Illustrated chapter headingCHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FOUR
All has gone well, and I am to be married to-morrow. Kotmasu is to be best man, and for this purpose he has hunted out from the depths of his disused steamer-trunk an antiquated suit of Bond Street “morning attire,” a relic of his stay in London; which, if less modern, is more correct than the creations of Kinew, the Anglo-Japanese tailor near the quay, who has a tendency, so I am told, to make his coats short in the waist.
Mousmé’s mother is delighted—a state of mind perhaps not altogether unconnected with various handsome presents which faithful Kotmasu, who should be a member of thecorps diplomatique, naïvely suggested my making her.
The marriage can be very easily contracted;and Kotmasu, who still seems to have little or no faith in my constancy, has assured me, over and over again, that if, after all, I should change my mind about taking Mousmé with me back to England, a few more handsome presents to Mousmé’s mother, and the gift of a couple of hundredyen, with a handsome dress or two, to Mousmé herself, will simplify matters.
But I am vain enough to think that this is not so; and that the gleams of Western ideas which I have detected in Mousmé’s conversations, picked up doubtless at the school, may cause liking to ripen into a lasting affection on her side, and be the forerunners of greater breadth of mind. There is a great deal of complexity about relationship in Japan, and I had long ago ceased to be surprised at anything in this way; but I received a mild shock on my wedding day when I discovered to whatinnumerable families—to say nothing of individuals—I had allied myself. In fact, I somewhat ruefully thought that I must be brother-in-law, son-in-law or grandson-in-law to half the Japanese population of Nagasaki.
The marriage company was a study—if I had been in the humour to make one—of all sorts and conditions of men, women, children and babies, all gathered together to do honour to the marriage of their kinswoman, Miss Hyacinth, with “the most honourable English sir.”
Mousmé’s mother was resplendent in one of my “handsome presents,” and her compliments were interminable. She advanced smilingly to meet me, and remained in the same condition throughout the whole proceedings. I felt almost as nervous as I should have been expected to be had I contracted an aristocratic alliance in England, culminating in a smart wedding.I have very little recollection of the details of a day, or rather part of a day, which seemed to resolve itself into a series of oft-repeated salutations and endless congratulations, refreshments, smoke and discreetly repressed excitement.
At length it was over.
I had plucked my Hyacinth, and was free to lead her away to my home.
Mousmé in all her bridal finery of flowered satin gown, andobiof plum-coloured silk; Mousmé with the shy face, and pretty ways which might or might not be artificial.
I was to discover all this, perhaps, and many other things.
The legal formalities had been all previously arranged with the assistance of my excellent Kotmasu, who is a person of some importance, and of weight with the officials who attend to such matters.
There is really such a very little to do;so few things for Mousmé to transport to her new home; nearly all could be easily packed in a large Gladstone if she possessed such a thing. As it is, her belongings are brought up the hill to my house in an elaborately decorated lacquer box, by a big little brother with a bullet-head, nice eyes, and a great liking forteriyaki(plums in sugar coats). This box is a fit ornament for the boudoir of a princess, I think, as the youngster puts it down in a corner with a sigh, produced by aching arms.
I smile and fancy how Lou would laugh at a trousseau contained in a lacquer box measuring about 20 inches by 12 inches by 10 inches!—remembering that hers, which was described at portentous length and with unblushing detail in the columns of theQueenandLady’s Pictorial, must have occupied little short of six large Saratoga trunks. But what matter? This style of thing is a mere flaunting of wealth byDives before the aching eyes of Lazarus. Even the wealthiest can only wear one dress at a time, and Mousmé can do this, and with far more grace than some of the salt of society.
As for Mousmé, she seems quite at home. She soon unpacks her tiny box; and, noticing that things connected with my toilet, such as my razors, hair-brushes, comb, and tin of shaving soap, are arranged near the window on an improvised dressing-table which was (when I first took the house) in reality an idol stand, she arranges hers there too. How queer they look, to be sure!
Alongside my shaving soap now stands a tiny lacquer pot with a jade lid, on which is carved a wonderfully pretty group of storks, containing the rouge which gives a delicate sunset flush to her cheeks. She puts a little on at once, right in front of me, as naturally as another woman mightwash her hands, probably because she feels she must do something before a glass which is, as she puts it, “so big and great and bright,” compared to those to which she has been accustomed. Then there is a little pot—also with a jade lid—containing a white face preparation, the use of which I shall at once inhibit; this she puts close beside the other by the force of association of ideas. The tiny brushes, with backs of tortoise-shell, the combs of the same, the hairpins with big eccentric knobs, are all placed near my gigantic brushes.
