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Title: The Way of the Gods
Author: John Luther Long
Release Date: September 3, 2010 [EBook #33616]
Language: English
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THE WAY OF THE GODS
_By_ JOHN LUTHER LONG
_Author of_ "MADAME BUTTERFLY"
"MISS CHERRY BLOSSOM" "THE FOX WOMAN"
"HEIMWEH" _Etc._ * * * *
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
_NEW YORK MCMVI_
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
COPYRIGHT, 1906,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1906.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass.,
U.S.A.
TO HIM WHO OWNS
HIS JOY BECAUSE
HE HAS BOUGHT
IT WITH SORROW--OR
WILL * * * * * *
PAGE
_TADAIMA!_ (Wait a moment!), 3
CONTENTS
PAGE
_IMPRIMIS_ 13
I Nippon Denji 19
II The Flying of the August Carp 29
III A Good Lie 37
IV Yet--a Lie Loosens Fealty 47
V Yamato Damashii 55
VI Yoné 65
VII Ping-Yang 75
VIII Dream-of-a-Star 81
IX Isonna 93
X The Task of Jizo 101
XI Angel of the Earth-Heaven 109
XII Impertinent Isonna 119
XIII Only to Take Her 129
XIV The Going of the Soldier 137
XV But What could He Do? 143
XVI The Making of a Goddess 153
XVII The Eta 161
XVIII To the Emperor 169
XIX On Miyagi Field 175
XX Faded Glory 183
XXI In the Andon's Light 195
XXII Tadaima-Tadaima! 203
XXIII The Pity of the Gods 215
XXIV The Land of the Brave 225
XXV Jones 231
XXVI The "Tsarevitch" 241
XXVII The Small White Death 251
XXVIII "Present for Duty" 261
XXIX The Reincarnation of Shijiro Arisuga 269
XXX Zanzi, Lover of Battles 279
XXXI The Tomb of Lord Esas 285
XXXII When the Watch Passed 297
XXXIII Teikoku Banzai 303
XXXIV Afterward 311
TADAIMA
I thought I saw the bronze god Asamra (he who may speak but once in a
thousand years, and whose friendship I keep by making time stand still
for him in the stopping of the clock and its turning back) shake his
head in doubt as I put the manuscript into its wrappings and addressed
it to the publisher.
"Well?" I inquired, testily.
"Suppose They do not like it?" sighed the god.
"Why should They not?" demanded I, loftily.
"It has, among other unusualities, (I hope you like the gentleness of
the word!) those dashes which--You ought to have learned by this time
that They don't like to read over dashes."
"Why not?" asked I, again. "_I_ like them. And, they are my own!"
"Well, you know a dash necessitates lucubration. It stands for something
which you trust your reader to supply. That is unfair. If you are
writing a book and receiving an honorarium for it, do not expect him to
do it. It is a bit like eating. One does not go to a restaurant, and pay
for his food, then cook it himself."
"I have seen it done," cried I, "by particular people!"
"Ahem!" murmured the polite god: more polite on this day than I had
recently observed him--which meant some sort of propaganda.
"It is not an ahem!" I went on in the unregenerate heat which the
friction of the god often engendered in me. "Have _you_ never seen it
done?"
"I have," admitted the effigy, "seen a waiter sorely vexed to bring the
materials for a salad--"
"Aha!" cried I, triumphantly.
"Gomen nasai," begged the deity, "I had not finished. I have seen a
waiter, I say, sorely vexed to bring the materials for a salad which the
maker has--spoiled!"
"Then," demanded I, with icy coldness, "you think that if I permit Them
to supply a few thoughts to carry Them over the dashes They will--"
"Think something you did not think; perhaps something worse," the
effigy finished, calamitously.
"Or better?" I suggested, bitterly.
"Or better," agreed the god. "There is a small number of people (but,
extremely small) who like to supply in full what you suggest in dashes.
It tickles Them tremendously to think that you couldn't have done it so
well; that you trust Them to do it better. Often They are certain that
They have helped you over a place you could not help yourself
over--hence the dash."
"Sometimes," I mused, diffidently, "that is true."
"Ha, ha!" laughed the image, and our mood became more human.
"But, do you mean to say," I asked, "that if I leave John and Jane in
the upper hall, and take them up again in the lower hall, I must
acquaint Them with the fact that John and Jane have been obliged to
traverse the stairway to get away from the one and to reach the other?
Am I permitted no ellipsis in so patent a matter as that?"
"They will expect the stairway," sighed the god.
"And a page for each step, I suppose! How can They differ from me? What
other thought can They have than that John and Jane descended the
stairway to reach the lower hall?"
"There may be a back stairway, or a fire escape," chuckled the deity.
"Then, I suppose, I must spend some pages in telling Them not only that
John and Jane descended the stair, but that they did _not_ descend by
the back stair or the fire escape!"
"It would be better," said the idol. "They can skip it. But They cannot
deny that it is there, as They can if it is not. They would rather skip
what you supply than supply what you skip. One is Their judgment of your
mental caliber--usually too small--the other is your judgment of
Theirs--usually too generous. Ahem! There is a golden mean."
"Besides, however bad for literature it may be," laughed I, "at so much
a word, it is good for me!"
"Well," ventured god, in doubt, "are novels literature?"
"I am not the one to say," I retorted, with some asperity. "I
manufacture them. But I can swear that they are better literature--if
literature at all--than some of the criticisms of them--if literature at
all."
"Have I touched a broken, perhaps often mended, place in your armor?"
laughed the god.
"Well," I admitted, crustily, "I have read criticisms of English--no
matter whose--the English of which was eminently criticisable. Here is
one. The gentleman makes no distinction in the uses of 'which' and
'that,' and he has not a 'who' in his vocabulary."
"I have my eye on it," laughed the image, "and I admit that a few
whiches and whos for thats, and--even--er--pardon!--a few of your
dashes, would make its teaching more grateful."
"God," adjured I, happily, "thank you! Now do please stop and think! No
speech, no thought, goes on without dashes. When we write the speech
which flows mellifluous, we do violence to nature. And in all art the
tendency is toward nature."
"Recently," began the deity, in that high tone which always meant
checkmate to me, "I have seen the statue of an alleged athlete, in which
his bunions were reproduced!"
"I saw it, too," I laughed. Indeed, the god and I had stared at it
together.
"Well," the effigy went on, "that was certainly nature!"
"There is a golden mean," I re-quoted. "An artistic attitude toward all
manifestations of art. If one has this one will appreciate--er--whether
to reproduce the bunions. They may, of course, be picturesque bunions.
Why, god, if one should reproduce human speech, as it is spoken, there
would be a dash after every third word! Mine are quite within bounds."
"It would look queer," said the god, "and you would be called eccentric
instead of original. Please don't do it! In fact stop it! Placate both
your readers and your critics."
"Oh, as to that," said I, airily, "the labor would all be lost. Anything
which is unusual to the superficial experience of the average person is
glibly dubbed eccentric. You know how it is. A reader likes to find the
dear old situations in advance of him so that he knows what he is
approaching. There is the same fear of the terra incognita in literature
that there is in nature. A book or a play which is too novel a tax upon
the faculties of a client is not to his liking."
"Who, pray, do you write books for?" asked the effigy, with the
suspicion of a yawn.
"The people who read them," said I, cockily.
"Do They include the critics?"
"Oh, no," said I, hastily.
"Aren't they 'people who read them'?"
"Why, they are critics," cried I. "How can they?"
"That is hard doctrine," said the god, dully. "If you write for the
people who read, you must submit to their verdict. And the critics are a
part of them."
"A small part. But they pretend to speak for the whole. Permit me to
explain--"
The god politely waited.
"Your critic approaches a book as a lawyer does his
case--temperamentally--not judicially--with an opinion of it in advance
or upon the first pages, which the book must either justify or fail to
justify. The result appears in his published estimate. He states his
view as if it were the only one. And, being delivered ex cathedra, the
multitude take it as they do their preaching--for the gospel of
Literature! But how would you like that in your judge? Who is sworn to
decide upon the evidence adduced alone?
"So it happens that every book is well cursed and well blessed,
according to the humor of the dissector. And the cursing and blessing
are usually about equal."
"There does seem to be something wrong about criticism which can be
unanimous both ways," laughed the god.
"There ought to be some tribunal to which criticism could be referred
upon appeal as lawsuits are," said I. "But," I went on, hastening a bit
to my climax as the god seemed to doze, "the most terrible of all
criticism is the modern humorous kind--"
"I have heard an odious term used to characterize those who make it,"
whispered the deity.
"The man who can do nothing else--and usually he _can_ do nothing
else--can poke fun. It is a peculiarly tasteful form of iconoclasm."
Said the god:--
"If I should sleep, do not forget to stop the clock."
He pretended to do so.
That is his way when I have tired him.
J. L. L.
IMPRIMIS
Four times on earth and once elsewhere Shijiro Arisuga thought the
happiest moment of his life had come.
But you are to be warned, in two proverbs, concerning the peril of the
thing called happiness, in Japan. One has it that happiness is like the
tai, the other that it has in it the note of the uguisu. Now, the tai is
a very common fish, and the uguisu is a rare bird of one sad note,
reputed to be sung only to O-Emma, god of death, in the night, most
often when there is a solemn moon. Which, again, is much the same as
saying that, in Japan, at least, happiness is the common lot, and easy
to get as to catch the lazy perch; but that it has its sad note, which
may have to be sung in the darkness, alone, to death.
For in the East one is taught to be no more prodigal with one's joy than
with one's sorrow. The sum of both joy and sorrow, it is said, are
immutably the same in the world from eternity. And of these each soul
born is allotted its reasonable share as the gods adjudge it. So that if
one takes too much joy out of the common lot, some one, perhaps many
ones, must receive less than they ought.
Thus, one not only limits the rights of his fellow-men, who has no
warrant to do so, but impiously exercises the prerogatives of the gods,
than which nothing can be more heinous.
For this larceny of joy, therefore, the culprit must suffer more than
his share of woe, until the heavenly balance is once more restored. And
that may be in this life or another, in this world or another.
So you observe that in Japan, among those who yet believe in the old
ways of the gods (and they are many!), it is perilous to be over-happy.
For one is almost certain to pay for it with over-woe. And this is the
happy catching of the tai and the melancholy note of the uguisu which
wind through the carols of one's joy in the East.
Yet, when one is always happy, as Shijiro Arisuga was before we knew
him, it seems difficult to say that here or there was a happier moment.
Therefore, you are to learn of each of these five occasions in their
order, according to your patience, and, quite at the end, you are to be
left to judge for yourself, which was, indeed, the happiest moment of
Shijiro Arisuga's life. There will come a time, too,--at the end,--when
you will know nothing of Shijiro Arisuga's own views upon the subject:
he will not be there to tell them. I shall try to interpret for him. But
you are not to be prejudiced by this judgment of mine, since you cannot
know Shijiro Arisuga as well as I do until the end is reached--quite the
end.
And it is nothing--the little story--you are, further, warned, until the
woman enters. Indeed; nothing is anything--no story--until woman enters.
Try to fancy Eden without Eve!
Not that Star-Dream is another Eve; nor that this is like the first love
story. But there is a Garden and a Serpent; an Apple and a Woman. And,
from that Garden, Shijiro Arisuga is driven with a sword which flames.
But here my story differs entirely from that of the first love story.
For the woman is left in the garden--alone! And it is eternal night.
And she can hardly stay there alone. For the uguisu sings. I wonder if
Eve could have been happy in Eden alone? With the singing of the
death-bird? You will remember that though they were driven forth, it was
together: comrades in misfortune as in joy--yet comrades!
NIPPON DENJI
I
NIPPON DENJI
Now, the first of these five great occasions was that day Shijiro was
accepted in the haughty Imperial Guards, most of whom had genealogies
which would best impress us by the yards of illuminated mulberry paper
they covered. Arisuga had many of such yards himself. That was not a
question. But his inches raised many questions. The Guards were tall.
Shijiro Arisuga was small. Though he was a samurai of the samurai, his
ancestors kugé, it seemed impossible to admit him until Colonel Zanzi
spoke.
"He is a samurai," said Zanzi, gruffly. "Of course all Japanese fight.
But the rest, the commoners, are new to it. It is possible in a pinch
for them to run away. It happened once to my knowledge. But a samurai
goes only in the one direction when he is before an enemy. You all know
what direction that is. The commoner may be as good as the samurai in a
century. But the samurai is always dependable now. I wish the whole of
the Guards were shizoku. His uncles, the Shijiro of Aidzu, though they
were shiro men at Kyoto, and so against the emperor, in that old time,
were, nevertheless, kugé by rank. I do not see how we can keep him out
of the Guards. I don't want to, whether he is tall or small."
Now Zanzi was an autocrat who constantly pretended that he was not. He
had an iron temper which he nearly always concealed under courteous
persistence, until his men understood what must be without his ever
having precisely said that it must be. So, in this matter, he pretended
to have left it to them. But he had decided upon Shijiro's final
admission to the regiment, even though it was a time of peace, when
one's qualifications were more strictly scanned than in time of war,
simply because he was of the samurai, whom he adored.
"Nevertheless," warned Nijin, the recruiting major, "he is considerably
below the physical standard."
"He is _not_ the stuff for the Guards," alleged Yasuki.
And Matsumoto said:--
"I have heard him called 'Onna-Jin.'"
"Girl-Boy!" laughed Jokichi. "So have I."
"He used to carry a samisen about with him when he was a child--he and
little Yoné, Baron Mutsu's daughter."
This came from Kitsushima, who added:--
"I have seen them at Mukojima, wandering under the cherry-boughs, hand
in hand, and singing childish songs!"
"I have seen him doing that later, where the lanterns shine in Geisha
street, and the little girl was not Yoné."
They all laughed. This was not seriously against him.
"Having settled it that he practises the art of music, I will surprise
you with the information that he also pretends to the sister art of
poesy," laughed Asami. "He is the author of 'The Great Death'!"
"What!"
From half a dozen of them.
And they broke into the song: hoarse, iron, clanging, mongolian! Within
the six notes of the old Japanese scale!
(Do not be surprised at this. The Japanese army is full of poets.
Indeed, the Japanese land is full of them. They will spin you a complete
comedy or tragedy between seventeen or thirty-seven syllables. And, to
practise poetry is not there as here, heinous to one's friends. I know
of a gunner who sat cross-legged under his gun behind Poutuloff and
wrote a poem concerning The-Moon-in-a-Moat. It was finished as the
Russians got his range and dropped a covey of shrapnel upon him. After
the smoke cleared they found him dead. And he is forgotten. But his poem
was also found and lived on.)
This was "The Great Death" of Shijiro Arisuga.
"Yell of metal,
Strake of flame!
Death-wound spurting
In my face!
Hail Red Death!"
"Banzai!" cried Jokichi.
"Teikoku Banzai!" yelled Asami.
And, after the tumult, Yasuki, the reserved, himself said:--
"By Shaka, it is the very Yamato Damashii itself! The spirit of young
Japan."
"Nippon Denji!" laughed jolly Kitsushima.
"Yes! The Boys in Blue--as they called them in America in 1864."
Matsumoto had been to Princeton. But the thought of war--giving his soul
for his emperor--made him as mad as they who had never left their native
soil.
"I take all back," cried Nijin, into the tumult.
"And I," yelled Yasuki, who had agreed with him.
"Let him in!" shrilled Matsumoto and Jokichi together. "If he can write
songs--"
"And let him sing! Let him sing war-songs!" adjured Kitsushima!
Still, the happy Nijin, out of propriety of his office, as
recruiting-major, pretended to wish to stem the current started by the
song.
"One moment!" he cried.
But they laughed him down and again started the war-song.
"I _will_ have a moment!"
"Take two!" shouted Jokichi.
"Singing and fighting are two very different occupations."
"No, they are precisely the same," laughed Kitsushima.
"I deny it!"
It was a fierce yell from Nijin, who was happiest, to pretend tremendous
anger.
"I affirm it!" laughed Jokichi, into his face.
"Pretender!" cried Asami, shaking a happy fist at his superior.
Asami and Nijin stood with Zanzi for his admission.
Still, Nijin said in thunder:--
"Remember! poets never practise their preaching."
Nevertheless, if he had entered then, Arisuga would have been chosen, by
acclaim, because of his song.
But enthusiasm cools rapidly, and these stoical orientals could be moved
to enthusiasm by but this one thing--war.
So that after a month--two--it required another word from grizzled
Zanzi, who had been in the war of the Restoration, to let Shijiro in.
"Jokoji!" That was the word. "His father is at Jokoji!"
And they demanded, and he told, the story of Jokoji--which, pardon me, I
do not mean to tell. Save this little, so that you may understand, that
it was that last terrible stand of Saigo behind the hills of Kagoshima,
where the Shogunate perished and the empire was born again in 1868. And
the shoguns you may care to know were that mighty line of feodal
chieftains who had usurped the throne from the time of Yoritomo, to that
of Keiki. For all these years the imperial power had rioted at Yedo, in
the hands of two generals, while the emperor, a prisoner in his
palace-hermitage in Kyoto, had been but the high priest of his people.
They are there yet, at Jokoji, to the last man, Saigo and his gallant
rebels, in a great trench, without their heads, a warning to future
rebels.
After that other word--Jokoji--Arisuga was chosen.
Observe that they finally took him because of his father--though he died
a rebel. Indeed, those old insurgents, of 1868, are gradually being
canonized with crimson death-names, because they neither knew dishonor,
no, nor suffered it.
THE FLYING OF THE AUGUST CARP
II
THE FLYING OF THE AUGUST CARP
There was a time, of course, when Shijiro was too young to think of
being a soldier--save of the tin-sworded and cocked-hatted kind. And it
must be confessed, nay, it was confessed, by his uncles with profound
sorrow, that he cared little enough for even that. It is quite true that
lighted paper lanterns gleaming in the night, and morning glories with
first sun on them, and his small samisen, pleased him more. All this was
quite heinous to his samurai uncles and they did what they could to
correct it and instil into the little mind of the boy that love for the
glory of combat which they had. But, as often happens, their care and
their prayers availed them nothing, while their carelessness and their
repinings availed much. Of that I shall stop and tell: the picture--the
flying of the carp--how all the life of the little boy was changed in
one night,--so that he thought no more of Yoné, the lanterns and the
flowers, but only of being a soldier.
It was that day when he was ten. All his relatives were present and they
flew a tremendous number of paper carp. For you are to know that this is
the way the gods have of telling one on one's birthday in Japan, whether
one is to be as strong and virile as the open-mouthed carp in a swift
wind, or as flaccid as they when there is no wind. The gods were kind
and sent a propitious day. The carp stood out, straining upon their
poles so that some of them broke loose and whirled cloud-ward--whereat
the multitude of Arisuga's relatives shouted with joy. For this was an
august omen of great good. Arisuga cared nothing for the omen. But the
carp eddying upward, and those straining on their poles, were very fine.
The tired, happy little boy had been put early to bed, while his uncles
remained to smoke and gossip. For one was from Kobé and the other was
from Osaka, and they did not meet as often as they could have wished.
For a long time there was no sound save the tapping of their pipes
against the metal rim of the hibachi as they were emptied of their ashes
to be filled again. This is still much the way of ceremonious old men in
Japan. They have learned the comradeship of silence.
Presently this sound of the tapping pipes woke the little boy from his
dreaming; and hearing whisperings in the room beyond he crept from his
futons to the fusuma, which he silently parted to look and listen.
His small eyes grew greater as he saw that his two uncles were still
there, and greater yet as he observed that they gesticulated in the
direction of the picture of "The Great Death" while they whispered.
Now this was a thing which had always troubled him: that they whispered
together about that picture, and that, somehow, he was included in the
mystery. It had hung there at the tokonoma since he could remember. He
had been taught to reverence it; for nowhere have pictures more
influence than in Japan.
It was divided in the horizontal middle into two panels. In that below
was carnage amazing. On the one side were the hosts of the emperor under
the brocade banner (the most ancient Japanese flag of war), yet armed
with guns and using cannon. On the other side were the rebel hosts of
Saigo with ancient halberds and spears and in bamboo armor, depending
upon the gods alone. Dying upon one of the cannon, with a shout upon his
lips and ecstasy upon every feature, was a soldier in the uniform of the
ancient Imperial Guards. The panel above showed one of the heavens far
toward nirvana. There this same soldier appeared glorified and on the
way to his reward in Shaka's bosom. Of course! He had died for the
emperor! The artist had not spared the glory when he came to write the
picture. And yet he had preserved a certain family likeness, so that
little Arisuga presently came to know, by the subtle presence and
teaching of his uncles, that this was Jokoji, the graveyard-battlefield
in Satsuma, and that the figure informed with the ecstasy of the great
red death for the emperor, was his father!
That no part of the lesson might be lost, the artist had also shown, in
that lower panel, the obverse of the reward of fealty. Those who had
fought against the emperor were being tossed like dogs into a trench.
Their heads were off. And the little boy had been taught to have no
pity upon them. Of course! He had none. They had impiously rebelled
against that god whose other name is Mutsuhito, Mikado!
Moreover, in the lower corner of this panel, in an amazing opening among
clouds with blazing edges, was that part of the hells reserved for the
souls of traitors; and there the enemies of the emperor, who had died at
Jokoji, were being variously tortured, in the intervals of their
reincarnations.
A GOOD LIE
III
A GOOD LIE
Said Namishima, Arisuga's uncle from Kobé, to Kiomidzu, his uncle from
Osaka:--
"The flying of the august carp has been honorably auspicious and
doubtless the gods now design to make him, in spirit, unlike his
regretted father."
"It was the gods' punishment upon him for fighting against his
emperor--that his son should miserably be an onna-jin," whispered
Kiomidzu.
"Nevertheless the honorable picture has aided greatly in making him
adore the emperor," protested Namishima.
"Yes, the money for its painting was augustly well spent," agreed
Kiomidzu, wisely shaking his head.
"Some day he will know, notwithstanding, that his father was a rebel.
Others know. It cannot unhappily be kept from him always."
"No."
"Perhaps then we shall be augustly dead--"
Both bowed and murmured again.
"And beyond his most excellent vengeance."
"Nevertheless," said Namishima, finally, "the august conscience within
informs me that we have brought him up honorably well!"
"There is excellently no doubt of it!" agreed Kiomidzu.
They bowed to each other.
For a while there was silence and the tapping of the pipes. Then they
spoke of a new and weightier matter.
Said Namishima--and here the little boy's eyes bulged:--
"If the soul of our brother continues to wander in the Meido, it will
not be chargeable, now, in the heavens, to us, but to him. We have kept
the lamps alight. We have taught him honor."
"We are too aged, also," agreed Kiomidzu, "to redeem him forth unto the
way to the heavens by dying in his stead the great death. It is for his
son!"
