“You—you don’t think he’ll come back here before he leaves for the front?” he asked the professor.
“Certainly,” laughed the other. “He isn’t through yet with these!” indicating a wizardly array of tubes and pipes whence acrid, sulphurous fumes were rising to be caught, yellow, cloudy, whirling, in a bulb-shaped retort which hung from the ceiling.
“But—he is a samurai, a soldier!” stammered Takagawa. “What have these—these gases to do with—”
“With war?” Kreutzer gave a cracked laugh. “Don’t you know?”
“I know the ingredients. I know how the gas is produced.”
“Oh, you do; do you?”
“Yes.”
And Takagawa, turning on the right spigot in his fact-gathering brain, reeled off the correct formula in all its intricacies.
The professor laughed again. “And you mean to say,” he asked in the same sibilant undertone, “that you have no idea what the gas is for—that you have no idea why Baron von Eschingen has honored us these six weeks with his spurred and booted presence?”
“Why—no!”
Kreutzer slapped his knees. “Blessed innocence!” he chuckled. “Blessed, spectacled, yellow-skinned, Asiatic innocence! It is—Well, never mind!”
He turned to the German students who were still talking excitedly among themselves.
“Silentium!” he thundered. “War is all very well, gentlemen. But we are not here to kill or to remake the map of Europe. We are here to learn about…” And then a lengthy Greek word and the hush of the classroom.
The baron, who had shed his pale-blue and silver regimentals for a uniform of gray-green, came in toward the end of the lesson. He spoke courteously to the students, who instinctively stood at attention, shook hands with Takagawa with his usual friendliness, and drew the professor into a corner where he engaged him in a low, heated conversation.
“I won’t do it!” Takagawa could hear Kreutzer’s angry hiss. “The lesson is over. I insist on my academic freedom! I am a free burgess of the university! I—” and the baron’s cutting reply: “This is war, Herr Professor! I am here by orders of the Ministry of War. I order you to—”
Takagawa smiled. Here was the real samurai speaking; and he was still smiling ecstatically when, a moment later, the professor turned to the class.
“Go downstairs, meine Herren,” he said. “I have a private lesson to give to—to—” he shot out the word venomously—“to our army dunce! To our saberrattling gray-green hope! To our so intelligent East-Elbian Junker! To—”
“Shut up!” came the baron’s harsh voice. “Don’t you dare, you damned—” At once he controlled himself. He forced himself to smile. “I am sorry, gentlemen,” he said, “to disturb you and to interfere with your lessons in any way. But I have some private business with the professor. War—you know—the necessities of war—”
“Yes—yes…”
“Naturlich!”
“Selbstverstandlick!”
“Sie haben ganz Recht, Herr Leutnant!” came the chorus of assent, and the students left the laboratory together with Takagawa, who went last.
“Wait for me downstairs, old boy,” the baron called after him as he was about to close the door.
Arrived in the street, without civil words or touching their hats, the German students turned to the left to take their “second breakfast” at the Café Victoria, while Takagawa paced up and down in front of the building to wait for his friend.
Troops were still marching in never-ending files, like a long, coiling snake with innumerable, bobbing heads, and crowds of people were packing the sidewalks in a dense mass, from the Brandenburger Thor to beyond the Schloss.
They whirled about Takagawa. A few noticed him—only a few, since he was so small—but these few glared at him. They halted momentarily, mumbling: “A Japanese!”
“Ein Ausladnder!” (“A foreigner!”)
There was sullen, brooding hatred in the word where, only yesterday, it had held kindliness and hospitality and tolerance.
Takagawa stepped back into a doorway. Not that he was afraid. He did not know the meaning of the complicated emotion called fear, since he was a samurai. But something intangible, something nauseating and hateful, seemed to float up from the crowd, like a veil in the meeting of winds the air, the people, the music, everything, suddenly shot through with peculiar, disturbing, prismatic diffractions.
He was glad when the baron’s tall form came from the laboratory building.
