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DREAM TEA

 

By

L. ADAMS BECK

 

 

 

 

LONDON  ERNEST  BENN  LIMITED

First published in 1934

Visiting a most beautiful Japanese temple the other day—or rather an enclosure with many temples in it, a town of peace—I was shown temple after temple lovely in themselves, gemmed with beauty in rarely displayed treasures of art, images, pictures, exquisitely wrought shrines, made by the patient hands of the greatest artists of China and Japan for the delight of ages. I looked and praised until words failed me. Surely this was the inmost heart of the place; the meaning of it all this breathless quiet of beauty—round it all the wonder of the crowding temples had risen. But no!

“And now will you please to be silent while we pass the Meditation Hall,” said our guide bowing and leading us down a side-way. Before me a hall with great tiled roofs swept outward and tapering into points curved upward as if in a rebound from earth. It was dim inside—the place full of shadow like still water, but pausing you might see faces within of men sitting lost in meditation, hands folded as careless of our passing as of the earth we trod, and I knew they were absorbed in the greatest science in all the world—the science of meditation and concentration—the wise use of which is Asia’s greatest wisdom and purest glory. And I knew of my own knowledge that this was the central meaning of all the temples and the manifold beauty only one expression of its meaning.

“Ridiculous!” many will say—“People who had to wait for us to teach them how to live!—People who don’t even know the meaning of a good time! People we wouldn’t ask to our houses! If that kind of thing is Asia’s purest wisdom and glory thank Heaven I’m a Westerner!” Ah, well!—are you so sure? They know exactly what your life is. You cannot know theirs. You come as tourists and flutter past, more ignorant than the swooping swallows who nest in their eaves, and you never know. But it can be known. Let me tell you a little of what it means and of how it strengthens the threefold power of spirit, intellect, and body. I speak from deep and long experience for I too have learnt this science of concentration. You will understand that in it there are grades of knowledge as in all science and I am very far from claiming that I have achieved its heights.

but yet I too travel in the Way and spend every dawn in meditation. I have studied the Indian science and its Japanese version received through China. In India they have called it many names but one is Jnana, which in China became Chan and in Japan Zen. But the heart of it is the same whether in India, China or Japan.

Now first let me say what it does, for in this period of Western science one may congratulate it on drawing nearer and nearer to the secret of Man’s inmost being, and the time is at hand when the West must acknowledge its infinite psychological debt to the Orient. It is however better to know early than late.

What the Oriental science of concentration does is this. It enables you to penetrate into the depth of your own nature and to realise what you are. Not much, you may say, to boast of when you get there! Nothing to boast of certainly, for boasting destroys what it trumpets, but something to glory in with a triumph surpassing all words, to hail with ecstasy, to use with wisdom, to manifest with more than tripled power in body, mind and spirit. What it really does (in the words of a great Japanese writer on “Zen”) is to liberate all the energies stored in us which are in ordinary circumstances cramped and distorted so that they find no adequate channel for activity. This body of ours, he adds, is something like an electric battery. It is unused, unrealised as a source of power. But when you understand—you may move the world with its forces. You have seen, no doubt, in the images of Indian gods a third eye between the brows. It is the symbol of wisdom. The aim of Jnana, Chan, Zen (use which national name you will) is to open the symbolical third eye of wisdom in you so that you may realise your own energies and powers. And from my own experience, supported by the experience of millions, I can say that when that third eye is opened, though as yet it surveys only a part of the Way, you realise that you have thitherto walked in a cloud, and that—“whereas I was blind now I see.”

All the struggles, all the tragic defeats of life, come from this blindness. The man or woman who has seen goes forward in perfect joy and lucidity. If this were all it would be worth great sacrifices, but there is much more.

This science discovers and liberates your physical powers because as its first condition it prescribes a life of strict temperance in food and in all the circumstances of life. It puts you in touch with the Vitally Energising currents of natural force. You will ask the almost invariable question:—“Does this quest oblige me to leave the world?”

Not in the very least. But there are certain things in the world which must be avoided. There are things forbidden by the wise doctor whether of the soul or body. And one can get nothing without payment. You will have to make certain sacrifices. I incline to believe that at a certain stage of wisdom—perhaps many lives ahead—one may wish to surrender a world which then will weigh very light in one’s hands, but as I have not yet reached that point I cannot say for certain. I know people of very high attainment who could quit it if they would, and do not.

Now what does the discipline do for you?

It gives you the full measure of health possible to the body by which your earthly manifestation is conditioned and that is sometimes a very amazing revelation to those who have felt painful limitations. It discovers wholly unexpected intellectual energies. In my own case it made me a writer. Spiritually—its possibilities are limitless. I wish to speak of these consecutively for they should be considered separately before it is possible to lead up to the final fusion.

The first question for each of us is What am I? The answer given by the greatest thinkers of Asia (and therefore of the world) along these lines is this—

“You are not I” in reality. You are the universal Power that moves the worlds. That sends the sun upon his orbit with his planets sweeping about him. You are the Primal Force. You have neither beginning nor end. But you are an imprisoned Force, a Force ignorant of its powers, fettered in the prison of life as you believe it to be and is not. You are deceived by your senses and their picture-paper reports of what lies about you. You are the Prince deprived of his Kingdom, who does not realise his strength nor unsheath his sword to cut the fetters asunder which chain him in the dark. Does it sound absurd to say that a mere man is universal force? Then listen to what Western science—so far as it understands—has to say. Let me quote from Professor Eddington in his remarkable book lately published, The Nature of the Physical World. Listen to his description of what science now makes of the solidities, including our own bodies, which we thought surrounded us. He takes an ordinary table as an illustration. I paraphrase:

“I have in reality two tables. Table number one has been familiar to me from earliest years. It is a commonplace object. It is substantial. It is a thing.” Yes, that is the table we all of us know, on which we eat, write, and lean our elbow. Surely that must be the summing up of its existence? and there is no more to say about it? There is much more. Professor Eddington goes on to tell us how science sees that very ordinary table. And Professor Eddington is one of the greatest scientists of to-day.

“Table number two is my scientific table. It is mostly emptiness. Sparsely scattered in that emptiness are numerous electric charges. When I lay the paper on it little electric particles keep on hitting the underside so that the paper is maintained in shuttlecock fashion at nearly a level.”

You cannot call electric charges substantial, and the Man in the Street would be justified in saying that from his point of view the table has no real existence at all. It certainly has no substance. And the only reason why your elbow does not go through this unsubstantial table when you lean it upon it is because your body is no more substantial than the table. It is emptiness and a few electric charges. Now, strange as it may appear, it is upon that very fact that those men were meditating in that quiet Meditation Hall in the Japanese Temple. It is what I myself have concentrated upon daily until I extracted meanings from it which have revolutionised my life. And Asia has meditated upon it for many thousands of years perfectly unmoved by European conceptions of a substantial world. She knew that Truth is immortal and can afford to wait even though not a single human being ever realised that truth. And that therefore the West must one day realise that the world is insubstantial as a dream.

But what does it mean in connection with the vast promises made in the beginning of my article, you will ask. Most people have heard the word “relativity” nowadays and have wondered what it meant. I, like other students of Asiatic thought, knew one important meaning of it long before Einstein hurled it at a bewildered world. In relation to what I am saying it means this.

There are two sorts of truth. One sort relates to the world we think we see and to the life we think we have to live in it. This worldly truth is called relative truth. It is true as far as we know and as far as it goes and within our limits it works practically. The other is naked absolute Truth which no mortal mind can comprehend. It is the Law of the Universe and we can only feel after it in symbols and parables. If you read Professor Eddington’s book, which in parts is fascinatingly easy to follow and in other parts extremely difficult, you will see that he admits these two spheres of Truth.

Now the Indian science of concentration knowing all this long ago pointed out that Truth, the Energy, the Law of the Universe (call it which you will, or all three), is a thinking or conscious force in ways beyond our understanding, and that because we are one with it we can by following a certain discipline realise that we are It—(in a very different sense from the worldly It!—) and, being It, can use its powers exactly as I have described in the first part of this article or in any other way we please. It taught also that except for the purposes of daily life we need accept nothing our senses tell us as final. How difficult this is to believe!

Western science has not got so far as the admission that because we are part of the universal energy we can learn to dominate it as we have certainly learnt, through science, to dominate certain parts of it and to use them for our material comfort and prosperity. But Asia has proved by long experience that in greater or lesser degrees this can be done and that there is nothing quite so well worth doing. Asia contends that in this way, and this way only, the real Superman is produced and that when the world has matured sufficiently in wisdom to receive him, many crooked ways will be made straight and many rough places plain.

And here you will say “But why not now? If people saw such things happen they would be obliged to believe and everyone would want to reach the same end.” Would they? Have they ever whole-heartedly believed even when wonderful things were done before their eyes? One may see very wonderful things done now and not realise their wonder unless there is money or comfort in them. I could tell tale after tale of things which are entirely supernormal but have not even interested people. They were not the sort of things which can interest people who have only evolved to a certain point. It is an old story, corroborated by the Buddha and the Christ, that belief cannot be forced whatever wonders happen under your nose. Belief requires something in the person who is to believe as well as in the truth which is shown him. If he is not ready for it he will find a hundred reasons why it cannot be true or is not worth while if it is.

No, Western science has not yet got so far as this. It has now followed Asia in agreeing that what is called reality is not real at all, that the universe is devoid of matter and has no solidity, and that man himself has no more solidity than anything else. It is also now beginning to state what Asia has taught for thousands of years—namely that there is only one great Universal Force and that Gravitation, Electro Magnetism and the rest are only different aspects of it. I think it will be admitted before very long that Asia’s next step was insight, and that Man being himself conscious force can under certain conditions understand and dominate that Universal Conscious Force even as now he begins to dominate such parts of it as electric energy and others.

That at all events is one of the subjects on which my friends in the Japanese temple are meditating, and it may be quite as well worth while to meditate on that as for the great Edison to meditate in his laboratory on the control of the partial force with which he has worked such marvels for the world. The day is not far from its dawn in which there will be men who will demonstrate a far wider control and lesser men will follow their lead until they learn that in that new knowledge we may all be Edisons if we are prepared to pay the price. Until then those who know must keep it more or less to themselves for the victory is on a higher and more difficult plane than switching on the electric light which Edison has provided for you.

It is very difficult for anyone unskilled in science to realise these new truths with which it faces us to-day. How is it possible for the average man to realise that this solid earth has no solidity in truth? That our busy senses paint the figures which hide emptiness and invisible Forces from us? We trust our senses so pathetically that it seems all must go if they fail us.

“Credible witnesses saw it and so it must be true,” we say. And yet thousands of millions of credible witnesses see their tables and chairs daily and lean their elbows on them as Professor Eddington describes, though neither tables nor elbows are anything more than emptiness and electric charges. Strange! No, the senses are the last things on which we should rely if we are truth-seeking.

Sometimes indeed, we may catch them out in their tricks. Here is a very interesting anecdote from a lately published book by Sir Walter Lawrence, a man of great distinction and secretary to the late Lord Curzon when he was Viceroy of India. One, also, who approached the question of what is called the Occult in India in a very different spirit from that of the average man. He writes:

“There are many kinds of mysteries in India which I cannot explain but cannot ignore”—and in this philosophic attitude of mind he relates many most interesting anecdotes by no means difficult to explain if one possesses oneself of India’s own key. I have his permission to quote from his book. This one relates to the senses at the trickery in which we can so seldom surprise them—their favourite trickery of constructing time-pictures.

“One day I experienced a curious illusion. It was the break of the rains and I went out in the evening by myself to shoot. The ground was familiar to me but it was all changed. There was a large lake where I had formerly walked and on the lake was a punt with a paddle. I got in and paddled by the high bank of the lake to a little green promontory. On it by the edge of the lake sat a most lovely girl. I asked what the name of the lake was and where her village was. But she laughed and shook her head and said nothing. I paddled on, landed on the opposite bank and walked home. I was quite well and had no fever. I could remember every detail of the place, the dress and the face of the girl and a few days later I went back to the lake. But there was no lake and no sign of a punt and no one had ever seen a lake or a punt in the neighbourhood. Hallucination? I do not think so. I have seen so much in India of what we in England would call the supernatural that I have an open mind and I think that if we lived with the Hindus apart from our own people we should soon find in that land of enchantment that there is indeed more than is dreamt in our philosophy.”

I think so too. What bygone people had dreamed that dream of the lake and the girl in days long dead? And why did Sir Walter Lawrence’s senses for a brief hour or two reconstruct it for him and then brush it off the canvas of his mind and permit his own dream to return? It was no less true than the everyday scene which it obscured for awhile.

I myself have had the same experience and even now when I think of it the lost and bewildered feeling recurs. It was in my own home town and I had been visiting a friend about a mile from my own house. It was Sunday, broad daylight and many people about when I left hers. The way lay through a few small houses and then through a wooded road with houses here and there. Suddenly the way became quite strange to me. I had never seen it before. Great woods stretching along the sides with an utterly unknown road running through them. I cannot hope to describe how terrifying and lest an experience it was. I turned into another road and that also was strange. I could not ask my way, for it would have been a confession of helplessness and the people looked as strange to me as the place. I am quite unable to say how long it took me to wander among those strange woods, when, as suddenly as it had happened, I saw a house I knew and instantly all about me was familiar. But I had lost my dog who always faithfully followed me. I hunted for him and could not find him. Then at last I went home and found my dog sitting on the steps and waiting for me. I have always known since that one’s senses may not be trusted. One lives by their aid and so far trusts them—but, if one is wise, with a reservation.

Now that point too the monks in the Japanese temple meditate upon very often, for they are trained to see the reverse side of the picture and what one may expect when for a shorter or longer time one has broken through the tricks of the senses and attained a glimpse of Reality. Many have recorded their experiences and I will dwell on those later. But there is another point that I must make before I do so.

Western science now tells us that time is not a flowing thing or condition to be measured with watches. It is a thing which stands still, and it is we who run past it as we run past a landscape when we sit in the train. Well, Asia taught that truth also thousands of years ago and because Time does not move and there is really no Past, Present or Future, she called it the Eternal Now. So that is another instance of Western science catching up with Asia after a very long time. But it has very strange consequences, many of which are almost impossible to explain to those who have not closely studied the subject both in East and West. It would lead me to say that the woods in which I wandered in a well-known road were as really there still as the houses which my senses represented to me when they regained the hold they had lost for a moment, and that Sir Walter Lawrence’s lake was quite as real as the grass and path on which he walked home, but that both he and I acquired in a flash the time-sense and saw another layer as it were of time beneath the surface one. Certainly the monks of my Japanese temple would say so and they would give quite as clear reasons why it is so as any you could hear from the scientific men of the West, though their approach would have been different and based on the personal experiences of many.

If you consider you will see that the fact that time stands still and has in truth neither Past, Present, nor Future explains many very strange instances of prophecy or what we call clairvoyance—that strange faculty of which the frauds and charlatans make one of their happiest hunting-grounds. And explains also why we cannot use it to spot the Derby winner or to convert the unbeliever in the absolute veracity of the senses to the wider knowledge of science, and the still more far-reaching knowledge which has been attained by the discipline of which I speak.

There are people who deny that there is any such thing as true clairvoyance or power of prophecy, and one can hardly blame them for fraud clings to the occult as shadow dogs light. It gives one at times an even sickening feeling to use the word when one remembers with what it has been connected. I much prefer the word “supernormal” a word which sets aside all magic and hanky-panky and says: “Yes, these things happen and the only difference about them is that they are rare, especially in the West for they have been despised and left unstudied because the Western mind does not naturally lean to psychology and is now only beginning to think the matter worth looking into.” There again, Asia has not only looked into it for millenniums but has been making perpetual practical experiments. Not practical in the sense that invents machinery for instance, and learns how to turn it into money but in the sense that has always appealed to her—namely spiritual power and insight. In these she has achieved magnificent results. Therefore it is worth while to listen to what she says. She has known how—

far more deeply and understandingly than the West, and therefore before I speak of her disciplines I must speak of the subjects and the results of her investigations.

Let me take the question of dreams. In the past they attracted only superstitious interest in the West, but of late Western psychologists have discovered in them a new and important field. Maeterlinck, the well-known writer, has issued a very interesting book in which he discusses the subject to such advantage from his sympathy with Oriental thought that I quote him with comments inspired by my Asiatic experience and studies.

First he points out that, contrary to what one would expect, dreams reveal to us quite a different world and different order of things from that of which we have any knowledge. In the dream-world he says “We find ourselves at the same moment in places far apart from each other and it does not surprise us. Weight no longer exists. The Past and Future are confounded in the same Present; logic is completely overturned. We are forced to admit that the mysterious kingdom of dream which fills almost half our lives has not yet surrendered to us any of its essential secrets.”

True, but only true of the West. Asiatic thought at its highest has held the Key of the Mysterious Land of Sleep for the simple reason that it has known, what Western science is only beginning to grasp, that the world seen by our eyes and heard by our ears is but a painted veil hiding the real world where there is the only reality. In that world, as in the land of Sleep, weight does not exist, Past and Future are one in an eternal Present and our worldly logic is utterly confounded. And of this Reality behind the painted veil Sleep gives us nightly glimpses bewildered and distorted on the surface by our memories of earth but to be very much clarified if we follow the right means.

For, in discoursing on the power of dreams to foretell the future, he describes how the Marquis d’Hervey was able after six months of a special training to remember his dreams at the moment of waking, and inspired by this success and believing that the thoughts can be controlled in sleep also set himself to controlling his dreams and succeeded to a certain extent. I fully believe that this could be done with what I call “surface dreams,” but that below that surface lies a region where the control of everyday reason entirely ceases.

Maeterlinck believes as I myself do that no sleep is dreamless, but that we have no knowledge of the dreams of deep sleep. To this I add that such knowledge can be attained by the discipline I have spoken of which is the only key to the whole of that mysterious world which every one of us enters nightly. Says Maeterlinck:

“The experiment of dream cultivation is an interesting one. If it is practised for some time we shall discover for ourselves a region entirely unknown, and such a discovery is always profitable. It teaches us also that if we take the trouble to cultivate certain latent faculties we are all prophets more or less. We do not as yet know how far experiment will take us in this direction. Above all, it teaches us to investigate the most stupendous of all the problems which the unknown universe offers us; the pre-existence of the future. It does not matter how little or insignificant the fact is which reveals this pre-existence, the riddle is no less tremendous for it means that somewhere hidden in eternity things are already unalterably present which have not happened to us as yet. A bottle which I see falling in my dream to-day, whereas it does not actually fall until three days later, reveals a mystery just as extraordinary as the fall of an empire which does not collapse until three centuries have passed.”

His reference here is to a singular dream of his own. He dreamed that a bottle filled with peroxide of hydrogen stood on a small three-legged table in his dressing-room. One of the table legs rested on a rug and the other two on bare tiles. On passing the little table he struck it with his knee; the bottle rolled off the table and broke on the tiles and the carpet began to smoke as if it had caught fire. Waking, he noted the dream (as must be done if one is experimenting) and forgot it. Three days later he bought a bottle of sulphuric acid and put it on the table. A few hours later the dream was fulfilled. He shook the table accidentally, the bottle was broken and the rug began to smoke freely. The odd thing is that peroxide of hydrogen could not have caused the rug to smoke whereas the sulphuric acid did, and this without any premeditation of his. In other words, somewhere in eternity to be reached by Maeterlinck some days later an event was waiting prepared of which he caught a glimpse in the land of dreams. How? Here is another strange instance. He dreamed that at the door of a church in Bruges he met a young man who told him he was the son of an old friend whom Maeterlinck had not seen for twenty years. A motor car rushed out of the church (with all the inconsequence of a dream-car) and the young man got in. Maeterlinck saw the car make a sharp turn and fall over. Most of the passengers were hurt—amongst them the son of his friend.

A month later he met his friend in the waking world. He mentioned that his son (whom Maeterlinck had known only as a little child) had met with a bad motor accident. He was driving his own car. It had collapsed while turning a corner and he was badly hurt. Maeterlinck had forgotten the dream and it was only on reaching home that he looked up his notebook and found the entry. He gives other very interesting cases, and I am certain that if we had the habit of noting down our dreams we should find ourselves prophets and seers very much more often than we have ever thought possible. But it must be done at once for dreams vanish on waking more swiftly than a morning frost and once gone they cannot be retrieved. Of course dreams with very much more serious indications and fulfilments can be given and are perfectly authentic. F. Myers has made a magnificent collection of them. But the principle is the same in great and small and in many ways the trifling dreams are more interesting because they show that these revelations appear without conscious or unconscious brooding in ourselves on anything that has happened or is likely to happen.

But why is it worth while to investigate this subject and why may it open to us regions of the deepest mystery and wisdom? Why may a bottle falling off a table in a dream be much more important to our lives than the teaching of the churches?

Because (according to Oriental psychology) there are three different sorts of consciousness. The first is our ordinary waking consciousness. Of course we all think we know all about that though in reality we know very little as yet. The next is dreaming. And the third is deep sleep. And of these the last is much the most important because there, unblinded by our daily activities or the dream memories of those activities, man in his depths is in communion with the deepest sources of power and inspiration. Happy are those who have learnt to bring back those deeply hidden jewels when they return to the surface! And to do this is a part of the discipline to which I have so often referred. In Oriental psychological science these three states are called “the Gross,” “the Subtle,” and “the Pure.” It is a strange realisation that even the most degraded natures are nightly removed from contamination and bathed in the pure springs of the primal forces and return to the dark prison of self-consciousness with each returning dawn. It creates the certainty that the end of everything is and must be perfection, and that it is only the fatal belief in human personality for anything other than worldly purposes which stands in the way.

So therefore the study of the psychology of dreams has been for many one of the ways which lead to joy and power—in other words to the sweeping of the narrow personality of self into the ocean of being even as it is described by Thomas Trahearne the long-ago mystic who had attained that bliss and could not rest until he communicated it to others.

“You never enjoy the world aright until the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars, and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world and the more so because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you, till your spirit filleth the whole world and the stars are your jewels, till you are as familiar with the ways of God in all ages as with your walk and table, till you are intimately acquainted with that shady nothing out of which the world was made, till you love men so as to desire their happiness with a thirst equal to the zeal for your own, you never enjoy the world. Till you more feel it than your private estate and are more present in the hemisphere considering its glories and beauties than in your own house.”

That is the absolute truth. Joy and power are the inevitable consequences of pursuing that wisdom of realisation. But why does Asiatic thought attach so much importance to a state of which though we experience it every night most of us have no waking memory? Because our waking thoughts are under the jealously prized control of reason and our carefully measured individuality, and are therefore bounded by the limits of earth and held apart from the rest of the universe and its forces; but in the depths of sleep, set free from these guards, we commune with what we are in reality.

Yes, in our waking hours we are the prisoners of personality; our gaoler is the Ego. But in the land of Sleep personality is forgotten; we melt into others or they into us. Distance and time vanish. We escape from those limits of the solidity of the world in which we believe so fervently in waking hours. We escape from the Gross and transact our affairs in the Subtle. In dreams, as Maeterlinck points out, we realise practically the scientific truth that Time is not in reality a flowing stream. It is motionless and those who in dreams have experienced the upside-downness of time and the presence of past, present and future in one event will have a glimpse of the scientific truth.

Time stands still and we move past it like people in a moving train who seem to see the landscape moving and themselves standing still. The true clairvoyant has the power to get outside this illusion of Moving time and to see what the ordinary person calls “future events” as present events, much as one sees pictures of past, present, and future events hanging on the one wall. Let us say as one might see pictures of signing the Declaration of Independence, of the latest sensation in Wall Street and of the New Jerusalem descending from heaven, all visible in the one glance. In ordinary life we make an imaginary journey from the present to the future forgetting that even in our own misguided reckoning the present becomes both the past and the future in every tick of the clock.

In the Scriptures of all the faiths we have records of the great revelations which some have been permitted to bring back and communicate to others. What may they not have kept to themselves of untold beauty and mystery?

I have noticed myself that many things in dreams do not seem to be realised in the same way as in waking. They do not happen but are more like a fragrance that evaporates as we perceive it. And yet it is more than that—it is sight and even touch as well. I am convinced that as in art all is one inspiration though separated in the world into painting, poetry, music and so forth, that the means of perception which we call sight, smell, hearing, etc., really proceed from some one spiritual means of perception which we guess in dreams and know in the deeper state that lies below dreaming. May not this power be hinted at by the amazing fact which yet is a fact that in certain conditions people have been known to see with parts of the body apparently unrelated to the eyes?

It is well authenticated too that when the guard of waking reason is off duty and the sentinels of the senses sleep, the very feelings which we most cling to very often disappear and are replaced by very different ones. You may love those you do not love in waking, and distrust those to whom your fullest trust is given in what we call real life. Here certainly the dream world is often the wiser. Cases exist where a man who has betrayed all confidence—(in the waking memory of whom reason and even all the senses cry Beware)—is invariably a presence beloved bringing back in reality days now seemingly lost for ever before bitter knowledge replaced trust. That, in itself, may make a dream a foretaste of a kind of spiritual comprehension where all opposites are reconciled and nothing stands outside the bounds of sympathy. “To understand all is to pardon all,” say the French.

Another strange power which some have possessed is that of making sleeping life as continuous as the life lived in the daily world. This is a fact which occurs in the literature of every country and cases of it are authenticated. The strange thing—and yet why should it be strange?—is that the two lives are kept as it were in water-tight compartments and the dreamer never confuses the sleeping life with the waking. There is a tendency, I think, to prefer the dream-life and to believe that the ideal more easily becomes actual there. In his poem “East of the Sun, West of the Moon,” William Morris gives a beautiful version of this world-known story.

I myself had for a considerable time what I may call a serial dream. When I fell asleep the dream continued as if there had been no interruption. A man naturally gifted in thought-reading was able once to describe the dream to me. Not in every detail, but very graphically as to its setting. After that I dreamed it no more. The intrusion seemed to disperse it.

Thus dreams give us glimpses of a world we can never know in waking—until indeed the great discipline of Asia faithfully followed enables us to say—

and in this day-world as in our night-world live in the eternal Everywhere which we call Space and the Eternal Present which we call Time.

In the words of a great thinker—“Truth lies beyond the threshold of sleep,”—and of another—“The deepest sleeping state is ecstasy. From ecstasy it passes downward, forgetting itself into deep sleep, from deep sleep downward into the world of dreams, from dreams into the thoroughly waking state and the outer world of sense.”

So, therefore, even in the world of sleep rules the great discipline on which the monks were meditating in my Japanese temple—a discipline derived from the highest Indian thought and more perfectly practised there than elsewhere. Let me quote Professor James in that great book Varieties of Religious Experience.

“In India training in mystical insight has been known from time immemorial under the name of Yoga. Yoga means the experimental union of the individual with the divine. It is based on persevering exercise, and the diet, posture, breathing, intellectual concentration, vary slightly in the different systems which teach it. The yogin, or disciple, who has by these means overcome the obscurations of his lower nature sufficiently, enters into the condition termed samadhi and he comes face to face with facts which no instinct or reason can ever know. Higher stages still of contemplation are mentioned.”

Yes—but I would add that preparatory states can also be experienced where immense increase of physical and intellectual power together with increasing spiritual insight can be known, which are profoundly useful in the ordinary daily life lived by most human beings. Therefore none need fear to approach the outposts of Absolute Truth. The conception of man set apart from the world and revealing to it the greatest wisdom is true, but true also is the conception of the ordinary man helped by patient discipline to discover gifts and powers and graces which he never dreamed he possessed and using them for the good and delight of himself and of everyone in his little circle. Many such cases are known to me. Every man by training can find within himself that hidden well-spring of joy of which the great Emperor Marcus Aurelius says that a man has but to dig and find it within him.

It is quite certain that through this avenue of realisation of the truth about ourselves we shall build up the new Humanity and by this avenue only. We shall never do it by law-making. That is the mistake the Socialists perpetuate and it invalidates every one of their conclusions. They expect a paradise on earth when every man capable of earning money is compelled by law to surrender a given part of it to the State for the need or comfort of the man who from various reasons is incompetent to earn it for himself.

But who is to guarantee either the wisdom or honesty of the State, a corporate group composed of men no better than ourselves and in many cases worse? Who is to guarantee the moral attitude of the man who receives this unearned gift? Have we not learnt by bitter experience that every fresh law produces a fresh crop of crime? Not only the man who is worthy to give must be developed but also the man who is worthy to receive, before any giving and receiving can be safely enforced by law, and when it can be safely enforced—such laws will be unnecessary.

“Democratic organisation and the rule of the Majority guarantee nothing. On the contrary even now, where they are realised, they create and promise in future to create on a larger scale, violence towards the minority and the curtailment of freedom.”

What is the use of transferring money from one man whose idea of happiness consists in limitless opportunities of spending it on sensual enjoyments to another man whose enjoyments will be exactly the same when it becomes his? No—the kingdom of heaven is within us and a change of heart is better than all the laws which the most enlightened majorities can impose upon us. But this change of heart can only be attained by a discipline which gives perfect self-control alike of the body and the intellect and sets the deepest consciousness in man free to realise its union with the source of all power. And this it is to which Asia has pointed the way for thousands of years.

These matters should be made as clear as they can be made to those who do not follow any discipline and take the world as it appears for the last word in truth and reality.

It was a hot, hot night. There had been far-off rolling thunder in the evening, dull tension denied the relief of rain. Before she slept she noticed how low the massive clouds hung—not a star to pierce the gloom. The bungalow was dead still. The old Chinese servant Li slept in the basement, her little Scotch terrier in the sleeping-porch opening from her bedroom, and every window was wide to catch a faint breath of the heavy perfumes from the garden.

All the day the garden was friendly, familiar in sunshine. Then came dusk with looming clouds and it withdrew into itself and darkened, the scarlet lamps of the poppies with the devil’s thumb-mark on each petal the first to die out. It now became alien, forgetting all human relationships, casting them off secretly and slipping back to the spirit of the primeval jungle where wild things hid in shadow. Now in the waxen sweetness of the perfumes corruption emerged and breathed death. Strange creatures of the dark fluttered grey-winged through the beam of light from her window and were lost in the dim sighing of the poplars. When the dog went out at eleven it seemed to frighten him. She saw his little black figure on the grass below the window staring out as if afraid to venture into the gulfs of blackness. Presently he came in soberly and led the way to the bedroom. Old Li had gone to bed long since and there was a thunderous quiet. Before sleeping she read a little by the shaded lamp at her bed-head, moving her head restlessly to find a cooler place on the pillow. And outside the garden lay menacing and silent, the air thick with the perfumes of white flowers offered at the shrines of the dead.

At last she fell asleep. Dark when she woke—velvet dusk of dark stifling the eyes. Her luminous clock said two. She touched the switch and flooded the room with the soft electric beam. Don never stirred but she heard a faint whisper.

She looked for the glass of water beside her. Forgotten. Then she must go to the bathroom and drink for her throat was parched. She crept out of the hot tumbled bed and turned the handle softly. Not that anyone could hear, but the night was holding its breath, sinister and afraid. She put out the light and crept back to her door. It was shut. She had left it ajar. No wind, no sound of closing, but it was shut. No beam of light through the keyhole. Yet she had left the light burning.

She felt a swelling of fear in her throat and told herself it was absurd and knew it was terrible. But Don would have barked. She must get back to him. She must——

With bravado she opened the door and as she did it darkness swept out to meet her and two hands fell on her shoulders. They forced her to her knees—not with strength for they were hot and weak but with the utter collapse of terror. Afterwards it was marvellous to her that she had lived through it. She felt a man’s knee against her shoulder; she felt the unseen face and the disablement of fear ran through her soul and body and left her helpless flesh. Weak as water she crouched in a heap, flashes of light bursting in her eyes, wild heartthrobs shaking her body. Not a sound from Don. They must have killed him.

“Where do you keep your jewels? Your money?”—A whisper hissed against her ear. How could she answer? Her voice shrivelled in her throat.

“I won’t hurt you. I won’t touch you. I must have money. No—now!” the thick whisper went on. She could only make an inarticulate sound horrible in her own ears, like the choking of an animal. She was slipping out of his hands to the floor and then—miraculously she spoke; a sickening whisper.

“Don’t touch me and I’ll try to tell you. The light.”

If she could see him he would be human. It could not be so frightful as this hidden thing.

“No!” said the hoarse whisper. “You’re not to see me. When I strike a match you point. That’s all. Then go out and shut the door.”

It flashed through her that she could fly to Li the moment the door was shut. She waited, tense now. Then came the sharp scritch of the match and a weak flame. She saw—not the man, she had not known where to turn—but Don, looking up at him, his little ragged face alight with joy, his tail wagging. Quickly the match went out.

“Don!” a voice said above her, slow, incredulous, and then a rush of pattering feet, a shriek of delight, leaping paws.

It was then she fainted.

Eternity kept its timeless time and for how long she never knew, but gradually the world flowed back upon her.

Soft light flooded the room. She lay on her bed with wet hair plastered on her brow, paralysing weariness chaining every limb. A man knelt beside it, his head buried in his arms. Don stood with his paws against him, pushing his nose into one hand, trying frantically to be noticed and loved. Now she knew the thick fair hair and looked at him as if across the river of death. The river of life is wider sometimes. So it had been with them.

So they stayed for a minute; she lying like the marble woman on a century-old tomb, he like the mourner beside it. Only the dog moved. Two slow tears of self-pity, huge crystal drops, welled beneath her black lashes and hung there, a congealed grief.

Without raising his head he put an arm about the dog and there instead of rushing to his mistress he clung.

At last she raised herself heavily on one elbow and looked at him, torturing her brows as if the very sight were loathsome. Her voice was hard as steel.

“I had begun to hope you were dead.”

Not a word. Not a sound. She thrust out her hand and dragged the dog away but he crept back. “What brought you here?”

From under the shadow of his arms he answered:

“I was coming to you.”

“To me? Why?” She shot out the question fiercely.

No answer. How could he know why? A dumb homing instinct. How could he tell such a folly to those hard eyes? He put out one arm and clasped it about the dog.

“It’s devilish—it’s like you to break up my life again,” she said savagely. “After two years, when you took yourself off with another woman, you had ruined me enough one would think! God knows I had had enough of you! I was beginning to have peace. Oh, I was beginning——”

Suddenly her thoughts switched off to another track.

“What have you fallen to? A common thief? A murderer? Did you come to rob me? What are you?”

“I wanted to get to you. I had no money. I thought you were at Allerford still. I went there first.”

“To me? And for God’s sake, why? I was the last person—the very last——”

He lifted his head and looked at her mutely.

The skin was strained over the bones, the veins roped on the forehead, terrible brilliance in the sunken eyes. He had been a handsome young man once—in another life, it seemed. But now—he dropped his head again. She sat up and caught his shoulder and shook it violently.

“I will hear. I won’t be tortured like this. What had I done to deserve it? What happened? You never wrote a word. Tell me and go, and I pray I may never see you again. Get up, I tell you, and tell me and go! Is it money you want?”

As if her fierce words had given him some sort of spur he pulled himself up to his feet, holding on to the foot-rail of the bed. She saw then that his clothes were threadbare, on one elbow a patch, on the other a ragged rent. He had no collar and his fair hair hung uncut about his forehead. Could she ever—ever have loved that miserable object? At all events she loathed him now—curled back from the very sight of him. The dog followed him to the foot of the bed and sat looking—absorbed in worship.

After a minute she got up and slipped on her dressing-gown. He must be got rid of as soon as possible. And so, fixing him with her eyes, sat down with due distance between them to hear, sick with repulsion but now holding the mastery firmly. As for him he choked on his story. It came out in broken words with gasps of agony and dreadful silences. Gasps of more than agony also, breath that rattled in the lungs and fought with a hard cough.

“Did she leave you?” she prompted fiercely.

“I left her. If I were not a devil myself I’d say she was worse.”

“How long were you together?”

“Six months. Six months of hell. The minute I’d done it I knew. The door was shut. I’d lost you for ever.”

She made a sound like laughter but her lips were too stiff to move. Her face felt stiff like a mask and she could not mould it to her will.

“Me? Lost me?”

“You. If you could have said one word that night it would have saved me. But how could you? You were worlds away. Even to-night you’re nearer for you hate me. Then you were—like death.”

She put that aside. Easy to talk now!

“And when she left you?”

“I’d no money. I hired myself out for rough jobs. No one wanted an educated fellow like me. I could only sell my strength and I did.”

Such strength! He was torn with coughing, but brushed it aside as if it were nothing, going on directly he could get breath. She was cold, impassive as a judge, resolute to have the last word out of him, using her composure as a weapon; he, all impulse and broken passion, the tattered prey of emotion. So it had always been with them.

“I caught some kind of chill in the winter and it gave me this beastly cough. Couldn’t shake it off.”

“Were there no other women?” She interrupted the coughing mercilessly.

“Not one. I had no money,” he said with unconscious irony, and then, seeing the look she threw at him, added: “I don’t profess to be better than I am,” and choked off in a rending cough.

Had she no pity? Who can tell what a woman may feel down in her deepest deeps? She may not have known herself. But mountains were heaped over it. Things that cannot be told in words, cruelties of thought, burning lavas of shame and despised love. No one could have read these things in her face as she dragged his soul through the hell of confession. It was rigid with hate.

“Well, and then?”

“They took me as a pool marker at a low joint in San Francisco and then I got to be such a death’s head and my cough worried them so that they wouldn’t stand for it and the rooming people put me out. And then I thought——”

He looked at her dumbly.

“What?” she repeated, ruthlessly.

There was a far-off rattle of thunder in the distance like the sound of dim battle in the skies. A pale flash of summer lightning swept the window. The dog looked up at him steadfastly as if listening.

“I had enough to take me to Allerford and they said you’d left and were here. And when I got here—I tramped it—I asked at the post office and they said no. It’s only a village and I thought they’d know.”

“Ah, I’ve changed my name,” she said with sombre triumph. “You didn’t suppose I’d call myself by yours, did you? I’m not such a fool as to be tracked down like that.”

He made a kind of blind gesture with his hand and dropped it on the dog’s neck. Then went on:

“So then it came to me to get money anyhow, for I could tramp no more, and get back to Allerford and find out for sure where you were. This house was nearest and so I hid in the garden. I couldn’t get further.”

The cough shook him from head to foot. She looked at him and felt him to be a hideous intruder. She would have dragged the dog away if possible. She would hate to touch him afterwards.

“What ever happened between us that made you face me?” she asked. “I loved and trusted you once and you left me. And now—when I’d scraped together the beginning of peace, you come back—vilely, like this. You surely never thought——”

“No, never,” he agreed hurriedly. “I don’t know why—Anyhow, I’ll go now.”

“Stop,” she said with scorn. “You know as well as I do that I can’t let you go without money. You shan’t have me to blame if you fall into crime again. But be honest. That was why you came. You knew this was my house. You wanted to frighten me into giving you money. Well—you shall have it.”

He stared at her while she went to the little bureau and took out her check book. She sat and wrote with an unwavering hand, then threw it to him.

“Two hundred and fifty dollars, and here’s a ten dollar bill, for I don’t want that cashed anywhere here. If you like to give me an address I’ll send two hundred and fifty quarterly, but no more. I tell you that plainly. And now go. I’ve done with you.”

She stood expectant, her white face fixed sternly on him. For a moment she thought he would leave the money, for he stood silent—silent. Then he took it up and said slowly:

“Thank you. Good-bye.—Good-bye,—Don.”

At the movement Don sprang from the bed to his feet, ears sharp-pointed, one paw lifted—waiting.

“Don, come here!” she called furiously. Not a bit of it. Step for step he followed at the man’s heels, never a look back. She might not have existed for any heed he took of her. The door closed. They were gone, gone together. Thunder and rain followed,—a great storm.

In the morning old Li, tranquil and kind, knew nothing of the storm within or without. She ordered bars for the glass door leading to the sleeping-porch. Nothing like that should happen again. She had had a shock which would last her life.

Four days after a few words reached her, scrawled on a bit of paper.

