In the same town of Kama-Suwa where the barracks-like high school for girls spreads its wings there also rises the tiled roof of ageishahouse. Under its protection other daughters of the Empire are also being rigorously trained to duties—the life of amusing and entertaining. The position of thegeishacannot be illuminated by comparisons. There are the “sing-song girls†of Peking and the nautch dancers of India, and there were in the days of the fruition of Greek civilization the sisters of Aspasia; the life of thegeishamight be considered to be somewhat parallel to their lives in so far as it is a response to the demand of highly civilized man for the romance of idealized anarchy; the inhibitions of custom, or dogma, having precluded the expression of inborn romantic desire in his conventional life. Men whose minds have realized some measure of freedom through imagination and culture instinctively seek idealistic companionship with women. When realization is compressed by suchcustom as marriage by family arrangement this desire finds expression in some direction where there is at least the illusion of freedom. Human nature is like the human body, if pressure is applied in one spot, unless there is some equitable, compensating bulge elsewhere, the compression is likely to be vitally destructive. If the highest ideality has as its cornerstone responsibility, then when marriage is an institution by arrangement and the sense of responsibility is not created through the freedom of choice, feminine companionship and charm will inevitably be sought in the romance of some more voluntary arrangement. Who will absolutely deny that when the endeavour to save poetical yearning from defeat is such companionship as the almost classical ceremony of watching the white fingers of ageishapour tea into a shell of porcelain, a sort of mutual sense of responsibility to save the fineness of life may enter into the relationship as a redeeming grace against the professionalism of thegeisha’slife?
We turned from the street into the gate of the principal tea-house. There was a clapping of hands by the first servant who heard our steps on the gravel path and in a moment the mistress and all the men-servants and maid-servants wereat the door to greet us. It was at an hour in the afternoon when the tea-house did not expect guests. We took off our shoes and were led to the floor above. There were four or five rooms but they soon became one, the maids removing the sliding screen panels, and we were given the luxury of unpartitioned possession. One side, entirely without wall, overhung the garden.
The maids brought cold water and tea and sherbets and iced beer and fruits and cakes, and there were dishes on the table of which we did not even lift the covers. Then they knelt and awaited our orders whether they should send forgeishas. They explained that at that hour there might be the rude annoyance to our honourable patience of having to endure an unavoidable delay. It would not be likely that thegeishascould come immediately. We told them that our honourable patience would suffer the delay.
When the French builders and decorators tried to attain the ultimate for the housing of royalty in the age of the Grand Monarch, their success approached close to the realization of what the imagination of the period asked. Versailles was built with the idea of reaching theoretical perfection through the completion of detail. The imagination of the beholder was supposed to findcomplete satisfaction in what he saw and not to feel the urge of the possibility of still higher flights. If the beholder was not content with this “perfection,†he was indeed in a plight, for there was no next step except to begin all over again. The rhythm of the art of the Japanese tea-house is not dependent upon regularity nor balance. Its perfection can never be completed. The last word cannot be spoken. It is like life.
We walked over the soft mats examining the work of the craftsman builder who had made his material yield its beauty through the grain and line of each plank, board, beam, pillar, and panel. I moved a cushion to the balcony and sat down to study the room in deeper perspective. I never followed out this sedate contemplation, for instead I happened to look over the balcony. Across the court of the garden I saw into an open room of a wing. Three little girls, from about five to seven years of age, were being trained in the arts of thegeisha. At that moment their instruction was in the dance.
The work was being gone through seriously but the teachers were sympathetic and encouraging. A dancing master assumed the general superintendence: several older girls, full-fledgedgeishas, sat offering suggestions from their experience.They were in simple, everyday dress and not ingeishacostume. The novitiates sometimes begin their training even younger than five years. Quite often such children are orphans who come into the profession by legal adoption; others are the children of parents who have apprenticed their daughters under an arrangement which virtually amounts to a sale. Naturally thegeishamaster does not select children who do not possess the promise of grace, beauty, and charm. The long training is expensive and it is intended that there shall be a return on the investment. The little girls, whom we could see, were practising over and over again the steps of some classical dance to the music of asamisen. From the expression of their faces to the position of their fingers in carrying their fans, every possibility of technic which should enter into the dance was receiving the minutest attention.
For many years, Hori whispered, the training of those little girls must go on to one end—to interest, to entertain, and to amuse men. They will be taught to wear the gorgeous silks and embroideries of thegeisha; they will be taught that every movement of the hand and arm in pouring tea or passing the cup should be an art; they will be taught when they should smile, whenthey should laugh, and when they should sympathize; they will be taught how to converse, how to repeat the classical tales and the tales of folklore and how deftly to introduce merry stories of the day. After all this training the graduation comes when they enter actively into the life of thegeisha. In this budding a girl may amuse partly by the mere gossamer fragility of her youth, but later maturity brings the capital of acquired experience, not only in the art of entertaining but through having learned that the charm of woman is largely the solace that she can bring through sympathy and understanding.
