Chapter XXIX: The Reincarnation of Shijiro Arisuga

For I think that you will wish to know what Hoshiko did to appear learned in the trade of the soldier before she joined the Guards. But it is not easy. For I am very near her now. And the satin hands must be as leather; the tiny feet must often leave their prints in blood on the snow; the plump, pink cheeks must be pounded into caverns and scarred with wounds; the nails must be deliberately torn and broken from the exquisite hands; the beautiful hair must be shorn. And last and hardest to tell, in her forehead must be made a ragged scar like that Arisuga got at Pekin--the one which had brought him to her. That I shall tell first--the making of the wound.

For a long time she studied it. This all men knew and it must be perfect. Once she mistrusted her own skill and went to see a surgeon. She showed him the picture of Arisuga and asked whether he could reproduce his wound upon herself. But immediately the doctor began to be wary. For he was a doctor like all other doctors, and when confronted with a thing unusual--one which no other doctor had put into the books--he was not wise.

"Ugly women," he said, "have often asked me to make them pretty. But this is the first time, in a somewhat extended practice, that I have had a pretty one ask me to make her ugly. Tell me the reason for it, and perhaps I can convince you that such beauty as the creator graciously gives us ought to be preserved, not destroyed, for it is more rare than you think."

But while he opened his case for some instrument of exploration, Hoshiko fled--so quietly and swiftly that when he turned he wondered if she had ever been there. Yes, there was in the air the flower perfume with which she had anointed her pretty body for his offices.

Of course she could run no such risk again. She must do it herself. So for long she thought upon wounds and woundings. How they were made; how they were healed; how that one of Arisuga's had been made; how it was healed: it was a sabre, and it had cut--so. Then it had been stitched so--very carelessly she had thought every time she saw it.

She was entirely capable of striking herself with a sabre; but through long reasoning she understood that she would not be likely to reproduce the precise form of Arisuga's wound. Though this was necessary, there was only one chance in many thousands of accomplishing it.

She finally knew that she must do it carefully, slowly--very slowly. There would be none of the ecstasy of the battle. Arisuga had often told her that he had never felt the wound until it was healed. That, in fact, he would not have known that he was struck but for the blood in his eyes. But she must do it as one argues a thing. Do you understand the difference? Can you see how a wound received in hot carnage and one slowly carved in one's own flesh may differ? Be sure that Hoshiko understood all this.

But she could not in America. It seemed an alien thing to do in a country which would only have misunderstood and perhaps have laughed. It needed her native soil and atmosphere, and ancestors and gods, to make the undertaking simple. Besides, while she was studying the making of the wound, steam and wind were taking her home. It was there, in the little deserted house, still deserted, where they had lived so happily those few days, that everything seemed fortunate.

And so there, after much preparation, she did it--all in one tortured day. Early in the morning she sat down before her little round mirror. She knew what she was to suffer. But she neither shrank from it nor sought to mitigate its agony. First she prayed the gods--very long. Then she set his picture before her. Then she washed--very clean. Then she made very sharp the little toilet sword. Then she bound her body with many towels and made the first incision bravely. But she had not well calculated the agony of such slow self-wounding. Her senses slowly left her as if to protest against what she did.

It was long before her hands would return to their office of self-mutilation. Yet no matter how weak the flesh was, the spirit always drove the hands back to their office until it was done--and well done--to the stitches--to the anointing--to the binding--the destruction of the quivering parts of herself.

Can you fancy her there on the floor before the little mirror which had once told back to her all her loveliness, with that little sword deliberately carving out of her own beautiful flesh with her own hand Arisuga's horrid badge of honor? She knew it so well that she limned it in her forehead as faithfully as had the Chinese sabre in his. You could not--no one could--have told the difference. There was a curious curve upward at the end, and a thickened cicatrice, as if it had been carelessly gathered up by the surgeon's needle. These she made with her own needle.

And then for many days she lay clutching her mattress, not moving for fear the contour of the wound might be marred.

That was a splendid morning to her--it would have been one of horror to you--when she could crawl from the futons and know by the glass that his wound was set forever in its place on her forehead. She did not observe that her face was vague and shadowy; her eyes saw nothing but that. Why should they see anything more?

Yet, and I must tell you this, she did see something else, presently, as she looked, day after day.

The face she saw only vaguely, at first, in her weakness, as she watched the growing into beauty of the wound, was gradually not hers. And then it seemed that behind her own a shadow face hovered. Presently she knew it for the face of Shijiro Arisuga. Then slowly her own face passed away and his was there. The difference was quite clear--it was his. And in that way she knew that the pitying gods had fully granted and completed her a reincarnation without death, and that she was no longer Hoshiko, but Arisuga.

Shall you be glad to know further that when she answered to the name of Shijiro Arisuga that morning at Sendai, (on that same Miyagi Field, where Shijiro had been decorated!) all that had been the Lady Hoshi was no more? That she was like the rest of them--a ruffian? That she had an oath or two, that her voice was harsh, her words which once flowed like pleasant water few and terrible?

But she had to sing his songs, to be gay as he had been, and to be beloved as he had been. And all these things she accomplished, even to his songs, which fled through smiling lips--laughing, shouting lips--over the graves within. For the woman always remained in some subconscious fashion, and it was upon the rebellious singing of his songs more than anything else that this latent Lady Hoshi awoke.

Yet I am certain that you will like to be told, since it must have been, that this made no difference; she made no mistakes. That she did no discredit to Shijiro Arisuga. That, in fact, in a fashion difficult to fathom, save by the doctrine of reincarnation, so had she become him in all matters of action that she never even thought of herself as Hoshiko. She was Shijiro Arisuga--when there was to be fighting--and always had been. And this was no easy thing for such a flower as Hoshiko. For Arisuga had been a man. So that, as one thinks on it, one is not irreparably offended at the possibility of Hoshiko, by a living reincarnation, having become another being. How do we know? And, how else could she have accomplished it?

But putting aside all possible differences concerning that, in this rejoice: the sun-flag was never borne with greater daring!

ZANZI, LOVER OF BATTLES