On the other side of Tokyo that night Doctor Bersonin sat with Phil in his great laboratory. Dinner had been laid on a round table at one end of the room. This was now pushed into a corner; they sat in deep leather chairs with slim liqueur glasses of green crême de menthe on a stand between them, with a methyl lamp and cigars.
Phil had more than once refilled his glass from the straw-braided, long-necked vessel at his elbow. He was restless and ill at ease. The tense excitement that had followed his hour with Bersonin at the Club had been allayed by the lights and movement of the cherry-festival; but in that cool, bare room, under the continuous, slow scrutiny of the expert's pallid, mask-like face, the sense of half-fearful elation had returned, reinforced by a feverish expectation.
During the dinner, served at ten, conversation had been desultory, full of lapses broken only by the plaintive chirp of the hiwa from its corner. When the cigars and cordial had been brought by the silent-footed Ishida, Bersonin had risen to draw the curtain closely over the window and to lock the door. When he came back he stood before the mantelpiece, his arm laid along it, looking down from his towering height on the other's unquiet hand playing with the chain of the spirit-lamp. His face was very white. Phil drew a long, slow breath and looked up.
Bersonin spoke. His voice was cold and measured; the only sign of agitation was in the slow, spasmodic working of the great white fingers against the dark wood.
"I have brought you here to-night," he said, "to make you a proposition. I have need of help—of a kind—that you can give me. It will require certain qualities which I think you possess—which we possess in common. I have chosen you because you have daring and because you are not troubled by what the coward calls conscience—that fool's name for fear!"
Phil touched his dry lips with his tongue. "I have as little of that as the next man," he replied. "I never found I needed much."
Bersonin continued:
"What I have to say I can say without misgiving. For if you told it before the fact there is possibly but one man in Japan who would think you sane; and if you told it after—well, for your own safety, you will not tell it then! Your acceptance of my proposition will have a definite effect on your prospects, which, I believe, can scarcely be looked on as bright."
Phil muttered an oath. "You needn't remind me of that," he said with surly emphasis. "I've got about as much prospects as a coolie stevedore. Well, what of it?"
The cold voice went on, and now it had gathered a sneer:
"You are twenty-three, educated, good-looking, with the best of life before you—but dependent on the niggardly charity of a rich brother for the very bread you eat. Even here, on this skirt of the world where pleasures are cheap, it is only by dint of debt that you keep your head above water. Now your sedate relative has come to sit in judgment on your past year. What does he care for your private tastes? What will he do when he hears of the geisha suppers and the bar-chits at the Club and the roulette table at the bungalow? Increase that generous stipend of yours? I fancy not."
Phil lit a cigar with a hand that shook. The doctor's contemptuous words had roused a tingling anger that raced with the alcohol in his blood. He, with the tastes of a gentleman, as poor as a temple-rat, while his brother sailed around the globe in his steam-yacht! He saw his allowance cut off—saw himself driven to the cheap expedients of the Bund beach-comber, cringing for a yen from men who had won his hundreds at the Roost—or perhaps sitting on an under-clerk's stool in some Settlement counting-house, shabby-genteel, adding figures from eight in the morning to five at night. No more moon-light cherry-parties on the Sumida River, or plum-blossom picnics, or high jinks in the Inland Sea. No more pony-races at Omori, or cat-boat sailing at Kamakura, or philandering at the Maple-Leaf Tea-House. No more laughing Japanese faces and tinted fingers—no more stolen kisses in bamboo lanes—no more Haru!
He struck the stand with his fist. "And if—I agree?" he said thickly. "What then?"
Bersonin leaned forward, his hands on the stand. It rocked under his weight. "I have talked of money. I will show you a quick way to gain it—not by years, but by days!—wealth such as you have never dreamed, enough to make your brother poor beside you! Not only money, but power and place and honors. Is the stake big enough to play for?"
Phil stared at him, fascinated. It was not madness back of those dappled, yellowish eyes. They were full of a knowledge, cold and measured and implacable.
"What do you—want me to do?" He almost gasped the words.
The expert looked him in the eye a full moment in silence, his fingers crawling and twitching. Then, with a quick, leopard-like movement, he went to the wall-safe, opened it and took out what seemed a square metal box. In its top was set an indicator, like the range-finder of a camera. Its very touch seemed to melt his icy control. His paleness flushed; his hand trembled as he set it upon the desk.
"Wait!" he said. "Wait!"
He looked swiftly about the room. His eye rested on the bamboo cage and a quick gleam shot across his face. He opened the wire door and the little bird hopped to his finger. He moved a metal pen-rack to the very center of the desk and perched the tiny creature on it. It burst into song, warbling full-throated, packed with melody. Bersonin set the metal case a little distance away and adjusted it with minutest care.
"Sing, Dick!" he cried loudly; "sing! sing!—"
The song stopped. There had come a thrill in the air—a puff of icy wind on Phil's face—a thin chiming like a fairy cymbal. Phil sprang up with a cry. The fluffy ball, with its metal perch, had utterly disappeared; only in the center of the desk was a pinch of reddish-brown powder like the dust of an emery-wheel, laid in feathery whorls.
He stared transfixed. "What does it mean?" he asked hoarsely.
The doctor's voice was no longer toneless. It leaped now with an evil exultation. "It means that I—Bersonin—have found what physicists have dreamed of for fifty years! I have solved the secret of the love and hatred of atoms! That box is the harness of a force beside which the engines of modern war are children's toys."
He grasped Phil's arm with a force that made him wince. The amber eyes glittered.
"At first I planned to sell it to the highest bidder among the powers. I was a fool to think of that! The nation that buys it, to guard the secret for itself, must wall me in a fortress! That would be the reward of Bersonin—the great Bersonin, who had wrested from nature the most subtle of her secrets! But I am too clever for that! It must be I—I alone—who holds the key! It shall bring me many things, but the first of these is money. I must have funds—unlimited funds. The money I despise, except as a stepping-stone, but the money you love and must have! Well, I offer it to you!"
Phil's heart was beating hard. The tension of the room had increased; a hundred suffocating atmospheres seemed pressing on it. "How—how—" he stammered.
Bersonin took a paper from his pocket, unfolded it and laid it on the stand. It was a chart of Yokohama harbor. A red square was drawn in the margin, and from this a fine, needle-like ray pointed out across the anchorage. With his pencil the Doctor wrote two words on the red square—"The Roost."
