The Second Achmed Abdullah Megapack

by Achmed Abdullah

  There was, thirdly, the memory of his old tutor, Komoto, a bonze of the Nichiren sect who had made senaji pilgrimages to the thousand shrines, who had taught him the Chinese classics from the Diamond Sutra to the King-Kong-King, later on the wisdom of Ogawa and Kimazawa and the bushi no ichi-gon the lessons of Bushido, the lore of the two-handed sword, the ancient code of Nippon chivalry.

  “The spiritual light of the essential being is pure,” Komoto had said to the marquis when the governors of the cadet school at Nagasaki had decided that the young samurai’s body was too weak, his eyes too short sighted, his blood too thin to stand the rigorous military training of modern Japan. “It is not affected by the will of man. It is written in the book of Kung Tzeu that not only the body but also the brain can raise a levy of shields against the enemy.”

  “Yes,” the marquis had replied; for he, too, was versed in the Chinese classics. “Ships that sail the ocean, drifting clouds, the waning moon, shores that are washed away these are symbolic of change. These, and the body. But the human mind is essential, absolute, changeless, and everlasting. O Takamori-san!” He had turned to his grandson. “You will go to Europe and learn from the foreigners, with your brain, since your body is too weak to carry the burden of the two-handed sword. You will learn with boldness, with patience, and with infinite trouble. You will learn not for reward and merit, not for your self, but for Nippon. Every grain of wisdom and knowledge that falls from the table of the foreigners you will pick up and store away for the needs of the Rising Sun. You will learn—and learn. But you will learn honorably. For you are a samurai, O Takamori-san!”

  And so the young samurai took ship for Europe. He was accompanied by Kaguchi, an old family servant, short, squat, flat-nosed, dark of skin and long of arm. A low-caste he was who had sunk his personality in that of the family whom his ancestors had been serving for generations, who had never considered his personal honor but only that of his master’s clan which to him stood for the whole of Nippon.

  If Takagawa Takamori had been small among the short, sturdy daimios of Kiushu, he seemed wizened and diminutive among the long-limbed, well-fleshed men of Prussia and Mecklenburg, and Saxony who crowded the chemical laboratory of Professor Kreutzer. Gentlemen according to the stiff, angular, ram rod German code, they recognized that the little parchment-skinned, spectacled Asian was a gentleman according to his own code, and so, while they pitied him after the manner of big blond men, lusty of tongue, hard of thirst and greedy of meat, they sympathized with him. They even liked him; and they tried to help him when they saw his narrow-lidded, myopic eyes squint over tomes and long-necked glass retorts in a desperate attempt to assimilate in six short semesters the chemical knowledge which Europe had garnered in the course of twice a hundred years.

  Professor Kreutzer, who had Semitic blood in his veins and was thus in the habit of leaping at a subject from a flying start and handling it with consciously dramatic swiftness, was frequently exasperated at Takagawa’s slowness of approach and comprehension. On the other hand, his German training and traditions made him appreciate and admire the student’s Asiatic tenacity of purpose, his steel-riveted thoroughness and efficiency which made it impossible for him to forget a fact which he had once mastered and stored away. Perhaps his method of learning was parrotlike. Perhaps his memory was mechanical, automatic, the fruit of his early schooling when, with the mountain wind blowing icy through the flimsy shoji walls, he had knelt in front of Komoto and had laboriously learned by heart long passages from the Yuen-Chioh and the erudite commentaries of Lao-tse. Whatever the basic cause, whatever his method, the result was peculiar and startling to his fellow students. Given a certain discussion, a certain argument which sent his German class-mates scuttling for library and reference books, the young samurai seemed to turn on a special spigot in his brain and give forth the desired information like a sparkling stream.

  “Sie sind ja so’n echter Wunderknabe, Sie Miniatur gelbe Gefahr!” (for that’s what he called him: a “miniature yellow peril”) the professor would exclaim; and he would give him a resounding slap on the back which would cause the little wizened body to shake and smart.

  But, sensing the kindliness beneath rough words and rougher gesture, Takagawa would bow old-fashionedly, with his palms touching his knees, and suck in his breath noisily.

