Haru was brought up, chiefly at home, in that old-fashioned way which
produced one of the sweetest types of woman the world has ever seen.
This domestic education cultivated simplicity of heart, natural grace
of manner, obedience, and love of duty as they were never cultivated
but in Japan. Its moral product was something too gentle and beautiful
for any other than the old Japanese society: it was not the most
judicious preparation for the much harsher life of the new--in which it
still survives. The refined girl was trained for the condition of being
theoretically at the mercy of her husband. She was taught never to show
jealousy, or grief, or anger--even under circumstances compelling all
three; she was expected to conquer the faults of her lord by pure
sweetness. In short, she was required to be almost superhuman--to
realize, at least in outward seeming, the ideal of perfect
unselfishness. And this she could do with a husband of her own rank,
delicate in discernment--able to divine her feelings, and never to
wound them.
Haru came of a much better family than her husband; and she was a
little too good for him, because he could not really understand her.
They had been married very young, had been poor at first, and then had
gradually become well-off, because Haru's husband was a clever man of
business. Sometimes she thought he had loved her most when they were
less well-off; and a woman is seldom mistaken about such matters.
She still made all his clothes; and he commended her needle-work. She
waited upon his wants; aided him to dress and undress; made everything
comfortable for him in their pretty home, bade him a charming farewell
as he went to business in the morning, and welcomed him upon his
return; received his friends exquisitely; managed his household matters
with wonderful economy; and seldom asked any favors that cost money.
Indeed she scarcely needed such favors; for he was never ungenerous,
and liked to see her daintily dressed--looking like some beautiful
silver moth robed in the folding of its own wings--and to take her to
theatres and other places of amusement. She accompanied him to
pleasure-resorts famed for the blossoming of cherry-trees in spring, or
the shimmering of fireflies on summer nights, or the crimsoning of
maples in autumn. And sometimes they would pass a day together at
Maiko, by the sea, where the pines seem to sway like dancing girls; or
an afternoon at Kiyomidzu, in the old, old summer-house, where
everything is like a dream of five hundred years ago--and where there
is a great shadowing of high woods, and a song of water leaping cold
and clear from caverns, and always the plaint of flutes unseen, blown
softly in the antique way--a tone-caress of peace and sadness blending,
just as the gold light glooms into blue over a dying sun.
Except for such small pleasures and excursions, Haru went out seldom.
Her only living relatives, and also those of her husband, were far away
in other provinces; and she had few visits to make. She liked to be at
home, arranging flowers for the alcoves or for the gods, decorating the
rooms, and feeding the tame gold-fish of the garden-pond, which would
lift up their heads when they saw her coming.
No child had yet brought new joy or sorrow into her life. She looked,
in spite of her wife's coiffure, like a very young girl; and she was
still simple as a child--notwithstanding that business capacity in
small things which her husband so admired that he often condescended to
ask her counsel in big things. Perhaps the heart then judged for him
better than the pretty head; but, whether intuitive or not, her advice
never proved wrong. She was happy enough with him for five
years--during which time he showed himself as considerate as any young
Japanese merchant could well be towards a wife of finer character than
his own.
Then his manner suddenly became cold--so suddenly that she felt assured
the reason was not that which a childless wife might have reason to
fear. Unable to discover the real cause, she tried to persuade herself
that she had been remiss in her duties; examined her innocent
conscience to no purpose; and tried very, very hard to please. But he
remained unmoved. He spoke no unkind words--though she felt behind his
silence the repressed tendency to utter them. A Japanese of the better
class is not very apt to be unkind to his wife in words. It is thought
to be vulgar and brutal. The educated man of normal disposition will
even answer a wife's reproaches with gentle phrases. Common politeness,
by the Japanese code, exacts this attitude from every manly man;
moreover, it is the only safe one. A refined and sensitive woman will
not long submit to coarse treatment; a spirited one may even kill
herself because of something said in a moment of passion, and such a
suicide disgraces the husband for the rest of his life. But there are
slow cruelties worse than words, and safer--neglect or indifference,
for example, of a sort to arouse jealousy. A Japanese wife has indeed
been trained never to show jealousy; but the feeling is older than all
training--old as love, and likely to live as long. Beneath her
passionless mask the Japanese wife feels like her Western sister--just
like that sister who prays and prays, even while delighting some
evening assembly of beauty and fashion, for the coming of the hour
which will set her free to relieve her pain alone.
