Part 12

Tani, maker of sandals, looked up from his work as each one came abreast his shop, responding gravely to the low-voiced, musical greetings. But after the last worker had passed, his eyes, shaded beneath the palm of his hand, still sought the road beyond the village in patient expectancy.

Presently he heard the distant click of clogs, and a little figure came in sight. Her cotton kimono was looped to the knees, the mud of the paddy-fields still clung to her slender brown limbs. She drew near.

"Greeting, Su Su O!"

"Greeting, Tani!" The girl paused before the shop, with quaint genuflection and the gentle hiss of indrawn breath that in Japan is a courtesy. The sandal-maker sat back on his heels.

"Tired, Su Su O?"

"Very," replied the girl. She moved the heavy, mud-caked hoe from her shoulder and leaned on the haft, looking down at him with a little smile. Her mouth, with its geranium-scarlet lips, drooped wearily at the corners when in repose: her whole attitude betrayed fatigue.

The man frowned. "It is not well, Su Su O, that you should do coolie work. You are not of coolie stock, nor yet of coolie strength. Su Su O, hearken yet again! Be my wife! Come and live with me here, and let me labour for us both! I need you so, little Flower. I want you for my wife ... not to see you only at sunrise and dusk, passing my dwelling by."

The sun set swiftly; swiftly the purple night swept up over rice-field and cherry-orchard. Here and there along the village street a coloured lantern glowed suddenly out of the darkness; through the frail oiled-paper walls of the cottages drifted the voices of children and the tinkle of a samisen. The sandal-maker stood up and took the girl's hand in his.

"I am lonely without you, Su Su O," he pleaded.

Her lip quivered. "I too am lonely, Tani; but I am a beggar--a coolie girl without father or mother. I cannot marry you: I have no dowry. I can bring nothing to the wedding--save myself, in rags. It would bring disgrace upon us."

In vain he pleaded, all the poetic imagery of the Asiatic upon his tongue. In vain he scoffed at convention--that terrible, inexorable convention of the East; still the dainty head shook in plaintive negation. Some unknown strain in her blood set honour before love, bowed to the decrees that had ruled her unknown forbears. At length, as if fearing that her resolution might weaken from sheer physical weariness--and she loved very dearly too--she turned towards the village.

"I must go, Tani. It is of no avail.... Nay, entreat me not further.... Nay, Tani, I am so tired...."

The sandal-maker stepped back among his wares. Punctiliously they went through the little ceremony of genuflection and gesture. Click-click went the clogs up the narrow street, and among the shadows the sandal-maker stood with head bent, as if listening, long after the sound had died away.

That evening a traveller came to the village, a little wizened man, clad somewhat incongruously in a grey silk kimono, a bowler hat, and elastic-sided boots. Rumour whispered that he was the owner of a fashionable _cha-ya_ (tea-shop) in Tokyo, renowned for the beauty of its Geishas. Gossip spreading quickly from door to door supplemented this as the night wore on. The honourable stranger was touring the country on the look-out for pretty girls. He paid well, they said, and his establishment was much frequented by Europeans, who, as all the world knows, part freely with the sen. Here was a chance for a girl with looks!

The old gentleman was sipping saki in the guest-room of the village inn when Su Su O was announced. His keen old eyes noted with appreciation the lines of the childish figure as she bowed her forehead to the matting. But when she raised herself to her knees, and faced him with downcast eyes, he pursed up his mouth as if contemplating a whistle. Had he been a European he probably would have whistled, but this is not an art practised among owners of _cha-ya_. Otherwise his face was expressionless.

"Who is your mother?" he inquired, breaking the silence.

"She is dead, most honourable one. A peasant woman. I reside at the house of Matsu the charcoal-burner and his wife."

"And your father?"

"I do not know, O honourable one."

"Ah!" said her interlocutor, as if something had been explained that he did not understand. Peasants do not beget daughters with hair like Su Su O's, nor with ears like tiny pink shells, nor yet slender wrists and fingers. "And you wish to be a Geisha?"