Phil shrank trembling into his chair. He seemed to see the other looking at him over clinking glasses at the Club, while voices spoke from the next room. "What if one of those Dreadnaughts should go down in this friendly harbor!" It came from his lips in a thin whisper, almost without his volition—the answer to the question that had haunted him that day.
A gleam like the fire of unholy altars came in Bersonin's eyes.
"Not one—two! A bolt from a blue sky, that will echo over Europe! And what then? A fury of popular passion in one country; suspicion and alarm in all. Rumors of war, fanned by the yellow press. The bottom dropping out of the market! It means millions at a single coup, for, in spite of diplomatic quibbles, the market is like a cork. The Paris bourse is soaring. Wall Street will make a new record to-morrow. In London, Consols are at Ninety-two. My agents are awaiting my word. I have many, for that is safer. I shall spread selling orders over five countries—British bonds in Vienna and New York, and steel and American railroads in London. I risk all and you—nothing. Yet if you join hands with me in this we shall share alike—you and I! And with the winnings we get now we shall get more. Trust me to know the way! Money shall be dirt to you. The pleasure-cities of every continent shall be your playgrounds. You shall have your pretty little Japanese peri, and fifty more besides."
Phil's face had flushed and paled by turns. He looked at the expert with a shivering fascination: "But there are—there will be—men aboard those ships...." He shuddered and wrenched his gaze away.
Bersonin put out his great hand and laid it on the other's shoulder—its weight seemed to be pressing him down into the chair.
"Well?" he said, in a low intense voice. "What if there are?"
There was a long silence. Then slowly Phil lifted a face as white as paper. A look slinking and devilish lay in it now.
The doctor bent down and began to speak in a low tone. The sound passed around the room, sibilant, like the sound of a bat's wings in the dark.
It was an hour before midnight when Phil opened the gate of the expert's house and passed down the moon-lighted street. He walked stumblingly, cowering at the tree-shadows, peering nervously over his shoulder like one who feels the presence of a ghastly familiar.
In the great room he had left, Bersonin stood by the fireplace. The nervous strain and exaltation were still on him. He poured out a glass of the liqueur which he had not yet tasted and drank it off. The hot pungent mint sent a glow along his nerves. Behind him Ishida was methodically removing the dinner service. The doctor crossed the room and stood before the bamboo cage. He drew back the spring-door and whistling, held out his finger.
"Here, Dick!" he called. "Here, boy!"
There was no response.
He started. His face turned a gray-green. He drew back and stealthily turned his head.
But the Japanese did not seem to have noticed the silence. With the tray in his hands, he was looking fixedly at the feathery sprays of reddish-yellow dust on the polished top of the desk.
Barbara pushed open the bamboo gate of the temple garden, then paused. The recluse with whom she had talked yesterday sat a little way inside, while before him, in an attitude of deepest attention, stood the diminutive figure on the huge clogs whose morning acquaintance she had made from her window. Thorn was looking at him earnestly with his great myopic eye, through a heavy glass mounted with a handle like a lorgnette.
"My son," he said. "Why will you persist in eating amé, when I have taught you the classics and the true divinity of the universe? It is too sweet for youthful teeth. One of these days you will be carried to a dentist, an esteemed person with horrible tools, prior to the removal of a small hell, containing several myriads of lost souls, from the left side of your lower jaw!"
Barbara's foot grated on a pebble and he rose with a startled quickness. The youngster bent double, his face preternaturally grave. Thorn thrust the glass into his sleeve and smiled.
"I am experimenting on this oriental raw material," he said, "to illustrate certain theories of my own. Ishikichi-San, though a slave to the sweetmeat dealer, is a learned infant. He can write forty Chinese characters and recite ten texts of Mencius. He also knows many damnable facts about figures which they teach in school. He has just propounded a question that Confucius was too wise to answer: 'Why is poverty?' Not being so wise as the Chinese sage, I attempted its elucidation. Thus endeth our lesson to-day, Ishikichi. Sayonara."
He bowed. The child ducked with a jerky suddenness that sent his round, battered hat rolling at Barbara's feet. She picked it up and set it on the shaven head.
"Oh!" she said humbly. "I beg your pardon, Ishikichi! I put the rim right in your eye!"
"Don't menshum it," he returned solemnly. "I got another." He stalked to the gate, faced about, bobbed over again and disappeared.
Barbara looked after him smilingly. "Is Ishikichi in straitened circumstances? Or is his bent political economy?"
"His father has been ill for a long time," Thorn replied. "He keeps a shop, and in some way the child has heard that they will have to give it up. It troubles him, for he can't imagine existence without it."
"What a pity! I would be so glad to—do you think I could give them something?"
He shook his head. "After you have been here a while, you will find that simple charity in Japan is not apt to be a welcome thing."
"I am beginning to understand already," she said, as they walked along the stepping-stones, "that these gentle-mannered people do not lack the sterner qualities. Yet how they grace them! The iron-hand is here, but it has the velvet glove. Courtesy and kindness seem almost a religion with them."
"More," he answered. "This is the only country I have seen in the world whose people, when I walk the street, do not seem to notice that I am disfigured!"
She made no pretense of misunderstanding. "Believe me," she said gently, "it is no disfigurement. But I understand. My father lived all his life in the dread of blindness."
A faint sound came from him. She was aware, without lifting her eyes to his, that he was staring at her strangely.
"All his life. Then your father is not ... living?"
"He died before I was born."
She glanced at him as she spoke, for his tone had been muffled and indistinct. There was a deep furrow in his forehead which she had not seen before.
"Do you look like him?"
"No, he was dark. I am like my mother."
Thorn was looking away from her, toward the lane, where, beyond the hedge, a man was passing, half-singing, half-chanting to himself in a repressed, sepulchral voice.
"My mother died, too, when I was a little girl," she added, "so I know really very little about him."
She had forgotten to look for the Flower-of-Dream. They had come to the little lake with its mossy stones and basking, orange carp. Through the gap in the shrubbery the white witchery of Fuji-San glowed in the sun with far-faint shudderings of lilac fire. She sat down on a sunny boulder. Thorn stooped over the water, looking into its cool, green depths, and she saw him pass his hand over his brow in that familiar, half-hesitant gesture of the day before.
"Will you tell me that little?" he asked. "I think I should like to hear."
"I very seldom talk about him," she said, looking dreamily out across the distance, "but not because I don't like to. You see, knowing so little, I used to dream out the rest, so that he came to seem quite real. Does that sound very childish and fanciful?"
