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.
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:
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:
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.
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!"
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.
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."
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.
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 edges 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.
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.