The Breath of the Gods Part 45

The biwa player now stood beside the piano. Two j.a.panese tatami (padded straw mats six feet in length) were brought in and placed upon the floor. Before inviting him to be seated Yuki made a hesitating little speech to the company, first in English, then in j.a.panese, saying to the foreigners that while the music to come would doubtless be strange, and possibly displeasing to them, to her and her compatriots it was a trumpet-call to heroism. "It stirs our blood to every drop!" she cried, forgetting, for the instant, her shyness. "It echoes to the brave deeds of a thousand years ago,--it foretells deeds more greater that may come!

It is the crying of strong souls, it is breath of our fathers' G.o.ds!"

Gwendolen, in that vague sort of way in which impressions of alien customs are formed, had believed all male musicians in j.a.pan to be blind. Some one had told her so, or she had read it. She was surprised, therefore, and interested, to see in this famous singer of battle-hymns a young man, indeed almost a boy, with thin, shaven face, tumultuous black hair not too closely or evenly cut, tossed in thick locks all over his well-poised head; and eyes, large, straight, expressive, and brilliant enough to be the ornament of a young French or Italian seigneur. He showed a slight embarra.s.sment, at first, in the presence of so many women. He was used to the audience of statesmen, to the flas.h.i.+ng response of Majesty. Here were not only j.a.panese girls, mere children, but a great company of high-nosed, pink and purple foreigners. Saturated as he was, made up of lore and legend, with songs of the Lady Sakanouye, or of Ono no Komachi never far from his lips, even Gwendolen's bright beauty seemed a trifle abnormal, bleached, repellent.

Now his hostess, the young Princess Hagane, looked into his eyes, and spoke to him in their own tongue. "Be not concerned, honorable sir, at the presence of foreign women! They cannot understand your words, of course; but I am sure they will listen courteously. As for us,--we j.a.panese women,--we are the wives, the daughters, the mothers of heroes.

Our frail lives toss as thin flames on the altar of prayer. We cannot fight, we can only pray and work. Sing strength to us as we minister to distant soldiers dying, perhaps on barren fields, or heaped, dead, in the ploughed siege-trenches of this fearful war!"

His deep eyes seemed to drink of her inspiration, so long was the gaze with which he held her. "I am honored to sing at your bidding," he answered. He had forgotten to bow at the words. He forgot that she was a princess. He recognized her as a spirit. Forever after this slight girl, seen but once, became one of the poet's galaxy of pale, pure stars. For years he could not sing of the death-struggle of the Heike clan without a vision of her prophetic eyes.

He took his seat very slowly on the soft straw mat. Yuki withdrew, and became lost among her guests. The biwa, a large lute in the shape of half a pear, had been held, all this time, closely against the young man's breast. Now, in taking his seat, the instrument was extended to the full length of his right arm. It gave out, under his close grasp, a sleepy hum. For an instant only it was placed apart from him, on the mat, that he might spread and smooth the knees of his silken robe, draw his stiff sleeves into exact angles, and adjust the low kimono collar.

Then he turned impatiently again to the lute. It murmured to him; he drew it close, smiling as a mother upon her babe.

"Ain't he handsome for a j.a.p?" whispered Mrs. Stunt to Gwendolen. The girl winced. She was studying him in her own way. His manner, just before beginning, was aloof and reserved, as if he were restating to himself consecration to service. The j.a.panese women, even the oldest, gazed upon him with deep reverence.

"Beethoven may have smiled like that, or St. Francis of a.s.sisi," thought Gwendolen. "It is a look, not of race, but of immortality."

The player's head lifted slightly. He was losing consciousness of material presences. His part was with the unseen world; he must draw down currents of a mighty past, and send them as new streams of influence, on through a menaced future. For he was to improvise, not to repeat. His theme alone was set,--a most heroic incident of civil wars, resulting in extermination of a dominating clan. The annihilation of the Heike might give him text, but the flow of rhythmic words should vibrate, thrill, moan, quicken, purl, or shatter, as the mood of the moment might demand. Doubtless in this pause he was invoking, in full faith, the souls of those dead heroes; offering them possession of his human frame, and entreating higher G.o.ds to make him worthy of the test.

