Page:Four Japanese Tales.pdf/48

 stands, and that is why it hates the elect. For to the elect all things have manifold, deepened meanings,« He smiled in apology and hurriedly returned to the story, the outline of which he had broken by this deviation; but the forgotten Masushige made use of this crevice to force his way back into the narrative. For naturally Masushige was of the elect. It might be said simply that Masushige never ceased loving O-Take; on the contrary, his love increased till it became the desire of a man for a woman, and O-Take’s inaccessibility excited him to the paroxysms of a morbid imagination and irritated senses; but the young engineer took pains to transpose his Masushige into as extraordinary a key as possible. He made out of the natural desire of a love- smitten youth a mystic affair, the symbol of the eternal, something of the Faust tragedy. But then he gradualygradually [sic] slipped into a more natural key, without hunting far-fetched explanations for different points of his story.

In the end even daimios with their trains did not disdain to make pilgrimages to Kaze-no-miya; one poet and then another sang the praises of O-Take and her divine dance; the temple dancer of a formerly unknown nook became the subject of paintings. And Masushige was jealous, tortured himself, and longed with all his soul and all his heart, with all his young body, which withered with vain desire With a few sentences the engineer succeeded in depicting his condition as vividly and as truthfully as if he were describing his own suffering; and it did not escape me that now his face was pale and his eyes shone strangely.

Then sudendlysuddenly [sic] his story took an unexpected turn; and he endeavored not to betray with a single word the surprise in store. Almost sentimentally he described Masushige’s strolls about the Temple of the Winds, his sighs, his impotent outbursts of despairing determination which never ripened into acts; nor did he neglect to mention trifling episodes in which O-Take sometimes tortured Masushige, not directly as in her childhood, but indirectly in such a refined way that he did not even have the sweet certainty of really being tortured, of being worth at least so much trouble to her. And one afternoon he met her in the woods, in a fragrant wild nook of a secluded spot, where he often took refuge with his love and pain. She was so beautiful and her eyes burned with such a strange fire that he caught his breath and in the first moment thought he had fallen victim to witchcraft, that his senses were deceiving him. It was, however, the real O-Take, flesh and blood, white but flaming with red flames, palpably a mortal but still like a being from another world She knew of his haunt, she