The Kingdom of Slender Swords
by Hallie Erminie Rives · English · Gutenberg #42427 · 562,674 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Kingdom of Slender Swords
Author: Hallie Erminie Rives
Illustrator: A. B. Wenzell
Release date: March 29, 2013 [eBook #42427]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE KINGDOM OF SLENDER SWORDS ***
THE KINGDOM OF
SLENDER SWORDS
BY HALLIE ERMINIE RIVES
(MRS. POST WHEELER)
SATAN SANDERSON
Illustrated by A. B. Wenzell
TALES FROM DICKENS
Illustrated by Reginald B. Birch
THE CASTAWAY
Illustrated by Howard Chandler Christy
HEARTS COURAGEOUS
Illustrated by A. B. Wenzell
A FURNACE OF EARTH
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
INDIANAPOLIS
[Illustration]
THE KINGDOM OF
SLENDER SWORDS
BY
HALLIE ERMINIE RIVES
(MRS. POST WHEELER)
_With a Foreword by His Excellency Baron Makino_
ILLUSTRATIONS BY
A. B. WENZELL
INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT 1910
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
BROOKLYN, N.Y.
TO
CAROLYN FOSTER STICKNEY
FOREWORD
It has been my happy fortune to have made the acquaintance of the gifted
author of this book. From time to time she was kind enough to confide to
me its progress. When the manuscript was completed I was privileged to
go over it, and the hours so spent were of unbroken interest and
pleasure.
What especially touched and concerned me was, of course, the Japanese
characters depicted, the motives of these actors in their respective
roles, and other Japanese incidents connected with the story. I am most
agreeably impressed with the remarkable insight into, and the just
appreciation of, the Japanese spirit displayed by the author.
While the story itself is her creation, the local coloring, the moral
atmosphere called in to weave the thread of the tale, are matters
belonging to the domain of facts, and constitute an amount of useful and
authentic information. Indeed, she has taken unusual pains to be
correctly informed about the people of the country and their customs,
and in this she has succeeded to a very eminent degree.
I may mention one or two of the striking characteristics of the work.
The sacrifice of the girl Haru may seem unreal, but such is the dominant
idea of duty and sacrifice with the Japanese, that in certain
emergencies it is not at all unlikely that we should behold her real
prototype in life. The description of the Imperial Review at Tokyo and
its patriotic significance vividly recalls my own impression of this
spectacle.
It gives me great satisfaction to know that by perusing these pages, the
vast reading public, who, after all, have the decisive voice in the
national government of the greatest republic of the world, and whose
good will and friendship we Japanese prize in no uncommon degree, should
be correctly informed about ourselves, as far as the scope of this book
goes. We attach great importance to a thorough mutual understanding of
two foremost peoples on the Pacific, in whose direction and coöperation
the future of the East must largely depend. It is, therefore, incumbent
upon us all to do our utmost to cultivate such good understanding, not
only for those immediately concerned, but for the welfare of the whole
human race.
In the chapters of this novel the author seems always to have had such
high ideals before her, and the result is that, besides being an
exciting and agreeable reading, the book contains elements of serious
and instructive consideration, which can not but contribute toward
establishing better and healthier knowledge between the East and West of
the Pacific.
N. MAKINO.
Sendagaya, Tokyo, 9th of August, 1909.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I WHERE THE DAY BEGINS 1
II "THE ROOST" 13
III THE LAND OF THE GODS 27
IV UNDER THE RED SUNSET 42
V THE MAKER OF BUDDHAS 52
VI THE BAYING OF THE WOLF-HOUND 62
VII DOCTOR BERSONIN 72
VIII "SALLY IN OUR ALLEY" 78
IX THE WEB OF THE SPIDER 86
X IN A GARDEN OF DREAMS 92
XI ISHIKICHI 101
XII IN THE STREET-OF-PRAYER-TO-THE-GODS 107
XIII THE WHORLS OF YELLOW DUST 113
XIV WHEN BARBARA AWOKE 119
XV A FACE IN THE CROWD 125
XVI "BANZAI NIPPON!" 133
XVII A SILENT UNDERSTANDING 142
XVIII IN THE BAMBOO LANE 149
XIX THE BISHOP ASKS A QUESTION 154
XX THE TRESPASSER 160
XXI THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD 169
XXII THE DANCE OF THE CAPITAL 181
XXIII THE DEVIL PIPES TO HIS OWN 194
XXIV A MAN NAMED WARE 198
XXV AT THE SHRINE OF THE FOX-GOD 206
XXVI THE NIGHTLESS CITY 213
XXVII LIKE THE WHISPER OF A BAT'S WINGS 224
XXVIII THE FORGOTTEN MAN 233
XXIX DAUNT LISTENS TO A SONG 244
XXX THE ISLAND OF ENCHANTMENT 252
XXXI THE COMING OF AUSTEN WARE 266
XXXII THE WOMAN OF SOREK 276
XXXIII THE FLIGHT 284
XXXIV ON THE KNEES OF DELILAH 288
XXXV WHEN A WOMAN DREAMS 292
XXXVI BEHIND THE SHIKIRI 297
XXXVII [Japanese: Donto] 303
XXXVIII THE LADY OF THE MANY-COLORED FIRES 308
XXXIX THE HEART OF BARBARA 320
XL THE SHADOW OF A TO-MORROW 326
XLI UNFORGOT 334
XLII PHIL MAKES AN APPEAL 338
XLIII THE SECRET THE RIVER KEPT 345
XLIV THE LAYING OF THE MINE 353
XLV THE BISHOP ANSWERS A SUMMONS 360
XLVI THE GOLDEN CRUCIFIX 366
XLVII "IF THIS BE FORGETTING" 371
XLVIII WHILE THE CITY SLEPT 379
XLIX THE ALARM 389
L WHOM THE GODS DESTROY 396
LI THE LAUGH 401
LII THE VOICE IN THE DARK 409
LIII A RACE WITH DAWN 414
LIV INTO THE SUNLIGHT 425
LV KNOW ALL MEN BY THESE PRESENTS 428
THE KINGDOM OF
SLENDER SWORDS
THE KINGDOM OF
SLENDER SWORDS
CHAPTER I
WHERE THE DAY BEGINS
Barbara leaned against the palpitant rail, the light air fanning her
breeze-cool cheek, her arteries beating like tiny drums, atune with the
throb, throb, throb, of the steel deck as the black ocean leviathan
swept on toward its harbor resting-place.
All that Japanese April day she had been in a state of tremulous
excitement. She had crept from her berth at dawn to see the hazy sun
come up in a Rosicrucian flush as weirdly soft as a mirage, to strain
her eyes for the first filmy feather of land. Long before the gray-green
wisp showed on the horizon, the sight of a lumbering _junk_ with its
square sail laced across with white stripes, and its bronze seamen, with
white loin-cloth and sweat-band about the forehead, naked and thewed
like sculptures, as they swayed from the clumsy tiller, had sent a
thrill through her. And as the first far peaks etched themselves on the
robin's-egg blue, as impalpable and ethereal as a perfume, she felt warm
drops coming with a rush to her eyes.
For Japan, every sight and sound of it, had been woven with the earliest
imaginings of Barbara's orphaned life. Her father she had never seen.
Her mother she remembered only as a vague, widowed figure. In Japan they
two had met and had married, and after a single year her mother had
returned to her own place and people broken-hearted and alone. In the
month of her return Barbara had been born. A year ago her aunt, to whom
she owed the care of her young girlhood, had died, and Barbara had found
herself, at twenty-three, mistress of a liberal fortune and of her own
future. Japan had always exercised a potent spell over her imagination.
She pictured it as a land of strange glowing trees, of queer costumes
and weird, fantastic buildings. More than all, it was the land of her
mother's life-romance, where her father had loved and died. There was
one other tangible tie--her uncle, her mother's brother, was Episcopal
bishop of Tokyo. He was returning now from a half year's visit in
America, and this fact, coupled with an invitation from Patricia
Dandridge, the daughter of the American Ambassador, with whom Barbara
had chummed one California winter, had constituted an opportunity wholly
alluring. So she found herself, on this April day, the pallid Pacific
fuming away behind her, gazing with kindling cheeks on that shadowy
background, vaguely intangible in the magical limpidity of the distance.
The land was wonderfully nearer now. The hills lay, a clear pile of
washed grays and greens, with saffron tinted valleys between, wound in a
haze of tender lilac. By imperceptible gradations this unfolded, caught
sub-tones, ermine against umbers, of warmer red and flickering emerald,
white glints of sun on surf like splashes of silver, till suddenly,
spectral and perfect, above a cluster of peaks like purple gentians,
glowed forth a phantom mountain, its golden wistaria cone inlaid in the
deeper azure. It hung like an inverted morning-glory, mist and
mother-of-pearl at the top, shading into porphyry veined with streaks of
verd and jade--Fuji-San, the despair of painters, the birthplace of the
ancient gods.
The aching beauty of it stung Barbara with a tender, intolerable pang.
The little fishing-villages that presently came into sight, tucked into
the clefts of the shore, with gray dwellings, elfishly frail, climbing
the green slope behind them--the growing rice in patches of cloudy gold
on the hillsides--the bluish shadows of bamboo groves--all touched her
with an incommunicable delight.
A shadow fell beside her and she turned. It was her uncle. His
clean-shaven face beamed at her over his clerical collar.
"Isn't it glorious?" she breathed. "It's better than champagne! It's
like pins and needles in the tips of your fingers! There's positively an
odor in the air like camelias. And did any one ever see such colors?"
She pointed to the shore dead-ahead, now a serrated background of deep
tones, swimming in the infinite gold of the tropic afternoon.
Bishop Randolph was a bachelor, past middle age, ruddy and with eyes
softened by habitual good-humor. He was the son of a rector of a rich
Virginian parish, which on his father's death had sent the son a
unanimous call. He had answered, "No; my place is in Japan," without
consciousness of sacrifice. For him, in the truest sense, the present
voyage was a homeward one.
"Japan gets into the blood," he said musingly. "I often think of the old
lady who committed suicide at Nikko. She left a letter which said: 'By
favor of the gods, I am too dishonorably old to hope to revisit this
jewel-glorious spot, so I prefer augustly to remain here for ever!' I
have had something of the same feeling, sometimes. I remember yet the
first time I saw the coast. That was twenty-five years ago. We watched
it together--your father and I--just as we two are doing now."
She looked at him with sudden eagerness, for of his own accord he had
never before spoken to her of her dead father. The latter had always
seemed a very real personage, but how little she knew about him! The
aunt who had brought her up--her mother's sister--had never talked of
him, and her uncle she had seen but twice since she had been old enough
to wonder. But, little by little, gleaning a fact here and there, she
had constructed a slender history of him. It told of mingled blood, a
birthplace on a Mediterranean island and a gipsy childhood. There was a
thin sheaf of yellowed manuscript in her possession that had been left
among her mother's scanty papers, a fragment of an old diary of his.
Many leaves had been ruthlessly cut from it, but in the pages that were
left she had found bits of flotsam: broken memory-pictures of his own
mother which had strangely touched her, of a bitter youth in England and
America overshadowed by the haunting fear of blindness, of quests to
West-Indian cities, told in phrases that dripped liquid gold and
sunshine. The voyage to Japan had been made on the same vessel that
carried her uncle, and they two had thus become comrades. The latter had
been an enthusiastic young missionary, one of a few chosen spirits sent
to defend a far field-casement thrown forward by the batteries of
Christendom. His sister had come out to visit him and a few months later
had married his friend.
Such was the story, as Barbara knew it, of her father and mother--a love
chapter which had soon closed with a far-away grave by the Inland Sea.
Her fancy had made of her father a pathetic figure. As a child, she had
dreamed of some day placing a monument to his memory in the Japanese
capital. She possessed only one picture of him, a tiny profile
photograph which she wore always in a locket engraved with her name. It
showed a dark face, clean-shaven, finely chiseled and passionate, with
the large, full eye of the dreamer. She had liked to think it looked
like the paintings of St. John. Perhaps this thought had caused the
projected monument to take the form of a Christian chapel. From a
nebulous idea, the plan had become a bundle of blue-prints, which she
had sent to her uncle, with the request that he purchase for her a
suitable site and begin the building. He had done this before his visit
to America and now the Chapel was completed, save in one particular--the
memorial window of rich, stained-glass stowed at that moment in the
ship's hold. The bishop had not seen it. From some feeling which she had
not tried to analyze, Barbara had said nothing to him of the Chapel's
especial significance. Now, however, at his unexpected reference, the
feeling frayed, and she told him all of her plan.
He gazed at her a moment in a startled fashion, then looked away, his
hand shading his eyes. When she finished there was a long pause which
made her wonder. She touched his arm.
"You were very fond of father, weren't you?"
"Yes," he said, in a tone oddly restrained.
"And was my mother with you when he fell in love with her?"
"Yes," and after a pause: "I married them."
"Then they went to Nagasaki," she said softly, "and there--he died. You
weren't there then?"
"No," he answered in a low voice. His face was still turned away, and
she caught an unaccustomed note of feeling in his voice.
He left her abruptly and began to pace up and down the deck, while she
stood watching the shoreline sharpen, the tangled blur of harbor resolve
and shift into manifold detail. Shapeless dots had become anchored
ships, a black pencil a wharf, a long yellow-gray streak a curved
shore-front lined with buildings, and the warm green blotch rising
behind it a foliaged hill pricked out with soft, gray roofs. There was a
rush of passengers to one side, where from a brisk little tug, at whose
peak floated a flag bearing a blood-red sun, a handful of spick-and-span
Japanese officials were climbing the ship's ladder.
At length the bishop spoke again at her elbow, now in his usual voice:
"What are you going to do with that man, Barbara?"
A faint flush rose in her cheek. "With what man?"
"Austen Ware."
She shrugged her shoulders and laughed--a little uneasily. "What can one
do with a man when he is ten thousand miles away?"
"He's not the sort to give up a chase."
"Even a wild-goose chase?" she countered.
"When I was a boy in Virginia," he said with a humorous eye, "I used to
chase wild geese, and bag 'em, too."
The bishop sauntered away, leaving a frown on Barbara's brow. She had
had a swift mental vision of a cool, dark-bearded face and assured
bearing that the past year had made familiar. It was a handsome face, if
somewhat cold. Its owner was rich, his standing was unquestioned. The
fact that he was ten years her senior had but made his attentions the
more flattering. He had had no inherited fortune and had been no idler;
for this she admired him. If she had not thrilled to his declaration, so
far as liking went, she liked him. The week she left New York he had
intended a yachting trip to the Mediterranean. When he told her, coolly
enough, that he should ask her again in Japan, she had treated it as a
jest, though knowing him quite capable of meaning it. From every worldly
standpoint he was distinctly eligible. Every one who knew them both
confidently expected her to marry Ware. Well, why not?
Yet to-day she did not ask herself the question confidently. It belonged
still to the limbo of the future--to the convenient "some day" to which
her thought had always banished it. Since she had grown she had never
felt for any one the sentiment she had dreamed of in that vivid girlhood
of hers, a something mixed of pride and joy, that a sound or touch would
thrill with a delight as keen as pain; but unconsciously, perhaps, she
had been clinging to old romantic notions.
A passenger leaning near her was whistling _Sally in our Alley_ under
his breath and a Japanese steward was emptying over the side a vase of
wilted flowers. A breath of rose scent came to her, mixed with a faint
smell of tobacco, and these and the whistled air awoke a sudden
reminiscence. Her gaze went past the clustered shipping, beyond the gray
line of buildings and the masses of foliage, and swam into a tremulous
June evening seven years past.
She saw a wide campus of green sward studded with stately elms festooned
with electric lights that glowed in the falling twilight. Scattered
about were groups of benches each with its freight of dainty frocks, and
on one of them she saw herself sitting, a shy girl of sixteen, on her
first visit to a great university. Men went by in sober black gown and
flat mortar-boards, young, clean-shaven, and boyish, with arms about one
another's shoulders. Here and there an orange "blazer" made a vivid
splash of color and groups in white-flannels sprawled beneath the trees
under the perfumed haze of briar-wood pipes that mingled with the
near-by scent of roses. From one of the balconies of the ivied
dormitories that faced the green came the mellow tinkle of a mandolin
and the sound of a clear tenor:
"Of all the girls that are so smart,
There's none like pretty Sally.
She is the darling of my heart--"
The groups about her had fallen silent--only one voice had said: "That's
'Duke' Daunt." Then the melody suddenly broke queerly and stopped, and
the man who had spoken got up quickly and said: "I'm going in. It's time
to dress anyway." And somehow his voice had seemed to break queerly,
too.
Duke Daunt! The scene shifted into the next day, when she had met him
for a handful of delirious moments. For how long afterward had he
remained her childish idol! Time had overlaid the memory, but it started
bright now at the sound of that whistled tune.
Her uncle's voice recalled her. He was handing her his binoculars. She
took them, chose a spot well forward and glued her eyes to the glass.
A sigh of ecstasy came from her lips, for it brought the land almost at
arm's length--the stone _hatoba_ crowded with brown Japanese faces,
pricked out here and there by the white Panama hat or pith-helmet of the
foreigner; at one side a bouquet of gay muslin dresses and beribboned
parasols flanked by a phalanx of waiting _rick'sha_,--the little
flotilla of crimson sails at the yacht anchorage--the stately, columned
front of the club on the Bund with its cool terrace of round tables--the
_kimono'd_ figures squatting under the grotesquely bent pines along the
water-front, where a motor-car flashed like a brilliant mailed
beetle--farther away tiny shop-fronts hung with waving figured blue and
beyond them a gray billowing of tiled roofs, and long, bright,
yellow-chequered streets sauntering toward a mass of glowing green from
which cherry blooms soared like pink balloons. Arching over all the
enormous height of the spring-time blue, and the dreamy soft witchery of
the declining sun. It unfolded before her like a panorama--all the
basking, many-hued, polyglot, half-tropical life--a colorful medley,
queer and mysterious!
Nearer, nearer yet, the ship drew on, till there came to meet it two
curved arms of breakwater, a miniature lighthouse at each side. The
captain on the bridge lifted his hand, and a cheer rose from the group
of male passengers below him as the anchor-chain snored through the
hawse-holes.
Barbara lowered the glass from her eyes. The slow swinging of the vessel
to the anchor had brought a dazzling bulk between her gaze and the
shore, perilously near. She saw it now in its proper perspective--a trim
steam yacht, painted white, with a rakish air of speed and tautness,
the sun glinting from its polished brass fittings. It lay there,
graceful and light, a sharp, clean contrast to the gray and yellow
_junk_ and grotesque _sampan_, a disdainful swan amid a noisy flock of
teal and mallard.
Adjusting the focus Barbara looked. A man in naval uniform who had
boarded the ship at Quarantine was pointing out the yacht to a
passenger, and Barbara caught crisp bits of sentences: "You see the
patches of green?--they're decorations for the Squadron that's due
to-morrow. Look just beyond them. Prettiest craft I've ever seen east of
the Straits.... Came in this morning. Owner's in Nara now, doing the
temples.... Has a younger brother who's been out here for a year, going
the pace.... They won't let private yachts lie any closer in or they'd
go high and dry on empty champagne bottles."
Barbara was feeling a strange sensation of familiarity. Puzzled, she
withdrew her gaze, then looked once more.
Suddenly she dropped the glass with a startled exclamation. "What are
you going to do with that man?"--her uncle's query seemed to echo
satirically about her. For the white yacht was Austen Ware's, and there,
on the gleaming bows, in polished golden letters, was the name
BARBARA
CHAPTER II
"THE ROOST"
The day had been sluggish with the promise of summer, but the failing
afternoon had brought a soft suspiration from the broad bosom of the
Pacific laden with a refreshing coolness. Along the Bund, however, there
was little stir. A few blocks away the foreign dive-quarter was
drowsing, and only a single _samisen_ twanged in Hep Goon's saloon,
where sailors of a dozen nationalities spent their wages while in port.
At the curbing, under the telegraph poles, the chattering _rick'sha_
coolies squatted, playing _Go_ with flat stones on a square scratched
with a pointed stick in the hard, beaten ground. On the spotless mats
behind their paper _shoji_ the curio-merchants sat on their gaudy wadded
cushions, while, over the glowing fire-bowls of charcoal in the inner
rooms, their wives cooked the rice for the early evening meal. The
office of the Grand Hotel was quiet; only a handful of loungers gossiped
at the bar, and the last young lady tourist had finished her flirtation
on the terrace and retired to the comfort of a stayless _kimono_. In the
deep foliage of the "Bluff" the slanting sunlight caught and quivered
till the green mole seemed a mighty beryl, and in its hedge-shaded
lanes, dreamy as those of an English village, the clear air was pungent
with tropic blooms.
On one of these fragrant byways, its front looking out across the bay,
stood a small bungalow which bore over its gateway the dubious
appellation "The Roost." From its enclosed piazza, over which a wistaria
vine hung pale pendants, a twisted stair led to the roof, half of which
was flat. This space was surrounded by a balustrade and shaded by a
rounded gaily striped awning. From this airy retreat the water, far
below, looked like a violet shawl edged with shimmering quicksilver and
embroidered with fairy fishing _junk_ and _sampan_; and the subdued
voices of the street mingled, vague and undefined, with a rich dank
smell of foliage, that moved silently, heavy with the odor of
plum-blossoms, a gliding ghost of perfume. Thin blue-and-white Tientsin
rugs and green wicker settees gave an impression of coolness and
comfort; a pair of ornate temple brasses gleamed on a smoking-stand, and
a rich Satsuma bowl did duty for a tobacco jar.