Then her few garments are taken from the box and hung—also like mine—on pegs which I have had put up on the wall near my mattress-like bed.
Mousmé is satisfied with her work, exclaiming, “Velly good ting that!” in the monotonous voice of a person speaking an unaccustomed tongue, and we are ready for our first meal.
She is pleased with herself, with me, with her new home, with everything. And after our dinner, during which she has chattered in most diverting English, learned at school from an “English teacher,” anxious to please me, whom she still, I fear, looks upon as her owner, she proposes to sing.
What queer English it was!—often almost unrecognizable from mispronunciation. She still calls me “Mister,” and almost makes me choke with smothered laughter each time.
Fully twenty minutes are occupied in attempts to master the appalling intricacies of “Cyril”—my name. The nearest approach as yet is “Cy-reel,” which must do for the present, with lapses into “Mister” when she forgets.
Whilst I smoke, Mousmé sings songs in a soft little tone, to the accompaniment of her long-neckedsamisen.
She has a rather pretty voice, and more idea of expression than any other Japanese singer I have heard.
Night comes at last, and after a long look down from the verandah at the hundreds of lights gleaming far below, we go to rest upon the mattresses which Oka’s wife has unrolled ready for us upon the floor; Mousmé with her head fixed into the groove of a block of mahogany, which serves her as a pillow, and preserves her wonderful erection of hair intact.
We are under a huge mosquito-net, of course—one of steel-blue gauze. When I first came I used to detest the confinement, and tried to do without it. But mosquitos are invincible, humanity frail, and the epidermis easily punctured. I returned to the protection of what I laughingly got to call “my meat-safe,” after the second night.
Outside our tent-like mosquito-curtainwe hear the angry buzzing of the foe; whilst big, heavy-winged moths every now and again come with a tiny thud against the enshrouding gauze, to dart away again towards the small, glowworm-like flame of the pendent lamp, which for no particular reason I always keep alight throughout the night.
When I awake next morning with the sunlight streaming in through one of the shutters, which the warmth of the previous night induced me to leave open, Mousmé is sleeping still, sleeping as peacefully as a child, her face wreathed in the smile of a happy dream, and her head still resting upon her little wooden pillow.
I creep out from beneath the environing curtain without disturbing her, after carefully reconnoitring lest one of the enemy should gain entrance.
I blow out the tiny flame of the lamp, which looks so horribly yellow and sicklyin the daylight, put on my flannels, and go out into the garden.
I am going to get some flowers for Mousmé when she awakes. I cross one of the tiny bridges—spanning an equally tiny streamlet—which seem made only in children’s size, and which creak complainingly beneath my tread, and make my way to the thicket of roses in which my soul delights. A big frog contemplates me with an offensively open stare for an instant, from the edge of the basin of the plashing fountain, before diving with outstretched hind-legs beneath the shining surface. The red-gold noses of the fish, which are poked just above the water as they nibble at the edges of the lily leaves, disappear instantly the surface is ruffled.
I gather a huge bunch of damask-petalled tea-roses, heavy with perfume, and smelling as attar never smells. As I go along the walk with the mossy edge, inwhich lizards and strangely beautiful beetles play hide-and-seek in the sun, in search of some gardenias, the stanzas of a native poet stray through my mind, commencing:
“The dew shines on the lily; and the rose opens her crimson heart to greet the rising sun.”
“The dew shines on the lily; and the rose opens her crimson heart to greet the rising sun.”
“The dew shines on the lily; and the rose opens her crimson heart to greet the rising sun.”
“The dew shines on the lily; and the rose opens her crimson heart to greet the rising sun.”
I soon have my sprigs of gardenias mingled with the roses, and I return to the house, hoping to lay my offering by Mousmé’s side ere she awakes.
I enter the strangely bare bedroom, with its gray panels and vermilion storks, from the verandah. A queer old idol, belonging to the former owner of the house, grins—there is no other word for an accurate description—benign approval from its pedestal in the corner. I had retained it because it filled a niche; because I have rather apenchantfor curios; and lastly, because, as an irrepressible midshipman nephew once put it, “It’s the jolliest-lookingold idol I’ve ever seen—a combination of J. L. Toole and Madame Blavatsky.”
Mousmé is still asleep when I enter, but the creaky floor awakes her ere I have half crossed it. She rubs her eyes in a somewhat bewildered fashion, and then with a smile promptly buries her littleretroussénose in the posy I have brought.
Then she rises from the mattress-like bed, a blue linen gowned little figure with tiny bare feet, and nails on them like rose leaves, and trots across the matting floor to a position in front of our improvised dressing-table.
