The Catholic bulletin. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn.) 1911-1995, 1917-09-15
Cherry Blossoms Fade.

If I had thought o. FRANKLIN Hoyt
after the time when we had worked
together in Chicago, should have
pictured him, bent over his drawing
board evolving new Irish lace gowns
for old pictures Of society matrons,
for to the rest OF us tramps on the
road of neWspaperdom, Hoyt seemed
to possess quality Of plodding per
manency that threatened to tie him to
one job for the term of his natural
life; but, because he was, in the time
when knew him, merely a quiet, I'M
inspiring young chap who deserved
better rewards for his persistence of
effort than he. would receive, i didn t
think of him at all in the ten years
that l trailed all kinds of copy in all
sorts of places. Then, one day. /
met him on a highway of the world,
and in his eyes saw the truth that
strikes us every once in a while, the
knowledge that some men have lived
while We have been watching life
Hull down, out Of Japan, the EN-
press of Asia was steaming eastward.
In the tea room the Filipino orches-
ira played weird native melodies
while girls and young men tapped
time for the beginning of the newt
able dance music. Down in the smok-
ing room the usual mixed crowd of
American trade pioneers, of American
civil servants from the islands, of
Russian munitions inspectors, of An
glicized Japanese and of Americanized
Chinese was settling into groups. On
the decks globe-trotting women specu-
lated on the possibility of submarines
in the Pacific and began to plan
bridge tournaments. Here and there
man or woman commanded atten-
ton by reason of a solitariness of per-
sonality deeper than the circumstance
of being alone. One of them, tall
man wearing the sort of raiment one
finds in the so-called American shops
of Kobe and Nagasaki, stood at the
stern, looking back landward in an
immortality that seemed llnbreak-
able. His detachment from the sur
roundings that must be- his world
for days to come was so complete,
SO pronounced, that l watched his
back with the admiration one feels
for those who have surmounted the
need of human companionship. Final
ly he turned from the rail. To my
utter, unbelieying amazement I knew
him for Franklin Hoyt.
He wasn't glad to see me. In
differently, almost brusquely, he re
turned my surprised greetings. Con
Versation, after my first efforts,
dragged. Had it not been for that
strange, scared surety of his gaze, l
should have been relieved to lose him
as abruptly as had found him: but
somehow his eyes drew my curiosity
with a magnetic power that kept me
trailing him. Accepting me at first
with a hardly concealed resentment,
he fell into companionship with me
after little as a shield against other
interference withsllis solitude. Bit by
bit he gave me superficial explanations
of himself, but it was as If he were
fiinging scraps of revelation over the
wall of his self-reserve rather than
taking down single brick of that
structure
All that i knew of him by the
time we were running out of Homo
lulu was that he had chosen to
marry girl whom he had known
in Chicago rather than take a job
in New York: that she had accepted
with him his ambition to live in
Japan; that they had, gone to the
Orient some seven years before, man
aging to live on his earnings as an
illustrator for American books and
magazines: that she had died but a
little while back, and that he was re-
turning to his own country.
1t was on that point that / ven
tured to make comment. Queer, 2
told him as we watched together
from the stern the light of Homo
lulu glimmer down into pin-points
against the vast darkness of the
ocean. how war times bring YOU