Under the striped awning three men were grouped about a miniature
roulette table; a fourth, middle-aged and of huge bulk, with a cynical,
Semitic face, from a wide arm-chair was lazily peering through the
fleecy curdle of a Turkish cigarette. A fifth stood leaning against the
balustrade, watching.
The last was tall, clean-cut and smooth-shaven, with comely head well
set on broad shoulders, and gray eyes keen and alert. Possibly no one of
the foreign colony (where a Secretary of Embassy was by no means a _rara
avis_) was better liked than Duke Daunt, even by those who never
attempted to be sufficiently familiar with him to call him by the
nickname, which a characteristic manner had earned him in his salad
days.
At intervals a player muttered an impatient exclamation or gave a
monosyllabic order to the stolid Japanese servant who passed
noiselessly, deftly replenishing glasses. Through all ran the droning
buzz of bees in the wistaria, the recurrent rustle of the metal wheel,
the nervous click of the rolling marble and the shuffle and thud of the
ivory disks on the green baize. All at once the marble blundered into
its compartment and one of the gamesters burst into a boisterous laugh
of triumph.
As the sudden discord jangled across the silence, the big man in the
arm-chair started half round, his lips twitched and a spasm of something
like fright crossed his face. The glass at his elbow was empty, but he
raised it and drained air, while the ice in it tinkled and clinked. He
set it down and wiped his lips with a half-furtive glance about him, but
the curious agitation had apparently been unnoted, and presently his
face had once more regained its speculative, slightly sardonic
expression.
Suddenly a distant gun boomed the hour of sunset. At the same instant
the marble ceased its erratic career, the wheel stilled and the youngest
of the gaming trio and the master of the place--Philip Ware, a graceful,
shapely fellow of twenty-three, with a flushed face and nervous
manner--pushed the scattered counters across the table with shaking
fingers.
"My limit to-day," he said with sullen petulance, and flipping the
marble angrily into the garden below, crossed to a table and poured out
a brandy-and-soda.
Daunt's gray eyes had been looking at him steadily, a little curiously.
He had known him seven years before at college, though the other had
been in a lower class than himself. But those intervening years had left
their baleful marks. At home Phil had stood only for loose habit, daring
fad, and flaunting mannerism--milestones of a career as completely
dissolute as a consistent disregard of conventional moral thoroughfares
could well make it. To Yokohama he was rapidly coming to be, in the eyes
of the censorious, an example for well-meaning youth to avoid, an
incorrigible _flanêur_, a purposeless idler on the primrose paths.
"Better luck next time," said one of the others lightly. "Come along,
Larry; we'll be off to the club."
The older man rose to depart more deliberately, his great size becoming
apparent. He was framed like a wrestler, abnormal width of shoulder and
massive head giving an effect of weight which contrasted oddly with
aquiline features in which was a touch of the accipitrine, something
ironic and sinister, like a vulture. His eyes were dappled yellow and
deep-set and had a peculiar expression of cold, untroubled regard. He
crossed to the farther side and looked down.
"What a height!" he said. "The whole harbor is laid out like a
checker-board." He spoke in a tone curiously dead and lacking in
_timbre_. His English was perfect, with a trace of accent.
"Pretty fair," assented Phil morosely. "It ought to be a good place to
view the Squadron, when it comes in to-morrow morning. It must have cost
the Japanese navy department a pretty penny to build those temporary
wharves along the Bund. They must be using a thousand incandescents! By
the decorations you'd think the Dreadnaughts were Japan's long lost
brothers, instead of battle-ships of a country that's likely to have a
row on with her almost any minute. I wonder where they will anchor."
The yellowish eyes had been gazing with an odd, intent glitter, and into
the heavy, pallid face, turned away, had sprung sharp, evil lines, that
seemed the shadows of some monstrous reflection on which the mind had
fed. Its sudden, wicked vitality was in strange contrast to the toneless
voice, which now said: "They will lie just opposite this point."
"So far in?" The young man leaning on the balustrade spoke interestedly.
"It seems as though from here one could almost shoot a pea aboard any
one of them."
"You might send me up some sticks of _Shimosé_, Doctor," said Phil with
satiric humor, "and I'll practise. I'll begin by shying a few at this
forsaken town; it needs it!"
The big man smiled faintly as he withdrew his eyes, and held out his
hand to the remaining visitor. The degrading lines had faded from his
face.
"I'm distinctly glad to have seen you, Mr. Daunt," he said. "I've
watched your trials with your aëroplane more than once lately at the
parade-ground. I saw the elder Wright at Paris last year and I believe
your flight will prove as well sustained as his. It's a pity you can't
compete for some of the European prizes."
"I'm afraid that would take me out of the amateur class," was the
answer. "It's purely an amusement with me--a fad, if you like."
"A very useful one," said the other, "unless you break your neck at it.
I wonder we haven't met before in Tokyo. I have an appointment to-night,
by the way, with your Ambassador. Come in to see me soon," he said,
turning to Phil. "I'm at home most of the time. Come and dine with me
again. I've only an indifferent cook, as you have discovered, I'm
afraid, but my new boy Ishida can make a famous cup of coffee and I can
always promise you a good cigar."
"Doctor Bersonin's the real thing!" said Phil, when the other had
disappeared. "He's a scientist--the biggest in his line--but he's no
prig. He believes in enjoying life. You ought to see his villa at
Kisaraz on the Chiba Road. He's worth a million, they say, and he must
make no end of money as a government expert." He paused, then added:
"You seem mighty quiet to-night! How does he strike you?"
Daunt was silent. He had seen that strange look that had shot across the
expert's face--at the sound of a laugh! He was wondering, too, what
attraction could exist between this middle-aged scientist with his cold
eyes and emotionless voice and Phil, sparkling and irresponsible
black-sheep and ne'er-do-well, who thought of nothing but his own coarse
pleasures. Frequently, of late, he had seen them together, at theater or
tea-house, and once in Bersonin's motor-car in Shiba Park in Tokyo.
"You don't like him! I can see that well enough," went on Phil
aggressively. "Why not? He's a lot above any man _I_ know, and I'm proud
to have him for a friend of mine."
"There's no accounting for tastes," returned Daunt dryly. "At any rate,
I don't imagine it matters particularly whether I like Doctor Bersonin
or not. There's another thing that's more apropos." He pointed to the
decanter in the other's hands. "You've had enough of that to-night, I
should think."
Phil reddened. "I've had no more than I can carry, if it comes to that,"
he retorted. "And I guess I'm able to take care of myself."
Daunt hesitated a moment. To-day's call had been a part of his
consistent effort, steadily growing more irksome, to keep alive for the
sake of the old college name, the _quasi_ friendship between them and to
invoke whatever influence he might once have possessed.
"I'm thinking of your brother," he said quietly. "You say his yacht came
into harbor from Kobe to-day. He'll scarcely be more than a week in the
temple cities, and any train may bring him after that. You'll want all
the time you've got to straighten out. You'll need to put your best foot
forward."
A look that was not pleasant shot across Phil's face. "I suppose I
shall," he said savagely. "A pretty brother he is! He wrote me from home
that if he found I'd been playing, he'd cut his allowance to me to
twenty dollars a week. I'd like to knock that smile of his down his
throat--the cold-blooded fish! _He_ spends enough!"
"He's earned it, I understand," said Daunt.
"So will I, perhaps, after I've had my fling. I'm in no hurry, and I
won't take orders always from him! I've had to knuckle down to him all
my life, and I'm precious tired of it, I can tell you."
Daunt's eyes had turned to the broad expanse below, where the white
sails of vagrant _sampan_ drifted. In the road he could hear the sharp
tap-tap of a blind _amma_--adept in the Japanese massage which coaxes
soreness from the body--as he passed slowly along, feeling his way with
his stick and from time to time sounding on his metal flute his
characteristic double note. Across the moment's silence the sound came
clear and bird-like, very shrill and sweet.
"What business is it of his," Phil added, "if I choose to stay out here
in the East?"
Daunt withdrew his gaze. "Take his advice, Phil," he said. "The East
isn't doing you any good. You're doing nothing but dissipate. And--it
doesn't pay."
Phil gave a short, sneering laugh. "Why shouldn't I stay abroad if I can
have more fun here than I can at home?" he returned. "If I had my way,
I'd never want to see the United States again! This country suits me at
present. When I get tired, I'll leave--if I can raise enough to get out
of town."
A flush had risen to Daunt's forehead, but he turned away without reply.
At the stair, however, he spoke again:
"Look here, Phil," he said, coming slowly back. "Why not come up to
Tokyo for a while? It's--quieter, and it will be a change. I have a
little Japanese house in Aoyama that I leased as a place to work on my
Glider models, but I don't use it now, and it's fairly well furnished.
The caretaker is an excellent cook, too." He took a key from its ring
and laid it on the table. "Let me leave this anyway--the address is on
the label--and do as you like about it."
Phil looked at him an instant with narrowing eyes, then laughed. "Tokyo
as a gentle sedative, eh? And pastoral visitations every other day!"
"You needn't be afraid of that," replied Daunt. "I'll not come to
lecture you. I haven't set foot in the place for a month, and probably
shan't for a month to come. Go up and try it, anyway. Drop the Bund and
the races for a little while and get a grip on things!"
Phil looked away. A sudden memory came to him of a face he had seen in
Tokyo--at one of the _matsuri_ or ward-festivals--a girl's face, oval
and pensive and with a smile like a flash of sunlight. Her _kimono_ had
been all of holiday colors, and he had tried desperately to pick
acquaintance, with poor success. A second time he had seen her, on the
beach at Kamakura. Then she had worn a _kimono_ of rich brown, soft and
clinging, and an _obi_ stamped with yellow maple leaves and fastened
with a little silver clasp in the shape of a firefly. She was with a
party of girls bent on frolic; they had discarded the white cleft _tabi_
and clog and were splashing through the surf bare-kneed. He could see
yet the foam on the perfect naked feet, and below the lifted _kimono_
and red petticoat, the gleam of the white skin that is the dream of
Japanese women. A flush crept over Phil's face as he remembered. He had
had better success that time. She had dropped her swinging clog and he
had rescued it, and won a word of thanks and a smile from her dark eyes.
She herself had unbent little, but the girls with her were full of
frolic and the handsome foreigner was an adventure. He had discovered
that she spoke English and lived in Tokyo, in the ward of the _matsuri_.
But though he had strolled through that district a score of times since,
he had not seen her again.
"You're not a bad sort, Daunt," he said. "I don't know but I--will."
"Good," said Daunt. "I'll send a chit to my caretaker the first thing in
the morning, and I'll put your name on the visitors' list at the Tokyo
Club. Well, I must be off."
* * * * *
Phil saw him cross the fragrant close to the gate with a growing sneer.
Then he threw himself on a chair and gazed moodily out across the
deepening haze to where, just inside the harbor breakwater, lay the
white yacht of whose coming Daunt had spoken.
A bitter scowl was on his face. Far below, at a little wharf, he could
see a tiny red triangle; it marked his sail-boat, the _Fatted-Calf_, so
christened at a tea-house on the river where he and other choice spirits
maintained the club whose _geisha_ suppers had become notorious. Japan,
to his way of life, had proven expensive. He had drawn on every
available resource and had borrowed more than he liked to remember, but
still his debts had grown. And now, with the coming of the white yacht,
he saw a lowering danger to the allowance on which he abjectly depended.
He knew his brother for one whom no plea could sway from a
determination, who on occasion could hew to the line with merciless
exactitude. Suppose he should cut off his allowance altogether. An ugly
passion stole over his countenance. He sprang up, filled a glass from
the decanter and drank it thirstily. With the instant glow of the liquor
his mood relaxed. He picked up the key from the table and stood
thoughtfully swinging it a moment by its wooden label. Then he put it in
his pocket and, looking at his watch, caught up a straw hat and went
briskly down to the street.
He swung down the steep, twisting, ravine-like road to the Bund with
less of ill-humor. He had no thought of the dark blue sky arching over,
soft with vapors like a smoke of gold, or of the glimpses of the sea
that came in sharp bursts of light between the curving walls that
towered on either side. He sniffed the thick, Eastern smells as a cat
sniffs catnip, his eye searching the stream of brown, shouting coolies
and toiling _rick'sha_, to linger on a satiny oval face under a shining
head-dress, or the powdered cheek of a gold-brocaded _geisha_ on her way
to some noble's feast.
At the foot of the hill, stood a sign-board on which was pasted a large
bill in yellow:
AT THE GAIETY THEATER
LIMITED ENGAGEMENT OF
THE POPULAR HARDMANN COMIC OPERA COMPANY
WITH
MISS CISSY CLIFFORD
He paused in front of this a moment, then passed to the Bund. At its
upper end, near the hotel front, great floating wharves had been built
out into the water. They were gaily trimmed with bunting and electric
lights in geometrical designs, and were flanked by arches covered with
twigs of ground-pine. A small army of workmen were still busied on them,
for the European Squadron in whose honor they had been erected would
arrive at dawn the next morning. Just beyond the arches, under a row of
twisted pines, were a number of park benches, and from one of these a
girl with a beribboned parasol greeted him.
"You're a half hour late, Phil," she complained. "I've been waiting here
till I'm tired to death." She made place for him with a rustle of
flounces. She was showily dressed, her cheeks bore the marks of habitual
grease-paint and the fingers of one over-ringed hand were slightly
yellowed from cigarette smoke.
"Hello, Cissy," he said carelessly, and sat down beside her. In his mind
was still the picture of that oval Japanese face suffused with pink,
those pretty bare feet splashing through the foam, and he looked
sidewise at his companion with an instant's sullen distaste.
"I had another row with the manager to-day," she continued. "I told him
he must think his company was a kindergarten!"
"Trust you to set him right in that," he answered satirically.
"My word!" she exclaimed. "How glum you are to-day! Same old poverty, I
suppose." She rose and shook out her skirts. "Come," she said. "There's
no play to-night. I'm in for a lark. Let's go to the Jewel-Fountain
Tea-House. They've got a new juggler there."
CHAPTER III
THE LAND OF THE GODS
In the first touch of the shore, where the Ambassador's pretty daughter
waited, Barbara's problem had been swept away. Patricia had rushed to
meet her, embraced her, with a moist, ecstatic kiss on her cheek,
rescued the bishop from his ordeal of hand-shaking and carried him off
to find their trunks, leaving Barbara borne down by a Babel of sound and
scent whose newness made her breathless, and to whose manifold
sensations she was as keenly alive as a photographic plate to color.
A half-dozen gnarled, unshaven porters in excessively shabby jackets
and straw sandals carried her hand-baggage into the hideously
modern, red-brick custom-house, over whose entrance a huge golden
conventionalized chrysanthemum shone in the sunlight, and as she watched
them, a dapper youth in European dress, with a shining brown derby, a
bright purple neck-tie, a silver-mounted cane and teeth eloquent of gold
bridge-work, slid into her hand a card whose type proclaimed that Mr. Y.
Nakajima "did the guiding for foreign ladies and gentlemans." The air
was fragrant with the mild aroma from tiny Japanese pipes and a-flutter
with moving fans. A group of elderly men in hot frock-coats and tiles of
not too modern vintage were welcoming a returning official, and sedate
gentlemen in sad-colored _houri_ and spotless cleft foot-wear, bowed
double in stately ceremonial, with the sucking-in of breath which in the
old-fashioned Japanese etiquette means "respectful awe bordering on
terror."
Barbara had found herself singularly conscious of a feeling of universal
good-nature. It came to her even in the posture of the resting coolies,
stretched at the side of the quay, lazily sunning themselves, with
whiffs of the omnipresent little pipe, and in the faces of the
bare-legged _rick'sha_ men, with round hats like bobbing mushrooms, arms
and chests glistening with sweat, and thin towels printed in black and
blue designs tucked in their girdles. She smiled at them, and they
smiled back at her with that unvarying smile which the Japanese of every
caste wears to wedding and to funeral. She even caught herself patting
the tonsured head of a preternaturally solemn baby swaddled in a
variegated _kimono_ and strapped to the back of a five-year-old boy.
The _rick'sha_ ride to the _stenshun_ (for so the Japanese has adapted
the English word "station") was a moving panorama of strange high lights
and shades, of savory odors from bake-ovens, of open shop-fronts hung
with gaudy figured crape, or piled with saffron _biwa_, warty purple
melons, ebony eggplant, shriveled yellow peppers and red Hokkaido
apples, of weighted carts drawn by chanting half-naked coolies, and
swiftly gliding victorias of Europeans. From a hundred houses in the
long, narrow streets hung huge gilded sign-boards, painted with
idiographs of black and red. At intervals the tall stone front of a
foreign business building looked down on its neighbors, or a tea-house
towered three stories high, showing gay little verandas on which stood
pots of flowers and dwarf trees; between were smaller houses of frame
and of cement, and thick-walled _go-downs_ for storing goods against
fire.
Here and there, from behind a gateway of unpainted wood, showing a
delicate grain, a pine thrust up its needled clump of green, or a
cherry-tree flung its pink pyrotechnics against the sky's flood of
dimming blue and gold. At a crossing a deformed beggar with distorted
face and the featureless look of the leper, waved a crutch and wheedled
from the roadside, and a child in dun-colored rags, unbelievably agile
and dirty, ran ahead of Barbara's _rick'sha_, prostrating himself again
and again in the dust, holding out grimy hands and whining for a _sen_.
In the side streets Barbara could catch glimpses of bare-breasted women
sitting in shop doors nursing babies, and children of a larger growth
playing Japanese hopscotch or tossing "diavolo," the latest foreign toy.
When the _rick'sha_ set them down at the station she felt bewildered,
yet full of exhilaration. As they drew up at its stone front, a porter
with red cap and brass buttons emerged and began to ring a heavy bell,
swinging it back and forth in both hands. The bishop bought their
tickets at a little barred window bearing over it the sign: "Your
baggages will be sent freely in every direction."
Making their way along the platform, crowded with Japanese, mostly in
native dress, and filled with the aroma of cigarettes and the thin
ringing of innumerable wooden clogs on stone flags, Barbara was
conscious for the first time of a studious surveillance. A young
Japanese passed her carrying his bent and wizened mother on his back;
the old woman, clutching him tightly about the neck, turned her shaven
head to watch. Children in startling rainbow tinted _kimono_ stared from
the platform with round, serious eyes. A peasant woman, with teeth
brilliantly blackened, peered from a car window, and a group of young
men turned bodily and regarded her with gravely observant gaze, in a
prolonged, unwinking scrutiny that seemed as innocent of courtesy as of
any intent to offend. In European cities she had felt the gaze of other
races, but this was different. It was not the curious study of a
phenomenon, of an enduring puzzle of far origins, nor the expression of
the ignorant, vacantly amused by what they do not understand; it was a
deeper look of inner placidity, that held no wonder and no awe, and
somehow suggested thoughts as ancient as the world. A curious sense
began to possess Barbara of having left behind her all familiar
every-day things, of being face to face with some new wonder, some
brooding mystery which she could not grasp.
They entered the car just behind an ample lady who had been among the
ship's passengers--a good-natured, voluble Cook's tourist who, the
second day out, had confided to Barbara her certainty of an invitation
to the Imperial Cherry-Blossom party, as her husband had "a friend in
the litigation." She wore a painted-muslin, and the husband of
influential acquaintance and substantial, red-bearded person showed now
a gleaming expanse of white waistcoat crossed by a gold watch-chain that
might have restrained a tiger. The lady nodded and smiled beamingly.
"Isn't it all perfectly splendid!" she cried. "There was a baby on the
platform that was too _sweet_!--for all the world like the Japanese
dolls we buy at home, with their hair shingled and a little round spot
shaved right in the crown! My husband tried to give it a silver dollar,
but the mother just smiled and bowed and went away and left it lying on
the bench." She found a seat and fanned herself vigorously with a
handkerchief. "I just thought I never _would_ get through that car
door," she added. "It's only two feet across!"
The road was narrow gage and the seats ran the length of the car on
either side. Hardly had its occupants settled themselves when, to the
shrill piping of a horn, the train started.
"Goodness, this is a relief!" sighed Patricia, as the bishop opened the
first Japanese newspaper he had seen for many months. "I hate
_rick'sha_--they're such unsociable things! I haven't said ten words to
you, Barbara, and I've got oceans to talk about. But I'll be merciful
till I get you home. What a good-looking youth that is in the corner!"
The young man referred to had a light skin and long, almond-shaped eyes.
He wore a suit of gray merino underwear, and between the end of the
drawers and the white, cleft sock, an inch of polished skin was visible.
His hat was a modish felt. His _houri_, which bore a woven crest on
breast and sleeves, swung jauntily open and above his left ear was
coquettishly disposed an unlighted cigarette. Next him, under a brass
rack piled with bright-patterned carpet-bags, an old lady in
dove-colored silk was placidly inflating a rubber air-cushion. Her face
had an artificial delicacy of _nuance_ that was a triumph of rice-powder
and rouge. Beside her was a girl of perhaps eighteen, in a _kimono_ of
dark blue and an _obi_ of gold brocade. The latter wore white silk
"mits" with bright metal trimming and on one slender finger was a
diamond ring. Her hands were delicately artistic and expressive, and her
complexion as soft as the white wing of a miller. She gazed steadfastly
away, but now and then her sloe-black eyes returned to study Barbara's
foreign gown and hat with surreptitious attention.
