This Scorching Earth by Donald Richie

Author:Donald Richie [Richie, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781462912803
Publisher: Charles E. Tuttle Company
Published: 1955-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Just then one of the pageboys approached and said that a lady wished to see Mrs. Ainsley. Even though the boy spoke good English, Mr. Swenson made him repeat the message in Japanese, then corrected his grammar and patted him on the head. Dave raised his eyebrows quizzically, and Dottie made big, wondering eyes.

"Whoever do you suppose?" she asked. Then she followed the boy through the swinging doors into the main lobby.

"Oh, Sensei, Sensei," screamed Dorothy and ran as swiftly across the deep rug as her heels would permit, dropping breathless beside Mrs. Schmidt. "What a nice surprise!"

Dottie looked at the fawn breast-pin and wished her teacher wouldn't wear it. She also wished she could afford American stockings to show off her still shapely legs. Too, she would have liked it had Mrs. Schmidt not insisted upon a shawl—at least not that one. It looked dreadfully Old World to Dottie—not the old world of cathedrals and the La Scala that she'd read about, but the real old world, the world of poverty and wailing walls, of persecution and hungry children. To be sure, Dorothy had only read about this world, but the morning headlines every day seemed to her much more real than, say, a guide book to Chartres. Sometimes she spoke to Mrs. Schmidt about her clothes, about how much better she ought to dress, and then her teacher would look at her sadly, as she might have looked at a brutally uncomprehending child, and remind her that she had no others. Today, however, Dottie was careful to say nothing. She had been saving for some time to buy Mrs. Schmidt a new winter coat from the PX and didn't even want to hint about the surprise until it was all ready. (In her mind she'd already buried the fact that the last time she had enough money saved she'd sent away for two ridiculously expensive pairs of shoes for herself.)

"I suppose it is rather a surprise, isn't it?" said Mrs. Schmidt. "You'd never expect to see me against this kind of background, would you?" As she spoke she indicated the high ceilings and decorated pillars of the lobby. "But I've been here before, years ago, often. This used to be a favorite meeting place for foreigners in Tokyo. It was expensive in those days and very elegant. Naturally, in Vienna it would have been third-class, but here, in Tokyo, in those days it was the most popular of places to go."

"Has it changed much?" asked Dottie. Whenever Mrs. Schmidt talked about the days before the war, which was rather often, Dorothy always felt as though she were listening to a kind of fairy tale, an unlikely story of something which occurred when she was a little girl thousands of miles away. Now she imagined the tired and familiar American Club with crystal chandeliers and hundreds of candles; she heard the sound of taffeta and the strains of a string ensemble playing Strauss; and there she was, on the

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