Instead of answering Yonoi had looked him straight in the eyes and pleaded instead: ‘I am an officer and ready to die. Could you please be so good as to tell me the honourable truth. Am I to be hanged like the rest?’
‘I don’t know,’ Lawrence had answered. ‘I fear the chances are you may.’
‘In that case,’ Yonoi begged, ‘you understand us Japanese and will know how important it is to me. As my last wish would you recover this thing for me and send it to my home to be offered to the spirit of the ancestors in the shrine of my fathers?’
‘I will if I can but you mustn’t expect me to be definite until I know what it is,’ Lawrence replied.
Yonoi had paused, clearly aware that this might be his last chance to achieve a result of such overwhelming importance to him. But then he had explained in detail. This thing was just a strand of yellow hair. The British soldier who had found it on him, fed on stories of Yonoi’s brutality to women prisoners, had thought Yonoi had cut it from the head of one of his victims, and had snatched it from him and hit him with his fist. Yonoi did not complain of that. All that mattered was the fact that the soldier was wrong. It was a man’s not a woman’s hair? It was a lock of hair from the head of the most remarkable man he had ever met, an enemy and now a dead enemy, but none the less a man so remarkable that he would never forget him.
He had cut that strand of hair from the dead head purely so that the spirit of the man should be honoured and given a proper home in the hereafter. It was his intention when the war was over to give a place in the inmost hall of his own ancestors to that strand of hair. But alas, from what Lawrence now had told him, he could not hope to do it that way. Instead, would Lawrence please do it for him, for only then could Yonoi die as he ought to die?
Lawrence had promised but in the end as Yonoi was given seven years in prison instead of the expected death sentence, he had recovered the hair from the other articles of evidence produced against Yonoi and kept it for him. When after four years Yonoi was pardoned and released, Lawrence had sent the hair to him in Japan. Yonoi had written back immediately with immense gratitude. The hair had been dedicated in the sacred fire of his people’s shrine. It was, Yonoi wrote, a beautiful place at the end of a long cryptomeria avenue and among steep hills covered with maples burning like a forest fire on the autumn day of the ceremony. A long elegant waterfall poured out of the heights above the clouds and fed the stream and pools full of carp and wing-swift trout at the foot of the shrine. The air there was fragrant with the scent of leaf and pine and purified with so much water. He hoped Lawrence would agree that it was a suitable home for such a spirit. Finally he, Yonoi, had written a poem for the occasion. Presenting himself at the shrine, bowing low and clapping his hands sharply to ensure that the spirits knew he was there, he had deposited this verse for the ancestors to read:
In the spring,
Obeying the August spirits
I went to fight the enemy.
In the Fall,
Returning I beg the spirits,
To receive also the enemy.
‘You see,’ Lawrence said to me now, his voice low with feeling: ‘the seed sown by brother in brother in that far-off homeland was planted in many places. It was planted that day in your prison in Java. Yes, even in the manner they killed Celliers his enemies acted out their unwitting recognition of the seed of his deed, for they did not only bury him alive but planted him upright like a new young growth in the earth. Even the manner of their denial of the deed was confirmation of what was rejected. He was planted again by Yonoi on the hills and spirit of his native country, and here again the seed is alive and growing in you and me.’
I believe he might have gone on had my wife not entered the room just then and asked me to see to the windows and doors because a wireless warning had come through that a great gale was bearing down on us fast. When I came to check on the last window at the top of the house I stood there for a while looking out at the dying day. Yes, the great grey calm of Christmas was breaking fast. In the south-west against the pale yellow sky the clouds, ragged and torn, were coming racing towards us. The elements were loose and wild with movement and how good it was to know them once more on the move. I stood there with a heart full of welcome for the storm and it was as if Celliers had come again from all those many places in which he had been born, lived, died, been buried and enshrined, to stand behind me renewed and reintegrated, saying clearly in my ear: ‘Wind and spirit, earth and being, rain and doing, lightning and awareness imperative, thunder and the word, seed and sower, all are one: and it is necessary only for man to ask for his seed to be chosen and to pray for the sower within to sow it through the deed and act of himself, and then the harvest for all will be golden and great.’
fn1 ‘The anchor-dropping place.’
fn2 ‘The desired earth.’
The Sword and the Doll
Christmas Night
The Sword and the Doll
THE GALE WHICH bore down on us that Christmas night when John Lawrence and I carried the story of Jacques Celliers as far as we could, was one of the greatest in living memory. It was upon us almost before I could get down from the top of the house to re-join him in the drawing-room where the heavy curtains and shutters already were shutting out the last little light of day. He himself was sitting in semi-darkness by the large open fire and we remained there without speaking for long, listening to the rising voice of the storm. Words seemed utterly unnecessary just then, so much did the wind speak for Hara, Celliers, Yonoi, him, me and us all. Indeed no storm had ever sounded more eloquent and I pondered for quite a while on nature’s need for violence in accomplishing the transition between the seasons. I wondered to what extent too it was part of the terrible necessity of our own world to experience storms of war sometimes twice in one generation. When I reached this point in my thinking I noticed something about this storm that before I had never fully realized: the strange harmony at the heart of it. At all sorts of moments, sometimes in the lowest trough of the wind when the voice of the storm was little more than a sigh, or again on some great Everest crest when the individual sounds were torn alive and screaming from the immense trees thrashing in our tender, elegiac English earth, all the many and various noises would suddenly blend and a moment or two of pure music would float over the heaving waters of darkness and chaos. Sometimes the music had a twang-like accompaniment as if plucked from a great harp; sometimes it was like a rounded blast of Roland’s horn summoning the spirit of Man to turn about and stand; at others it was a scamper up and down the scales. But in its most gentle moments the sounds resembled the opening notes of a theme on the Shaku-hachi flute of Hara’s own people, which sings not only the song willed upon it by the player but also out of its nature of the fountain of green which once surged up through its native shoots of bamboo.
We were still sitting there in silence listening to the harmony brought forth from such violence (as perhaps Celliers had heard the first intimation of music beyond the storm in our Japanese prison camp), when my wife came into the room, turned on the light and asked: ‘I wonder if you two would mind going up and seeing the children? I promised that you’d go and say good night to them.’
Although we went upstairs at once we arrived too late. Christmas, of course, is notoriously exhausting for children and the twins, who had found sleep hard enough the night before and had been awake since early morning, were already fast asleep. In fact the little girl had been overcome by her fatigue in the act of trying to lift the Dutch doll her grandmother had given her from its miniature play-pen. Her fine black hair hung over the side of the little bed with the light in it a subtle night-sheen. Her outstretched arm held the doll firmly in hand and her face was buried deep in the white pillow. I settled her into a more comfortable sleeping position without waking her but could not loosen her grip on the doll. Whenever I tried to do so she protested instantly, moaning in her sleep. Afraid that I might wake her altogether I placed the doll, still clasped tightly in her hand, beside her underneath the eiderdown. The moment I did that a sigh of content broke from her, the flush of sleep in her cheeks deepened and her long dark lashes settled over the clear white skin.