CHAPTER XVI
"BANZAI NIPPON!"

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

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

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

It was a mile from the great, double-moated park of the Imperial Palace, from the Diet and the Foreign Office, whither, scarcely a generation ago, representatives of European powers had galloped on horse-back, with a mounted guard against swashbuckling "two-sword men." The streets, however, on which once an American Secretary of Legation, so spurring, had been cut in two by a single stroke of a thirsting samurai sword, were peaceful enough in this era of Meiji. The cathedral, the college, the low brown hospital and the lines of red-brick mission houses stood on grassy lawns behind green hedges which gave a suggestion of a quiet English village. A couple of the smaller Legations still clung to their ancient sites and the quarter boasted, besides, a score of ambitious European residences and a modern hotel.

In the rectory the bishop sat at tiffin with the archbishop of the Russian Cathedral, a man of seventy-eight, gray-bearded and patriarchal—another St. Francis Xavier. In this foreign field the pair had been friends during more than a score of years. Both were equally broad-minded, had long ago thrown down the sectarian barriers too apt to prevail in less restricted communities. To a large extent they were confidants. The archbishop spoke little English, and the bishop no Russian and but "inebriate" French (as he termed it), so that their talk was habitually in Japanese. When they had finished eating both men bowed their heads in a silent grace. The Russian, as he rose, made the sign of the cross.

As they entered the library a wrinkled house-servant sucked in his breath behind them.

"Will the thrice-eminent guest deign to partake of a little worthless tobacco?" he inquired, in the ceremonious honorifics of the vernacular.

The thrice-eminent shook his head, and the bishop answered: "Honorable thanks, Honda-San, our guest augustly does not smoke."

At the table they had been talking of the great dream of both—the Christianization of modern Japan. The archbishop continued the conversation now:

"As I was saying, the great stumbling-block is the language. It is all right for you and me, who have had twenty years at it, but our helpers haven't. His code of courtesy forbids a Japanese to seem to correct even when we are absurdly wrong. One of my boys"—so the bishop affectionately referred to his younger coadjutors—"was preaching the other day on 'The Spiritual Attributes of Mankind.' He meant to use the word ningen, man in the wide sense. He preached, he thought, with a good deal of success—the people seemed particularly grave and attentive. Afterward he asked an old Japanese what he thought of the subject. The man replied that he had felt much instructed to find there were so many things to be said about it. He added that he himself generally ate them boiled. My young man had used the word ninjin—carrots. 'The Spiritual Attributes of Carrots!' And a whole sermon on it. Imagine it!"

The archbishop threw back his head and laughed. Then the conversation drifted again into the serious. "Of course," said the bishop, "there is at bottom the oriental inability to separate racial traits, to realize that Christianity has made Christendom's glories, not her shames. The Japanese are essentially a spiritually-minded people. Some of the West's most common vices they are strangely without. And their code of every-day morals—well, we can throw very few stones at them there!"

The archbishop nodded.

"Few, indeed," he said. "No Japanese Don Juan ever could exist. A Japanese woman would be scandalized by a Greek statue. She would recoil at a French nude. She would fly with astonishment and shame from the sight of a western ballet. Our whole system strikes the Oriental as not only monstrous but disgustingly immoral. It seems to him, for instance, sheer barbarity for a man to love his wife even half as well as he does his own mother and father. A curious case in point happened not so long ago. A peasant had a mother who became blind. He consulted the village necromancer, who told him if his mother could eat a piece of human heart she would get her sight back. The peasant went home in tears and told his wife. She said, 'We have only one boy. You can very easily get another wife as good or better than me, but you might never have another son. Therefore, you must kill me and take my heart for your mother.' They embraced, and he killed her with his sword. The child awoke and screamed. Neighbors and the police came. In the police court the peasant's tale moved the judges to tears. They quite understood. They didn't condemn the man to death. Really the one who ought to have been killed was the necromancer."

"And this," said the bishop musingly, "only a few miles from where they were teaching integral calculus and Herbert Spencer!"

His visitor sat a while in thought. "By the way," he said presently, changing the subject, "I passed your new Chapel the other day. It is very handsome. Your niece, I think you told me, built it. May I ask—"

"Yes," said the host, "it is my dead sister's child, Barbara—John Fairfax's daughter."