She peers into the glass anxiously to see whether her slumbers have disturbed her hair, touches the thick, neatly-arranged plaits with deft fingers on either side of her smiling face, and then laughs at my amusement.
Mousmé’s toilet is a very simple matter. She has few garments to put on, no hair todo, or rather no hair which wants doing, her elaboratecoiffurebeing a permanent erection for some considerable time. She tells me that it took “nearly a large day to do it,” and I quite believe her; it is such a wonderful erection.
All is so delightfully simple. She puts on her little patches of rouge—with a less reckless hand, in deference to my opinions on the subject—in a trice, puffs some white powder upon her cheeks and charmingly impudent nose, reddens her lips with the certitude of a practised hand, slips into her gown of flowered silk, and with a pretty little pleadingmoueentreats me to tie the enormous bow of her brilliantly colouredobi; and hey, presto! as the conjurer says, almost in less time than it takes a Western woman to put on her bonnet, Mousmé’s toilet is complete, and she is ready for our make-believe playing at breakfast.
She eats her sugared plums with daintygrace, and drinks an astonishing number of cups of pale amber-coloured tea; but then the cups are so small that her doing so provokes little wonder in my mind. She has, perhaps, a misgiving that she has eaten more than I can afford, although I overheard my mother-in-law telling her that I was a very rich man; for she says, interrogatively, “I eat too great velly much? Not eat so again?”
I smilingly assure her that she is to eat as much as she can, and she laughs and gets up to attend to the flowers on the verandah, and place fresh blossoms in the blue china bowls which stand on eccentric perches on the walls, in the corners of the room, on a bamboo and lacquer cabinet, and on my English-pattern knee-hole writing-table in the window.
Mousmé has deft fingers and good taste, and the flowers seem to arrange themselves in negligently artistic masses beneath her touch.
She makes an exquisite picture as she flutters about in the bright sunshine of this white, airy room, in her dress of rich, gay colours.
I sit still, and desist from my mail letter to watch her. And as I do so, I become aware that a journalist who “did” Japan may be forgiven much for one true, picturesque phrase, “Japanese women are butterflies—with hearts.”
The cicalas chirp unceasingly, making a natural orchestral accompaniment to her movements—the chirping cicalas, which seem to rest neither day nor night.
The only bowl still unfilled with flowers is that on the table at which I am sitting. Perhaps she is still too shy of me to touch it. A thought has evidently flitted through her pretty head, for she goes out on to the balcony, and a minute later I see her slender, quaint little figure going down one of the sunlit garden-walks, evidentlyin search of something. A lizard scuttles away across the path at her approach, to cower amongst the moss and tea-roses; and as she turns the corner towards the gold-fish pond, I catch a last glimpse of the huge, brilliant bow of herobiwhich I laboriously tied an hour or so before.
It is very pleasant to have my pretty little mousmé flitting about my home and garden. I wonder somewhat vaguely why her absence has never struck me before. Love apparently is one of those flavours of life which one misses least when one has not enjoyed its piquancy.
I take up the thread of my letter to Lou again. It is a thousand pities, I think as I do so, that I cannot present Mousmé to her some such bright morning as this, and in Japan. The rarest gem is best seen in its proper setting. How surprised Lou will be! She is large and fresh-coloured.There is sure to be an explosion. How well I know the sort of thing which is certain to occur! Her handsome face will redden, and the letter will be tossed across to Bob with a sharp, “How ridiculous of him! He really should think of us a little. I only hope he won’t bring the woman here. Fancy a Japanese sister-in-law! Why, Bob, you’re laughing! It’s no laughing matter, I can assure you. A yellow-faced, painted scrap of a woman. There——” I can hear her in imagination saying all this, and in my mind’s eye see her expression. Ah! Lou, I also remember that all your roses are not of Dame Nature’s giving, and that others—malicious, no doubt—have remarked upon the fact.
I hear the patter of feet coming up the verandah steps. It is Mousmé returning. Ah! Mousmé, you and I will conquer London together! You with your daintygrace andpiquanteface, I with my wealth, as you esteem it, and family name.
Her hands are so full of flowers that she has to push aside the panel with one knee ere she can enter.
She comes across to my table and places the blossoms in the empty bowl of bronze.
By a stroke of genius in coquetry the flowers are hyacinths!
When she has finished their arrangement, she says smilingly, her lips parted, and twin rows of white pearls showing between them:
“They are me. You never forget me when you see them!”
“No! Mousmé, I never shall.”
