It was a true Japanese garden, a wide landscape seen through the diminishing end of a telescope. There was a forest, a mountain which had spilt its mighty boulders by the side of a running river with a Chinese bridge thrown over it. True, one could have bestridden the mountain and hopped the river, but what did that matter? The real river, the Kogagawa, rippled beside the grass which ran down to where a great willow dipped cool fingers in liquid crystal from the mountain heights, and under that green veil of drooping boughs with eyes half closed it was possible to dream that the little garden passed into the idea which had filled its maker’s mind, and became grand and terrible, a place of wild beauty and awe.
“It must be so,” said Arima smiling, “because he saw it so, and what a man has once clearly seen is registered immortal and can be seen by others when necessary.”
He sat under the willow, his fine bronzed face and throat bare to the flitting shadows of trembling leaves.
“Who made it?” I asked. “He cannot have been a common man.”
“He was my great-great-grandfather and very far from a common man. I have a paper in his own hand which tells why and how he made it and it is a very strange story.”
He threw away his cigarette and sat looking at the wandering paths paved with flat stones here and there, the little flowering herbs springing in the crevices; at the mountain where, altering the scale, you might wander and be lost for dreadful days in mighty gorges and ravines. The river swept round it in a rapid current possibly two feet wide and joined the Kogagawa in a lovely bay quite four feet across where a fairy fleet might have anchored after a prosperous voyage from Stratford on Avon in the dream of a midsummer night.
“Some day I will read you his paper, but not yet. I have reasons for delay. The spirit of our country is hovering over you but has not yet entered in and possessed you. People come to Japan in ship-loads and see the surface bright with colour and gaiety which we spread out before them. But they do not know. We do not mean they should. To be truthful—I do not think any foreigner can understand Japan unless he is a Buddhist at heart— As you are.”
“I?” I echoed in uttermost astonishment. “My good fellow, I am nothing. I haven’t the devil of a ghost of a notion what it all means.”
He looked at me with a quaint smile hiding in the deeps of his narrow eyes. It peered out like a wise gnome, as old as the hills and older.
“Your downstairs self knows very well. It has not passed it on yet to your honourable upstairs self. But the wireless begins to talk and the air is full of voices beating at your ears. What stories they will tell you! I should like to hear them.”