Alien Souls/The Two-Handed Sword
THE TWO-HANDED SWORD
He judged each act of the passing days by three pictures in the back cells of his brain. These pictures never weakened, never receded; neither during his meals, which he shared with the other students at Frau Grosser's pension in the Dahlmannstrasse, nor during his hours of study and research spent over glass tubes and crucibles and bottles and retorts in the Royal Prussian Chemical Laboratory overlooking Unter den Linden, with Professor Kreutzer's grating, sarcastic voice at his left ear, the rumbling basso of the professor's German assistants at his right.
There was one picture which showed him the island of Kiushu rising from the cloudy gray of the China Sea, black-green with cedar and scarlet with autumn maple, and the pink snow of cherry fluffing April and early May; the island which stood to him for princely Satsuma, and Satsuma—since he was a samurai, permitted to wear two swords, the daito and the shoto—for the whole of Japan.
There was the picture of his grandfather, the Marquis Takagawa—his father had gone down fighting his ship against the Russians under Makarov—who in his youth had drawn the sword for the Shogun against the Mikado in the train of Saigo, the rebel chief, who had finally made his peace with his sovereign lord and had given honorable oath that he would lay the lives, the courage, and the brains of his descendants for all time to come on the altar of Nippon to atone for the sin of his hot youth.
There was, thirdly, the memory of his old tutor, Komoto, a bonze of the Nichiren sect who had made senaji pilgrimages to the thousand shrines, who had taught him the Chinese classics from the Diamond Sutra to the King-Kong-King, later on the wisdom of Ogawa and Kimazawa and the bushi no ichi-gon—the lessons of Bushido, the lore of the two-handed sword, the ancient code of Nippon chivalry.
"The spiritual light of the essential being is pure," Komoto had said to the marquis when the governors of the cadet school at Nagasaki had decided that the young samurai's body was too weak, his eyes too shortsighted, his blood too thin to stand the rigorous military training of modern Japan. "It is not affected by the will of man. It is written in the book of Kung Tzeu that not only the body but also the brain can raise a levy of shields against the enemy."
"Yes," the marquis had replied; for he, too, was versed in the Chinese classics. "Ships that sail the ocean, drifting clouds, the waning moon, shores that are washed away—these are symbolic of change. These, and the body. But the human mind is essential, absolute, changeless, and everlasting. O Takamori-san!" He had turned to his grandson. "You will go to Europe and learn from the foreigners, with your brain, since your body is too weak to carry the burden of the two-handed sword. You will learn with boldness, with patience, and with infinite trouble. You will learn not for reward and merit, not for yourself, but for Nippon. Every grain of wisdom and knowledge that falls from the table of the foreigners you will pick up and store away for the needs of the Rising Sun. You will learn—and learn. But you will learn honorably. For you are a samurai, O Takamori-san!"
And so the young samurai took ship for Europe. He was accompanied by Kaguchi, an old family servant, short, squat, flat-nosed, dark of skin and long of arm. A low-caste he was who had sunk his personality in that of the family whom his ancestors had been serving for generations, who had never considered his personal honor but only that of his master's clan which to him stood for the whole of Nippon.
If Takagawa Takamori had been small among the short, sturdy daimios of Kiushu, he seemed wizened and diminutive among the long-limbed, well-fleshed men of Prussia and Mecklenburg, and Saxony who crowded the chemical laboratory of Professor Kreutzer. Gentlemen according to the stiff, angular, ramrod German code, they recognized that the little parchment-skinned, spectacled Asian was a gentleman according to his own code, and so, while they pitied him after the manner of big blond men, lusty of tongue, hard of thirst and greedy of meat, they sympathized with him. They even liked him; and they tried to help him when they saw his narrow-lidded, myopic eyes squint over tomes and long-necked glass retorts in a desperate attempt to assimilate in six short semesters the chemical knowledge which Europe had garnered in the course of twice a hundred years.
Professor Kreutzer, who had Semitic blood in his veins and was thus in the habit of leaping at a subject from a flying start and handling it with consciously dramatic swiftness, was frequently exasperated at Takagawa's slowness of approach and comprehension. On the other hand, his German training and traditions made him appreciate and admire the student's Asiatic tenacity of purpose, his steel-riveted thoroughness and efficiency which made it impossible for him to forget a fact which he had once mastered and stored away. Perhaps his method of learning was parrotlike. Perhaps his memory was mechanical, automatic, the fruit of his early schooling when, with the mountain wind blowing icy through the flimsy shoji walls, he had knelt in front of Komoto and had laboriously learned by heart long passages from the Yuen-Chioh and the erudite commentaries of Lao-tse. Whatever the basic cause, whatever his method, the result was peculiar—and startling to his fellow students. Given a certain discussion, a certain argument which sent his German class-mates scuttling for library and reference books, the young samurai seemed to turn on a special spigot in his brain and give forth the desired information like a sparkling stream.
