The Kingdom of Slender Swords

  CHAPTER XIII

  THE WHORLS OF YELLOW DUST

  For a long time in her blue and white room Barbara lay awake,listening to the incessant chorus that came on the deepening mysteryof the dark: the rustle of the pine-needles outside her window, the_kiri-kiri-kiri-kiri_ of a night-cricket on the sill, and the waveringchant of a toiling coolie keeping time to the thrust of his body as hehauled his heavy cart. The shadow of a twisted pine-branch crossed oneof the windows, and in the infiltering moonlight she could see theyellow gleam of the gold-lacquer Buddha on the Sendai chest.

  She could imagine it the same image she had found as a little girl inthe garret, and had made her pet delight. For an instant she seemed tobe once more a child seated on her low stool before it, her handstight-clasped, looking up into its immobile countenance, half-hoping,half-fearing those carven lips would speak. On the wings of thissensation came a childish memory of a day when her aunt had found herthus and had thought her praying to it. She remembered the look offrozen horror on her aunt's face and her own helpless mortification. Forshe did not know how to explain. She had had to write a verse from theBible fifty times in her copybook:

  _Thou shalt have no other gods before Me._

  And she had had to do half of them over because she had forgotten thecapital M. That day her treasure had disappeared, and she had never seenit again.

  The glimmering figure in the dark made her think, too, of the man ofwhom Daunt had told her, who shunned his own race, hiding himself foryears and years in a Japanese temple, with its painted dragon carvings,glowing candles and smoking censers. The incense from them seemed now tobe filling all the night with odors rich and alluring, whispering ofthings mysterious and confined. Striking across the lesser sounds shecould hear at intervals the flute of a blind _masseur_, and nearer, inthe Embassy grounds, the recurrent signal of a patroling night watchman:three strokes of one hard, wooden stick upon another, like a high,mellow note of a xylophone.

  This sounded a little like a ship's bell--striking on a white yacht,whose owner was visiting the ancient capital, Nara. He would appearbefore long, and she knew what he would say, and what he would want herto say to him. She felt somehow guilty, with a sorry though painlesscompunction. The man on the steamer that morning had spoken of a youngerbrother who was in Japan, "going the pace." Phil--she had often heardAusten Ware speak of him. Perhaps he had only come over to keep theother out of mischief. She told herself this a second time, because itgave her a drowsy satisfaction, though she knew it was not so. She hadalways pictured Phil as "fast," and she wondered sleepily what the wordmeant here in the orient, where there were no theater suppers, and wheremen probably played _fan-tan_--no, that was Chinese--or some other queergame instead of poker--unless they ... had aeroplanes.

  The bell of the distant temple, which she had heard in the garden,boomed softly, and the _amma's_ flute sounded again its piercing,plaintive double-note. The two sounds began to weave together with asense of unreality, dreamy, occult, incommunicable. So at length Barbaraslept, fitfully, the fragments of that lavish day falling into a bizarremosaic, in which strange figures mingled uncannily.

  She knew them for visions, and to avoid them climbed a grassy hill to agray old temple in which she saw her father seated cross-legged on ahuge lotos-flower. She knew him because his face was just like the facein the locket she wore. She called out and ran toward him, but it wasonly a great gold-lacquered Buddha with candles burning around it. Sheran out of the temple, where a dog pursued her and a monstrous man witha pallid face, who sat in a tree full of cherry-blossoms, threwsomething at her which suddenly went off with a terrific explosion andblew both him and the dog into bits. It seemed terrible, but she couldonly laugh and laugh, because somebody held her tight in his arms andshe knew that nothing could frighten her ever any more.

  And on the tide of this shy comfort she drifted away at last upon a deepand dreamless sea.

  * * * * *

  Later, when the moon had set and only the faint starlight lay over thegarden, the Ambassador still sat in his study, thoughtfully smoking acigar. On the mantel, under a glass case, was a model of a battle-ship.Over it hung a traverse drawing of the Panama Canal cuttings, and mapsand framed photographs looked from the walls between the dark-tonedbook-shelves. The floor was covered with a deep crimson rug ofcamel's-hair. The shaded reading-lamp on the desk threw a bright circleof light on an open volume of Treaties at his elbow.

  At length he rose, took up the lamp, and approached the mantel. He stooda moment looking thoughtfully at the model under its rounded glass. Itwas built to scale, and complete in every exterior detail, from thepennant at its head to the tiny black muzzles that peeped from its opencasemates. Two years ago America had sent a fleet of such vessels tocircumnavigate the globe. An European Squadron of even deadlier typewould cast anchor the next morning in those waters. Yet now Bersonin'sphrase rang insistently through his mind: "Mere silly shreds of steel!"It recurred like a refrain, mixing itself with the expert's curiouswords in the study, with that extraordinary incident of thepiazza--which had bred a stealthy mistrust that would not down.

  With the lamp in his hand he opened the door into the hall and stoodlistening a moment. Save for the creaks and snappings that haunt framestructures in a land of rapid decay, the house was still. He entered thedrawing-room, noiselessly undid the fastenings of a French window andstepped out on to the piazza.

  There he threw the lamplight about him, mentally reconstructing thescene of two hours before. Here he himself had stood, yonder Bersonin,and in the corner the dog--ten feet from the edge of the porch. It hadvanished in the same instant that he had seen it leaping straight at theexpert. What was it Bersonin had taken from his pocket? A weapon? And_where had the hound gone_?

  He stepped forward suddenly; the chair which had been thrown by theJapanese boy had been set upright, but beneath it, and on the piazzabeyond, disposed in curious wreaths and whorls, like those made by steelfilings above an electro-magnet, lay a thick sifting of what looked likereddish-yellow dust. He stooped and took up some in his fingers; it wasdry and impalpable, of an extraordinary fineness.

  He stood looking at it a full minute, intent with some absorbed anddisquieting communing. Then he shook his broad shoulders, as thoughdismissing an incredible idea, returned the lamp to the study and wentslowly up the stair to his room.

  But he was not sleeping when dawn came, gray in the sky. It stolepink-fingered through the window and drew rosy lights on the blank wallacross which strange fancies of his had linked themselves in a weirdprocessional. It crept between the heavy curtains of the study below,and gilded the fittings of the little battle-ship on the mantel--asthough to deck it in crimson bunting like its mammoth prototypes in thelower bay.

  For at that moment the Yokohama Bund was throbbing with the _salvos_ ofgreat guns pealing a salute. The water's edge was lined with a watchingcrowd. Files of marines were drawn up beneath the green-trimmed archesand cutters flying the sun-flag lay at the wharf, where groups ofofficers stood in dress-uniform.

  Over the ledge of the morning was spread a filmy curtain of damask rose,and beneath it, into the harbor, like a broad dotted arrow-head, wassteaming a flock of black battle-ships, with inky smoke pouring fromtheir stacks.