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Title: Kimono

Author: John Paris

Release Date: June 5, 2004  [eBook #12527]

Language: English

Character set encoding: US-ASCII


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KIMONO

by

JOHN PARIS

1922







CONTENTS


CHAPTER

    I AN ANGLO-JAPANESE MARRIAGE

   II HONEYMOON

  III EASTWARDS

   IV NAGASAKI

    V CHONKINA

   VI ACROSS JAPAN

  VII THE EMBASSY

 VIII THE HALF-CASTE GIRL

   IX ITO SAN

    X THE YOSHIWARA WOMEN

   XI A GEISHA DINNER

  XII FALLEN CHERRY-BLOSSOMS

 XIII THE FAMILY ALTAR

  XIV THE DWARF TREES

   XV EURASIA

  XVI THE GREAT BUDDHA

 XVII THE RAINY SEASON

XVIII AMONG THE NIKKO MOUNTAINS

  XIX YAE SMITH

   XX THE KIMONO

  XXI SAYONARA (GOOD-BYE)

 XXII FUJINAMI ASAKO

XXIII THE REAL SHINTO

 XXIV THE AUTUMN FESTIVAL

  XXV JAPANESE COURTSHIP

 XXVI ALONE IN TOKYO

XXVII LADY BRANDAN




  _Utsutsu wo mo
  Utsutsu to sara ni
  Omowaneba,
  Yume wo mo yume to
  Nani ka omowamu?

  Since I am convinced
  That Reality is in no way
  Real,
  How am I to admit
  That dreams are dreams?_


The verses and translation above are taken from A. Waley's "JAPANESE
POETRY: THE UTA" (Clarendon Press), as are many of the classical
poems placed at the head of the chapters.




CHAPTER I

AN ANGLO-JAPANESE MARRIAGE

  _Shibukaro ka
  Shiranedo kaki no
  Hatsu-chigiri_.

  Whether the fruit be bitter
  Or whether it be sweet,
  The first bite tells.


The marriage of Captain the Honourable Geoffrey Barrington and Miss
Asako Fujinami was an outstanding event in the season of 1913. It
was bizarre, it was picturesque, it was charming, it was socially
and politically important, it was everything that could appeal to
the taste of London society, which, as the season advances, is apt to
become jaded by the monotonous process of Hymen in High Life and by
the continued demand for costly wedding presents.

Once again Society paid for its seat at St. George's and for its
glass of champagne and crumb of cake with gifts of gold and silver and
precious stones enough to smother the tiny bride; but for once in a
way it paid with a good heart, not merely in obedience to convention,
but for the sake of participating in a unique and delightful scene, a
touching ceremony, the plighting of East and West.

Would the Japanese heiress be married in a kimono with flowers and
fans fixed in an elaborate _coiffure_? Thus the ladies were wondering
as they craned their necks to catch a glimpse of the bride's
procession up the aisle; but, though some even stood on hassocks and
pew seats, few were able to distinguish for certain. She was so very
tiny. At any rate, her six tall bridesmaids were arrayed in Japanese
dress, lovely white creations embroidered with birds and foliage.

It is hard to distinguish anything in the perennial twilight of St.
George's; a twilight symbolic of the new lives which emerge from its
Corinthian portico into that married world about which so much has
been guessed and so little is known.

One thing, however, was visible to all as the pair moved together
up to the altar rails, and that was the size of the bridegroom as
contrasted with the smallness of his bride. He looked like a great
rough bear and she like a silver fairy. There was something intensely
pathetic in the curve of his broad shoulders as he bent over the
little hand to place in its proud position the diminutive golden
circlet which was to unite their two lives.

As they left the church, the organ was playing _Kimi-ga-ya_, the
Japanese national hymn. Nobody recognized it, except the few Japanese
who were present; but Lady Everington, with that exaggeration of the
suitable which is so typical of her, had insisted on its choice as a
voluntary. Those who had heard the tune before and half remembered
it decided that it must come from the "Mikado"; and one stern dowager
went so far as to protest to the rector for permitting such a tune to
desecrate the sacred edifice.

Outside the church stood the bridegroom's brother officers. Through
the gleaming passage of sword-blades, smiling and happy, the strangely
assorted couple entered upon the way of wedlock, as Mr. and Mrs.
Geoffrey Barrington--the shoot of the Fujinami grafted on to one of
the oldest of our noble families.

"Are her parents here?" one lady was asking her neighbour.

"Oh, no; they are both dead, I believe."

"What kind of people are they, do you know? Do Japs have an
aristocracy and society and all that kind of thing?"

"I'm sure I don't know. I shouldn't think so. They don't look real
enough."

"She is very rich, anyhow," a third lady intervened, "I've heard they
are big landowners in Tokyo, and cousins of Admiral Togo's."

       *       *       *       *       *

The opportunity for closer inspection of this curiosity was afforded
by the reception given at Lady Everington's mansion in Carlton House
Terrace. Of course, everybody was there. The great ballroom was draped
with hangings of red and white, the national colours of Japan. Favours
of the same bright hues were distributed among the guests. Trophies
of Union Jacks and Rising Suns were grouped in corners and festooned
above windows and doorways.

Lady Everington was bent upon giving an international importance to
her protegee's marriage. Her original plan had been to invite the
whole Japanese community in London, and so to promote the popularity
of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance by making the most of this opportunity
for social fraternising. But where was the Japanese community in
London? Nobody knew. Perhaps there was none. There was the Embassy, of
course, which arrived smiling, fluent, and almost too well-mannered.
But Lady Everington had been unable to push very far her programme for
international amenities. There were strange little yellow men from
the City, who had charge of ships and banking interests; there were
strange little yellow men from beyond the West End, who studied the
Fine Arts, and lived, it appeared, on nothing. But the hostess could
find no ladies at all, except Countess Saito and the Embassy dames.

Monsieur and Madame Murata from Paris, the bride's guardians, were
also present. But the Orient was submerged beneath the flood of our
rank and fashion, which, as one lady put it, had to take care how it
stepped for fear of crushing the little creatures.

"Why _did_ you let him do it?" said Mrs. Markham to her sister.

"It was a mistake, my dear," whispered Lady Everington, "I meant her
for somebody quite different."

"And you're sorry now?"

"No, I have no time to be sorry--ever," replied that eternally
graceful and youthful Egeria, who is one of London's most powerful
social influences. "It will be interesting to see what becomes of
them."

Lady Everington has been criticised for stony-heartedness, for
opportunism, and for selfish abuse of her husband's vast wealth. She
has been likened to an experimental chemist, who mixes discordant
elements together in order to watch the results, chilling them in ice
or heating them over the fire, until the lives burst in fragments or
the colour slowly fades out of them. She has been called an artist in
_mesalliances_, a mismatch-maker of dangerous cunning, a dangler of
picturesque beggar-maids before romantic-eyed Cophetuas, a daring
promoter of ambitious American girls and a champion of musical comedy
peeresses. Her house has been named the Junior Bachelors Club. The
charming young men who seem to be bound to its hospitable board by
invisible chains are the material for her dashing improvisations and
the _dramatis personae_ of the scores of little domestic comedies
which she likes to keep floating around her in different stages of
development.

Geoffrey Barrington had been the secretary of this club, and a
favourite with the divinity who presided over it. We had all supposed
that he would remain a bachelor; and the advent of Asako Fujinami into
London society gave us at first no reason to change our opinion. But
she was certainly attractive.

       *       *       *       *       *

She ought to have been married in a kimono. There was no doubt about
it now, when there was more liberty to inspect her, as she stood there
shaking hands with hundreds of guests and murmuring her "Thank you
very much" to the reiterated congratulations.

The white gown was perfectly cut and of a shade to give its full
value to her complexion, a waxen complexion like old ivory or like
a magnolia petal, in which the Mongolian yellow was ever so faintly
discernible. It was a sweet little face, oval and smooth; but it might
have been called expressionless if it had not been for a dimple which
peeped and vanished around a corner of the small compressed mouth, and
for the great deep brown eyes, like the eyes of deer or like pools of
forest water, eyes full of warmth and affection. This was the feature
which struck most of us as we took the opportunity to watch her in
European dress with the glamour of her kimono stripped from her. They
were the eyes of the Oriental girl, a creature closer to the animals
than we are, lit by instinct more often than by reason, and hiding
a soul in its infancy, a repressed, timorous, uncertain thing,
spasmodically violent and habitually secretive and aloof.

Sir Ralph Cairns, the famous diplomat, was talking on this subject to
Professor Ironside.

"The Japanese are extraordinarily quick," he was saying, "the most
adaptable people since the ancient Greeks, whom they resemble in some
ways. But they are more superficial. The intellect races on ahead, but
the heart lingers in the Dark Ages."

"Perhaps intermarriage is the solution of the great racial problem,"
suggested the Professor.

"Never," said the old administrator. "Keep the breed pure, be it
white, black, or yellow. Bastard races cannot flourish. They are waste
of Nature."

The Professor glanced towards the bridal pair.

"And these also?" he asked.

"Perhaps," said Sir Ralph, "but in her case her education has been so
entirely European."

Hereupon, Lady Everington approaching, Sir Ralph turned to her and
said,--

"Dear lady, let me congratulate you: this is your masterpiece."

"Sir Ralph," said the hostess, already looking to see which of her
guests she would next pounce upon, "You know the East so well. Give
me one little piece of advice to hand over to the children before they
start on their honeymoon."

Sir Ralph smiled benignly.

"Where are they going?" he asked.

"Everywhere," replied Lady Everington, "they are going to travel."

"Then let them travel all over the world," he answered, "only not to
Japan. That is their Bluebeard's cupboard; and into that they must not
look."

There was more discussion of bridegroom and bride than is usual at
society weddings, which are apt to become mere reunions of fashionable
people, only vaguely conscious of the identity of those in whose
honour they have been gathered together.

"Geoffrey Barrington is such a healthy barbarian," said a pale young
man with a monocle; "if it had been a high-browed child of culture
like you, Reggie, with a taste for exotic sensations, I should hardly
have been surprised."

"And if it had been you, Arthur," replied Reggie Forsyth of the
Foreign Office, who was Barrington's best man, "I should have known
at once that it was the twenty thousand a year which was the supreme
attraction."

There was a certain amount of Anglo-Indian sentiment afloat among
the company, which condemned the marriage entirely as an outrage on
decency.

"What was Brandan dreaming of," snorted General Haslam, "to allow his
son to marry a yellow native?"

"Dreaming of the mortgage on the Brandan property, I expect, General,"
answered Lady Rushworth.

"It's scandalous," foamed the General, "a fine young fellow, a fine
officer, too! His career ruined for an undersized _geisha_!"

"But think of the millions of _yens_ or _sens_ or whatever they are,
with which she is going to re-gild the Brandan coronet!"

"That wouldn't console me for a yellow baby with slit eyes," continued
the General, his voice rising in debate as his custom was at the
Senior.

"Hush, General!" said his interlocutor, "we don't discuss such
possibilities."

"But everybody here must be thinking of them, except that unfortunate
young man."

"We never say what we are thinking, General; it would be too
upsetting."

"And we are to have a Japanese Lord Brandan, sitting in the House of
Lords?" the General went on.

"Yes, among the Jews, Turks, and Armenians, who are there already,"
Lady Rushworth answered, "an extra Oriental will never be noticed. It
will only be another instance of the course of Empire taking its way
Eastward."

       *       *       *       *       *

In the Everington dining-room the wedding presents were displayed. It
looked more like the interior of a Bond Street shop where every kind
of _article de luxe_, useful and useless, was heaped in plenty.

Perhaps the only gift which had cost less than twenty pounds was Lady
Everington's own offering, a photograph of herself in a plain silver
frame, her customary present when one of her protegees was married
under her immediate auspices.

"My dear," she would say, "I have enriched you by several thousands of
pounds. I have introduced you to the right people for present-giving
at precisely the right moment previous to your wedding, when they know
you neither too little nor too much. By long experience I have
learnt to fix it to a day. But I am not going to compete with this
undistinguished lavishness. I give you my picture to stand in
your drawing-room as an artist puts his signature to a completed
masterpiece, so that when you look around upon the furniture, the
silver, the cut glass, the clocks, the engagement tablets, and the
tantalus stands, the offerings of the rich whose names you have
long ago forgotten, then you will confess to yourself in a burst of
thankfulness to your fairy godmother that all this would never have
been yours if it had not been for her!"