"Sie sind ja so'n echter Wunderknabe, Sie Miniatur gelbe Gefahr!" (for that's what he called him: a "miniature yellow peril") the professor would exclaim; and he would give him a resounding slap on the back which would cause the little wizened body to shake and smart.
But, sensing the kindliness beneath rough words and rougher gesture, Takagawa would bow old-fashionedly, with his palms touching his knees, and suck in his breath noisily.
He was learning—learning honorably; and at night, when he returned to his rooms in the pension, he would go over the garnered wisdom of the day together with Kaguchi, his old servant. Word for word he would repeat to him what he had learned, until the latter, whose brain was as that of his master—persistent, parrotlike, mechanical—could reel off the chemical formulæ with the ease and fluency of an ancient professor gray in the craft. He had no idea what the barbarous foreign sounds meant. But they amused him. Also he was proud that his young master understood their meaning—his young master who stood to him for Kiushu and the whole of Nippon.
Summer of the year 1914 found Takagawa still at work under Professor Kreutzer, together with half a dozen German students who like himself were using the Long Vacations for a postgraduate course in special chemical research, and a Prussian officer, a Lieutenant Baron Horst von Eschingen, who on his arrival was introduced by the professor as "a rara avis indeed—pardon me, baron!" with a lop-sided, sardonic grin—"a brass-buttoned, much-gallooned, spurred, and booted East-Elbian Junker who is graciously willing to descend into the forum of sheepskin and learned dust and stinking chemicals, and imbibe knowledge at the feet of as humble a personage as myself."
The German students laughed boisterously, while the baron smiled. For it was well known throughout the empire that Professor Kreutzer was a Liberaler who disliked bureaucratic authority, sneered at the military, and was negligent of imperial favor.
From the first Takagawa felt a strong liking and even kinship for Baron von Eschingen. He understood him. The man, tall, lean, powerful, red-faced, ponderous of gesture and raucous of speech, was nevertheless a samurai like himself. There was no doubt of it. It showed in his stiff punctiliousness and also in his way of learning—rather of accepting teaching. For the professor, who welcomed the opportunity of bullying with impunity a member of the hated ruling classes, took a delight in deviling the baron's soul, in baiting him, in putting to him sudden questions hard to solve and pouncing on him when the answer did not come swift enough, with such remarks as: "Of course, lieber Herr Leutnant, what can I expect? This is not a hollow square, nor a firing squad, nor anything connected with martingale or rattling scabbard. This is science—the humble work of the proletariat—and, by God, it needs the humble brain of the proletariat to understand it."
Another time—the baron was specializing in poisonous gases and their effect on the human body—the professor burst out with: "I can't get it through my head why you find it so terribly difficult to master the principles of gas. I have always thought that the army is making a specialty of—gas bags!"
Von Eschingen would bite his mustache and blush. But he would not reply to the other's taunts and gibes; and Takagawa knew that the baron, too, was learning; learning honorably; nor because of reward and merit.
They worked side by side through the warm, soft July afternoons—while the sun blazed his golden panoply across a cloudless sky and the scent of the linden trees, drifting in through the open windows, cried them out to field and garden—cramming their minds with the methodical devices of exact science, staining their hands with sharp acids and crystals, with the professor wielding his pedagogic whip, criticizing, sneering, mercilessly driving. More than once, when Kreutzer's back was turned, Takagawa would help the baron, whisper him word or chemical formula from the fund of his tenacious Oriental brain, and then the two would laugh like naughty schoolboys, the German with short, staccato bursts of merriment, the Japanese discreetly, putting his hand over his mouth.
Finally one afternoon as they were leaving the laboratory together and were about to go their separate ways at the corner of the Dorotheenstrasse, Takagawa bowed ceremoniously before the officer and, painfully translating in his mind from the Chinese book of etiquette into Japanese and thence into the harsh vagaries of the foreign tongue, begged him to tie the strings of his traveling cloak and deign to set his honorable feet in the miserable dwelling of Takagawa Takamori, there to partake of mean food and entirely worthless hospitality.
