Page:Four Japanese Tales.pdf/45

 parison and the wonderful succinctness of that single line. Unfortunately however, our old ballad is all too succinct.«

It was evident that the subject of his narrative was too dear to him to allow his slighting any stage of it without adornments of his own imagiationimagination [sic], gradually heating to the story; and when he was at his best he wished to say so much so beautifully that more than once his supply of English words or some phrase failed him, and then he became impatient, almost angry, cutting up his sentences and losing the main thread. At other times, however, when the stream of his eloquence flowed continuously and every sentence was like a brisk ripple, foaming with some adroit turn of speech, he seemed to live the story to such a degree that he began to forget his real relation to the narrated episodes. From time to time he talked of O-Take as if he had known her, as if now he were relating something he had lived through; I explained this to myself as due to his narrative glow, temperament, and subtly different understanding of English and of our Western logic in sentence-building. For that matter, his inimitable, fragmentary style soon began to affect me, perhaps partly for the reason that he himself was carried away, until even to me the temple dancer became something more than a mere image but recently conceived; I felt that her charm still emanated from the ruins of the temple she formerly graced, that in the atmosphere formerly permeated by the admiration awakened by her there still vibrated the desires she never disappointed by fulfillment, and that these vibrations called forth in my imagination her real image. From time to time I was surprised by the {{SIC|concidence}coincidence}} of my expectation with the words of the engineer; it was almost as if he were relating to me something which, I had just become aware, was already known to me.

I acknowledge that the story excited me somewhat; and still it was so entirely simple. The comely little O-Take was from her earliest childhood the companion of Masushige; they were both of the same age to an hour, and because their families lived close to each other and were on friendly terms, it was not to be wondered at that the simultaneous arrival into the world of the two children was looked upon as a sort of mystic sign, which the mutual sympathy of O-Take and Masushige seemed to confirm. But nobody had the slightest idea that this reciprocation was only seeming, that O-Take, on the surface so sweet and gentle, knew how to torture her companion in every conceivable way, at the same time being unwilling to forego his society altogether. Countless, it would seem, were the subterfuges through which she tortured him; but I must confess that more than one of the examples offered by the en-