s first fruits--the soul of man....
_In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth_--that morning star of
Hebrew revelation was not at all dimmed; indeed, it shone with fairer
lustre in the more spacious heavens of the Farther East.

Directly from his old Japanese teacher, and subtly from the _Bhagavad
Gita_ and the modern prophets, Bedient felt strongly urged to India.
This culminated in 1903, when he was twenty-five years old. Hatred of
Russia was powerfully fomenting through the Japanese nation at this
time. Bedient grew sick at the thought of the coming struggle, but
delayed leaving for several weeks, in the hope of seeing David Cairns,
who, surely enough, was one of the first of the war-correspondents to
reach Tokyo late that year. Cairns had put on pounds and power, and
only Bedient knew at the end of certain fine days together, that the
beauty of their first relation had not returned in its fullness....
They parted (a third time during five years) in the wintry rain on the
water-front at Yokohama, Cairns remaining and Bedient taking ship for
Calcutta.

Up into the Punjab he went with the new year; and there, all but lost
trace of time and the world. _He seemed to have come home_--an
ineffable emotion. When they told him quite seriously that the Ganges
was sent from heaven, and had wandered a thousand years in the hair of
Shiv before flowing down upon the plains with beauty and plenty and
healing for sin-spent man--Bedient instantly comprehended the meaning
of the figure: that the hair of Shiv was the Himalayas, whose peaks
continually rape the rain-clouds. And the lotos--name, fragrance and
sight of this flower--started a little lyrical wheel tinkling in his
mind, turning off snatches of verses that sung themselves; and
fluttering bits of romance, half-religious and altogether impersonal;
and strange pictures, lovely, though all but effaced.

Indeed, he was one with the Hindus in a love for the bees, the silence,
the mountains, rivers, the moon, and the heaven-protected cattle, in
whose great soft eyes he found the completion of animal peace.... The
legend that the bees had come from Venus, with the perfect cereal,
wheat, as patterns of perfection from that farther evolved
planet--fascinated, became the _leit-motif_ of his thoughts for weeks.
Earth had earned a special dispensation, it was said, and bright
messengers came with a swarm and a sheaf, each milleniums advanced
beyond any species of its kind here.