"What complexions!" whispered Patricia. "The old lady made hers this
morning, sitting flat on a white mat in front of a camphor-wood
dressing-chest about two feet high, with twenty drawers and a round
steel mirror on top. It beats a hare's-foot, doesn't it! The daughter's
is natural. If I had been born with a skin like that, it would have
changed my whole disposition!"
Having settled her air-cushion, the old lady drew from her girdle a
lacquer case and produced a pipe--a thin reed with a tiny silver bowl at
its end. A flat box yielded a pinch of tobacco as fine as snuff. This
she rolled between her fingers into a ball the size of a small pea,
placed it carefully in the bowl and began to smoke. Each puff she
inhaled with a lingering inspiration and emitted it slowly, in a thin
curdled cloud, from her nostrils. Three puffs, and the tiny coal was
exhausted. She tapped the pipe gently against the edge of the seat, put
it back into the case and replaced the latter in her girdle. Then,
tucking up her feet under her on the plush seat, she turned her back to
the aisle and went to sleep.
Three students in the uniform of some lower school with foreign jackets
of blue-black cloth set off with brass buttons, sat in a row on the
opposite side. Each had a cap like a cadet's, with a gilt cherry-blossom
on its front, and all watched Barbara movelessly. The man nearest her
wore a round straw hat and horn spectacles. He was reading a vernacular
newspaper, intoning under his breath with a monotonous sing-song, like
the humming of a bumblebee. Between them a little boy sat on the edge of
the seat, his clogs hanging from the thong between his bare toes, the
sleeves of his _kimono_ bulging with bundles. He stared as if hypnotized
at a curl of Barbara's bronze hair which lay against the cushion. Once
he stretched out a hand furtively to touch it, but drew it back hastily.
"If I could only talk to him!" Barbara exclaimed. "I want to know the
language. Tell me, Patsy--how long did it take you to learn?"
"I?" cried Patricia in comical amazement. "Heavens and earth, _I_
haven't learned it! I only know enough to badger the servants. You have
to turn yourself inside out to think Japanese, and then stand on your
head to talk it."
"Never mind, Barbara," said the bishop, looking up from his newspaper.
"You can learn it if you insist on it. Haru would be a capital
teacher--bless my soul, I believe I forgot to tell you about her!"
"Who is Haru?" asked Barbara.
"She's a young Japanese girl, the daughter of the old _samurai_ who sold
us the land for the Chapel. The family is a fine old one, but of frayed
fortune. I was greatly interested in her, chiefly, perhaps, because she
is a Christian. She became so with her father's consent, though he is a
Buddhist. She isn't of the servant class, of course, but I thought--if
you liked--she would make an ideal companion for you while you are
learning Tokyo."
"I know Haru," said Patricia. "She's a dear! She's as pretty as a
picture, and her English is too quaint!"
"It would be lovely to have her," Barbara answered. "You're a very
thoughtful man, Uncle Arthur. Are you sure she'll want to?"
"I'll send her a note and ask her to come to you at the Embassy this
evening. Then--all aboard for the Japanese lessons!"
"No such wisdom for me, thank you," said Patricia. "I prefer to take
mine in through the pores. All the Japanese officials speak English
anyway, just as much as the diplomatic corps. By the way, there's Count
Voynich, the Servian _Chargé_." She nodded toward the farther end of the
carriage where a bored-looking European plaintively regarded the
landscape through a monocle. "He's nice," she added reflectively, "but
he's a dyspeptic. I caught him one night at a dinner dropping a capsule
into his soup. He has a cabinet with three hundred Japanese
_nets'kés_--they're the little ivory carvings on the strings of
tobacco-pouches. He didn't speak to me for a month once because I said
it looked like a dental exhibition. Almost every secretary has a fad,
and that's his. Ours has an aëroplane. He practises on it nearly every
day on the parade-ground. The pudgy woman in the other corner with a
cockatoo in her hat is Mrs. Sturgis, the wife of the big exporter. She
wears red French heels and calls her husband 'papa'."
Barbara's laughter was infectious. It caught the bishop. It reflected
itself even on the demure face of the Japanese girl, and the serious
youths opposite giggled openly in sympathy.
"I do envy you your first impressions!" exclaimed Patricia. "I've been
here so long that I've forgotten mine. It seems perfectly natural now
for people to live in houses made of bird-cages and paper napkins, and
travel about in grown-up baby-buggies, and to see men walking around
with bare legs and oil-skin umbrellas. It's like the sea-shore at home,
I suppose--you get used to it."
The train had stopped at a suburb and guards went by proclaiming its
name in a musical guttural, their voices dwelling insistently on the
long-drawn, last syllable. The next carriage was a third-class one with
bare floors and wooden benches, set crosswise. Through the opened door
Barbara could see its crowd of brown faces, keen and saturnine. On its
front seat a heavy-featured, lumpish coolie woman was nursing a
three-year-old baby, holding it to her bared breast with red and
roughened hands. Just outside the station's white-washed fence, a clump
of factory chimneys spouted pitchy smoke into the dimming sky, and the
descending sun glistened from a monster gas-tank. Farther away, beyond
clipped hedges, lay thatched roofs, looking as soft as mole-skin, with
wild flowers growing on the ridges, and bamboo clumps soaring above
them, like pale green ostrich-feathers yellow at the tips. Through the
open window came the treble note of a girl singing.
A man passed hastily through the carriage leaving a trail of small
pamphlets bound in green paper with gold lettering--an advertisement of
a health resort, printed in English for the tourist. Barbara opened one
curiously. She looked up with a merry eye.
"Here's a paragraph for you, Uncle Arthur," she said. "Listen:
"'This place has other modern monuments, first and second-class
hotels and many sea-scapes. In one quarter are a number of
missionaries, but they can easily be avoided.'"
"Do let us credit that to difficulties of the language," he protested.
"I'm sure that must have been meant complimentarily."
"But what a contradiction!" put in Patricia wickedly.
"Well," he retorted. "My baker has a sign on his wagon, 'The biggest
loafer in Tokyo.' He means that well, too."
A shrill whistle, a slamming of doors, and now the gray roofs fell away.
On one side the steel road all but dipped in the bay. Wild ducks drew
startled wakes across the rippleless lagoon. On a sand-bar a flock of
gray and white gulls disported, looking at a distance like pied bathers;
and about an anchored fishing boat, a dozen naked urchins were splashing
with shrill cries. Far across the inlet, hazy, vapory, visionary,
Barbara could make out a farther shore, an outline in violets and
opalines, coifed with lilac cloud, and in the mid-azure a high-pooped
_junk_ swam by, a shape of misty gold, palely drawn in wan, blue light.
On the other side the train was rounding grassy hills, terraced to the
very tops. Laid against their steep sides, or standing upright on wooden
framework, were occasional huge advertisements in red or white--Chinese
characters or pictures--while flowering camelia trees and small
green-yellow shrubs drew lengthening blue shadows. A high tressle
spanned acres of orchard where continuous trellis made a carpet of
growing fruit, across which Barbara saw far away the bold outline of
bluish hills.
They were crossing flooded rice-fields now, like gigantic crazy
checker-boards, and the air was musical with the low, chirring chorus of
frogs. Shades of orange light played over the marshes, bars of rape
braided them with vivid yellow, and on the narrow, curving partitions
between the burnished squares, round stacks of garnered straw stood like
crawfish chimneys. Amid them peasants worked with broad-bladed mattocks,
knee-deep in mud. They were blue clad, with white cloths bound about
their heads, and some had sashes of crimson. Here and there, naked to
the thighs, a boy trod a water-wheel between the terraced levels. At
intervals a refractory rock-hillock served as excuse for a single
twisted pine-tree shading a carved tablet to some _Shinto_ divinity, or
a steep bluff sheltered a tiny shrine of unpainted wood; and all along
the way, shining canals drew silver ribbons through the paddy-fields,
and little arrowy flights of birds darted hither and thither.
Occasionally they passed small, neat stations, each with its white
sign-boards bearing long liquid names in English, and queer Japanese
characters. Opposite one, on a sloping hill that was a mass of deep
glowing green, Patricia pointed out the peaked roofs of a cluster of
temples, the shrine of some century-dead Buddhist saint. Barbara began
to realize that these fields through which this modern train was gliding
were old Japan, that in those blue hills had been nurtured the ancient
legends she had read, of famous two-sworded _samurai_, of swaggering
bandits and pleasure-loving _shogun_, and of tea-house _geisha_ who
danced their way into _daimyo's_ palaces. The spell of the land, whose
sheer beauty had thrilled her on the ship, drew her closer with the
threads of memories almost forgotten.
Its contrasts were wonderful. They spoke of primary and unmixed
emotions, that lisped themselves through the fading golden sunlight, the
moist, dreamy air, the graceful outlines of roof and tree. In the west
the sun was declining toward a range of hills jagged as the teeth of a
bear. Their tops were pale as cloud and their bases melted into an ebony
line of forest. The plain below was a winey purple, with slashes of red
earth gorges like fresh wounds, and one side had the cloudy color of
raspberries crushed in curdled milk. The farther range seemed a part of
a far-off painted curtain, tinted in pastels, and high above a milky
cloud floated, curling like a lace scarf about the opal crest of Fuji,
mysteriously blue and dim as an Arctic summer sea.
Barbara glimpsed it, the very spirit of beauty, between the whirling
shadows of pine and camphor trees, between tiled walls guarding thatched
temples, flights of gray pigeons and spurts of pink cherry-blossom. As
she leaned out, and the pines bowed rhythmically, and the water-wheels
turned in the furrows, and the yellow-green of the bamboo, the
purple-indigo of the hills and the golden-pink of the cherries lifting,
above the hedges, went by like raveling skeins of a tapestry--that
majestic Presence, ghostly and splendid above the wild contour of hill
and mountain, seemed to call to her.
And across the gorgeous landscape, rejoicing from every rift and crevice
of its moist soil, in its colors of rich red earth and green foliage, in
the grace and vigor of its springing, resilient bamboo groves and the
cardinal pride of its flowering camelias, Barbara's heart answered the
call.
CHAPTER IV
UNDER THE RED SUNSET
The slowing of the train awoke Barbara from her reverie. The three boy
students got out, casting sidelong glances at her. More Japanese
entered, and two foreigners--a bright-faced girl on the arm of a
keen-eyed, soldierly man with bristling white hair, a mustache like a
walrus, and a military button. The girl's hands were full of
cherry-branches, whose bunches of double blossoms, incredibly thick and
heavy, filled the car with a delicate fragrance. The bishop folded his
newspaper and put it into his pocket.
As he did so the owner of the expansive waistcoat leaned across the
aisle and addressed him.
"Say, my friend," he said, "you've lived out here some time, I
understand."
"Yes," the bishop replied. "Twenty-five years."
"Well, I take it, then, you ought to know this country right down to the
ground; and if you don't mind, I'd like to ask a question or two."
"Do," said the bishop. "I'll be glad to answer if I can."
The other got up and took a seat opposite. "You see," he pursued
confidentially, "I came on this trip just for a rest and to settle the
bills for the curios my wife"--he indicated the lady, who had now moved
up beside him--"thinks she'd like to look at back home. But I've been
getting interested by the minute. It's quite some time since I went to
school, and I guess there hadn't so much happened then to Japan. I wish
you'd run down the scale for me--just to hit the high places. Now there
was a big rumpus here, I remember, at the time of our Civil War. They
chose a new Emperor, didn't they?"
"No. The dynasty has been unbroken for two thousand years."
"Two thousand years!" cried the lady. "Why, that's before Christ!"
"When our ancestors, Martha, were painting themselves up in yellow ochre
and carrying clubs--what was the row about, then?"
"It was something like this. To go back a little, the Emperor was always
the nominal ruler and spiritual head, but the temporal power was
administered by a self-decreed Viceroy called the _shogun_. Japan was a
closed country and only a little trading was allowed in certain ports."
His questioner nodded. The girl beside the white-haired old soldier had
touched the latter's sleeve, and both were listening attentively. "Then
Perry came along and kicked open the gate. Bombarded 'em, didn't he?"
The bishop's eyes twinkled. "Only with gifts. He brought a small
printing-press, a toy telegraph line and a miniature locomotive and
railroad track. He set up these on the beach and showed the officials
whom the _shogun's_ government sent to treat with him, how they worked.
In the end he made them understand the immense value of the scientific
advancement of the western world. The visit was an eye-opener, and the
wiser Japanese realized that the nation couldn't exist under the old
_régime_ any longer. It must make general treaties and adopt new ideas.
Some, on the other hand, wanted things to stay as they were."
"Pulling both ways, eh?"
"Yes. At length the progressists decided on a sweeping measure. Under
the _shogunate_, the _daimyos_ (they were the great landed nobles) had
been in a continual state of suppressed insurrection."
"Some wouldn't knuckle down to the _shogun_, I suppose."
"Exactly. There was no national rallying-point. But they all alike
revered their Emperor. In all the bloody civil wars of a thousand
years--and the Japanese were always fighting, like Europe in the Middle
Ages--no _shogun_ ever laid violent hands on the Emperor. He was half
divine, you see, descended from the ancient gods, a living link between
them and modern men. So now they proposed to give him complete temporal
power, make him ruler in fact, and abolish the _shogunate_ entirely."
"Phew! And the big _daimyos_ came into line on the proposition?"
"They poured out their blood and their money like water for the new
cause. The _shogun_ himself voluntarily relinquished his power and
retired to private life."
"Splendid!" said the stranger, and the girl clapped her gloved hands.
"So that was the 'Restoration,' the beginning of _Meiji_, whatever that
may mean?"
"The 'Era of Enlightenment.' The present Emperor, Mutsuhito, was a boy
of sixteen then. They brought him here to Yedo, and renamed it
Tokyo----"
"And proceeded to get reeling drunk on western notions," said the man
with the military button, smiling grimly. "I was out here in the
Seventies."
"True, sir," assented the bishop. "It was so, for a time. And the
opposition took refuge in riot, assassination, and suicide. But
gradually Japan worked the modernization scheme out. She sent her young
statesmen to Europe and America to study western systems of education,
jurisprudence and art. She hired an army of experts from all over the
world. She sent her cleverest lads to foreign universities. In the end
she chose what seemed to her the best from all. Her military ideas come
from Germany and her railroad cars from the town of Pullman, Illinois.
When the best didn't suit her, she invented a system of her own, as she
has done with wireless telegraphy."
"So!" said the other. "I'm greatly obliged to you, sir. I've read plenty
in the newspapers, but I never had it put so plain. It strikes me," he
added to the old soldier, "that a nation plucky enough to do this in
fifty years, in fifty more will make some other nations get a move on."
He brought a big fist smashing down in an open palm. "And, by gad! the
Japanese deserve all they get! When we go back I guess me and Martha
won't march in any anti-Jap torch-light processions, anyway!"
The fields were gone now. The train was rumbling along a canal teeming
with laden _sampan_, level with the paper _shoji_ of frail-looking
houses on its opposite bank. Beyond lay a sea of roofs, swelling gray
billows of tiling spotted with green foam, from which steel factory
chimneys lifted like the black masts of sunken ships. A leafy hill of
cryptomeria rose near-by, and an octagonal stone tower peeped above its
foliage. Crows were circling about it, black dots against the bronze.
The train was entering Tokyo.
A door slammed sharply. From the forward smoking carriage a man had
entered. He was an European and Barbara was struck at once by his great
size and the absence of color in his leaden face. The bored-looking
diplomatist in the corner gathered himself hastily into a bow, which the
other acknowledged abstractedly. Seemingly he had been occupied in some
intent speculation which spread a kind of glaze over his sharp features.
A book drooped carelessly from his heavy fingers.
"That is Doctor Bersonin," said the bishop, as the girls collected their
wraps. "He came just before I left, last fall. He is the government
expert, and is supposed to be one of the greatest living authorities on
explosives."
"Oh, yes," said Patricia, "I know. He invented a dynamo or a torpedo, or
something. I saw him once at a reception; he had a foreign decoration as
big as a dinner-plate."
The big man made his way slowly along the aisle and, still absorbed,
took a dust-coat from a rack. As he ponderously drew it on, the daylight
was suddenly eclipsed, and the rumbling reëchoed from metal roofing.
They were in Shimbashi Station.
"Isn't he simply odious!" whispered Patricia, as the expert stepped
before them on to the long, dusky, asphalt platform. "His eyes are like
a cat's and his hands look as if they wanted to crawl, like big white
spiders! There is the Embassy _betto_," she said suddenly, pointing over
the turnstile, where stood a Japanese boy in a wide-winged _kimono_ of
tea-colored pongee with crimson facings and a crimson mushroom hat. "The
carriage is just outside. You'll come, too, of course, Bishop," she
added. "Father will expect you."
He shook his head and motioned toward a dense assemblage comprising a
half dozen of his own race in clerical black, and a half hundred
_kimono'd_ Japanese, whose faces seemed one composite smile of welcome.
"There is a part of my flock," he said. "There will be a jubilation at
my bachelor palace to-night. I shall see you to-morrow, I hope."
They watched him for a moment, the center of a ceremonious ring of
bowing figures, then passed through the station to the steps where the
carriage waited.
The station debouched on to a broad open square bordered with canals and
lined with ranks of _rick'sha_, some of which had small red flags with
the name of a hotel in white letters, in English. The space was gray and
dusty; pedestrians dotted it and across it a bent and sweating
street-sprinkler hauled his ugly trickling cart, chanting in a half-tone
as he went. A little distance away Barbara caught a glimpse of a busy
paved street, lined with ambitious glass shop-fronts and with a double
line of clanging trolley-cars passing to and fro beneath a maze of
telegraph wires seemingly as fine as pack-thread. Her nostrils twitched
with strange odors--from stagnant moats of sticky, black mud, from
panniers of dressed fish, from the rice-powder and pomade of women's
toilets--all the scents bred in swarming streets by a glowing tropic
sun.
At one side waited a handful of foreign carriages. All the drivers of
these wore the loose, flapping liveries and the round hats of green or
crimson or blue. "They are Embassy turn-outs," explained Patricia. "Each
one has its color, you see. Ours is red and you can see it farthest." As
they took their seats an open victoria rolled up, with cobalt-blue
wheels, and a _betto_ with a _kimono_ of dark cloth trimmed with wide
strips of the same hue ran ahead, clearing the way with raucous cries.
"There goes the Bulgarian Minister's wife," said Patricia. "She's got
the finest pearls in Tokyo."
A hundred yards from the entrance the Embassy carriage halted abruptly
and Barbara caught her companion's arm with a low exclamation. At the
side of the square, seated or reclining on the ground was a body of
perhaps eighty men dressed in a deadly brownish-yellow, the hue of
iron-rust, with coarse hats and rough straw sandals. They were disposed
in lines, a handcuff was on each left wrist, and a thin, rattling iron
chain linked all together.
"They are convicts," said Patricia; "on their way to the copper mines, I
imagine. They will move presently and we can pass."
At the head of the melancholy platoon stood an officer in dark blue
cloth uniform and clumsy shoes, a sword by his side. He stood motionless
as an idol, his sparse mustaches waxed, his visored cap set square on
his crisp, black hair, his bronze face impassive. The prisoners looked
on stolidly at the stir of the station, the flying _rick'sha_, the
crowded _sampan_ in the canal, and the noisy trolley-cars passing
near-by. Some talked in low tones and pointed here and there, with
furtive glances at the officer. Barbara noted their different
expressions, some stolid, low-browed and featureless, some with
side-looks of sharper cunning, all touched with oriental apathy.
A bell now began to clamor in the train-shed and there came the rasping
hoot of an engine. The officer turned, gave a sharp order, and the
prisoners rose, with light clanking of their chains. Another order, and
they moved, in double lines of single file, into the station.
Patricia heaved a sigh of relief as the halted traffic started.
"_Hyaku_, Tucker," she called to the driver. "_Hyaku_ means quickly,"
she explained aside. "His name is Taka, but I call him Tucker because
it's easier to remember."
As they rolled swiftly on, through the wondrous panorama of teeming
Tokyo streets, the sun hung, an elongated globe of deep orange-crimson,
streaked with little whips of rosy cloud. Beneath it the mountains lay
like coiled, purple dragons, indolent and surfeited. One star twinkled
palely in the lemon-colored sky. Yet now to Barbara the splendor of
color seemed tragic, the poured-out beauty but a veil, behind which
moved, old and apish and gray, the familiar passions of the world.
Before her eyes were flowing and mingling a thousand strands of orient
life, yet she saw only the red light glowing on the stone entrance of
Shimbashi, with those hideous saffron jackets filing perpetually into
its yawning mouth, like unholy spectres in a dream.
CHAPTER V
THE MAKER OF BUDDHAS
The setting sun poured a flood of wine-colored light over
Reinanzaka--the "Hill-of-the-Spirit"--whose long slope rose behind the
American Embassy, whither the Dandridge victoria was rolling. It was a
long leafy ridge stippled with drab walls of noble Japanese houses, and
striped with narrow streets of the humble; one of the many green knolls
that, rising above the gray roofs, make the Japanese capital seem an
endless succession of teeming village and restful grove.