In a corner of the room and apart from the more ostentatious homage,
stood on a small table a large market-basket, in which was lying a
huge red fish, a roguish, rollicking mullet with a roving eye, all
made out of a soft crinkly silk. In the basket beneath it were rolls
and rolls of plain silk, red and white. This was an offering from
the Japanese community in London, the conventional wedding present of
every Japanese home from the richest to the poorest, varying only
in size and splendour. On another small table lay a bundle of brown
objects like prehistoric axe heads, bound round with red and white
string, and vaguely odorous of bloater-paste. These were dried flesh
of the fish called _katsuobushi_ by the Japanese, whose absence also
would have brought misfortune to the newly married. Behind them, on
a little tray, stood a miniature landscape representing an aged
pine-tree by the sea-shore and a little cottage with a couple of old,
old people standing at its door, two exquisite little dolls dressed
in rough, poor kimonos, brown and white. The old man holds a rake,
and the old woman holds a broom. They have very kindly faces and white
silken hair. Any Japanese would recognise them at once as the Old
People of Takasago, the personification of the Perfect Marriage.
They are staring with wonder and alarm at the Brandan sapphires,
a monumental _parure_ designed for the massive state of some
Early-Victorian Lady Brandan.

Asako Fujinami had spent days rejoicing over the arrival of her
presents, little interested in the identity of the givers but
fascinated by the things themselves. She had taken hours to arrange
them in harmonious groups. Then a new gift would arrive which would
upset the balance, and she would have to begin all over again.

Besides this treasury in the dining-room, there were all her
clothes, packed now for the honeymoon, a whole wardrobe of fairy-like
disguises, wonderful gowns of all colours and shapes and materials.
These, it is true, she had bought herself. She had always been
surrounded by money; but it was only since she had lived with Lady
Everington that she had begun to learn something about the thousand
different ways of spending it, and all the lovely things for which it
can be exchanged. So all her new things, whatever their source, seemed
to her like presents, like unexpected enrichments. She had basked
among her new acquisitions, silent as was her wont when she was happy,
sunning herself in the warmth of her prosperity. Best of all, she
never need wear kimonos again in public. Her fiance had acceded to
this, her most immediate wish. She could dress now like the girls
around her. She would no longer be stared at like a curio in a shop
window. Inquisitive fingers would no longer clutch at the long sleeves
of, crinkled silk, or try to probe the secret of the huge butterfly
bow on her back. She could step out fearlessly now like English women.
She could give up the mincing walk and the timid manner which she felt
was somehow inseparable from her native dress.

When she told her protectress that Geoffrey had consented to its
abandonment, Lady Everington had heaved a sigh.

"Poor Kimono!" she said, "it has served you well. But I suppose a
soldier is glad to put his uniform away when the fighting is over.
Only, never forget the mysterious power of the uniform over the other
sex."

Another day when her Ladyship had been in a bad mood, she had
snapped,--

"Put those things away, child, and keep to your kimono. It is your
natural plumage. In those borrowed plumes you look undistinguished and
underfed."

       *       *       *       *       *

The Japanese Ambassador to the Court of St. James proposed the health
of the bride and bridegroom. Count Saito was a small, wise man, whom
long sojourn in European countries had to some extent de-orientalised.
His hair was grizzled, his face was seamed, and he had a peering way
of gazing through his gold-rimmed spectacles with head thrust forward
like a man half blind, which he certainly was not.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "it is a great pleasure for me to
be present on this occasion, for I think this wedding is a personal
compliment to myself and to my work in this splendid country. Mr. and
Mrs. Geoffrey Barrington are the living symbols of the Anglo-Japanese
Alliance; and I hope they will always remember the responsibility
resting on their shoulders. The bride and bridegroom of to-day must
feel that the relations of Great Britain and Japan depend upon the
perfect harmony of their married life. Ladies and gentlemen, let us
drink long life and happiness to Mr. and Mrs. Geoffrey Barrington, to
the Union Jack and to the Rising Sun!"

The toast, was drunk and three cheers were given, with an extra cheer
for Mrs. Geoffrey. The husband, who was no hand at speechmaking,
replied--and his good-natured voice was quite thick with emotion--that
it was awfully good of them all to give his wife and himself such a
ripping send-off, and awfully good of Sir George and Lady Everington
especially, and awfully good of Count Saito; and that he was the
happiest man in the world and the luckiest, and that his wife had told
him to tell them all that she was the happiest woman, though he really
did not see why she should be. Anyhow, he would do his best to give
her a jolly good time. He thanked his friends for their good wishes
and for their beautiful presents. They had had jolly good times
together, and, in return for all their kindness, he and his wife
wanted to wish them all a jolly good time.

So spoke Geoffrey Barrington; and at that moment many people present
must have felt a pang of regret that this fine specimen of England's
young manhood should marry an oriental. He was over six feet high. His
broad shoulders seemed to stoop a little with the lazy strength of a
good-tempered carnivore, of Una's lion, and his face, which was almost
round, was set off by a mane of the real lion colour. He wore his
moustache rather longer than was the fashion. It was a face which
seemed ready to laugh at any moment--or else to yawn. For there
was about the man's character and appearance something indolent and
half-awakened and much of the schoolboy. Yet he was over thirty. But
there is always a tendency for Army life to be merely a continuation
of public-school existence. Eton merges into Sandhurst, and Sandhurst
merges into the regiment. One's companions are all the time men of
the same class and of the same ideas. The discipline is the same,
the conventionality and the presiding fetish of Good and Bad Form. So
many, generals are perennial school boys. They lose their freshness,
that is all.

But Geoffrey Barrington had not lost his freshness. This was his great
charm, for he certainly was not quick or witty. Lady Everington said
that she kept him as a disinfectant to purify the atmosphere.

"This house," she declared, "sometimes gets over-scented with
tuberoses. Then I open the window and let Geoffrey Barrington in!"

He was the only son of Lord Brandan and heir to that ancient but
impoverished title. He had been brought up to the idea that he must
marry a rich wife. He neither jibbed foolishly at the proposal, nor
did he surrender lightly to any of the willing heiresses who threw
themselves at his head. He accepted his destiny with the fatalism
which every soldier must carry in his knapsack, and took up his post
as Mars in attendance in Lady Everington's drawing-room, recognising
that there lay the strategic point for achieving his purpose. He was
not without hope, too, that besides obtaining the moneybags he might
be so fortunate as to fall in love with the possessor of them.

Asako Fujinami, whom he had first met at dinner, at Lady Everington's,
had crossed his mind just like an exquisite bar of melody. He made no
comments at the time, but he could not forget her. The haunting tune
came back to him again and again. By the time that she had floated in
his arms through three or four dances, the spell had worked. _La belle
dame sans merci_, the enchantress who lurks in every woman, had him
in thrall. Her simplest observations seemed to him to be pearls of
wisdom, her every movement a triumph of grace.

"Reggie," he said to his friend Forsyth, "what do you think of that
little Japanese girl?"

Reggie, who was a diplomat by profession and a musician by the grace
of God, and whose intuition was almost feminine especially where
Geoffrey was concerned, answered,--

"Why, Geoffrey, are you thinking of marrying her?"

"By Jove!" exclaimed his friend, starting at the thought as at a
discovery; "but I, don't think she'd have me. I'm not her sort."

"You never can tell," suggested Reggie mischievously; "She is quite
unspoilt, and she has twenty thousand a year. She is unique. You could
not possibly get her confused with somebody else's wife, as so many
people seem to do when they get married. Why not try?"

Reggie thought that such a mating was impossible, but it amused him
to play with the idea. As for Lady Everington, who knew every one so
well, and who thought that she knew them perfectly, she never guessed.

"I think, Geoffrey, that you like to be seen with Asako," she said,
"just to point the contrast."

Her confession to her sister, Mrs. Markham, was the truth. She had
made a mistake; she had destined Asako for somebody quite different.
It was the girl herself who had been the first to enlighten her. She
came to her hostess's boudoir one evening before the labours of the
night began.

"Lady Georgie," she had said--Lady Everington is Lady Georgie to
all who know her even a little. "_Il faut que je vous dise quelque
chose_." The girl's face glanced downward and sideways, as her habit
was when embarrassed.

When Asako spoke in French it meant that something grave was afoot.
She was afraid that her unsteady English might muddle what she
intended to say. Lady Everington knew that it must be another
proposal; she had already dealt with three.

"_Eh bien, cette fois qui est-il?_" she asked.

"_Le capitaine Geoffroi_" answered Asako. Then her friend knew that it
was serious.

"What did you say to him?" she demanded.

"I tell him he must ask you."

"But why drag me into it? It's your own affair."

"In France and in Japan," said Asako, "a girl do not say Yes and No
herself. It is her father and her mother who decide. I have no father
or mother; so I think he must ask you."

"And what do you want me to say?"

For answer Asako gently squeezed the elder woman's hand, but Lady
Georgie was in no mood to return the pressure. The girl at once felt
the absence of the response, and said,--

"What, you do not like the _capitaine Geoffroi_?"

But her fairy godmother answered bitterly,--

"On the contrary, I have a considerable affection for Geoffrey."

"Then," cried Asako, starting up, "you think I am not good enough for
him. It's because I'm--not English."

She began to cry. In spite of her superficial hardness, Lady
Everington has a very tender heart. She took the girl in her arms.

"Dearest child," she said, raising the little, moist face to hers,
"don't cry. In England we answer this great question ourselves. Our
fathers and mothers and fairy godmothers have to concur. If Geoffrey
Barrington has asked you to marry him, it is because he loves you. He
does not scatter proposals like calling-cards, as some young men do.
In fact, I have never heard of him proposing to anyone before. He does
not want you to say 'No', of course. But are you quite ready to say
'Yes'? Very well, wait a fortnight, and don't see more of him than you
can help in the meantime. Now, let them send for my _masseuse_. There
is nothing so exhausting to the aged as the emotions of young people."

That evening, when Lady Everington met Geoffrey at the theatre, she
took him severely to task for treachery, secrecy and decadence. He,
was very humble and admitted all his faults except the last, pleading
as his excuse that he could not get Asako out of his head.

"Yes, that is a symptom," said her Ladyship; "you are clearly
stricken. So I fear I am too late to effect a rescue. All I can do
is to congratulate you both. But, remember, a wife is not nearly so
fugitive as a melody, unless she is the wrong kind of wife."

It was a wrench for the little lady to part with the oldest of
her friendships, and to give up her Geoffrey to the care of this
decorative stranger whose qualities were unknown, and undeveloped. But
she knew what the answer would be at the end of the fortnight. So she
steeled her nerves to laugh at her friends commiserations and to make
the marriage of her godchildren one of the season's successes. It
would certainly be an interesting addition to her museum of domestic
dramas.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was one person whom Lady Everington was determined to pump for
information on that wedding-day, and had drawn into the net of her
invitations for this very purpose. It was Count Saito, the Japanese
Ambassador.

She cornered him as he was admiring the presents, and whisked him away
to the silence and twilight of her husband's study.

"I am so glad you were able to come, Count Saito," she began. "I
suppose you know the Fujinamis, Asako's relatives in Tokyo?"

"No, I do not know them." His Excellency answered, but his tone
conveyed to the lady's instinct that he personally would not wish to
know them.

"But you know the name, do you not?"

"Yes, I have heard the name; there are many families called Fujinami
in Japan."

"Are they very rich?"

"Yes, I believe there are some who are very rich," said the little
diplomat, who clearly was ill at ease.

"Where does their money come from?" his inquisitor went on
remorselessly, "You are keeping something from me, Count Saito. Please
be frank, if there is any mystery."

"Oh no, Lady Everington, there is no mystery, I am sure. There is one
family of Fujinami who have many houses and lands in Tokyo and other
towns. I will be quite open with you. They are rather what you in
England call _nouveaux riches_."

"Really!" Her Ladyship was taken aback for a moment. "But you would
never notice it with Asako, would you? I mean, she does not drop her
Japanese aitches, and that sort of thing, does she?"

"Oh no," Count Saito reassured her, "I do not think Mademoiselle Asako
talks Japanese language, so she cannot drop her aitches."

"I never thought of that," his hostess continued, "I thought that if a
Japanese had money, he must be a _daimyo_, or something."

The Ambassador smiled.

"English people," he said, "do not know very well the true condition
of Japan. Of course we have our rich new families and our poor old
families just as you have in England. In some aspects our society is
just the same as yours. In others, it is so, different, that you would
lose your way at once in a maze of ideas which would seem to you quite
upside down."

Lady Everington interrupted his reflections in a desperate attempt to
get something out of him by a surprise attack.

"How interesting," she said, "it will be for Geoffrey Harrington and
his wife to visit Japan and find out all about it."