"In us, besides," Namishima went on, "the gods could not be augustly
deceived. But the child has his name."
"Therefore, should he die the great death, the merciful gods may be
deceived by the name into thinking it he who died at Jokoji. In that
case he would not only be redeemed to the way to the heavens, but on
this earth his name would be graciously added to honor."
So said he from Kobé. And he from Osaka:--
"For the gods are merciful!"
"So merciful, I sometimes abjectly think, that they desire to be
deceived, for our peace of mind."
"Or, at least," mended Kiomidzu, to whom this was a trifle too much,
"they will close their eyes while we augustly do it."
Namishima disliked a trifle the correction of his brother:--
"Do not the gods so act upon the minds of their creatures that they
remember or forget? Well, then! It is true that now others know that our
brother died on the rebel side at Jokoji. But do we not know that, in
the course of much time, the gods can make this to be forgotten, and
make to be remembered that he died on the emperor's side?"
"Yea, if his son should die for the emperor."
"Yea! For the name is the same!"
"And I have had a sign in a dream," said Kiomidzu, lowering his voice a
little more. "Before me stood a tall god--"
They both bowed and rubbed their hands.
"--I knew neither his august name nor his presence. But his face shone
as the sun, so that it is certain he was a god who can see the end from
the beginning, and all between. And thus he spake: 'Rise and light the
lamps and burn the sweet and bitter incense. For Shijiro Arisuga, he who
died at Jokoji, shall have a crimson death-name.'"
"How shall that come to pass, augustness?" I asked upon my face.
"'Through his son,'" said the god. "'The names are the same. Arise and
light the lamps and burn the bitter incense.'"
"And the augustness only vanished with the light of the new lamps I
lighted before Shijiro's tablet."
"Yet," doubted Namishima, though a deity had spoken, "the vengeance of
the gods must also first be accomplished--yea, satisfied full! And until
he is redeemed by this unhappy onna-jin, must our brother wander in the
dark Meido--so think I! The new lamps will be sacrilege."
"Nevertheless, one cannot honorably tell," argued the milder uncle from
Osaka, himself not convinced by his vision. "His father was no taller
nor of a greater spirit than he. He may not always be an onna-jin. And,
also, any day the vengeance of the gods may be satisfied and they will
permit him to redeem both his own and the spirit of his father. For I
believe it true that he was not beheaded by the victors at Jokoji, and
cast into the ditch as dogs are cast, but committed the honorable
seppuku upon himself. That he would do."
"Let it be hoped so. This is our one blot wherefore we cannot speak of
our ancestors."
And they chafed a prayer from between their hands that it might all be
so.
The little boy parted the fusuma yet more and looked. He had been taught
that his face must always be as expressionless as if it were always
under observation. And these old uncles had, more than others, taught
him so. Yet now they were not observing their own precepts. Their faces
were unmasked, and showed terror and anxiety. And this communicated
itself to the boy as he looked.
"Does it matter to the gods," asked Kiomidzu, "how fealty to the
heaven-born-one is augustly inculcated?"
"'The way does not matter when one is arrived!'" said Namishima.
"And 'a lie which doeth good,'" quoted Kiomidzu, "'is, manifestly, a
good lie.'"
"Happy is he," said Namishima, "who, being a liar for the truth, is
willing, like us, to abide by its consequences from the unenlightened,
to whom there is but one office in a lie--evil!"
"Nembutsu!" agreed the brother of Namishima, his hard hands rasping with
his prayer as do the soles of worn sandals.
And then they went on, to the end of the story of this picture of "The
Great Death," which had been painted and hung at the tokonoma when
Arisuga was a child to deceive him into thinking that his father had
honorably fought and died for his emperor instead of against him, that
his soul was probably in Buddha's bosom instead of wandering in the
alien dark Meido, unredeemed, that his body had been burned on a pyre
instead of left to rot in that great ditch in Jokoji. This these old
imperialists fancied their duty. The little boy sobbed there behind the
shoji.
"Sh!" whispered the uncle from Osaka.
"Sh!" echoed the uncle from Kobé. "He wakes. If he should hear, all
would be of no avail."
They covered the fire of the hibachi and caused a darkness in which they
stole away.
YET--A LIE LOOSENS FEALTY
IV
YET--A LIE LOOSENS FEALTY
The little boy slept no more. He got forth from his small room and made
the offerings, and lighted the incense which he had forgotten that
tired, joyous day, and then he took down his father's ihai, and touching
to it his forehead, pledged all his lives to make true that which had
been made false. For, yes, their names were the same, his father's and
his, and the gods are easily deceived--Shijiro Arisuga should be upon
the brass of those who had died for the emperor! The gods would attend
to the forgetting which must follow.
But this was not enough. The filial sin they had let him commit vexed
his little soul.
Where he had made a dim wisp of fibre to burn in oil before the tablet
of his father, he rubbed a prayer from between his small pink palms.
"Father and all the augustnesses, I did not know," he said childishly,
"that your spirit waited in the dark Meido for me to set it free. There
were lies!"
Then he stopped and waited, for the tears ran down his face and choked
his voice.
"It would have been better to teach me truth than lies. For they have
not made me wish to fight and die for the emperor--lies. But this, this
that you wait, wait always in the cold dark Meido for me to set you on
your way to the sleep in Buddha's bosom, this it is which makes me
promise, here, now, by all the eight hundred thousand, by my own soul's
reincarnations, all of them, that you shall be free; that your name
shall yet stand among those on the brass who are not forgotten."
"I did not know," he sobbed again. "And so I sang songs and made poems
while you wandered there. I did not know. I was only a little boy. But
now I am at once a man. It is true, august father, I must not lie to
you, that I would rather be at Shiba with Yoné; I would rather walk on
the hills with her hand in mine; I would rather sing as she plays the
samisen; but I will be a soldier."
And then a strange thing happened--and you must not fail to remember
that stranger things happen in Japan than here--there came a crackling,
ripping noise at the last word of that prayer, and the upper panel of
the false picture loosed itself from the brocade to which it was
attached and, falling, covered completely the lower panel and blotted
out the whole. And that night yet, the little boy got his father's seal,
and, where it fell, there he sealed it fast.
So that when his uncles again saw it they grew troubled, kowtowed and
made a prayer. For suddenly, also, Arisuga, from a child, at ten had
become man. All he said to them when they diffidently undertook a
question was:--
"I know the samurai commandment: 'Thou shalt not live under the same
heavens nor upon the same earth with the enemy of thy lord!'"
"The commandments are not for children," said the uncle from Osaka,
gently.
"That I know well," answered Arisuga. "For I am not a child."
Said the terrified one from Kobé, "It does not mean that you must quit
the earths and the heavens--"
"But, rather," supplemented the one from Osaka, "that they shall--"
"That you shall kill many enemies of your lord and live yourself--my
child--"
"Cease! I am not a child," said Arisuga again, haughtily, "and I know
the commandments!"
"Nevertheless that," said the one, "is a manifestation from the gods!"
He pointed to the picture.
"There have been many such," said the other. "It means something."
"Yes," said the little boy, significantly, "it means something!"
"But were you present when the gods obscured the picture?" ventured
Kiomidzu.
"I was present," said Arisuga.
"And is it that which has changed you?" further ventured Namishima.
"No," declared Arisuga, looking upon them both sternly, and without an
honorific for either.
"I trust," whined Kiomidzu, "that all is well between us?"
"All is as well as it ever will be," said the boy.
Then, after a silence, he added:--
"And the sun is setting!"
Which meant, indeed, that they were driven from the door of their
brother's house by his son!
When they were in their going the boy said:--
"If I have sinned against the honorable hospitality, remember that a lie
loosens fealty!"
And when they were in the way, one said to the other:--
"He knows!"
After some thought he who was addressed answered:--
"I think it very well. I have no regret. Our brother will now be
released from the Meido. He will die for the emperor."
"However, we shall be unwelcome in his presence, so that I shall come
less often."
To this his brother agreed with melancholy.
"Our work is now done."
Thus, Shijiro was much more alone than before, and had many more
thoughts. But all were of war and the great red death, and none of Yoné.
And then, presently, he came to join the haughty Imperial Guards, who
had never dreamed of being a soldier, but only of poetry, and
cherry-blossoms, and his samisen, and the soft satin hand of the little
Yoné. For it was true, as Nijin said, and as they all agreed, Arisuga
among them, that he was not the stuff out of which the empire made its
Imperial Guards--quite.
It was in this time, in the presence of the obscured picture, that he
wrote his song of "The Great Death."
And his years grew faster than his inches.
YAMATO DAMASHII
V
YAMATO DAMASHII
And, slowly, that fantasy of a great death which infects every Japanese
crept into the life and thought of Shijiro Arisuga. Though it came to
him, in whom it had lain latent, hardly. But, perhaps for that reason,
as is the case with certain diseases, it came with greater certainty and
severity than if it had been always with him.
Yet the Yamato Damashii outstripped them both: the spirit of war--the
ghost of Japan!
He still went with little Yoné to Mukojima sometimes, though less
frequently. And the small heart of the small girl wondered and grew hurt
at this. So that she asked him one day:--
"Little lord, why is it that we so seldom come here and that you no more
sing, no more carry your samisen, and are grown too suddenly for your
years a man with a face as serious as the unlaughing barbarians of the
West--why is it?"
They were at Shiba. And Shijiro laughed again, as he had used to laugh,
while he answered:--
"Sing no more! Listen!"
"Reign on for a thousand years of peace!
Reign on for a myriad years of ease!
Till the pebbles are boulders,
Moss grows to our shoulders,
O heaven-born lord of Nippon!"
"The Kimi Gayo!" said the little girl. "You sing the Imperial Hymn with
that light in your face who never sang it before--whose face was never
before so lighted? You answer my fear with fears."
"I sing a war-song, little moon-maid, because I am now a soldier," cried
Arisuga, with a certain fanatical ecstasy in spite of his gayety. "I am
going to die for the emperor the great death! I am going to set my
father free to pursue his way to the heavens or another reincarnation!
Think! The gods will love me for such a holy thing! Why do not you?"
"Oh, yes," whispered the little girl, "the gods will love you. And I.
But who, then, will come with me here? And who will hold my hand?"
"My spirit, I promise you that!"
A little chill crept over the girl.
"Yes," she answered doubtfully, "if I cannot have your body."
Shijiro still laughed.
"After all, a spirit is a safer comrade than a body. The custodians
cannot drive it away from the tombs. And will you wait here for my
spirit, as you do for my body?"
"Yes," she whispered, in her awe, once more.
But he gayly touched her.
"I will come like that--that--that!"
"I would rather have you so," said the little girl, touching him, as
flesh touches flesh, not as spirit touches flesh in the East.
Though she suspected that he was laughing at her, it was in a land where
both the spirits which loved one and hated one were believed to be
always at one's elbow.
Now that it had all been decided--his career fixed, the way made clear,
and he well in it--much of his absorption had passed away, and he was
both gayer and gentler with her. But it was not as before.
"There will be others, with bodies," laughed Shijiro.
The small maiden shook her head.
"No, there will not be others. I know. Oh, how differently you speak to
me now! You are suddenly grown a man with great thoughts. But you still
think of me as a little girl with small thoughts. Well, perhaps I am.
Yet I shall wait for you here. I can do that. The gods may not accept
your sacrifice for a time. They may not accept it at all. And there may
be no war for you to fight and die in. You may have to come back. No one
can know the purposes of the gods. And when you do, I, with my small
body and small thought, will be here only to make you happy."
"And, suppose," laughed Shijiro, treating her indeed as if he were
suddenly become a man and she were still a little girl, "suppose I go
away and forget--that often happens--and never come back?"
And Arisuga laughed again.
"I will wait," said the girl.
"What, after I have forgotten?"
"Do not tell me. Let no one tell me. Let me wait. Then your spirit may
come. It is cruel to wait, always wait. But it is not so cruel as to be
forgotten."
The soldier still laughed.
"The spirit of all the goddesses thrives in you!"
And he touched her gently.
"But the gods may send it to me soon--the great crimson death."
"Then," answered the little girl, "I can die the great death, too, and
still be with you--if you should wish!"
"What!" laughed Shijiro, anew, "little you--gentle Yoné--in the wild
glory of the conflict, with a plunge into the fires of all the hells, in
the madness of carnage, with a yell frozen on your lips? Shall little
_you_ experience that arch esctasy: your death-wound spurting your own
warm blood into your own face? Then out, out, out into the eternal
solitude and silence of souls awaiting other reincarnations? To that
place called Meido? Ha ha, my fragile Yoné, the great red death--is not
for you--not for perfumed little Yoné's. It is a man's death!"
At this she was reproved, but as he always reproved her, very gently.
Yet it was wonderful that his gentleness held here. She understood well
her presumption in wishing to die the great death of a man.
"Pardon, small lord," she said humbly. "I spoke when I had not counted
three--instead of nine."
He laughed happily.
"Speak whatever comes to your lips. All is good, because it comes from
them--which are all good. But when you speak of the things which are a
man's, I look at your stature and--laugh! I tell you what is
yours--little Yoné--and what is mine!"
She tried to forget that he was not much taller than she.
"No, forgive me; I must die only the small, white death of women and
children. But, until it comes, I shall be here where you and I were
happy together. And if you die, still caring for me, your spirit will
come and touch me, as you said. That much I know. You have said it! But
if you have forgotten, then there will be no touches; then I will still
wait until I die. It will not be long."
"Little one," said Arisuga, in pity, "we have lived and loved together
here. All has been good. But it is as a splendid summer day which one
forgets, in the glow, the madness of glory, the moment the call comes!
This we did not know, the madness of glory, and I had never thought to
learn. But it has come, and it is greater than all love. Should the call
sound now, I would leave you where you stand, and go upon the business
of our sovereign. As it is," he laughed, "we shall once more go homeward
hand in hand!"
And so they did. But still it was not as before. It never could be. As
he had said, this madness of glory had obscured all love.
YONÉ
VI
YONÉ
The war with China got slowly into the air. Troops were mobilizing. The
Guards were being fitted with uniforms for a warmer climate. The army
was thrilled with that nameless thing which speaks of action to the
soldier. Maps and plans of campaign grew over night. Nurses were
gathered where they could be most easily requisitioned. Plans for
hospital and transportation service were born and matured as certainly
now, as if the army had lived in an atmosphere of war instead of peace
for many years. But when the actual going came near, Arisuga thought of
Yoné. There would be no more of that. And when it was said, a certain
sadness came and stayed with him, when the glory dulled a little. For it
had been sweet. And it might be only once again. Marching orders were
imminent.
So that, though it was even, and Yoné might not go out in the even, he
found her one day, when the sadness came, and they stole through the
house's rear to that tomb of Esas in Shiba, where they had made a seat
of stone and moss. They had never before been alone together in the wood
at night, and Yoné was terrified, as a maid ought to be, while Arisuga
was brave, as a soldier should be.
Yet, notwithstanding these adverse circumstances, it was there--at the
tomb of Esas, on this night of nights to Yoné--that they made together
that song of "The Stork-and-the-Moon." And it was on this night, while
they sang it (without the samisen, for Yoné was reposing too snugly
against one of Arisuga's arms for him to play, though they had the
samisen with them), that the watchman came with lantern and staff and
cried out that he had heard a song in that place of sacred tombs--a
foolish, worldly song--and adjured the sinners to come forth and be
punished.
Now both were frightened suddenly, and Yoné crept deeply into the arms
of her soldier for protection. And she did not vacate her place of
safety when the watchman had passed on; Arisuga prevented her.
For he had not in the least fancied how sweet that might be. And her
fancies had fallen short of truth. And yet other things passed there at
that tomb of Lord Esas which I shall not stop to tell.
Later, perhaps, in this story, there may be occasion to tell what
happened there at the tomb of Lord Esas on the seat of stones and mosses
they had made: the promises,--if there were any,--the song, and all the
joy of that night upon which little Yoné would have to live until
Arisuga came again--for this was indeed all he left to her.
It was a disgraceful hour when they stole forth. And had the watchman
seen them then, the gods alone know what the penalty would have been.
They passed the walls safely; but there was yet before them the reëntry
to the house of Yoné, which was more terrible. Yet they were strangely
happy in their terrors, though Yoné expected, hoped, to be disowned and
driven from home, disgraced in the eyes of the world. But also, in that
case, Arisuga would marry her. Chivalry would demand it. Of course he
had not exactly said so. In order that he might have the opportunity,
Yoné protested:--
"I do not regret--not a word, not a thing!"
"No, it is my fault--"
"If they drive me from home, outcast me, I shall sing in the streets!"
"You!"
"Or go to Geisha street."
"You!"
"What, then, will I do, lord?"
"You will marry me--a little sooner than we planned, and live with my
mother while I fight."
"Yes," breathed Yoné, quite content with this. It was more than she had
expected. Indeed, she was so filled with content that it was all she
could say.
Nevertheless, though this event had been arranged there behind the tomb,
under the influence of the terror of the watchman, yet its consummation
was put a long time off, for the parents of each had to be consulted,
cunningly, as if it had not at all been arranged. And this marred Yoné's
happiness a trifle; for, if marriage was anything like that behind the
tomb, it could not come too soon. And, however soon it might come, it
would not be soon enough, for soon enough was now, and that was
passing.
Besides, she hoped it might happen before his sacrifice; for though she
would then be his widow and quite sure of his spirit, that first
personal contact by the tomb of old Lord Esas had been sweet.
However, there seemed, happily, no way of escape from an outcasting and
the consequences they had fixed upon, and this grew upon them more and
more as they went homeward, so that as they were yet quite happy in it
they came into the vicinity of Yoné's home. Now, by that time all the
details had been arranged: Yoné was to go to Arisuga's mother, where a
complete confession would be made. Then, on the morrow, the consent of
the parents would be asked, which, whether it were or were not obtained,
would be the signal for the wedding preparations. For in the one case
Yoné would be the daughter of her parents, whose consent would have been
obtained, in the other of his whose consent was sure.
Then they looked up to find themselves almost in the midst of a great
fire which their absorption had kept them from noticing. And it was at
once but too plain that Yoné's home was in that part of the district
already burned clear. Of course there were parents and brothers to
think of at once, and in thought of their safety Yoné forgot the
opportunity for her outcasting and the hastening of her happiness. When
she remembered, it was too late.
She had been pounced upon by her father, and borne in joy to the
rendezvous where all the brothers and sisters, as well as the parents of
Yoné, were now in prosaic safety and little perturbation. Shijiro
Arisuga had, upon the appearance of the father, ignominiously
disappeared--which, indeed, was the best thing which could have happened
for Yoné, so far as her safety from scandal was concerned, and the worst
so far as her wish for an immediate marriage was concerned. There was,
now, not the least hope of an outcasting. No one had even seen Shijiro,
it appeared, nor knew of their going away or coming back together.
"How did you escape, my pleasant daughter?" cried the happy father,
embracing her.
"I do not know," said Yoné, with some truth, looking furtively about for
Arisuga.
"And fully dressed?" asked the father again.
With a sigh of disgust, Yoné answered again that she did not know.
"It was an interposition of the gods."
"Yes," sighed Yoné, in her heart, "I suppose it was an interposition of
the infernal gods."
For Shijiro was undoubtedly gone, not at once to return.
"The smell of fire has not even passed upon your garments," pursued the
delighted parent.
"It is very strange," sighed the daughter.
"The gods love you!" declared her father.
"I suppose so," answered Yoné, indifferently, thinking of quite another
escape and another love.
It happened that the next day the _Kowshing_ was sunk and the Guards
started for Ping-Yang.
PING-YANG
VII
PING-YANG
Arisuga sang for the Guards, and made rhymes and laughter, and they
liked him tremendously, as big men are inclined to like little ones,
until they reached Ping-Yang, when they liked him still more for
something better. You will remember how the first assault of the
Japanese was met by the Chinese, who had yet to be taught defeat. The
big Satsuma color-bearer was killed, and the flag fell in the polluting
Chinese dust. It was little Arisuga who raised it--to such a shout as
cost the Chinese the hundred or so men they could spare at that time.
And he stayed out there, with the flag, where the Chinese were, when the
rest retired, and taunted the enemy with polite epithets, kept his
pistol going, and finally came through without a scratch!
Thus, the smallest member of the Guards had demonstrated to the
greatest, the thing which helped to win their other victories: that
though their enemy was not lacking in courage, as they had thought, yet
he could neither manoeuvre nor shoot.
Afterward, there was a contest for the picturesque office of
color-bearer. Some of them wanted Okuma. And Arisuga was willing, of
course. He knew how impossible it was to him at his size. But Colonel
Zanzi said the colors belonged to Arisuga.
"Men get what they win in the army--nothing more, and not less. Here, no
honor goes by favor! A man passes for a man until he is proven
otherwise, no matter who or what he is, or whether he be five feet or
six. In the army there are neither eta nor samurai, only sons of the
emperor."
After the peace of Shimenoseki there was dull barrack life for little
Arisuga, far from Yoné, until he led the allies in their assault upon
the gate of the Hidden City. You will remember that the Japanese were
conceded the advance. After the first repulse they disentangled Arisuga
from a heap of Chinese with the colors still upright in his hands. The
wound was in his forehead. The great death had been near.
Now it happened that the next day a man with a Japanese name was brought
before Colonel Zanzi and desired to know why it was that wounded
Japanese soldiers were taken to the houses of the Chinese when there
were Japanese houses near where they would be not only welcome
but--Well, he had a pretty daughter, and the Chinese annoyed her by
their attentions. A Japanese soldier in the house, a flag in the yard,
and a pink ticket at the door would be not only glory but protection.
"I see," laughed the colonel. "Will a wounded one do?"
The visitor thought he would--if he were the young man who had been
carried to the house of Han-Hai next door to him, the day before.
"Very good," smiled the colonel. "I observe that we are not only
glorifying the emperor, but assisting a countryman to humble his Chinese
neighbor. Very good!"
"It is not that," said the Japanese in China. "My daughter has seen
him."
"Oh-h! Oh-h! He will have good care!"
Without another word the smiling commanding officer wrote the order for
his transfer.
And the next day Orojii Zasshi was the proudest Japanese in China. For
the imperial sun-flag waved over his roof; the pink ticket, to indicate
that a soldier was quartered there, was tacked to his door-post; and
within, in the most sumptuous room the house afforded, lay Shijiro
Arisuga, color-bearer.
DREAM-OF-A-STAR
VIII
DREAM-OF-A-STAR
When Arisuga saw the face of "Hoshi-no-Yumé," some days later--and this
"Dream-of-a-Star," as he at once called her, was well enough worth
seeing--he said first:--
"It is not like what I thought it, angel."
Referring, of course, to the great red death, which he thought he had
suffered--and what had necessarily followed.