Along its crest ran a lane bordered with thorn hedges. A little way
inside this stood a huge stone _torii_, facing a square, ornamented
gateway, shaded by cryptomerias. The latter was heavily but chastely
carved, and on its ceiling was a painting, in green and white on a
gold-leaf ground, of Kwan-on, the All-Pitying. From the gate one looked
down across the declivity, where in a walled compound, the rambling
buildings of the Embassy showed pallidly amid green foliage. Beyond this
were sections of trafficking streets, and still farther a narrow, white
road climbed a hill toward a military barracks--a blur of dull,
terra-cotta red. In the dying afternoon the lane had an air of placid
aloofness. Somewhere in a thoroughfare below a trolley bell sounded, an
impudent note of haste and change in a symphony of the intransmutable.
Over all was the scent of cherry-blossoms and a faint musk-like odor of
incense.
From the gate a mossy pavement, shaded by sacred _mochi_ trees, led to a
Buddhist temple-front of the _Mon-to_ sect, before which a flock of
fluttering gray-and-white pigeons were pecking grains of rice scattered
by a priest, who stood on its upper step, watching them through placid,
gold-rimmed spectacles. He wore a long green robe, a stole of gold
brocade was around his neck, and his face was seamed with the lines of
life's receding tides. At one side of the pavement, worn and grooved by
centuries of worshiping feet, was a square stone font and on the other
side a graceful bell-tower of red lacquer. Back of this stood a forest
of tall bronze lanterns, and beyond them a graveyard, an acre thick with
standing stone tablets of quaint, squarish shape, chiseled with deep-cut
idiographs. Nearer the graveyard, overshadowed by the greater bulk of
the temple, was a long, low nunnery, with clumps of flowers about it.
Through its bamboo lattices one caught glimpses of women's figures, clad
in slate-color, of placid faces and boyishly shaven heads. About the
yard a few little children were playing and a mother, with a baby on her
back, looked smilingly on.
The space where the priest stood was connected by a small, curved,
elevated bridge with another temple structure standing on the right of
the yard, evidently used as a private residence. This was more ornate,
far older and touched with decay. Its porch was arcaded, set with oval
windows and hung with bronze lanterns green from age. Its entrance doors
were beautifully carved, paneled with endless designs in dull colors,
and bordered with great gold-lacquer peonies laid on a background of
green and vermilion. From their corners jutted snarling heads of
grotesque lions and on either side stood gigantic _Ni-O_--glowering
demon-guardians of sacred thresholds. Through the straight-boled trees
that grew close about it, came transient gleams of a hedged garden, of
burnished green and maroon foliage, where cherry-blooms hung like fluffy
balls of pink smoke. The garden had a private entrance--a gate in the
outer lane--and over this was a small tablet of unpainted wood:
[Illustration]
Which, translated, read:
ALOYSIUS THORN
Maker of Buddhas
Directly opposite stood a small Christian Chapel. It was newly built and
still lacked its final decoration--a rose-window, whose empty sashes
were stopped now with black cloth. High above the flowering green its
slanting roof lifted a cross.
It rose, white and pure, emblem of the Western faith that yet had been
born in the East. Over against the ornate pageantry of Buddhist
architecture, in a land of another creed, of variant ideals and a
passionate devotion to them, it stood, simple, silent, and watchful. The
priest on the temple steps was looking at the white cross, regarding it
meditatively, as one to whom concrete symbols are badges of spiritual
things.
Footsteps grated on the gravel and the occupant of the older temple came
slowly through its garden. He was a foreigner, though dressed in
Japanese costume. His shoulders were broad and powerful and he moved
with a quickness and grace in step and action that had something feline
in it. His hair, worn long, was black, touched with gray, and a curved
mustache hid his lips. His expression was sensitively delicate and
alertly odd--an impression added to by deeply-set eyes, one of which was
visibly larger than the other, of the variety known as "pearl," slightly
bulbous, though liquid-brown and heavily lashed.
The new-comer ascended the steps and stood a moment silently beside the
priest, watching the gluttonous pigeons. As he looked up, he saw the
other's gaze fixed on the Chapel cross. A quick shiver ran across his
mobile face, and passing, left it hard with a kind of grim defiance.
Presently the priest said in Japanese:
"The Christian temple across the way honorably approaches completion.
Assuredly, however, moths have eaten my intelligence. Why does the
gloomy hole illustriously elect to remain in its wall?"
"It is for a thing they call a 'window'," said Thorn. "After a time they
will put therein an august abomination, representing sublimely hideous
cloud-born beings and idiotic-looking saints in colored glass."
The priest nodded his shaven head sagely.
"It will, perhaps, deign to be a _gaku_ of the Christian God. I shall,
with deference, study it. I have watered my worthless mind with much
arrogant reading of Him. Doubtless He was also Buddha and taught The
Way."
An acolyte had come from the temple and approached the red bell-tower.
Midway of the huge bronze bell a heavy cedar beam, like a catapult, was
suspended from two chains. He swung this till its muffled end struck the
metal rim, and the air swelled with a dreamy sob of sound. He swung it
again, and the sob became a palpitant moan, like breakers on a far-away
beach. Again, and a deep velvety boom throbbed through the stillness
like the heart of eternity.
"It is time for the service," said the priest, and turning, went into
the temple, from whose interior soon came the woodeny tapping of a
_mok'gyo_--the hollow wooden fish, which is the emblem of the _Mon-to_
sect--and the sound of chanting voices.
* * * * *
Thorn, the man with whom the priest had spoken, crossed the bridge to
the other temple with a slow step. He passed between the scowling
guardian figures, slid back a paper _shoji_ and entered. The room in
which he stood had been the _haiden_, or room of worship. Around its
walls were oblong carvings, marvelously lacquered, of the nine flowers
and nine birds of old Japanese art. In one were set six large painted
panels; the red seal they bore was that of the great Cho Densu, the Fra
Angelico of Japan. In its center, under a brocade canopy, was a raised
platform once the seat of the High Priest. It faced a long transept,
like a chancel; this ended in a short flight of steps leading, through
doors of soft, fretted gold-lacquer, to a huge altar set with carved
tables, great tarnished brasses and garish furniture. The walls of the
transept were done in red with green ornamentations. From the overhead
gloom grotesque phoenix and dragon peered down and in the gathering
dimness, shot through with the wan yellow gleam of brass, the place
seemed uncanny.
Thorn drew back a heavy drapery which covered a doorway, and entered a
room that was windowless and very dark. He lit a candle.
The dim light it furnished disclosed a weird and silent assembly. The
space was crowded with strange glimmering deities--of bronze, of silver,
of priceless gold-lacquer--the dust thick on their faces, their aureoles
misty with cobwebs. Some gazed with passionless serenity, or blessed
with outstretched hand; some threatened with scowling faces and clenched
thunderbolts: Jizo of the tender smile, in whose sleeves nestle the
souls of dead children; Kwan-on, of divine compassion, with her many
hands; Emma-dai-O, Judge of the Dead, menacing and terrible; strange
sardonic _tengu_, half-bird, half-human. The floor was thick with them.
From shelves on the walls leered swollen, frog-like horrors such as
often appear on Alaskan totem-poles, triple-headed divinities of India
and China, coiled cobras, idols from Ceylon, and curious Thibetan
praying-wheels. A sloping stairway slanted through the gloom; beside it
was an image of the red god, Aizen Bosatsu, his appalling countenance
framed in lurid flames, seated on a fiery lotos.
The master of this celestial and infernal pantheon closed and locked the
door, and mounted the stairway to the loft--a low, rambling room of
eccentric shape, under the curving gables.
Here, through a long window beneath the very eaves, the light still came
brightly. In the center was a board table, littered with delicate
carving-tools. He kindled the charcoal in a bronze _hibachi_, and set
over it a copper pot which began to emit a thick, weedy odor. From a
cabinet he took phials containing various powders, and measured into the
pot a portion from each. Lastly he added a quantity of gold-leaf,
slowly, flake by flake. At one side a white silk cloth was draped over a
pedestal; he drew this away and looked at the unfinished figure it had
concealed. It was an image of Kwan-on, the All-Merciful.
Through the open window the chant of the priests came clearly:
"_Waku hyoryu kokai_
_Ry[=u]gyo Shokinan_
_Nembi Kwan-on riki_
_Har[=o] fun[=o]motsu._"
(He who is beset with perils of dragon and great fish--who
drifts on an endless sea--if he offer petition to Kwan-on, waves
will not destroy him.)
Thorn crossed the room and leaning his elbows on the window-ledge,
looked out. Through the odor of incense the monotonous intonation of the
liturgy rose with the grandeur of a Gregorian chant:
"_Sh[=u]j[=o] kikon-yaku
Mury[=o]ku hisshin
Kwan-on myochiriki
N[=o]ku sekenku._"
(He who is in distress--when immeasurable suffering presses on
him--Kwan-on, all-wise and all-powerful, can save him from the
world's calamity.)
Once, while the quiet yard echoed back the slow cadences of the antique
tongue, the watcher's eyes turned to the image on the pedestal, then
came back to an object that drew them--had drawn them for many days
against his will!--the white cross of the Chapel. A last glow of
refracted light touched it now, as red as blood, a symbol of the
infinite passion and pain. A long time he stood there. The twilight
deepened, the chant ceased, lights sprang up along the lane, night fell
with its sickle moon and crowding stars, but still he stood, his face
between his hands.
At length he turned, and groping for the cloth, threw it over the
Kwan-on and lit a lamp swinging from a huge brass censer. Unlocking an
alcove, he took out a fleece-wrapped bundle and sweeping the tools to
one side, set it on the table. He carefully closed the window and thrust
a bar through the staple of the door before he unwrapped it.
When the fleece was removed, he propped the image it had contained
upright on the table. He poured into a shallow plate a few drops of the
liquid heating over the fire-bowl--under the lamplight it gleamed and
sparkled like molten gold--and with a small brush, using infinite care,
began to lay the lacquer on its carven surface.
Once, at a sound in some room below--perhaps the movement of a
servant--he stopped and listened intently. It was as if he worked by
stealth, at some labor self-forbidden, to which an impulse,
overmastering though half-denied, drove him in secret.
It was a crucifix with a dead Christ upon it.
CHAPTER VI
THE BAYING OF THE WOLF-HOUND
Barbara stood in her room at the Embassy. It was spacious and airy, the
high walls paneled in ivory-white, with draperies of Delft blue. The bed
and dressing-table were early Adams. A generous bay-window set with
flower-boxes filled a large part of one side, and its deep seat was
upholstered in blue crepe, the tint of the draperies, printed with large
white chrysanthemums. The floor was laid with thin matting of rice-straw
in which was braided at intervals a conventional pattern in old-rose.
Opposite the bay-window stood a Sendai chest on which was a small
Japanese Buddha of gold-lacquer, Amida, the Dweller-in-Light, seated in
holy meditation on his lotos-blossom. At first sight this had recalled
to Barbara a counterpart image which she had unearthed in a dark corner
of the garret in her pinafore days, and which for a week had been her
dearest possession.
To this room Mrs. Dandridge herself had taken her, presenting to her
Haru, whom the bishop's note had brought--a vivid, eager figure from a
Japanese fan, who had sunk suddenly prone, every line of her slender
form bowed, hands palm-down on the floor and forehead on them, in a
ceremonious welcome to the foreign _Ojo-San_. Her mauve _kimono_ was
woven with camelias in silver, set off by an _obi_, showing a flight of
storks on a blue background and clasped in front with a silver firefly.
The heavy jet hair was rolled into wings on either side, and a high puff
surmounted her forehead. Thin twin spirals, stiff with pomade, joined at
the back like the pinions of a butterfly, and against the blue-black
loops lay a bright knot of ribbon. She was now moving about the room
with silent padding of light feet in snowy, digitated _tabi_, admiring
the gowns which the maid had taken from Barbara's trunks. Occasionally
she passed a slim hand up and down a soft wrap with a graceful, purring
regard, or held a fleecy boa under her small oval chin and stole a
glance in the cheval glass with a little ecstatic quiver of shoulder.
Once she paused to look at the lacquer image on the Sendai chest.
"Buddha," she said. "Japan man think very good for die-time."
"Haru," said Barbara as the maid's busy Japanese fingers went searching
for elusive hooks and eyes, "is it true that every Japanese name has a
meaning?"
"So, _Ojo-San_! That mos' indeed true. All Japan name mean something.
'Haru' mean spring, for because my born that time. Very funny--_né?_"
"It is very pretty," said Barbara.
"How tha's nize!" was the delighted exclamation. "_Mama-San_ give name.
My like name yella-ways for because _mama-San_ no more in this world. My
house little lonesome now."
"Where is your house, Haru? Near by?"
The slender hand, pointed to the wooded height behind the garden. "Jus'
there on the street call Prayer-to-the-gods. My house so-o-o small, an'
garden 'bout such big." She indicated a space of perhaps six feet
square. "Funny!--_né_?"
"And who lives there with you?"
Haru smiled brilliantly. "Oh, so-o-o many peoples! _Papa-San_, an'--jus'
me."
"No brother?"
She shook her head. "My don' got," she said. "_Papa-San_ very angry for
because my jus' girl an' no could be kill in Port Arthur!"
She spoke with a smile, but the matter-of-fact words brought suddenly
home to Barbara something of the flavor of that passionate loyalty, that
hot heroism and debonair contempt of death which has been the theme of a
hundred stories. "Do all Japanese feel so, Haru?" she asked. "Would
every father be glad to give his son's life for Japan?"
The girl looked at her as if she jested. "Of _course_! All Japan man
mos' happy if to be kill for our Emperor! Tha's for why better to be
man. Girl jus' can stay home an' _wish_!" As the gown's last fastening
was slipped into its place, she turned up her lovely oval face with a
smiling, sidelong look.
[Illustration]
"_Ma-a-a!_" she exclaimed. "How it is _beau_-tee-ful! _né_? only--"
"Only what?"
"My thinks the _Ojo-San_ must suffer through the center!"
Laughingly Barbara caught the other's slim wrist and drew her before the
mirror. By oriental standards the Japanese girl was as finely bred as
herself. In the two faces, both keenly delicate and sensitive, yet so
sharply contrasted--one palely olive under its jetty pillow of straight
black hair, the other fair and brown-eyed, crowned with curling
gold--the extremes of East and West looked out at each other.
"See, Haru," said Barbara. "How different we are!"
"You so more good-look!" sighed the Japanese girl. "My jus' like the
night."
"Ah, but a moonlighted night," cried Barbara, "soft and warm and full of
secrets. When you have a sweetheart you will be far more lovely to him
than any foreign girl could be!"
Haru blushed rosily. "Sweetheart p'r'aps now," she said, "--all same
kind America story say 'bout."
"Have you really, Haru?" cried Barbara. "I love to hear about
sweethearts. Maybe--some day--I may have one, too. Some time you'll tell
me about him. Won't you?"
Suddenly, far below the window, there came a snarling scramble and a
savage, menacing bay. Barbara leaned out. A tawny, long-muzzled
wolf-hound, fastened to a stake, glared up at her out of red-dimmed
eyes.
"Poor fellow!" she exclaimed. "He looks sick. Does he have to be tied
up?"
The Japanese girl shivered. "Very bad dog," she said. "My think very
danger to not kill."
The deep tone of the dinner gong shuddered through the house and Barbara
hastened out. Patricia met her in the hall and the two girls, with arms
about each other's waists, descended the broad angled stair to the
dining-room, where the Ambassador stood, tall and spare and iron-gray,
with a contagious twinkle in his kindly eye.
"Well," he asked, "did you feel the earthquake?"
Barbara gave an exclamation of dismay. "Has there been one already?"
"Pshaw!" he said contritely. "Perhaps there hasn't. You see, in Japan,
we get so used to asking that question--"
"Now, Ned!" warned Mrs. Dandridge. "You'll have Barbara frightened to
death. We really don't have them so very often, my dear--and only gentle
shakes. You mustn't be dreaming of Messina."
The Ambassador pointed to the ceiling, where a wide crack zigzagged
across. "There's a recent autograph to bear me out. It happened on the
eleventh of last month."
"Father remembers the date because of the horrible accident it caused,"
said Patricia. "A piece of the kitchen plaster came down in his favorite
dessert and we had to fall back on pickled plums.
"I'm simply wild to see your gowns, Barbara," she continued, as they
took their places. "Is that the latest sleeve, and is everything going
to be slinky? We're always about six months behind. I know a girl in
Yokohama who goes to every steamer and kodaks the smartest tourists.
I've almost been driven to do it myself."
"You should adopt the Japanese dress, Patsy," said Mrs. Dandridge. "How
does it seem, Barbara, to see _kimono_ all around you?"
"I can't get it out of my mind," she answered, "that they are all
wearing them for some sort of masquerade."
"It takes a few days to get used to it," said the Ambassador. "And what
a beautiful and practical costume it is!"
"And comfortable!" sighed Patricia. "No 'bones' or tight places, and
only four or five things to put on. I don't wonder European women look
queer to the Japanese. The cook's wife told me the other day that the
first foreign lady she ever saw looked to her like a wasp with a wig on
like a _Shinto_ devil."
There rose again on the still night air the savage bay Barbara had heard
in her room. "I'm afraid I must make up my mind to lose Shiro," the
Ambassador said regretfully. "He's a Siberian wolf-hound that a friend
sent me from Moscow. But the climate doesn't agree with him, apparently.
For the last two days he's seemed really unsafe. There's a famous
Japanese dog-doctor in this section, but he's been sick himself and I
haven't liked to go to an ordinary native 'vet.' But I shall have him
looked at to-morrow."
"I do hope you will," said Mrs. Dandridge nervously. "He almost killed
Patsy's Pomeranian the first day he came. Watanabé says he hasn't
touched his food to-day, and we can't take any risks with so many
children in the compound. We have forty-seven, Barbara," she continued,
"counting the stablemen's families, and some of them are the dearest
mites! Every Christmas we give them a tree. It makes one feel
tremendously patriarchal!"
It was a home-like meal, albeit thin slices of lotos-stem floated in
Barbara's soup, the lobster had no claws, and the _entrée_ was baked
bamboo. Save for a high, four-paneled screen of gold-leaf with delicate
etchings of snow-clad pines, the white room was without ornament, but
the table gleamed with old silver, and in its center was a great bowl of
pink azaleas. Smooth-faced Japanese men-servants came and went
noiselessly in snowy footwear and dark silk _houri_ whose sleeves bore
the Embassy eagle in silver thread.
The Ambassador was a man of keen observation, and a cheerful philosophy.
His theory of life was expressed in a saying of his: "Human-kind is
about the same as it has always been, except a good deal kinder." He had
learned the country at first hand. He had a profound appreciation of its
whole historical background, one gained not merely from libraries, but
from deeper study of the essential qualities of Japanese character and
feeling. He had the perfect gift, moreover, of the _raconteur_, and he
held Barbara passionately attentive as he sketched, in bold outlines,
the huge picture of Japanese modernization. Yet light as was his touch,
he nevertheless made her see beneath the veneer of the foreign, the
unaltering ego of a civilization old and austere, of unfamiliar,
strenuous ideals, with cast steel conventions, eternal mysteries of
character and of racial destiny.
Coffee was served in the small drawing-room--a home-like, soft-toned
room of crystal-paned bookcases, and furniture that had been handed down
in the Dandridge family from candle-lighted colony days.
"It seems a shame," said Mrs. Dandridge, "that this evening has to be
broken, but Patsy and I must look in at the Charity Bazaar. I'm sure you
won't mind, Barbara, if we leave you alone now for an hour or so. It's a
new idea: every lady is to bring something she has no further use for,
but which is too good to throw away."
"I presume," observed the Ambassador innocently, "that some of them will
bring their husbands."
"Ned," said Mrs. Dandridge, as she drew on her wrap, "people will soon
think you haven't a serious side. It would serve you right if I took you
along as my contribution."
"Ah," returned he, "I was thoughtful enough to make a previous
engagement. Doctor Bersonin is coming to see me."
Patsy's nose took a decided elevation.
"The Government expert," she said. "He was on the train. It's the first
time I ever saw him without that smart-looking Japanese head-boy of his
who goes with him everywhere as interpreter."
"I've noticed that," Mrs. Dandridge said. "He's always with him in his
automobile. By the way, Patsy, who _does_ that boy remind me of? It has
always puzzled me."
"Why," Patricia answered, "he looks something like that Japanese student
we saw so often the winter Barbara and we were in Monterey. You
remember, Barbara--the one who spoke such perfect English. We thought he
was loony, because he used to sit on the beach all day and sail little
wooden boats."
"So he does," said her mother. "There's a decided resemblance. But
Doctor Bersonin's boy is anything but loony. He has a most intelligent
face."
"Besides," said Patricia, "the other was nearsighted and wore
spectacles. Good-by, Barbara. I hope the doctor will be gone when we get
back."
Her voice came muffled from the hall "--Oh, I can't help it, mother! I'm
only a diplomat-once-removed! He _is_ horrid!"
CHAPTER VII
DOCTOR BERSONIN
The Ambassador received his caller in his study. From across the hall,
Barbara, through the half-open door, could see the expert's huge form
filling an arm-chair, where the limpid light of the desk-lamp fell on
his heavy, colorless face. The walls were lined with bookshelves and
curtains of low tone, and against this formless background his big
profile stood out pallid and hawk-like. She could hear his voice
distinctly. Its even, dead flatness affected her curiously; it was not
harsh, but absolutely without tone-quality or sympathy.
For some time the talk was on casual topics and she occupied herself
listlessly with a tray of photographs on the table. She read their
titles, smiling at the extraordinary intricacies of "English as she is
Japped" by the complaisant oriental photographer: _The Picking Sea-Ear
at Enoshima_; _East-looking Panorama of Fuji Mount_; _Geisha in the
Famous Dance of Maple-Leaf_.
