But he was interrupted by a jangling of bells, clamor of voices.
"_Gogai!_" the hoarse shout came in from the street. "_Gogai!_"
An extra. They were rushing to the windows, the door. "Hey, come here, in here."
A little old man ran in, breathless, amid a jingle from a bunch of small bells clustered from his belt. Under his arm he held a bundle of small printed sheets, the _gogai_, extras, great news of some kind. They all crowded around him, tore the papers from him as he gathered in their coppers.
Tokyo had been in a fever of excitement for days. The discovery had been made that a score of carloads of the arms left in the care of the Japanese army when the Czecho-Slovak troops retired from Siberia, had disappeared. At the same time Chang Tse-lin, the Manchurian war-lord, had received, from some mysterious source, a large amount of war supplies. The newspapers almost unanimously accused the militarists, the General Staff, of having engineered the transfer, in spite of Japan's agreement with the other Powers that none of them should supply the warring factions in China with arms. Dual diplomacy, the General Staff calmly overriding, for its own sinister purposes, the international pledges made by the Foreign Office. The accusation which the Japanese press so resented when made by foreigners was shouted by all the papers. And the people took it up. Now had finally come the time when the issue had been fairly made, when the yoke of the militarists must be overthrown by the rest of the Cabinet. Breathlessly the nation watched for the struggle.--But the General Staff haughtily denied the charge. They knew nothing of it all. A major in the army "confessed" that he was responsible; he had sold the arms to a Russian faction with which he sympathized. It was all his own, personal doings. He took all the responsibility. His wife committed suicide; she would not face the disgrace. The nation cried out. She was one more innocent victim of the juggernaut of the General Staff. Her husband was another, a scapegoat, a martyr. Of course, no one believed his story, a palpable invention to save the skins of his superiors. Now, what would the Premier, what would the Foreign Office do?
The _gogai_ brought the answer. The Premier issued a statement, setting forth in tedious detail the opera bouffe proceedings of the court-martial. He confirmed the whole thing.