Illustrated chapter headingCHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER FIVE
I have only seen Kotmasu once since our marriage, now five days ago; and then it was quite by accident, down near the quay, where I had gone to discover whether my quarterly parcel of magazines and books had arrived, which Lou with commendable regularity despatches “to that brother of mine who is out in Japan, living at one of those towns with a heathenish and unpronounceable name.”
Kotmasu seemed somewhat surprised to see me.
“Where is Madame?” he asks with a smile, as though—as no doubt he did—he half suspected she had returned to her mother already.
I must have shown that I read theundercurrent of suggestion somewhat plainly. “At home,” I answered. “You wouldn’t surely expect me to bring her out at this part of the day, in all this heat, and down here, too!”
“No! no! Of course not,” he hastened to reply.
I was somewhat mollified by his evident anxiety to put matters straight again between us. He can scarcely, I thought, be expected to have the same faith in my experiment as I have. To him my marriage, until it has existed for some time, can, I realize, only appear in the light of a temporary arrangement.
“Why do you not come up as you used?” I inquire in a friendly tone.
“It is your—what you call it?—something to do with the bees and the moon. I did not care to intrude,” he replies deprecatingly.
“How ridiculous! We shall be alwaysglad to see you, my good fellow,” I reply, laughing as naturally as I can.
Kotmasu is so terribly English.
Even his attire this morning is that odd mixture of Anglo-Japanese garments he so much affects, consisting of a straw hat and tennis flannels, worn in conjunction with the flowered dressing-gown-like garment of a well-to-do merchant.
He looks a strange figure as he stands talking to me, in the sun, at the corner of the little narrow alley leading from the water-side into one of the newer streets, the incongruities of his garments thrown up into strong relief by a background formed by the sail of a large trading-junk alongside the quay, which a swarm of Japanese coolies, all dressed alike in tight hose and dark butcher’s-blue cotton tunics, with somebizarredevice in a different colour on the back, were unloading with extraordinary rapidity.
“I must go back to the warehouse,” he says, after considering my remark. “I will come to see you to-night.”
He shakes hands; and a coolie who has been staring at my “strange white face,” as I overheard him call it, for at least five minutes, to the neglect of his work, appears much mystified by the supposed rite.
I am glad Kotmasu is coming, as I wish him to believe in my experiment as thoroughly as I do myself.
The books have come, and I return to the warehouse of my parcels-agent to see if they are unpacked.
Mr. Karu’s office is always a source of wonder to me.
The amount of business transacted there, in a building of toy-like dimensions and fragile structure, was little less than marvellous. Whenever a parcel heavier than usual was dropped on the floor by a careless coolie, I expected that the room, withits ink-stained, paper-panelled walls, on which were pasted or fixed with quaint-headed pins the steamship bills and those of several of the theatre tea-houses, would collapse forthwith with no more warning than the crack of its slight, dry timbers.
The parcel was ready.
Mr. Karu was all smiles. He was a little, short man with extremely beady eyes, quick movements, and a yellow skin deeply pitted by small-pox.
“It is very big to-day!” he exclaimed in Japanese, referring to the package. “Very much larger; half ayenmore, please, most honourable gentleman,” as I put down the usual amount.
The smiles were explained; and there was no doubt some truth, I thought, in what the little chief-clerk at the bank, who is so anxiously cultivating a beard, said, namely, “That most excellent friend, Karu, is in great much hurry to get much rich man.”
I pay what I know to be in great part an imposition, with an indulgent grin—I am in a hurry to get back to Mousmé, or might have argued the matter even in this heat—accept the offer of a coolie to carry my parcel for the equivalent of three-halfpence, and start to climb up the shady side of the rough-paved street to my home.
Mousmé was waiting for me at the little gate in the toy fence of bamboo—a fence the like of which in no country save Japan would have been deemed sufficient for the purpose intended.
She came forward to be kissed (I had had to give her a few lessons in this custom) with her chin—which in the sunlight was as if carved out of ivory, so fine is the texture of her skin—tilted up, and the red rosebud mouth wreathed in a smile. Mousmé is learning European ways rapidly. My experiment seems very promising; and she is evidently growing very fond of me.She is learning English, and even the English alphabet, so books are becoming of interest to her, especially those with pictures in them.
“What is there?” she inquires eagerly in Japanese, pointing to the parcel which the coolie carries on ahead of us up the garden-walk.
“Books.”
“Books? More books!”
My slender library, contained on shelves about five feet high and three feet six broad, appears illimitable to her.
“Yes,” I replied, smiling.
“Are there pictures in them?”
“I expect so.”
