Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life Part 6

Why sounds the stirring signal now More faintly than before?

What time the bugle ceased to sound, The breast was smitten through;-- What time the blast rang faintly, blood Gushed from the lips that blew.

Death-stricken, still the bugler stands!

He leans upon his gun,-- Once more to sound the bugle-call Before his life be done.

What though the shattered body fall?

The spirit rushes free Through Heaven and Earth to sound anew That call to Victory!

Far, far beyond our sh.o.r.e, the spot Now honored by his fall;-- But forty million brethren Have heard that bugle-call.

Comrade!--beyond the peaks and seas Your bugle sounds to-day In forty million loyal hearts A thousand miles away!

(2) Haori, a sort of upper dress, worn by men as well as women.

The linings are often of designs beautiful beyond praise.

(3) Chirimen is c.r.a.pe-silk, of which there are many qualities; some very costly and durable.

(4) Soshi form one of the modern curses of j.a.pan. They are mostly ex-students who earn a living by hiring themselves out as rowdy terrorists. Politicians employ them either against the soshi of opponents, or as bullies in election time. Private persons sometimes employ them as defenders. They have figured in most of the election rows which have taken place of late years in j.a.pan, also in a number of a.s.saults made on distinguished personages.

The causes which produced nihilism in Russia have several points of resemblance with the causes which developed the modern soshi cla.s.s in j.a.pan.

III

Hyogo, May 15.

The Matsushima Kan, returned from China, is anch.o.r.ed before the Garden of the Pleasure of Peace. She is not a colossus, though she has done grand things; but she certainly looks quite formidable as she lies there in the clear light,--a stone-gray fortress of steel rising out of the smooth blue. Permission to visit her has been given to the delighted people, who don their best for the occasion, as for a temple festival, and I am suffered to accompany some of them. All the boats in the port would seem to have been hired for the visitors, so huge is the shoal hovering about the ironclad as we arrive. It is not possible for such a number of sightseers to go on board at once, and we have to wait while hundreds are being alternately admitted and dismissed. But the waiting in the cool sea air is not unpleasant; and the spectacle of the popular joy is worth watching. What eager rushing when the turn comes! what swarming and squeezing and clinging! Two women fall into the sea, and are pulled out by blue-jackets, and say they are not sorry to have fallen in, because they can now boast of owing their lives to the men of the Matsushima Kan! As a matter of fact, they could not very well have been drowned; there were legions of common boatmen to look after them.

But something of larger importance to the nation than the lives of two young women is really owing to the men of the Matsushima Kan; and the people are rightly trying to pay them back with love,--for presents, such as thousands would like to make, are prohibited by disciplinary rule. Officers and crew must be weary; but the crowding and the questioning are borne with charming amiability. Everything is shown and explained in detail: the huge thirty-centimetre gun, with its loading apparatus and directing machinery; the quick-firing batteries; the torpedoes, with their impulse-tubes; the electric lantern, with its searching mechanism. I myself, though a foreigner, and therefore requiring a special permit, am guided all about, both below and above, and am even suffered to take a peep at the portraits of their Imperial Majesties, in the admiral's cabin; and I am told the stirring story of the great fight off the Yalu. Meanwhile, the old bald men and the women and the babies of the port hold for one golden day command of the Matsushima. Officers, cadets, blue-jackets, spare no effort to please. Some talk to the grandfathers; others let the children play with the hilts of their swords, or teach them how to throw up their little hands and shout "_Teikoku Banzai!_" And for tired mothers, matting has been spread, where they can squat down in the shade between decks.

