Long into the night Yodogima struggled hard with the problem which now
crowded closer round, hemming her in and forcing her down till there
seemed no other means of escape. Their own religion promised no relief
short of the phenomenal, and her husband had made a last appeal: would
again tear himself away, going this time into foreign lands, thus to
retrieve his fallen prestige with further deadly conflict.
Something must be done; and that quickly, as circumstances indicated;
the recently subdued daimyos, though loyal, were veterans, and out of
employment, became unmanageable; using, no doubt, the matter of the
taiko's failure of a natural son as an excuse themselves to break the
peace. Korea, therefore, offered a likely outlet, and thither her
husband should go, yet it must take many months to equip and move such
an army as he had threatened upon so hazardous an undertaking. Yodogima
reasoned that she still had time to save him and reestablish confidence
at home.
"I shall in truth try the temple," concluded she, to herself, "as this
meddlesome Oyea--I fear with more of knowledge than faith--has so
earnestly and Christianly-like advised. Perhaps creed, after all, is
verily some real man-made, opportunely-devised opening unto the Way. I
must, however, accept faith, as a guide, more upon the strength of
Jokoin's fain attitude; she seems to have gotten for the trouble all she
asked or could manage. This Christian device, though new and
undemonstrable, if it does no more, may be the means of revealing to me
a bit of the benefaction that some of our fathers profess these six
hundred years or more to have found hidden behind the benignity of
Buddha. Yes, I shall just this once, if not again, set aside staid
reason to test dame truth, deny self at the bidding and for the love of
others--the effect can be no more trying than the cause is just. My
prayer must be answered."
Thus convinced and resigned, sleep, peaceful and converting, brought in
its round at waking a hope that held hitherto only in the making. Now
she could look out upon the world with a freedom that brooked no
questioning: the very clouds themselves seemed fraught with a charity
that she had believed the part and the due of man alone. No longer need
she concern herself about sin; the blood of a savior had atoned that:
Buddha made it plain that knowledge is the way, and men, inspired no
doubt, had built a temple, sacredly ruled at the door.
She had, only, to proceed thither, and pray.
Yodogima really held fast at heart a true conversion; the same ideal
shone as brightly as before; only the means had shifted; let them smite;
she should turn the other cheek.
And they did strike. Long before Hideyoshi had tried out or finished his
advantage, Oyea clandestinely entered the temple and there counselled
the keeper--she had known him for a long time, and designed better than
he knew or Yodogima anticipated.
The morning wended brightly, and the confiding princess, departing
tenderly the vain, mute welcomings of an ardently-inclined,
hard-accepted husband, trod expectantly toward the selfsame edifice,
devised and made in the name of One who consoles, be it man or his
cold-striven image.
Two lions carved in stone stood sentinel at either side the entrance.
These Yodogima contemplated in the light of a new understanding, born
not of tradition, but of faith proclaimed and knowledge derived. She
stood there in the footprints of an enforced progression, and must no
longer question dogma, though God be greater. Then she turned toward the
gate, frosted with antiquity and jealous of its passage--a receptacle
midway standing glaringly reminded her of a duty that fortunately she
had remembered: Yodogima, too, cast her bread upon the waters, and
passed on, that others might feast as she did penance.
Intercepted now by grated screens, warning her that she must ask and it
shall be given, Yodogima looked and there beheld an image, a true
likeness of what she all her life had painted sublime. Neither male nor
female, but of wood, carved in lines more symmetrical than reality had
effected, lacquered of gold finer than the wants of ordinary man had
ever acclaimed, these surrounded with safeguards seemingly beyond human
invasion, guarded on either side by emblems without either beginning or
ending, all surmounted in a halo that two burning pots of incense
ceaselessly wafted thither, this Yodogima, a penitent, believed with the
spirit of one who would suffer no transgression to stay or hinder any
fulfilment that her God might elect, and clapping her hands as inwardly
decreed and outwardly expressed through time hoary invoked a passage no
less distant or angelic than others perhaps as discerning or more
plastic, of ages recurring and lands apart, had sought or denied in the
lesser stranding of a course no more divinely conceived.
No further or greater low proving and encouraging of an inspiration born
within, and the spit-ball propitiously thrown--not with vulgar
meaning--the gates on either side the lofty emblem swung ajar--Yodogima
had gained the promise of an inner sanctuary, where moods and morals are
the more finely, if not subtly, wrought and there dwells no other god or
goddess than communion withal.
Yodogima chose the right approach and her prognosticator the left. As an
affinity draws, so it resolves only the transverse of an attending
unity. The positive and the negative harmonize upon grounds no more
irreducible, and that bonze followed his prey as the quadrant confronts
a Cardan.