Baron von Eschingen smiled, showing his fine, white teeth, clicked his heels, and accepted; and the following evening found the curious couple in Takagawa's room: the former in all the pale-blue and silver glory of his regimentals, the latter, having shed his European clothes, wrapped in a cotton crêpe robe embroidered on the left shoulder with a single pink chrysanthemum, queer and hieratic—the mon, the coat of arms of his clan.
To tell the truth, the baron had brought with him a healthy, meat-craving German appetite, and he felt disappointed when all his host offered him was a plate of paper-thin rice wafers and some very pale, very tasteless tea served in black celadon cups. His disappointment changed to embarrassment when the Japanese, before filling the cups, went through a lengthy ceremony, paying exaggerated compliments in halting German, extolling his guest's nobility, and laying stress on his own frightful worthlessness.
"And the funny little beggar did it with all the dignity of a hidalgo," the baron said the next morning to a major in his regiment who had spent some years as military attaché in Japan. "Positively seemed to enjoy it."
The major laughed. "Why," he replied, "you ought to feel highly honored. For that Jap paid you no end of a compliment. He has initiated you into the cha-no-yu, the honorable ceremony of tea sipping, thus showing you that he considers you his equal."
"His—his equal?" flared up the other, who, away from the laboratory, was inclined to be touchy on points of family and etiquette.
"To be sure. Didn't you say his name is Takagawa Takamori?"
"Yes."
"Well—the Takagawas are big guns in their own land. They don't make 'em any bigger. They are relatives of the Mikado, cousins to all the feudal houses of Satsuma, descendants of the gods, and what not—"
It was not altogether snobbishness which caused the German to cultivate the little Asiatic after that. He really liked him. At the end of a few weeks they were friends—strangely assorted friends who had not much in common except chemistry, who had not much to talk about except acids and poisonous gases. But they respected each other, and many a sunny afternoon found them strolling side by side through the crowded thoroughfares of Berlin, the baron swinging along with his long, even step, the tip of his scabbard smartly bumping against the asphalt, while Takagawa tripped along very much like a small, owlish child, peering up at the big man through the concave lenses of his spectacles.
Only once did the samurai mention the reasons which had brought him to Europe. They were passing the Pariser Platz at the time, and stopped and turned to look at the half company of Grenadiers of the Guard who were marching through the Brandenburger Thor to change the castle watch, shoulders squared, rifles at the carry, blue-clad legs shooting forth at right angles, toes well down, the spotless metal on spiked helmet and collar and belt mirroring the afternoon sun, while the drum major shook his horse-tailed bell tree and a mounted captain jerked out words of command:
"Achtung! Augen—links! Vorwärts! Links an! Links an! Marsch!"
Takagawa pointed a lean, brown finger.
"The scabbard of my blue steel spear is the liver of my enemy," he quoted softly, translating from the Japanese. "I carry the red life on my finger tips; I have taken the vow of a hero!" and when the baron looked down, uncomprehending, asking astonishedly: "Hero? Hero?" the other gave a little, crooked smile.
"The mind too fights when the body is too weak to carry the burden of the two-handed sword," he explained. "The mind too can be a hero. Mine is!" he added, with utter simplicity. "For my body aches for the touch of steel, while I force my mind to drink the learning of books. My mind bends under the strain of it. But I do it—for Japan."
The baron's hand descended on his friend's lean shoulder.
"Yes," he said. "I understand, old boy. I have an older brother. No good for the King's coat—lost a leg when he was a kid. Family shot him into the Foreign Ministry. Works like a slave. But, auf Ehrenwort, he hates it, the poor old beggar!"—and, seeing a drop of moisture in the other's oblique eyes, he went on hurriedly: "Now, as to that gas—that new one Kreutzer is driveling about—with some unearthly, jaw-breaking Greek name and that fine, juicy stink to it—do you remember how—" And a moment later they were deep once more in the discussion of poison gases.
July swooned into August and, overnight, it seemed, the idyl of peace was spattered out by a brushful of blood. Excitement struck Berlin like a crested wave. People cheered. People laughed. People wept. A conjurer's wand swung from Spandau to Köpenick, thence east to Posen, and north and northwest in a semicircle, touching Kiel, Hamburg, Cologne, and Mayence. A forest of flags sprang up. Soldiers marched in never-ending coils down the streets, horse and foot, foot again, and the low, dramatic rumbling of the guns. They crowded the railway stations from Lehrter Bahnhof to Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof. They entrained, cheered, were cheered, leaned from carriage windows, floppy, unstarched fatigue caps set jauntily on close-cropped heads, singing sentimental songs:
Lebt wohl, ihr Frauen und ihr Madchen,
Und schafft euch einen And'ren an. …
The cars pulled away, bearing crudely chalked leg ends on their brown sides—"This car for Paris!" "This car for Brussels!" "This car for Calais!"—and, twenty-four hours later, the world was startled from stupid, fattening sleep through the news that Belgium had been invaded by the gray-green hordes, led by generals who had figured out each chance of victory and achievement with logarithmic, infallible cunning, and that already the Kaiser had ordered the menu which should be served him when he entered Paris.
