Part 4

"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 Yone 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 Yone'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:--