His low voice and the first three slow notes rose together. The minor quality suggested lamentation. A short pa.s.sage, rapidly chanted without accompaniment, made the hearts of the listeners beat a little faster.

Then voice and instrument clashed together; both whirled nearer, until, all at once,--silence! The player looked about the room in bewilderment.

He stared down upon the biwa. He closed his eyes and swayed slightly backward, then forward, then back again. Suddenly he reopened his eyes.

They were larger, more brilliant; they flashed a new fire, the glare of battle reflected in their depths. Words now came rapidly. His sentences fell of themselves into long, unstable rhythms. Cadences were lacking.

All phrasing, except in rarest intervals, broke into the air with a sob, a sigh, a shuddering gasp. Often now the biwa strings were slashed across by the ivory plectrum, and the human wail rang through vibrating response. Then voice and strings plunged into a seeming discord, a frantic wrack of sound exorcised an instant later by pure calm notes struck separately, like the drip of slow water.

In the sense of Western harmony there was none, but something in the weird vibrations of long notes, the intricacies of overtone, and, above all, the unbelievable subtleties of rhythm, gave to one eager American listener, at least, her first insight into a new world of sound. "They are nearer in this, as in all their other arts, to nature," she thought to herself. "They summon the very essences of being, and find skeins for entangling them. Without conscious representation, they suggest to the human ear the lisp of sea winds, the flutter of fire, the rus.h.i.+ng monologue of mountain streams. They hear sounds we Westerners never hear. I believe the very mists are audible."

As the emotion increased and the subject became more martial, the time of the music grew rapid, broken, syncopated, involved. Soft, melodious pa.s.sages shattered into jarring notes. Like European troubadours of France, or the meistersingers of mediaeval Germany, he yielded himself to the unconscious swing of impulse, and sang what was given him. Lines shortened. Syllables became more staccato. It was dramatic, undidactic--the deeds rather than the thoughts of men. His diction became more simple and direct, with sharp, incisive verbs at the end that rang like smitten steel. His whole body, at times, was shaken.

After some terrific pa.s.sage, while the sobbing lute-strings sustained the pa.s.sion, his body would bend over and down, as if, in its abandonment to joy, grief, or battle ardor, it would hug the instrument that had become its soul.

Now he sang of the hero youth, Atsumori, of his insistence upon honorable death at the hand of his conqueror, k.u.magaye.

"The Hour of the Hare comes at last, and the red sun advances, Raised like a cry and a s.h.i.+eld in the mists of the morning,

"Warriors and chiefs and the dauntless brave youth Atsumori Drive to the sea all the hordes of the sweating red demons."

The dove-gray garments of the j.a.panese women, folded so modestly across seemingly quiet b.r.e.a.s.t.s, began to stir and palpitate. More than one tear fell upon the bandages. Yuki's face, set now unfalteringly upon the singer, grew ever more white; her long eyes burned, and trembled apart.

Unconsciously she went close to him, and, kneeling upon the hard floor, drank of his voice. The group of j.a.panese maidens hid faces in their bright sleeves. The air stirred and tingled with invisible influences.

Gwendolen began to s.h.i.+ver like an animal which knows not its own source of fear. The charged atmosphere, the face, the voice of the singer, Yuki's great glowing eyes, swept in her soul strained chords of unknown feeling. She felt in herself the vibrations of that trembling lute. In its cell a soul, just wakened, fumbled at a new discovered latch.

"Surely it must be reincarnation," whispered the girl. "Surely I have felt and seen all this before! Yuki and I together have listened; that look was on her face. Yuki!" The cry was scarcely a whisper. Yuki, many feet away, could not possibly have heard, yet instantly she turned,--the eyes, night-black and hazel, caught and clung together, with half ghostly memories that were the same.