A look passed between them, and the bishop rose and paced up and down, a habit when he was deeply moved. "She came back to Japan with me," he continued. "I am to take her to see the Chapel this afternoon. Yesterday she told me that she intends it to be dedicated to her father's memory."

For a moment there was no reply. Then the other said: "You have heard nothing of Fairfax all these years?"

"Not a word."

"She has never known?"

The bishop shook his head. "She believes he died before her mother left Japan." He paused before the window, his back to the other. "He was my friend!" he said; "and I loved him. I gave my sister to him, and she loved him, too!"

"I remember," said the archbishop slowly. "She went back to America from Nagasaki. How strange it was! She never told any one why she left him?"

"Never a word. She died before I went to America again. She left me a letter which hinted at something wholly unforgivable—almost Satanic, it must have seemed to her."

"And he?"

"Disappeared. He was thought to have gone to China. Perhaps he is alive there yet. I have always wondered. If so, how is he living—in what way?" The bishop turned abruptly. "In view of what we know, can I lend myself to the dedication of this house of our Lord to a memory that may be infamous? I ask you as a friend."

The older man was a long time silent.

"'His ways are past finding out,'" he said at length. "I am conscious, sometimes, of a hidden purpose in things. The daughter's memory of her father is a beautiful thing. Let us not destroy it!"

CHAPTER XX
THE TRESPASSER

Barbara had fallen in love with Haru's piquant personality—with her fragile loveliness, her quaint phrasing, her utter desire to please. While Patricia deepened her engaging freckles on the tennis court, she had made the Japanese girl bring her samisen and play. At first the music had seemed uncouth and elfish—a queer, barbaric twanging, like an intoxicated banjo with no bass string, tricked with unmelodious chirpings, and woven with extraordinary runs and unfamiliar intervals. But slowly, after the first few moments, there had crept to her inner ear a strange, errant rhythm. She had felt her feet stealthily gliding, her arms bending, with those of the score of listening children who at the first twittering of the strings, had crept from stables and servants' quarters like infant toads in a shower. Afterward Haru, in her pretty broken English, had told her stories—old legends that are embalmed in the geisha dances, of the forty-seven Ronin, and of the great Shogun who slept by the huge stone lanterns in Uyeno Park.

When Barbara and her uncle started on their walk—he was to show her the Chapel—the Ambassador strolled with them as far as the main gate of the compound. A string of carriages from the Imperial stables—each with the golden chrysanthemum on its lacquered panel—was just passing. Their occupants, some of whom were Japanese and some foreign, were in naval uniform, their breasts covered with orders.

"The officers of the foreign Squadron, no doubt," said the Ambassador, "being shown the sights of the capital. Day after to-morrow the Minister of Marine begins the official entertainment with a ball in their honor. You will enjoy that, Barbara."

"I wish," said the bishop, "that the pessimists who are so fond of talking of diplomatic 'strain' could see a Japanese welcome. The stay of these officers will be one long festivity. Yet to read a Continental journal you would think every other Japanese was carrying a club for use if they ventured ashore."

The Ambassador watched the cavalcade thoughtfully. For weeks, the newspapers of European capitals had talked of conflicting interests and unreconciled differences between the two countries. He knew that there was little in this, in fact, save the journalistic necessity for "news" and a nervousness that seems periodically to oppress highly strung Chanceries as it does individuals. Beneath this surface current, diplomacy had gone its even, temperate way, undisturbed. But as a trained diplomatist he knew that the most baseless rumor, if too long persisted in, had grave danger, and he had welcomed the coming of the Squadron, for the sake of the effect on foreign public opinion, of the lavish and open-hearted hospitality which Japan would offer it. When the carriages had whirled past he bade the others good-by and went back to his books.

Walking up the sloping "Hill-of-the-Spirit" to the templed knoll behind it, Barbara felt in tune with the afternoon. All along flaunting camphor-trees and cryptomeria peered above the skirting walls and the scent of wistaria was as heavy as that of new-mown hay. The ground was white and dusty and here and there briskly moving handcarts were sprinkling water. Little girls, with their hair in pigtails tied with bright-colored yarn and ribbon, and in brilliant figured kimono of red and purple, ran hither and thither in some game, and on the gutter-edge a naked baby stared up at them with grave, mistrustful eyes, his shaven head bobbing in the sunshine. Half-way up the hill a group of coolies were resting beside their carts. Their faces had the look of lotos-eaters, languid and serene. As they walked Barbara told of the adventure of the evening before with the wolf-hound, and of the Review of the morning, and the bishop, shrewdly regarding her, thought he had never seen her so beautiful.