The wave of war struck the laboratory and the pension in the Dahlmannstrasse together with the rest of Berlin.
People assumed new duties, new garb, new language, new dignity—and new psychology. The old Germany was gone. A new Germany had arisen—a colossus, a huge, crunching animal of a country, straddling Europe on massive legs, head thrown back, shoulders flung wide; proud, defiant! And sullen!
Takagawa did not understand. He had come to Berlin to learn honorably. He was not familiar with European politics, and Belgium was only a geographical term to him.
War? Of course! War! It meant honor and strength and sacrifice. But—
There was Hans Grosser, the only son of Frau Grosser, the comfortable, stout Silesian widow who kept the pension. Long, lean, pimply, clumsy, an underpaid clerk in the Dresdner Bank, he had been heretofore the butt of his mother's boarders. When at the end of the meal the Kompottschale, filled with stewed fruit, was passed down the table, he was the last to help himself, and then apologetically. The day after war was declared he came to dinner—his last dinner before leaving for the front—in gray-green, with a narrow gold braid on his buckram-stiffened collar, gold insignia on his epaulet, a straight saber dragging behind his clicking spurs like a steel-forged tail. Overnight the negligible clerk had become Herr Leutnant—second lieutenant in the reserves, detailed to the I24th Infantry. The butt had become the potential hero. He was listened to, bowed to. He was the first to dip the battered silver spoon into the Kompottschale.
Dinner over, cigars and cigarettes lit, he held court, leaning over the piano in all his gray-green glory. He received congratulations which he accepted with a yawn. But when Takagawa bowed to him, saying something very kindly and very stiltified in his awkward German, Grosser looked him up and down as he might some exotic and nauseating beetle, and it was clear that the other boarders approved of his strange conduct.
It was the same in the laboratory. When he entered the students who were already there turned stony eyes upon him.
"Good morning, gentlemen," he said. A harsh, rasping sound, something between a cough and a snort, was the reply.
Only the professor seemed unchanged.
"Good morning, miniature yellow peril!" he said, while the German students formed into a group near the window whence they could see the soldiers file down Unter den Linden, with the hollow tramp-tramp of drilled feet, the brasses braying out their insolent call.
They seemed silent and grave and stolid, though at times given to unreasonable, hectic fits of temper. They talked excitedly among themselves about "Weltpolitik" about "Unser Plats in der Sonne" and "Deutsche Ideate." Every once in a while one of them would whisper something about "die Engländer," pronouncing the word as if it were a dread talisman. Another would pick up the word: "die Engländer," with a tense, minatory hiss. Then again they would all talk together, excitedly; and once Takagawa, busy with a brass crucible and a handful of pink crystals, could hear: "Japan—the situation in the Far East—Kiauchau—"
Baron von Eschingen, usually punctual to the minute, did not make an appearance at the laboratory that morning.
"Getting ready for the wholesale butchery," the professor explained to Takagawa in an undertone. "Sharpening his cleaver and putting a few extra teeth in his meat saw, I've no doubt."
Takagawa felt disappointed. He would have liked to say good-by to his friend, ceremoniously. For he remembered how his father had gone forth at the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War. He had only been a small child at the time, but he recollected everything: how his mother and grandmother had bowed low and had spoken unctuously of naijo, of inner help; how the little girls of the household had brought their kai-ken dirks to be blessed by the departing warrior; how Komoto had quoted long passages from the Po-ro-po-lo-mi, reënforcing them with even lengthier quotations from the Fuh-ko; how his father had taken him to his arms with the true bushi no nasaké, the true tenderness of a warrior, and how immediately after his father had left the women had put on plain white linen robes, without hems, as the ancient rites prescribe for widows.
"You—you don't think he'll come back here before he leaves for the front?" he asked the professor.
"Certainly," laughed the other. "He isn't through yet with these!" indicating a wizardly array of tubes and pipes whence acrid, sulphurous fumes were rising to be caught, yellow, cloudy, whirling, in a bulb-shaped retort which hung from the ceiling.