"Tell me the dreams," he answered. "Mine are always more true than facts."
"He was born," she began, "in the Mediterranean—"
She turned her head. The stone on which Thorn's foot rested had crashed into the water. He staggered slightly in regaining his balance, and his face had the pale, startled look it wore when he had first seen her from the roadside. He drew back, and again his hand went up across his face.
"Yes," he said. "Go on."
"In the Mediterranean—just where, I don't know, but on an island—and his mother was Romaic. I have never seen Greece, but I like to know that some of it is in my blood. His father was American, of a family that had a tradition of Gipsy descent. Perhaps he was born with the 'thumb-print' on the palm that they call the Romany mark. As a child I used to wonder what it looked like."
She smiled up at him, but his face was turned away. He had taken his hand from his brow, and slipped it into his loose sleeve, and stood rigidly erect.
"I often used to try to imagine his mother. I am sure she had a dark and beautiful face, with large, brown eyes like a wild deer's, that used to bend above his cradle. Perhaps each night she crossed her fingers over him, and said—"
"En to onoma tou Patros," he repeated, "kai tou Ouiou kai tou Agiou Pneumatos!"
"Yes," she said, surprised. "In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. You know it?"
"It is the old Greek-orthodox fashion," he said in a low voice.
"I should not wonder," she continued, "if she made three little wounds on him, as a baby, as I have read Greek mothers do, to place him under the protection of the Trinity. She must have loved him—her first boy-baby! And I think the most of what he was came to him from her."
Thorn moved his position suddenly, and Barbara saw his shoulders rise in a deep-taken breath.
"Love of right and hatred of wrong," he said, "admiration for the beautiful and the true, faith in man and woman, sensitiveness to artistic things—ah, it is most often the mother who makes men what they are. Not our strength or power of calculation, but her heart and power to love! In the twilight of every home one sees the mother-souls glowing like fireflies. I never had a picture of my mother. I would rather have her portrait than a fortune!"
His voice was charged with feeling. She felt a strange flutter of the heart, a painful and yearning sympathy such as she had never felt before.
"I wonder what he saw from that Greek cradle," she resumed. "I could never fancy the room so well. I suppose it had pictures. Do you think so?"
He nodded. "And maybe—on one wall—a Greek ikon, protected by a silver case ... I've seen such ... that left exposed only the olive-brown faces and hands and feet of the figures. Perhaps ... when he was very little ... he used to think the brown Virgin represented his mother and the large-eyed child himself."
"Ah," she cried, and a deeper light came in her eyes. "You have been in Greece! You have seen what he saw!" But he made no reply, and after a moment she went on:
"He had never known what terror was till one day an accident, received in play, brought him the fear of blindness. It must have stayed with him all his life after that, wherever he went—for he lived in other countries. I have a few leaves of an old diary of his ... here and there I feel it in the lines."
She, too, fell silent. "And then—?" he said.
"There my dreams end. You see how little I know of him. I don't know why he came to Japan. But he met my mother here and here they were married. I should always love Japan, if only for that."
"He—died here?"
"In Nagasaki. My mother went back to America, and there I was born."
She was looking out across the wide space where the roofs sank out of sight—to the foliaged slope of Aoyama. Suddenly a thrill, a curiously complex motion, ran over her. Above those far tree-tops, sailing in slow, sweeping, concentric circles, she saw a great machine, like a gigantic vulture. She knew instantly what it was, and there flashed before her the memory of a day at Fort Logan when a brave young lieutenant had crashed to death before her eyes in a shattered aëroplane.
If Daunt were to fall ... what would it mean to her! In that instant the garden about her, Thorn, the blue sky above, faded, and she stared dismayed into a gulf in whose shadows lurked the disastrous, the terrifying, the irreparable. "I love him! I love him!"—it seemed to peal like a temple-bell through her brain. Even to herself she could never deny it again!
She became aware of music near at hand. It brought her back to the present, for it was the sound of the organ in the new Chapel across the way.
Looking up, she was struck by the expression on Thorn's face. He seemed, listening, to be held captive by some dire recollection. It brought to her mind that bitter cry:
She rose with a sudden swelling of the throat.
"I must go now," she said. "The Chapel is to be dedicated this morning. The organ is playing for the service now."
She led the way along the stepping-stones to the bamboo gate. As they approached, through the interstices of the farther hedge she could see the figure of the Ambassador, with Mrs. Dandridge, among the kimono entering the chapel door. In the temple across the yard the baton had begun its tapping and the dulled, monotonous tom-tom mingled weirdly with the soaring harmonies of the organ.
With her hand on the paling she spoke again:
"One thing I didn't tell you. It was I who built the Chapel. It is in the memory of my father. See, there is the memorial window. They were putting it in place when I came a little while ago."
She was not looking at Thorn, or she would have seen his face overspread with a whiteness like that of death. He stood as if frozen to marble. The morning sun on the Chapel's eastern side, striking through its open casements, lighted the iridescent rose-window with a tender radiance, gilding the dull yellow aureole about the head of the Master and giving life and glow to the face beside Him—dark, beardless, and passionately tender—at which Thorn was staring, with what seemed almost an agony of inquiry.
"St. John," she said softly, "'the disciple whom Jesus loved.'" She drew from the bosom of her dress the locket she always wore and opened it. "The face was painted from this—the only picture I have of my father."
His hand twitched as he took it. He looked at it long and earnestly—at the name carved on its lid. "Barbara—Barbara Fairfax!" he said. She thought his lips shook under the gray mustache.
"You—are a Buddhist, are you not?" she asked. "And Buddhists believe the spirits of the dead are always about us. Do you think—perhaps—he sees the Chapel?"
He put her locket into her hands hastily. "God!" he said, as if to himself. "He will see it through a hundred existences!"
Her eyes were moist and shining. "I am glad you think that," she said.
In the Chapel the bishop's gaze kindled as it went out over the kneeling people.
"We beseech Thee, that in this place now set apart to Thy service, Thy holy name may be worshiped in truth and purity through all generations."
The voice rang valiant and clear in the summer hush. It crossed the still lane and entered a window where, in a temple loft, a man sat still and gray and quiet, his hands clenched in his kimono sleeves:
"We humbly dedicate it to Thee, in the memory of one for the saving of whose soul Thou wert lifted upon the Cross."
The man in the loft threw himself on his face with a terrible cry.
