Without conscious thought, acting entirely on impulse, he leaned towards her. She looked at him, awakened suddenly from her reverie. "I must be poor company," she smiled. "But then, you know, I told you beforehand. It is all so bewildering, puzzling to me. I can see the pictures here, the dazzlingly wonderful potentialities which lie right here before me, about me; and yet I can't get hold of it. It eludes me entirely. It is the lack of color, I think, the predominance of light and shadow effects, black and white. It is not for me, I'm afraid. This is a subject for some great etcher, for some kind of a Klinger or Boeklin composition; and yet one would have to get in these elusive opalescent tints, these evasive iridescences. It is very disappointing, to feel it all so far beyond one's capabilities; and yet I have enjoyed it so much. I have let it get away with me. But now it must be late. Come," she took his hand simply, confidently. "We must be going home. You must forgive me if I have let the moonlight run away with my thoughts. But didn't you feel something like that too? Did you not feel coming to you dreams, visions that, even though they must fade away and lose their evanescence, will still continue to live in some form, to take shape in one's life."
He did not answer. The dream was already beginning to concentrate, to solidify into definite form of thought, purpose. He wondered whether it were possible that she might divine, by some subtle woman's intuition, the inspiration which was now growing into tangible form of a wish, deliberate pursuance of desire, that now finally he was sure that she was the woman whom he had been awaiting, that he had come to the end of his seeking.
CHAPTER XIX
"Thank God, that's over," said Butterfield. "If there's anything much more deadly than the banquets of the Nippon-Columbia Society, I don't want to see it."
They had come down from the banquet hall in the Imperial Hotel, a group of correspondents, Kittrick, Kent, Butterfield and Templeton, with Roberts, just arrived from New York to gather material for a series of magazine articles; Sands, an engineer who had something to do with the new subway, and one or two others. At one end of Peacock Alley they found a table where they might observe the crowd, the men coming down here to meet the women who had dined below in the main dining room, Japanese and foreigners mingling, concentrating in little groups about the guests of honor, an eminent engineer from America, a Cabinet member from Washington, and a couple of Congressmen of whom no one in Tokyo had heard until they arrived in Japan, unofficially, of course, it was given out, but as "Ambassadors of Friendship," as the newspapers called them.
Butterfield was still grouching. "Here I've been to dozens of these affairs, and I wonder if I'll ever come away from one without a bad taste in my mouth. It makes me sick, all this fulsomeness. Take to-night, Barry talking as if the Japanese were the only engineers in the world, as if they had invented the steam engine, electricity, telephones, radio and all that. Here Japan is suffering so badly from swelled head that the best service one may do her is to tell her the truth, for her own good, and still whenever we have distinguished visitors here, they always insist on making asses of themselves. Barry is a pleasant enough, kindly old ass, but, heavens, the only way I could stand his speech to-night was by watching Matthews. He has in one way or another been behind half the things that Barry was lauding our Japanese friends for. Did you see his face? It was the only fun I got out of it all, seeing Matthews' face getting redder and redder. I thought he'd have a fit. But all the rest of it honestly gets my goat; the main table, with old Count Ibara sitting through the speeches waiting for the time when he'll have a chance to spring his eternal story about his college days with President Wilson. I can stand on my head and write a complete report of these meetings as they were ten years ago, as they will be ten years from now; old Baron Nishida leads off with "Perry's Black Ships" and everlasting love for America. Eminent American stands up and talks of Bushido—I have lived here ten years, and I've yet to hear Bushido mentioned by a Japanese; it's as dead as the rules of knighthood with us—more Eminent Americans tell the Japanese how wonderful they are. Why the devil is it that when an American comes here, he must almost invariably make a fool of himself? Of course, the trouble is often that they are generally mediocrities who become all puffed up at the attentions they get here; and then we do send out such asses. Do you remember the Congressional Party some years ago? The men acted like clodhoppers, and their women were worse. That's where the Japanese are wiser than we are. When they let any one represent them, officially or semi-officially, abroad, they hand-pick them, send only the best they have, and our people at home get a wonderful idea of the advanced stage of Japan. That's how half the good spirit towards Japan was built up at the Washington Conference; they sent their best men in the entourage of the delegation, who chummed with our newspapermen and writers; the best kind of advertising.
"But we let loose third-rate Congressmen, ebullient business men, who let Japanese hospitality get to their heads and proceed to slobber all over the landscape. I wouldn't mind if it were not for the fact that just as we in America judge the Japanese people from the Japanese who make a splash there, thus the Japanese judge us Americans from the kind of specimens who come over here and spill their foolishness as these fellows did to-night. We Americans ought to have a censorship here to prevent visiting notables from making speeches which have not been carefully edited."
"But what do you come here for then, if you dislike it so?" It was Roberts, the magazine man. "Why do you belong to the Society at all if you think it does no good?"