The Ambassador's manner changed.

"No, I do not think," he said, "I do not think that is a good thing at
all. They must not do that. You must not let them."

"But why not?"

"I say to all Japanese men and women who live a long time in foreign
countries or who marry foreign people, 'Do not go back to Japan,'
Japan is like a little pot and the foreign world is like a big garden.
If you plant a tree from the pot into the garden and let it grow, you
cannot put it back into the pot again."

"But, in this case, that is not the only reason," objected Lady
Everington.

"No, there are many other reasons too," the Ambassador admitted; and
he rose from his sofa, indicating that the interview was at an end.

       *       *       *       *       *

The bridal pair left in a motor-car for Folkestone tinder a hailstorm
of rice, and with the propitious white slipper dangling from the
number-plate behind.

When all her guests were gone, Lady Everington fled to her boudoir and
collapsed in a little heap of sobbing finery on the broad divan. She
was overtired, no doubt; but the sense of her mistake lay heavy upon
her, and the feeling that she had sacrificed to it her best friend,
the most humanly valuable of all the people who resorted to her house.
An evil cloud of mystery hung over the young marriage, one of those
sinister unfamiliar forces which travellers bring home from the East,
the curse of a god or a secret poison or a hideous disease.

It would be so natural for those two to want to visit Japan and to
know their second home. Yet both Sir Ralph Cairns and Count Saito, the
only two men that day who knew anything about the real conditions,
had insisted that such a visit would be fatal. And who were these
Fujinamis whom Count Saito knew, but did not know? Why had she, who
was so socially careful, taken so much for granted just because Asako
was a Japanese?




CHAPTER II

HONEYMOON

  _Asa no kami
  Ware wa kezuraji
  Utsukushiki
  Kimi ga ta-makura
  Fureteshi mono wo._

  (My) morning sleep hair
  I will not comb;
  For it has been in contact with
  The pillowing hand of
  My beautiful Lord!


The Barringtons left England for a prolonged honeymoon, for Geoffrey
was now free to realise his favourite project of travelling abroad.
So they became numbered among that shoal of English people out of
England, who move restless leisure between Paris and the Nile.

Geoffrey had resigned his commission in the army. His friends thought
that this was a mistake. For the loss of a man's career, even when it
is uncongenial to him, is a serious amputation, and entails a lesion
of spiritual blood. He had refused his father's suggestion of settling
down in a house on the Brandan estate, for Lord Brandan was an
unpleasing old gentleman, a frequenter of country bars and country
barmaids. His son wished to keep his young bride as far away as
possible from a spectacle of which he was heartily ashamed.

First of all they went to Paris, which Asako adored; for was it not
her home? But this time she made the acquaintance of a Paris unknown
to her, save by rumour, in the convent days or within the discreet
precincts of Monsieur Murata's villa. She was enchanted by the
theatres, the shops, the restaurants, the music, and the life which
danced around her. She wanted to rent an _appartement_, and to live
there for the rest of her existence.

"But the season is almost over," said her husband; "everybody will be
leaving."

Unaccustomed as yet to his freedom, he still felt constrained to do
the same as Everybody.

Before leaving Paris, they paid a visit to the Auteuil villa, which
had been Asako's home for so many years.

Murata was the manager of a big Japanese firm in Paris. He had spent
almost all his life abroad and the last twenty years of it in the
French capital, so that even in appearance, except for his short
stature and his tilted eyes, he had come to look like a Frenchman with
his beard _a l'imperiale_, and his quick bird-like gestures. His wife
was a Japanese, but she too had lost almost all traces of her native
mannerisms.

Asako Fujinami had been brought to Paris by her father, who had died
there while still a young man. He had entrusted his only child to the
care of the Muratas with instructions that she should be educated in
European ways and ideas, that she should hold no communication with
her relatives in Japan, and that eventually a white husband should be
provided for her. He had left his whole fortune in trust for her, and
the interest was forwarded regularly to M. Murata by a Tokyo lawyer,
to be used for her benefit as her guardian might deem best. This money
was to be the only tie between Asako and her native land.

To cut off a child from its family, of which by virtue of vested
interests it must still be an important member, was a proceeding
so revolutionary to all respectable Japanese ideas that even the
enlightened Murata demurred. In Japan the individual counts for
so little, the family for so much. But Fujinami had insisted, and
disobedience to a man's dying wish brings the curse of a "rough ghost"
upon the recalcitrant, and all kinds of evil consequences.

So the Muratas took Asako and cherished her as much as their hearts,
withered by exile and by unnatural living, were capable of
cherishing anything. She became a daughter of the well-to-do French
_bourgeoisie_, strictly but affectionately disciplined with the proper
restraints on the natural growth of her brain and individuality.

Geoffrey Barrington was not very favourably impressed by the Murata
household. He wondered how so bright a little flower as Asako could
have been reared in such gloomy surroundings. The spirits dominant in
the villa were respectable economy and slavish imitation of the tastes
and habits of Parisian friends. The living-rooms were as impersonal as
the rooms of a boarding-house. Neutral tints abounded, ugly browns
and nightmare vegetable patterns on carpets, furniture and wallpapers.
There was a marked tendency towards covers, covers for the chairs
and sofas, tablecloths and covers for the tablecloths, covers for
cushion-covers, antimacassars, lamp-stands, vase-stands and every kind
of decorative duster. Everywhere the thick smell of concealed grime
told of insufficient servants and ineffective sweeping. There was not
one ornament or picture which recalled Japan, or gave a clue to the
personal tastes of the owners.

Geoffrey had expected to be the nervous witness of an affecting scene
between his wife and her adopted parents. But no, the greetings were
polite and formal. Asako's frock and jewellery were admired, but
without that note of angry envy which often brightens the dullest talk
between ladies in England. Then, they sat down to an atrocious lunch
eaten in complete silence.

When the meal was over, Murata drew Geoffrey aside into his shingly
garden.

"I think that you will be content with our Asa San," he said; "the
character is still plastic. In England it is different; but in France
and in Japan we say it is the husband who must make the character of
his wife. She is the plain white paper; let him take his brush and
write on it what he will. Asa San is a very sweet girl. She is very
easy to manage. She has a beautiful disposition. She does not tell
lies without reason. She does not wish to make strange friends. I do
not think you will have trouble with her."

"He talks about her rather as if she were a horse," thought Geoffrey.
Murata went on,--

"The Japanese woman is the ivy which clings to the tree. She does not
wish to disobey."

"You think Asako is still very Japanese, then?" asked Geoffrey.

"Not her manners, or her looks, or even her thoughts," replied Murata,
"but nothing can change the heart."

"Then do you think she is homesick sometimes for Japan?" said her
husband.

"Oh no," smiled Murata. The little wizened man was full of smiles.
"She left Japan when she was not two years old. She remembers nothing
at all."

"I think one day we shall go to Japan," said Geoffrey, "when we get
tired of Europe, you know. It is a wonderful country, I am told;
and it does not seem right that Asako should know nothing about it.
Besides, I should like to look into her affairs and find out about her
investments."

Murata was staring at his yellow boots with an embarrassed air. It
suddenly struck the Englishman that he, Geoffrey Harrington, was
related to people who looked like that, and who now had the right to
call him cousin. He shivered.

"You can trust her lawyers," said the Japanese, "Mr. Ito is an old
friend of mine. You may be quite certain that Asako's money is safe."

"Oh yes, of course," assented Geoffrey, "but what exactly are her
investments? I think I ought to know."

Murata began to laugh nervously, as all Japanese do when embarrassed.

"_Mon Dieu_!" he exclaimed, "but I do not know myself. The money has
been paid regularly for nearly twenty years; and I know the Fujinami
are very rich. Indeed, Captain Barrington, I do not think Asako would
like Japan. It was her father's last wish that she should never return
there."

"But why?" asked Geoffrey. He felt that Murata was keeping something
from him. The little man answered,--

"He thought that for a woman the life is more happy in Europe; he
wished Asako to forget altogether that she was Japanese."

"Yes, but now she is married and her future is fixed. She is not going
back permanently to Japan, but just to see the country. I think we
would both of us like to. People say it is a magnificent country."

"You are very kind," said Murata, "to speak so of my country. But the
foreign people who marry Japanese are happy if they stay in their own
country, and Japanese who marry foreigners are happy if they go away
from Japan. But if they stay in Japan they are not happy. The national
atmosphere in Japan is too strong for those people who are not
Japanese or are only half Japanese. They fade. Besides life in Japan
is very poor and rough. I do not like it myself."

Somehow Geoffrey could not accept these as being the real reasons. He
had never had a long talk with a Japanese man before; but he felt that
if they were all like that, so formal, so unnatural, so secretive,
then he had better keep out of the range of Asako's relatives.

He wondered what his wife really thought of the Muratas, and during
the return to their hotel, he asked,--

"Well, little girl, do you want to go back again and live at Auteuil?"

She shook her head.

"But it is nice to think you have always got an extra home in Paris,
isn't it?" he went on, fishing for an avowal that home was in his arms
only, a kind of conversation which was the wine of life to him at that
period.

"No," she answered with a little shudder, "I don't call that home."

Geoffrey's conventionality was a little bit shocked at this lack
of affection; he was also disappointed at not getting exactly the
expected answer.

"Why, what was wrong with it?" he asked.

"Oh, it was not pretty or comfortable," she said, "they were so afraid
to spend money. When I wash my hands, they say, 'Do not use too much
soap; it is waste.'"

       *       *       *       *       *

Asako was like a little prisoner released into the sunlight. She
dreaded the idea of being thrust back into darkness again.

In this new life of hers anything would have made her happy, that is
to say, anything new, anything given to her, anything good to eat or
drink, anything soft and shimmery to wear, anything--so long as her
big husband was with her. He was the most fascinating of all her
novelties. He was much nicer than Lady Everington; for he was not
always saying, "Don't," or making clever remarks, which she could not
understand. He gave her absolutely her own way, and everything that
she admired. He reminded her of an old Newfoundland dog who had been
her slave when she was a little girl.

He used to play with her as he would have played with a child,
watching her as she tried on her finery, hiding things for her to
find, holding them over her head and making her jump for them like
a puppy, arranging her ornaments for her in those continual private
exhibitions which took up so much of her time. Then she would ring the
bell and summon all the chambermaids within call to come and admire;
and Geoffrey would stand among all these womenfolk, listening to the
chorus of "_Mon Dieu!_" and "_Ah, que c'est beau!_" and "_Ah, qu'elle
est gentille!_" like some Hector who had strayed into the _gynaeceum_
of Priam's palace. He felt a little foolish, perhaps, but very happy,
happy in his wife's naive happiness and affection, which did not
require any mental effort to understand, nor that panting pursuit
on which he had embarked more than once in order to keep up with the
witty flirtatiousness of some of the beauties of Lady Everington's
_salon_.

Happiness shone out of Asako like light. But would she always be
happy? There were the possibilities of the future to be reckoned
with, sickness, childbirth, and the rearing of children, the hidden
development of the character which so often grows away from what
it once cherished, the baleful currents of outside influences, the
attraction and repulsion of so-called friends and enemies all of which
complicate the primitive simplicity of married life and forfeit the
honeymoon Eden. Adam and Eve in the garden of the Creation can hear
the voice of God whispering in the evening breeze; they can live
without jars and ambitions, without suspicion and without reproaches.
They have no parents, no parents-in-law, no brothers, sisters,
aunts, or guardians, no friends to lay the train of scandal or to
be continually pulling them from each other's arms. But the first
influence which crosses the walls of their paradise, the first being
to whom they speak, which possesses the semblance of a human voice,
is most certainly Satan and that Old Serpent, who was a liar and a
slanderer from the beginning, and whose counsels will lead inevitably
to the withdrawal of God's presence and to the doom of a life of pain
and labor.

There was one cloud in the heaven of their happiness. Geoffrey was
inclined to tease Asako about her native country. His ideas about
Japan were gleaned chiefly from musical comedies. He would call his
wife Yum Yum and Pitti Sing. He would fix the end of one of her black
veils under his hat, and would ask her whether she liked him better
with a pigtail.

"Captain Geoffrey," she would complain, "it is the Chinese who wear
the pigtail; they are a very savage people."

Then he would call her his little _geisha_, and this she resented;
for she knew from the Muratas that _geisha_ were bad women who took
husbands away from their wives, and that was no joking matter.

"What nonsense!" exclaimed Geoffrey, taken aback by this sudden
reproof: "they are dear little things like you, darling, and they
bring you tea and wave fans behind your head, and I would like to have
twenty of them--to wait upon you!"