"My child!" he cried in a breaking voice. "My little, little child, whom they have robbed me of—whom I have never known in all these weary years! You have grown away from me—I shall never have you now! Never ... never!"
Behind him the unfinished image of Kwan-on the All-Pitying, tossed the sunlight about the room in golden-lettered flashes, and beneath his closed and burning lids these seemed to blend and weave—to form bossed letters which had stared at him from the rim of the rose-window:
THOU SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE ME.
The day had dawned sultry, with a promise of summer humidity, and Daunt was not surprised to find the barometer performing intemperate antics. "Confound it!" he muttered irritably, as he dressed. "If it was a month later, one would think there was a typhoon waltzing around somewhere in the China Sea."
That morning had seen his first trial of his new fan-propeller, and the Glider's action had surpassed his wildest expectation. The flight, of which Barbara had caught a glimpse from Thorn's garden, had been a longer one than usual—quite twelve miles against a sluggish upper current—but even that failed to bring its customary glow. Thereafter he had spent a long morning immersed in the work of the Chancery: the study of a disputed mining concession in Manchuria; a report on a contemplated issue of government bonds; a demand for a passport by a self-alleged national with a foreign accent and a paucity of naturalization papers; the daily budget of translations from vernacular newspapers, by which a home government gains a bird's-eye view of comment and public opinion in far-away capitals. The Chancery was a pleasant nest of rooms opening into one another. Through its windows stole the smell of the garden blossoms, and across the compound wall sounded the shrill ventriloquistic notes of peddlers, the brazen chorus of a marching squad of buglers, or the warning "Hek! Hek!" of a flying rick'sha. The main room was cool, furnished with plain desks and filing cabinets. Against one wall yawned a huge safe in which were kept the code-books and records, and framed pictures of former Chiefs of Mission hung on the walls. In the anteroom Japanese clerks and messengers sat at small tables. The place was pervaded by the click of type-writer keys, tinkling call-bells, and the various notes of a busy office, and floating down from a stairway came the buzzing monotone of a Student Interpreter in his mid-year oral examinations under the Japanese secretary.
But to-day Daunt could not exorcise with the mass of detail the leering imps that plagued him. They peered at him over the edge of the code-books and whispered from the margins of decorous despatches, chuckling satirically.
"Barbara!" they sneered. "Mere acquaintances often name steam-yachts for girls, don't they! Arrived the same day as her ship, eh? Rather singular coincidence! What a flush she had when Voynich spoke of Phil's brother last night at the tea-house. Angry? Of course she was! What engaged girl likes to have the fact paraded—especially when she's practising on another man? And how about the telegram? How long have you known her, by the way? Two days? Really, now!"
The weekly governmental pouch had closed at noon, and pouch-days were half-holidays, but Daunt did not go to the Embassy. An official letter had arrived from Washington which must be delivered in Kamakura. Daunt seized this excuse, plunged ferociously into tweeds and an hour afterward found himself in a railway carriage thudding gloomily toward the lower bay. In his heart he knew that he was trying to run away—from something that nevertheless traveled with him.
The sky was palely blue, without a cloud, but the bay, where the rails skirted it, was heaving in long swells of oily amethyst like a vast carpet shaken at a distance in irregular undulations, on which junk with flapping, windless sails, of the deep gold color of old straw, tumbled like ungainly sea-spiders. The western hills looked misty and uncertain, and Fuji was wrapped in a wraith-like mist into which its glimmering profile disappeared.
At a way-station a coolie with a huge tray piled with neat, flat, wooden boxes passed the window calling "Ben-to! Ben-to!" It reminded Daunt that he had had no luncheon, and he bought one. He had long ago accustomed himself to Japanese food and liked it, but to-day the two shallow sections inspired no appetite. The half which held the rice he viciously threw out of the window and unrolling the fresh-cut chop-sticks from their paper square, rummaged discontentedly among the contents of the other: dried cuttlefish, bean-curd, slices of boiled lily-bulb, cinnamon-sticks, lotos stems and a coil of edible seaweed, all wrapped in green leaves. In the end, the mélange followed the rice.
At Kamakura an immediate answer to the letter he brought was not forthcoming, and to kill the time he strolled far down the curved beach. The usual breeze was lacking. A haze as fine as gossamer had drawn itself over the sky, and through it gulls were calling plaintively. Here and there on the sea-wall women were spreading fish-nets, and along the causeway trudged blue-legged peasant-women, their backs bent beneath huge loads of brushwood. In one place a bronze-faced fisherman in a fantastic kimono on which was painted sea-monsters and hobgoblins in crimson and orange, seated on the gunwale of his sampan drawn above the shingle, watched a little girl who, with clothing clutched thigh-high, was skipping the frothy ripples as if they were ropes of foam. A mile from the town he met a regiment of small school-boys, in indigo-blue and white kimono, marching two and two like miniature soldiers, a teacher in European dress at either end of the line—future Oyamas, Togos and Kurokis in embryo.
They were coming from Enoshima, the hill-island that rises in the bay like an emerald St. Michael, where in a rocky cave, looking seaward, dwells holy Ben-ten, the Buddhist Goddess of Love. Daunt could see its masses of dark green foliage with their pink veinings of cherry-trees, and the crawling line of board-walk, perched on piling, which gave access from the mainland when the tide was in. On its height, if anywhere, would be coolness. He filled his pipe and set off toward it along the sultry sand. The hot dazzle of the sun was in his face. There was no movement in the crisp leaves of the bamboo trees and the damp heat beat up stiflingly from the gray glare. Somewhere in the air, stirless and humid, there rested a faint, weedy smell like a steaming sea-growth in a tidal ooze.
Daunt's pipe sputtered feebly, and, girding at the heat, he hurled it at a handful of blue ducks that plashed tiredly in the gray-green heave, and watched them dive, to reappear far away, like bobbing corks. He wished he could as easily scatter the blue-devils that dogged him.
He drew a sigh of relief as he reached the long elevated board-walk and shook the sand from his shoes. Underneath its shore-end a fisherman sat in the stern of a boat fishing with cormorants. A row of the solemn birds sat on a pole projecting over the water, each tethered by a string whose end was tied to the man's wrist. They seemed to be asleep, but now and then one would plunge like a diver, to reappear with a fish wriggling in its beak. Daunt watched them listlessly a moment, then, passing beneath a great bronze torii, he slowly climbed the single shaded street that staggered up the hill between the multitudes of gay little shops running over with colored sea-shells, with grotesque lanterns made of inflated fish-skins, with carved crystal and pink and white coral—up and up, by old, old flights of mossy steps, under more ancient trees, by green monuments and lichen-stippled Buddhas, till the sea below crawled like a wrinkled counterpane. Daunt knew a tea-house on the very lip of the cliff, the Kinki-ro—"Inn of the Golden Turtle"—and he bent his steps lazily in its direction.
