Returning home from the princely banquet side by side in the double
jinrikisha, not a word had been spoken between Tetsujo Onda and his
child. The master went at once into his little study, banging shoji and
fusuma close around him.
Yuki, forcing back her sad thoughts, related to her mother and the eager
servants an account of the many beautiful dishes at the feast. For their
amusement she even told a few of the queer foreign mistakes. Some of
these were received by Maru San in gasping horror.
"Ma-a-a-a!" she cried once. "A foreign lady, rich and educated,
leave--one--chopstick--standing on its head in a bowl of rice! Ma-a! But
how can I believe that? Miss Yuki must be joking."
"Just think what foolish things you would do at a foreign banquet, with
their awkward knives, forks, and spoons," said Yuki, smiling.
Maru shook her head. This revolution of the poles of etiquette was too
much for her brain.
Each article of Yuki's attire, beginning with the heavy satin obi
(sash), was carefully folded, pressed smooth by the hands, and put away
lovingly in a lacquered clothes-chest. Sometimes Iriya performed this
service, sometimes Suzumé. Yuki and Maru were both considered too
inexperienced for such careful manipulation.
That night it was the old warrior's turn to remain awake, staring at the
ceiling, spelling out the future by the andon's dim light, and planning
ways to rescue his daughter from her mad attachment without inflicting
unnecessary pain. For Yuki was indeed the pride of his heart. It was a
humiliation as well as a sorrow that she should be willing to repudiate
her nationality.
With his slow wits and somewhat rigid cast of mind he had not caught the
full importance of the evening just passed, or the significance of the
test in which the Red God had played so large a part. Yet in his
daimyo's eye, as it rested on Yuki, he had seen something that stirred
the blood in the old samurai's veins. Surely not even the ladies of the
golden Fujiwara age had been more beautiful than Yuki-ko. Then, Hagané
was not indifferent to beauty in women. Could it be possible-- But no!
Tetsujo dared not let this fancy spread. His skull would split with it.
Groaning, he turned on his wooden pillow and tried to sleep--but in
vain.
Meanwhile his daughter, not twenty feet away, behind her silver fusuma,
lay in dreamless quiet. The certainty of Hagané's implication, and the
tremendous opposition it involved, steadied and concentrated her. She
knew what she had before her and deliberately willed the sleep that
should bring strength.
In the early dawn, within the sound of her father's restless tossing,
she crouched against a shoji, and in the faint pink glow wrote an
English letter. Every motion showed care. The rustling of the long
sheets of Japanese paper would have betrayed her, so she wrote in pencil
on a little pad that bore the name of a stationer in Washington. From
time to time she consulted an open letter in a man's writing, a wild,
illogical, despairing letter,--the one that Gwendolen had brought some
days before.
"How will your thoughts be this gray morning, my dear?" she wrote to
him. "Last night you were as one stung by happy madness. You would not
see nor hear my warnings. Now you will be realizing why I wished to make
warnings. Lord Hagané is with my father against us. They wish me not to
marry with a foreigner. That terrible painting was a test, and I have
betrayed us by my woman's soft heart. Now they are sure that the one I
love is in Tokio they will take stronger care against me. Dear Pierre, I
do not think there is any hope! We can wait,--or we can die!--just now I
believe nothing else is possible. O Pierre! If my weakness offend you,
and if already it seem to you far beyond any help,--if you, being the
impatience, have not heart to so long wait,--let me go! Forget poor
Yuki! Indeed, I should not have promised at all. I belong to my country,
as in previous time I said. I must not make sad your bright life. Rather
would I be forgotten than bring you to grief. Your Yuki-ko."
This letter she addressed to Pierre at the French Legation, stamped,
sealed it, and slipped it into the long, hanging sleeve of her kimono,
intending, at the first opportunity, to get it into the hands of a
postman. After this she arranged her hair and obi quickly and went out
into the kitchen where already she heard old Suzumé and Maru San at
work. Hardly had she entered when the front gate opened and the
newspaper-boy ran in, his small copper bell clamoring on his hip. His
bovine face was crimson with suppressed joy. Beside the usual morning
sheet he held out a printed extra, shaking it toward her.
"Look at this! Honorably read these headlines, o jo san! Banzai Nippon!"
he cried.