“You did more than I deserved and I thank you. You shall have Don back before long. He’s safer with you. This postmark is not where I am. Any decent fellow would have stayed away and I’m sorry I came. You were right—right all through. I don’t ask you to forgive me. How could you?”

The house was lonely,—lonely without Don, and the whole thing had shaken her more than she chose to allow to herself. The pattering of the faithful little feet, the walks with the happy little body flickering in and out of the long meadow grasses, the small warmth curling up to her on the sofa—the quiet breathing at night—it was dull to walk without him—not much good going into the woods without his pleasure to take her thoughts off herself. Don’t give your heart to a dog to tear—never were truer words! Ungrateful! He owed her two years more of love than he owed him—and yet, without a regret, he went. Yet people talked of the fidelity of dogs! She said that almost aloud, but she never felt it. Something under all her assertions knew—But wait!

One morning she went into the garden—delicious with the first cool breath of dawn. The world was diamonded with dew, garlanded with glittering webs swaying from stalk to stalk. A heavenly dawn, with masses of white cloud heaped in harebell blue skies.

What was that by the gate under the silver maple? A little black figure tethered, with sharply uplifted ears and eyes that watched her with passionate eagerness—leaping, straining to get to her. She ran to him, trembling in every limb and threw herself on her knees beside him. So thin, she could feel the panting of the weak bird-like heart against the ribs—the body fallen away to nothing, the hair matted and untended. Only the eyes unchanged—brown and clear, wells of love and devotion.

“And he could treat you like this—the devil!” she sobbed. “Oh, how like him—how like him! Oh, Don, you should have stayed with me. I loved you!”

It seemed an excuse for all her bitterness that this should be. She had wanted excuse, sought for it as an escape from some terrible clear-eyed truth that might pierce her with eye-beams like swords. The dog’s misery was a justification and she was in a fury of passionate anger and fanned the flame. Then, as he crept into her lap, released from the rope, she saw about his neck a paper, scrawled in an unknown hand.

Twice and again she read and could not understand. The grave—But then—To-morrow he would have been twenty-eight. A boy still—and dead. It seemed the very wheels of life halted. Silence.

The ice in her heart broke before the storm of horror that swept it away.

“Oh, my God—my God!” she sobbed, clasping Don to her. “You did what you could. You gave yourself. I gave money like an insult. Merciful God, forgive my devil’s work.”

All pretences were dead. Now she knew. Indeed she had always known really that she would give in at the right moment—when the screw of agony had pinned him down to the last humiliation and the pain he deserved. Yes, she would forgive then with the pride she had a right to. But no—He had come back for forgiveness, a boy lost in the blind alleys of life with a sunset hope at the end of the long road, and she had thrown the darkness of her soul between.

“You gave yourself,” she wept. “I gave nothing. Nothing.”

Yes, the dog had never doubted. His flame had burned pure and strong to light the Dark Way;—a flame that death itself could not darken. And on her forehead was the mark of Cain. The miracle of love! Here in this tiny way-worn body it shone clear as in an archangel. She carried him in, washed him, tried to feed him, but he would not eat. Other thoughts held him.

“He velly tired. He walkum long way,” said kind old Li, looking down at the little stretched-out legs and the deep cut through the black cushion of one paw. She never left him that day or next, but who can outwit love pursuing its own clear ends? Some deep incommunicable pain looked at her from his eyes—something she could not share. Glad to see her—yes—but in a darkened world. She was called to answer some folly on the telephone and when she came back he was gone; the grass where he had lain still warm. She flew frantically down the road, almost out of her mind with fear and grief, questioning, searching desperately. Rewards—advertisements. She never saw him again. Her check came back untouched.

It is hard to have met the one testing moment of life and to see its white wings vanish in the blue uncaptured. Those two had found the refuge of the Eternal Pity in spite of her hindering. She remained outside.

But none can remain outside for ever.

One evening much later, she lay in the verandah looking out into the garden—staring down the grass alley where apple-trees beautiful to the last vied with the blood-red maples. In her heart it was winter, dead apathy of white levels under a freezing sky and no trumpet of a prophecy to speak of spring. She was enduring the hell of world-sickness, disillusionment everywhere, ice in the inmost springs of the heart that water it for growth and blossom. Bitterest self-loathing possessed her. It can never be hell when the soul escapes so far from its prison of self that it can look back upon it with loathing. But that she did not know.

Twilight was bleaching colour into colourless beauty of night and she began to gather her books and papers for the long listless evening indoors. Again she looked down the alley where she had last seen Don. A dog was standing at the end of it. He moved, coming quickly towards her, then halted and sat motionless beneath the verandah looking up. For a moment her heart stopped beating—literally stopped—then raced ahead. He had come back.

In that moment it was the very sign and seal of hope. She leaned over, calling, stretching her hands—but he did not move. Only that motionless gaze. Then he was frightened—hungry! She flew down the steps, breathless. Never did her eyes leave him—the little beloved figure. She ran, hands out, the love in her filling the air between them, and threw herself beside him. He was gone. Nothing. Hallucination. And she had thought it was the Divine Pity.

That was the very irony of fate—cruel—cruel! Instantly she hardened to meet it. Well—so be it! One can live one’s life alone in hatred and scorn of injustice; and love is a luxury for the happy. She turned to go back to the house, but trembling, for this had renewed the shock and horror of the past. Suddenly she saw him again, a few feet from her and looking, looking at her.

Now comes a thing I cannot explain. She knew it was Don but knew also that upon him had passed the change we call death. She must not try to touch him. They were nearer and dearer to each other than ever, but he was the wiser now and obeying a law known to him but not to her. From her feet he looked up with shining eyes but came no closer. And in looking she knew that death is far other than we have supposed, but knew no fear. She followed obediently where he led the way, praying only for strength and wisdom to understand.

Down the grass alley. It was not dark—no! but shadows were flowing together like deep water under the trees. Sometimes the little shape was submerged in them, but when that happened he turned and she saw his eyes shining in the gloom as they used to shine in firelight long, long ago. He led her to the group of rose-trees—most lovely of all in summer—and now but ragged gold left to mark the passing of beauty. There he stopped.

She knew who sat there, arm propped on knee, chin on hand, leaning forward and looking past her at some grief unspeakable.—Wasted, worn,—the blood ran from her heart at the sight,—seeing nothing but sorrow and loss, he sat, the outcast of the universe, coughing with the dreadful sound which had tolled in her ears ever since that night. Utterly alone, and she loved him now too late and would have given her soul to reach him and tell him so and could not. Well—that was what she had chosen! How could she dare to complain?

But not alone. The dog sprang to him, leaped between his knees, put his paws against his breast and loved him. He put out his arms and gripped the little struggling body to him and stooped his own over it. He never looked at her. She did not know how long she stood there beating against some invisible barrier between them, hard and cold as ice. She beat at it frantically, but it resisted. Every moment was precious—she fought with the distance and the cold. A moonbeam slanted through the boughs and in it they—diffused.—Yes, that is the word—diffused into the moonlight and shadows and were gone. She threw herself face down on the grass where she had seen them, overwhelmed with the trembling that comes upon the deathly flesh brought face to face with the spiritual.

When she could she crawled back to the house, lamed in spirit. A second time she had failed. Surely she had sinned the unforgivable sin and for her there was no pity. The air about her had been alive with Presences charged with beauty and power and she had no part in them. They rejected her, perpetuating her own rejection.

She did a thing she had not done for years. Fell on her knees and cried out to Something—but she did not know what—for sight and hearing, that she might walk no longer a mute, deaf and blind, in a universe that moved in splendour beside her. For light in the dark soul.

She went into the garden next night when the moon blossomed, a flower in starry skies. Nothing, though it seemed Presences passed on their own way, talking softly among themselves. “Will she know?” and again—“She cannot. It is not time.” She could not. She could only grope at a shut door.

Words are helpless to express the dreadful silence of the next year. She had twice had her chance and had failed, as a man of base instinct may disgrace himself in the presence of kings and carry in his soul “the torment of the difference” until death.

She wrestled with the problem, recalling all she had ever read of the life after death, that country whose geography is written only by those who have never visited it; and could not wring out the heart of the mystery. Only of one thing was she sure. Hell? Never. There is no hate in all the universe and Don loved him. She loved him. Too late,—yet a knowledge like stealing sunshine.

Then she recoiled from it all—her mind utterly exhausted; her body also. Lassitude and languor overwhelmed her, and the empty garden haunted her night and day. She went off to Switzerland. Perhaps she could forget what she could not mend. There, on those high mountain lawns, neither he nor Don had ever trodden and at least there could be no torment of memory. Perhaps returning health might bring her the deafness and blindness that shrouds poor human nature from too much sight—and not enough—a glimpse—but no understanding of the mighty processes at work. She prayed for forgetfulness now as eagerly as she had once prayed for light.

One thing she certainly gained—health of body. It flowed back in a returning tide of energy, colour, and the vital flush. She felt she had climbed out of danger and began to think the whole a sick quivering of wearied nerves. She walked, she made expeditions with the few people who penetrated to the quiet little village above Beatenberg where she had settled. Lovely indeed, with blue glimpses of the Lake of Thun far, far beneath. It was a perfect life. Heavenly air and sunshine, a little châlet kept by two kind old maiden sisters, where fatigue and excitement were equally impossible. She slept on the verandah over the drop to the Valley of Flowers, as they called it, and it was like floating in starry air. And when dawn came she looked down into the valley laughing with all the mountain heart of it breaking out in a foam of flowers at her feet—blossoms so thickly set that a wandering angel could find no foot-room between them. She would go home cured in the autumn and take life up again on a more reasonable basis. She could assure herself of that now.

There came a sunset. She sat in the verandah to watch a sea of gold mingled with fire storming the zenith and pouring torrents of splendour upon the mountains and lake. Huge Jungfrau flushed fiery rose and shouted to her lesser sisters. Each in turn joined the radiant chorus—unendurable in glory, transfigured into pure spiritual essence. She covered her eyes a moment, then looked down into the Valley of Flowers to rest them, dazzled with unearthly beauty. But the flowers blazed also—each a fountain of fire and the grass was liquid emerald. Then, clear and sharply defined among them, she saw Don, looking up with summoning eyes of love. “Come. Come.” She saw and understood. No mistaking;—his black coat absorbed the light so that of all things there he was the most real.

In an instant she was rushing with flying feet down the steps, down the rocky way to the Valley of Flowers. He waited, saw and sprang to her. Sprang into her arms—no, not physically—here we play with the stubbornness of words—but real and living; and into her very being to be lost no more. Reality fusing with reality. And then he was running before her with the little throwing jumps (her heart knew how) through tall grass and flowers to the seat in the rocks whence she looked down so often on dreaming Thun. But now another sat there, chin propped on hand, looking down into the underworld, smiling and at rest.

I write here with care for this is true and truth is always simple and perhaps therefore more difficult to convey than the things we may play with and ornament with fancy. She stopped, thinking that since she had deserved no pity the icy barrier must rise again and shut them apart though with all her soul she loved him and longed to reach him. But there was none. She went on and threw herself on her knees before him and looked up into the face from which all trouble had been smoothed away by the effacing hand of wisdom, knowing that the bond forged between them was eternal and the gold of it was love. The accidents of life had dispersed at last like mists at dawn and they met in the mighty rhythm of the universe. He looked down at her. That was heaven. What other is needed,—than wisdom and love?

If I say that kneeling she clasped the two to her breast I say what is true and false. For it happened—it did happen—but not as we conceive such happenings,—rather as we could and must conceive them if we are ever to know the truth. And if anyone says—“Imagination!” I reply that imagination is the gate of truth truer than any earthly belief and with power to reshape a darkened human creature into a heavenly radiance enlightening to himself and others;—the winged soul escaping from its chrysalis of ignorance and luminous as its source. Because thought is the true Creator.

She, at all events, knew that the embrace was real and her spirit floated in a sea of joy drowning all thought of division.

Together, with her head leaned against the rock and Don beside her, they watched through the night. First, the glory of sunset touched its mighty climax and faded into dusk and quiet as into the womb of peace whence it sprang. Slowly the moon and stars disclosed their hidden writing of beauty. No words were spoken or needed in that perfect communion.

Home, home from the far horizons came all her doubts and fears and folded their wings for ever in the dove-cote of peace.

Wearied with joy she slept a little before dawn, waking as the lake emerged grey and pure from its mystic communion with silence. But she did not wake alone. They were in her heart of hearts for ever. No need to say “Be with me.” They never left her. And at any moment, a thought, a flash, could summon them into perfect realisation, transcending all the senses can tell.

I must not tell here how this rare knowledge manifested itself in the life that all the world may know, for it is not yet ended and will never end. Fling a stone into water the ripple spreads and who can say what strange shores it touches and what reeds will sway in unison? That is another and wonderful story. But there is one thing which must be made clear.

She never interpreted the vision of her two as one of “spirit return”—so called. Where should they return from and to where, when time and distance are nothing and “here” is there and everywhere? Nor would the sight of her eyes and hearing of her ears have satisfied her as proof. There are no such liars as the daily-deceiving senses. Those who know ask no witnesses and least of all the most fallible of all evidence. Her vision transcended all formulas. It was Truth, and definition died before it, and Love needs no instructor.

For Love is neither above nor below reason and the knowledge of good and evil. It lies beyond and like God holds good and evil in its hands and sees both alike—and nothing. And, thus is the fulfilling of all Law.

I tell this story from the haunted mountains of Japan because I believe science has so far cleared the path of approach to things unseen that they will not now be shouted down as impossible by the cheap unbelief of ignorance. Slowly almost fearfully the gates of the hidden world which crowds and whispers about us are unclosing and all will be forced to realise that there are things ordinary eyes cannot see nor ordinary ears hear, yet far more real and enduring than those we call real—because we cannot see through them to what lies behind.

In writing of this happening in the mountains of Japan I write of things and places well known to me. It is the experience of an American whose love of Japan drew him within her occult orbit—so little guessed by those who pass through her on pleasure or business. For Japan like other Asiatic countries, and especially India and China, is a country where you may live all your life and never dream awake or asleep of the ceaseless strange life going on all about you. You may be deceived to the last and take surface for reality. But I predict that this attitude will grow less and less possible and that the adventure of understanding will become more and more eagerly sought as the bridge of thought is built strong and sure between Yokohama and the Golden Gate. Through America must come the understanding of Asia to the Western World. The bridge is the Pacific Ocean and any other is not worth consideration and impossible.

I had the story direct and with Riador’s own letters from an intimate friend of his, a man named Kingscote, who was with him as will be seen. At Kingscote’s desire, and for excellent reasons, I have changed the names and place-names and have suppressed one or two details which would still further confirm my own inferences.

Riador came of a good family of Welsh extraction and his grandfather was one of the early Americans to live in Japan. His father carrying on the family tradition, settled here with his wife and here Riador was born. Ill-health took them back to America about 1908. Riador determined to come back when he could, and on his father’s death had his way. He had small means of his own and more for love’s sake of the work than anything else he became a teacher of English in a Japanese school where he was immensely liked by the boys. A tranquil useful life, and yet I can safely say I am certain that it was only the fettering force of circumstances that kept him where he was,—the model teacher, the useful citizen, for in him there was something responsive to all things dark and strange which a different environment might have released dangerously. A man who never dominated his circumstances but created them unconsciously by his thoughts and actions and then succumbed to them.

One singular thing about him was his inborn antipathy to Japanese women. With the men and boys he was a good comrade, liked them sincerely, was conscious of no racial differences, but the women he disliked and avoided. To those who know and love the charming womanhood of Japan this was an amazing trait and I know Japanese friends of his had often wondered whether there was some deep inevitable instinct from past life at work which explained that oddity. Such reasons are subterranean however until time bears its fruit, sweet or bitter. It only remains to add that he was a tall well-built man with black hair and eyes and a smile that won friends. He spoke Japanese perfectly and had been more than once mistaken at first meeting for a Japanese.

Now, Riador, in common with most people in Japan, had a notion that he knew a good bit of old handicraft when he saw it and was an ardent collector. The result was a fine heap of junk at which his Japanese friends smiled politely and with hidden meaning. At one object however they did not smile and this was the reason.

He was in Murashima at one time and saw what took his fancy immensely—a really beautiful old sword. Even to a beginner there is allure in the deadly grace and finish of a fine sword;—the coquetry lavished on the hilt, guard, and sheath gives it the sinister charm of death lurking in all beauty. He fell in love with it on the spot and asked the price. Poor fellow! His eyebrows went up into his hair when he heard. The dealer, an old man of knowledge, was wounded.

“Honourable sir, this is a sword of Ako!” as if all were said in that appeal against crass ignorance.

“And just what does that mean?” asked Riador calmly.

A spectator had joined the party as so often happens in Japan when bargains are to the fore—a Buddhist priest with a thin ascetic face, a mask of criss-cross wrinkles about keen eyes and the saint and thinker looking through them upon a world very exactly gauged and understood. He intervened:

“The swords of Ako were some of the finest made in Japan and it is said that the makers welded their own fierce purpose into them, so that they know no rest in their sheaths but hunger and thirst for blood like the souls of the samurai who wore them. It is told also that the man who wears one is always a hunter of men’s lives and if he cannot satisfy the sword’s hunger he ends by committing suicide, and with the sword itself.”—He appealed to the dealer— “Is it not true?”

“Fine and true, your Reverence! This one came into my hands two months ago through a suicide. There’s little use for swords now but the fellow who owned it killed his wife with it and then—hurried after her! Mad no doubt.”

Riador took the sword up and made blue light play along the perfect steel. The handle was silver and bronze with a touch of gold here and there—a thing of military beauty impossible to imagine if not seen. He longed for it and its romance and wondered for how many lives that keen edge was responsible. This would be the crown and apex of all his collection. But the price! Again the priest—who had been watching him keenly—intervened.

“You should own this sword, sir. Not only is it a splendid one, but if I do not mistake, there is an interesting connection between you.”

Riador was certain now that the priest had an interest in the sale and was running up the price as cleverly as he knew how. But all the same he wanted the sword furiously and as he was not likely to go swaggering about Japan with a sword the superstition was neither here nor there except to work up the interest when he showed it off.

“Oh, I’ll take it,” he said bluntly. “That is if he’ll come down anywhere near my price. I know a good thing when I see it.”

“Then what is your honourable opinion as to its worth?” asked the dealer hopefully.

“It isn’t my honourable opinion. It’s my honourable purse,” Riador answered crossly. “I can only give two hundred yen and I couldn’t give more if you skinned me alive. There! Take it or leave it! That is, if you guarantee it to be an Ako sword.”

The priest and the dealer whispered apart while Riador pointed and feinted with the sword. The grip was delicious; the flash splendid. It fitted his hand as if made for it and, instinctively, as the vibration ran up his arm he felt it his own and necessary to him. He caught a quick look at him from the priest passed on to the dealer, and he caught the word ingwa which means what is called in India karma—the Law of Cause and Effect which follows you from life to life in virtue of your actions. But that made no impression on him consciously and he did not remember it until later.

In a minute more the dealer turned to him.

“Sir, I will sell at your price. The sword is worth more—much more—but his Reverence counsels me to sell. There is really a mirror which should go with it according to the old story but I have never seen that and do not know where it is. And in my opinion they are best apart.”

“What is the story?” Riador’s interest was roused. Another quick glance between the priest and dealer. The priest took up the running.

“The last famous holder of the sword was a man of good birth named Asano Shuzen, or as you would say—Shuzen Asano. A man of the great Asano clan. It is a very romantic tale and his love affair with a famous beauty of the Yoshiwara is still remembered.”

“The usual fighting and lovemaking?” Riador said carelessly. “I suppose the mirror was hers? Could you get it for me?”

The priest shook his head.

“Impossible. But if ever you meet the woman who owns it keep out of her way. The Law of Cause and Effect takes long to work out. But it is sure. And that sword and mirror are best apart, as my friend says.”

Riador laughed aloud. He girt the sword on and liked the feel of it, then walked off with his purchase.

He often did that when he was showing it off and was conscious of no murderous thrills. Time had robbed the beautiful snake of its venom. But he loved to draw it and study the perfect craftsmanship of the blade and when any American friends came along—which seldom happened—and told him he could make a mighty fine profit on the sale of it to the Metropolitan Museum he shook his head pityingly: “You never have loved my steed!” He would quote Browning.

Summer came and vacation. He had invitations from several of his boys to spend bits of it at their homes and accepted two or three. The first invitation took him into new ground up the mountain of Takayama, the 6,000 feet guardian that broods over four provinces and down the other side into Mikasa—the country of running rivers fed from the range. Of all things he loved a solitary tramp where he could brood over his own thoughts and dreams. One of these was the almost universal belief in Asia in rebirth on this planet. It commended itself to him as by far the most interesting of the explanations of life after death and that which completely answered the difficulties of what is called “original sin” and of “future punishment.” But he did not take it from any religious standpoint. It was simply a thing with which he liked to trifle mentally until some more interesting speculation should come along.

“But if it’s true, isn’t it a mighty queer thing one never remembers the past,” he thought as he swung along. “On the other hand they say here that you can get at it if you train for it, and in any case one may come into a fortune without knowing its history.” He stopped there remembering a dream he had had once—one in which he had walked into a strange house and seen people sitting and talking there. They looked at him and suddenly he knew he knew them. A man rose and took him by the hand and said:

“So you have come back to us,” and tears rose in his eyes and were wet on his cheek when he woke. He had always wished he could retrieve that pang of joy.

I wish I could give the story in his own words as it was given to me. But the shock of amazement and fear so broke it up into exclamations, repetitions, and questionings that it is useless though to me its very disorder carried conviction that I can scarcely hope to achieve here.

On the first day he reached the district he did a good climb and slept that night at the last little inn. The next was steady collar-work and the track through the pinewoods and by rushing streams was as beautiful and lonely as could be. He could hope to reach the shoulder where an old Buddhist temple would give him shelter at about six o’clock but there were one or two tracks crossing each other and he was glad when he reached a woodcutter’s hut and could get his directions. He halted and shouted.

An old man came out of the woods axe in hand and gazed at him. Not many travellers troubled Takayama at that height—that was easy to be seen, but his manners had an old-fashioned politeness which even in Japan tends to disappear.

“Keep on that track for an hour or so, sir, and then take the first track to the left. It’s a climb, for the winter rains above have washed the track away in places, but hold on steadily through the woods. In the last climb, before the pines begin to thin for the mountain top, is the Temple of the Slanting Stars. But you should certainly get there before dark, though to-night is full moon.”

“I suppose I’m certain of finding the monks there?” Riador asked.

“There are always people at the Temple of the Slanting Stars,” he answered bowing. There was no more to say.

But Riador noticed as he returned the profound bow how keen was the black sparkling eye fixed on him, how eager its swift glance! Age had not dimmed it nor loosed the stern set of the lips. For an instant its searching quality recalled to Riador that he had forty yen in his pocket for travelling expenses—little enough—though wealth to some of the mountain people. But he put this aside as ridiculous, and took a last look back to see the old man standing to watch him from under a peaked hand as he went striding up.

An hour above he stopped, took out his late lunch and ate and rested. He would have a nap before he went on. The golden sunshine in the pines was drowsy—and he with it.

He slept much longer than he intended in the sleepy pine-scented air, for when he woke the sun was sinking and the pine-stems were rose-colour in the suffused glow of the western sky. Angry with his laziness he sprang up and went on at the top of his speed—a glorious climb, steeper and steeper as he breasted it. Crowding trees opening on the deep-down view of wild moorlands and far-scattered villages until now they grew dimmer and twilight was darkening over them. It brought some anxiety for in one or two places already he had had to climb with hands as well as feet and a stumble might be serious. But the moon was beginning to unfold her meridian glories and soon her ocean of light would wash into the unknown places of darkness with flooding silver. And then a singular thing happened.

He had halted for a breather and was perched on a little crag jutting over the downward track when he heard a rustle above and looked up sharply, saw the undergrowth parted and a girl’s face look out upon him. Saw it as plainly as you see the page before you. It was not too dark to see the hair knotted into a great ebony coil, the skin pure as a white lotus, the great startled dark eyes and lips of cherry blossom pink. She stared down at him with a kind of horror and he up at her, both struck dumb for one swift moment. A girl—and alone at dusk on Takayama! Then she was gone and how he could not tell! But she could not be alone. Of that he was as sure as that he sat precariously on the crag. He shouted to ask his way to the temple and his voice came back to him in wistful echoes. Again! The same. There was nothing for it but to climb on resolutely, for every minute the way darkened until at long last he came to a stop in the track and a few foot-worn steps to a higher ledge. He took hands and knees to it and climbed and found level ground, and his feet sinking in the thick rich moss of the Japanese mountain heights—silent as death. The trees were thinner here and the moon lit a lamp so glorious that the way would have been light as day but for the rigid canopies of the pines. Therefore he went on and saw at last the looming of a wide-curved roof before him. The Temple of the Slanting Stars.

And now long grasses heavy with dew barred the way and boughs stretched stiffly and low so that he must stoop to push beneath. He knew the passion of Buddhist monks for the high solitudes so that this did not surprise him. A stern solitary life in summer, in winter terrible with the silence of the snow pallid under coldly glittering stars.

But the door rose before him heavy and barred under vast curving eaves, stern, repellent, shut for the night. Familiar with temples and their ways he made for the little side-door wondering whether the lovely stranger would be his fellow guest. He hoped not. Women are out of tune with these Buddhist solitudes. But no concern of his! He went into the courtyard, his foreign tread sending light echoes along the lowering front.

Before him lay the long low stretch of temple front, presenting a corridor shut in with closed sliding panels behind which would lie the life of the monastery—the chapels, guest rooms, and those of the community. Presently a panel would slide back and the guest-manager appear and welcome him.

But none came. No sign of expectation. Silence. He went up the steps, left his shoes, pushed back an unresisting panel and was confronted by darkness like a wall save for solitary patches of moonlight that entered with him. Then indeed he stopped to consider—fear of the unknown clutching his heart like the tentacles of an octopus in icy sea-water. Asleep—yet no. It was but ten o’clock. The sound of his coming must have—— Silence, cold and impenetrable. Trying to recall his cool non-committal attitude he called aloud—“Is anyone there?” No answer. The darkness reunited after the desecrating shout like black water a swimmer has cloven.

Instantly he slipped back two more panels and let in companionable moonlight by which he could find his way to some room and be ready next day to face the sleeping brethren. In this fashion and leaving the panels open he made his way round a corner into a small room looking upon the moonlit garden which always makes beautiful every Buddhist temple. There he unpacked his small needs, ate and drank and so lay down on his coat and fell asleep tired out with the climb.

He started up suddenly and broad awake at midnight. He knew that for he looked at the wrist watch beside him. He had taken it off when he washed in the bronze basin fed by a little stream through a bamboo pipe on the small wooden platform four feet above the ground. He sat staring into the garden. Beautiful! A little lake, a cliff thickly wooded walling it—all lying bleached beneath a lamping moon. His soul bathed in peace. And even as he thought it the peace was rent apart as with a shriek, though silently. He sprang to his feet seeing a girl running from the trees towards him as though Fear and Death pursued. Something glittered in her hand, her long black hair streaming, a storm-cloud, behind her. A sword—a sword! The moon ran along the blade in a flash of vivid light. His heart cried Danger! and leaped to meet it.

She tripped at the platform gasping, and with a wrench of his strong arms he swung her up the four feet that separated them. The terror in her face was ghastly, the words, more sobs than speech, through the thick pulsing of her heart.

“They are coming to kill you. A den of robbers. You were watched up the mountain. I saw you. The sword. Take this. I could not see you die!”

She thrust it on him. His own! He knew it. Amazement stunned him. He had left it—where?—where? He could not remember. But it was the same! No matter. Death was on them.

He grasped it and the contact was fire and strength. He could give an account of himself now—no dying like a rat in a hole with that bright Death in his hand. He turned to thank her but she was slipping silently over the platform’s edge and under it—a safe hiding-place if swords were clashing.

Yes, a passionate thrill ran up the arm to the heart and set it dancing with a joy he had never known. No dream this! Hurrah—the bride of steel, the kiss of death! He would have shouted aloud but for the stealthy peril that must not guess what waited its coming.

Muffled steps along the bare boards of the corridor. He slipped noiselessly behind where the sliding panels must open, and held the sword ready in air,—a sword and he who had never handled one but to admire the deadly beauty of blade and hilt! Slowly the panels slid apart, a head looked in cautiously to where he had been sleeping. (Then they had reconnoitred from the garden!) He swung the sword aloft and the terrible two-handed blow fell on the nape. The head rolled on the mats, the body spouting blood from the heart’s last struggle.

Now rushed upon him a possession new and dreadful;—the red wine of fury and hate boiled along his veins a furious torrent. A shout outside, a scuffle, and three men rushed into the room, sworded also. One stumbled over the corpse. Riador cut him down through the shoulder, a mighty blow. It was as though the sword leaped in his hand to meet them, lusting itself for blood to slake the fires that played along the blade—for the clash and clang. For now—a storm of swords—they sang together. Another man went down—a lump of inert flesh. The last came at Riador like a mad bull, and the swords rang. But Riador’s was charmed. Like a living thing it darted at the man’s throat; pierced it—a deadly rush of blood spouted to meet it. He fell wallowing on the other bodies and Riador set his foot on the breast, felt the heart leap beneath and deliberately drove the sword in to still the beat for ever.

Silence and the glory of the moon.

Faint and palpitating, the strength and fury pulsing from him with every throb, he leaned against the panels—himself again but inexpressibly weak and helpless. Reason returned like a frightened bird to its nest. What was he to do? To whom should he carry his story? His life had been so peaceful that such happenings were the distant tale of a nightmare and no more real. Now, violent death had broken in upon him and in a most lonely place—utterly alone. For he had forgotten the girl. Actually when she stirred and came clambering up the platform he thought her another enemy and held his dripping sword at the ready. She put up her hands and he saw and lowered it, shuddering now from head to foot.

“O brave—brave! Now come. There is no time to lose. The old woodcutter is one of them and the others will return to-morrow. Come and take me with you.”

She was clinging to his arm—her hair falling backward—a river of darkness—but her face death-pale, a flower of terror in the moonlight. She dragged him forward.

“But who are you?” he said in bewilderment, for still the strangeness closed about him like mist, and he was a man struggling in a dimness distorting all he sees and hears.

“I am Tsuru, daughter of Minami, the rich old samurai of Adzuma. They robbed my father’s home of much treasure ten days since and me too they carried off to sell to the Yoshiwara (the licensed quarter) in Yedo.”

“Yedo?” Was he going mad. That is the ancient name of Tokyo—long since disused and only a historic memory. But he pulled himself into common sense.

“They can never dare it. If your father applies to a Court of Law—Why the newspapers would flash it all over the world! The police——”

She stared at him in bewilderment as great as his own.

“My lord, I cannot understand? Law?—What is that? These men may be protected by some great daimyo (nobleman). But don’t delay. Bring the sword. My father will reward you.”

Like a girl used to handling such things she caught it up and wiped it on the kimono of one of the dead men without a sign of shrinking. He stared at her, half stupefied. Did some wild barbaric life persist in this part of Japan all unknown to the city dwellers? Into what strange place where dead days still lived had he fallen?

She thrust the sword into its sheath.

“Here is the girdle. Put it on!” then looked about her for any possessions of his. To his bewilderment they seemed to have disappeared—the bandits had perhaps stolen them while he slept.

“Nothing!” she said. “Well, no matter. A sword is more than riches in a soldier’s eyes and my father will bow before this. An Ako sword! Now let us leave these carrion. Come and sleep, for the way is dangerous at night, and to-morrow we must take food and money—as much as we can carry. You shall say I am your sister as we go down to Adzuma.”

Folly! he thought as he followed her. A likely story this Japanese girl should be his sister!—a hovering memory made it seem absurd. And why not tell the simple truth—that he had rescued her from these devils? The police should be set on the track of the rest! To hide his part in it would be madness, and might make most dangerous trouble. He said as much to her. She answered eagerly:

“No other way, my lord, until we know whose these men are. If they are the retainers of one of the great daimyo it would be the murder of every soul in Adzuma. No—no. Let us say only that you found me in a forest on Takayama where the robbers had left me when they saw a band of soldiers following them. That is enough——”

“But what madness to invent a story that can be disproved at once when the police——”

Again she stared at him in amazement. He saw she had not a notion of his meaning and the dim terror and uncertainty of a man lost in a strange land was throwing its impalpable web about him strand by delicate strand. He felt himself enmeshed and the more helplessly inasmuch as it is more terrible than any difference of language when the same language is spoken and still no understanding passes from one to the other. No nightmare can be more overpowering. It seemed to him that reality was vanishing and carrying memory with it. He could clearly remember speaking to the old woodcutter half-way up the mountain but all before that was now beginning to sway and circle and dizzy and fuse into a fog in which his mind groped helplessly.

But she was leading swiftly along the corridor with noiseless sliding feet, leaving the dead bodies to their fate as carelessly as the wind abandons the drift of red autumn leaves it has torn from the trees. He followed, trying—struggling to adjust his mind to this invading strangeness.

Now they stepped straight into a long bygone past, he thought.

A great room lit by two guttering candles and a dying fire—a vast roof far above. An ancient hearth and square fire-hole filled with charcoal embers and above it a huge kettle swinging on a hook. Rice, dried fish, pickled plums and drink scattered about among strange garments flung in confusion—a wild scene of coarse plenty and robbery—for he caught the glint of silver and saw pieces of rich brocade casting golden gleams from dark corners. He looked to see jewels and coined money among the plunder, but of these there were none. Again, most strange!

“Sit here! Drink,” said the girl. She pushed a bowl of rice-spirit to him, and sipped a mouthful herself. “We must carry as much food as we can in a basket. Dare we sleep a little, my lord? We cannot go until dawn for the track is dangerous. There is blood on your forehead—a wound? Oh, no, no. Look here!”

She raised a beautifully polished mirror of metal to him—clear as glass. He took it and dropped it ringing on the floor.

For the face it gave back was his and not his. His eyes—features—yes!—but darkened and a subtle racial change had passed upon them that made them Japanese—the curved eyelids above the higher cheek bones, the nose and jaw strengthened and built into power,—a terrible fighting face, yet beautiful with the beauty of the sword beside him. And the blood trickling from a clean cut on the side of the head. He had known nothing of it in the fierce excitement. Indeed it scarcely stung now.

He sat—a Japanese man alone with a Japanese woman. Even his dress was strange and the past had reeled away from him as a fading dream.

“Once I dreamt——” he began hesitating.

But she would not let him speak. She flew for cold water to bathe the cut, satisfied herself it was clean and bound it with a blue cloth about the head. She sat looking up at him with adoring eyes.

“How beautiful you are, my lord! How brave! Happy am I that I may serve you as a slave!”

His brain vibrated between two doubts. Was he only a spectator of the drama—as one sits at a cinema and sympathises with the moving shadow shapes? Or was he an actor and the delicate tie shattered that binds thought and reality? He thought if he could sleep his brain might clear. “Let me sleep—only sleep!” he said. His head felt overcharged with blood. Instantly she piled the coverings the robbers had used and made some sort of pillow for him. None were left and when he lay down so utterly was the West slipping from him that he settled himself without a thought for her. She wreathed herself towards him and lay with her head beside his without a word said.

The moon, the Lady of Shadows on earth, riding the heavens in unclouded glory—how must her purity have looked in upon the room of horrors so near them! Yet nothing but the cut and thrust of life—yours to-day and mine to-morrow! And his thoughts wandered from that to his own riddle. How clearly he had once dreamed himself a man of some unknown race.—It had all dissolved now into a feeling of strangeness. Perhaps when he slept and waked it would be gone. Dreams cannot face the light of day. At last he slept and she beside him.

Dawn came radiant, and she shifted her head, sat up and looked at him with pleading eyes—the incense of all a girl’s passion for beauty and bravery.

“Lie still, my lord, until I heat the water for your honourable washing.”

She lit the little charcoal stove and went out to the shallow metal basin on the wooden platform outside and in the pale golden morning slipped her kimono down and sluiced herself all over in cold running water with the perfect disregard of the Japanese mind for nakedness. Water sparkled in her hair, in crystal runnels down her smooth shoulders and slim breasts as she twisted up her black locks into braids about the little head. He lay staring at her but testing his own thoughts. Yes—the disturbing dream had vanished now and solid foothold was under his feet if only—If only he could remember whence he came, his name, his people. But that would come also.

When it was ready he washed away his battle stains while she prepared the rice and dried fish and waited for her own share as he ate in comfort. She pointed laughing to the thick humming of the cloud of blue-flies gathering in the growing heat to that other room with wide-flung panels not so far away. They both laughed and he bestowed a more perfect polish on his sword and gladdened to see the lightnings play upon it. Then they gathered and stored what they needed of food. He bound a huge bundle on her little slender back while he took charge of the rest, obliterated every trace of their presence and went down the wooden temple-steps into the densely matted growth of grass and weeds that surged up to them. He turned and looked at the Temple of the Slanting Stars—dark, sinister even in dawn sunshine—a fit nest for the hornets who had so nearly stung him to death—whom he had made stingless for ever. Let them lie! He had secured peace with the sword.

But had he? That question instantly succeeded the assertion as he tramped on with little Tsuru shuffling submissively behind him. No—no—he knew better than that. Much better! He had only sent them to try again—to start life once more upon the capital their deeds had brought them of good or ill. Why—he himself might easily have to reckon with them once more in the revolution of the Wheel and the accumulated chances of eternity. Men are their own children, inheritors of their own thoughts, words and deeds. It did not dismay him—had he not always known this truth? But he resolved that as the usual act of courtesy and piety towards a dead enemy he would offer incense and food to their memories at the first Buddhist temple they touched on the way down. He would have scripture read for their repose and good rebirth. That settled, he flung it off his mind and forgot it. He called her up like a little dog and she came, all sparkling and flushing.

“But will your honourable parents be glad to see me, Tsuru sama? Or will they drive a wandering stranger from their door like a devil at the New Year? For I have no home, no riches, but this.” He caressed the hilt of his sword while he spoke.

“But that is riches,” she said demurely. “The moment I saw it on the corridor I knew you were a great samurai. It is an Ako sword—and brave men and fine swords come from there. My parents will lay their heads at your feet for have you not brought back their worthless daughter? They must already have burnt incense for me and offered food and recited sutras. How will they believe when they see me glad and living?”

They walked a little way in silence through the wood—a shaken bough here and there shedding diamonds on her little black head or a golden sun-arrow bringing out the hidden russet. He scarcely saw her except to think coolly that no man could see a girl more certain than this one to develop into seductive loveliness. She was far too young as yet to know what she was worth, but the value was there. Then the stream of his own thought flowed on:

“Tsuru sama,” he said suddenly, “I had a bad dream. I dreamed I was a foreign barbarian with a white face like a leper and a heart naked of our knowledge and faith. And I dreamed of a sword— But it was my sword—mine, though I cannot yet understand how it came here. But you saw it?”

She looked down a moment, then into his eyes.

“Certainly I saw it, my lord. Did I not bring it to you? Dreams are strange things.”

“But if it was mine—and mine it is—how could you bring it to me. Was it not with me?”

She answered instantly:

“Surely the robbers stole it while you slept. That is not difficult to answer.”

He said no more and they went on in silence. Presently she said timidly:

“May his servant ask my lord’s noble name and family? I am of the Minami of Adzuma,—their worthless daughter Tsuru, as I have said. But most surely my lord is of a great and powerful clan.”

Her eyes were wistful. She longed for that to be a triumph also—that she might return to her people in glory. The red blood ran into his face—it was sickening shame to him that he could make no answer. He hid it with pride.

“A man of my clan announces his name when he chooses. He does not answer questions,” and did not relent even when she put out a little leaf-like hand for forgiveness. Oh, that he could remember! But he dared not answer. He must have some story ready when they reached Adzuma.