In the heavy heat the low tile roof looked cool and inviting. Tall soft-eyed iris were standing in its garden overlooking the water, and against the green their velvety leaves made vivid splashes of golden blue. On a dead tree two black crows were quarreling and cherry-petals powdered the paths like pink hail. The haze, sifting from the sky, seemed to wrap everything in a vast, shimmering veil. At the hedge he paused an instant. Some one, somewhere, was humming, low-voiced, an air that he had once loved. He pushed open the gate and went on into the tremulous radiance. Then he stopped short.
Barbara was seated above him in the fork of a low camelia tree, one arm laid out along a branch, her green gown blending with a bamboo thicket behind her and her vivid face framed in the blossoms. She sat, chin in hand, looking dreamily out across the bay, and the hummed song had a rhythm that seemed to fit her thought—slow and infinitely tender.
"You!" he cried.
She turned with a startled movement that dissolved into low, delicious laughter.
"Fairly caught," she answered. "I don't often revert far enough to climb trees, but I thought no one but Haru and I was here. Will you come and help me down, Honorable Fly-man?"
"Wait—" he said. "What was the song you were humming?"
She looked at him with a quick intake of breath, then for answer began to sing, in a voice that presently became scarce more than a whisper:
Daunt's hand fell to his side. A young girl's face nested in creamy, pink blossoms—a sweet, shy, flushed face under a mass of curling, gold-bronze hair. "I remember now!" he said in a low voice. "I ... sang it to you ... that day!"
"I am flattered!" she exclaimed. "The day before yesterday you had forgotten that you ever saw poor little me! It was Mrs. Claybourne, of course, that you sang to! Yet you were my idol for a long month and a day!"
"It was to you," he said unsteadily. "I didn't know your name. But I never forgot the song. I remembered it that night in the garden, when I first heard you playing!"
They walked together around the curving road, leaving Haru with the tea-basket. "Patsy would have come," Barbara had said, "but she is in the clutches of her dressmaker." And Daunt had answered, "I have a distinct regard for that Chinaman!"
His black mood had vanished, and the leering imps had flown. In the brightness of her physical presence, how baseless and foolish seemed his sullen imaginings! What man who owned a steam yacht, knowing her, would not wish to name it the Barbara? Walking beside her, so near that he could feel the touch of her light skirt against his ankles, it seemed impossible that he should ever again be other than light-hearted. She was no acquaintance of hours, after all. He had known her for seven years. He was in wild spirits.
The sky was duller now. Its marvelous haze of blue and gold had turned pallid, and the sun glared with a pale, yellowish effrontery. A strange sighing was in the air, so faint, however, that it seemed only the stirring of innumerable leaves, the resinous rasping of pine-needles and the lisping fall of the flaming petals from the century-old camelia trees, that stained the ground with hot, bleeding red. Far below in the shallow pools, nut-brown, bare-legged girls were gathering seaweed in hand-nets, kimono tucked beneath their belts and scarlet petticoats falling to their knees, like a flock of brilliant flamingos. At a turn in the road stood a stone image of Jizo, with a red paper bib about its neck. Before it lay three small rice-cakes; somewhere in the neighborhood was a little sick child, three years old. At its base were heaps of tiny stones, piled by mothers whose little children had died.
They stopped at a tea-house open on all sides, and, sitting cross-legged on its tatamé, drank tea from earthenware pots that held only a small cupful, while they listened to a street minstrel beating on a tom-tom, and singing a mysterious song that seemed about to choke him. They fed a crisp rice-cake to a baby sagging from an urchin's shoulder. A doll was strapped to the baby's back. They peered into a Buddhist temple where a monotonous chant came from behind a blue-figured curtain. They went, laughing like two children, down the zigzag stone steps, past innumerable uomitei—crimson-benched "resting-houses," where grave Japanese pedestrians sat eating stewed eels and chipping hard-boiled eggs—to the rocky edge of the tide, which now rolled in with a measured, sullen booming. He pointed to a gloomy fissure which ran into the mountain, at a little distance.
"O Maiden, journeying to Holy Ben-ten," he said, "behold her shrine!"
"How disillusioning!"
"People find love so, sometimes."
She slowly shook her head. "Not all of them," she said softly. "I am old-fashioned enough not to believe that." Her brown eyes were wistful and a little troubled, and her voice was so adorable that he could have gone on his knees to her.
"We will ask Ben-ten about it," he said.
"Oh, but not 'we!'" she cried. "I must go alone. Don't you know the legend? People quarrel if they go together."
"I can't imagine quarreling with you. I'd rather quarrel with myself."
"That would be difficult, wouldn't it?"
"Not in some of my moods. Ask my head-boy. to-day, for instance—"
"Well?" For he had paused.
"I was meditating self-destruction when I met you."
"By what interesting method, I wonder?"
"I was about to search for a volcano to jump into."
"I thought the nearest active crater is a hundred miles away."
"So it is, but I'm an absent-minded beggar."
She laughed. "May I ask what inspired to-day's suicidal mood?"
"It was—a telegram."
"Oh!" She colored faintly. "I—I hope it held no bad news."
He looked into her eyes. "I hope not," he said. Something else was on his tongue, when "Look!" she exclaimed. "How strange the sea looks off there!"
A sinister, whitish bank, like a mad drift of smoke, lay far off on the water, and a tense, whistling hum came from the upper air. A drop of water splashed on Daunt's wrist. "There's going to be a blow," he said. "The seaweed gatherers are all coming in, too. Ben-ten will have to wait, I'm afraid. See—even her High Priest is forsaking her!"
From where they stood steps were roughly hewn into the rock, winding across the face of the cliff. Beside these, stone pillars were socketed, carrying an iron chain that hung in rusted festoons. Along this precarious pathway from the cavern an old man was hastily coming, followed by a boy with a sagging bundle tied in a white cloth. "That parcel, no doubt," said Daunt, "contains the day's offerings. Wait! You're not going?" For she had started down the steps.