“Hi!” to the coolie staggering under the weight of the parcel. “Hayaku!Walk faster! Run!”
And then, almost before I know she has left my side, she is gone, hurrying with short steps up the moss-bordered walkafter the coolie, who has quickened his pace into a shambling run.
By the time I reach the house at my slower rate, and enter my room by way of the balcony, she has already got the parcel in front of her on a square of white matting in a patch of brilliant sunshine.
The only fault I am able to find with Mousmé’s face is that it is somewhat apathetic at times, a trifle expressionless. It is animated enough now, however. A look of eager curiosity suffuses it. She is like some gay-coloured humming-bird in her brilliant-hued dress, squatting there in the patch of sunlight, already at work with nimble, painstaking fingers upon the knots of the string around the parcel, coaxing loose the more stubborn ones with the point of one of her immense jade-topped hairpins.
Lou has sent some magazines this quarter which delight Mousmé immensely—TheStrand,English Illustrated, and a copy of theUniversal Review. This last is a veritable El Dorado of pictures, and provokes exclamations of delight when Mousmé turns the pages over. Only there is so much she cannot understand.
One particular picture in a number of theEnglish Illustrated, a group of ladies at an evening party, mystifies her immensely.
“Why are all these women cut out in the middle?” she asks with a puzzled expression. “Are they all born like that?”
“No,” I reply.
“Then do they make themselves like that?” glancing at her own slender though by no means exaggerated figure.
“Yes; they make themselves so, I suppose. It is a custom of our nation, and other European nations,” I explain as best I can.
“Oh!” with another look at the ultra-fashionablyslender figure of the woman in the foreground of the picture. “How very uncomfortable!”
We both laugh; I because Mousmé makes this last remark in such a finite voice, and without any real idea of its naïve truthfulness, and she because to her loose-robed little body such a fashion appears highly ridiculous.
There is evidently something mysterious about this funny custom, which, as Mousmé says, “makes women look as if a dog had bitten a great piece out of them, both sides;” for she says, ere turning over the page:
“Shall I do that when I go with you to England?”
“No, certainly not.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re much prettier as you are.”
Mousmé smiles contentedly, and patsmy big hand, which looks so very large beside hers, and rambles off to tell me of a lizard she found in our bed just before I came back from the town; whilst I, glancing over the pages of one of the magazines, divide my attention between her story and a critique ofRobert Elsmere.
The time passes very quickly with Mousmé; she is soon tired of looking at books and papers which, at present, she only half understands; and lest she should interrupt me, she gets up, and goes with a hushed pad, pad of her shoeless feet into our bedroom, to fetch a strange little lacquer box which contains her writing materials. A flat shell, with lovely mother-of-pearl tints on its nacre hollow, in which she grinds her Indian ink; the fine paintbrush, which plays the part of pen; the flimsy rice-paper, in long, thin strips, and envelopes to match, are among her belongings, and are decorated with tiny picturesof trees and strangely grotesque animals, birds and fishes. She is going to write to her mother, to ask her to send up a sash of turquoise-blue silk which was left behind when she was married, and which she has found out I admired.
I watch her as she writes, her head bent over her paper, and the lower half of her face in shadow—such a scrap of daintily dressed femininity.
I wonder what else she is saying—women’s inter-confidences are always so distressing and perplexing to a man—for she has already covered one long strip with delicately minute writing, which at a little distance looks like the ground-plan of an intricate maze; and surely even a turquoise silkobicannot call for such a lengthy description, except, perhaps, in a Parisian fashion-journal.
She has finished by the time I have cut the pages of one of the novels Lou has includedin the parcel; and, with a solemnity worthy of the best traditions of the Japanese official, she seals it up securely in an envelope of whitey-blue rice-paper—so small, that it necessitates the folding of the letter half a dozen times.
One of the ever-amiable Oka’s almost innumerable children, a quaint toddler of five, with a queer, shaven head, with its little ebon queue, and small, bright, black beads of eyes, is easily persuaded to take it down to Mousmé’s mother for a couple ofsen.
Then we have tea.
Really it is a sort of dinner, a nondescript meal best conveyed to the mind by that equally nondescript English phrase, “high tea”—a strange meal indulged in by people who are too hungry to have tea, and too modest to have a second dinner.
How Mousmé can tackle plums stillgreen, though coated in sugar, without paying the penalty for her seeming indiscretion, is a mystery. But she does; and I sit and watch her in genuine though unexpressed admiration. The shrimps, really large prawns, with their intricately stuffed interiors, I can venture upon; and seaweed, with sweet sauce, I take with resignation. She does not care for the latter to-night, and so she goes to a panel cupboard, where we keep our priceless English biscuits cunningly hidden from the possible depredations of Oka’s somewhat inquisitive children, and eats some of these instead, nibbling off first the pink-and-white sugar decorations, which are such a source of delight.