They ate twice that day in the heights and then the track began to drop downwards and glimpses of milder country to show far below among the trees. But he was eager for a Buddhist temple where he could set matters straight with the dead and as twilight came on they found a little lost one drowned in trees on the spur of a hill whence the deep tone of the bell came profoundly deep and mystic on the pale air lit by the evening star. They found two priests there who gave them food and praised their pious purpose and the little candles were lit and incense offered and they crouched reverentially before the faded golden altar and looked up into the royal golden Face above them of the shining Lord of the World as a Scripture was read. As they rose the old priest said thoughtfully:

“Be at peace in this matter. We sleep, but the loom of life never stops and the pattern which we wove when the sun set is still weaving when it rises again in life to-morrow. Let your life be comfortable to this knowledge for so teach all the Buddhas.”

He took them for a beautiful young couple lately married and wished them children and peace in the quiet of Adzuma.

“And yet,” he added, “I think it will not be peace, for surely such a splendid young samurai will not want for a noble master, and many a brave deed remains for doing before you rub the dust of this transient world from your eyes.”

They waited a moment evidently expecting him to disclose his name but he was silent and Tsuru looked down.

So, rested and refreshed and provided with food, they set out in the morning and in two days’ walking through stern gorges and by rushing rivers came at last within sight of the little country town of Adzuma.

He said to her:

“Now we must go with care for joy may be as deadly to your parents as fear. Let me go first and break it to them that you are safe and returning.”

But even as he spoke it became impossible, for a boy screamed out that Tsuru sama had returned and the children ran like chickens to see, and in a minute they were the centre of a rejoicing crowd, sweeping them along the narrow street and between the little rough-roofed homes where the dried-fish sellers left their odoriferous wares and booths, where blue and white rice and tea bowls were left to glitter for sale while their owners ran to see and rejoice. And suddenly to his amazement Riador heard them shouting a name with extravagant praises to valour and honour and the name was Asano Shuzen. What had Asano Shuzen done and what member of the proud Asano clan was there to receive that applause?

Suddenly again, with all eyes on him, all heads bowed, he realised with petrifying amazement that he himself was the Asano—that—that was the lost name he had been hunting for days! So at least it seemed it must be if these people knew it and if in his own brain it found some dim echo. Well—a proud thing to be an Asano! No great daimyo (lord) but would rejoice to enroll an Asano among his samurai. If a doubt crept in he strangled it. He lifted his head proudly as he walked by Tsuru. He looked down with scorn upon these common people surrounding him. Let them shout! He was as far above their praise as their blame. He was and would be an Asano.

In this fashion they surged up a street where each little low-browed house clung around a growing pine or two as the heart of its being and so reached the garden of Tsuru’s parents—a garden of pines and rocks made musical with the song of running water, where the house, all verandah and rooms open to the air, stood over a tiny lake where at your ease you might watch the golden carp curving among the iris like sunbeams. And when they reached it Tsuru, holding his hand lest the eager crowd should swing them apart, announced her deliverer as “Shuzen, a son of the Asano.” Her pride was as winning a thing to see as their joy and gratitude. They had believed her dead and here she returned in honour with the noblest son-in-law that even a samurai heart could wish. That was the instant flash of thought in both their hearts and who could look at Tsuru’s childish beauty and doubt it hers! They were half stunned with joy and pride. Asano (for so he should surely be called now) saw it also, but with no answering flash of joy. What was the girl to him? And looking round at the little drowsy town set in the close circle of hills he pictured already the age-long drowsiness of life there—no adventure, no sparkle of life, no noble swordsmanship, or luring women—only an obedient little slave and a life scarcely less sluggish than the final sleep in the little hakaba (graveyard) in the hills. He set his teeth under locked lips as he bowed to them with samurai reserve.

It was not a fortnight before through a little landowner in the village the formal proposal was made to Asano. He was to be their adopted son and Tsuru’s husband. He was to drop his own name, however distinguished, and to become a Minami. No money would be demanded from him. The old couple would consider themselves honoured sufficiently without anything of that kind. They besought the favour of his acceptance. He would have refused—and on the spot, but it was impossible. These people had received him with the most generous hospitality and gratitude. And Tsuru’s eyes brimmed with love and pride of possession. It paralysed resistance.

“But you know nothing of me—nothing!” he said. “How can you tell I should be a dutiful son or a good husband? I speak against myself—but is it not true?”

Sitting side by side upon their cushions they answered gravely:

“Son, that has been considered. The very day after your joyful home-coming we sent runners to the Asano in Shimosa and they bring back word that you, the son of one of the Asano chieftains, left home to seek your fortune two years since. The description was yours. Joyfully we received this news, and so—son of our hearts—there is nothing to hide from us and all is well.”

He looked down at the mats and was silent for a moment. How could he—a nameless man—reject this great good fortune flung into his grip by Karma—the Law that rewards all according to their deeds? Would it not be sinful to pass it by? And to what end? Might it not indeed be true—the truth that always escaped him, that he could never grasp and compel to yield its treasures to Memory. Presently he looked up and said gravely:

“I have not said this myself. I might never have revealed it. There are reasons——”

“We respect your reasons. We know the truth and would not be guilty of impertinent questions where nothing but faith and gratitude are due. It is settled and our hearts at rest.”

He left them, a caged eagle. Yet in the garden with Tsuru’s tremulous beauty, unfledged, untrained, before him, he knew the thing could never be. How could he fail to weary of a girl of fifteen to whom the world and all its wonders, but for her one terrible adventure, was a sealed book. He had a knowledge of the great story of Japan, her passionate out-reach to China and Korea for their gifts of beauty and wisdom. How he had gained it he did not know, but it was there. She had nothing but a lovely little face and body which might satisfy a man’s longing for a month and then satiate to sickening. Should he take her and leave her and spoil her beauty beyond any other man’s desire? No, of that cruelty he could not be capable. She had saved his life if he had saved hers and he could not let that one debt cancel the other. Certainly the cage must break before the bird can fly and the cage might be her heart. If so—time must mend it.

And yet he could not steel his own to inflict that wound so soon, so absolutely they trusted him! He would deceive them a little longer—for their own good. But, child as she was, Tsuru knew all was not well. There are instincts that need no teaching. She pondered much but could find no words with which to tell her thought to this beautiful and savage young man (for so he seemed to her), whom she loved with all her heart and soul. He lived in a world as far out of her reach as the pictures of divine beings crowned and haloed in the little temple. But she would try.

“My lord, are you happy?” she asked timidly one night as they sat on the platform over the little lake, the moon floating in the sky above them and in the water beneath—a gold ripple in lotus leaves.

“Shall you be happier when I am your wife?”

His eyes were fixed on the moon below them—so near yet never to be reached.

“And of what shall we talk, Tsuru sama, in the long eternal evenings when we rest from work? How shall we be companions? You know nothing of life,” he said, touching the soft babyish round of her cheek with careless pity. “You are too young. All the great things of life mean nothing to you.”

“Is not love a great thing?” she asked fearfully.

“Yes—but love has a million voices. You know only one—to obey and obey—but I cannot make you understand.”

She sat silent, looking also at the moon.

At last he rose and spoke passionately.

“Tsuru sama, I cannot bear it yet. Not yet. I cannot be imprisoned in little Adzuma. I must go. Try to understand. I shall come back—I swear it. I acknowledge my debt. Only remit it for a little and I will be your prisoner for life.”

Said like a lover this last might be very well, but he did not speak like a lover. The colour flowed into her face and ebbed to white. The daughter of a samurai must hide her wound. She rose with all her usual softness and grace.

“Certainly, Asano sama. You say what is true and wise. I will go at once to my parents and tell them that this is my choice as well as yours.”

Does Love hesitate at giving? No more than egoism hesitates at taking. He could not hide his delight.

Hand in hand they went to her parents where they sat upon silken cushions like old images of the early gods. “As your very obedient daughter I ask agreement to this,” she ended, bowing before them. And so after bitter disappointment and much entreaty from them Tsuru had her way. Finally, the old man went to his cupboard and took out a heavy bag.

“My son, though I do not approve this delay, yet it is the wish of our children. Come home when you find the world bitter. But, if you desert us, I tell you this—Sorrow comes from ill deeds and your own end will be violent and deserted. But I think you will not fail us nor take the guilt of ruining the child’s life on your shoulders. Here is silver. Take a freely given gift. Gird on your great sword of Ako and go to-morrow morning, for whatever the child says her heart is wounded sorely.”

He went next day and with scarcely a regret. So loudly did life call that it drowned all other voices and he never guessed the bitter and violent change that this desertion might make in the heart of Tsuru sama. He carried away her youth with him and did not know it.

So at last he reached the great way that led to Yedo (Tokyo)—a gay way, a way of wonder, for it was filled with people coming and going between the ancient capital Kyoto and the City of the Shoguns who ruled in the name of the Emperor and kept him a mere shadow of power. Thither all the ambitious young men to meet the mighty daimyo (nobles) whose riches and quarrels made the fortunes of their followers. To Yedo went the girls, willingly or unwillingly, to put their beauty on sale in the Yoshiwara, the licensed quarter of Yedo—that gay resort painted by the great artists in colours so vivid that youth fled to it as moths to fire, to drop in it at last scorched and done for and to return no more to the still gardens of their birth.

And Asano was merry at heart. His escape was like strong wine in him and Life danced before him in rainbows. How right he had been! This, this only, was the life for a man who would know how to handle it! With delight he saw the great nobles and their trains of slashing swordsmen, all lust and valour and egoism, each for himself and himself only though in obedience to the master who fed and supported him in all he did. Splendid retinues. Splendid ladies peeping through the bamboo blinds of their lacquered litters and ox-carriages. Peeping at him, too, for all they were so grand! They looked through rich silken tassels, but they looked! Behind them followed on poles the lacquered boxes of treasure and of rich dresses. Life and youth shone radiant and in their best along the road to Yedo with these radiant lords, and not a few of the faces behind the blinds quickened their heart-beat as Asano swaggered past, sunlight flashing on the hilts of his great sword and the dagger to match, given by the old Minami at parting—a magnificent young two-sworded samurai indeed and clearly a masterless man seeking his fortune where all sought it—in Yedo. It was these looks that won him more than a heart-beat, a sly swift smile from a beautiful face behind the bamboo blind of the most magnificent litter of all—that of the lady of the powerful Daimyo of Iwashima, and he saw it and his eyes sparkled for joy and hope. Later she spoke indolently to the youngest and fairest concubine of her husband—a stupid, lovely doll.

“This is the bravest looking of all the men upon the road this year, and if my lord needs one to supply the place of Takagi can he do better? It is no concern of mine, but the thought may please him. Suggest it.”

And please him it did, coming from lips he loved, and Asano’s fortune was secure. He joined the retinue journeying to the great yashiki in Yedo—the huge residence of the Daimyo of Iwashima.

So life began for him among crowding men as dissolute as brave, which is saying much, and women flitting everywhere, ready, many of them, for a smile and a secret caress from the handsomest of all the samurai. And the Lady, set aside and forgotten by her husband for newer faces, sent him messages and gifts and wooed him with most dangerous love, which yet gave sharp relish to his triumph and turned his head with riches and ill-won favours. He lived every moment of his life now and drank it in huge draughts—a rich intoxicating wine.

No letters nor any message went down the long road to Adzuma in the lonely heart of the hills. If he remembered it at all it was only to bless the lucky gods for his escape from the house of bondage.

So two joyous years went by and he grew in his lady’s graces until none dared refuse him and she found him the most ardent and faithless of lovers—though she never guessed the last and none had the courage to tell her. For he had found his way to the Yoshiwara—that district of wild and ruthless sensuality where women skilled in all the arts of love waited for him and his like, the chief among them summing up such culture as no chaste woman could hope to rival. Who could weary of such beauty so armed? There were women there who could tell stories of love and war better than any professional hanashika, holding a man entranced through all the earlier hours and then melting into his arms—a mistress so seductive that nothing else on earth was worth a memory. Yes, gaiety and delight reigned in the Yoshiwara and it was easy to forget that every man must lay his sword and dagger aside before entering any of its houses lest in some storm of despair these very women should catch them up and end their slavery.

And in this Flower Quarter at the sign of the Jewel Garden Asano was the best known and most lavish of all visitors who came when their purses were full and lingered round it when they were empty—which often happened with all the lovely bloodsuckers within to empty them. How he longed then for the gay companionship, the dalliance, the wit and flattery of the enclosed Paradise! What else could they desire? Nothing in the world equalled its fierce delights. And so especially was it with Asano. He had tried the other love and found it pitifully wanting, but now gaiety flowed over and almost filled the deep hollow of strange forgetfulness in his heart. Other men could boast of their families. The poorest had their memories and traditions but he had nothing. He was silent when the men spoke of these things. For him life began with waking from sleep on the mountain of Takayama, and, though he knew something had gone before, it hid behind a cloud which might be charged with thunder. Therefore he clutched at opiates and daily strengthened the dose.

One evening when he had just returned from a long journey to the province of Kasuga on his lord’s business he was loafing in the courtyard of the mansion when a fellow samurai, Ikeda of Kansai, came up with the usual formal bows of ceremony. They dissolved at once into good comradeship.

“Have you been to the Yoshiwara since you came back?” he asked.

Asano twinkled:

“No, indeed! Other engagements came first, as you know. Any news stirring there? How is Forest of Cherries?”

“Prettier than ever and has two new stories that—well, I won’t spoil them. The little vixen! But all the same her charming nose is quite put out of joint!”

Asano laughed outright.

“I don’t believe it. That little nose! There wasn’t a girl in the whole Yoshiwara to touch her.”

“Very true! There wasn’t—but there is. A wonder. A beauty from the topmost hair on her head to her darling little toes. The sweetest, wonderfullest fairy ever seen in Japan. And she sings—Pearl Harp is forgotten when you hear that voice! And she dances the Blue Sea Waves so that you hold your breath and hear the waves ringing and her white hands are the spray flung up. And if her face is beautiful her body is delicious. You can’t believe that any man can hold such beauty in his two arms in anything but a dream. And the reality——!”

“It sounds well,” Asano said cautiously. “Now, what are the drawbacks? Probably she has no teeth!”

“Wicked wretch!” the indignant orator shouted. “Her teeth are picked pearls, and what’s more she won’t follow the fashion of blackening them—a thing I always hate. You may think she’s strong if she sets the fashion to the rest. In the Jewel Garden they’re beginning cautiously to follow her lead and learn that snow in roses is one of the prettiest things in the world. Let the stuffy married women blacken their teeth, but not our beauties!”

“There I am with you heart and soul!” said Asano. “But the girl must have lots of assurance! What do they call her?”

“Little Dragon. Assurance in the right place—yes, but otherwise shy as a doe. Indeed a shade too frightened of us men. And yet—there are worse ways of spending a summer night than in teaching Little Dragon that we really are quite good fellows after all! She hasn’t learnt the lesson yet. I shall be half sorry when she does. It makes her different!”

“I should think it might!” Asano said laughing. “The others don’t suffer from either fear or shame. Does she shine at the suppers? Of course, she’ll be an Oiran”—(a chief courtesan who receives much respect and attention)—“one of these days!”

“Will be? She was nothing else from the beginning. Go down to-night. You’ll thank me. And I deserve thanks for I’m a fool to advertise what I want myself. But you and I were always friends.”

That night Asano slipped out of the house, evading another engagement, and went down full of expectation to the Yoshiwara. A brilliant full moon dominated the sky and paled the stars and the shadows were black and white on the streets as he entered the Flower Quarter. Splendid and alluring light was cast upon the painted faces and glittering brocades of the women who sat on show for the attraction of passers by, their black hair piled into fantastic bows and butterflies with light-coloured tortoiseshell and golden pins run through them. He felt now that he was a little tired of them and needed a new stimulant. He knew exactly when Little Crane would laugh and why, how Jewel River’s voice would always hover the quarter of the eighth of a note below the hit she aspired to. He passed on and politely saluted the proprietor. Might he see the Little Dragon?

The man shook his head with the utmost decision. See Little Dragon? Impossible. No—not possible—for even such a valued visitor and gallant soldier. That day week—possibly. No, he must really ask before he could promise. The greatest lords in Yedo—he ran off a string of mightinesses, must wait their turn before such an Oiran as Little Dragon could grant an interview. Asano, unaccustomed to be contradicted, came to threats at last, but to no purpose. Nothing could be done. He went away sourly to quarrel with his friend Ikeda on the question of how such as he had gained two interviews with so proud a beauty. They came to swords over it and it was only the Daimyo’s command that drove them apart. A week went by and brought an obsequious message from the proprietor of the Jewel Garden that in another week Little Dragon would be at liberty to receive the honour of a visit from the famous swordsman Asano. Nothing could be more courteous, but the week crawled by with such ponderous slowness that in his angry heart Asano resolved he would make her pay some day for his suspense. Even the women of the Yoshiwara have hearts now and again and hearts can be pierced.

When the day came he dressed himself to perfection—looked at himself in his lady’s polished mirror with pride at his black and ivory beauty and with his Ako blade by his side and dagger thrust into his girdle went off to the Yoshiwara and the Jewel Garden.

The people there easily gathered from his pride that he had no disposition to crawl even before the beauty of beauties and he was ushered at once to her room by the Kamuro—the little attendants.

She was sitting on a golden cushion by the window and the turn of her graceful neck suggested sad thought. Beside her lay a mirror of great beauty of workmanship—bronze with a gold-touched crane beneath a gold-touched pine. Something familiar seemed to strike a kindred vibration in him before she turned her head. Where had he seen it? It had dropped forgotten from her hand. Next moment it had passed from his mind. He could only look at her. Her magnificently dressed head glittering with a halo of golden and pale tortoiseshell pins rested on her hand propped on a little low table and about her flowed a magnificent robe with a design on gold of pines and cranes and cloud.

He made a quick motion and she turned sharply and rose with gold flowing about her, then bowed in obeisance so low that her face was hidden for a moment, Asano bowing deeply also. At last, raising his head with a ready smile, he saw before him the splendid figure—idol—stiff and gorgeous. And the face—— The smile froze on his lips.

It was Tsuru.

White and motionless he stared at her. Her cheeks were rouged, her lips heavily gilded. The eyebrows were plucked to the perfect line of beauty and the native cream of the skin only showed beneath the whitening in three points at the nape whence the neck rose proudly. That promised the creamy curves of the hidden body. But stiff, remote, armoured in glittering brocade—like a bird too gorgeous for capture by any but a prince—it was still Tsuru and as that tremendous truth overwhelmed him the colour rose slowly in his face and settled there in painful red, holding him speechless.

She did not blush. One very near her might have seen a throbbing in the throat, but that was all—and to him unnoticeable. She waved to the attendants to disappear, then bowed low and stood with hands folded in each other to hear.

How could he be calm? To find the treasure-daughter of the Minami in a shameful house of the Yedo Yoshiwara—to find her who had been all fluttering submission, calm and composed, conscious of her queendom, shameful though it was—half stunned him. Yet even in the depths of the bewilderment was the thought that she should be no queen for him. Let her trample on other men! For him it was Tsuru and if she had forgotten obedience she should learn it with tears. He took a man’s means to his end. He stretched his arms to her and spoke her name softly as if to waken the old passion. At once she put up her hand.

“Not that name here, my lord. She who owned it is dead. I have brought but one thing from Adzuma—the mirror in which I saw my face change daily as I learnt my lesson. The lesson you taught me. It brought me here to our meeting. But Tsuru is dead.”

Next moment she smiled as if her words were meaningless.

“Do you not desire to hear by what road I have come to the Yedo Yoshiwara? Sit here and when you are refreshed you shall know.”

With his eyes on her face he watched while she clapped her little white hands and the small attendants brought flower-petal cakes and rice-spirit and served the best they had for the gilded Queen of Shame. She served her visitor herself while the little ones hovered about them like gorgeous blossoms blown on a breeze of perfume. He watched in a dream. This—his Tsuru—the little flower of friends and sweethearts, this—the girl who had looked up at him with trembling lips and dewy eyes in mingled love and awe? No. Life has changes more searching than death’s, and had not he himself changed also? Was the swaggering soldier and freebooter, the haunter of wine and women, still the man bewildered of purpose who had come into this life through a mystery impenetrable? Again, no! Life had seized and made its prey of them both and who was he to struggle? Doubtfully he looked at her across a gulf of misunderstanding where seething mists boiled up and hid the truth beneath, and with calm inscrutable eyes she returned his look and, speaking aloud, yet kept her own heart hidden.

“Now, I will tell you my story. But yet there are certain things I must say of your valorous and powerful self before I speak of my unworthiness. May I ask if you have yet discovered to what noble and knightly family you owe your courage and beauty?”

Instantly his pride was alive and darting. His eye sparkled.

“Insolent question! I am what I always was—an Asano—a man of noble blood and splendid tradition. How should it change?”

She bowed so low as to make the gesture a mockery.

“As to that—it was I who gave you the name, my lord. It was I who made you an Asano. I could not bring a nameless man to my parents as my husband-to-be. But you accepted it and then I knew you had no other.”

He tried to swagger—to bluster—but her eyes resting on his face humiliated him with their proud composure. His name had meant everything in his way of life and a thought that glanced against it pierced him to the quick. He said haughtily:

“Restrain yourself to decency. My name is mine as you were mine. From me you heard it—and, if any proof is wanted, when your parents sent a messenger to the home of my people they were told that I had left them to find my fortune with my sword.”

His sword—the word struck his pride into a flame. He looked down to his side as if to find it, forgetting he had laid it aside,—the splendid sword of Ako! She listened and her eyes never changed or flickered. He went on proudly:

“For my proof—I have that sword, more mine than your mirror is yours, and——”

She interrupted, speaking with profound gentleness and humility:

“My lord of the great Asano clan, my mirror is mine and the mirror of a woman is her soul. Where I go it shall go. But is your sword yours? When the robbers dragged me to the Temple of the Slanting Stars I saw there a young man of the Asano bound hand and foot. I saw them strike his head off that his people might never know his fate and take vengeance. And when I needed a name for you I took his and when I wanted a sword that you might free me and yourself I took his also. For the men who killed him had brought it to the Temple of the Slanting Stars little knowing they brought their death. But what is this between you and me? Why speak of it but to show that I loved you and love you?”

Her beautiful eyes dwelt on him languidly as she spoke the words that killed his pride. That look and that alone held him from killing her on the spot that his secret might die with her. But—if she loved him it was safe and he her master. He would watch—watch and make very sure before he trusted her to carry what was more to him than life. She spoke on gently.

“I had seen your pride and valour. What could I do but give you the name and the sword to hide your own, still nobler, till you should choose to make it known to your servant. Tell it to me now or never, as you will, for I am yours always. But as for the sword—do you know these swords? They are made with a spell and are greedy of men’s blood. They themselves fight like warriors. How otherwise could you have killed four men? The terrible sword fought for its own glory and pride as it has fought ever since. Oh, we have heard the stories of you down in Adzuma! And we know that the pride of the swords of Ako is that they will have blood and if they cannot have it otherwise they will have their masters’—Was it not a great gift?”

“A great gift!” he muttered. A slow stealing enchantment was creeping over him, stupefying his limbs and brain. He swayed towards her as if half asleep and her eyes triumphed. She stretched her arms and drew his head to her bosom. He looked up at her and his lips shaped something but he could not speak. She sat in silence and looked at him and in her embrace strange unspoken messages ran between them in vibrations that shook their hearts.

“Your own story?” he said at last, with effort. “I was a faithless wretch. Did it break your heart?—I hoped you thought me dead.”

She shook her head, smiling gently:

“Nothing came from you, but much came down the Yedo Road of the splendid young Asano, the right hand of the Daimyo of Iwashima and lover of his wife. Lover of women many and fair. Then my parents died and my uncle would have taken me as he took all else, but I desired to come to Yedo and to see you once more so I went to the old Takagi who trains girls for the Yoshiwara and for two years he trained me—and here I sit. And to you I owe it!”

Her eyes were all tenderness and he could not read the thoughts in their black deeps. Takagi’s training had taught them more than beauty of lowered lashes. His own hung on them passionately. There was all to bind them together—not only love but each held the secret of each other’s past. And Asano or none he could not sit cowed before a beauty of the Yoshiwara. His manner changed instantly and he clasped her in his arms like a conqueror.

“Did you think I had forgotten my love? Never—never. You are right. I am no Asano but something higher. I will keep my secret until we have conquered the world. Forget it for awhile. I am your man and love you and you me—and at last we are together.”

She yielded. Tsuru was forgotten, but the Little Dragon of the Yoshiwara was strong and wise. She knew that all the past had fallen away from her, that the queendom of the Yoshiwara is as fleeting as the life of a summer rose, that the one hope in her ruined life was vengeance, and straight and unwavering she took the woman’s way to it.

If the Yoshiwara’s work is swift and sure, so also was hers. Asano had forgotten her once, he forgot Tsuru again for ever in the wicked splendour of the Little Dragon. A dragon indeed she coiled about him like the woman who in dragon form pursued a young priest and when he hid in despair under a huge bell coiled herself about it until it glowed white hot with her passion and burnt him to ashes.—So it was with Asano. He had not dreamed that such passion was in the world—but his own caught fire at it and flamed and slowly it made a burning ring of flame between him and the rest of the world.

The day came when he openly scorned the woman who had made him—the wife of his lord the Daimyo of Iwashima, and she was not one to take his desertion tamely. What easier than a trumped-up charge against Asano? Yes—with bitter grief she must tell her lord that Asano, trusted above all others, had made secret love to one of his concubines—and the child the girl had borne was none of her lord’s. A fearful vengeance fell on the woman and child and would have fallen on Asano but that he fled the place taking the Little Dragon with him and they came down the long way to Kyoto, and thus at one stroke ridded the Daimyo’s lady of all the enemies she feared. And in Kyoto great was the fame of the famous beauty, the Little Dragon, and all the Yoshiwara girls of Kyoto paled in her glory and rich men poured their riches into her lap. And who but Asano with that unfailing stream of riches to draw upon as well as the harvest of his sword!

So it might have lasted for six or seven years more, no longer—for the gods, jealous of earthly beauty, set a limit to its summer—and he might have fed upon a passion which flamed only for him—as he thought—whatever it might pretend for others—but for his sword—his bride of steel, the Sword of Ako. Just as the mirror of the Little Dragon, flattering her beauty, taught her to desire fresh victims, so also with the sword. And her glittering inflexible determination matched the Little Dragon’s and exceeded them by as much as the spirit of things inanimate is more enduring than the flickering human spirit. The Little Dragon might wince and relent and refrain, but the bride of steel never. The rich daimyo going along the Yedo road in state to pay their respects to the Shogun never knew that the Wild Hawk, as they called him now, was not resting in the pinewoods along the road, ready with his band of sword-brothers to dash upon them and strip them to their shirts. It happened often enough, and the worst was they had no redress for unlike other famous freebooters he was generous to the poor and their protector and none would betray him. Riches? It is said that to this day among the mountains of Kansai are buried hoards of the treasure he amassed while the Little Dragon gained gold faster than he and played into his hands by decoying the men who were later to be his victims as they journeyed from Kyoto along unguarded roads in the mountains.

He had been away for a month on a raid when she sat one day in her beautiful rooms in Kyoto looking out upon the river flowing before them. Four years had armed her dangerous beauty and when men told of her now along the great road to Yedo it was as the loveliest woman in Japan. Therefore it was no surprise when another young man sitting before her laid his heart at her feet—the feet of a woman who had inspired great poets and artists, whose beauty lives still in the famous colour-prints which hide her name but leave immortalised her beauty in lands of which she never dreamed. Still she fetches her price from men who never saw her!

For her part she saw a young man with the fresh eyes and passion of youth—whom no woman could see without desire to make them hers. He shone like dawn against the memory of Asano grown coarser, older, seamed with scars and reddened with drink. And she herself a girl of twenty-two—no more! Her heart beat to a new tune and Love the wandering Singer made music in it in every throb. He sat with her but she would not talk of love.

“Not yet, my lord. Speak of poetry, of art, of all loveliness. Never again will I love a man until I have tested his heart and know that it can be friend as well as lover.”

He sprang to more eager life at that. Look! Would she read a poem of his own.—She read:

“That is you—you!” he said, crushing her hand against his breast. She felt it throbbing like the very fall of time bringing the dark nearer—nearer. She looked into his ardent face—ivory-pale beside the dark glow of his eyes under black brows and drew his head to her bosom and was silent awhile, holding him in her embrace and looking down upon him with measureless delight.

Why, she could not tell, but that innocent caress was more to her than all the violences of passion she had known and re-known until the very nerve of feeling was numbed. He clung to her as a poet clings to beauty. More she would not have. But the very next day she sent for him—and it was to say a dreadful thing. Pale and with fixed eyes she said it.

“Love me,—I cannot live without you, but there is danger to you and me for Asano calls himself my master and until he dies we cannot live. He has insulted me again and yet again, and while he lives I cannot love.”

He looked in her eyes, understood, and nodded silently and her face brightened slowly with a terrible hope, the hope that had led her on for years. Not for nothing had she hidden her rival the Sword of Ako—when Asano went out on this last raid. It lay silent and snake-like beneath her brocades. Now she took it out and showed it bare and they smiled together before she sheathed it and hid it again.

Far down the Yedo road the news reached Asano, carelessly told for what right has any man more than another in a woman of the Yoshiwara?—that the Little Dragon had taken another lover.

“It is Itaro from Wakayama. She dotes on the ground he walks on but no doubt she will tire of him as she does of all. These women—what hearts have they? But she has grown so beautiful that the law should compel her to veil her face. It is not good for men to see for she has her will of us all and what she chooses she has. Naturally a woman of the Yoshiwara must have lovers, but this time she loves him.”

And Asano asked carelessly as if it mattered nothing:

“And what is the lucky Itaro of Wakayama like?”

“A handsome fellow indeed—the very face to take a woman’s heart. I wonder what sort of welcome she will give an old friend like yourself, Asano the Fortunate, when you go Kyoto way! Who can tell?”

When news was brought to the Little Dragon that Asano had heard of Itaro and her passion for him she looked down and her beautiful lips drew together until they were a thin line of fierce scarlet burning in a field of snow. Then she asked one question.

“And what did he say?”

“Why nothing! He laid his hand on his sword but that is an old trick of his.”

“Indeed, yes!” she said and laughed.

That afternoon she sent for the chief of the soldiers who guarded Kyoto. He came rejoicing. This woman did not send for men as a rule. It was they who thronged her doors. He went with his heart in his throat and a case of glorious jade pins from China in his hand. She took them smiling and touched them with finger-tips as smooth.

“Beautiful indeed! What can be withheld from such generosity and such looks? You are the handsomest man ever seen in Kyoto,—Ah, I have watched when you did not know! And so for a change I desire to give also and something more than my worthless self and my poor love—Tell me—what is the deed that would win you the highest promotion and most of the Shogun’s favour?”

He did not hesitate.

“A thing not within your gift, loveliest and most generous. The capture of Asano of Yedo. Both the Emperor and the Shogun would reward the man who caught that tiger with rank and riches and fame. But it cannot be.—Talk of love.—The people would rise to save him.—Talk of love.”

“I will first talk of hate. This man has insulted me,” she said. “Now listen. Can you keep my name secret if I tell you where he lies in wait between this and Yedo to ambush the Daimyo of Kagoshima as he comes down to Kyushu? For the first time in his life he has forgotten the sword of Ako!”

For a moment the man forgot love. He knelt before her, bowing his head to the earth as though she were a divinity, golden upon the high altar. Then, after an oath of truth she stooped her head over him and told him all. For an hour he crouched and heard.

“And now go in joy,” she said, rising, “and give these pins to your women for it is yourself I desire and not your riches. But in return for what I have given I ask this only. That I shall have due notice of when he arrives in Kyoto and that you will never let my name pass your lips.”

He promised, thrilling with hope and when he was gone she sent for Itaro and flung herself into his arms.

“Love me as you have never yet loved me for the day is short and the night comes in which none may love and the bridegroom forgets the bride. Great things are upon us. Be strong.”

A month later came the news that they had caged the Wild Hawk in the hills and that on a certain day Asano bound and wounded would be dragged into Kyoto. To say the streets were crowded that day is to say little for it seemed that every soul who dwelt in the city or the countryside had collected to see the greatest of swordsmen and freebooter enter in defeat. But his guards were many and they had him safe.

Since he was wounded they brought him in an ox-cart with guards about him and a broken sword beside him. As he passed along the Street of Flowers he raised himself on his elbow and looked up at the Little Dragon’s window, not far above him. She leaned out her head haloed with gold and jade pins, beautiful as the day. But it was not of beauty he thought. His lips shaped two words:

“My sword?”

She smiled and bowed:

“Your sword is here, my lord. The sword of the Asano. I will send it to you to-day. A sure friend when death is at hand.”

He bowed his head. Yes, the day was upon him when the sword that had dealt death to so many was ready for its master, and hidden under his cold mask of reserve was the certainty that it was not chance it had not been with him in that last desperate fight against great odds in the hills of Kansai. He looked up no more. But his heart owned the justice of fate.

Next day she sent for Itaro.

“Love of my heart, I have saved you from his sword and nothing less would have done it. But he is a mighty swordsman and he may yet break loose upon us. Now, do this. Take this sword of his which I have wrapped up honourably and take it to him with my mirror and this letter from me. The sword of Ako knows its business. No—do not read the letter. It is between him and me. A last farewell.”

That night as Asano sat alone, strongly guarded, the sword was brought him and a letter. But he took the sword first and it seemed to him that it stirred and writhed like the Little Dragon herself as he drew it slim and beautiful from its sheath and it caught the lamplight that glittered down the blade. A terrible temptation assailed him with the touch of it—to fall upon the men who stood looking at him with bronzed hard faces and to kill where he could and die fighting like the heroes of the great days. Impossible. He laid the sword across his knees and opened her letter, wondering that she should send her mirror.

Reading this he tore the paper into small pieces and swallowed it, then laid the mirror beside the sword. But again he owned her justice. It was Karma. Who shall escape the Law? He had sworn himself to her for three lives. He had failed.

The hearing of his crimes was long and terrible and if any had pity it was impossible to save him, but none even dreamed of such a thing. Still, because of his courage and generosity to the poor, public feeling ran high in his favour and instead of a vulgar death he was granted the self-inflicted death known in Japan as seppuku but in the West as hara-kiri. He accepted this grace with such stern joy that a samurai of distinction seeing it offered himself as second and this also Asano accepted joyfully for it completed all the rites of honourable departure.

It was fixed for the next day and he sat alone musing on the strange mystery that had enclosed his life, the mystery from which he had come and to which he must return. Would death unveil the face of life or must he toil through many lives to read his own riddle? For still the blow on his head at the sinister Temple (or some deeper cause) had buried the memory of his birth as it seemed for ever.

When they led him next morning to the hall and to those appointed to witness his end, his thoughts were on these things and not on the terrors of his departure. To him they scarcely seemed terrors. Tradition and example had alike prepared him and till the actual moment came he could put it aside. He looked with composure at the mats prepared and covered with red cloth upon which he would sit, at the white screen behind which his body would be laid, at the soldier-second saluting him with a stiff punctilio which he courteously returned. He knew exactly why the dagger wrapped ceremoniously in papers and laid on a lacquer stand was prepared and how he should use it, and what the second concealed behind him,—a proved sword.

In the midst of the officials he took his seat upon the mats. The second immediately stepped forward bowing profoundly:

“Sir, I am Hidetaro Yuki and I have the honour to ask if you have any last commands to lay upon me, your second?”

Asano bowed to his knees.

“Sir, I accept and thank you for your honourable and courteous attention. I ask that the sword used by you may be my own—the sword of Ako—and that you will accept it afterwards as the gift of a grateful heart.”

This was immediately granted, for in the ceremony of hara-kiri the seconds much preferred to use the sword of the victim that no blame might attach to their own in case of any want of skill or failure. Therefore the sword of Ako was brought and Hidetaro Yuki courteously concealed it behind him as he had done the first.

All was now ready and bowing around Asano bade all an honourable farewell, then slipped his garment down below the waist and tucked his long sleeves tightly under his knees that in death he might fall face forward and not backward—a thing disgraceful to a samurai. For the last time he lifted the mirror and looked into its depths, empty of the face he remembered, then, for the last time also, turned to his second.

“I beg that your honourable condescension will return this mirror to its owner the Little Dragon of Kyoto with this message. ‘We are pledged for three lives and we shall meet again.’ Let her not doubt this.—And show me my sword once more. Why hide it from the man who loves it?”

They gave it to his hand and for a moment he laid his cheek upon it and returned it to his second with a salute.

Then:

“Be ready!”

Asano took the dagger, looked at it from point to tip and with a fierce sudden blow drove it into his abdomen. He drew it sharp and deep to the right side and made a slanting upward cut. Hidetaro Yuki’s eyes had been fixed on him. He sprang to his feet and poised the sword of Ako. He swung it. A terrible flash lightened as it swept downward. The body fell forward. The head rolled upon the ground.

.     .     .     .     .     .

Sunbeams were still tangled in the drowsy pines of Takayama and the heavy silence of the summer afternoon weighed upon it deepened by the bubble of a stream. Lying in fern, his head on his knapsack Riador turned sharply in his sleep and woke. He had dreamed of pain—searching agonising pain—but no,—when he woke there was nothing. But he was still dull with sleep and disinclined for anything but rest and remembrance—if he could remember!—of a something of strange power and drama in his sleep. Vanishing presences, words, thoughts, feelings, all very alien to his knowledge but yet coming and going in him like a part of himself. A long, long tangled web of people and things woven into what seemed an endless sleep. But he could recall nothing clearly as yet.

Presently he sat up and looked at his watch. He had slept no more than twenty minutes. Somehow that intensified the strangeness and, let us say, horror of the experience. He had lived through a life-time—but where—how? In some strange world he could not now remember, and a sunbeam flickering on his eyes had recalled him to this and left him lost between both. But it did not dissolve after the manner of dreams. It persisted and cleared, like solid land emerging from mist to homing ships.

Gradually as he sat, hugging his knees and brooding, the thing began to take shape and coherence. Not at first—but at last it began to draw together as if with returning memory of the life of a living man who was not himself—yet was,—of his own life grown to be a story and yet more than a story, a tale to shape his present doings in some intimate way of which he had no explanation to give.

He hesitated whether to go home and consider it, or forward, and rose at last slowly and heavily and began the climb, trying to capture his composure. But as he went the way was as familiar as a path trodden from childhood and that certainty invaded him like fear, and when he reached the Temple of the Slanting Stars he knew it and trembled—recalling every evil memory lying behind the hospitable welcome of the four lonely monks who lived there in Buddhist solitude.

They took him to the very guest-room where he—but was it he?—had slept so long ago and with every step memory grew on him in stern verity. He saw it with horror that he could not control.

“May I ask for another room?” he said. “It gives me a kind of feeling I can’t describe. Will you think me foolish if I say I should get no sleep here?”

They looked at each other—the two with him—and were silent. Then the elder spoke.

“You are not the first, sir, who has said that. There are dreams, they say——”

Dreams?—The very word turned him cold. A dream, but one that had left him a wanderer on the shores of what might be no better than a dream itself. What is true and what is false and where is the line of division, he asked himself, and found no answer. Words he had read—Buddhist words—haunted him:

Ah, they knew that truth in this strange country! They knew that life is not a beginning and end. It is a chain of many links, and memory may suddenly and terribly awake and light on any one of the many. Had that been in his own case and why—why? He remembered his University days and words of Plato’s which he had passed so lightly by:

And he remembered!

They led the way to another room,—this also looking on the garden and almost opposite the first. He saw her running—running—with the sword in her hand. Could these men see it too?

“Have you ever heard any of the dreams they dream in that room?” he asked, the words dragged from his lips in spite of himself, for to speak of the thing seemed to give it a dreadful reality. Again they looked at one another. Again the elder answered, but with hesitation:

“Death and violence and the terrible sword of Ako.”

“What is the sword of Ako?”

“A sword famous from its maker’s reputation and the men who have used it. A terrible sword—it is said it knows its owner and meets him in successive lives. It is an old story—nearly forgotten now.”