"No," answered Hoshiko, comfortingly, remembering what the surgeon had
said, that when he came out of his delirium he would probably be a bit
queer.
"I suppose, after all, that the earth-heavens are much like the earth."
"Yes," from Miss Star-Dream.
"I don't think you understand me, since you answer only yes and no?"
"I understand your _words_ perfectly. I am Japanese!" answered the lips
of Hoshiko, while they slowly smiled. "But your thought--"
"How lucky! For, I suppose here all peoples are mixed."
"Yes. There are all sorts: Russians, Germans, Americans, Frenchmen--"
She was thinking of the allies.
"It looks like Japan."
This was the interior which he was seeing.
"But you think it is China?"
"Yes! Out there it is precisely like the place where we fought."
"Yes," said puzzled Hoshiko.
"I suppose the gods surround us in the heavens with the things which
have pleased us most on earth."
Something made him look at the girl who flitted near, and the same thing
made him connect her with this state of celestial bliss.
But he sighed and turned from her. In the heavens, of course, she was
incorporeal, and, while patent to the eyes, would fail like the air
itself to the touch.
He looked through the window, then, at the Forbidden City.
"But there is no fighting here now," ventured the girl.
"Naturally," agreed the soldier.
"The Forbidden City is taken."
"I am glad to hear it. How long have you been here?"
"About thirteen years."
"You couldn't have been more than three or four when you died! I don't
understand."
But, now, Hoshiko at last did. And she laughed.
"Excuse my levity," she said. "I am not dead, and you are not. I am not
an angel, and this is not a heaven!"
"Oh!" said Arisuga; and then, "All right," as if it were a thing to be
endured. He ended by also laughing. "But you must excuse the mistake. It
seems a good deal like a heaven, and you more like an angel."
Still, as he looked about, and at the girl, he was not sure. That is
what they were likely to tell a sick man.
"Might I touch you?" he asked.
"Oh, yes!" cried the girl, with a pleasure which challenged his
attention. She put herself within his reach.
"It is _not_ a heaven," he agreed, when he had passed his hand along an
exquisite arm.
"I am honorably glad that you are not dead," breathed the girl, bravely.
"Are not you?"
And every little atom of her showed that she was glad and begged that he
might be. Though the mists were still in the brain of Shijiro Arisuga,
he could not help knowing both of these things: her innocence had
uncovered them so completely. For a moment he studied her. Then he
answered a tardy yes to her question.
"For such as you it is good to live--yes--and--" The soldier stopped to
sigh. "Good for others to live near you for the little while."
"For a little while, lord?"
She thought it the mere hyperbole of their race.
"Oh, you shall be old, old, old, and beautiful, with long white hair and
perhaps a beard, and all the earth shall worship your piety--"
Arisuga laughed and caught a hand to stop her.
"Lord," she went on, "most vast lord, I will make you. Yes! I have thus
far made it to be. When they brought you they said you would die. So
said my father and mother. But I--"
She turned and summoned her maid with fierce irrelevance.
"Isonna, come here!"
The maid hastened from the next room, where, it is almost certain, she
had lain with her ear to the fusuma, and then Hoshiko's mysterious
purpose appeared.
"But I--Isonna and me--this is Isonna, my ugly maid--Isonna and me
prayed for you--wept for you; you were so beautiful and bloody. And
Benten--see, I have Benten always near! Benten loves the tears of
sympathy, and to her we prayed, so--"
"I owe you and Isonna my life," laughed the soldier.
"No, Benten," whispered the girl, now answering his laugh with a smile.
"And she will grant other prayers of ours--Isonna and me--will she not,
Isonna, you little beast? Why do you not speak?"
Isonna corroborated her mistress by a deep prostration.
"And so we have asked for long life for you, very long, until the
pebbles grow to boulders and the moss grows to your shoulders--"
Arisuga laughed, in frank joy of her.
"And suppose, you who are so powerful with the goddess of beauty--for
which I do not blame the goddess--suppose I have sworn to die the great
death, to release my father's soul from the Meido so that he can be born
again, and for the glory of the emperor?"
"Oh!" gasped the girl.
The soldier went on.
"--what will the other gods think of me, saving Benten, if I stop here
and forget to die because a woman has hands, a voice, and eyes?"
"No, no!" cried Isonna, in sudden strange anguish.
Then she prostrated herself in abjection.
Arisuga rose on his elbow to look at her.
"What have I said to cause such sorrow?" he wondered. "Let me see. It
was about your hands and voice and eyes."
"Yes!" cried mistress and maid together.
But it was the maid who went on:--
"And you must not, mighty lord. You must not find any beauty in my
mistress's eyes and hands and voice. None anywhere. It is evil for both
you and her!"
"Who said I found any beauty there?" smiled Arisuga, languidly.
"There is a secret, lord--" the maid went on in a frenzy.
But Star-Dream, suddenly grasping the place of her heart with both
hands, cried out to the maid, as if she were desperately wounded:--
"Go, go, go, little foul beast! What do you do here? Who called you?
Go!"
The maid disappeared like a spirit. Star-Dream found herself upon her
feet, still gasping with ecstasy and terror together. Then she at last
turned slowly toward the bed and smiled a sick mechanical smile.
"Lord, you said," she prompted. "Say on. Do not listen--do not observe
the ugly Isonna. She has a trouble of the head."
Hoshiko drooped her own in some sort of gentle guilt.
"Ah, but I displeased you also," said Arisuga.
"Lord--I--no. I have a distemper. In it I am harsh to Isonna. That is
what she is for. That is why my father keeps her. That she may bear my
distemper. Presently I will go and put my arms about her, so, and all
will be well!"
She illustrated with her own person.
"So?" asked the soldier, laughing; "certainly all will be well!" and she
came with another laugh and knelt at his bed. She touched him. She
chattered on helplessly.
"Truly, all will be well. She loves me, wicked as I am to her, and with
a touch I can win her!"
"Yes!" he agreed. "Or any one, I should fancy!"
Thus, at least, she had cunningly won him from his wonder at the scene
he had just witnessed, if she had not won all else she had hoped for.
"May I ask a question?" said the girl.
"A hundred," said Shijiro.
"Lord, you said--you called me--"
"Yes," laughed Arisuga. "The eyes, the hands, the lips--"
"I am not beautiful--"
"I did not say so."
"My hands are not--"
She held them out that he might see that they were not. The soldier
examined them and then said:--
"No, the maid was right. I find no beauty there."
"And my eyes--they are only beast's eyes--"
"Let me see," begged the soldier.
She came closer, and seriously opened them upon him. It was very hard
for Shijiro looking into them to nod his assent that they were beast's
eyes.
"Then the question is," said the girl, with innocent mirth, "why, if I
am not beautiful, if nothing about me is, why did you do so?"
"Do what?" demanded the soldier, with a pretence of savagery.
"Look so into my eyes, touch so my hands, listen so to my miserable
voice?"
"I supposed that I was in a heaven, and that you were an--attendant,"
said Arisuga.
"But after you knew that you were not in a heaven?"
The soldier gave up with a laugh.
"I see that we shall be very good friends," he said. They laughed
together.
"Lord," she said, "I do not know whether you speak true!"
"I," said the soldier, "have the impression that I have lied to you
about you."
"Shaka!" breathed the girl, between laughter and fear.
"Did you wish it--what I did--said?"
"Lord," confessed the girl, "I wish to be as beautiful as the
sun-goddess, so that you must--do--say--!"
She crept closer. It was as if she caressed the soldier.
ISONNA
IX
ISONNA
On another day Hoshiko asked:--
"Lord, must it be soon--now--that you die?"
"Now," he said, with a pretence of severity.
"Is the day fixed?"
"Yes. Am I to wait here because your eyes are not exactly a beast's,
while my father languishes in the Meido?"
"Yea, lord, if you are hap--happy. For the spirits of our augustnesses,
no matter where they are, even in the suffering of the hells, are not
sad while they make us happy."
"In what book did you learn that?" demanded the soldier.
"In the Bushido," lied the girl, seriously.
"Then I have not read the commandments of the Bushido with sufficient
care. I must do it all over. I am glad that there is such a doctrine.
One may keep to a holy purpose, but need not hasten it. And to-day I
like to linger from the red death; I like it well!"
"Yes, lord, that is a filial duty. To die for--for--the repose of your
father's soul. But there is no need of--haste?"
"No," said the disgraceful young soldier, "there is no need of haste."
She laughed and touched his face--where he caught and held her hand.
"Perhaps, many many years?"
"Perhaps," said Arisuga.
"Until you are mi--married?"
"Perhaps until I am married."
"Beautiful!" cried the girl.
"And who would you have me marry?"
"Isonna!" laughed Hoshiko, "if you were not so great, lord. Oh, she is
most sweet to men! Often I have wondered that men do not marry her!
Isonna!"
Again the girl plunged from the next room.
"Isonna," said her mistress, "ugly little beast, you are to marry the
lord soldier when he is a trifle better."
Isonna forgot her manners in the violence of another amazement. Arisuga
shouted with happy laughter.
"Vast lord," wailed the maid, as if she believed it all, "there is the
same reason in me as in my mistress, that--"
"Sh!"
Hoshiko put her two hands violently upon the garrulous mouth of the
servant.
"You little beast! Is not once enough? I dislike to kill you. But I
suppose I must!"
When all was well again she turned to Arisuga:--
"Then you will need a servant--and I am very industrious, am I not,
Isonna?"
Isonna said nothing. This seemed safest.
"Is she industrious, Isonna?" asked the mystified young soldier. "We
will have no servants who are not industrious!"
"No," said the frightened maid to him, and "Yes" to her when she had
looked, first, the way of her mistress, then the way of the soldier.
"Do I not curl the futons, dress my hair, fill my father's pipe, clean
the sand out of his sandals, mend his bed-netting, tie his girdle, cook
his rice?"
Isonna said yes.
"I am convinced," laughed the soldier. "When I marry Isonna you shall
serve us."
"Go," said the girl to the maid, "and be ready when the lord commander
wishes."
And when she was gone the young soldier and the girl laughed again
together.
"Almost," said the girl, "she lost me my place in your household."
And one could not be certain from her words that she was not serious.
The soldier had again the impression that she had barely prevented some
momentous disclosure. It gave his gayety pause and his coquetry caution.
"Then I am not in a heaven," said he, "and--_you_ are not a heavenly
person?"
The girl dropped to her knees beside him and asked:--
"I wish I might make this a heaven to you, and that I might
seem--truly--like--a heavenly--person!"
"I never knew one on earth who seemed more like one! Be content."
"Alas! that is only because you have been ill and I have been kind to
you?"
"You are very pleasant--very pleasant!" said Arisuga, setting the
current of desire away from the peril of her. "What have you been doing
with me all the while I have been here?"
Nevertheless, and notwithstanding his retreat from sentiment, the
wounded soldier possessed himself of one of Hoshiko's hands--quite by an
unconscious act of fellowship. But one was not enough; he took the
other. As he did it, he remembered and smiled because his hands and his
will were at such variance.
The Lady Hoshi did not stay him. Indeed, she had always liked the
stories of those bandits in the mountains, who took pretty girls and
were never heard of again.
But she had to get away just then, much to her regret, because, out of
her innocent honesty, she was not prepared to answer the question he had
asked her--What had she been doing with him during the period of his
delirious unconsciousness? And he repeated it!
Now to call one a pleasant person is about as far as a Japanese lover
ordinarily goes. But Hoshiko was disappointed with it. What had gone
before promised more.
In her disappointment, her humor became as testy as it was possible for
her humor to become, which was, after all, not very testy. And so it
remained for the day.
THE TASK OF JIZO
X
THE TASK OF JIZO
"Why didn't he take me?" she demanded savagely of Isonna the maid that
night as she was putting her mistress to bed in the adjoining room. "And
quickly! Like that! I would!" She clapped her hands--and then said: "Sh!
Do you think he heard that?"
The maid reassured her.
"But _why_ is a man satisfied with a hand--even two--when by a strong
arm he might have--" she stopped to sigh and to look into the round
mirror which the maid was holding up to her--"all!"
"All of what?" asked the astonished maid.
"Me! This."
"Oh!" said the maid.
"If a man calls a girl an angel when he thinks he is in heaven, he has
no business to call her only--" she stopped and sniffed disdainfully at
the word--"_pleasant_ when he finds he is not."
"What would you, then, have him to call you on earth?" questioned the
puzzled maid.
"Angel still."
"Permit him a little time, mistress."
"Time! Time! What do you call time, you ignorant one? It was fifteen
minutes! Yes! We had been talking fifteen minutes when he said I was a
_pleasant_ person! After saying I was an angel!"
"Oh!" said Isonna--which Hoshiko took for reproof.
"I have known him two weeks!"
"Yes," agreed the maid.
"And if you speak--if you suggest again, that which twice nearly escaped
your lips, I will kill you. One night you will lie down, and, into your
horrid, tattling mouth, I will pour, as you sleep, a something which
will prevent you from ever rising. I have it always ready for you."
"But, your father?" whined Isonna.
"I, not my father, am speaking now!"
"I will be silent," agreed the maid.
"What is the use to take the trouble to tell him? Soon he will go and
forget both us and that--what is the use?"
"I will be silent," said the maid, again. "I do not wish to die."
"And then--O Jizo, punish him!" She broke off and addressed another of
her goddesses. "And then he had the unparalleled audacity to ask me what
I had been doing with him all the while he has been here! After he had
said angel repeatedly! O Jizo, punish him!"
"Well, well," comforted the maid, "why did you not inform him? Surely
that was not difficult!"
"Oh! it was not, eh? Well, you blind little beast, do you _know_ what I
_have_ been doing?"
"You have recovered him from his illness with the utmost tenderness and
beauty," said the maid.
"Oh, you little fool!" cried her mistress, first striking her, then
embracing her; "I have been falling in love with him. It happened that
day they carried him into the house of Han-Hai, where live three
daughters, all unmarried. You saw it; you were present! Do you not
remember how beautiful and bloody he was? His eyes were closed, the sun
shone in his face, and that was pale with here and here the windings of
a bandage, like an aureole. Oh, how we both wept! He was so young; and
we thought that we could heal him with great care! We wept. My father
did the one thing which would stop our tears--brought, him here!"
"Yes--yes!" agreed Isonna.
"Now! Shall I tell him?"
"Oh, no, Lady Hoshi, no! That is a dreadful thing to do," sighed the
maid.
"It is not dreadful. It is beautiful."
"But, dear, dear mistress, you must not love a man. That is what your
father pays me to prevent!"
"Well, you haven't prevented it. And I shall tell my father, and he,
also, will kill you and get me some one who is more useful. That is two
killings for you!"
"But I did not know, mistress! Perhaps I do not know love."
"You do not, Isonna. For it has been right under your nose these two
weeks. After all, I will not tell my father. For he might give me a maid
who would not be as pretty as you," and she hugged Isonna, who was not
pretty at all. "And in exchange for my mercy you must not be odious,
but recognize that it is too late. Is it a bargain?"
Well, any bargain the lovely Hoshi might propose to the plain Isonna
would meet with her approval, though it should mean her death the next
instant, and so this one was approved.
ANGEL OF THE EARTH-HEAVEN
XI
ANGEL OF THE EARTH-HEAVEN
Now, the next day, Arisuga, laughing, greeted her with that very
word--"angel"! Perhaps he did hear a bit of their talk. For the walls
between them were very thin. This was the way of it: He clapped his
hands so early in the morning that he was amazed at the despatch with
which she arrived. But we are not. For we know that she was waiting just
outside of his screens to be called. She meant to dissemble and pretend
that she was at a distance. But you can fancy how instantly she forgot
that when he called:--
"Angel! Angel of my earth-heaven!" Though there are no angels in the
Japanese heavens.
You have seen that, in her presence, he had forgotten his caution!
Observe, now, that he did likewise in her absence! What end but one
could there be to such recklessness!
"Stand there! I want to look at you!" he cried when she came. For the
light of the morning was in her face--and the light of love, too! "By
your Jizo," he said, then, "I am glad you are _not_ an angel!
"Cherry blooms are very pink,
But not so pink as you are!"
he sang, laughing, and her heart was so choked with ecstasy that she had
to put both hands to her face and run from the room hearing him still
call "Angel" after her.
"O Benten," she cried to the goddess of beauty in her room, "that is
different! He is not careful now--he is awake to-day! _We_ must beware
of him! There is danger!"
And at once she returned--with the water for his bath!
For, that was always her way: when he would say something to make her
heart leap into her mouth, to fly from him in the direst panic, suborn
the goddess, then hasten back to have it happen again.
"A heart is a strange thing," she laughed to him. "Sometimes it is here
(at the proper place for it), sometimes here (in her throat), and
sometimes here (in her sandals)."
"And sometimes," laughed the young soldier, "one's heart, which should
be here (in his own bosom), is there (in hers)."
"And again," she rioted with him, "one's heart, which was here (in
herself), is gone--gone--utterly gone--"
"That is quite proper," the soldier said. "For if you kept your own, you
would have two and I none!"
"It is trying to get out!" she cried in mock alarm, holding it in.
"Let it come!"
But, just then, they heard the sigh of a moving screen, and the acid
face of Hoshiko's mother looked in. She said nothing, only let her eyes
rove from face to face. But that was very cooling. She closed the shoji
and went away--apparently.
Now, for the benefit of her mother, whom she knew to be still behind the
fusuma, Hoshiko tried to look very severe. She had taken the poppies
from behind her ear and had pinned a napkin about her hair, and turned
up the sleeves of her kimono, making herself all the lovelier as she
very well knew in this fashion of a nurse.
"You are to wash your hands in this cold water to refresh you. Then I
will take it away and bring you other water for your face."
But, in the end, she washed his hands for him, and his face, too, amid a
great deal of laughter and splashing.
"And now," he said, "I will take every advantage of my defenceless
enemy. I will make her give me my breakfast."
Though she demurred, Hoshiko was quite mad to do it.
"Beware!" she whispered, as she let a persimmon slip from between her
chopsticks into his mouth. "In the East, walls have not only ears but
eyes!"
"And no conscience!"
"What would you?"
She hoped that he might desire walls without senses, where they might be
fearlessly alone.
"Another persimmon!" he laughed.
"No," she pouted, for his punishment, "nothing but the rice."
"Not all the hard hearts," he sighed, "are behind the walls!"
Then she gave him the most luscious of the persimmons.
"You haven't told me yet," he insisted, "what I did and what you did
while I was unconscious. That is always interesting."
She filled his mouth with rice.
"But what did you do and what did I do?"
It came through the rice.
"Please drink," she said.
"What did you do, what did I do?" he sputtered.
"Pardon me while I wipe your mouth."
"But what--"
"Nothing. I did nothing, you did nothing."
"It must have been very dull for you," sighed the defeated soldier.
"Jizo--" she was praying to the goddess at her small shrine that
night--"I am going to conceal and lie! I pray you to intercede with the
Lord Shaka for my pardon. He loves me--and he must not know. It is for
happiness, Jizo. _His_ happiness, do you understand, dear Jizo?"
She cried out savagely in her further confidences to Jizo that night,
when she was ready for bed.
"I _was_ very busy--yes, _very_ busy--falling in love with him! And you
must intercede with Shaka for my forgiveness. It was a lie. But could I
tell him that I was busy falling in love with him?"
The maid had come in to put her to bed.
"Strange prayers!" she said.
The mistress turned, intending to rebuke her. But she laughed.
"Come here and stop that laughing. He will hear!"
"Mistress, I did not laugh."
"Come here!"
When the maid was abject before her she said:--
"Why do you stare?"
"At the joy."
"Where?"
As if it were a symptom of disease.
"In the face."
"I have a trouble of the heart. Feel! That is why!"
"Yes!" said the maid, pretending terror.
"It will kill me!"
"Yes!"
"It will not!"
"No!"
They fell, laughing, together, to the floor.
"He does love me!"
"I know that much."
"But he does not know it--yet."
They laughed again.
"It WAS for _his_ happiness!"
"Certainly!"
"Not mine!"
"No!"
"He shall be told that he loves me!"
She shook her fist at her favorite deity, sitting unruffled in her
shrine.
"Benten! You shall let him know!"
"The goddess is too decorous for that," chided the maid. "The only woman
who tells a man that she loves him--"
"Is me!" cried her mistress to the shocked maid.
"Aie!" wailed the maid. "There is a kind of woman who does that, but she
is not the lady Hoshi--"
"Oh, silence!" laughed the girl. "It would not take me a moment to tell
him, if it were not for what he might think! And, perhaps, he is not
wise and will not know enough wisdom to think that!"
"All men think that!" said Isonna.
"But, how can they," argued Hoshiko, "if they are not taught? How can he
if I do not teach him?"
"It is born in them!"
"But how do you know?"
"I have studied," said the maid.
"Well, at all events, it was not that for which I petitioned the
goddess: to tell him--that I loved him, you ignorant little animal. I
asked her to tell him that he loved me!"
"Oh!" cried the maid, kowtowing. "I misunderstood."
"Now go to bed, you little scandal-monger!"
Isonna started. Her mistress recalled her.
"And--and, if there is a way of letting him know that _he_--"
"Yes," answered the maid, understandingly.
"And as to letting him know that I love _him_--"
"Yes?"
"Do you think that necessary?"
"I do not know the ways of love," confessed Isonna.
"You are a little beast," said her mistress. "That can wait--if he once
knows that he loves me. At all events it is too dangerous. Go to bed,
wicked one!"
IMPERTINENT ISONNA
XII
IMPERTINENT ISONNA
But the next day trouble, though not exactly of the heart, did arrive.
It was one of Arisuga's days of retreat from Hoshiko. He asked her why
she lived there--in China--when she might live in Japan, where she
belonged.
She answered him that her father had come there many years before, when
she was a child.
"I will ask him the reason if you wish."
"No, no, no!" laughed Arisuga. "What does it matter, my dear child?"
She ran away from him again. And all that day she kept repeating:--
"'My dear _child_'! I am as tall as he!"
And at night, again, while the maid was undressing her, it was that
still.
"Now he shall never know who--what I am. For I _am_ beautiful. The
mirror says so. As beautiful as if I were not--what I am. Look, look and
tell me!"
This the maid, for the hundredth time since he had come, did.
"You are, indeed, beautiful, dear mistress, yet, nevertheless, it is
your duty to tell him! Otherwise he might wish to marry you. Already he
loves you."
"I will not! And if you do, I will kill you!" threatened Hoshiko. "I
will have these few days of heaven. He will go and not think of me
again. He will never know. He will not have been contaminated. But I
will have the few days in heaven! To him I am only a child."
And she fell to the floor and sobbed for an hour, during which the maid
lay like a graven image at her side. Then she sat up and asked:
"_Now_ you don't blame me, do you?"
