The ivory plectrons chirruped, the flutes squeaked and wailed, the little hour-glass drums thudded, and down the stage swept sixty geisha, in blue, cherry-painted kimono. A sly, thin thread of scarlet peeped from their woven sleeves. Their small tabi'd feet, cleft like the foot of a faun, moved in slow, hovering steps. When they wheeled, swaying like young bamboo, they stamped softly, and the white foot, raised from the boards, under the puffed kimono edge writhed and bent from the ankle like a pliant hand. Their faces, heavily powdered, and held without expression, looked like white, waxen masks in which lived sparkling black eyes. In the slow, languorous movement their obi of gold and fans of silver caught the cherry-shaded lights and tossed them back in gleams of mother-of-pearl.
Barbara fell to watching the Japanese spectators. All around her they stood and sat at ease, drinking in the play of color and motion of which they never tire. The dance had no passion, no sensuality, none of the savagery and abandon of the dances of Southern Asia, with whose reproductions the western stage is familiar. Beside a ballet of the West, it would have seemed almost ascetic. She knew that it was symbolic—that every posture was a sentence of a story they knew, as old and as sacred, perhaps, as the birth of the gods.
The parted curtain swung together and Daunt seated himself at Barbara's side. "Do you like it, ever so little?" he asked.
"Ever so much!"
"I wonder if you are going to like me, too," he said, so softly that no one else heard.
She felt her color coming as she answered: "Why, of course. How could I help it, when you plan things like this for me?"
"I have at last found my métier; give me more things to do."
"Very well. When will you take me to see your Japanese house?"
For a second Daunt hesitated. The little native house in the Street-of-the-Misty-Valley was a sentimental place to him. There he had worked out the models of his first Glider; there he had talked with his Princess of Dreams, his "Lady of the Many-Colored Fires." The glimpse of Phil had reminded him that it now had a tenant. When he showed it to Barbara, it should not be with Phil in possession.
She noted the hesitation, and, somewhat puzzled, and wondering if to oriental ethics the suggestion was a gaucherie, waved the matter lightly aside. "You are just going to say 'one of these days.' Please don't. When I was little, that always meant never. I withdraw the motion—but what is this coming?"