From the room where he stood he could see the vast chamber he knew rising into the dark roof where the kettle still hung over the smoking fire. There he had sat and eaten—with another. But where was she?

“The kitchen,” they said and shut the sliding screens. From his own he looked at the room they had just left—the room of dreams where, for all he knew, might still lie (for seeing eyes) those dead memories taking horrible shape in broken flesh and blood. He remembered the cloud of blue-flies—her careless glance. His own. Who can tell how far the real world may impinge on the transient one of daily life when in the night-time a man sets his fancy free? He sat lost in troubled thought.

After supper when he and the elder monk sat alone looking out upon the sinister garden, something in the pale spiritual face beside him encouraged Riador to ask a question touching on the phantoms haunting his mind:

“I seem to have heard some story of bandits haunting this temple in the time of the Shoguns. Is there any truth in it, reverend sir?”

The monk answered tranquilly:

“Indeed, yes. For about twenty years it was in the hands of a fearful band of robbers who descended from Takayama to plunder and murder. They had no mercy on travellers who came this way thinking it was still in the hands of the monks. Here they murdered a young Asano of the great Asano clan. It was here that the famous samurai Shuzen Asano killed four of them and rescued a beautiful girl of the Minami family who afterwards became one of the most famous courtesans of Yedo and Kyoto.”

Riador’s face was set like a mask, but a cold tremor ran through him none the less.

“The usual love affair, I suppose?”

“Not the usual. She betrayed and ruined him. It was known she held some secret of his which kept him in fear. But what it was is not known. And indeed it matters little. Both now are reborn in this life and facing the struggle of a new existence. It is all but certain that no memory of the past haunts either and that many lives will pass before they remember and understand. Yet that past shapes their every thought and action! Strange thought! But I talk to one who does not share our belief in reincarnation.”

“That is not so. I share it,” Riador said briefly and relapsed into dream. Presently he said, as though thinking aloud:

“And by reason of that past a man must now look through an opened door and live with its phantoms! Is it justice?”

The older monk looked him steadily in the face.

“It is justice for it is law. What a man has thought is a reality combining again and again until he has learnt the Law in successive lives and becomes one with it.”

“It is a terrible belief,” said Riador and was silent.

“It is a belief that will influence the West as surely and greatly as it has done the East, for all your science leads to it,” answered the monk. “We rejoice in certainties as far above anything known in the West as the moon is above the troubled sea. The West in spite of all its philosophies wanders like a child in the dark without this knowledge. But it can be dangerous to those who have not learnt its meanings.”

There was a long silence. The moon lamped above the trees and cast black shadows into the haunted garden. Suddenly, and on an impulse he could no more resist than stop his heart-beat, Riador spoke:

“Sir, I need counsel from one who understands these matters. May I open my mind to you?”

The monk bowed and folded his thin hands upon his knee. A listener carved in marble could not have been colder and more silent, and yet Riador was not unconscious of sympathy and interest in the vibrations that passed between them. When all was told the monk spoke:

“Sir, this is a story I would willingly not have heard, for where the Eastern insight breaks in upon the West it brings often pain and danger in which advice helps little. You say you knew nothing of this story and that you are now the possessor of the sword of Ako. Taking these things into account I cannot for one moment disbelieve that for you the door has been opened and you have seen your former life as in a glass reflected darkly. You ask me if I can tell you anything of your origin in that life when you were Shuzen Asano, since neither in your vision nor now can you remember anything of your Japanese life that preceded climbing this mountain. I can tell you nothing certain but there was a rumour, believed by many people, that you were the outcast child of a Japanese mother at Nagasaki by a Portuguese father, and that you never knew your birth. More I cannot tell, but may it not be that the blow on the head received from the murderers in this temple broke the memory of your youth and also that your European ancestry determined your birth as a European in this life? We believe that the call of race is strong.”

Riador paled a little as he heard. The recital was hateful to him—he who had taken pride in his birth and race! He said coldly:

“I am not likely to believe that story. Probably the whole thing is imagination from beginning to end. But the thing interests me as a psychic curiosity and I shall make it my business to hunt down all the evidence. I don’t mean to let it drop.”

The monk rose.

“Sir, I strongly recommend you to follow it no further. These things are dangerous in the extreme for those unprepared and untaught. There is nothing now to be certainly known about Shuzen Asano. Let the past sleep, and live in a worthy present. But if I may say so—Beware when love meets you. These attachments recur in successive lives—and sometimes terribly. Beware of any woman connected with this past.”

“One question more. Is anything known of the end of the woman who betrayed Asano?”

“Certainly. She was stabbed to death by one of his retainers soon after his death. Once more I counsel you to let it rest. So sure as I myself live that woman waits for you.”

Again Riador shook his head.

What remains of the story can be briefly told. I heard it from his friend Kingscote. He spoke of what his own eyes had seen, and Riador’s letters confirmed it as I read them.

When again Riador was at home the story grew and grew upon him and there were moments when the two lives tangled so far that he was not certain which was actual and which memory. There were some who thought his mental powers were overshadowed but Kingscote never believed this. Riador devoted himself to books on the subject of rebirth, and there he would have stood absolutely convinced even without his own terrible experiences, for terrible it was. It came to that point that at night he always lived in the past, miserably seeking to find his own origin and in the daytime he haunted every spot where he was likely to gain the slightest clue to it and never found one. The past dwarfed the present and he could not struggle free of its coils. Kingscote, who saw his danger, begged him to return to his own country and shake off the nightmare, for it was no less, in surroundings new and opposed in their very nature to this sinister influence which seemed to float from every association in the land of his past and present. At last he agreed, saying:

“I will go but I shall come back. I can’t hold myself away. I have more than myself to escape. In my heart of hearts I know that the woman and I must meet again and fulfil our destiny from life to life.”

He went and in a year returned, drawn more fanatically than ever into the mesh of memory. Kingscote met him and took him to live with him for a time, but could do nothing. The seed had towered now into a tree that darkened his life.

One day in a village by the sea Riador found at an inn an old colour-print of the Little Dragon, one of great beauty and value. Not an original, it purported to be taken from a portrait done in the time of her splendour in Yedo, and its loveliness confirmed every story. But the effect on Riador was terrible. He brought it to his friend Kingscote:

“It is she herself—as I see her night and day. Look at it and you’ll understand my madness and ruin.”

What could Kingscote say? The strangeness beat upon his own heart like the tolling of desolate waves. Here were grace and beauty immortal and long, long dead. Here was the living man who remembered them and in whose eyes the old flame was rekindling. What is death? What is life? A wind of the Outer Spaces blew upon him.

“Burn the thing and go no more near that place,” he said snatching at it. “You’re bringing yourself to ruin with this madness!”

He tore it across and across and threw the bits at Riador’s feet. One moment he stared at them and then went out shutting the door carefully behind him.

Straight back to the inn he went.

“Have you another of those prints of the Little Dragon? Look here! Can you find me one in the length and breadth of Japan? I’ll pay you or anyone else double and treble the value if you can find it or induce anyone to sell.”

The man laughed;

“They say that in the old days men went mad even for her picture! Maybe it’s the same still. I’ll do my best, sir. You may rely on that, but I never saw another. Still, I’ll tell you something. That print belonged to a young girl at a shop a mile away and she brought it to me to sell. She has an old mirror that belonged to the Little Dragon, with the crest of the Minami on it—as fine a mirror as ever I saw. Well, if you take an interest in the Little Dragon you should buy that mirror for it was hers as sure as I stand here. And, still more, you should see the girl herself. A beauty of beauties and the very image of your picture. I never saw such a thing. And likely enough she will go the same way—the best way for a lovely girl that hasn’t a sen to rattle against another. If you care to see her—just to see what your picture was like alive, come on Monday evening and you shall see!”

He looked with sensuous significance at Riador, smiling. Riador walked out.

He came back and told Kingscote what had happened, quietly but with a flushed hidden look upon him that the other did not like. He refused to discuss it any more. Riador went to his room.

Two days later came a little timid letter written in Japanese through which the delicate characters, written on paper designed with what looked like the ghosts of flowers, meandered. No English can render the grace and humility of its submission, for reading it you might image a black head resting almost in prostration on delicate hands set in the dust.

Riador laid this before Kingscote. He pointed to the signature “Imamura Tsuyu”—the first and second names reversed as always in Japan.

“Her name was Tsuru long ago. It’s like enough!” he said with those strangely shining eyes. Kingscote read and pushed it contemptuously away.

“Sheer madness! I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of girls are called Tsuyu in Japan! It’s the merest fakealoo—I believe half the people round here know of your insanity about Asano. She wants to make her market. Who gives away valuable mirrors belonging to famous people? We all know that sort of present in Japan—when you take it and give double in return. For God’s sake give the whole thing the kiss-off, or you’ll get mixed up with some gang of racketeers and rue the day.”

Riador shook his head doggedly:

“Not that—not that. She wants to see me. What does the mirror matter? She wants—Oh, my God, these stories go on and on for ever and ever! Will they never stop?”

Kingscote took him by the shoulder and shook him—literally shook him.

“You big fool—Can’t you drop this cursed possession? The girl wants to market either herself or her mirror and you act as if an everyday bit of business like that proves some wild theory of pre-existence. I myself—every fellow that knows the Orient—has been up against that kind of thing. And remember the priest warned you!”

He blustered for Riador’s sake for, looking at his face white and sunken with nerves and pain, he pitied him with all his heart and soul. He would not admit a ghost of truth or reason in this madness yet knew inwardly that coincidence after coincidence was breaking down his own resistance into a weird engrossing wonder and expectation to see how the thing would end. Folly, you might—must—call it, when judged by the light of everyday belief, and yet——! Certainly Riador was getting badly on his nerves. He said angrily:

“You shouldn’t see the slut—You know what the fellow at the inn said of her. It doesn’t do to get mixed up with this kind of woman. Let her keep her mirror and forget it.”

Forget? thought Riador. Had he invited the reminder that had poisoned his life? He was sitting by the table and his head dropped on his arms with a weariness of abandonment that made Kingscote feel a cruel coarse intermeddler with the delicately poised springs of human suffering. He touched Riador’s nerveless hand in a way that meant much:

“I tell you what! I’ll go to Shimamura and see her for you. I’m armour-plated against Oriental blandishments and I’ll size the lady up and tell you.”

Riador neither agreed nor disagreed. He was groping in a world where even Kingscote could only reach him sometimes and that from far off and faintly.

But he submitted this time and Kingscote went to Shimamura to the address given in the letter. Not promising. It proved to be a shop for the sale of geishas’ head ornaments, gaudy bunches of flowers, spangled pins, and gay twists of coloured crepe for securing the smooth black bows of satin hair. Next door was a dubious tea-house. The whole place was evidently a low-class holiday resort for the town a mile off. Kingscote looked about him with deepened suspicion. They referred him to the tea-house.

Imamura san was not there, they said, eyeing him with curiosity. They did not know when she would come back but they would send a message to the inn where the foreign gentleman had bought the picture of the Little Dragon. She would be there to meet him. There Kingscote betook himself, trying to cling to reality though more and more conscious that he was wading in deep water, detesting his errand and the oily proprietor who received him with servile reverence and a side-glance that betrayed the filth beneath.

In an hour she came—a little creature, milky pale but otherwise with the dusky deliciousness of some tropic night-flower imaginable only in wizard stories of earths and heavens beyond the nearer stars. He had expected the practised cunning of the gold-digger. He saw a girl whose every movement was tenderness and grace, whose little hands were gentlest pleas for pardon as she bowed before him. But how lovely! Black hair, dressed in European fashion in a knot behind, framed a face that no man’s eyes could see unmoved. Great dark eyes with the soft Japanese curve at the inner corner instead of the European acute angle, clouding lashes weighting their slow upward lift, delicately shaped nose, and a sweet mouth most sensitively curved into rosy petals. Not only that—she had charm, as an iris brings its inseparable perfume with it. That filled the room and the rough place became gracious, and obeyed its lady as the moon the sea. Only the narrow-eyed human beast watching in the corner was left to protest the animal that will not be denied, and he spiritualised her presence into sheer beauty. She began unwrapping a cloth which held some precious object and spoke in a little fluttering voice.

“This is the mirror, Augustness. It is truly what is said. One of my ancestors was a Minami and it has always been ours.”

Kingscote, bowing, took it. She was evidently very poor. Her clothes were of the simplest, her little bare feet in dusty sandals. She had walked all the way. The mirror was a beautiful thing shaped and wrought exactly as the man had said. Such as his knowledge was Kingscote believed it to be genuine.

“But what do you want to do with it?” he asked awkwardly.

Her face brightened: her eyes deepened.

“Sir, I wish to give it as a gift to Riador sama. We have heard that in a former birth he was Asano Shuzen, and if so who is there with Minami blood in their veins who would keep it from him? I beg that he will condescend to accept it.”

“But you are poor—Surely——” he began uncomfortably and stopped. Poor she might be but it was pride that flashed in those soft eyes as she answered:

“But not too poor to return what is rightfully another’s. The Little Dragon sent it to Asano sama before his death. Sir, I beg you to take it to him.” She corrected herself and added “To Riador sama,” as an afterthought, and began to fold up the cloth which had carried it and to begin the preliminary bows of departure.

“But—impossible,” Kingscote said. “It is worth much money. Pray take it back. Riador sama could not——”

“Riador sama will not refuse it. It is our desire,” she answered and dropped the cloth into her long kimono sleeve. What could he say? Only one resolution was clear in his mind. Riador must never see that pleading beauty. Who could know what chain of madness might bind him link by link with the girl and end in his fixed belief that she had ruined him once and must again, and so, perhaps, in murder. He wished he had never seen her himself—the delicate sweetness of her face was disturbing even to him. He would remember it always and his own enforced cruelty. He tried to pull himself together to deal the blow.

“I cannot take it to Riador sama. Such a gift he could not accept, and no sensible person believes the story of Asano sama’s rebirth. It is an idle story told by those who have nothing better to think of. But it was a kindly thought, and if I can help you in any way——”

Dark eyes like dewy violets looked up at him with the pathos of tears.

“Sir, I am sorry. I do not take gifts. I thank you humbly.”

She obediently took the cloth from her sleeve and tied her poor rejected gift carefully into it, bowed again and for a last time at the door. He heard a silver “Sayonara” and she was gone. The place darkened and grew stagnant without her. Some women have that quality, he thought, but who would expect to find it here? Had he rejected hope and happiness for Riador or saved him from some appalling psychic danger? He could not tell. But if one believed the priest’s warning he had done right.

The eager questioning! Was she like the picture? There Kingscote honestly could not say—he himself had been beauty-drunk. He had forgotten the picture’s existence. He did not say that, but briefly and with a few swift touches sketched a girl of the lower classes, handsome, very likely unscrupulous in her narrow way, catching at an opening with a foreigner whose weakness she was testing.

“May I be forgiven!” he said inwardly as Riador sighed and dropped listless hands on his knees.

That night, without a word, wrapped with care in softest silk, came the mirror. Riador sat staring at it.

“I remember. I remember,” was all he said, turning it over and over, then staring into it as if for a vanished face. At that sight Kingscote thanked Heaven he had acted on his decision to keep the girl away. For there was danger in the air.

“I’m better. This has done me good—brought me back to reality. I shall sleep soundly,” he said.—And Kingscote winced before the wistful eyes that looked into his.

But in the morning his room was silent. Good sleep—Kingscote might hope.

Possibly the best. He had killed himself with the sword of Ako and the mirror lay beside it smirched with blood.

“He has escaped,” thought Kingscote, doubting his own deed. Still more he doubted when two years later he passed through the Yoshiwara in Tokyo and saw the face that even he remembered with a certain tenderness behind the gilded bars.

But there is no escape. Again and again must the man return until he stands leaning on his sword, a conqueror looking down upon a silent battlefield.

“Out of the unknown darkness we rise a moment into sunlight, look about us, rejoice and suffer, pass on the vibration of our being to other beings and fall back again into darkness. So, a wave rises, catches the light, transmits its motion, and sinks back again into the sea.”

But, to rise again!

When the Yellow Emperor was a young man he was so avid of wisdom that nothing could delay his anxious search for its treasures. He frequented every sage of whom he could hear. And as in the youth of the world sages naturally abounded, much of his time was spent in journeying from one city of the Celestial Empire to another in search of the wisest. The difficulty, however, which beset him was that though all of them agreed in recommending the standard morals as worthy of reverence, none of them could agree as to the reasons why they should be practised, and to a mind of superior intelligence as the Yellow Emperor’s—a mind which inevitably sought to pierce into the causes of things—this could not be satisfactory.

He said to himself in deep meditation—

“If this is so, it may be that there is truly no valid reason whatever for following the accepted codes of propriety. If they were a part of the Framework of Things, surely this would have been so unmistakably indicated that the venerable Pi Lung could not dispute their origin with the no less venerable Pi Li. What then should be my course? May it not be suspected that these sage persons, like the doctors of the body, know nothing whatever of the subject in hand, but with an air of infinite wisdom prescribe what probably will do least mischief.”

Thus musing he took his way (attended by a magnificent retinue) to the city of Pu-Chou where dwelt the sage Yen, a scholar dowered with an intelligence so superior that to protect it from the swift workings of its own keenness he was compelled to pass nearly all his time in sleep. But it was said that in the scanty intervals of waking thought, his speech was so oracular, so soul-shaking that the universal prayer was that sleep might speedily overtake him again.

To him the Yellow Emperor now bent his steps, hoping for some gnomic word which might enlighten all the dark places of perplexity. Yet, the Emperor and truth-seeker as he was, he felt very unfit to present himself before such exalted wisdom.

“For what have I achieved?” meditated the Emperor, as he sat contemplating the large and lucent stars reflected in broken brilliance in the waters of the river by which his pavilions were pitched by the night. “It is true that I have sought to comprehend the causes of things and have struggled to practise virtue—a gymnastic as difficult as standing perpetually on tip-toe. And even the virtues I have achieved were more or less inevitable. I have venerated my parents, and might mention this to the Sleeping Philosopher, but truth compels me to add that their respectability scarcely left me any other choice. To my numerous ladies I have been an indulgent master, but truth qualifies this virtue by explaining that their vagaries and peccadilloes troubled me no more than the scratchings of mice. Is any sane person harsh with the reasonless? I have spent large sums in almsgiving, but if gold is so plentiful as to be valueless—what merit resides in giving? With shame and sorrow I fear I must own that I have followed the line of least resistance,—a disgraceful confession to be made to a sage!”

This became a source of perplexity to the Yellow Emperor and though he took counsel with his chief adviser, the Earl of Exalted Strength, it did not advance matters, because that usually perspicuous person took refuge in the weak subterfuge of a hope that the sage Yen might be asleep on their arrival, and therefore unable to scan the Emperor’s antecedents too narrowly.

It was just at this juncture that news of a lady known as the Model Beauty reached the perplexed monarch.

She was so called because in her face and person all the graces were summed up and presented collectively. She moved like the modulation of a perfect music, with unequalled dignity and sweetness. In the radiance of her eyes were fused the sparkle of running streams, the calm of moonlight, the kindling warmth of sunshine and the transparency of water, so that they seemed in turn the very spirit and essence of each. The jasmine, the lily, were pale in the vain effort to match the living ivory of her complexion; and the rose blushed for shame because its bloom was less delicate and glowing than her lips. Nature herself in all her beauties appeared only to exist that she might illustrate by her comparative shortcomings the perfections of this one fair creature.

It was but natural that as the Yellow Emperor travelled through his dominions specimens of the rarities of various places should be brought to his notice. The silks, the jade carvings, the porcelains, and other productions of the swarming cities were all passed in review, each city protesting its own skill. But, wherever he went, when women were mentioned all voices coincided in declaring that there was no beauty to be compared with the Model Beauty in all the length and breadth of the Empire.

When, disguised as a mere man, he mingled with the throng (a favourite pursuit of his in the quest for information) he heard it asserted everywhere that among the beauties collected for the enjoyment of the Son of Heaven (his own exalted self) there was not one worthy to kiss the foot of the Model Beauty. In a word, no one could pretend to be an amateur of loveliness who had not seen that fairest of fair faces.

The Yellow Emperor was human. Thoughts of the Model Beauty obscured even those which hovered about the sage Yen. It was not only the natural curiosity to see what all praised, nor even the still more natural inclination of sex. These were strong, yet might have been combated but for the settled conviction that only the Emperor could be worthy to possess the most beautiful woman of his Empire.

What! should the Son of Heaven content himself with ladies merely commendable in their attractions while the flower of flowers bloomed in the clasp of a lesser lover?

For the painful truth must now be stated, namely, that the Model Beauty was already the property of another. She was the wife of the Prince of Chin and was said to be an example to her sex in the obedience with which she honoured her husband.

The Yellow Emperor wrestled manfully with the temptation to behold this lovely lady. His conscience pointed out to him how weak, how flagitious would be his conduct if he erred while actually on his way to the seat of Wisdom. With what air could he present himself before the sage if he had broken an elementary rule of morality, no doubtful case on which a dispute might be based to save the face of a transgressor, but one of the solid square-hewn fundamentals whereon society rests secure.

He had with him the celebrated book—wherein he inscribed his thoughts and observations. Thus meditating, he drew it to him and wrote:

“My fault is want of moderation. Where a hundred wives should have contented a frugal spirit I have a thousand. Whereas I have but one neck I have four hundred pearl necklaces to adorn it. Where a knowledge of the Precepts contents other men, I must needs be seeking into the roots whence the Precepts spring. Let me now by refusing to see the Model Beauty evade temptation and present this evasion as my offering at the feet of Yen.”

Much satisfied with this resolve, he fell asleep and the hun or spirit leaving the body for a time he dreamed.

He was walking in the gardens of his Palace, and as he wandered through the pavilions he became aware of a lady who sat by the side of a marble basin where the goldfish swam through the forests of leaves and flowers. She appeared to be watching them intently, her brows knitted in thought, and as he looked he knew that he had never beheld true beauty before. Her loveliness not only satisfied all visions of perfections but set a new and higher standard whereby perfection might be measured. And he dreamed that he said aloud:

“Here is a temptation impossible to be resisted. Such beauty is imperial in its nature, and as the greatest pearls, the choicest sables, porcelains and jade carvings are presented before the Dragon Throne, so also should be this immaculate loveliness. There is a right and wrong in all things, and in arrogating it to himself the Prince of Chin commits a crime in which I will not be an accomplice.”

Therefore, when he returned to his body and awaked, he sent instantly to the Prince of Chin, commanding the attendance of his wife, the Model Beauty.

Within two days’ time she was presented before the Yellow Emperor, and when he beheld her, she exceeded his dream by as much as she excelled her own picture, and henceforward she journeyed with him and he received a great content.

Yet, as he neared the city of Pu-Chou, misgivings seized him for reports came thicker and faster of the marvellous wisdom and introspection of Yen. It was credibly told that those who stood before him were irresistibly impelled to confession even though he asked no questions, and that to the unworthy he gave answers (if he answered at all) so misleading though to all appearance so consummately wise, that their lives henceforward were as a stream taught to flow in a new channel ending in the marches of destruction. To the worthy, his replies were as if inspired by Heaven for their instruction. For many days the Yellow Emperor revolved these alarming considerations in trepidation of spirit. He could not reconcile his late action with the dictates of propriety, and to present himself thus blemished before the closed eyes of wisdom was a risk he dared not incur. Finally rousing himself to action he returned the Model Beauty to her husband with rich and magnificent gifts as a peace offering, and then continued his way, glad of heart and serene of soul in this intrepid exercise of wisdom.

The day was fair and promising when he entered the city of Pu-Chou and was received with acclamation by his loyal subjects. They applauded the more because rumour had brought the news of the Emperor’s sublime generosity in the return of the Model Beauty and it was universally conceded that in their Ruler the Superior Man and the August Emperor were happily combined as an illustrious example to all.

After he had refreshed himself at the Municipal Palace, a deputation of sages only less distinguished than Yen prepared to conduct him to that abode of wisdom, and clothing himself in a dark robe and a yellow cap unadorned with jewels he followed these worthy persons with a gait of marked humility.

The residence of Yen stood in a small but exquisitely designed garden representing the mountain of Pu-Shan and the adjacent country. A small rivulet took the place of the mighty Pei Ho, a marble basin imaged the lake Po Yang with its many islands, a few diminutive trees the hoary forests, and a small eminence the mountain. Yet so exquisitely were the perspective and proportions considered that this little world appeared a great one, and the soul fluttered its wings in the vastness of space and of the most majestic works of nature.

But it was impossible for the Emperor to stop and admire, for in a natural cleft of rocks, his head thrown back and reclining on a cushion of moss sat a venerable man wrapt in deep slumber, seeming himself a part of the ancient landscape, so enormous was his age; the face covered with a network of wrinkles which almost obliterated the eyes, his hands bird-like in their leanness and length of nails, his features composed into a meaningless immobility, over which a thought occasionally appeared to flit like the shadow of a cloud over Pu-Shan.

The Emperor instinctively softened his footsteps but was immediately assured that a roll of drums had been tried at either ear of the sleeper and had had no effect whatever in rousing him.

“He sleeps,” said the Yellow Emperor faintly, “I will retire and await a more convenient moment.”

“Not so, O Son of Heaven!” said the eldest of his escort. “You might possibly wait a year or more and yet in vain. The custom is to state the qualification of the suppliant and to put a question, and though the majestic spirit of Yen be wandering in inaccessible heights the faint echo reaches him and he replies when the speaker is worthy.”

All stood expectant while the Emperor, not dissatisfied with so venerable an audience took his stand before the sleeping sage. He began thus:

“O myriad-minded Man of sublime insight, I, the unworthy Ruler of the Yellow Empire, present myself in the hope of some high-minded utterance which shall be my guide through the cares and distractions of life.”

He paused, and seeing no sign of hearing, continued:

“All my life I have sought this clear word of enlightenment. And if to conquer temptation qualify me to receive it, let me lay before your Venerability the fact that a week since I restored the loveliest woman of the world to the arms of her husband, leaving my own empty.”

An expression of admiration brightened every countenance at this statement, but no motion of life appeared on the awful face of the sage. He slept immovably.

For two hours the Yellow Emperor waited in all humility and no change took place.

Then a faint ripple of the muscles of speech was observed and all fell on their knees to await the oracle. It came low and distinct.

“Your Majesty has done well in following the line of least resistance. The only temptations are those we succumb to.”

And having thus replied the sage relapsed into slumber.

The Yellow Emperor sprang to his feet, enlightened, enfranchised, while the other hearers remained on their knees in petrified bewilderment.

“Wisdom, sublime and unapproachable,” he cried aloud. “What I have sought for is found. My wanderings are ended. My path in life is made straight and unerring before footsteps no longer faltering.”

With the liberality of an Emperor he left gifts for the family of the August Sleeper, and so returned rejoicing to his capital city there to exalt the praises of Yen, and to recall the Model Beauty.

The wise men of Pu-Chou were however entirely unable to solve the riddle.

But it is possible to enlighten the present age because the Yellow Emperor’s generosity of disposition forbade his keeping this treasure of philosophy for his sole use, and he therefore entered his reflections upon it in the Book referred to. But since they were set forth in the terms of an intellectual exercise of the deepest and profoundest and surrounded with speculations on the Yin and Yang and that mysterious Feminine which is the root of all things and the despair of poet and philosopher, I will endeavour to translate them into modern terms which alas, cannot equal his own inspired language. Also I will take into consideration the opinions and declarations of our own sages on the subject of temptation, none of them so far as I know having gone quite as far into the subject as the sage Yen.

His pronouncement that the only temptations are those we succumb to strikes at the very root of human pride. If we are proud of one power in ourselves it is our resistance to temptation. On this point our moralists have said their finest things to a universally responsive audience. Emerson has a peculiarly fine glorification of the man who resists temptation. He ends with the assertion that it was believed by the North American Indians that the strength of a conquered warrior passed into the victor, and so also with a resisted temptation, the strength passing into the resister and he goes the stronger for it to his life’s end. To Yen and the Emperor this was a fallacy pure and simple.

They held we gain no additional strength from resisting a temptation for we never resist one.

The process is as follows:

The desire, wrong or inexpedient, at once puts nature on the alert, whips it into observation of itself and its desire, and then begins the process which we call temptation and resistance. They pointed out it is really a process of discrimination. St. Augustine evidently agrees with them, and he is a close observer of the human heart. He says—“We needs must follow what most delights us.”—and as a matter of fact we always do what we really like best.

Therefore no credit is due for a resisted temptation. The struggle was but the difficulty of judging what really would give us most satisfaction. It was in fact an agony of indecision, nothing more. And to the real temptation, the thing we want most, we invariably succumb and cannot do otherwise. The question is complicated by the fact that we have two selves (possibly a hundred, but certainly two) and it is a case of pull devil, pull baker, in a tug of war. We shall be inevitably dragged over the line by the stronger. And temptations vary entirely in different natures and circumstances. You cannot tempt a donkey with a diamond tiara, nor a lady of fashion with a bunch of carrots. And though this is absolutely true we are always forgetting it and taking as the standard of temptation the commandments issued by the moralists. And this is just where the moralists evaporate into hazy platitudes.

The donkey, if it could express its views, would probably be astonished at the duchess’s virtuous strength of mind and stoic fortitude in resisting the bunch of carrots. The duchess considers the donkey trebly a donkey because he sees no charm in a tiara. These indeed are extreme examples, but the truth is the same.

A man desires to run away with his neighbour’s wife—as witness the Yellow Emperor. He weighs the question: there is a mental struggle. He decides not to do it.—The Emperor was an emperor and therefore did.—He goes to Africa and shoots big game instead. Those cognisant of the facts applaud him and talk of a resisted temptation. Those curious in analysis of human nature would say to themselves—“What was it he preferred?”—It might be one of many things,—social peace, domestic peace, an untroubled future, a blameless past, convention, freedom—It might be a hundred things. But he chose inevitably what he really preferred. And that is why women, in their hearts, can never really forgive the moral lover. Their unerring instinct, entirely uncomplicated by reason, tells them there was a preference and this stings them to the quick, while the so-called moral struggle does not for a moment deceive them.

Set a child on the ground and put before it two toys, convincing it that it cannot have both. The mental struggle in that child is exactly what the man undergoes in the case I have cited. Yet when the child chooses the teddy bear instead of the jack-in-the-box you do not talk of the resisted temptation but of the difficulty of choice, knowing that what the child believed he liked best he chose. We really are far too kind to our own weakness. It seems to be forgotten that the word “temptation” applies to good things as well as to those considered objectionable. Just as some people prefer clean hands, so they instinctively prefer a clean conscience, and as little credit is due for the preference. It is the way they were born or brought up or circumstances have reacted on them. If they go in that direction, what does it prove? Simply that the other course was less attractive.

Of course it must be owned that the people whose prepossessions happen to be in the right direction for social purposes are quite the best citizens, the most respectable, and sometimes (but not invariably) the pleasantest. But they really deserve no more gratitude than the man who preferring food and clothing to moralities may pick your pocket to-day as he certainly would not to-morrow if he had what he preferred and the temptation to bask in the approval of his neighbours would then assert itself. So infallible is this rule that you can vary the incidence of many temptations by raising and depressing a man’s income, for in relation to many sins it is a far greater temptation to be considered respectable than to face obloquy, and we act accordingly.

The question of cowardice enters largely into all these matters also. Most of us, many at all events, are kept from transgression by the counter-temptation of fear,—an extremely subtle one. How this works may be seen in the following example.

You detest a man and have an injury to avenge. You weigh the injury you could do him against the possible consequence to yourself, with the two counsellors, doubt and fear. Instead of injuring him you shake hands when you meet at the club and discuss the weather, and those who know of the doing will say “Blessed are the merciful!”—Comfort and safety have been the stronger temptation, and when they are not, when it is the stronger temptation to run amok, you run,—and there is a paragraph in the daily papers.

It is interesting to speculate how preferences of this kind would work if absolute immunity were guaranteed. In the Pepper Chamber of the Yellow Emperor, the Model Beauty herself observed in speaking of another inmate—“If wishing could blast her beauty she would be hideous this moment, and if I decreed it there are those who would serve me faithfully.—But I dare not risk my own and so she goes free and we meet like sisters.”—It was doubtless said when age had come to the Beauty of All Perfections.—She lived and died in the odour of sanctity. Her remark carries a moral. Shall it be called a resisted temptation? Surely a mental analyst would simply say she had succumbed to the greater delights of social esteem and acknowledged virtue?

“IF you do that,” we say to a child, “you shall be punished.” It is therefore a greater temptation to keep the peace with our clumsy and rather brutal elders. And when we do—“Good little girl! You must always resist the temptation to be naughty and then you shall have some chocolate!”

It may be thought that the Philosopher Yen and the Emperor took a cynical view of human nature? Truth is so often called cynicism that she has become quite used to the name and smiles acquiescent. It may be that a certain well-known writer (now with God) was right when he hazarded the opinion “that pleasure may be a safer guide than right or duty, though at the time when The Way of All Flesh was written, that assertion was furiously repelled.” He added, “Right and Duty are much harder to distinguish, and a mistake in either will land in just as sorry a plight.” One would add the rider, however, that pleasure may be the better for a little training in taste.

And the moral?—The Emperor pointed out that the social instincts in youth should be developed even at the risk of suppressing individuality. Most of the yielding to the anti-social aspects is due to an over-enthusiastic estimate of our own importance to ourselves and others, and a too highly developed recognition of what is due to us. The social instincts fight against this kind of perverted individualism themselves, and make the welfare of others an allurement in the resulting security of our own welfare. There are examples of this which cannot be denied. But when the choice, good—or so-called bad—reaches agony point, and the pressure of doubtful choice is anguish, then we all give in. We cannot do otherwise. And nothing short of this is really a temptation at all—it is only a foil for the real desire that is all-conquering.

It is folly to make a religion of our weakness. Let us send this flattering doctrine of resisted temptations to pass into limbo with the theory and practice of rewards and punishments. But let us try to cultivate a taste for things which are socially convenient and smiled upon, and hope to succumb invariably to the temptation of being good citizens and obliging neighbours.

When in the Far East you discuss the qualities of Western and Asiatic women and weigh them one against the other you will not infrequently hear this true story and some courteous Japanese will tell you, smiling enigmatically, that though all Western women have, of course, all the virtues in perfection, he is not sure—will you enlighten him?—that any Western would in any circumstances have played the part of the Japanese girl in this story. Not quite! No doubt something much nobler and more daring, but the grace of perfect humility and submission—! He is certain you will agree. To each nation its own virtues—especially to its women. I read the story differently myself. But here it is.

Clear the way! The Emperor passes. Not in full state, yet it is He—the unapproachable Emperor of Japan, the Sun-descended Divinity made manifest upon earth.

It was spring in Japan—a long dead spring and heavenly sunshine warmed the river Miya through all its shining shallows. The willow-buds had opened their little green stars against the blue, and cherry blossoms massed their divine beauty for the Imperial delight. Gallantly he came followed by his lords and retainers and drew rein before the wonderful trees towering in rose and pearl, behind them a grove of willows and the little path leading to Miya river.

All waited in silent reverence while the Emperor dreamed of spring.

Presently he threw his reins to a prince beside him.

“Wait. I will see the river also.”

He paused under the cherry blossom, parted the willows with his own august hand and went slowly down the little trodden path to the singing water. “He had forgotten his men, the Court,—and all the world was Spring.”

In a deep pool, glimmering with netted sunbeams, screened by hanging willows he saw sunshine slip along the wet marble of perfect limbs—and his heart leaped awake. She stood, hand on a gnarled willow bough and neither heard nor saw. She also dreamed of Spring. But the Emperor beheld the beauty of an unequalled face—the blossom of earth held up for the delight of the gods—and was not he himself a god? Not a beauty in Japan but he owned it. No life that was not his. His, the dark dreaming eyes, the mouth like a peony bud, his. And he was a lad in his first youth, and she a maid in hers. He made an imperious movement and she turned in terror, smooth hair uncoiling and veiling her to the feet in midnight,—a moon in clouds. She knew him instantly—all Japan knew that face—and threw herself on her knees before him.

He stood a moment amazed at the beauty that breathed from her, then stooping raised her and put his arms about the little body, clasping her close. She felt the Emperor’s heart beat hard against her bosom. Wonder and joy stunned her into silence as surely as death himself. The breeze blew a strand of black hair across his wrists. He too was captured. Youth, beauty and power, at one in the flushed world of Spring.

How long they remained clasped in that ardour none knows—least of all themselves. Time touched lips with eternity.

A horse neighed from the distant road. A call sounded. They started apart. Trampling memories of the world rushed into their solitude. Clutching her to him again the lad said passionately:

“Wait. I will send for you to the palace. Keep yourself apart. Let no man dare to woo you. You are mine, mine, for ever and ever. I shall send. I swear it.”

“For ever and ever!” she murmured, white with joy.

“Your name?”

“Akaiko. But my father is no one—one of the Hiketa Guild. I am not worthy——”

“You are mine and when that is said you are higher than the stars. You are mine and I command you to be the joy and delight of my people. Have I not said it? Remember.”

Once more he clasped her fiercely to his heart. Loud and shrill the horse called to his master. Slowly and reluctantly the arms fell apart and the beautiful lad went slowly away. He turned—she heard his voice—“Be ready. Obey!”

The Emperor parted the willows and was gone.

The procession took its way to the city.

Radiant, she knotted up her hair and flung her clothes on with trembling hands. Radiant, she rushed to the little house beyond the willow groves to tell her marvel. Her mother stood trembling from head to foot to hear.

“No—no. It cannot be. The Emperor? You dreamed it. The sun beat on your head. A god might as well—No!”

They sent for her father. Assured of the truth he looked at his daughter with awe:

“Scarcely dare we look upon his chosen! Send for rich foods and perfumes. He has augustly said—‘Keep yourself apart!’ It is an Imperial command. We must keep her apart even from ourselves.”

It was done. Stunned with change she must now accept daily homage from all. To wealthy people the observances and luxuries would have seemed poor enough but to Akaiko they were overwhelming and a foretaste of heaven.

She was set apart even from her parents. How could it be otherwise when they prostrated themselves before her? No longer must her girl friends share her pleasures and she theirs. She sat, perfumed and painted in proudly woven silk. She ate luxurious food which no others touched. The girls came to look, knowing the wonder that had happened, and slipped away in awe. The young men who had stared at her with amorous eyes passed looking on the ground. They knew the Imperial command. She had given herself for ever and was accepted. Prostrating herself every day towards the Palace she waited joyfully.

Months went by. No word from the Emperor. Matters of State, no doubt. She trembled not with doubt but religious awe to think of such a lover. A year. Then, change. Her parents murmured because the silken kimono soiled and there was no money to replace it. They grew tired of prostrations and of cooking the luxurious foods, tired of observances that brought nothing solid and began now to bring the mockery of the neighbours.

Girls and lads jeered.

“She and her pride! And the Palace full of lovely ladies! She is not fit to be their waiting-maid. She dreamt it all or made it up that her parents might pamper her. But even they see through it now!”

Two years passed. Her mother died. No message had come and to all but herself the thing had become a foolish dream best forgotten and flung aside in the flat daylight of common sense. With perfect duty and serenity she stepped down from her poor splendours to live the life of toil seasoned with bitter mockery. She cooked and swept and washed. Could the Chosen of the Emperor do less? If her August Lover ruled his people must not she serve them? And her service spread wide. Her door stood open to the poor. The delicate white hands the Emperor had clasped must nurse the sick and gather neglected children to her breast. No toil must weary them. No taunts repel them. And all this was done in the name of the Emperor. The Emperor and the Divine Buddha would understand this preparation for the great duties to which they had called her. And every day she looked steadfastly to the Palace expecting the call and every night lay down in wearied peace to await the next day’s hope.

Thus the years went by and dimmed her beauty. Indeed all was dimming about her but her truth and valour. No longer did men fear to gaze at her. Men had asked her in marriage. Some were wealthy, some poor, but all considered themselves generous in offering to take a girl who had dreamed so foolish a dream. But she refused all kindly, giving no reason.