"What has happened—who has happened, Barbara?" he asked, for he suddenly guessed he knew what that look meant.

Her eyes dropped and her rising color confirmed his idea. "I don't know—do you?"

He took out his pocketbook and handed her a clipping from a morning newspaper. It chronicled the arrival of the yacht Barbara.

She looked at him out of eyes brimming with laughter:

"But not Ware?" he finished. "All right. He'll speak for himself, no doubt. The paper says he's at Nara; but then, he doesn't know you are here yet. We pushed our sailing date forward, you remember."

"I'm trying to curb my impatience," she said blithely. "Meanwhile, I can't tell you what a good time I'm having. I shall stay in Japan for ever: I can feel it in my bones! I shall have a Japanese house with a chaperon, two tailless cats and an amah, and study the three systems of flower-arrangement and the Tea-Ceremony."

They had reached the huge gate, with its little booth in which a sentry now stood. "He wears the uniform of the Imperial Guard," the bishop said. "That is the residence of one of the daughters of the Emperor."

He turned into the lane that opened opposite. It was hedged with some unfamiliar thorny shrub with woolly yellow blossoms, and a little way inside stood an old temple gate with a stone torii. She stopped with an exclamation.

"Yes," he said, "there is the Chapel."

Barbara was looking opposite the torii, where, amid the flowering green, a slanting roof lifted, holding a cross. It stood out, whitely cut against the blue, a silent witness. Facing the dragon-swarming gate, it made her think of pale martyrs in gorgeous pagan countries, of Paul standing before the Temple of Diana in Ephesus, and lonely Christian anchorites in profane lands of green and gold.

"What Christians some of these Japanese make!" the bishop said, as they finished their tour of the building. "I know of a carpenter in Sendai who became a convert. He used to visit the prison and one day he took a woman there to see her husband, a hardened and obdurate criminal. In the interview the man stabbed his wife. The chief-of-police, on account of the carpenter's reputation for justice and pure-living, left the punishment of the man to him. What do you think he did?"

She could not guess.

"He refused to punish him at all, on the simple ground that Christ would not. As a result the convict is now one of the best Christian teachers we have in Sendai. The month before this happened," he continued, smiling reflectively, "a thief broke into the rectory and stole my watch. I notified the police, and they brought it back to me in a few days. But where is my thief? You remember Jean Valjean and the silver candle-sticks? Maybe the Sendai carpenter was nearer right than I."

Barbara had paused in front of the black space for the stained-glass window.

"It will be here," the bishop said, answering her thought. "It is to be put in place in time for the dedication service to-morrow morning." He stepped to the door and peered into the interior. "You will want to look about a bit, no doubt. I have a call to make in the neighborhood—suppose I stop on my way back for you."

For a few moments after his departure Barbara stood listening to the dulled sound of the workmen's tools. The roof of the temple opposite had a curving, Tartar-like ridge, at either end of which was a huge fish, its head pointed inward, its wide forked tail twisted high in air. Under its scalloped eaves she saw the flash of a swallow, and far above a gaudy paper kite careened in the blue.

She crossed the lane and looked into the shady inclosure, where the bronze lanterns and the tombstones stood, as gray and lichened as the stone beneath her feet. Before many of the graves stood green bamboo vases holding bunches of fresh leaves. An old woman was moving noiselessly about, watering these with a long bamboo dipper and lighting incense-sticks as she went. In one place a young man knelt before an ancestral monument, softly clapping his hands in prayer. The whole place was drenched in a tone limpid and serene, the very infusion of peace. Only in the black temple interior she caught the dim glow of candles and somewhere a muffled baton was tapping on hollow wood.

"Min ... Min ... Min .. Min .. Min . Min . Min-Min-Min-Minminminminmin...." At first slowly, then faster and faster, till the notes merged and died away in a muttering roll, to begin once more with the slowness of a leisurely metronome.

The ornate front of the building on the right of the yard attracted her and she went nearer. Beyond the hedge she could see a portion of its garden. Reflecting that this was a temple property and hence, no doubt, open to the public, she unlatched its bamboo gate and entered.

