But, clambering down the hundreds of beautiful broken steps overgrown with flowers and moss where so many generations have come and gone in pilgrimage, I said nothing to Arima. It had become impossible. Something called the war to my mind and I said something careless, but he waved that aside.
“We must speak of it no more. Why steep one’s soul in illusion? Much that we thought real and allowed to affect us was nothing, and the emotions it caused less than nothing. I have awaked. You are near the dawn.”
I thought this remark cruel, and said something heated about the dead who had paid with their lives for the illusion—the ignorant things one does say! He received it with his invulnerable Japanese courtesy.
“I went too fast. Pardon me. The Buddha alone can impart knowledge to the Buddha, and who am I that I should speak? The time and the master come together. Here, my friend,—you should drink of this running water. It comes from a beautiful spring in the mountain above. They call it ‘Light Eternal’ and say that to taste of it is to drink perfect health. If only it were as easy as that!”
By the mossy rock lay two little dippers of pure white wood. I was extremely English at that instant and nothing would have induced me to soil my lips with a cup used by strangers. I hooped my hands and drank,—he, from the dipper.
“You miss the sacrament,” he said, “but the water in any case is good.”
And so we went home, talking of the treasures of the monastery, wonders of art, famous throughout Japan.
But now, in the gathering night concentrating its radiance in a moon so glorious as to obscure the nearer stars, in the breathless silence made vocal by the ripple of the river on its eternal way, beneath the dropped veil of the willow influences were loosed which opened my heart, and I told Arima my experience of the afternoon. I asked whether he had been conscious of what had passed.
His face was a shadow beneath the boughs. I saw only the moonlight in his eyes as he replied.
“No. I knew nothing. The Abbot Gyōsen was speaking with me all the time. I thought you were absorbed in the view. It is most wonderful.”