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 mystery of 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 wavering chant of a toiling coolie keeping time to the thrust of his body as he hauled his heavy cart. The shadow of a twisted pine-branch crossed one of the windows, and in the infiltering moonlight she could see the yellow gleam of the gold-lacquer Buddha on the Sendai chest.

She could imagine it the same image she had found as a little girl in the garret, and had made her pet delight. For an instant she seemed to be once more a child seated on her low stool before it, her hands tight-clasped, looking up into its immobile countenance, half-hoping, half-fearing those carven lips would speak. On the wings of this sensation came a childish memory of a day when her aunt had found her thus and had thought her praying to it. She remembered the look of frozen horror on her aunt's face and her own helpless mortification. For she did not know how to explain. She had had to write a verse from the Bible 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 the capital M. That day her treasure had disappeared, and she had never seen it again.

The glimmering figure in the dark made her think, too, of the man of whom Daunt had told her, who shunned his own race, hiding himself for years and years in a Japanese temple, with its painted dragon carvings, glowing candles and smoking censers. The incense from them seemed now to be filling all the night with odors rich and alluring, whispering of things mysterious and confined. Striking across the lesser sounds she could hear at intervals the flute of a blind _masseur_, and nearer, in the 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 appear before long, and she knew what he would say, and what he would want her to say to him. She felt somehow guilty, with a sorry though painless compunction. The man on the steamer that morning had spoken of a younger brother who was in Japan, "going the pace." Phil--she had often heard Austen Ware speak of him. Perhaps he had only come over to keep the other out of mischief. She told herself this a second time, because it gave her a drowsy satisfaction, though she knew it was not so. She had always pictured Phil as "fast," and she wondered sleepily what the word meant here in the orient, where there were no theater suppers, and where men probably played _fan-tan_--no, that was Chinese--or some other queer game instead of poker--unless they ... had aëroplanes.

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 a sense of unreality, dreamy, occult, incommunicable. So at length Barbara slept, fitfully, the fragments of that lavish day falling into a bizarre mosaic, in which strange figures mingled uncannily.

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

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

* * * * *

Later, when the moon had set and only the faint starlight lay over the garden, the Ambassador still sat in his study, thoughtfully smoking a cigar. 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 maps and framed photographs looked from the walls between the dark-toned book-shelves. The floor was covered with a deep crimson rug of camel's-hair. The shaded reading-lamp on the desk threw a bright circle of light on an open volume of Treaties at his elbow.

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

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

There he threw the lamplight about him, mentally reconstructing the scene 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 had vanished in the same instant that he had seen it leaping straight at the expert. 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 the Japanese boy had been set upright, but beneath it, and on the piazza beyond, disposed in curious wreaths and whorls, like those made by steel filings above an electro-magnet, lay a thick sifting of what looked like reddish-yellow dust. He stooped and took up some in his fingers; it was dry and impalpable, of an extraordinary fineness.

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

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

For at that moment the Yokohama Bund was throbbing with the _salvos_ of great guns pealing a salute. The water's edge was lined with a watching crowd. Files of marines were drawn up beneath the green-trimmed arches and cutters flying the sun-flag lay at the wharf, where groups of officers 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, was steaming a flock of black battle-ships, with inky smoke pouring from their stacks.