The smile left her face. Something had been said in the farther room
which caught her attention and in a moment she found herself listening
intently.
"I understand the trials of the new powder have been very successful,"
the Ambassador was saying. "Is it destined to revolutionize warfare, do
you think?"
"It is too soon to tell yet," was the reply, "just what the result will
be. It will enormously increase the range of projectiles, as Your
Excellency may guess, and its area of destruction will nearly double
that of lyddite."
Barbara felt, rather than saw, that the Ambassador gave a little
shudder. "I can imagine what that means," he said. "I saw Port Arthur
after the siege. So war is to grow more dreadful still! When will it
cease, I wonder."
"Never," Bersonin answered, with a cold smile. "It is the love of power
that makes war, and that, in man, is inherent and ineradicable. A nation
is only the individual in the aggregate, and selfishness is the guiding
gospel of both."
To Barbara the words seemed coldly, cruelly repellant. She felt a sudden
quiver of dislike run over her.
"You paint a sorry picture," said the Ambassador. "Can human ingenuity
go much further, then? What, in your opinion, will be the fighting
engine of the future?"
"The engine of the future"--Bersonin spoke deliberately--"will be along
other lines. It will be an atomic one. It will employ no projectile and
no armor plate will resist it. The discoverer will have harnessed the
law of molecular vibration. As there is a positive force that binds
atoms together, so there must be a negative force that, under certain
conditions, can drive them apart!"
He spoke with what seemed an extraordinary conviction. His manner had
subtly changed. For the first time his tone had gathered something like
feeling, and the dry, metallic voice seemed to Barbara to vibrate with a
curious, gloating triumph.
"Granted such a force," he went on, "and a machine to generate and
direct it, and of what value is the most powerful battle-ship, the most
stupendous fort? Mere silly shreds of steel and stone! Why, such an
engine might be carried in a single hand, and yet the nation that
possessed it could be master of the world!"
A dark flush had risen to his pallid cheek, and on the arm of his chair
Barbara saw the massive fingers of one huge hand clench and unclench
with a furtive, nervous gesture. The sight gave her a sharp sense of
recoil as if from the touch of something sinister and evilly suggestive.
"No!" said the Ambassador vehemently. "Humanity would revolt. Such a
discovery would be worth less than nothing! Its use by any warring
nation would call down the execration of civilization, and the man who
knew the secret would be too dangerous to be at large!"
There was dead silence for a moment. Bersonin sat motionless, staring
straight before him. Very slowly the color seemed to fade from his
cheek. When he spoke again his voice had regained its dead level of
tonelessness.
"That has occurred to me," he said. "I think Your Excellency is right.
Invention may do its work too well. However--no doubt we speak of
scientific impossibilities; let us hope so, at any rate."
Barbara pushed the photographs aside and slipped into the next room,
closing the door and drawing the heavy portières that hung over it. She
had had for a moment a vague, almost childish, sense of shrinking as if
from something monstrous and uncanny--such a sensation as the naked
diver may have, when, peering through his water-glass, he sees a dim
grisly shape glide, stealthy and cold, through the opaque depths. She
was growing absurdly fanciful, she thought. She did not turn on the
electric light, but threw open one of the long, French windows. There
was a new moon and a pale radiance flooded the room, with a sudden odor
of wistaria and plum-blossoms. The window gave on to a porch running the
length of the house, and this made her think suddenly of home. Yet the
air was too humid for California, too moist and rich even for Florida.
And suddenly she found herself pitying the people there to whom the East
would always be a closed book. Yet how dim and vague Japan had been to
her a month before!
A grand piano stood open by the window and in the dim light she sat down
and let her fingers wander idly in long arpeggios. She could see one
side of the Japanese garden, with a glimpse of a tiny dry lake and a
pebbled rivulet spanned by an arching bridge of red lacquer. It ended in
a sharp, sloping hill covered with shrubbery. On the ridge far above she
distinguished the outlines of native houses and flanking them the
curved, Tartar-like gables of a gray old temple. Somewhere, beyond that
little hill, perhaps, stood the Chapel erected to her father's memory,
which she had yet to see. As her fingers strayed over the ivory keys,
she thought of him, of his vivid, aberrant career and untimely end.
There are nights in the Japanese spring when the landscape, in its
wondrous delicacy of tones, seems only an envelope of something subtler
and unseen, the filmy covering of a beauty that is wholly spiritual.
To-night it seemed so to Barbara. The close was very still, wrapped in a
dreamy haze as soft as sleep, the mountains on the horizon wan shapes of
silver mist, semi-diaphanous. It seemed to her that in this living,
sentient breath of Japan, her father was nearer to her than he had ever
been before.
The thought brought to her vague memories of her mother and of her
childhood. Old airs began to mingle with the chords, and on the shrill
fairy sound-carpet woven by the myriad insect-looms of the garden, the
bits of melody went treading softly out across the perfume of the
wistaria.
CHAPTER VIII
"SALLY IN OUR ALLEY"
She thought no one heard, but out by the azalea hedge, a man was
standing, listening to the hushed chords floating through the open
window.
From the bungalow on the Yokohama Bluff, Daunt had come back to Tokyo
with a sense of dissatisfaction deeper than should have been caused by
his jarring talk with Phil. Perhaps, though he did not guess it, his
mood had to do with a bulky letter in his pocket, received that day. It
was from "Big" Murray, his chum at college, whom he had commonly
addressed by opprobrious epithets that covered an affection time had not
diminished. Of all the men in his class Daunt would have picked him as
the one least likely to marry. Yet the letter had contained a
wedding-invitation and a ream of the usual hyperbole. "Going to name me
godfather, is he!" Daunt had muttered as he read. "The driveling old
horse-thief!" For in some elusive way the intended distinction suggested
that he himself was a hoary back-number, not to be reckoned among the
forces of youth. Strolling from Shimbashi Station, under the clustered,
gaily-colored paper-lanterns, swaying above the rustle and stir of the
exotic street, this thought rankled. A vague discontent stirred in him.
Tokyo had been the objective point of Daunt's six years of diplomatic
career, and he had found the Kingdom of the Slender Swords a fascinating
and absorbing study. He loved its contrasts and its contradictions, its
marvelous artistry, the reserve and nobility of its people, and its
savage, unshamed, sincerity of purpose. In the absorbing routine of the
Chancery and the bright gaieties of the capital's diplomatic circle, the
first year had gone swiftly enough. Since then the Glider experiments
had lent an added zest.
Even at college, Langley's first aëroplane had interested him and out of
that interest had grown a course of reading which had given him a broad
technical knowledge of applied mechanics. In Japan he had conceived the
idea of the new fan-propeller, worked out in many an hour of study in
the little Japanese house in Aoyama, which he had taken because it
adjoined the parade-ground where his earliest experiments were made. At
first the _Corps Diplomatique_ had smiled at this as a harmless _pour
passer le temps_, to be classified with the Roumanian Minister's kennel
of Pomeranians or the Chilian Secretary's collection of _daimyo_ dolls.
But week by week the little crowd of Japanese spectators had grown
larger; often Daunt had recognized among the attentive brown faces this
or that superior military officer whom he knew, albeit in civilian
dress. One day his friend, Viscount Sakai, a dapper young officer on the
General Staff, had surprised him with the offer from the Japanese War
Department of the use of an empty garage on the edge of the great
esplanade. Only a month ago, he had awaked to the knowledge that his
name was known to the aëro enthusiasts of Paris, New York and Vienna,
and that his propeller was an assured success.
Yet to-night he felt that he had somehow failed. The splendid vitality
of the moving scene, the thud and click of wooden _géta_ and the whirr
of _rick'sha_--all the many-keyed diapason of the rustling, lanterned
vistas stretching under the pale moon-lighted sky--lacked the sense of
intimate companionship. The warm still air, freighted with aromatic
scents of cedar from some new-built shop, the pungent smell of incense
burning before some shadowed shrine, the odors of drenched shrubbery
behind the massive retaining wall of some rich noble's compound, came to
him with a new sense of estrangement. The murmured sound of voices
behind the glimmering paper _shoji_ told him, suddenly, that he was
lonely. For the first time in six years, he was feeling keenly his long
isolation from the things of home, the pleasant fellowship and the
firesides of old friends. In this foreign service which he so loved, he
had been growing out of touch, he told himself, out of thought, of the
things "Big" Murray had sought and found.
Unconsciously, the "drivel," as he had denominated it, of the letter in
his pocket, had infected him with sweet and foolish imaginings, and
slowly these took the nebulous shape of a woman. He had often dreamed of
her, though he had never seen her face. It was half-veiled now in the
bluish haze of his pipe, while she talked to him before a fire of
driftwood (that burned with red and blue lights because of sea-ghosts in
it) and her voice was low and clear like a flute.
The wavering outline was still before his mind's eye as he trod the
quiet road that led to the Embassy, entered its wide gate and slowly
crossed the silent garden toward his bachelor cottage on the lawn. And
there, suddenly, the vision had seized a vagrant melody and had spoken
to him in song. Daunt thrust his cold pipe into his pocket and listened
with head thrown back.
It was no brilliant display of technique that held him, for the player
was touching simple chords, but these were singing old melodies that
took him far to other scenes and other times. He smiled to himself. How
long it had been since he had sung them--not since the old college days!
That happy, irresponsible era of senior dignities came back vividly to
him, the campus and the singing. For years he had not recollected it all
so keenly! He had been glee-club soloist, pushed forward on all
occasions and applauded to the echo. Praise of his singing he had
accepted somewhat humorously--never but once had it touched him deeply,
and that had been on commencement afternoon.
He had slipped away from the wavering cheers at the station, because he
could not bear the farewells, and, far down one of the campus lanes, had
come on pretty Mrs. Claybourne sitting on a rustic bench. Again he heard
her speak, as plainly as if it were yesterday: "Why, if it isn't Mr.
Daunt! I wonder how the university can open in the fall without you!" He
had sat down beside her as she said: "This very insistent young person
with me has been heartbroken because we could not get tickets for the
Glee-Club Concert last night. She wanted to hear you sing."
He had looked up then to see a young girl, seated on the leaning trunk
of a tulip-tree. Her neutral-tinted skirt lay against the dark bark; her
face was almost hidden by a spray of the great, creamy-pink blossoms.
Some quality in its delicate loveliness had made him wish to please her,
and sitting there he had sung the song that was his favorite. Mrs.
Claybourne had pulled a big branch of the tulip-tree to hand him like a
bouquet over the footlights, but the girl's parted lips, her wide deep
brown eyes, had thanked him in a better way!
The music, now floating over the garden, by such subconscious
association, recalled this scene, overlaid, but never forgotten. Hark! A
cascade of silver notes, and then an old air that had been revived in
his time to become the madness of the music-halls and the pet of the
pianolas--the one the crowded campus had been wont to demand with
loudest voice when his tenor led the "Senior Singing." It brought back
with a rush the familiar faces, the gray ivied dormitories with their
slim iron balconies, the throbbing plaint of mandolins, and his own
voice--
"Of all the girls that are so smart,
There's none like pretty Sally!
She is the darling of my heart,
And she lives----"
He scarcely knew he sang, but the vibrant tenor, lifting across the
scent of the wistaria, came clearly to the girl at the piano. For a
moment Barbara's fingers played on, as she listened with a strained
wonder. Then the music ceased with a discord and she came quickly
through the opened window.
The song was smitten from Daunt's lips. In the instant that she stood
outlined on the broad piazza, a fierce snarling yelp and a clatter came
from within the house and there rang out a screamed Japanese warning. An
outer door flew open and the huge figure of Doctor Bersonin ran out,
pursued by a leaping white shadow, while the air thrilled to the savage
cry of a hound, shaken with rage.
"_Run, Barbara!_" The Ambassador's voice came from the doorway. But the
white, moonlit figure, in its gauzy evening gown, turned too late.
Empty-handed, Daunt dashed for the piazza, as, with a crash, a heavy
porch chair, hurled by a Japanese house-boy, penned the animal for an
instant in a corner. He caught the white figure up in his arms, sprang
into the shade of the wistaria arbor, and set her feet on its high
railing. The voice from the doorway called again, sharply.
"This way, Doctor! _Quick!_"
The wolf-hound, trailing its broken chain, had leaped the barrier and
was launched straight at the crouching expert. The latter had dragged
something small and square from his pocket and he seemed now to hold
this out before him. Daunt, wrenching a cleat from the arbor railing,
felt a puff of cold wind strike his face, and something like an elfin
note of music, high and thin as an insect's, drifted across the
confusion. He rushed forward with his improvised weapon--then stopped
short. The dog was no longer there.
The Ambassador made an exclamation. He stepped down and peered under the
piazza; even in the dim light the long space was palpably empty. The
head-boy spoke rapidly in Japanese and pointed toward the gate.
"He says he must have jumped down this side," explained Daunt, "and run
out to the street. He's nowhere in the garden, at any rate. We can see
every inch. How surprising!" He spoke to the boy in the vernacular. "He
will have the gates closed at once and telephone a warning to the police
station."
Bersonin had sat down on the edge of the piazza. He was crouched far
over; his big frame was shaken with violent shudderings. Suddenly his
head went back and he began to laugh--a jarring, grating, weird
man-hysteria that seemed to burst suddenly beyond his control.
The Ambassador went to him hurriedly, but Bersonin shook off the hand on
his shoulder and rising, still emitting his dreadful laughter, staggered
across the lawn and out of the gate.
The appalling mirth reëchoed from far down the quiet road.
CHAPTER IX
THE WEB OF THE SPIDER
Bersonin walked on, fighting desperately with his ghastly spasm of
merriment.
It was a nervous affection which had haunted him for years. It dated
from a time when, in South America, in an acute crisis of desperate
personal hazard, he had laughed the first peal of that strange laughter
of which he was to be ever after afraid. Since then it had seized him
many times, unexpectedly and in moments of strong excitement, to shake
him like a lath. It had given him a morbid hatred of laughter in others.
Recently he had thought that he was overcoming the weakness--for in two
years past he had had no such seizure--and the recurrence to-night
shocked and disconcerted him. He, the man of brain and attainment, to be
held captive by a ridiculous hysteria, like a nerve-racked anæmic girl!
The cold sweat stood on his forehead.
Before long the paroxysms ceased and he grew calmer. The quiet road had
merged into a busier thoroughfare. He walked on slowly till his command
was regained. West of the outer moat of the Imperial Grounds, he turned
up a pleasant lane-like street and presently entered his own gate. The
house, into which he let himself with a latch-key, was a rambling,
modern, two-story structure of yellow stucco. The lower floor was
practically unused, since its tenant lived alone and did not entertain.
The upper floor, besides the hall, contained a small bedroom, a bath and
dressing-room and a large, barely-furnished laboratory. The latter was
lined on two sides with glass-covered shelves which gave glimpses of
rows of books, of steel shells, metal and crystal retorts and crucibles,
the delicate paraphernalia of organic chemistry and complicated
instruments whose use no one knew save himself--a fit setting for the
great student, the peer of Offenbach in Munich and of Bayer in Vienna.
Against the wall leaned a drafting-board, on which, pinned down by
thumb-tacks, was a sketch-plan of a revolving turret. From a bracket in
a corner--the single airy touch of delicacy in a chamber almost sordid
in its appointments--swung a bamboo cage with a brown _hiwa_, or
Japanese finch, a downy puff of feathers with its head under its wing.
In the upper hall Bersonin's Japanese head-boy had been sitting at a
small desk writing. Bersonin entered the laboratory, opened a safe let
into a wall, and put into it something which he took from his pocket.
Then he donned a dressing-gown the boy brought, and threw himself into a
huge leather chair.
"Make me some coffee, Ishida," he said.
The servant did so silently and deftly, using a small brass _samovar_
which occupied a table of its own. With the coffee he brought his master
a box of brown Havana cigars.
For an hour Bersonin sat smoking in the silent room--one cigar after
another, deep in thought, his yellow eyes staring at nothing. Into his
countenance deep lines had etched themselves, giving to his coldly
repellant look an expression of malignant force and intention. With his
pallid face, his stirless attitude, his great white fingers clutching
the arms of the chair, he suggested some enormous, sprawling batrachian
awaiting its more active prey.
All at once there came a chirp from the cage in the corner and its tiny
occupant, waked by the electric-light, burst into song as clear and
joyous as though before its free wing lay all the meads of Eden. A look
more human, soft and almost companionable, came into its master's
massive face. Bersonin rose and, whistling, opened the cage door and
held out an enormous forefinger. The little creature stepped on it, and,
held to his cheek, it rubbed its feathered head against it. For a moment
he crooned and whistled to it, then held his finger to the cage and it
obediently resumed its perch and its melody. The expert took a dark
cloth from a hook and threw it over the cage and the song ceased.
Bersonin went to the door of the room and fastened it, then unlocked a
desk and spread some papers on the table. One was a chart, drawn to the
minutest scale, of the harbor of Yokohama. On it had been marked a group
of projectile-shaped spots suggesting a flotilla of vessels at anchor.
For a long time he worked absorbedly, setting down figures, measuring
with infinite pains, computing angles--always with reference to a small
square in the map's inner margin, marked in red. He covered many sheets
of paper with his calculations. Finally he took another paper from the
safe and compared the two. He lifted his head with a look of
satisfaction.
Just then he thought he heard a slight noise from the hall. Swiftly and
noiselessly as a great cat he crossed to the door and opened it.
Ishida sat in his place scratching laboriously with a foreign pen.
Bersonin's glance of suspicion altered. "What are you working at so
industriously, Ishida?" he asked.
The Japanese boy displayed the sheet with pride.
It was an ode to the coming Squadron. Bersonin read it:
"Welcome, foreign men-of-war!
Young and age,
Man and woman,
None but you welcome!
And how our reaches know you but to satisfy,
Nor the Babylon nor the Parisian you to treat,
Be it ever so humble,
Yet a tidbit with our heart!
What may not be accomplishment Rising-Sun?
"_By H. Ishida, with best compliment._"
Bersonin laid it down with a word of approbation. "Well done," he said.
"You will be a famous English scholar before long." He went into the
dressing-room, but an instant later recollected the papers on the table.
The servant was in the laboratory when his master hastily reentered; he
was methodically removing the coffee tray.
Alone once more, Ishida reseated himself at his small desk. He tore the
poem carefully to small bits and put them into the waste-paper basket.
Then, rubbing the cake of India-ink on its stone tablet, he drew a mass
of Japanese writing toward him and, with brush held vertically between
thumb and forefinger, began to trace long, delicate characters at the
top of the first sheet, thus:
[Japanese: Ouryuu no fusetsusuirai ni oyobosu eikyou
hidarino toori kinji]
In the Japanese phrase this might literally be translated as follows:
cross-current of, laying water thunder on,
work-effect
left hand respectively
Which in conventional English is to say:
A STUDY OF CROSS-CURRENTS IN THEIR EFFECT ON
SUBMARINE MINES
SUBMITTED WITH DEFERENCE
This finished, he sealed it in an envelope, took a book from the breast
of his _kimono_ and began to read. Its cover bore the words: "Second
English Primer, in words of Two Syllables." Its inner pages, however,
belied the legend. It was Mahan's _Influence of Sea-Power on History_.
Yet Lieutenant Ishida of the Japanese Imperial Navy, one time student in
Monterey, California, now in Special Secret-Service, read abstractedly.
He was wondering why Doctor Bersonin should have in his possession a
technical naval chart and what was the meaning of certain curious
markings he had made on it.
CHAPTER X
IN A GARDEN OF DREAMS
In the garden the moon's faint light glimmered on the broad, satiny
leaves of the camelias and the delicate traceries of red maple foliage.
At its farther side, amid flowering bushes which cast long indigo
shadows, stood a small pagoda, brought many years before from Korea, and
toward this Daunt and the girl whom he had held for a breathless moment
in his arms, strolled slowly along a winding, pebbled path tremulant
with the flickering shadows of little leaves. The structure had a small
platform, and here on a bench they sat down, the fragrant garden spread
out before them.
He had remembered that a guest had been expected to arrive that day from
America, and knew that this must be she. But, strangely enough, it did
not seem as if they had never before met. Nor had he the least idea
that, since that short sharp scene, they had exchanged scarcely a dozen
words. In its curious sequel, as he stood listening to the echo of
Bersonin's strange laughter, he had momentarily forgotten all about her.
Then he had remembered with a shock that he had left her perched, in
evening dress, on the high railing of the arbor.
"I wonder if you are in the habit," she had said with a little laugh,
"of putting unchaperoned girls on the tops of fences, and going away and
forgetting all about them."
Her laugh was deliciously uneven, but it did not seem so from fright. He
had answered something inordinately foolish, and had lifted her down
again--not holding her so closely this time. He remembered that on the
first occasion he had held her very tightly indeed. He could still feel
the touch of a wisp of her hair which, in his flying leap, had fallen
against his cheek. It was red-bronze and it shone now in the moonlight
like molten metal. Her eyes were deep blue, and when she smiled--
He wrenched his gaze away with a start. But it did not stray
far--merely to the point of a white-beaded slipper peeping from the
edge of a ruffle of gauze that had mysteriously imprisoned filmy
sprays of lily-of-the-valley.
He looked up suddenly, conscious that she was laughing silently. "What
is it?" he asked.
"We seem so tremendously acquainted," she said, "for people who--" She
stopped an instant. "You don't even know who I am."
In the references to her coming he had heard her name spoken and now, by
a sheer mental effort, he managed to recall it.
