The Ginza—the "Street-of-the-Silversmiths"—is the Broadway, the Piccadilly, the Boulevard des Italiens of modern Tokyo. Here old and new war daily in a combat in which the new is daily victor. Modern shop-fronts of stone and brick stand cheek by jowl with graceful, flimsy frame structures that are pure Japanese. Trolley-cars, built in the United States, fill the street with clangor and its pavements (for it has them) roar with trade.
In its flowing current one may see many types: Americans from the near-by Imperial Hotel, bristling with enthusiasm; earnest tourists with Murrays tucked in their armpits, doggedly "doing" the country; members of foreign Legations whirling in victorias; Chinamen, queued and decorously clad in flowered silk brocade; an occasional Korean with queerly shaped hat of woven horse-hair; over-dandified O-sharé-Sama—"high-collar" men, as the Tokyo phrase goes—in tweeds and yellow puttees; comfortable merchants and men of affairs in dull-colored kimono and clogs; blue-clad workmen with the marks of their trades stamped in great red or white characters on their backs; sallow, bare-footed students with caps of Waseda or the Imperial University; stolid and placid-faced Buddhist priests in rick'sha, en route to some temple funeral; soldiers in khaki with red- and yellow-striped trousers; coolies dragging carts; country people on excursions from thatched inland villages, clothed in common cloth and viewing the capital for the first time with indrawn breath and chattering exclamations; rich noblemen, beggars, idlers, guides—all are tributary to this river.
When evening falls women and children predominate: bent old women with brightly blackened teeth; patient-faced mothers with babies on their backs toddling on clacking wooden géta; white-faced vermilion-lipped geisha glimpsing by in rick'sha to some tea-house entertainment; coolie women dressed like men, trudging in the roadway; girl-students peering into jewelers' windows; children clad like gaudy moths and butterflies, clattering hand in hand, or pursuing one another with shrill cries.
Before the sun has well set lanterns begin to twinkle and glow above doorways—yellow electric bulbs in clusters, white acetylene globes, smoky oil lamps, and great red and white paper-lanterns lit by candles. As the violet of the dusk deepens to purple, these multiply till the vista is ablaze. Lines of colored lights in pink and lemon break out like air-flowers along upper stories of tea-houses, from whose interiors come the strumming of biwa and the twang of samisen. On frail balconies, pricked out with yellow lanterns, dwarf pines or jars of growing azalea hang their masses of soft green or pink down over the passers-by. From open shoji women lean, their kimono parted, their rounded breasts bared to the cool night.
On the curb peripatetic dealers squat in little stalls formed of movable screens with their wares spread before them; curio-merchants with a mélange of brass, crystal and bronze; dealers in suzumushi—musical insects in the tiniest cages of plaited straw; sellers of Buddhist texts and worm-eaten, painted scrolls; of ink-horns, shoe-sticks, eye-glasses and children's toys. At intervals grills of savory waka-fuji (salted fry-cakes) sizzle over charcoal braziers which throw a red glow on an intent row of children's faces. Here and there a shop-front emits the blatant bark of a foreign phonograph. On the corners men with arms full of vernacular evening newspapers call the names of the sheets in musical cadences, with a quaint, upward inflection. The air is filled with a heavy, rich odor, suggesting the pomade of women's head-dresses, saké, and sandalwood. In the roadway every vehicle contributes its bobbing lantern, till the traffic seems a celestial Saturnalia, staggering with drunken stars.
So it looked to Barbara as her two goriki—"strong-pull men"—whirled her rubber-tired rick'sha across the interminable city in her first bewildering view of Tokyo by night. Daunt, for her benefit, had arranged a trip to the Cherry-Viewing-Festival on the Sumida River, and a Japanese dinner at the Ogets'—the Cherry-Moon Tea-House—in the famous district of Asak'sa, where the great temple of Kwan-on the Merciful shines with its ever-burning candles. They had started from the Embassy: Baroness Stroloff, the wife of the Bulgarian Minister and Patricia's especial favorite, the twin sisters of the Danish Secretary, the Swiss Minister's daughter and two young army officers studying the language—all of whom Barbara had met at the Review—and the long procession (since police regulations in Tokyo forbid rick'sha to travel abreast) trailed "goose-fashion," threading in and out, a writhing, yellow-linked chain.
Daunt had traced their route with Barbara on a map of the city, and had translated for her the names of the streets through which they were now passing. By the Street-of-Big-Horses they skirted the District-of-Honorable-Tea-Water, threaded the Lane-where-Good-Luck-Dwells, and so, by Middle-Monkey-Music-Street, they came to the Sumida, a broader, slothful Thames, gleaming with ten thousand lanterns on sampan, houseboats and barges. The bridge of Ah-My-Wife brought them to the farther side. At the entrance of a long avenue of blooming cherry-trees a policeman halted them. Rick'sha were not permitted beyond this point and the sweating human horses were abandoned.
The road ran high along the river on a green embankment like a wide wall, between double rows of cherry-trees, whose branches interlocked overhead. It was densely crowded with people, each one of whom seemed to be carrying a colored paper-lantern or a cherry-branch drooped over the shoulder. In the hues of the loose, warm-weather kimono bloomed all the flowers of all the springs—golds and mauves and scarlets and magentas—and everywhere in the lantern-light fluttered radiant-winged children, like vivid little birds in a tropical forest. From tiny one-storied tea-houses along the way, with elevated mats covered with red flannel blankets, biwa and koto and samisen gurgled and fluted and tinkled. On the right the embankment descended steeply, giving a view of sunken roadways and tiled roofs; on the left lay the long reaches of the dreamy river murmuring with oars and voices and vibrating like a vast flood of gold and vermilion fireflies.
