CHAPTER XL
THE SHADOW OF A TO-MORROW
Nikko's thin street, with its gigantic isle of cryptomeria, was a shimmer of gold, a flicker of crimson and mandarin-blue. All the town was out of doors, for it was the matsuri, the local festival of Ieyasu, the great shogun deity, when the ancient furniture and treasures of the temple are carried in priestly processional through the streets. The path of the pageant was lined with spectators: old country-women with shaven eyebrows and burnished, blackened teeth, and with hair tightly plastered in old-fashioned wheels and pinions; children in kaleidoscopic dress, frantically dragged by older girls with pink paper flowers in their stiff black hair; men sitting sedately on sober-colored f'ton, bowing to pedestrian acquaintances with elaborate and stereotyped ceremony. In the moldy shade above a grim, wizened row of images of the god of justice, was nailed a sign-board: "Everybody are require not to broke the trees." Beside the moss-covered replicas a booth had been erected for foreign spectators. It was crowded with tourists—a bank of perspiring, fan-fluttering humanity. Up and down trudged post-card sellers, and saké bearers with trays of shallow, lacquer cups. The air shimmered with a fine white dust from the thousands of wooden clogs, and the trees were sibilant with the tumult of the semi.
The procession seemed interminable. Priests rode on horseback, clothed in black gauze robes with stoles of gold brocade and queer, winged hats. Acolytes marched afoot in green or yellow with stoles of black, like huge parti-colored beetles. Groups of bearers in white houri carried brass altar furniture, great drums fantastically painted, ancient chain-armor and tall banners of every tint. The center of interest was a sacred mikoshi, or palanquin, holding the divine symbols, elaborately carved and gold-lacquered, borne by sixty men in white, with cloths of like hue bound turban-wise about their foreheads. Around these circled drum-beaters and pipe-players, making an indescribable medley of sounds. The god entered into his devotees. The palanquin tossed like the waves of the sea. The bearers howled and chanted gutturally. Sweat poured from their faces. Some of them smiled and danced as they staggered on under the immense bearing-poles.
Austen Ware saw the strain on Barbara's face. "You are tired," he said. "Let us go back to the hotel."
"Where is Patsy?" she asked.
"She went with the bishop to see the priestesses dance at the temple. But we can skip that."
He drew her out of the crowd and they walked slowly down a side street to the road that skirts the brawling Alpine torrent, rushing between its steep stone banks. Here the spray filled the air with a cool mist and the westerning sun tied the seething water with silver tasseling. Caravans of panier-laden Chinese ponies passed them, led by women in tight blue breeches with sweat-bands about their heads, and squads of uncomfortable tourists bound to Chuzenji, the summer capital of the Corps Diplomatique, crumpled in sagging red-blanketed chairs hanging from the bearing-poles of lurching, bronze-muscled coolies. Young peasant girls trotted by swinging baskets of yellow asters and purple morning-glories. A rick'sha carried a baby with gay-colored dolls and painted cats of papier-mâché tied behind it, on its way to the family shrine where the toys could be blessed. The rick'sha man was smiling, but his cough rattled against Barbara's heart. A line of white-robed Buddhist pilgrims trudged along under mushroom hats, with rosaries crossed over their breasts and little bells tinkling at their girdles on their way to worship the Sun on the sacred mountain of Nantai-Zan. Now and then the cut-velvet of the hills rolled back to display clumps of dwellings—the wizard-gray of thatched roofs set in a rippling sea of leaves—and green flights of worn stone steps, staggering up to weird old temples where droning priests were ever at prayer. At the bottom of the road the stream narrowed to a gorge, spanned by the sacred red-lacquer bridge which no foot save the Emperor's may ever tread. On the farther side the wooded hills rose in fantastic, top-heavy shapes like a mad artist's dream. Everywhere they were split and seamed by landslide, gashed by torrents and typhoon, but covered with a wealth and splendor of color. Here and there century-old cryptomeria stood like gray-green bronze pillars, towering over younger forests as straight and symmetrical as Noah's-ark trees.
As they walked, Ware chatted of his trip up the China coast—an interesting recital that took Barbara insensibly out of herself. More than once he looked at her curiously. Since that fateful hour when he had stood behind the shikiri, he, like Barbara, had gone through much to look so unflurried. He had known moments of bitterness that were galling and stinging, and that left behind them a sense of degradation. But he held to his course. So short-lived a thing as her love for Daunt must wither! "It will pass," he had told himself, "and she will turn to me."