What is the end? It may be better or worse, tragic or domestic, marriage, shame, servitude, modest anonymity, or the retirement to the teaching of her art to another generation. Her life is one obviously wherein the path has many by-ways to temptation. There is much that must be insincere and tinsel. If many a little heart, sweet, modest, and unhardened, is crushed, nevertheless if there be forgiving gods among those to whom she prays, surely those gods must know that these Mary Magdalenes are (so a poet of theyoshiwarawrote) in the greater truth as the flowers of the lotus. Though their feet have touched the black mud of the stagnant pond,“the heart of thegeishais the flower of the lotus.â€
We heard a footstep at the door and turned to see ageishastanding there. She was tall and slender. The delicate paleness of her face was even whiter through fear. She saw us, barbarians, sitting in the refinement of the tea-house room. The carmine spots on her lips shone brightly, giving to her expression the unreality of the frightened look a doll might have if suddenly brought to life. She was carrying asamisen. Her fingers tightly clutched the wrappings. She came across the room toward us and as her knees bent against the skirt of herkimonoI could see that they were trembling. She sat down and tried to smile. The duty of ageishais to smile. She smiled with the same last effort of loyalty which carries the soldier into a hopeless charge.
I felt an abysmal brute to be there. Absurd perhaps, but it was as if the command of some strange, scornful, hitherto unheeded, almost unknown spirit of justice was calling me to name some defence why man in his arrogance has assumed the right to pluck the beauty of the flowers and has assumed the justification that the reason for the perfume and the beauty is thatthey were created for him. It was a strange beginning for the gaiety of ageishaluncheon.
Tsuro-matsu drew back the fold of her sleeve to her elbow and raised the teapot. The spout trembled against the rim of the cup which she was filling. She handed the cup to Hori and until that moment I do not believe that she had noticed that he was a Japanese.
“The child is frightened to death,†said O-Owre-san. “Say something, Hori, quick! If she wants to go home——â€
Tsuro-matsu had read the meaning of the words from their tone before Hori tried to translate. She smiled and this time her lips parted from her pretty teeth spontaneously. Then she said that Hisu-matsu, a secondgeisha, would soon come. When the messenger had arrived for them they had first to send for their hair dresser. The messenger had told them that the guests at the tea-house were foreigners. Thus her frightened anticipation had had its beginning before she had entered the room. We asked what had been her fears.
Tsuro-matsu did not wish to say. She had once before seen foreigners but only from her balcony. We still persisted in our question. When she realized that the truth would pleaseus more than compliments, even if the telling somewhat offended against the etiquette of hospitality, she ventured slowly to repeat some of the tales which had been passed along by imaginative tongues until they had eventually reached thegeishahouse of Kama-Suwa. We sat waiting to hear some legend truly scandalous, but there was nothing of such atrocity. She had not heard of Buddhist children being stolen for sacrifice on Christian altars. Our barbarities of the Western world that worried thegeishasensibility were departures not from mercy but from manners. We were wild and rough and of much noise, always in a hurry, and knowing nothing of the refinements, such as tea drinking, and we were always to be discovered dropping rice grains from our chopsticks onto the floor. And, as a conclusion, the foreigner, such was her information, had no appreciation for gentle conversation, nor for any of the arts of social intercourse of which thegeisha, in her vocation, is the guardian priestess.
Of all the intricacies of thought in modern Japan, the most interesting is the side-by-side existence (without its possession seemingly arousing any astonishment in the mind of the possessors) of two completely different conceptionsof the foreigner. A Japanese may sometimes sincerely render honour to a foreigner for superior attainments and yet sustain the old feudal idea that the foreigner must be a barbarian even in those very attainments. It is quite possible when the frightened Tsuro-matsu left thegeishahouse in her ’ricksha that she not only felt that she was going to an ordeal where she would suffer from the crudities of theinferiorforeigner, but that she was being singled out for the distinct honour of entertaining thesuperiorforeigner. In one way, for the common people, this paradox may be partially explained by the fact that their leaders order them to honour the foreigner for his practical achievements, and in their unhesitating loyalty they do as they are told. It is much easier to accept such authority than to puzzle out how the knowledge and experience of their worshipped ancestors could have been of such superior brand and yet been of such ignorance.
Tsuro-matsu was telling us something of her fears when Hisu-matsu entered. Upon what scene she had expected to come, I have no imagining, but her surprise at the state of intimate peace which did reign proved that she had been thinking of a different probability. Her surprise dissipatedher timidity, and she began to laugh at Tsuro-matsu’s earnestness. Hisu-matsu was somewhat older. Hergeishadress was perhaps richer; quite likely her skill in conversation and in playing thesamisenwas superior—but she was not so exquisitely fragile in her beauty.
