THE ISLAND OF ENCHANTMENT
They walked together around the curving road, leaving Haru with the
tea-basket. "Patsy would have come," Barbara had said, "but she is in
the clutches of her dressmaker." And Daunt had answered, "I have a
distinct regard for that Chinaman!"
His black mood had vanished, and the leering imps had flown. In the
brightness of her physical presence, how baseless and foolish seemed his
sullen imaginings! What man who owned a steam yacht, knowing her, would
not wish to name it the _Barbara_? Walking beside her, so near that he
could feel the touch of her light skirt against his ankles, it seemed
impossible that he should ever again be other than light-hearted. She
was no acquaintance of hours, after all. He had known her for seven
years. He was in wild spirits.
The sky was duller now. Its marvelous haze of blue and gold had turned
pallid, and the sun glared with a pale, yellowish effrontery. A strange
sighing was in the air, so faint, however, that it seemed only the
stirring of innumerable leaves, the resinous rasping of pine-needles and
the lisping fall of the flaming petals from the century-old camelia
trees, that stained the ground with hot, bleeding red. Far below in the
shallow pools, nut-brown, bare-legged girls were gathering seaweed in
hand-nets, _kimono_ tucked beneath their belts and scarlet petticoats
falling to their knees, like a flock of brilliant flamingos. At a turn
in the road stood a stone image of Jizo, with a red paper bib about its
neck. Before it lay three small rice-cakes; somewhere in the
neighborhood was a little sick child, three years old. At its base were
heaps of tiny stones, piled by mothers whose little children had died.
They stopped at a tea-house open on all sides, and, sitting cross-legged
on its _tatamé_, drank tea from earthenware pots that held only a small
cupful, while they listened to a street minstrel beating on a tom-tom,
and singing a mysterious song that seemed about to choke him. They fed a
crisp rice-cake to a baby sagging from an urchin's shoulder. A doll was
strapped to the baby's back. They peered into a Buddhist temple where a
monotonous chant came from behind a blue-figured curtain. They went,
laughing like two children, down the zigzag stone steps, past
innumerable _uomitei_--crimson-benched "resting-houses," where grave
Japanese pedestrians sat eating stewed eels and chipping hard-boiled
eggs--to the rocky edge of the tide, which now rolled in with a
measured, sullen booming. He pointed to a gloomy fissure which ran into
the mountain, at a little distance.
"O Maiden, journeying to Holy Ben-ten," he said, "behold her shrine!"
"How disillusioning!"
"People find love so, sometimes."
She slowly shook her head. "Not all of them," she said softly. "I am
old-fashioned enough not to believe that." Her brown eyes were wistful
and a little troubled, and her voice was so adorable that he could have
gone on his knees to her.
"We will ask Ben-ten about it," he said.
"Oh, but not '_we!_'" she cried. "I must go alone. Don't you know the
legend? People quarrel if they go together."
"I can't imagine quarreling with you. I'd rather quarrel with myself."
"That would be difficult, wouldn't it?"
"Not in some of my moods. Ask my head-boy. To-day, for instance--"
"Well?" For he had paused.
"I was meditating self-destruction when I met you."
"By what interesting method, I wonder?"
"I was about to search for a volcano to jump into."
"I thought the nearest active crater is a hundred miles away."
"So it is, but I'm an absent-minded beggar."
She laughed. "May I ask what inspired to-day's suicidal mood?"
"It was--a telegram."
"Oh!" She colored faintly. "I--I hope it held no bad news."
He looked into her eyes. "I hope not," he said. Something else was on
his tongue, when "Look!" she exclaimed. "How strange the sea looks off
there!"
A sinister, whitish bank, like a mad drift of smoke, lay far off on the
water, and a tense, whistling hum came from the upper air. A drop of
water splashed on Daunt's wrist. "There's going to be a blow," he said.
"The seaweed gatherers are all coming in, too. Ben-ten will have to
wait, I'm afraid. See--even her High Priest is forsaking her!"