We have scarcely finished our meal, and Mousmé is still nibbling a biscuit, when we hear the sound of Kotmasu’s expected footsteps coming up the garden-path.
Illustrated chapter headingCHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SIX
It is clear to me from Kotmasu’s talk, glances, and conduct in general, that he has not yet got to consider Mousmé in the light of the mistress of the house. I am also sure that he even yet cannot understand that my marriage with her is anything more serious than a passing freak, a fancy of the hour.
He is very familiar with her, and she with him—they have known each other so long—chatting together quite freely. I am not jealous, surely; but I suddenly discover that it is time to go out. Kotmasu at once agrees that it is, and Mousmé seems delighted.
Where shall we go?
That is the all-important question, which is not easily settled.
Mousmé inclines to paying her mother a visit; Kotmasu to visiting a little play-house down below in Nagasaki, where some newgeishasfrom Yeddo are to make theirdébut.
I am not so fond of my mother-in-law as I should be, nor of my perplexingly numerous sisters and brothers-in-law, both small and great. The former I suspect of rapacity, an insatiable appetite for “handsome presents,” which, if not always very costly in European eyes, are certainly numerous, and range fromrouge fin(imported from Paris) andblanc perleto gay-huedobisand handsome hairpins of tortoise-shell, or of bronze with carved jade heads.
Fancy supplying one’s mother-in-law with rouge! But it was Kotmasu’s doing. He was evidently in her confidence; for he said one day, just as my marriage arrangements were nearing completion:
“You give Madame Choto some rouge.The woman very fond of it. You make her like you.”
This being what I wished her to do, I did as friend Kotmasu desired, expending threeyen(12s.) upon a box at Yan’s, the best druggist in Nagasaki, and paying at least four times its original price. The only satisfaction I have is the knowledge that my mother-in-law’s complexion is of the best!
Mousmé clearly is to-night all for going down to Madame Choto’s, but I have one trump card to play against that. I am destined to find it in the future—as in the past—of great service. I have merely to say, “Let us go and look at the shops.”
“Yes, yes,” answers Mousmé with alacrity, clapping her small hands.
And so it is settled.
The recollection of Madame Choto and the little brothers and sisters she was half a minute ago so bent on visiting, speedily fades from her mind.
Kotmasu agrees readily enough, no doubt thinking that there is still a chance of our dropping in, later on, at the Willow Tree Theatre, to see the famousgeishasfrom Yeddo.
To get down into the town at night is a matter of some difficulty, the path being so rough and unlighted. Of course, we carry lanterns—nearly every one does at night—and one constantly meets processions of families or friends, out either for a walk or on their way to some place of amusement, all carrying paper lanterns of various colours, and giving a pretty, fantastic effect to the dark roads and narrow streets of the town.
It is far more interesting to go down into the older quarter of the town, the true Japanese, if so I may call it—the native quarter unalloyed by European customs and commerce.
Mousmé leaves us for an instant to lookout three paper lanterns with their slender, quivering carrying-sticks of bamboo. She at any rate is all eagerness to be off, visions of possible purchases for her personal adornment doubtless flitting through her mind.
It is nicer out under the verandah; the dry wood roof, in which the cicalas live a chirping existence, seems to be giving out the heat with which a thorough sun-baking has stored it during the day.
Kotmasu and I step out on to the balcony to await Mousmé’s coming with the lanterns.
There is no moon to-night, and the clouds hang low, making the evening dull and close. Everything is so still, with a deep silence that is at once oppressive and slightly terrifying, until one is accustomed to it. Down below lies the town, like some vast black monster with many twinkling eyes. There is no wind; indeed,there is scarcely enough air to disperse the smoke of our cigars, the ends of which glow like the red eyes of some wild animal. I can just see Kotmasu’s face when his glows brighter as he inhales.
“And you are not getting bored?” he asks, puffing a cloud of smoke amongst the foliage of a creeper trailing at his elbow.
I know what he means, although he mentions no name, because we are talking in Japanese, and Mousmé may even now be creeping silently, as is her wont, across the room behind us.
“No; I am charmed. She is even more charming than I thought. I shall certainly go home to England as soon as I can.”
“And take her?”
“Certainly; why not?”
Kotmasu can on occasion be fairly concise, if not epigrammatic.
