CHAPTER LXI

How Dr. Argyle Huberston Uncovered a Scandal

Baxter smoked a moment or two reflectively, as though to marshal his thoughts together in proper order. And suddenly he asked:

“Just what, Halse, do you remember of conditions in the Pacific and elsewhere back in 1937? You’re a young man now—but you were considerably younger then, I regret to say!”

“So I was accused yesterday,” said Halsey disgruntledly, “by that television engineer of my uncle’s—Braisted—who proffered that I was probably trying to make a college football team back around a time—also some five years or so back—when some Dutch professor named Van Noorden made a discovery concerning the altering of steel which resulted in no practical consequences for anyone or anybody.”

Baxter’s face lighted up: “Oh, so you’re familiar with that angle? Good! For that’s involved in what I have to tell you. But first, Halse, what do you know of Yasuri?”

“Nothing at all,” said the younger man, unabashed. “He reigned for such a short time in Japan—hardly more than a year, wasn’t it?—that he didn’t make so much of a flicker in my world. But what the devil authority, Artemus, have you for calling him a madman? I’ve never heard anything like that.”

Baxter smiled wearily: “Halse, I was on the Associated Press, down in St. Louis, in August of 1937, at the time that an article was released to it from the pen of Dr. Argyle Huberston, a very famous raciologist of that city—anthropologist, if you like that word better—who had made considerable studies concerning the Hairy Anu, the original white natives of Japan, who, as you may not know, were displaced by the Mauie, a Mongolian tribe which originally spread over China, but who now, like the Hairy Anu in Japan, live back in the Chinese mountains, leaving China filled with its present combination of races called Chinese, It is these Mauie, you see, which form the present Japanese race. But enough of that. It’s not the source of the Jap race we’re interested in. As I say, I was on the St. Louis Associated Press five years ago when this article by the famous Huberston was released to it. And I was one of the Council of Editors who reluctantly had to rule that it would almost certainly be impossible to run the article—as written, and that its main points should undoubtedly be submitted to the head once in New York City before it was nationally released.”

“Why? Did Huberston accuse the Emperor of Japan of being hairy?”

“Worse, Halse. Dr. Huberston had, before he retired from the medical profession fully seven full years before even that, to pursue his intellectual hobby, been the foremost psychiatrist in America; he was the author of several textbooks, one of which presented the then new thesis that paranoia was allied in some way to dementia praecox. As for Yasuri, he was one of the most weird and in some ways inunderstandable personalities who ever sat on the Japanese throne. Headstrong, horribly. Inquisitive, fearfully. Egotistic, tremendously. Brilliant, intens—well—conjure yourself up a look at him. Better, a look at both at them. For I met Huberston myself, and as for Yasuri, we had a grand picture of him in our morgue that would have been a humdinger with that article!

“Huberston was just a round-faced simple looking man of about 45, somewhat pale and moonlike in visage, with rimless glasses—invariably wore a heavy watch chain across his vest—but with extremely penetrating steel-gray eyes that seemed always surveying anyone with whom he spoke, as though looking far into their very hidden selves. As for Yasuri, picture him for yourself: a slight man, about 33, I believe; none too robust; clad, as should a true Son of Heaven be, in a royal embroidered silken-padded gown with old-time Japanese Samuri short-sword suspended ever at his narrow waist by an emerald studded leather thong; silvered fan with ‘oozed colors,’ from the early Momoyama art period, in his talons; head shaven close to the scalp, so that it resembled, truly, a skull with saffron skin drawn tightly over it, deepset eyes ever burning in it like twin coals, and teeth that gleamed from the yellow face with the whiteness of a sun-bleached gravestone. Gosh, those teeth—those teeth—they were the most prominent part of him! A fine education, he had, in military, naval and aeronautical tactics and strategy, gotten when he was just one of the many heir presumptives—for you would hardly be in a position to remember that Emperor Hirohita and Empress Nagako back in 1932 were throwing nothing but daughters—their fourth arrived in 1931 or 1932—and only male descendants of the sun goddess may occupy the Jap throne. A truly remarkable player, also, Yasuri was, of Japanese chess—a form of chess called—”

“Shogo,” put in Halsey. “I’m educated this morning to things—Japanese!”