Those decks, only a few months ago, were covered with the blood of brave men. Here and there dark stains, which still resist holy-stoning, are visible; and the people look at them with tender reverence. The flagship was twice struck by enormous sh.e.l.ls, and her vulnerable parts were pierced by a storm of small projectiles. She bore the brunt of the engagement, losing nearly half her crew. Her tonnage is only four thousand two hundred and eighty; and her immediate antagonists were two Chinese ironclads of seven thousand four hundred tons each. Outside, her cuira.s.s shows no deep scars, for the shattered plates have been replaced;--but my guide points proudly to the numerous patchings of the decks, the steel masting supporting the fighting-tops, the smoke-stack,--and to certain terrible dents, with small cracks radiating from them, in the foot-thick steel of the barbette. He traces for us, below, the course of the thirty-and-a-half centimetre sh.e.l.l that pierced the ship. "When it came," he tells us, "the shock threw men into the air that high" (holding his hand some two feet above the deck). "At the same moment all became dark; you could not see your hand. Then we found that one of the starboard forward guns had been smashed, and the crew all killed. We had forty men killed instantly, and many more wounded: no man escaped in that part of the ship. The deck was on fire, because a lot of ammunition brought up for the guns had exploded; so we had to fight and to work to put out the fire at the same time. Even badly wounded men, with the skin blown from their hands and faces, worked as if they felt no pain; and dying men helped to pa.s.s water. But we silenced the Ting-yuen with one more shot from our big gun. The Chinese had European gunners helping them. If we had not had to fight against Western gunners, _our victory would have been too easy._"

He gives the true note. Nothing, on this splendid spring day, could so delight the men of the Matsushima Kan as a command to clear for action, and attack the great belted Russian cruisers lying off the coast.

IV

Kobe, June 9.

Last year, while traveling from Shimonoseki to the capital, I saw many regiments on their way to the seat of war, all uniformed in white, for the hot season was not yet over. Those soldiers looked so much like students whom I had taught (thousands, indeed, were really fresh from school) that I could not help feeling it was cruel to send such youths to battle. The boyish faces were so frank, so cheerful, so seemingly innocent of the greater sorrows of life! "Don't fear for them," said an English fellow-traveler, a man who had pa.s.sed his life in camps; "they will give a splendid account of themselves." "I know it," was my answer; "but I am thinking of fever and frost and Manchurian winter: these are more to be feared than Chinese rifles(1)."

The calling of the bugles, gathering the men together after dark, or signaling the hour of rest, had for years been one of the pleasures of my summer evenings in a j.a.panese garrison town. But during the months of war, those long, plaintive notes of the last call touched me in another way. I do not know that the melody is peculiar; but it was sometimes played, I used to think, with peculiar feeling; and when uttered to the starlight by all the bugles of a division at once, the mult.i.tudinously blending tones had a melancholy sweetness never to be forgotten. And I would dream of phantom buglers, summoning the youth and strength of hosts to the shadowy silence of perpetual rest.

Well, to-day I went to see some of the regiments return. Arches of greenery had been erected over the street they were to pa.s.s through, leading from Kobe station to Nanko-San,--the great temple dedicated to the hero spirit of Kusunoki Masashige. The citizens had subscribed six thousand yen for the honor of serving the soldiers with the first meal after their return; and many battalions had already received such kindly welcome. The sheds under which they ate in the court of the temple had been decorated with flags and festoons; and there were gifts for all the troops,--sweetmeats, and packages of cigarettes, and little towels printed with poems in praise of valor. Before the gate of the temple a really handsome triumphal arch had been erected, bearing on each of its facades a phrase of welcome in Chinese text of gold, and on its summit a terrestrial globe surmounted by a hawk with outspread pinions(2).

I waited first, with Manyemon, before the station, which is very near the temple. The train arrived; a military sentry ordered all spectators to quit the platform, and outside, in the street, police kept back the crowd, and stopped all traffic. After a few minutes, the battalions came, marching in regular column through the brick archway,--headed by a gray officer, who limped slightly as he walked, smoking a cigarette. The crowd thickened about us, but there was no cheering, not even speaking,--a hush broken only by the measured tramp of the pa.s.sing troops. I could scarcely believe those were the same men I had seen going to the war; only the numbers on the shoulder-straps a.s.sured me of the fact.

Sunburnt and grim the faces were; many had heavy beards. The dark blue winter uniforms were frayed and torn, the shoes worn into shapelessness; but the strong, swinging stride was the stride of the hardened soldier. Lads no longer these, but toughened men, able to face any troops in the world; men who had slaughtered and stormed; men who had also suffered many things which never will be written. The features showed neither joy nor pride; the quick-searching eyes hardly glanced at the welcoming flags, the decorations, the arch with its globe-shadowing hawk of battle, --perhaps because those eyes had seen too often the things which make men serious. (Only one man smiled as he pa.s.sed; and I thought of a smile seen on the face of a Zouave when I was a boy, watching the return of a regiment from Africa,--a mocking smile, that stabbed.) Many of the spectators were visibly affected, feeling the reason of the change. But, for that, the soldiers were better soldiers now; and they were going to find welcome, and comforts, and gifts, and the great warm love of the people,--and repose thereafter, in their old familiar camps.

