He began to count the days which must pass before his release. He knew by now that the war was soon to end. Already negotiations were under way. At first he had bitterly regretted the fact that the gods had not mercifully permitted him to give up his life; now he realized that perchance they had saved it for another purpose—the purpose of finding his lost wife. He would devote the rest of his life, he promised himself, to this undertaking; and, ah! when once again they two should meet, nothing should part them.
They would go away to a new land—a better land even than Japan—of which he had heard so much from a friend he had made out here in Manchuria. There men did not cast off their wives because they were childless. There no cruel laws sacrificed an innocent wife at the demand of the dead. There there were no licensed dens of inquity into which the innocent might be sold into a bondage lower than hell itself!
Gonji dreamed unceasingly of this land of promise, whither he intended to go when once he had found his beloved Moonlight.
Incognito, finally, the Lord Gonji returned to Japan. He did not, as became a dutiful and honorable son, proceed straightway to his home, there to permit the members of his family to celebrate and rejoice over his return.
At last Lord Gonji felt free of the thrall of the ancestors. He was a son of the New Japan, master of his own conscience and deeds. The old strict code set down for men of his class and race he knew was medieval, childish, unworthy of consideration. Hitherto his actions had been governed by the example of the ancestors and by order of those in authority over him. Now he was free—free to choose his own path; and his path led not to the house of his fathers.
It led, instead, to that “hell city” which had been imprinted so vividly upon his mind that even in the heart of Manchuria he had seen its lights and heard its brazen music.
From street to street of the Yoshiwara, and from house to house, now went the Lord Saito Gonji, scanning with eager, feverish eyes every pitiful little inmate thus publicly exhibited in cages. But among the hopeless, apathetic faces that smiled at him with enforced beguilement was not the one he sought.
He turned to other cities, wherever the famous brothels were maintained, leaving for the last his home city of Kioto, where once the Spider had been the darling of the House of Slender Pines.
How his haughty relatives had despised her calling; yet how desirable, how infinitely superior it was in every way to the one to which they had perhaps driven her.
The geisha was protected under the law, and her virtue was in her own hands. She could be as pure or as light as she chose. Not even the harshest of masters could actually drive her to the degradation of the inmates of the Yoshiwara, who were sold into bondage often in their babyhood.