Baxter raised his brows inquiringly: “Yes? Well, Shogo—that was it. But a highly eccentric player, Yasuri. For he would never play with any player until he had studied in detail, over many weeks, the records of at least five of his prospective opponent’s previous games. He maintained that it was not the playing of chess that was the true sport, but the calculation of the opposing player’s psychology and probable moves. And he knocked ’em cold, I understand, the oldest experts in Japan, when he took ’em on!” Baxter paused. “And inquisitive as a cat, as I think I said. For never did a foreign visitor of any degree of fame, register at the International Hotel, or the Hotel Katsenubi, at Tokyo, than the Emperor must summon him to the royal palace and have practically a full day’s chin-chin with him on every subject under the sun. Why, he spoke 7 languages, Japanese, Chinese, English, French, German, and African Bantu. And Yiddish! A fact.” Baxter paused. “A brilliant man, a searching man, Yasuri, don’t mistake me.”

“But he made the great mistake, I take it, somehow, of interviewing an alienist?”

“Exactly—and of thereby becoming psychiatrically interviewed himself! I was on the committee sent to call on Dr. Huberston, with the order from the Secretary of State of the United States that had been sent to the New York offices of the Associated Press, who personally requested Dr. Huberston to withdraw this article. Huberston, you see, had just returned to the States after a visit to Japan to pursue further his studies of the Hairy Anu. He had compiled the article for the Associated Press, who had accepted it sight unseen, even before it was written, even though Huberston had said it would be rather sensational. The A.P., you see, presumed it would be something dealing with racial derivations. But much to their surprise, however, it dealt with Yasuri, and not the Hairy Anu at all! In the conversation between our committee and Huberston in his home on Russell Avenue, which conversation was friendly enough, he told us of how considerable attempts were made to block utterly his visit to Yasuri by high-up Japanese officials who, as we knew then, realized that Yasuri lacked the balance that a great Eastern ruler should have, and that Huberston was a Westerner who might detect more things than he should. For, Halse, it appears that there were already in Japan, you see, a number of persons, chiefly Japanese medical experts, who practically knew that the Emperor was a paranoiac, a dozen Kaiser Wilhelms rolled into one, with egoistic dreams for self-aggrandizement and other persecutory ideas so intense as, taken in conjunction with his power, to make him the most dangerous man in existence with respect to peace in the Pacific.”