From where they stood steps were roughly hewn into the rock, winding
across the face of the cliff. Beside these, stone pillars were socketed,
carrying an iron chain that hung in rusted festoons. Along this
precarious pathway from the cavern an old man was hastily coming,
followed by a boy with a sagging bundle tied in a white cloth. "That
parcel, no doubt," said Daunt, "contains the day's offerings. Wait!
You're not going?" For she had started down the steps.
She had turned to answer, when, with the suddenness of an explosion, a
burst of wind fell on them like a flapping weight, spattering them with
drops that struck the rock as if hurled from a sling-full of melted
metal. Barbara had never in her life experienced anything like its
ferocity. It both startled and angered her, like a personal affront.
Daunt had sprung to her side and was shouting something. But the words
were indistinguishable; she shook her head and went on stubbornly,
clinging to the chain, a whirl of blown garments. She felt him grasp her
arm.
"Go back!" she shrieked. "It's--bad--luck!"
As he released her there came a second's menacing lull, and in it she
sprang down the steps and ran swiftly out along the pathway. He was
after her in an instant, overtaking her on a frail board trestle that
spanned a pool, where the cliff was perpendicular. Here the wind, shaggy
with spume, hurled them together. Daunt threw an arm about her, clinging
with the other hand to the wooden railing. Her hair was a reddish swirl
across his shoulder and her breath, panting against his throat, ridged
his skin with a creeping delight. The rocks beneath them, through whose
fissures tongues of water ran screaming, was the color of raspberries
and tawny with seaweed. There was only a weird, yellow half-light,
through which the gale howled and scuffled, like dragons fighting. A
slather of wave licked the palsied framework.
He bent and shouted into her ear. All she caught was: "Must--cave--next
lull--"
She nodded her head and her lips smiled at him through the confused
obscurity. A thrill swept her like silver rain. Pulse on pulse, an
emotion like fire and snow in one thrilled and chilled her. She closed
her eyes with a wild longing that the wind might last for ever, that
that moment, like the ecstasy of an opium dream, might draw itself out
to infinite length. Slowly she felt the breath of the tempest ebb about
them, then suddenly felt herself lifted from her feet, and her eyes
opened into Daunt's. Her cheek lay against his breast, as it had done in
that short moment in the Embassy garden. She could feel his heart bound
under the rough tweed. Once more the wind caught them, but he staggered
through it, and into the high, rock entrance of the cave.
Inside its dripping rim the sudden cessation of the wind seemed almost
uncanny, and the boom of the surf was a dull thunderous roar. He set her
on her feet on the damp rock and laughed wildly.
"Do you realize," she said, "that we have transgressed the most sacred
tenet of Ben-ten by coming here together? We are doomed to
misunderstanding!"
"Now that I recollect, that applies only to lovers," he answered. "Then
we--"
"Are quite safe," she quickly finished for him. "Come, I want to see the
shrine. We must find a candle."
He peered into the gloomy depths. "I think I see some burning," he said.
"We will explore."
A little way inside they came to a small well, with a dipper and a rack
of thin blue-and-white towels to cleanse the hands of worshipers. On a
square pedestal stood a stone Buddha, curiously incrusted by drippings
from the roof. Near it was a wooden booth, its front hung with pendents
of twisted rice-straw and strips of white paper folded in diagonal
notches. It held a number of tiny wooden _torii_ strung with lighted
candles, above each of which was nailed a paper prayer. A few copper
coins lay scattered beneath them. Daunt thrust two of the candles into
wooden holders and they slowly followed the narrowing fissure, guttered
by the feet of centuries, between square posts bearing carven texts, and
small images, coated with the spermy droppings from innumerable candles.
She held up her winking light toward his face. "What a desperate
absorption!" she said laughingly. "You haven't said a thing for five
minutes."
"I'm thinking we had better explain at once to Ben-ten that we're not
lovers. Otherwise we may get the penalty. Perhaps we'd better just tell
her it was an accident, and let it go at that? What do you think?"
"That might be the simplest."
