The clump of bushes on the right parted and a tall strong fellow burst out of them and planted himself across my way. A Japanese, broad, brawny, violent-faced. As I halted he sprang at my throat like a wolf.
“And you tracked her here? You could not let her be? Then take your payment from her husband Kondo!”
What happened next came in a blinding flash. He struck at me with a loaded stick. It missed the first blow and I had him by the throat with the new lock I had learnt from Arima, shaking him violently to and fro, driving my fingers deeper and deeper into his flesh in a frenzy of rage and hate. I would have the innermost heart’s blood of the brute.
I had it. He reeled in my grasp with horrible choking noises, and suddenly I was shaking the life out of a dead thing. As I thrust him from me with sickening triumph he fell heavily as a full sack prone on the track before me.
It must have been long before the rage died in me and I stood face to face with my position. I—a foreigner—had killed a Japanese, and after an intrigue with his wife. It felled me beside him—I crouched and hid my face and tried to think.
Presently I rose and with the murderer’s instinct dragged the corpse into the bushes to hide it. Thought was impossible. I suffered as a dumb beast must suffer the extremity of torture without the power to reason. Only I must hide it and flee. The neighbourhood of the horrible thing was hell.
I went on.
Later— “Is it just—is it just?” I said to myself, “that one instant’s madness should doom a man for ever?”—forgetting the long temptation I had played with, the slow delicious yielding, the triumph and delight with which I had slowly built up my torture chamber. Not only from the time I landed in Japan, but before,—I had been busy at the building all my life. How could I complain when the trap snapped on me?
At last I broke from the numbness into memory. The man who had passed me on his way to his garden. His words returned like black birds flying heavily round my head.
“You are not in the right way. Places are states of mind. In this way you will have much need of self-defence.”