  He was learning—learning honorably; and at night, when he returned to his rooms in the pension, he would go over the garnered wisdom of the day together with Kaguchi, his old servant. Word for word he would repeat to him what he had learned, until the latter, whose brain was as that of his master—persistent, parrotlike, mechanical—could reel off the chemical formulae with the ease and fluency of an ancient professor gray in the craft. He had no idea what the barbarous foreign sounds meant. But they amused him. Also he was proud that his young master understood their meaning—his young master who stood to him for Kiushu and the whole of Nippon.

  Summer of the year 1914 found Takagawa still at work under Professor Kreutzer, together with half a dozen German students who like himself were using the Long Vacations for a postgraduate course in special chemical research, and a Prussian officer, a Lieu tenant Baron Horst von Eschingen, who on his arrival was introduced by the professor as “a rara avis indeed—pardon me, baron!” with a lop-sided, sardonic grin—“a brass-buttoned, much-gallooned, spurred, and booted East-Elbian Junker who is graciously willing to descend into the forum of sheepskin and learned dust and stinking chemicals, and imbibe knowledge at the feet of as humble a personage as myself.”

  The German students laughed boisterously, while the baron smiled. For it was well known throughout the empire that Professor Kreutzer was a Liberaler who disliked bureaucratic authority, sneered at the military, and was negligent of imperial favor.

  From the first Takagawa felt a strong liking and even kinship for Baron von Eschingen. He under stood him. The man, tall, lean, powerful, red-faced, ponderous of gesture and raucous of speech, was nevertheless a samurai like himself. There was no doubt of it. It showed in his stiff punctiliousness and also in his way of learning—rather of accepting teaching. For the professor, who welcomed the opportunity of bullying with impunity a member of the hated ruling classes, took a delight in deviling the baron’s soul, in baiting him, in putting to him sudden questions hard to solve and pouncing on him when the answer did not come swift enough, with such remarks as: “Of course, lieber Herr Leutnant, what can I expect? This is not a hollow square, nor a firing squad, nor any thing connected with martingale or rattling scabbard. This is science the humble work of the proletariat and, by God, it needs the humble brain of the proletariat to understand it.”

  Another time—the baron was specializing in poisonous gases and their effect on the human body—the professor burst out with: “I can’t get it through my head why you find it so terribly difficult to master the principles of gas. I have always thought that the army is making a specialty of—gas bags!”

  Von Eschingen would bite his mustache and blush. But he would not reply to the other’s taunts and gibes; and Takagawa knew that the baron, too, was learning; learning honorably; nor because of reward and merit.

  They worked side by side through the warm, soft July afternoons—while the sun blazed his golden panoply across a cloudless sky and the scent of the linden trees, drifting in through the open windows, cried them out to field and garden—cramming their minds with the methodical devices of exact science, staining their hands with sharp acids and crystals, with the professor wielding his pedagogic whip, criticizing, sneering, mercilessly driving. More than once, when Kreutzer’s back was turned, Takagawa would help the baron, whisper him word or chemical formula from the fund of his tenacious Oriental brain, and then the two would laugh like naughty schoolboys, the German with short, staccato bursts of merriment, the Japanese discreetly, putting his hand over his mouth.

  Finally one afternoon as they were leaving the laboratory together and were about to go their separate ways at the corner of th
e Dorotheenstrasse, Takagawa bowed ceremoniously before the officer and, painfully translating in his mind from the Chinese book of etiquette into Japanese and thence into the harsh vagaries of the foreign tongue, begged him to tie the strings of his traveling cloak and deign to set his honorable feet in the miserable dwelling of Takagawa Takamori, there to partake of mean food and entirely worthless hospitality.

  Baron von Eschingen smiled, showing his fine, white teeth, clicked his heels, and accepted; and the following evening found the curious couple in Takagawa’s room: the former in all the pale-blue and silver glory of his regimentals, the latter, having shed his European clothes, wrapped in a cotton crêpe robe embroidered on the left shoulder with a single pink chrysanthemum, queer and hieratic—the mon, the coat of arms of his clan.

