THE FORGOTTEN MAN
Barbara pushed open the bamboo gate of the temple garden, then paused.
The recluse with whom she had talked yesterday sat a little way
inside, while before him, in an attitude of deepest attention, stood
the diminutive figure on the huge clogs whose morning acquaintance she
had made from her window. Thorn was looking at him earnestly with his
great myopic eye, through a heavy glass mounted with a handle like a
lorgnette.
"My son," he said. "Why will you persist in eating _amé_, when I have
taught you the classics and the true divinity of the universe? It is too
sweet for youthful teeth. One of these days you will be carried to a
dentist, an esteemed person with horrible tools, prior to the removal of
a small hell, containing several myriads of lost souls, from the left
side of your lower jaw!"
Barbara's foot grated on a pebble and he rose with a startled quickness.
The youngster bent double, his face preternaturally grave. Thorn thrust
the glass into his sleeve and smiled.
"I am experimenting on this oriental raw material," he said, "to
illustrate certain theories of my own. Ishikichi-_San_, though a slave
to the sweetmeat dealer, is a learned infant. He can write forty Chinese
characters and recite ten texts of Mencius. He also knows many damnable
facts about figures which they teach in school. He has just propounded a
question that Confucius was too wise to answer: 'Why is poverty?' Not
being so wise as the Chinese sage, I attempted its elucidation. Thus
endeth our lesson to-day, Ishikichi. _Sayonara_."
He bowed. The child ducked with a jerky suddenness that sent his round,
battered hat rolling at Barbara's feet. She picked it up and set it on
the shaven head.
"Oh!" she said humbly. "I beg your pardon, Ishikichi! I put the rim
right in your eye!"
"Don't menshum it," he returned solemnly. "I got another." He stalked to
the gate, faced about, bobbed over again and disappeared.
Barbara looked after him smilingly. "Is Ishikichi in straitened
circumstances? Or is his bent political economy?"
"His father has been ill for a long time," Thorn replied. "He keeps a
shop, and in some way the child has heard that they will have to give it
up. It troubles him, for he can't imagine existence without it."
"What a pity! I would be so glad to--do you think I could give them
something?"
He shook his head. "After you have been here a while, you will find that
simple charity in Japan is not apt to be a welcome thing."
"I am beginning to understand already," she said, as they walked along
the stepping-stones, "that these gentle-mannered people do not lack the
sterner qualities. Yet how they grace them! The iron-hand is here, but
it has the velvet glove. Courtesy and kindness seem almost a religion
with them."
"More," he answered. "This is the only country I have seen in the world
whose people, when I walk the street, do not seem to notice that I am
disfigured!"
She made no pretense of misunderstanding. "Believe me," she said gently,
"it is no disfigurement. But I understand. My father lived all his life
in the dread of blindness."
A faint sound came from him. She was aware, without lifting her eyes to
his, that he was staring at her strangely.
"All his life. Then your father is not ... living?"
"He died before I was born."
She glanced at him as she spoke, for his tone had been muffled and
indistinct. There was a deep furrow in his forehead which she had not
seen before.
"Do you look like him?"
"No, he was dark. I am like my mother."
Thorn was looking away from her, toward the lane, where, beyond the
hedge, a man was passing, half-singing, half-chanting to himself in a
repressed, sepulchral voice.
"My mother died, too, when I was a little girl," she added, "so I know
really very little about him."
She had forgotten to look for the Flower-of-Dream. They had come to the
little lake with its mossy stones and basking, orange carp. Through the
gap in the shrubbery the white witchery of Fuji-San glowed in the sun
with far-faint shudderings of lilac fire. She sat down on a sunny
boulder. Thorn stooped over the water, looking into its cool, green
depths, and she saw him pass his hand over his brow in that familiar,
half-hesitant gesture of the day before.
"Will you tell me that little?" he asked. "I think I should like to
hear."
"I very seldom talk about him," she said, looking dreamily out across
the distance, "but not because I don't like to. You see, knowing so
little, I used to dream out the rest, so that he came to seem quite
real. Does that sound very childish and fanciful?"
"Tell me the dreams," he answered. "Mine are always more true than
facts."
"He was born," she began, "in the Mediterranean--"
She turned her head. The stone on which Thorn's foot rested had crashed
into the water. He staggered slightly in regaining his balance, and his
face had the pale, startled look it wore when he had first seen her from
the roadside. He drew back, and again his hand went up across his face.
"Yes," he said. "Go on."
"In the Mediterranean--just where, I don't know, but on an island--and
his mother was Romaic. I have never seen Greece, but I like to know that
some of it is in my blood. His father was American, of a family that had
a tradition of Gipsy descent. Perhaps he was born with the 'thumb-print'
on the palm that they call the Romany mark. As a child I used to wonder
what it looked like."
She smiled up at him, but his face was turned away. He had taken his
hand from his brow, and slipped it into his loose sleeve, and stood
rigidly erect.
"I often used to try to imagine his mother. I am sure she had a dark and
beautiful face, with large, brown eyes like a wild deer's, that used to
bend above his cradle. Perhaps each night she crossed her fingers over
him, and said--"
"_En to onoma tou Patros_," he repeated, "_kai tou Ouiou kai tou Agiou
Pneumatos!_"
"Yes," she said, surprised. "In the name of the Father, Son and Holy
Ghost. You know it?"
"It is the old Greek-orthodox fashion," he said in a low voice.
"I should not wonder," she continued, "if she made three little wounds
on him, as a baby, as I have read Greek mothers do, to place him under
the protection of the Trinity. She must have loved him--her first
boy-baby! And I think the most of what he was came to him from her."