“Sorry I kept you waiting,” said the officer, slipping his white-gloved hand through the other’s arm. “I’ve only a minute for you at that. Got to rush back to headquarters, you know. But a word to the wise—is your passport in order?”
“Yes. Why?”
The baron did not seem to hear the last question. He took a visiting card from his pocketbook and scribbled a few rapid words. “Here you are,” he said, giving the card to Takagawa. “Take this to my friend Police Captain von Wilmowitz, at the Presidency of Police—you know—near the Spittelmarkt. He’ll see to it that you get away all right before it’s too late—you, and your old servant, Kaguchi—”
“Get away? Too late? You mean that—”
“That you’d better wipe your feet on the outer doormat of the German Empire. Get out of the country, in other words. Go to Holland, Switzerland—anywhere.”
“Why?”
“War!” came the baron’s laconic reply.
“Yes, but Japan and Germany are not at war!”
The baron had put back his pocketbook and was buttoning his tunic. “I know,” he said. “But England declared war against us three hours ago, and Japan is England’s ally. Hurry up. Do what I tell you. I’ll drop in on you tonight or tomorrow and see how you’re making out.” He turned and came back again.
“By the way,” he went on, “be careful about any papers you take along. Destroy them. Your chemistry notebooks the notes you made during class. There’s that poison gas, for instance.” He was silent, hesitated, and continued: “I’m sorry about that, Takagawa. Puts both you and me in a devilishly embarrassing position. You see, I had no idea—honestly—that war was due when the powers that be detailed me on that chemistry course. I thought it was all a tremendous bluff. Otherwise I would never have dreamt of working side by side with you, comparing notes on these poison-gas experiments, and all that. Well—” he shrugged his shoulders “what’s the use of crying over spilt milk? Burn your notebooks—chiefly those dealing with the gas.” And he was off.
Takagawa looked after him, uncomprehending. The poison gas! Here it was again. The same mysterious allusion. First Professor Kreutzer had spoken of it, and now the baron.
But what did they mean? What did it signify?
Finally, obeying the suggestion of the dusty laboratory windows looking down on him from their stone frames, Takagawa re-entered the building and went straight to Professor Kreutzer’s lecture room.
He found the latter seated at his desk, his chin cupped in his hands, his haggard face flushed and congested. The man seemed to be laboring under an excitement which played on every quivering nerve of his body; the hand supporting the lean chin showed the high-swelling veins, and trembled.
He looked up as Takagawa entered, and broke into a harsh bellow of laughter. “Come back, have you, you stunted yellow peril!”
“Yes. I want to ask you about—about the gas.”
Again the professor laughed boisterously.
“The gas!” he cried. “The poison gas! To be sure! Not quite as innocent as you made yourself out to be a while back, are you? Well, by God, I’ll tell you about the poison gas! Got a remarkable sort of brain, haven’t you? Retentive faculty abnormally developed—don’t need written notes or any other sort of asses’ bridge, eh? Just as good! Couldn’t take anything written out of Germany. But your brain—your tenacious Oriental brain—they can’t put that to the acid test! All right! Listen to me!”
Professor Kreutzer did not stop to disse
ct himself or his motives. He obeyed, not a feeling, a sudden impulse, but a pathological mood which was the growth of forty years. For forty years he had hated autocratic, imperial Germany. For forty years he had battled with his puny strength against militarism. Now the steel-clad beast had won. The shadow of war had fallen over the land. His gods lay shattered about him.
Forty years of ill-suppressed hatred—brought to a head, half an hour earlier, by Baron von Eschingen’s curt command: “This is war, Herr Professor. I am here by orders of the Ministry of War. I order you to—”
That uniformed, gold-braided jackanapes to order him, a scientist, a thinker!
Kreutzer swore wickedly under his breath. He turned to the Japanese, and talked to him at length, going with minute care over the whole process of making poison gas, from the first innocuous-looking pink crystal to the final choking cloudy yellow fumes. He made Takagawa repeat it, step by step, formula by formula. Finally he declared himself satisfied. “You know it now, don’t you?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“You’ll never forget it?”
