Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/206

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 Ger mans, 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 to-morrow Japan. To-morrow the standard of the Rising Sun would unfurl. To-morrow the trumpets would blow through the streets of Nagasaki. Peasants and merchants and samurai would rush to arms.