Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/184

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THE TWO-HANDED SWORD

He judged each act of the passing days by three pictures in the back cells of his brain. These pictures never weakened, never receded; neither during his meals, which he shared with the other students at Frau Grosser's pension in the Dahlmannstrasse, nor during his hours of study and research spent over glass tubes and crucibles and bottles and retorts in the Royal Prussian Chemical Laboratory overlooking Unter den Linden, with Professor Kreutzer's grating, sarcastic voice at his left ear, the rumbling basso of the professor's German assistants at his right.

There was one picture which showed him the island of Kiushu rising from the cloudy gray of the China Sea, black-green with cedar and scarlet with autumn maple, and the pink snow of cherry fluffing April and early May; the island which stood to him for princely Satsuma, and Satsuma—since he was a samurai, permitted to wear two swords, the daito and the shoto—for the whole of Japan.

There was the picture of his grandfather, the Marquis Takagawa—his father had gone down fighting his ship against the Russians under Makarov—who in his youth had drawn the sword for the Shogun against the Mikado in the train of Saigo, the rebel chief, who had finally made his peace with his sovereign lord and had given honorable oath that he would lay the lives, the courage, and the brains of

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