“Mousmé in Bond Street!” he ejaculated; and if he had been English, Iknew instinctively that he would have whistled.
“Why Bond Street?” I asked somewhat feebly, with just a shade of chilliness at my heart from the incongruity conjured up by his words.
“Because,” he replied slowly, “that would be a good test.”
I might have attempted a reply, but there is a sudden glow of light on the verandah, a yellow-red, diffused light, which fails to pierce the gloom at the far end, and Mousmé and Oka appear with the lanterns.
Mousmé gives me a kiss, to the peril of her lantern with its monster of a crayfish painted in vermilion on its yellow side; at which Kotmasu smiles indulgently; then we start off.
We go away down our garden—which has such narrow paths, some of them scarcely less pigmy than those associated in my memory with the garden of childhood’sdays—now so dark and full of mysterious shadows, heavy with the strong scent of flowers, alive with the incessant noise of the cicalas, and movements of huge, soft-winged night-moths, which circle round the light of our lanterns, beating their wings with a soft, quick rattle against their distended sides, and every now and again flying into our faces and making Mousmé give a little scream of simulated terror, at which Kotmasu and I laugh.
I shut the gate after us, and then taking Mousmé’s arm, we make our way down the rapidly sloping road. There is another party ahead of us, also with lanterns; and so steep is the path, that in the black darkness we almost seem as though we should step off into the abyss, right down on to the swaying lights below us.
Such strange shadows are set dancing on the road by the swaying lanterns we carry, that Mousmé, who must, after all, haveseen such things dozens of times before, clings closer to me for protection, and in a low, frightened undertone she says:
“Cy-reel! Cy-reel! I am frightened! I shall shut my eyes and take hold of you!”
But when I look down at her a few paces further on, I see that it is but her delightful coquetry; for her dark-brown eyes, which in the lantern light have shadows like a lake, are open, and are watching Kotmasu, who is a little in advance of us two.
She catches sight of me, and bursts out laughing. She is never a bit ashamed of being caught like this.
When once we reach the bottom of the road, which runs past older houses even than mine, villas mostly inhabited by the better-class merchants and the few foreigners who may have protracted business in Nagasaki, we are plunged almost without transition or warning into the heart and life of the town.
We go along the street, brightly illuminated by hundreds of lanterns, pendent and ambulatory, at some small risk of being run over byrikishastaken at a rapid, nay, almost reckless pace by their active drawers.
Mousmé walks along quite gaily, her wooden clogs making a great clatter on the stones which crop up in the street, in concert with those of scores of other women who are out with husbands, brothers or escorts for an evening’s amusement or stroll. She is so naïvely proud of her “English sir,” who is a real husband after all.
We go through the streets, which at night seem all the same, all gaily lit with flaring oil-lamps, and illuminated with countless numbers of paper lanterns, which throw a mellow-coloured radiance on the faces of the passers-by; looking in this shop and that as we walk slowly along.
The sense of possession is very strong inMousmé. Every now and again she clutches my hand or arm—though, strictly speaking, to do so is not Japanese etiquette—and fires off little nods to acquaintances. Every clutch at the sleeve of my coat means that she has caught sight of some one to whom she wishes to exhibit me as her real husband. When Kotmasu, who is a wonderful recounter of tales relating to those we meet and nod to, laughingly reproaches her with indecorousness, she says:
“What you say well enough; but I Engleesh now, you know,” with amoueand a little quick turn of her dainty head, which makes both of us laugh, and the passers-by stare in astonishment at our sudden merriment.
Yes, Mousmé is so English—in everything except what really constitutes Englishness. What a revelation England will be to her, and she to my respected relatives!
These streets we walk through are wonderful. They are all alike; the houses, of frailest woodwork and paper panelling, are scarcely varied in any particular, save that of ornamentation, from one end of the long row to the other. There are no shop fronts, no glass windows; so that intending purchasers, or even those who have no intentions other than curiosity, can take up the various articles so openly displayed, and examine them at their leisure.
This is what Mousmé delights in doing. She likes best the shops in which rich dress fabrics and women’s ornaments play an important part.
A tiny parcel, done up neatly in rice-paper, betrays the fact that she has already coaxed me into purchasing “a little present.” The shopkeepers, who squat in the midst of their wares, offer no objection to Mousmé’s inspection; and as it amuses her, why should I mind?
As we go along towards the lower and harbour end of the town, the crowd of people gets denser and denser. If the terrors of horses—Nagasaki is as guiltless of horses as Venice itself—driven or ridden, were added to thedjin-harnessedrikishas, one would walk along at momentary risk of annihilation.
