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BROKEN BUTTERFLIES
THE CODE OF THE KARSTENS BROKEN BUTTERFLIES
BROKEN BUTTERFLIES
BY HENRY WALSWORTH KINNEY
TORONTO THE MUSSON BOOK COMPANY LIMITED
Published February, 1924
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BROKEN BUTTERFLIES
Arms folded over the rail, Hugh Kent looked forward into the opaque dimness. From the main deck below the plaint of a bamboo flute came softly up to him. The following wind brought stray bits of the dance music from astern where the cabin passengers were enjoying their last night at sea. Ahead the Orient, dim, mysterious, indefinitely veiled as the flute notes--behind him the virile, strident, restless clamor of the West; ever approaching, the two, East and West, seeking to blend, even partly blending, yet each as yet too strongly individual, mutually strange, to combine in full harmony.
The vastness of space, vagueness of translucent darkness, shimmer of niveous sparkle of foam cascaded before the tall prow and glimmer of phosphorescence flickering in the dark water below, all induced to introspection, reflection, vague wonder as to what lay before him, what new revelations would life in Japan bring to him.
It had surely changed vastly in the score of years which had passed since he had left it, at fifteen. He would find much that he knew though, would enjoy recapturing fluency in the speech which he had prattled expertly as a toddler in amah's care and as a boy in the streets and gardens of Kyoto. It would be a new, a more sophisticated Japan that he would see, spoiled without doubt; still how he had longed for years to return, to rediscover.
It had been borne in on him that in her heart she welcomed this as an opportunity to end, through propitious circumstance, a relationship which had become apathetic, a marriage which had failed. He could understand her feeling--the thought was not unfamiliar to him--but she had evidently progressed much farther than had he on the road of indifference. Further conversations had brought the same result. She had resolutely refused to place credence in his belief that life in a new country might revive affection. She was not romantic, she had said, and it was plain that separation would cause neither of them to suffer. He had felt that had she given him but a little encouragement, the slightest sympathy, he might ardently have swept her over to his belief that here lay a chance for renewal of the affection of the first years; but her indifference had chilled him.
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