The Way of the Gods

by John Luther Long

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.