through me. I leaned my head back against the seat and closed my eyes. I remember smiling to myself, though I do not know why. It was as though we had communication, he and I, through thought and silence, instead of words.

The day wore on and still I did not speak to anyone. Then in the middle of the afternoon, my seat mate asked if he might tell me that he recognized me. I was reluctant to acknowledge recognition, but I have never been able to lie comfortably and it was not worth the effort now, and so I thanked him, and said yes, it was I. It became necessary then to talk politely and casually, but I could still be solitary, not mentioning the reason why I was here, and I asked him about himself. I do not remember his name, it seems impossible to remember anything specific about that journey, and I doubt I would recognize his face again if I saw him. He was tall, because I had to look up when I spoke, and he had a lean western sort of face. The one thing I do remember was that he was traveling for the Wells Fargo Bank and that roused a vague historical interest. Wells Fargo is a romantic name in American history, but of banking I know nothing beyond the needs of every day.

Encouraged by my ignorance, the traveler explained to me with a dry vivid clarity exactly what his task was, and I grasped the significance of international banking, particularly in our modern world. He had been to Singapore and Hong Kong and other cities that I knew well, but he saw them in a light entirely new to me, in areas unknown, where men manipulate the exchange of currencies and provide capital and create power as they see fit. I listened with an interest that was first listless and then superficial and finally real, “the irresistible need to explore.” I forgot myself, almost, and was surprised when the voice of the radio over our heads announced that we had arrived in Honolulu. I saw then that it was night again. We had run through a whole day in a short space of time and were once more entering our own country.

The usual bustle of disembarking and lining up for customs inspection took place and I do not remember that. What I do remember was again an experience. For while I waited, deeply aware again of being alone, a customs official came to me and asked me to step aside. I did so, and he leaned across the counter to speak in a low voice.

“I don’t want to hold you up, but there’s something I want to talk about, confidentially.”

I was surprised out of myself again. I had never seen this man before, a big burly fellow, a kind round face, very American.

“You see,” he said, his voice low, “I have a retarded daughter.”

Ah, now I knew why he had drawn me aside! I am accustomed to having people take me aside and tell me this. Everywhere in the world I have had the same experience. “I want to tell you — I have a child—”

“Tell me about her,” I said.

I listened while he talked, and though I heard every familiar word, I was filled with inner wonder. How could it be that at this very moment when I needed desperately to be made to want to live, this man should be here, recalling me to life? For much of my life has been spent in working with and for those who are the parents of retarded children and for their children. This has been my destiny. Yet in the last hours, ever since my daughter’s voice had come to me over the telephone in the early morning in Tokyo, I had not once remembered this part of my life. Now here it was, claiming me again.

“You see,” the man was saying, “it’s this way. My wife and I are having an argument. She says that Americans always put their retarded children into institutions because it’s better for them there. And she says that we ought to be doing what Americans do, now that Hawaii is a state. And I say that our girl is no trouble — she’s gentle and quiet and she’d be lonesome in an institution.”

“Would your wife be happier if she were there?” I asked.

“No, she cries when she talks about it but she says it would be better for the girl.”

“Do you want her there?”

“Me? It would break my heart.”

I considered. “What would happen if both of you happened to die? Who would take care of your daughter?”

“Plenty! My wife’s Hawaiian. She’s got one of these big Hawaiian families. They’d all take care of our girl. Matter of fact, they get mad when we talk about an institution. It’s just that my wife—”

“Tell your wife she is wrong and the rest of you are right,” I said. “Your daughter is lucky. She has a family who wants to keep her. I am sure that American parents in your circumstances would wish they were as lucky as you and your wife in having such a family.”

His honest face cleared. “Thanks,” he said.

He led me back to the luggage station. “Anything to declare?”

“Nothing,” I said. It was true. I had nothing.

“Okay,” he said, and marked my bags with chalk and smiled at me. “So long,” he said. “I’ll never forget you. This is my lucky day. Wait till I tell my wife. She won’t believe me. It’s a miracle.”

It was a miracle for me, too.

