Chapter XXVI: The "tsarevitch"

So the little exiles lived and starved, and feasted and loved on; happy sometimes, sorrowing more often, while Japan was yet at peace.

Always Arisuga kept his address at headquarters, and always he waited--listened almost--for the call. But it was long--very long. And his face grew sharp and his eyes narrow. And more and more in the waiting and listening he forgot, in America, Hoshiko--his Eastern Dream-of-a-Star.

For, presently, it was nearly ten years of this exile. Ten years of prayer which grew only more fervid as the years doubled upon themselves, and the hope so long deferred made the heart of Arisuga ill. Ten years of yearning for their own country, which fate denied them and which nothing but war could again give to them! The heart of Hoshiko sickened, too. But it was thus because Arisuga more and more often forgot her rather than with the homesickness which she suffered as he did. Yet she guiltily knew that while there was no war she might keep him, even though he forgot her. So it was he alone at last who prayed for war. It was sacrilege to obstruct the gods; it was impossible to pray to be kept from her own perfumed land, so--she stubbornly prayed not at all.

And then it did come: the great war--though not as he had fancied it would. Slowly it got into the air. Every day he spent at the bulletins. But they said Japan would not fight. Russia was getting and would get what she wished. She was too great for Japan. And some of the newspapers began to pour contempt upon his country. She was baying the moon, one said.

"What! are there no more samurai in Japan?" Arisuga cried out to his wife that night. She did not reply. Her silence was almost guilt. For as the threat of war went on, and as Arisuga grew older, he valued the more what he had lost for her. "Gods," he proceeded with a hollow laugh, "I am not a samurai myself. And I must wait my call to be even allowed to fight."

"Forgive me, dear lord," said his wife. And the words and her attitude recalled that other time she was servilely at his feet.

"Rise!" he commanded impatiently. "And do not call me lord. I am no more--nothing more--than you--eta! It cannot be helped. We must suffer it." But there were no caresses--there were never any now.

Then it came, quite according to Arisuga's fancy--a thunder-clap from the heavens! Togo had sunk the "Tsarevitch"!

"At last," cried Arisuga, that day, "I am a soldier once more, if not a samurai! A son of the emperor! Banzai!" And that night it seemed as if all the old sweetness had come back and she slept in his arms as she had used to sleep.

"All that remains now is the call," he said the next day, still happy.

He went to the consulate to see that they had his address correctly, but on the way home he remembered that there was no money for the passage. For, strangely, this passion of war had obliterated that other passion of chance! He ran all the way.

"I must--I must," he said roughly to Hoshiko, "have money for the passage! When my call comes I shall not be ready. And there is none!"

"I have not forgotten it, lord," she answered, giving him the little she had been secretly able to save from his gambling for the purpose.

Arisuga counted it. He did not even stop to thank her for this unexpected sacrifice and munificence.

"Gods! It is not one-tenth," he accused. "We must have more at once. Jones liked you. Why not?"

"Yes, lord," said Hoshiko, growing pale.

"Remember the wives of the forty-seven ronins. They gave themselves to harlotry for their husbands' cause."

"Yes, lord, to-morrow," answered the trembling little woman. And though each day there was a little more money, she did not go to Moncure Jones. She could not. Some things are impossible!

All day she was gone, and he thought her there, with the yellow-fanged dragon, and did not care! Nothing had hurt her heart so much as that. Each night she came back to him with her pitiful wage in her sleeve. Arisuga might have thought this strange had he not ceased all thought of her--that Jones permitted her to come home to him each night with each day's wages. And he might have noticed, if he had still adored the hands of satin, that they were stained: now with red, now with blue, yellow, green. But he never touched the hands any more, and was become impatient when they touched him void of money. But the little wage, the sixty or seventy cents which he seized eagerly and put away--you will want to know how she got them.

Try, then, to fancy as she did that this was the beginning of her punishment for the happiness of being his wife. To stay away from the chance of being with him, from early morning until late night. To watch the slow-going clock; the shadows as they crept up the wall to the red stain first, then the blue, then that pale yellow one, scarcely to be seen at seven o'clock; and then still (for her wish always outran the shadow) to wait until the clock in the cathedral struck before she might stop making muslin flowers "for the happy occasions" and go wanly home to unhappiness. She was a flower-maker--this flower of another land made flowers for weddings, christenings, festivals, soiling them only, now and then, with a tear. Yet no one had ever made prettier flowers "for the happy occasions" than she who had, now, no happy occasions.

But the war went on, on, and he was not called.

"Gods!--yes!" he cried to her in his madness. "I understand. I am an eta! The damned word has passed all through the army. It stands opposite my name. It makes all my oaths, all my obligations before the gods, naught. There is but one hope. They will not call me unless the last man must be put into the field. Then--_then_ they will take the eta. Gods of the skies! Gods of the earth! Gods of the seas and caverns below--let it be so! Let my country be among the dregs at the bottom of the cup of the nations' despair! I--I, Shijiro Arisuga, will bring it--lead it--to victory with my flag! I! For my father's ghosts will fight with me. That is what we need! The ghosts of our ancestors! Who can vanquish them? And, O ye augustnesses,--" he addressed the spirits of his own ancestors,--"bring it about! For ye--ye alone can vanquish this upstart foe. And ye must--ye _must_ permit me to make for my father the red death! Ye must--ye must."

Do you not see that he was gone quite mad?

Yet every insane word was a stabbing accusation upon the soul of Hoshiko, for whom it had all been. And she fancied that she was no more worth the sacrifice than was one of the morning-glories which were now only a memory. For she was now as pale, as sad, as evanescent and fleeting, as they: those morning-glories in their garden in happy China, unto whose beauty in the dewy morning she had once been wont to liken her life with this mad Arisuga. Unto whose beauty he had used to liken her!

THE SMALL WHITE DEATH