Barbara had never imagined such a welter of movement and color. The soft flute-like voices, the slow shuffling of sandals on the dry earth, the pensive smiling faces, the pink flowers on every hand, made this different from any holiday crowd she had ever seen. It suggested a carnival of Venice orientalized, painted over and set blazing with Japanese necromancy.
Here and there jugglers and top-spinners displayed their skill to staring spectators. A cluster of shaven-headed babies swarmed silently about a sweetmeat seller, and beside his push-cart a man clad like a gray-feathered hawk whistled discordantly on a bamboo reed and gyrated with a vacant grin on his pock-marked face. Where the crowd was less close men tricked out in girls' attire, with whitened, clown-like faces, turned somersaults, and through the thickest of the press a dejected, blaze-faced ox, whose nose and forehead were painted with spots of scarlet, slowly drew a two-storied scaffold on which was perched the god of spring—a plaster figure wreathed with flowers. The animal's ears were tickled by long tassels of bright green and red, and his look was one of patient boredom. The man who led him wore a short jerkin, and his bare legs, from thigh to knee, were tattooed in big, blue, graceful leaves.
The greatest numbers surged about a large tent, outside of which waddled here and there mountains of men, their faces round as full moons, naked save for gaily colored aprons. The fat hung on their breasts in great creased folds like an overfed baby's, and in the lantern-light their flesh looked an unhealthy, mottled pink. Each wore his hair wound in a short queue, bent forward and tied in a stiff loop on the crown. As one of the vast hulks lumbered by, cooling his moon-face with a tiny fan, Daunt pointed him out to Barbara.
"That is the famous Hitachiyama," he told her, "the champion wrestler of Japan."
"How big he is!"
"It runs in families," he said. "They diet and train, too, from babyhood. He weighs three hundred and forty-seven pounds."
A roar came from the lighted canvas and a man emerged and wrote something on a sign-board like a tally-sheet. Daunt stopped and perused it. "You may be interested, ladies and gentlemen," he said, "to learn that Mr. Terrible-Horse has knocked out Mr. Small-Willow-Tree, but that Mr. Tiger-Elephant has been allowed a foul over Mr. Frozen-Stork. I wish we could see a bout, but we must hurry or we'll miss the geisha dancing."
They came presently where the roadway overlooked a sunken temple yard encircled by moats of oozy slime dotted with pink and white lotos buds. The inclosure was set with giant cryptomeria centuries old, and was crowded with people. Stone steps led down between twisted pine-trees and Shinto lanterns, to a gate on whose either side was a great stone cow, rampant, like the figures in coats-of-arms. There was a droll contrast between the posture and the placid bovine countenances. In the center of the inclosure rose a wide platform with a tasseled curtain like the stage of a theater. Opposite was a pavilion in which sat rows of women in dark-colored dress, moveless as images and holding musical instruments. The whole flagged space between jostled with the iridescent, lantern-carrying throng. A priest led the party to seats at one side on mats reserved for foreign visitors.
"Look, Barbara," said Patricia. "There goes our friend the expert—across there. He looks bigger and pastier than ever."
Bersonin was dressed in white flannel which accentuated his enormous size. A younger man was with him, smoking a cigarette, and in their wake followed a Japanese servant.
The rest of the party had turned and were looking in that direction. "Why," said Baroness Stroloff, "that's Doctor Bersonin."
One of the young army men looked at her curiously. "Do you know him?" he asked.
"Why, of course. One meets him everywhere. I saw him at a dinner last week. Have you met him?"
"Oh, yes, we're supposed to know everybody," he said carelessly. His tone, however, held something which made her say:
"Most men don't like him, I find. I wonder why."
"Why don't people like lizards?" said Patsy. "Because they're cold and clammy and wicked-looking."
"They like them enough to eat them in Senagambia," said the young officer smiling. "Bersonin is a great man, no doubt, but there's something about him—I met a man once who had run across him in South America and—he was prejudiced. Who's the young fellow with him, Daunt?"
"His name is Ware—Philip Ware," was the answer. "I knew him at college."
Barbara felt the blood staining her cheeks. So that was "Phil," the brother of whom Austen Ware had told her! The name called up thoughts that had obtruded themselves in the moment she saw the white yacht lying at anchor, and which since then she had wilfully thrust from her mind. Her gaze studied the handsome, youthful form, noting the bold, restless glance, the dissipated lines of the comely face, with a sudden distaste. A twang from the orchestra recalled her, as the curtain was looped back for the Miyako Odori, the "Dance of the Capital."
It was Barbara's introduction to a native orchestra and at first its strummings and squealings, its lack of modes and of harmony, its odd barbaric phrasing, infected her with a mad desire to laugh. But gradually there came to her the hint of under-rhythm—as when she had listened to Haru's samisen in the garden—and with it an overpowering sense of suggestion. It was the remote cry of occult passions, a twittering of ghostly shadows, the wailing of an oriental Sphynx whom Time had abandoned to the eternal desert. It had in it melancholy and the enigma of the ages. It wiped away the ugly modern European buildings, the western costumes, the gloze of borrowed method, and left Barbara looking into the naked heart of the East, old, intent, and full of mystical meaning.
The ivory plectrons chirruped, the flutes squeaked and wailed, the little hour-glass drums thudded, and down the stage swept sixty geisha, in blue, cherry-painted kimono. A sly, thin thread of scarlet peeped from their woven sleeves. Their small tabi'd feet, cleft like the foot of a faun, moved in slow, hovering steps. When they wheeled, swaying like young bamboo, they stamped softly, and the white foot, raised from the boards, under the puffed kimono edge writhed and bent from the ankle like a pliant hand. Their faces, heavily powdered, and held without expression, looked like white, waxen masks in which lived sparkling black eyes. In the slow, languorous movement their obi of gold and fans of silver caught the cherry-shaded lights and tossed them back in gleams of mother-of-pearl.
