I did not trace any likeness to Matsuo nor did I want to. Now we had many things to talk about, and for the first time I began to feel acquainted with my husband.īut always, deep in my heart, was the feeling that the baby was mine. But from the day the baby came, everything was changed. Indeed, we had no common topic of conversation for he was interested in his own plans, and my mind was taken up with my home and my new friends. He and I were very good friends, but we seldom talked freely to each other except in the presence of others. I think that, before the baby came, there had been nothing in his life to which it was second. Matsuo was a man who had always been vitally interested in his business. There is a saying in Japan, “Only the fingers of a babe can tie a uniting knot that will pull two families together.” As the Japanese marriage is not an affair of individuals I had never applied the saying to Matsuo and myself, but one day some Mysterious Power twisted this bit of truth into an incident that played an unsuspected and important part in my life and in that of my husband. “Why, the stockin’s is double,” said Minty, almost in a tone of awe, “and I s’posed they wuz two-toed folks.” “My lawsy me!” cried Minty in a tone of the greatest astonishment. “Certainly,” said the nurse, turning up the baby’s long dress and cuddling the little pink feet in her hand. When she came upstairs to see the baby, the nurse was holding the little one on her lap, and Minty squatted down by her side and began talking baby talk, cooing and clucking in the most motherly fashion. These were made of cotton or silk, with the great toe separated, as is the thumb of a hand mitten. She had never spoken of them as being different from others, but several times I noticed her examining them with interest, especially my white foot mittens. She had been washing for Mother for years, and, when I came, she accepted the additional burden of my queer clothes with kind good nature. One of the first callers the baby had was our faithful black laundress, Minty.
Strangeland disciple full#
I closed the book with a half-smile, for I understood at once the wordless warning of my gentle, anxious mother but my heart was full of loving gratitude as I bowed respectfully in the direction of Japan and resolved that my love for my baby should make me more thoughtful and tender toward all the world.
“When you were a baby, her only care was for you, and one day when she saw a little field-mouse happily playing, she so longed to have its gray, silky tail for a cord to tie your holiday coat, that her wish was thought murder.” “But she had a wicked thought,” sadly the Buddha replied.
“Oh, good Master,” he cried, “you have brought me to the ‘Hell of Seven Hills.’ Why is my mother here? She never, throughout her life, did a wicked deed.”
The disciple was horrified to behold his precious mother climbing painfully over a hilly path made of sharp spears. On one of these was a scene from “The Mount of Spears.” The story is of a favourite disciple of Buddha who grieved so bitterly over the loss of his beloved mother that the pitying Master exerted his holy power and took the sorrowing son to a place from which the mother could be seen. Mother had marked some of the pages with a dot of vermilion. How familiar and dear they looked! There were no stories-only pictures-but as I turned the pages, I could hear again the gentle voice of Honourable Grandmother and see the old tales acted before my mind as plainly as in the days of my childhood. My mother must have seen the germ of a too-selfish love in my devotion for one day I received from her a set of Buddhist picture-books which had belonged to Father’s library. Wherever I went, and no matter who came to see me, the conversation was sure to drift to her and my letters to my mother held little else than the information that a few ounces had been added to the baby’s weight, or a new accent to the little cooings and gurglings, or that she had developed a dimple when she smiled. F OR months after the baby came my entire life centred around that one small bit of humanity.
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