MEANWHILE, within the war-torn heart of Manchuria, the last words of
Ohano came up to torment the soldier. His days and nights were made
horrible by the imagined reiteration in his ears of the words of Ohano.
By the light of a hundred camp-fires he saw the face of Moonlight, the
wife he had discarded at the command of the ancestors. He tried to
picture it as he had first seen her, with that peculiar radiance about
her beauty. She had appeared to him then like to some rare and precious
flower, so fragile and exquisite it seemed almost profanation to touch
her. How he had desired her! How he had adored her!
He recalled, with anguish, the first days of their marriage—a mixture of
exquisite joy and pain; then the harrowing, heartbreaking months that
had followed—the metamorphosis that had taken place in his beautiful
wife. How timid, meek, submissive, they had made her in those latter
days! He paced and repaced the ground, suffering torments incomparably
worse than those of the wounded soldiers.
To think of Moonlight as an inmate of the Yoshiwara, as Ohano had
insisted, the last resource of the most abandoned of lost souls, was to
arouse him to an inner frenzy that no amount of action in the bloodiest
encounters could even temporarily efface.
He began to count the days which must pass before his release. He knew
by now that the war was soon to end. Already negotiations were under
way. At first he had bitterly regretted the fact that the gods had not
mercifully permitted him to give up his life; now he realized that
perchance they had saved it for another purpose—the purpose of finding
his lost wife. He would devote the rest of his life, he promised
himself, to this undertaking; and, ah! when once again they two should
meet, nothing should part them.
They would go away to a new land—a better land even than Japan—of which
he had heard so much from a friend he had made out here in Manchuria.
There men did not cast off their wives because they were childless.
There no cruel laws sacrificed an innocent wife at the demand of the
dead. There there were no licensed dens of inquity into which the
innocent might be sold into a bondage lower than hell itself!
Gonji dreamed unceasingly of this land of promise, whither he intended
to go when once he had found his beloved Moonlight.
Incognito, finally, the Lord Gonji returned to Japan. He did not, as
became a dutiful and honorable son, proceed straightway to his home,
there to permit the members of his family to celebrate and rejoice over
his return.
At last Lord Gonji felt free of the thrall of the ancestors. He was a
son of the New Japan, master of his own conscience and deeds. The old
strict code set down for men of his class and race he knew was medieval,
childish, unworthy of consideration. Hitherto his actions had been
governed by the example of the ancestors and by order of those in
authority over him. Now he was free—free to choose his own path; and his
path led not to the house of his fathers.
It led, instead, to that “hell city” which had been imprinted so vividly
upon his mind that even in the heart of Manchuria he had seen its lights
and heard its brazen music.
From street to street of the Yoshiwara, and from house to house, now
went the Lord Saito Gonji, scanning with eager, feverish eyes every
pitiful little inmate thus publicly exhibited in cages. But among the
hopeless, apathetic faces that smiled at him with enforced beguilement
was not the one he sought.
He turned to other cities, wherever the famous brothels were maintained,
leaving for the last his home city of Kioto, where once the Spider had
been the darling of the House of Slender Pines.
How his haughty relatives had despised her calling; yet how desirable,
how infinitely superior it was in every way to the one to which they had
perhaps driven her.
The geisha was protected under the law, and her virtue was in her own
hands. She could be as pure or as light as she chose. Not even the
harshest of masters could actually drive her to the degradation of the
inmates of the Yoshiwara, who were sold into bondage often in their
babyhood.
If he could but believe that Moonlight was now in the House of Slender
Pines! Yet his agents had insisted she had not returned to her former
home: moreover, they had supported the contention of Ohano, that
undoubtedly it was into some such resort that the unhappy outcast had
finally been driven.
Upon a day when the inmates of the Yoshiwara of Kioto were upon their
annual parade, when the city was swept by a paroxysm of patriotic
enthusiasm over the return of the victorious troops, Saito Gonji, worn
and wearied from his vain quest through many cities, returned at last to
his home city.
The streets were in holiday dress. From every roof-tree and tower the
sun-flag tossed its ruddy symbol in the air. The people ran through the
streets as if possessed, now cheering the passing soldiers, now waving
and shouting to the happy paraders, and all following, some taunting,
some cheering the long line of courtezans of the Yoshiwara.
They marched in single file, their long, silken robes, heavily
embroidered, held up by their maids, and accompanied by their
diminutive, toddling apprentices, often little girls as young as six and
seven.
Yet, small as they were, each was a miniature reproduction and
understudy of her mistress, in her elaborate coiffure with its
glittering ornaments (the geisha wears flowers), her obi tied in front,
and the thick paste of paint laid lividly from brow to chin. Some day it
would be their lot to step into the place of the ones they emulated,
and, in turn, slaves would hold their trains and masters would exhibit
them like animals in public cages.
Gonji followed the long train of courtezans for miles. Sometimes he
would run ahead, and, walking backward, pass down the long line,
scanning every face piercingly and letting not one escape his scrutiny.
And, as he studied the faces of these “hell women,” as his countrymen
had named them, for the first time Gonji forgot his beloved Moonlight.
The words of the American officer he had met in the campaign in
Manchuria came up vividly to his mind:
“No nation,” the American had said, “can honorably hold its head erect
among civilized nations, no matter what its prowess and power, so long
as its women are held in such bondage; so long as its women are bartered
and sold, often by their own fathers, husbands, and brothers, like
cattle.”
A great and illuminating light broke upon the tempest-tossed soul of the
Lord Saito Gonji. He would erect an imperishable monument to the memory
of his lost wife. She should be the inspiration for the most knightly
act that had ever been performed in the history of his nation.
It should be his task to effect the abolishment of the Yoshiwara! He
would devote his life to this one great cause, and never would he
abandon it until he had succeeded. This, and the revision of the inhuman
and barbarous laws governing divorce, should be his life-work.
He would show the ancestors that there were deeds even more worthy and
heroic than those of the sword.
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