But thedjinsare wonderfully active and intelligent, and avoid obstacles with marvellous ability. There are few corns in Japan, and the wheel of arikishaover one’s feet, therefore, is of somewhat less moment.
Mousmé flutters along at my side, chattering in Japanese, and English of a sort, gay and contented, her sense of the ludicrous being aroused every now and then by the sight of one or other of her countrymen in the garb of civilization—Western civilization, that is. A Japanese in European attire in Europe may be an artisticmistake; in Japan an inartistic atrocity. There are several of these about, in out-of-date pot-hats, and tail-coats of the year before last’s cut. Even Kotmasu, who himself is attached to pseudo-European attire, laughs at them. How queer they look!—the pot-hatcuma fringe of black, shining hair beneath its brim, and other really picturesque garments.
We are getting tired, and Mousmé’s natural lust of buying useless things is increasing.
Unfortunately, she has been told I am “one very much rich man.” Kotmasu—who is beginning to pine for thegeishas—and I have our arms uncomfortably full of purchases——little lacquer boxes, fantastic hair-combs and pins, silk sashes, a tiny silver tobacco-pipe with tortoises, frogs and tiny lizards scarcely bigger than a pin’s head crawling up the chased stem, boxes of plums preserved in sugar, andFrench bonbons purchased at a ruinous price. All this is very strange, and even Mousmé’s recklessness is charming, captivating.
There is no time for the theatre now, so Mousmé and I make our way to a tea-house, and Kotmasu, who has been such a long-suffering companion of our peregrinations, goes off to see thegeishas, and, I fear, a somewhat improper variety entertainment.
Thechayais full of its patrons. Such a crowd of mousmés and their escorts; and very few of the crimson-and-gold coveredfutons(cushions), which are negligently arranged for the use of the guests under the verandah overlooking the garden, are vacant. So we step out into the garden, and enter a quaintly constructed summer-house built to accommodate two.
We have scarcely seated ourselves, after my having drawn aside the paper shutterson the garden side, ere a charming little scrap of an attendant mousmé, with a dress of yellow silk and scarlet satinobi, presents herself to take our orders.
She stands in the lantern-light just outside the doorway, caressing her knees with her tiny hands, and smiling and showing her pretty teeth in anticipation of receiving a “good order.”
After a hurried consultation with Mousmé, who says, “Sugar plums! Oranges! Tea!” the little gay-hued waitress flits away in search of what we have ordered.
The garden, of which the owner is so proud that he calls it that of “The Hundred Beautiful Lights,” is a quaintly pretty one. Just behind our little summer-house, with its octagon roof of thin split laths of mahogany and papershoji, with French-grey backgrounds adorned with country views by a local artist whohas shamefully overlooked all the canons of perspective, are lotus-ponds—tiny, toy-like expanses of water in which doubtless the inevitable gold-fish swim and mouth for air bubbles; miniature waterfalls, stone votive lamps, and grotesquely trained trees, dwarfed by some strange process to accord with the minuteness of their surroundings.
Whilst we are observing all these things, and the now blossomless wisterias in their belated garb of light green, our mousmé returns, staggering along with two huge iron candlesticks three feet high, one in each hand, which are to light us at our feast. With great exactitude, she sticks two wax candles upon their respective spikes, and lights them; and then vanishes, like the genie of the lamp, to carry out further bidding.
Although the garden and tea-house were so full of patrons, we had not long to waitfor our refreshments. Our mousmé knew that I was English—not, of, course, a difficult matter; and to be English spells generosity in Japanese eyes in the matter ofsenfor her own little pocket. So we were waited on quickly.
In a few minutes we seemed positively surrounded by tiny dishes and plates.
As an Irish gentleman who came to Japan for three months, and made my acquaintance, once said, “Everything relating to meals is so singularly numerous.”
This exactly puts it.
We had ordered a simple enough meal, in all conscience, and yet we were literally surrounded by it.
Mousmé sipped her light-coloured tea, which was suffused with cherry blossoms, with the air of a princess, and behaved as a great lady. At any rate the attendant mousmé should clearly understand that she was not like the party ofgeishasoverthere in the brilliantly lighted pagoda near the balcony, who were entertaining and being entertained by some of the gilded youths of Nagasaki.
“What a noise they make!” exclaims Mousmé with a smile of pitying disgust. “Their laugh is as hollow as a drum, and they sing because they must. They will be with some one else to-morrow night, and the next, and the next. While,” and the expression of Mousmé’s face changes and grows very soft and tender, “I have always you.”
“Yes, always me,” I answer, taking her hand that she has rested on my knee whilst talking.