🧚 Story of a Tengu[1] · page 2

The structure was very simple.100 The bottom was a piece of thick plank, perfectly square, and measuring about ten inches across.101 Each one of its corners supported a slender slick about sixteen inches high; and these four uprights, united above by cross-pieces, sustained the paper sides.102 Upon the point of a long nail, driven up through the centre of the bottom, was fixed a lighted candle.103 The top was left open.104 The four sides presented five different colors,—blue, yellow, red, white, and black; these five colors respectively symbolizing Ether, Wind, Fire, Water, and Earth,—the five Buddhist elements which are metaphysically identified with the Five Buddhas.105 One of the paper-panes was red, one blue, one yellow; and the right half of the fourth pane was black, while the left half, uncolored, represented white.106 No _kaimyō_ was written upon any of the transparencies.107 Inside the lantern there was only the flickering candle.108

I watched those frail glowing shapes drifting through the night, and ever as they drifted scattering, under impulse of wind and wave, more and more widely apart.109 Each, with its quiver of color, seemed a life afraid,—trembling on the blind current that was bearing it into the outer blackness….110 Are not we ourselves as lanterns launched upon a deeper and a dimmer sea, and ever separating further and further one from another as we drift to the inevitable dissolution?111 Soon the thought-light in each burns itself out: then the poor frames, and all that is left of their once fair colors, must melt forever into the colorless Void.112

Even in the moment of this musing I began to doubt whether I was really alone,—to ask myself whether there might not be something more than a mere shuddering of light in the thing that rocked beside me: some presence that haunted the dying flame, and was watching the watcher.113 A faint cold thrill passed over me,—perhaps some chill uprising from the depths,—perhaps the creeping only of a ghostly fancy.114 Old superstitions of the coast recurred to me,—old vague warnings of peril in the time of the passage of Souls.115 I reflected that were any evil to befall me out there in the night,—meddling, or seeming to meddle, with the lights of the Dead,—I should myself furnish the subject of some future weird legend….116 I whispered the Buddhist formula of farewell—to the lights,—and made speed for shore.117

As I touched the stones again, I was startled by seeing two white shadows before me; but a kindly voice, asking if the water was cold, set me at ease.118 It was the voice of my old landlord, Otokichi the fishseller, who had come to look for me, accompanied by his wife.119

“Only pleasantly cool,” I made answer, as I threw on my robe to go home with them.120

“Ah,” said the wife, “it is not good to go out there on the night of the Bon!”121

“I did not go far,” I replied;—“I only wanted to look at the lanterns.”122

“Even a Kappa gets drowned sometimes,”[1] protested Otokichi.123 “There was a man of this village who swam home a distance of seven ri, in bad weather, after his boat had been broken.124 But he was drowned afterwards.”125

[1] This is a common proverb:—_Kappa mo oboré-shini_.126 The Kappa is a water-goblin, haunting rivers especially.127

Seven _ri_ means a trifle less than eighteen miles.128 I asked if any of the young men now in the settlement could do as much.129

“Probably some might,” the old man replied.130 “There are many strong swimmers.131 All swim here,—even the little children.132 But when fisher-folk swim like that, it is only to save their lives.”133

“Or to make love,” the wife added,—“like the Hashima girl.”134

“Who?” queried I.135

“A fisherman’s daughter,” said Otokichi.136 “She had a lover in Ajiro, several _ri_ distant; and she used to swim to him at night, and swim back in the morning.137 He kept a light burning to guide her.138 But one dark night the light was neglected—or blown out; and she lost her way, and was drowned….139 The story is famous in Idzu.”140

—“So,” I said to myself, “in the Far East, it is poor Hero that does the swimming.141 And what, under such circumstances, would have been the Western estimate of Leander?”142

III143

Usually about the time of the Bon, the sea gets rough; and I was not surprised to find next morning that the surf was running high.144 All day it grew.145 By the middle of the afternoon, the waves had become wonderful; and I sat on the sea-wall, and watched them until sundown.146

It was a long slow rolling,—massive and formidable.147 Sometimes, just before breaking, a towering swell would crack all its green length with a tinkle as of shivering glass; then would fall and flatten with a peal that shook the wall beneath me….148 I thought of the great dead Russian general who made his army to storm as a sea,—wave upon wave of steel,—thunder following thunder….149 There was yet scarcely any wind; but there must have been wild weather elsewhere,—and the breakers were steadily heightening.150 Their motion fascinated.151 How indescribably complex such motion is,—yet how eternally new!152 Who could fully describe even five minutes of it?153 No mortal ever saw two waves break in exactly the same way.154

And probably no mortal ever watched the ocean-roll or heard its thunder without feeling serious.155 I have noticed that even animals,—horses and cows,—become meditative in the presence of the sea: they stand and stare and listen as if the sight and sound of that immensity made them forget all else in the world.156