The years went by more swiftly. Her father died. Now, following the Emperor’s command as she read it, she could give her service more entirely to those who had no other helper. No lovers came her way any more. That day was done. Girls unborn when she was young had bloomed into brief beauty and faded. She saw their children ageing and felt incredibly old and wise and happy. How differently life had fallen out from her expectation, yet what glory, what joy had been hers! The Chosen of the Emperor! She smiled alone and clasped her hands in thinking of it.

Her sixtieth birthday came and still no message from the Palace, and now she felt the time had come to lay at the August Feet her gratitude for the charge committed to her. She had no thought of his misunderstanding. With perfect trust she set out—a beautiful old woman with wrinkles like channels for smiles and tears shed for the griefs of others. A great lady indeed!

Reaching the Palace, undaunted by its splendours, she spoke to the guard, desiring them to tell his Sacred Majesty that Akaiko of the Hiketa Guild implored the honour of the sight of his August Face. The answer returned at once.

“His Imperial Majesty does not recall that name. Will Madame state her business?”

How could she? She stood in patient silence, considering. Then, raised her head with new hope.

“Tell the August One my business concerns a river, a girl, and a day in spring.”

She waited. A silent messenger returned to conduct her to the Presence. There she prostrated herself, seeing nothing.

A gentle hand raised her.

“Old woman, I do not understand, but who can appeal in vain in the names of love and spring? What is your business with me?”

What, indeed? She looked at him and saw that there too the years had been at work. The golden beauty was hammered iron, the eyes stern under black brows—a face of pride and locked calm. So they met and he remembered nothing. His life also, she was certain, had been passed in work for his people, high and far beyond her understanding. She clasped her hands in awe and bowed again to his feet. Then, she spoke.

“Forty-four years ago I was a girl of sixteen bathing in Miya river. The Emperor came——”

In a flash he remembered. The blue river flowed into the blue horizon. Cherry blossoms blushed and bloomed. Youth looked in immortal upon the dust of death. Tears started in the Emperor’s eyes. In horror he cried:

“You waited?”

“I waited.”

“And I forgot.”

All the immeasurable sacrifice rushed upon him. Life and love wasted. Beauty broken, love despised and rejected. What had he done?

“Never can I forgive myself. What will you accept? In mercy speak!”

She answered:

“My life has been one of great joy and peace. Called to the august duties by my Emperor I have done little indeed, but yet what I could. The poor have blessed his name. The last prayer of the dying has been for him. Therefore I have come to lay my gratitude before him. What could I have been otherwise? A nameless girl blossoming and fading and in vain. But I have been the Chosen of the Emperor.”

Then in silence the Emperor reviewed his own life—the foolish pleasures, the cruel forgetfulness, the record of his royal duties so little realised. And the slow tears brimmed and rolled down his face unchecked. At last he spoke.

“Choose what you will. All I have is yours.”

She answered:

“If this humble one may ask I choose one word written by the Imperial hand that may lie in my bosom and go up with me in flame when I die.”

He took his writing-brush and wrote this poem.

Radiant with joy she laid it in her bosom, radiant she returned to her home. But the Emperor sat lonely, lost in vain remorse.

When last that story was quoted to me by an imperturbable Japanese in the tone that emphasizes the gulf between East and West I answered:

“Is it only in Asia women choose to be conquerors rather than conquered, givers rather than takers, enduring rather than weaklings? This is no tale of Oriental submission of women! It is a sword forged and tempered in white-hot flame. To the faithless, remorse or more miserable forgetfulness. To the faithful, victory and peace. The bright wind of strength blows East and West and is the breath of our women and of yours alike.”

I have read in some book that the truest stories are generally the least believed. It is certainly so, and the reason is this. In writing fiction we may invent and attribute motives to give the plausible air the world demands and so command belief, but in writing truth we are face to face with deeps which it may need almost god-like comprehension to sound, and we flutter about on the surface and make them incredible by our own miscomprehension. Therefore I will tell this true story as simply as I can so that each may read into it their own view of the eternal things of life. It will bear many readings.

There is a mountain in Japan where every grain of dust is holy, every tree waves to a spiritual rhythm, every flower is a song of praise. It was singled out about eleven hundred years ago by the greatest of Japanese—a saint possessed of mighty supernormal powers, supreme in genius as painter, sculptor, organiser, statesman, and inventor of the simplification of Chinese characters which has enabled Japan to take her place as a progressive nation in education and otherwise while China remains mummified in the binding fetters of the past. But Kobo Daishi did more. In choosing this mountain and its solemn solitudes of pines and crags and rivers for the foundation of his many temples and monasteries he made a thing of such divine beauty that one can say a few may be as beautiful but none surpass it. Of all parts of it the sleeping place of the dead is the most beautiful, and in a temple at the further end of its miles of giant trees and running streams stands the little building in which the Saint—not dead, but in spiritual ecstasy—waits for the coming of the triumphant Buddha.

Naturally this burial place is supremely holy and here many priests come to meditate, especially when the moon drops her mystic lights and shadows upon the troubled earth. Centuries ago a young priest sat there beneath a giant cedar trying to attune his own soul to the peace about him, and in vain. The world he had left tracked him like a beast of prey up the wild mountain ways and sprang at his throat even in the supreme place of self-abandonment. His face, pale as ivory, glimmered in the shadow like a drowned man’s on a wave and more than one monk as he passed envied what they took to be the perfect calm of contemplation.

Now, hurrying towards him, came another priest, older, sterner, with a dying fire in his eyes and hands knotted in each other as if fearful of opportunity to follow a wicked will, and in his driven speed he saw the first, sitting with folded hands as the Buddha sits in the mountain temples. The first monk called to him from where he sat:

“Brother, you walk like one blown on a wind of fear. The sleepers about us must turn in their quiet with such feet hurrying past. The air from you blows cold. Your face strikes chill into my blood. If you have a grief turn and confess it before Him who waits the rising day.”

The other answered bitterly:

“And why do you stop me? Have you attained the Peace? I too can read faces and I know you are a man of this world—not of heaven. Let me pass.”

The younger started to his feet with clenched fist.

“Life is sweet to most men. It cannot be to you or you would not dare to rouse remembrance of the past in me. I tell you this——”

Some memory of the present forced him to self-control. His arm fell by his side. The elder stood motionless, staring at the white passive face. A cloud came drifting over the moon and now they were veiled from one another in darkness. The younger spoke again.

“Men who have thrown the world aside may learn from each other’s griefs and in this quiet place what story cannot be told? What brought you here? Why are you a priest?”

Cowed, beaten down and terrified, the other answered as if compelled by the whip in a hand invisible.

“If I hear your story I will force myself to tell mine. For I do not belong to this holy mountain. I am a pilgrim and we shall never meet again. Let us unburden our souls.”

Invisible as two disembodied spirits they spoke and answered.

The younger said:

“We must suffer for the sins of others as for our own. Perhaps I have been too absorbed in the thought of mine and yours may rouse me. This is my story. I come from the great city of Yedo hundreds of miles away where I was a young man rich and happy. There I loved a girl so lovely that every face turned to see as she passed. I will not describe her—I dare not. This outward beauty was only the reflection of the beauty within. Calm as the water of the well in a deserted house it mirrored the very soul of peace. For two years I watched her with longing. Then, by what seemed the merest chance—but what is chance!—we became known to each other and after a time of unspeakable hope and fear our marriage was fixed. I was obliged to go on business to Kyoto just before it took place. While there——”

He drew his breath as if in agony and for a moment could not speak. It was only after a struggle that he went on.

“While there the fearful news reached me that she was dead—horribly murdered. A wretch—a common thief—made his way into her father’s house at night. He found her awake—with a letter of mine before her, and fearing to be taken stabbed her to the heart. Let me be brief here. Kyoto is not many days’ journey from this holy mountain. Loathing the traitor world and every man and woman in it I lost myself. I disappeared. I left those belonging to me to scramble for my riches—what were either to me? Nothing—nor I to them. And I became a priest. But I have not found the Peace. It is not in the woods and hills, or day and night, or before the Altar. And in my soul I believe that too is a man-invented dream.”

The other answered fiercely.

“I also. That is my belief. There is no Peace. Hear my story. I was a poor wretch in a great city. No man loved me nor I them. I remembered no parents. I had fought for my food in the gutter from the beginning. A masterless child. A masterless man. A human wolf in unhuman loneliness. Now hear me—and let your hand be swift. I went out one night to rob a rich man’s house—who had all, while I had nothing. I climbed into a room and found a woman awake. Her face I could not see for her hair fell about her. In terror she prayed for mercy. I struck and as the blood sprang from her breast I saw her face and fled.”

Stunned with horror the younger listened as a man all but dead—yet conscious. The voice of the other rose to a cry.

“I fled but I was a haunted man. Sleep and food poisoned me. I fled to the feet of the Holy One. That is why I am a priest. But I have not found the Peace, nor have you. There is none to find, either for the striker or the victim. Kill me and let us go out into the dark, for all is a lie!”

The numb horror shattered in the young priest’s heart. He was a warrior again. He seized a heavy billet of wood on the ground beside them and swung it above his head, two-handed, to destroy the human vermin delivered over to his vengeance, his own face distorted like a devil’s with Hell’s own hate. The other stood motionless, accepting his doom.

The moon drifted free of her cloud and light fell all about them in an awful splendour. Every bough, twig—every stone—was flooded with pale glory. The quiet was awful as though all held back some terrible utterance until the moment should come.

The moment! As the would-be murderer and the victim stood face to face, frozen for a second into immobility before the blow fell, a marvel! As a flash of lightning splinters midnight, revealing earth, ocean and sky staring upon each other in ghastly amazement, so in one terrific instant each saw and realised the mysteries of life and death, and their eyes met in piercing insight and perfect recognition of motive and consequence.

Such a moment may be called “Conversion” in the West. In the East it is called “Enlightenment.” In either world life thus arrested and smitten awake is for ever changed.

The club dropped from the hand of the younger would-be murderer. It lay in a pool of silver moonlight at his feet. Love and wisdom submerged them in a gently rising tide.

The murderer stretched out his hand. The other clasped it. So they stood at home in life and death and prepared for either.

“Let us amend for the better that in which we have ignorantly sinned”—was the silent cry of their hearts.

The moon increased in glory, their souls floated in a celestial ocean of peace. Voices not of earth made harmony about them.

Gradually the moment passed. Veils of clouds floated together over the sky and unbearable beauty withdrew itself into its own mystery. Still clasping hands the two men went beneath the trees to where a steadfast light burned upon the altar of the Master of Peace. There kneeling, they offered incense and saw their sorrows and joys dissolve into smoke that floated upwards in fragrance and was gone. For a long time they remained there in silence.

They rose, and standing with clasped hands in the glimmering lights of the temple spoke for the last time.

“Brother, together we have found the Peace.”

“Brother, all is well.”

Each took his way, never again to meet in this world of shadows, but eternally one in the Universe of Light.

Sir Henry Apsley, the great consultant on mental and nervous disorders, sat in his consulting room in Harley Street arranging his case-notes, his morning’s work done. Within a few hours he had seen tragedy and comedy unrolled before him—nervous patients, frauds—conscious and unconscious, two men doomed to worse than death, two restored to comparative sanity by the magic of hope, a beautiful girl, a mere tatter of nerves and terror. There was much in his profession to induce questions on the doubtful doom of man. In many instances one could tell where the immediate blame lay, but even behind that there brooded some immitigable Law, terrible, unwavering,

And in all his years of experience he had found no answer to his “Why?”

He sat, the typical physician, a man of forty-eight, kindly even in solitude, but disillusioned, a little weary, dark hair slightly silvering, his cheek leaned on a fine hand, almost fibrous in delicacy. He was marvelling a little at it all and his part in it, knowing his trained skill a reed swayed in the rush of a torrent from heights no man has scaled. Some day the sources would be laid bare, but not yet—and even then would stand behind it the unanswerable Why.

He was interrupted. His secretary with a card.

“Mr. Gervase Dacre.”

A good old name. The sound of knightly chronicles in it, the clash of spears. “Swords for the King!” He was sensitive to the music of words as he was to all the loveliness of ancient culture.

“But surely you made no appointment for this hour?”

“Certainly not, sir. The gentleman has written a message on the card.”

He turned it over.

“Dear Sir Henry Apsley, I have no excuse but that of great anxiety. Please see me.”

He laid it on his desk. “Let him be shown in”—and resumed his grave consultant aspect devoid of any expectation.

At the door appeared a young man of twenty-two, as he judged. Dark, excellently clear-featured and well built, with the air of race never to be ignored by those who share the freemasonry. But his eyes were set in haggard sockets, his thin lips almost showed the ridge of the teeth within. He looked played-out—done-in—the hieroglyphs of drink and reckless self-spending were written plainly on his face for such eyes as Apsley’s. “An utter rotter!” was the thought in his mind as he bowed and pointed to a chair where such light as London gives fell on the prisoner at the bar. He said within himself—“The man is Fear.” His hands shook on the arms of the chair, his eyes expressionless as frozen water, his body in the tension of dread. Waiting for no questions, he plunged into revelation.

“I’ve come to you a broken man, sir. Two days ago I was having the best of good times, money enough, to be married in two months, a mother that would do anything for me—always has. And then——”

His lips contracted over the choke in his throat. He recovered and went on, clutching at self-control. But his voice broke again. Sir Henry looked at him compassionately:

“Bad news?”

“Awful. I was rummaging over some old papers in the lumber-room at home and folded into an old lease I found a letter to my mother from a great doctor. He’s retired now. I found my father had died raving mad, and my grandfather cut his own throat after killing his keeper. I know no more, but enough is as good as a feast, they say——”

He was trying pitiably for irony, but the effort was beyond him. Sir Henry interposed.

“Certain no mistake? You’re naturally upset. But old letters, you know——”

“None. I rushed down to my mother. The minute she looked at me she knew I knew. It had been the ruin of her own life, though my father took it like a hero. She kept it from me—boosted my father to me—did the best she could.”

“Can you give me the history? Was it known when she married?”

“That I can’t tell, nor she. Her father was one of the Beaufoys of Mardillion—but as poor as a church mouse and bound to die in a few months. So he married her off—not quite sixteen, to my father thirty years older. He sounded all right—a writer, scholar, beautiful little old place, Mardyke in Devonshire. I was born seven months after the marriage. She had some fright. I don’t know what.”

“And what of your father?”

The kind questioning voice soothed Dacre. It was as if some pent-up poisoned blood welled out under a skilful probe and left him cooler, clearer.

“My mother adored him. I told you—simply splendid, she says. He died when I was eight but I saw awfully little of him. He had a man nurse and was always in his own rooms. He was ill for years, she says. Then came this outbreak when I was six—dangerous, but still she kept him at home with two keepers. Mardyke’s big and rambling, and it could be done so that people didn’t talk. Then she heard about my grandfather from the doctor—and she only twenty-two. And there are fools who believe in God!”

His hands clenched like a fighting man’s with bitter hatred of the obscure Power on whom Apsley had been meditating. Justice—a name! Pity—none. Doom, irrational and obscene.

“So she thought the thing would drive me mad and she kept me out of it. When he died they said softening of the brain to everybody. I’ll never forgive her for not telling me the truth. What happened? I thought I was like other fellows and I got wrong at Harrow and was kicked out. Same at Oxford—I never saw any reason not to have a jolly good time like the rest. But if I’d known, of course I’d have toed the line. The son of a madman can’t afford to play tricks. I’m as fond of my mother as other men, and so I ought, but I told her straight out it was a damned shame to let me loose on the world with that behind me. Why should she expect me to put any brake on? Why should she be surprised when I stepped on the gas and let her rip! It’s all my mother’s doing! But when she makes up her mind nothing will stop her.”

Apsley understood perfectly. A failure, and someone must be blamed—not himself. Fate, of course, but there must be the human victim too. He met that trait often in the immense egomania of the diseased brain. But the cruelty of youth! He could see the unhappy mother withering under that taunt. And yet—she had given the lad his chance.

“In my opinion your mother did perfectly right,” he said sharply. “There are quite other reasons besides your father why you should have kept straight at Harrow and Oxford. A man’s self-control——”

“But suppose it’s not his own fault that he has none?” countered Dacre.

“Then there’s all the more reason to hide the flaw in his armour from him. What was the name of your father’s doctor?”

“Sir Mansfield Hutton. But he’s retired. Quite old.”

“I know him. I shall get in touch. But now—what was your special reason for coming to me?”

“My chances. I’m going to be married in two months and——”

“I think I must consider the matter further, and with Sir Mansfield Hutton, before I can give any assent there—— And I must see your mother.”

“You don’t mean to say——”

“Certainly. Have you no thought for the young woman you propose to marry? Has she no people—no father?”

His tone was sterner than he knew, but it had no effect on Dacre.

“She’s most awfully gone on me and I on her, and you’ve got to take the thick with the thin these days. She must take her luck.”

No sense of responsibility—a bad sign, but somehow Apsley felt there was a good deal of play-acting about it—grinning in the face of danger according to the way of the modern world. After all—pitiful! But his eyes eluded Sir Henry’s—another disquieting symptom.

“Now tell me about yourself?”

He looked puzzled for a moment but the subject was congenial and he was interested.

“Oh, I don’t know! But you see I’ve all sorts of feelings and notions that I don’t suppose are very common. For one thing, I’ve a horrible temper and I get so damned depressed. I know I’ve given my mother a dose, but she’s more grit than anyone I know and she’ll take anything from me. You see, I’m a writer—at least I mean to be. My writing is all skulls and crossbones at present. I’ve gone into the Russian bog, but I believe I’m working through. There’s fine stuff in my head if I could dig it out. You see, I’ve a kind of other self in me—big, powerful, that takes charge and some day people will read what I write. But naturally a man with that in him doesn’t always see everything blue skies and beer and skittles. You couldn’t expect it.”

And so on—self, self, self. Playing a part consciously, and unconsciously baring himself all the time to the eyes that watched him, measuring, calculating. At last:

“I see. Suppose you send me a story to read?”

Dacre was a little flattered.

“Well, if you don’t mind type. I haven’t published yet. Editors don’t know good stuff when they see it.”

“Thanks. Now for a health talk.”

Apsley gave half an hour to that. No drug as yet, he could swear, but infinite folly in late hours, cocktails, smoking, women. Nothing irreparable.

“And now your mother. Could she be here the day after to-morrow at three?”

“Yes, she’s in town. I’ll bring her.”

“You won’t. I must see her alone.”

So it was settled after some objection. The boy was guarding all his defences. Apsley knew he had withheld much—and he did not want his mother probed. When he was alone he thought:

“He can’t be frank even in a life and death business like this. They never can.”

An impression had been left on him of fitful, erratic brilliance, wayward and impudent, that might or might not come to anything. Morbid, a skull in a blossoming bush, dangerous and repellent. But obscure—obscure! Many men have all this and pass their days in little mutual admiration societies in London, and make good business of it all. His mind turned to the mother. It was not difficult to realise that she had borne the burden of these two maimed lives.

He had a note from her fixing the appointment. It was signed “Magdalen Dacre,” and that too appealed to his sense of beauty. He was too accessible there, he thought. Then he went down in his car to Framling Moor and his interview with Sir Mansfield Hutton—a fine, clear-headed man of eighty. Sparing technicalities, it came to this.

“The wife was splendid, Harry. A mere child, but obstinate and eager and generous—a little thoroughbred mare that would die sooner than be beat. I fancy the man was a brooding egoist before he broke down altogether, but he took it then along the sullen vicious line, poor devil!—morbid irritability and mental cruelty to all about him and specially to her. The child wasn’t safe with him. She had to keep them apart. But even after he was certified she wouldn’t let him go. They have a rambling old house and he had his own rooms shut off with a strong door and two keepers. She would have died sooner than have the thing get out. For the child’s sake. And she swore me never to let him know, and destroyed every letter and we talked of softening of the brain and paralysis and what not. And she went through it all with her teeth clenched and hands gripped. God bless us! Has it ever struck you, Harry, that in all these infernal cases there’s generally some high light of heroism to show up the black? Well—she provided that. I saw her often till I retired and left London. Now I don’t often hear from her. As to the boy—taking it for all in all, he’s probably booked.”

“And yet who’s to tell the effect of the two blending strains,” Apsley said thoughtfully. “We haven’t worked that out to the end.”

That was the human side of the talk. They became medical and formidable then. But it ended in Mansfield shaking his grey head.

“If you let that young man marry you’ll be criminal, Harry. Even if he remained sane himself what about the children? No, let him stick to his writing. He can do harm enough that way to satisfy the most morbid lust for notoriety. But with a brain on a hair-spring balance like his, and marriage what it is to-day!—Don’t look at me like that. You know I’m right.”

“I know—I know! But who’s to say that the shock—the repression—And the mother—I suppose it’s a case of the tigress and her cub where she comes in?”

“Why, yes! I should say she worships him. Well, you can but do your best.”

“I know. It’s on the lap of the gods, Non nobis, Domine! One often feels that in our show, Sir Mansfield, eh?”

But all this had stirred up in him rather unusual curiosity to see this tragic mother who had built her little card-fortress of ignorance about the boy, to see it levelled in a bitter blast of knowledge. He pictured her large, calm, with greying hair and the generous bosom where pain may drowse itself asleep. He hardened himself as the time drew near, but could not quite resume his ironclad professional kindness.

It was a shock when the door opened and a girl walked in, for such she seemed to his astonished eyes. The only part of the case that had slipped his memory was her extreme youth. Sixteen. Hurriedly he added it to twenty-two. Thirty-eight. But the modern woman has drunk at the Fountain of Youth and this hazel-eyed, brown-haired creature was a girl still—and as eager and sensitive to pleasure and pain. Height perfect—“As high as my heart,” Shakespeare would have said; delicately but strongly shaped. Critically examined, not beautiful, but a face of fascinating interest in its glooms and gleams of thought quick as the ruffle of a breeze on sleeping water. Why had she not married again? The boy, always the boy. No doubt, an agonising mother.

She stood looking at him hopefully, her ungloved hand on the back of her chair. Her wavering hazel eyes troubled his judgment with pity.

“Prisoner at the bar, receive your sentence.” Those were the words in his mind as he addressed himself to his task. And no Court of Appeal!

“Mrs. Dacre, pray sit down. You have heard from your son?”

She tightened the grip of her hands on each other and answered at once:

“Yes—but you’ll wish to ask me—I’ll tell you everything. Don’t hide anything from me—Don’t!”

She spoke deliciously—an enchanting voice, and the clear-cut beauty of words. It moved him like the cool sound of a bell in twilight. A man might go far to hear that music. Any woman must delight—be her face what it would—who could wield that charm. Centuries of fine ancestry had gone to making it. She took charge then and there.

“I’ll tell you as shortly as possible. Then question me.”

She sat with bare hands clasped on the edge of his writing-table and spoke, looking straight at him:

“I was terribly young, not sixteen, when I had my baby. My husband broke down six years later. He had been ill and gloomy and depressed since our marriage. And—a gardener came in for orders and he was fearfully angry about nothing and suddenly he went quite wild and furious. He trampled the man, he swore, he—was raving mad. He never got better—but I kept him at home. You know about that? I was determined no one should know.—For Gervase’s sake!”

She stopped—her own face distorted into pain by memory. But she collected herself instantly, went on, submitted patiently to his questions and ended:

“When he was sane, my husband was splendid. Simply splendid. I never——”

Did something in his steady gaze warn her that he knew better—that for the first time she had lost the ring of sincerity and his belief? She stopped suddenly. Her look flickered. He said with a twinge of acute discomfort:

“I’ve seen Sir Mansfield Hutton. Can’t I ask you to trust me fully? These things are delicate in the extreme, but how can I judge for your son if you don’t give me a basis of truth to work from?”

Her manner changed completely, it was almost defiant.

“If Sir Mansfield told you—I can’t see that it matters, but if it does—Can one trust doctors absolutely? Can we know we’re safe?”

“So safe that if you had committed a crime and told me here it would be my duty to conceal it if even in a court of law.”

Then with her hands still clasped she bore her witness to the truth of Sir Mansfield’s story. No need to dwell on it. Under a dreadful shadow had the child’s young life and hers been passed. He might envy a beggar’s child born in open spaces in the thriftless joy of vagrancy. Yet Sir Henry knew there were still reserves. She was not telling all she knew. He read the painful red that stained her cheek as she ended—A woman innately truthful and sincere, he thought, but doomed to subterfuge. What could it be? She ended while he revolved that question silently and built up a mental image of her into the kind of womanly ideal decent men like to believe in until it becomes impossible.

“So I resolved he should never know,—and—Oh, the struggle it was! I swore the doctor to secrecy. They gave out that it was general paralysis and softening of the brain. And I resolved he should have his father to believe in—so I talked of him as you know. Who could tell that a miserable forgotten letter would—But that’s done and now my one hope—no, certainty, is his happy marriage.”

“And this girl he has set his heart on—what sort is she? Has she any staying power?”

“A splendid girl. Strong and healthy—a regular open-air girl. It’ll be his salvation if they marry. Even now he knows she can save him. They’ll have a gorgeous life in the open air. I’ll give up Mardyke to them. I—Why do you look like that? Oh, Sir Henry—I—entreat you—I entreat you!”

He said slowly:—“Does she know?”

“Of course not. She never need. There’s never been the slightest sign—No, no! She’ll give him such normal happy companionship. She’s had no troubles like me. An unspoilt girl. Gay and full of enjoyment. And full of power.”

“Could you think it possible without telling her parents?”

She looked defiantly at him.

“Never! She has no mother. Her father’s an irritably unreasonable man, always thwarting his children on principle. He’s delighted with the marriage. Anyone would be. Gervase—why he’ll be a distinguished man before long if he’s given a chance! You couldn’t spoil it. A devil couldn’t.”

She went on pleading—pleading; the passion of a mother, nature’s own travail in agony for the hope of future good and he could do nothing but watch and pity! The play of emotion gave her face an April beauty;—he watched her fascinated as human nature always fascinates or terrifies when stripped naked and quivering sublimely in the nude. The girl? She thought nothing of her future except as a means of good to the boy, and there she was confident of her exceptional courage and power. She repeated that she was the one in a million.

He told her at last that that hope must follow the rest into darkness. In no circumstances could he and Sir Mansfield sanction the marriage until she and her son had laid the case frankly before the girl’s father. The law had no power to forbid such marriages but no honest medical man could be a party to any deceit in the matter. He doled out a measure of hope that in this generation the curse might not fulfil itself. But who could answer for the next?—who could unroll the scroll of agony for future generations?

She turned sickly white as he spoke. He thought that for a few merciful moments of respite she might slip out of it into a faint under his eyes, but she was staunch even then—she pulled herself together. Almost he wished the telephone bell would ring and announce that some merciful merciless accident had ended the boy and his story together—but the gods did not intervene so obviously. She sat at last with bowed head and clasped hands and spoke.

“I’ve put it all before you. Is that your ultimatum?—You persist?”

“I persist in saying she and her people must be told.”

“You know you’re dooming him?”

“Certainly not. There are a hundred reasons why he should cultivate self-control. You are there to influence him.”

“No one influences him really but Cecily,” she said—almost sullenly. Then—as if to herself—“Well, it’s over. I did my best.”

He said:

“I warn you, Mrs. Dacre, that if you allow the marriage to go through without honest dealing with her father, your responsibility is frightful. No doubt you might manage it, but——”

His look said the rest. She was silent. He led the talk skilfully away to Dacre’s health, his pursuits. It seemed to calm her, but all the hazel brightness of her eyes was dimmed. She shook hands at last—he could not part with her formally—and went slowly away.

Left alone he felt that she had made a profound impression upon him of natural joyfulness subdued into love and sorrow and helpless fury at Fate,—but even more as a woman who would make the delight of all about her, given her rightful chance. Her voice haunted him. Her presence filled the empty chair. He had thwarted her one poor hope. She would never wish to see him again and he—he wished intensely to see her, to know the end of the story and her decision. He thought that womanlike she would evade and elude. Make the marriage, justify herself a hundred ways and then, if it went as horribly wrong as her own, set it down to destiny and be the victim of injustice. Hers was not the first case of the kind he had known. He could draw his own conclusions and he thought her one of those women whose gentleness is as invincible as power itself.

But surprise was in store. Two days later the sharp summons of the telephone put through by his secretary.

“Mrs. Dacre. May I see you to-day? I have something important to say.”

He agreed instantly. What had happened? The marriage off? A crisis? His mind shaped many pictures. He knew he would not have seen anyone else that day—it was a crowded one. But—he also knew there would always be time for Magdalen Dacre. She came—still self-possessed, a something deeply resolved about her. “She has come to defy me—to say she will do it.” That was his thought. But no!

She sat down and pulled her close hat off as if the pressure tired her. The brown tendrils about her brows showed her younger, more touching therefore, than he had seen her before. She might have been a girl mourning for a lost lover rather than a mother agonising over a ruined son. But at once she struck her note full in the middle.

“Sir Henry, I can’t stand this for him. You said the other day that a doctor can be trusted through life and death—Was it just words or true?”

“True,” he answered looking at her doubtfully. “A man who breaks that rule should be hounded from the profession.”

“Then if I trust you it’s with the knowledge that neither to my son nor to anyone else will you tell what I shall tell you now. Take my hand and promise.”

She held it out impulsively. He clasped it warm and strong in his.

“No need to promise—but I promise.”

She drew it away and gripped her hands together on her knee.

“Once more I ask what you will do if we decide on the marriage? Do you mean you would tell her father?”

“Certainly not. But I should warn your son that it was his duty to do so. It would be criminal to let him act in ignorance.”

“And you understand that he would read between the lines and take it as his sentence. You would do that cruel thing?”

“I must.”—So she had only come to renew the battle! But he did not draw out his watch,—the usual hint for haste. There was a long, long silence. Almost he wished for an interruption—it grew so unbearable. At last she broke it:

“I have something to tell you that will change all your mind. There’s no fear——”

At once he knew what she was going to tell him. What will a mother not say to save her child? He put up his hand as if to ward it off—He could see it in her face. Her eyes were bright, hard, glittering with surface lights. She looked a desperate woman.

“Don’t, Mrs. Dacre,” he said in a low incisive voice. “I shouldn’t believe it. It would be a wicked cruel deception—cruel to yourself and your son. Far—far worse for him in the end. The shock might even precipitate what you fear.”

All the fight went out of her. She relaxed, sighing heavily and sank back in her chair. With closed eyelids and drooping mouth she was a very masque of sorrow.

“But it’s true!” she said. “Give me a minute. I’ll tell you.”

Another long silence. Then he said sharply:

“I don’t believe you. You’re lying to save him. But it will only make it worse when his inheritance finds him. I honour your self-sacrifice but it is out of place.”

She made a faint gesture.

“I took the wrong road so long ago that I don’t know the right one now. Listen—and judge for me. I can’t judge for myself. It’s this. When I was a very young girl my very distant cousin, Jan Beaufoy, six years older, was in love with me. We could never have married then—He had nothing, nor I. When I was going to have a child I told my father. That was why he married me off to any man who would take me. When my husband found out—No. I mean when I told him,—then he went raving mad. Of course it had always been in him, but Gervase was six then and he was brutal to him as he had been to me, and I told him the child was mine not his, and then—you can imagine! But I had to tell him—I had to. Don’t you see?”

Apsley said slowly and deliberately:

“How can you expect me to believe this new story? Why are you so eager for this marriage? Why do you hope so much from it?”

She answered instantly:

“What I say is true. I swear it! I could do nothing else. Was I to let him be as brutal to the child as he had been to me? Was I to let him think he had any right over him? A raging lunatic! Oh, Sir Henry—if you had seen—had known! Ask Sir Mansfield.—But I knew you’d say this. I suppose cases like mine come to you every day. I knew you’d say—‘Mothers will do anything—anything!’ So here’s a letter from my cousin. Read it and doubt me then if you can.”

He read. No question—if the letter were real. None. But then—Mothers will do anything. The world takes that for granted though it is so often untrue. He took it so, but even yet hesitated visibly. She leaned forward:

“Now I have told you this—proved it; remember your promise! My son shall never be told. Never—No, not even to save the marriage. He has got into a bad set. He believes in no woman but Cecily; and of course me. If that were lost he’d go headlong to the devil. He hardly knows himself how much he needs Cecily, but it’s there and so is his confidence in me. If he knew this—Yes, yes—I know it would relieve his mind, but I tell you he’s safe if he marries. And you can’t stand in the way now. You can’t ruin him by telling him he mustn’t marry. The girl is so unusually strong that she’s simply salvation. He wants her. Tell Sir Mansfield what I’ve told you. Both of you tell him he can marry, but tell him my secret and I’ll kill myself.”

He believed her there whatever he might doubt, and sat turning and twisting a paper knife in his hands. Poor security to risk a girl’s happiness on!—children!—No, he could never let it pass. He took up the letter again and looked doubtfully at it. Quick as thought she interpreted his mind—

“If I send Colonel Beaufoy to see you,—alone,—without me to prompt him? If you cross-question him, will you believe then?”

He looked up; startled:

“Colonel Beaufoy—the man who distinguished himself on the Somme?”

“The same.” With a kind of pale triumph she added; “I suppose you’ll believe him. If not, you’ll be the only man in the world who wouldn’t.”

He roused himself into businesslike plain-dealing; there had been too much sentiment.

“Mrs. Dacre, when you reflect you won’t be angry with me. My responsibility is very heavy. I am obliged to consider your natural—I’ll even say your heroic—feeling in the matter. You put me in a most painful dilemma. Were the case an ordinary one I should throw it up. But it’s not ordinary and, if you insist, I will see Colonel Beaufoy. That’s a name every Englishman must respect. But again I bid you remember that to allow your son to marry is a half-way measure. It doesn’t release him from the fear that poisons his life—his conduct,—and may in itself ruin his marriage. If you go so far should you not go further?”

She flashed into sudden flame.

“Am I never to be right—never to think of myself? This one shred of self-respect is all I ask. If you and Sir Mansfield assure him he’s perfectly safe, that what you have heard satisfies you in his case he’s safe? I’ll do anything for him but lose his faith in me—and I won’t do that because it will ruin him. Don’t I know him better than you—a stranger? No, I hold to it—I hold to your promise. So far and no further will I go. That’s why I insist you see Colonel Beaufoy. That’s why I drag myself in the mud.”

She was pleading desperately—how could he refuse? And suppose it were true, and it seemed he must believe it now, it would be the deepest cruelty to give up the case. And in any case he could not. She hypnotised him. Her hands fluttered before her like white birds struggling for freedom. Hot tears swelled her eyes. For the first time he saw her beautiful—the naked soul shining resplendent through the accident of the flesh. Passion triumphant. Could he blame her if she who knew all determined that something less than perfect certainty was better for her son than smug self-safety and a trampled ideal? She had won her victory; he said earnestly:

“I believe you entirely. I need not see Colonel Beaufoy—unless you desire it. Let it be as you will. Your son has a splendid heritage.”

“But a bitter childhood! Does heritage cover everything? I don’t know. But you shall see Colonel Beaufoy. Since his marriage we have met very little, but he will certainly not flinch from this. May I telephone from here?”

He silently set the telephone before her. She gave her number. Presently:

“Jan—Magdalen speaking. The matter I mentioned to you. It’s necessary you should see Sir Henry Apsley before he can sanction what I wish.”

He heard the thin rattle of a distant speaking voice in answer. She lifted her head:

“He says—any time. When?”

“To-morrow morning at 12.30.”

She made the appointment and rose.

“I thank you even for your disbelief. It proves you thought me capable of anything for my son’s sake. It might be better if I were, but you see I draw my line. Only—I know him. You don’t.”

He answered, holding out his hand:

“You may be right. You shall hear from me as soon as possible. May I thank you for the realisation of a devoted mother.”

Her lip trembled—she was gone.

He was left with his mind in an extraordinary state of confusion where right and wrong argued and neither had the last word. What a case! Tragedy after tragedy unfolded dark vistas as he looked back along her youth. Only one certainty emerged—he had never seen a woman so magnetic—so dynamic—whatever the last catchword might be. He knew its meaning now, however. She haunted him. Life and strength surrounded her,—a rhythm from the steady beat of her heart. He almost feared that poignant intense vitality fixed like a searchlight on one only object—her son—the morbid sensuous offspring of her exquisitely poised body. With what passion she desired this marriage; with what hope! He felt he had never seen eagerness before—unselfish to madness, thinking only of the boy, never once of herself. He knew that if he never saw her again—which was likely enough—she would be for ever memorable—the one woman who had ever flashed into real life for him from his endless rows of docketed cases.

“If I could know her better—meet her on happier ground!” he thought, and sat a moment lost in dream; then sprang to attention and was the great specialist once more.

Something in him shrank from seeing this Colonel Beaufoy. Surely it was unnecessary. He believed her now—and to see this man who was implicated in her miserable story wounded him. But he could not break the appointment. He had doubted. He had wounded her pride and she was wholly within her right. He was conscious of freezing distance as he rose to receive him, coolly professional and reserving all his deductions.

A tall soldierly man of about forty-four, grave, composed, quite evidently facing the hateful necessity in the spirit of the trenches. Otherwise—nothing apparently outstanding in spite of his renown. You meet such men in the streets about the great London clubs and you feel them difficult of approach yet worth knowing—if it were possible. But it would never be possible in most cases. They keep themselves impenetrable and aloof.

He came straight to business:

“I have been informed by Mrs. Dacre that painful circumstances made it necessary for her to take you into her confidence as regards her son.”

All Apsley’s professional habit defended him like a rampart as he answered:

“That is the case. But it is due to myself to say that I have no disbelief in Mrs. Dacre’s statement. It is true I had a doubt. Such a mother will go to great lengths to ensure her son’s happiness. We meet with this in our profession, and marriage unrolls the lot of future generations. But I need no further assurance.”

Colonel Beaufoy, his hand resting on the table, tapped it thoughtfully with his fingers as he answered:

“That’s a plain statement and I thank you, but I agree with Mrs. Dacre that the matter demands equal plainness from us. Gervase Dacre is my son. Having no children of my own I shall make him my heir. Is there anything to add to this statement? Do you desire it in writing?”

Apsley was shocked at his own position:

“By no means!” he said hurriedly. “I am deeply distressed that circumstances obliged me—”

“Pray say no more. You could scarcely have done otherwise.”

Beaufoy had risen. Apsley did the same.

“I hope that Mrs. Dacre will live to see the perfect happiness of her son and his wife.”

A quiver troubled the other man’s face, but he was silent. They bowed,—even with coldness, and parted. No interview could have been briefer and more decisive. Yet again the feeling of baffled confusion overwhelmed Apsley for a moment. He struggled in a world of shadows, where nobody, including himself, was normal, where the word must be taken at the face-value of the deed. He shook himself impatiently. So that was the man she had loved—and what wonder! There must always have been something gallant behind his quiet unpretentiousness and none with a grain of observation could fail to catch the atmosphere of steadfastness to which a woman clings when she is lonely. And how lonely!—For a moment it seemed that the past surrounded her like a wall. But if a man could climb it, could drop into the meadows and gliding streams of the Paradise beyond—Ah, was not he himself lonely too, and would there not be rest invincible, trust and peace won from the heart of the battle, the beatific vision of all the loveliness of a woman’s nature responsive to his own?

He roused himself and made his appointment with Sir Mansfield. Not that it was necessary now, and yet, in spite of all, he needed the buttress of the kindly philosopher’s agreement.

He went down to Framling Moor and found him sitting in his orchard under apple-trees with rifts of gentian blue sky between massed clusters of pink-pearl blossom, the very picture of sane and wise content.

Apsley laid it all before him—as student to master. He could never shake off the memory of those old days.

“And I give you my word, Sir Mansfield, that I believed not a word of it. The sort of woman that would throw herself against a hedge of swords for—that cub of hers!”

He said it with sharp distaste. Sir Mansfield raised his grey eyebrows and laid his pipe down carefully.