  To tell the truth, the baron had brought with him a healthy, meat-craving German appetite, and he felt disappointed when all his host offered him was a plate of paper-thin rice wafers and some very pale, very tasteless tea served in black celadon cups. His disappointment changed to embarrassment when the Japanese, before filling the cups, went through a lengthy ceremony, paying exaggerated compliments in halting German, extolling his guest’s nobility, and laying stress on his own frightful worthlessness.

  “And the funny little beggar did it with all the dignity of a hidalgo,” the baron said the next morning to a major in his regiment who had spent some years as military attaché in Japan. “Positively seemed to enjoy it.”

  The major laughed. “Why,” he replied, “you ought to feel highly honored. For that Jap paid you no end of a compliment. He has initiated you into the cha-no-yu, the honorable ceremony of tea sipping, thus showing you that he considers you his equal.”

  “His his equal?” flared up the other, who, away from the laboratory, was inclined to be touchy on points of family and etiquette.

  “To be sure. Didn’t you say his name is Takagawa Takamori?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well—the Takagawas are big guns in their own land. They don’t make ’em any bigger. They are relatives of the Mikado, cousins to all the feudal houses of Satsuma, descendants of the gods, and what not—”

  It was not altogether snobbishness which caused the German to cultivate the little Asiatic after that. He really liked him. At the end of a few weeks they were friends—strangely assorted friends who had not much in common except chemistry, who had not much to talk about except acids and poisonous gases. But they respected each other, and many a sunny afternoon found them strolling side by side through the crowded thoroughfares of Berlin, the baron swinging along with his long, even step, the tip of his scabbard smartly bumping against the asphalt, while Takagawa tripped along very much like a small, owlish child, peering up at the big man through the concave lenses of his spectacles.

  Only once did the samurai mention the reasons which had brought him to Europe. They were passing the Pariser Platz at the time, and stopped and turned to look at the half company of Grenadiers of the Guard who were marching through the Brandenburger Thor to change the castle watch, shoulders squared, rifles at the carry, blue-clad legs shooting forth at right angles, toes well down, the spotless metal on spiked helmet and collar and belt mirroring the afternoon sun, while the drum major shook his horse-tailed bell tree and a mounted captain jerked out words of command:

  “Achtung! Augen links! Vorwarts! Links an! Links an! Marsch!”

  Takagawa pointed a lean, brown finger.

  “The scabbard of my blue steel spear is the liver of my enemy,” he quoted softly, translating from the Japanese. “I carry the red life on my fingertips; I have taken the vow of a hero!” and when the baron looked down, uncomprehending, asking astonishedly: “Hero? Hero?” the other gave a little, crooked smile.

  “The mind too fights when the body is too weak to carry the burden of the two-handed sword,” he explained. “The mind too can be a hero. Mine is!” he added, with utter simplicity. “For my body aches for the touch of steel, while I force my mind to drink the learning of books. My mind bends under the strain of it. But I do it—for Japan.”

  The baron’s hand descended on his friend’s lean shoulder.

  “Yes,” he said. “I understand, old boy. I have an older brother. No good for the King’s coat—lost a leg when he was a kid. Family shot him into the Foreign Ministry. Works like a slave. But, auf Ehrenwort, he hates it, the poor old beggar!”—and, seeing a drop of moisture in the other’s oblique eyes, he went on hurriedly: “Now, as to that gas—that new one Kreutzer is driveling about—with some unearthly, jaw-breaking Greek name and that fine, juicy stink to it—do you remember how—” And a moment later they were deep once more in the discussion of poison gases.

  July swooned into August and, overnight, it seemed, the idyl of peace was spattered out by a brushful of blood. Excitement struck Berlin like a crested wave. People cheered. People laughed. People wept. A conjurer’s wand swung from Spandau to Kopenick, thence east to Posen, and north and northwest in a semicircle, touching Kiel, Hamburg, Cologne, and Mayence. A forest of flags sprang up. Soldiers marched in never-ending coils down the streets, horse and foot, foot again, and the low, dramatic rumbling of the guns. They crowded the railway stations from Lehrter Bahnhof to Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof. They entrained, cheered, were cheered, leaned from carriage windows, floppy, unstarched fatigue caps set jauntily on close-cropped heads, singing sentimental songs:

  Lebt wohl, ihr Frauen und ihr Madchen,

  Und schafft euch einen And r en an.…

  The cars pulled away, bearing crudely chalked leg ends on their brown sides—“This car for Paris!” “This car for Brussels!” “This car for Calais!”—and, twenty-four hours later, the world was startled from stupid, fattening sleep through the news that Belgium had been invaded by the gray-green hordes, led by generals who had figured out each chance of victory and achievement with logarithmic, infallible cunning, and that already the Kaiser had ordered the menu which should be served him when he entered Paris.