Barbara fell to watching the Japanese spectators. All around her they stood and sat at ease, drinking in the play of color and motion of which they never tire. The dance had no passion, no sensuality, none of the savagery and abandon of the dances of Southern Asia, with whose reproductions the western stage is familiar. Beside a ballet of the West, it would have seemed almost ascetic. She knew that it was symbolic—that every posture was a sentence of a story they knew, as old and as sacred, perhaps, as the birth of the gods.
The parted curtain swung together and Daunt seated himself at Barbara's side. "Do you like it, ever so little?" he asked.
"Ever so much!"
"I wonder if you are going to like me, too," he said, so softly that no one else heard.
She felt her color coming as she answered: "Why, of course. How could I help it, when you plan things like this for me?"
"I have at last found my métier; give me more things to do."
"Very well. When will you take me to see your Japanese house?"
For a second Daunt hesitated. The little native house in the Street-of-the-Misty-Valley was a sentimental place to him. There he had worked out the models of his first Glider; there he had talked with his Princess of Dreams, his "Lady of the Many-Colored Fires." The glimpse of Phil had reminded him that it now had a tenant. When he showed it to Barbara, it should not be with Phil in possession.
She noted the hesitation, and, somewhat puzzled, and wondering if to oriental ethics the suggestion was a gaucherie, waved the matter lightly aside. "You are just going to say 'one of these days.' Please don't. When I was little, that always meant never. I withdraw the motion—but what is this coming?"
A boy was ascending the platform. He bowed and laid a box of thin unpainted wood at Daunt's feet. It contained a kakemono, or wall-painting, rolled and tied with a red-and-white cord of twisted rice-paper. Daunt read the accompanying card.
"'Miss Happy-for-a-Thousand-Years,'" he said, "'presents her compliments to the illustrious strangers.' She is the star. The gift is a pretty custom, isn't it, even if it is advertisement. Here comes the lady herself to present her thanks for our distinguished patronage."
She bowed low before them, smiling, her small piquant face powdered white as mistletoe-berries above her carmine-painted lips. Daunt unrolled the kakemono, revealing a delicately-painted cluster of butterflies. He chatted with her in the vernacular, and she replied with much drawing-in of breath and flute-like laughter.
"She says," he translated, "that this is a picture of her honorable ancestors." A little smile, a genuflection, a breath of perfume and the powdered face and gorgeous kimono were gone. The orchestra chirruped, the curtain parted and another figure began.
Miss Happy-for-a-Thousand-Years! As the party walked back to the waiting rick'sha, Barbara wondered what lay beneath that smiling surface. She had heard of the strenuous training that at five years began to teach the gauzy, fragile, child-butterfly to paint its wings, to flirt and sing and dance its dazzling moth-flame way. For the geisha nothing was too gorgeous, too transcendent. Her lovers might be statesmen and princes. But in return she must be always gay, always laughing, always young—all things to all men—to the end of the butterfly chapter! Butterfly hair, butterfly gown—and butterfly heart?
Barbara wondered.
Doctor Bersonin, huge and white-flanneled, with Phil by his side, strolled away through the swarming crowd.
Not a word, not a glance of the younger man that evening, had escaped him—he had been studying him with all the minute attention of that great, overweening brain that, from an origin of which he never spoke, had made him one of the foremost experimenters in Europe. The swift gleam in Phil's eye as he watched the geisha, the eager drinking in of the girlish daintiness, the colors and perfumes to which he stretched himself like a cat—the watchful, impassive eyes took note of everything. All Bersonin's talk had held an evil lure. It had touched on the extravagant and sensual vagaries of luxury, the sybaritic pleasures of the social gourmet, subjects appealing to the imagination of the youth whom he was examining like a slide under the microscope. They had stopped once at a chaya for tea, but Phil had called for the hot native saké, and as its musty, sherry-like fumes crept into his blood he talked with increasing recklessness. Beneath their veiled contemptuousness, Bersonin's feline eyes began to harbor a stealthy satisfaction. He had guessed why Phil had suggested coming to Mukojima. The latter's restlessness, his anxious surveillance of the passers-by, might have enlightened a less observant spectator.
Phil's new passion had, in fact, a strong hold on him. That long-ago picture of Haru, barefooted in the surf, frequent recollection had stamped on his brain and the sight of her fresh beauty to-day had fanned the coal to a flame. Those stolen kisses in the bamboo lane had roused a lurking devil that counted nothing but his own desires. For this hour, while the saké ran in his pulses, the flame overshadowed even Bersonin.
"Well, my boy," said the latter at length quizzically, "when you find her, just give me the hint and I'll go."
Phil flushed, then laughed shortly. "So you are a mind-reader, too?" he said.
"It's written all over you," said Bersonin. "Why didn't you tell me? We could have postponed our dinner and left you free for the chase. It is a chase, eh?"
"Yes," said Phil. "I—I haven't had much luck with her yet. I just happened to know she was to be here to-night. She's a pretty little devil," he added, "the prettiest I've seen in Japan."
"The Japanese type is the rage in Paris now," said the other. "Take her there, dress her in jewels, and drive her through the Bois some afternoon and you'll be the most talked-of man in France next morning."
The red deepened in Phil's cheek. The prospect drew him. He looked at Bersonin. Paris and jewels!
He drank more saké at the next tea-house. It had begun to show in a shaking of the hand, a louder voice. Suddenly Phil sprang to his feet. "There she is!" he exclaimed.