And then, as though to test me, I was alone again. I had never traveled alone before his illness. Traveling had always been a gay business for us. He was a delightful traveling companion. He always knew what there was to see, and where we should go and I went with him in careless happiness. Now I had to find the restaurant and get something to eat. We had been given dinner tickets. But where was one to go? I wandered about, feeling stupidly helpless and shy. When a woman has always been accompanied by a cheerful, knowledgeable man, to be suddenly alone is a bewilderment. I wandered the wrong way, asked someone and went in the opposite direction and arrived too late in the restaurant and saw no available seat. I was about to leave again and think no more of food, when a pleasant-looking American approached me and asked if I were looking for a place to sit, and if so, there was one over yonder — two, in fact, if I didn’t mind having dinner with him.

I accepted with relief and he led the way to a small half-hidden table. We sat down, he ordered dinner, and I was grateful. The inner solitude was invincible and permanent, I knew that, but it was as if somewhere he saw my predicament and since he could not be with me, he sent strangers in his place. I asked this stranger’s name. He gave it to me and told me he was a scientist and had been sent from Washington to work with other scientists in Japan. Again part of my life reclaimed me. Science, especially nuclear physics, has long been my avocation, and I listened now with understanding and interest, quite detached from my inner self. The Japanese, he told me, were excellent scientists, and in particular they know more about the ionosphere than any other scientists in the world. The ionosphere, that state of the upper atmosphere where, as Clyde Orr says, “radiations produce a witch’s brew of metastable molecules and ions, atomic entities having electric charges,” (Between Earth and Space, page 21). It is the birthplace of electricity, the source of electric storms, against which the energy stored in the earth plays an eternal duet of contrapuntal violence. Again my mind was stirred by irresistible curiosity and I was reminded, as though he, wherever he was now, had reminded me that life could go on in these interests which we had shared. An hour passed and the voice came over the radio bidding us take our seats in the jet again. Somehow the day had passed and three times a human being had been sent to speak to me, help me, and remind me of life.

Night fell once more. I did not know what night to call it, a nameless night, since time had stretched itself longer than its name. I had lived twenty-four hours beyond the span between Sunday night and Monday morning. I had made the initial step into my future life. This night I slept, fitfully but without fear. No one could take his place, he would not expect that, nor could I, but strangers would come when I needed them, and I could learn of them and let them go, because another would come. It was like the universal motion of all life, the waves of energy that beat about our globe, made up of innumerable separate particles. What are human beings but particles, and we come and go, too, ceaselessly, in waves of motion and substance. My life was now part of the whole, a separate particle, alone and apart, yet drawn inescapably into the surge and withdrawal of the human tide.

When next dawn came it was to pour its golden light upon the landscape of America. The voice on the radio announced that we would now begin the descent over the city of Allentown in Pennsylvania. Allentown is only a few miles from my farmhouse home. Did the children dream that I was passing by, but far above them in the clouds? I made a hasty toilet, drank coffee, and then we came swiftly down and down, and I saw the gleaming towers of New York.

Now friends had to be faced again and family and for a moment I dreaded it. It had been easier here in the shelter of those who knew nothing about my journey and why I made it. I had told no one, and so needed not to meet the strain of sympathy. It was time now, however, to meet my children and especially to accept their help. In comforting me, they too would be comforted.

The morning was fair. Sunshine poured through the mists as I walked across the airfield into the port. There inside the door my dear and only sister and two of my daughters waited and with them the faithful Pennsylvania Dutchman who has driven my cars for many years. I looked into each face and whatever I had dreaded melted away. I had been wrong — it was good to be with those who knew me and loved me and whom I loved. I am rich in three sons and six daughters, of these six, the eldest is the child who never grew, to whom I owe so much, and five others ranging from my competent, professional, occupational-therapist daughter to the gentle half-American child of eleven who came to me from Japan. The two youngest daughters are half-Japanese, their fathers, American soldiers. The next, lively and an organizer, is half-German, her father American, too. The little middle one, the married one with three perfect babies, is the one who lives across the brook from me, the one with dark hair, big violet eyes and a fiery temper, softened by a quick sense of humor. Each son has his individual strength, each daughter her peculiar grace, each an indispensable place in my life. But today I was glad the three younger daughters were at home and that the middle and older ones were here to meet me with my sister, three strong and understanding women.

