Chapter IV: Front Matter (4)

Lying on a board in the field hospital at the foot of the hill up which he had charged, Soichi opened his eyes to see the slow sun dropping behind the ridge across the river they had won. The long line of carts and pack horses filing by, told him the victory was complete, the transportation was coming up. His head and arm and shoulder were wrapped with bandages, and when he turned slightly on his hard bed a sharp pain warned him to lie still. A man in a long white apron, with his sleeves rolled up and a red cross on his arm came toward him, and he recognized the spectacled, kindly face of the surgeon. With a pleasant smile the doctor looked him in the face and touched his wrist a moment.

“You’ll do now,” he said.

Then two men came with a stretcher and carried him to a soft bed of blankets in a big white tent, and told him to go to sleep. It was very comfortable in the warm bed, and he lay there quietly, trying to recall the events of the day. After a little, he turned his head slowly and stared into the eyes of the man in the next bed. It was Lieutenant Kudo.

“Oho,” said Kokan, and his eyes danced. “It’s you, is it, Samurai? They say you won the charge.”

But because he was a good soldier and it was the order, Soichi calmly closed his eyes and went to sleep.

Next morning stretcher men came again and carried Soichi and all his tent mates into the town they had helped to capture the day before, and there, in a fine, big room in a solid house, he found another bed of blankets ready for him. Kokan was not with them; the officers had a different hospital and there the Samurai boy was taken. Wrapped in his soft blankets Soichi rested and dreamed and slept. One morning when the surgeon came to see him he brought some officers of the staff, and one of them, a grizzled colonel, with the star of a great decoration blazing on his breast, spoke to him and asked his name. Soichi tried to stand up, as was proper for a man answering an officer, but the colonel forbade him and he lay still. Then the colonel said in a loud voice, so that all the room could hear:

“The general sends his compliments to Kutami Soichi-san, first-class private, and grants him a _kanjo_ for his extraordinarily gallant conduct in the charge of the Guards and at the redoubt.”

Before Soichi could think, his wounded comrades were shouting “_Banzai!_” the grizzled colonel joining with all his voice. For a moment he could not speak. He was overwhelmed with the unexpected honor. A _kanjo_, that certificate of merit and honorable service more dearly prized than life itself. He had never dared to dream of winning that. The staff officers saw his confusion and smiled in kindly encouragement, and the surgeon beamed at him through the big spectacles. He lifted his head a little and tried to reply to the colonel.

“It was only a little,” he said feebly; “nothing at all. I thought it was the Emperor’s wish!”

He fell back on his blankets, and with flashing eyes the staff officers saluted him and stalked out of the room.

“Ha!” said the colonel, as he mounted his horse, “there is a soldier!”

His comrades were miles away, daring the Russians to renewed conflict, when Soichi had recovered enough to walk about a little and write to his father.

“I had hoped to win a glorious death,” he said in his first letter, “as was fitting for the first Kutami to be a soldier of the empire. But now I have received this honorable _kanjo_ and I am happy to live and to come back to see you and my mother again. I shall be quite well in a little time, but my service is ended. The surgeon says my rifle arm will not stand that work again, and a better man must take my place. I tried to do my duty, but now it is finished.

“For one thing I am very glad. Kokan and I are friends. We are coming home very soon, as soon as we can travel, but Kokan will return when he is quite well. He calls me Samurai now, and says I ‘won it with the redoubt.’ We have talked much about the old days and our homes, and even about O-Mitsu. Perhaps if you send someone to ask Kudo-san for her now he would not refuse.”

It was a different letter that Lieutenant Kudo sent to the house in Timber Street. Himself he spared not at all, and in long detail told the story of the midnight scout and described the day of battle.

“You do not know this Kutami,” he said. “He may have the name of an Eta, but he has the heart of a thousand Samurai. He has taught me a great lesson. O-Mitsu will be honored, and we too, if he still wishes to marry her.”

When Jukichi read the letter he sat a long time in silence, but O-Mitsu put her face in the cushion and wept for joy.

Two gray-haired men stood together on the landing watching the hospital ship swing into her moorings. Together they stepped down to the launch that puffed out into the bay, and as the steamer’s anchor rattled down, together they stood up and shouted “_Banzai!_” Together Jukichi and Chobei climbed the gangway to greet their soldier sons. That day the Gentleman had accepted the Commoner’s proposal for his daughter, and in the house in Timber Street a happy girl was awaiting the return of her lover.

XVI

The period of “Little Heat” had come and gone. Natsu-zemi and Min-min-zemi boomed their deafening chorus in the pines about the Shinto shrine and the rice was tall and straight in the myriad fields. The _kitsunichi_ (lucky day) had come, and as evening fell, O-Mitsu waited in her pure white robe the coming of the friends who were to bear her away to her husband. Presently the little group set out, and in a few moments the house in Azalea Street had received its new mistress.

When she had changed to the beautiful new dress of softest silk Soichi had given her, she sat down with him and drank the _san-san ku-do_ that made her his wife. Three times from each of the three cups she sipped the sake and passed the cup to him. Then, husband and wife, they joined the friends assembled in the wide rooms for the feast that crowned the day. And among those guests none were more honored than Kudo Jukichi and his son. The proud old Samurai had taken the last step, and become in fact as well as in law, a citizen of the new Empire.

WORKS OF ROBERT W. CHAMBERS.

IOLE

Colored inlay on the cover, decorative borders, headpieces, thumb-nail sketches, and tail-pieces. Frontispiece and three full-page illustrations. 12mo. Ornamental Cloth, $1.25.

Does anybody remember the opera of The Inca, and that heart-breaking episode where the Court Undertaker, in a morbid desire to increase his professional skill, deliberately accomplishes the destruction of his middle-aged relatives in order to inter them for the sake of practice?

If I recollect, his dismal confession runs something like this:

“It was in bleak November
When I slew them, I remember,
As I caught them unawares
Drinking tea in rocking-chairs.”

And so he talked them to death, the subject being “What Really Is Art?” Afterward he was sorry—

“The squeak of a door,
The creak of a floor,
My horrors and fears enhance;
And I wake with a scream
As I hear in my dream
The shrieks of my maiden aunts!”

Now it is a very dreadful thing to suggest that those highly respectable pseudo-spinsters, the Sister Arts, supposedly cozily immune in their polygamous chastity (for every suitor for favor is popularly expected to be wedded to his particular art)—I repeat, it is very dreadful to suggest that these impeccable old ladies are in danger of being talked to death.

But the talkers are talking and Art Nouveau rockers are rocking, and the trousers of the prophet are patched with stained glass, and it is a day of dinkiness and of thumbs.

Let us find comfort in the ancient proverb: “Art talked to death shall rise again.” Let us also recollect that “Dinky is as dinky does;” that “All is not Shaw that Bernards;” that “Better Yeates than Clever;” that words are so inexpensive that there is no moral crime in robbing Henry to pay James.

Firmly believing all this, abjuring all atom-pickers, slab furniture, and woodchuck literature—save only the immortal verse:

“And there the wooden-chuck doth tread;
While from the oak trees’ tops
The red, red squirrel on the head
The frequent acorn drops.”

Abjuring, as I say, dinkiness in all its forms, we may still hope that those cleanly and respectable spinsters, the Sister Arts, will continue throughout the ages, rocking and drinking tea unterrified by the million-tongued clamor in the back yard and below stairs, where thumb and forefinger continue the question demanded by intellectual exhaustion:

“L’arr! Kesker say l’arr?”