Bersonin looked. "Lovely!" he said, "I congratulate you. I'll walk back to the motor-car—the sights amuse me. You can come along when you please. Dinner will wait. And, anyway, what's dinner to a pretty woman?"
Phil plunged into the crowd and the expert spoke quickly to the servant, who was staring after him. "Better keep him in sight," he said. "You can come when he does."
Bersonin was sauntering on, when a turmoil behind him made him turn. A woman's cry and an angry oath in English rang out, startlingly clear above the low murmur of the multitude. He caught a glimpse of a Japanese form leaping like a tiger—of Phil lying in the dust of the road—of a girl vanishing swiftly into the shadows.
As the expert hurried forward, Phil stumbled to his feet. Lights were dancing before his eyes and his neck felt as if he had been garroted. With his first breath he turned on Ishida, incoherent with rage and curses. The big man caught his arm.
"The honorable sir make mistake," said the Japanese smoothly. "Man have done that who have ranned away."
"He lies!" said Phil fiercely. "There was no one else near me but the girl. He did it himself! He tried to ju-jits' me!"
The fingers of the Japanese were clenched, but his face was impassive as he added: "I think he have been snik-thief."
"That's no doubt the way it was, Phil," said Bersonin. "Why on earth would Ishida touch you? That's an old thieves' trick. The fellow tried to get your watch, I suppose. But we must move on. The police will be here presently, and we don't want our names in the papers."
They went rapidly through the close ranks that had been watching with the decorous, inquisitive silence so typically oriental.
"I suppose you're right," said Phil sulkily. "I—I beg your pardon, Ishida."
The Japanese bowed gravely.
"Only a mistake," he said, "which honorable sir make."
The three-storied front of the Cherry-Moon Tea-House, when Daunt's party arrived, was glowing with tiers of large round lanterns of oiled-paper bearing a conventionalized moon and cherry-blossoms. At the door sat rows of little velvet-lined sandals. Here shoes were discarded, and servants drew on the guests' feet loose slippers of cotton cloth, soft and yielding. One other guest was awaiting the party at the entrance. This was Captain Viscount Sakai, of the General Staff, spruce, fine-featured and in immaculate European evening dress. He had a clear, olive complexion, and, save for the narrow, Japanese eye, might have been a Spaniard.
The small second-story shokudo in which they dined was floored in soft tatamé edged with black and laid in close-fitting geometrical pattern. Save for a plain alcove at one end, holding a dwarf pine and a single nanten branch with clusters of bright red berries, it was empty. There was no drapery. The walls were sliding screens of gold-leaf on which were finely drawn etchings of pine-trees covered with snow, the effect suggested rather than finished. It was brilliant with electric light.
Tiny square tables of black lacquer were disposed along three sides of the room, one for each guest. They were but four inches high and on the floor behind each lay a thin, flat zabuton or cushion of brocade. The bowing geisha in wonderful rainbow kimono who awaited them might have stepped from the temple stage at Mukojima. These pointed to the tables with inviting smiles:
"Plee shee down!" they said in unison.
"I never could 'shee down' gracefully when any one is looking!" complained Patricia, as she tucked her small feet under her on the kneeling-cushion.
"Banzai!" commented Voynich, setting his monocle. "You have practised before a mirror!" He collapsed beside her with a groan. "I shall be reincarnated an accordion!"
"Count," said Patricia plaintively, "no bouquets, please. I know when you are stringing me."
He looked blank and the Japanese officer hastily produced a lavender note-book and a gold pencil. "That is a new one," he said. "I must—what is it?—ah yes! I must nail it. Excuse me. I write it in my swear-album."
"The Viscount is learning American slang," Patricia informed Barbara. "One of these days you must tell him some of the very latest."
He looked across with gravely twinkling eyes. "I shall be—ah—tickle to die!" he said. "It is my specialty. Nex' year I become Professor in Slang Literature at the Imperial University."
The meal began merrily. Barbara sat on Daunt's left, with one of the attachés next her. Baroness Stroloff was on Daunt's other hand. Barbara remembered it afterward as a meal of elfish daintiness—of warm, pungent, wine-like liquor in blue porcelain bottles, of food of strange look and cloying taste, highly colored and seasoned, in a hundred tiny red and black lacquer dishes that carried her back to her doll-days, with covers patterned in gold, served by prostrating geisha whose kimono were woven with violet Fujis, winged dragons and marvelous exotic blossoms.
Daunt pointed to a dish which had just been set before her. "You must try the hasu-no-renkon," he said. "That's cooked lotos-root. It's nearly as good as it looks."
"How do you ever remember the names!"
"Oh, it's quite easy to talk Japanese," he replied recklessly. "There are only fifty syllables in the language, and any way you string them together it means something or other. It doesn't matter whether it's the right thing or not, if you just bow and smile. There are seventeen ways of drawing in your breath which are a lot more important than what you say!"
"What disgraceful nonsense! What is that pink thing?"
"Raw bonito. The refuge of dyspeptics. Voynich, over there, eats nothing else at home, they say. The variegated compound is kuchitori. It's made of sugared chestnuts, leeks and pickled fish. May I compliment you on the way you handle your chopsticks? At my first Japanese dinner I bit one in two. Isn't Baroness Stroloff stunning, by the way!"
The latter was deep in discussion with Patricia, moving her hands in quick, vivacious gestures which clusters of opals made into flashes of blue fire. "But you must send to Hakodate for your furs," she was saying. "I will give you the address of my man there. You should get them now, not wait till fall, when the tourists have bought all the best."
"I'm dying for an ermine stole."