Japan is the court of Haroun al-Raschid in the love of hearing stories. Always we were being asked for stories, stories of romance, love, and adventure, “such as you tell at home when sitting on the mats drinking tea.†Perhaps the elevation to chairs has subtly sapped away from us the art of tale spinning beyond the briefest of anecdotes and jokes. There was no more of a response in us when Tsuro-matsu asked us to tell a story than there had been when Hori had asked us to extemporize poetry in the valley of the Kiso. We scored a failure as always but a moment later chance gave us a second opportunity for the vindication of Occidental accomplishments.
O-Owre-san had picked up asamisenand was searching for some harmonies in the long strings. In the mystery of the night, coming out of the darkness, the music of Japan has a certain functioning charm harmonizing with the rhythm of the wings of insects beating their way through the shadows; but to hear the love song of a stridentcicada coming from the white throat and red lips of ageisha—at least that is not our melody of passion. It was Hisu-matsu this time who made the request. She asked O-Owre-san to sing a song, “as you sing songs in America.†This was the chance to redeem our failure. The hills of Norway gave O-Owre-san a birth-gift of melody. His whistling is like a bird call, clear and true. Hori and I insisted that he must whistle. It was the air of a folksong that he remembered. It had the Viking cry of the Norse wind and the lust of storm and battle. The two girls tried to listen.
“Change to Pagliacci,†I whispered. The music of the North had failed. I was in duress to save our faces.
Again they tried to listen. Then they looked at each other in astonishment and in each pair of eyes there was annoyance. They began talking to each other in disregard of Pagliacci and everything Italian. It was an obvious disregard. At first they had thought that he might be practising, but when he continued the distressing sounds, then they were sure that we were making fun of their request. They were trying to save their own faces. They had begun talking to prove that they could not so easily be taken in.Hori had the brilliancy to retreat. He hastened to ask them to sing and play again. By sitting raptly while the strings of thesamisenwere rasped by the sharp ivory pick and their voices followed in accompaniment, we were able in a measure to atone for the barbarity of our own music by showing that we could listen appreciatively to good music when opportunity granted.
The hour came to pay our reckoning and to depart. We said good-bye over the teacups, but when we were sitting at the door putting on our shoes we heard the sound of thegeishas’whitetabion the stairs. Their two ’rickshas wheeled up to the entrance for them, but they hesitated. They stood whispering to each other for a moment and then turned to us and suggested that they would walk as far as our inn gate with us if we wished. O-Owre-san and I were nonplussed. Hori hurriedly told us that their suggestion was a marked compliment, that we should accept it with thanks, and that he would explain later. Sometimes—and the occasions are supposed to be so sufficiently rare as to be of complimentary value—a populargeishawill drag the hem of her embroideredkimonoalong the street in this custom of courtesy by which she shows her appreciation for her entertainment.It should be remembered that ageishais traditionally a guest. In Tokyo, said Hori, a young blood who has spent his last spendthriftsenon a gorgeous dinner will await such approval as the hallmark upon his artistry as host. If it is denied he reads in the answer not a mere feminine caprice but an impartial, critical disapproval. He seeks for the reason by trying to remember any errors in his own hostly proficiency. It is to be imagined, however, that while the bestowal of this approval may theoretically only be employed for the maintenance of the rigid standard of etiquette and artistry, in practice it is not always confined to such rarefied judgment.
The five of us started on the long walk to the inn gate. I am afraid that the gentlegeishashad not given thought to the composition of the picture. Tsuro-matsu was rather tall for a Japanese, but Hisu-matsu was not, and theseiyo-jinswere somewhat over six feet each. In the daylight, also, thegeishacostume noticeably brightens a street. Walking abreast we made a cordon stretching across the road to the utter bewilderment of Kama-Suwa.
We had found before this that the crowds which gather in provincial towns are seldom intentionally annoying, although sometimes they dojam around a shop door, shutting off the light and air. The steadfast staring may be unpleasant, but the foreigner soon learns to think little about naïve curiosity. Our march through Kama-Suwa certainly did attract attention, but the crowds separated and allowed us to pass without following at our heels, and I believed Hori when he said that this heroic restraint of curiosity arose from their innate feeling that its manifestation would be discourteous and inhospitable. This sense of consideration was not a sufficiently quick reaction, however, to prevent inordinate amazement when anyone met us suddenly. A boy on a bicycle, coming round a corner, forgot his own personal existence entirely and his unguided wheel carried him directly into a shop door, somewhat to the disturbance of the ménage and himself. Our progress continued slowly as the toed-in sandals under the longkimonoskirts of thegeishasdid not take steps measuring with our usual stride. We found that dictionary conversation could not be pursued expeditiously in the street, and after a few attempts to make known words do the work of unknown with discouraging results, the advance proceeded silently and rather solemnly, although I received flashes from those two demure maids that they had a sense of humour.The corners of their mouths did twitch in mischievous enjoyment of the situation.
