Page:Four Japanese Tales.pdf/46

 gineer seemed rather petty to me. He perceived my doubts, interrupted himself for a moment, impatiently motioned with his hand and remarked: “The suffering of childhood loses nothing in poignancy because it is sometimes imaginary or exaggerated by individual sensitiveness. Rest assured that Masushige’s daily tragedies were not less cruhingcrushing [sic] than many an exemplary suffering made so much of in your literatures and to us Orientals either incomprehensible or even comical.« And before I could answer, he plunged into his story again, or better said, into Masushige’s story, which he related as if he drew upon his own memories, half intoxicating and half poisonous.

Arriving however at the point when O-Take became a in the Temple of the Winds, he suddenly dropped Masushige and devoted himself to an eloquent description of O-Take’s growing beauty, her success and her strange power over all with whom she came into contact. Already when she was nine years old her fame as a temple dancer spread from Shinshu into the neighboring provinces; and upon festival days Kaze-no-miya was visited by an ever increasing number of strangers. O-Take moved as lightly and noiselessly on the platform as if she were floating, and her arms seemed to chant with every gesture. The mystic with its little bells was endowed by her charming hand with so much life that people hearing and seeing it would feel as if they had conceived a new meaning in the old parable, a new meaning which disclosed to them the profoundest mysteries of their beings; and they were happy, they smiled, but when the dance was over, they tried in vain to remember what a short time before had been so clear to them. Her face was always pretty, but from the time she became a priestess it grew beautiful in some superhuman way, at the same time always seeming to be different. Once it was her oblique and lustrous eyes that attracted, once it was her scarlet lips and delicate nose with its quivering nostrils, again it was her forehead, cheeks and chin, at another time something undescribable and intangible perhaps in the expression of her face, perhaps in that which was hidden behind her face.

For soon it was evident that from time to time O-Take was carried away by her dancing into religious ecstasy. Then even the dullest became aware that they did not exist for her as an audience, that she was not even conscious of this world, but that she really was dancing in the dusky eternity of space in front of the cave in which the refractory Sun-Goddess had hidden herself. Only some, gifted with instinctive insight, felt that in her exaltation there was something disquieting, which after each festival persecuted them