Chapter XXVII: The Small White Death

He was not called. The war went terribly on. The bewildered giant was buffeted, dismembered, at will by the shy pygmy. All about Shijiro fell the pink tickets, everywhere he met his mad, happy countrymen hurrying to the seaports, looking askance, but nothing came to him. Perhaps it was this. Perhaps it was too much work, exposure, and anxiety. Perhaps too little food. Perhaps all of these together. But presently he was in an hospital with his temperature at a hundred and five. Hoshiko was there always. And sometimes he forgot the harshness of his later life and fancied that it was again that day he first saw her by the Forbidden City. So he would live again through all that happy life until he came to the battle--whence he always came. Often in his fancy he was in the very presence of that glorious death he had sworn to die. Then Hoshiko was forgotten again. And presently she went out of his sick mind as she had long since gone out of his shattered life, and nothing but battle lived there. She did not strive to recall herself by so much as a touch. So the gods wished it to be; this was their will. She had entered upon her eternal penance for happiness, and she did not again question its time or place or form. The happiness was gone. It could return no more. But with the sense that she had impiously raped her joy from the heavens themselves came the exultation that not even the gods could ever take that from her. It had been. She had had it.

He knew, one day, in a sane moment, that he was not leading armies to battle and himself to the great crimson death, but with an immense horror that he was confined within four deadly white walls, upon a narrow cot, not the damp, blood-stricken earth. That there were no belching cannons in front of him, no hell of hoarse shouts behind him, no curses and death-groans about him, but quiet, terrible, maddening, only the still, small white death of women and children.

He leaped up to fly from it and made this small death all the more sure. No prayers to his father, none to the augustnesses, none to the myriad gods availed. There he saw the still small white death of women closing down upon him while he lay inert, bound to his bed.

"This is my punishment," he whispered to her in anathema; "this is my punishment for taking you and forgetting him. Yes, even the gate of the Meido will be closed on me. I am not fit to meet my father. He must still wait. And for whom? There is only I! Only I can redeem him! And I must first descend--and cleanse my sinning face in the waters--the hot, hot waters of the hells! And when, after many lives, I meet my father--"

His mind could not endure the horror of this. But he turned his fury upon her.

"For you," he cried, "such a thing as you! Eta, jigoku onna! Hell woman! Yes, you came to me in the form of a goddess. But the hell woman does that. And now that death is here my vision sees through that and you are a skeleton with talons--with a beak--with hell's hollow laughter--the devils sent you to tempt me and I fell--and am lost--my father's soul is lost--and you laugh--"

Alas! she did not laugh--she sobbed. For that was one of the days when the flesh was weak.

"Yes," she said, "I tempted you; I am all you say!"

He fell into coma then and remembered no more: leaving her here on earth with those fearful words in her heart to remember which had loved him only too well. Sometimes she half believed them. Once she crept from his side to look in the glass. She saw no talons or beak, but a wanness which, indeed, suggested a skeleton.

He knew, before his wits left him, that the objective of the Guards was the Yalu. And now he fancied himself gloriously leading them. But half-sane moments came in which he would again suspect the four white walls.

"Gods!" he whispered hoarsely, in one of these, "am I going to the small white death of women and children? Have I only dreamed that I was still leading them?"

"No," said his wife. "This is the dream--these white walls. You are to die the great red death. God has told me."

"Is it so?"

He gazed distractedly about and still thought he saw the walls.

"It is as I say."

He gripped her hands.

"By all the gods?"

"By all the gods," she swore.

Then, again, for the last time, came full delirium--and again it came in red.

"You have told me true!" he shouted. "There the devils come! On, on, on! Banzai! On! Nippon Denji! On! Ah, my sword slips at the handle--it is red! And the staff of my flag, too! A little earth!" He rubbed his palms on the bed covers as if they were the ground, and clenched his hands again. "Ah, now we are on them! Mutsushima! Up, up, up! Too early to die! You have not killed enough! Up, Banzai! The gods will not redeem your samurai vow with so few dead enemies of the emperor to your credit!" Then he must have been struck. "Father! Father!" he cried, and held out his hands.

After that he lay as one dead for a long time, then woke with slow doubt to find himself still without the heavens.

"I have not killed enough. That is it. There must be many more before I can see my father's face. Many more because--because I married an eta--yes, an eta seduced me. Did you know her? She was a hell woman. She kept me from my father. Did you know her?"

He stared up at her with half recollection, and then went on to his battles.

In one of them he lost his colors. No one has ever suffered a sharper agony than he--until they were retaken.

"But--the flag! The flag! I am hit! Here! Not much! Gods in the skies! There it is! They have it! The cursed dogs! They have touched it! Defiled it! Come with me--Kondo--Musima--Tani--Ichimon--now! At them!"

And she knew that he had retaken the flag and was bringing it gloriously back; each act was faithfully fought.

But then he missed it. He looked in his hands.

"Do you see my flag?"

"Yes," she cajoled, "it is here."

But she did not convince him, and he slept under his opium unhappily. He thought sometimes that the enemy had again taken it.

When he awoke next morning, still unhappy and in doubt (he had not forgotten it), the flag was in his hand. There was not one in America for the little wife. But that night she made one. He shouted with sudden strength as he gripped it and kept it in his hands until they could feel no more. And then with it lashed to the foot of his bed he lived the little remnant of his life in its glory, and in sight of its crimson and white went out--mad with the supremest ecstasy a Japanese can know--out in the great red death to another reincarnation, at what, for the fourth time, he must have thought the happiest moment of his life.

And then--shall I tell it?--his call came.

And a letter from Zanzi, now a general commanding a brigade. Almost as one would write of love, he wrote.

"Come back, eta," it said joyously; "we need you now. You shall not go to the Hakodate men. Every one of us clamors for you at the colors. Come! It is war. Your doctrine prevails. There are now neither samurai nor eta, but only sons of the emperor. Come! We are going to a glorious victory. Take your share. Your penance is complete. Your exile is finished. Come, the emperor himself calls his sons to die for him! Come! The flag waits. Come!

"ZANZI."

"PRESENT FOR DUTY"