  The wave of war struck the laboratory and the pension in the Dahlmannstrasse together with the rest of Berlin.

  People assumed new duties, new garb, new language, new dignity—and new psychology. The old Germany was gone. A new Germany had arisen—a colossus, a huge, crunching animal of a country, straddling Europe on massive legs, head thrown back, shoulders flung wide; proud, defiant! And sullen! Takagawa did not understand. He had come to Berlin to learn honorably. He was not familiar with European politics, and Belgium was only a geographical term to him.

  War? Of course! War! It meant honor and strength and sacrifice. But—

  There was Hans Grosser, the only son of Frau Grosser, the comfortable, stout Silesian widow who kept the pension. Long, lean, pimply, clumsy, an underpaid clerk in the Dresdner Bank, he had been heretofore the butt of his mother’s boarders. When at the end of the meal the Kompottschale, filled with stewed fruit, was passed down the table, he was the last to help himself, and then apologetically. The day after war was declared he came to dinner his last dinner before leaving for the front in gray-green, with a narrow gold braid on his buckram-stiffened collar, gold insignia on his epaulet, a straight saber dragging behind his clicking spurs like a steel-forged tail. Overnight the negligible clerk had become Herr Leutnant second lieutenant in the reserves, detailed to the 124th Infantry. The butt had become the potential hero.

  He was listened to, bowed to. He was the first to dip the battered silver spoon into the Kompottschale.

  Dinner over, cigars and cigarettes lit, he held court, leaning over the piano in all his gray-green glory. He received congratulations which he accepted with a yawn. But when Takagawa bowed to him, saying something very kindly and very stiltified in his awkward German, Grosser looked him up and down as he might some exotic and nauseating beetle, and it was clear that the other boarders approved of his strange conduct.

  It was the same in the laboratory. When he entered the students who were already there turned stony eyes upon him.
r />   “Good morning, gentlemen,” he said. A harsh, rasping sound, something between a cough and a snort, was the reply.

  Only the professor seemed unchanged.

  “Good morning, miniature yellow peril!” he said, while the German students formed into a group near the window whence they could see the soldiers file down Unter den Linden, with the hollow tramptramp-tramp of drilled feet, the brasses braying out their insolent call.

  They seemed silent and grave and stolid, though at times given to unreasonable, hectic fits of temper. They talked excitedly among themselves about “Weltpolitik” about “Unser Plats in der Sonne” and “Deutsche Ideate.” Every once in a while one of them would whisper something about “die Englander,” pronouncing the word as if it were a dread talisman. Another would pick up the word: “die Englander,” with a tense, minatory hiss. Then again they would all talk together, excitedly; and once Takagawa, busy with a brass crucible and a handful of pink crystals, could hear: “Japan—the situation in the Far East—Kiauchau—”

  Baron von Eschingen, usually punctual to the minute, did not make an appearance at the laboratory that morning.

  “Getting ready for the wholesale butchery,” the professor explained to Takagawa in an undertone. “Sharpening his cleaver and putting a few extra teeth in his meat saw, I’ve no doubt.”

  Takagawa felt disappointed. He would have liked to say good-by to his friend, ceremoniously. For he remembered how his father had gone forth at the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War. He had only been a small child at the time, but he recollected everything: how his mother and grandmother had bowed low and had spoken unctuously of naijo, of inner help; how the little girls of the household had brought their kai-ken dirks to be blessed by the departing warrior; how Komoto had quoted long passages from the Poro-po-lo-mi, reenforcing them with even lengthier quotations from the Fuh-ko; how his father had taken him to his arms with the true bushi no nasaké, the true tenderness of a warrior, and how immediately after his father had left the women had put on plain white linen robes, without hems, as the ancient rites prescribe for widows.