THE BISHOP ANSWERS A SUMMONS
The Chapel was but sparsely filled. From where she sat, Barbara, through
the open door, could see the willows along the disconsolate roadway
whipping in the fleering dashes of wind. A woman trudged by,
bare-legged, her _kimono_ tucked knee-high, the inevitable, swaddled
baby on her back. The hot, fibrous song of the _semi_ had died to a thin
humming, like bees in an old orchard. Across the bishop's voice she
heard the plaintive call of a huckster, swinging by in slow dogtrot with
panier-pole on shoulder, and the chirr of a singing-frog under the
hedge.
The service was in the vernacular, and though she tried to follow it in
her _Romaji_ prayer-book--whose words were printed in Roman letters
instead of the Japanese ideograph--the lines were meaningless, and she
could not fasten her mind on them.
She had reached a point in these few tragical days where her mind,
overwrought with its own pain, had acquired a kind of benumbing
lassitude that was not apathy and yet was far removed from spontaneous
feeling. Daunt's presence that dreadful night on the hillside--his
confusion--his bleeding hand--his round-about return to the hotel--all
this, at the sight of the Damascene crop in the bushes, had flashed to
her mind in damnable sequence. And yet something deep and unfathomed
within her had driven her to the obliteration of that mute evidence.
Austen Ware had slipped and fallen--such was the universal verdict. The
truth was sealed for ever in the urn now bound over-seas to its last
resting-place. She alone, she thought, knew the secret of that Nikko
tragedy.
With the next daylight the storm had broken and the ensuing gloomy
weather had formed a dismal setting for gloomier scenes, through which
she had moved dully and mechanically. When all was over, to Patricia's
sorrow, she had not returned to the Embassy, but had gone immediately to
her uncle's. The pity offered her--though not openly expressed, since
her engagement had not been formally announced--hurt her like physical
blows, and the quiet of the Ts'kiji rectory was some solace. To-night,
an unwelcome task lay before her. She was to visit the yacht--now, by a
satiric freak of chance, legally her own!--to seal the private papers of
the man whose deed of gift might not now be recalled.
As she sat listening to the meaningless reading and the sighing of the
wind above the Chapel roof, Barbara's eyes on the stained-glass figure
in the rose-window were full of a wistful loneliness. If her father were
only alive--if he could be near her now! Unconsciously her gaze strayed
across the hedges, to the gray roof of the old temple where lived the
eccentric solitary to whom her thought insistently recurred. In her
trouble she longed to go to him, with a longing the greater because it
seemed fantastic and illogical. She recalled suddenly the quaint
six-year-old of the huge clogs and patched _kimono_--Ishikichi, troubled
over the giving up of the family establishment, puzzling his baby brain
over the hard things of life.
She was startled by a sound outside--the single, shrill, high scream of
a horse in some stable near at hand. It cut through a pause in the
service, sharp, curdling, like a cry of mortal fear. A baby, near
Barbara, awoke and began to cry and the mother soothed it with whispered
murmurings.
Suddenly there arose a strange rattling, a groaning of timbers. The
bishop ceased reading. People were rising to their feet. The building
was shifting, swaying, with a sickening upward vibration, as though it
were being trotted on some Brobdingnagian knee. Barbara felt a qualm
like the first touch of _mal de mer_. "_Ji-shin! Ji-shin!_" rose the
cry, and there was a rush for the open air. In another moment she found
herself out of doors with the frightened crowd.
It was her first experience of earthquake, and the terror had gripped
her bodily. The wet trees were waving to and fro like gigantic fans, and
a dull moan like an echo in a subterranean cavern seemed to issue from
the very ground. A section of tiling slid from the Chapel roof with a
crash. "Rather severe that, for Tokyo," said the bishop at her elbow,
where he stood calmly, watch in hand. "Almost two minutes and vertical
movement."
"Two minutes!" she gasped. She had thought it twenty.
The nauseating swing had ceased, but in an instant, with a vicious
wrench, it began again. "The secondary oscillations," he said. "It will
all be over in a ..."
As he spoke, the air swelled with a horrible, crunching, grinding roar,
like the complaint of a million riven timbers. Across the lane a
sinister dust-cloud sprang into the air like a monstrous hand with
spread fingers. "It is one of the temples!" said the bishop, and hurried
with the rest, Barbara following him.
The paved yard was filling with a throng. Agitated priests and acolytes
ran hither and thither and slate-colored nuns, with shaven heads and
pale, frightened faces, peered through the bamboo-lattices of the
nunnery. The newer temple faced the open space as usual, but across the
hedged garden no ornate roof now thrust up its Tartar gables. Instead
was a huddle of wreckage, upon which lay the huge roof, crumpled and
shattered, like the fragments of a gigantic mushroom. From the tangle
projected beam ends, coiled about with painted monsters, and here and
there in the cluttered _débris_ lay great images of unfamiliar deities.
Over all hung a fine yellow dust, choking and penetrating.
What was under those ruins? Barbara shivered. She was quite unconscious
of the mud and the pelting rain. The bishop drew her under the temple
porch, and they stood together watching the men now working with
mattocks, saws and with loose beams for levers, prying up a corner of
the fallen roof. It seemed an hour they had stood there, when a priest,
bareheaded, his robes caked with mud, came from the clustering crowd.
The bishop questioned him in Japanese. Barbara guessed from his face
what the priest had answered! She waited quiveringly.
Through the bishop's mind swift thoughts were passing. He knew by
hearsay of the recluse--knew that he was not an Oriental. He had often
seen the placard on the little gate: "Maker of Buddhas." He had never
passed it without a pang. It seemed a satirical derision of the holiest
ideal of the West--a type and sign of reversion, a sardonic mockery of
the Creed of Christ. He was a priest holding the torch of the true light
to this alien people, and here, a dark shadow across its brightness, had
stood this derisive denial. Yet now, perhaps, this man stood on the
threshold of the hereafter--and he was a man of his own race!
He turned to Barbara. "Wait here for me," he said. "I am going in. I
will come back to you as soon as I can."