He would tease her about a supposed fondness for rice, for
chop-sticks, for paper umbrellas and _jiujitsu._ She liked him to
tease her, just as a child likes to be teased, while all the time
on the verge of tears. With Asako, tears and laughter were never far
apart.

"Why do you tease me because I am Japanese?" she would sob; "besides,
I'm not really. I can't help it. I can't help it!"

"But, sweetheart," her Captain Geoffrey would say, suddenly ashamed
of his elephantine humour, "there's nothing to cry about. I would be
proud to be a Japanese. They are jolly brave people. They gave the
Russians a jolly good hiding."

It made her feel well to hear him praise her people, but she would
say:

"No, no, they're not. I don't want to be a Jap. I don't like them.
They're ugly and spiteful. Why can't we choose what we are? I would be
an English girl--or perhaps French," she added, thinking of the Rue de
la Paix.

       *       *       *       *       *

They left Paris and went to Deauville; and here it was that the
serpent first crawled into Eden, whispering of forbidden fruit.
These serpents were charming people, amusing men and smart women, all
anxious to make the acquaintance of the latest sensation, the Japanese
millionairess and her good-looking husband.

Asako lunched with them and dined with them and sat with them near the
sea in wonderful bathing costumes which it would be a shame to wet.
Conscious of the shortcomings of her figure as compared with those
of the lissom mermaids who surrounded her, Asako returned to kimonos,
much to her husband's surprise; and the mermaids had to confess
themselves beaten.

She listened to their talk and learned a hundred things, but another
hundred at least remained hidden from her.

Geoffrey left his wife to amuse herself in the cosmopolitan society of
the French watering-place. He wanted this. All the wives whom he
had ever known seemed to enjoy themselves best when away from their
husbands' company. He did not quite trust the spirit of mutual
adoration, which the gods had given to him and his bride. Perhaps it
was an unhealthy symptom. Worse still, it might be Bad Form. He wanted
Asako to be natural and to enjoy herself, and not to make their love
into a prison house.

But he felt a bit lonely when he was away from her. Occupation did not
seem to come easily to him as it did when she was there to suggest it.
Sometimes he would loaf up and down on the esplanade; and sometimes he
would take strenuous swims in the sea. He became the prey of the bores
who haunt every seaside place at home and abroad, lurking for lonely
and polite people upon whom they may unload their conversation.

All these people seemed either to have been in Japan themselves or to
have friends and relations who knew the country thoroughly.

A wonderful land, they assured him. The nation of the future, the
Garden of the East, but of course Captain Barrington knew Japan
well. No, he had never been there? Ah, but Mrs. Barrington must have
described it all to him. Impossible! Really? Not since she was a baby?
How very extraordinary! A charming country, so quaint, so original,
so picturesque, such a place to relax in; and then the Japanese girls,
the little _mousmes_, in their bright kimonos, who came fluttering
round like little butterflies, who were so gentle and soft and
grateful; but there! Captain Barrington was a married man, that was no
affair of his. Ha! Ha!

The elderly _roues_, who buzzed like February flies in the sunshine
of Deauville, seemed to have particularly fruity memories of tea-house
sprees and oriental philanderings under the cherry-blossoms of
Yokohama. Evidently, Japan was just like the musical comedies.

Geoffrey began to be ashamed of his ignorance concerning his wife's
native country. Somebody had asked him, what exactly _bushido_ was. He
had answered at random that it was made of rice and curry powder. By
the hilarious reception given to this explanation he knew that he must
have made a _gaffe_. So he asked one of the more erudite bores to give
him the names of the best books about Japan. He would "mug it up,"
and get some answers off pat to the leading questions. The erudite
one promptly lent him some volumes by Lafcadio Hearn and Pierre Loti's
_Madame Chrysantheme_. He read the novel first of all. Rather spicy,
wasn't it?

Asako found the book. It was an illustrated edition; and the little
drawings of Japanese scenes pleased her immensely, so that she began
to read the letter press.

"It is the story of a bad man and a bad woman," she said; "Geoffrey,
why do you read bad things? They bring bad conditions."

Geoffrey smiled. He was wondering whether the company of the
fictitious _Chrysantheme_ was more demoralizing than that of the
actual Mme. Laroche Meyerbeer, with whom his wife had been that day
for a picnic lunch.

"Besides, it isn't fair," his wife continued. "People read that book
and then they think that all Japanese girls are bad like that."

"Why, darling, I didn't think you had read it," Geoffrey expostulated,
"who has been telling you about it?"

"The Vicomte de Brie," Asako answered. "He called me _Chrysantheme_
and I asked him why."

"Oh, did he?" said Geoffrey. Really it was time to put an end to
lunch picnics and mermaidism. But Asako was so happy and so shiningly
innocent.

She returned to her circle of admirers, and Geoffrey to his studies of
the Far East. He read the Lafcadio Hearn books, and did not perceive
that he was taking opium. The wonderful sentences of that master of
prose poetry rise before the eyes in whorls of narcotic smoke. They
lull the brain as in a dream, and form themselves gradually into
visions of a land more beautiful than any land that has ever existed
anywhere, a country of vivid rice plains and sudden hills, of gracious
forests and red temple gateways, of wise priests and folk-lore
imagery, of a simple-hearted smiling people with children bright as
flowers laughing and playing in unfailing sunlight, a country where
everything is kind, gentle, small, neat, artistic, and spotlessly
clean, where men become gods not by sudden apotheosis but by the easy
processes of nature, a country, in short, which is the reverse of our
own poor vexed continent where the monstrous and the hideous multiply
daily.

One afternoon Geoffrey was lounging on the terrace of the hotel
reading _Kokoro_, when his attention was attracted by the arrival of
Mme. Laroche Meyerbeer's motor-car with Asako, her hostess and another
woman embedded in its depths. Asako was the first to leap out. She
went up to her apartment without looking to right or left, and before
her husband had time to reach her. Mme. Meyerbeer watched this arrow
flight and shrugged her shoulders before lazily alighting.

"Is all well?" asked Geoffrey.

"No serious damage," smiled the lady, who is known in Deauville as
_Madame Cythere_, "but you had better go and console her. I think she
has seen the devil for the first time."

He opened the door of their sunny bedroom, and found Asako packing
feverishly, and sobbing in spasms.

"My poor little darling," he said, lifting her in his arms, "whatever
is the matter?"

He laid her on the sofa, took off her hat, and loosened her dress,
until gradually she became coherent.

"He tried to kiss me," she sobbed.

"Who did?" her husband asked.

"The Vicomte de Brie."

"Damned little monkey," cried Geoffrey, "I'll break every miserable
bone in his pretence of a body."

"Oh, no, no," protested Asako, "let us go away from here at once. Let
us go to Switzerland, anywhere."

The serpent had got into the garden, but he had not been a very adroit
reptile. He had shown his fangs; and the woman had promptly bruised
his head and had given him an eye like an Impressionist sunset, which
for several days he had to hide from the ridicule of his friends.

But Asako too had been grievously injured in the innocence of her
heart; and it took all the snow winds of the Engadine to blow away
from her face the hot defilement of the man's breath. She clung
closely to her husband's protection. She, who had hitherto abandoned
herself to excessive amiability, barbed the walls of their violated
paradise with the broken glass of bare civility. Every man became
suspect, the German professors culling Alpine plants, the mountain
maniacs with their eyes fixed on peaks to conquer. She had no word
for any of them. Even the manlike womenfolk, who golfed and rowed and
clambered, were to her indignant eyes dangerous panders to the lusts
of men, disguised allies of _Madame Cythere_.

"Are they all bad?" she asked Geoffrey.

"No, little girl, I don't suppose so. They look too dismal to be bad."

Geoffrey was grateful for the turn of events which had delivered up
his wife again into his sole company. He had missed her society more
than he dared confess; for uxoriousness is a pitiful attitude. In
fact, it is Bad Form.

At this period he wanted her as a kind of mirror for his own mind and
for his own person. She saw to it that his clothes were spotless and
that his tie was straight. Of course, he always dressed for dinner
even when they dined in their room. She too would dress herself up in
her new finery for his eyes alone. She would listen to him laying down
the law on subjects which he would not dare broach were he talking
to any one else. She flattered him in that silent way which is so
soothing to a man of his character. Her mind seemed to absorb his
thoughts with the readiness of blotting paper; and he did not pause to
observe whether the impression had come out backwards or forwards. He
who had been so mute among Lady Everington's geniuses fell all of a
sudden into a loquaciousness which was merely the reaction of his love
for his wife, the instinct which makes the male bird sing. He just
went on talking; and every day he became in his own estimation and in
that of Asako, a more intelligent, a more original and a more eloquent
man.




CHAPTER III

EASTWARDS

  _Nagaki yo no
  To no nemuri no
  Miname-zame,
  Nami nori fune no
  Oto no yoki kana_.

  From the deep sleep
  Of a long night
  Waking,
  Sweet is the sound
  Of the ship as it rides the waves.


When August snow fell upon St. Moritz, the Barringtons descended to
Milan, Florence, Venice and Rome. Towards Christmas they found their
way to the Riviera, where they met Lady Everington at Monte Carlo,
very indignant, or pretending to be so, at the neglect with which she
had been treated.

"Fairy godmothers are important people," she said, "and very easily
offended. Then, they turn you into wild animals, or send you to sleep
for a hundred years. Why didn't you write to me, child?"

They were sitting on the terrace with the Casino behind them,
overlooking the blue Mediterranean. A few yards farther on, a tall,
young Englishman was chatting and laughing with a couple of girls too
elaborately beautiful and too dazzlingly gowned for any world but the
half-world. Suddenly he turned, and noticed Lady Everington. With a
courteous farewell to his companions, he advanced to greet her.

"Aubrey Laking," she exclaimed, "you never answered the letter I wrote
to you at Tokyo."

"Dear Lady Georgie, I left Tokyo ages ago. It followed me back to
England; and I am now second secretary at Christiania. That is why I
am in Monte Carlo!"

"Then let me introduce you to Asako Fujinami, who is now Mrs.
Barrington. You must tell her all about Tokyo. It is her native city;
but she has not seen it since she was in long clothes, if Japanese
babies wear such things."

Aubrey Laking and Barrington had been at Eton together. They were old
friends, and were delighted to meet once more. Barrington, especially,
was pleased to have this opportunity to hear about Japan from one who
had but lately left the country, and who was moreover a fluent and
agreeable talker. Laking had not resided in Japan long enough to get
tired of orientalism. He described the quaint, the picturesque, the
amusing side of life in the East. He was full of enthusiasm for the
land of soft voices and smiling faces, where countless little shops
spread their wares under the light of the evening lanterns, where the
twang of the _samisen_ and the _geisha's_ song are heard coming from
the lighted tea-house, and the shadow of her helmet-like _coiffure_
is seen appearing and disappearing in silhouette against the paper
_shoji_.

       *       *       *       *       *

The East was drawing the Barringtons towards its perilous coasts.
Laking's position at the Tokyo Embassy had been taken by Reggie
Forsyth, one of Geoffrey's oldest friends, his best man at his wedding
and a light of Lady Everington's circle. Already, Geoffrey had sent
him a post-card, saying, "Warm up the _sake_ bottle," (Geoffrey
was becoming quite learned in things Japanese), "and expect friends
shortly."

However, when the Barringtons did at last tear themselves from the
Riviera, they announced rather disingenuously that they were going to
Egypt.

"They are too happy," Lady Everington said to Laking a few days later,
"and they know nothing. I am afraid there will be trouble."

"Oh, Lady Georgie," he replied, "I have never known you to be a
prophetess of gloom. I would have thought the auspices were most
fortunate."

"They ought to quarrel more than they do," Lady Everington complained.
"She ought to contradict him more than she does. There must be a
volcanic element in marriage. It is a sign of trouble coming when the
fires are quiet."

"But they have got plenty of money," expostulated Aubrey, whose
troubles were invariably connected with his banking account, "and they
are very fond of each other. Where is the trouble to come from?"

"Trouble is on the lookout for all of us, Aubrey," said his companion,
"it is no good flying from it, even. The only thing to do is to look
it in the face and laugh at it; then it gets annoyed sometimes, and
goes away. But those two poor dears are sailing into the middle of it,
and they don't even know how to laugh yet."

"You think that Egypt is hopelessly demoralising. Thousands of people
go there and come safely home, almost all, in fact, except Robert
Hichens's heroines."

"Oh no, not in Egypt," said Lady Everington; "Egypt is only a
stepping-stone. They are going to Japan."