She had turned to answer, when, with the suddenness of an explosion, a burst of wind fell on them like a flapping weight, spattering them with drops that struck the rock as if hurled from a sling-full of melted metal. Barbara had never in her life experienced anything like its ferocity. It both startled and angered her, like a personal affront.
Daunt had sprung to her side and was shouting something. But the words were indistinguishable; she shook her head and went on stubbornly, clinging to the chain, a whirl of blown garments. She felt him grasp her arm.
"Go back!" she shrieked. "It's—bad—luck!"
As he released her there came a second's menacing lull, and in it she sprang down the steps and ran swiftly out along the pathway. He was after her in an instant, overtaking her on a frail board trestle that spanned a pool, where the cliff was perpendicular. Here the wind, shaggy with spume, hurled them together. Daunt threw an arm about her, clinging with the other hand to the wooden railing. Her hair was a reddish swirl across his shoulder and her breath, panting against his throat, ridged his skin with a creeping delight. The rocks beneath them, through whose fissures tongues of water ran screaming, was the color of raspberries and tawny with seaweed. There was only a weird, yellow half-light, through which the gale howled and scuffled, like dragons fighting. A slather of wave licked the palsied framework.
He bent and shouted into her ear. All she caught was: "Must—cave—next lull—"
She nodded her head and her lips smiled at him through the confused obscurity. A thrill swept her like silver rain. Pulse on pulse, an emotion like fire and snow in one thrilled and chilled her. She closed her eyes with a wild longing that the wind might last for ever, that that moment, like the ecstasy of an opium dream, might draw itself out to infinite length. Slowly she felt the breath of the tempest ebb about them, then suddenly felt herself lifted from her feet, and her eyes opened into Daunt's. Her cheek lay against his breast, as it had done in that short moment in the Embassy garden. She could feel his heart bound under the rough tweed. Once more the wind caught them, but he staggered through it, and into the high, rock entrance of the cave.
Inside its dripping rim the sudden cessation of the wind seemed almost uncanny, and the boom of the surf was a dull thunderous roar. He set her on her feet on the damp rock and laughed wildly.
"Do you realize," she said, "that we have transgressed the most sacred tenet of Ben-ten by coming here together? We are doomed to misunderstanding!"
"Now that I recollect, that applies only to lovers," he answered. "Then we—"
"Are quite safe," she quickly finished for him. "Come, I want to see the shrine. We must find a candle."
He peered into the gloomy depths. "I think I see some burning," he said. "We will explore."
A little way inside they came to a small well, with a dipper and a rack of thin blue-and-white towels to cleanse the hands of worshipers. On a square pedestal stood a stone Buddha, curiously incrusted by drippings from the roof. Near it was a wooden booth, its front hung with pendents of twisted rice-straw and strips of white paper folded in diagonal notches. It held a number of tiny wooden torii strung with lighted candles, above each of which was nailed a paper prayer. A few copper coins lay scattered beneath them. Daunt thrust two of the candles into wooden holders and they slowly followed the narrowing fissure, guttered by the feet of centuries, between square posts bearing carven texts, and small images, coated with the spermy droppings from innumerable candles.
She held up her winking light toward his face. "What a desperate absorption!" she said laughingly. "You haven't said a thing for five minutes."
"I'm thinking we had better explain at once to Ben-ten that we're not lovers. Otherwise we may get the penalty. Perhaps we'd better just tell her it was an accident, and let it go at that? What do you think?"
"That might be the simplest."
"All right then, I'll say 'Ben-ten, dear, she wanted to come alone; she really did! We didn't intend it at all. So be a nice, gracious goddess and don't make her quarrel with me!'"
"What do you suppose she will answer?"
"She will say: 'Young man, in the same circumstances, I should have done exactly the same myself.'"
The passage had grown so low that they had to bend their heads, then all at once it widened into a concave chamber. The cannonading of the wind rumbled fainter and fainter. He took her hand and drew her forward. "There is Ben-ten," he said.
The Goddess of Love sat in a barred cleft of the rock, enshrined in a dull, gold silence. Beads of moisture spangled her robe, glistening like brilliants through the mossy darkness. "Poor deity!" said Barbara. "To have to live for ever in a sea-cavern! It's a clammy idea, isn't it?"
"That's—" He paused. "I could make a terrible pun, but I won't."
"One shouldn't joke about love," she said.
"Have you discovered that too?"
She gazed at him strangely, without answering. In the wan light his face looked pale. Her unresisting fingers still lay in his; he felt their touch like a breath of fire through all his veins. Her eyes sparkled back the eery witch-glow of the candle-flames. "You are a green-golden gnome-girl!" he said unsteadily. "And I am under a spell."
"Yes, yes," she said. "I am Rumptydudget's daughter! I have only to wave my candlestick—so!—to turn you into a stalagmite!"
She suited the action to the word—and dropped her candle, which was instantly extinguished on the damp floor. Bending forward to retrieve it, Daunt slipped. The arm he instinctively threw out to save himself struck the wall and his own candle flew from its socket. As he regained his footing, confused by the blank, enfolding darkness, he stumbled against Barbara, and his face brushed hers. In another instant the touch had thrilled into a kiss.
A moment she lay in his arms, passive, panting, her unkissed mouth stinging with the burn of his lips. The world was a dense blackness, shot with fire and full of pealing bells, and the beating of her heart was a great wave of sound that throbbed like the iron-shod fury of the seas.
"I love you, Barbara!" he said simply. "I love you!"
The stammering utterance pierced the swift, confused sweetness of that first kiss like a lance of desperate gladness. Through the tumbling passion of the words he poured into her heart, she could feel his hands touching her face, her throat, her loosened hair.
"Barbara! Listen, dear! I must say it! It's stronger than I am—no, don't push me away! Love me! You must love me!
With her arms on his breast, she had made a movement to release herself. "We are mad, I think!" she breathed.
"Then may we never be sane!"
"I—you have known me only two days! What—"
"Ah, no! I've known you all these years and have been loving you without really knowing it. I made a woman out of my own fancy, that I dreamed alive. In the long winter evenings when I worked at my models in the little house in Aoyama, I used to see her face in my driftwood blaze and talk to her. I called her my 'Lady of the Many-Colored Fires.' I never thought she really existed, but that first night in the Embassy garden I knew that my dream-woman was you!—you, Barbara!"
Her hands pushed him from her no more. They fell to trembling on his breast. In the dense, salty obscurity, she turned her head sharply, to feel again his lips on hers, her own molding to his kiss. She drooped, swaying, stunned, breathless.