"No."
"Anyhow, he will go as soon as possible."
"No, he will not," said the impertinent Isonna.
"He will! You know that he will! Say that he will!"
But the maid knew better.
"That is what men always do when they find out."
"He will not," said Isonna.
"You are very impertinent!" And her mistress punished her maid's
impertinence by flinging her the amber bracelet she wore.
"Now, disobedient one, you shall tell me why you think such a naughty
thing. Yet you cannot know. No one can see into his large mind. He keeps
it closed. He is as wise as a priest. Not even I can enter it. And you
are very ignorant, Isonna."
"Nevertheless, his mind is as glass to me!" insisted the maid.
"I will tell my father and he shall punish you with whips. Now, you dear
little beast, I shall force you to tell me the reason you think in your
evil mind the great color-bearer to the prince of heaven stays here!"
"You," said the maid, coolly refilling first the pipe of her mistress,
then her own.
"I shall _not_ tell my father," said Miss Star-Dream, "for I pity you.
It is such a great lie that he would make Ozumi whip you to death. Yet
it is a lie which makes me happy. Was I ever so happy as I am now--since
he came?"
"No," said the maid.
"But he _will_ go sometime--we agree upon that?" questioned the
mistress, once more hoping anything but that they did agree upon that.
The maid was not blind to her hope.
"Not yet," she answered with a decision which gave joy to the girl's
soul.
"He will. He must die."
"Not yet," declared the maid again.
"Do you suppose his love for me--_you_ said it was love, I did not!--is
greater than his love for the spirit of his father?"
"Yes," answered the maid.
"Oh, little beast!" cried her mistress, embracing her. "Benten, but I am
happy!"
She chattered on:--
"Also have you noticed how beautiful he is? He has hair like the
pictures of the gods--though he is a shaven samurai. And those songs he
sings he makes himself. I am going to learn a thousand musical
instruments so that I may play them all. I wish I could sing! And,
Isonna, we never laughed--really--until he came, did we? Always that
thing hung over us. But he is not to know it. And we may forget it! And,
Isonna, have you noticed that exquisite habit he has of touching me,
here, here, here?"
She laughed and made the serving-girl the illustrant of this aberration
of the soldier.
"That he does when he wants me to look at something--often only himself.
Or when I am not attending to his words. I used to shudder and go away
from it--it was so strange--no one else ever did it. But I now think it
very foolish to start and be frightened by such small things."
"I have observed you go toward it!" droned the maid.
"That is a vile lie!" cried Hoshiko. "Say, do you know what causes
that?"
"No."
"His wife; he does that to his wife, and she--she is not a nice person,
and likes it! Aha!"
"He has no wife," said the maid.
It was this she was hungry to hear.
"How do you know? Did he tell you?"
"No. But he wears stockings, not tabi. All soldiers do."
"Well, you suspicious little beast, what has that got to do with his
wife?"
"I wash them."
"Well?"
"There are no darns."
"Oh! What then?"
"Holes."
"Isonna," said her mistress, solemnly, "I believe that you are as wise
as you say you are! But, then, how do you suppose he learns it?"
"From you!"
"Am I so dreadful?"
"I have observed you giving those touches."
"He will hate me."
"Hate is not in the direction he is going," said the wise maid.
Hoshiko could have endured more of this ecstasy. But it was very late,
and Arisuga had the soldier's habit of early rising. Moreover, the first
thing he was wont to do when he rose was to clap his hands, in that way,
and call for his earth-angel. So she said to Isonna:--
"You have been a naughty, impertinent, gossiping little beast. Put me to
bed."
Yet, when this had been done the mistress embraced the maid and would
hardly let her go.
"What a shame it is that one must sleep when one might talk of him! But,
then, if one does not, one is hideous in the morning! And he calls the
moment he wakes. Put out the lights and go to bed! I will listen to you
no longer!"
Isonna had not spoken. But she did as she was commanded.
"Isonna!" the mistress called after the maid--who instantly returned--"I
have had such a thought! Suppose he should never know! Suppose I should
go to some place with him where there is no one who had ever known me?
Marry him?"
"I should be there."
"You! Not unless I should first cut out your gossiping tongue!"
"It would be wrong. The gods must punish you!"
"How would the gods know? I should lie to them also."
"It would be very wrong," the maid repeated. "The only woman who
deceives a man--"
"Is his _wife_, you naughty little beast! Go straight to bed! I hate
you!"
ONLY TO TAKE HER
XIII
ONLY TO TAKE HER
It happened precisely as the wise maid had said. He did not go, but, on
the contrary, protracted his recovery in a scandalous fashion.
For here it was that Arisuga began to suspect, for the second time, that
the happiest moment of his life had come. If he had known that he was in
love, as he did not, or that there was such a thing as this love he was
experiencing, which he did not, he would have been more certain of that
happiest moment. But a Japanese must be told when this has happened to
him. And it must be in another tongue than his. For in his language
there are no words for it--and he knew no other. He really was not quite
sure, therefore, why he was lingering in China--only suspected it. How
could he know, under the circumstances? No feeling like this had
insidiously crept upon him when he had taken Yoné to Mukojima or
Shiba--even upon that great night which now began to go more and more
out of his memory. And he did not even think of what he had laughingly
prophesied to her--that forgetting--her waiting. He simply forgot her.
Perhaps if Hoshiko had known of this defect in the character of Arisuga,
she might not have loved him. What Arisuga remembered most about his and
Yoné's excursions was that when they got hungry they went separately
home and ate. But he had the feeling that he would stay here with
Hoshiko and starve--or until some one from the regiment came and took
him back at the point of a bayonet. For this was a most piquant and
unusual condition of affairs between them: that they should be so much
alone together, that there should be so little--almost nothing--of
Hoshiko's parents, that she should be as frankly intimate as a geisha at
a festival, who meant to please at all hazards. It was this volunteer
intimacy which puzzled him most about the girl. But who was there to
tell him that she had known him two weeks longer than he knew her? And
that during all that halcyon time she had had her way with her adoration
of him--and saw no reason in his returned consciousness for changing
it? Or that she had lived here untaught as a child? That to her, since
she frankly adored him, there was only one reason why he might not as
frankly know it--the one she had decided never to tell?
Before Arisuga became a soldier he had been a poet, a musician, a
songster--one who had responded at nature's high behest to all
manifestations of beauty. Now, in this time of peace and indolent
convalescence, he went back to all that--almost as if the life of the
soldier, which intervened, had never been. He had instantly called her
"Dream-of-a-Star." And she was all this to him. It was good to lie in
his futons and see the perfections of her grace as she moved about
intent upon his healing. It was better to hear her pretty voice. It was
best of all to feel her touch upon him and to see the lighted eyes which
always accompanied it. At first there was the sense of having found a
butterfly by the dusty roadside of his duty which might yield a moment
of joy. But when he knew that, whether he wished it or not, he must lie
here many weeks before he could fight again, the sense that he was
sacrificing duty to pleasure disappeared, and he let himself enjoy his
nearness to the girl and let his poetic spirit revel in her fragile
beauty without further thought of the duty which lay in wait for him.
That, he finally decided, would attend to itself. A soldier is not long
permitted to forget his duty.
But, the thing which continued to stir and puzzle him most was the fancy
which now and then came, that he might have this wonderful creature
precisely like the butterfly he had thought her. Indeed, he could
scarcely get away from the impression that there were times when she
offered herself to him. Yet though he was not very learned concerning
women himself, he knew that there was only one sort who offered herself
to a man. Sometimes her little timorous darings let him believe, for a
moment, that she was of this kind. But nearly always the idea was
quenched out by some act of such utter innocency as could not be
mistaken for coquetry. Still the recurrence of an idea, originally
erroneous, is likely to be strengthened by each repetition. And this was
what was happening to the sick soldier.
Nevertheless he continued to fancy that of all the spirits, from the
moon-goddess down, none were so dainty, so fragile, so tender,
caressing, and altogether lovely as this Hoshiko, who was not a spirit
at all, even though she was there, day after day, at his bedside,
suggesting herself to him with either the abandon of a child or the
intention of a woman of joy. Had he been as wise about women as he was
simple, and she as wise about men as she pretended, who had no wisdom at
all concerning them, such a misunderstanding would not have occurred.
For she was not offering herself to him at all. She was a child with a
toy. And at first the subtraction of this toy, even though the like and
fascination of it exceeded any other she had ever had, would have
portended little of tragedy. But later it was more serious. Something
inside which had never stirred before began to stir now. This contact
with a man, these intimacies with one not much more learned in the art
of loving than she, had awakened the sleeping thing within which would
one day be her womanhood.
As for her, one must not forget that at the last she wished to be
adored. All women do. But if a woman loves a man too much, he runs
away. If she loves him just enough, he stays. If she loves him a little
less than enough, he runs after her.
"If I were a man," said Isonna, "I would care for only such pretty
things as you--not for wars and fightings--even great deaths. For what
is the last heaven but a state of bliss! And if one has all the bliss
one can bear or understand here on earth, is that not a heaven? And
truly if I were a man, it would be extreme bliss to touch you, here, and
here, and here, to put an arm about you so, to sit in the andon light,
so--"
All of which things the adoring maid illustrated, to her saddened
mistress, in the light of the night lamp, and to all of them her
mistress agreed.
THE GOING OF THE SOLDIER
XIV
THE GOING OF THE SOLDIER
For the soldier must go. There was not a vestige of excuse for remaining
longer. The terrible mother had entered his chamber, had looked at him,
had said briefly that he was quite well. And Hoshiko herself had done
everything but ask him flatly to stay. How could she do that? Isonna had
warned her constantly of the sort of woman who did that in Japan. The
mere asking would be enough--in such a woman--to advertise her as of
joy. And for want of this word of asking, the heaven she had made was
closing.
But Isonna and some of the circumstances of the case had taught her more
and more that any more forwardness would be seriously misconstrued by
the invalid.
"You are awake," said Isonna, mysteriously, who was not blind to the
maturing of the thing called womanhood.
"Ah," sighed the happy and miserable girl, "if to wake means this, then
I wish that I might always have slept."
"You did not sleep," said the still mysterious maid.
"What did I then, little beast?"
"You dreamed."
"Then," begged the girl, with a piteous smile, "make me to dream again,
and take care that I never wake."
"Ah, sweet mistress," said the maid, "there comes to all, in the matter
of men, a time to sleep, a time to dream, and a time to wake. The sleep
is best. For in that one knows nothing. The dream is sweet. But it never
lasts. The waking sometimes is good--sometimes evil. Good it is if all
is fair between a man and a woman. Evil it is if all is not. And,
mistress dear, all is not fair between you and him. So there is another
thing after the waking--which the gods make."
"What is that, wise little beast?" laughed Hoshiko.
"It is the forgetting which heals," said the maid.
"I do not wish to be healed," answered her mistress.
"Then must you be always ill of this thing."
"So be it. That is better than a forgetting."
"But it must go no further," pleaded the servitor. "There must be no
touches, no eyes, no beatings of the heart."
"Can you stop the beating of the heart? The adoring of the eyes? Can any
one?"
"Yes. In your room waits always the goddess of tranquillity. Go there.
Stay there. She will soothe you."
"Yes, when he is gone--quite gone--then we will try for that
tranquillity. We had it before he came!"
"We shall have it again," cheered the maid. "As soon as he is gone--"
"Oh!" A flash of Hoshiko's old manner energized her. "I know a better
and happier way to insure that tranquillity."
"What is it?"
"Ask him to--stay! You!"
The maid only gasped.
"Yes," said her mistress, more timorously than she had ever spoken of
him.
"Ask a man to stay?"
"Certainly! That is what I said. Am I so hard to understand?"
Hoshiko spoke with more pain than asperity.
"You may--with honor--" pleaded Hoshiko. "He doesn't love you. You do
not love him."
"And if the asking of these lips and hands and eyes and this voice, all
that are permitted you, are not potent--how shall I be? How shall any
one or anything be? Let him go."
"Stop!" cried her mistress. "He is a god. We are creatures. What we wish
we must petition for as we do the gods. Yet I dare not--will not you?"
"No!" said the maid. "I know the penalty. I do not wish you to know
it."
BUT WHAT COULD HE DO?
XV
BUT WHAT COULD HE DO?
However, it all came out involuntarily when, at last, he began with
tremendous difficulty to go away. He was already at the courtyard gate
when she sobbed. He was gone--oh, it mattered not now what she did!
But Arisuga hearing this, of course, returned. His renewed presence only
renewed the Lady Hoshi's tears.
"But what can I do?" he kept on asking politely.
"Stay!" cried the Lady Hoshi, madly, forgetting everything but that one
wish.
"Oh!" said Arisuga.
"Gods!" breathed Isonna.
"Only till to-morrow; that is but one day; to-morrow, lord--lord of my
soul!"
"Oh!" said Arisuga again, and, at once entirely willing, dismissed his
'rik'sha.
The next day he took her to the Forbidden City and showed her the
tragic, broken wonders of it, while he puzzled out that scene of the day
before. There were times when he had to help her up on broken walls and
over fallen sculptures. And more and more as he possessed her thus for
one day he wanted to possess her indefinitely. For the hands were very
soft, the eyes luminous, the small body where it touched his exquisite.
He found it hard to believe--that, like a courtezan, she would beg him
to stay. Yet, it was for but one day! No woman of joy would stop there!
At last he spoke:--
"Were you educated in Japan--or China, angel of my earth-heaven?" he
asked of her.
"In China, lord, such things as a girl learns after three years, but in
the Japanese way entirely."
There was little enlightenment in that.
"And have you known many men?"
"Yes," she answered at once, thinking that was what he wished.
"No!" cried Isonna.
The two girls turned together. Hoshiko was about to chastise the maid.
But she was terrified at the pallor of her face. Nevertheless she
insisted, with a certain pathetic dignity:--
"I said--yes!"
"I say no!" stubbornly cried the maid. "None! none!"
Arisuga deprecatingly waved his hand, and courteously believed what they
disagreed about.
"What does it matter?" he said.
But the maid whispered tragically to her mistress:--
"See what you have done!"
"What?" asked Hoshiko.
The maid's whisper was sinister.
"Do you wish him to think that you have been any one's? Every one's?
That is why he asked."
"It is not!" protested Hoshiko. "He asked to learn how many others love
me."
"And why should he ask that?"
"Because _he_ loves me," was Hoshiko's enigmatic answer.
There was no time at this moment for further explication. Arisuga had
evidently decided something which was in his mind when he asked his
first question, and Hoshiko fancied that his decision was against her.
For he laughed (not as she would have wished him to laugh), and took an
almost rude and assured possession of her.
"When the mistress says yes and the maid says no, one must believe his
eyes, which say it is improbable that so fair a flower has bloomed
unseen even in this arid plain of China!"
"You think, then, that I _have_ had--twenty lovers?" asked Hoshiko.
"Certainly," laughed Arisuga.
"No!" still cried the maid in her terror. "You believe, lord, that she
has had none--not one--until you came!"
"Certainly," laughed the soldier again.
The two girls looked at each other dazedly. Arisuga laughed again in
that unpleasant way.
"Now he will never know that I love him," chided the mistress, at an
opportune moment. "If he had thought that I gave up twenty lovers the
moment he came--"
The maid had not seen the value of creating such a situation. Hoshiko
practised tremendous wisdom. She repeated to Isonna, in the intervals
of the day, the very things Isonna had taught her with great pains.
"A man will think nothing of you unless he knows that others do. If one
has two lovers, one can easily have twenty. If one has one and is
truthful--that is all one will ever have. If one has none, how is one to
get even one unless she pretends to have many? For if no man cares for
you, no man will. If many men care for you, many more will. If a man
loves one and he sees that no one else does, he persuades himself that
he does not. For he thinks that if no one else loves one, one is not
worth loving. But if many love one, he persuades himself that he does,
because if many love one it must be right and proper for him to do it.
Now, you little beast, you must help, after putting him further off, to
bring him nearer by making him think that he loves and desires me more
than any of the twenty."
These philosophies of her own teaching, changed and informed with the
aroma of Hoshiko, went far to convince Isonna.
"Sweet mistress," said the repentant servant, "the gods pardon me--and
you--you also pardon me--if I have done wrong. But this--this I will
do--and swear it on the tablet of my father: If he should offer you
marriage, I will go with you to some place where he can never know. I
will keep your secret forever. Such things have happened. In another
country the gods will not follow. Even to the country of some barbarian
people, like America, I will go. What gods are there? Certainly none of
our gods--such as know you and him. But I will _not_ say that you have
been the creature of twenty lovers!"
"But only to make him understand that he loves me--now--here--to-day? We
have given him doubt! The rest does not matter."
Isonna was repentant but not helpful.
"Well--study--think--you little beast! And be more careful next
time--then whisper it to me. How to make him understand!"
But there was no further communication from the maid.
In the evening Arisuga said:--
"If what I have been thinking all day--since the events of last
night--is correct, and also meets your approval, I will take you."
And the little Lady Hoshi, shocked and stunned and shivering at her
heart, answered:--
"Yes, lord."
And again that night she wept--not an hour--many hours. For you will
have observed that Shijiro Arisuga did not say that he would marry--but
only take her. (There is a difference in Japan.) And he did not ask her
parents.
"You see, he knows!" she sobbed to the faithful maid. "Oh, it was so
sweet--so sweet--that I forgot that I must not. And when I thought he
loved me I was sure he would say 'I will marry you,' even if he did not
mean it. But he only said, 'I will take you.' So--he does not love
me--no! Well, Isonna, he shall have me. And I will enter his very soul!
And then, some day, he will regret those awful words, and when he does I
will die where he can see me afterward. You shall dress my hair in the
shimada fashion, with flowers."
"He does _not_ know," said the maid. "And he does love you. It is the
result of telling him that you have had twenty lovers!"
"Ah, Isonna, do not make my sorrow heavier. That would be worse. He
would not dare to say that to even me--if I were not what I am."
The maid still insisted.
"Then to-morrow I will tell him. If he would say that to a lady, who he
thinks has dismissed many suitors for him, he shall know that he has
said it to one who is not a lady and who has had no suitor but him
alone."
"And one who has parents to be consulted! Not like one who goes to
Geisha street without the leave of parents or uncles," advised the maid,
with great severity.
"Yes," sobbed the girl. "Geisha street! Refuge of the forsaken! Oh, love
exalts, as we do our parents. It does not demean. So, there is no love,
no love! No matter what I am, however low, no matter what he is, however
high, if he loved me he would ask my parents for leave to marry me--even
if he only meant to take me. And I thought he loved me! Do you remember
how, only a little while ago, I wished him only to know well that he
loved me! Alas, he knows now that I love him, but he has told me
odiously, odiously, that he does _not_ love me! Yes, Isonna, he shall
have me. Then I will die."
THE MAKING OF A GODDESS
XVI
THE MAKING OF A GODDESS
So she said the next day, not now with the aplomb of a lady, but as a
servant:--
"Lord, there is a reason why you cannot--even--" she choked in her
throat--"take me. Do you not know it?"
"Do not call me lord," he said, "as if you were a servant and I your
master."
"It is right that I should do so, lord."
"I won't have it," he laughed.
And he had never seemed so beautiful nor the sound of his voice so
tender. But she went on as she had planned in her sleepless night.
She was kneeling at his feet now--her head upon the mats--reaching out
to touch him.
"Dear lord, I have deceived you," she said. "My only excuse is that it
was sweet. All the sweetness I have had in my small life. Lord, I am
young. But I had scarcely smiled until you came. In Japan we were
accursed. I was beautiful and my father pitied me and brought me here
where no one knew. Lord, I am an eta."
Arisuga recoiled from the word. The instant would have been
inappreciable to measures of time. But in it the girl's heart leaped and
fell with its own understanding. In the same instant Arisuga knew all
that had so puzzled him concerning the beautiful creature at his feet.
And he understood what his saying must have been to her. For this he
would make a soldier's great reparation--and at once! That was the way
of Arisuga.
"Then you have known no one--no man but me?"
"No," whispered the girl. "I thought if I had twenty lovers, you would
wish me the more."
"And what I have foolishly taken for the advances of experience have
been innocencies!"
Not she, but Isonna, spoke out:--
"Yes, lord. It was as I said. I am here now, when men might wish her, to
see that none approach. There has been no one but you."
"Little Lady Hoshi," said Shijiro Arisuga, to her bruised heart, "there
is but one reparation I can make for yesterday. It is to wish you to
become my wife--to-day."
"But, lord, beautiful lord," cried the girl, "you did not hear what I
said. I spoke too low. I was at your feet--" and now she deliberately
raised her agonized face to his that there might be no mistake--"Lord, I
am an eta! The accursed, despised caste! To the samurai we are as
lepers! No samurai in all the thousands of years of our empire has ever
married an eta! None has ever touched one! Lord, you did not hear!"
"I heard. Pray, call me lord no more, but husband."
"Li--li--Pardon me, husband, I have been taught that I am not to expect
marriage."
"Who taught you that?"
"Even my father! My mother!"
"Gods! It shall be to-morrow."
"Yi--yes, li--li--husband," chattered Hoshiko.
"And on that day there shall be a new goddess to be worshipped, and her
name shall be called Star-Dream! And the first prayer she shall hear
will be from a very brutal soldier to be forgiven for a little start
upon hearing a certain untrue word. For no goddess can be an eta--even
if it were possible for a mortal as beautiful as you to be an eta. So,
even to-day, see," as he gathered her from the floor strongly into his
arms, "you are my goddess--to-morrow you will be my wife."
"Lord, I have no wedding garments! You know that though a Japanese
maiden has always ready her garments for death or marriage, an eta maid
has only those for death ready. It is presumption to have--the--the
others."
"Then there shall be no wedding garment but this," and he touched the
dainty thing she wore. "Where are your parents that I may ask their
consent?"
Hoshiko did not know. But Arisuga suspected that they were close behind
the fusuma listening with staring eyes and gaping mouths.
He suddenly pushed aside the slides--and there they were.
"To-morrow I wed your daughter," he said to them with his soldier's
savagery.
He respectfully gave them time for an answer--but he meant them to
understand that they dare not refuse. And together, when they had the
breath for it, they bowed to the very earth and said:--
"Yea, august lord!"
Arisuga bowed haughtily in return, and closed the slides upon them.
"You see," he said to Hoshiko, "there is nothing but the three times
three between us and our earth-heaven, goddess!"
"Yes, lord," she shivered.
She begged for delay, but he would not grant it, so all that night,
while he slept near, she and Isonna in the next room strove to make a
trousseau out of her shroud.