"Well, certainly Japan is harmless enough. There is nobody there worth
flirting with except us at the Embassies, and we generally have our
hands full. As for the visitors, they are always under the influence
of Cook's tickets and Japanese guides."

"Aubrey dear, you think that trouble can only come from flirting or
money."

"I know that those two preoccupations are an abundant source of
trouble."

"What do you think of Mrs. Barrington?" asked her Ladyship, appearing
to change the subject.

"Oh, a very sweet little thing."

"Like your lady friends in Tokyo, the Japanese ones, I mean?"

"Not in the least. Japanese ladies look very picturesque, but they are
as dull as dolls. They sidle along in the wake of their husbands, and
don't expect to be spoken to."

"And have you no more intimate experience?" asked Lady Everington.
"Really, Aubrey, you have not been living up to your reputation."

"Well, Lady Georgie," the young man proceeded, gazing at his polished
boots with a well-assumed air of embarrassment, "since I know that you
are one of the enlightened ones, I will confess to you that I did keep
a little establishment _a la_ Pierre Loti. My Japanese teacher thought
it would be a good way of improving my knowledge of the local
idiom; and this knowledge meant an extra hundred pounds to me for
interpreter's allowance, as it is called. I thought, too, that it
would be a relief after diplomatic dinner parties to be able to swear
for an hour or so, big round oaths in the company of a dear beloved
one who would not understand me. So my teacher undertook to provide me
with a suitable female companion. He did. In fact, he introduced me
to his sister; and the suitability was based on the fact that she
held the same position under my predecessor, a man whom I dislike
exceedingly. But this I only found out later on. She was dull, deadly
dull. I couldn't even make her jealous. She was as dull as my Japanese
grammar; and when I had passed my examination and burnt my books, I
dismissed her."

"Aubrey, what a very wicked story!"

"No, Lady Georgie, it was not even wicked. She was not real enough to
sin with. The affair had not even the excitement of badness to keep it
going."

"Do you know the Japanese well?" Lady Everington returned to the
highroad of her inquiry.

"No, nobody does; they are a most secretive people."

"Do you think that, if the Barringtons go to Japan, there is any
danger of Asako being drawn back into the bosom of her family?"

"No, I shouldn't think so," Laking replied, "Japanese life is so very
uncomfortable, you know, even to the Japs themselves, when once they
have got used to living in Europe or America. They sleep on the floor,
their clothes are inconvenient, and their food is nasty, even in the
houses of the rich ones."

"Yes, it must be a peculiar country. What do you think is the greatest
shock for the average traveller who goes there?"

"Lady Georgie, you are asking me very searching questions to-day. I
don't think I will answer any more."

"Just this one," she pleaded.

He considered his boots again for a moment, and then, raising his face
to hers with that humorous challenging look which he assumes when on
the verge of some indiscretion, he replied,--

"The _Yoshiwara_."

"Yes," said her Ladyship, "I have heard of such a place. It is a kind
of Vanity Fair, isn't it, for all the _cocottes_ Of Tokyo?"

"It's more than that," Laking answered; "it is a market of
human flesh, with nothing to disguise the crude fact except the
picturesqueness of the place. It is a square enclosure as large as a
small town. In this enclosure are shops, and in the shop windows
women are displayed just like goods, or like animals in cages; for the
windows have wooden bars. Some of the girls sit there stolidly like
stuffed images, some of them come to the bars and try to catch hold of
the passers-by, just like monkeys, and joke with them and shout after
them. But I could not understand what they said--fortunately, perhaps.
The girls,--there must be several thousands--are all dressed up in
bright kimonos. It really is a very pretty sight, until one begins to
think. They have their price tickets hung up in the shop windows, one
shilling up to one pound. That is the greatest shock which Japan has
in store for the ordinary tourist."

Lady Everington was silent for a moment; her flippant companion had
become quite serious.

"After all," she said, "is it any worse than Piccadilly Circus at
night?"

"It is not a question of better or worse," argued Laking. "Such a
purely mercenary system is a terrible offence to our most cherished
belief. We may be hypocrites, but our hypocrisy itself is an admission
of guilt and an act of worship. To us, even to the readiest sinners
among us, woman is always something divine. The lowest assignation
of the streets has at least a disguise of romance. It symbolises
the words and the ways of Love, even if it parodies them. But to the
Japanese, woman must be merely animal. You buy a girl as you buy a
cow."

Lady Everington shivered, but she tried to live up to her reputation
of being shocked by nothing.

"Well, that is true, after all, whether in Piccadilly or in the
Yoshiwara. All prostitution is just a commercial transaction."

"Perhaps," said the young diplomat, "but what about the Ideal at the
back of our minds? Passion is often a grotesque incarnation of the
Ideal, like a savage's rude image of his god. A glimpse of the ideal
is possible in Piccadilly, and impossible in the Yoshiwara. The divine
something was visible in Marguerite Gautier; little Hugh saw it even
in Nana. For one thing, here in London, in the dirtiest of sordid
dramas, it is still the woman who gives, but in Japan it is always the
man who takes."

"Aubrey," said his friend, "I had no idea that you were a poet, or in
other words that you ever talked nonsense without laughing. You think
such a shock is strong enough to upset the Barrington _menage_?"

"It will give furiously to think," he answered, "to poor old Geoffrey,
who is a very straight, clean and honest fellow, not overused to
furious thinking. I suppose if one married a monkey, one might
persuade oneself of her humanity, until one saw her kindred in cages."

"Poor little Asako, my latest god-daughter!" cried Lady Everington.
"Really, Aubrey, you are very rude!"

"I did not mean to be," said Laking penitently. "She is a most
ingratiating little creature, like a lazy kitten; but I think it is
unwise for him to take her to Japan. All kinds of latent orientalisms
may develop."

       *       *       *       *       *

The spring was at hand, the season of impulse, when we obey most
readily the sudden stirrings of our hearts. Even in the torrid climate
of Egypt, squalls of rain passed over like stray birds of passage.
Asako Barrington felt the fresh influence and the desire to do new
things in new places. Hitherto she had evinced very little inclination
to revisit the home of her ancestors. But on their return from the
temples of Luxor, she said quite unexpectedly to Geoffrey,--

"If we go to Japan now, we shall be in time to see the
cherry-blossoms."

"Why, little Yum Yum," cried her husband, delighted, "are you tired of
Pharaohs?"

"Egypt is very interesting," said Asako, correctly; "it is wonderful
to think of these great places standing here for thousands and
thousands of years. But it makes one sad, don't you think? Everybody
here seems to have died long, long ago. It would be nice to see green
fields again, wouldn't it, Geoffrey dearest?"

The voice of the Spring was speaking clearly.

"And you really want to go to Japan, sweetheart? It's the first time
I've heard you say you want to go."

"Uncle and Aunt Murata in Paris used always to say about now, 'If we
go back to Japan we shall be in time to see the cherry-blossoms.'"

"Why," asked Geoffrey, "do the Japanese make such a fuss about their
cherry-blossoms?"

"They must be very pretty," answered his wife, "like great clouds of
snow. Besides, the cherry-flowers are supposed to be like the Japanese
spirit."

"So you are my little cherry-blossom--is that right?"

"Oh no, not the women," she replied, "the men are the
cherry-blossoms."

Geoffrey laughed. It seemed absurd to him to compare a man to the
frail and transient beauty of a flower.

"Then what about the Japanese ladies," he asked, "if the men are
blossoms?"

Asako did not think they had any special flower to symbolise their
charms. She suggested,--

"The bamboo, they say, because the wives have to bend under the storms
when their husbands are angry. But, Geoffrey, you are never angry. You
do not give me a chance to be like the bamboo."

Next day, he boldly booked their tickets for Tokyo.

The long sea voyage was a pleasant experience, broken by fleeting
visits to startled friends in Ceylon and at Singapore, and enlivened
by the close ephemeral intimacies of life on board ship.

There was a motley company on board _S.S. Sumatra_; a company
whose most obvious elements, the noisy and bibulous pests in the
smoking-room and the ladies of mysterious destination with whom
they dallied, were dismissed by Geoffrey at once as being terrible
bounders. Beneath this scum more congenial spirits came to light,
officers and Government officials returning to their posts, and a few
globe-trotters of leisure. Everybody seemed anxious to pay attention
to the charming Japanese lady; and from such incessant attention it
is difficult to escape within the narrow bounds of ship life. The
only way to keep off the impossibles was to form a bodyguard of the
possibles. The seclusion of the honeymoon paradise had to be opened up
for once in a way.

Of course, there was much talk about the East; but it was a different
point of view, from that of the enthusiasts of Deauville and the
Riviera. These men and women had many of them lived in India, the
Malay States, Japan, or the open ports of China, lived there to earn
their bread and butter, not to dream about the Magic of the Orient.
For such as these the romance had faded. The pages of their busy lives
were written within a mourning border of discontent, of longing for
that home land, to which on the occasion of their rare holidays they
returned so readily, and which seemed to have no particular place or
use for them when they did return. They were members of the British
Dispersion; but their Zion was of more comfort to them as a sweet
memory than as an actual home.

"Yes," they would say about the land of their exile, "it is very
picturesque."

But their faces, lined or pale, their bitterness and their reticence,
told of years of strain, laboriously money-earning, in lands where
relaxations are few and forced, where climatic conditions are adverse,
where fevers lurk, and where the white minority are posted like
soldiers in a lonely fort, ever suspicious, ever on the watch.

       *       *       *       *       *

The most faithful of Asako's bodyguard was a countryman of her own,
Viscount Kamimura, the son of a celebrated Japanese statesman and
diplomat, who, after completing his course at Cambridge, was returning
to his own country for the first time after many years.

He was a shy gentle youth, very quiet and refined, a little
effeminate, even, in his exaggerated gracefulness and in his
meticulous care for his clothes and his person. He avoided all company
except that of the Barringtons, probably because a similarity in
circumstances formed a bond between him and his country-woman.

He had a high, intellectual forehead, the beautiful deep brown eyes of
Asako, curling, sarcastic lips, a nose almost aquiline but starting a
fraction of an inch too low between his eyes. He had read everything,
he remembered everything, and he had played lawn tennis for his
university.

He was returning to Japan to be married. When Geoffrey asked him who
his fiancee was, he replied that he did not know yet, but that his
relatives would tell him as soon as ever he arrived in Japan.

"Haven't you got any say in the matter?" asked the Englishman.

"Oh yes," he answered, "If I actually dislike her, I need not marry
her; but, of course, the choice is limited, so I must try not to be
too hard to please."

Geoffrey thought that it must be because of his extreme aristocracy
that so few maidens in Japan were worthy of his hand. But Asako asked
the question,--

"Why is the choice so small?"

"You see," he said, "there are not many girls in Japan who can speak
both English and French, and as I am going into the Diplomatic Service
and shall leave Japan again shortly, that is an absolute necessity;
besides, she must have a very good degree from her school."

Geoffrey could hardly restrain himself from laughing. This idea of
choosing a wife like a governess for her linguistic accomplishments
seemed to him exceedingly comic.

"You don't mind trusting other people," he said, "to arrange your
marriage for you?"

"Certainly not," said the young Japanese, "they are my own relatives,
and they will do their best for me. They are all older than I am, and
they have had the experience of their own marriages."

"But," said Geoffrey, "when you saw your friends in England choosing
for themselves, and falling in love and marrying for love's sake--?"

"Some of them chose for themselves and married barmaids and divorced
persons, just for the reason that they were in love and uncontrolled.
So they brought shame on their families, and are probably now very
unhappy. I think they would have done better if they had let their
relatives choose for them."

"Yes; but the others who marry girls of their own set?"

"I think their choice is not really free at all. I do not think it is
so much the girl who attracts them. It is the plans and intentions of
those around them which urge them on. It is a kind of mesmerism. The
parents of the young man and the parents of the young girl make the
marriage by force of will. That also is a good way. It is not so very
different from our system in Japan."

"Don't you think that people in England marry because they love each
other?" asked Asako.

"Perhaps so," replied Kamimura, "but in our Japanese language we have
no word which is quite the same as your word Love. So they say we
do not know what this Love is. It may be so, perhaps. Anyhow Mr.
Barrington will not wish to learn Japanese, I think."

Geoffrey liked the young man. He was a good athlete, he was unassuming
and well-bred, he clearly knew the difference between Good and Bad
Form. Geoffrey's chief misgiving with regard to Japan had been a doubt
as to the wisdom of making the acquaintance of his wife's kindred. How
dreadful if they turned out to be a collection of oriental curios with
whom he would not have one idea in common!