"Hissed there the sea with the scorching of steel and of pa.s.sion, Rolled up the clouds from the sky and the sh.o.r.e in a tumult, There on the sand lies the body of young Atsumori."

One great cras.h.i.+ng across the strings, "like the tearing of brocade,"

and the singer's head fell forward,--his frame trembled and shrank, he quivered into stillness. Yuki half crawled to him, holding out a protecting arm, and facing her guests like a young tigress. "Do not any one speak. Do not crowd about him," she cried in English. "His soul will be weary from the long journey."

The j.a.panese women understood, and returned quietly to their sewing. The foreigners t.i.ttered, shrugged, and exchanged glances, then they, too, began to work. A servant brought tea to the singer, and a gla.s.s of cold water. At length he stretched out a trembling hand to the latter, and having finished the draught, rose quietly and went from the room, with Yuki close behind. A few moments later Gwendolen heard her returning, unaccompanied, along the hall. She went out to meet her, thankful indeed for the privilege of a few words alone.

"Yuki-ko," she faltered, "I just wanted to say that at last I understand,--I think I understand entirely."

Yuki, still half in the world of shadows, gave her a strange look. "You understand, Gwendolen? Is it my marriage you speak of?"

"Oh, so much more than that!" cried the other, with a little sob. "Had you been what the conventional foreigner calls 'faithful,' you would have been the most faithless girl in all the world!"

"You are a wonderful friend," said Yuki. Her voice had the strange quality of her look. Both had caught the rhythm of low martial chanting.

"But even you, my Gwendolen, did not hear or understand it all. There is tragedy before me. You did not hear that in the music?"

"I thought I heard it, darling, but I shut my ears! I shall not believe.

We can compel even tragedy, Yuki. Nothing can harm you with Hagane's love!"

"It is of that the tragedy come. But do not trouble. If I can serve Nippon, I asks no more of this life."

"Yuki, what can you mean?" cried the other, holding her back.

"Hush, dearest; do not trouble," smiled Yuki. "See, the guests turn their heads to listen. I must go to them. I have no fear at all."

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Throughout the months of March and early April this strange hiatus in war bulletins hung, like a gray sky, above national enthusiasm. The more dignified of the newspapers still adjured the populace to patience, still exhorted them to have faith in their wise and careful leaders.

"The Hawk's Eye," on the other hand, bereft of inflammatory battle themes, served up, with new condiment of ingenious suggestion, the personal gossip of the hour. Few of the weekly issues (those printed entirely in English) omitted a guarded slur upon the conjugal felicity of the Hagane household. Gwendolen came in for her share of veiled allusion. Yuki-ko, each week stung by the contemptible malice of the attack, promised herself that never again should the paper be opened in her home. Gwendolen, at the American Legation, weekly did the same. The results of both resolutions were equally humiliating.

This was not a happy time for Gwendolen, creature of suns.h.i.+ne and spring breezes as she seemed. The continued strained relations between herself and Dodge interfered quite seriously at times with the young man's official duties. Mr. Todd leaned more heavily than he knew upon his attache's four past years of experience in Tokio life, and resented an att.i.tude of one of his own family, which kept Dodge so rigidly within the paling of mere officialdom. Mrs. Todd, who had never professed great friends.h.i.+p for the secretary, now most loudly denounced his "outrageous flirtation" with the Spanish girl, and even declared it an affront upon her Legation. Gwendolen, urged one moment to stop the affair, "as she certainly could by the lifting of a finger," was, the instant after, taunted by her inability to do so.

