DAUNT LISTENS TO A SONG
The day had dawned sultry, with a promise of summer humidity, and Daunt
was not surprised to find the barometer performing intemperate antics.
"Confound it!" he muttered irritably, as he dressed. "If it was a month
later, one would think there was a typhoon waltzing around somewhere in
the China Sea."
That morning had seen his first trial of his new fan-propeller, and
the Glider's action had surpassed his wildest expectation. The flight,
of which Barbara had caught a glimpse from Thorn's garden, had been a
longer one than usual--quite twelve miles against a sluggish upper
current--but even that failed to bring its customary glow. Thereafter
he had spent a long morning immersed in the work of the Chancery: the
study of a disputed mining concession in Manchuria; a report on a
contemplated issue of government bonds; a demand for a passport by a
self-alleged national with a foreign accent and a paucity of
naturalization papers; the daily budget of translations from
vernacular newspapers, by which a home government gains a bird's-eye
view of comment and public opinion in far-away capitals. The Chancery
was a pleasant nest of rooms opening into one another. Through its
windows stole the smell of the garden blossoms, and across the
compound wall sounded the shrill ventriloquistic notes of peddlers, the
brazen chorus of a marching squad of buglers, or the warning "_Hek!
Hek!_" of a flying _rick'sha_. The main room was cool, furnished with
plain desks and filing cabinets. Against one wall yawned a huge safe in
which were kept the code-books and records, and framed pictures of
former Chiefs of Mission hung on the walls. In the anteroom Japanese
clerks and messengers sat at small tables. The place was pervaded by the
click of type-writer keys, tinkling call-bells, and the various notes of
a busy office, and floating down from a stairway came the buzzing
monotone of a Student Interpreter in his mid-year oral examinations
under the Japanese secretary.
But to-day Daunt could not exorcise with the mass of detail the leering
imps that plagued him. They peered at him over the edge of the
code-books and whispered from the margins of decorous despatches,
chuckling satirically.
"Barbara!" they sneered. "Mere acquaintances often name steam-yachts for
girls, don't they! Arrived the same day as her ship, eh? Rather singular
coincidence! What a flush she had when Voynich spoke of Phil's brother
last night at the tea-house. Angry? Of course she was! What engaged girl
likes to have the fact paraded--especially when she's practising on
another man? And how about the telegram? How long have you known her, by
the way? Two days? Really, now!"
The weekly governmental pouch had closed at noon, and pouch-days were
half-holidays, but Daunt did not go to the Embassy. An official letter
had arrived from Washington which must be delivered in Kamakura. Daunt
seized this excuse, plunged ferociously into tweeds and an hour
afterward found himself in a railway carriage thudding gloomily toward
the lower bay. In his heart he knew that he was trying to run away--from
something that nevertheless traveled with him.
The sky was palely blue, without a cloud, but the bay, where the rails
skirted it, was heaving in long swells of oily amethyst like a vast
carpet shaken at a distance in irregular undulations, on which _junk_
with flapping, windless sails, of the deep gold color of old straw,
tumbled like ungainly sea-spiders. The western hills looked misty and
uncertain, and Fuji was wrapped in a wraith-like mist into which its
glimmering profile disappeared.
At a way-station a coolie with a huge tray piled with neat, flat, wooden
boxes passed the window calling "_Ben-to! Ben-to!_" It reminded Daunt
that he had had no luncheon, and he bought one. He had long ago
accustomed himself to Japanese food and liked it, but to-day the two
shallow sections inspired no appetite. The half which held the rice he
viciously threw out of the window and unrolling the fresh-cut
chop-sticks from their paper square, rummaged discontentedly among the
contents of the other: dried cuttlefish, bean-curd, slices of boiled
lily-bulb, cinnamon-sticks, lotos stems and a coil of edible seaweed,
all wrapped in green leaves. In the end, the _mélange_ followed the
rice.
At Kamakura an immediate answer to the letter he brought was not
forthcoming, and to kill the time he strolled far down the curved beach.
The usual breeze was lacking. A haze as fine as gossamer had drawn
itself over the sky, and through it gulls were calling plaintively. Here
and there on the sea-wall women were spreading fish-nets, and along the
causeway trudged blue-legged peasant-women, their backs bent beneath
huge loads of brushwood. In one place a bronze-faced fisherman in a
fantastic _kimono_ on which was painted sea-monsters and hobgoblins in
crimson and orange, seated on the gunwale of his _sampan_ drawn above
the shingle, watched a little girl who, with clothing clutched
thigh-high, was skipping the frothy ripples as if they were ropes of
foam. A mile from the town he met a regiment of small school-boys, in
indigo-blue and white _kimono_, marching two and two like miniature
soldiers, a teacher in European dress at either end of the line--future
Oyamas, Togos and Kurokis in embryo.
