Mr. Carteret and Others

by David Gray

Nature had made Caswell short, swarthy, high cheek-boned, with dark hair and narrow dark eyes, and for ten years he had been sitting at the feet of the Priest of Lake Biwa, dressing as the Japanese dress, leading their life, and thinking as far as an Occidental may their thought. In these ten years the inscrutable expression of the East had begun to dawn in his eyes. His cheek-bones grew more prominent. His nose had begun to flatten. He was a text for those who hold that the soul makes the face. He could also sit upon the floor with his feet tucked under him for indefinite periods, so that it was not strange that among the Japanese he often passed as Nipon Jin (Japanese man).

One May morning he was in the Kin-Ka-Kuji, sitting by the water on the lower balcony of the temple, watching the ancient carp as they slowly wove and interwove among the lily stems, waiting to be fed. He often came to the garden in May because the tourists were apt not to be there then, for they desert Kioto when the summer heat has begun, and it was his habit to come early in the day because the beauty of the place renews itself with each morning’s dew and the fragrance of the new flowers, as if in the first hours of the day a woman should be a girl again.

None of Caswell’s friends knew what the esoterism of Biwa was or was not; whether the venerable one with the shriveled, monkey-like face had a sweeter communion with the eternal than others, or was a deceiver, for the disciple never wrote or spoke of his experience, but it was a fact that he had acquired the calmness of the East and that was much, for he had his reasons for desiring peace. After his decade of meditation he could regard the hurryings of men, the catching of trains, and the yoke of small annoyances to which society bends its neck, as one inside watches the buzzing of unclean flies against the pane without.

He opened a book of verses by a Japanese poet and gazed across the little, many-islanded lake, whose surface was a sisterhood of silver pools, each framed in the new green of the young lotus pads. The bamboos on the opposite bank glistened faintly as the intermittent touch of an unfelt, unsuspected breeze stroked their plumes. The air was sweet with pine and the pungent aroma of maples in new foliage, and with perfumes from unseen gardens.

To Caswell each year of the past ten, “More weary seemed the sea, weary the oar.” Of late the decision had been ripening to shut the door forever upon his old world, and that morning a divine approval of his course seemed to float into his soul upon a tide of peace. He closed his eyes for a time; then he opened them with a fresh thirst for the beauty of the place. Suddenly he started, for he heard a voice. It was a woman’s voice, speaking with a cultivated New England intonation, but literal and unsympathetic. His impulse was to flee.

“The temple is called Kin-Ka-Kuji or Roku-onji,” said the voice, evidently reading from a guide-book, “from Kin-Ka-Ku, meaning golden pavilion. In thirteen ninety-seven Yoshimitsu retired from the shogunate—”

“Auntie,” interrupted another voice, “sha’n’t we shut the guide-book? The garden is lovely enough as a garden.”

This was a woman’s voice, too, but soft and young, with low, resonant tones that brought a thrill to the senses as sometimes comes with the breath of a remembered perfume.

Caswell glanced out of the corner of his eye and saw a party of tourists filing toward the temple on the path along the border of the lake. At the head marched a gray-haired woman with a kind but somewhat aggressive countenance. She carried an open guide-book. At her heels was a fat, squat, shaven-headed Japanese boy, the guide. Behind him there was a girl. He had only an instant’s glimpse of her, but he knew that it was the girl that had spoken; lithe, slender, exquisite in white. He looked across the lake again, but he looked without seeing. The garden was full of the sweetness of blue eyes, the softness of fair hair and the loveliness of a girl’s smile.

For a moment it was as if the priest of Biwa had never been. His pulses throbbed, a choking seized his throat. Then the habit of years asserted itself. With an effort of will his mind grew calm and the vision faded. Again he saw the lake, the bamboos upon the opposite shore, the carp in the water weeds at his feet.