Lying there, at one side, behind closed doors, his own view
unobstructed, this godly man, with the aid of Oyea, a Christian
accomplice's assurances, had penetrated deeper than the veil donned in
faith gained and worn as a security provisioned, and discerning the
motive augured a fulfilment that Yodogima alone had striven for in vain.
Once inside the four walls of this more than sacred, an over-beautiful,
a divinely wrought, and suggestively potent place, our vainly beguiled
and no less hard-pressed princess dropped hopelessly to her knees and
gazing round saw no other thing than one bewilderingly done round and
covering of modestly drawn yet bewitchingly significant prisms or
reflections that led apparently to or from nowhere, yet emanating in or
symbolizing afar the one ideal that had lured her thither.
"At last!" whispered she, as the sun above gathered and mellowed,
merging and intertwining the fanciful and the real, till comprehension
ceased and ideality carried her aloft the world she knew.
Only the soft matting underneath served her now prostrate form; the
spirit ceased its aching quest: a reality bordering the extremes of
ethereal generation possessed her. The great sun seemed marshaling its
hosts. Glad bugles sounded. A myriad cupids, winged as doves and armed
with bows and arrows, balanced and made ready for the flight. The great
father of fathers reached into his mighty knapsack, and Yodogima
breathed sparingly lest he withdraw empty the hand she longed to realize
filled. The good benefactor smiled, and that she sorrow no more revealed
to her the jewel--it was a son. And as the troopers charged earthward,
their purpose revealing itself in every fiber, the glad tidings of a
fulfilment worthy and complete filling her to overflowing, Yodogima
opened wide her eyes, and--Katsutoya stood over her.
Her dream, then, was in truth an unthinkable reality: faith, as
designed, a pregnant hoax.
Words were worse than useless now, and the body as helpless; thus
Yodogima only stared, the harder: with one furtive glance Katsutoya read
her innermost thoughts, and flushing to the full bent his knee with
partings still baser:
"Trust me, Yodogima: henceforth I am Harunaga."
Yodogima did not attempt to answer her traducer, who departed as he had
entered, professing the bestowal, only, of mercies latent underneath the
sackcloth and of the beadroll. She lay submerged now; overweighted with
a fantasy as far beneath the earth she abode as fancy had heretofore
carried her above it. Darkness came on, tremors marked some hard
internal disturbance, while yawning caverns fumed and spat fiery bursts
and sulphurous clouds from the mountain away. The infernal possessed
her. A huge dragon, half within, half without, at the summit, coiling
and straightening, lifting and lowering, seeking and searching, here and
there, all around, to the horizon, at last found her out, and mounting
its slender neck, with no hold to retain her balance, the monster,
rising with her, curved easily round and, retracing its slimy part,
disappeared into the uttermost depths of hades itself.
And there Ono Harunaga sweat and forked at building the fires. Great
heaps of humans replenished the fuel bins. These Yodogima scanned with
eagerness: many faces seemed familiar, but always before she could come
close enough to determine certainly who the victim was, Harunaga had
snatched away and pitched him into the flames beyond her reach or
discernment. Which eager haste seemed quite unreasonable to her, but
upon questioning him he answered resolutely as of old:
"Have faith in--"
Yodogima did not exactly catch the last word in his reply, but she could
not believe it "Christ" or "Buddha" or "Confucius," or any like name
that she knew, because the furnace fender were himself a reverend man.
No Shinto patron had been named; these were gods: the antithesis of
Saviors, hence in fact and not on trust.
Once she thought she saw her father, but upon closer scrutiny discerned
this victim's plight to be in consequence of the vain ambitions of three
unfaithful daughters, hence knew that she must have mistaken him. This
almost inexcusable blunder shocked her severely, and to avoid any
further unpleasantness of that sort Yodogima determined, as she were
there, to do as others did; disguise her own true self, and rely wholly
upon deception to carry her forward thence in the quest of all things
hellish. Therefore she began ignoring the individual, and continued
considering altogether the classes; and as there appeared to be only one
such there, she hit upon the plan of segregating Harunaga's vast
unrealized mass of strident humans by considering more their color. And
here, too, distinguishment proved difficult, though there appeared to
be, distinctly, some awful difference in the flame if white fuel were
added, or the reverse. The former flared more fiercely, burned the less
willingly, and their screams--
Rising to her feet and looking round at the barren walls yet enclosing
her, Yodogima realized for the first time that what we think we see is
but the shadow of an energy stupidly awaiting over there the magic wand
here to unfold.
Intelligence had wrought a true womanhood.
But invoke it, and the world itself were a fairyland--let gods be gods
and the rest each his allotted part endure. She would live down the sin
of beguiling, and bring to earth with ambition's might the heaven she
had fancied above.