Part 8

"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