"What a shame it is that one must sleep when one might talk of him! But, then, if one does not, one is hideous in the morning! And he calls the moment he wakes. Put out the lights and go to bed! I will listen to you no longer!"

Isonna had not spoken. But she did as she was commanded.

"Isonna!" the mistress called after the maid--who instantly returned--"I have had such a thought! Suppose he should never know! Suppose I should go to some place with him where there is no one who had ever known me?

Marry him?"

"I should be there."

"You! Not unless I should first cut out your gossiping tongue!"

"It would be wrong. The G.o.ds must punish you!"

"How would the G.o.ds know? I should lie to them also."

"It would be very wrong," the maid repeated. "The only woman who deceives a man--"

"Is his _wife_, you naughty little beast! Go straight to bed! I hate you!"

ONLY TO TAKE HER

XIII

ONLY TO TAKE HER

It happened precisely as the wise maid had said. He did not go, but, on the contrary, protracted his recovery in a scandalous fashion.

For here it was that Arisuga began to suspect, for the second time, that the happiest moment of his life had come. If he had known that he was in love, as he did not, or that there was such a thing as this love he was experiencing, which he did not, he would have been more certain of that happiest moment. But a j.a.panese must be told when this has happened to him. And it must be in another tongue than his. For in his language there are no words for it--and he knew no other. He really was not quite sure, therefore, why he was lingering in China--only suspected it. How could he know, under the circ.u.mstances? No feeling like this had insidiously crept upon him when he had taken Yone to Mukojima or Shiba--even upon that great night which now began to go more and more out of his memory. And he did not even think of what he had laughingly prophesied to her--that forgetting--her waiting. He simply forgot her.

Perhaps if Hoshiko had known of this defect in the character of Arisuga, she might not have loved him. What Arisuga remembered most about his and Yone's excursions was that when they got hungry they went separately home and ate. But he had the feeling that he would stay here with Hoshiko and starve--or until some one from the regiment came and took him back at the point of a bayonet. For this was a most piquant and unusual condition of affairs between them: that they should be so much alone together, that there should be so little--almost nothing--of Hoshiko's parents, that she should be as frankly intimate as a geisha at a festival, who meant to please at all hazards. It was this volunteer intimacy which puzzled him most about the girl. But who was there to tell him that she had known him two weeks longer than he knew her? And that during all that halcyon time she had had her way with her adoration of him--and saw no reason in his returned consciousness for changing it? Or that she had lived here untaught as a child? That to her, since she frankly adored him, there was only one reason why he might not as frankly know it--the one she had decided never to tell?

Before Arisuga became a soldier he had been a poet, a musician, a songster--one who had responded at nature's high behest to all manifestations of beauty. Now, in this time of peace and indolent convalescence, he went back to all that--almost as if the life of the soldier, which intervened, had never been. He had instantly called her "Dream-of-a-Star." And she was all this to him. It was good to lie in his futons and see the perfections of her grace as she moved about intent upon his healing. It was better to hear her pretty voice. It was best of all to feel her touch upon him and to see the lighted eyes which always accompanied it. At first there was the sense of having found a b.u.t.terfly by the dusty roadside of his duty which might yield a moment of joy. But when he knew that, whether he wished it or not, he must lie here many weeks before he could fight again, the sense that he was sacrificing duty to pleasure disappeared, and he let himself enjoy his nearness to the girl and let his poetic spirit revel in her fragile beauty without further thought of the duty which lay in wait for him.

That, he finally decided, would attend to itself. A soldier is not long permitted to forget his duty.

But, the thing which continued to stir and puzzle him most was the fancy which now and then came, that he might have this wonderful creature precisely like the b.u.t.terfly he had thought her. Indeed, he could scarcely get away from the impression that there were times when she offered herself to him. Yet though he was not very learned concerning women himself, he knew that there was only one sort who offered herself to a man. Sometimes her little timorous darings let him believe, for a moment, that she was of this kind. But nearly always the idea was quenched out by some act of such utter innocency as could not be mistaken for coquetry. Still the recurrence of an idea, originally erroneous, is likely to be strengthened by each repet.i.tion. And this was what was happening to the sick soldier.

Nevertheless he continued to fancy that of all the spirits, from the moon-G.o.ddess down, none were so dainty, so fragile, so tender, caressing, and altogether lovely as this Hoshiko, who was not a spirit at all, even though she was there, day after day, at his bedside, suggesting herself to him with either the abandon of a child or the intention of a woman of joy. Had he been as wise about women as he was simple, and she as wise about men as she pretended, who had no wisdom at all concerning them, such a misunderstanding would not have occurred.

For she was not offering herself to him at all. She was a child with a toy. And at first the subtraction of this toy, even though the like and fascination of it exceeded any other she had ever had, would have portended little of tragedy. But later it was more serious. Something inside which had never stirred before began to stir now. This contact with a man, these intimacies with one not much more learned in the art of loving than she, had awakened the sleeping thing within which would one day be her womanhood.

As for her, one must not forget that at the last she wished to be adored. All women do. But if a woman loves a man too much, he runs away. If she loves him just enough, he stays. If she loves him a little less than enough, he runs after her.

"If I were a man," said Isonna, "I would care for only such pretty things as you--not for wars and fightings--even great deaths. For what is the last heaven but a state of bliss! And if one has all the bliss one can bear or understand here on earth, is that not a heaven? And truly if I were a man, it would be extreme bliss to touch you, here, and here, and here, to put an arm about you so, to sit in the andon light, so--"

All of which things the adoring maid ill.u.s.trated, to her saddened mistress, in the light of the night lamp, and to all of them her mistress agreed.

THE GOING OF THE SOLDIER

XIV

THE GOING OF THE SOLDIER

For the soldier must go. There was not a vestige of excuse for remaining longer. The terrible mother had entered his chamber, had looked at him, had said briefly that he was quite well. And Hoshiko herself had done everything but ask him flatly to stay. How could she do that? Isonna had warned her constantly of the sort of woman who did that in j.a.pan. The mere asking would be enough--in such a woman--to advertise her as of joy. And for want of this word of asking, the heaven she had made was closing.

But Isonna and some of the circ.u.mstances of the case had taught her more and more that any more forwardness would be seriously misconstrued by the invalid.

"You are awake," said Isonna, mysteriously, who was not blind to the maturing of the thing called womanhood.

"Ah," sighed the happy and miserable girl, "if to wake means this, then I wish that I might always have slept."

"You did not sleep," said the still mysterious maid.

"What did I then, little beast?"

"You dreamed."

"Then," begged the girl, with a piteous smile, "make me to dream again, and take care that I never wake."

"Ah, sweet mistress," said the maid, "there comes to all, in the matter of men, a time to sleep, a time to dream, and a time to wake. The sleep is best. For in that one knows nothing. The dream is sweet. But it never lasts. The waking sometimes is good--sometimes evil. Good it is if all is fair between a man and a woman. Evil it is if all is not. And, mistress dear, all is not fair between you and him. So there is another thing after the waking--which the G.o.ds make."

"What is that, wise little beast?" laughed Hoshiko.

"It is the forgetting which heals," said the maid.

"I do not wish to be healed," answered her mistress.

"Then must you be always ill of this thing."

"So be it. That is better than a forgetting."

"But it must go no further," pleaded the servitor. "There must be no touches, no eyes, no beatings of the heart."

"Can you stop the beating of the heart? The adoring of the eyes? Can any one?"

"Yes. In your room waits always the G.o.ddess of tranquillity. Go there.

Stay there. She will soothe you."