Su Su O prostrated herself in silent acquiescence.

"I will take you on condition that you remain with me three years." The heart of Su Su O sank. Would Tani wait three years? "And I will pay you"--he named what was to the girl a considerable sum. That clinched it: with a dowry like this she could marry Tani over and over again. Yet her fingers trembled as she painted her signature to the indentures, and her heart was sick at the thought of the parting. Even "passing his dwelling by" was better than never seeing it at all. But she left for Tokyo the next day, and a few moments were all that she had for saying good-bye.

"Oh, but you will wait?" she pleaded. "It will soon pass, the three years, and I will come back rich, and--marry you, Tani."

Tani's reply, in flowery Japanese, was to the effect that he would wait a hundred million years if necessary.

* * * * *

Her life in the Tokyo tea-house was no worse than that led by the thousands of other Geishas in the great straggling city. In some respects it was better, because European tourists of many nationalities frequented the establishment, and her beauty was such as to appeal not only to Japanese ideas, but Western as well. For one thing, her cheek-bones were not accentuated; and her mouth, scarlet-lipped and tremulous at times with laughter, you would have thought adorable whatever part of the world you hailed from. Also there was something very bewitching about her plaintive love-ditties (even if you couldn't understand them), which she sang in a minor key to guitar accompaniment through her inconsiderable nose.

One day there came to the house a German officer on leave from Tsingtau. He was a big, bearded youth with blue eyes, and--this was a ceaseless wonder and delight to the Geishas--the centre of his front upper row of teeth was crowned with a diamond.

Attracted by the glitter in his mouth, and inured to the oafish attentions of European customers, she suffered him to put his arm round her. Without further warning, he lowered his bearded face and kissed her publicly on the lips.

To the Japanese mind the act was an indignity--worse, indecent. With a deft wriggle she twisted an arm free and struck him in the face, her eyes blazing. The big man laughed uproariously, imprisoned her arm, and kissed her again and again, while she quivered helplessly. Released at length, she faced him like a tiger-cat.

"Swine!" she cried. "Son of a foreign swine!"--and struck the piece of gold that he extended towards her out of his hand.

2

The railway terminus at Tokyo was gay with bunting and thronged by a great crowd of people. A brass band somewhere out of sight broke into crashing martial music. "Banzai!" roared the khaki-clad figures in the closely packed carriages, and in response the women and children waved little hand-flags that bore the national emblem on a white ground.

Japan had declared war on Germany, and the occasion was the departure of a Reserve Division which was shortly to operate against the German fortress of Tsingtau. The windows of the carriages were blocked by grim, fighting faces: men from the North. Among them was Tani, sometime maker of sandals; and on the platform beneath his window, like a painted butterfly hovering round the cannon's mouth, stood Su Su O, eyes suspiciously bright.

"Return if the gods will it!" she whispered, echoing the murmured farewells of mothers, wives, and lovers. The grim memories of ten years ago still lingered. The vaulted roof of the terminus had echoed so many farewells; so few who parted amid the roars of "_Banzai!_" had greeted one another again. "If the gods will," said the women now, and the younger men still shouted "_Banzai!_" in reply. But at the last, as the long train steamed slowly out of the station, the finite human heart held sway. The oft-repeated "_Banzai!_" changed to "_Sai-onara! Sai-i-onara!_"--the saddest, most plaintive-sounding farewell yet fashioned by the human tongue.

A month later found Tani leading a moist and somewhat precarious existence in a trench before Tsingtau. His recollection of the siege since he took part in it had been a series of blurred impressions, mud being predominant throughout. It had seemed an eternity of mud, of ceaseless rifle and artillery fire, of being soaked to the skin, of cold, hunger, and fatigue. Once or twice there had been moments of ferocious hand-to-hand fighting. They were good moments, those; and as he sat in the bottom of a trench cleaning the bolt of his rifle with a piece of oily rag, his thoughts recurred to them with a certain grim enjoyment.