Of course we were close, closer than we had ever been even in our happy life together. His death quickened every bond between us. Nor did I overlook the quiet understanding of our driver. He took my baggage checks and led us to the car and we got in and waited for him. In a few minutes we were on our way home, through the streets of New York to the Lincoln Tunnel and the Turnpike. It was all familiar and safe, a journey I had made hundreds of times through the years, at first always with him, and in the last five years alone. It had taken seven years for his strong body and fine brain to end their span on earth.

And what fun it had been from the very beginning, how satisfying the years together! We had begun in New York, where his life had been for thirty years before we met. The first winter we lived in a cosmopolitan hotel in a suite of pleasant rooms and it had not been strange to me, for with people passing to and fro from all parts of the world, it might have been a hotel in Shanghai or Peking. And the next year, when we adopted our first two babies, we moved to a terraced apartment, and began our life as parents. He had always wanted a big family and how we enjoyed its gradual accumulation! Two years slipped by, and they held nothing but joy and content, and we took two more babies. Then his next dream, which was to live in the country, became a necessity. Four small children can scarcely be contained successfully in any apartment. My own childhood had been spent in a spacious old tropical bungalow, surrounded by gardens and beyond the wall the hills and fields outside the city of Chinkiang, in Kiangsu province, a port city on the great Yangtze River. I could not imagine a child growing up on cement among towers, however beautiful, for in its city way I love New York. We moved then to our farm home, and he devoted himself, as he had always hoped he could, to editorial work. He was a reluctant business man, and had his brilliance been only a little more channeled, he might have been a writer of books. As it was, he wrote a few as varied as he was himself, the clever rhymes for children, a humorous mystery novel, a fine nonfiction work on Marco Polo, simplified again for young people and published by Random House in the Landmark Series, and a critical study of Buffalo Bill, a character in whom he took much skeptical interest.

As the years passed, the farmhouse developed into a rambling comfortable home for an increasing family. He taught the children tennis and baseball and golf and they learned early to swim and to ride. I was busy at my own work, but the big window of my study opens toward the swimming pool, and I could see by instinct when a child grew too adventuresome. Our life was organized casually around work and children and we lived deeply. Our pleasures were in music and people and children and books and the world of woods and mountain and sea.

I do not know whether it is easier to have the end come suddenly or gradually over the years. I think, if I had been given the choice, I would have preferred a sudden end, shock and all. Then memory would not be entangled with the slow and agonizing fading of perception and speech and at last recognition even of those loved and dear. There is, however, one balm. He did not know of his own decline. And as he was reduced to the elemental physical aspects of his life, his essential nature remained, as I have said, what it had always been, an unselfish sweetness.

Slowly, slowly, the change came. When his eyes failed and he could no longer read, we sent for the records of books. I must here express my permanent gratitude to the Library of Books for the Blind. They kept a continuing stream of records coming into the house, free of charge, and his brain was kept alive and stimulated beyond what we had feared. But this too came to an end. The day came when words ceased to have their meaning, and even music faded, and he was content merely to exist. He would have suffered had he known, and I thank a kind intelligence, wherever it is, that he never knew. The body lived on, relieved of any strain of mind or spirit or emotion, and assumed a strange durability of its own.

“This will last a long time,” our family doctor said again. “You must go on about your usual work. You must live, you must travel, you must not let yourself be absorbed by this which cannot be helped.”

And indeed it was the only way to endure what was happening to us. I tried to live as usual, insofar as I could.

The end had come quite unexpectedly. I listened as my dark-haired daughter talked while we drove homeward through the green countryside of late spring. Everything had been the same with him until two days before. She came across the brook with her three little children after breakfast, on her morning visit. She found him awake and ready for the day. The children climbed on his bed and kissed him and stroked his cheeks. He provided, I think, an element of total security in their lives. He was always there in bed, had been ever since they were born, and they had no memories of his being different. They went away again, and when she returned a little later he was gone. It was so simple a story that I could bear to hear it told. For a long time he had not known he was living and he did not know when he died.

