In the corner of his car Soichi threw off his heavy pack and curled himself up in his great-coat. Near him no man spoke. In silent peace they lay wrapped in their own thoughts or already soundly asleep. Ahead, toward the center of the car, a little group gathered around the glow of their cigarettes and talked in subdued, but excited whispers. So they rumbled off down the road through the darkness, headed toward War.
With a tranquil mind Soichi lay in his comfortable corner and thought of what had happened and what was to come. He had no fear of the future. His only anxiety was lest he should fail unwittingly or his opportunity should not come. He belonged to the Empire. It had made him all he was, and now that it needed him he would give it cheerfully all he had of muscle, brain, or life. He had no expectation of coming back. That day he had written his parents his last good-by. He calmly and fully expected to die on the field, and was concerned only to make his death count for the most he could. He wondered how the end would come, and hoped it would be in the first line of battle.
Yet not all the men would be killed! He knew that in the last war, when he was a boy, only a few, comparatively, died. By far the majority of them came back. What if it should be his fate to go through the dangerous trial and come out unscathed! The human heart within him leaped at the thought, and his mind came back with a start to the letter from O-Mitsu he had received only that afternoon. He smiled now at his surprise in getting it. He had not thought it possible that she could write to him. In his inability to send letters to her it seemed, of course, she could not reach him. He had even thought she did not know where he was. Kokan must have written home about the new member of his company and unconsciously given her the information he, most of all, would have withheld. Soichi laughed at the thought of such a trick for fate to play on the imperious lieutenant.
There the letter was now, safe in his pocket, and he felt again, as he touched it, the thrill with which he had read her good-by; the simple straightforward statement of her unchanging love for him, and how, after her father’s discovery of his letter, there had been a scene of terrible anger; how she had braved him with the point of her dagger at her heart and told him she would never marry. The man for her was a soldier, as befitted the daughter of a Samurai, and now her soldier was going away to die for his country and hers. So then, good-by. He was a soldier and would do a soldier’s duty.
Yes, he would do a soldier’s duty, he had no doubt of that. But suppose after doing it to the utmost limit, life should still remain? Ah, that would be the last crowning stroke of cruel fate. Even her constancy held out no promise to him. The honor he coveted waited in a sable cloak on some unknown battlefield. He shut his heart to other hope.
XII