"Oh, my dear, not ermine! Get sables. One can be so insulting in sables!"
Barbara laughed with the rest. "What a nice lot you are," she said, "all knowing each other, all friendly. I thought diplomatists were always poring over international law books and drawing up musty treaties."
"It's not all cakes and ale," he asserted. "I worked till three this morning on a cipher telegram."
"After the melodrama?"
"Ah, it was opera!" he protested. "It has left me memories of only flowers, and scents and music!"
"You made most of the music, if I remember rightly."
"How unkind! I could no more help it than fly."
"On your Glider?"
He laughed again. "Don't forget what is to happen one day with that same machine."
"What is that?"
"I am to swoop down and carry you off. It was your own suggestion, you know."
"But it was to be at the Imperial Review. That doesn't happen again for a year."
"I won't wait that long!"
She turned her head; her eyes sparkled in the caught light. Her fingers were fluttering a square of red paper that had been rolled about her chopsticks. On it was a line of tiny characters. "What is that writing?"
"That is a love-poem," he answered. "You know a Japanese poem has only thirty-one syllables. You find them everywhere and on everything, from a screen to a fire-shovel. I've seen them printed on tooth-picks. Your huckster composes them as he brings the fish from market, and your amah writes them at night by a firefly lantern."
"Can you read it?"
He translated: "I thought my love's long hair drooped down from the gate of the sky. But it was only the shadow of evening."
"How delicately pretty!" she exclaimed. "It's written in kana, the sound-alphabet, isn't it?"
"Yes. How much you have learned already!"
"Haru has begun teaching me. Let me show you my proficiency." She took his pencil and wrote:
ドント
"There! who would guess that was Japanese for 'Daunt.' And what an impression you must have made on Haru for her to select your name as my first lesson!"
Across the soft shoo-shoo of spotless, tabi-clad feet, the flitting of bright-hued kimono, the gay badinage that flew about the low tables, Daunt felt her beauty thrill him from head to foot like a garment of mist and fire. As she dropped her hand to the cushion it had touched his, and for an instant their pulses had seemed to throb into one. The tiny, lacquered cup she took up trembled in her fingers.
She started when the young army officer nearest her said: "Speaking of sailing, give me a steam-yacht like the one that berthed yesterday at Yokohama. She belongs to a man named Ware—Austen Ware—a New Yorker, I understand. Perhaps you know him, Miss Fairfax."
"I have met him," she answered.
The young army officer looked up quickly—he was an enthusiastic yachtsman. "A beautiful vessel!" he said. "I noticed her to-day, but she was too far away to make out her name."
"It is the Barbara," said Voynich.
"Why—" exclaimed Patricia, "that's—" She bit her tongue, caught by something in Barbara's face. "Good gracious!" she ended. "My—my foot's asleep!"
Barbara had felt her flush fading to paleness. She felt a quick relief that none there, save Patricia and Daunt, knew her first name. In the diversion caused by Patricia's helpless efforts to stand up, she stole a glance at Daunt.
A shadow had fallen on his face. He did not look at her, but in his brain the yacht's name was ringing like a knell. She knew Phil's brother! Austen Ware's yacht had arrived in Yokohama on the same day as her ship. And it was named the Barbara. Yet to-night he had dreamed—what had he been dreaming? These thoughts mixed themselves weirdly with the gaiety and nonsense that he forced himself to render.
Barbara felt this with an aching sense of resentment. What was he thinking of her? And why should she care so fiercely? The courses passed, but the lightness and blitheness of the scene were somehow chilled. The decorative food: the numberless, tiny cups and trays; the taper, pink-tinted fingers that poured the warm drink; the kimono, the music and lights,—all palled.
She was glad when the Baroness decreed the dinner over by repeating Patricia's experiment of painful unfolding, and calling for her wraps.
The street into which they trooped seemed an oriental opera-bouffe: swaying, chatting people in loose, light-colored kimono, some carrying crested paper lanterns tied to the ends of short rods: a thousand lights and hues flashing and weaving. But for two of the party the colors had lost their warmth and the movement its fascination.
"I simply can't coop up yet in a rick'sha!" pleaded Patricia, as they donned their discarded shoes. "Why not walk a little?" The proposal met with a chorus of approval. They set out together, and presently Barbara found Daunt beside her. Her resentment did not cool as she laughed and talked mechanically, acutely aware that he was answering in monosyllables or with silence.
Daunt was crying out upon himself for a fool. What right had he to feel that hot sting in his heart? Yesterday morning he had not known that she existed. If an hour ago the skies had been golden-sprinkled azure, and Tokyo the capital of an Empire of Romance, it was only because he was a boyish, silly dolt, sick with vanity and complacency. What had there been between them, after all, save a light camaraderie into which a man was an insufferable cad to read more? So he paced on, achingly cognizant of the lapses in his conversation, quite unconscious that her own was growing more forced and strained.
They were in the midst of a densely packed crowd where a native theater was pouring its audience into the street. They had fallen behind the rest, and there were about them only kimono'd shoulders and flowered, blue-black head-dresses. He made a way for her ruggedly toward a paling where there was a little space. Above it was hung a poster of a Japanese actress.
"That is the famous Sada Gozen," he told her. "She has just returned from a season in Paris and New York, and Tokyo is quite wild about her."
As he spoke numbers thrust him against her and the touch brought instantly to him that moment in the garden when he had held her in his arms to lift her to the arbor ledge. The picture of her that evening in the pagoda was stamped on his heart: the sweet, moon-lighted profile, the curling, brown hair, the faint perfume of her gown that mingled with the wistaria. It came before him there in the bustle and press with a sudden swift sadness. He knew that it would be always with him to remember.