"But—he is a samurai, a soldier!" stammered Takagawa. "What have these—these gases to do with—"
"With war?" Kreutzer gave a cracked laugh. "Don't you know?"
"I know the ingredients. I know how the gas is produced."
"Oh, you do; do you?"
"Yes."
And Takagawa, turning on the right spigot in his fact-gathering brain, reeled off the correct formula in all its intricacies.
The professor laughed again. "And you mean to say," he asked in the same sibilant undertone, "that you have no idea what the gas is for—that you have no idea why Baron von Eschingen has honored us these six weeks with his spurred and booted presence?"
"Why—no!"
Kreutzer slapped his knees. "Blessed innocence!" he chuckled. "Blessed, spectacled, yellow-skinned, Asiatic innocence! It is— Well, never mind!"
He turned to the German students who were still talking excitedly among themselves.
"Silentium!" he thundered. "War is all very well, gentlemen. But we are not here to kill or to remake the map of Europe. We are here to learn about—" And then a lengthy Greek word and the hush of the classroom.
The baron, who had shed his pale-blue and silver regimentals for a uniform of gray-green, came in toward the end of the lesson. He spoke courteously to the students, who instinctively stood at attention, shook hands with Takagawa with his usual friendliness, and drew the professor into a corner where he engaged him in a low, heated conversation.
"I won't do it!" Takagawa could hear Kreutzer's angry hiss. "The lesson is over. I insist on my academic freedom! I am a free burgess of the university. I—" and the baron's cutting reply: "This is war, Herr Professor! I am here by orders of the Ministry of War. I order you to—"
Takagawa smiled. Here was the real samurai speaking; and he was still smiling ecstatically when, a moment later, the professor turned to the class.
"Go downstairs, meine Herren," he said. "I have a private lesson to give to—to"—he shot out the word venomously—"to our army dunce! To our saber-rattling gray-green hope! To our so intelligent East-Elbian Junker! To—"
"Shut up!" came the baron's harsh voice. "Don't you dare, you damned—" At once he controlled himself. He forced himself to smile. "I am sorry, gentlemen," he said, "to disturb you and to interfere with your lessons in any way. But I have some private business with the professor. War—you know—the necessities of war—"
"Yes—yes—"
"Natürlich!"
"Selbstverständlich!"
"Sie haben ganz Recht, Herr Leutnant!" came the chorus of assent, and the students left the laboratory together with Takagawa, who went last.
"Wait for me downstairs, old boy," the baron called after him as he was about to close the door.
Arrived in the street, without civil words or touching their hats, the German students turned to the left to take their "second breakfast" at the Café Victoria, while Takagawa paced up and down in front of the building to wait for his friend.
Troops were still marching in never-ending files, like a long, coiling snake with innumerable, bobbing heads, and crowds of people were packing the side walks in a dense mass, from the Brandenburger Thor to beyond the Schloss.
They whirled about Takagawa. A few noticed him—only a few, since he was so small—but these few glared at him. They halted momentarily, mumbling: "A Japanese!"
"Ein Ausländer!" ("A foreigner!")
There was sullen, brooding hatred in the word where, only yesterday, it had held kindliness and hospitality and tolerance.
Takagawa stepped back into a doorway. Not that he was afraid. He did not know the meaning of the complicated emotion called fear, since he was a samurai. But something intangible, something nauseating and hateful, seemed to float up from the crowd, like a veil in the meeting of winds—the air, the people, the music, everything, suddenly shot through with peculiar, disturbing, prismatic diffractions.
He was glad when the baron's tall form came from the laboratory building.
"Sorry I kept you waiting," said the officer, slipping his white-gloved hand through the other's arm. "I've only a minute for you at that. Got to rush back to headquarters, you know. But—a word to the wise—is your passport in order?"
"Yes. Why?"
The baron did not seem to hear the last question. He took a visiting card from his pocketbook and scribbled a few rapid words. "Here you are," he said, giving the card to Takagawa. "Take this to my friend Police Captain von Wilmowitz, at the Presidency of Police—you know—near the Spittelmarkt. He'll see to it that you get away all right before it's too late—you, and your old servant, Kaguchi—"
"Get away? Too late? You mean that—"
"That you'd better wipe your feet on the outer door mat of the German Empire. Get out of the country, in other words. Go to Holland, Switzerland—anywhere."
"Why?"
"War!" came the baron's laconic reply.
"Yes, but Japan and Germany are not at war!"
The baron had put back his pocketbook and was buttoning his tunic. "I know," he said. "But England declared war against us three hours ago, and Japan is England's ally. Hurry up. Do what I tell you. I'll drop in on you to-night or to-morrow and see how you're making out." He turned and came back again.
