meanwhile, within the war-torn heart of manchuria, the last words of ohano came up to torment the soldier. his days and nights were made horrible by the imagined reiteration in his ears of the words of ohano.
by the light of a hundred camp-fires he saw the face of moonlight, the wife he had discarded at the command of the ancestors. he tried to picture it as he had first seen her, with that peculiar radiance about her beauty. she had appeared to him then like to some rare and precious flower, so fragile and exquisite it seemed almost profanation to touch her. how he had desired her! how he had adored her!
he recalled, with anguish, the first days of their marriage—a mixture of exquisite joy and pain; then the harrowing, heartbreaking months that had followed—the metamorphosis that had taken place in his beautiful wife. how timid, meek, submissive, they had made her in those latter days! he paced and repaced the ground, suffering torments incomparably worse than those of the wounded soldiers.
to think of moonlight as an inmate of the yoshiwara, as ohano had insisted, the last resource of the most abandoned of lost souls, was to arouse him to an inner frenzy that no amount of action in the bloodiest encounters could even temporarily efface.
he began to count the days which must pass before his release. he knew by now that the war was soon to end. already negotiations were under way. at first he had bitterly regretted the fact that the gods had not mercifully permitted him to give up his life; now he realized that perchance they had saved it for another purpose—the purpose of finding his lost wife. he would devote the rest of his life, he promised himself, to this undertaking; and, ah! when once again they two should meet, nothing should part them.
they would go away to a new land—a better land even than japan—of which he had heard so much from a friend he had made out here in manchuria. there men did not cast off their wives because they were childless. there no cruel laws sacrificed an innocent wife at the demand of the dead. there there were no licensed dens of inquity into which the innocent might be sold into a bondage lower than hell itself!
gonji dreamed unceasingly of this land of promise, whither he intended to go when once he had found his beloved moonlight.
incognito, finally, the lord gonji returned to japan. he did not, as became a dutiful and honorable son, proceed straightway to his home, there to permit the members of his family to celebrate and rejoice over his return.
at last lord gonji felt free of the thrall of the ancestors. he was a son of the new japan, master of his own conscience and deeds. the old strict code set down for men of his class and race he knew was medieval, childish, unworthy of consideration. hitherto his actions had been governed by the example of the ancestors and by order of those in authority over him. now he was free—free to choose his own path; and his path led not to the house of his fathers.
it led, instead, to that “hell city” which had been imprinted so vividly upon his mind that even in the heart of manchuria he had seen its lights and heard its brazen music.
from street to street of the yoshiwara, and from house to house, now went the lord saito gonji, scanning with eager, feverish eyes every pitiful little inmate thus publicly exhibited in cages. but among the hopeless, apathetic faces that smiled at him with enforced beguilement was not the one he sought.
he turned to other cities, wherever the famous brothels were maintained, leaving for the last his home city of kioto, where once the spider had been the darling of the house of slender pines.
how his haughty relatives had despised her calling; yet how desirable, how infinitely superior it was in every way to the one to which they had perhaps driven her.
the geisha was protected under the law, and her virtue was in her own hands. she could be as pure or as light as she chose. not even the harshest of masters could actually drive her to the degradation of the inmates of the yoshiwara, who were sold into bondage often in their babyhood.
if he could but believe that moonlight was now in the house of slender pines! yet his agents had insisted she had not returned to her former home: moreover, they had supported the contention of ohano, that undoubtedly it was into some such resort that the unhappy outcast had finally been driven.
upon a day when the inmates of the yoshiwara of kioto were upon their annual parade, when the city was swept by a paroxysm of patriotic enthusiasm over the return of the victorious troops, saito gonji, worn and wearied from his vain quest through many cities, returned at last to his home city.
the streets were in holiday dress. from every roof-tree and tower the sun-flag tossed its ruddy symbol in the air. the people ran through the streets as if possessed, now cheering the passing soldiers, now waving and shouting to the happy paraders, and all following, some taunting, some cheering the long line of courtezans of the yoshiwara.
they marched in single file, their long, silken robes, heavily embroidered, held up by their maids, and accompanied by their diminutive, toddling apprentices, often little girls as young as six and seven.
yet, small as they were, each was a miniature reproduction and understudy of her mistress, in her elaborate coiffure with its glittering ornaments (the geisha wears flowers), her obi tied in front, and the thick paste of paint laid lividly from brow to chin. some day it would be their lot to step into the place of the ones they emulated, and, in turn, slaves would hold their trains and masters would exhibit them like animals in public cages.
gonji followed the long train of courtezans for miles. sometimes he would run ahead, and, walking backward, pass down the long line, scanning every face piercingly and letting not one escape his scrutiny. and, as he studied the faces of these “hell women,” as his countrymen had named them, for the first time gonji forgot his beloved moonlight. the words of the american officer he had met in the campaign in manchuria came up vividly to his mind:
“no nation,” the american had said, “can honorably hold its head erect among civilized nations, no matter what its prowess and power, so long as its women are held in such bondage; so long as its women are bartered and sold, often by their own fathers, husbands, and brothers, like cattle.”
a great and illuminating light broke upon the tempest-tossed soul of the lord saito gonji. he would erect an imperishable monument to the memory of his lost wife. she should be the inspiration for the most knightly act that had ever been performed in the history of his nation.
it should be his task to effect the abolishment of the yoshiwara! he would devote his life to this one great cause, and never would he abandon it until he had succeeded. this, and the revision of the inhuman and barbarous laws governing divorce, should be his life-work.
he would show the ancestors that there were deeds even more worthy and heroic than those of the sword.