“No, sir.”
“All right. You have what you came here to get. In one respect at least you know as much as the German War Office. Go back to Japan as soon as you can.” He returned to his desk and picked up a book.
Takagawa went after him. “Herr Professor!” he said timidly.
“Well? What is it now?”
“I—I—” the samurai hesitated. “I know the gas. I know how it is produced, how it is projected, how it affects the human body. I understand all that. But what is it for?”
“You you mean to say you don’t know?”
The professor twirled in his chair, utter incredulity in his accents. Then, reading the question in Takagawa’s oblique eyes, sensing that the man was asking in perfect good faith, in perfect innocence, he rose, took him by the arm, and led him to the window. He pointed. Afternoon had melted into a soft evening of glowing violet with a pale moon growing faintly in the north. The linden trees stood stiff and motion less as if forged out of a dark-green metal. But still the soldiers tramped. Still there was the glitter of rifle barrel and sword tip and lance point. Still crowds packed the sidewalks, cheering. The professor made a great gesture. It was more than a mere waving of hand and arm. It seemed like an incident which cut through the air like a tragic shadow.
“They are going out to kill—with bullet and steel. But gas, too, can kill—poison gas, projected from iron tanks on an unsuspecting, unprepared enemy! It can win a battle, a campaign, a war! It can change the course of world history! It can ram imperial Germany’s slavery down the throat of a free world! Poison gas—it is a weapon—the newest, most wicked, most effective weapon!” The professor was getting slightly hysterical. “Take it back with you—to Japan—to France, to England—anywhere! Fight us with our own weapons! Fight us—and give us freedom—freedom!” And, with an inarticulate cry, he pushed the Japanese out of doors.
Takagawa walked down the Dorotheenstrasse like a man in a dream. His feelings were tossed together into too violent confusion for immediate disentanglement. “You will learn, not for reward and merit, not for yourself, but for Japan!” his grandfather, the old marquis, had told him. And he had learned a great secret for Japan. And Japan would need it. For, passing the newspaper kiosk at the corner of the Wilhelmstrasse, he had glanced at the headlines of the evening edition of the Vossische Zeitung.
“Japan Stands by England. Sends Ultimatum. War Inevitable!”
War inevitable—and he was a samurai, a man entitled to wield the two-handed sword, though his body was too weak to carry the burden of it.
What of it? The professor had told him that poison gas, too, was a weapon, the most modern, most effective weapon in the world; and he had its formula tucked snugly away in his brain.
The poison gas! It was his sword! But first he must get out of the country. He hailed a taxicab and drove straight to the Presidency of Police. A crowd of foreigners of all nationalities—anxious, nervous, shouting, gesticulating—was surging in the lower entrance hall of the square, baroque building. But the baron’s card proved a talisman, and in less than half an hour Takagawa had seen Police Captain von Wilmowitz, had had his passport viséed and had received permission for himself and his servant Kaguchi to leave Berlin for Lake Constance on the following day.
Captain von Wilmowitz repeated the baron’s warning: “Take nothing written out of Germany. Neither yourself nor your servant. They’ll examine you both thoroughly at the Swiss frontier. Be careful,” and Takagawa had hidden a smile.
Let them search his person, his clothes, his baggage. They would not be able to search his brain. He started figuring rapidly. He would go to Switzerland, thence via Paris to London. The Japanese ambassador there was a second cousin of his. He would give him the precious formula, and then—
He returned to the pension in the Dahlmannstrasse, settled his bill, and ordered Kaguchi to pack. Note book after notebook he burned, and as he worked he was conscious of a feeling of power. There was no actual presentiment, no psychic preliminaries. It simply was there, this feeling of power, as if it had always been there. He was a samurai, and his was the two-handed sword—a two-handed sword forged in a stinking, bulb-shaped glass retort and shooting forth yellow, choking, sulphurous fumes.
