THE slow-wrought colors of autumn, which have in them all the keen hope of spring and the rich fulfillment of summer, and so much music at the close, blended easily into the warm blue-gray and then velvet black of the Southern Japanese evening.

The island of Tomoshima in the Inland Sea, itself enclosing yet another and more secret sea, — for it is shaped like a hollow heart, through whose aortic vein could just flow in a navy to be in hiding, — was as silent as any country in the East can ever be.

The clamor of the Shinto temple bell had ceased with the setting sun. Somewhere across the water of the inner bay, but still upon the island, a Buddhist temple’s lovely gong was ringing at decreasing but still long intervals, and the last tired woman, heavy-breasted, had wound her way down from the daikon fields, where the precious turnips were now all unearthed and hung to dry upon long bamboo poles.

An unbroken ring of hills, which is the island, completely surrounds the bay, where nothing ever happens, unless an occasional crown prince visits the military academy on the island, with the pomp of an escort and in a battle cruiser; the bay, where nothing ever has happened of great historic moment, where, no doubt, little ever will happen, but where always there seems a menace, the portent of a nascent clash of arms, the warning of some imminent disaster — perhaps only an earthquake.

On the highest point of this ring of hills, upon the cast side of the island, whence the great new naval harbor of Nagasaki is visible with its cranes outlined even at evening against the black pines on the hills of the mainland, stood a single Englishman.

He stood just within the darker shadows of the wood, which runs up upon the inside of the island at this point, but which ends suddenly upon the summit.

Below him upon the outside of the ring of the island, and in the direction in which he was facing, the land was entirely cleared of trees and dropped steeply to the sea, nearly a thousand feet below.

Despite the steepness of the slope, however, the immense industry of a nation of Shinto persuasion, with an ever-increasing birth rate and no great colonies, had terraced the whole side of the hill, where now paddy was grown in tiny fields to within a few feet of the top.

Charles Surtees was not in the least lonely in Tomoshima. He lived there because he was paid to do so. He taught army cadets all the mornings the elements of the great commercial language of the world, and in the afternoons, particularly in autumn, he walked over the hills with a dog, which he had rescued as a puppy from a slow death at no man’s hand — such is Eastern murder.

Surtees, indeed, was essentially happy. The air was warm and calm, yet had the virtue of the salt, however different from the wind along an English coast. His work was simple, tedious stuff, but his real work was learning — learning himself, learning the East, watching the colors in the most perfect climate in the world; and he dreamed a good deal, too — dreamed of writing, like Claude Farrèrc, perhaps, for he was a young man and younger than his years; dreamed of travel, of going on and on round this musical world, collecting the memories of the bells of all the temples of the Middle Kingdom and the chants of all the ports from Penang to Vladivostok.

Certainly he never dreamed of home; partly because he had none, partly, too, because he supposed that if he ever did have one it would be entirely respectable, perhaps in Middlesex — and one does not dream of Middlesex.

Sometimes he dreamed of Europe as a whole, of Western things, chiefly of Western hills: the Fletschhorn with its hollow cave of ice, which in his memory was always in the shade; the hills behind Rome as he had come dow n them before Easter years ago — but the Via Appia was dead, dead as its catacombs, and gnarled before it died.

There were the young hills, of course, the South downs, green and careless, but they had not the sérieux that quite claimed respect from him; better, he thought, the quite childish hills behind Cadenabbia, which were always laughing at the lake, and where you could not even write poetry because of the onus of their mirth.

He loved them, of course, these different hills of home, but he had seen others since. Penang Hill, where piracy is a story only a century old; the real hills behind Kowloon, where wisdom looks unmoved at Europe in Hongkong and, perhaps, counts. He could n’t tell.

Anyway, he was, he knew, just now a professor of English, and when he got some sort of leave he would go home across Siberia and buy furs at Chita and Korean lacquer on the way thither.

He thought neither of marriage nor of old age, and certainly he did not think of death — death, cold and useless, a dull beginning and a bitter end; death, the beginning of speculation for the living and the end of everything for the dead. Ugh!

Presently, as he stood, he started, as always, to count the seconds between the strokes on the distant gong. Nine seconds divided the first two strokes, then eight seconds and the third lovely note, then seven, then six. He stood getting his breath; then, as the intervals shortened, the swelling sound exasperated him and he stepped quickly out into the open, whistled to his dog, and turned along the ridge toward the military academy, kicking a loose stone irritably, then stumbling, catching at a dried twig and finding no hold, falling rather clumsily.