The public friends.h.i.+p between Dodge and the charming Senorita deepened obviously with each day. Hints of an early marriage flecked "The Hawk's Eye." Mrs. Todd began to feel herself personally injured by her wilful daughter. Finally, goaded into action and spurred by her own restless heart, the girl made a counter-move of a sudden and desperate intimacy with Carmen herself. Such things are not unknown in the history of adolescence. Carmen yielded to the American's bright fascination with the caressing languor characteristic of her. The two girls lunched together, dined, drove, and had tea together, and spoke of each other in exaggerated terms of endearment. Dodge, whatever his private surmises, retained an unaltered front. Naturally he and Gwendolen were more often together. She showed to him an air of cherished hostility, varied by small lightning-flashes of appeal. Two feminine currents blew full upon him. Dodge kept his hat on. The beautiful Castilian bore toward him the att.i.tude of an indulgent conqueror. Gwendolen aided this, and whenever possible threw Dodge into the position of Carmen's accepted lover. Also, for some reason known only to herself, she encouraged the Spanish girl in her belief in Dodge's overwhelming adoration.

Gwendolen soon discovered that her new friend had an uncontrollable yearning for "dulces," and eagerly embraced this opportunity for demonstrating her new affection. Gwendolen scoured the alleys of old Yedo for novel sweetmeats; she purveyed from the French shops of Yokohama imported dainties; she sent a telegraphic order to a certain New York confectioner. Carmen appreciated and devoured all results. The j.a.panese confections, which many other European ladies might (without, of course, having tasted) pretend to despise, she declared delicious.

The "ama-natto," or small purple bean, boiled and sugar-coated with lilac frosting, she called "fairy marron." Mikan, or small oranges preserved whole, with a flake of cinnamon and ginger, gained an established place on the Spanish Legation table. "Hakka ame," that delicious triangle of peppermint cream, improved from an American missionary's original recipe, vied in public favor, as a hors-d'oeuvre with French bonbons, salted almonds, and olives.

Once Carmen's French maid, suspecting, perhaps, more than a purely altruistic intention in Gwendolen's persistent offerings, warned her young mistress against immoderate indulgence in sweet foods, and protested, with many gesticulations and a hint of tears, that the very last importation of Paris gowns already needed the letting out of seams, and would soon be unwearable. "Nonsense, Lizette," smiled the pampered one, "not eat dulces? I have always eaten dulces. How, in the Virgin's name, would one get through a novel without a plate of dulces beside it?"

The maid sent a hostile glance to Gwendolen, which the blonde beauty had the conscience not to resent. Rapidly increasing embonpoint was Carmen's one menace to beauty. She had already begun to pray to her patron saint for diminution. On the prie-dieu invariably lay a half-nibbled chocolate. Were not Gwendolen's friends.h.i.+p so open, so obvious, one might have suspected that she connived with fate to circ.u.mvent her Carmen's pet.i.tion; that actually she a.s.sisted in the mournful process of burying perfect features and luscious, languorous dark eyes in warm cus.h.i.+ons of pink fat. But no, we must not think such things of Gwendolen.

Because of the new intimacy and an increasing activity in Tokio society Gwendolen now saw much less of her schoolmate, Yuki. Perhaps it was as well. The Princess Hagane had her own lessons to learn, and they were j.a.panese lessons. Following close upon her first sewing-meeting came Yuki's presentation to Their Majesties. The court ladies welcomed her into their midst. As in humbler j.a.panese circles she was immediately asked innumerable questions. In return she began learning, from her high-born interrogants, the new language of extreme court ceremony.

Another reception and another sewing-meeting fell due. To the latter of these functions a mere handful of foreign ladies came. Gwendolen and Mrs. Todd were detained, actually, by some globe-trotting Was.h.i.+ngton a.s.sociates, who landed that very day at Yokohama. In the two subsequent gatherings foreign attendance ceased altogether.

Each reception was, however, a "crush." Gossip is a magnet; the presence of eligible young men not exactly detraction. Mrs. Stunt and others of her kind went openly to see whether Pierre Le Beau would attend, and how he would conduct himself before host and hostess. It was the secret craving of such social vultures that a scene, the more disgraceful the better, be enacted for their entertainment, and the disappointment was correspondingly keen when neither Pierre nor Count Ronsard attended. The count, indeed, sent cards and a gift of flowers. No mention at all was made of the younger man.