THE ETA
XVII
THE ETA
Now, even when Arisuga had spoken of marriage, he had the thought that
it would probably not be longer than for his stay in China. At his going
there would be a happy understanding that this meant divorce and that
she might marry again. For he was bound by his oath to the great death,
that she knew; and if this were to be all, it mattered little that
Hoshiko was an eta. In China it was not heinous.
Yet even thus early the thought of some one else finding this wild
flower when he was gone as he had found it--and, alas! of doing as he
was about to do--he did not like that. He did not like his part in it.
It haunted his dreams there in the room next to her and he woke.
She was sobbing. Then he heard her mother:
"Here is the sword," she said, in a voice hard as steel. "Be brave!
First pray!"
"Yes," sobbed Hoshiko.
Arisuga crashed through the paper wall between them like the
thunder-god. Before him was Hoshiko, preparing the sword for its work.
About her, on the floor, was spread the pitiful evidence that she had
tried to improvise a trousseau out of her funeral garments. There was a
sheer white kimono of silk, the sleeves of which she had lengthened to
the wedding size. (Death and marriage are both white in Japan.) She had
just laid it down. It was with this--all useless now--that she had
wrapped the sword. Above her stood her mother.
"What does this mean?" demanded Arisuga, taking the sword from Hoshiko.
"My mother wishes me to die," sobbed the girl.
"And you?" asked Arisuga, savagely.
"I wish to live. To marry you, lord."
"There are no wedding garments," said the mother.
"Nor any funeral garments now!" said Arisuga, slashing them with the
sword.
"You wish my daughter for only a little while--then go!"
"That is my affair. I _take_ her!"
"O Jizo," Hoshiko whispered within herself, "I thank you! Do not let
your mercy stop! Perhaps--perhaps--O Benten!"
"You become an eta if you marry her," Hoshiko's mother was saying.
"In Japan," admitted Arisuga. "That is the way the unwise men of old
worked to prevent the marriage of etas--and so blot out the caste. But
this is China."
And now as the young soldier looked down upon the pitiful little heap at
his side, a great shame rose in his soul that he had ever thought of
marrying her for a little while, and, quite like Arisuga, he rushed in
his penitence from one extreme to the other.
"By all the eight hundred thousand gods, I will marry her for all my
lives!"
No adjuration, no promise, could be greater than that. Some men had
sworn fealty to a woman for two lives--some for three or four--and it
was said that once a man had sworn to love a great poetess for seven
lives; but no one had ever yet, so it was said, sworn his love, much
less marriage, for all his lives. Yet even this did not stop the savage
mother of Hoshiko, bent upon her daughter's honorable death rather than
her dishonorable marriage.
"How will you assure me of this?" demanded she.
"By nothing but my word," said Shijiro, with all his samurai's
haughtiness.
"Gods! Gods! How mighty and wise you are, lord!" sobbed Hoshiko, kissing
his feet.
"But you will not be satisfied to live in China. You will take her to
Japan, where both will be accursed etas," went on the implacable mother.
"You are a soldier."
"I am a soldier," answered Shijiro Arisuga. "In the army there is
neither eta nor samurai. All are equal. All are sons of the emperor.
This is Yamato Damashii. The New Japan! And I am Shijiro Arisuga! That
is the end!"
And it was the end. Here was a soldier who could vanquish the Medusa
mother of Hoshiko by the cold process of words.
"Witnesses! Saké! I will not leave this lady again until she is my
wife!"
And so terrible was this Shijiro Arisuga in his wrath that everything
happened as he ordered--and they were married. I wish they might have
lived happily ever after. But it was only a few glad weeks. Yet, in
those little days and hours, she did what she had threatened: crept into
his heart so deeply that he was never to dislodge her quite until he
died. And it was here Shijiro Arisuga thought for the second time,
without suspicion to mar it, that the happiest moment of his life had
come.
Fancy the joy of it all! Sure, I cannot tell it. I have no fit words. It
was infinitely better than either had dreamed. The dainty little
creature known as Hoshiko bloomed into splendor as Madame
Shijiro--perhaps because she had no thought--absolutely none--for
anything but him. And he was daily more and more amazed at the number of
thoughts he spent upon her, who, he had once fancied, he could leave
behind for some one else--for many others.
Indeed, it came to such a state that he had little thought for anything
but her. The military death was forgotten--Yoné was.
"Now if we dream," he laughed to her one day, "take heed that we do not
wake. For this dream is such as I have never dreamed before. In it are
perfumes and melodies, caresses and touches, passions and calms, sleeps
and wakings, and all delights."
"And you," laughed his wife, flinging herself upon him.
"And you," he laughed back, not putting her away.
"And that thing the foreigners call love."
"Grown larger in our sunny East than they know it in their chilly West!"
added her husband.
TO THE EMPEROR
XVIII
TO THE EMPEROR
But the little paradise she had made for him there was one day invaded
by two soldiers with some mysterious order, the command of which was
that he must rejoin his regiment at once, though there was now no war.
"It is 'on to the emperor,'" laughed Arisuga, "and I must go. I had
forgotten--thank _you_! Forgotten the emperor! The death!"
"Is it far to the emperor?" asked his little wife.
"Yes," sighed and laughed Arisuga, rubbing her cheek against his--you
know they were of precisely the same height.
"And there is danger?"
"Oh, yes," said her husband, indifferently.
"If you should be killed, you will let me know at once?"
"Certainly, I will tell you myself," laughed he. "For what is that
killing to this going away from you!"
"Oh--it is not so sad as waiting--waiting--waiting--for you to come
again! Have I made you happy?"
"As a god," he said.
"Then, if you should not be killed--you will come back to be happy
again?"
"Nothing but death shall keep me from you!"
"Swear--by your eyes--by your heart--by your soul--by your mother's,
your father's memory!"
All of which he did--still laughing.
"What more, beloved one?"
"Only your own sweet word, my beautiful lord, that you will come back.
Say this: 'Beloved who loves me more than the rest in Buddha's bosom,
and whom I love as much--' That is true, is it not?"
"That is true," he laughed.
"'I will come back at the first moment of opportunity, if I live, to
my--wife!'"
He repeated this after her.
"Now go! The waiting will be ecstasy. Go! The sooner you go, the sooner
you will return. I am not afraid. I am your wife. You have said it. Here
or there, in the earths or the heavens! For all your lives--all, all!
And I will be no other man's wife while I live! Or after death. And some
day you shall have a son--like you in everything!--to keep the lamps
alight when you are dead. For there will be for you a soldier's shrine.
Now go or my heart will burst. And remember that in China or America or
Germany I am your wife! But in Japan I am an eta--and you. Remember!
Some day there will be a son, some day--_soon_!"
For if nothing else would bring him back, she thought this untrue
promise would!
And so they parted--she pulling him back and pushing him off--there by
the Sacred City he had helped to win--until she closed her eyes and
clenched her hands and flung herself on the ground, face down, and would
not touch or speak to him again. When he was out of sight she was sorry,
and ran to the roof whence she could see the hills. There he was,
walking between the two soldiers! And he turned because she so
desperately wished him to--the gods made him do it, of this she was
certain--and waved a hand to her; and with both of hers she sent after
him all the blessings of the immortal gods.
"I will--I will be brave," she cried terribly to Isonna, who had said
nothing. "I will be brave as he!"
"But how can we when all our life has gone yonder!"
And the maid sobbed in utter abandon.
"You love him too? You! Isonna, the savage, the eta, the man-hater! The
declaimer against him, and me, and love! You! Oh, gods!"
"Yes," whined the maid.
"Come," cried her mistress, with tears and laughter. "He shall have two
widows!"
She embraced her maid violently enough for bodily injury.
"Oh, is not the world beautiful!" cried Hoshiko. "I, who never hoped to
be a wife at all, am the wife of a god. And he who had no thought of one
goes yonder leaving two widows! Oh, girl brute, we are his wife for all
his dear lives! Yes, we will be brave! We are a soldier's wife!"
ON MIYAGI FIELD
XIX
ON MIYAGI FIELD
But the mystery of his summoning was no more than this: One morning the
regiment was aligned on Miyagi field, in parade uniforms, and in such a
tremendous spirit as was never before known. Yet no one seemed to
understand the purpose of it. And, there, at about the centre of all the
glory, was Shijiro Arisuga himself, with his beloved colors once more
above his head--the same that he had twice fallen and risen with! Pale
he was, and ill-looking still. And the bandage on his head yet smelled
of drugs--for this excitement was a bit too much for him after the quiet
of China. Nevertheless it is not safe to let you fancy how happy little
Arisuga was--nor how his heart thumped. You will be likely to fall short
of the fact.
Now, far away on his right, came a glittering cavalcade, and the
regiment began to sing with the bands massed in his front: first, his
own exultant song, then the Kimi Gayo--hoarse, iron, terrible--announced
the coming of the emperor of Japan. This gave way to acclaim, and, to
the mongolian roll of on-coming "Banzais!" the emperor galloped down the
line, with all his resplendent suite, and, by all the gods, stopped
directly in front of Arisuga and faced the regiment! At that the singing
stopped and the playing of the bands, and there was that silence before
the sovereign which is more impressive than any acclaim. All the colors
of the regiment were trooped in a little square before Arisuga into
which the emperor rode--all the colors but his, whereat he wondered.
To his last day the little color-guard does not know precisely what
happened after his name was called.
"Shijiro Arisuga, attention! Forward! To the emperor!"
Though choked with amazement, the little color-guard forgot nothing of
his mechanical duty. At "Attention!" his flag went straighter, higher,
his chest bulged, his legs grew stiff, and his hand flew to his visor.
"Forward to the emperor!" and, almost unconscious with his emotion, he
yet stepped straightly forward until he stood directly in the Presence.
He knew that before him was a white horse with very pink nostrils, which
gently raised and lowered a hoof, now and then. That on the horse sat a
grave, sad man, the plumes of whose kepi, as he looked kindly down upon
the little color-guard, half veiled his eyes.
A bit of a smile grew there as his sovereign, for the first time, saw
how small he was. Arisuga did not know the reason for that smile, but he
felt it all through, and a tear started to his eyes. For you will
remember that he was not meant for a soldier, but for simple and
beautiful things.
Then Mutsuhito spoke to him.
"Shijiro Arisuga, the emperor is proud of such sons as you! Let him
never regret his pride. It is upon you and such as you that the empire
rests and must always rest. Be steadfast in your patriotism. No one in
the army bears so great a responsibility as he who guards the colors.
With them in sight my sons will follow anywhere--everywhere. When they
are down, their guiding-star has set. For your flag is your whole
country, all your ancestors, your myriad gods, your emperor--your all!
And every eye watches it! Twice in battle, you have raised your flag
when it has fallen. The circumstances show great valor. Your emperor has
a thousand eyes. He is everywhere, and always he knows and sees all the
acts of his sons. He knows and has seen yours. And for them he decorates
you with the order--"
Shijiro Arisuga's sick head drooped upon his breast and would hold no
more. But presently he knew that the glittering cavalcade had wheeled
and was out of sight, that the colors had returned to their places, that
the regiment singing again his song was marching home, and that, for a
very inadequate reason to him, he wore a medal over his heart and was
nominated by the emperor himself Hero!
Well, that was all. But for the third time Shijiro Arisuga was certain
that the happiest moment of his life had come--as well as that he had
made a tremendous fool of himself. The tears rolled down his face all
the way to the barracks.
But after that do you suppose he would ever let the flag go down? Do you
suppose that he could love anything more than his colors? Well, you are
to judge at the end. For now this last obligation was added to that
which first made him a soldier. And the gods, his ancestors, his father,
the emperor, the world, looked always on!
Whatever we may think, it was true that this tremendous moment blotted
out all others. Long ago he had forgotten Yoné. Now he forgot Hoshiko.
He saw before him nothing but the sun-gilt path of glory. The emperor,
the flag, the gods, the shades, his father's honor, were in his
thoughts, and nothing of love.
THE FADED GLORY
XX
THE FADED GLORY
But presently the glory faded (alas! nothing fades more quickly than
glory!) and Arisuga thought again of Hoshiko. Yet it was still good to
be back among those whose trade like his own was war. And there were
pretty words to listen to--which made the heart swell--and friends
joyously to caress one, and others to recount one's courage--for at
least two weeks: then all was as before, and Arisuga had only his medal
as a surety that all the heroic splendor of Miyagi Field had ever been.
It was then that he began not only to think of but to wish for
Hoshiko--her hands--her voice--her laughter. In another week he would
have given it all for these! And he had sworn to go back. But how could
he--now? It was like open treason. Yea, so it is! Glory may fill our
lives for a while, but presently it becomes smaller than a woman's
steadfast love--as it is smaller. Then he began to think of bringing
Hoshiko to Japan. There was that theory, you will remember, that in the
army there were neither samurai nor eta--only soldiers. Only sons of the
emperor! Understand what that means--to be a son of the emperor. Yet no
one but a Japanese can. Remember that the emperor is a god!
The yearning for Hoshiko grew upon him until he knew that he must do
something definitive. Either she must come to him, or he must go to her,
or he must forget her. Forget her! For three nights he strove to keep
her out of his thoughts. When she came he would sing--shout madly. But
she came quite easily through the songs. Then he cursed--everything
which had conspired to bring about his unhappy status, pausing only
before the emperor. She came smiling, seductive, through the curses.
Then he remembered the kindly face of the emperor and took a moment's
hope. He would understand, and perhaps permit him to live in China. But
when he told Zanzi his hope, that officer grew savage:--
"What! After the emperor has decorated you, touched you, you
want--actually _want_--to go away from him? Adopt another country? Sir,
if he should know that you have such small purposes, I think he would
recall your medal."
Then he thought it might be looked at differently, if they knew that he
was married. Especially if they could see Hoshiko. Of course this was
impossible, since she could not come to Japan. But he felt that, if he
could interest his colonel in the facts, he could give him an adequate
description of Hoshiko. No one, he thought, need know that she was an
eta. Having secured so much, he would intimate that he had no intention
of adopting another country, but that the air of China was necessary for
his recovery; that the retrogression in his convalescence, which all
noticed and spoke of, was because of the now unaccustomed air of Japan.
He told Colonel Zanzi tentatively, not that he was married--but that he
wished to marry. Zanzi was opposed to marriage for soldiers.
"I am sorry," grinned the colonel, with a shrug. "Why must you many? It
is peace. Are the yoshiwara and Geisha street empty?"
"I have given my promise," said Arisuga.
"Oh, well," replied the colonel, with the air of dismissing a hopeless
and useless topic, "if she is a samurai--"
"I have not inquired concerning that," said the color-bearer,
untruthfully.
"But you must," said the officer, sharply.
"The old order is no more," quoted Arisuga against him. "I have heard
you say yourself, Colonel Zanzi, that in the army there is neither eta
nor samurai,--only sons of the emperor."
"In time of war, yes," finished the colonel. "We need them all then.
But, these are times of peace. And the old order lives always. I have
never said otherwise. You, sir, the son of a samurai who died at Jokoji,
even if he died on the wrong side, ought not to need to be told that.
Sir, no member of this regiment marries below his caste! If you are
thinking of such a thing, I regret it. Your decision lies between this
woman and the emperor, who gives you life, and who, when he accepts you
as his son, takes back that life again to himself to dispose of at his
will. You cannot have forgotten the samurai obligation,--not to live
under the same heavens nor to tread the same earth with the enemy of
your lord. You must leave it, or the enemy must. This woman, sir, puts
herself in opposition to your emperor. She is, therefore, his enemy, and
consequently yours. Nevertheless the emperor is gracious. He leaves the
choice to his sons. But they must take the consequences. Good morning,
sir."
But the color-bearer did not move. He stood there still with his hand to
his forehead.
"Good morning!" thundered the colonel.
And even that could not frighten him. He was momentously deciding
between the emperor and Hoshiko.
"I desire to say, sir, that I shall not marry," said Arisuga.
"I am glad to hear it. The soldier who marries is a fool."
And therefore the little color-guard set himself to fight again, and to
the end, against the invincible thing called love. It makes me smile as
I think of it. Who has ever vanquished it? At first he stubbornly
thought of other battles he had fought and won. But he was surprised
that this brought no courage to the new kind of conflict. She came in
the visions of night, like the sappers and miners, when he was least
defended against her, smiling, beckoning. He could see her and touch
her, and know that she was at his side.
Now all things mightily conspired to make that thing he had once thought
of in China--a temporary alliance,--a going away, an easy forgetting,
another marriage, many--to be more fully than he could have hoped.
It was only necessary that he should remain in Japan. Time would do the
rest. He used to wonder, in the night, under the stars, how long it
would take her to understand, then forget, then to take another husband.
He never got over this latter without waking his sleeping comrade by a
certain wild violence of passion.
He thought of it with a pitying laugh at himself--now mad to go back
where he was denied the going--to have her there who must not
come--whose coming would be ruin.
One night he spoke wildly to this comrade:--
"I tell you that she will never forget, never take another: if she did,
I would kill her! But I am the liar and the scoundrel--I. She chose
me." Concerning which interruptions of his repose his sleeping-mate
continued to complain to headquarters.
A dozen times he sat down to write to her. But what comfort was that? It
was herself he wanted: the bodily presence which could softly touch him,
the voice which could gently speak to him, all the beauty which he might
see! A dozen times he threw the unfinished letter from him.
And so, finally, this fight against Hoshiko became a rout. Every night,
when he should have slept, it came on--like an enemy who knew the time
and place of the weakness of his adversary. If there had only been no
nights to fight through! At last his bunk-mates so complained of him
that the doctor sent him to live out of the barracks, where he would
disturb no one. He had a small house to himself.
But in this new solitude she came and stayed and possessed him. She made
him again to possess her. She was there always. The night mattered no
more. He saw her eyes in the dusk, heard her voice in daylight. He
often parted the shoji--sometimes to find vacancy--when his mood was
practical and he had slept well; but often when he had not eaten or
slept, and the visions came--to have her swiftly in his arms.
Presently a certain infidelity came and lodged in him, and the knowledge
of it spread through the army.
"What a spirit must that be of the emperor--the gods--the
augustnesses--even a father waiting in the Meido--which would not permit
him to have one small woman!"
That is what he publicly said. And, worse, he had once thought of
throwing his medal into the moat near by and of escaping to China. Of
deserting the emperor he had doubly sworn to serve. His gods, his
father, the shades. Perhaps there was but one thing in the old days,
worse than the eta--the deserter. He thought of this and took terrible
pause.
Finally it was known in the army that Arisuga was mad--quite mad. The
wound in his head had done it. His talk was of a woman: an houri, if
ever there was one, should his talk of her be believed. He had cursed
the gods, reviled the augustnesses, the spirit of his father, the
emperor who had pinned the medal on his coat. Certainly Shijiro Arisuga
was mad. He himself heard this, and thought to take a cunning advantage
of it. If he were mad, he would be invalided, and then he would see
China again.
IN THE ANDON'S LIGHT
XXI
IN THE ANDON'S LIGHT
But one night there came a gentle tapping on his shoji--like the dream.
He sat up and listened. There was more tapping--still like the dream.
And then a whispered voice--not the dream--which woke him to mutiny:--
"Ani-San! Beloved! Do you no more wish me? Oh, it is so long--so long!
And we have walked--walked--walked. I would rather know and die. At
first I thought you dead--you said nothing but that should keep you from
me--death! death! And I could not sleep--I never slept! At last I
decided to come and get your body, steal it out of the grave, and take
it back with me, where I might weep over it and make the offerings--only
your dear, dead body I have loved and which has loved me--lain down by
my side, held me in its arms! And so I came with Isonna--faithful Isonna
is here--and learned that you are not dead, and all the glory. O
beloved! My soul swells with joy of you. You, mine, once mine, so
glorious in the eyes of our country! For, oh, Ani-San, it is _my_
country, too! They shall not take that from me, though it makes me an
outcast. And my feet touch it now. My country! Nippon! Nippon! After all
the evil years of exile. My emperor! My gods! Forgive me, beloved, but
it must all come out of my heart, or it will burst. I know you are
there. I know you listen! I see--touch--adore--your shadow. I have seen
_you_! I have hid in the trees--Isonna and me--for three days, until we
are very hungry and have begged rice. Three times--on each day--we have
seen you. Three nights we have watched your dear shadow. Once it prayed
and then rushed upon the outside and spoke loudly to the heavens--words
which we could not hear. Were they of me? Were they hate or love?
To-night I touch your shadow--put my lips upon it on the paper.
For--yes--I know that is all I am ever to have: the shadow of you. You
do not wish me! That is what my mother said; and laughed. She struck me
and said her words concerning you had all come true. Ah, pardon, lord.
What matter that? It is three days! Three days! We could not die until
the moon was dark; for some one, passing, might see and find our bodies.
But I am glad for those three days. Now the moon is gone--the moon which
sees our deeds and tells them to the gods of night; and, lord, only
to-night, when the moon was gone, could I come to you to say
farewell--Ani-San, to-night we die--Isonna and I. Unless you still wish
me? No! Pardon that. But--if you should! Ah! if you should! Speak one
word though it be Go! Only one word, that I may die in the blessed sound
of your voice! Oh, it has been so lonely! For you first taught me how to
be happy--to laugh, to love. And then you went, and took it all
away--all, all away. Beloved, you do not wish us--No? so, to-night we
die. We shall not harm you, even in our death. As long as this little
paper wall is between us you are not contaminated even while we live. No
one will know us in this far land; and we shall die where no one will
ever find us; only the gods, only the pitying gods. So we do not harm
you in coming here. We would not have come had we known you lived.
Ani-San, it is finished--all quite finished; you wish me no more. I hear
no blessed word. Lo! I listen--listen with my soul--but I hear no word!
All the gods in all the skies bless you. All the gods in all the skies
make you happy. All the gods in all the skies make you glorious.
Ani-San, beloved, farewell, forever and forever, farewell!"
At first the little color-bearer put his hands madly to his ears; but
not for long. Could you? And at the end he heard her sink slowly to the
earth, slipping, sighing, down the shoji.
At that moment he would have had her if the empire itself had fallen for
it. He did not wait to part the shoji. He plunged through them as he had
done once before in China. And there at his feet was the pitiful little
heap. Too numb she was to be wakened by his tumult.
He carried her within and laid her in the lamplight. The pretty face was
ghastly with starvation. The feet were nearly bare, for walking had worn
out her sandals. The kimono was one he knew. But it had been in the rain
and had trailed many tired miles in the dust. He did not need the light
of the andon to tell him of her sufferings. Nor even her voice. And
presently when she woke it was not of that she told. Indeed, of that she
never spoke. It was all forgotten in that waking in his arms. And all
she said--all she ever said of it--was to ask him, with a breath, if she
dreamed.
She slept a little, then woke and said with terror:--
"Isonna!"
"Yes, beloved," answered Arisuga. "Where is she? You have slept
sweetly."
"Has the clock struck?"