Haru had cause for jealousy; but she was too much of a child to guess
the cause at once; and her servants too fond of her to suggest it. Her
husband had been accustomed to pass his evenings in her company, either
at home or elsewhere. But now, evening after evening, he went out by
himself. The first time he had given her some business pretexts;
afterwards he gave none, and did not even tell her when he expected to
return. Latterly, also, he had been treating her with silent rudeness.
He had become changed--"as if there was a goblin in his heart"--the
servants said. As a matter of fact he had been deftly caught in a snare
set for him. One whisper from a geisha had numbed his will; one smile
blinded his eyes. She was far less pretty than his wife; but she was
very skillful in the craft of spinning webs--webs of sensual delusion
which entangle weak men, and always tighten more and more about them
until the final hour of mockery and ruin. Haru did not know. She
suspected no wrong till after her husband's strange conduct had become
habitual--and even then only because she found that his money was
passing into unknown hands. He had never told her where he passed his
evenings. And she was afraid to ask, lest he should think her jealous.
Instead of exposing her feelings in words, she treated him with such
sweetness that a more intelligent husband would have divined all. But,
except in business, he was dull. He continued to pass his evenings
away; and as his conscience grew feebler, his absences lengthened. Haru
had been taught that a good wife should always sit up and wait for her
lord's return at night; and by so doing she suffered from nervousness,
and from the feverish conditions that follow sleeplessness, and from
the lonesomeness of her waiting after the servants, kindly dismissed at
the usual hour, had left her with her thoughts. Once only, returning
very late, her husband said to her: "I am sorry you should have sat up
so late for me; do not wait like that again!" Then, fearing he might
really have been pained on her account, she laughed pleasantly, and
said: "I was not sleepy, and I am not tired; honorably please not to
think about me." So he ceased to think about her--glad to take her at
her word; and not long after that he stayed away for one whole night.
The next night he did likewise, and a third night. After that third
night's absence he failed even to return for the morning meal; and Haru
knew the time had come when her duty as a wife obliged her to speak.
She waited through all the morning hours, fearing for him, fearing for
herself also; conscious at last of the wrong by which a woman's heart
can be most deeply wounded. Her faithful servants had told her
something; the rest she could guess. She was very ill, and did not know
it. She knew only that she was angry--selfishly angry, because of the
pain given her--cruel, probing, sickening pain. Midday came as she sat
thinking how she could say least selfishly what it was now her duty to
say,--the first words of reproach that would ever have passed her lips.
Then her heart leaped with a shock that made everything blur and swim
before her sight in a whirl of dizziness--because there was a sound of
kuruma-wheels and the voice of a servant calling: "Honorable-return-is!"
She struggled to the entrance to meet him, all her slender body
a-tremble with fever and pain, and terror of betraying that pain. And
the man was startled, because instead of greeting him with the
accustomed smile, she caught the bosom of his silk robe in one
quivering little hand--and looked into his face with eyes that seemed
to search for some shred of a soul--and tried to speak, but could utter
only the single word, "Anata?"[10] Almost in the same moment her weak
grasp loosened, her eyes closed with a strange smile; and even before
he could put out his arms to support her, she fell. He sought to lift
her. But something in the delicate life had snapped. She was dead.
[10] "Thou?"
There were astonishments, of course, and tears, and useless callings of
her name, and much running for doctors. But she lay white and still and
beautiful, all the pain and anger gone out of her face, and smiling as
on her bridal day.
Two physicians came from the public hospital--Japanese military
surgeons. They asked straight, hard questions--questions that cut open
the self of the man down to the core. Then they told him truth cold and
sharp as edged steel--and left him with his dead.
The people wondered he did not become a priest--fair evidence that his
conscience had been awakened. By day he sits among his bales of Kyoto
silks and Osaka figured goods--earnest and silent. His clerks think him
a good master; he never speaks harshly. Often he works far into the
night; and he has changed his dwelling-place. There are strangers in
the pretty house where Haru lived; and the owner never visits it.
Perhaps because he might see there one slender shadow, still arranging
flowers, or bending with iris-grace above the goldfish in his pond. But
wherever he rest, sometime in the silent hours he must see the same
soundless presence near his pillow--sewing, smoothing, softly seeming
to make beautiful the robes he once put on only to betray. And at other
times--in the busiest moments of his busy life--the clamor of the great
shop dies; the ideographs of his ledger dim and vanish; and a plaintive
little voice, which the gods refuse to silence, utters into the
solitude of his heart, like a question, the single word--"Anata?"