There is a folk-saying of the coast:—“_The Sea has a soul and hears_.”157 And the meaning is thus explained: Never speak of your fear when you feel afraid at sea;—if you say that you are afraid, the waves will suddenly rise higher.158 Now this imagining seems to me absolutely natural.159 I must confess that when I am either in the sea, or upon it, I cannot fully persuade myself that it is not alive,—a conscious and a hostile power.160 Reason, for the time being, avails nothing against this fancy.161 In order to be able to think of the sea as a mere body of water, I must be upon some height from whence its heaviest billowing appears but a lazy creeping of tiny ripples.162

But the primitive fancy may be roused even more strongly in darkness than by daylight.163 How living seem the smoulderings and the flashings of the tide on nights of phosphorescence!—how reptilian the subtle shifting of the tints of its chilly flame!164 Dive into such a night-sea;—open your eyes in the black-blue gloom, and watch the weird gush of lights that follow your every motion: each luminous point, as seen through the flood, like the opening and closing of an eye!165 At such a moment, one feels indeed as if enveloped by some monstrous sentiency,—suspended within some vital substance that feels and sees and wills alike in every part, an infinite soft cold Ghost.166

IV167

Long I lay awake that night, and listened to the thunder-rolls and crashings of the mighty tide.168 Deeper than these distinct shocks of noise, and all the storming of the nearer waves, was the bass of the further surf,—a ceaseless abysmal muttering to which the building trembled,—a sound that seemed to imagination like the sound of the trampling of infinite cavalry, the massing of incalculable artillery,—some rushing, from the Sunrise, of armies wide as the world.169

Then I found myself thinking of the vague terror with which I had listened, when a child, to the voice of the sea;—and I remembered that in after-years, on different coasts in different parts of the world, the sound of surf had always revived the childish emotion.170 Certainly this emotion was older than I by thousands of thousands of centuries,—the inherited sum of numberless terrors ancestral.171 But presently there came to me the conviction that fear of the sea alone could represent but one element of the multitudinous awe awakened by its voice.172 For as I listened to that wild tide of the Suruga coast, I could distinguish nearly every sound of fear known to man: not merely noises of battle tremendous,—of interminable volleying,—of immeasurable charging,—but the roaring of beasts, the crackling and hissing of fire, the rumbling of earthquake, the thunder of ruin, and, above all these, a clamor continual as of shrieks and smothered shoutings,—the Voices that are said to be the voices of the drowned., Awfulness supreme of tumult,—combining all imaginable echoings of fury and destruction and despair!173

And to myself I said:—Is it wonderful that the voice of the sea should make us serious?174 Consonantly to its multiple utterance must respond all waves of immemorial fear that move in the vaster sea of soul-experience.175 Deep calleth unto deep.176 The visible abyss calls to that abyss invisible of elder being whose flood-flow made the ghosts of us.177

Wherefore there is surely more than a little truth in the ancient belief that the speech of the dead is the roar of the sea.178 Truly the fear and the pain of the dead past speak to us in that dim deep awe which the roar of the sea awakens.179

But there are sounds that move us much more profoundly than the voice of the sea can do, and in stranger ways,—sounds that also make us serious at times, and very serious,—sounds of music.180

Great music is a psychical storm, agitating to unimaginable depth the mystery of the past within us.181 Or we might say that it is a prodigious incantation, every different instrument and voice making separate appeal to different billions of prenatal memories.182 There are tones that call up all ghosts of youth and joy and tenderness;—there are tones that evoke all phantom pain of perished passion;—there are tones that resurrect all dead sensations of majesty and might and glory,—all expired exultations,—all forgotten magnanimities.183 Well may the influence of music seem inexplicable to the man who idly dreams that his life began less than a hundred years ago!184 But the mystery lightens for whomsoever learns that the substance of Self is older than the sun. He finds that music is a Necromancy;—he feels that to every ripple of melody, to every billow of harmony, there answers within him, out of the Sea of Death and Birth, some eddying immeasurable of ancient pleasure and pain.185

Pleasure and pain: they commingle always in great music; and therefore it is that music can move us more profoundly than the voice of ocean or than any other voice can do.186 But in music’s larger utterance it is ever the sorrow that makes the undertone,—the surf-mutter of the Sea of Soul….187 Strange to think how vast the sum of joy and woe that must have been experienced before the sense of music could evolve in the brain of man!188

Somewhere it is said that human life is the music of the Gods,—that its sobs and laughter, its songs and shrieks and orisons, its outcries of delight and of despair, rise never to the hearing of the Immortals but as a perfect harmony….189 Wherefore they could not desire to hush the tones of pain: it would spoil their music!190 The combination, without the agony-tones, would prove a discord unendurable to ears divine.191

And in one way we ourselves are as Gods,—since it is only the sum of the pains and the joys of past lives innumerable that makes for us, through memory organic, the ecstasy of music.192 All the gladness and the grief of dead generations come back to haunt us in countless forms of harmony and of melody.193 Even so,—a million years after we shall have ceased to view the sun,—will the gladness and the grief of our own lives pass with richer music into other hearts—there to bestir, for one mysterious moment, some deep and exquisite thrilling of voluptuous pain.194