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:--
"See what you have done!"
"What?" asked Hoshiko.
The maid's whisper was sinister.
"Do you wish him to think that you have been any one's? Every one's?
That is why he asked."
"It is not!" protested Hoshiko. "He asked to learn how many others love
me."
"And why should he ask that?"
"Because _he_ loves me," was Hoshiko's enigmatic answer.
There was no time at this moment for further explication. Arisuga had
evidently decided something which was in his mind when he asked his
first question, and Hoshiko fancied that his decision was against her.
For he laughed (not as she would have wished him to laugh), and took an
almost rude and assured possession of her.
"When the mistress says yes and the maid says no, one must believe his
eyes, which say it is improbable that so fair a flower has bloomed
unseen even in this arid plain of China!"
"You think, then, that I _have_ had--twenty lovers?" asked Hoshiko.
"Certainly," laughed Arisuga.
"No!" still cried the maid in her terror. "You believe, lord, that she
has had none--not one--until you came!"
"Certainly," laughed the soldier again.
The two girls looked at each other dazedly. Arisuga laughed again in
that unpleasant way.
"Now he will never know that I love him," chided the mistress, at an
opportune moment. "If he had thought that I gave up twenty lovers the
moment he came--"
The maid had not seen the value of creating such a situation. Hoshiko
practised tremendous wisdom. She repeated to Isonna, in the intervals
of the day, the very things Isonna had taught her with great pains.
"A man will think nothing of you unless he knows that others do. If one
has two lovers, one can easily have twenty. If one has one and is
truthful--that is all one will ever have. If one has none, how is one to
get even one unless she pretends to have many? For if no man cares for
you, no man will. If many men care for you, many more will. If a man
loves one and he sees that no one else does, he persuades himself that
he does not. For he thinks that if no one else loves one, one is not
worth loving. But if many love one, he persuades himself that he does,
because if many love one it must be right and proper for him to do it.
Now, you little beast, you must help, after putting him further off, to
bring him nearer by making him think that he loves and desires me more
than any of the twenty."
These philosophies of her own teaching, changed and informed with the
aroma of Hoshiko, went far to convince Isonna.
"Sweet mistress," said the repentant servant, "the gods pardon me--and
you--you also pardon me--if I have done wrong. But this--this I will
do--and swear it on the tablet of my father: If he should offer you
marriage, I will go with you to some place where he can never know. I
will keep your secret forever. Such things have happened. In another
country the gods will not follow. Even to the country of some barbarian
people, like America, I will go. What gods are there? Certainly none of
our gods--such as know you and him. But I will _not_ say that you have
been the creature of twenty lovers!"
"But only to make him understand that he loves me--now--here--to-day? We
have given him doubt! The rest does not matter."
Isonna was repentant but not helpful.
"Well--study--think--you little beast! And be more careful next
time--then whisper it to me. How to make him understand!"
But there was no further communication from the maid.
In the evening Arisuga said:--
"If what I have been thinking all day--since the events of last
night--is correct, and also meets your approval, I will take you."
And the little Lady Hoshi, shocked and stunned and shivering at her
heart, answered:--
"Yes, lord."
And again that night she wept--not an hour--many hours. For you will
have observed that Shijiro Arisuga did not say that he would marry--but
only take her. (There is a difference in Japan.) And he did not ask her
parents.
"You see, he knows!" she sobbed to the faithful maid. "Oh, it was so
sweet--so sweet--that I forgot that I must not. And when I thought he
loved me I was sure he would say 'I will marry you,' even if he did not
mean it. But he only said, 'I will take you.' So--he does not love
me--no! Well, Isonna, he shall have me. And I will enter his very soul!
And then, some day, he will regret those awful words, and when he does I
will die where he can see me afterward. You shall dress my hair in the
shimada fashion, with flowers."
"He does _not_ know," said the maid. "And he does love you. It is the
result of telling him that you have had twenty lovers!"
"Ah, Isonna, do not make my sorrow heavier. That would be worse. He
would not dare to say that to even me--if I were not what I am."
The maid still insisted.