The Way Of The Gods Part 26

For, strangely, this pa.s.sion of war had obliterated that other pa.s.sion of chance! He ran all the way.

"I must--I must," he said roughly to Hoshiko, "have money for the pa.s.sage! 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.

"G.o.ds! 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.

"G.o.ds!--yes!" he cried to her in his madness. "I understand. I am an eta! The d.a.m.ned word has pa.s.sed all through the army. It stands opposite my name. It makes all my oaths, all my obligations before the G.o.ds, 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. G.o.ds of the skies! G.o.ds of the earth! G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds 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 h.e.l.l of hoa.r.s.e 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 G.o.ds 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 h.e.l.ls! 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! h.e.l.l woman!

Yes, you came to me in the form of a G.o.ddess. But the h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l'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 gla.s.s. 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.

"G.o.ds!" he whispered hoa.r.s.ely, 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. G.o.d 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 G.o.ds?"

"By all the G.o.ds," 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 G.o.ds 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 h.e.l.l 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! G.o.ds in the skies!