"A Half Caste" and Other Writings

A Half Caste

✻ a half caste A miscellaneous crowd of men, women and children jostled each other on the wharf, some of them going perilously near the end of it in their eagerness to watch the passengers on the Empress of India, which had just arrived . Norman Hilton stood on deck, his hands thrust deep in his trousers pockets . He seemed in no hurry to leave the boat, but leaned against the guardrail , watching the surging crowd on the wharf beneath. “Shall you go ashore to-night?” He started from the moody dream into which he had drifted; then answered , absently, pushing his cap far back on his head: “Well, I don’t know. Fact is, now the journey is over—I feel—er—just a trifle nervous.” His friend looked at him keenly. “Second trip for you, I believe?” “Yes.” “Fifth for me,” his companion continued. “Rather be here than anywhere else.” “Why?” Hilton looked at him curiously. The other laughed, waving his hand lightly toward the city. “You know my weakness—and, for that matter, your own—women. I like the Japanese style, too—artless, jolly, pretty—er ———. Agree with me?” “Perhaps.” Hilton put a cigar between his teeth and began smoking it. He broke a silence that fell between them with the information that on his former voyage he had married a Japanese girl—in Japanese fashion—adding, with unconcealed grim contempt for himself, that of course he had left her in American fashion. 4 Part 1: Short Fiction “Expect to see her again?” “No, she is dead!” He paused for a moment, and then added, a trifle hesitatingly: “There was a child. I want it.” “Ah!” Hilton finished smoking his cigar and threw the stub into the bay. “I have a hard job before me,” he said, nervously, “as I have little or no clew to the child’s whereabouts. It was nearly sixteen years ago, you know.” He paused again, ruminating, and took a few slow strides across the deck. “I am alone in the world. She is about all the kin I have, in fact. It sounds brutal, I suppose, but during all these years I have made no inquiry about her whatever. I forgot the fact of her birth almost as I forgot the mother’s existence. I don’t know what possessed me to come now, anyhow. One of my unconquerable impulses, I suppose. You know how they affect me.” His friend made no remark whatever. Hilton had always seemed to him so young a man that it was hard for him to realize for the moment that he was actually the father of a girl of fifteen. He was an extremely handsome man, with a keen, clever face, hair slightly tinged with gray, and fine athletic figure. He dressed well, and had the appearance of a man of the world, one who was in the habit, perhaps, of putting himself always first and best. In his early youth Hilton had gone the pace of most young men of fashion and wealth in a foreign land. Divorced from his American wife scarcely a year after his marriage to her, he had lived alone ever since. His wife had remarried long ago. Now, at the age of forty, Hilton found himself altogether alone in the world, with a strange weariness of his own companionship and an unconquerable longing to have someone with him who actually belonged to him. Then, one day, there came a memory of a little Japanese woman who had once really loved him for himself. Hilton’s hard eyes had softened a trifle. He was suddenly keenly alive to the fact that he was a father; that he owed his first duty in life to the one being in the world who belonged to him—his little Japanese daughter, whom he had never seen, for she had been born after he had left Japan. He could not account for the vague yearning and longing for his own child that now suddenly possessed him. ✻ ✻ ✻ Okikusan (Miss Chrysanthemum) was in trouble again. This time she had offended her master by refusing to dance for the American who threw his money so lavishly about. He had specially asked that the girl with the red cheeks, large eyes and white skin be asked to dance for him. The dancing mats were thrown, the music started, and Kiku had thrust forward one little foot and had courtesied to the four corners of the earth. [3...