Three of the Hagane official functions had taken place. March hurled itself gruffly into the outstretched arms of spring. Gwendolen knew why Pierre stayed away and why Ronsard remained so impa.s.sive. She had good reasons for not telling Yuki. At her friend's silence the latter wondered. Instinct told her that there was a deeper explanation than mere forgetfulness. More than once she had nerved herself to inquire; but always, just on the point of asking, something had happened to interfere.

A new cry, which affected Yuki far more openly, began to ring through the current press. "If complications have arisen in Manchuria let Prince Hagane go and unravel them!" This demand grew in insistence with each day. Presently the whole nation had arisen, and was clamoring, "Send our War Lord, Hagane, to the front!" Yuki waited patiently for her husband to inform her of the reception of this demand in high quarters. Like a good j.a.panese wife she dared not force the issue. On every side her part, it seemed, was to wait, to command herself, to endure suspense. To an impatient nature such as Gwendolen this would have been torture. To Yuki, trained through centuries of brave ancestors to play her woman's part of uncomplaining quiescence, the strain was not so great. Her ignorance of Pierre seemed, indeed, the heaviest burden. She scanned now the English columns of every paper, hoping against hope that her eyes would seize the printed a.s.surance of his return to France. This was the young wife's prayer, uttered on her knees each night, muttered through pale lips a hundred times each day, that Pierre would go quietly home, and in his own dear land forget the woman who had broken faith with him.

His threat against Hagane's life did not sound to her absurd. It re-echoed to her, always with a pang of fear. Love and hate alike give preternatural insight. By injury to Prince Hagane alone could Pierre gain full revenge. By this means he could strip the flesh from the bones of her loyal sacrifice, laying bare the grinning skeleton of a national disaster, wreaked through her.

Of course she could not speak these fears to Hagane. There was no one, not even Gwendolen, to whom she could whisper them. Hagane was now seldom at his home. She gathered, once or twice, from gossip of the servants, that he had spent the previous night and day at the Tabata villa, with a small company of statesmen as his guests. In the infrequent visits, she, studying his face with unconscious intensity, saw the same power, the same sadness, the invincible strength unshadowed and unexcited by this renewal of popular hero-wors.h.i.+p. The thought that he might leave her alone, to fulfil the duties of his position, brought to the young wife a pang of terror, of misgiving. She believed it to be merely a shrinking from heavy responsibility. To outward appearance she and Hagane stood on opposite sh.o.r.es of an increasing chasm; but in her heart, when she dared listen to its timid pleadings, she knew it to be a narrowing, not a widening, void their joint lives spanned. She could not doubt that he felt some grave pleasure in seeing her on his expected visits to the great sh.e.l.l of his official home. The weekly receptions, where she bore herself with ever-increasing dignity and poise, did indeed give to the husband a deep impersonal satisfaction. It was more than satisfaction that he felt, as he saw the great filled packing-cases sent away each week to suffering soldiers in Manchuria.

Once, coming in upon her unannounced, as was his custom, he had suddenly taken the white thing in his arms, thrown her head back to his shoulder, and gazed into her eyes as though to drag from some hidden depth an awakening thought,--a cradled possibility. Yuki's lids drooped under the blinding force of his look. She felt as though a great silent wind blew, pinning her against a rock. Surely in his twitching face was more than a calm self-congratulation! It was the man, the master, summoning by right what was rightly his. Love--strong, terrible, yet tender, showed for an instant in his dark eyes. He went from her as quickly as he had come. No word had broken the silence. During the rest of that day Yuki rocked in her heart a new-born hope, a possibility so strange, so ineffable that she dared not open her eyes to its tiny face. With bowed head and fast-closed lids she hushed it. That day set her feet on the temple-stair of s.h.i.+ning prophecy. But how dare she, already to one pledge so faithless, climb upward, even on bleeding knees, to that splendid portico above?