CHAPTER XXI

THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD

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

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

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

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

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

He made a gesture, a quick timid movement of one hand, and stepped down toward 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 was clouded, as though a film covered the iris. It gave her a slight feeling of repugnance, which she instantly regretted, for, as though rendered conscious of it through a sensitiveness almost telepathic, he turned slightly, and put a hand to his brow to cover it.

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

He looked at her quickly and keenly with his one bright eye. It held none of the swart, in-turned reflectiveness of the Japanese; it was sharp and restless. Its brilliance, under eyebrows that seemed on the verge of a frown, was almost fierce. The curved, gray mustache did not hide the strong, irregular, white teeth.

"You know Japanese gardens?"

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

"Strangers!" he laughed; the sound was not musical like his spoken voice, but harsh and grating. "I have one joy--no stranger ever dreams of 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 least like him. His features were refined and unquestionably aristocratic but his whole expression was quiveringly sensitive, resentfully shy. It was the expression, she thought, of one whom a look might cut like a whiplash, a word sting like a searing acid.

"The only foreigners I know are those who write me letters: malicious busybodies, people who want subscriptions to all sorts of shams, or invite me to join respectable, humbug societies, or write merely to gratify 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 was catching 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 to sorrow. The owner of the carriage has sent six hundred _yen_ to the father, who is now able to pay his debts and enlarge his business. The tablet on the Buddha-shelf that bears the little boy's death-name will be henceforth the dearest possession of the family. To Ishikichi he is a glorious hero whose passing it would be a crime to grieve." He broke off, with the odd, timid gesture she had seen before. "But you came to see the garden," he said. "If you like, I will show it to you."

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

"When you passed me in the carriage this morning you must have thought me unmannerly," he said. "I was, no doubt. My manners are only villainous 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 behind the flowering bush came the tintinnabulent tinkle and drip of running water. The stepping-stones meandered on in graceful curves and presently arrived at a little lake at whose edge grew pale water-hyacinths and whose surface was mottled with light green lotos-leaves, dotted here and there with pink half-opened buds. Now and then these stirred languidly at the flirt of a golden fin, while over them, in flashes of flame-yellow, darted hawking dragon-flies. Thickets of maroon-tinted maple glowed in the sunlight and clusters of yellow oranges hung on dwarf trees. On the lake's margin bright-hued pebbles were strewn between rounded stones whose edges were soft and green with moss. Barbara longed to feel those mossy boulders with her bare feet--to splash 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 first time 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 covered his myopic eye, he seemed to answer her thought:

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

"I see," she said. "We insist on looking through a tinted film that makes 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 through the vista she saw the distant mountains, clear and pure as though carved of tinted jade set in a plate of lapus lazuli. A faint curdle of cloud frayed from their jagged tops, and above it hung the dreamy snow-clad cone of Fuji, palely emerald as the tint of glaciers under an Alaskan sky. A single crow, a jet-black moving spot, flapped its way across the azure expanse.

"The one touch of blue," he said. "The color ethical, the color pantheistic, 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 sat down on one of the warm boulders. Thorn rested one foot on the bent trunk of a dwarf tree and leaned his elbow on his knee, his hand, in the gesture that seemed habitual, covering his eye. In the wide _kimono_ sleeve the forearm was bare and suggested a peculiar physical cleanliness like that of a wild animal.

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

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

"Hungry!"

"Yes--and worse. I've not spoken of those experiences for years. I don't know why I speak of them now to you. Does it surprise you to hear that I have known poverty?" For the first time he turned fully facing her. His supple hand had left his brow and moved in gestures at one time fierce and 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 of the Thames. My memory of it is a mixture of dreadful sights and sounds--of windows thrown violently open or shattered to pieces--of shrieks of murder--of heavy plunges in the river."

Barbara shuddered in the warm sunlight. Over the edge of the garden was a misty space where foliage and roofs sank out of sight, to rise again in long undulations of green trees and gray tiling, like a painted ocean. Far away lifted the leafy plateau of Aoyama, with its blur of terra-cotta barracks. At an immense distance a great temple roof jutted, and still farther away the spread-out, populous city curved up, like the rim of a basin, to a hazy horizon. Yet on this background of pleasantness and peace those other scenes of horror--such was the vehemence of his tone, the savage directness in his phrases--seemed to start 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 billion ants crawling in the skeleton of the mastodon. I was threadbare and meals were scant and uncertain--a little, penniless, half-blind, eccentric wanderer! I lived in a carpenter-shop and slept on the shavings. One week I sold coral for a Neapolitan peddler. Oh, I learned my civilization well! The very memory now of walking down those roaring cañons of streets--all cut granite and iron fury, and hideous houses two hundred feet high--moos at me in the night! It is frightful, nightmarish, devilish! And when one can be here under a violet sky, in sight of blue peaks and an eternally lilac, luke-warm sea!"

His hand swept across the hewn vista--to the wild, bold background of indigo hills, with its slender phantom above them, swimming in the half-tropical blue. "It is better," he said, "to live in Japan in sack-cloth and ashes, than to own the half of any other country. I am as old as the three-legged crow that inhabits the sun. I can't read the comic papers or a French novel. I shouldn't go to the Paris opera if it were next door. I shouldn't like to visit the most beautiful lady and be received 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 old Buddhist cemetery there, beside the nunnery, among the fireflies and grasshoppers, with six laths above me, inscribed with prayers in an unknown tongue and a queerly carved monument typifying the five elements into which we melt away."

He shook his broad shoulders. Again his hand went to his brow and he half 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 boasted western civilizations--industrious, pleasing, facing death with a smile, not because they are such fatalists as the Arabs, for instance, but because they have no fear of the hereafter. The old courtesy, the old faith, the old kindliness--will they weather it? Or vanish like snow in sun? The poetry, the legend, the lovely and touching observances are going fast. Modernism gives them foreign fireworks now, and forbids the ghost-boats of the Bon! I wish I could fly out of _Meiji_ for ever, back against 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 the Japanese All-Souls Day--the Feast of Lanterns, when the spirits of the dead return, to be fed with tea in tiny cups and with the odor of incense; how, when the dusk falls, on canal and river the little straw boats are launched with written messages and lighted paper lanterns, to bear back the blessed ghosts.

Returning, Barbara led the way. Once she stooped over a single, strange blossom on a long stalk, whose golden center shone cloudily through silky filaments like the leaves of immortelles. "What is that?" she asked.

"It is a wild flower I found on one of my inland rambles," he said. "Perhaps it has no name. I call it _Yumé-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 walked along the stepping-stones.

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

"May I--some time?"

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

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

"Just one thing," he said. "I am a solitary. If you would not mention--to any one--"

"I understand," she answered.

He walked by her side to the bamboo gate. "I am glad," she said, "that I remind 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. He was walking absorbed in thought, his eyes on the ground, his hands clasped behind him.

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

But Thorn did not answer. At sight of the approaching figure he had drawn back abruptly. Now he turned sharply away into a path which led toward the temple. She saw him once glance swiftly back over his shoulder before he disappeared behind the hedges.

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

Thorn shook his head. "It moves with exalted slowness. To-day I contemptibly 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 the heat of the day. Presently I will say an insignificant prayer to the _Hotoké-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.