"The clock has struck."
"Then she is dead," whispered Hoshiko. "She was to die first--when the
clock struck. And I was sleeping--sweetly, you said. Oh, gods! Go to the
moat. I will pray."
At the moat there was nothing but some pebbles dislodged where small
feet might have tracked. Some fresh soil was uncovered, where two large
stones had been taken. One was gone, the other waited at the edge of the
waters. And in this he knew how the manner of their death had been
planned. Each was to take a great stone in her small arms and wade into
the moat until--At the piteous picture he who had seen death by
thousands choked in his throat and followed Isonna into the water.
But it was too late--much too late. And so he left her there, where she
had chosen to be, for him and for Hoshiko, quite at rest, with her
burden still clasped strongly in her arms, and only a little prayer to
Buddha--nembutsu--Isonna!
TADAIMA--TADAIMA!
XXII
TADAIMA--TADAIMA!
It was three days before she could smile. Then she said wanly:--
"What will you do with _me_, Ani-San? Must I die, too? You cannot go
back to China with me."
"By all the gods in all the skies we shall part no more! We can
die--yes--together--but part never!"
"Alas! that is all we can do now, beloved, for I have harmed you in
coming here."
"You have brought me the happiness I do not deserve. I will never again
put it in jeopardy."
But you are to understand that even that, dying together, perhaps, with
her obi binding them close to each other, walking arm in arm, into the
sea, or the moat, until they could but dimly know that the sun was yet
in the heavens, on through the green water, more and more dim unto
darkness, peace, sleep--you are to understand that this, death with him,
was next in its sweetness to life with him.
He meant to go to the colonel; but not yet. You remember how she raped
those few days of happiness out of the very hand of fate in China. So
now Arisuga said Tadaima! Wait!
For again his little wife had to have a trousseau, and she was yet very
weak and tired. And on the way she had sold her pretty hair-pins for
food--these had to be replaced. But so potent is happiness, that it was
not three days more till all her loveliness had returned and bloomed
again--just in time to be adorned by the new kimono of blue crêpe, and
the new kanzashi of tortoise-shell and gold.
Still it was Tadaima!
For three days more Arisuga lived in his paradise and then went
resolutely to the colonel.
"I am married," he said bluntly, with his salute.
"What?" roared the colonel.
"I was married when I was here before."
Finally the officer smiled. That is the way he would have been likely
to do it at the color-bearer's age.
"I remember that you said you did not mean to marry! You _were_ married!
Well, well, if she is a samurai--"
"She is an eta," said Arisuga. "That one in China."
"Ah! After a little while you can divorce her. No one need know of it."
"I beg your pardon."
"You will not?"
"I cannot."
"You understand your position the moment this becomes public?"
"You cannot make me an eta in the army. I am a soldier."
"You will ask for a furlough. Time indefinite upon recall. It will be
granted," said Zanzi, coldly.
This was the color-bearer's dismissal from the regiment. For a moment he
could not speak.
"You are too ill for service," continued the colonel, less coldly. "If,
however, you should think it best to take my advice, let me know of your
recovery."
"I thank you, sir," said Arisuga, chokingly, "it is impossible. The
flag--my flag--?" he begged.
"Good morning," said the officer; "I will find some one for the flag."
But, after he was gone the colonel determined to see what manner of
woman this was who could make Arisuga give up his flag. Orojii had said,
in China, that she was pretty! He pictured her an Amazon, with
tremendous force, and painted cheeks, who had enslaved the little
color-bearer, and he meant to exhibit his authority against hers and
save Arisuga from her.
"It is always so," he was thinking as he arrived at the little house, in
some haste to be ahead of Arisuga, "a little fellow like Shijiro is sure
to choose some woman twice his size for a wife, and to be under her
thumb ever after."
You may fancy, therefore, his surprise, when a little flower of a maiden
pushed aside the door for him, and, to his question, announced that she
was Shijiro's wife. For a moment the colonel did not speak. Tremendous
readjustment was necessary. In the meantime she had led him within.
"Sit down," she said. "I will bring you some tea. My husband will be
here very soon. He has gone to see his colonel. Alas! you must sit on
the floor in the Japanese fashion. We have none of the new foreign
chairs!"
In an instant she had the tea before him.
"I do not care for tea," said the soldier. "I am Colonel Zanzi."
"His colonel!" gasped the little wife. "And--and--you have come to be--"
"As kind to you as I can be," said the soldier, hastily. "Be at peace!"
"Oh! Is it true?" The tears ran over her eyes at once. "You know? And
yet you will be kind? Oh, Jizo--that is my favorite goddess--look upon
you! But you will smoke a little? See, here is my own pipe." She
cleansed it and filled it and put it to his lips, and he who smoked only
cigars smoked Hoshi's little metal pipe. "And he is not disgraced? I
have not ruined him? No! Or you would not be here smoking my pipe. You
would be savage. You would wish to kill me. Oh, I know he is the
emperor's and you, also, even me! I know how that is. Everything for the
emperor! Wives! Children! Even parents! Why, was it not Akima Chinori
who killed his child, which was too small to be left alone, so that he
might obey the call? 'I have given you life,' so says the imperial call,
'now give it back to me.' But I will not harm him. I will help him to be
a soldier. Oh, I am brave! You cannot think how brave. It is only
waiting, waiting, waiting, that I cannot endure. Do you know that we
were married away down there? And that Arisuga-Sama left me to go to the
emperor? Did you know that? And that it was I came to him? He did not
bring me. I meant to die here without harm to him. But only Isonna died.
He is not to blame."
"Who was Isonna?" asked the soldier.
"She was my little maid. She was to die first when the clock struck, die
there in the moat--then I. But first I came to see his shadow on the
shoji--touch it. Say farewell. To hear a word, if there were one. I am
afraid I wept, fainted with hunger, and he heard me and took me in and
kept me. He _did_ wish me! He _did!_ But Isonna was dead. Yes, while I
slept in his arms! Dead for us. The tea is very good, excellency?"
And because she put it into his hands with that fear in her great eyes,
and because of that shaking of the little hand, and that chattering
story in the quavering voice, and those tears, he drank the tea, who
drank only hot brandy.
"Do you mean to say that Isonna killed herself so that--so that--"
Even the grizzled soldier choked at the thought.
"So that no disgrace might come to him. And I--I, also, should have
died--before he knew. Then he would not have been harmed. As long as the
thin paper was between us he was safe--safe as if I were yet in China.
But you do not know how sweet that was--to sleep in his arms, to wake in
his arms--with the words he spoke that night he married me again in my
ears? But while I slept the clock struck. Ah, you know him only as a
soldier! I know him as a lover! A husband! A god!"
Still this soldier, brought up to the religion of sacrifice, thought of
the serving-woman sacrificially dead there in the moat.
"Was Isonna an eta, too?"
"She was an eta, too," said Hoshiko.
"Gods! And we think you lack spirit--courage--devotion!"
"No! We are brave!" she said piteously. "We are as ready as you to die
for the emperor! If you will only learn to let us!"
"I believe you!" said Zanzi.
"Shall I tell you?" she begged. "He is not at fault. Let me plead for
him!"
"Yes, tell me," he said.
But she could only repeat the old story:--
"We came because we thought he was dead--he said that only death should
keep him from us--to take his body back with us--only his dear, dead
body. That would have been no disgrace. For the Lord Buddha does not
permit any one to disgrace the dead who cannot help themselves. But when
we knew that he was alive, we knew also that, by coming to Japan, we had
harmed him. Then we meant to die without him knowing, keeping always the
thin wall between us. Where no one could find us after. But I could not
without one word of farewell to his shadow--only his shadow! And one
word from him--if there was one. That would not harm him. Oh, yes, I
knew that I must not touch his body in Japan! But his shadow! Was that
harm? And one word? Would not you have touched his shadow? And he _did_
wish me--he _did_! And then--I woke in his arms!
"But the clock had struck while I slept. Eight. And that was the signal
for Isonna to take a stone in her arms and walk into the moat. And
Isonna was faithful. For there he found her afterward, asleep, with the
gods, the great stone in her arms. And that one I was to take is still
there, on the edge of the moat, waiting. But now I cannot die. He has
made my life sweet again. Would you die with life all sweet again, as
the morning glories in the morning? So the stone must wait there.
Perhaps he and I shall carry it together. For, so he says, we shall die,
together, rather than part again."
"You shall not part. Would you like to go to America?" asked the
officer.
"No. Nowhere but here."
For America to her was the country of the barbarians--a horrid waste,
where no flowers grew.
"But if your husband should go there?"
"Yes!"
It did not matter then.
The colonel rose.
"Tell him to come to see me again."
"And you will be as kind to him as you have been to me?"
"No," smiled the colonel. "He doesn't deserve it. He doesn't deserve
you." But, then, seeing that she did not quite understand his
pleasantry, he added: "I shall be as kind to him as I can be, as I am
permitted to be, for your sake. And you are to tell him that!"
"Shaka, and all the augustnesses bless you!"
He held the tiny hands a moment at parting.
"Once I knew a little lady like you. It was long ago, and there is a
tomb for her in Asakusa. Perhaps she was _not_ like you, not as lovely.
But so it seems now--after the years. If she had not died, I would not
have been a soldier."
And no one had ever heard the grizzled colonel's voice so soft.
She sent Arisuga back. But she did not tell him that.
THE PITY OF THE GODS
XXIII
THE PITY OF THE GODS
There seemed little kindness in Colonel Zanzi's greeting when Arisuga
arrived. He did not even look up.
"You will be transferred to a Hakodate regiment," he said in a monotone;
"they are ruffians, but good soldiers. You will report to your new
regiment when you are recalled. Your furlough must be spent in America
and in communication with headquarters."
This was exile, but mitigated by every possible circumstance.
"Sir," said Arisuga, with emotion, "I do not deserve this
consideration."
"No," answered his colonel; "but your wife does."
Have I let you suppose that Hoshiko accepted all this perilous happiness
without question? No Japanese woman ever does that. It is true that, at
first, there was no thought--there could be none. The gods had put them
both suddenly into a position from which they could not retreat. But
after that, when thought came, and Hoshiko knew that it had all been for
her, and how much it was that he had given--then she began to prepare
her recompense. To you it would have been a strange one, but it was not
so to her. What she had taken beyond her share from the universal
happiness, that she would balance with such suffering as came.
What she had taken from him, the shade of his father, that she would
restore. What he stood in danger of losing because of her, that she
would insure against loss. And the gods would help her. For they always
heeded such constant and faithful praying as she meant to render. At
last she knew that they would. For they sent her a sign. But before I
speak of that I must go on and make plain what her purpose came finally
to be. Nothing less than to make sure in some way (she waited on the
gods to make the way plain to her) that since she prevented Shijiro from
dying for his emperor in his father's stead, his reparation should come
about in some other way--perhaps some way not thought of as yet--even
by the gods. All she could do now was to pray that if he should die the
small white death, the gods would send _her_ some sort of reincarnation
in which _she_ might accomplish his purpose, though he were dead. And of
course, whether she survived him or not, this was possible, to the
immortal gods. But I think she had no idea that she--she herself--might
herself be the instrument--that the gods meant anything as strange and
startling as that--nor that her reincarnation might be in the very form
of her husband while she yet lived. She would not be likely to think of
precisely that. Until that day of the sign from heaven itself--that day
while they were playing as children might do on the mats. Their feet
were against the groove which held the fusuma. The little soldier
reached upward above his head.
"I can touch the other mat," laughed Arisuga.
"And I," laughed his wife, doing the same.
"What!" cried the soldier. "I am taller than you are."
Then Hoshiko understood that she ought not to have said that. It was
heinous to make herself the equal of her lord in anything.
"No, lord," she hastened to say, "I lied--a little lie--while we
sported. I am sorry."
"It is no lie," laughed happy Arisuga once more; for you will remember
that all her daintiness was then his, and that he was not like other
Japanese husbands; "we are exactly the same height."
"No, no, no, lord," pleaded Hoshiko, who fearfully knew that it was so,
"you are much taller than miserable small me."
And, to prove it, she bent her knees within her kimono and stood beside
him, for he had risen to prove the matter.
But he detected the bent knees and straightened them, and, lo! there was
not a shadow of difference in their height.
And when the little soldier laughed and was very happy about it, she
laughed too, timorously at first, then more joyously than he. For to be
his equal in something, and to see him happy about it--well, she
supposed that no Japanese girl had ever before such felicity, and
perhaps she was right.
So, in their playing and laughter, he cried:
"And I shall be punished for my haughty spirit in thinking I was, and
you shall be rewarded for the humility of yours in thinking you were
not."
And the manner of this punishment and reward was for him to strip off
her kimono and put it on himself, and his uniform and put it on her. Oh,
you may be sure that she tried to fly in her terror of him, that she
fought and wept and at last utterly exhausted had to let him have his
way--even to tucking her splendid hair under his military cap. She lay
there happily crushed and disgraced until he had made himself so like
her that she hardly knew him.
But she would not see herself until he brought the mirror and told her
that he was looking at himself. Then she looked, and it was true. With
staring eyes she stood upon her feet and passed the mirror up and down.
Then suddenly she saw the smiling face of a god in the mirror also, and
knew that this was to be the fashion of the reincarnation she had begged
of the gods.
She whispered her husband to look into the mirror.
"There is the face of a god there!"
Arisuga looked and laughed, but saw no god.
"It is the reflection of your Jizo," he said, pointing to the goddess
behind her.
But Hoshiko said it was not that. For, you see, she knew what it was,
and her husband did not--and must not--the sign.
Now after that Shijiro Arisuga was amazed, considering the terrors out
of which it had first been accomplished, to find his little wife often
in his uniform. And more, to learn that this gentle creature was mad for
the learning which is a soldier's. Of course it was great sport in this
happy time, and Arisuga taught her all he knew!--how to stand and step
and march, to load and fire and intrench herself, and all the hoarse
songs and sayings of the army--among others that battle song of his. But
most of all he taught her how to carry the sun-flag, and how to keep it,
nay, how to retake it if it should be captured--which, however, he
instructed her, illogically, must never happen.
"Our method of advance," he told her, "is never in thick fat lines--such
delectable food for the shrapnel. One at a time we run to a position we
have fixed in advance. Then we dig. Sometimes there are as many as five
all scattered--never more. After digging holes we make another rapid
advance and do the same, and then, again, until there are three chains
of holes parallel to the enemy. Then other troops advance. They have the
first holes to hide in. They make them deeper and wider and advance as
we did until we have a solid line out near the enemy, the holes being
joined to form a trench. And by that time there are two such trenches to
our rear for those who support us--or to retire to--"
Here he laughed, and added impressively:--
"If that should ever become necessary. But a Japanese soldier goes only
in one direction--forward where the flag is. And as to the flag," he
went on, "that goes forward with the first advance, like this--"
He rolled it into a ball.
"But, once it is there, the lines formed, the advance ordered, it is
raised, like this, so that the artillery know where we are when they
fire at the enemy. So," he laughed happily, "when you take my flag
forward, you will go like this--"
He made her run with bent supple back the length of the apartment.
"Drop like this; now there is nothing but a small lump of earth to see;
dig like this, lying on the flag, and so on till, out there, in the
first trench, you raise it never to return with it. Then you will hear
the bursting of the gates of all the hells. For our enemies are stupid
and never understand, until they see the flag, what our purpose is, then
they waste their ammunition and we _use_ ours. But then it is too late
for them and it is ours only to go forward and defeat them, led by the
sun-flag."
There was nothing of this which the girl did not treasure up. And
Arisuga laughed, she laughed, and he never asked or wondered why.
THE LAND OF THE BRAVE
XXIV
THE LAND OF THE BRAVE
So, presently, they were in America. On the way over they were quite
happy once more.
"For there are no etas in America," said Hoshiko.
But there _was_ the Japan Society in America, which turned its back on
them, etas, whereby they were left in a strange land, with only a
strange language and half pay, all of which would have been beggarly
enough.
However, that is how it happened that Moncure Jones, who had made a
sudden fortune and wanted a Japanese butler, became the happy master of
Arisuga. He had found them in one of his "raids" upon southern New York,
where they had a little room and were starving and studying the
language.
Arisuga told his small wife one day that the thing called divorce was
going on in the Jones household and in the courts. They laughed
together about it. Divorce in America meant something very different
from what it did in their country. It appeared that it had been preceded
by tremendous quarrels in the house of Jones, of which Arisuga was a
witness, and an amazed one. For Mrs. Jones had rather the better of the
quarrelling.
"It is not certain that the divorce will be granted by the judges," said
Arisuga.
"Do they make people live together who do not wish to?" asked his wife.
"So it seems," laughed Shijiro.
From day to day Arisuga went with Jones to the courts to testify of the
quarrelling. Then one day he told Hoshiko that the divorce would be
granted because of the cruel and barbarous treatment of Jones by his
wife. But even then the court was many months in doing what would have
been executed in a few minutes in their country.
Finally the decree was perfect and Jones needed a housekeeper. He asked
Arisuga if he knew of one as efficient as he was. He spoke to Hoshiko.
An income was more and more needed to provide the money for his return
when his summons should come. For it had surprised them, in the
auriferous American country, how their expenditures grew and their
income failed.
Well, it pleased Hoshiko: for there would be only so much more time in
her husband's company. Shijiro's time spent with Jones had grown much
more than the time spent with her. Indeed, it was here where the rift
began to show in the little lute of their joy. For Shijiro also learned
some habits in America, save for which they would have had a fair start
on their fund for the return: he gambled.
Jones, it seemed, was vexed with ennui. To teach Arisuga how to gamble,
and even to let him win, gave him both employment and amusement. Indeed,
with his little winnings, Arisuga began to feel opulent. He put away,
now and then, something for his return, and was more often in good
humor. And as he was happy, so was Hoshiko. For she always reflected
only him. Her one great unhappiness was that he was so constantly away
from her, and more and more so as the time went on, so that often he
forgot to come home to her for several days. Then he would explain that
he with Jones had been on a gambling tour.
So the little unhappiness which had threatened her life fled quite away
the moment she knew that Jones wanted an honorary housekeeper. In her
innocence she did not reason why he might want to set up such an
establishment. Nor did Shijiro.
JONES
XXV
JONES
Jones! He had watery gray eyes and thick lips. He stooped a trifle and
was not so shockingly firm in his gait as most Americans are. Yet he
would smile betimes, and then his mouth seemed armed with yellow fangs.
"Like the dragon on Hanayama," breathed Hoshiko, shivering herself into
Arisuga's arms the night after she had gone for inspection. "He smiled
at me."
"A smile is good," said Arisuga.
"You did not see that smile! It was not good!"
"Hereafter I shall watch it," laughed Shijiro.
For Jones's maiyi, or "look-at-meeting," as they called it in their own
language, Hoshiko had dressed her hair anew, put her best kanzashi into
it, brought out that worn but still beautiful kimono in which she had
been married, full still of the flower perfume of her maiden-hood, put
her feet into the tall, ceremonious geta of her own land, and so went,
quite in oriental state (Shijiro would have it so), in a hansom to Mr.
Moncure Jones. No wonder he stared and put on his glasses. In all his
sordid life Jones had not had so fresh a sensation as this. In all his
life he had seen no creature at once so dainty and fragile and splendid.
When they were home again, came that shuddering of which I have spoken.
And since Hoshiko did not at once take to his plan, but shuddered anew
whenever it was mentioned, Arisuga let her wait, putting Jones off,
until he could convince her rather than command her. For more than ever
it, presently, became necessary for her to go to Jones. Now, strangely,
since that day of the look-at-meeting Arisuga did not often win. On the
contrary Jones did, until there was not only nothing for the passage
being put aside, but a huge debt which appalled Arisuga. So that, in the
end, the only argument he used to Hoshiko was of Jones's wealth.
"I shall win yet--Jones-Sama says so--all I have lost and more in one
great stake. It is always so, therefore it is lucky to lose. I am not
downcast."
"But, O beloved, that smile!" pleaded the girl.
"Nevertheless Jones is rich," said Arisuga.
"Yet a dragon!" cried the girl.
"And I kill dragons which frighten little wives," laughed her husband,
without fear. "Besides," he said, "it is well to remember that otherwise
we shall not have the money for the passage when my call comes! You will
go? Yes, you will go. Let us make a friend of this Jones."
Suddenly Hoshiko saw the hand of the gods in this, also, and went to
Jones. Was not this a part of the way she had prayed to be shown? And
she had impiously rebelled! Because of her rebellion she went with a
certain alacrity.
Jones smiled often at Hoshiko. So often that Arisuga could not but
notice it.
"The yellow dragon of Hanayama covets the dove of Arisuga," he laughed.
"Yet doves are not good for dragons. This will be better."
He handed her the small toilet sword which Japanese women carry.
"I have heard," said Jones to Shijiro one day, "that Japanese husbands
often rent their wives to pay their debts."
"That is true, lord," bowed his little butler.
"For a year, don't you know, or six months, or something like that?"
"It is true, lord," repeated the butler.
"And that the wives really like it?"
"True, lord," answered Arisuga.
"They don't lose caste after the--er--debt has been paid, but go back to
their husbands?"
"True, lord."
"Well, that's a pretty sensible arrangement. You Jap chaps are always
sensible; and"--the yellow fangs came out--"I am your creditor for a
couple of thousand dollars. Arisuga, I am willing to be so paid and to
pay you a couple more thousand than you owe me! Then your passage will
be safe. I don't believe, now, it will be otherwise. I have got you in
too deep a hole."
Jones laughed hoarsely at his own cunning.
Arisuga received the suggestion as he would have received an unimportant
business proposition.
"I will consider and let the enlightened eijinsan know," he said. This,
also, as if it were the mere oriental courtesy of bargaining--the sloth
which is polite.
"I guess it will be all right," laughed Jones. "Take your time. No one
is proof against the blandishments of American gold. Even oriental
virtue yields to it. Don't you think it will be all right?"--a bit
anxiously.
"Let the honorable American lord so think," said Arisuga. "I will
consider."
"I shan't be niggardly, understand. If you are not satisfied with a
couple of thousands, we'll make it a quartette. She is about the dearest
little morsel I have ever seen."
"Ha, ha!" laughed Arisuga, with American politeness, this time.
"Ha, ha!" laughed Jones.
And Hoshiko, taking her cue, laughed too, out of the palest face she had
ever had. For she was present--though she was not thought to know
English enough to understand what was said.
But that night Jones was awakened by something strange at his throat. It
was a steel blade--and an ominous Arisuga. In one hand he had a candle.
In the other Hoshiko's sharp little sword--close against his skin.
"Ha, ha!" laughed Arisuga.
Jones was in no laughing mood.
"Laugh!" said Arisuga.