“You did very right, Harry. Don’t believe in it now. Don’t I remember the beginning when I was called in after Dacre broke out and her ghastly fright for her boy, watching every minute for the taint to show in him? I made her send him early to a preparatory school that he might get out of the range of her terror. And it was a trial for her no woman could stand. You take it from me the boy’s a Dacre.”

“But all that might tally with her story,” Apsley interrupted. “She had plenty of reasons for fear. Suppose Dacre had disowned the child? And she said the shock of discovery drove her husband mad. Are you remembering all the facts?”

Sir Mansfield shook his head:

“No man’s infallible—especially in our side of the profession where we deal with the impossible, the incredible. But a thousand little facts and observations strengthen me; especially her terror when the husband broke down. She cried out—‘Is there any escape for my boy!’ I only heard of the cousin once or twice and saw him once at Mardyke. He never came——”

“Of course he never would!” said Apsley.

“Not in her extremity—and he the sort of fellow you describe? Well—take your way, Harry—but——”

“If you had seen him,—Remember he volunteered to see me. Remember his reputation!”

“A man may be a splendid soldier—the soul of honour and yet where women are concerned—But what can I say? She has you on the horns of a dilemma. You can’t tell Dacre he can’t marry. You couldn’t do that now. The story hangs together perfectly. You did perfectly right to see Beaufoy. And yet—looking back—I don’t believe a word of it. And look at the young fool himself!—It should be true with Beaufoy’s word—but——”

Again he paused on the word of doubt and Apsley was silent. They were each following trains of thought to their far conclusion. Apsley roused himself, sighing:

“Sir Mansfield, did you find any kink in her in those days? Would you have called her straight, honest?”

“As honest as any woman can be who’s frightened out of her senses!”

“Well I find none in her now unless you can call this devotion to her son abnormal, and it isn’t. I find it human and natural that she’ll go so far and no further and won’t tell him the whole truth and——”

“I find that an extremely doubtful feature,” retorted the old man. “A devoted mother, and yet won’t free him of the horrible thought that——”

“She trusts to the effect of your word and mine,” said Apsley with spirit, “and she wants to keep her influence over him.”

“Yes, there’s something in that,” the other said musingly. “A mother’s chastity means much to a son. They can never see the other side of the question. All or nothing.”

“Well we can stay all day arguing. What am I to do?” Apsley was growing impatient. The case was so clear to him. Sir Mansfield had not heard her story nor seen Beaufoy. He had.

“There’s only one thing you can do, Harry my boy. She’s got us—the dear poor little soul! It isn’t true, a word of it, but she’s deprived us of the right to remonstrate. But it won’t work. She’ll live to regret it. And just one word more—I never knew a woman so well able to capture a man’s interest. Something about her—Well, I’m not so blind but I can see this isn’t only a mental case to you. Keep out of it, young man!”

The old man still thought of the younger as his student and Apsley clung to that relationship, but he flushed over it now and brushed it aside with a shrug.

“Let’s plan a letter to her and I’ll post it in town and forget the whole blessed show.”

They composed a letter to Magdalen Dacre, sitting under the apple blossom with the heavenly smell of ripening earth about them. It was in Apsley’s name. Sir Mansfield Hutton and Sir Henry Apsley had fully considered the case and in view of all the circumstances put before them, past and present, had decided that there was no cause for alarm and they considered that no possible objection could be taken to the marriage which would probably be in the best interests of the patient provided he decided to live a healthy quiet life at his place in the country. These would be the best possible remedies for the slight nervous irritability and insomnia complained of. A letter to the same effect was written to Dacre. They sat awhile chatting of common interests and then Apsley went off through air softly gliding into twilight. A world of peace. At parting the old man said:

“All the same, Harry my boy, I don’t like our day’s work. Poor dear child—what a business for her! Well—there it is!”

There it was. No human being could hinder a young man of untainted descent from his rights as a man. Apsley posted the letters with his own hand and wondered if Fate stood at his shoulder. He tried to drive it all out of his mind. He went that night to a great symphony concert. Always the celestial harmony of wood and wind—the heavenly poignancy of the strings—lifted him to the indescribable paradise reserved for the true believers of music. But not to-night. The golden doors were shut. He came away and tried another medicine. He unrolled a great Chinese scroll picture, hung it on its slender hook and pulled his chair before it.

Wildly spired mountains pierced the clouds. They were clothed with processional pines marching steadfastly upward beside the unending cry of wild mountain torrents. Seated among the dragon-roots of a mighty tree sat an ancient man—an Immortal of immeasurable age. One with nature in all her emanations, a wise snake coiled about him and whispered secrets in his ear, and looked into his eyes with cold and infinite wisdom. A marvellous picture, the work of one who seeing into the innermost soul of things was content to know good and evil one in the final issue, the right and left hands of the Inscrutable moulding the world. That was the truth. That soothed him, and when he put it away in its Orient-smelling box with more care than a cradled child he was readier to face the world’s complexes.

He had a brief and kindly letter of thanks from her a few days later. All he could expect; more than he had hoped. His own doubt rankled in his mind—he was alternately ashamed of it and frightened at something spectral and evasive behind it. Sir Mansfield sent him a long and intimate letter from her, charming in its grace and confidence, speaking of her hope and recalling his kindness in old days, dwelling on her joy in the marriage. To that sentence Sir Mansfield had appended in his small precise handwriting—“The prayers of the congregation are requested——” He was not a whit moved from his opinion.

Two months later, Apsley saw the marriage in The Times—Cecily, daughter of Thomas Cultram, Esq., of 12 Sacheverell Street, W. There was more fashionable glitter about it than he would have expected from what he deciphered as the excellent refinement of Magdalen Dacre, but he supposed the bride’s family was responsible for that side of the business. The couple were to spend the honeymoon in the Pyrenees and would settle at Mardyke—the bridegroom’s place in Devonshire. So she had been as good as her word. She had given it up to them. Later, he heard from Sir Mansfield that she had taken a flat in London. That stirred him. London is a small area for people of a certain class. He might stumble across her any day,—walking swiftly, lightly—always as if her face were set to some goal she was vowed to attain.

It was entirely true what Sir Mansfield’s quick eye had noted—that the case had become too human to him, too near. Only it was not the boy he thought of. She dwelt in his thoughts—far more beautiful than in life, infinitely alluring in mystery. He might never hear a word more,—the happiest women like the happiest countries have no history, and she would be happy now. He even grudged her that in love’s selfishness. He rejoiced inwardly that Beaufoy was married—bound. There could never have been anything real in that childish affair; there could never be anything now. Perhaps some day if all went well—gratitude!—A man may hope. It is an expensive luxury to himself but it costs others nothing.

But there was another side that he could not shake off—doubt and speculation as to the marriage. The boy was a rotter anyhow. If anything did go wrong, would it justify Sir Mansfield’s opinion? He went so far one day as to write his own prognosis of what might be expected to happen supposing the boy were not the son of his putative father. He locked it up carefully—he had put no name to it and tried to forget it.

One cold March day he drove his car down to Framling Moor and found Sir Mansfield sitting by a clear March fire. He was eager to keep that channel open and after a good hammer-and-tongs talk on various matters, he was glad when it veered to what he had at heart. Sir Mansfield came to it with the zest her name always inspired.

“By the way, Harry, I’m told Beaufoy’s wife is dead. Now, if you’re in the right—a decent interval, a marriage and living happy ever after. Right or wrong, I should like to think that poor child was all right and had someone to back her up when the smash comes. She deserves it and I’m told Beaufoy is as steady as a church.”

There was much in that speech to silence Apsley and he took it silently. Sir Mansfield went on:

“The wife was a taisy old toad”—as they say in Devonshire. “Mrs. Dacre came to see me a month ago, and I declare she looks younger every time I see her. I hope she’ll keep that up. She does an old body like me a mint of good. But I didn’t think she looked too happy, mind you! She said she believed the young couple found Mardyke dull. They talked of London.”

But still Apsley was silent. Free—free to marry the man she had once loved to her ruin—and her joy. Of course, it was clear now why she wanted to be in London. Any decency and honour would wish her happy with such a man as Beaufoy—but his could not.

A woman he had only seen twice! But his whole being gave the lie to that count. Life is not measured by the clock and they had stood face to face—as a man and woman may never do in years of friendship. And having heard this news suddenly his whole life grew arid, wintry, in his eyes. How did he bear the solitude of work, the crueller solitude of leisure?—life crucified like an espalier against a wall and no fruit but money to show for it.

“The boy has written a story,” Sir Mansfield went on, “and some firm has published it for private circulation and got into a devil of a row for doing it. One of these modern beastlinesses. I could see she was frightened. Poor little soul! Was I half in love with her long ago—I often wonder! She’s that sort of woman—you don’t think she’s anything wonderful and then—Well, anyhow, if you’re right about the boy you’ll see no more of her, Harry. I like to see her better than anyone I know.”

“Can I get hold of his stuff?” Apsley asked. His flesh was quivering like a raw surface.

“Oh yes—Lord bless me!—I forget—Yes, Dallas has a copy. A patient left it with him. You should see it.”

Apsley sent for the little book directly he got back and sat down to study it as part of the case. A black photograph of the worst aberrations of life—savage delight in it as in an animal that embrutes itself in carrion, smearing himself in its purulence. Stealthy beasts of the dark moving through a jargon of half-senseless phrases, newly coined words, a peacock parade of originality—a grinning thick-lipped Venus of savage islands lumped in stone.

“Asylum stuff!” he said to himself at last. “The mark of the beast.” He saw such efforts not seldom in pen and brush. The keepers had orders to collect them from the places where he sent his worst cases and their curious diseased talent in sadism and lust interested him as symptoms. Atavism was written broad across the pages. Divested of the heritage won by painful ages they fought for the privileges of primitivism.

“The literature of the latrine and lupanar,” he said thoughtfully. “Strange how their minds make the obscene the chief business of life. It is madness in itself to exaggerate one idea out of all proportion to the rest and sometimes with power that cuts like a whip-lash. Poor devils!”

He had sat with his hand resting on it for ten minutes, reflecting like this when with a start he realised that the writer of The Story of Ursula Livinghurst was no maniac but a son of the calm, soldierly man who had cut an impression on his mind strong and sharp as the print of a new die. And her son also;—never a child better parented in all the world! The riddle was beyond him, unless indeed—— A belief was taking strong shape in his mind—dismissed more than once but returning—that here might be a drug addict, cunningly hiding his crime. The drop of the reins of self-control, diseased brilliant imagination, the foolish gabble of vocabulary were symptoms one and all, and if not of madness, of what?—He picked up the story again and studied it, then carefully filed it for reference with his case-notes.

“About the gem of my collection!—and now what?” he said under his breath.

That would take patient consideration. Apparently Magdalen Dacre had intimated that he had served his turn and she had no more need of him. Naturally. Who wants to be reminded of a risen past to distort the present? But yet—after long thought he wrote to an artist friend who hovered in the outside edges of the laxest set of the London intelligentsia. He believed he should find Dacre in the hinterland. He was right; a reception of the Cocktail Crowd was to be held on a certain night, and Apsley got himself invited.

Apart from Dacre he was interested. To him they were all more or less cases, men and women alike—naturally below par from the lives they led, strung feverishly high above it by foods, drinks and drugs that were making havoc of their brains and bodies. Some pathetically young fools had strayed in among the old stagers. They were in the fullest blossom of pride in themselves and their brilliant surroundings. This was life, intellect, genius,—all that sets one in the seats of the mighty, with unlimited powers of contempt for the sane, calm and normal sides of life. He watched them with cool, ironic observation.

About eighty people were congregated in the great studio nearly as high as a church and of great length. There were curtains of grotesque batik dividing it into little chapels in each of which a picture was presented for the adoration of the faithful. The whole thing seemed so apart from the real business of life and art that Apsley could hardly suppress a smile as he looked about him. A rabble of excited talk, interruptions, shrieks of laughter, voices cutting across each other. Women in pyjamas, women like men, with cropped hair and loose shirt-collars, cigarettes stuck in their jaws, men like women, in what his ignorance supposed to be glorified dressing-gowns, hustling for drinks, shouting, arguing, contradicting. And into this hot little vortex came Dacre and his wife.

Apsley’s eyes narrowed into instruments of research—inhuman as the microscope. The girl he passed by—nothing wonderful to look at—big surprised blue eyes and a fine bloom—no features to speak of; but even a devil is beautiful at eighteen, say the Japanese, and she had that beauty, and a frank open-air look about her slight well-set-up, almost epicine figure. But it was Dacre on whom he focussed.

Change—and for the worse. Bluish puffiness under the lower eyelids, slight increase in the fever of the sparkling eyeballs set in haggard sockets; his coat hung loose on him. But he was keyed up to concert pitch. People were obviously to say: “Gervase Dacre! Of course you’ve read The Story of Ursula Livinghurst. Hot stuff that! As new and original!—He’s going to give all the old pioneers like Blank and Star and Asterisk a lead. Set quite a new pace. The most original genius in London, if you ask me.”

As if they were worth asking, thought Apsley, quietly making his plans for attack. Heroin possibly—and cocktail after cocktail atop of it, and starvation. Sickening at food and insomnia nightly except for drugged sleep. Well—he knew you could get yourself into that particular fix without any insane inheritance, and possibly something might be done, especially if the wife—

She had a cocktail or two, and then turned off to gossip with a man and two women, and Apsley advanced on his prey. He started:

“I say!—Sir Henry, you here! I shouldn’t have thought this was your dish, but I’m most awfully glad to see you.”

The words gave the lie to the look, but Apsley coolly ignored that—and the escaping gesture.

“I’m glad to see you. How are you? Mustn’t talk shop here, but a doctor likes to see his patients all a-blowin’ and a-growin’. May I know your wife?”

“Why, certainly. I’ll call her in a jiff. But I say—Now I come to think of it I’d like a word apart from the pleasure of seeing you. The nights give me hell. We came up from Mardyke—life perfect putrid in that rotten old hole, but whether it is that London doesn’t suit me—Still, it’s the only wear, with Paris for a kick. But what I wanted to say—I’m a writer now—I told you I would, you remember,—but the mischief is that sometimes when I’m writing—Oh, I say!—I can’t hear myself think in this clatter. Could I blow in and tell you! Suppose we say one o’clock day after to-morrow. Can do?”

“Can do,” said Apsley good humouredly, “but I’d rather say ten.” In either case it meant shifting an appointment days ahead, but he would hook his fish.

“Oh, I say—dash it all! I can’t get up at that hour. Haven’t a leg to stand on. Let’s say one. And now I’ll call the missus.”

Summoned, she came from her group with surprised eyes. What could that sort of man be doing in their crowd? But she gave a little nod in a spirit of tentative friendliness.

“Sir Henry Apsley—(the great doctor),” Dacre said aloud and aside. “He saw me once when I was under the weather and he’s awfully bucked to see me so skittish! Still—No, Vic darling, you’re too devastatingly sweet to-night, but Cecily and I are on duty for a minute! Cecily, tell him how awfully I’m sleeping.”

She laughed as if at a good joke.

“Simply shattering. Couldn’t you give him some dope?”

Her laugh was a crystal bell—and with as much understanding.

“He got bored stiff at Mardyke. A jolly old place, I think and the hunting terribly attractive. But he thought it all a crashing bore. I expect we’ll go down for the cub-hunting. I’ll have a divorce if not.”

Apsley shrugged his shoulders. He had summed up the situation.

“Well, I must be off. Day after to-morrow. One.”

He went down into the street. The night air was cool. The pure companionship of the moon dwelt over the glittering streets of London—a friend thrust back and forgotten. He was thinking of the girl. A thoughtless good-natured fool. But what in heaven could have made Magdalen Dacre——!

He hailed a taxi and took it to the corner of her road in Kensington and walking very slowly passed the tall building where he knew her flat was on the second floor. It looked into the sleeping trees of a great garden—once belonging to a noble old house now a memory. That was her substitute for the golden woods of Mardyke and the old moat with its drifting swans. Had she yet tired of paying and paying and buying nothing? What had she to show for all her sacrifice?

With a startled shock he saw her sitting by a window not too far above his head, cheek leaned on her hand, looking out into the shadowy trees. He also was alone—a quiet backwater and late. He could stand and gaze to his heart’s content. That steadfast study was very far from the passion of a young lover, but perhaps the deeper, in the quiet of the moonlight. No rest there, no guarding peace, harsh grinding anxiety. A sudden impulse took him off his feet. He called up softly:

“Mrs. Dacre, can it possibly be you? What an amazing chance—though I knew from Sir Mansfield that you lived somewhere here. How are you?”

She leaned out, answering hurriedly:

“Amazing! I was just thinking of you, Sir Henry. Would it be possible—Could you come up for a minute? My number is 444. The porter will show you.”

The reward of courage! Without the faintest preconception of a plan he went in and in five minutes was in the shrine of his dreams—holding her hand. Her surroundings were exactly what he had guessed—a harmony of happy colour sensitively felt. One picture—a portrait of some bygone Dacre, high-bred and cool, strong hands resting on a sword-hilt, eyes fixed on the distance with disdainful observation. There was a growing lily in a Japanese bronze, the moonlight for lamp, except only one tiny glimmer at her elbow.

“My eyes were tired,” she apologised, releasing her hand gently. He had clasped it closer than he knew.

“Do sit down. Do you know I have been thinking I was ungrateful. I should have written to you. I’m ashamed of my ingratitude. But I gave you such trouble.”

He would have said that trouble from her was dearer—No, no, ridiculous!—And how could she open her grief to a man preoccupied with love of her? He said instead, smiling a little:

“That’s my business, you know, and as a matter of fact I’ve been very anxious to hear how your young folk were doing. I saw them to-night at Ogilvie’s studio, and your boy made an appointment with me.”

She started visibly and clasped her hands in the little helpless gesture he loved.

“He did? That frightens me. If he did that!—I only knew he was a little out of sorts. A mother-in-law can’t interfere. Cecily hasn’t made her own of him as I hoped. He was so passionately in love with her. I thought she could do anything with him.”

He smiled grimly now.

“One may allow a few months for that as a rule. I should say he bosses the show completely. But of course I know nothing. He spoke of insomnia—the usual symptom in nervous cases. I think that’s what he wants to talk about.”

She wore some thin transparent black stuff falling in long pure folds—and on her bosom a pearl chain. A moon in clouds. To him she seemed as lovely and unattainable. She said piteously:

“I wanted so much to see you—You were so good—you understood——”

“Not I. I doubted.”

“How could you do anything else? If I was angry at first—even then I knew it was perfectly reasonable. But women like me don’t like reason when it clashes with love. I was wild with longing that he should be happy. And now he’s not even happy. No better;—worse! We get what we want and—dust and ashes! She’s a charming girl but no good for him. I thought——”

He knew what she had resolved to think. All words failed beneath the weight of his great pity.

“He comes to see me sometimes and he has got into an utterly worthless set here—a miserable Mutual Admiration Society. And he had gifts—he had power. He has written an awful story and they flatter him to death. And too much drinking. And——”

There came a pause as if she were assembling all her forces to draw nearer to the dread. “And, Sir Henry, terror is haunting him about his heritage. He says it makes him reckless—he says—‘How could the doctor know I was safe? It always breaks out. It’s breaking out in me.’ Oh, you were right—fearfully right. I didn’t go far enough. My cursed selfishness. And yet I did think of him first.”

The moon looked in upon them as serenely as upon any joy in London. She went on, gasping:

“He said: ‘You doomed me when you bore me,’ ” and was silent.

A pool of moonlight lay on the floor between them—pure as eternity. That is why nature is infinitely calming. She looks to the far-off divine events to which we struggle so blindly. She is the immortal sphinx, but, for those who know, her full-set gaze is that of utter content. The moonlight shed comfort. She went on more calmly.

“Yes, you were right. I left him in a position of horrid danger. He said: ‘Whatever I do I can go free. Even the law can’t hold a madman.’ ”

“He said that? That won’t do. I was afraid—” Apsley spoke sharply. He added: “Has the wife no hold?”

“None.”

He thought awhile, then said gravely:

“Since there is no hereditary trouble in his case have you thought of drugs?”

“I’m certain—certain. Drugs—and drink to a certain extent but behind it all—the Fear. You were right. I agree with you heart and soul. I give you back your promise. When he comes—tell him the whole truth. All but his father’s name. Keep that, and bid him thank God whatever becomes of me.”

“I won’t,” he said shortly, “I refuse. You shan’t strip yourself of everything. If he isn’t man enough to pull himself together for your sake now, will he when—I think with you. He’ll never understand your sacrifice.”

“Stop.” She put out her hand passionately. “I think that too, but what does it matter if he throws me over so long as I know he’s well and happy. I tell you I don’t care—I don’t care. Only set him free. I know him and I tell you that when he’s released from that—It’s poisoning him. I see that now. If you won’t do it—coolly and medically, the right way—I’ll write to him. But—don’t make me tell him. I entreat you.”

Apsley realised that he could not refuse. What man could refuse her anything she desired? Without oratory she had the power of great orators. She bore you on a charging current. Afterwards you might regret but not with those inspired eyes—

“Lights that do mislead the morn,” looking into yours.

She saw deliverance now—winged and sunbright. He saw it with her.

“Yes—he should know. It’s his right. I said so—but no living man could blame you for stopping half-way. The marriage should have answered. Now we shall get to the bottom of the trouble and set it right.”

She gave a long sigh of relief:

“Thank God you see it. Promise me a true report of how he takes it. If he will never see me again tell me frankly. I can bear anything. Why, I could live because of your wonderful kindness that will keep me in touch with him even if he throws me aside. And— I promise you to do my best.”

A church clock chimed midnight. She rose and took his hand in both hers.

“I trust you entirely. Use the knife, clean and sharp. Spare me no pain for the cure.”

To his confounding amazement she brought his hand to her lips, kissed it, and almost before the soft warmth had reached his heart dropped it and passed through an open door. He caught the sound of a sob as it shut.

At the appointed time he waited in a kind of horror for young Dacre’s appearance. Apart from the complication of his own heart never in all his experience had such a case come before him. He had no precedent, no time to consult Sir Mansfield. And to Sir Mansfield it was but a case;—of more interest than most but a foregone conclusion. To himself a living bleeding agony. How was he to do it? How break up the immaculate ideal of motherhood, sublimer than any virginity and humble it in the dust?

Dacre came in jauntily, and with a languid self-possession that nothing but high breeding saved from insolence. And yet—so horribly cruelly boyish and foredoomed through it all!

“I’ll throw my cards on the table. I’ve been running a race with the devil. I’ve got as much into the last year as most men get into sixty. But—It takes it out of a fellow, and I’ll own up—the nights beat everything!”

“It’s as well to be frank if you want my help,” Apsley said curtly. “You know Sir Mansfield and I warned you that you were by no means the type that could play Old Harry with your health. We prescribed a quiet life, no racket, no drink, no drugs, the country.—What do you expect when you disobey orders? What have you been doing?”

He confessed,—Apsley tracing geometrical designs on the paper before him. Drugs, cocktails—their inevitable results, best left in medical oblivion.

“And what about your wife?”

“Oh, Cecily knows nothing—except the cocktails and an occasional dope. There’s a kind of tom-boy chuckle-headedness about Cecily that’s a positive invitation to a fellow to amuse himself. She knows nothing but what you tell her. She still thinks me the ordinary husband, only with a crack-brain that she puts down to genius—a thing she doesn’t profess to understand. After all, you know, I can write.”

“I read your story.—Diseased stuff.”

“Yes—I believe the publisher’s in hot water, but of course they can sell millions overseas. We stand in to make an honest penny between us.”

Apsley looked at him in contemptuous distaste.

“And now may I have your symptoms?”

He gave them—and well; amongst others, sudden stoppage of the brain action that occasionally came on when he was writing—a kind of blankness of mental vision—like the stoppage of a watch—resuming later with a few minutes dropped out.

No need to give the medical cross-questioning. At the end Apsley put mercilessly before him the riches of youth and talent he was wasting, his wife, his mother, everything. Dacre lit a cigarette coolly:

“May I smoke? Yes, but you know, Sir Henry,—it’s all very fine—but I’m not like other fellows. I’m under sentence, and respited for—how long? God knows! I’m out for a good time until then, and even in my mad-house I’ll write stuff the world shall read. I’m piling up my experiences now while I can. Very soon I shall be grimacing behind the bars. Do you think I don’t know my mother wheedled you and Sir Mansfield into letting me marry? You couldn’t refuse her. No man ever could but myself, but I tell you that if you live with an angel it isn’t so hard to say no. She doesn’t get away with it with me. And I say that marriage was jolly hard on poor Cecily. My mother was against telling her people, but even then I thought it damned hard luck. She doesn’t know what she’s in for, but it’ll come some day with a bust—and then!—What do you suppose her father’ll say to us? I think and think about it. I got books about dafties and I went to Dorfmann a few months ago in Paris and told him my story as if I wasn’t married, and he said—‘What? you marry? Give it up, young man. Impossible?’ No, no! A short life and a merry one for me! Well!—my mother would have it and now she’s got it! I was never so keen about marriage as all that.”

His eyes grew subtle and inward as he ended. That tirade left Apsley speechless for a moment. It was the truth as far as the boy could know it. Magdalen was right. There was no other way than to give him the truth. Dacre was sitting huddled in his chair now, exhausted with his own emotion; his strange dangerous eyes seeing visions—not wholesome for a man to live with. Thinking with rending pity of her and her noble recklessness for her son, Apsley made a pretence of consulting a scribbled paper before he collected himself to speak. The great doubt in his mind was—“Is he worth salvation? And at that cost?”—But such questions lie outside the physician’s province and he went on:

“As you state the case it would have been criminal to allow your wife to marry you in ignorance of the facts. But suppose we knew facts you have never known which certified us that we were safe in encouraging the marriage—what would you say then?”

“That I should have been the first to hear them.”

“But if there were reasons why you should not hear them—and yet must believe them valid—Could you have brought yourself to that point? Could you now?”

“No, I couldn’t. I’m not a fool—nor a child.”

“Not if I tell you there are facts which made you a free man—which justified our decision. But we had not permission to tell you?”

Dacre turned a white face on him.

“Facts? Permission? Go on. I’m not the dummy you think me. I’ve a right to know whatever there is.”

Repelled, Apsley said curtly:

“I think so too, but what is more to the point the person most concerned thinks so and has directed me to inform you. You must know you are your mother’s son but not your putative father’s. You have no hereditary taint whatever.”

There was an awful silence. He watched Dacre’s face keenly as the releasing blow fell. Dead white at first, the blood presently surging into it in scarlet spots. His eyes furtive and dark, fixed on Apsley’s broad and staring.

“Go on.” That was all he said.

“You were born seven months after your mother’s marriage. Her father married her to Mr. Dacre because she had been compromised with a man older than herself whose name is to be reserved. Apart from that circumstance you have every reason to be proud of your descent. No man in England has better. Health, intellect and life well lived.”

Dacre said slowly:

“Then I have no right to my name—to Mardyke? I’m nobody’s child.”

“Legally you are your putative father’s child. You have every legal right. He never disowned parentage. He accepted it. His will proves it. But in truth you are not his child.”

Another long pause. Then Dacre turned on him.

“It’s a lie. She told you. My mother would lie herself into eternal hell to do anything she had fixed her mind on and she fixed it on marrying me. O my God, if only it were true! It’s a lie but it’s a splendid one. To think of her saying it. It’s as impossible as for a saint to be a street-walker. If you knew her pride and courage——”

“Why talk of street-walkers?” Apsley said dryly. The boy’s emotion steadied him. “Though, after all, they have had points in common with saints. I must pin you down to facts. I gauged your mother exactly as you do. I declined to believe her. I pointed out the fearful responsibility she was taking. She confronted me with proofs. On this knowledge Sir Mansfield and I gave our consent and encouragement to your marriage. Your mother persisted and——”

“She persisted? So she would. She’d persist in being burnt alive if it secured my marriage. Her whole heart was set on it. She tried to get you on her side and failed and then she did this. There never was anyone so steady when her mind is made up. Look at her life with my father! My poor, poor mother!”

Tears glittered in his eyes. His voice rang true for the first time. Bravado, pose, had fallen away like matter from spirit. Steel had fallen on steel. She was right, a thousand times right, thought Apsley,—though not as she had expected.

“But I must ask you to realise that I do believe your mother—as sincerely as I respect her,” said Apsley. “Otherwise I should never have consented to your wife’s father being ignorant. I have evidence——”

“Tell me no more! Not a word more. I won’t hear it and I’ll never believe it. It’s not in me to believe it, for I know. Tell her—Or no, I’ll tell her myself—that it’s pulled me together exactly as if it were true. She was sacrificed before she was sixteen to my father and then to me. She shall see I can do my bit too. I’ll take this fight standing. I’ll live clean and die clean whatever happens. I’m done with those rotters. A fellow who’s her son anyhow ought to have stuff in him. I’ve never understood her. I’ve not cared for her as I should, but, by God! she has courage!”

An immense dilemma confronted Apsley. One talked, but was it really enough? Could he leave it there, and herself enthroned higher in her son’s heart—a steadfast unflinching Madonna—or should he rank his proofs? Would the dark haunting return and beset him in the lonely watches of the night, the fevers of the day. Or would the supernal human love—the eternal victim offered on the eternal altar—suffice? He would take the chance. Proofs could come later if needed. He said gravely:

“Your mother convinced me, but you should know her best. In any case I am sure I need not allude to what she has suffered in coming forward—(Dacre waved a forbidding hand)—Yes, you are right. It’s not for me to interfere——”

“No one can interfere between my mother and me. Now let’s come down to business. Will you see me through this fight? I’ll go where you say—do what you say. I’ll obey you like a slave.”

Wrung out of his professional calm for an instant, unable to estimate the driving force of sudden conversion, hoping, yet doubting, as a man of his profession must, Apsley showed a quick glint of fire. He grasped the hot quivering hand on his table.

“By God I will.”—Then relapsed instantly and coolly into the physician.

“I’ll send you down into the country the day after to-morrow to a man I know—Dr. Ettrick. Come and see me again to-morrow, same time, for the arrangements. Good day, I have the highest expectations of a cure.” He rang the bell for his man.

“Next patient,”—ashamed of the emotion that was conquering his own self-control in this most unexpected quick-change. But every interval of the day he spent in wondering if Dacre had gone straight to her or what? Strange meeting between them if so. Strange results and changes would flow from it. And now he must write to her with the report he had promised. He lingered over it and hesitated. It did not reach his secretary’s typewriter.

That last sentence he could not refuse himself. She and her interests had become the food of his inward existence. He could absent his outer thoughts in his work but the inner current flowed steadily and was his Paradise of pain. She had kissed his hand. He looked at it often seeing the kiss as clearly as if a flower red as heart’s blood lay in the palm. All he had was hers now.

Pretty well for dingy Harley Street, but the man had hidden wells of passion in him. The ice had broken. The torrent ran free.

He went down himself with Dacre to Ettrick’s place in the country. The boy was quiet, scarcely spoke, kept his thoughts to himself. But he liked the peace and the look of Ettrick; so much was certain. Apsley came back, content so far as it went but on tenterhooks to hear from Magdalen Dacre.

On the fourth day—he had watched every post—came a letter which he saw among the rest with a shock of expectation. He opened it ravenously:

He read the enclosed letter next—tremors running along his blood and vibrating through his body. But none the less the physician’s acumen dissected every word he read:

Yes—; that satisfied him. No gas. It rang clear.

Then a letter to him from Dacre. He liked Ettrick. He felt the place would do him good. He had written to Cecily to let the flat. When Sir Henry allowed it he thought they would travel for a bit and then give Mardyke another trial. He meant to persevere with his writing and see what came of it. It appeared Dr. Ettrick was frightfully keen on good stuff of that sort—“a really modern-minded man”—and so forth. Apsley smiled there. He knew Ettrick’s extraordinary gift for being all things to all men—so long as he could catch their interest and turn it to his own uses for them. But he read with growing confidence and went instantly to the telephone. Not her own voice, but an appointment was instantly made for that evening. He realised that she had left instructions.

With what strange expectation and fear he went there. One softly glimmering lamp—no moon, but a pure stream of night air with the smell of trees flowing through the room. She was in cloudy black with her string of pearls. But when she sprang to meet him it was as if her hair had shot forth stars, her shoulders wings. She was revelation exultant, triumphant.

Always she had the aristocratic tendency to be sober in speech even perhaps in thought; no spilling over, but now she was transfigured beyond herself. She came at him in a rush, like flame.

“I distrusted him, I deserve to be shot. And he—Oh, Sir Henry, I’m so glad that it breaks me! When I had your letter—No, how can I talk of it? Tell me more—more. How he looked—exactly what he said. I don’t know how I waited without imploring you to come.”

She caught him in her own electric storm. He said in a very low voice, but deeply moved:

“Let me tell you. Yes, I believe there’s hope.”

“Hope? Certainty!” she cried with shining eyes. “This is what they call conversion. You’ll see! Sit where I can watch your face.”

She turned on a stream of light and almost forced him into a chair, sitting so near that he could feel her breath. Once she laid her hand on his knee and did not know it. Drawn into close, almost passionate intimacy of the moment he was yet outside her world. The Angel of the Annunciation but not the Deliverer. He told her all. He showed her his own letter.

“Ettrick’s a man of the finest tact and experience. I shall see him weekly. It will be a hard struggle; don’t blind yourself. But he has a fine ally in Ettrick. He’s a man of wide cultivation. He’ll get Gervase on his strong point—will encourage his writing. Also, his brother edits Forward—If Gervase can write anything worth getting in there—modern of the modern—he’d have reason for pride. Music, too. Ettrick’s a profound believer in the therapy of music and colour and his patients get so interested that they forget themselves. It’s a fine place—and——”

She interrupted passionately:

“You’ve thought of everything and what have we done to deserve it? But I must see him. I must. Can’t I go down with you?”

“Be wise!” he said, daring to lay a quieting hand over hers on his knee. “Think how a child treasures his secret! It’s an incentive to go ahead. And he must have no emotion now but those Ettrick chooses for him. Don’t let us have an anticlimax. I’ll tell him I’ve seen you and how you looked—

Imagination is inspiration in a case like this.”

Not even that could disappoint her or dim the shining beauty of her eyes. Hers was the beauty of emotion—light shining through alabaster; and what does feature matter in comparison with that living irradiation?

“Shall I ever be calm again—why did such a perfect joy ever come to me!” she said, trying vainly to draw the veil over her soul. “He loves me!”

She repeated that with the ecstasy of humility shot through with the gold of triumph that a girl uses for her first love. What might he not so enkindled have said if she had not suddenly spoken on a very different plane.

“And Cecily? We must think of her, poor dear. She has never grasped the danger and now she never need. She must go abroad. Her father’s a foolish gobble-gobble sort of man, angry and red-faced. But she has just the right cousins—all sports and dancing, and they’re going to the Dolomites for the summer. She’ll love that. If I mayn’t see him I’ll go abroad myself for fear I should give way to temptation.”

Going away? Sailing on a great joyous breeze a minute ago his sails dropped flat. He had imagined his weekly report—and seeing her gladden. Ettrick should fling all his splendid energy into this case of cases;—but it was he who would profit. He had forgotten Cecily. She was nothing to him. A poor everyday fool.

But of course Magdalen was right. Something must be done with the girl.

He restrained himself sharply. It had become a habit.

“The best plan all round, unless indeed you would like to stay in England awhile yourself so that you could go abroad with certainty. Should you go alone?”

“No—not alone.” A little pale colour flickered in her cheek. “A cousin and his sister—To Spain and the Tyrol later. And they wouldn’t start for quite awhile. I shall see. I can’t think of anything now but this.”

He hardened. The Beaufoys of course. After all what was he himself but a doctor doing his duty for a handsome cheque at the end of the business? Yet her tone had made him most infinitely more. He made one last desperate struggle for his own chance.

“I think I should see you occasionally—of course very occasionally. You may make most valuable suggestions. Not that I want to hinder your going. Speaking professionally I think you should go. But I should be in touch——”

“I should think so, indeed!” she answered, all eagerness. “I’ll never go unless you let me. As to being out of touch—never!”

A plan had suddenly struck him, but as it required Ettrick’s collaboration he would say nothing immediately. With a skill he had never guessed in himself he lured her away into talk of books, music, art, the things he loved, and though every now and then she flashed back to her son with a swallow’s swoop, she satisfied the very soul within him. He felt the answering spark in her and glowed to it. She showed him a manuscript book she had kept almost since childhood and he turned the leaves earnestly from promise to fulfilment, stopping here and there to read a few words with delight. Nothing of her own—a knotting together of flowers and medicinal herbs to serve all the uses of life. She had chosen with sensitive feeling—had filled her urn where the purest waters rise. He left, passionately determined to win her and for the first time in his life to taste joy. She came with him to the door—still in her rapture. He could even have imagined that she might lean and kiss his cheek as a lady of old did to her faithful knight. No otherwise—as yet. But instead she took both his hands in her little clutch and thanked and blessed him as the tears started in her eyes.

“Joy—nothing else—and I owe it to you,”—and turning sharply, ran back like a girl ashamed to be seen in emotion. Was he wrong in claiming any of it for himself, or was it pure mother-passion, the most primitive and enduring of all?

That he could not know but he knew the straight road to her consideration and fortunately it did not pull against duty. He flung himself straight into Dacre’s struggle. He wrote to Ettrick constantly and saw him oftener than it should have been possible. And his reward was astonishing progress. Under Ettrick’s direction the drugs were being gradually abandoned with the help of such crutches as science gives and Dacre endured the frightful reaction of less with courage. Never better help than Apsley’s and Ettrick’s, and the atmosphere of Thorwalton suited him perfectly. Ettrick, a lean dark-haired Scotsman with true Celtic vision, saw beyond the horizon with all his patients but especially with Dacre. He honestly liked him and believed in his gifts. Sensitive and brilliantly burnished as fine steel he captured Dacre’s imagination instantly and, combined with the influence of the skilled physician, his authority with him was amazing even to Apsley; Dacre brightened for battle. Once he said with a forced laugh that hid real feeling:

“I say—I’m like that old chap in the Bible—Moses, wasn’t it?—with two mighty men to hold up his arms because the fight went to blazes when they dropped. I expect they ached damnably. So do I. But I’ve got a big bit of fight in me yet. Dr. Ettrick, I like the look of you!”

Ettrick grinned:

“Same to you.”

Next time Apsley went down Ettrick said instantly:

“With no hereditary taint in the fellow (and you’re sure of that), I see no earthly reason why we shouldn’t pull him through and make a decent job of it. Of course he was beginning to debauch himself horribly with drugs, but we’ve caught him on the hop and his feeling about his mother’s action is a prop. It sounds brutal, Apsley, and I wouldn’t botch your work for worlds but I can’t help wishing sometimes that he had really swallowed her story. Not a word from him, but suppose the dread is there still—only a scotched snake?”

“He can believe her for it’s true,” Apsley said coolly. “I saw the father. Remember that. Remember too that we have her leave to put the proofs before him the moment we think it advisable. She spares herself in nothing. You’ve only to say the word.”

Ettrick looked at him thoughtfully.

“Must be a remarkable woman. The boy’s remarkable too in his way. But—Well, never mind. All’s as right as rain now. Come and have a look at him. I like him—He interests me. A queer problem.”

As to Cecily—with amazed blue eyes she heard what they thought fit to tell her.

“Of course I knew he was sleeping rottenly, but most of our set do that. And as to cocktails—I did think he was rushing it a little there! Poor old boy!—I hope they won’t knock off everything. He’ll never stand it. You’ll never get him to Mardyke to live, though it’s really all right in winter with the hunting. Yes, of course I’ll go with my cousins. I’m a perfect rabbit at nursing.”

Apsley saw her letters sometimes—healthy, good-humoured and full of enjoyment; nothing more. Well, perhaps it might be the best sort of companionship for Dacre, if they could drive some understanding of risks into her head. So she was out of the way and his own plan was maturing with the look of health and energy that was returning to Dacre and Ettrick’s certainty that they were over the top.

