Some grim old samurai show their feelings about the occurrence in a less gentle manner. The high official intrusted with the safety of the Czarevitch at Otsu receives, by express, a fine sword and a stem letter bidding him prove his manhood and his regret like a sa murai, by performing harakiri immediately.
For this people, like its own Shintō gods, has various souls: it has its Nigi-mi-tama and its Ara-mi-tama, its Gentle and its Rough Spirit. The Gentle Spirit seeks only to make reparation; but the Rough Spirit demands expiation. And now through the darkening atmosphere of the popular life, everywhere is felt the strange thrilling of these opposing impulses, as of two electricities.
Far away in Kanagawa, in the dwelling of a wealthy family, there is a young girl, a serving-maid, named Yuko, a samurai name of other days, signifying "valiant."
Forty millions are sorrowing, but she more than all the rest. How and why no Western mind could fully know. Her being is ruled by emotions and by impulses of which we can guess the nature only in the vaguest possible way. Something of the soul of a good Japanese girl we can know. Love is there—potentially, very deep and still. Innocence also, insusceptible of taint—that whose Buddhist symbol is the lotus-flower. Sensitiveness likewise, delicate as the earliest snow of plum-blossoms. Fine scorn of death is there—her samurai inheritance—hidden under a gentleness soft as music. Religion is there, very real and very simple,—a faith of the heart, holding the Buddhas and the Gods for friends, and unafraid to ask them for anything of which Japanese courtesy allows the asking. But these, and many other feelings, are supremely dominated by one emotion impossible to express in any Western tongue—something for which the word "loyalty" were an utterly dead rendering, something akin rather to that which we call mystical exaltation: a sense of uttermost reverence and devotion to the Tenshi-Sama. Now this is much more than any individual feeling. It is the moral power and will undying of a ghostly multitude whose procession stretches back out of her life into the absolute night of forgotten time. She herself is but a spirit-chamber, haunted by a past utterly unlike our own,—a past in which, through centuries uncounted, all lived and felt and thought as one, in ways which never were as our ways.
"Tenshi-Sama go-shimpai." A burning shock of desire to give was the instant response of the girl's heart—desire over powering, yet hopeless, since she owned nothing, unless the veriest trifle saved from her wages. But the longing remains, leaves her no rest. In the night she thinks; asks herself questions which the dead answer for her. "What can I give that the sorrow of the August may cease?" "Thyself," respond voices without sound. "But can I?" she queries wonderingly. "Thou hast no living parent," they reply; "neither does it belong to thee to make the offerings. Be thou our sacrifice. To give life for the August One is the highest duty, the highest joy." "And in what place?" she asks. "Saikyō," answer the silent voices; "in the gateway of those who by ancient custom should have died."
Dawn breaks; and Yuko rises to make obeisance to the sun. She fulfills her first morning duties; she requests and obtains leave of absence. Then she puts on her prettiest robe, her brightest girdle, her whitest tabi, that she may look worthy to give her life for the Tenshi-Sama. And in another hour she is journeying to Kyōto. From the train window she watches the gliding of the landscapes. Very sweet the day is;—all distances, blue-toned with drowsy vapors of spring, are good to look upon. She sees the loveliness of the land as her fathers saw it, but as no Western eyes can see it, save in the weird, queer charm of the old Japanese picture-books. She feels the delight of life, but dreams not at all of the possible future preciousness of that life for herself. No sorrow follows the thought that after her passing the world will remain as beautiful as before. No Buddhist melancholy weighs upon her: she trusts herself utterly to the ancient gods. They smile upon her from the dusk of their holy groves, from their immemorial shrines upon the backward fleeing hills. And one, perhaps, is with her: he who makes the grave seem fairer than the palace to those who fear not; he whom the people call Shinigami, the lord of death-desire. For her the future holds no blackness. Always she will see the rising of the holy Sun above the peaks, the smile of the Lady-Moon upon the waters, the eternal magic of the Seasons. She will haunt the places of beauty, beyond the folding of the mists, in the sleep of the cedar-shadows, through circling of innumerable years. She will know a subtler life, in the faint winds that stir the snow of the flowers of the cherry, in the laughter of playing waters, in every happy whisper of the vast green silences. But first she will greet her kindred, somewhere in shadowy halls awaiting her coming to say to her: "Thou hast done well,—like a daughter of samurai. Enter, child! because of thee to-night we sup with the Gods!"
It is daylight when the girl reaches Kyōto. She finds a lodging, and seeks the house of a skillful female hairdresser.
"Please to make it very sharp," says Yuko, giving the kamiyui a very small razor (article indispensable of a lady's toilet); "and I shall wait here till it is ready." She unfolds a freshly bought newspaper and looks for the latest news from the capital; while the shop-folk gaze curiously, wondering at the serious pretty manner which forbids familiarity. Her face is placid like a child's; but old ghosts stir restlessly in her heart, as she reads again of the Imperial sorrow. "I also wish it were the hour," is her answering thought. "But we must wait." At last she receives the tiny blade in faultless order, pays the trifle ashed, and returns to her inn.
There she writes two letters: a farewell to her brother, an irreproachable appeal to the high officials of the City of Emperors, praying that the Tenshi-Sama may be petitioned to cease from sorrowing, seeing that a young life, even though unworthy, has been given in voluntary expiation of the wrong.
When she goes out again it is that hour of heaviest darkness which precedes the dawn; and there is a silence as of cemeteries. Few and faint are the lamps; strangely loud the sound of her little geta. Only the stars look upon her.