Then Jones brought forth a sickly cachinnation which stopped at the
first note; for it made the sword to penetrate his skin.
"Lie still--quite still!" admonished the Japanese, with deadly quiet,
and Jones did not move a muscle for a moment, which seemed years.
Then the light went out and Jones expected death. But nothing happened.
He waited long. The sweat poured out until his bed was wet. He was
certain that he felt that blade still at his throat--and the little
stream of blood from it. But there was no more. He was not dead. At last
he cautiously put his hand out. It encountered nothing. Then he raised
it to his throat. Nothing was there. He leaped out of bed on the other
side. Nothing further happened. He did not even call for the police.
So the opportunity which Jones had seemed to offer for preparation to
return to Japan when the call came vanished, leaving only the vain thing
he had taught Arisuga--his little skill at cards. This he still tried to
use. But though he sometimes won, he more often lost. Yet he played on,
certain of the great luck which would not only recoup all in one night,
but establish his circumstances far beyond what they had ever been. It
was the old, old gambler's lust. It was the old, old consequence. Luck
seemed cruelly delayed, and they fell into desperate poverty.
And, worse than all, this--the gambler's fetish--was now the thing which
possessed him. But though he loved the life of chance for itself, he
never lost sight of the more and more frenzied necessity of providing
for his return. For, rumors of war began to hover in the air. Hoshiko
saw less and less of him. And he often forgot her for days together. If
he were mad, for another reason, in Japan, he was mad equally in
America.
Yet nothing was saved; always such pittances as he could raise, or she,
were spent upon the small gambling devices in which the city abounded,
no matter whether he had food or not. Presently his life was that and no
more: a vain search for luck. But miserable as it was, there was hope in
it, and a certain exhilaration. He was like one who has no doubt of
ultimate good fortune, and wakes daily with the uplifting thought that
this may be the grateful day. And his hope and happiness in it brought
hope and happiness, in the brief whiles it reigned, to Hoshiko, where
happiness came of late not often. Nor hope.
THE "TSAREVITCH"
XXVI
THE "TSAREVITCH"
So the little exiles lived and starved, and feasted and loved on; happy
sometimes, sorrowing more often, while Japan was yet at peace.
Always Arisuga kept his address at headquarters, and always he
waited--listened almost--for the call. But it was long--very long. And
his face grew sharp and his eyes narrow. And more and more in the
waiting and listening he forgot, in America, Hoshiko--his Eastern
Dream-of-a-Star.
For, presently, it was nearly ten years of this exile. Ten years of
prayer which grew only more fervid as the years doubled upon themselves,
and the hope so long deferred made the heart of Arisuga ill. Ten years
of yearning for their own country, which fate denied them and which
nothing but war could again give to them! The heart of Hoshiko
sickened, too. But it was thus because Arisuga more and more often
forgot her rather than with the homesickness which she suffered as he
did. Yet she guiltily knew that while there was no war she might keep
him, even though he forgot her. So it was he alone at last who prayed
for war. It was sacrilege to obstruct the gods; it was impossible to
pray to be kept from her own perfumed land, so--she stubbornly prayed
not at all.
And then it did come: the great war--though not as he had fancied it
would. Slowly it got into the air. Every day he spent at the bulletins.
But they said Japan would not fight. Russia was getting and would get
what she wished. She was too great for Japan. And some of the newspapers
began to pour contempt upon his country. She was baying the moon, one
said.
"What! are there no more samurai in Japan?" Arisuga cried out to his
wife that night. She did not reply. Her silence was almost guilt. For as
the threat of war went on, and as Arisuga grew older, he valued the more
what he had lost for her. "Gods," he proceeded with a hollow laugh, "I
am not a samurai myself. And I must wait my call to be even allowed to
fight."
"Forgive me, dear lord," said his wife. And the words and her attitude
recalled that other time she was servilely at his feet.
"Rise!" he commanded impatiently. "And do not call me lord. I am no
more--nothing more--than you--eta! It cannot be helped. We must suffer
it." But there were no caresses--there were never any now.
Then it came, quite according to Arisuga's fancy--a thunder-clap from
the heavens! Togo had sunk the "Tsarevitch"!
"At last," cried Arisuga, that day, "I am a soldier once more, if not a
samurai! A son of the emperor! Banzai!" And that night it seemed as if
all the old sweetness had come back and she slept in his arms as she had
used to sleep.
"All that remains now is the call," he said the next day, still happy.
He went to the consulate to see that they had his address correctly, but
on the way home he remembered that there was no money for the passage.
For, strangely, this passion of war had obliterated that other passion
of chance! He ran all the way.
"I must--I must," he said roughly to Hoshiko, "have money for the
passage! When my call comes I shall not be ready. And there is none!"
"I have not forgotten it, lord," she answered, giving him the little she
had been secretly able to save from his gambling for the purpose.
Arisuga counted it. He did not even stop to thank her for this
unexpected sacrifice and munificence.
"Gods! It is not one-tenth," he accused. "We must have more at once.
Jones liked you. Why not?"
"Yes, lord," said Hoshiko, growing pale.
"Remember the wives of the forty-seven ronins. They gave themselves to
harlotry for their husbands' cause."
"Yes, lord, to-morrow," answered the trembling little woman. And though
each day there was a little more money, she did not go to Moncure Jones.
She could not. Some things are impossible!
All day she was gone, and he thought her there, with the yellow-fanged
dragon, and did not care! Nothing had hurt her heart so much as that.
Each night she came back to him with her pitiful wage in her sleeve.
Arisuga might have thought this strange had he not ceased all thought of
her--that Jones permitted her to come home to him each night with each
day's wages. And he might have noticed, if he had still adored the hands
of satin, that they were stained: now with red, now with blue, yellow,
green. But he never touched the hands any more, and was become impatient
when they touched him void of money. But the little wage, the sixty or
seventy cents which he seized eagerly and put away--you will want to
know how she got them.
Try, then, to fancy as she did that this was the beginning of her
punishment for the happiness of being his wife. To stay away from the
chance of being with him, from early morning until late night. To watch
the slow-going clock; the shadows as they crept up the wall to the red
stain first, then the blue, then that pale yellow one, scarcely to be
seen at seven o'clock; and then still (for her wish always outran the
shadow) to wait until the clock in the cathedral struck before she
might stop making muslin flowers "for the happy occasions" and go wanly
home to unhappiness. She was a flower-maker--this flower of another land
made flowers for weddings, christenings, festivals, soiling them only,
now and then, with a tear. Yet no one had ever made prettier flowers
"for the happy occasions" than she who had, now, no happy occasions.
But the war went on, on, and he was not called.
"Gods!--yes!" he cried to her in his madness. "I understand. I am an
eta! The damned word has passed all through the army. It stands opposite
my name. It makes all my oaths, all my obligations before the gods,
naught. There is but one hope. They will not call me unless the last man
must be put into the field. Then--_then_ they will take the eta. Gods of
the skies! Gods of the earth! Gods of the seas and caverns below--let it
be so! Let my country be among the dregs at the bottom of the cup of the
nations' despair! I--I, Shijiro Arisuga, will bring it--lead it--to
victory with my flag! I! For my father's ghosts will fight with me.
That is what we need! The ghosts of our ancestors! Who can vanquish
them? And, O ye augustnesses,--" he addressed the spirits of his own
ancestors,--"bring it about! For ye--ye alone can vanquish this upstart
foe. And ye must--ye _must_ permit me to make for my father the red
death! Ye must--ye must."
Do you not see that he was gone quite mad?
Yet every insane word was a stabbing accusation upon the soul of
Hoshiko, for whom it had all been. And she fancied that she was no more
worth the sacrifice than was one of the morning-glories which were now
only a memory. For she was now as pale, as sad, as evanescent and
fleeting, as they: those morning-glories in their garden in happy China,
unto whose beauty in the dewy morning she had once been wont to liken
her life with this mad Arisuga. Unto whose beauty he had used to liken
her!
THE SMALL WHITE DEATH
XXVII
THE SMALL WHITE DEATH
He was not called. The war went terribly on. The bewildered giant was
buffeted, dismembered, at will by the shy pygmy. All about Shijiro fell
the pink tickets, everywhere he met his mad, happy countrymen hurrying
to the seaports, looking askance, but nothing came to him. Perhaps it
was this. Perhaps it was too much work, exposure, and anxiety. Perhaps
too little food. Perhaps all of these together. But presently he was in
an hospital with his temperature at a hundred and five. Hoshiko was
there always. And sometimes he forgot the harshness of his later life
and fancied that it was again that day he first saw her by the Forbidden
City. So he would live again through all that happy life until he came
to the battle--whence he always came. Often in his fancy he was in the
very presence of that glorious death he had sworn to die. Then Hoshiko
was forgotten again. And presently she went out of his sick mind as she
had long since gone out of his shattered life, and nothing but battle
lived there. She did not strive to recall herself by so much as a touch.
So the gods wished it to be; this was their will. She had entered upon
her eternal penance for happiness, and she did not again question its
time or place or form. The happiness was gone. It could return no more.
But with the sense that she had impiously raped her joy from the heavens
themselves came the exultation that not even the gods could ever take
that from her. It had been. She had had it.
He knew, one day, in a sane moment, that he was not leading armies to
battle and himself to the great crimson death, but with an immense
horror that he was confined within four deadly white walls, upon a
narrow cot, not the damp, blood-stricken earth. That there were no
belching cannons in front of him, no hell of hoarse shouts behind him,
no curses and death-groans about him, but quiet, terrible, maddening,
only the still, small white death of women and children.
He leaped up to fly from it and made this small death all the more sure.
No prayers to his father, none to the augustnesses, none to the myriad
gods availed. There he saw the still small white death of women closing
down upon him while he lay inert, bound to his bed.
"This is my punishment," he whispered to her in anathema; "this is my
punishment for taking you and forgetting him. Yes, even the gate of the
Meido will be closed on me. I am not fit to meet my father. He must
still wait. And for whom? There is only I! Only I can redeem him! And I
must first descend--and cleanse my sinning face in the waters--the hot,
hot waters of the hells! And when, after many lives, I meet my father--"
His mind could not endure the horror of this. But he turned his fury
upon her.
"For you," he cried, "such a thing as you! Eta, jigoku onna! Hell woman!
Yes, you came to me in the form of a goddess. But the hell woman does
that. And now that death is here my vision sees through that and you are
a skeleton with talons--with a beak--with hell's hollow laughter--the
devils sent you to tempt me and I fell--and am lost--my father's soul
is lost--and you laugh--"
Alas! she did not laugh--she sobbed. For that was one of the days when
the flesh was weak.
"Yes," she said, "I tempted you; I am all you say!"
He fell into coma then and remembered no more: leaving her here on earth
with those fearful words in her heart to remember which had loved him
only too well. Sometimes she half believed them. Once she crept from his
side to look in the glass. She saw no talons or beak, but a wanness
which, indeed, suggested a skeleton.
He knew, before his wits left him, that the objective of the Guards was
the Yalu. And now he fancied himself gloriously leading them. But
half-sane moments came in which he would again suspect the four white
walls.
"Gods!" he whispered hoarsely, in one of these, "am I going to the small
white death of women and children? Have I only dreamed that I was still
leading them?"
"No," said his wife. "This is the dream--these white walls. You are to
die the great red death. God has told me."
"Is it so?"
He gazed distractedly about and still thought he saw the walls.
"It is as I say."
He gripped her hands.
"By all the gods?"
"By all the gods," she swore.
Then, again, for the last time, came full delirium--and again it came in
red.
"You have told me true!" he shouted. "There the devils come! On, on, on!
Banzai! On! Nippon Denji! On! Ah, my sword slips at the handle--it is
red! And the staff of my flag, too! A little earth!" He rubbed his palms
on the bed covers as if they were the ground, and clenched his hands
again. "Ah, now we are on them! Mutsushima! Up, up, up! Too early to
die! You have not killed enough! Up, Banzai! The gods will not redeem
your samurai vow with so few dead enemies of the emperor to your
credit!" Then he must have been struck. "Father! Father!" he cried, and
held out his hands.
After that he lay as one dead for a long time, then woke with slow doubt
to find himself still without the heavens.
"I have not killed enough. That is it. There must be many more before I
can see my father's face. Many more because--because I married an
eta--yes, an eta seduced me. Did you know her? She was a hell woman. She
kept me from my father. Did you know her?"
He stared up at her with half recollection, and then went on to his
battles.
In one of them he lost his colors. No one has ever suffered a sharper
agony than he--until they were retaken.
"But--the flag! The flag! I am hit! Here! Not much! Gods in the skies!
There it is! They have it! The cursed dogs! They have touched it!
Defiled it! Come with me--Kondo--Musima--Tani--Ichimon--now! At them!"
And she knew that he had retaken the flag and was bringing it gloriously
back; each act was faithfully fought.
But then he missed it. He looked in his hands.
"Do you see my flag?"
"Yes," she cajoled, "it is here."
But she did not convince him, and he slept under his opium unhappily.
He thought sometimes that the enemy had again taken it.
When he awoke next morning, still unhappy and in doubt (he had not
forgotten it), the flag was in his hand. There was not one in America
for the little wife. But that night she made one. He shouted with sudden
strength as he gripped it and kept it in his hands until they could feel
no more. And then with it lashed to the foot of his bed he lived the
little remnant of his life in its glory, and in sight of its crimson and
white went out--mad with the supremest ecstasy a Japanese can know--out
in the great red death to another reincarnation, at what, for the fourth
time, he must have thought the happiest moment of his life.
And then--shall I tell it?--his call came.
And a letter from Zanzi, now a general commanding a brigade. Almost as
one would write of love, he wrote.
"Come back, eta," it said joyously; "we need you now. You shall not go
to the Hakodate men. Every one of us clamors for you at the colors.
Come! It is war. Your doctrine prevails. There are now neither samurai
nor eta, but only sons of the emperor. Come! We are going to a glorious
victory. Take your share. Your penance is complete. Your exile is
finished. Come, the emperor himself calls his sons to die for him! Come!
The flag waits. Come!
"ZANZI."
"PRESENT FOR DUTY"
XXVIII
"PRESENT FOR DUTY"
OF Hoshiko I do not speak--I have not spoken--in these last days. I
cannot. I am near her heart as I write. She for whom everything had been
had nothing--was eternally to have nothing. Yet it remained for her now
to make all that be which would have been--but for her. The way of the
gods was quite plain.
There was no oath to this effect, no tragic undertaking before the
mysterious gods. It became simply her life. Nothing else was possible
with the existences which remained but to make all true which ought to
be true--which would have been true--but for her happiness. She had had
that, and now was to come the recompense which the gods always demanded.
And the plan of it had not consciously grown; it had been
there--inside--always. Save that when she knew he was to die the small
white death, all the details formulated themselves in her mind there at
his side, fixed, she had no doubt, by the gods.
We know now that the war was fought to its end in the council chambers
in Tokyo long before that torpedo sank the "Tsarevitch." This is the
curious fashion of the Eastern mind: to see the end before the
beginning. So now all that was to follow formed itself in the mind of
Hoshiko as if it were already done and she saw it not from the beginning
but from the end. The means to make it be would have puzzled us. They
puzzled her not at all. She knew that suffering lay there; but no
suffering could matter if the end was achieved and that was safe.
In due time General Zanzi received a cable, saying:--
"Keep colors. Coming.
"SHIJIRO ARISUGA."
Then Hoshiko went to the house of Moncure Jones for the second time. The
place of horror to her. That day she dressed once more in her best
kimono,--she had always kept the white one,--and put the new kanzashi
again in her hair, (which you will remember Arisuga bought for her the
day after she had knocked on his shoji,) and painted her face and eyes
to hide their hollowness, and put upon her dainty little body the last
of the "flower perfume"--which every Japanese girl saves from her
marriage for her burial so that she may appear fittingly as a bride
indeed before the gods above. In this matter Jones must be
propitiated--made sure. She did not forget their last parting. So she
went to him arrayed and adorned as she had once meant to go before the
gods.
And she remembered again, and was repeating their last adjuration to
fealty as she stepped upon the sill of Jones's door, those forty-seven
ronins whose wives lent themselves to harlotry that their husbands might
the better achieve their cause. Are they not upon brass to-day, though a
thousand years have passed? Are their wives not properly forgotten?
So when she had come to Jones's house she smiled and was very gay, like
a woman of joy, as she had often read had been the way of the wives of
the forty-seven, and said:--
"You wish me?"
"Wish you!" cried the delighted Jones. "I have never wished for anything
so much in all my life. I have never missed any one so much. It was
beastly of you to go away in that fashion. I haven't married yet."
Hoshiko was very impatient inside, but outside she smiled.
"You wish me?" she repeated.
"Yes! But that beastly husband of yours, with his knives--"
"He--is--dead," said the little woman, forcing each word out of her
heart with agony, laughing shrilly at the end like a creature of
pleasure.
"Ha, ha!" laughed Jones.
"Ha, ha, ha," echoed Hoshiko.
"You're as glad as I am!"
"Yes," smiled Hoshiko.
"Sure he's dead?"
"By your large God!" swore the laughing wife.
"Oh! I understand. And believe you, too! All right, my little Japanese
doll," cried the delighted Jones. "Here's money."
What followed I may not tell: save that Hoshiko made a cold
bargain--Jones calls it his Japanese marriage to this day,--whereby she
got a great deal of money in a short time.
The next day Zanzi got this cable:--
"Keep colors. Starting.
"SHIJIRO ARISUGA."
Presently (it seemed years, but it was only a little while) the time was
come, and Hoshiko cut her hair, rubbed her face each morning with a
rough brush, put on Arisuga's uniform, pinned his medal over her heart,
and sent her last cable:--
"Keep colors. Aboard.
"SHIJIRO ARISUGA."
And so it was that the morning the Imperial Guards started for the Yalu,
Shijiro Arisuga, though dead in America, answered to his name at Sendai.
But how that was accomplished, I must stop my story to tell.
THE REINCARNATION OF SHIJIRO ARISUGA
XXIX
THE REINCARNATION OF SHIJIRO ARISUGA
For I think that you will wish to know what Hoshiko did to appear
learned in the trade of the soldier before she joined the Guards. But it
is not easy. For I am very near her now. And the satin hands must be as
leather; the tiny feet must often leave their prints in blood on the
snow; the plump, pink cheeks must be pounded into caverns and scarred
with wounds; the nails must be deliberately torn and broken from the
exquisite hands; the beautiful hair must be shorn. And last and hardest
to tell, in her forehead must be made a ragged scar like that Arisuga
got at Pekin--the one which had brought him to her. That I shall tell
first--the making of the wound.
For a long time she studied it. This all men knew and it must be
perfect. Once she mistrusted her own skill and went to see a surgeon.
She showed him the picture of Arisuga and asked whether he could
reproduce his wound upon herself. But immediately the doctor began to be
wary. For he was a doctor like all other doctors, and when confronted
with a thing unusual--one which no other doctor had put into the
books--he was not wise.
"Ugly women," he said, "have often asked me to make them pretty. But
this is the first time, in a somewhat extended practice, that I have had
a pretty one ask me to make her ugly. Tell me the reason for it, and
perhaps I can convince you that such beauty as the creator graciously
gives us ought to be preserved, not destroyed, for it is more rare than
you think."
But while he opened his case for some instrument of exploration, Hoshiko
fled--so quietly and swiftly that when he turned he wondered if she had
ever been there. Yes, there was in the air the flower perfume with which
she had anointed her pretty body for his offices.
Of course she could run no such risk again. She must do it herself. So
for long she thought upon wounds and woundings. How they were made; how
they were healed; how that one of Arisuga's had been made; how it was
healed: it was a sabre, and it had cut--so. Then it had been stitched
so--very carelessly she had thought every time she saw it.
She was entirely capable of striking herself with a sabre; but through
long reasoning she understood that she would not be likely to reproduce
the precise form of Arisuga's wound. Though this was necessary, there
was only one chance in many thousands of accomplishing it.
She finally knew that she must do it carefully, slowly--very slowly.
There would be none of the ecstasy of the battle. Arisuga had often told
her that he had never felt the wound until it was healed. That, in fact,
he would not have known that he was struck but for the blood in his
eyes. But she must do it as one argues a thing. Do you understand the
difference? Can you see how a wound received in hot carnage and one
slowly carved in one's own flesh may differ? Be sure that Hoshiko
understood all this.
But she could not in America. It seemed an alien thing to do in a
country which would only have misunderstood and perhaps have laughed. It
needed her native soil and atmosphere, and ancestors and gods, to make
the undertaking simple. Besides, while she was studying the making of
the wound, steam and wind were taking her home. It was there, in the
little deserted house, still deserted, where they had lived so happily
those few days, that everything seemed fortunate.
And so there, after much preparation, she did it--all in one tortured
day. Early in the morning she sat down before her little round mirror.
She knew what she was to suffer. But she neither shrank from it nor
sought to mitigate its agony. First she prayed the gods--very long. Then
she set his picture before her. Then she washed--very clean. Then she
made very sharp the little toilet sword. Then she bound her body with
many towels and made the first incision bravely. But she had not well
calculated the agony of such slow self-wounding. Her senses slowly left
her as if to protest against what she did.
It was long before her hands would return to their office of
self-mutilation. Yet no matter how weak the flesh was, the spirit always
drove the hands back to their office until it was done--and well
done--to the stitches--to the anointing--to the binding--the
destruction of the quivering parts of herself.
Can you fancy her there on the floor before the little mirror which had
once told back to her all her loveliness, with that little sword
deliberately carving out of her own beautiful flesh with her own hand
Arisuga's horrid badge of honor? She knew it so well that she limned it
in her forehead as faithfully as had the Chinese sabre in his. You could
not--no one could--have told the difference. There was a curious curve
upward at the end, and a thickened cicatrice, as if it had been
carelessly gathered up by the surgeon's needle. These she made with her
own needle.
And then for many days she lay clutching her mattress, not moving for
fear the contour of the wound might be marred.
That was a splendid morning to her--it would have been one of horror to
you--when she could crawl from the futons and know by the glass that his
wound was set forever in its place on her forehead. She did not observe
that her face was vague and shadowy; her eyes saw nothing but that. Why
should they see anything more?
Yet, and I must tell you this, she did see something else, presently, as
she looked, day after day.
The face she saw only vaguely, at first, in her weakness, as she watched
the growing into beauty of the wound, was gradually not hers. And then
it seemed that behind her own a shadow face hovered. Presently she knew
it for the face of Shijiro Arisuga. Then slowly her own face passed away
and his was there. The difference was quite clear--it was his. And in
that way she knew that the pitying gods had fully granted and completed
her a reincarnation without death, and that she was no longer Hoshiko,
but Arisuga.