“There was nothing anyone could have done,” my daughter told me;

“I know,” I said. “I have known that for a long time.”

I could feel nothing for the moment but finality, an immense weariness of mind and body, now that I knew all there was to know. I suppose two nights of broken sleep and the strain of being myself, insofar as possible, even among strangers, had been more wearing than I knew. I sat in silence, my hands in my daughter’s warm young grasp. The car drove up the familiar driveway at last. The kind people who help me in house and offices and grounds were waiting. There had to be meeting, the acceptance of their tears and sympathy, and then the freedom to go to my own room. All our children were at home, gathered from everywhere. They had done everything. His room which for so long had been a hospital was already a guest room. The hospital bed was gone, carpets were fresh and clean, crisp white curtains hung at the windows. My room was immaculate and cheerful with roses. I saw everything and felt nothing. I was walking in my sleep. When anyone stopped talking for a moment, I fell asleep. After luncheon, which I suppose I ate, but I cannot remember, I lay on the couch in the living room, I who am never exhausted, and while the children planned, I slept. It was not like any sleep I have ever known. I simply fell into unconsciousness.

The next two days center upon three events. We went, all of us, to tell him our last good-by. Of course it was only his body we saw. He was not there. But the body is precious. Through the body we express our love and with the body we live. I remember my mother one day when I was a small child, not more than seven. I was desperately ill with diphtheria in a Chinese city. My younger brother had just died of the same disease, and they were burying him that day, and my mother was sobbing. A friend, well-intentioned but without understanding, reproached her.

“It is only his body,” she told my mother. “His soul is in heaven with Our Lord.”

My mother flew into anger, sobs and all. “But his body is precious,” she cried. “I gave it birth. I tended it and loved it. Wherever his soul is, it is out of my reach, and they are taking his body away, and it is all I have.”

These words came back to me as I stood by his beloved body. He lay on a couch, his eyes closed and his hands loosely at his sides. He wore his tweed suit, the one he liked, a blue-gray, and the dark blue tie I had given him last Christmas. His beautiful hair, only partly white, was brushed as he always wore it, back from his forehead. His face was young again, the lines gone, the lips tranquil. I kissed his cheek. I touched his hand that had always been warm and quick to respond. The flesh was cold.

The next day we had the simple service that the children had planned. They had moved to one side the furniture in the library and in midmorning, when the sun was pouring into the courtyard, and the small fountain, a little stone boy from Italy, was playing gently into the pool, I stood at my bedroom window. The men were bringing him home for the last time. When I came downstairs our household people and those on the farm, the children and their families and the nurses who had cared for him, were waiting for me. The men had set his coffin before the chimney piece. The lid was closed. Our family minister read aloud from such books as he deemed fitting. Then he spoke a few words of friendship. I do not remember what he said. I sat thinking of the many hours we had spent in this room. It had first been the children’s playroom. Then when they grew big enough to want basketball and roller-skating we made the barn into their play place and designed this room into the family library, lined with bookshelves. Above the chimney piece he hung a painting of an illustration of a story by John Galsworthy, which he had published in Collier’s when he was editor of that magazine. It is a beautiful painting in oils, evocative and poetic. The story was the first ever published in America, I believe, by Galsworthy. It is about a young novice in a nunnery, upon the last night of her novitiate. She must make up her mind in these final hours whether she will become a nun or return to life and to her lover. By chance a beautiful dancer takes shelter for the night in the nunnery and after the evening meal she dances for the nuns. The artist paints her dancing, her long scarlet skirt floating about her. In the foreground the little novice sits entranced and, as the story goes, she ran away that night to join her lover and live her woman’s life as wife and mother. The picture has always hung there above the oak-paneled chimney piece and it hangs there now.