By clearing away the earth at the top of the trench he was able to catch an occasional glimpse of his surroundings. An amphitheatre of barren hills, with the gleam of the sea in the far distance; a small, slow-moving speck upon it that was a Japanese or Allied warship shelling the fortress. Elsewhere, as far as he could see, the ground was scarred by bursting shell, and herring-boned by wire entanglements. Ahead, where the picric shells were pitching, a yellow cloud hung low, as the mists sometimes cling to the slopes of Fujiyama. There were intermittent points of jagged fire beneath the cloud; shrapnel bursting about the German redoubts.

It all represented to Tani a certain amount of uphill ground to be covered under fire: how soon he did not know, but the rest was familiar enough. The inferno of shell-fire that was bursting ahead would redouble till the mere contemplation of it almost stunned the senses. Then the order rippled along to advance: you leaped out of your trench and ran as well as you could across the debris of the last attack and the chaos of barbed wire till the next trench was reached. Sometimes you just dropped into it and panted; sometimes you met other men there, fierce, blue-eyed men who had to be bayoneted. Bullets would shriek and whimper overhead, or hit something with a sullen "Zip!" Men grunted and seemed to fall asleep, or rolled over and lay twitching in a novel and rather ludicrous fashion. And there was the ceaseless rain, the smell of cordite smoke, the bewildering roar of the howitzers.

That was War, as understood by Tani, sometime maker of sandals.

Early one morning a flask of raw saki was passed along the advanced trench. Tani drank deep and tightened his belt, for he was hungry; the spirit ran through his veins like fire. "It is the end," said the man next to him, a battle-scarred veteran of Nogi's Army, with a queer note of exultation in his voice. There, was a sudden lull in the firing. Whistles sounded shrilly.

An officer near Tani who had been divesting himself of his overcoat leapt to his feet with a shout. With an answering roar the trenches seemed to vomit wave upon wave of steel, and yellow-faced, khaki-clad figures. They swept forward, stabbing and cheering, hewing their way through the wire entanglement in the face of a tempest of bullets, leaving their dead dangling as they fell.

Tani reached a line of sandbags at the crest of a rise unhurt, and drove his bayonet into the chest of a German who was clubbing his rifle. He heard the breast-bone crunch as the steel went home to the muzzle of the rifle. The German fell sideways, twisting the weapon out of Tani's grip with his weight. Then Tani saw a bearded officer, the haft of a broken sword dangling from a leather thong at his wrist, struggling to reload his revolver.

As a mongoose jumps for a snake the Japanese leapt at the German's throat. They fell together in the bottom of the trench, and for a moment they fought with their hands, in the welter of mud and water, trampled on by other combatants, breathing in short, savage gasps. Then Tani got the "neck-lock" he had been struggling for. Something snapped with a sound like a dry twig breaking, and the German's head dropped back. Tani sat up, spitting and wiping the mud out of his eyes. His adversary was dead, and lay staring up at the grey sky as if amazed. The bearded lips were drawn back, showing his teeth; one of these sparkled curiously. Save for the dead and wounded, the trench was deserted: the assault had swept forward. Above them was a sound of great cheering. Someone was wedging a colour-staff between the sandbags; the emblem of the Rising Sun, tattered and stained, stirred in the morning breeze. Tsingtau had fallen.

Tani leaned over to examine more closely the phenomenon in the dead man's mouth. Then he emitted an interested grunt. The centre tooth of the German's upper jaw was crowned with a diamond.

3

Tani, maker of sandals, leaned over the parapet of the little cedar-wood bridge that spanned an artificial hike in the temple grounds. Every now and again the moon's placid reflection on the water broke into widening ripples as a carp rose. In the stillness the sound of its feeding was audible--a tiny "gluck!" as if a greedy child were smacking its lips. It was late spring, the season of the cherry-blossom, and the light airs of evening came in puffs across the water, laden with faint fragrance. The doors of the temple stood open: inside, a lamp burned dully before the altar.

