Page:Four Japanese Tales.pdf/47

 in their subconsciousness, even in the privacy of their thoughts and conceptions. Finally it was rumored that at times the gods enter the body of this darling of theirs and prophesy through her lips; then even noblemen from distant towns and the envoys of powerful daimios began to make pilgrimages to the Temple of the Winds, to make this or that inquiry of the prophetess. Her answers had all the charm of double and enigmatic meaning that since the beginning of the world has characterized all oracles; nobody could complain of the answers of the gods given him in Kaze-no-miya but only perchance of his own interpretation of them.

There were many who forgot what they really came to ask; when O-Take was twelve years old, many a samurai had more questions in his heart when leaving than when he came. But though she had ripened into a woman, O-Take did not even in the following years give the slightest cause for the suspicion that she ever forgot for a moment the requirement of chastity not only of body but also of thought. It looked as if youths and young men for her were not distinguishable from children, women, and old men; she was so kind to everyone that it hurt, she was so modest and courteous that it crushed, and when he with whom she had just been talking stepped back, he felt as if he had been engulfed by a chasm before her eyes and had been instantly forgotten by her, even with his sad fate. She was so chaste that also those who never desired to sin, when looking at her or even at the thought of her felt a wild ebullition of the senses that filled them with horror. And still her dance brought all nearer to the joyous and clean fundaments of life; some in its beginning, some in its middle and others in its end found the key to happiness which at other times seemed impossible, and unimaginable; but the same people either before this feeling of equilibrium or after it grew restless, became abashed in the presence of their neighbors, and took fright at their own fancies.

Such was this temple dancer when she was sixteen years of age; inviolable and still desired by many, chaste and maddening, gentle and cruel: »In her was personified the primordial principle of the relation of the human to the superhuman,« said the engineer after some deliberation, »she was a dancing problem of sex, intellect, instinct, religion, exaltation, good-evil, the longing for the infinite, art, soul-body Oh, a dancing problem, that is all « He snapped his fingers and tossed his head.« Of course, the mob did not comprehend of what exactly consisted the strange fascination of her singing and dancing. The mob never understands. All such things are reserved for the elect; that is all that the mob under-