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.