After a while the man took from his pocket a little pouch of oiled silk and emptied the contents into his palm. There was some dusty tobacco, two or three matches, and a small object that caught the light as he moved his hand. This he retained, and put the pouch and the rest of its contents back into his pocket.

"Click-click, click-click!" Light, metal-shod sandals were approaching from the direction of the village. A form fluttered towards him out of the darkness like a soft grey moth.

"Have you waited long, Tani?"

"So long, Su Su O, that the night had grown into Eternity, and the sound of my sighing checked the very lamentation of the frogs!"

She laughed in her delicious gurgling way, and pressed her face against his sleeve. He slipped one hand beneath her chin, raising the flawless oval face to the full light of the moon.

"Thou art very beautiful," he said, half below his breath. "A thousand men assuredly have loved thee since we bade farewell."

Su Su O sighed. "But none have laid a finger on me in love, Tani--save one, and him I struck."

The man smiled a little, and then his face grew grave. He fretted with the sling which supported his left arm. "What manner of man was he, this love-besotted fool?"

"A German, Tani; a man of great stature, bearded, with a jewel set in the centre tooth of his upper jaw."

Tani released her chin. "A diamond, belike, Little Flower?"

She nodded assent. "And by force he kissed me--upon the mouth."

"Ah!" For a moment the sandal-maker stared across the water, his eyes narrowed into slits, his face inscrutable. Then, with a sudden jerk of the wrist, he sent something spinning through the air--something that glittered like a point of flame in the moonlight. It fell with a splash, scaring the lazy carp that lay just beneath the surface.

"He has paid his forfeit," said Tani grimly.

All uncomprehending, Su Su O nestled against him and slipped her slender hand into his. Together they turned towards the temple.

VI

SUPPER BEER

(1914)

1

With the turn of the tide the wind backed and swept a wet mist in from the sea. During the day promenaders had thronged the stone pier that partly encircled the deserted harbour; townspeople for the most part--stolid, sombre-clad folk, taking their constitutionals soberly, as if they formed part of some inflexible schedule that regulated their lives. In the afternoons a sprinkling of infantrymen from the fort intermingled with them; loose-limbed young conscripts in grey uniforms, with heads too small for their bodies--a phenomenon partly accounted for by the zeal of the garrison barber, and partly by the size of their grotesque boots.

Now, however, as the evening set in with every promise of dirty weather, the promenaders turned in pairs towards the town. The angler who had been fishing in the shelter of the stone beacon slowly wound in his lines, gathered together his paraphernalia, and departed also. A watchman, carrying a short ladder over his shoulder, came and examined the automatic revolving gear of the lantern, and after polishing the reflector, briskly returned to the town, taking his ladder with him.

With the exception of a solitary figure pacing backwards and forwards under the lee of the rough wall, the pier was soon deserted. But this figure's constitutional appeared to partake of the nature of a vigil, for every few minutes he paused and stared seaward into the mist through a pair of binoculars.

His face, as much of it as was visible above the collar of his ulster, was that of an elderly man, thin and aristocratic-looking. When not gazing out to sea, he contemplated his slow-pacing feet with mild, thoughtful blue eyes through rimless pince-nez. One cheek-bone was ornamented by a duelling-sabre scar.

Half an hour passed, while the spray drifted over the sea-wall and collected under-foot in shallow pools that alternately mirrored the waning light and darkened as a fresh gust of wind hurled itself in from the North Sea. Out at the entrance to the harbour a solitary gull faced the wind with steady beats of its powerful wings, calling with querulous persistency. Lights were beginning to twinkle here and there along the deserted sea-front when the watcher at the pier-head lowered his glasses, hastily wiped the lenses, and raised them again to his eyes. Then he made a guttural observation in an undertone.

Out of the grey smudge of sea and sky a small vessel suddenly became an object distinct, making for the mouth of the harbour: a short, squat craft, with high bows and a tall raking funnel set far aft. To judge by the derricks topped up to her mainmast she had every appearance of being a trawler; yet for a trawler returning in the height of the fishing season she gave evidence of very empty holds by the buoyancy of her movements. She carried no lights, though the dusk was now settling fast.