In the next room a half dozen Germans were smoking and drinking and singing. He could hear Hans Grosser’s excited voice, and now and then a snatch of song, sentimental, patriotic, boastful, and he thought that he too would soon again hear the songs of his fatherland, back in the island of Kiushu, in the rocky feudal stronghold of the Takagawas. The bards would be there singing the old heroic epics; the uguisus would warble the old melodies. Komoto would be there, and he himself, and his grandfather, the marquis.
“You will learn honorably!” his grandfather had told him. And he had learned. He was bringing back the fruit of it to Nippon.
He turned to Kaguchi with a laugh.
“I have learned, Kaguchi, eh?”
“Yes,” replied the old servant, “you have learned indeed, O Takamori-san!”
“And”—he said it half to himself—“I have learned honorably.”
Honorably?
He repeated the word with a mental question mark at the end of it.
Had he learned—honorably?
He stood suddenly quite still. An ashen pallor spread to his very lips. He dropped the coat which he was folding. Doubt floated upon him imperceptibly, like the shadow of a leaf through summer dusk. Something reached out and touched his soul, leaving the chill of an indescribable uneasiness, and indescribable shame.
“Honorably!” He whispered the word.
He sat down near the window, looking out into the street. Night had fallen with a trailing cloak of gray and lavender. The tall, stuccoed apartment houses on the Kurfurstendamm, a block away, rose above the line of street lamps like a smudge of sooty black beyond a glittering yellow band. Still people were cheering, soldiers tramping.
Kaguchi spoke to him. But he did not hear. He stared unseeing.
He said to himself that he had come to Germany, to Berlin, as a guest, to partake of the fruit of wisdom and knowledge. Richly the foreigners, the Germans, had spread the table for him. Generously they had bidden him eat. And he had dipped his hands wrist-deep into the bowl and had eaten his fill in a friend’s house, giving thanks according to the law of hospitality.
Then war had come. Belgium, France, England, Russia—and tomorrow Japan. Tomorrow the standard of the Rising Sun would unfurl. Tomorrow the trumpets would blow through the streets of Nagasaki. Peasants and merchants and samurai would rush to arms.
And he was a samurai; and he had a weapon, a weapon of Germany’s own forging—the formula for the poison gas, safely tucked away in his brain.
They had taught him in good faith. And he had learned. Nor would he be able to forget.
Professor Kreutzer? He did not count. He was a traitor. But his friend, Ba
ron von Eschingen, the Prussian samurai who had worked side by side with him, who had even helped him get away?
Takagawa walked up and down. His labored, sibilant breathing sounded terribly distinct. From the next room there still came excited voices, the clink of beer steins, maudlin singing:
Von alien den Madchen so blink und so blank…
winding up in a tremendous hiccup. But he did not hear. In his brain something seemed to flame upward, illuminating all his thoughts.
They were very clear. He could not stay here, in the land of the enemy, while Nippon was girding her loins. Nor could he go home. For home he was a samurai, entitled to wield the two-handed sword. And he carried that sword in his brain, the formula for the poison gas. He would be forced—forced by himself, forced by his love of country—to give it to Nippon, and thus he would break the law of hospitality, his own honor.
He had learned the formula honorably. But there was no way of using it honorably.
A great, tearing sob rose in his throat. Then he heard a voice at his elbow: “O Takamori-san!”
He turned. “Yes, Kaguchi?”—and, suddenly, the answer to the riddle came to him. He looked at the old servant.
“You love me, Kaguchi?” he asked.
“My heart is between your hands!”
“You trust me?”
Kaguchi drew himself up.
“You are a samurai, O Takamori-san. The sword of Kiushu is unsullied.”
“And unsullied it shall remain! And so,” he added incongruously, “you will speak after me the foreign words which I shall now teach you, syllable for syllable, intonation for intonation”; and, step by step, formula by formula, he taught Kaguchi the meaningless German words.
For hours he worked with him until the old man reeled off the strange sounds without hitch or error.
The Second Achmed Abdullah Megapack Page 20