The plumed hats of the diplomatists came off; they bowed low. The ladies courtesied, and Barbara, as her gaze lifted, caught an instant's glimpse, through the coach's glass sides, of that kingly figure, heaven-descended and sacred, mysterious alike to his own subjects as to the outside world, through whom flows to the soul of modern Japan the manifest divinity and living guidance of cohorts of dead Emperors stretching backward into the night of Time!
The band stationed in the center of the immense field had begun to play—something with a martial swing; and now the far brown strip that had blent with brown earth began to shift and tremble like the quiver of air above heated metal. Its motes detached themselves, clustered anew; and the long, wide ribbon, like a huge serpent waked from rigid sleep in the sunshine, swept into view: regiments of men, armed and blanketed, by file and platoon. They moved with high, jerky "goose-step" and loosely swinging arm, line upon line, till the ground shook with the tread.
Before each regiment were borne strange flags, blackened and tattered by blood and shell. Some were mere flapping fringes. But they were more precious than human lives. One had been found on a Manchurian battlefield, wrapped about the body of a dead Japanese, beneath his clothing. Wounded, he had so concealed it, then killed himself, lest, captured alive, the standard he bore might fall into the hands of the enemy. As each new rank came opposite the coach before the purple canopy, an officer's sword flashed out in salute, and a "banzai!" tore across the martial music like the ragged yell of a fanatical Dervish.
Daunt, watching Barbara, saw the light leaping in her brown eyes, the excitement coming and going in her face. Again and again he fixed his gaze before him, as infantry, cavalry and artillery marched and pounded and rumbled past. In vain. Like a wilful drunkard it returned to intoxicate itself with the sight of her eager beauty, that made the scene for him only a splendid blur, an extraneous impression of masses of swaying bodies moving like marionettes, of glistening bayonets, horses, clattering ammunition wagons, and fluttering pennants.
In Barbara, however, every nerve was thrilling to the sight. For the moment she had forgotten even the man beside her. As she watched the audacious outpouring of drilled power, tempered and restrained, yet so terribly alive in its coiled virility, she was feeling a keen pang of sympathy that was almost pain. In this burning panorama she divined no shrinking, devious thing sinking with the fatigue of ages, aping the superficialities of a remote race: not merely a tidal wave of intense vitality, mobile and mercurial, hastening onward toward an inaudible unknown, but a splendid rebirth, a dazzling reincarnation of old spirit in new form, a symbol concrete and vital, like the blaze of a beacon flaming a racial réveille.
She turned toward Daunt, her hand outstretched, her fingers on his arm, her lips opened.
But she did not speak. Afterward she did not know what she had intended to say.