"Barbara, I love you!"
"No—not again. Light—the candle."
"Just a moment longer—here in the dark, with Ben-ten. It's fate, darling! Why should I have been in Japan and not in Persia when you came? Why did I happen to be there in the garden that night, at that particular moment? Why, it was the purest accident that I came here to-day! No—not accident. It was kismet! Barbara!"
His lips were murmuring against her cheek. "Say 'I love you,' too!"
"I—can not. You ... you would hold me cheap ... I would be—I am!... What? Yes, it was a tulip tree. I was sixteen.... Oh, you couldn't have—why, you'd forgotten the whole thing! You had, you had!... Don't hold me.... No, I don't care what you think!... Yes, I do care!... Yes, I—I ... This is perfectly shameless!... Dark? That makes it all the worse. What will you ... No, no! You must not kiss me again! We must go back!—I will go back...."
She freed herself, and he fumbled for his fallen candle. He struck a match. The sputtering blue flame lit her white, languorous face, her fallen hair, her heaving breast. It went out. He struck another and the wick blazed up.
"Look at me, dear!" he said. "Tell me in the light. Will you marry me?"
"I can not answer—now."
"Why? Don't you love me?"
"I—in so short a time, how could I? Let us go now. I don't know myself—nor—nor you!"
She was trembling, and he noted it with a pang of compunction.
"To-morrow, sweetheart? Will you give me my answer then?"
"Yes!" It was almost inaudible.
"At the Foreign Minister's ball to-morrow night? I'll come to you there, dearest. I—"
He stopped. She had caught her hand to her throat with a wild gesture. "Ben-ten! She—she is frowning at us! There—look there!"
"My poor darling!" he said. "You are nervous. See, it was only the shadow! I ought not to have brought you into this dismal hole! You are positively shivering."
"Let us hurry," she said, and they went quickly into the warmer air and light of the entrance.
The squall had passed with the fateful swiftness of its coming. The waves still gurgled and tumbled, but the fury of the wind was over. The murk light had lifted, showing the wet sky a patchy drab, which again was beginning to show glimpses of golden hue.
They walked back to Haru at the tea-house, beneath the wild, poignant beauty of disheveled cryptomeria, echoing once more the eternal song of the semi—along paths strewn with drenched petals and sweet with the moist scents of sodden leaves—then together, down the steep, templed hill and across the planked walk to the mainland, where a trolley buzzed through the springing rice-fields, musical now with the mé kayui—mé kayui of the frogs. Daunt accompanied them to the through line of the railway. From there he was to return to Kamakura for the answer to his letter.
The sun was setting when the Tokyo express pulled into the station. As Haru disappeared into the compartment, Daunt took Barbara's hand to help her to the platform. There had been no other first-class passengers to embark and the forward end of the asphalt was deserted. Her lovely, flushed face was turned toward him, and there in the dusk of the station, he bent swiftly and kissed her once more on the lips.
"Dearest, dearest!" he said behind his teeth, and turned quickly away.
In the car, as the train fled through the glory of the sunset, Barbara closed her eyes, the longer to keep the impression of that eager gaze: the lithe, muscular poise of the strong frame, the parted lips, the brown hair curling under the peak of the cloth cap. She tried to imagine him on his backward journey. Now the trolley had passed the rice-fields, now he was striding along the shore road toward Kamakura, where the great bronze Buddha was lifting its face of dreamless calm. Now, perhaps, he was turning back toward the deepening blur of the green island. She shivered a little as she remembered the frown that had seemed to rest on the stony countenance of Ben-ten in her cave.
Her thought drifted into to-morrow, when she was to give him her answer. Ah, she knew what that answer would be! She thought of the telegram of the night before, which she had read in the candle-lighted street! To-morrow Ware also was coming—for an answer! She knew what that would be, too. She felt a sudden pity for him. Yet she knew now—what wisdom she had gained in these two swift days!—that his was not the love that most deserved it. Daunt's parting kiss clung to her lips like a living flower. The hand he had clasped still burned to his touch; she lifted it and held it against her hot face, while the darkening carriage seemed to fill with the dank smell of salty wind and seaweed, mingled with his voice:
"Barbara, I love you!—Dearest! Dearest!"
She thought the gesture unseen, unguessed by any one. But in the forward car, beyond the glass vestibule door, which to her was only a trembling mirror, a man sat watching with burning eyes. He had been gazing through the window when the train stopped, had risen to his feet with instant recognition—to shrink back into his seat, his fingers clenched, his bitten lip indrawn, and a pallor on his face.
It was Austen Ware, and he had seen that kiss.
Dusk purpled over the rice-fields as the train sped on. Still the man who had witnessed that farewell sat crouched in his seat in the forward car, stirless and pallid.
From boyhood Austen Ware had trod a calculate path. Judicious, masterful, possessed, he had gone through life with none of the temptations that had lain in wait for his younger brother Phil. These traits were linked to a certain incapacity for bad luck and an unwearying tenaciousness of purpose. Seldom had any one seen his face change color, had seldom seen his poise of glacial complacency shaken.
To-night, however, the oil lamps which glowed dully in the ceiling of the carriage threw their faint light on a face torn with passion. Barbara's beauty, whose perfect indifference no touch of sentimental passion had devitalized, had, from the first, aroused Ware's stubborn sense of conquest. He had been too wise to make missteps—had put ardor into the background, while surrounding her with tactful and graceful observances which unconsciously usurped a large place in her thought. In the end he had broken down an instinctive disinclination and converted it into liking.
But this was all. For the rest he had perforce been content to wait. Thus matters had stood when they parted a few months ago. He recalled the day he had sailed for Suez. Looking back across the widening water, he had conceived then no possibility of ultimate failure. "How beautiful she is!" he had said to himself. "She will marry me. She does not love me, but she cares for no other man. She will marry me in Japan." There had been nobody else then!
As he peered out into the glooming dusk all kinds of thoughts raced through his mind. Who was the man? Was this the resurrection of an old "affair" that he had never guessed? No, when he left her, Barbara had been fancy free! It was either a "steamer acquaintance," or one come to quick fruition on a romantic soil. He took out a cigar-case and struck a match with shaking fingers. Had it even come to clandestine rendezvous? She had gone one way, the man another! A whirl of rage seized him: the slender metal snapped short off in the fierce wrench of his fingers. He thrust the broken case into his pocket with a muttered curse that sat strangely on his fastidious tongue.
