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Updated: June 26, 2025
Sometimes when he was calling I wished Gabriel would appear in my doorway and announce the end of the world to see, if without omitting a syllable, Kishimoto would keep on to the end of the last phrase in the greeting prescribed for the occasion. The ceremony off his mind, he sat silent, unresponsive to the openings I tried to make for a beginning.
Kishimoto San had not only offered me a tremendous experience, but all unwittingly he made it easily possible for me to defy the tradition of his picture language, and risk Jane Gray as a permanent fireside companion. Just below "The House of the Misty Star," in an old temple, a priest played a merry tattoo on a mighty gong early every morning.
With Kishimoto San's plea for progress of the right kind still ringing in my ears, my eyes fell upon some of the rules for the conduct of the passengers, printed in large type, and hung upon the front door of the car: "Please do not stick your knees or your elbows out of the windows." "Fat people must ride on the platform." "Soiled coolies must take a bath before entering."
Then above the noise and curses and threats Kishimoto San's voice rang out. "Stop! you crawling vipers of the swamp! How dare you brawl before this sacred place? How dare you touch one of my blood! My granddaughter accounts to me, not to the spawn of the earth such as you! Disperse your dishonorable bodies to your dishonored homes! Go!" Blind to reason, they cowered before a masterful mind.
They knew the unbending quality of Kishimoto's will, his power to command, to punish. Kishimoto San turned to the girl and with words cold as icicles, cutting as a whiplash, dismissed the child of his only daughter from his house and home. He cared neither where she went, nor what she did. She no longer belonged to him or his kind. He disowned her. Her foreign blood would be curse enough.
Of course she meant "converts," but the kinks in Miss Gray's tongue were as startling as the peculiar twists in her religion. Upon her asking for more particulars I repeated what Kishimoto San had told me. The girl's father was an artist by profession and, as nearly as I could judge, a rover by habit. Of late the family had lived in a western city.
Its antiquated laws are as withered as the dead needles of a pine tree. Any one reading it would know that when old man Kaibara wrote it he was not feeling well or had quarreled with his cook." In most things Kishimoto San was just; in many things he was kind. But he was as utterly devoid of humor as a pumpkin is of champagne. Without a flicker he went on.
Then I told her of my interview with Kishimoto San; of how Zura Wingate had come to her grandfather's house; of her rebellion against things that were; and that she was to come to me for private study. Had I not been so excited over the elements of romance in my story, I would have omitted telling Jane of the incident of the girl and the youth in the park, for it had a wonderful effect on her.
When I first entered, the farther parts of the large room were veiled in the shadow of the late afternoon. But when Mrs. Kishimoto called, "Zura, come!" a stream of sunlight, as though waiting for the proper time, danced into one corner and rested on the figure of a young girl, sitting awkwardly on her feet, reading.
"Honest! Open you name it! There is but one definition for it. Immodesty! In a young girl that is deadlier than impiety. It is the wild blood of her father," he ended sadly. I could have added, "Dashed with a full measure of grandpa's stubbornness." But I was truly sorry for Kishimoto San. His trouble was genuine.
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