"You are Miss Fairfax," he said. "And my name, perhaps I ought to add,
is Daunt. I am the Secretary of Embassy. I hope, after our little effort
of to-night, you will not consider diplomacy only high-class vaudeville.
Such comedy scarcely represents our daily bill."
"It came near enough to being tragedy," she answered.
"It was so uncommonly life-like, I was torn with a fear that you might
not guess it was gotten up for your especial benefit."
"How well you treat your visitors!" she said with gentle irony. "Had you
many rehearsals?"
"Very few," he said. "I was afraid the boy might misread the stage
direction and slip the dog-chain too soon. But I am greatly pleased. I
have always had an insatiable longing to be a hero--if only on the
stage. I aspire to Grand Opera, also, as you have noticed." He laughed,
a trifle shamefacedly, then added quickly: "I hope you liked the final
disappearance act. It was rather effective, don't you think?"
She smiled unwillingly. "Ah, you make light of it! But don't think I
didn't know how quickly you acted--what you risked in that one minute!
And then to run back a second time!" She shuddered a little. "You could
have done nothing with that piece of wood!"
"I assure you," he said, "you underrate my prowess! But it wasn't to be
used--it was only the dog's cue."
"Poor brute!" she said. "I hope he will injure nobody."
"Luckily, the children are off the streets at this hour," he answered.
"He'll not go far; the police are too numerous. I am afraid our very
efficient performer is permanently retired from the company. But I
haven't yet congratulated you. You didn't seem one bit afraid."
"I hadn't time to be frightened. I--was thinking of something else! The
fright came afterward, when I saw you--when you left me on the railing."
She spoke a little constrainedly, and went on quickly: "I really am a
desperate coward about some things. I should never dare to go up on an
aëroplane, for instance, as Patsy tells me you do almost every day. She
says the Japanese call you the 'Honorable Fly-Man'."
"There's no foreign theater in Tokyo, and no winter Opera," he said
lightly. "We have to amuse one another, and the Glider is by way of
contributing my share of the entertainment. It is certainly an uplifting
performance." He smiled, but she shook her head.
"Ah," she said, "I know! I was at Fort Logan last summer the day
Lieutenant Whitney was killed. I saw it."
The smile had faded and her eyes had just the look he had so often
fancied lay in those eyes he had been used to gaze at across the burning
driftwood--his "Lady of the Many-Colored Fires." He caught himself
longing to know that they would mist and soften if he too should some
day come to grief in such sudden fashion. They were wholly wonderful
eyes! He had noted them even in the instant when he had snatched her
from the piazza--from the danger into which his cavalier singing had
called her.
"How brazen you must have thought it!" he exclaimed. "My impromptu solo,
I mean. I hardly know how I came to do it. I suppose it was the
moonlight (it does make people idiotic sometimes, you know, in the
tropics!) and then what you played--that dear old song! I used to sing
it years ago. It reminded me--"
"Yes--?"
"Of the last evening at college. It was a night like this, though not so
lovely. I sang it then--my last college solo."
"Your _last_?" She was leaning toward him, her lips parted, her eyes
bright on his face.
"Yes," he said. "I left town the next day."
Her eyes fell. She turned half away, and put a hand to her cheek. "Oh,"
she said vaguely. "Of course."
"But it _was_ brazen," he finished lamely. "I promise never to do it
again."
The breath of the night was coolly sweet. It hovered about them, mingled
of all the musky winds and flower-months of Eden. A dulled, weird sound
from the street reached their ears--the monotonous hand-tapping of a
small, shallow drum.
"Some Buddhist _devotée_," he said, "making a pious round of holy
places. He is stalking along in a dingy, white cotton robe with red
characters stamped all over it--one from each shrine he has visited--and
here and there in a doorway he will stop to chant a prayer in return for
a handful of rice."
"How strange! It doesn't seem to belong, somehow, with the telegraph
wires and the trolley cars. Japan is full of such contrasts, isn't it?
It seems to be packed with mystery and secrets. Listen!" The deep,
resonant boom of a great bell at a distance had throbbed across the
nearer strumming. "That must be in some old temple. Perhaps the man with
the drum is going there to worship. Does any one live in the temples?
The priests do, I suppose."
"Yes," he answered. "Sometimes other people do, too. I know of a
foreigner who lives in one."
"What is he? European?"
"No one knows. He has lived there fifteen years. He calls himself
Aloysius Thorn. I used to think he must be an American, for in the
Chancery safe there is an envelope bearing his name and the direction
that it be opened after his death. It has been there a long time, for
the paper is yellow with age. No doubt it was put there by some former
Chief-of-Mission at his request. He has nothing to do with other
foreigners; as a rule he won't even speak to them. He is something of a
curiosity. He knows some lost secret about gold-lacquer, they say."
"Is he young?"
"No."
"Married?"
"Oh, no! He lives quite alone. He has one of the loveliest private
gardens in the city. Sometimes one doesn't see him for months, but he is
here now."
She was silent, while he looked again at the white toe of the slipper
peeping from a gauzy hem. The silence seemed to him an added bond
between them. The moon, tilting its slim sickle along the solemn range
of western hills, touched their jagged contour with a shimmering
radiance and edged with silver the vast white apparition towering,
filmily exquisite, above them, a solitary snowy cone, hovering
wraith-like between earth and sky. The horizon opposite was deep violet,
crowded with tiny stars, like green-gilt coals. In the quiet a drowsy
crow croaked huskily from the hillside. Barbara looked through dreamy
eyes.
"It can't always be so beautiful!" she said at length. "Nothing could, I
am sure."
"No, indeed," he agreed cheerfully. "There are times when, as my
number-one boy says, 'honorable weather are disgust.' In June the
_nubai_, the rainy season, is due. It will pour buckets for three weeks
without a stop and frogs will sing dulcet songs in the streets. In July
your head feels as if a red-hot feather pillow had been stuffed into
your skull and everybody moves to Chuzenji or Kamakura. If it weren't
for that, and an occasional dust-storm in the winter, and the
centillions of mosquitoes, and a weekly earthquake or two, we wouldn't
half appreciate this!" He made a wide gesture.
"Yet now," she said softly, "it seems too lovely to be real! I shall
wake presently to find myself in my berth on the _Tenyo Maru_ with Japan
two or three days off."
He fell into her mood. "We are both asleep. That was why the dog
vanished so queerly. Dream-dogs always do. And I don't wonder at my
singing, either. People do exactly what they shouldn't when they are
asleep. But no! I really don't like the dream version at all. I want
this to be true."
"Why?"
Her tone was low, but it made him tingle. A sudden _mêlée_ of daring,
delicious impulses swept over him. "Because I have dreamed too much," he
said, in as low a voice. "Here in the East the habit grows on one; we
dream of what all the beauty somehow misses--for us. But to-night, at
least, is real. I shall have it to remember when you have gone, as I--I
suppose you will be soon."
She leaned out and picked a slender maple-leaf from a branch that came
in through the open side of the pagoda, and, holding it in her fingers,
turned toward him. Her lips were parted, as if to speak. But suddenly
she tossed it from her, rose and shook out her skirts with a laugh.
Carriage-wheels were rolling up the drive from the lower gate.
"Thank you!" she cried gaily. "But no hint shall move me. I warn you
that I intend to stay a long time!"
In the lighted doorway, as Patricia and her mother stepped from the
carriage, she swept him a curtsey.
"Honorably deign to accept my thanks," she said, "for augustly saving my
insignificant life! And now, perhaps, we can be properly introduced!"
CHAPTER XI
ISHIKICHI
Under the frail moon that touched the Embassy garden to such beauty,
Haru walked home to the house "so-o-o small, an' garden 'bout such big"
in the Street-of-Prayer-to-the-Gods.
On Reinanzaka Hill the shadows were iris-hearted. From its high-walled
gardens of the great came no glimpses of phantom-lighted _shoji_, no
sound of vibrant strings from tea-houses nor gleams of painted lips and
fingers of _geisha_.
Haru carried a paper-lantern tied to the end of a short wand, but it was
not dark enough to need its light, and as she walked, she swung it in
graceful circles. She heard a dove sobbing its low _owas! owas!_ and
once a crow flapped its sleepy way above her, uttering its harsh note,
which, from some subtlety of suggestion hidden from the western mind,
the Japanese liken to the accents of love. It startled her for a second;
then she began to sing, under her breath, to the tune of her clacking
_géta_, a ditty of her childhood:
"_Karasu, Karasu!_ "Crow, crow,
_Kanzaburo!_ Kanzaburo!
_Oya no on wo--_ Forget not the virtue
_Wasurena yo!_" Of your honorable parents."
On the crest of the hill, by the Street-of-Hollyhocks, a wall opened in
a huge gate of heavy burnished beams studded with great iron
rivet-heads. Here resided no less a personage than an Imperial Princess.
Beside the gate stood a conical sentry-box, in which all day, while the
gate was open, stood a soldier of the Household Guards. The box was
empty now.
Opposite the gate, a hedged lane opened, into which she turned, and
presently the song ceased. She had come to the newly built Chapel. Her
father's name was on the household list of the temple across the way,
but she herself walked each Sunday to Ts'kiji, to attend the bishop's
Japanese service in the Cathedral. When, influenced by a school-mate,
she had wished to become a Christian, the old _samurai_ had interposed
no objection. With the broad tolerance of the esoteric Buddhist, to whom
all pure faiths are good, he had allowed her to choose for herself. She
had grown to love the strangely new and beautiful worship with its
singing, its service in a tongue that she could understand, its Bible
filled with marvelous stories of old heroes, and with vivid imagery like
that of the _Kojiki_, the "Record of Ancient Matters" or the
_Man-yoshu_, the "Collection of a Myriad Leaves," over whose archaic
characters her father was always poring. She had ceased to visit the
temple, but otherwise the change had made little difference in her
placid life. With the simplicity with which the Japanese of to-day
kneels with equal faith before a plain _Shinto_ shrine and a golden
altar of Buddha, she had continued the daily home observances. Each
morning she cleaned the _butsu-dan_--refilled its tiny lamp with
vegetable oil, freshened its incense-cup and water bowl, and dusted its
golden shrine of Kwan-on which held the scroll inscribed with the spirit
names of a hundred ancestors, and the _ihai_, or mortuary tablet, of her
dead mother. Though she no longer prayed before it, it still signified
to her the invisible haunting of the dead--the continuing loving
presence of that mother who waited for her in the _Meidoland_.
For many days Haru had watched the progress of the Chapel building. The
Cathedral was a good two miles distant, but this was near her home; here
she would be able to attend more than the weekly Sunday service.
To-night, as she looked at the cross shining in the moonlight, she
thought it very beautiful. A tiny symbol like it, made of white enamel,
was hung on a little chain about her neck. It had been given her by the
bishop the day of her confirmation. She drew this out and swung it about
her finger as she walked on.
In the Street-of-Prayer-to-the-Gods were no huge and gloomy compounds.
It was a roadway of humbler shops and homes, bordered with mazes of
lantern fire, and lively with pedestrians. At a meager shop, pitifully
small, whose _shoji_ were wide open, Haru paused. A smoky oil lamp swung
from the ceiling, and under its glow, a woman knelt on the worn
_tatamé_. Beside her, on a pillow, lay a newborn baby, and she was
soothing its slumber by softly beating a tiny drum close to its ear. She
nodded and smiled to Haru's salutation.
"_Hai! Ojo-San_," she said. "_Go kigen yo!_ Deign augustly to enter."
"Honorable thanks," responded Haru, "but my father awaits my unworthy
return. _Domo! Aka-San des'ka?_ So this is Miss Baby! Ishikichi will
have a new comrade in this little sister."
"Poison not your serene mind with contemplation of my uncomely last-sent
one!" said the woman, pridefully tilting the pillow so as to show the
tiny, vacuous face. "Are not its hands degradedly well-formed?"
"Wonderfully beyond saying! The father is still exaltedly ill?"
"It is indeed so! I have not failed to sprinkle the holy water over
Jizo, nor to present the straw sandals to the Guardians-of-the-Gate.
Also I have rubbed each day the breast of the health-god; yet O-Binzuru
does not harken. Doubtless it is because of some sin committed by my
husband in a previous existence! I have not knowledge of your Christian
God, or I would make my worthless sacrifices also to Him."
"He heals the sick," said Haru, "but He augustly loves not sacrifice--as
He exaltedly did in olden time," she hastily supplemented, recalling
certain readings from the Old Testament.
"The gods of Nippon divinely change not their habit," returned the
woman. "Also my vile intellect can not comprehend why the foreigners'
God should illustriously concern Himself with the things of another
land."
"The Christian Divinity," said Haru, "is a God of all lands and all
peoples."
The other mused. "It passes in my degraded mind that He, then, would
lack a sublime all-sympathy for our Kingdom-of-Slender-Swords. You are
transcendently young, _Ojo-San_, but I am thirty-two, and I hold by the
gods of my ancestors."
"Honorably present my greetings to your husband," Haru said, as she
bowed her adieu. "May his exalted person soon attain divine health!
To-morrow I will send another book for him to read."
The woman watched her go, with a smile on her tired face--the Japanese
smile that covers so many things. She looked at the baby's face on the
pillow. "Praise _Shaka_," she said aloud, "there is millet yet for
another week. Then we must give up the shop. Well--I can play the
_samisen_, and the gods are not dead!"
Behind her a diminutive figure had lifted himself upright from a
_f'ton_. He came forward from the gloom, his single sleeping-robe
trailing comically and his great black eyes round and serious. "Why must
we give up the shop, honorable mother?"
"Go to sleep, Ishikichi," said his mother. "Trouble me not so late with
your rude prattle."
"But why, _Okka-San_?"
"Because rent-money exists not, small pigeon," she answered gently. "So
long as we have ignobly lived here, we have paid the _banto_ who brings
his joy-giving presence on the first of each month. Now we have no more
money and can not pay."
"Why have we no more money?"
"Because the honorable father is sick and you are too small to earn. But
let it not trouble your heart, for the gods are good. See--we have
almost waked the _Aka-San_!"
She bent over the pillow and began again the elfin drumming at the
infant's ear. But Ishikichi lay open-eyed on his _f'ton_, his baby mind
grappling with a new and painful wonder.
CHAPTER XII
IN THE STREET-OF-PRAYER-TO-THE-GODS
Haru unlatched a gate across which twisted a plum-branch with tarnished,
silver bark. It hid a garden so tiny that it was scarcely more than a
rounded boulder set in moss, with a clump of golden _icho_ shrubs.
Across the path, high in air, were stretched giant webs in whose centers
hung black spiders as big as Japanese sparrows. Beyond was a low
doorway, shaded by a gnarled _kiri_ tree. The thin, white rice-paper
pasted behind the bars of its sliding grill shone goldenly with the
candle-light within. She rang a bell which hung from a cord.
"_Hai-ai-ai-ai-ee!_" sounded a long-drawn voice from within, and in a
moment a little maid slid back the _shoji_ and bobbed over to the
threshold.
Her mistress stepped from her _géta_ into the small anteroom. Here the
floor was covered with soft _tatamé_,--the thick, springy rice-straw
mats which, in Japan, play the part of carpets--and a bronze vase on a
low lacquer stool held a branch of dark ground-pine and a single white
lily. A voice was audible, reciting in a droning monotone. It stopped
suddenly and called Haru's name.
She answered instantly, and parting the panels, passed into the next
room, where her father sat on his mat reading in the faint soft light of
an _andon_. He was an old man, with white head strongly poised on gaunt
shoulders. Broken in fortune and in health, the spirit of the _samurai_
burned inextinguishably in the fire of his sunken eyes. He took her hand
and drew her down beside him. She knew what was in his mind.
"Be no longer troubled," she said. "The American _Ojo-San_ is as lovely
as Ama-terasu, the Sun Goddess, and as kind as she is beautiful. I shall
be happy to be each day with her."
"That is good," he said. "Yet I take no joy from it. You are the last of
a family that for a thousand seasons has served none save its Emperor
and its _daimyo_."
"I am no servant," she answered quickly. "Rather am I, in sort, a
companion to the _Ojo-San_, to offer her my tasteless conversation and
somewhat to go about with her in this unfamiliar city. It is an
honorable way of acquiring gain, and thus I may unworthily pay my
support, for which now from time to time you are brought to sell the
priceless classics in which your soul exaltedly delights."
His face softened. "I have lived too long," he said. "My hand is
palsied--I, a two-sword man of the old clan! I should have died in the
war, fighting for Nippon and my Emperor. But even then was I too
dishonorably old! Why did not the gods grant me a son?--me, who wearied
them with my sacrifices?"
She did not answer for a moment. Nothing in her cried out at this
reiterated complaint, for she was of the same blood. If she had been a
son, that wound in her father's heart had been healed. Through her arm
the family would have fought. Her glorious death-name might even now be
written on an _ihai_ on the Buddha-shelf, her glad soul swelling the
numbers of that ghostly legion whose spiritual force was the true
vitality of her nation.
"Perhaps that, too, might be," she said presently in a low voice.
"Should I augustly marry one not of too exalted a station, he could
receive adoption into our family."
He looked into her deeply flushing face. "You think of the Lieutenant
Ishida Hétaro," he said. "It is true that the go-between has already
deigned to sit on my hard mats. He is, I think, in every way worthy of
our house. I would rather he were in the field, with a sword in his
hand--I know not much of this 'Secret Service.' What are his present
duties? Doubtless"--with a spark of mischief in his hollow, old
eyes--"you are better informed than I."
"He is in the household of one named Bersonin, a man-mountain like our
wrestlers, whose service Japan pays with a wage."
His seamed face clouded. "To cunningly watch the foreigner's incomings
and his outgoings, and make august report to the Board of Extraordinary
Information," he said, with a trace of bitterness. "To play the clod
when one is all eyes and ears. Honorable it is, no doubt, yet to my old
palate it savors too much of the actor strutting on the circular stage.
But times change, and if, to live, we must ape the foreigners, why, we
must borrow their ways till such time--the gods grant it be soon!--when
we can throw them on the dust heap. And what am I to set my debased
ignorance against my Princes and my Emperor!" He paused a moment and
sighed. "Ishida is well esteemed," he continued presently. "He has dwelt
in America and learned its tongue--a necessity, it seems, in these
topsy-turvy times. Yet, as for marriage, waiting still must be. These
are evil days for us, my child. From whence would come the gifts which
must be sent before the bride, to the husband's house? Your mother"--he
paused and bowed deeply toward the golden _butsu-dan_ in its
alcove--"may she rest on the lotos-terrace of _Amida_!--came to my poor
house with a train of coolies bearing lacquer chests: silken _f'ton_,
_kimono_ as soft and filmy as mist, gowns of cloth and of cotton,
cushions of gold and silver patternings, jeweled girdles, velvet sandals
and all lovely garniture. Shall her daughter be sent to a husband with a
chest of rags? No, no!"
She leaned her dark head against his blue-clad shoulder and drew the
scroll from his trembling fingers.
"I wind your words about my heart," she said. "Waiting is best. Perhaps
the evil times will withdraw. I have prayed to the Christian God
concerning it. But your eyes are augustly wearied. Let me read to you a
while."
He settled himself back on the mat, his gaunt hands buried in his
sleeves, and, snuffing the wick in the _andon_, she began to read the
archaic "grass-writing." It was the _Shundai Zatsuwa_ of Kyuso Moro.
"Be not _samurai_ through the wearing of two swords, but day and
night have a care to bring no reproach on the name. When you
cross your threshold and pass out through the gate, go as one
who shall never return again. Thus shall you be ready for every
adventure. The Buddhist is for ever to remember the five
commandments and the _samurai_ the laws of chivalry.
"All born as _samurai_, men and women, are taught from childhood
that fidelity must never be forgotten. And woman is ever taught
that this, with submission, is her chief duty. If in unexpected
strait her weak heart forsakes fidelity, all her other virtues
will not atone.
"_Samurai_, men and women, the young and the old, regulate their
conduct according to the precepts of Bushido, and a _samurai_,
without hesitation, sacrifices life and family for lord and
country."
CHAPTER XIII
THE WHORLS OF YELLOW DUST
For a long time in her blue and white room Barbara lay awake,
listening to the incessant chorus that came on the deepening mystery
of the dark: the rustle of the pine-needles outside her window, the
_kiri-kiri-kiri-kiri_ of a night-cricket on the sill, and the wavering
chant of a toiling coolie keeping time to the thrust of his body as he
hauled his heavy cart. The shadow of a twisted pine-branch crossed one
of the windows, and in the infiltering moonlight she could see the
yellow gleam of the gold-lacquer Buddha on the Sendai chest.
She could imagine it the same image she had found as a little girl in
the garret, and had made her pet delight. For an instant she seemed to
be once more a child seated on her low stool before it, her hands
tight-clasped, looking up into its immobile countenance, half-hoping,
half-fearing those carven lips would speak. On the wings of this
sensation came a childish memory of a day when her aunt had found her
thus and had thought her praying to it. She remembered the look of
frozen horror on her aunt's face and her own helpless mortification. For
she did not know how to explain. She had had to write a verse from the
Bible fifty times in her copybook:
_Thou shalt have no other gods before Me._
And she had had to do half of them over because she had forgotten the
capital M. That day her treasure had disappeared, and she had never seen
it again.