Gradually, out of the wrack emerged his dominant impulse, caution. He had many things to learn; he must find out how the land lay. He must move slowly, reëstablish the old, easy, informal footing. Above all he must lay himself open to no chance of a definite refusal. A plan began to take shape. His telegram had told her he would arrive in Tokyo next day. Meanwhile he would find out what Phil knew.
He left the train at Yokohama under cover of the crowd. In a half-hour he was aboard his yacht. Two hours later he sat down to order his dinner on the terrace of the hotel, cool, unruffled, immaculately groomed. The place was brightly barred with the light from the tall dining-room windows, and the small, round tables glowed with andons whose candle-light shone on men's conventional black-and-white, and women's fluttering gowns. There was no wind—only the long, slow breath of the bay that seemed sluggish with the scents of the tropical evening. A hundred yards from the hotel front great floating wharves had been built out into the water. They were gaily trimmed with bunting and electric lights in geometrical designs. A series of arches flanked them, and these were covered with twigs of ground pine. Ware had guessed these decorations were for the European Squadron of Dreadnaughts, of whose arrival to-day's newspapers had been full.
As he looked over the menu, a man sitting near-by rose and came to him with outstretched hand. He was Commander DeKay, a naval attaché whom Ware had known in Europe. They had met again, a few days since, at Kyoto. He hospitably insisted on the other's joining his own party of five.
Ware was not gregarious, and to-night was in a sullen mood. But, with his habitual policy, he thrust this beneath the surface and in another moment was bowing to the introductions: Baroness Stroloff, her sister, a chic young matron whose natural habitat seemed to be Paris; the ubiquitous and popular Count Voynich, and a statuesque American girl, whose name Ware recognized as that of a clever painter of Japanese children. He looked well in evening dress, and his dark beard, thick curling pompadour and handsome eyes added a something of distinction to a well-set figure.
"So you have just arrived, Mr. Ware?" the Baroness said. "I hope you're not one of those terrible two-days-in-Japan tourists who spoil all our prices for us."
"I expect to stay a month or more," he said. "And as for prices, I shall put up as good a battle as I can."
"You know," said the artist, with an air of imparting confidential information, "everybody is scheduled in Tokyo. If you belong to an Embassy you have to pay just so much more for everything. In the Embassies, 'number-one-man' pays more than 'number-two-man,' and so on down. You and I are lucky, Mr. Ware. We are not on the list, and can fight it out on its merits."
"Belonging to the rankless file has its advantages in Japan, then."
"Not at official dinners, I assure you," interposed the Baroness' sister with a shrug. "It means the bottom of the table, and sitting next below the same student-interpreter nine times in the season. I have discovered that I rank with, but not above, the dentist."
"You tempt me to enter the service—in the lowest grade," said Ware, and the Baroness laughed and shook her fan at him reprovingly.
The sky above their heads was pricked out with pale stars, like cat's-eye pins in a greenish-violet tapestry. Up and down the roadway went shimmering rick'sha, and Japanese couples in light kimono strolled along the bay's edge, under the bent pines, their low voices mingled with the soft lapping of the tide. Now and then a bicycle would pass swiftly, bare sandaled feet chasing its pedals, and kimono sleeves flapping like great bats'-wings from its handle-bars; or a flanneled English figure would stride along, with pipe and racquet, from late tennis at the recreation-ground. From the corner came the cries of romping children and the tapping staff and double flute-note of a blind masseur.
The talk flew briskly hither and thither, skimming the froth of the capital's causerie: recent additions to the official set, the splendid new ball-room at the German Embassy, and the increasing importance of Tokyo as a diplomatic center—the coming Imperial "Cherry-Viewing Garden-Party," and the annual Palace duck-hunt at the Shin-Hama preserve, where the game is caught, like butterflies, in scoop-nets—the new ceremonial for Imperial audiences—whether a stabbing affray between two Legation bettos would end fatally, and whether the Turkish Minister's gold dinner service was solid—and a little scandalous surmise regarding the newest continental widow whose stay in Japan had been long and her dinners anything but exclusive—a rumored engagement, and—at last!—the arrival of the new beauty at the American Embassy.
"A real one!" commented Voynich, screwing his eye-glass in more tightly. "And that means something in the tourist season."
Ware's fingers flattened on the stem of his glass of yellow chartreuse as the artist said: "We are in the throes of a new sensation at present, Mr. Ware; a case of love at first sight. It's really a lot rarer than the novelists make out, you know! We are all tremendously interested."
"But he knows her," said Voynich. "The other evening in Tokyo, Mr. Ware, Miss Fairfax mentioned having met you. She is from Virginia, I think."
Ware bowed. "She is very good to remember me," he said. "And so Miss Fairfax has met her fate in Japan?"
"Well, rather!" said the artist. "I hear betting is even that she'll accept him inside a fortnight."
Ware sipped his liqueur with a tinge of relief. Evidently the world of Tokyo had not yet discovered that the new arrival's first name was that of his yacht.
"Daunt doesn't play according to Hoyle," grumbled Voynich. "She's a guest of his own chief and he ought to give the others half a chance. He lives in the Embassy Compound, too, confound him! He monopolized her outrageously at the Review the other day! He's an American 'trust.' I shall challenge him."
The voice of DeKay broke in:
"Coppery hair and pansy-brown eyes, a skin like a snowdrift caught blushing, and a mouth like the smile of a red flower! A girl that Romney might have loved, slim and young and thoroughbred—there you have the capital sentence of the Secretary of the American Embassy!"
Down the middle of the street came running a boy, bare-legged, bareheaded and scantily clad. A bunch of jangling bells was tied to his girdle, and his hands were full of what looked like small blue hand-bills. DeKay got up quickly. "There's an evening extra," he said. "It's the Kokumin Shimbun." He bolted down the steps, stopped the runner and returned with one of the blue sheets.
He scanned it rapidly—he was a student of the vernacular. "Nothing especial," he informed them. "Prices in Wall Street are smashing the records. That looks like a clear political horizon, in spite of what the wiseacres have been saying. This visit of the Squadron will prove a useful poultice, no doubt, to reduce international inflammation—its officers being shown the sights of the capital, and the celebrations to come off as per schedule, including the Naval Minister's ball to-morrow night. By the way," he added, turning to Ware, "I arranged for an invitation for you. It's probably at the hotel in Tokyo now, awaiting your arrival."