The company of this young aristocrat, in no way distinguishable from
an Englishman except for a certain grace and maturity, reassured him.
No doubt his wife would have cousins like this; clean, manly fellows
who would take him shooting and with whom he could enjoy a game of
golf. He thought that Kamimura must be typical of the young Japanese
of the upper classes. He did not realize that he was an official
product, chosen by his Government and carefully moulded and polished,
not to be a Japanese at home, but to be a Japanese abroad, the
qualified representative of a First Class Power.

Kamimura left the boat with them at Colombo and joined them in their
visit to some tea-planting relatives. He was ready to do the same at
Singapore, but he received an urgent cable from Japan recalling him at
once.

"I must not be too late for my own wedding," he said, during their
last lunch together at Raffles's Hotel. "It would be a terrible sin
against the laws of Filial Piety."

"Whatever is that?" asked Asako.

"Dear Mrs. Barrington, are you a daughter of Japan, and have never
heard of the Twenty-four Children?"

"No; who are they?"

"They are model children, the paragons of goodness, celebrated because
of their love for their fathers and mothers. One of them walked miles
and miles every day to get water from a certain spring for his sick
mother; another, when a tiger was going to eat his father, rushed to
the animal and cried, 'No, eat me instead!' Little boys and girls in
Japan are always being told to be like the Twenty-four Children."

"Oh, how I'd hate them!" cried Asako.

"That is because you are a rebellious, individualistic Englishwoman.
You have lost that sense of family union, which makes good Japanese,
brothers and cousins and uncles and aunts, all love each other
publicly, however much they may hate each other in private."

"That is very hypocritical!"

"It is the social law," replied Kamimura. "In Japan the family is the
important thing. You and I are nothing. If you want to get on in the
world you must always be subject to your family. Then you are sure
to get on however stupid you may be. In England you seem to use your
families chiefly to quarrel with."

"I think our relatives ought to be just our best friends," said Asako.

"They are that too in a way," the young man answered. "In Japan it
would be better to be born without hands and feet than to be born
without relatives."




CHAPTER IV

NAGASAKI

  _Hono-bono to
  Akashi no ura no
  Asa-giri ni
  Shima-kakure-yuku
  Fune wo shi zo omou._

  My thoughts are with a boat
  Which travels island-hid
  In the morning-mist
  Of the shore of Akashi
  Dim, dim!


After Hongkong, they let the zone of eternal summer behind them. The
crossing from Shanghai to Japan was rough, and the wind bitter. But on
the first morning in Japanese waters Geoffrey was on deck betimes to
enjoy to the full the excitement of arrival. They were approaching
Nagasaki. It was a misty dawn. The sky was like mother-of-pearl,
and the sea like mica. Abrupt grey islands appeared and disappeared,
phantasmal, like guardian spirits of Japan, representatives of those
myriads of Shinto deities who have the Empire in their keeping.

Then, suddenly from behind the cliff of one of the islands a fishing
boat came gliding with the silent stateliness of a swan. The body of
the boat was low and slender, built of some white, shining wood; from
the middle rose the high sail like a silver tower. It looked like the
soul of that sleeping island setting out upon a dream journey.

The mist was dissolving, slowly revealing more islands and more boats.
Some of them passed quite close to the steamer; and Geoffrey could see
the fishermen, dwarfish figures straining at the oar or squatting at
the bottom of the boat, looking like Nibelungen on the quest for the
Rhinegold. He could hear their strange cries to each other and to the
steamer, harsh like the voice of sea-gulls.

Asako came on deck to join her husband. The thrill of returning to
Japan had scattered her partiality for late sleeping. She was dressed
in a tailor-made coat and skirt of navy-blue serge. Her shoulders were
wrapped in a broad stole of sable. Her head was bare. Perhaps it was
the inherited instinct of generations of Japanese women, who never
cover their heads, which made her dislike hats and avoid wearing them
if possible.

The sun was still covered, but the view was clear as far as the high
mountains on the horizon towards which the ship was ploughing her way.

"Look, Asako, Japan!"

She was not looking at the distance. Her eyes were fixed on an emerald
islet half a mile or less from the steamer's course, a jewel of the
seas. It rose to the height of two hundred feet or so, a conical
knoll, densely wooded. On the summit appeared a scar of rock like a
ruined castle, and, rising from the rock's crest, a single pine-tree.
Its trunk was twisted by all the winds of Heaven. Its long, lean
branches groped the air like the arms of a blinded demon. It seemed to
have an almost human personality an expression of fruitless striving,
pathetic yet somehow sinister--a Prometheus among trees. Geoffrey
followed his wife's gaze to the base of the island where a shoal of
brown rocks trailed out to seawards. In a miniature bay he saw a tiny
beach of golden sand, and, planted in the sand, a red gateway, two
uprights and two lintels, the lower one held between the posts, the
upper one laid across them and protruding on either side. It is
the simplest of architectural designs, but strangely suggestive.
It transformed that wooded island into a dwelling-place. It cast
an enchantment over it, and seemed to explain the meaning of the
pine-tree. The place was holy, an abode of spirits.

Geoffrey had read enough by now to recognize the gateway as a
"_torii_"; a religious symbol in Japan which always announces the
neighbourhood of a shrine. It is a common feature of the country-side,
as familiar as the crucifix in Catholic lands.

But Asako, seeing the beauty of her country for the first time, and
unaware of the dimming cloud of archaeological explanations, clapped
her hands together three times in sheer delight; or was it in
unconscious obedience to the custom of her race which in this way
calls upon its gods? Then with a movement entirely occidental she
threw her arms round her husband's neck, kissing him with all the
devotion of her being.

"Dear old Geoffrey, I love you so," she murmured. Her brown eyes were
full of tears.

       *       *       *       *       *

The steamer passed into a narrow channel, a kind of fiord, with wooded
hills on both sides. The forests were green with spring foliage. Never
had Geoffrey seen such a variety or such density of verdure. Every
tree seemed to be different from its neighbour; and the hillsides were
packed with trees like a crowded audience. Here and there a spray of
mountain cherry-blossom rose among the green like a jet of snow.

At the foot of the woods, by the edge of the calm water, the villages
nestled. Only roofs could be seen, high, brown, thatched roofs with a
line of sword-leaved irises growing along the roof-ridge like a crown.
These native cottages looked like timid animals, cowering in their
forms under the protecting trees. One felt that at any time an
indiscreet hoot of the steamer might send them scuttering back to
the forest depths. There were no signs of life in these submerged
villages, where the fight between the forester's axe and primal
vegetation seemed still undecided. Life was there; but it was hidden
under the luxuriance of the overgrowth, hidden to casual passers-by
like the life of insects. Only by the seaside, where the houses were
clustered together above a seawall of cyclopean stones, and on the
beach, where the long narrow boats, sharp-prowed and piratical, were
drawn up to the shore, the same gnome-like little men, with a generous
display of naked brown limbs, were sawing and hammering and mending
their nets.

The steamer glided up the fiord towards a cloud of black smoke ahead.
Unknown to Geoffrey, it passed the grey Italianate Catholic cathedral,
the shrine of the old Christian faith of Japan planted there by Saint
Francis Xavier four hundred years ago. Anchor was cast off the island
of Deshima, now moored to the mainland, where during the locked
centuries the Dutch merchants had been permitted to remain in
profitable servitude. Deshima has now been swallowed up by the
Japanese town, and its significance has shifted across the bay to
where the smoke and din of the Mitsubishi Dockyard prepare romantic
visitors for the modern industrial life of the new Japan. Night and
day, the furnace fires are roaring; and ten thousand workmen are
busy building ships of war and ships of peace for the Britain of the
Pacific.

The quarantine officers came on board, little, brown men in uniform,
absurdly self-important. Then the ship was besieged by a swarm
of those narrow, primitive boats called _sampan_, which Loti has
described as a kind of barbaric gondola, all jostling each other to
bring merchants of local wares, damascene, tortoise-shell, pottery and
picture post cards aboard the vessel, and to take visitors ashore.

Geoffrey and Asako were among the first to land. The moment of arrival
on Japanese soil brought a pang of disappointment. The sea-front at
Nagasaki seemed very like a street in any starveling European town.
It presented a line of offices and consulates built in Western style,
without distinction and without charm. Customs' officers and policemen
squinted suspiciously at the strangers. A few women, in charge of
children or market-baskets, stared blankly.

"Why, they are wearing kimonos!" exclaimed Asako, "but how dirty and
dusty they are. They look as though they had been sleeping in them!"

The Japanese women, indeed, cling to their national dress. But to
the Barringtons, landing at Nagasaki, they seemed ugly, shapeless and
dingy. Their hair was greasy and unkempt. Their faces were stupid
and staring. Their figures were hidden in the muffle of their dirty
garments. Geoffrey had been told they have baths at least once a day,
but he was inclined to doubt it. Or else, it was because they all
bathed in the same bath and their ablutions were merely an exchange
of grime. But where were those butterfly girls, who dance with fan and
battledore on our cups and saucers?

The rickshaws were a pleasant experience, the one-man perambulators;
and the costume of the rickshaw-runners was delightful, and their
gnarled, indefatigable legs. With their tight trunk-hose of a coarse
dark-blue material and short coat to match like an Eton jacket and
with their large, round mushroom hats, they were like figures from the
crowd of a Flemish Crucifixion.

Behind the Barrington's _sampan_, a large lighter came alongside the
wharf. It was black with coal-dust, and in one corner was heaped
a pile of shallow baskets, such as are used in coaling vessels at
Japanese ports, being slipped from hand to hand in unbroken chain
up the ship's side and down again to the coal barge. The work was
finished. The lighter was empty except for a crowd of coal-stained
coolies which it was bringing back to Nagasaki. These were dressed
like the rickshaw-men. They wore tight trousers, short jackets and
straw sandals. They were sitting, wearied, on the sides of the barge,
wiping black faces with black towels. Their hair was long, lank and
matted. Their hands were bruised and shapeless with the rough toil.

"Poor men," sighed Asako, "they've had hard work!"

The crowd of them passed, peering at the English people and chattering
in high voices. Geoffrey had never seen such queer-looking fellows,
with their long hair, clean-shaven faces, and stumpy bow-legs. One
more disheveled than the others was standing near him with tunic
half-open. It exposed a woman's breast, black, loose and hard like
leather.

"They are women!" he exclaimed, "what an extraordinary thing!"

But the children of Nagasaki--surely there could be no such
disillusionment. They are laughing, happy, many-coloured and
ubiquitous. They roll under the rickshaw wheels. They peep from behind
the goods piled on the floors of the shops, a perpetual menace to
shopkeepers, especially in the china stores, where their bird-like
presence is more dangerous than that of the dreaded bull. They are
blown up and down the temple-steps like fallen petals. They gather
like humming-birds round the itinerant venders of the streets, the old
men who balance on their bare shoulders their whole stock in trade of
sweetmeats, syrups, toys or singing grasshoppers. They are the dolls
of our own childhood, endowed with disconcerting life. Around their
little bodies flames the love of colour of an oriental people, whose
adult taste has been disciplined to sombre browns and greys. Wonderful
motley kimonos they make for their children with flower patterns,
butterfly patterns, toy and fairy-story patterns, printed on
flannelette--or on silk for the little plutocrats--in all colors,
among which reds, oranges, yellows, mauves, blues and greens
predominate.

They invaded the depressing atmosphere of the European-style hotel,
where Geoffrey and Asako were trying to enjoy a tasteless lunch--their
grubby, bare feet pattering on the worn lino.

It pleased him to watch them, playing their game of _Jonkenpan_
with much show of pudgy fingers, and with restrained and fitful
scamperings. He even made a tentative bid for popularity by throwing
copper coins. There was no scramble for this largesse. Gravely and
in turn each child pocketed his penny; but they all regarded Geoffrey
with a wary and suspicious eye. He, too, on closer inspection found
them less angelic than at first sight. The slimy horror of unwiped
noses distressed him, and the significant prevalence of scabby scalps.

       *       *       *       *       *

After their dull lunch in this drab hotel, Geoffrey and his wife
started once more on their voyage of discovery. Nagasaki is a hidden
city; it flows through its narrow valleys like water, and follows
their serpentine meanderings far inland.

They soon left behind the foreign settlement and its nondescript
ugliness to plunge into the labyrinth of little native streets,
wayward and wandering like sheep-tracks, with sudden abrupt hills
and flights of steps which checked the rickshaws' progress. Here, the
houses of the rich people were closely fenced and cunningly hidden;
but the life of poverty and the shopkeepers' domesticity were flowing
over into the street out of the too narrow confines of the boxes which
they called their homes.