As for the books, he took great care that they were properly classified in their own alcoves: fiction, social science biographies, children’s books, travel books, new books, and so on. He was a lover of books, a cultivated and world-minded man. Well and deeply as I knew Asia, he could tell me facts that I did not know. When once we visited India and Southeast Asia, and China and Japan, he knew all the important people whom we should meet, and he could tell me the history of every sight we saw. He was a charming and interesting companion at home and abroad. Above all, he never condescended to me as man to woman.

I went upstairs to my own room again as they carried him away and this somehow was the worst moment and still is. He was leaving our house and our home and forever. And then came the long drive to his family cemetery in New York, where his parents are buried. Yes, everyone was kind. Those whose duty it was to tend him on this last journey were thoughtful and quiet and when we neared the end of the journey, policemen led us through traffic to our destination.

I pause here, remembering. And what do I remember? This — in the midst of that sorrowful ride, every moment of it concentrated agony so that my very bones ached, I chanced to see from the rear window, and against my will, the long slow procession of black cars. Yes, but at the very end were two other cars. They were station wagons and they were fire-engine red. I recognized them immediately. One belonged to my second son and one to my equally youthful son-in-law. I had winced when they brought them to show me proudly before I went to Japan and heroically I had admired them. Now here they were, bright and alive in the morning sun. I knew why — and my heart dissolved again in tears and laughter. What a shame, what a pity, that he could not see those two shining red station wagons, doing him honor upon this occasion — and how he would have laughed!

Why do I say would have? It is possible that somewhere you were laughing. It is still possible. I maintain my stand, until—

Everything was ready for us when we arrived in the quiet place. The birds were singing and flowers were blooming. It did not take long to perform the final ceremony of giving his body back to the earth. Our minister had come with us and he spoke the final words of peace and acceptance. My sons and my stepson stood beside me, strong young men, the stepson to carry on his father’s firm. My daughters walked with me back to the car and we drove away … But oh, that silent last moment, when he must be left behind, and the arrival at the house, now empty! Of these I cannot speak. To other women in like circumstances, who may read these pages, I can only say there is no escape from such moments when they come. They must be lived through, not once but many times in memory. I have been told that they grow easier. I do not find it so. I come back to my home as to a haven whenever I leave it, but it is not the same, and it will never be the same. I know that now. Since there is no escape from the fact, there can only be acceptance. And acceptance comes at last, but not at once — oh, never at once.

I should not, I suppose, have gone to Vermont. But we have always gone there when the summer gets too hot in Pennsylvania. It can grow very hot, for, as someone has said, this State is “the far thin edge of the tropics.” Our woods and fields grow lush as any jungle, and the nights stay hot. Perhaps I felt that I could escape, somehow, from his continuing absence. It took me long to learn how impossible that is, wherever I go in the world. At any rate, after a few weeks I took my three younger daughters with me to Vermont. Years ago, when it became settled that ragweed and I could not exist together, I built a three-room house for him and for me — two bedrooms and a big living room which was also a dining room with a cooking counter. Here he and I had spent good summers, and the children had rooms over the garage for their own. Into this house that had been his and mine, I now went alone, and the girls took the rooms over the garage. I set myself to writing and I practiced my piano, and spent hours on the high terrace facing Stratton Mountain. I do not know why I imagined that anything would be easier here. For one thing, I could not write. My mind, lost in thought and memory and question, simply would not busy itself with the creation of other people’s lives. I was as remote from everyone as though it were I who had died. No, it would not do. Vermont was not the place. And for once I needed another employment than writing. I needed work that I had to do, work with others, compelling me daily to rise early and go to an appointed place where it was my duty to be.

When this conviction dawned upon me I made up my mind. I would go back to Japan and resume my work on the picture. My co-workers had been busy. They had found locations, a fishing village which they thought ideal for our picture, a terraced farm, an empty beach, a fisherman’s house, a gentleman’s house. The volcano we had. They were ready for me to return to the job. When was I corning? I said, immediately. It was nearing the end of August. The girls would go back to school soon, and they could live with their elder sister. There was no family reason to hold me at home and I welcomed the thought of work and Japan.