‘I didn’t know what to say.’ Lawrence turned to me with a gesture of despair. ‘He was only asking me what I had asked myself ever since these damned war-trials began. I honestly did not understand myself. I never saw the good of them. It seemed to me just as wrong for us now to condemn Hara under a law which had never been his, of which he had never even heard, as he and his masters had been to punish and kill us for transgressions of the code of Japan that was not ours. It was not as if he had sinned against his own lights: if ever a person had been true to himself and the twilight glimmer in him, it was this terrible little man. He may have done wrong for the right reasons but how could it be squared by us now doing right in the wrong way. No punishment I could think of could restore the past, could be more futile and more calculated even to give the discredited past a new lease of life in the present than this sort of uncomprehending and uncomprehended vengeance! I didn’t know what the hell to say!’
The distress over his predicament became so poignant in this recollection that he broke off with a wave of his hand at the darkening sky.
‘But you did say something surely,’ I said. ‘You could not leave it that.’
‘Oh yes, I said something,’ he said sadly, ‘but it was most inadequate. All I could tell him was that I did not understand myself and that if it lay with me I would gladly let him out and send him straight back to his family.’
‘And did that satisfy him?’ I asked.
Lawrence shook his head. He didn’t think so, for after bowing deeply again and thanking Lawrence, he looked up and asked: ‘So what am I to do?’
Lawrence could only say: ‘You can try to think only with all your heart, Hara-san, that unfair and unjust as this thing which my people are doing seems to you, that it is done only to try and stop the kind of things that happened between us in the war from ever happening again. You can say to yourself as I used to say to my despairing men in prison under you: “There is a way of winning by losing, a way of victory in defeat which we are going to discover.” Perhaps that too must be your way to understanding and victory now.’
‘That, Rorensu-san,’ he said, with the quick intake of breath of a Japanese when truly moved, ‘is a very Japanese thought!’
They stood in silence for a long while looking each other straight in the eyes, the English officer and the Japanese N.C.O. The moonlight outside was tense, its silver strands trembling faintly with the reverberation of inaudible and far-off thunder and the crackle of the electricity of lightning along the invisible horizon.
Hara was the first to speak. In that unpredictable way of his, he suddenly smiled and said irrelevantly: ‘I gave you a good Kurīsumasu once, didn’t I?’
‘Indeed you did,’ Lawrence answered unhappily, adding instinctively, ‘You gave me a very, very, good Christmas. Please take that thought with you tonight!’
‘Can I take it with me all the way?’ Hara asked, still smiling but with something almost gaily provocative in his voice. ‘Is it good enough to go even where I am going?’
‘Yes: much as circumstances seem to belie it,’ Lawrence answered, ‘it is good enough to take all the way and beyond . . .’
At that moment the guard announced himself and told Lawrence he had already overstayed his time.
‘Sayonara Hara-san!’ Lawrence said, bowing deeply, using that ancient farewell of the Japanese ‘If-so-it-must-be’ which is so filled with the sense of their incalculable and inexorable fate. ‘Sayonara and God go with you.’
‘If so it must be!’ Hara said calmly, bowing as deeply. ‘If so it must be, and thank you for your great kindness and your good coming, and above all your honourable words.’
Lawrence stood up quickly not trusting his self-control enough to look at Hara again, and started to go, but as he came to the doorway, Hara called out: ‘Rorensu!’ just as he had once called it in the Commandant’s office after Lawrence’s weeks of torture. Lawrence turned and there was Hara grinning widely, faded yellow teeth and gold rims plainly showing as if he had never enjoyed himself more. As Lawrence’s eyes met his, he called out gaily: ‘Merry Kurīsumasu, Rorensu-san.’
But the eyes, Lawrence said, were not laughing. There was a light in them of a moment which transcends lesser moments wherein all earthly and spiritual conflicts tend to be resolved and unimportant, all partiality and incompletion gone, and only a deep sombre between-night-and-morning glow left. It transformed Hara’s strange, distorted features. The rather anthropoidal, prehistoric face of Hara’s looked more beautiful than any Lawrence had ever seen. He was so moved by it and by the expression in those archaic eyes that he wanted to turn back into the cell. Indeed he tried to go back but something would not let him. Half of himself, a deep, instinctive, natural, impulsive half, wanted to go back, clasp Hara in his arms, kiss him good-bye on the forehead and say: ‘We may not be able to stop and undo the hard old wrongs of the great world outside, but through you and me no evil shall come either in the unknown where you are going, or in this imperfect and haunted dimension of awareness through which I move. Thus between us, we shall cancel out all private and personal evil, thus arrest private and personal consequences to blind action and reaction, thus prevent specifically the general incomprehension and misunderstanding, hatred and revenge of our time from spreading further.’ But the words would not be uttered and half of him, the conscious half of the officer at the door with a critical, alert sentry at his side held him powerless on the threshold. So for the last time the door shut on Hara and his golden grin.
But all the way back to town that last expression on Hara’s face travelled at Lawrence’s side. He was filled with great regret that he had not gone back. What was this ignoble half that had stopped him? If only he had gone back he felt now he might have changed the whole course of history. For was not that how great things began in the tiny seed of the small change in the troubled individual heart? One single, lonely, inexperienced heart had to change first and all the rest would follow? One true change in one humble, obedient and contrite individual heart humble enough to accept without intellectual question the first faint stirring of the natural spirit seeking flesh and blood to express it, humble enough to live the new meaning before thinking it, and all the rest would have followed as day the night, and one more archaic cycle of hurt, hurt avenged and vengeance revenged would have been cut for ever. He felt he had failed the future and his heart went so dim and black on him that abruptly he pulled up the car by a palm-grove on the edge of the sea.