They were coming from Enoshima, the hill-island that rises in the bay
like an emerald St. Michael, where in a rocky cave, looking seaward,
dwells holy Ben-ten, the Buddhist Goddess of Love. Daunt could see its
masses of dark green foliage with their pink veinings of cherry-trees,
and the crawling line of board-walk, perched on piling, which gave
access from the mainland when the tide was in. On its height, if
anywhere, would be coolness. He filled his pipe and set off toward it
along the sultry sand. The hot dazzle of the sun was in his face. There
was no movement in the crisp leaves of the bamboo trees and the damp
heat beat up stiflingly from the gray glare. Somewhere in the air,
stirless and humid, there rested a faint, weedy smell like a steaming
sea-growth in a tidal ooze.
Daunt's pipe sputtered feebly, and, girding at the heat, he hurled it at
a handful of blue ducks that plashed tiredly in the gray-green heave,
and watched them dive, to reappear far away, like bobbing corks. He
wished he could as easily scatter the blue-devils that dogged him.
He drew a sigh of relief as he reached the long elevated board-walk and
shook the sand from his shoes. Underneath its shore-end a fisherman sat
in the stern of a boat fishing with cormorants. A row of the solemn
birds sat on a pole projecting over the water, each tethered by a string
whose end was tied to the man's wrist. They seemed to be asleep, but now
and then one would plunge like a diver, to reappear with a fish
wriggling in its beak. Daunt watched them listlessly a moment, then,
passing beneath a great bronze _torii_, he slowly climbed the single
shaded street that staggered up the hill between the multitudes of gay
little shops running over with colored sea-shells, with grotesque
lanterns made of inflated fish-skins, with carved crystal and pink and
white coral--up and up, by old, old flights of mossy steps, under more
ancient trees, by green monuments and lichen-stippled Buddhas, till the
sea below crawled like a wrinkled counterpane. Daunt knew a tea-house on
the very lip of the cliff, the _Kinki-ro_--"Inn of the Golden
Turtle"--and he bent his steps lazily in its direction.
In the heavy heat the low tile roof looked cool and inviting. Tall
soft-eyed iris were standing in its garden overlooking the water, and
against the green their velvety leaves made vivid splashes of golden
blue. On a dead tree two black crows were quarreling and cherry-petals
powdered the paths like pink hail. The haze, sifting from the sky,
seemed to wrap everything in a vast, shimmering veil. At the hedge he
paused an instant. Some one, somewhere, was humming, low-voiced, an air
that he had once loved. He pushed open the gate and went on into the
tremulous radiance. Then he stopped short.
Barbara was seated above him in the fork of a low camelia tree, one arm
laid out along a branch, her green gown blending with a bamboo thicket
behind her and her vivid face framed in the blossoms. She sat, chin in
hand, looking dreamily out across the bay, and the hummed song had a
rhythm that seemed to fit her thought--slow and infinitely tender.
"You!" he cried.
She turned with a startled movement that dissolved into low, delicious
laughter.
"Fairly caught," she answered. "I don't often revert far enough to climb
trees, but I thought no one but Haru and I was here. Will you come and
help me down, Honorable Fly-man?"
"Wait--" he said. "What was the song you were humming?"
She looked at him with a quick intake of breath, then for answer began
to sing, in a voice that presently became scarce more than a whisper:
"Forgotten you? Well, if forgetting
Be hearing all the day
Your voice through all the strange babble
Of voices grave, now gay--
If counting each moment with longing
Till the one when I see you again,
If this be forgetting, you're right, dear!
And I have forgotten you then!"
Daunt's hand fell to his side. A young girl's face nested in creamy,
pink blossoms--a sweet, shy, flushed face under a mass of curling,
gold-bronze hair. "I remember now!" he said in a low voice. "I ... sang
it to you ... that day!"
"I am flattered!" she exclaimed. "The day before yesterday you had
forgotten that you ever saw poor little me! It was Mrs. Claybourne, of
course, that you sang to! Yet you were my idol for a long month and a
day!"
"It was to _you_," he said unsteadily. "I didn't know your name. But I
never forgot the song. I remembered it that night in the garden, when I
first heard you playing!"