When we reached the shores of the lake we sat down on the rocks and watched the boats. The rising breeze roughened the surface into a long path of flame against the red sun. Hisu-matsu had been dissatisfied all afternoon with the hurried effort of her hairdresser. She drew out the large combs and the heavy strands of hair fell over her shoulders. She told us a queer, whimsical story about the birds that were flying over the reeds. They said good-bye to us and walked away and we turned in at our inn lane.
Our dinner was very late. Finally the stumbling maid came, rubbing her eyes and yawning. She was, as always we had seen her, on the immediate point of going to sleep. She had been carryingsake, all the night before, but she had been almost as sleepy on the previous day. Now, in serving dinner, she went definitely to sleep every time there was a lull in her duties. She had one hiatus of lukewarm wakefulness in which she mumbled some appeal to Hori, but he declared to us that the words had no sense. We began fearing for the few faculties she appeared to have.
Hori listened more carefully. “I believe she is saying something,†he decided.
Little by little we learned that she had a favour to ask the foreign doctor. Just how she had discovered that O-Owre-san had medical wisdom was a mystery. She said that all Japan knows that foreign doctors can do anything. She begged for a drug to keep her awake, something that she could swallow so that she would never feel sleepy again, or better than that, some drug so potent, if there were any such, that she would never even have to sleep again.
“H’m,†said the foreign doctor. “Tell her there isn’t any such drug. Tell her to get a good night’s sleep. She will feel better about it in the morning.â€
Her disappointment was pitiful.
“But I shall never have a night’s sleep,†she said. “If I ask for time to sleep I shall be told that there are many maids who will be glad to take my place.†She knew, she went on, that she was very stupid, but she maintained that she was not so stupid when she was not so sleepy.
It is outside our comprehension and experience how the Chinese and Japanese can labour on and on, more nearly attaining a wakeful condition for the full round of the day than the individuals of other races would consent to endure even if they could continue life under the strain. In allinns the maids work long hours, nor do the mistresses spare themselves. The mistress of the inn at Kama-Suwa seemingly lacked the usual kindly sympathy for her maids and was unusually demanding. O-Hanna-san (the irony of calling her aflower!) could not dare the risk of attempting to escape from her slavery. It was for the sake of her fatherless child that she dared not, she told us. She, the clumsy, stumbling, stupid, sleepy maid, had had her tragedy as had had the pale, forsaken daughter of the nobility whom she had waited upon the night before.
After her disappointment that she could obtain from us no sleep-dispelling drug she toppled again into unconsciousness. We could at least give her temporary help. We sent for the mistress and asked her for a full night’s sleep for the girl. For the maid’s sake it was necessary to put our demand on the ground that we must have better service in the morning. This saved the face of the mistress. After the mistress had consented and had gone, poor O-Hanna-san’s affectionate thanks were embarrassing.
On a point reaching into the lake and under our balcony stood a small, one-storied shrine. It was sheltered by a tiled roof pitched on four columns. We saw from our room two figuresin white walking along the shore. They stopped at the shrine and knelt for some time. When they arose the bright moon suddenly revealed that the two figures were Tsuro-matsu and Hisu-matsu. Hori went down to speak to them and in a moment their three heads appeared up the stairs. Thegeishashad changed the silks and brocades of their costume for simple whitekimonosand their hair was not now arranged after the elaborate style of the professional hairdresser. Instead of this simplicity detracting it quite startlingly bespoke the charm of their delicate beauty.
They were embarrassed and they were blushing. It was one thing to have it their duty to be whirled in ’rickshas to a tea-house to meet strange patrons, but to pay an informal visit at our rooms, especially at that hour, was quite another affair, and most unconventional. They were shocked at their own impulsiveness in having run up the stairs and they were very much afraid that someone in the inn would discover their presence. The little shrine, it appeared, was in especial favour with the members of thegeishahouse where they lived, and they often came, particularly if the moon were shining in the early evening, to worship before their duties called.We opened our rucksacks and found some odds and ends which we made do for presents. They chatted for a moment and then ran off into the night.
Later Hori told me that as they were going they had asked us to be their guests at the theatre—there was a performance of one of the classic dramas by a travelling troupe from Tokyo—and afterwards to have supper at the tea-house.
Hori’s explanation of his refusal was rather intricate and elaborate, but stripped ofbushidoI think the inner simplicity was that he had suffered enough for one day from the conspicuous exhibition of our long legs and he had no desire for being responsible for taking them into a crowded Japanese theatre.