Shall you be glad to know further that when she answered to the name of
Shijiro Arisuga that morning at Sendai, (on that same Miyagi Field,
where Shijiro had been decorated!) all that had been the Lady Hoshi was
no more? That she was like the rest of them--a ruffian? That she had an
oath or two, that her voice was harsh, her words which once flowed like
pleasant water few and terrible?
But she had to sing his songs, to be gay as he had been, and to be
beloved as he had been. And all these things she accomplished, even to
his songs, which fled through smiling lips--laughing, shouting
lips--over the graves within. For the woman always remained in some
subconscious fashion, and it was upon the rebellious singing of his
songs more than anything else that this latent Lady Hoshi awoke.
Yet I am certain that you will like to be told, since it must have been,
that this made no difference; she made no mistakes. That she did no
discredit to Shijiro Arisuga. That, in fact, in a fashion difficult to
fathom, save by the doctrine of reincarnation, so had she become him in
all matters of action that she never even thought of herself as Hoshiko.
She was Shijiro Arisuga--when there was to be fighting--and always had
been. And this was no easy thing for such a flower as Hoshiko. For
Arisuga had been a man. So that, as one thinks on it, one is not
irreparably offended at the possibility of Hoshiko, by a living
reincarnation, having become another being. How do we know? And, how
else could she have accomplished it?
But putting aside all possible differences concerning that, in this
rejoice: the sun-flag was never borne with greater daring!
ZANZI, LOVER OF BATTLES
XXX
ZANZI, LOVER OF BATTLES
At Tokyo there was a contest between the Hakodate regiment and the
Guards for the color-bearer who had been decorated by the emperor.
Hoshiko wished to go on--mad as Arisuga once was for the fight.
(Perhaps we had better call her Arisuga from this on? Yet, you may then
forget that she was Hoshiko; you may forget that each moment was a new
expiation for happiness. No, we shall continue to call her Hoshiko--that
you may remember.)
Said General Zanzi:--
"Stay where you are, you little fool. The Guards will move first. We are
going to the greatest victory a nation ever won. Do you want to be left
behind--come when it is won, and march in parade order over the field?
You used to fight, you infernal little eta. What is the matter with you
now? Look at me."
She did this fearlessly, for the gods were at her elbow.
"You--you--What is the matter?"
"Nothing," said Hoshiko.
"You don't seem quite the Arisuga I banished to America. But then the
Americans have changed you, I suppose. They are a melancholy lot and
have made you so, eh? Of course, if you are less brave than you were,
the Guards don't want you. Go to the Hakodate men."
"I am not less brave," smiled Hoshiko, with a salute. "And I prefer the
Guards."
"Well, I ought to have known that. Come! Drink with me."
He produced a bottle of the foreign sort, and poured her a libation of
terrible brandy. She drank what she could of it and managed to spill the
rest as he drank.
"Sing!"
But he gave her no opportunity.
"Oh, these burly idiots!" he cried, hot and merry with the brandy. "It
is only ten years and they have already forgot! They do not know that
since Shimenoseki we have prepared for this. They do not know that they
have not a secret from us. They do not know that the whole course of
the war is already planned here--here--by Japan. And that as it is
planned so it will be fought. Their navy first--every ship of it. Port
Arthur next. Mukden! Saghalien! Vladivostock! We will meet them at the
Yalu--do you hear? At the Yalu, near Wiju, where we met the Chinese in
1894, only to be robbed of victory by these Russian louts! We are
decoying them to the tryst now as we did the Chinese. They will not
steal our winning this time. They will pay! We shall meet them at the
Yalu. And we shall meet but once there. There will not be a battlefield
we will not ourselves choose. Nor a time to battle which we shall not
fix. Oh, they call us little men--us! But, by the immortal gods, they
will know, presently, that souls are measured not by size. They call us
few; but they fail to reckon the myriad spirits of our ancestors, all
the augustnesses who will fight with us, direct our bullets, lead our
assaults with a knowledge which they, born of beasts, cannot have. Eta,
we shall meet them at the Yalu. Wait here till you are transferred. Then
on with us. Banzai!"
They laughed together, and Zanzi went out, singing of carnage as if he
were beneath the window of his lady, with a samisen.
THE TOMB OF LORD ESAS
XXXI
THE TOMB OF LORD ESAS
It was but two days. Yet in that time Hoshiko hastened to all the dear
places where he had gone in the days he had told her of--when he held
the hand of Yoné instead of hers. It was on the second day, in the
evening, at Shiba, that some one spoke his name behind her. The voice
was a woman's--that she at once knew. And also at once, in that strange
intelligence which we have of the spirit and not of any teaching, she
knew that this was Yoné--and that she had not forgotten all and married
(as they had laughingly fancied), but was still waiting, as she had
said. And suddenly for a moment, only a moment, she was no longer
Arisuga the color-bearer, but again a woman of those who know the terror
and weariness of hopeless waiting--such as only women, and never men,
know. And she remembered. It was ten years. Yet this faithful one had
waited while she had had her happiness. And what should she do? There
was little question of that. Here she was confronted with the evidence
of how she had destroyed the gods' balance by taking her overdue of joy,
leaving to Yoné an overdue of sorrow, and was given the opportunity to
restore, in some part, the account. But how? It was quite plain upon
the briefest reflection. She must be to her, also, Arisuga. She must
touch her as he had done, take her hands as he once did, and
then--perhaps--perhaps--Yoné would be comforted and she might go.
For that moment she was a woman only--only Hoshiko--and the tears ran
down her face. Now she might not turn. What? Tears on the face of a
rough soldier!
"Shijiro," Yoné was saying to Hoshiko's back, "I have waited--waited all
the years. Yet had they been ten times ten they are all blotted out by
this moment. Oh, the gods have been true, as they always are! I prayed
them, and they let me know that they would bring you to me if I would
but wait patiently. Turn and look at me. See whether I am grown too old
for you to touch once more. See whether my hands are yet fit for yours.
I have prayed Benten to keep me young and make me beautiful against this
moment of your coming. And every day--every day, Ani-San--I have come
here, whether it rained or the sun shone--every day--here or at
Mukojima--or the other dear places of our youth. And yet my sandals are
not worn, my kimono is new--see, because ever I renewed them,
remembering that you liked me always so. Will you not look, beloved?
Yoné will not trouble you if you do not wish. She will let you go and
will wait still."
Hoshiko slowly turned. Yoné stepped back from her. So they stood a
moment at gaze. Hoshiko saw a creature as small and fragile as she
herself had once been, and more beautiful she thought--much more
beautiful.
Yoné saw a soldier whose face she knew, but whose soul, at first, was
strange.
"I am Shijiro Arisuga," said Hoshiko.
"Yes," breathed Yoné, "wait. There is something strange. Something I did
not expect. Is it the years? Yes. But your voice is more gentle though
less gay."
"I can make it harsh," smiled Hoshiko.
"Nay!" cried Yoné, still at gaze. "Did you know me? Did you know my
voice?"
"Yes," said Hoshiko.
"And you have a scar--you have fought."
"In many battles."
"Yet the gods did not send you the great red death, but sent you to me,
as I prayed."
"Yes."
"It is all the gods' will."
Twilight had fallen and Yoné came confidently closer.
"Will you walk with me as we used? It is the gods' will!"
"Yes."
"Will you take my hand?"
"Yes."
As Hoshiko felt the small hand curl in hers the tears fell again from
her eyes. But they could not be seen now and she let them fall. Nor need
she talk and thus betray herself. Yoné had lost all fear in the giving
of her hand and now chattered on.
"Come--to the tomb of Lord Esas, where we made the seat of a stone and
moss. It is there yet. I have kept it as it was. Often I have sat there.
Only once before were we here at night--hiding, as perhaps we shall
to-night, when the watchman comes with his lantern and staff. Shall we
go to the tomb of Lord Esas, beloved?"
"Yes," said Hoshiko.
"You speak as if you wept--and, when you turned, your face looked as if
you had wept. Oh, it looked for a moment like a woman's--and not a
soldier's! Soldiers do not weep."
"Soldiers weep. I do."
"Ani-San! For me?"
"For you."
"The waiting?"
"The waiting."
"But, then, weep no more, Ani-San. I am here--at your side. All the
waiting is forgot. Blotted out by this one great moment. And
perhaps--Here is the seat. Is it not all as it was? Though it is ten
years--ten years of weary waiting. Here you sat, always, here I sat. And
we are grown too old now to change."
She laughed timorously, and when Hoshiko had seated herself where
Arisuga had once sat, she took her place as if there were no years
between this and that. Then she went on:--
"--perhaps, to-night, you will be as sweet as you were on that other
night--when--Do you remember?"
"I remember," said Hoshiko.
"But we have no samisen. Yet I can sing--if you ask me--"
"Sing."
"--the song of 'The Moon-and-the-Stork,' which we ourselves
made--here--where the moon looked down upon us. See, it knows. It knows
you are come. There it passes above the great criptomeria now.
And--and--oh, it is an omen of all good! A stork flies over its face. Or
it is a branch of the tree? No matter, the omen is the same, Ani-San;
all is as it was, is it not?"
"All is as it was, beloved," whispered Hoshiko.
Yoné came diffidently closer at the dear word.
"When I sang that night I was in your arms--"
The arms of Hoshiko closed about the girl at her side almost with
violence.
"That is it," she cried happily, nesting there. "Yes, that is quite it.
Don't you remember how your violence frightened me until you explained
that it was love? And we laughed. Now we are sad. We used to laugh
then. And you could not play the samisen because I was in your arms. And
I would not get out of them. So that I sang without the samisen that
night. Therefore, all will be quite the same if I sing to-night without
it. You have not forgotten the Moon-and-the-Stork song?"
"No"--for Arisuga had often sung it to her.
Then she sang:--
"O moon get out of my way," said the stork,
"O stork get out of my light," said the moon.
"I will not," said the stork,
"I will not," said the moon:
So that is why the stork is in the light of the moon,
And that is why the moon is in the way of the stork.
It was a little voice, with no great melody, but well fitted for so
frail a theme. Hoshiko joined her, stumbling upon a word, at which Yoné
chided her for forgetting, laughed happily and crept yet closer. Then
she said, after a silence:--
"Now!"
"What?" asked Hoshiko; for that she did not know.
"Oh, have you forgotten--have you forgotten? That also? Alas--alas!
After the song you spoke of--"
Her pretty head was burrowed deeply into the space beneath Hoshiko's
chin.
"What?" Hoshiko had to ask again.
"Of marriage," whispered the girl, in terror. And the terror of Hoshiko
was no less than that of Yoné.
"You said, you swore by this sacred tomb of a hero, that if the gods did
not send you the red death we should be married one to the other--"
"But, beloved," breathed Hoshiko, in further terror, "I am still a
soldier, still bound to the great red death. I am here but this day.
To-morrow, this night yet, I go to battle. Would you wish me to marry
you and at once go to the field?"
"Yes," whispered the girl.
"And, perchance, fall and never return?"
"Yes."
"So that you will be a widow with blackened teeth?"
"Yes."
Hoshiko made no other protest. What had been first considered with a
certain horror, seemed beautiful and merciful to this love-lorn maiden
now. She need never know. She would live and die thinking herself
married to Arisuga. At her death she would cut her hair and hang it at a
shrine, and always keep the lamps alight, and always pray for the soul
of Shijiro Arisuga. It was the way of the gods; and, as always, the way
of the gods was best, was beautiful!
WHEN THE WATCH PASSED
XXXII
WHEN THE WATCH PASSED
"Sh! sh!" whispered Yoné, suddenly, and crushed her small hand upon
Hoshiko's mouth.
It was the watchman with staff and lantern, crying weirdly in the night.
He passed near. He paused nearer. Yoné drew a bit of shrubbery before
them.
"I heard a song, by all the gods I heard a foolish song in this sacred
place of tombs. Come forth," he cried aloud, "he who sings foolishly in
a sacred place, come forth and be punished of the gods so that you may
repent! Otherwise your punishment will wait until you are unready for
it."
Now he moved on. His voice came muttering back:--
"Come forth, come forth! I heard a song, an unholy song in the sacred
place of tombs."
Yoné let the bush return and laughed happily in the arms of Hoshiko.
"Oh, is it not all as it was, beloved? It is the same watchman--older.
And they are the same, almost the same, words--more eery. And we are
close, close--as we were then. Oh, it is divine to be close with you!
So--so, my beloved, another omen! Everything else is as it was. Shall
not we be?"
Hoshiko was silent.
"Be not afraid, beloved," Yoné said. "I will be true always until we
meet in the heavens. Always I will be your widow with blackened teeth if
you fall--my hair blowing at a shrine. Think! But for me there will be
no one to keep the lamps alight before you if you die--but for me. And
I--they shall never fail. For, if you fall, I will wait as I have
done--keeping the lamps, hoping that you will hold out your hand in the
black Meido when I pass to death, and that then we shall, somehow, never
part. Oh, beloved, there have been suitors and suitors and always
suitors! The nakado has worn bare the mat at the door. But was I not
yours? How could I listen to any one else? And the wedding garments are
all ready. And there is no one to stay us but the old deaf Hana, who
will not even hear. If you must go quickly, to-night, there is the
foreign minister--there is the new registry office--"
"And for this," said Hoshiko, "the few words of a foreign priest, nine
cups of saké, a line in the registry office, you will give up your dear
life to me?"
"I will give up all my souls--all my hope of a rest at last in Buddha's
bosom if I must. Oh, Shijiro Arisuga, for this I have waited until it
seemed that I could wait no more. Give it to me now--this night--before
you go!"
"O love," whispered Hoshiko, "what is like you in all the earths, in all
the heavens! There is no other miracle but you alone. Come! My hour is
almost here. But were it already past, and though a soldier but obeys
the hours, yet you should be a wife before I go."
And even to that moment Hoshiko had not known how Yoné yearned for that
one word to be added to her. Suddenly she grovelled on the earth and
caught the hands and knees of her who had been wife to him they both
loved.
"All the gods bless you--all the gods--for giving me that one name. For
in all the earths and heavens together there is none so sweet as--wife
to Shijiro Arisuga."
And there, that night, Hoshiko married little Yoné.
"Now go and die," she wept at farewell, "and here I will wait--wait,
until I, also, die--wait for that touch of your spirit on my arm, wait
for your hand in the dark Meido. But if you do not die? if the gods are
not ready yet for you--you will come?"
"I will come again," said Hoshiko, weeping, too, which was strange for a
soldier.
And there they parted, only a moment after they were married, and
Hoshiko was ordered to join the Guards and hurry to the Yalu, where
their prey was fattening.
TEIKOKU BANZAI
XXXIII
TEIKOKU BANZAI
Then, at last, after three months of marching and wading and six days of
fighting, they faced the Russian intrenchments at that place beyond
Wiju, which some call, to this day, Hamatan, but which is Yujuho. And
the Imperial Guards were there. Shijiro Arisuga, if he were there, also,
must have observed with joy that the Guards had the right of the line
and would reach the Russian intrenchments first--perhaps off toward
Kiuliencheng, where the battery of six pieces was still stubbornly
firing. He would know that the Guards must give many happy ones their
opportunity for the great red death. Perhaps he could, then, see far
enough into the future to know that his own regiment would have the
advance and be cut to pieces. It would hurl itself straight upon those
stubborn guns. They would tear bloody lanes in its ranks. And Hoshiko
would be in the forefront of it.
Kuroki's artillery ceased, Zassuliche's ceased, and that stillness which
the soldier knows for the prelude to the assault fell. The two shots
from the right was the advance. Zanzi raised his hand, and into the
smoke raced Hoshiko with the colors. And she did not forget Arisuga's
glory--nor his father's--nor that dream of his when the small white
death was closing down upon him. She understood that he was there. And
not only he.
His ancestors were looking on--the stately samurai. And hers--the humble
eta. His father whom she here redeemed. The emperor with his thousand
eyes. The myriads of the gods. The army. The world. The heavens!
Yet she forgot nothing which Arisuga had taught her. She went forward
with two others. To her right, to her left, were other threes zigzagging
onward. But always she was in their front--steadily, carefully, almost
to where the battery of six pieces had fixed a point to reach her, as
she passed. There her three dropped and dug. And there they rested until
the battery lost them. Up then and out again till the gunners once more
noted her like a moving lump of earth and corrected their elevation in
her favor. And so twice more. At the last she dared to look back. Behind
her stretched two lines of trenches. In the nearest a little fringe of
rifle muzzles already showed. She had brought these there. Further back
was a thin line of blue racing for the first trenches. She had set these
going. Still further back the army in vast masses of blue was moving
into position from behind the willows on the bank of the river.
And these waited also upon the little sun-flag on which Hoshiko lay. She
felt for the first time the soldier's ecstasy, and she understood better
and forgave more the latter years of Arisuga.
She and her two had rested, and had made of their chain of holes a
shallow trench. They meant to dig this deeper for those who were to come
after them. But the two vast armies they had set in motion began to move
with accelerated speed toward each other, and they stopped the trench
where it was.
There would be no more digging. Any one might see that. The Russian
battery had again found them. One of the guns was exploding shrapnel
over their heads. The rest were trying for the thin blue line further
back. The willows which yet hid the army were too far away. The moment
was ripe. Hoshiko threw aside the spade and everything else which might
impede action, and went toward the battery.
From behind her rose the hoarse mongolian yell she had learned to love.
There was no need now for concealment. Their own guns had located the
battery in her front. A wicked shell had just burst over it. She could
hear the song of the fragments. And but three men stood by the gun
afterward. The little figure with the sun-flag raced down upon them,
firing. It was quite alone. The three gave her a weak, magnanimous cheer
and retired, leaving their gun.
Her own men answered from the rear. And even amid the "Banzais" she
could hear the wild song of Arisuga. One line clanged in her mad
brain:--
"Death-wound spurting--"
Further up the hill a single rapid-fire gun which knew her only as an
enemy came into action. It found her at once and riddled her with
bullets, as, flag in hand, she leaped into the first of the Russian
trenches.
That line was in her last articulate consciousness:--
"Death-wound spurting--"
Perhaps it only remained in her ears--Arisuga's song. But she fancied
that she could feel her own warm blood spurting into her own face. Was
it as glorious as he had thought it? Or was it only terrible? At that
moment, first, she knew. Perhaps she became in that last instant all
woman once more. Perhaps she saw something not for mortal eyes. Perhaps
she was not as brave with death as she had taught herself to be--gentle
Hoshiko! Her lips moaned, piteously, when she ought to have been dead,
"Arisuga!"
So that one of the two who had gone forward with her bent hastily and
said to the other, with a pleasant smile:--
"He speaks his own name!"
"Nembutsu," answered the other. "Take the flag."
The first one tried, but it held fast in her hand.
"There is no need," he said; "the battle is won. Let him keep it!"
But they covered her face. For the peace, the ecstasy, of a glorious
death was not on it! What did she learn in that death-instant?
Others caught at the flag. But her hand held it fast. So that when that
dense line of blue which she had started from the willows reached her,
at first it parted chivalrously at the flag and passed on either side.
But at last it could not part. Some one trod upon the little
color-bearer. Then many. The thick-massed line passed over her. It could
not be helped. Some one took the flag from her hand and planted it on
the Russian redoubt. At last she seemed but part of the earth beneath
their feet, and they who trod on her did not even look down.
AFTERWARD
XXXIV
AFTERWARD
Afterward there was a great funeral. The hillside was a temple. The
summer blue was its roof. The jagged mountains were its eaves. Evergreen
trees were its walls. A torii made of firs was its gate. Blossoming
trees held the gohei strips which pledged purity to the august shades
which waited near. The altar was of rifles and a soldier's blanket. The
offerings were the vapors of the simple grains and flowers, of the
country.
Beyond it was the great pyre--not grim, as death is, but more beautiful
than that on which Dido perished, adorned, perfumed, with aromatic
spring firs and blossoming trees. In the temple, first, the shades of
those who had fought with them were worshipped and exalted by the
brocaded priests. Then fealty was sworn to those who had just died, and
whose shades yet lingered by their greatest incarnation.
Last, Nisshi read the names of those who had died with glory. And first
among them was that of Shijiro Arisuga. Then with others they put the
blackened, riven little body they had found, upon the pyre, and,
lighting it, gave Hoshiko's ashes to the earth, her spirit to oblivion,
and Arisuga's name to honor.
It began the next day. Shijiro Arisuga was in the Tokyo newspapers, upon
the dead walls, and in the hoarse voices of the people. It was a story
like the terrible courage of their old warriors, and they loved it. His
medal was hung in a temple. And to-day there is a record of his heroism,
on the brass where it can never fade--though Shijiro Arisuga lies dead,
unknown, in America.
And that was the fifth time that Shijiro Arisuga must have thought the
happiest moment of his life had come.
And now we may speculate a little, before we forget, upon this last of
the five occasions. For there may be those who think that Shijiro could
not have been happy in seeing what he saw that day. But we are to
remember that, then, he had knowledge of many things which he had not on
earth. And among these was a more intimate knowing of the heart of
Hoshiko. And in that, it seems to me, he ought to have been happiest of
all. Yet--who knows?
Perhaps, too, the merciful gods permitted themselves to be deceived into
thinking that the Shijiro Arisuga who died at Hamatan is, indeed, the
one who died at Jokoji. For the life name is the same. Or perhaps they
are only complaisant, and, in the passing years, will permit the people
to think that this is so. Who knows?
At all events, Shijiro Arisuga, father and son, will take their way hand
in hand from the dark Meido to the heavens.
And for these some one will reverently write a splendid death name upon
a golden tablet at a beautiful shrine. And before it will burn always
the lights and the incense. Perhaps this happiness will be for gentle
Yoné. Perhaps the spirit of her who died at Hamatan, in its boundless
compassion, will also come and touch the little Yoné on the arm as she
wanders, lonely, by the tomb of Lord Esas, so that she, too, may have
her heart's desire, and only one, she who bought her happiness with an
eternity of obliteration, have nothing. For, who knows?
And one wishes it were possible for Shijiro to have defied O-Emma of the
hells and to have taken Hoshiko straight from the great red death, past
all the lesser heavens, to be forever lost in the bosom of the Lord
Buddha in the lotus fields--if the souls of mortals ever fly straight
from earth to the last white heaven. But this could not be. There was
that eternal penance for over-joy to accomplish.
For Hoshiko there never can be again, in the heavens above or on the
earth beneath or the hells below, a being. All her existences--all her
thousands of years of life--whether of the earths or the heavens or the
hells, were given for Shijiro Arisuga, whom she loved--and who once, for
a little while, loved her. Shijiro Arisuga lives, and the father in the
son will live on the brass forever.
The Dream-of-a-Star is forever vanished, save for the moment I write
here--save for the moment you read here.
Transcriber's note:
The following have been changed:
Myagi=>Miyagi
Damashi=>Damashii
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