Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 2 (1925-08).djvu/79

 dreams and poetry, mixed with subtle perfumes. Surely this wondrous maze of brilliance which scintillated and reflected, changing every second, made of all the glory of the sun, could not have been colored with coarse dyes and paints mixed by the hand of man. In that lantern there was hypnotism and mysticism, and more, there was enticement—a sensuous loveliness hard to understand in an inanimate thing.

"The lantern is not yet done," declared Yin Wen. "When it is completed it will draw her back to me."

Abruptly as he finished speaking, he went back to his work. And though I sat there without moving for perhaps an hour, or it may have been longer, he told me no more. At last, reluctantly, I rose to my feet and walked from the shop. As I did so, old Yin Wen was crooning over his work:

like living in a dream. I wanted to go to some quiet spot where I could meditate. Fortunately not fifty feet away there was a tiny tea shop and to this shop I retired. I felt in an extremely poetical mood and I could not wonder that the Chinese have almost made tea-drinking a religion.

When the little shopkeeper had brought me my tea I made no effort to drink it. I could not help thinking of Taki. How could a girl of such wondrous beauty have fallen in love with the toadlike, shriveled, ugly old Yin Wen even for a single moment? Taki was as lovely as the caress of sunrise upon a coral beach, while Yin Wen was uglier than a night storm in the mountain solitudes.

The keeper of the tea-shop seemed desirous of conversing with me. He hovered ever near. So at last I spoke. I repeated to him in substance the story which Yin Wen had told to me.

When I had finished, he said, "The love of Taki for Yin Wen is not such a puzzle as you have concluded. In his youth the lantern-maker was a comely boy. All that he has told you happened forty years ago. He lost Taki then, nor has he ever seen her since. At the moment of her going his brain stopped, like a run-down clock. And it has never gone on again. He lives the moments he spent with her on the eve of 4 The Feast of Lanterns' every hour of every day. For him time has ceased to exist."

"But the Love Lantern," said I, "will he not use it some day?"

The keeper of the tea-house shrugged his shoulders. "And if he does," said he, "it will avail him little. He still thinks of Taki as a gorgeous, graceful girl. Now, if she be living, she is probably an old hag almost as ugly and withered as himself. Even if they met he would, undoubtedly, not know her."

"It is a very sad case," I said thoughtfully.

"I think not," was the reply, "for he still has the memory, and ofttimes a memory is sweeter than the thing itself."