Kimiko and Other Japanese Sketches Part 3

She struggled to the entrance to meet him, all her slender body a-tremble with fever and pain, and terror of betraying that pain. And the man was startled, because instead of greeting him with the accustomed smile, she caught the bosom of his silk robe in one quivering little hand--and looked into his face with eyes that seemed to search for some shred of a soul--and tried to speak, but could utter only the single word, "Anata?"[10] Almost in the same moment her weak grasp loosened, her eyes closed with a strange smile; and even before he could put out his arms to support her, she fell. He sought to lift her. But something in the delicate life had snapped. She was dead.

[10] "Thou?"

There were astonishments, of course, and tears, and useless callings of her name, and much running for doctors. But she lay white and still and beautiful, all the pain and anger gone out of her face, and smiling as on her bridal day.

Two physicians came from the public hospital--j.a.panese military surgeons. They asked straight, hard questions--questions that cut open the self of the man down to the core. Then they told him truth cold and sharp as edged steel--and left him with his dead.

The people wondered he did not become a priest--fair evidence that his conscience had been awakened. By day he sits among his bales of Kyoto silks and Osaka figured goods--earnest and silent. His clerks think him a good master; he never speaks harshly. Often he works far into the night; and he has changed his dwelling-place. There are strangers in the pretty house where Haru lived; and the owner never visits it.

Perhaps because he might see there one slender shadow, still arranging flowers, or bending with iris-grace above the goldfish in his pond. But wherever he rest, sometime in the silent hours he must see the same soundless presence near his pillow--sewing, smoothing, softly seeming to make beautiful the robes he once put on only to betray. And at other times--in the busiest moments of his busy life--the clamor of the great shop dies; the ideographs of his ledger dim and vanish; and a plaintive little voice, which the G.o.ds refuse to silence, utters into the solitude of his heart, like a question, the single word--"Anata?"

THE END