A Japanese couple, hastening to their rick'sha, caromed against them, and, with an effort, he tried to turn it to a smile:
"Some say it's difficult for a foreigner to come into intimate contact with the Japanese," he said. "You have already pierced that illusion. One is always finding out that he has been mistaken in people."
Her quivering feeling grasped at a fancied innuendo. "It doesn't take long, then, you think?" Her tone held a dangerous lure, but he did not perceive it.
"Not where you are concerned, apparently," he answered lightly.
She turned her head swiftly toward him, and her eyes flashed. "Where I am concerned!" she repeated fiercely, and in his astonishment he almost wrecked the paling. "Oh, I hate double-meaning! Why not say it? Do you suppose I don't know what you are thinking?"
"I?" he said in bewilderment. "What I am thinking?"
"You mean you have found you are mistaken in me! You have no right—no earthly right, to draw conclusions."
"Ah!" he said, with a sharp breath. "I had no such meaning. You can't imagine—"
"Don't say you didn't," she interrupted. "That only makes it worse!" She scarcely understood her own resentment, and a hot consciousness that her behavior was quite childish and unreasonable mixed itself with her anger.
"What have I said?" he exclaimed, in contrition and distress. "I wouldn't hurt you for a million worlds! Whatever it was, I ought to do hara-kiri for it! I—I will perform the operation whenever you say!"
A ridiculous desire to cry had seized her—why, she could not have told—and she would rather have died than have him see her do so. "If you will go ahead," she said tremulously, "and make a path for me, I think we can get through now."
He turned instantly and his broad shoulders parted the crowd in a haste that was thoroughly un-Japanese. But she did not follow him. Instead, she drew back, and thinking only to hide momentarily her hurt and her pride, slipped through a narrow gateway.
She found herself in a crowded corridor of the emptying playhouse. The mass of Japanese faces confused her. A door opened at another angle and she passed through it hastily into the open air. The street she was now in was narrow, and she followed it, expecting it to turn into the larger thoroughfare. It did so presently, and at its corner she paused till the burning had left her eyes, and her breath came evenly. Then she walked back toward the theater, feeling an impatient irritation at her behavior.
Presently, however, she stopped, puzzled. The theater was not there. The street, too, had not the character of the one in which she had left Daunt. She must have taken the wrong turn. She walked rapidly in the opposite direction, until another street crossed at right angles. This she tried with no better result. In the maze of lantern-lighted vistas, she was completely lost.
She was not frightened, for she was aware that, so far as physical harm was concerned, Tokyo, of all great cities of the world, was perhaps the safest and most orderly. She knew that "Bei-koku Taish'-kan" meant "American Embassy." She had mastered the phrase that morning, and had only to step into a rick'sha and use it. Daunt, however, did not know this. Aware that she had been behind him, he would not go on, and she contritely pictured him anxiously searching the crowds for her. The thought overrode her anger and humiliation. She would not take the rick'sha till she despaired of finding him.
Just before her, at the side of the way, stood a small temple with a recumbent stone fox at its entrance. It made her think suddenly of the riding-crop she had seen Daunt carrying, with its Damascene fox-head handle. In the doorway burned a rack of little candles, and a chest, barred across the top, sat ready to receive the offerings of worshipers. Above this was suspended the mirror which is the invariable badge of a Shinto shrine. It was tilted at an angle and tossed back the glimmer of the candle-flame. With a whimsical smile she took a copper coin from her purse and leaned to toss it into the chest.
But her fingers closed on it and she drew back hastily, with a quick memory of one of the tales Haru had told her in the garden. She knew suddenly that she stood before a temple of Inari, the Fox-God, patron deity of her whose conquests brought shame to households and dishonor to wives. She remembered a song the Japanese girl had sung to the tinkle of her samisen:
It was the song of the "Fox-Woman." She slipped the purse hastily back into her pocket.
The Fox-Woman! As she walked on, for the first time the phrase came to Barbara with a sudden, sharp sense of actuality. There were fox-women of every race and clime, women who came, with painted smile, between true lovers! What if she herself—what if here, in this land, that baleful wisdom were to strike home to her? Like a keen blade the thought pierced through her, and something shy and sweet, newborn in her breast, shrank startled and fearful from it.
The street had narrowed curiously. It was paved now from side to side with flat stone flags. She realized all at once that there were no longer rick'sha to be seen, only people afoot. A blaze of light caught her eye, and she looked up to see, spanning the street, an arched gateway, at either side of which stood a policeman, quiet and imperturbable. Its curved top was decorated with colored electric bulbs, and from its keystone towered a great image molded in white plaster—the figure of a woman in ancient Japanese costume. One hand held a fan; the other lifted high above her head a circular globe of light. A huge weeping-willow drooped over one side of the archway, through which came glimpses of moving colors, crowds, hanging lanterns and elfish music.
Barbara hesitated. To what did that white, female figure beckon? She looked behind her—direction now meant nothing. Perhaps she had wandered in a circle and the theater lay beyond.
She stepped through the gate.
Straight before her lay a wide pavement, humming with voices, lined with three-story houses that glowed with iron-hooped lanterns of red, yellow and green, and tinkled with the music of samisen. From their gaily lighted shoji swathes of warm, yellow light fell on the kimono'd figures of men strolling slowly up and down. A little way off rose a square tower, with a white clock-face, illumined by a circle of electric bulbs. Narrower streets, also innocent of roadway, crossed at right angles and at mathematical intervals. They were starry with lamps that hung in long projecting balconies ornamented with grill and carved work. From these came the shrieking sounds of music and an indescribable atmosphere of frivolity, of obvious dedication to some flippant cult.
