The Kingdom of Slender Swords

  CHAPTER XXI

  THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD

  It was the man she had seen that morning at the entrance to the littlepark.

  Barbara realized instantly and uneasily that she was an intruder. Yetshe felt an intense interest, mixed of what she had heard and of whatshe had imagined. His _outre_ street-costume had now been laid aside; hewore Japanese dress, with dark gray _houri_ and white cleft sock. Hisiron-gray head was bare. The expression of his face was conscious andalert, with a sort of savage shyness.

  "I am afraid I am intruding," she said. "I ought to have known thegarden was private."

  "Private gardens may sometimes be seen, I suppose."

  The words were ungracious, though the _timbre_ of the voice was musicaland soft. "I beg your pardon," she said, and moved away.

  He made a gesture, a quick timid movement of one hand, and stepped downtoward her. "No," he said almost violently. "I don't want you to go.Can't you see I mean you to stay?"

  Barbara saw clearly now the variation in his eyes; the larger one wasclouded, as though a film covered the iris. It gave her a slight feelingof repugnance, which she instantly regretted, for, as though renderedconscious of it through a sensitiveness almost telepathic, he turnedslightly, and put a hand to his brow to cover it.

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

  He looked at her quickly and keenly with his one bright eye. It heldnone of the swart, in-turned reflectiveness of the Japanese; it wassharp and restless. Its brilliance, under eyebrows that seemed on theverge of a frown, was almost fierce. The curved, gray mustache did nothide the strong, irregular, white teeth.

  "You know Japanese gardens?"

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

  "Strangers!" he laughed; the sound was not musical like his spokenvoice, but harsh and grating. "I have one joy--no stranger ever dreamsof coming to see me!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "The little Toru, who was run over?"

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

  Without waiting for her answer, he led the way, moving quickly andagilely. The softness of his tread in the cloth _tabi_ seemed almostfeminine. A little farther on he turned abruptly:

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

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

  "Well?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  His personality, so touched with mystery, interested Barbara intensely.The sense of strangeness and unfamiliarity had quite vanished. She satdown on one of the warm boulders. Thorn rested one foot on the benttrunk of a dwarf tree and leaned his elbow on his knee, his hand, in thegesture that seemed habitual, covering his eye. In the wide _kimono_sleeve the forearm was bare and suggested a peculiar physicalcleanliness like that of a wild animal.

  "How strange it is," she said, "that for centuries, the western worldbelieved this wonderful land inhabited by a barbarous people--because itdidn't possess western civilization!"

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

  "Hungry!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Returning, Barbara led the way. Once she stooped over a single, strangeblossom on a long stalk, whose golden center shone cloudily throughsilky filaments like the leaves of immortelles. "What is that?" sheasked.

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

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

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

  "May I--some time?"

  "Then you are not afraid? Remember I am a renegade, a follower ofBuddha, and a most atrocious and damnable _taboo_!"

  "Afraid!" For a moment they looked at each other, and she saw a littlequiver touch his lips. "I shall come again to-morrow--to see theflower."

  "Just one thing," he said. "I am a solitary. If you would notmention--to any one--"

  "I understand," she answered.

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

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

  "Yes," she said. "Perhaps it was."

  As she spoke she saw him start. She looked up. Across the temple yard,through the entrance _torii_, she saw the bishop coming up the lane. Hewas walking absorbed in thought, his eyes on the ground, his handsclasped behind him.

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

  But Thorn did not answer. At sight of the approaching figure he haddrawn back abruptly. Now he turned sharply away into a path which ledtoward the temple. She saw him once glance swiftly back over hisshoulder before he disappeared behind the hedges.

  * * * * *

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

  "_Credo in resurrectionem mortuorum_," he muttered--"Yes, I believe inthe resurrection of the dead!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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