THE KINGDOM
OF SLENDER SWORDS
CHAPTER I
WHERE THE DAY BEGINS
Barbara leaned against the palpitant rail, the light air fanning her breeze-cool cheek, her arteries beating like tiny drums, atune with the throb, throb, throb, of the steel deck as the black ocean leviathan swept on toward its harbor resting-place.
All that Japanese April day she had been in a state of tremulous excitement. She had crept from her berth at dawn to see the hazy sun come up in a Rosicrucian flush as weirdly soft as a mirage, to strain her eyes for the first filmy feather of land. Long before the gray-green wisp showed on the horizon, the sight of a lumbering junk with its square sail laced across with white stripes, and its bronze seamen, with white loin-cloth and sweat-band about the forehead, naked and thewed like sculptures, as they swayed from the clumsy tiller, had sent a thrill through her. And as the first far peaks etched themselves on the robin's-egg blue, as impalpable and ethereal as a perfume, she felt warm drops coming with a rush to her eyes.
For Japan, every sight and sound of it, had been woven with the earliest imaginings of Barbara's orphaned life. Her father she had never seen. Her mother she remembered only as a vague, widowed figure. In Japan they two had met and had married, and after a single year her mother had returned to her own place and people broken-hearted and alone. In the month of her return Barbara had been born. A year ago her aunt, to whom she owed the care of her young girlhood, had died, and Barbara had found herself, at twenty-three, mistress of a liberal fortune and of her own future. Japan had always exercised a potent spell over her imagination. She pictured it as a land of strange glowing trees, of queer costumes and weird, fantastic buildings. More than all, it was the land of her mother's life-romance, where her father had loved and died. There was one other tangible tie—her uncle, her mother's brother, was Episcopal bishop of Tokyo. He was returning now from a half year's visit in America, and this fact, coupled with an invitation from Patricia Dandridge, the daughter of the American Ambassador, with whom Barbara had chummed one California winter, had constituted an opportunity wholly alluring. So she found herself, on this April day, the pallid Pacific fuming away behind her, gazing with kindling cheeks on that shadowy background, vaguely intangible in the magical limpidity of the distance.
The land was wonderfully nearer now. The hills lay, a clear pile of washed grays and greens, with saffron tinted valleys between, wound in a haze of tender lilac. By imperceptible gradations this unfolded, caught sub-tones, ermine against umbers, of warmer red and flickering emerald, white glints of sun on surf like splashes of silver, till suddenly, spectral and perfect, above a cluster of peaks like purple gentians, glowed forth a phantom mountain, its golden wistaria cone inlaid in the deeper azure. It hung like an inverted morning-glory, mist and mother-of-pearl at the top, shading into porphyry veined with streaks of verd and jade—Fuji-San, the despair of painters, the birthplace of the ancient gods.
The aching beauty of it stung Barbara with a tender, intolerable pang. The little fishing-villages that presently came into sight, tucked into the clefts of the shore, with gray dwellings, elfishly frail, climbing the green slope behind them—the growing rice in patches of cloudy gold on the hillsides—the bluish shadows of bamboo groves—all touched her with an incommunicable delight.
A shadow fell beside her and she turned. It was her uncle. His clean-shaven face beamed at her over his clerical collar.
"Isn't it glorious?" she breathed. "It's better than champagne! It's like pins and needles in the tips of your fingers! There's positively an odor in the air like camelias. And did any one ever see such colors?" She pointed to the shore dead-ahead, now a serrated background of deep tones, swimming in the infinite gold of the tropic afternoon.