"By the way," he went on, "be careful about any papers you take along. Destroy them. Your chemistry notebooks—the notes you made during class. There's that poison gas, for instance." He was silent, hesitated, and continued: "I'm sorry about that, Takagawa. Puts both you and me in a devilishly embarrassing position. You see, I had no idea—honestly—that war was due when the powers that be detailed me on that chemistry course. I thought it was all a tremendous bluff. Otherwise I would never have dreamt of working side by side with you, comparing notes on these poison-gas experiments, and all that. Well"—he shrugged his shoulders—"what's the use of crying over spilt milk? Burn your notebooks—chiefly those dealing with the gas." And he was off.
Jakagawa looked after him, uncomprehending. The poison gas! Here it was again. The same mysterious allusion. First Professor Kreutzer had spoken of it, and now the baron.
But what did they mean? What did it signify?
Finally, obeying the suggestion of the dusty laboratory windows looking down on him from their stone frames, Takagawa reentered the building and went straight to Professor Kreutzer's lecture room.
He found the latter seated at his desk, his chin cupped in his hands, his haggard face flushed and congested. The man seemed to be laboring under an excitement which played on every quivering nerve of his body; the hand supporting the lean chin showed the high-swelling veins, and trembled.
He looked up as Takagawa entered, and broke into a harsh bellow of laughter. "Come back, have you, you stunted yellow peril!"
"Yes. I want to ask you about—about the gas."
Again the professor laughed boisterously.
"The gas!" he cried. "The poison gas! To be sure! Not quite as innocent as you made yourself out to be a while back, are you? Well, by God, I'll tell you about the poison gas! Got a remarkable sort of brain, haven't you? Retentive faculty abnormally developed—don't need written notes or any other sort of asses bridge, eh? Just as good! Couldn't take anything written out of Germany. But your brain—your tenacious Oriental brain—they can't put that to the acid test! All right! Listen to me!"
Professor Kreutzer did not stop to dissect himself or his motives. He obeyed, not a feeling, a sudden impulse, but a pathological mood which was the growth of forty years. For forty years he had hated autocratic, imperial Germany. For forty years he had battled with his puny strength against militarism. Now the steel-clad beast had won. The shadow of war had fallen over the land. His gods lay shattered about him.
Forty years of ill-suppressed hatred—brought to a head, half an hour earlier, by Baron von Eschingen's curt command: "This is war, Herr Professor. I am here by orders of the Ministry of War. I order you to—"
That uniformed, gold-braided jackanapes to order him, a scientist, a thinker!
Kreutzer swore wickedly under his breath. He turned to the Japanese, and talked to him at length, going with minute care over the whole process of making poison gas, from the first innocuous-looking pink crystal to the final choking cloudy yellow fumes. He made Takagawa repeat it, step by step, formula by formula. Finally he declared himself satisfied. "You know it now, don't you?" he asked.
"Yes, sir."
"You'll never forget it?"
"No, sir."
"All right. You have what you came here to get. In one respect at least you know as much as the German War Office. Go back to Japan—as soon as you can." He returned to his desk and picked up a book.
Takagawa went after him. "Herr Professor!" he said timidly.
"Well? What is it now?"
"I—I—" the samurai hesitated. "I know the gas. I know how it is produced, how it is projected, how it affects the human body. I understand all that. But what is it for?"
"You—you mean to say you don't know?"
The professor twirled in his chair, utter incredulity in his accents. Then, reading the question in Takagawa's oblique eyes, sensing that the man was asking in perfect good faith, in perfect innocence, he rose, took him by the arm, and led him to the window. He pointed. Afternoon had melted into a soft evening of glowing violet with a pale moon growing faintly in the north. The linden trees stood stiff and motionless as if forged out of a dark-green metal. But still the soldiers tramped. Still there was the glitter of rifle barrel and sword tip and lance point. Still crowds packed the sidewalks, cheering. The professor made a great gesture. It was more than a mere waving of hand and arm. It seemed like an incident which cut through the air like a tragic shadow.
"They are going out to kill—with bullet and steel. But gas, too, can kill—poison gas, projected from iron tanks on an unsuspecting, unprepared enemy! It can win a battle, a campaign, a war! It can change the course of world history! It can ram imperial Germany's slavery down the throat of a free world! Poison gas—it is a weapon—the newest, most wicked, most effective weapon!" The professor was getting slightly hysterical. "Take it back with you to Japan—to France, to England—anywhere! Fight us with our own weapons! Fight us—and give us freedom—freedom!" And, with an inarticulate cry, he pushed the Japanese out of doors.