"All right then, I'll say 'Ben-ten, dear, she wanted to come alone; she
really did! We didn't intend it at all. So be a nice, gracious goddess
and don't make her quarrel with me!'"
"What do you suppose she will answer?"
"She will say: 'Young man, in the same circumstances, I should have done
exactly the same myself.'"
The passage had grown so low that they had to bend their heads, then all
at once it widened into a concave chamber. The cannonading of the wind
rumbled fainter and fainter. He took her hand and drew her forward.
"There is Ben-ten," he said.
The Goddess of Love sat in a barred cleft of the rock, enshrined in a
dull, gold silence. Beads of moisture spangled her robe, glistening like
brilliants through the mossy darkness. "Poor deity!" said Barbara. "To
have to live for ever in a sea-cavern! It's a clammy idea, isn't it?"
"That's--" He paused. "I could make a terrible pun, but I won't."
"One shouldn't joke about love," she said.
"Have _you_ discovered that too?"
She gazed at him strangely, without answering. In the wan light his face
looked pale. Her unresisting fingers still lay in his; he felt their
touch like a breath of fire through all his veins. Her eyes sparkled
back the eery witch-glow of the candle-flames. "You are a green-golden
gnome-girl!" he said unsteadily. "And I am under a spell."
"Yes, yes," she said. "I am Rumptydudget's daughter! I have only to wave
my candlestick--so!--to turn you into a stalagmite!"
She suited the action to the word--and dropped her candle, which was
instantly extinguished on the damp floor. Bending forward to retrieve
it, Daunt slipped. The arm he instinctively threw out to save himself
struck the wall and his own candle flew from its socket. As he regained
his footing, confused by the blank, enfolding darkness, he stumbled
against Barbara, and his face brushed hers. In another instant the touch
had thrilled into a kiss.
A moment she lay in his arms, passive, panting, her unkissed mouth
stinging with the burn of his lips. The world was a dense blackness,
shot with fire and full of pealing bells, and the beating of her heart
was a great wave of sound that throbbed like the iron-shod fury of the
seas.
"I love you, Barbara!" he said simply. "I love you!"
The stammering utterance pierced the swift, confused sweetness of that
first kiss like a lance of desperate gladness. Through the tumbling
passion of the words he poured into her heart, she could feel his hands
touching her face, her throat, her loosened hair.
"Barbara! Listen, dear! I must say it! It's stronger than I am--no,
don't push me away! Love me! You _must_ love me!
With her arms on his breast, she had made a movement to release herself.
"We are mad, I think!" she breathed.
"Then may we never be sane!"
"I--you have known me only two days! What--"
"Ah, no! I've known you all these years and have been loving you without
really knowing it. I made a woman out of my own fancy, that I dreamed
alive. In the long winter evenings when I worked at my models in the
little house in Aoyama, I used to see her face in my driftwood blaze and
talk to her. I called her my 'Lady of the Many-Colored Fires.' I never
thought she really existed, but that first night in the Embassy garden I
knew that my dream-woman was you!--_you_, Barbara!"
Her hands pushed him from her no more. They fell to trembling on his
breast. In the dense, salty obscurity, she turned her head sharply, to
feel again his lips on hers, her own molding to his kiss. She drooped,
swaying, stunned, breathless.
"Barbara, I love you!"
"No--not again. Light--the candle."
"Just a moment longer--here in the dark, with Ben-ten. It's fate,
darling! Why should I have been in Japan and not in Persia when you
came? Why did I happen to be there in the garden that night, at that
particular moment? Why, it was the purest accident that I came here
to-day! No--not accident. It was kismet! Barbara!"
"Make--a light. I--beg you!"
His lips were murmuring against her cheek. "Say 'I love you,' too!"
"I--can not. You ... you would hold me cheap ... I would be--I am!...
What? Yes, it was a tulip tree. I was sixteen.... Oh, you couldn't
have--why, you'd forgotten the whole thing! You had, you _had_!... Don't
hold me.... No, I don't care what you think!... Yes, I _do_ care!...
