The horse continued to rush headlong through the almost endless millet-fields, with Khashoji on its back. The din of fighting men and horses, and the clash of swords were now hushed. The autumn sunshine in Liaotung was serene and peaceful. It was like an autumn afternoon in Japan.
Poor Khashoji was groaning with the pain of his wound, which was emphasised by the rocking movement of his horse. But there was a deeper meaning in the moans which broke through his grinding teeth. He was not only struggling against bodily pain, but he was being tormented with an agony that was spiritual—he was crying out against the sudden terror of death which he felt was upon him. To say farewell to life filled him with an unspeakable sorrow. A deep resentment against all men and their worldly affairs for causing him to be mortally wounded surged in his heated brain. He was angered at having to leave the world. Thoughts of this kind flashed one by one through his brain, inflicting endless sorrow upon him, and as these feelings came and went, he cried out in a heartrending groan, “I’m dying! I’m dying!”
He cursed the Japanese cavalry, and then in gentler tones he muttered the loved names of his parents. But already he was so exhausted that as soon as these cries rose to his lips, they changed into senseless, hoarse moans.
“Oh, how unhappy I am! What a misery it is to have been brought here in the very prime of my life, to fight and be killed like a dog! What a hateful beast is that Japanese who tried to kill me! What fools those officers were to have sent me on that reconnaissance! And how detestable are the two fighting powers, China and Japan!
“But even more abominable than these are all the human beings who have in any way been responsible for making me a soldier. They are all my enemies! Through the stupidity of these people I am obliged to give up my life and leave the world in which I still have so many things to do. Alas! what an idiot I have been to have allowed myself to be the tool of circumstance and to have let these people do just as they liked with me!”
These thoughts surged through his brain one after another as poor Khashoji continued on his mad stampede through the high millet-fields.
Being surprised by the rush of the horse, flocks of quail here and there started up in confusion. The horse paid little heed to anything. It only felt its master clinging to its back, sometimes nearly falling from the saddle, but on and on it galloped, with froth dripping from its mouth.
Khashoji might have continued his perilous journey on the back of his horse for that whole day, and he might have kept going until the copper-hued sun had sunk in the western sky, complaining to heaven in his misery and groaning incessantly. But where the fields gradually began to slope down towards a narrow and dirty river which ran through the tall millet-fields, a few willow-trees, with their lower boughs still covered with withered leaves, stood solemnly in his way on the brink of the stream. Just as his horse made a dash through them, he was roughly torn from his saddle by the branches, and was deposited headlong on the muddy bank that bordered the stream.
At that instant some old association of the past flashed into his mind, and he fancied he saw before him a brilliant yellow flame burning in the sky. It was the same bright, yellow flame he had so often watched when he had been a child, the fire that burnt under the big kitchen oven of his home. “My God! Look at the fire burning!” he muttered, and the next instant he had lost consciousness.
Part II
But did Khashoji really faint when he was thrown from his horse? It is true that he had been unconscious of any pain from his wounded neck, and he distinctly remembered lying helpless on the muddy bank of a lonely river, smeared from head to foot with mud and blood. As he lay there he gazed up into a clear blue sky, and across his vision a few branches of willows waved to and fro.
How densely blue the sky seemed to him compared with any he had ever looked at hitherto! It appeared as if he were peering from below into a gigantic, inverted jar of indigo. At the bottom of the jar, clouds like gathering foam were drifting, and as fast as they came they disappeared again behind the quivering leaves of the willows.
So was it possible that Khashoji had been unconscious? Between his eyes and the blue sky, however, floated many curious things like shadows, things that did not exist at all, but merely visions of his fevered brain. First there appeared the old skirt which his mother used to wear. When he had been a child, how often he had clung to it in joy or sorrow! Poor Khashoji stretched out his hands to grasp it, but it at once eluded him. It flapped like transparent silk-gauze, allowing the drifting banks of clouds to be seen through its folds like glittering mica, and then it disappeared altogether.
Then behind that gauzy film appeared the same vast fields of sesame which had grown at the rear of his house—the sesame fields, which in midsummer