He lay where he had fallen and swore round, soft English oaths, and felt the pain in his ankle grow worse. Presently the dog came and licked his hand, and when he moved he knew that he had broken his ankle, and whistled again, an almost pleased, excited whistle. A night in the open — coldish toward dawn, perhaps, but rather fun. Bed for a week or so — his house in the compound was very comfortable. Then a holiday — he would go to Kiushiu.

If he lay quite still, his ankle did not hurt at all. He watched the lights come out in the harbor across the bay, where, anchored among her great sisters, Admiral Togo’s flagship lay floating disarmed like a glorious memory on a dark mind.

She was to have been destroyed, he seemed to remember, after the Washington Conference, but in deference to public sentiment she floated still, but unarmed and impotent, and, by day, like a toothless grandmother; but at night she looked fine enough.

Suddenly, below him, right below him on the island, where he knew no house was, a stealthy light flashed, and up the hillside in the now perfect quiet of the night the sharp clang of a challenge and an answer, then another light, then another, and then after a moment darkness again; and, when the eye became accustomed to it, a small boat rowing out to sea, back apparently to the harbor opposite, about six miles away.

Suddenly Surtees knew — quite certainly, though he could not tell how — that something was hidden there below him, something guarded in the night; something dark, like the warning which was everywhere about this vast arsenal of a bay. Something that he wanted to understand.

He moved, but his ankle hurt; then he waited for perhaps half an hour. In the dark the sense of foreboding was overwhelming, and the stir of some call. Nothing had moved below him; the little boat was long since lost to sight. His dog moved, anxious, uncomprehending.

Something went on working in Surtees’s mind — it must have been for hours; presently it came to birth, and quite quietly, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, Surtees started down the long steep slope among the paddy fields. He went on hands and knees. He no more thought of physical pain than he thought of the Bernese Oberland at dawn. He went down because he had to, down into the Eastern night. He thought hard of adventure, something splendid in the abstract, and tried to believe that it was these thoughts which made his heart beat so fast — but he knew really.

He knew that there was no need to think about anything in the abstract. Here was his adventure now. Then he pretended that he thought he was being melodramatic — all this crawling about at midnight on a peaceful Japanese island in the lovely Inland Sea. It was perfectly preposterous, even a little vulgar. But whatever he thought, or thought he thought, he never stopped climbing down, and suddenly a late moon came full up behind Nagasaki, and less than a hundred feet below him he saw the sea and a long low wall, and inside it, lying in a tidy row, about thirty long shapely gleaming things, whose ends reflected a warm light, but whose straight bodies gleamed like steel.

Suddenly his leg hurt horribly. He winced. ‘God!’ he said. ‘Guns! Hidden guns. How hellish! Where am I? Oh, this is filthy! I shall never get back. Am I a spy? I must get back, or—or—’ His dog barked violently, bristled, and drew back on its forelegs like a cat about to spring, and behind the wall below him, for the whole hill was terraced upon low walls, a smallheaded Japanese — a petty officer, it seemed — rose and said only, ‘Sodegozaimasu.’

Surtees did not answer. The Japanese swung him on to his back and carried him down. When he got to the sea wall he laid him face upward on the grass between the muzzles of the great guns pointing outward and their protecting wall.

Surtees noticed that the guns were covered at either end with red lead. He remembered that he had never before seen a great naval gun lying dismounted on the ground, and they seemed to him, now, strange and uncouth and disquieting; but he was nearer to the Japanese soul, then, than any Japanese ever knew, for something of the night had entered into him and he thought not at all of his own position; and then, letting his head sink back, he saw the stars paling into a new dawn in the Land of the Rising Sun.

He could not tell whether seconds only or minutes passed. Presently three Japanese sailors were round him and he was being lowered headfirst into a sack. He felt a rope cut into his ankles and then, as his head bumped over the ground, he gave one cry of anguish, for he was a European, he was young, and life had been good.

When he was in the water he struggled, and finally he dreamed again. He dreamed so much, did Surtees.

He seemed to be gliding along under the sea at a great pace, smoothly, into a Western harbor . . . the shouts along the quay side . . . he could n’t be sure — Naples perhaps. . . .

On the evening of the next day a gun was fired at sunset in honor of the late English professor, whose body, it was said, had been washed up just by the steps of the bathing place in the inner bay, where he must have bathed in the cool of the evening. The ankles had been chafed against the rocks, poor fellow. His body would be sent to Kobe for burial.