With an extra man to push behind, the rickshaws had brought them up a
zigzag hill to a cautious wooden gateway half open in a close fence of
bamboo.

"Tea-house!" said the rickshaw man, stopping and grinning. It was
clearly expected of the foreigners that they should descend and enter.

"Shall we get out and explore, sweetheart?" suggested Geoffrey. They
passed under the low gate, up a pebbled pathway through the sweetest
fairy garden to the entrance of the tea-house, a stage of brown boards
highly polished and never defiled by the contamination of muddy boots.
On the steps of approach a collection of _geta_ (native wooden clogs)
and abominable side-spring shoes told that guests had already arrived.

Within the dark corridors of the house there was an immediate
fluttering as of pigeons. Four or five little women prostrated
themselves before the visitors with a hissing murmur of "_Irasshai_!
(Condescend to come!)."

The Barringtons removed their boots and followed one of these ladies
down a gleaming corridor with another miniature garden in an enclosed
courtyard on one side, and paper _shoji_ and peeping faces on the
other, out across a further garden by a kind of oriental Bridge of
Sighs to a small separate pavilion, which floated on a lake of green
shrubs and pure air, as though moored by the wooden gangway to the
main block of the building.

This summer-house contained a single small room like a very clean box
with wooden frame, opaque paper walls, and pale golden matting. The
only wall which seemed at all substantial presented the appearance of
an alcove. In this niche there hung a long picture of cherry-blossoms
on a mountain side, below which, on a stand of dark sandalwood,
squatted a bronze monkey holding a crystal ball. This was the only
ornament in the room.

Geoffrey and his wife sat down or sprawled on square silk cushions
called _zabuton_. Then the _shoji_ were thrown open; and they looked
down upon Nagasaki.

It was a scene of sheer enchantment. The tea-house was perched on a
cliff which overhung the city. The light pavilion seemed like the
car of some pullman aeroplane hovering over the bay. It was the brief
half-hour of evening, the time of day when the magic of Japan is at
its most powerful. All that was cheap and sordid was shut out by
the bamboo fence and wrapped away in the twilight mists. It was a
half-hour of luminous greyness. The skies were grey and the waters of
the bay and the roofs of the houses. A grey vapour rose from the town;
and a black-grey trail of smoke drifted from the dockyards and from
the steamers in the harbour. The cries and activities of the city
below rose clear and distinct but infinitely remote, as sound of the
world might reach the Gods in Heaven. It was a half-hour of fairyland
when anything might happen.

Two little maids brought tea and sugary cakes, green tea like bitter
hot water, insipid and unsatisfying. It was a shock to see the girls'
faces as they raised the tiny china teacups. Under the glaze of their
powder they were old and wise.

They observed Asako's nationality, and began to speak to her in
Japanese.

"Their politeness is put on to order," thought Geoffrey, "they seem
forward and inquisitive minxes."

But Asako only knew a few set phrases of her native tongue. This
baffled the ladies, one of whom after a whispered consultation and
some giggling behind sleeves, went off to find a friend who would
solve the mystery.

"_Nesan, Nesan_ (elder sister)" she called across the garden.

Strange little dishes were produced on trays of red lacquer, fish
and vegetables of different kinds artistically arranged, but most
unpalatable.

A third _nesan_ appeared. She could speak some English.

"Is _Okusama_ (lady) Japanese?" she began, after she had placed the
tiny square table before Geoffrey, and had performed a prostration.

Geoffrey assented.

Renewed prostration before _okusama_, and murmured greetings in
Japanese.

"But I can't speak Japanese," said Asako laughing. This perplexed the
girl, but her curiosity prompted her.

"_Danna San_ (master) Ingiris'?" she asked, looking at Geoffrey.

"Yes," said Asako. "Do many Englishmen have Japanese wives?"

"Yes, very many," was the unexpected answer. "O Fuji San," she
continued, indicating one of the other maids, "have Ingiris' _danna
San_ very many years ago; very kind _danna san_; give O Fuji plenty
nice kimono; he say, O Fuji very good girl, go to Ingiris' wit him;
O Fuji say, No, cannot go, mother very sick; so _danna san_ go away.
Give O Fuji San very nice finger ring."

She lapsed into vernacular. The other girl showed with feigned
embarrassment a little ring set with glassy sapphires.

"Oh!" said Asako, dimly comprehending.

"All Ingiris' _danna san_ come Nagasaki," the talkative maid went on,
"want Japanese girl. Ingiris' _danna san_ kind man, but too plenty
drink. Japanese _danna san_ not kind, not good. Ingiris' _danna san_
plenty money, plenty. Nagasaki girl very many foreign _danna san.
Rashamen wa Nagasaki meibutsu_ (foreigners' mistresses famous product
of Nagasaki). Ingiris' _danna san_ go away all the time. One year, two
year--then go away to Ingiris' country."

"Then what does the Japanese girl do?" asked Asako.

"Other _danna san_ come," was the laconic reply. "Ingiris' _danna san_
live in Japan, Japanese girl very nice. Ingiris' _danna san_ go away,
no want Japanese girl. Japanese girl no want go away Japan. Japanese
girl go to other country, she feel very sick; heart very lonely, very
sad!"

A weird, unpleasant feeling had stolen into the little room, the
presence of unfamiliar thoughts and of foreign moralities, birds of
unhealth.

The two other girls who could not speak English were posing for
Geoffrey's benefit; one of them reclining against the framework of the
open window with her long kimono sleeves crossed in front of her like
wings, her painted oval face fixed on him in spite of the semblance
of downcast eyes; the other squatting on her heels in a corner of the
room with the same demure expression and with her hands folded in her
lap. Despite the quietness of the poses they were as challenging in
their way as the swinging hips of Piccadilly. It is as true to-day as
it was in Kaempffer's time, the old Dutch traveler of two hundred and
fifty years ago, that every hotel in Japan is a brothel, and every
tea-house and restaurant a house of assignation.

From a wing of the building near by came the twanging of a string,
like a banjo string being tuned in fantastic quarter tones. A few
sharp notes were struck, at random it seemed, followed by a few bars
of a quavering song and then a burst of clownish laughter. Young
bloods of Nagasaki had called in _geisha_ to amuse them at their meal.

"Japanese _geisha_," said the tea-house girl, "if _danna san_ wish to
see _geisha_ dance--?"

"No thank you," said Geoffrey, hurriedly, "Asako darling, it is time
we went home: we want our dinners."




CHAPTER V

CHONKINA

  _Modashi-ite
  Sakashira suru wa
  Sake nomite
  Yei-naki suru ni
  Nao shikazu keri._

  To sit silent
  And look wise
  Is not to be compared with
  Drinking _sake_
  And making a riotous shouting.


As soon as the meal was over, Asako went to bed. She was tired out
by an orgy of sight-seeing and new impressions. Geoffrey said that
he would have a short walk and a smoke before turning in. He took the
road which led towards the harbour of Nagasaki.

  _Chonkina, Chonkina, Chon, Chon, Kina, Kina,
  Yokohama, Nagasaki, Hakodate--Hoi!_

The refrain of an old song was awakened in his mind by the melodious
name of the place.

He descended the hill from the hotel, and crossed a bridge over a
narrow river. The town was full of beauty. The warm light in the
little wooden houses, the creamy light of the paper walls, illuminated
from within, with the black silhouettes of the home groups traced upon
them, the lanterns dancing on the boats in the harbour, the lights on
the larger vessels in stiff patterns like propositions of Euclid, the
lanterns on carts and rickshaws, lanterns like fruit, red, golden and
glowing, and round bubble lamps over each house entrance with Chinese
characters written upon them giving the name of the occupant.

  _Chonkina! Chonkina!_

As though in answer to his incantation, Geoffrey suddenly came upon
Wigram. Wigram had been a fellow-passenger on board the steamer. He
was an old Etonian; and this was really the only bond between the two
men. For Wigram was short, fat and flabby, dull-eyed and pasty-faced.
He spoke with a drawl; he had literary pretensions and he was
travelling for pleasure.

"Hello, Barrington," he said, "you all alone?"

"Yes," answered Geoffrey, "my wife is a bit overtired; she has turned
in."

"So you are making the most of your opportunity, studying night-life,
eh, naughty boy?"

"Not much about, is there?" said Geoffrey, who considered that a "pi
fellow" was Bad Form, and would not be regarded as such even by a
creature whose point of view was as contemptible as that of Wigram.

"Doesn't walk the streets, old man; but it's there all the same. The
men at the club here tell me that Nagasaki is one of the hottest spots
on the face of the globe."

"Seems sleepy enough," answered Geoffrey.

"Oh, here! these are just English warehouses and consulates.
They're always asleep. But you come with me and see them dance the
_Chonkina_."

Geoffrey started at this echo of his own thoughts, but he said,--

"I must be getting back; my wife will be anxious."

"Not yet, not yet. It will be all over in half an hour, and it's worth
seeing. I am just going to the club to find a fellow who said he'd
show me the ropes."

Geoffrey allowed himself to be persuaded. After all he was not
expected home so immediately. It was many years since he had visited
low and disreputable places. They were Bad Form, and had no appeal for
him. But the strangeness of the place attracted him, and a longing for
the first glimpse behind the scenes in this inexplicable new country.

  _Chonkina! Chonkina!_

Why shouldn't he go?

He was introduced to Wigram's friend, Mr. Patterson, a Scotch merchant
of Nagasaki, who lurched out of the club in his habitual Saturday
evening state of mellow inebriation.

They called for three rickshaws, whose runners seemed to know without
instructions whither they had to go.

"Is it far from here?" asked Geoffrey.

"It is not so far," said the Scotchman; "it is most conveniently
situated."

Noiselessly they sped down narrow twisting streets with the same
unfamiliar lights and shadows, the glowing paper walls, and the
luminous globes of the gate lamps.

From the distance came the beat of a drum.

Geoffrey had heard a drum sounded like that before in the Somali
village at Aden, a savage primitive sound with a kind of marching
rhythm, suggestive of the swing of hundreds of black bodies moving to
some obscene festival.

But here, in Japan, such music sounded remote from the civilisation of
the country, from the old as from the new.

"_Chonkina, Chonkina_," it seemed to be beating.

The rickshaws turned into a broader street with houses taller and more
commanding than any seen hitherto. They were built of brown wood like
big Swiss chalets, and were hung with red paper lanterns like huge
ripe cherries.

Another stage-like entrance, more fluttering of women and low
prostrations, a procession along shining corridors and up steep
stairways like companion-ladders, everywhere a heavy smell of cheap
scent and powder, the reek of the brothel.

The three guests were installed, squatting or lounging around a
low table with beer and cakes. There was a chorus of tittering and
squeaking voices in the corridor. The partition slid open, and six
little women came running into the room.

"Patasan San! Patasan San!" they cried, clapping their hands.

Here at last were the butterfly women of the traveller's imagination.
They wore bright kimonos, red and blue, embroidered with gold thread.
Their faces were pale like porcelain with the enamelling effect of the
liquid powder which they use. Their black shiny hair, like liquorice,
was arranged in fantastic volutes, which were adorned with silver
bell-like ornaments and paper flowers. Choking down Geoffrey's
admiration, a cloud of heavy perfume hung around them.

"Good day to you," they squeaked in comical English, "How do you do? I
love you. Please kiss me. Dam! dam!"

Patterson introduced them by name as O Hana San (Miss Flower), O Yuki
San (Miss Snow), O En San (Miss Affinity), O Toshi San (Miss Year), O
Taka San (Miss Tall) and O Koma San (Miss Pony).

One of them, Miss Pony, put her arm around Geoffrey's neck--the little
fingers felt like the touch of insects--and said,--

"My darling, you love me?"

The big Englishman disengaged himself gently. It is Bad Form to be
rough to women, even to Japanese courtesans. He began to be sorry that
he had come.

"I have brought two very dear friends of mine," said Patterson to all
the world, "for pleasure artistic rather than carnal; though perhaps I
can safely prophesy that the pleasure of the senses is the end of
all true art. We have come to see the national dance of Japan, the
Nagasaki reel, the famous _Chonkina_. I myself am familiar with the
dance. On two or three occasions I have performed with credit in these
very halls. But these two gentlemen have come all the way from England
on purpose to see the dance. I therefore request that you will dance
it to-night with care and attention, with force of imagination, with
a sense of pleasurable anticipation, and with humble respect to the
naked truth."

He spoke with the precise eloquence of intoxication, and as he flopped
to the ground again Wigram clapped him on the shoulder with a "Bravo,
old man!"