Before her curved a line of flat stepping-stones set in clean, gray gravel. On one side was a low camelia hedge spotted with blossoms of deep crimson and on the other a miniature thicket of fern and striped ground-bamboo. Beyond this rose a mossy hillock up whose green sides clambered an irregular pathway, set with tall shinto lanterns and large stones, like gigantic, many-colored quartz pebbles. Here and there the flushed pink of cherry-trees made the sky a tapestry of blue-rose, and in the hollows grew a burnished, purple shrub that seemed to be powdering the ground with the velvet petals of pansies.

Barbara had seen many photographs of Japanese gardens, but they had either lacked color or been over-tinted. This lay chromatic, visualized, braided with precious hues and steeped in the tender, unshamed glories of a tropic spring. For a moment she shut her eyes to fix the picture for ever on her brain.

She opened them again to a flood of sunlight on the gilded carvings of the ancient structure. Its shoji had been noiselessly drawn open, and a man stood there looking fixedly at her.

CHAPTER XXI
THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD

Barbara saw clearly now the variation in his eyes; the larger one was clouded, as though a film covered the iris. It gave her a slight feeling of repugnance, which she instantly regretted, for, as though rendered conscious of it through a sensitiveness almost telepathic, he turned slightly, and put a hand to his brow to cover it.

"Oh," she said hastily, "I am glad. This is the most beautiful garden I have ever seen."

He looked at her quickly and keenly with his one bright eye. It held none of the swart, in-turned reflectiveness of the Japanese; it was sharp and restless. Its brilliance, under eyebrows that seemed on the verge of a frown, was almost fierce. The curved, gray mustache did not hide the strong, irregular, white teeth.

"You know Japanese gardens?"

"Not yet," she answered. "Japan is new to me. I needn't say how lovely I think this is—you must grow tired hearing strangers rhapsodize over it!"

"Strangers!" he laughed; the sound was not musical like his spoken voice, but harsh and grating. "I have one joy—no stranger ever dreams of coming to see me!"

"I should have said 'your friends,'" said Barbara.

"Friends would be more troublesome than my enemies," he said grimly, "who, at least, never ask me where I don't want to go."

She looked at him wonderingly. She had never met any one in the least like him. His features were refined and unquestionably aristocratic but his whole expression was quiveringly sensitive, resentfully shy. It was the expression, she thought, of one whom a look might cut like a whiplash, a word sting like a searing acid.

"The only foreigners I know are those who write me letters: malicious busybodies, people who want subscriptions to all sorts of shams, or invite me to join respectable, humbug societies, or write merely to gratify a low curiosity. As for friends, I have none."

"Surely, I saw you with one this morning," she said, with a smile.

"Ah," he said, his look changing swiftly; "I don't count Ishikichi. Children understand me."

"And me," she said. "I made friends with Ishikichi this morning. He was catching crickets in the garden. I am visiting the American Embassy," she added.

"The garden there has been a famous playground for the child, no doubt," he returned. "His boon companion lived just opposite the compound."

"The little Toru, who was run over?"

"Yes. Ishikichi has been inconsolable. To-day, however, he has ceased to sorrow. The owner of the carriage has sent six hundred yen to the father, who is now able to pay his debts and enlarge his business. The tablet on the Buddha-shelf that bears the little boy's death-name will be henceforth the dearest possession of the family. To Ishikichi he is a glorious hero whose passing it would be a crime to grieve." He broke off, with the odd, timid gesture she had seen before. "But you came to see the garden," he said. "If you like, I will show it to you."

Without waiting for her answer, he led the way, moving quickly and agilely. The softness of his tread in the cloth tabi seemed almost feminine. A little farther on he turned abruptly:

"When you passed me in the carriage this morning you must have thought me unmannerly," he said. "I was, no doubt. My manners are only villainous notions of my own."

"Not at all," she answered. "I only thought—"

"Well?"

"That perhaps I reminded you of some one you had known."

He turned and walked on without reply. As they proceeded, from behind the flowering bush came the tintinnabulent tinkle and drip of running water. The stepping-stones meandered on in graceful curves and presently arrived at a little lake at whose edge grew pale water-hyacinths and whose surface was mottled with light green lotos-leaves, dotted here and there with pink half-opened buds. Now and then these stirred languidly at the flirt of a golden fin, while over them, in flashes of flame-yellow, darted hawking dragon-flies. Thickets of maroon-tinted maple glowed in the sunlight and clusters of yellow oranges hung on dwarf trees. On the lake's margin bright-hued pebbles were strewn between rounded stones whose edges were soft and green with moss. Barbara longed to feel those mossy boulders with her bare feet—to splash in that limpid water like a happy child.

