It was spring and it was Spain. Sunset brought the white-haired custodian of the Court of the Lions to the balcony overhanging my fountain. His blue coat bespoke officialdom but his Andalusian lisp veiled this suggestion of compulsion. His wishes for my evening’s happiness, nevertheless, were to be interpreted as a request for my going. The Alhambra had to be locked up for the night.
I was lying outstretched on the stones of Lindaroxa’s Court with my head against a pillar. The last light of the April sun had scaled the walls and was losing itself among the top-most bobbing oranges of Lindaroxa’s tree. To dream there must be to have one’s dreams come true, some inheritance from Moorish alchemy.
Despite the setting, I was dreaming nothing of the Alhambra, not even of Lindaroxa. I was thinking of a friend of irresponsible imagination but of otherwise responsibility. I was wonderingwhere he could be. On the previous summer we had walked the highroads of England and I had found him a most satisfying disputatious companion of enquiring mind. We had talked somewhat of a similar wandering in Japan, a vagabondage free from cicerones and away from the show places, but although we had treated this variety of imagining with due respect, we had never an idea of transmuting it into action.
The Alhambra had to be locked up for the night. The custodian bowed low, and I bowed low, in unhurried obligation to dignity, and I walked away to my inn. There I found a cablegram from America. It read:
“Can meet you Kyoto June two months’ walking.”
It was signed by the other dreamer of the Two-Sworded Trails.
I cabled back, “yes.” The message gone, I awoke to the reality of time and space. All Europe, Siberia, Manchuria, and Korea spread out their distances on the map and were lying between me and the keeping of my promise.
It was in the darkness of midnight and it was raining when I stepped off the express to the Kyoto platform. For a month the world hadbeen revolving giddily under railway carriage succeeding railway carriage until it seemed that the changing peoples outside the car windows could be taking on their ceaseless variety only through some illusion within my own eyes.
I stood for a while in the shelter of the overhanging, dripping roof of the Kyoto station awaiting some providential development, but probably the local god of wayfarers did not judge my plight worry of special interposition. Finally I found a drenched youth in a stupor of sleep between the shafts of his ’ricksha. His dreams were evidently depressing, for he awoke with appreciation for the escape. We bent over his paper lantern and at last coaxed a spurt of flame from a box of unspeakable matches. (The government decrees that matches must be given away and not sold by the tobacconists. Japan’s spirit of the art of giving should not be judged by this item. The generosity is in the acceptance of the matches.) I climbed into the ’ricksha and stowed myself away under the hood, naming the inn which had been appointed by cablegram for the meeting place. The boy pattered along in his straw sandals at full speed through the mist, shouting hoarsely at the corners. At last he dug his heels into the pebbles and stopped, and pounded atthe inn door until someone came and slid back the bolts.
Yes, the clerk answered my question, a guest with the name of Owre had arrived that day at noon and had sat up for me until midnight. He had left word that I should be taken to his room. Thus I was led through dark halls until we came to the door. We pushed it open and called into the darkness. Back came a welcome—somewhat sleepy. The clerk struck a match and I discovered my vagabond companion crawling out from under the mosquito netting of his four-poster. Between us we had covered twenty thousand miles for that handshake.
“It’s the moment to be highly dramatic,” he said with an eloquent flourish of his pajam’d arm, and he sent the clerk for a bottle of native beer. It came, warm and of infinite foam, but we managed to find a few drops of liquid at the bottom with which to drink a toast. The toast was to “The Road.”