Baxter paused but a second, then resumed. “As you have just surmised, in the great chin-chin that took place between Yasuri and Dr. Argyle Huberston that day in July, 1937, Huberston interviewed Yasuri as no white man, out of the hundreds of famous visitors who have passed through Japan, ever interviewed an emperor. Huberston had just come into Tokyo from the island of Yezo, and the ever-curious Emperor no doubt expected to talk with him about the Anu. But after dismissing briefly the subject of these hairy peoples, Huberston talked dreams with the Emperor. Sounded him out. Drew him out. And he showed him remarkable word-association tests, psychiatrical methods used in his former practice. In which the delighted Emperor served as the subject! Huberston worked out curious experiments with paper, pen, scissors, toy dreadnoughts, and Lord knows what else, that highly amused and entertained the Emperor—that to him were just a game of—of—well, wits. For of course the Emperor, Halse, like all insane lunatics, knew that he himself was perfectly sane! And therefore quite safe. No white dog from the West, with any fool letters after his name, could possibly find anything wrong with his mental workings. For his mind was a super-mind! But Huberston was finding a-plenty! He even found enough wrong with the Emperor’s mental reactions to current events—his complexes, we’ll say—to know that the latter hated the White Race, and had some hidden reason for expecting ultimately to see them get the solar-plexus blow of their existence. The Emperor had no way of knowing Huberston was finding this out, of course, for he mouthed tremendous numbers of cordial and honey-tinged sentiments of international amity. Particularly, Huberston told us, he aimed at finding why the Emperor always signed documents of state with a ball-pointed pen, dipped in his own blood. He suspected, he said, that therein lay the latter’s idee fixée—in simple language, Halse, delusion!—which made him a true paranoiac. But he could not get at it. The Emperor suavely stated, when asked directly about it, as he had always stated to everyone, that ink was not a noble enough thing in which to delineate a royal signature. Huberston at least believed otherwise. He probed fruitlessly back into the Emperor’s boyhood. He concluded, at last, that the Emperor himself had forgotten the psychic trauma—as some term it, Halse, the psychic injury—that might have given rise to this eccentricity. He did, however, elicit the fact that the Emperor had had a tutor from babyhood up, in his former home near the Tenryuji Temple, at Kyota. A tutor named Eiichi Hokuda. Huberston believed that perhaps this tutor could provide the clew to that early childhood psychic trauma—and that there and there alone lay the true explanation of why Yasuri, in signing documents of state with foreign ambassadors, always called in his physician, the old Dr. Kamero Chibo, and had a half ounce or so of his own blood drawn, for ink. So, Huberston told us, when he left the Tokyo Palace that day, he ran down to Kyota, presumably on some matters touching further investigation of the history of the Hairy Anu. He found old Hokuda, dreaming on an arched wooden foot-bridge across the pond in the center of his garden of cherry trees, wistaria and chrysanthemums, awarded to him as a sort of pension. Old Hokuda was glad to talk to the kindly white man, about the Emperor’s little boyhood days. And at last Huberston got at it—that psychic trauma which was back of the Emperor’s chief eccentricity. As a tiny boy, it seems, he had been given a knife to help prune a plum tree. He had cut himself slightly with the knife. The blood had flown. He had run crying to his nurse, his tutor. Both, to stop his crying, had told him that if he willed that blood not to exist—‘wish it not to be’ was the Japanese term they naturally used—it would instantly vanish, including the cut! Unbelievingly, the little boy had tried it. And the two of them, to reassure him, had told him that they no longer could see any blood, any cut. His tears stopped. But his miniature brain had commenced working. He knew he was one of the heirs presumptive to the Japanese throne, if not the most likely one of all. From babyhood on that had been instilled, imbrued, into his very being. So the lie, grafted upon his undoubted congenital psychopathic personality—Huberston said Yasuri had that personality—developed into the idee fixee of his subsequent paranoia—the one isolated thing in a subtle lunatic, Halse, which, if you can only put your finger on it, brands him, classifies him, but about which a lunatic will invariably throw a smokescreen. So, when Huberston left Japan a few days later on the Pacifica for home, he knew not only that the Emperor of Japan was a madman who by rights should be locked within the walls of an asylum but who, unfortunately, as Emperor, was as safe from all forms of physical restraint as he was from even having mind tests made upon him. Additionally safe, in fact, because his insanity, as I say, was so exceedingly subtle as to give him all the appearances of a brilliant, though headstrong, and clever ruler.

“For the idee fixee, which Huberston uncovered, established by deduction and induction, and coordinated with his other findings, was that the Emperor believed that his blood was invisible, or rather that he could, instantly, by his power of will, across space itself, will it so to be. And that he therefore applied his signature to state documents with other nations so that he could repudiate them if he ever wished to, by willing his signature to become invisible, and therefore non-existent!

“And it is all this, Halse, that has caused this Mazoru-Ikeuna rumpus here in Chicago. And which has—but I’ll forge on with the story. For that phone over there will eventually be ringing.” Baxter knocked the ashes off his cigar.