The glimmering figure in the dark made her think, too, of the man of
whom Daunt had told her, who shunned his own race, hiding himself for
years and years in a Japanese temple, with its painted dragon carvings,
glowing candles and smoking censers. The incense from them seemed now to
be filling all the night with odors rich and alluring, whispering of
things mysterious and confined. Striking across the lesser sounds she
could hear at intervals the flute of a blind _masseur_, and nearer, in
the Embassy grounds, the recurrent signal of a patroling night watchman:
three strokes of one hard, wooden stick upon another, like a high,
mellow note of a xylophone.
This sounded a little like a ship's bell--striking on a white yacht,
whose owner was visiting the ancient capital, Nara. He would appear
before long, and she knew what he would say, and what he would want her
to say to him. She felt somehow guilty, with a sorry though painless
compunction. The man on the steamer that morning had spoken of a younger
brother who was in Japan, "going the pace." Phil--she had often heard
Austen Ware speak of him. Perhaps he had only come over to keep the
other out of mischief. She told herself this a second time, because it
gave her a drowsy satisfaction, though she knew it was not so. She had
always pictured Phil as "fast," and she wondered sleepily what the word
meant here in the orient, where there were no theater suppers, and where
men probably played _fan-tan_--no, that was Chinese--or some other queer
game instead of poker--unless they ... had aëroplanes.
The bell of the distant temple, which she had heard in the garden,
boomed softly, and the _amma's_ flute sounded again its piercing,
plaintive double-note. The two sounds began to weave together with a
sense of unreality, dreamy, occult, incommunicable. So at length Barbara
slept, fitfully, the fragments of that lavish day falling into a bizarre
mosaic, in which strange figures mingled uncannily.
She knew them for visions, and to avoid them climbed a grassy hill to a
gray old temple in which she saw her father seated cross-legged on a
huge lotos-flower. She knew him because his face was just like the face
in the locket she wore. She called out and ran toward him, but it was
only a great gold-lacquered Buddha with candles burning around it. She
ran out of the temple, where a dog pursued her and a monstrous man with
a pallid face, who sat in a tree full of cherry-blossoms, threw
something at her which suddenly went off with a terrific explosion and
blew both him and the dog into bits. It seemed terrible, but she could
only laugh and laugh, because somebody held her tight in his arms and
she knew that nothing could frighten her ever any more.
And on the tide of this shy comfort she drifted away at last upon a deep
and dreamless sea.
* * * * *
Later, when the moon had set and only the faint starlight lay over the
garden, the Ambassador still sat in his study, thoughtfully smoking a
cigar. On the mantel, under a glass case, was a model of a battle-ship.
Over it hung a traverse drawing of the Panama Canal cuttings, and maps
and framed photographs looked from the walls between the dark-toned
book-shelves. The floor was covered with a deep crimson rug of
camel's-hair. The shaded reading-lamp on the desk threw a bright circle
of light on an open volume of Treaties at his elbow.
At length he rose, took up the lamp, and approached the mantel. He stood
a moment looking thoughtfully at the model under its rounded glass. It
was built to scale, and complete in every exterior detail, from the
pennant at its head to the tiny black muzzles that peeped from its open
casemates. Two years ago America had sent a fleet of such vessels to
circumnavigate the globe. An European Squadron of even deadlier type
would cast anchor the next morning in those waters. Yet now Bersonin's
phrase rang insistently through his mind: "Mere silly shreds of steel!"
It recurred like a refrain, mixing itself with the expert's curious
words in the study, with that extraordinary incident of the
piazza--which had bred a stealthy mistrust that would not down.
With the lamp in his hand he opened the door into the hall and stood
listening a moment. Save for the creaks and snappings that haunt frame
structures in a land of rapid decay, the house was still. He entered the
drawing-room, noiselessly undid the fastenings of a French window and
stepped out on to the piazza.
There he threw the lamplight about him, mentally reconstructing the
scene of two hours before. Here he himself had stood, yonder Bersonin,
and in the corner the dog--ten feet from the edge of the porch. It had
vanished in the same instant that he had seen it leaping straight at the
expert. What was it Bersonin had taken from his pocket? A weapon? And
_where had the hound gone_?
He stepped forward suddenly; the chair which had been thrown by the
Japanese boy had been set upright, but beneath it, and on the piazza
beyond, disposed in curious wreaths and whorls, like those made by steel
filings above an electro-magnet, lay a thick sifting of what looked like
reddish-yellow dust. He stooped and took up some in his fingers; it was
dry and impalpable, of an extraordinary fineness.
He stood looking at it a full minute, intent with some absorbed and
disquieting communing. Then he shook his broad shoulders, as though
dismissing an incredible idea, returned the lamp to the study and went
slowly up the stair to his room.
But he was not sleeping when dawn came, gray in the sky. It stole
pink-fingered through the window and drew rosy lights on the blank wall
across which strange fancies of his had linked themselves in a weird
processional. It crept between the heavy curtains of the study below,
and gilded the fittings of the little battle-ship on the mantel--as
though to deck it in crimson bunting like its mammoth prototypes in the
lower bay.
For at that moment the Yokohama Bund was throbbing with the _salvos_ of
great guns pealing a salute. The water's edge was lined with a watching
crowd. Files of marines were drawn up beneath the green-trimmed arches
and cutters flying the sun-flag lay at the wharf, where groups of
officers stood in dress-uniform.
Over the ledge of the morning was spread a filmy curtain of damask rose,
and beneath it, into the harbor, like a broad dotted arrow-head, was
steaming a flock of black battle-ships, with inky smoke pouring from
their stacks.
CHAPTER XIV
WHEN BARBARA AWOKE
When Barbara awoke next morning she lay for a moment staring open-eyed
from her big pillow at the white wall above, where a hanging-shelf
projected to guard the sleeper from falling plaster in earthquake. The
room was filled with a soft light that filtered in through the
split-bamboo blinds. Then she remembered: it was her first whole day in
Japan.
She felt full of a gay _insouciance_, a glad lightness of joy that she
had never felt before. Slipping a thin rose-colored robe over her
nightgown, she threw open the window and leaned out. The air was as pure
and clean as if it had been sieved through silk, and she breathed it
with long inspirations. It made her think of the unredeemed dirt of
other countries, the sooty air of crowded factories, hardly growing
foliage and unlovely walls.
The Embassy was a pretentious frame structure in which frequent
alterations had masked an original plan. With its tall porte-cochère,
its long narrow L which served as Chancery, the smaller white cottage
across the lawn occupied by the Secretary of Embassy, the rambling
servants' quarters and stables, it suggested some fine old Virginia
homestead, transported by Aladdin's genii to the heart of an oriental
garden. For the tiny rock-knoll, with its single twisted pine-tree in
front of the main door, the wistaria arbor and red dwarf maples, the
great stone lanterns, the miniature lake and pebbled rivulet spanned by
its arching bridge--all these were Japanese. In the early morning the
eerie witchery of the night was gone, but the sky was as deep as space
and the air languid with the perfume and warmth of a St. Martin's
summer. A green-golden glow tinged the camelia hedges and above them the
long cool expanse of weather-boarding and olive blinds--like a carving
in jade and old ivory.
As she stood there bathed in the sunlight, her hands dividing the
curtains, Barbara made a gracious part of the glimmering setting. Her
thick, ruddy hair sprang curling from her strongly modeled forehead, and
fell about her white shoulders, a warm reddish mass against the
delicately tinted curtain. There was a thoroughbred straightness in the
lines of the tall figure, in the curve of the cheek and the round
directness of the chin; and her eyes, bent on the lucent green, were the
color of brown sea-water under sapphire cloud-shadows.
From a circle of evergreens near the porte-cochère a white flag-pole
rose high above the treetops. The stars-and-stripes floated from its
halyards, for the day was the national holiday of an European power. In
the hedges sparrows were twittering, and in a plum-tree a _uguisu_--the
little Buddhist bird that calls the sacred name of the Sutras--was
warbling his sweet, slow, solemn syllables: "_Ho-kek-yo! Ho-kek-yo!_" A
gardener was sweeping the pink rain of cherry-petals from the paths with
a twig broom, the long sleeves of his blue _kimono_ fluttering in the
yellow sunshine, and in front of the servants' quarters a little girl in
flapping sandals was skipping rope with a chenille fascinator. Beyond
the wall of the compound Barbara could see the street, a low row of open
shops. In one, a number of men and girls, sitting on flat mats, were
making bamboo fans. At the corner stood a round well, from which a group
of women, barefooted and with tucked-up clothing, were drawing water in
unpainted wooden buckets with polished brass hoops, and beside it, under
a dark blue awning, a man and woman were grinding rice in a hand-mill
made of two heavy stone disks. A blue-and-white figured towel was bound
about the woman's head against the fine white rice-dust. Above them, on
a tiny portico, an old man, with the calm, benevolent face of a
porcelain mandarin, was watering an unbelievably-twisted dwarf plum on
which was a single bunch of blossoming. At the side of the street grew a
gnarled _kiri_ tree, its shambling roots encroaching on the roadway. In
their cleft was set a wooden _Shinto_ shrine with small piles of pebbles
before it. From a distance, high and clear, she heard a strain of bugles
from some squad of soldiers going to barracks, or perhaps to the
parade-ground, where, she remembered, an Imperial Review of Troops was
to be held that morning.
Barbara started suddenly, to see on the lawn just below her window, a
figure three feet high, with a round, cropped head, gazing at her from a
solemn, inquiring countenance. He wore a much-worn but clean _kimono_,
and his infantile toes clutched the thongs of clogs so large that his
feet seemed to be set on spacious wooden platforms. The youngster bent
double and staggeringly righted himself with a staccato "_O-hayo!_"
Barbara gave an inarticulate gasp; in face of his somber dignity she did
not dare to laugh. "How do you do?" she said. "Do you live here?"
"No," he replied. "I lives in a other houses."
"Oh!" exclaimed Barbara, aghast at his command of English. "What is your
name?"
"Ishikichi," he said succinctly.
"And will you tell me what you are doing, Ishikichi?"
A small hand from behind his back produced a tiny bamboo cage in which
was a bell-cricket. As he held it out, the insect chirped like an elfin
cymbal. "Find more one," he said laconically.
"And what shall you do with them, I wonder."
He took one foot from its clog and wriggled bare toes in the grass.
"Give him to new little sister," he said.
"So you have a new little sister!" exclaimed Barbara. "How fine that
must be!"
A glaze of something like disappointment spread over the diminutive
face. "Small like," he said. "More better want a brother to play with
me."
"Maybe you might exchange her for a brother," she hazarded, but the
cropped head shook despondently:
"I think no can now," he said. "We have use her four days."
Barbara laughed outright, a peal of silvery sound that echoed across the
garden--then suddenly drew back. A man on horseback was passing across
the drive toward the main gate of the compound. It was Daunt,
bareheaded, his handsome tanned face flushed with exercise, the breeze
ruffling his moist, curling hair. She flashed him a smile as his
riding-crop flew to his brow in salute. The sun glinted from its
Damascene handle, wrought into the long, grotesque muzzle of a fox.
Between the edsges of the blue silk curtains she saw him turn in the
saddle to look back before he disappeared.
She stood peering out a long time toward the low white cottage across
the clipped lawn. The laughter had left her eyes, and gradually over her
face grew a wave of rich color. She dropped the curtain and caught her
hands to her cheeks. For an instant she had seemed to feel the pressure
of strong arms, the touch of coarse tweed vividly reminiscent of a pipe.
What had come over her? The one day that had dawned at sea in golden
fire and died in crimson and purple over a file of convicts--the
dreaming night with its temple bell striking through silver mist and
violet shadows--these had left her the same Barbara that she had always
been. But somewhere, somehow, in the closed gulf between the then and
now, something new and strange and sweet had waked in her--something
that the sound of a voice in the garish sunlight had started into
clamorous reverberations.
She sat down suddenly and hid her face.
CHAPTER XV
A FACE IN THE CROWD
They rode to the parade-ground--Barbara and Patricia with the
Ambassador, behind his pair of Kentucky grays--along wide streets grown
festive overnight and buzzing with _rick'sha_ and pedestrians. Every
gateway held crossed flags bearing the blood-red rising-sun, and colored
paper lanterns were swung in festoons along the gaudy blocks of shops,
as wide open as tiers of cut honeycomb.
In their swift flight the city appeared a living sea of undulations, of
immense green wastes alternating with humming sections of trade, of
abrupt, cliff-like hills, of small parks that were masses of
cherry-bloom and landscapes of weird Japanese beauty. Patricia quoted
one of Haru's quaint sayings: "So-o-o many small village got such a
lonesomeness an' come more closer together. Tha's the way Tokyo born."
Occasionally the Ambassador pointed out the stately palace of some
influential noble, or the amorphous, depressing front of the
foreign-style stucco residence of some statesman, built in that
different period when the empire took first steps in the path of
world-powers, with its low, graceful Japanese portion beside it.
Everywhere Barbara was conscious of the flutter of children--of little
girls whose dress and hair showed a pervasive sense of care and
adornment; of faces neither gay nor sad looking from latticed windows
that hung above open gutters of sluggish ooze; of frail balconies
adorned with growing flowers or miniature gardens set in earthen trays;
of doorways hung with soft-fringed, rice-straw ropes and dotted with
paper charms--the talismanic _o-fuda_ seen on every hand in Japan. In
Yokohama what had struck her most had been the curious composite, the
jumbled dissonance of East and West. Here was a new impression; this was
real Japan, but a Japan that, if it had taken on western hues, had
everywhere qualified them by subtle variations, themselves oriental.
Past the carriage whirled landaus bearing Japanese _grandes dames_ in
native dress, with pomade-stiff coiffures against which their
rice-powdered faces made a ghastly contrast; between the rear springs of
each vehicle was fixed a round flat pommel on which a runner stood,
balancing himself to the swift movement. A Japanese military officer in
khaki, with a row of decorations on his breast, rode by on a horse too
big for him, at a jingling trot. Two soldiers passing afoot, faced
sidewise and their heavy cowhide heels came together with a thud, as
they saluted. Their arms had the jerky precision of a mechanical toy.
Through all there seemed to Barbara to strike a sense of the tenacity of
the old, of the stubborn persistence of type, as though eyes behind a
mask looked grimly at the mirror's reflection of some outlandish and but
half-accustomed masquerade. It was the shadow of the old Japan of castes
and spies and censors, of homage and _hara-kiri_, of punctilio and
porcelain. Trolley cars rumbled past; skeins of telegraph wire spun
across the vision. Yet when stone wall gaped or green hedge opened, it
was to reveal the curving tops of Buddhist _torii_ in quaint vistas of
straight-boled trees, gliding Tartar contours of roof between clumps of
palm, or bamboo thickets with shadows as black as ink; while from the
lazy scum of the wide, moat-like, stone gutters, open to the
all-putrefying sun, rose thick, marshy odors suggesting the vast languor
of a land more ancient than Egypt and Nineveh.
The carriage stopped abruptly at a cross street. A _Shinto_ funeral
_cortège_ was passing. Twelve bearers, six on each side, clad in
mourning _houri_ of pure white, bore on their shoulders the hearse, like
a shrine, built of clean unpainted wood, beautifully grained, and with
carven roof and curtains of green and gold brocade. Priests in yellow
robes, with curved gauze caps and stoles of scarlet and black, walked at
the head, fanning themselves now and then with little fans drawn from
their girdles. Coolies, dressed in white like the hearse bearers,
carried stiff, conical bouquets, six feet long, made of flowers of
staring colors, and clumps of lotos made of _papier maché_ covered with
gold and silver leaf. The chief mourner, a woman, rode smiling in a
_rick'sha_. She wore a silver-gray _kimono_ and a tall canopied cap of
white brocade with wide floating strings like an old-fashioned bonnet.
"Well, of all things!" said Patricia, in an awe-struck whisper. "What do
you think of that?" For the file of _rick'sha_ following her carried a
curious assemblage of mourners. In each sat a dog, some large, some
small, with great bows of black or white crepe tied to their collars.
Taka, the driver, turned his head and spoke:
"Dog-doctor die," he said. "All dog very sorry."
"It's the 'vet.,' father," Patricia cried. "He is dead, then--and all
his old patients are attending the funeral! See, Barbara! They are lined
up according to diplomatic precedence. That French poodle in front
belongs to the Japanese senior prince. The Aberdeen is the British
Ambassador's. And there's the Italian Embassy bull-terrier and the
Spanish _Chargé's_ 'chin.' The foreigners' dogs have black bows and the
others white. Why is that, I wonder?"
"I presume," said the Ambassador, "because white is the Japanese
mourning color."
"Of course. How stupid of me!" She sat suddenly upright. "Of all
_things_! There's our 'Dandy'!" She pointed to a tiny Pomeranian on the
seat of the last _rick'sha_. "I wondered why number-three boy was
washing him so hard this morning! It's a mercy he didn't see us, or he'd
have broken up the procession. Please take note that he's the
tail-end--which shows my own unofficial insignificance."
"There's a tourist at the hotel," said the Ambassador, "who should have
seen this. I was there the other day and I overheard her speaking to one
of the Japanese clerks. She said she had seen everything but a funeral,
and she wanted him to instruct her guide to take her to one. The clerk
said: 'I am too sorry, Madam, but this is not the season for funerals.'"
The horses trotted on, to drop to a walk, presently, on a brisk incline.
High, slanting retaining walls were on either side, and double rows of
cherry-trees, whose interlacing branches wove a roof of soft pink bloom.
Along the road were many people; _inkyo_--old men who no longer labored,
and _ba-San_--old women whom age had relieved from household cares--bent
and withered and walking with staves or leaning on the arms of their
daughters, who bore babies of their own strapped to their backs;
children clattering on loose wooden clogs; youths sauntering with
_kimono'd_ arms thrown, college-boy fashion, about each other's
shoulders; a troop of young girls in student _hakama_--skirts of deep
purple or garnet--laughing and chatting in low voices or airily swinging
bundles tied in colored _furoshiki_. Midway the wall opened into a
miniature park filled with trees, with a small lake and a _Shinto_
monument.
"Why, there's little Ishikichi," said Patricia. "I never saw him so far
from home before. Isn't that a queer-looking man with him!"
The solemn six-year-old, Barbara's window acquaintance of the morning,
was trotting from the inclosure, his small fingers clutching the hand of
a foreigner. The latter was of middle age. His coat was a heavy,
double-breasted "reefer." His battered hat, wide-brimmed and
soft-crowned, was a joke. But his linen was fresh and good and his
clumsy shoes did not conceal the smallness and shapeliness of his feet.
He was lithe and well built, and moved with an easy swing of shoulder
and a step at once quick and graceful. His back was toward them, but
Barbara could see his long, gray-black hair, a square brow above an
aquiline profile at once bold and delicate, and a drooping mustache shot
with gray. Many people seemed to regard him, but he spoke to no one save
his small companion. His manner, as he bent down, had something
caressing and confiding.
At the sound of wheels the man turned all at once toward them. As his
gaze met Barbara's, she thought a startled look shot across it. At side
view his face had seemed a dark olive, but now in the vivid sunlight it
showed blanched. His eyes were deep in arched orbits. One, she noted,
was curiously prominent and dilated. From a certain bird-like turn of
the head, she had an impression that this one eye was nearly if not
wholly sightless. All this passed through her mind in a flash, even
while she wondered at his apparent agitation.
For as he gazed, he had dropped the child's hand. She saw his lips
compress in an expression grim and forbidding. He made an involuntary
movement, as though mastered by a quick impulse. Then, in a breath, his
face changed. He shrank back, turned sharply into the park and was lost
among the trees.
"What an odd man!" exclaimed Patricia. "I suppose he resented our
staring at him. He's left the little chap all alone, too. Stop the
horses a moment, Tucker," she directed, and as they pulled up she called
to the child.
But there was no reply. Ishikichi looked at her a moment frowningly,
then, without a word, turned and stalked somberly after his companion.
"What an infant thunder-cloud!" said Patricia as the carriage proceeded.
"That must be where our precious prodigy gets his English. Poor mite!"
she added. "He was the inseparable of the son of Toru, the flower-dealer
opposite the Embassy, Barbara, and the dear little fellow was run over
and killed last week by a foreign carriage. No doubt he's grieving over
it, but in Japan even the babies are trained not to show what they feel.
I wonder who this new friend is?"
"I've seen the man once before," said the Ambassador. "He was pointed
out to me. His name is Thorn. His first name is Greek--Aloysius, isn't
it?--yes, Aloysius. He is a kind of recluse: one of those bits of human
flotsam, probably, that western civilization discards, and that drift
eventually to the East. It would be interesting to know his history."
So this, thought Barbara, was the exile of whom Daunt had told her, who
had chosen to bury himself--from what unguessed motive!--in an oriental
land, sunk out of sight like a stone in a pool. When he looked at her
she had felt almost an impulse to speak, so powerfully had the shadow in
his eyes suggested the canker of solitariness, the dreary ache of
bitterness prolonged. She felt a wave of pity surging over her.
But the carriage leaped forward, new sights sprang on them and the
fleeting thought dropped away at length behind her, with the overhanging
cherry-blooms, the little green park, and the strange face at its
gateway.
CHAPTER XVI
"BANZAI NIPPON!"
Gradually, as they proceeded, the throng became denser. Policemen in
neat suits of white-duck and wearing long cavalry swords lined the road.
They had smart military-looking caps and white cotton gloves, and stood,
as had the officer before the file of convicts in Shimbashi Station,
moveless and imperturbable. The crowds were massed now in close, locked
lines on either side. In one place a school-master stood guard over a
file of small boys in holiday _kimono_: a little paper Japanese flag was
clutched in each chubby hand.