A short, thick-set man in a blue jersey stood at the wheel; at his side was a younger man, a tall, upright figure muffled in a thick pilot coat. The crew, with the exception of two who were getting ready to make the vessel fast, stood in a group in the waist. For a North Sea trawler the complement of hands appeared somewhat in excess of the usual requirements.

The man at the helm brought the vessel smoothly alongside without acknowledging the presence of the watcher on the pier. His companion, however, smiled a greeting, raised his hand as if to salute, and checked himself. As the trawler went astern and her way slackened, he jumped out and joined the figure in the ulster.

"Well?" asked the elder man.

"Absolutely successful! Twenty-four, all told. I got right across to within ten miles of their coast."

The other gave an abrupt, disconcerting laugh. "You laid them in fours, as you were ordered?"

The young man nodded. "They cannot miss them. And if a ship fails to touch one direct she must cross one of the wires that connect them. The impetus of her speed will swing them aft against her side--two on each side.... Or three on one and one on the other...! Then----!" The speaker made a graceful upward gesture with his hands and smiled.

"And you were not sighted?"

"Once. The fog lifted a little, and one of their Light Cruisers must have seen us. But I was flying their flag----" He laughed again. "Oh, they are fools! Fools! They had time to blow us out of the water six times over before I could slip back into the fog again." The speaker lit a cigarette and moistened his dry lips. "Then I came back as quickly as possible. And now I want my supper and some beer--it's thirsty work, that--that trawling in the North Sea!" He took a Service revolver out of the side pocket of his coarse reefer jacket and extracted the cartridges from it as they walked along the deserted quay.

His companion took his arm affectionately. "My dear boy," he ejaculated. "Beer! Come along! You shall have a gallon--you have earned it! Herr Gott in Himmel! You shall swim in it if you like."

2

It was the supper hour on board the Cruiser, and the "watch below" were enjoying their leisure, after the fashion of the sailor-man, along the crowded batteries. The sailor's meal, especially in war time, is a satisfying affair; but he does not linger over it as one lingers over the tea-table ashore. For one thing, the surroundings are cramped and stuffy, and the time is short; there are other needs more pressing: there is a duck jumper to be scrubbed by to-morrow perhaps; or a few more inches to be added to the wonderful patchwork quilt destined some day to be the pride and ornament of somebody's home. Besides, on deck one can smoke a pipe.

The battery was thronged with men; many were sitting in pairs at a mess-kettle, up to their elbows in soap-suds; forward by the break of the forecastle the ship's barber was reaping a rich harvest of pennies--a "penny a shave and twopence hair-cut" is the recognised tariff. A sewing-machine whirred busily in the lee of a gun-shield; the crew "standing by" the gun exchanged lazy chaff with the bearded sempster. Their watch was nearly at an end, and with the prospect of a meal ahead the sailor brightens wonderfully. The ship's pet goat wandered from group to group, gravely accepting the attentions--cigarettes, banana-skins, and the like--that came his way during stand-easy.

Out of the wreaths of fog and tobacco-smoke forward drifted presently the strains of an accordion----

"It's a long, long way to Tipperary...." The voices of the men, singing under their breath as they worked, blended restfully with the throb of the engines and the swish of water past the ship's side. A little breeze sprang up, tearing rifts here and there in the surrounding fog; a few pale gleams of sunlight filtered through, and on the fore-bridge of the Cruiser the Yeoman of Signals raised his glass and steadied it against the topmost rail. Suddenly he stiffened like a pointer.

"Trawler right ahead, sir!" His lynx-like eye and almost lifelong training told before the others could see anything. The Captain stepped out of the tiny chart-house, where he had been busy with the chart and a pair of dividers.

"There, sir." The Officer of the Watch extended his arm and forefinger. The Navigating Lieutenant joined them, and together they peered through the shifting veil of vapour.