Takagawa walked down the Dorotheenstrasse like a man in a dream. His feelings were tossed together into too violent confusion for immediate disentanglement. "You will learn, not for reward and merit, not for yourself, but for Japan!" his grandfather, the old marquis, had told him. And he had learned a great secret—for Japan. And Japan would need it. For, passing the newspaper kiosk at the corner of the Wilhelmstrasse, he had glanced at the headlines of the evening edition of the "Vossische Zeitung":
"Japan Stands by England. Sends Ultimatum. War Inevitable!"
War inevitable—and he was a samurai, a man entitled to wield the two-handed sword, though his body was too weak to carry the burden of it.
What of it? The professor had told him that poison gas, too, was a weapon, the most modern, most effective weapon in the world; and he had its formula tucked snugly away in his brain.
The poison gas! It was his sword! But first he must get out of the country. He hailed a taxicab and drove straight to the Presidency of Police. A crowd of foreigners of all nationalities—anxious, nervous, shouting, gesticulating—was surging in the lower entrance hall of the square, baroque building. But the baron's card proved a talisman, and in less than half an hour Takagawa had seen Police Captain von Wilmowitz, had had his passport viséed and had received permission for himself and his servant Kaguchi to leave Berlin for Lake Constance on the following day.
Captain von Wilmowitz repeated the baron's warning: "Take nothing written out of Germany. Neither yourself nor your servant. They'll examine you both thoroughly at the Swiss frontier. Be careful," and Takagawa had hidden a smile.
Let them search his person, his clothes, his baggage. They would not be able to search his brain. He started figuring rapidly. He would go to Switzerland, thence via Paris to London. The Japanese ambassador there was a second cousin of his. He would give him the precious formula, and then—
He returned to the pension in the Dahlmannstrasse, settled his bill, and ordered Kaguchi to pack. Notebook after notebook he burned, and as he worked he was conscious of a feeling of power. There was no actual presentiment, no psychic preliminaries. It simply was there, this feeling of power, as if it had always been there. He was a samurai, and his was the two-handed sword—a two-handed sword forged in a stinking, bulb-shaped glass retort and shooting forth yellow, choking, sulphurous fumes.
In the next room a half dozen Germans were smoking and drinking and singing. He could hear Hans Grosser's excited voice, and now and then a snatch of song, sentimental, patriotic, boastful, and he thought that he too would soon again hear the songs of his fatherland, back in the island of Kiushu, in the rocky feudal stronghold of the Takagawas. The bards would be there singing the old heroic epics; the uguisus would warble the old melodies. Komoto would be there, and he himself, and his grandfather, the marquis.
"You will learn honorably!" his grandfather had told him. And he had learned. He was bringing back the fruit of it to Nippon.
He turned to Kaguchi with a laugh.
"I have learned, Kaguchi, eh?"
"Yes," replied the old servant, "you have learned indeed, O Takamori-san!"
"And"—he said it half to himself—"I have learned honorably."
Honorably?
He repeated the word with a mental question mark at the end of it.
Had he learned—honorably?
He stood suddenly quite still. An ashen pallor spread to his very lips. He dropped the coat which he was folding. Doubt floated upon him imperceptibly, like the shadow of a leaf through summer dusk. Something reached out and touched his soul, leaving the chill of an indescribable uneasiness, and indescribable shame.
"Honorably!" He whispered the word.
He sat down near the window, looking out into the street. Night had fallen with a trailing cloak of gray and lavender. The tall, stuccoed apartment houses on the Kurfurstendamm, a block away, rose above the line of street lamps like a smudge of sooty black beyond a glittering yellow band. Still people were cheering, soldiers tramping.
Kaguchi spoke to him. But he did not hear. He stared unseeing.
He said to himself that he had come to Germany, to Berlin, as a guest, to partake of the fruit of wisdom and knowledge. Richly the foreigners, the Ger mans, had spread the table for him. Generously they had bidden him eat. And he had dipped his hands wrist-deep into the bowl and had eaten his fill in a friend's house, giving thanks according to the law of hospitality.
Then war had come. Belgium, France, England, Russia—and to-morrow Japan. To-morrow the standard of the Rising Sun would unfurl. To-morrow the trumpets would blow through the streets of Nagasaki. Peasants and merchants and samurai would rush to arms.
And he was a samurai; and he had a weapon, a weapon of Germany's own forging—the formula for the poison gas, safely tucked away in his brain.