“Well,” he went on, “it was Dr. Huberston’s direct charges against the mental well-being of the Emperor of Japan, and his incontrovertible psychiatrical proofs added to it, that caused the New York office of the A.P. to show the article to the Department of State, and they in turn to request the A.P. to have him withdraw it—and the A.P., in turn to refuse to syndicate it. The Department of State declared that publication of the article would strain the otherwise tranquil diplomatic relations existing between Japan and America. The ultimate upshot, in fact, was that the Department of State itself purchased the article for $1000; Huberston had contracted to deliver it to the A.P. for only $500. And so he, being more or less of a good fellow at heart even if he was an alienist, and realizing that all the great news syndicates probably would likewise not touch it, canceled the contract calling for its publication across America, and took Uncle Sam’s thousand dollars. I daresay the article’s locked up today in some dusty archive at Washington. And to conclude with Huberston, he did another article instead for the A.P.—on the Hairy Anu, and everybody was happy! He died—I helped to write his obit—it was a damned impressive thing, too, all the work he’d done in both lines of knowledge—he had more degrees than a dog has fleas—in January, 1938, and Yasuri himself kicked off in February that year. That was when Himbosho, the present Emperor of Japan, climbed up onto the throne. Himbosho is, of course, the friend of Premier Chamberleigh of Great Britain, as well as of Sir George Leets, British Secretary of Foreign Relations, not to omit mentioning our own present Secretary of State Bruce Patterson. A wise ruler, Himbosho, who realizes that the old Singapore treaty of 1934 was logical enough from both Uncle Sam’s and John Bull’s viewpoints. A bit too placid, if anything—fat as a Buddha—with three chins, they say—he lives mainly to eat, sending to the Kwang-Tunk province of China, on the Pearl River, age-old home of the best cooks and most fastidious eaters of China, for sharks’ fins at $7.50 the pound and from which pound but four bowls of soup can be made, and for duck a-la-East-China-Sea—air-mail, cooked with ginger and stuffed with almonds, and to Russia for Beluga caviar, and to France for truffles, and to Scotland for wood-cock, and—all right, I’ll stop. I realize you haven’t had your breakfast! A disciple, Himbosho is, of Apicius, famous Roman epicure, instead of Mars, God of War—a man with the tolerant viewpoint of the legist rather than the salesman—and with, apparently, no dreams of Empire, for he has sent Prince Ido, most famous fire-eater of all war ministers, into tea gardening, and has taken, for his present Minister of War, Tota Honda, a stern, ever-watchtul but wise statesman. And so, Halse—all of this makes a lot of difference, you see, compared to conditions in 1936 and ’37, with Yasuri smiling ever suavely through those gleaming white teeth of his, yet secretly hating almost everybody in the white portion of the globe and having dreams he shouldn’t have had!

“But what, Halse, was the condition of Japan five years ago? Ten years ago? Twelve years ago? And today, in fact? I ask this because, associated with that condition then, as even today—plus an additional factor, a mad Emperor—you and I nearly got perforated last night!”

“Well—I’m sure I don’t know. Unless you mean—crowded with population?”

“That exactly, Halse. That, coupled with Japanese fecundity and refusal to sanction legal birth control. Take the native islands of Japan. They include only 150,000 square miles, Halse, or very much less area than our native state of Texas occupies. And less than one-fifth of Japan is arable land, and largely poor, volcanic soil at that. In 1846 there were but 27,000,000 inhabit—”

“Artemus,” Halsey put in helplessly, “do you mind telling me how the devil you master and retain figures the way you always have done?”