I said to Manyemon: "This evening they will be in Osaka and Nagoya. They will hear the bugles calling; and they will think of comrades who never can return."

The old man answered, with simple earnestness: "Perhaps by Western people it is thought that the dead never return. But we cannot so think. There are no j.a.panese dead who do not return.

There are none who do not know the way. From China and from Chosen, and out of the bitter sea, all our dead have come back,--all! They are with us now. In every dusk they gather to hear the bugles that called them home. And they will hear them also in that day when the armies of the Son of Heaven shall be summoned against Russia."

(1) The total number of j.a.panese actually killed in battle, from the fight at A-san to the capture of the Pescadores, was only 739. But the deaths resulting from other causes, up to as late a date as the 8th of June, during the occupation of Formosa, were 3,148. Of these, 1,602 were due to cholera alone. Such, at least, were the official figures as published in the Kobe Chronicle.

(2) At the close of the great naval engagement of the 17th of September, 1894, a hawk alighted on the fighting-mast of the j.a.panese cruiser Takachiho, and suffered itself to be taken and fed. After much petting, this bird of good omen was presented to the Emperor. Falconry was a great feudal sport in j.a.pan, and hawks were finely trained. The hawk is now likely to become, more than ever before in j.a.pan, a symbol of victory.

VII.

HARU

Haru was brought up, chiefly at home, in that old-fashioned way which produced one of the sweetest types of woman the world has ever seen. This domestic education cultivated simplicity of heart, natural grace of manner, obedience, and love of duty as they were never cultivated but in j.a.pan. Its moral product was something too gentle and beautiful for any other than the old j.a.panese society: it was not the most judicious preparation for the much harsher life of the new,--in which it still survives.

The refined girl was trained for the condition of being theoretically at the mercy of her husband. She was taught never to show jealousy, or grief, or anger,--even under circ.u.mstances compelling all three; she was expected to conquer the faults of her lord by pure sweetness. In short, she was required to be almost superhuman,--to realize, at least in outward seeming, the ideal of perfect unselfishness. And this she could do with a husband of her own rank, delicate in discernment,--able to divine her feelings, and never to wound them.

Haru came of a much better family than her husband; and she was a little too good for him, because he could not really understand her. They had been married very young, had been poor at first, and then had gradually become well-off, because Haru's husband was a clever man of business. Sometimes she thought he had loved her most when they were less well off; and a woman is seldom mistaken about such matters.

She still made all his clothes; and he commended her needle-work.

She waited upon his wants, aided him to dress and undress, made everything comfortable for him in their pretty home; bade him a charming farewell as he went to business in the morning, and welcomed him upon his return; received his friends exquisitely; managed his household matters with wonderful economy, and seldom asked any favors that cost money. Indeed she scarcely needed such favors; for he was never ungenerous, and liked to see her daintily dressed,--looking like some beautiful silver moth robed in the folding of its own wings,--and to take her to theatres and other places of amus.e.m.e.nt. She accompanied him to pleasure-resorts famed for the blossoming of cherry-trees in spring, or the shimmering of fireflies on summer nights, or the crimsoning of maples in autumn. And sometimes they would pa.s.s a day together at Maiko, by the sea, where the pines seem to sway like dancing girls; or an afternoon at Kiyomidzu, in the old, old summer-house, where everything is like a dream of five hundred years ago,--and where there is a great shadowing of high woods, and a song of water leaping cold and clear from caverns, and always the plaint of flutes unseen, blown softly in the antique way,--a tone-caress of peace and sadness blending, just as the gold light glooms into blue over a dying sun.

Except for such small pleasures and excursions, Haru went out seldom. Her only living relatives, and also those of her husband, were far away in other provinces, and she had few visits to make.

She liked to be at home, arranging flowers for the alcoves or for the G.o.ds, decorating the rooms, and feeding the tame gold-fish of the garden-pond, which would lift up their heads when they saw her coming.

No child had yet brought new joy or sorrow into her life. She looked, in spite of her wife's coiffure, like a very young girl; and she was still simple as a child,--notwithstanding that business capacity in small things which her husband so admired that he often condescended to ask her counsel in big things.