In all the ranks there was no jostling, or fighting for position, no
loud-voiced jest or expostulation; a spell was in the air; the Imperial
Presence who was to pass that way had cast His beneficent Shadow before.
Through a double row of saluting police they whirled into an immense
brown field, as level as a floor, stretching before them seemingly
empty, a dull, yellow-brown waste horizoned by feathery tree-tops. The
carriage turned to the right, skirting a surging sea of brown faces held
in check by a stretched rope; these gave place to a mass of officers
standing in dress-uniform, with plumed caps and breasts ablaze with
decorations; in another moment they descended before a canvas _marquée_
where brilliant regimental uniforms from a dozen countries shifted and
mingled with diplomatic costumes heavy with gold-braid, and with women's
gay frocks and picture-hats.
The air was full of exhilaration; people were laughing and chatting. The
British Ambassador displayed the plaid of a Colonel of Highlanders; he
had fought in the Soudan. The Chinese Minister was in his own mandarin
costume; from his round, jade-buttoned hat swept the much coveted
peacock feathers and on his breast were the stars of the "Rising-Sun"
and the "Double-Dragon." The American Ambassador alone, of all the
foreign representatives, wore the plain frock-coat and silk hat of the
civilian. From group to group strolled officials of the Japanese Foreign
Office and Cabinet Ministers, their ceremonial coats crossed by white or
crimson cordons. And through it all Barbara moved, responsive to all
this lightness and color, bowing here and there to introductions that
left her only the more conscious of the one tall figure that had met
them and now walked at her side.
Daunt could not have told that the flowers in her hat were brown
orchids: he only knew that they matched the color of her eyes. Last
night the moonlight had lent her something of the fragile and ethereal,
like itself. Now the sunlight painted in clear warm colors of cream and
cardinal. It glinted from the perfect curve of her forehead, and tangled
in the wide wave of her bronze hair, making it gleam like hot copper
spun into silk-fine strands. His finger-tips tingled to touch it.
He started, as--"A penny for your thoughts," she said, with sudden
mischief.
"Have you so much about you?" he countered.
"That's a subterfuge."
"You wouldn't be flattered to hear them, I'm afraid."
"The reflection is certainly a sad blow to my self-esteem!"
"Well," he said daringly, "I was thinking how I would like to pick you
up in my arms before all these people and run right out in the center of
that field--"
She flushed to the tips of her ears. "And then--"
"Just run, and run, and run away."
"What a heroic exploit!" she said with subtle mockery, but the flush
deepened.
"You know to what lengths I can go in my longing to be a hero!" he
muttered.
"Running off with girls under your arm seems to have become a mania. But
isn't your idea rather prosaic in this age of flying-machines? To swoop
down on one in an aëroplane would be so much more thrilling! This is the
field where you practise, too, isn't it? Is that building away over
there where you keep your Glider?"'
"Yes. At first I made the models in a Japanese house of mine near here.
I keep it still, from sentiment."
"How fine to meet a man who admits to having sentiment! I'm tremendously
interested in Japanese houses. You must show it to me."
"I will. And when will you let me take you for a 'fly?'"
"I'm relieved," she said, "to find you willing to ask permission."
Her eyes sparkled into his, and both laughed. Patricia was chatting
animatedly with Count Voynich, the young diplomatist whom she had
pointed out in the train, and whose monocle now looked absurdly
contemplative and serene under a menacing helmet. The confusion of many
colors, the pomp and panoply under the day's golden azure, was singing
in Barbara's veins. She moved suddenly toward the front. "Come," she
said, "I want you to tell me things!"
"I'm going to," he answered grimly. "I've known I should, ever since--"
"Look!" she cried. Several coaches had bowled up; behind each stood
footmen in gold-lace and cocked hats, knee breeches and white silk
stockings. Daunt named the occupants as they descended: the Premier, one
of the "Elder Statesmen," the Minister of the Household.
"Who are the people there at the side, under the awning?"
"Tourists. Each Embassy and Legation is allowed a certain number of
invitations."
"Why, yes," said Barbara. "I see some of my ship-mates." She smiled and
nodded across as faces turned toward her. There was the gaunt, sallow
woman who had distributed Christian Science tracts (till sea-sickness
claimed her for its own) and little Miss Tippetts (the printed
steamer-list, with unconscious wit, had made it "Tidbits"), who had
flitted about the companion-ways like a shawled wraith, radiant now in a
white _lingerie_ gown and a hat covered with red hollyhocks. And there,
too, was the familiar painted-muslin and the expansive white waistcoat
of the train.
A hundred yards to the right was spread a wide silk canopy of royal
purple, caught back with crimson tassels. "What is that?" Barbara asked,
pointing.
"That is for the Emperor and his suite. The big sixteen-petaled
chrysanthemum on its front is the Imperial Crest; no one else is allowed
to use or carry it. The men on horseback are Princes of the Blood.
Almost all the great generals of the late war are in that group behind
them. The man smoking a cigarette is the Japanese Minister of War."
"But when do the troops come?" Barbara inquired. "I see only one little
company out there in the center."
"That is a band," he said. "Look farther. Can you make out something
like a wide, brown ribbon stretched all around the field?"
She looked. The far-away, moveless, dun-colored strip merged with the
sere plain, but now, here and there, she saw minute needle points of
sunlight twinkle across it. She made an exclamation. For the tiny
flashes were sun-gleams from the bayonets of massed men, clad in
neutral-tinted khaki, silent, motionless as a brown wall, a living river
frozen to utter immobility by a word of command that had been spoken two
long hours before.
A mounted _aide_ galloped wildly past toward the purple canopy. As he
flashed by, a thin bugle-note rang out and a band far back by the gate
at which they had entered began playing a minor melody. Strange, slow,
infinitely solemn and sad, the strain rolled around the hushed
field--the _Kimi-ga-yo_, the "Hymn of the Sovereign," adapted by a
German melodist a score of years ago, which in Japan is played only in
the Imperial Presence or that of its outward and visible tokens. The
counterpoint, with its muttering roll of snare-drums on the long chords,
and sudden, sharp clashes of cymbals, gave the majestic air an effect
weird and unforgetable. The strain sank to silence, but with the last
note a second nearer band caught it up and repeated it; then, nearer
still, another and another.
Barbara, leaning, saw a great state-coach of green and gold coming down
the field. It was drawn by four of the most beautiful bay horses she had
ever seen. Coachman, postilions and footmen wore red coats heavily
frogged with gold, white cloth breeches and block enamel top-boots. As
it came briskly along that animate wall of spectators, the vast
concourse, save for the welling or ebbing minor of the bands, was
silent, hushed as in a cathedral. But as it passed, the packed sea of
brown faces--the mass of _kimono_ next the gate and the ranks of
splendid uniforms--bent forward as one man, in a great sighing rustle,
like a field of tall grass when a sudden wind passes over it.
The plumed hats of the diplomatists came off; they bowed low. The ladies
courtesied, and Barbara, as her gaze lifted, caught an instant's
glimpse, through the coach's glass sides, of that kingly figure,
heaven-descended and sacred, mysterious alike to his own subjects as to
the outside world, through whom flows to the soul of modern Japan the
manifest divinity and living guidance of cohorts of dead Emperors
stretching backward into the night of Time!
* * * * *
The band stationed in the center of the immense field had begun to
play--something with a martial swing; and now the far brown strip that
had blent with brown earth began to shift and tremble like the quiver of
air above heated metal. Its motes detached themselves, clustered anew;
and the long, wide ribbon, like a huge serpent waked from rigid sleep in
the sunshine, swept into view: regiments of men, armed and blanketed, by
file and platoon. They moved with high, jerky "goose-step" and loosely
swinging arm, line upon line, till the ground shook with the tread.
Before each regiment were borne strange flags, blackened and tattered by
blood and shell. Some were mere flapping fringes. But they were more
precious than human lives. One had been found on a Manchurian
battlefield, wrapped about the body of a dead Japanese, beneath his
clothing. Wounded, he had so concealed it, then killed himself, lest,
captured alive, the standard he bore might fall into the hands of the
enemy. As each new rank came opposite the coach before the purple
canopy, an officer's sword flashed out in salute, and a "_banzai!_" tore
across the martial music like the ragged yell of a fanatical Dervish.
Daunt, watching Barbara, saw the light leaping in her brown eyes, the
excitement coming and going in her face. Again and again he fixed his
gaze before him, as infantry, cavalry and artillery marched and pounded
and rumbled past. In vain. Like a wilful drunkard it returned to
intoxicate itself with the sight of her eager beauty, that made the
scene for him only a splendid blur, an extraneous impression of masses
of swaying bodies moving like marionettes, of glistening bayonets,
horses, clattering ammunition wagons, and fluttering pennants.
In Barbara, however, every nerve was thrilling to the sight. For the
moment she had forgotten even the man beside her. As she watched the
audacious outpouring of drilled power, tempered and restrained, yet so
terribly alive in its coiled virility, she was feeling a keen pang of
sympathy that was almost pain. In this burning panorama she divined no
shrinking, devious thing sinking with the fatigue of ages, aping the
superficialities of a remote race: not merely a tidal wave of intense
vitality, mobile and mercurial, hastening onward toward an inaudible
unknown, but a splendid rebirth, a dazzling reincarnation of old spirit
in new form, a symbol concrete and vital, like the blaze of a beacon
flaming a racial _réveille_.
She turned toward Daunt, her hand outstretched, her fingers on his arm,
her lips opened.
But she did not speak. Afterward she did not know what she had intended
to say.
CHAPTER XVII
A SILENT UNDERSTANDING
Phil descended from his _rick'sha_ at the Tokyo Club and paid the
coolie.
The building faced an open square between the Imperial Hotel and the
Parliament Buildings, along one of the smaller picturesque moats, which
the fever for modernization was now filling in to make a conventional
boulevard. A motor shed stood at the side of the plaza and an automobile
or two was generally in evidence. The structure was small but
comfortable enough, with reading- and card-rooms and a billiard-room of
many tables. It was the clearing-house for the capital's news, the
general exchange for Diet, Peers' Club and the Embassies. It was a place
of tacit free-masonry and conversational dissections. From five to seven
in the afternoon it was a polyglot babble of Japanese, English, French,
German and Italian, punctuated with the tinkle of glasses and the
cheerful click of billiard balls. Over its tables secretaries met to
gossip of the newest _entente_ or the latest social "affair," and
_protocols_ had been drafted on the big, deep, leather sofas adjoining
the bar.
The door was opened by a servile bell-boy in buttons. Phil tossed his
hat on to the hall-rack and entered. It was cool and pleasant inside,
and a great bowl of China asters sat on the table beside the membership
book. On the wall was a wire frame full of visitors' cards. He strode
through the office and entered a large, glass-inclosed piazza where a
number of Japanese, some in foreign, some in native costume, were
watching a game of _Go_. Two younger Legation _attachés_ were shaking
dice at another table. It was but a little past noon and the place had
an air of sober quiet, very different, Phil reflected, from the club on
the Yokohama Bund, which was always buzzing, and where he was
hail-fellow-well-met with everybody. Frowning, he passed into the next
room.
Here his eye lightened. Sitting in a corner of one of the huge sofas
which sank under his enormous weight, was Doctor Bersonin. A little
round table was before him on which sat a tall glass frosted with
cracked ice.
"Sit down," said the expert. "How do you come to be in Tokyo? The
Review, I presume." He struck a call-bell on the table and gave an order
to the waiter.
Phil lighted a cigarette. "No," he said, "I've come to stay for a
while."
"You haven't given up your bungalow on the Bluff?" asked Bersonin
quickly. There was an odd eagerness in his colorless face--a look of
almost dread, which Phil, lighting his cigarette, did not see. It
changed to relief as the other answered:
"No. Probably I shan't be here more than a few days."
The expert settled back in his seat. "You'll not find the hotel
everything it should be, I'm afraid," he observed more casually.
"I'm not there," Phil answered. "I--I've got a little Japanese house."
"So! A _ménage de garçon_, eh?" The big man held up his clinking glass
to the light, and under cover of it, his deep-set yellowish eyes darted
a keen, detective look at Phil's averted face. "Well," he went on, "how
are your affairs? Has the stern brother appeared yet?"
Phil shifted uneasily. "No," he replied. "I expect him pretty soon,
though." He drained the glass the boy had filled. "You've been
tremendously kind, Doctor," he went on hurriedly, "to lend me so much,
without the least bit of security--"
"Pshaw!" said Bersonin. "Why shouldn't I?" He put his hand on the
other's shoulder with a friendly gesture. "I only wish money could give
me as much pleasure as it does you, my boy."
Two men had seated themselves in the next room. Through the open door
came fragments of conversation, the gurgle of poured liquid and the
bubbling hiss of Hirano mineral water. Bersonin lowered his voice:
"Youth! What a great thing it is! Red-blood and imagination and zest to
enjoy. All it needs is the wherewithal to gild its pleasures. After a
time age catches us, and what are luxuries then? Only things to make
tiresomeness a little less irksome!"
Phil moved his glass on the table top in sullen circles. "But suppose
one hasn't the 'wherewithal' you talk of? What's the fun without money,
even when you're young? I've never been able to discover it!"
"Find the money," said Bersonin.
"I wish some one would tell me how!"
Bersonin's head turned toward the door. He sat suddenly rigid. It came
to Phil that he was listening intently to the talk between the two men
in the next room.
"I needn't point out"--it was a measured voice, cold and incisive and
deliberate--"that when the American fleet came, two years ago,
conditions were quite different. The cruise was a national _tour de
force_; the visit to Japan was incidental. Besides, there was really no
feeling then between the two nations--that was all a creation of the
yellow press. But the coming of this European Squadron to-day is a
different thing. It is a season of general sensitiveness and distrust,
and when the ships belong to a nation between which and Japan there is
real and serious diplomatic tension--well, in my opinion the time is, at
best, inopportune."
"Perhaps"--a younger voice was speaking now, less certain, less poised
and a little hesitant--"perhaps the very danger makes for caution.
People are particularly careful with matches when there's a lot of
powder about."
"True, so far as intention goes. But there is the possibility of some
_contre-temps_. You remember the case of the _Ajax_ in the Eighties. It
was blown up in a friendly harbor--clearly enough by accident, at least
so far as the other nation was concerned. But it was during a time of
strain and hot blood, and you know how narrowly a great clash was
averted. If war had followed, regiments would have marched across the
frontier, shouting: 'Remember the _Ajax_!' As it was, there was a panic
in three bourses. Solid securities fell to the lowest point in their
history. The yellow press pounded down the market, and a few speculators
on the short side made gigantic fortunes."
A moment's pause ensued. Bersonin's fingers were rigid. There seemed
suddenly to Phil to be some significance between his silence and the
conversation--as if he wished it to sink into his, Phil's, mind. The
voice continued:
"What has happened once may happen again. What if one of those
Dreadnaughts by whatever accident should go down in this friendly
harbor? It doesn't take a vivid imagination to picture the headlines
next morning in the newspapers at home!"
The ice in the tumblers clinked; there was a sound of pushed-back
chairs.
As their departing footsteps died in the hall, Bersonin's gaze lifted
slowly to Phil's face. It had in it now the look it had held when he
gazed from the roof of the bungalow on the Bluff across the anchorage
beneath. Phil did not start or shrink. Instead, the slinking evil that
ruled him met half-way the bolder evil in that glance, from whose
sinister suggestion the veil was for a moment lifted, recognizing a
tacit kinship. Neither spoke, but as the hard young eyes looked into the
cavernous, topaz eyes of Doctor Bersonin, Phil _knew_ that the thought
that lay coiled there was a thing unholy and unafraid. His heart beat
faster, but it warmed. He felt no longer awed by the other's greater
age, standing and accomplishments. He was conscious of a new,
half-insolent sense of easy comradeship.
"Suppose," said Bersonin slowly, "I should show you how to find the
money."
A sharp eagerness darted across Phil's face. Money! How much he needed
it, longed for it! It could put him on his feet, clear off his debts,
square his bridge-balance, and--his brother notwithstanding!--enable him
to begin another chapter of the careless life he loved! He looked
steadily into the expert's face.
"Tell me!" he almost whispered.
Bersonin rose and held out his hand. He did not smile.
"Come with me to-night," he said. "I dine late, but we'll take a spin in
my car and have some tea somewhere beforehand. Tell me where your house
is and I'll send Ishida with the motor-car for you."
Phil gave him the address and he went out with no further word. A great,
brass-fitted automobile, with a young, keen-eyed Japanese sitting beside
the chauffeur, throbbed up from the shed. Bersonin climbed ponderously
in. A gray-haired diplomatist, entering the Club with a stranger,
pointed the big man out to the other as he was whirled away.
CHAPTER XVIII
IN THE BAMBOO LANE
_What did Bersonin mean?_ Phil replenished his glass, feeling a tense,
nervous excitement.
Why had he listened so intently--made _him_ listen--to what the men in
the next room were saying? He could recall it all--for some reason every
word was engraven on his mind. The visit of the foreign Squadron.
Speculators who had once made quick fortunes through an accident to a
battle-ship. He thought of the look he had seen on Bersonin's face.
"What do you want me to do?" He muttered the words to himself. As he
rose to go he glanced half-fearfully over his shoulder.
He walked along the street, his brain afire. He was passing a moat in
whose muck bottom piling was being driven; the heavy plunger was lifted
by a dozen ropes pulled by a ring of coolie women, dressed like men,
with blue-cotton leggins and red cloths about their heads. As they
dragged at the straw ropes, and the great weight rose and fell, they
chanted a wailing refrain, with something minor and plaintive in its
burden--
"_Yó--eeya--kó--ra!
Yó-eeya--kó--ra!_"
_What do you want me to do?..._ The words wove oddly with the refrain.
Why should he say them over and over? Again and again it came--an echo
of an echo--and again and again he seemed to see the look in the
expert's hollow, cat-like eyes! It haunted him as he walked on toward
Aoyama parade-ground, to the little house in _Kasumigatani Cho_, the
"Street-of-the-Misty-Valley."
Then, as he walked, he saw some one that for the moment drove it from
his mind. He had turned for a short-cut through a temple inclosure, and
there he met her face to face--the girl of the _matsuri_, whom he had
seen wading in the foam at Kamakura. Her slim neck, pale with
rice-powder, rose from a soft white neckerchief flowered with gold, and
a scarlet poppy was dreaming in her black hair. Phil's face sprang red,
and a wave of warm color overran her own.
"_O-Haru-San!_" he cried.
"_Konichi-wa_," she answered with grave courtesy and made to pass him,
but he turned and walked by her side. "Please, please!" he entreated.
"If you only knew how often I have looked for you! Don't be unkind!"
"Why you talk with me?" said Haru, turning. "My Japanese girl--no all
same your country."
"You wild, pretty thing!" he said. "Why are you so afraid of me?
Foreigners don't eat butterflies."
"No," she answered, without hesitation, "they jus' break wings."
He laughed unevenly. Her quickness of retort delighted him, and her
beauty was stinging his blood. He put out his hand and touched her
sleeve, but she drew away hurriedly:
"See!" she said. "My know those people to come in gate. Talk--'bout my
_papa-San_--please, so they will to think he have know you, _né_?"
Phil obeyed the hint, but Haru's cheeks, as she saluted her friends,
were flushing painfully. It was her first subterfuge employed in a
moment of embarrassment with the realization that her home was near and
that she was violating the code of deportment that from babyhood hedges
about the young Japanese girl with a complicated etiquette.
The women they had passed looked back curiously at the foreigner walking
with her. One, a girl of Haru's own age, called smilingly after her:
"_Komban Mukojima de sho?_" Phil understood the query. Was she going to
Mukojima--to the cherry festival--to-night! His eyes sparkled at the
tossed-back, "_Hai!_" Well, he would be there, too! He had appreciated
the quick wit of her subterfuge. The clever little baggage! She was not
such a small, brown saint, after all!
"I think I did that rather well," he said, when they had passed out of
earshot. "They'll think your honorable parent and I exchange New Year
gifts at the very least."
A little smile of irrepressible fun was lurking under Haru's flush. "You
have ask how is _papa-San_ rhu-ma-tis-um," she said. "In our street he
have some large fame, for because he so old and no have got."
Phil laughed aloud. "Look here, little Haru," he said, "you and I are
going to be great friends, aren't we?" He looked down at the slim,
nervous arm, so soft and firm of flesh, so deliciously turned and
modeled. He knew a jade bracelet in Yokohama that would mightily become
it--he would write to-night and have it sent up! "When can I see you
again, eh?"
They had turned into a narrow deserted lane, bordered with
bamboo fences, and opening, a little way beyond, into the wider
Street-of-Prayer-to-the-Gods. She stopped as he spoke and shook her
head. "My no can tell," she answered. "No come more far. My house very
near now."
He caught her hand--it was almost as small as a child's, with its
delicate wrist and slender fingers. "Give me a kiss and I will let you
go," he said.
As she shrank back indignantly against the palings, her free hand flung
up across her face, he threw his arms about her and strained her to him.
She wrestled against him with little inarticulate sobs, but he lifted
her face and kissed her again and again.
He released her, breathing hard, the veins in his temples throbbing, his
lips burning hot. He stood a moment looking after her, as white-faced
and breathless, she fled down the bamboo lane.
"There!" he muttered. "That's for you to remember me by--till next
time!"
CHAPTER XIX
THE BISHOP ASKS A QUESTION
Bishop Randolph lived in the quarter of Tokyo called Ts'kiji--a section
of "made-ground" in the
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