Yuki reached forward for the hand-bill. "It is war! War! Togo has
fired!" she read, in a low, tense voice. "War with that great brutal
nation, and we have fired! O Nippon! O my Emperor! The ancient gods be
with you!"
"Three ships already sunk! Three!" screamed the boy, wildly, and tossed
up his foreign jockey-cap.
"Kwannon preserve us! What has happened--an earthquake?" cried old
Suzumé, hastening from the well-curb, and wiping red hands on her apron
as she came.
"War! War, nurse! Our country is at war this minute, and three Russian
battle-ships are already sunk!"
"We'll teach the bears that we are not to be trampled--Banzai Nippon!"
boasted the paper-boy, as he hurried back to the street.
Iriya, not quite dressed, thrust her head from the parted fusuma.
"War, Mistress! War, Master! The honorable Mr. Togo has sunk all the
Russian battle-ships and beheaded all the generals with his own hand!"
shrieked Suzumé. Maru began to cry.
"War!" faltered Iriya, and shrank back into the dim room.
"Banzai! May our Emperor live a thousand years!" roared Tetsujo. Those
outside could hear him hurtling about the narrow room. "Tell them to
hang the flags above the gate, woman! Quick! Every moment wasted is a
sacrilege! Gods of my Ancestors, at last we fight! Would that I were
with Togo!"
Iriya, after giving orders for the flags, threw herself before the
family shrine, where lights burned always in small, steady, pointed
flames. "Ancestral spirits of our home, old deities of this land, give
strength to our soldiers and sailors!" she whispered.
Tetsujo brushed past her, fully equipped for walking. His old face
twitched with eagerness.
"Do you not wait for your worthless breakfast, honorable master?"
ventured Suzumé.
Onda gave a loud laugh and tossed the old dame a handful of coin.
"Breakfast! I'm eating and drinking food of the gods! Here! Take this
money, and all of you women go to your temple and make offering! I seek
the public places where men assemble." Suddenly he halted. Hagané's last
words came to his ears. His face turned black, and he slowly walked into
the house with bent head. "I had forgotten--I cannot go. Serve the
breakfast as usual," he muttered in the voice of an old man. Stumbling
into the main room he said under his breath, "Hachiman Sama, help me to
endure! On a day like this--I, Onda Tetsujo--I a warrior of Hagané's
clan--I must be held here like a tame cock in a bamboo basket! Had I not
seen the look in his Highness's eye--I might hurl all aside and take the
risk--"
Soft footsteps had been following him. He wheeled, to face Yuki. Her
eyes were gleaming and steady, though her face had crimsoned with shame.
"Father," she began proudly, "I know the reason of your return. All your
heart burns to be with other men, and to hear full news of this mighty
event. Go, I entreat you! There is no fear of what--you and Prince
Hagané think."
The old warrior himself now showed embarrassment. He would not meet her
gaze, but let his eyes move restlessly about the floor as he answered:
"Yes, my old heart strains like a bowstring to be gone--and I do not
dare! You defied me once,--my blood grows hot at the thought of it."
"Still, I am your daughter," said Yuki. "And I think you will believe me
when I offer you my pledge that, from this moment till your return, even
though it be a week hence, I shall not leave this house and garden,
shall not admit a foreign guest to it nor listen to foreign speech."
"I believe you," said Tetsujo, with great relief in his face. "You will
neither go nor admit a foreign guest--nor write and receive letters?"
Yuki caught up her sleeve. Onda's face darkened. Deliberately drawing
forth the letter she offered it to her father, saying, "Here is one I
have already written and shall send. Will you not trust me even further
and be the one by whose hand it goes?"
"Me post it? Me put it in a box?" he asked in amazement.
"The meaning it bears is not against your desire, father. Rather may it
destroy an evil that already lives. I ask you to take it."
"To bargain thus with a mere girl--" the samurai muttered. Then he threw
his head back. "My blood is in your veins. I trust you. Give it."
Yuki, choking back a little sob, fell at his feet and touched her
forehead to the floor. She heard his quick and heavy tread shiver
through the house. Then followed, coming in her direction, the gentler
steps of Iriya.
Yuki lifted her arms. "Mother, mother!" she cried passionately, "why
could I not have been born a man? To die for one's country, in battle,
with the thought of the Emperor like a cooling draught at the lips! To
stand on the great black ship, smiling in storm and snow and fog, driven
in like fate itself to glorious chances! Oh, that is to _live!_ But to
be a woman--"
"Yes," said Iriya, quietly seating herself. "The fortunate are those who
know, in this incarnation, full expression of a burning heart."