“Not at all. I was assigned, 10 years ago, to cover J. L. Jacobs, the efficiency engineer delegated to straighten out Chicago’s tax muddle. He taught me an ingenious mnemonic system that works perfectly if you don’t take a drink. It’s still so perfect, however, that if you do take a drink, you multiply all your mnemonical recollections by the factor ½X, in which X equals 2. Now as I was saying, in 1846 there were but 27,000,000 inhabitants in Japan; yet in 1926 there were some 60,000,000. By 1937 they had jumped to 69,000,000, gained at the rate of 800,000 souls per year thanks to the way they barred out old Mrs. Margaret Sanger some years back. By 1947, of course, there will be millions more, and Himbosho’s successor will eventually have one huge problem on his hands! Yasuri, though, didn’t intend to leave any problems like that to his successor. He—well—to our story—of 1937. It was quite as obvious then, as a decade before that, that Japan must expand, and, as has been made abundantly evident by the wars in China over Korea, and in Manchuria—first with Russia, then with China, resulting in a technical victory in 1932 as to the trade boycott, but an actual debacle because Japan foolishly tried to play the game with spot cards instead of picture cards, and wound up with her feet tied 11 ways around with treaties—not to mention the perpetual friction on our own Pacific coast—she cannot expand in any direction without a fight. The situation is further complicated by the peculiar living conditions required by the Japanese people. Sturdy and inured to hardships though they are, these little brown men cannot—or at least they will not—settle in any but warm or temperate countries; and they therefore leave practically unoccupied the northernmost portion of their elsewhere over-crowded islands. Most of China, as you yourself know, is already densely populated. The island of Sakhalin, is cold. Korea, now the Japanese province of Chosen, is not proving at all satisfactory for Japanese settlement. Manchuria? Well, the Japs tried hard years and years ago merely to colonize it, but failed miserably, for the little brown men could not plow the ground, fell the trees, or make homes in the wilderness as did the plodding Chinese under the five-toed dragon flag. California is ideal—but is closed by American possession. Formosa is already full.

“Where, then, is Japan to turn? Where did it have, ten years ago, to turn—five years ago—as today—and tomorrow?

“There are, Halse, but three possible alternatives. One is in South and Central America, where climates are warm and racial prejudices weak; but these countries are terribly distant and many of them are already under a quite definite American domination. Here, too, any very considerable penetration, if interpreted as a possible future menace to the United States, would lead to friction. Further to the south of Japan, however, in her own neck of the woods—or, as I ought to say, neck of the Pacific!—lies the smallest of the continents, Australia, warm, fertile, ideally suited to Asiatic settlement—and empty! It’s what we call a low-pressure area, as contrasted to the high-pressure area of Japan herself. Some five and a half million white men occupy nearly three million miles of territory, a large proportion of which is habitable, with a population density of slightly less than two persons to the square mile. In the great Murray River basin a scant three million are in occupation of a fertile territory equal in area to France, Italy and Germany combined—which is exceedingly tempting when surveyed from an island empire whose population in crowded areas rises to the astonishing density of 1,000 souls per square mile.

“Now glance at this little map of Asia, here, Halse, in this pocket memo book of mine. Observe how from Bering Sea to Formosa, a stretch of nearly 3,000 miles, the Mikado’s dominions lie like a barrier along the eastern coast of Asia, controlling, if properly fortified and equipped as submarine bases, the commercial sea lanes leading to the rich markets of China—a future source of incredible wealth for any industrial state that is lucky enough to win the opportunity to exploit them. But though the flag of the rising sun stops at Formosa, the island chain does not. It goes on down the Asiatic coast—the Philippines, Borneo, Celebes, Sumatra, New Guinea, and last of all, in the southern seas, the richest prize of all, Australia and New Zealand. Along this island chain, leading straight south toward Australia and its potential wealth, lies the only logical and promising future avenue of expansion that Japan ever had—or ever will have.

“And it is Australia that Yasuri, for the brief period of some 76 days, strange to relate, was in a position to seize and hold forever. And the one man in the world who was in a position to help him was Jose Luis Rodriguez Almedo, today President of Mexico, and tomorrow more so, by the Grace of God—and the recognition of Great Britain and Uncle Sam!”