He had seen Magdalen often lately with his reports, but deeper and deeper as he was drawn into the net of her sweetness he could still be generous. She must have no sense of obligation. He would not buy joy. He knew that merchandise lies on no bargain-counter, though physical possession is on sale at them all. Scrupulously he watched her growing friendship, her look of gentle confident trust. Whatever Beaufoy might be in the background her son was the true preoccupation and on that string he played. And now came his moment. He had been plotting for weeks with Ettrick’s deeply intelligent co-operation that she should have a look at Dacre. Surely she deserved it! She had taken the deprivation angelically, instinct and trust strengthening her against her longing for the beloved face. That was how Apsley had put it to himself and to Ettrick. And Ettrick, apparently touched, had agreed. She said eagerly now:

“Oh, if you knew what it means to me to see you and hear how he looks. Just the sight of him. Does he look happy?—really happy? He doesn’t feel he’s in prison?”

“Prison?—He has taken to Ettrick like anything. Ettrick’s a great walker and he takes him with him. They discuss art, literature—God knows what all! Gervase is on a novel now called God’s Earth. They talk of it incessantly. Prison, indeed!” He laughed, and—“But listen!—You were very good to put off going—and suppose—I could take you down to have a look without his knowing? Would you go away happier?”

She clasped her hands mutely. No words.

“Well then, we’ll do it. But mind, I must have Ettrick’s consent. He’ll give it, I believe. The craving for drugs is done with. Of course he has not quite regained tone yet. His brain has, and, as we often see that when the body’s a little under standard, the creative intellect seems more brilliant. But no harm in that. I’ve brought you a carbon of the first chapter of God’s Earth.—I knew you’d want to see it.”

He had his reward. With sobbing breath but no tears, she said:

“You’re nearly as glad as I am. You are wonderful—wonderful. There can be no one like you in all the world. You waste your marvellous self on your patient. And yet not ‘waste’—No,—You save them.”

Again he restrained himself. He could find no personal touch in it. Yet could there be? He did not know women. Almost he regretted now the cold absorption of his work that had kept him ignorant.

He pretended to read a newspaper while she opened the typescript. He had pushed the lamp near by and settled her cushion, and he watched her read.

It was a weirdly beautiful fantasy of the dead past impinging on the living present. A story of to-day but with roots set in a terrible and cruel past. The rose-gardens lie under the sands—that waste gold has overdrifted the gold of the starry pavilions. The cups of pink jade and agate brim with the dry drift for wine. Only one thing survives above the burned bones—the great jade tablet, grey and deeply incised, bearing on one side the record of the past, on the other the foreordained dooms of the future, fading each year with fulfilment and continued by hands unseen.

Dacre had re-created the past in surpassing loveliness and power, yet with irony, dry as salt Falernian wine of modern days. He had set aside the seven silent lamas guarding the tomb of the conqueror and had bidden the dead arise. Dolma smiled through exquisitely bent lashes; the flush on her cheek was rose-damask. The dead world injected its fever to the living. Magdalen read enraptured, almost incredulous.

If Apsley’s cold experience traced something still of the hashish dream in the beauty even he saw vital strength welling up beneath it and it rekindled his certitude of good as he watched her. Amazement, pride, joy, passed over her face like shadows of light. Her tender lips were fixed in a line of attention almost stern. She scarcely breathed, every faculty burning together in a white flame. His heart sang within him. “I did it. But for me it could never have been.” At last she laid it down with a long breath. “Thank God.” Then, after a long pause, turning to him with infinite grace and sweetness:

“And thank you. The dearest, truest friend that ever lived. Now take me to see him and I shall bless you for ever.”

She gave him her hand and they sat hand-clasped a moment. She drew it gently away:

“What day shall we go? I suppose I mustn’t write and tell him what I think of it?”

“He doesn’t know you have seen it, and you shall see no more till it’s published. That’s the great surprise. I broke faith to please you. But will you come next week?”

“Will I!”

“And will you swear not to let him know you’re there? Not to break loose and run to him.”

“I’ll obey like a soldier. Strange if I didn’t! If you knew——”

The word “yearning” is often used lightly. He saw its reality then, and a cold cruel jealousy ran its dagger into his heart. For a moment he felt rather than thought—

“If the fellow were dead! If the coast were clear.”—But saints have these darting devils as well as sinners. It was gone as it came—in a flash.

“Ettrick has agreed,” he said, “We’ve planned it out to a dot. I’ll take you down, and——”

“And then I’ll go abroad with the Beaufoys and trouble you no more—except with letters. I can’t give those up.”

The Beaufoys! So he was right. So he was building his own doom with his own hands. He said no more, but noted that a more cruel, more bitingly tangible jealousy was at him. It did not touch his work, for such a man can live in water-tight compartments where work is concerned, and there he was colder, more incisive than usual. But it embittered his daily life almost beyond bearing.

He hid it. He took counsel with Ettrick and brought her down for the day to Thorwalton in his car—a day of mingled hope and fear that he was to remember all his life.

They lunched at a little rose-garlanded inn in Windrush village—how could he ever forget the roses at the window and their heavenly scent which seemed to him her own; her white dress in floating shadows of leaves and sunshine, her dear unjewelled hands. She mixed a drink of fruit juices for him on some recipe of her own and it was amrit—the drink of immortality. But why recall trifles that were none to him? For a few hours she was his, and yet her eyes looked always to Thorwalton and when he would have delayed—one half-hour more in that delicious garden—she looked at him beseechingly:

“Mightn’t we be late?”

They went on.

The car drew up at the edge of a wood down a little side-lane which the usual car swept past never guessing its cloistered sweetness. The hedges were bowered in bloom and leafage. Apsley pointed west over the meadows.

“The house is a mile from here—a lovely walk. Now—when we hear steps sit back well in the car.—Pull your big hat over your face. All right! So.”

They sat silent. He saw she was speechless and could see the flutter of thin silk over her bosom. Could that ill-doing lad be worth it? And yet to have it—All joy and peace and security shone before him in the very thought. He too could not have spoken.

Steps came. Voices. They saw a hand laid on the hurdle in the hedge. Dacre vaulted over it. “Come along. You try the hurdle too, Doctor. Oh, I say! London trippers!”

His voice dwindled to disgust.

“Let’s get into the woods as soon as we can.”

Apsley saw her clinging to the window—her face fixed, radiant. Even in his eyes the boy was all health now, tanned, firm, hopeful, and with something of her own poise. One could be proud—one could be certain that here was no taint. Ettrick leaped the hurdle also. Dacre patted his shoulder laughing. He said something about a litter of fox cubs and they went on and into the wood. The bushes closed behind them.

Apsley took the wheel instantly and the car moved slowly down the lane. She looked from the back window with straining eyes and then relapsed into her seat.

Silence. Then she turned upon him suddenly.

“I shall never be frightened any more. Thank heaven for men like you and Dr. Ettrick! I didn’t see his face. I could look only one way, but I bless you with all my heart.”

On the way back she spoke very little—lost in the joy of her own thoughts. But she remembered to be kind and gracious; “remembered”—he repeated this word a little bitterly in his thoughts and then love swept it away again and that—like all else she did—was the perfect perfume of her sweet presence.

He began to think he must speak before she left, but he had a rush of work, postponed asking to see her for a day or two later, and then she went suddenly. The Beaufoys wished it and she could go with a happy heart now. So she wrote, in a letter he treasured. But she was gone and the bubble of hope in which he lived had scattered its bright colours to the thriftless winds.

She wrote to him weekly. Her letters could not assuage his jealousy of the man who was there—to whom she could give her inmost thoughts and hopes about their child—who might, for all he knew—No, no, that could not be. It would not be like her. If there were anything between them now she would have told him in that strange interview when she had opened her long-sealed heart to him. There might be danger in the future but he thought not as he pored over her letters, extracting the last drop of possible meaning. How they brought her before him and set her in the chair where the lamplight fell as she liked it. He could hold her hand in silent communion and none to forbid. He could draw her head to his shoulder and lean his cheek on the softness of her hair as she showed him the second letter Dacre had written to her (she sent a copy), brief, resolute, charged with certainty. He could rejoice with her over that, and over the book when it was published (a wonderful success) with the strangest growing feeling that the boy belonged to him as well as to her. There are more ways of fatherhood than of the flesh and now, through her exceeding love of the boy and his own for her, it could not but seem to Apsley that he had given him to her in a most profound and spiritual birth. There were notes in her letters which allowed him to think she felt this herself. She wrote once:

Was it unreasonable to hope? Then he was unreasonable indeed!

At last Ettrick thought it unnecessary to keep Dacre any longer under guard.

“But I like his company and he likes mine,” he wrote, “and I think it’s good for him. Suppose he has his wife back and they take Meadowlands for a bit? Not a mile from here and I can see him constantly and cheer him on with the new book The Flowing Stream—promises well. Quite outside the usual fools’ lovemaking. Later he can go back to Mardyke. He seems to be quite off London and the cheap little city sets, and, by George!—he has a gift! But look here, Apsley,—they’re not to have any children. The girl is mere woffle—the world will lose nothing, and I won’t have him upset with the kind of worries they bring. You tell him that. He has a kind of fitful brilliance that depends entirely on surroundings and—but we’ll talk when we meet and I wish you would run down. I should like to know the mother. One can learn a lot that way. It was the devil’s own luck that he picked up the knowledge that he had the taint in him. That’s my only problem now—Can the impression wear out? As to the tattered nerves and cocktails, etc.—we’ve cured all that, so far as I know.”

Months went by. She had written and written with the faithfulness of gratitude and affection. That would be enough to start on, Apsley had decided, and he would put his fate to the touch at the first chance.

It was the day when he was to bring her down to Meadowlands. He had kept her in touch with everything, but had not seen her since her return until he came to the flat with the car. He thought her more enchanting than ever as she came out into full sunlight—all in white in the gay spring sunshine. More beautiful than ever in his eyes than she could ever have been in her youngest years of beauty. She reminded him of lilac bloom swaying in a spring breeze. Yes—he would show her his triumph and then, this evening, returning, he would tell her all; he would make her realise what he could be to Dacre in the future.—Plans, words, hopes, surged in his brain. They would have a country house near Mardyke or it should be Mardyke if she liked that better.

She met him with the calm of fulfilled delight—the tide of joy had covered all the rocks and waste sand-hollows, and it reflected cloudless heavens. He got her into the car, and for the first half-hour all her questions were of Dacre and he could answer without reserve and with the note of victory. Then she must know all about himself.

“You look a little tired, Sir Henry. If you give yourself so generously to all your patients—If I were your sister I wouldn’t let you!”

And so they talked, each time, as it seemed to him, drawing nearer to the inevitable delight. And yet it was always “Then.” Never—“Now.”

She spoke of her own travels.

“Delightful until just the end—a fortnight ago, and then a horrible thing happened that brought back the past most miserably. The suicide of a distant cousin of my husband’s. A delightful boy, Kenneth Cameron, whom we knew very well. He shot himself. They sent me a dreadful descriptive letter. Of course I said not a word in writing to Gervase, and he has been writing me the happiest letters. But still—you can imagine! I shall never let him know it was suicide. But to me—Oh, that terrible family.”

She stopped with a shudder. Nothing could be more natural than horror and precaution. If the boy still believed himself a Dacre—He began to feel that the time was coming when clear certainty must be set before him, and if it made any rift—(but it never would now!)—he himself would guard her with a wall of tenderness no sorrow should climb.

“Bad enough!” he said seriously, “but you at all events have no cause for fear. A clean bill of health and what begins to look like a touch of genius—Surely if any mother on earth can be happy it’s you. As to your husband’s family it should be extinguished in this generation if right and science have their own.”

Looking straight at her he saw an indefinable expression flit across her face. He thought—“Is it fear?” Then she was answering with a sigh:

“Surely. It’s moral leprosy—as my husband himself once said. But now—let us be happy.”

They talked of other things and with quiet gaiety until they reached Meadowlands.

A long low house with roofs of different pitches and angles of loveliness—a cottage added to and pieced and stretched into the most romantic jumble imaginable. Encircled by meadows it stood in a delicious cottage garden where the beds of old-fashioned flowers were not too proud to acknowledge kinship with homely uses. Cabbage roses loading the bushes grew happily with cabbages. Lilacs and laburnums rained late gold and mauve over beds of mint and thyme and aspiring peas with white butterfly blossom. Strawberries lolled crimsoning heads under shady leaves and all the air was filled with the soft indefinite humming of bees—a delicious background of peace and plenty to the birds’ song and perfume that filled the air. Apsley’s own heart sang with them. Into this guarded place of peace and blessed sunshine no evil could enter. They must stay here for ever. Even London was forgotten. Joy! Gladness rang chimes within him like the bells of the distant village church for a wedding, stumbling over each other in the hurry of delight.

The car halted at the wide-flung door. Ettrick rushed out, pale as ash.

“Stop, Mrs. Dacre. Don’t come in. Apsley, here! Quick.”

Before she could think, Apsley was in the house and the door shut in her face. She sat, stiff-stricken, listening. Sounds of running steps. From above a cry,—Could it be Cecily? The sun shone on her as she sat, but the voices of joy were dumb and terror rose like a tide. Not tempted to disobey. Motionless. It had come at last. You cannot cheat fate. Leaden-footed, certain. But she could not think all this clearly. Darkness. Weight. Now Cecily screamed—a dreadful shriek. Presently—but was it long or short?—Apsley came out. His shirt sleeves were rolled up. A strand of hair clung to his wet forehead.

“I must bring you in. Come.”

He took her hand and led her into a little room full of roses. He put a strong arm about her.

“I know your courage. He shot himself twenty minutes ago.”

.     .     .     .     .     .

Later they gave her a letter.

Oh, I say, poor Cecily! Let her marry some jolly open-air sport. I hope she’ll be happy. She’s a good-natured soul.”

.     .     .     .     .     .

When Apsley saw Mrs. Dacre a month later she was pale and quiet as a grey day in November when the earth is composed for winter sleep. He held her hand as they sat silent awhile. She said:

“You’ll understand how bitterly I blame myself that I didn’t tell him in the beginning—the moment my husband died. He would have grown up then in peace—not tortured, driven. All my fault—my bitter, bitter fault. We’re too self-considerate. What did a girl’s slip matter in comparison with his long agony? Of course I thought I had safeguarded the secret but——”

He said quite involuntarily and strangely to himself:

“If it was true——”

She looked at him.

“So you doubted and he disbelieved! Will you believe if I tell you I’m going to marry Colonel Beaufoy? That was settled in Spain.”

He was dumb. She went on:

“It would have been long ago but I wanted to be my son’s only. I knew him and what he needed. No one else could know. I wouldn’t have let an angel come between us. But now—of course—my cousin——”

Still Apsley could not speak. Wild surmises dizzied his brain. He was wronged, robbed—but how? What right had he to complain? Wild words of love and sorrow were on his lips, but now—too late—too late. After what seemed a long time he got up and said slowly:

“I wish you every happiness, you know that.”

She said with a kind of fluttering in her voice:

“And you won’t think me ungrateful if we don’t meet? You’re so bound up with it all—You were so wonderful. I don’t think I can—Will you understand and forgive?”

That gave him strength. Cruel! But yet, no doubt wise and, shall we say, right?

“Don’t give it a thought,” he answered, dropping her hand. “You must remember that though I shall never forget you we physicians must take each case as it comes and the next obscures it. Must. Or how could we live?”

How, indeed? he thought as he walked past the trees before her window which he would never see again. But he could not refrain from those words or from noting the hurt surprise in her hazel eyes as she turned slowly away.

Soon after he saw her marriage in the paper. In Paris. The bride and bridegroom were to have a year’s travel. Then Mardyke.

Later he and Ettrick met Sir Mansfield informally to talk over a case obscure and terrible which had roused the interest of all the capitals. The talk turned to the Dacres. Sir Mansfield spoke first.

“Points of resemblance. But of course that boy was doomed from the beginning. I tell you I saw the mother the day the husband broke out. She was wild with fear. I can feel her shaking hand now—‘Is there any escape for my boy, Dr. Hutton? It haunts me day and night.’ No—Harry, don’t look at me like that! Don’t I tell you I know? Didn’t I see her perpetually and her terror at every fit of anger in the child. She took everything for a symptom. She should have begun her pious fraud at once if she wanted to blindfold me or to save him. And now, here’s the end that proves whose child he was! Mind you, I don’t say the line you took in consequence did any harm. It was the best anyhow, so there’s nothing to regret. But answer me, Harry—what did your instinct say when she told you?”

“It told me she lied. But later—proof after proof and I saw the father—a splendid fellow——”

“Yes—I suppose the man she’s married now. I saw him once long ago. D’you take that for proof? And why? His acknowledgment of paternity may have been her price for consenting to marry him. How can you tell with a mother that thinks of nothing but her son? And you, Donald?”

Sir Mansfield had turned his humorous old eyes on Ettrick.

“As to that, Sir Mansfield, I lived with him for eighteen months and I swear I don’t know. Many a sane man commits suicide. You can put it either way. The illegitimate child of an immature mother, spoiled, nerve-cracked, in a horrid environment, debauching his health in London with a crowd not fit to be at large—every man Jack and woman Jill of them! Or else—a man doomed before his birth. It could be either. But have you ever thought, Apsley, that there’s possibly a hidden story or several behind it all? Nothing like a confession for hiding a secret! I saw her several times after he shot himself. A born actress and a fine one. She compels belief. Look how you and Sir Mansfield stick to the opposite beliefs she dished out to you. I had a woman like her once at Thorwalton.—But as to Mrs. Dacre—she plays on the mother-string—until—Well, it’s a string that all the world dances to and she knows it. But we shall never know and Beaufoy will know least of all, unless he’s the story himself. I own that, professionally speaking, I leave off with an appetite for more information.”

Furious within—the tone rasped his every wound—Apsley said with calculated carelessness:

“You put it neatly. But I repeat I believe every word she said. Probably I shall never see her again. When a case ends it ends for me. But I think your experience leads you to suspicions and mysteries where there’s no room for them.”

He had quite regained self-control now for all outer purposes, but when alone he often sat with his head in his hands, suffering all the agonies of defeat. He had failed her. She rejected him altogether.

There was no way in which he was unwounded. But it must not show.

Ettrick lit a cigarette. Apsley thought a minute and added abruptly:

“You know you’re talking perfectly clotted nonsense. The father admitted paternity, said the boy was to be his heir. And he was a married man. Name his motive!”

“Love. Mad in love with her. She’s that kind of woman. But I could analyse while she talked! Now look here. Suppose for her own reasons she wanted the husband shut up. What better way to break him than to tell him about the boy? Who did she think to serve by it—that is if she did tell him? Would he be kinder to another man’s child? What about the boy’s prospects? How does the devoted mother come in there? Then the marriage. Suppose she wanted the boy off her hands and thought it worth a price? She must have known the girl was a fool. And as to her truthfulness. How many different stories has she told you and Sir Mansfield? And did the boy care for this devoted mother? I’ll swear he didn’t,—and I knew him. He fell for her courage and no wonder! But otherwise—No! My sympathy is with the boy all the time. But what’s the use? I declare, Apsley, you talk as if—Why even her allowing him to be told at the end was theatre through and through. A noble gesture! If you think——”

Sir Mansfield interposed:

“Don’t squabble, boys. Don’t I tell you I know. But I own that of late I’ve asked myself why she didn’t invent her story sooner, seeing the chance the boy might get wind of the truth. No doubt the poor dear soul felt exactly as she said she did, but—Well, women’s minds don’t work with machine-made logic and we often have to thank God for that. But I shouldn’t have thought he was the young man to mourn over a vanished ideal—even of a mother. I should have advised her otherwise on that point.”

“She made sure he could never hear of the lunacy,” Apsley said with stifled fury. Every word of Ettrick’s was a flick on the raw, “and the minute he did she told me. And she has married the father of her son.”

Ettrick’s smile was humorous.

“I’m a Scotsman and cautious. Well—I’ll put it this way. I won’t side with either of you. I give the Scots verdict—‘Not Proven’—and wouldn’t stake a penny one way or another. What’s the truth in such a fix for a woman? We shall never know. Here’s luck to her! I like these charmeresses as a study. Not nearer.”

They returned to the case under review.

But Apsley knew now that he had never been sure—that he had never understood her. You could explain—could balance proofs—but she stood beyond, calm, gently smiling, eager just where you would expect it, but impenetrably enigmatic. She would never drop a loop, would use you, take your best powers, and glide softly past you to her own ends, leaving you incapable of reproaching her. He pieced the story together for himself in twenty different ways now, prompted by Ettrick’s irony, and could never find the answer convincing. Remembered words of her son’s, drifting senses of his own, confused him.

Always she smiled beyond it and eluded him. Of only one thing he was certain—unquenchable desire to wring out the heart of her mystery. Faint strands of doubt were weaving into the web of his thought.

He saw her once more—sitting under the trees with her husband in the park. He himself was crossing it on his way from a consultation. She was looking up at Beaufoy with that intent air of gentle eagerness he remembered so well. He saw her lay her hand an instant on his knee. Apsley remembered that gesture also. The same scene with a different hero. She was smiling now. A pang of memory tore him. He turned sharply off to the clean austerities of his work. The boy at all events stood clear of the wood now.

Her return to England and to a life so different from that which she had left had brought to Yasoma Brandon the fulfilment of the peace she had realized in the house of Arima in Japan. In the children she had brought into it she found the laughter, the seriousness, the strength, the earnestness, the understanding, the all that she had found and loved in Ito—yet in a different measure, and she gave love to them with a purity that had not been hers before. Bridget too was happy, a very clucking hen, thoroughly enjoying the responsibilities of the large brood. And if with the nights Yasoma slept in the heart of love itself, and her days brought her into new paths of knowledge she remembered also with new understanding all that she had seen and known with Ito and Arima in Japan. One day and all that was in it she often dwelt upon much as a mother may think over the days which her young children have left for ever behind them, but over which she lingers none the less lovingly. It had given her a moment alone with Ito, a moment which had opened a shining hope, and more, a door in her mind that would never be closed again and which she used freely now and with no mechanical help. It was then for the first time she had realized that body forgotten—two dew-drops on the same lotus leaf running together—their two hearts would form one, and a new sphere of light. It had been for her the vision splendid and now she lived in its truth.

An hour afterwards she had sat in the late golden afternoon and felt with quick intuition the changed atmosphere in the meditation hall. There was a warmth of gentleness alien to its usual austere strength. An Indian—(a friend of Scott’s, and the other two Indians who lived there)—Sri Bhagavan, had come to the place only the day before. He was known to Arima by reputation and was to lecture to them that afternoon. She looked along the ranked Japanese faces, masculine in every fibre, sensitive indeed, but with the sensitive pliability of a sword of tempered steel, every movement, every revelation and reserve hiding the strength of intensely nervous energy. It was profoundly interesting to mark the difference as Sri Bhagavan entered—the two Indians holding each a hand of his as he went between them with something of a woman’s grace in spite of his European dress and turban. The three advanced gently, showing their affection delicately but without reserve, even the two who already bore Arima’s mark looking into the face of their friend with the burning veneration inspired by spiritual and literary attainment in India—the veneration which extinguishes all self-consciousness and leaves only pure worship.

“In its way that utter forgetfulness of self is rather a wonderful thing,” she had said in a low voice to Sayoko who sat beside her. “It accounts for the nakedness of their ascetics and a lot beside. They feel the body to be only an accident of the soul. They have the innocence of children or animals when they’re of the right sort.”

She had watched a moment longer and then added:

“I like to look at them. See their golden faces and eyes dark and dim with gazing at things which blind them to everything else.”

Sayoko who was always practical shook her little head:

“But these men are chosen mystics and one is a poet. How can they be like other men? Remember in Zen we do not study much. We live, very plainly and practically, and sweep our minds clean that when the Light comes there may be no dust for it to fall on. I think these men would not mind dust. They would be thinking it did not matter—the Light is all. But sitting cross-legged and staring into nothing will not make you a Buddha.”

She quoted merrily:

“No.—I like our men best. And remember we thought nothing of nakedness until you came into our Garden of Eden like the snake and told us it was abominable. Even now we don’t understand that! But, hush—listen!”

It was Scott who said the brief words of introduction. He had known Sri Bhagavan for years. “A famous poet. One for whom the darkness that covers reality is only a mist at dawn. A man who lights the gloom of the world with the lamp of beauty. An ambassador from the land which has given Asia her soul——” and so forth, for two minutes. He was no orator and the phrases had been so carefully planned that if he had had a shirt-cuff Yasoma would have suspected it of notes. But they served, and the guest stood with one slender brown hand leaning lightly on the reading desk and began to speak in English with perfect fluency and scarcely a trace of the clipped Indian-English accent. The picture was strangely interesting, the listening faces lit up by the spirits of six nationalities looking up to the golden features which might have been those of the Prince of the Sakyas, the Buddha, in his beautiful youth.

Invisible to the poet in her dark corner Yasoma’s love of beauty dominated her. A flat beam of sunlight framed the Indian, turning his fragile hands to gold and deepening the golden shadows of his face into velvety brown. This was the young Krishna—the Holder of Hearts—in the forest of Brindaban—his voice the Flute which strikes the earth into a passion of hearing. Yet for the first few sentences she did not hear. Then a word struck her awake and held her.

“Gentlemen of Japan, China, Burma, Ceylon, Siam, and India, can there be greater honour than that I should speak to you who all with myself have beheld the light that shone from an Indian palace and enlightened the darkness of Asia. Tibet, Cambodia, Tonquin are not represented here but—

“So also with those other countries who with us hold fast to the truth. For we are one. Yet before I begin I must diverge, for a strange thing has happened. As I entered this Hall an inward command overtook me—these commands are not unknown to you,—and the Voice said—‘As you begin recite the song of the dancing girl of Khetri.’ Why I do not know. But I obey in the certainty that it is a direct message for someone whom it will reach. This dancing girl was a woman of India so unfit for the society of the virtuous that a well-known religious teacher of India declined to enter the room where she stood. She made her way to him and sang this song. It is addressed to Shiva—the Self-Existent.—

“And the wise man understanding her words she danced for him, in the same spirit as that in which the juggler in ancient France tossed his knives before the altar of the great Lady, the Mother of Christ,—the Bodhisattva,—and saw his offering accepted. Hers also was accepted.”

There was a touching silence filled with a unison of deep comprehending sympathy from all who heard.

Yasoma had hid her face behind the shelter of her hand accepting the message for her own. She had no illusion now as to the nature of her action and its consequences to herself. Nothing—nothing but the flight from London could have saved her from gross destruction of the seed of light in her heart, and what instinct or memory had urged her to flight and brought her into this high beauty?

And Ito? Remembering the vision of the day before, the glory that had made them one sorrow and one joy so mingled that none could sever them flooded her to the extinction of the outer world for one long moment. When she heard again, the Indian had passed into a new train of thought.

“Action and reactions. The mesh in which personal life is involved and the clean simplicity of the break-away from the manifold to the One! No fly with its wings smeared with the spider’s clinging cobweb ever struggled more pitifully than the seeing soul too weak to use its own wings. Had we all the courage to relate our own experiences might not the blood and tears mingled in each cup be balm to the wounds of others? We meet here under these ancient trees with our secret woes and experiences. What pang of grief or joy or slavery or love of freedom has driven us here with this unslaked passion which only the Infinite is vast enough to satisfy? I put aside reticence and set my own story before you.”

There was a moment’s silence in which the sharp intake of breath by which the Japanese express respect ran round the gathering. No man before in that hall had proposed to lay himself on the table for dissection. What would be the bread broken before them—what the wine spilt? The rows of faces look like one, the glittering eyes fixed steadily on his.

“I was born thirty-two years ago in a city of the Punjab in a wealthy home and of a Brahmin family, my father being a scholar, my mother a saint. Surely I had earned something in past lives to have inherited so much. It is now the fashion to speak of Indian womanhood as the martyr of our lusts—the sacrifice to the bestiality of Indian manhood. That there are such instances I shall not deny. That by the folly and wickedness, or as Buddhists would call it, the ignorance, of many,—including our teachers,—these things have happened is also true, and that these men have sinned against a higher truth than the like sinners in the Western world is so true that the wise among us, though themselves innocent, accept the contempt to which we have been exposed as a self-imposed consequence and do not retort upon the West as we might if we would. For what has been wrong in us we have paid. I quote an ancient saying: ‘Where the gods are at work let no man meddle!’—

“In my sixth year a marriage was arranged for me by my father and mother with the unborn daughter of a family of our own caste. Prayers were offered in both families that such a daughter should be born, beautiful and good and dutiful. The prayer was granted and the name was given Sita—a name inexpressibly dear to all Indian hearts because of that Princess Sita who in the Ramayana, the second of our two great national epics, shines for ever the star of perfect womanhood. But her family lived in another city and though my mother had seen the child at the age of two I had not, and in truth her name meant nothing to me. So we grew, each in our own sphere, apart. Now, when I had reached the age of fourteen and marriage was discussed, I scarcely heard what was said, for two great Powers united to draw me from the formalities of common life. I began to write poetry secretly and though the ministrations of our purchita (family priest) were as nothing in my eyes I knew that behind these irksome ceremonials was Somewhat waiting for me, elusive, fugitive, mysterious, aware and wakeful as I for it. Something that fled yet desired my following and one day would clasp me. And one day, at the age of fifteen, seeing my elder sister hiding from the little youngest sister and tempting her to follow with sweet cries like a bird and lovely temptations, I wrote these words in Hindi and afterwards made them in English, because the case was exactly my own. But it was not of any woman I wrote, nor shall I ever write, save as a hieroglyph of divine Beauty.

He halted, and there was a break in his voice as if the structure of words collapsed under emotion and passion escaped like life-blood from a wound and filled the hall. But he quickly controlled himself and said with a child’s simplicity and gentleness:

“This is because I afterwards experienced what I sought, and even now how can it be spoken of as though it were an ordinary thing?”

Arima had come in a few moments later than the rest and sitting a little apart from the others he held a paper fan in his right hand and pressed it against his lips as if to check words which might have broken from them. Yasoma, herself profoundly touched, wondered a little angrily whether behind his masked face the thought protested:

“Erotic. Passionate. Unfit. These people! These people!”

She was convinced he would speak later. Sri Bhagavan’s voice gathered up emotion and stored it away, and went on:

“But my story. My parents and my bride’s parents commanded that the marriage should take place and it was done. What reason had I to urge against it? If I had said that all my heart was drawn above, the only reply that tradition and belief would have permitted them to make was that the two things had neither connection nor relevance. Therefore the marriage took place. What could the beauty of an unusually childish child of eight mean to me? She wept aloud with fear of the strangers present and I felt disgust only, stopping my ears and saying, ‘Take it away!’

“So the marriage ended and her parents took her home until she should be ten years old. At that age she would come to my mother for training and when she reached twelve years and I eighteen our true union would take place. For me, I was but fourteen at the time of the marriage and was sent to school in England and forgot her. Occasionally, at some chance allusion or when letters came from home the mention of her raised a careless wish in me that some event would sever us for ever.

“Now at school the fact that I was an Indian cut me off from the general life. It had unluckily leaked out that I was married and this, perhaps quite naturally, exposed me to a sort of annoyance of which I say nothing. But I have it to thank for this—that it drove me in on books.

“The first to strike me awake was one of Professor Max Muller’s called Theosophy—the title of which is misleading, for it has of course nothing whatever to do with the Society settled at Adyar, nor any of its branches. But like a trumpet call it roused my pride in my country, at first because it was my country’s teaching, and afterwards because it was the truth. I pored over it and bathed my soul in it and afterwards in the Upanishads and all the mighty Scriptures of my race. Shall I attempt to say to you who know what I felt when the rolling wave of that wisdom couched in immortal words broke upon me, and at first so drowned me that I lay passive beneath the light and sound and thunder of the ocean, stunned and broken with joy. Could I not have worshipped the feet of this Western man who wrote:

“Ah—that was truth! Had I not seen it in my home where night after night when the day’s work was done my father seated with the Scriptures before him read chosen passages aloud that my mother’s spiritual light, clear intuition and brighter than any lamp of reason, might illumine the written page until it glowed with a more living fire than life itself? Was it not in this pure air that my own unfledged wings had learnt to fly? Had I not seen the difference when in Europe I can most truly say I never heard from any person I met a word of their religion. There were slenderly attended services in the churches on Sunday, but all the week I knew well what gods were served and what worship and tribute were paid to them. And with inward refreshment I turned again to the saying of Max Muller—‘This is the highest summit of thought which the human mind has reached.’ Indeed, yes. And it was my inheritance. But I was too much alone. There were times when the vastness thundered upon me like a tempest let loose and my faculties fled before it like a dead leaf on the wind, stunned and helpless. It affected my health, and the more so because I strained to accomplish all that my teachers expected of me. But help was at hand and I have sincere delight in telling here of how it came.

“I was seventeen, and I had written to my father that the thought of returning to India so soon to become the head of a family was to me abhorrent and impossible. Here I condense by saying that, though against their will, my parents graciously consented to my wish and the matter was adjusted with my wife’s family. She was now living with my mother. But it was thought that I had gained all I could from school and that I should be transferred to the family of a tutor who had one son of his own and took two boys for education with him. The son is scarcely more than a phantom in my memory. The other boy was a Japanese—nineteen years old and soon going to Oxford. I have not asked his permission to give his real name, therefore I call him simply Kato.

“I see him now looking up from a book as I came in expecting nothing but humiliation from his strength and superior age. Should I not thank every Japanese here present for the sustaining pride and strength which he shared with me as though it had been my right instead of his bounty?

“We were two children of Asia astray in a riotous and alien civilisation which, especially among all but the most intelligent, regarded us as singularities to be endured with scarcely hidden impatience. We were ‘queer’ and ‘heathen’ even to those in whose minds Christianity was an outworn superstition. But there was a difference made between Kato and me which I felt sharply. It would be impossible to say how I envied this young man who could smile at their cold and careless superiority because the majesty of his country, if not his own, compelled a calculating politeness. Mine they regarded as a vassal. There were no civilities to be wasted on me. He saw it, and we became close friends.

“Shall I forget the day when I overheard a young Englishman of our Civil Service say a most insulting word of my people. It was the climax to much. With burning heart and cheeks I rushed in and found Kato sitting at our table and writing. I cried:

“ ‘These English are the first of our conquerors to despise us. The Greeks, the Moguls,—all took our gifts. But not these. How can I keep step with a free man?’—with more which I will not repeat.

“He looked silently in my face, then stood up and bowed to me. His face had the beauty of perfect masculinity built with a noble strength of brow and jaw, redeemed only from sternness by eyes like black pools of light, flashing humour and kindliness on all he trusted. His voice had the golden colour of a temple bell in twilight. Need I say to his own people that never once, however tired, did I see his courtesy falter, even to those whose crudity and coarseness revolted us both.

“ ‘May I ask,’ he said, ‘what view the wise men of your country would have taken of a fool’s folly? Would it have wrung their hearts? Would your Prince whom we in Japan have worshipped, not as Lord of the Universe, but as the Universe itself, have dispersed his golden calm because—Oh, is it worth talking of? Sit down, my friend. We are the slaves of his wisdom and my only astonishment is that you do not yourself worship this Prince who will yet conquer the world. Can it be that when your country rejected his Wisdom she shackled her own hands and feet and blinded her eyes? Can it be that the Truth would have kept her free?’

“Up to that moment we had spoken of many things wise and beautiful, but of religion we had not spoken, for on that point young men are either careless, or jealous, or shy. But from that day he flashed the truth to me for he was truly one of the Awakened, and from his lips I not only heard but saw.”

The men before him sat rigid hiding profound feeling under their composure, suffering with this living suffering nakedly thrust before them. Was it the magic of love or some sorcery of union which revealed to Yasoma of whom he spoke, and that his life like her own was a debt owed to Ito? She knew as though trumpets had proclaimed it. And Arima knew also—she read his knowledge in the smile that flickered over his lips and was gone. But the speaker had resumed and now her soul waited on his words.

“After that day I knew neither shame nor timidity. Pride, but no personal pride clothed me in armour that no dart could pierce. Together we read the Law of the Utterly Awakened One, and he, inspired by realisation, taught me who was not hard to teach. For what says a thinker of my people:

And a teacher far more ancient says also:

So it was with me. He led me to the point where what you have named Satori and we Indivisible Existence, Absolute Bliss, must of necessity meet the higher consciousness and coalescing with it make a new man. There was a night later when I sat alone, for he had gone on to Oxford where I was to follow. The window was open and I looked into a close London street panting for breath, listless in the heat. A large star hung as it were alone in the dark-blue heavens. At least I was conscious of no other. In my heart a great resolution was forming. I would not marry. I would bring none into the world who might reproach me because they were not born into a country of free men. But I would devote my life to writing, speaking and teaching my people the mighty faith and philosophy which makes every man who holds it with understanding a soul freed from all fetters of desire or grief or joy or life or death. And as I made this resolve the star came lamping down the sky nearer and nearer. Or was it that the light increased to the glory of a myriad suns? It swam to me over the housetops. Light, light unspeakable filled my eyes to blinding, my soul to swooning. But before the earthly broke under the eternal—I saw—I saw.”

He stretched his arms upward. His uplifted face with closed eyes shed light upon the gathering shadows. Rigid as effigies on tombs the men confronted him with closed eyes lost in their own deep dreams of remembrance. When he spoke again the interval had been neither long nor short for any—but timeless eternity.

“Then I wrote to my father and a letter to my wife—a letter which placed the decision in her own hands which might condemn her to life-long widowhood. My parents had told me much of her great intelligence and womanly sweetness and I, too submerged in my own great experiences to heed, only now realised the pain and shame and wrong I was inflicting on one most innocent, and depending wholly upon me for all joy. I told her that as a follower of the World-Honoured I desired to devote my life to the brotherhood ordained by Him that I might restore India to her royal heritage in His teaching. For so only can she stand free among the nations wise with a greater wisdom than rules the West. But I said—I accepted her decision, and if she claimed me would return and work as a householder can for the same great end—and if this should be her decision I implored her help.

“She replied:

A brief silence, and he continued to the end.

“Since that promise was fulfilled I have devoted my life to my people—many of whom have caught the torch from my hand and carried it onward knowing as I know that the resurrection and clear shining of India are bound up with the Law of the World-Honoured. It is a little thing to me that Western science begins to acknowledge His omniscience though she knows it not for His. That could be no otherwise for Truth abides. But it is a great thing—my life to me and more—that India should gather up her spilt treasure and with it rebuild her palaces of thought and freedom until she lifts her hand to the heavens, holding aloft a fire at which all the world may re-kindle its dimmed lamps of love and wisdom.”

He ceased, looking at the men before him with eyes in which the desire of the spirit burned like ardent flame. No one stirred until Arima rose. Yasoma trembled lest some sternness in him, some austerity should strike disharmony in the deep chord of feeling which almost visibly possessed the room. He spoke quietly, evenly, yet his voice gathered strength as it went on.

“We have heard. We thank our brother because he has trusted us with a noble story. If he speaks of any debt to our people what man is here who would not lay his face in the dust to honour the land to which Asia owes her all? The debt is ours—ours for ever. I have thought as I listened—Are we too arid in our words where these mighty experiences befall us? I do not know. It is perhaps a part of our racial inheritance. But this I know—to-day has stirred us like the recital of the deeds of our heroes. And more. Sir, we thank you. We rejoice that three of our band sail with you to the Land whence came our Light.”

The men all rose and bowed deeply to the slender figure beside the desk. He returned the salutations.

Dusk was gathering as they made their way into the wood outside, and it sealed the peace into which emotion had been resolved like the closing chord of a great music.