They had taught him in good faith. And he had learned. Nor would he be able to forget.
Professor Kreutzer? He did not count. He was a traitor. But his friend, Baron von Eschingen, the Prussian samurai who had worked side by side with him, who had even helped him get away?
Takagawa walked up and down. His labored, sibilant breathing sounded terribly distinct. From the next room there still came excited voices, the clink of beer steins, maudlin singing:
Von alien den Mädchen so blink und so blank …
winding up in a tremendous hiccup. But he did not hear. In his brain something seemed to flame upward, illuminating all his thoughts.
They were very clear. He could not stay here, in the land of the enemy, while Nippon was girding her loins. Nor could he go home. For home he was a samurai, entitled to wield the two-handed sword. And he carried that sword in his brain, the formula for the poison gas. He would be forced—forced by himself, forced by his love of country to give it to Nippon, and thus he would break the law of hospitality, his own honor.
He had learned the formula honorably. But there was no way of using it honorably.
A great, tearing sob rose in his throat. Then he heard a voice at his elbow: "O Takamori-san!"
He turned. "Yes, Kaguchi?"—and, suddenly, the answer to the riddle came to him. He looked at the old servant.
"You love me, Kaguchi?" he asked.
"My heart is between your hands!"
"You trust me?"
Kaguchi drew himself up.
"You are a samurai, O Takamori-san. The sword of Kiushu is unsullied."
"And unsullied it shall remain! And so," he added incongruously, "you will speak after me the foreign words which I shall now teach you, syllable for syllable, intonation for intonation"; and, step by step, formula by formula, he taught Kaguchi the meaningless German words.
For hours he worked with him until the old man reeled off the strange sounds without hitch or error.
"You know now?" he asked him finally, even as the professor had asked him earlier in the afternoon.
"Yes."
"You'll never forget it?"
"No."
Takamori Takagawa smiled.
"Kaguchi," he said, "you will go from here to London, using this passport." He gave him the official paper which Herr von Wilmowitz had viséed. "In London you will seek out the ambassador of Nippon, who is my cousin. You will tell him word for word what I have just taught you, adding that it is the formula of a poison gas and that this gas is mightier than the two-handed sword and will, perhaps, win the war for Nippon and her allies. You will furthermore tell him—and let this message be transmitted by him to my respected grandfather—that I learned this formula honorably, but that I could not take it back with me to Nippon without sullying the law of hospitality, since the foreigners taught me in good faith. I myself, being thus caught between the dagger of my honor and the dagger of my country, have tried to make a compromise with fate. Honorably I tried to do my duty by Nippon, honorably I tried to keep the law of hospitality untainted. I do not know if I have succeeded. Thus—" he made a gesture, and was silent.
Kaguchi bowed. His rugged old face was motionless. But he understood—and approved.
"You! Ah—" the word choked him.
"Yes." Takamori inclined his head. He used the old Chinese simile which his tutor had taught him. "I shall ascend the dragon."
He put his hand on Kaguchi's shoulder. "Come back here in half an hour," he said. "Fold my hands as the ancient customs demand. Then notify my friend, the German samurai. He will help you get over the frontier—with the formula safe in your brain."
And the servant bowed and left the room without another word.
The young samurai smiled slowly. An old quotation came back to him: "I will open the seat of my soul with a dagger of pain and show you how it fares with it. See for yourself whether it is polluted or clean."
He walked across the room, opened the mirror wardrobe, and took from the top shelf a dirk—a splendid, ancient blade in a lacquer case, whose guard was of wrought iron shaped like a chrysanthemum. Then he took off his European clothes and put on a voluminous white hemless robe with long, trailing sleeves. Very slowly he knelt. Carefully, according to the rites, he tucked the sleeves under his knees, to prevent himself falling backward, since a samurai should die falling forward. He took the dirk from the scabbard.
The next moment it had disappeared beneath the flowing draperies. He made a hardly perceptible movement. One corner of his mouth was slightly twisted, the first sign of great suffering heroically borne. His right leg was bent back, his left knee too. Then he drew the dirk slowly across to his right side and gave a cut upward.
Crimson stained his white robe. His eyes, glazed, staring, held a question—a question, a doubt to the last. Had he acted honorably? Had he—?
He fell forward. …
It was thus that Baron von Eschingen, ushered in by Kaguchi, found him.
"Hara-kiri!" he said, drawing a sheet across the dead man's face; and then, quite suddenly: "Yes—yes. I understand—honorable little beggar!"