The Way of the Gods

by John Luther Long

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 Japanese 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 circumstances? No feeling like this had insidiously crept upon him when he had taken Yoné 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 Yoné'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 butterfly 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 butterfly 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 repetition. And this was what was happening to the sick soldier.