"This is the best view," he said simply.

Looking on the endless symphonies of green, it came to her for the first time what fascination could be wrought of mere brown stone and foliage. The effect had a curious sense to her of the unsexual and unhuman. Again, with the odd impression of telepathy with which he had covered his myopic eye, he seemed to answer her thought:

"The Japanese," he said, "sees Nature as neuter. His very language possesses no gender. He does not subconsciously think of a young girl when he looks at a swaying palm, nor of the lines of a beautiful body when he sees the undulations of the hills. He notes much in nature, therefore, that western art—which is passional—doesn't observe at all."

"I see," she said. "We insist on looking through a tinted film that makes everything iridescent?"

"And deflects the lines of forms. The Japanese art is less artificial. Now—turn to the left."

In one spot the trees and shrubbery had been cut clean away, and through the vista she saw the distant mountains, clear and pure as though carved of tinted jade set in a plate of lapus lazuli. A faint curdle of cloud frayed from their jagged tops, and above it hung the dreamy snow-clad cone of Fuji, palely emerald as the tint of glaciers under an Alaskan sky. A single crow, a jet-black moving spot, flapped its way across the azure expanse.

"The one touch of blue," he said. "The color ethical, the color pantheistic, the color of the idea of the divine!"

His personality, so touched with mystery, interested Barbara intensely. The sense of strangeness and unfamiliarity had quite vanished. She sat down on one of the warm boulders. Thorn rested one foot on the bent trunk of a dwarf tree and leaned his elbow on his knee, his hand, in the gesture that seemed habitual, covering his eye. In the wide kimono sleeve the forearm was bare and suggested a peculiar physical cleanliness like that of a wild animal.

"How strange it is," she said, "that for centuries, the western world believed this wonderful land inhabited by a barbarous people—because it didn't possess western civilization!"

He made an exclamation. "Civilization! It is a hateful word! It stands in the West for all that is sordid and ugly. It has bred monstrous, thundering piles built up to heaven, eternally smoking the sky—places of architecture and mechanics gone mad, where one lives by machinery and moves by steam, and is perpetually tormented by absurd conventions. I have lived in its cities. I have walked their selfish streets, shy and shabby and hungry!"

"Hungry!"

"Yes—and worse. I've not spoken of those experiences for years. I don't know why I speak of them now to you. Does it surprise you to hear that I have known poverty?" For the first time he turned fully facing her. His supple hand had left his brow and moved in gestures at one time fierce and graceful. "When I was sixteen I learned what penury meant in London. Once I was driven to take refuge in a workhouse in some evil quarter of the Thames. My memory of it is a mixture of dreadful sights and sounds—of windows thrown violently open or shattered to pieces—of shrieks of murder—of heavy plunges in the river."

Barbara shuddered in the warm sunlight. Over the edge of the garden was a misty space where foliage and roofs sank out of sight, to rise again in long undulations of green trees and gray tiling, like a painted ocean. Far away lifted the leafy plateau of Aoyama, with its blur of terra-cotta barracks. At an immense distance a great temple roof jutted, and still farther away the spread-out, populous city curved up, like the rim of a basin, to a hazy horizon. Yet on this background of pleasantness and peace those other scenes of horror—such was the vehemence of his tone, the savage directness in his phrases—seemed to start up, blank and wretched apparitions, before her.

"At nineteen," he went on. "I found myself in New York, delicate, diffident, satanically proud, and without a friend—one of the billion ants crawling in the skeleton of the mastodon. I was threadbare and meals were scant and uncertain—a little, penniless, half-blind, eccentric wanderer! I lived in a carpenter-shop and slept on the shavings. One week I sold coral for a Neapolitan peddler. Oh, I learned my civilization well! The very memory now of walking down those roaring cañons of streets—all cut granite and iron fury, and hideous houses two hundred feet high—moos at me in the night! It is frightful, nightmarish, devilish! And when one can be here under a violet sky, in sight of blue peaks and an eternally lilac, luke-warm sea!"

