and once more looked for the stem bearing the inscription from the previous visit. I found it, and was almost terrified when underneath my words, "Where art thou, beloved," I read inscribed in the dainty hand of a woman, "Here I am."
I was amazed; then I smiled with joy, and my heart beat violently, as on the eve of an adventure. My Portuguese verses did not fit now, and I meditated a jolly, German answer; but I was too unskilful in my excitement and could not compose anything with any sense to it. I had to think too much of the writer. Who was she, and what did she look like?
Finally I took out my dagger, sharpened a twig of bamboo to the finest of points, and after I had assured myself that I was unobserved, I wrote simply,
Whether there or here,
Be with me, dear!
Once more I strode back and forth. Then it occurred to me that so long as I remained in the park I could observe from some hiding-place whether any one read the inscription.
My bamboo stood right at the intersection of a smaller path and the bamboo alley, and could be seen from a distance. I accordingly followed the cross path and came thus into the dark green bosket out of which the erythrina stood towering. From a distance it seemed as though the flowering giant were closely surrounded by the smaller trees and bushes; but if one stepped through the green hedge, one found in the centre of it a great open circle, like the hallowed precinct of a sacred tree; out of the ground rose massively the mighty trunk, showing in clear outline its flower-laden branches, of which the lower ones were far extended and dipped their fiery burden deep in the surrounding thicket. Beneath the tree was a bench; from it I could, to the left, look back along the path and into the bamboo alley, while straight ahead an opening in the bushes afforded a view of the fountain and the middle of the garden.
I seated myself in the hedged-in sultry air, which seemed to have been very little cooled by the night, and dreamed of the expected sweetheart. I gazed to the left and saw the sunbathed stems and twigs of bamboo stand out clearly and prettily on the dark shady background; and looked straight ahead and saw the fountain spraying and foaming, and often in the tea plantation observed the old man bend forward and rise erect again.
What did she look like? Like this woman and that woman who had before now found favor in my sight? Hardly; in that case those other women would have held me captive. How must she be? Black, white, or red--that cannot matter. Her eyes will take me, her lips will intoxicate me, because they are hers! She will be such that my eye will no more estimate and compare, that my mind will no more dream and desire, that I shall feel she is she, and acknowledge her as the only power outside myself; so that my heart, my brain, and every fibre of my flesh will glow under the same compulsion to take from itself this body and spirit now subject to another will than mine, to transform it, to engraft it upon my being, whether for life or for death, to consume it, to drain it up as the sole valid increase of my existence! I shall feel myself to be a force nevermore divisible!
Her hair will be curly and of the soft brown of an old walnut, and, like the shell of a walnut, her twisted braids will surround the back of her head--and her eyes gray as a German lake in May, when clouds hover over it and the wind chases bright electric sparks over the waves ... her hair may also be black, and her eyes brown like snuff; but her heart must be strong, so that a man may succumb to it!
My eyes watched the bamboo alley and saw the littlest leaves and the tiniest twigs gently quiver in the heat. Nothing else. She did not come.