In and out of these side streets flowed a multitude of boys and men, in unbelted summer robes of light colors, lazily vivacious, moving on naked, clogged feet, making the air a bluish haze of cigarette smoke. In the blazing dusk they suggested the populace of some crowded Spa strolling to the pools in flowing bath-robes and straw hats. On some of the far balconies Barbara could see women leaning, in ornate costumes, smoking tiny pipes. Here and there girls strolled past her, for the most part in couples, gaudily clad, their cheeks white with rice-powder, their lips carmined, their blue-black hair wonderfully coaxed and pomaded into shining wings and whorls, thrust through with many jeweled hair-pins, like slim daggers. They jested freely with the men they passed, laughing continually with low voices. In a doorway a slim girl, dressed in deep red, gleefully tickled with one bare foot the hide of a shaggy poodle vainly essaying slumber. As she went on, the crowd became more numerous; men's kimono brushed Barbara's skirts and eyes stared at her with contemplative boldness.
"Madame!"
She felt a hand pluck her sleeve. It was a young Japanese, in foreign dress, with a shining brown derby, shining aureated teeth, and shining silver-handled cane. "Madame wishes a guide?" he inquired. She recollected him instantly as the youth who had slipped into her hand the printed card when she had landed from the ship at Yokohama. She did not know the name of the theater she had left, however, so shook her head and hurried on.
Without warning she emerged into the nun-like quiet of a park with an acre of growing trees and an irregular little lake that lay dark and still under the moon. Beside it was a stretch of hard, beaten earth, seemingly a playground. Benches were set under the trees, and among them moved or sat other girls in costumes like those she had seen on the pavement. At sight of Barbara's foreign dress some of them giggled with amusement and called to one another in repressed, laughing voices. A bell struck somewhere, and, as though this had been a signal, they all rose and departed, passing out by the way Barbara had come.
She traversed the park—to come face to face with a high palisade. She took a new direction, only to come again on the same barrier. The park seemed only a part of a vast inclosure into which she had penetrated. Had this no outlet save the gate at which she had entered? Wondering, she retraced her steps to the lighted pavement. She was puzzled now, and turned into one of the cross streets. Its blaze of light, its movement and murmur of humanity bewildered her for a moment; then what she saw instantly arrested her.
The lower stories of most of the abutting buildings had for fronts only lattices of vertical wooden bars, set a few inches apart. Inside these bars, which made strange, human bird-cages, seated on mats of brocade, or flitting here and there, were galaxies of Japanese girls, marvelously habited in chameleon colors—even more brilliant than the geisha she had seen at Mukojima—like branches of iridescent humming-birds or banks of pulsing butterflies. Here and there, a foil to the fluttering cages, stretched a silent arcade brilliantly lighted and hung with women's photographs. Above each was fixed a placard with a name in Japanese characters.
What was this place into which she had strayed? She had heard of the famous "Street-of-the-Geisha," where the dancers live. Had she stumbled on this in the throes of some festival? Why were there no women on the pavements? She had seen none save those in the gaudy robes whom the bell had called away. What was the meaning of the high palisades?—the narrow gate with its stolid policemen?—the barred house fronts?
Projecting on to the pavement, at the side of each building, was a small, windowed kiosk like the box-office of a theater. In the one nearest Barbara a man was sitting. His arm was thrust through the window, and his hand, holding a half-opened fan, tapped carelessly on its side while he chanted in a coaxing voice. Inside a man with close-cropped gray hair strode along the seated rows, striking sharply together flint and steel, till a shower of gleaming sparks fell on each head-dress. This done, he emerged and paced three times up and down the pavement, making squeaking noises with his lips, and describing with his hands strange passes in the air. These reminded Barbara irresistibly of a child's cryptic gestures for luck. He then struck the flat of his hand six times smartly against the door-post and retired. She noticed that he paused at the entrance to snuff the row of candles that burned in a shrine beside it.
The whole street, with its rows of gilded cages was a gleaming vista of tableaux-vivants, drenched in prismatic hues. Each, Barbara noted, had its uniform scheme of costume: one showed the sweeping lines and deep, flowing sleeves of the pre-Meiji era; another the high, garnet skirt of the modern school-girl; in one the kimono were of rich mauve, shading at the bottom to pale pink set with languorous red peonies; in another, of gray crepe figured with craggy pine-trees; in a third, of scarlet and blue, woven with gold thread and embroidered in peacock feathers. Before each inmate's cushion sat a tiny brass hibachi, or fire-bowl, in whose ashes glowed a live coal for the lighting of pipes and cigarettes, and a miniature toilet-table, like a doll's-cabinet, topped by a small, round mirror. From tiny compartments now and then one would draw a little box of rouge, a powder-puff of down, or an ivory spicula, with which, in complete indifference to observation, she would heighten the vivid red of a lip, or smooth a refractory hair. The background against which they posed was of heavy and exquisitely intricate gold-lacquer carvings of stork, dragon and phoenix, of cunningly disposed mirrors, or of draped crimson and silver weaves. Before the bars men paused to chat a moment and pass on: behind them the gorgeous robes and tinted faces flitted hither and thither with a magpie chatter, with glimpses of ringed fingers clutching the lattice, and of naked feet, slim and brown against the flooring.
Barbara watched curiously. She was no longer conscious that passing men studied her furtively—that here and there, through the slender bars, a delicate hand waved daringly to her. In all the fairy-like gorgeousness she felt a subtle sense of repugnance that kept her feet in the middle of the pavement. She noted now that, however the costumes varied, they agreed in one particular: the obi of each inmate was tied, not at the back, but in front. It seemed a kind of badge. Somewhere she had read what it stood for. What was it?
