In one spot the trees and shrubbery had been cut clean away, and through the vista she saw the distant mountains, clear and pure as though carved of tinted jade set in a plate of lapus lazuli. A faint curdle of cloud frayed from their jagged tops, and above it hung the dreamy snow-clad cone of Fuji, palely emerald as the tint of glaciers under an Alaskan sky. A single crow, a jet-black moving spot, flapped its way across the azure expanse.
"The one touch of blue," he said. "The color ethical, the color pantheistic, the color of the idea of the divine!"
His personality, so touched with mystery, interested Barbara intensely. The sense of strangeness and unfamiliarity had quite vanished. She sat down on one of the warm boulders. Thorn rested one foot on the bent trunk of a dwarf tree and leaned his elbow on his knee, his hand, in the gesture that seemed habitual, covering his eye. In the wide kimono sleeve the forearm was bare and suggested a peculiar physical cleanliness like that of a wild animal.
"How strange it is," she said, "that for centuries, the western world believed this wonderful land inhabited by a barbarous people—because it didn't possess western civilization!"
He made an exclamation. "Civilization! It is a hateful word! It stands in the West for all that is sordid and ugly. It has bred monstrous, thundering piles built up to heaven, eternally smoking the sky—places of architecture and mechanics gone mad, where one lives by machinery and moves by steam, and is perpetually tormented by absurd conventions. I have lived in its cities. I have walked their selfish streets, shy and shabby and hungry!"
"Hungry!"
"Yes—and worse. I've not spoken of those experiences for years. I don't know why I speak of them now to you. Does it surprise you to hear that I have known poverty?" For the first time he turned fully facing her. His supple hand had left his brow and moved in gestures at one time fierce and graceful. "When I was sixteen I learned what penury meant in London. Once I was driven to take refuge in a workhouse in some evil quarter of the Thames. My memory of it is a mixture of dreadful sights and sounds—of windows thrown violently open or shattered to pieces—of shrieks of murder—of heavy plunges in the river."
Barbara shuddered in the warm sunlight. Over the edge of the garden was a misty space where foliage and roofs sank out of sight, to rise again in long undulations of green trees and gray tiling, like a painted ocean. Far away lifted the leafy plateau of Aoyama, with its blur of terra-cotta barracks. At an immense distance a great temple roof jutted, and still farther away the spread-out, populous city curved up, like the rim of a basin, to a hazy horizon. Yet on this background of pleasantness and peace those other scenes of horror—such was the vehemence of his tone, the savage directness in his phrases—seemed to start up, blank and wretched apparitions, before her.
"At nineteen," he went on. "I found myself in New York, delicate, diffident, satanically proud, and without a friend—one of the billion ants crawling in the skeleton of the mastodon. I was threadbare and meals were scant and uncertain—a little, penniless, half-blind, eccentric wanderer! I lived in a carpenter-shop and slept on the shavings. One week I sold coral for a Neapolitan peddler. Oh, I learned my civilization well! The very memory now of walking down those roaring cañons of streets—all cut granite and iron fury, and hideous houses two hundred feet high—moos at me in the night! It is frightful, nightmarish, devilish! And when one can be here under a violet sky, in sight of blue peaks and an eternally lilac, luke-warm sea!"
His hand swept across the hewn vista—to the wild, bold background of indigo hills, with its slender phantom above them, swimming in the half-tropical blue. "It is better," he said, "to live in Japan in sack-cloth and ashes, than to own the half of any other country. I am as old as the three-legged crow that inhabits the sun. I can't read the comic papers or a French novel. I shouldn't go to the Paris opera if it were next door. I shouldn't like to visit the most beautiful lady and be received in evening dress. I shall pass my life in sandals and a kimono, and when it's over I shall be under the big trees in the old Buddhist cemetery there, beside the nunnery, among the fireflies and grasshoppers, with six laths above me, inscribed with prayers in an unknown tongue and a queerly carved monument typifying the five elements into which we melt away."