Thorn moved his position suddenly, and Barbara saw his shoulders rise in
a deep-taken breath.
"Love of right and hatred of wrong," he said, "admiration for the
beautiful and the true, faith in man and woman, sensitiveness to
artistic things--ah, it is most often the mother who makes men what they
are. Not our strength or power of calculation, but her heart and power
to love! In the twilight of every home one sees the mother-souls glowing
like fireflies. I never had a picture of my mother. I would rather have
her portrait than a fortune!"
His voice was charged with feeling. She felt a strange flutter of the
heart, a painful and yearning sympathy such as she had never felt
before.
"I wonder what he saw from that Greek cradle," she resumed. "I could
never fancy the room so well. I suppose it had pictures. Do you think
so?"
He nodded. "And maybe--on one wall--a Greek _ikon_, protected by a
silver case ... I've seen such ... that left exposed only the
olive-brown faces and hands and feet of the figures. Perhaps ... when he
was very little ... he used to think the brown Virgin represented his
mother and the large-eyed child himself."
"Ah," she cried, and a deeper light came in her eyes. "You have been in
Greece! You have seen what he saw!" But he made no reply, and after a
moment she went on:
"He had never known what terror was till one day an accident, received
in play, brought him the fear of blindness. It must have stayed with him
all his life after that, wherever he went--for he lived in other
countries. I have a few leaves of an old diary of his ... here and there
I feel it in the lines."
She, too, fell silent. "And then--?" he said.
"There my dreams end. You see how little I know of him. I don't know why
he came to Japan. But he met my mother here and here they were married.
I should always love Japan, if only for that."
"He--died here?"
"In Nagasaki. My mother went back to America, and there I was born."
She was looking out across the wide space where the roofs sank out of
sight--to the foliaged slope of Aoyama. Suddenly a thrill, a curiously
complex motion, ran over her. Above those far tree-tops, sailing in
slow, sweeping, concentric circles, she saw a great machine, like a
gigantic vulture. She knew instantly what it was, and there flashed
before her the memory of a day at Fort Logan when a brave young
lieutenant had crashed to death before her eyes in a shattered
aëroplane.
If Daunt were to fall ... what would it mean to her! In that instant the
garden about her, Thorn, the blue sky above, faded, and she stared
dismayed into a gulf in whose shadows lurked the disastrous, the
terrifying, the irreparable. "I love him! I love him!"--it seemed to
peal like a temple-bell through her brain. Even to herself she could
never deny it again!
She became aware of music near at hand. It brought her back to the
present, for it was the sound of the organ in the new Chapel across the
way.
Looking up, she was struck by the expression on Thorn's face. He seemed,
listening, to be held captive by some dire recollection. It brought to
her mind that bitter cry:
"I can not but remember such things were,
That were most precious to me!"
She rose with a sudden swelling of the throat.
"I must go now," she said. "The Chapel is to be dedicated this morning.
The organ is playing for the service now."
She led the way along the stepping-stones to the bamboo gate. As they
approached, through the interstices of the farther hedge she could see
the figure of the Ambassador, with Mrs. Dandridge, among the _kimono_
entering the chapel door. In the temple across the yard the baton had
begun its tapping and the dulled, monotonous tom-tom mingled weirdly
with the soaring harmonies of the organ.
With her hand on the paling she spoke again:
"One thing I didn't tell you. It was I who built the Chapel. It is in
the memory of my father. See, there is the memorial window. They were
putting it in place when I came a little while ago."
She was not looking at Thorn, or she would have seen his face overspread
with a whiteness like that of death. He stood as if frozen to marble.
The morning sun on the Chapel's eastern side, striking through its open
casements, lighted the iridescent rose-window with a tender radiance,
gilding the dull yellow aureole about the head of the Master and giving
life and glow to the face beside Him--dark, beardless, and passionately
tender--at which Thorn was staring, with what seemed almost an agony of
inquiry.
"St. John," she said softly, "'the disciple whom Jesus loved.'" She drew
from the bosom of her dress the locket she always wore and opened it.
"The face was painted from this--the only picture I have of my father."
His hand twitched as he took it. He looked at it long and earnestly--at
the name carved on its lid. "Barbara--Barbara Fairfax!" he said. She
thought his lips shook under the gray mustache.
"You--are a Buddhist, are you not?" she asked. "And Buddhists believe
the spirits of the dead are always about us. Do you think--perhaps--he
sees the Chapel?"
He put her locket into her hands hastily. "God!" he said, as if to
himself. "He will see it through a hundred existences!"
Her eyes were moist and shining. "I am glad you think that," she said.
In the Chapel the bishop's gaze kindled as it went out over the kneeling
people.
"_We beseech Thee, that in this place now set apart to Thy
service, Thy holy name may be worshiped in truth and purity
through all generations._"
The voice rang valiant and clear in the summer hush. It crossed the
still lane and entered a window where, in a temple loft, a man sat still
and gray and quiet, his hands clenched in his _kimono_ sleeves:
"_We humbly dedicate it to Thee, in the memory of one for the
saving of whose soul Thou wert lifted upon the Cross._"
The man in the loft threw himself on his face with a terrible cry.
"My child!" he cried in a breaking voice. "My little, little child, whom
they have robbed me of--whom I have never known in all these weary
years! You have grown away from me--I shall never have you now! Never
... never!"
Behind him the unfinished image of Kwan-on the All-Pitying, tossed the
sunlight about the room in golden-lettered flashes, and beneath his
closed and burning lids these seemed to blend and weave--to form bossed
letters which had stared at him from the rim of the rose-window:
THOU SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE ME.