His hand swept across the hewn vista—to the wild, bold background of indigo hills, with its slender phantom above them, swimming in the half-tropical blue. "It is better," he said, "to live in Japan in sack-cloth and ashes, than to own the half of any other country. I am as old as the three-legged crow that inhabits the sun. I can't read the comic papers or a French novel. I shouldn't go to the Paris opera if it were next door. I shouldn't like to visit the most beautiful lady and be received in evening dress. I shall pass my life in sandals and a kimono, and when it's over I shall be under the big trees in the old Buddhist cemetery there, beside the nunnery, among the fireflies and grasshoppers, with six laths above me, inscribed with prayers in an unknown tongue and a queerly carved monument typifying the five elements into which we melt away."

He shook his broad shoulders. Again his hand went to his brow and he half turned away.

"But now even Japan must adopt western civilization," he said bitterly. It is 'putting a lily in the mouth of hell!' Carpets, pianos, windows, brass-bands—to make Goths out of Greeks! Who would want them changed? Who would not love them as they are, better than the children of boasted western civilizations—industrious, pleasing, facing death with a smile, not because they are such fatalists as the Arabs, for instance, but because they have no fear of the hereafter. The old courtesy, the old faith, the old kindliness—will they weather it? Or vanish like snow in sun? The poetry, the legend, the lovely and touching observances are going fast. Modernism gives them foreign fireworks now, and forbids the ghost-boats of the Bon! I wish I could fly out of Meiji for ever, back against the stream of time, into tempo fourteen hundred years ago!"

"The Bon?" she said. "What is that?"

"I forgot," he said, "that Japan is all new to you," and told her of the Japanese All-Souls Day—the Feast of Lanterns, when the spirits of the dead return, to be fed with tea in tiny cups and with the odor of incense; how, when the dusk falls, on canal and river the little straw boats are launched with written messages and lighted paper lanterns, to bear back the blessed ghosts.

Returning, Barbara led the way. Once she stooped over a single, strange blossom on a long stalk, whose golden center shone cloudily through silky filaments like the leaves of immortelles. "What is that?" she asked.

"It is a wild flower I found on one of my inland rambles," he said. "Perhaps it has no name. I call it Yumé-no-hana—the 'Flower-of-Dream.' It will open almost any day now."

"Have you quite forgiven me for breaking in?" she asked, as they walked along the stepping-stones.

For the first time she surprised him in a smile. It lit his face with a sudden irradiation. "Will you do it again?"

"May I—some time?"

"Then you are not afraid? Remember I am a renegade, a follower of Buddha, and a most atrocious and damnable taboo!"

"Afraid!" For a moment they looked at each other, and she saw a little quiver touch his lips. "I shall come again to-morrow—to see the flower."

"Just one thing," he said. "I am a solitary. If you would not mention—to any one—"

"I understand," she answered.

He walked by her side to the bamboo gate. "I am glad," she said, "that I remind you of some one you liked."

"Perhaps it was some one I knew in a dream," he answered.

"Yes," she said. "Perhaps it was."

As she spoke she saw him start. She looked up. Across the temple yard, through the entrance torii, she saw the bishop coming up the lane. He was walking absorbed in thought, his eyes on the ground, his hands clasped behind him.

"Good-by," she said, and stepped through the gate.

But Thorn did not answer. At sight of the approaching figure he had drawn back abruptly. Now he turned sharply away into a path which led toward the temple. She saw him once glance swiftly back over his shoulder before he disappeared behind the hedges.

The man with whom Barbara had been talking went slowly up the temple steps. His face was haggard and drawn. There he paused and looked back across the yard.

"Credo in resurrectionem mortuorum," he muttered—"Yes, I believe in the resurrection of the dead!"

As he stood there the head priest pushed open the shoji. He bowed to the other on the threshold and came out.

"To-day my abashed thought has dwelt on your exalted work," he said. "Is our new image of Kwan-on peerlessly all but done, perhaps?"

Thorn shook his head. "It moves with exalted slowness. To-day I contemptibly have not worked."

The priest looked at him curiously, through his gold-rimmed spectacles.

"You are honorably unwell," he said. "It is better to lie down in the heat of the day. Presently I will say an insignificant prayer to the Hotoké-Sama—the Shining Ones—for your illustrious recovery."

"I am not ill," was the answer. "Be not augustly concerned."

He turned away slowly and crossed the little bridge to his own abode.