"Do you feel so too, mother?--you, who are always so tranquil and so
dear?"
"I too am a samurai's daughter. In the strife of Restoration days I saw
my father and my brother die--I saw my mother live."
"Oh, dearest one, how selfish we young souls are. We are like green
fruit that has no mellowness. You have suffered so deeply--and I never
guessed."
Iriya, with half-closed eyes on the garden, uttered words which until
the hour of her death never quite loosed their echoes from the girl's
heart. "Young souls are indeed unripe in the ways of love. That
suffering of mine was mere indifference to the grief I shall know if, at
an hour like this, with Nippon in the throes of re-birth, my only child
should become the wife of her enemy."
Yuki cowered back. She could not look her mother in the face. Up to this
moment she had never dreamed that Iriya had been told anything. The
sense of comradeship and of interdependence between a Japanese husband
and wife is very strong; but in this case, where Tetsujo's angry
violence had been so out of keeping with the whole tenor of his life,
Yuki was perhaps justified in feeling that he would prefer to maintain a
sullen reticence.
Iriya's words, and the way she spoke them, showed not only that she was
conversant with the whole threatening situation, but that she had
thought and prayed deeply. It did not seem at all the every-day domestic
Iriya that spoke, but an older and more impersonal spirit, issuing from
borrowed human, lips.
An uncomfortable silence fell between them. Iriya sat rigid and upright,
as a silver image in a Buddhist niche. Little Yuki, feeling very small
and young and human, crept noiselessly to her own room.
* * * * *
Tetsujo did not return until the following day. He showed evidences of
strong excitement, and could not for a while be seated, but strode up
and down the matted floor of the house, throwing off ejaculations and
phrases of war-news. He had much to tell in his irritating, disjointed
way. But Japanese women do not show impatience. They knelt out of range
of his feet, but within good hearing, following his motions with
feverish eagerness, and snatching at his words as at whizzing fireflies.
Names of those killed, quotations from foreign newspapers, reports from
the Tokio war-office, maledictions upon himself that he was too old to
go,--all came in a scurrying swarm from the samurai's lips.
"Refused me--they refused me,--those grinning, foreignized apes at the
war-office. Even my daimyo will not help me. An age limit? Gods! Trained
men must twirl their thumbs while boys with soft hearts and flabby
muscles defend the Emperor! Would that I had ten thousand lives to give,
and that each life in passing held the agonies of ten thousand deaths.
Even that would be but a handful of blown petals to the whirling majesty
of Nippon in the breath of the Eternal.--But wait! There are many young
men now, there are hills of powder and river-beds of shot; but when that
powder melts like snow in a spring rain, when the last shot stings the
air, then may the sword-arm leap to usefulness. The Cossacks cut and
slay like demons,--why not we? For whom then will be the cry but for old
Onda? Onda Tetsujo! who has cut three bodies through with one slow,
steady stroke; who has bared a living bone so swiftly that the slain
creature turned inquisitive eyes on death! Bah, I babble and rave like a
Meiji actor."
"Yet, Lord, it may come,--it may come," whispered Iriya, aloud. "Daily I
shall pray and sacrifice that this desire of our hearts be granted."
Yuki looked upon these heroic beings that had given her life, and knew
the pangs of self loathing. What was she, their only child, now doing
for the land they loved? Planning ways of remaining faithful to a
foreign lover! She drooped her head still lower. Alas! Had Pierre not
taken that promise from her unguarded soul! If Pierre even now would
give her up--would understand.
Tetsujo, still fuming in a noble rage, cut the floor in cross-lines of
hasty striding. He turned at intervals, catching back his flight,
raising himself up to silence as if he heard a bugle-note, staring,
unseeing, into the garden, then clenching his fists, muttering new
imprecations, and throwing himself again into his restless walk. The
essence of Yamato Damashii breathed from him. One listened for the clank
of steel and shark's-skin armor. His right hand felt incessantly for the
vanished sword-hilts. All at once he stopped directly before Yuki,
transfixed her with fierce, tormented eyes and cried, "Onda Yuki, you
are a samurai's daughter."