Evil made manifest. The face of the creature on the Nikko road came before his mental eye. That was evil made manifest. He had seen the thing. He had known the devil by hearsay since a child. He had heard the “Deevil” thundered at from Scotch pulpits, tracts about the devil had been put into his hand; he had heard people make laughing remarks about him: he was so familiar with the vague personality called Satan that he felt no interest in him, neither interest nor aversion. Never a shudder.
But that thing in the sky of the opium dream, the music that had brought it—that, indeed, was evil painted by the hand of an artist; worth all the sermons ever thundered from pulpits, all the tracts ever printed.
Then his weary brain grew drowsy, and there strayed across it the fair figure of the Lost One, the very antithesis of all things evil.
Only last night before going to bed she had murmured a story half to herself, half to him, with her eyes fixed on the glowing embers of the hibachi, and he retold it to himself now to put himself to sleep.
It was about the great battle between the beasts and the birds—the real reason why the owl was reduced to shame and forced to cover himself with night.
“And they came from the North and the South and the East and the West in flight, oh, many ri broad. The quails from the millet, the stork from the river, and from the pond the king-fisher, flashing like a blue jewel in the sunlight.
“Then said the stork, who led all these people of the air:
“‘Behold! we are all assembled but where tarries Sir Owl?’”
“Then a sparrow made answer and said:
“‘As I paused to rest on a cherry bough, for my wings be little though my heart is big, I heard Sir Owl in treasonable conversation with a rat. And said he, “Come forth from thy burrow, O Rat, that I may feast my eyes upon thee; and the empire of the beasts shall be thine, and also the empire of the birds.”’”