The Sart family had been established for many centuries in a high rift in the Downs that run up from the fat sea-plains of Sussex, shouldering skyward with great smooth undulations like whales that break the surface of a sleeping sea and drowse in sun and rain in vast bulk above it. You wind along from stately Arundel by Clymping, with its strangely beautiful Norman church built by pious men in days now dream-like as any story imagined by romancers. And avoiding busy Bognor you turn up to the loom of the hills going by Westergate through Tangmere and so to beautiful Boxgrove—Bosen grave they called it in Domesday—with its stately priory church. And when you have paused there to see the stately arches, the little village nestling in roses and green shade and happy cottage gardens, you take the little road that climbs by the ruins of the King’s pleasaunce of Halnaker and so up and away into Down-land that is a world of its own—very different from the prosperous villages, the country seats of wealthy gentlemen and well-to-do folk at large and the comfortable cathedral city of Chichester. Hundreds of years of history centre about Chichester reaching back to the days when it was a Roman castra or camp, and its altars were built to strange gods very unlike the White Christ and His stirring, powerful bishops who succeeded them.

But Down-land lived above all this in its own isolation. A pagan air still haunts it in spite of the grey and lonely little church carrying on a feeble existence in a high and craggy fold of the Downs. There are the dew-paids that make the church a mushroom of to-day’s dawn. There are the driven trees fleeing like grey ghosts before the fierce Channel gales that whip them into cringing, and—there is Down-land Hall.

I am no archæologist. I do not know from what remote ancientry the core of that old house comes down, nor what resolved hands built it to face the cruel loneliness and stern surroundings. Why should men have fixed themselves remote from the comforts of the lowlands? Was it fear, or driven conscience or feuds, or world-surrender such as seizes men in some madness of religion and drives them into the wildernesses?—Who can tell? One thinks no woman can ever have willed to live there—that the Sarts must have descended armed and swooped like the Romans upon shrieking brides and so carried them fainting up into the solitudes of Down-land to live among the harsh beast-like serfs of their harsh masters.

Certainly the core of the house suggests a dungeon built of moorland stones piled together and jointed with such rough art as kept out the weather and scarcely more. Later times added rude windows to the dark rooms and still later bits added on here and there as the family needs grew. Nothing beautiful—nothing soft or evoking any tenderness even in the Sarts who handed it down from father to son, and with it only a fierce pride of possession because they had kept their narrow dynasty alive while in the world below the lines of kings and dukes ended, families married, died out, took on new names and new natures and changed utterly. And still from the time the first of the Sarts set a strong foot in England with the robber bands of the Conqueror they had remained Sarts.

It was said they had their name from the Sarthe, the great river which still names a Departement of France, and that is true for they came from near Alençon and had the raiding, robbing, Viking Norse blood in them that gave its name to Normandy. And it is certain also that they kept their blood pure to the Sart lineage.—Probably not following the example of the Egyptian Kings—(though God knows what happened in the early days, when it would have been as much as any priest’s life was worth to make his way up to Down-land and inquire into what the Sarts were at) but by making it a rule for the Sart men to marry their cousins and kinsfolk where it was at all possible. It sounds incredible yet is true that this was done, and those who search the Sart pedigree in company with a Sart who knows its ramifications will find that the sons sacrificed everything to cling to this family tradition, and that no bride so far as is known ever entered the house who had not a drop or more of the black and brooding Sart blood in her veins. Before and after birth the Sart mother imbued their sons and daughters with that tradition—a strange one in more ways than one.

And still the house stands in the far heights of the Downs—a wild place, tumbled stones about it, never a bit of garden to hedge it into any quiet thoughts of its own, only what looks like a sheep-track running up to the heavy secret door and forbidding windows. So the first Sart must have willed it to be, remote from, and dominating, the then wretched village with its huddling serfs. Nowadays they did not huddle—they fled instead to lower and more genial surroundings, and half the poor houses were tumbling into ruin. Aymer Sart’s son and daughter (his wife was long dead) had fled too, and he lived there alone—a secret bitter man, with only one tie to his world, his brother Godfrey—they still favoured the Norman names of the founders. His children meant nothing to him—who but a fool would bank on the unknown future? But his brother meant much. A true Sart. And that too was the Sart tradition. The fathers and children always kept their distance from each other.

Ivo Sart had taken a step which displeased the head of the family—but so had his sister Editha, for she had married, and he had not. He was a comparatively young Fellow of All Angels at Oxford—a born university man with a shrinking from women and from society—and his life mapped out for him in a kind of distinction, unaustere but which was what you could accept as a delicate asceticism among the noble old buildings and quiet gardens, where even the rooks modified their antiphon into a drowsy record of the passing of immemorial time. He possessed also the friendship of an unusual man named Blois, a Fellow also and of a family whose ancientry even a Sart could not despise. And it might well appear that in this deep and unruffled content their lives might flow with scarcely a ripple of change until they reached the unsounded ocean together.

And yet—here was Sart in Japan—of all places and Blois still dreaming under the mighty beeches in All Angels garden with sundering seas between them, but also a sense of severance more deep than any oceans. It began strangely—a man of whom they knew little had become a Fellow of All Angels—and from that moment the atmosphere had changed. The original Sart nature had shown itself, for a Sart was a Sart before anything else. Disruption followed and here was Sart in Japan, and Blois sad and dissatisfied in the ancient garden of All Angels.

It had been the mathematical spirit driving out the philosophising one. It was the Aristotelian rending the Platonic—the world of Ideas assaulted and riven by the devastating onslaught of facts. Those grave and peaceful conversations—hardly to be called discussions—in the common-room—where were they? Gifford’s shrill denunciations had rent them asunder, and Sart and Blois with them. And too, the dark, hard melancholy of the Sarts was beginning to show itself markedly in Ivo. It was his blood—it could not be otherwise.

Ivo Sart lay asleep in Japan walking through a place he knew very well in the daytime—the great temple built in Chinese fashion by a rushing river at Uji, a few miles from Kyoto. Nothing can be lovelier or more silent. Court after court climbs upwards in terraces surrounded by pines musing in perfect tranquillity—whether in vision against a low moon or towering in ecstasy against the rosy baths of dawn. Certainly priests live there but they are wise—they keep out of sight. It is very rarely one is seen, and then, only passing with quiet haste up the steps from one terrace to another and through a massive open gateway touched with splendid red, he is gone swiftly as a bird across the sunset.

But in this dream a very gentle rain fell stringing the boughs with diamonds and making tearful quiet in the ancient place as though a drift of memory breathed through it cloudlike.

Two Japanese people passed Sart with the small clop-clop of wooden clogs, a young man and woman. They were under a great blue Japanese umbrella with the family name upon it in Chinese characters splendid enough for an Emperor’s mausoleum. And they were speaking to each other.

“Of course,” he said, “the best tea in Japan is here in Uji. It is honourably priced at—as high as twelve yen a pound—and higher.”

The woman answered in a voice like little shaken silver bells:

“But did you know there is a sort they never sell? It grows in a small field in the hills, and once a year on the night of the Return of Souls a naked woman draws her kimono round it in the deepest dark before dawn. If any sees her he dies before the year is out. A priest owns it and gives it only where he will. They call it Dream Tea.” They were moving out of hearing. The dreamer caught only part of his reply:

“Dreams are never sold—but as we are here at Uji——”

The voices faded; the dream widened and lost its boundaries as a river does in nearing the ocean, but when he woke in the morning he was impressed in a manner apparently out of all proportion to the dream itself and that for a reason which will appear presently. Not only so, but he was conscious that it had had meanings which escaped him like a perfume not to be recaptured until without effort of your own it repossesses you again.

But he remembered Uji and the Japanese people and the unfamiliar fascinating name—“Dream Tea”—so clearly that it became worth while to visit the temple and strengthen the strange sandal-wood impression—the intangible loveliness in the presence of the visible beauty of the place itself.

He went. A few children were playing with a dog at the massive Chinese entrance to the first court and they gazed curiously at Sart for of the many tourists who visit the Phœnix Hall few indeed persevere to the real wonder in its solitude. But he bought off their curiosity with a box of the faintly flavoured green-tea sweetmeats sold at Uji and went in undisturbed, a wide-sailed butterfly of velvet black starred with crimson devices his only guide.

In the first court the silence of centuries was formidable. Not a sound; the pine-trees immersed in sleep. He muted his footfalls in stepping from stone to stone on the exquisitely planned path to the next stairway and the higher terrace where, in the great Kondo, the Buddha sits golden among his peaceful disciples. One solitary figure before it did not disturb the silence for the hands were raised in devotion. Instinctively Sart paused but instinctively also vibrations of disturbance touched the quiet figure. He turned, dropping his hands. An old priest. Sart went slowly up the steps.

Bows were exchanged. The old man, whose face was one of peculiar gentleness and beauty, said in Japanese which Sart knew well enough to detect the refinement—for he had now lived for two years in Japan:

“Could anything be more augustly beautiful than this temple with the hill rising above it and the perfection of man’s work set in the perfection of Nature’s? I can only allow myself the pleasure of coming once a month, and I chose to-day when the maples have kindled their fires and the sense of parting and transiency is in still air. It quickens pleasure into a pang more poignant than any happiness can. I see in your eyes that this is your errand also.”

Something in the tone and the remoteness of the look which accompanied it touched Sart into a fellowship he rarely felt with any human being. He answered thoughtfully:

“You are right. That need drew me also. But also I had a strange dream last night which centred about the place and I came to see how much would persist in daylight. It—it persists.”

“How could it be otherwise?” asked the old man, leaning a thin hand on the beautiful polished rail guarding the temple platform. “This is a haunted place. Those who have vision perceive many ministrants passing up and down these steps and beneath the trees in the courts. If I am not mistaken, and you will condescend to listen, I believe you will hear a sound of quiet breathing from the group under that aged tree who are now absorbed in meditation.”

His eyes indicated a tree of such beauty that no human being could deny it spiritual personality of the highest order. It was a camphor, gnarled and constricted in the spring of the trunk and greater boughs but breaking above into such a spread and swell and towering of glorious foliage as made it part of the sky and neighbour to drifting clouds and all the sky-children of stars or sunbeams. Struck by the words Sart looked upwards, then down at the deep-cushioned moss about its roots in profoundest silence. The old priest leaned forward, his lips moving as though he took part in a rite beheld and understood. Certainly, as he held his own breath Sart could imagine the sound of measured breathing, faint, rhythmic, controlled. The spirit of the place. A kind of shudder of delight passed through him. So they stood awhile.

The moment passed, and then, emboldened by its communion, he said:

“Reverend sir, may I tell you my dream? In dream the seeds fly far, and if this place is haunted, as I can believe, it may be that some outer ripple touched me last night. Perhaps you will be the judge since your words and appearance invite confidence. Dreams—dreams are what I need above all to lift me from the slough of materialism.”

The old man pointed to the steps where a refreshing shadow from another camphor tree made an atmosphere of sun-shot peace. They sat there—the priest on the step above which gave Sart the upward-looking attitude of the disciple, willingly accepting instruction. Thus he told his story which in telling seemed to him to lose all the mystic implications which had moved him and to become almost trivial in relation to the mysterious loveliness about them. But he was reassured. The priest answered:

“Your honourable story would fill me with surprise as coming from one of a foreign race did I not recognise the workings of the Law that knows no frontiers. And perhaps in turn it will not surprise you to learn that I myself am the priest spoken of in your dream. In the hills to the eastward of Uji, above the pinewoods and placed where the earliest rays of the sun strike it is my little field, watered by a stream which has its source in the extremest height. The tradition of the strange properties of the few bushes of tea grown there has been handed down in writing from the days of the Cloistered Emperor, Go-Shirakawa, and is much more ancient than that. It has been the privilege of my little temple—which is dedicated to the worship of Dai Nichi Buddha—to supply this tea on great occasions in the lives of many of the greatest men of Japan—not only of scholars, but great statesmen, artists, poets and others, for there comes a time in such lives when they desire with passion to escape into the world of True Dreaming. Had you applied to me in the ordinary way I must have refused, for the supply is small and the need great. Coming as it does through the unfolding Door of Sleep I dare not oppose it. Not yet dare I grant it without knowledge of the reasons why you make it. You will not mistake this for the vulgarity of curiosity.”

His voice had the smooth flowing quality of water and was in itself inexpressibly soothing to the ear. Sart paused only a moment to collect his thoughts before he began his story.

“Reverend sir, it appeared to me a few years ago that I possessed everything the world offers to its favourites. Sufficient means, perfect physical health, pleasant friends and the ability to write such things as the world cared to read. I had, however, been tormented with dark clouds of melancholy coming on every three months in which I wandered overwhelmed with sorrow and even despair for which I could find no name, nor reason. Believing in the material side of life only, I consulted great physicians only to find them helpless as myself. One, however, uttered some words which impressed themselves upon me. He questioned me as to whether I suffered from insomnia. I told him I did. He thought a moment and asked: ‘When you dream, of what nature are your dreams?’ I answered that I had never dreamed in my life. At least not consciously, for what happens in the deepest depths of sleep is beyond comprehension. When people spoke of dreams I listened as one for whom the subject had no meaning. He answered: ‘I have known one other such case and it was eventually cured. The cure came through a dream which led the patient to consult a master of Oriental psychology. There can be no doubt that such men have methods of approach unknown in the West. Therefore I say—in like circumstances act likewise.’ ”

The priest meditated a moment and answered:

“This confirms my belief that our meeting springs from occurrences in a former life by no means to be neglected, and this being so I will ask you to come with me to the temple in the hills where the tea itself has grown for many centuries.”

It could not but appear very strange to Sart that he did not even venture to ask whether it would be possible for him to return to Kyoto the same day, and that he followed the priest immediately and in silent acquiescence.

They left the temple by what may be called the upward entrance, ascending to the court which partially climbs the steep of the hill and leads to a steep little track with rough steps ending at a beautifully painted little pagoda modelled in noblest Chinese fashion among the trees. Thus it was that unseen by any human being they left the world, as it were, going up the hill steadfastly and the thought occurred to Sart, though half whimsically, that if he returned no more he would have vanished as mysteriously as the hero of a miracle story in medieval times. There was indeed in his own family just such a story of an ancestral Ivo Sart, brother of the head of the family, who had walked out of Down-land Hall one golden dawn in May and into the very halls of mystery, inasmuch as he never returned.

They walked upwards and onward steadily for some hours without speech on either side, and with more strength than might have been expected from the fragile age of the priest, until the sun was sloping westward and they had gained a wood even more dense than those below. This brought them to a natural excavation in the stony breast of the hill and in this stood a little temple evidently of very great antiquity. Its roof of layers of bark was so aged that it now formed a growing ground not only for ferns and mosses but even for bushes and an autumn growth of flowers which gave it an appearance of desolate beauty impossible to be described but conveying a thrill of awe as well as of delight. The view was glorious—opening as from a sky window the whole plain in which Kyoto lies like scattered jewels surrounded by the mighty circle of her hills.

The priest led the way to a side door and for the first time spoke:

“I bid you welcome to my humble habitation. With another recluse I may say that it resembles the shelter that some hunter might build for a night’s lodging in the hills, or the cocoon spun by an aged silkworm.”

This is so true that when Sart entered it could scarcely seem credible that it would supply the needs of his host. Through the roof the deepening evening sky was visible in parts and the ferns and mosses of the wood had invaded it and grew with luxuriance on the projections of the wood. Furthermore, which gave an impression of strangely beautiful but inhuman life, a little spring, crystal-clear, welled in one corner with a steadily throbbing pulse of water, pure as light. To this the priest pointed:

“That spring is connected with a very moving story of ancient days. The water is of peculiar excellence and has properties in themselves unusual, for which reason it is always used to water the tea bushes in season of drought, and when the Dream Tea is made with it it forms a drink not only different in degree but in quality with that made from the water of the lowlands.”

Sart ventured to enquire:

“Then does it lose its properties on descent?”

“It does not reach the lowlands,” the priest answered quietly. “It falls into a cavern below here known as the Dragon Girl’s Bath and is seen no more. For this reason I advise you remaining here for the night if you will condescend to occupy a hut no better than this.”

Sart could not refuse, but he had no desire to do so. When he had expressed his thanks the priest proceeded:

“It is my habit to offer prayers before Dai Nichi Kongo-kai on my return from my monthly visit below. Have the goodness therefore to occupy yourself here until I return.”

Left alone, Sart looked about him, touched with mingled pity and admiration for what appeared to him the heroism of life led in such terms in such a solitude. A little shrine stood on a ledge, its open doors disclosing a very ancient and rich image of the Amida Buddha in which gold had been cised with such effect that it appeared to ray forth light as does the setting sun from the mountain which soon will hide it. At either side stood smaller images of Kwannon and Seishi—the Infinite Mercy and Infinite Wisdom of the Buddha—hands bowed in reverence and adoring hands. The beauty of these awakened in him a truly religious emotion and one most strange and new. Below there lay a folding harp which he saw at once to be of great antiquity and value and by it a low roughly cut table of strong grained wood with some volumes of Japanese poems and music. A bed of cut ferns and two straw mats. Another low table for food. A ledge with some cups and plates. This, with a small firebox, completed the furniture. But, standing at the door, was a picture of infinite hills and rivers and noble beauty which kings might desire in vain and in the hut the wizard music of the spring completed enchantment which by slowly mounting degrees mastered the spirit within him until it appeared to Sart that here—here alone could peace be found, and here was the way of wisdom. Being thirsty he took a cup and dipped it in the silver lymph. The bubbles broke strangely against it with a sound like elfin music and as he raised it to his lips foam beaded itself upon it as on rare wine. Not only so but like wine it infused delicate fire as it ran down his throat and seemingly through his veins. He was gladder, lighter, younger, and the scene before him as he stood at the door glowed with unearthly beauty until it could be imagined to be an outpost of the Western Paradise peopled by unseen but celestial beings. This impression was emphasized by the measured chanting of the priest’s voice from the temple, and the odour of incense unknown to him but inexpressibly soothing to his nerves.

He stood thus until the old man returned. He said at once:

“I see you have drunk of the spring of Remembrance. It would have been better had you waited for my counsel, for the effects are sometimes far-reaching but that also was probably occasioned by the events of a former existence. With your permission I shall now prepare our evening meal. That it will consist only of unpolished rice and bean soup is an unavoidable circumstance for which I apologise.” Sart made the necessary rejoinder and his mind was occupied with nothing less than food. As the golden rose of the western sky opened its divine petals and a moon of purest silver dawned over the eastern hills the sense of the unreality of human life, frail as a dewdrop in comparison with these heavenly manifestations, flooded his soul. In the Buddhist philosophy all sin is ignorance and it was the thought of his ignorance in face of such manifestations which now overwhelmed him.

“I could have known. I could have understood had I not submerged myself in worthless nothings more perishable than the drops spun on the cobweb at dawn. May I henceforward understand, be responsive to the divine beauty and healing of revelations such as these.”

He was sure he had not spoken yet the old priest now busily engaged in tending the firepot made answer:

“Before understanding it is necessary to have beheld this world from outside though but for a moment for thus only can its real nature be apparent. Last night for a moment which yet comprised years you did so. To-day the seed thus sown breaks the surface with two green leaves, slender, but promising growth.”

To this no answer was needed and Sart continued at the door until the light dimmed its splendours and the moon strengthened and earth became a nest of shadows from which she had sailed upward upon the ocean of night. He was then summoned to the meal illumined by a little candle set in a scrolled bronze candlestick of great beauty of design.

Whether it was the drink from the spring bubbling and sparkling in candlelight or the unaccustomed meal, or the extraordinary purity of the air, who can say? It is certain that in remembering it Sart was conscious of events which he could scarcely accept as real but rather as emanating from that great current of emotional and spiritual life which underlies the most hardened surface of daily life. He had no conscious participation in them—may rather be said to have viewed them as moving pictures presenting a semblance of reality though but shadows on a plane. Yet—if it be possible—he knew that the relation to himself was direct and even authoritative.

For instance, the door of the hut was opened and a man looked in. He wore the ancient dress of a Japanese warrior, splendid armour lacings of red leather over a hitatare of autumn-gold brocade decorated with irregular orbs of crimson, and a metal helmet with high golden antennæ. His face, stern and pale under it with fiercely up-drawn black eyebrows, frowned obscurely upon Sart, then softened as he turned to the priest and made a motion with his hand towards the harp. The old man reached for it and began to play a melody comparable only to the crying of deer in autumn, which indeed at that moment sounded sadly from the recesses of the forest, to the wailing of the wind among pines on the crags and the incessant weeping of rain.

“It is called Autumn Grief,” he said, and even as the words left his lips other steps approached the door, which opening disclosed a most beautiful young woman in garments of Chinese silk complicated as lotus petals but almost obscured by the fall of satin black hair to her feet. She too turned a look of cold contempt upon Sart, but smiling upon the old priest remained an entranced listener leaning one hand lightly on the door post.

Other figures not so easily to be defined approached, gathering to the sound of the music like a cloud of fish in still water, their heads turned all one way in an immobility of hearing. But as Sart tried to observe and to distinguish with his own senses—if indeed it was with the senses he realised them—lost their edge and he lapsed into a beatitude of hearing in which time passed as in a dream where all sense of division is lost and ideas rising from the deep circle vague about conscious sensation.

When he awoke to what is called reality again the old man was still playing divinely upon the harp, which in itself was an object so beautiful as to be a sensible projection of the music within it. But he laid it aside and approached Sart where he sat upon a straw mat.

“It is now time for rest and for the drink of dreams, but before you taste it I would have you understand at least a part of the effect. The whole can only be understood by experience. I would not have you think this a small thing. Of the men who have dreamed some have gone on their way the happier and stronger. Some have become great poets and artists. Some, no longer able to endure the world, have committed suicide. One became a lover whose name rings through history for the crimes he committed to gain what he himself acknowledged to be worthless a few years later. Some attained the extremes of wealth and found it worthless. Some the extremes of poverty and found it joyful. None did it leave as it found them, for though nothing can be put into a man but what his former lives have woven into the stuff of his being yet very strange and new combinations are possible—as in certain chemical substances—when this ingredient re-determines their relation one to another. On the other hand your dream and our meeting make it certain that the opportunity was inevitably yours to accept or decline as you will. I beg that you will go out for a moment or two and commune with yourself before you decide.”

As one already in a dream Sart rose and went out into the night closing the door behind him. Stillness unbroken save by the mild ripple of water and the melancholy cry of the monkey so often celebrated by the poets of China and Japan, or the hooting of an owl. He was aware of presences other than those, but indescribably nearer. They were in no way sinister but watchful, participant.—And suddenly it appeared to him that if he had the courage to go forward he himself would become free of great zones of emotion and experience from which he had been shut out by bars of his own forging—bars of which he had never imagined the existence until this instant and which could only be fully realized by their absence. He stood a moment revolving this as a man who standing in a valley suddenly perceives a track winding up a mountain, disappearing and reappearing on its steadfast way to heights unknown, and then opening the door he re-entered the hut.

“Reverend sir, I accept the adventure.”

It seemed impossible to say more and the priest also was silent. Picking up pieces of charcoal with implements delicate as chopsticks he built a cone of fire in the grey ash of the firebox. Next taking a bronze kettle of simplest design he filled it with water of the spring with a white wooden dipper and stood the kettle upon a little tripod in the fire. Then from the shelf he took down a metal box, and here Sart who had watched, as does the participant at a sacrament, almost started, so great to his trained taste was its beauty of line and patina—green shading into blue and golden shadowings. Raising the lid the priest took out with a primitive bamboo spoon, as beautiful, two spoonfuls of tea and placed them in a little earthenware teapot, again of the simplest, and turned once more to Sart.

“And now I will beg you honourably to compose your mind—in so far as possible dismissing the belief that it is your mind and considering it rather as a part—or let us say a section—of the Universe which unites all in itself so that just now opening the door you stepped out into the vastness of the night, you may step out into a vastness transcending that as it transcended the feeble glimmer within this poor hut.”

The water still boiled in the kettle like the invisible voice of summer in the woods, and it was with no fear but a sense of tranquil expectation that Sart watched the remainder of the rite until the teacup was presented to him on a small lacquer tray. Accepting it he said with what might be taken for a last remnant of hesitation:

“You do not drink?”

The old man smiled:

“When you have drunk ask yourself if you need to drink again? Once in each life is sufficient for this drink and I have drunk long since. I wish you honourable enjoyment.”

Sart set his lips to the cup and drank.

It tasted like ordinary tea—no more—if a faint but delicious flavour is excepted—like the jasmin-bud tea of China. Sart set down the cup and looked at the priest with disappointment. Whether he had expected the universe to go up in rockets about him he could not say, but he certainly had not expected—nothing. His usual luck where anything outside the daily run was concerned.

The priest waved him towards the bed of fern-fronds with a straw mat over it and a Japanese wooden pillow. One wadded quilt—no more.

“Never.—What?—take your bed and I a young man still. Don’t even speak of it!”

The old man was going toward the door. He turned there with a smile which made his face beautiful:

“My son, it is my habit to spend the night under the skies. Not for the three worlds would I break it. Sleep and dream well.”

He was gone, but Sart noticed he had left the door wide and had no temptation to close it. Drowsiness was invading him. Even before he stretched himself on the fern he had imagined that a monkey had looked in mopping and mowing in innocent grotesque, that two playing squirrels had struck harmony from the harp as they scurried over it, and it was certain that an owl had perched on the Amida shrine and was staring down upon him with eyes like wheels of moonlight,—Nature stealing in. Strange! strange,—the welling of the spring became louder, deeper—was it brimming, flowing in a moonlit stream across the floor? Had the shrine opened wider? Had the image of the Amida Nyorai raised a golden hand in benediction—Had the Kwannon and Seishi risen from adoration and placed themselves as solemn guards one on either side of his bed? Was Kwannon holding a sword like Fudo, the St. Michael of Buddhism, instead of a lotus?—Was it raised—raised—Power—strength—wisdom.—Great words pulsed like orbs of fire through his brain riding the current of thoughts dissolving out of thought, out of reason into—into dark—delicious dark and rest and—deep quiet. He slept.

Now he dreamed.

He stood in the little cleft where the tea grew and it was dawn—liquid gold flowing in rivulets through every branch and leaf. But before the bushes, fronting to the great downward and outward view was seated a man looking at it as if in contemplation of extremest bliss. He looked round at Sart as if continuing a conversation begun before and said:

“Yes—what you have said is true as far as it goes—but how short a way is that! You allow that these bushes manifest psychic life and that is felt by all who drink of their life-blood. But surely that is only the earthly and three dimensional way of regarding it. You have not yet out-passed the geometry of Euclid. The truth is that they manifest in a quite peculiar way the psychic life of the vegetable species—a life of startling power and allied to some of the most intricate emotions of the human mind. And that is the secret of their influence upon the brain—I might say more—of man.”

“But why should that be—and why especially here?” Sart found himself leaning against a mossy stone, arguing exactly as he used to argue in the common-room at Oxford, with this difference only—that he did not know with whom he was arguing and had a thunder-cloud sense of possibilities which kept him nervously awake and aware. And yet the man had nothing unusual about him on the surface. He might very well have stepped out of the frame of the All Angels common-room so far as appearance went. Perhaps it was that which stimulated old opposition in Sart’s mind. The stranger answered:

“Excellent reasons. In this country Nature has ever since the entry of the Buddhist faith and in a different degree before, been accepted as a part of the Godhead and divine and ourselves. She was not dammed back as in Europe and then condescendingly admitted as a background to our own emotions or relegated to the sphere of scientific analysis. She has been loved, trusted and reverenced ever since Japan became self-conscious. How should she not repay it? And as to special reasons here—Do you know that in a hut near this temple lived for many years Semimaru the great music-maker and opener of the gates of the spirit? Here he was long a recluse and still his holy magic dwells in the earth and all that springs from it. Listen—it is an arcane music penetrating the inmost cell of being.”

He raised a hand and immediately a stealing music became perceptible moving like a faint breeze in the mosses at his feet as if a part of their growth. That it emanated from the earth Sart was as certain as one may be of the breathing vapour from water and damp inward places at dawn. It could not be said that it shaped itself in words but quite certainly it was idea in its finest and most piercing transparence.

Sart listened entranced to the dim music with the consciousness that were it to break into orchestral fullness it must shatter the vessel of his being. He trembled lest this should be, yet longed inexpressibly that it might, and still as the winding weaving silver threads spun themselves about him strange images, like the illustrations to a half-heard story, formed themselves within him and became perceptible without. He saw a pack of cards—the dealers of what men call fate—lie on the moss. The gentle breeze of music arose and fluttered them apart. Kings. Queens—people blown like autumn leaves about him—the One diffused into the many lying here and there in groups, every one of which had mysterious meaning and cohesion. It appeared to summarise the history of the world—nay, the universe. The four lines that enclose the infinite changes and combinations of which they are susceptible in a kind of geometrical procession. Now—now—the music strengthened, it blew the cards gently together again and Sart was aware of new insight—a new image—the life in himself an infinitely coiled spring in some infinitude of power uncoiling slowly in energy or character and so manifesting in successive lives in a world, itself a coiled power, and slowly uncoiling its aggregate in correspondence with the power of those manifesting in and through it. Thought, character, unfolding its tremendous energies in man and flower and insect eternally evolving and strengthening consciousness as the coil unwinds. Action and reaction of the collective consciousness, the spiritual spiral intersecting the earth-plane and at the junction generating what we call life and form. The music was growing, strengthening, the spark of perception was ready for the blaze when the cool Oxford voice recalled him to the sight of the man seated, and the pack of cards on the table-bench beside him. He was speaking again as if continuing a conversation.

“Of course you are entirely right in feeling that morality is in itself a system of æsthetics and for this reason one regrets the age-long conflict between religion and beauty. They crucified Venus as surely as worldlings crucified Christ, and whereas good sprang from the latter crime, what may well seem to humanity unmixed evil sprang from the first. But in this country they were faithful to the Divine Gospel. It was not for nothing that their Buddha taught his beloved disciple in simplest words that whatever is lovely is the whole teaching of the doctrine. And that is why in this place still living and breathing with the divine and geometrical harmonies the spirit of Semimaru—whose name in itself recalls one of the lowliest forms of life—the cicada—you may hear with unmixed emotion the flowing of the stream of life on its way to the ocean.”

What could Sart reply? He said as if groping—even his hands moved instinctively:

“But is it I who hear or the man who made it?”

The other answered:

“Such questions are the little children of wisdom’s own brood. The man who made it hears, but you and he have flowed together as honey impinges on wine in golden scales until they are wholly blent. When emotion is purified of self—when it breaks out of that burning house of egoism—why then—what division is possible? And morality—hateful word!—itself ceases to be the narrow expression of opinion and dogma but a co-ordinated harmony in which all contradiction and disharmonies are resolved and man is one and man only according to the measure of his attainment.”

“Hopeless—and utterly beyond us,” said Sart dreaming with downward eyes.

“Possible for the few at any time,” retorted the other. “And remember the search itself is victory. It is water seeking its level in the country where there is neither high nor low nor distance nor nearness. Are not the roses beautiful this year? I have never seen the college garden so beautiful.”

In amazement Sart raised his eyes—so familiar was the tone, so intimate the images it evoked. He was looking through a great mullioned window of the common-room at All Angels into the ancient garden with its splashing fountain and the embroidered walks paced for centuries by kings, divines and scholars discussing the problems of their day by aid of the philosophies which set philosophy and religion apart and morality like a sword between them. It appeared to him even that he could see their disquieted spirits or at least feel their impulse deeper than sight as they sought in vain through confused terms for a hidden truth. He listened to a torment of tongues. A wind of words swirled about him. The music of Semimaru was silenced or became an inaudible undertone. But through it all the fountain rose in light, the roses blossomed in incredible sweetness. Nature at least went her way assured and content. And so gradually from the cold wind of these deserts of the intellect the ordered music re-asserted itself in beauty crystalline as light, harmonious as the music of the spheres and the voice of his friend came through it like the voice which the whole orchestra supports, inspires and carries to supernal heights.

“Three ages has the world, three ages of growth. The first is the voice of the senses—opinion. A blinding power made manifest in wrath and hatred and blood. And the next is intellect—cold fire bright and hard as diamond—and the third illumination. This is no longer opinion or intellect. It is Certainty and Ecstasy; it is the immediate presence of the Infinite in the deeps of the soul. It is divine philosophy with the immortal face of Beauty embracing all belief in its arms.”

Music swelled about him gathering tones with the ground-swell of thunder. It was the organ in the chapel of All Angels and upon it the touch of the blind organist loosing the ocean,—flooding chapel, garden, the universe itself. Like a mighty fire music blazed, consuming all earthly illusion, shooting spirals of flaming sound to the zenith, a wind of flame and tongues that spoke in flame the words of divine wisdom. And Sart cried—“I cannot endure it,” and, fainting, still endured. Place and time had vanished in the vision hidden in utter darkness and he saw and knew, even as in the space of the higher dimensions all is seen and known within and without. It filled every crevice of his being. Every organ became perception and was transcended as the vast poured into the human.

Silence. Darkness,—for how long could not be told.

The singing of birds, the coolness of dawn. The harmless gold of a sunbeam upon his eyelids. He waked slowly into consciousness of self and his surroundings but it was long before he could collect his mind and gather it up like scattered stardust into its own small planet.

He was lying upon a bed of crushed but growing fern in the woods upon the side of a hill. Beside him bubbled a spring of such purity that it looked a gem of darkness amongst the ferns. But the hut in which he had lain down to sleep had vanished and of the temple only a few mossy beams and pillars were left. Far below, just appearing among the dense pines were the noble roofs of the Chinese temple, which it was now not difficult to guess had taken the place of one more ancient.

He stood confounded for a moment—lost in the sense of illusion, changing as mist wreathing about the hills. Into what strange world had he wandered—with what strange beings companied? Had he preserved even his own identity? That also might have failed and partition walls crumbled to admit a universal in- and out-going of all the elements of thought. Upon him like the grip of a Hand lay the certainty that he had—was it stumbled upon—some apprehension of his own most intimate powers and that they were infinitely beyond anything he had ever conceived or perceived in himself or others. What was this new depth in his existence? Or was it also height and expansion undreamed of—old limits merged in space—the permanent and the transient. What had he discovered? He felt rich beyond all dreams of wealth and could not yet tell what it would purchase.

He knelt and bathed his face and hands in cold spring water with marvellous delight and refreshment, then hollowing his hands drank. That too was a new experience and inspiration. Then slowly and without deliberate choice he took his way up the hill. How explain the events of the night—the shifting scene? He could not. He could only accept them. But exultation and understanding possessed him and around and within him were a new heaven, a new earth and union of comprehension with everything in it. Separation had ceased to be, the word “Time” had lost its meaning—and before him lay the great adventure.

He was glad that this vision had come to him in the immemorial East. He remembered how in the common-room at All Angels he had often contended that the thinkers of Asia had anticipated all modern conjectures as to a fourth dimension and were still ahead leading the way to a system of realisation dream-like to the West, revealed also but not realised by the mathematical approach of the West.

He gained the top of the hill without difficulty and sat with his arms about his knees with a strangeness upon him which can only be indicated. For what was he to do if this amazing clarity and lucidity should last? He had no means with which to express it to himself. It could only be felt. How could he communicate it to others, and if not communicable how should he live his life among them? He remembered a discussion at All Angels of the position of a being in whom a sixth sense had suddenly opened a new line of communication, neither touch, hearing, sight, smell nor taste but as it were combining all in perception clearer than any chemical ray to which every physical obstacle is translucence. He remembered saying that Indian thinkers postulate the mind as a sixth sense—could it be that there was a reference to this very power that had come upon him? The limitations of words wearied him, and analysis dissolved in perception. It was easier to stand and gaze upon a tree, sharing its vibrations of light and warmth and the pulsing of sap in myriad channels of bough and leaf. He knew he still had his own limitations. Though he shared in the general life his heart could not yet beat with the cosmic pulse. He must focus on one object to discern the soul within it and when he transferred that strange attention from the tree to running water or clouds floating in infinite blue he lost the tree’s ideas and was obliged to come and go between them and the others as is done in common life. He had got through but not to the unison of the strange land. Grief and relief mingled in that knowledge—not too much at once—not the utter isolation from his kind which is omniscience.

Before him lay the boundless beauty of earth and awakening to their lovely illusions of form the countless peoples. They now seemed utterly removed from him in their thoughts as if he had forded the River of Death and—and with that a new question. Could it be possible he had done so? Was the sleep which had possessed him the one we call the last? Could the potion mixed in that cup have been the Darker Drink? Certainly he had not shrunk from it and yet it might be so. He longed for, yet dreaded to meet some Being, some Presence of whom he could ask that question or whose very being would answer it for him. But all that strange day none came. He did not know hunger. He drank from a spring welling in a rocky basin, and had it been primeval light it could not have been more vivifying. He did not think, but gave himself up to perception as a man might who has wandered into a royal picture gallery and finds all his dreams realised in sight. The lizards flashing on their way, the quick chatter of the squirrels running over him where he sat were all notes in an eternal symphony, and he willed it to last for ever.

But gradually light lost its edge of brightness, diffused, dimmed as twilight drew her gradual veil over the beauty below him and the heavens prepared their revelation. He never thought of descent—If this were life and not death might it not be the life of profound contemplation under the shining peace of night and waking glories of day? Thus the ancient sages of India sat in meditation which out-soared conceptions of the gods and brought them to the point where they could say “Something known is doing we do not know how, but we know what.” Yes—it was good to be there whether life or death held his hand.

The first stars were alight when a voice said beside him:

“Has the day been long?” It was the ancient priest with all the life in him concentrated in his eyes.

Rising to greet him Sart replied:

“If you will tell me whether you are in my world or I in yours I can answer more aptly, for I conceive that you have attained a far higher plane of perception than the common and it may be that you have passed through an experience——”

He hesitated feeling instinctively the humiliation that most people ignorantly feel in the word “death”—so incongruous did it seem with the calm face beside him, the keen glance—the spiritual flame that burnt unwavering as a jewel. Yet how solve his own riddle?

The old man sat down beside him Japanese fashion, smiling:

“You mean—am I a discarnate spirit—as men call it—and are you yourself one? Are we dead or living? We are certainly in the same world for there is no division. And we are discarnate for the body is an illusion of the senses. And we live for there is no death in all the universe. There is my answer. But if you ask have you been awake or asleep all this long night of moon and stars I cannot fully answer for that depends upon yourself. But this I can say. The people who climb this height and drink my tea have gone out of the open door and into the world of True Sight, and further very strange experiences await them.”

“If they are stranger than what I have seen already——” said Sart, trembling a little as if with the cold of the outer spaces.

“They are much stranger, but remember this—we become what we behold, and that being so we shall fear it no more than we fear ourselves in our worst moments. One must be accustomed to the air of the mountains. But let that wait—May I ask a little of your past history and heredity? I shall understand better how to point the new way which you must certainly travel.”

Sart could not but notice that the old man’s speech and manner had lost anything distinctively Japanese and that when he tried to consider in what language they were speaking he grew bewildered for it appeared to have no limitations of meaning or manner any more than music. It was as simple to speak with him as it had been with Blois—indeed simpler for even with a friend, so near and dear, thought strangles speech and leaves it dead beside the way. He said earnestly—

“You know what is needful.—Question me.”

Sitting in the Japanese attitude which indeed is a form of kneeling and suggests the form of prayer, the old man began:

“Your race?”

“British by long usage, but originally Norman. My ancestors came to England with William the Conqueror and were the barons of a territory on the river still called the Sarthe. Hence our name. He was a man of immense and almost brutal energy. In Normandy he was known as the Wild Huntsman and the legend was that his wife was a kind of moonlight fairy he had captivated and enslaved in the woods at night. Her name in our pedigree is Ariane and no parentage given. He was given land in the wildest Down country in Sussex—with only the rudest Saxon serfs about them, and it is said that in his pride in the purity of his blood he handed down an injunction that every Sart in the succession to the property should marry only a woman of his own blood. Can you wonder that we are a strange people? My old father lives in the old house alone—for my sister and I could endure the life no longer, and she is married, and I—No man could be more solitary.”

“Yet you had a friend who loved you?”

The manuscript ends here.

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

A cover was created for this eBook and is placed in the public domain.

[The end of Dream Tea, by Elizabeth Louisa Moresby (as L. Adams Beck).]