Yes, I--I ... This is perfectly shameless!... Dark? That makes it all
the worse. What will you ... No, no! You must not kiss me again! We must
go back!--I will go back...."
She freed herself, and he fumbled for his fallen candle. He struck a
match. The sputtering blue flame lit her white, languorous face, her
fallen hair, her heaving breast. It went out. He struck another and the
wick blazed up.
"Look at me, dear!" he said. "Tell me in the light. Will you marry me?"
"I can not answer--now."
"Why? Don't you love me?"
"I--in so short a time, how could I? Let us go now. I don't know
myself--nor--nor you!"
She was trembling, and he noted it with a pang of compunction.
"To-morrow, sweetheart? Will you give me my answer then?"
"Yes!" It was almost inaudible.
"At the Foreign Minister's ball to-morrow night? I'll come to you there,
dearest. I--"
He stopped. She had caught her hand to her throat with a wild gesture.
"Ben-ten! She--she is frowning at us! There--look there!"
"My poor darling!" he said. "You are nervous. See, it was only the
shadow! I ought not to have brought you into this dismal hole! You are
positively shivering."
"Let us hurry," she said, and they went quickly into the warmer air and
light of the entrance.
The squall had passed with the fateful swiftness of its coming. The
waves still gurgled and tumbled, but the fury of the wind was over. The
murk light had lifted, showing the wet sky a patchy drab, which again
was beginning to show glimpses of golden hue.
* * * * *
They walked back to Haru at the tea-house, beneath the wild, poignant
beauty of disheveled cryptomeria, echoing once more the eternal song of
the _semi_--along paths strewn with drenched petals and sweet with the
moist scents of sodden leaves--then together, down the steep, templed
hill and across the planked walk to the mainland, where a trolley buzzed
through the springing rice-fields, musical now with the _mé kayui_--_mé
kayui_ of the frogs. Daunt accompanied them to the through line of the
railway. From there he was to return to Kamakura for the answer to his
letter.
The sun was setting when the Tokyo express pulled into the station. As
Haru disappeared into the compartment, Daunt took Barbara's hand to help
her to the platform. There had been no other first-class passengers to
embark and the forward end of the asphalt was deserted. Her lovely,
flushed face was turned toward him, and there in the dusk of the
station, he bent swiftly and kissed her once more on the lips.
"Dearest, dearest!" he said behind his teeth, and turned quickly away.
In the car, as the train fled through the glory of the sunset, Barbara
closed her eyes, the longer to keep the impression of that eager gaze:
the lithe, muscular poise of the strong frame, the parted lips, the
brown hair curling under the peak of the cloth cap. She tried to imagine
him on his backward journey. Now the trolley had passed the rice-fields,
now he was striding along the shore road toward Kamakura, where the
great bronze Buddha was lifting its face of dreamless calm. Now,
perhaps, he was turning back toward the deepening blur of the green
island. She shivered a little as she remembered the frown that had
seemed to rest on the stony countenance of Ben-ten in her cave.
Her thought drifted into to-morrow, when she was to give him her answer.
Ah, she knew what that answer would be! She thought of the telegram of
the night before, which she had read in the candle-lighted street!
To-morrow Ware also was coming--for an answer! She knew what that would
be, too. She felt a sudden pity for him. Yet she knew now--what wisdom
she had gained in these two swift days!--that his was not the love that
most deserved it. Daunt's parting kiss clung to her lips like a living
flower. The hand he had clasped still burned to his touch; she lifted it
and held it against her hot face, while the darkening carriage seemed to
fill with the dank smell of salty wind and seaweed, mingled with his
voice:
"Barbara, I love you!--Dearest! Dearest!"
* * * * *
She thought the gesture unseen, unguessed by any one. But in the forward
car, beyond the glass vestibule door, which to her was only a trembling
mirror, a man sat watching with burning eyes. He had been gazing through
the window when the train stopped, had risen to his feet with instant
recognition--to shrink back into his seat, his fingers clenched, his
bitten lip indrawn, and a pallor on his face.
It was Austen Ware, and he had seen that kiss.