Perhaps the heart then judged for him better than the pretty head; but, whether intuitive or not, her advice never proved wrong. She was happy enough with him for five years,--during which time he showed himself as considerate as any young j.a.panese merchant could well be towards a wife of finer character than his own.

Then his manner suddenly became cold,--so suddenly that she felt a.s.sured the reason was not that which a childless wife might have reason to fear. Unable to discover the real cause, she tried to persuade herself that she had been remiss in her duties; examined her innocent conscience to no purpose; and tried very, very hard to please. But he remained unmoved. He spoke no unkind words,-- though she felt behind his silence the repressed tendency to utter them. A j.a.panese of the better cla.s.s is not very apt to be unkind to his wife in words. It is thought to be vulgar and brutal. The educated man of normal disposition will even answer a wife's reproaches with gentle phrases. Common politeness, by the j.a.panese code, exacts this att.i.tude from every manly man; moreover, it is the only safe one. A refined and sensitive woman will not long submit to coa.r.s.e treatment; a spirited one may even kill herself because of something said in a moment of pa.s.sion, and such a suicide disgraces the husband for the rest of his life. But there are slow cruelties worse than words, and safer,-- neglect or indifference, for example, of a sort to arouse jealousy. A j.a.panese wife has indeed been trained never to show jealousy; but the feeling is older than all training,--old as love, and likely to live as long. Beneath her pa.s.sionless mask the j.a.panese wife feels like her Western sister,--just like that sister who prays and prays, even while delighting some evening a.s.sembly of beauty and fashion, for the coming of the hour which will set her free to relieve her pain alone.

Haru had cause for jealousy; but she was too much of a child to guess the cause at once; and her servants too fond of her to suggest it. Her husband had been accustomed to pa.s.s his evenings in her company, either at home or elsewhere. But now, evening after evening, he went out by himself. The first time he had given her some business pretexts; afterwards he gave none, and did not even tell her when he expected to return. Latterly, also, he had been treating her with silent rudeness. He had become changed,--"as if there was a goblin in his heart,"-the servants said. As a matter of fact he had been deftly caught in a snare set for him. One whisper from a geisha had numbed, his will; one smile blinded his eyes. She was far less pretty than his wife; but she was very skillful in the craft of spinning webs,--webs of sensual delusion which entangle weak men; and always tighten more and more about them until the final hour of mockery and ruin.

Haru did not know. She suspected no wrong till after her husband's strange conduct had become habitual,--and even then only because she found that his money was pa.s.sing into unknown hands. He had never told her where he pa.s.sed his evenings. And she was afraid to ask, lest he should think her jealous. Instead of exposing her feelings in words, she treated him with such sweetness that a more intelligent husband would have divined all.

But, except in business, he was dull. He continued to pa.s.s his evenings away; and as his conscience grew feebler, his absences lengthened. Haru had been taught that a good wife should always sit up and wait for her lord's return at night; and by so doing she suffered from nervousness, and from the feverish conditions, that follow sleeplessness, and from the lonesomeness of her waiting after the servants, kindly dismissed at the usual hour, had left her with her thoughts. Once only, returning very late, her husband said to her: "I am sorry you should have sat up so late for me; do not wait like that again!" Then, fearing he might really have been pained on her account, she laughed pleasantly, and said: "I was not sleepy, and I am not tired; honorably please not to think about me." So he ceased to think about her,--glad to take her at her word; and not long after that he stayed away for one whole night. The next night he did likewise, and a third night. After that third night's absence he failed even to return for the morning meal; and Haru knew the time had come when her duty as a wife obliged her to speak.

She waited through all the morning hours, fearing for him, fearing for herself also; conscious at last of the wrong by which a woman's heart can be most deeply wounded. Her faithful servants had told her something; the rest she could guess. She was very ill, and did not know it. She knew only that she was angry-- selfishly angry, because of the pain given her, cruel, probing, sickening pain. Midday came as she sat thinking how she could say least selfishly what it was now her duty to say,--the first words of reproach that would ever have pa.s.sed her lips. Then her heart leaped with a shock that made everything blur and swim before her sight in a whirl of dizziness,--because there was a sound of kuruma-wheels and the voice of a servant calling: "_Honorable-return-is!_"

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(1)?_" 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.

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?_"

(1) "Thou?"

VIII