A group of men passed her at the moment—foreigners, speaking an unfamiliar tongue. They talked loudly and pointed with their sticks. One of them observed her, and turning, said something to his companions. They looked back. One of them laughed coarsely.
At the sound, which echoed a patent vulgarity in the allusion, the blood flew to her cheeks. The tone had told her in a flash what the palisades, the barred inclosures, the gaudy finery and reversed obi had failed to suggest. A veil was wound about her hat and with nervous haste she drew down its folds over her face, feeling suddenly sick and hot. Driven now by an overpowering desire to find her way out, she doubled desperately back to the wider street.
"Madame!"
She turned, with relief this time, to see "Mr. Y. Nakajima," the guide, of the gold fillings and silver-topped cane.
"You are lost," he said. "Come with me, and I will find you."
She bade him take her to the gate as quickly as possible and followed him rapidly, stung with an acute longing for the noisy roadway with its careening rick'sha. He was a thin, humorous-looking youth with a chocolate skin and long almond eyes, from which he shot at Barbara glances half obsequious, half impertinent and preternaturally sly, from time to time making some remark which she answered as shortly as she might.
By the arch with its lofty female figure, under the weeping willow, Barbara turned for an instant and looked back. The street seemed to her a maze of reeling lights—a blur of painted lips and drowsing eyes and ghostly sobbing of the samisen. Just outside the gate a pilgrim-priest, his coffin-like shrine strapped on his back, was mumbling a prayer.
The guide spoke complacently: "Japan Yoshiwara are very famed," he said. "I think other countries is very seldom to have got."
"Where do they all come from?" Barbara asked suddenly. "How do they come to be here?"
"From many village," he answered. He had raised his voice, for several passers-by had paused to listen inquisitively to the strange sounds, so uncouthly unlike their own liquid syllabary; and he loved to display his English. "A man have a shop. Business become bad; he owe so plenty money. He can not pay, but he have pretty daughter. Here they offer maybe two, three hundred yen, for one year. So she dutifully pay honorable father debt."
Barbara turned away. Again she felt the edge of mystery, bred of the unguessable divergence between the moral Shibboleths of West and East. It caught at her like the cool touch of dread that chills the strayer in haunted places. In a hundred ways this land drew her with an extraordinary attraction; now a feeling of baffled perplexity and pain mingled with the fascination. It was almost a sort of terror. If in two days Japan offered such passionate variety, such undreamed contrasts and subtleties, what would it eventually show to her? Could she ever really know it, understand it?
"There is a theater near here where Sada Gozen is playing," she said. "Can you take me there?"
He nodded. "The Raimon-za—the Play-House-of-the-Gate-of-Thunder. It is more five minutes of distant."
He conducted her through a maze of narrow streets and pointed to the building, which she saw with a breath of relief. Taking out her purse she put a bill into his hand. "Thank you," she said, "and good night."
"I shall go with Madame at her hotel."
She shook her head. "I can find my way now."
"But Madame—"
"No," she said decidedly.
He stood a moment swinging his cane, looking after her with impudent almond eyes. Then he lighted a cigarette, settled his derby at a jaunty angle and sauntered back toward the Yoshiwara.
Barbara came on Daunt in the middle of the block. He had stationed himself in the roadway, towering head and shoulders above the lesser stature of the native crowds. With him was a Japanese boy who, she noted with surprise, was Ito, one of the house-servants. Her heart jumped as she saw the relief spring to Daunt's anxious face.
"Mea culpa!" she cried, and with an impulsive gesture reached out her hand to him. "What a trouble I have been to you! I was actually lost. Isn't it absurd?"
Her slim, white fingers lay a moment in his. All his heart had leaped to meet them. In the moment of her anger he had not read its meaning, but since then it had been given him partly to understand. His thoughtless words—blunderer that he was!—had seemed to carp at her like a whining school-boy, with cheap, left-handed satire! Yet to his memory even her hot, indignant voice had been ringingly sweet, for the stars again were golden, and Tokyo once more fairy-land.
"What will the others say!" she said. "They will have missed us long ago."
"We will take extra push-men," he said, "and easily overtake them. We can get rick'sha at the next stand."
"What did you think," she asked, as they rounded the corner, "when you found I had vanished into thin air?"
"I imagined for a while you were punishing me. Then I guessed you had somehow turned into the side street. But I felt that you would find your way back, so—I waited."
"Thank you," she said softly. "I have not acted so badly since I was a child. Are you going to shrive me?"
"I am the one to ask that of you," he replied.
"No—no! It is I. I must do penance. What is it to be?"
He looked at her steadily; his eyes shone with dark fire. In the pause she felt her heart throb quickly, and she laughed with a sweet unsteadiness. "I am glad you are going to give me none," she said.
"But I do," he answered, "I shall. I—"
The boy Ito, behind them, spoke his name. Daunt started with a stab of recollection and drew from his pocket a folded pink paper, fastened with a blue seal.
"How stupid of me! My wits have gone wool-gathering to-night. Here is a telegram for you. It came soon after we left the Embassy, and Mrs. Dandridge, thinking it might be urgent, sent Ito after us to the tea-house. He missed us, but saw me here on his way back."
Barbara broke the seal and held the message to the candle-light that shone from a low temple entrance. She did not notice at the moment that it was the temple of the Fox-God whose alms she had that evening denied. She had guessed who was the sender and the knowledge fell like a cool, fateful hand on her mood.
And alas, on Daunt's also. For, as she turned the leaf, his gaze, wandering through the temple doorway, to the candle-starred mirror above the tithe-box, had unwittingly seen reflected there, in the painfully exact chirography of a Japanese telegraph-clerk, the signature