Geoffrey felt very silent and rather sick.

  _Chonkina! Chonkina!_

The little women made a show of modesty, hiding their faces behind
their long kimono sleeves.

A servant girl pushed open the walls which communicated with the
next room, an exact replica of the one in which they were sitting. An
elderly woman in a sea-grey kimono was squatting there silent, rigid
and dignified. For a moment Geoffrey thought that a mistake had been
made, that this was another guest disturbed in quiet reflection and
about to be justly indignant.

But no, this Roman matron held in her lap the white disc of a
_samisen_, the native banjo, upon which she strummed with a flat white
bone. She was the evening's orchestra, an old _geisha_.

The six little butterflies lined up in front of her and began to
dance, not our Western dance of free limbs, but an Oriental dance
from the hips with posturings of hands and feet. They sang a harsh
faltering song without any apparent relation to the accompaniment
played by that austere dame.

  _Chonkina! Chonkina!_

The six little figures swayed to and fro.

  _Chonkina! Chonkina! Hoi!_

With a sharp cry the song and dance stopped abruptly. The six dancers
stood rigid with hands held out in different attitudes. One of them
had lost the first round and must pay forfeit. Off came the broad
embroidered sash. It was thrown aside, and the raucous singing began
afresh.

_Chonkina! Chonkina! Hoi!_

The same girl lost again; and amid shrill titterings the gorgeous
scarlet kimono fell to the ground. She was left standing in a
pretty blue under-kimono of light silk with a pale pink design of
cherry-blossoms starred all over it.

  _Chonkina! Chonkina!_

Round after round the game was played; and first one girl lost and
then another. Two of them were standing now with the upper part
of their bodies bare. One of them was wearing a kind of white lace
petticoat, stained and sour-looking, wrapped about her hips; the other
wore short flannel drawers, like a man's bathing-pants, coloured in
a Union Jack pattern, some sailor's offering to his _inamorata_. They
were both of them young girls. Their breasts were flat and shapeless.
The yellow skin ended abruptly at the throat and neck with the powder
line. For the neck and face were a glaze of white. The effect of this
break was to make the body look as if it had lost its real head under
the guillotine, and had received an ill-matched substitute from the
surgeon's hands.

  _Chonkina! Chonkina!_

Patterson had drawn nearer to the performers. His red face and his
grim smile were tokens of what he would have described as pleasurable
anticipation. Wigram, too, his flabby visage paler than ever, his
large eyes bulging, and his mouth hanging open, gazed as in a trance.
He had whispered to Geoffrey,--

"I've seen the _danse du ventre_ at Algiers, but this beats anything."

Geoffrey from behind the fumes of the pipe-smoke watched the unreal
phantasmagoria as he might have watched a dream.

  _Chonkina! Chonkina!_

The dance was more expressive now, not of art but of mere animalism.
The bodies shook and squirmed. The faces were screwed up to express an
ecstacy of sensual delight. The little fingers twitched into immodest
gestures.

_Chonkina! Chonkina! Hoi!_

Geoffrey had never gazed on a naked woman except idealised in marble
or on canvas. The secret of Venus had been for him, as for many men,
an inviolate Mecca towards which he worshipped. Glimpses he had seen,
visions of soft curves, mica glistenings of creamy skin, but never the
crude anatomical fact.

An overgrown embryo she seemed, a gawkish ill-moulded thing.

Woman, thought Geoffrey, should be supple and pliant, with a
suggestion of swiftness galvanising the delicacy of the lines.
Atalanta was his ideal woman.

But this creature had apparently no bones or sinews. She looked like
a sawdust dummy. She seemed to have been poured into a bag of brown
tissue. There was no waist line. The chest appeared to fit down upon
the thighs like a lid. The legs hung from the hips like trouser-legs,
and seemed to fit into the feet like poles into their sockets. The
turned-in toes were ridiculous and exasperating. There was no shaping
of breasts, stomach, knees and ankles. There was nothing in this image
of clay to show the loving caress of the Creator's hand. It had been
modelled by a wretched bungler in a moment of inattention.

Yet it stood there, erect and challenging, this miserable human
tadpole, usurping the throne of Lais and crowned with the worship of
such devotees as Patterson and Wigram.

Are all women ugly? The query flashed through Geoffrey's brain. Is
the vision of Aphrodite Anadyomene an artist's lie? Then he thought of
Asako. Stripped of her gauzy nightdresses, was she like this? A shame
on such imagining!

Patterson was hugging a girl on his knee. Wigram had caught hold of
another. Geoffrey said--but nobody heard him,--

"It's getting too hot for me here. I'm going."

So he went.

His little wife was awake, and disposed to be tearful.

"Where have you been?" she asked, "You said you would only be half an
hour."

"I met Wigram," said Geoffrey, "and I went with him to see some
_geisha_ dancing."

"You might have taken me. Was it very pretty?"

"No, it was very ugly; you would not have cared for it at all."

He had a hot bath, before he lay down by her side.




CHAPTER VI

ACROSS JAPAN

  _Momo-shiki no
  Omiya-bito wa
  Okaredo
  Kokoro ni norite
  Omoyuru imo!_

  Though the people of the
  Great City
  With its hundred towers
  Be many,
  Riding on my heart--
  (Only) my beloved Sister!


The traveller in Japan is restricted to a hard-worn road, dictated to
him by Messrs. Thos. Cook and Son, and by the Tourists' Information
Bureau. This _via sacra_ is marked by European-style hotels of varying
quality, by insidious curio-shops, and by native guides, serious and
profane, who classify foreigners under the two headings of Temples and
Tea-houses. The lonely men-travellers are naturally supposed to have
a _penchant_ for the spurious _geisha_, who haunt the native
restaurants; the married couples are taken to the temples, and to
those merchants of antiquities, who offer the highest commission to
the guides. There is always an air of petty conspiracy in the wake of
every foreigner who visits the country. If he is a Japan enthusiast,
he is amused by the naive ways, and accepts the conventional smile as
the reflection of the heart of "the happy, little Japs." If he hates
the country, he takes it for granted that extortion and villainy will
accompany his steps.

Geoffrey and Asako enjoyed immensely their introduction to Japan. The
unpleasant experiences of Nagasaki were soon forgotten after their
arrival at Kyoto, the ancient capital of the Mikado, where the charm
of old Japan still lingers. They were happy, innocent people, devoted
to each other, easily pleased, and having heaps of money to spend.
They were amused with everything, with the people, with the houses,
with the shops, with being stared at, with being cheated, with being
dragged to the ends of the vast city only to see flowerless gardens
and temples in decay.

Asako especially was entranced. The feel of the Japanese silk and the
sight of bright colours and pretty patterns awoke in her a kind of
ancestral memory, the craving of generations of Japanese women. She
bought kimonos by the dozen, and spent hours trying them on amid a
chorus of admiring chambermaids and waitresses, a chorus specially
trained by the hotel management in the difficult art of admiring
foreigners' purchases.

Then to the curio-shops! The antique shops of Kyoto give to the simple
foreigner the impression that he is being received in a private home
by a Japanese gentleman of leisure whose hobby is collecting. The
unsuspecting prey is welcomed with cigarettes and specially honourable
tea, the thick green kind like pea-soup. An autograph book is produced
in which are written the names of rich and distinguished people
who have visited the collection. You are asked to add your own
insignificant signature. A few glazed earthenware pots appear,
Tibetan temple pottery of the Han Period. They are on their way to
the Winckler collection in New York, a trifle of a hundred thousand
dollars.

Having pulverised the will-power of his guest, the merchant of
antiquities hands him over to his myrmidons who conduct him round the
shop--for it is only a shop after all. Taking accurate measurement of
his purse and tastes, they force him to buy what pleases them, just as
a conjurer can force a card upon his audience.

The Barringtons' rooms at the Miyako Hotel soon became like an annex
to the show-rooms in Messrs. Yamanaka's store. Brocades and kimonos
were draped over chairs and bedsteads. Tables were crowded with
porcelain, _cloisonne_ and statues of gods. Lanterns hung from the
roof; and in a corner of the room stood an enormous bowl-shaped bell
as big as a bath, resting on a tripod of red lacquer. When struck
with a thick leather baton like a drum-stick it uttered a deep sob,
a wonderful, round, perfect sound, full of the melancholy of the
wind and the pine-forests, of the austere dignity of a vanishing
civilisation, and the loneliness of the Buddhist Law.

There was a temple on the hill behind the hotel whence such a note
reached the visitors at dawn and again at sunset. The spirit of
everything lovely in the country sang in its tones; and Asako and
Geoffrey had agreed, that, whatever else they might buy or not buy,
they must take an echo of that imprisoned music home with them to
England.

So they bought the cyclopean voice, engraved with cabalistic writing,
which might be, as it professed to be, a temple bell of Yamato over
five hundred years old, or else the last year's product of an Osaka
foundry for antique brass ware. Geoffrey called it "Big Ben."

"What are you going to do with all these things?" he asked his wife.

"Oh, for our home in London," she answered, clapping her hands
and gazing with ecstatic pride at all her treasures. "It will be
wonderful. Oh, Geoffrey, Geoffrey, you are so good to give all this to
me!"

"But it is your own money, little sweetheart!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Never did Asako seem further from her parents' race than during
the first weeks of her sojourn in her native country. She was so
unconscious of her relationship that she liked to play at imitating
native life, as something utterly peculiar and absurd. Meals in
Japanese eating-houses amused her immensely. The squatting on bare
floors, the exaggerated obeisance of the waiting-girls, the queer
food, the clumsy use of chop-sticks, the numbness of her feet after
being sat upon for half an hour, all would set her off in peals of
unchecked laughter, so as to astonish her compatriots who naturally
enough mistook her for one of themselves.

Once, with the aid of the girls of the hotel, she arrayed herself in
the garments of a Japanese lady of position with her hair dressed
in the shiny black helmet-shape, and her waist encased in the broad,
tight _obi_ or sash, which after all was no more uncomfortable than
a corset. Thus attired she came down to dinner one evening, trotting
behind her husband as a well-trained Japanese wife should do. In
foreign dress she appeared _petite_ and exotic, but one would have
hesitated to name the land of her birth. It was a shock to Geoffrey
to see her again in her native costume. In Europe, it had been a
distinction, but here, in Japan, it was like a sudden fading into the
landscape. He had never realised quite how entirely his wife was one
of these people. The short stature and the shuffling gait, the tiny
delicate hands, the grooved slit of the eyelids, and the oval of the
face were pure Japanese. The only incongruous elements were the white
ivory skin which, however, is a beauty not unknown among home-reared
Japanese women also, and, above all, the expression which looked out
of the dancing eyes and the red mouth ripe for kisses, an expression
of freedom, happiness, and natural high spirits, which is not to be
seen in a land where the women are hardly free, never natural, and
seldom happy. The Japanese woman's face develops a compressed look
which leaves the features a mere mask, and acquires very often a
furtive glance, as of a sharp-fanged animal half-tamed by fear,
something weasel-like or vixenish.

Flaunting her native costume, Asako came down to dinner at the Miyako
Hotel, laughing, chattering, and imitating the mincing steps of her
country-women and their exaggerated politeness. Geoffrey tried to play
his part in the little comedy; but his good spirits were forced
and gradually silence fell between them, the silence which falls on
masqueraders in fancy dress, who have tried to play up to the spirit
of their costume, but whose imagination flags. Had Geoffrey been
able to think a little more deeply he would have realized that this
play-acting was a very visible sign of the gulf which yawned between
his wife and the yellow women of Japan. She was acting as a white
woman might have done, certain of the impossibility of confusion. But
Geoffrey for the first time felt his wife's exoticism, not from the
romantic and charming side, but from the ugly, sinister, and--horrible
word--inferior side of it. Had he married a coloured woman? Was he a
squaw's man? A sickening vision of _chonkina_ at Nagasaki rose before
his imagination.

When dinner was over, and after Asako had received the congratulations
of the other guests, she retired upstairs to put on her _neglige_.
Geoffrey liked a cigar after dinner, but Asako objected to the heavy
aroma hanging about her bedroom. They therefore parted generally for
this brief half hour; and afterwards they would read and talk together
in their sitting-room. Like other people, they soon got into the
habit of going to bed early in a country where there were no theatres
playing in a comprehensible tongue, and no supper restaurants to turn
night into day.

Geoffrey lit his cigar and made his way to the smoking-room. Two
elderly men, merchants from Kobe, were already sitting there over
whiskies and sodas, discussing a mutual acquaintance.

"No, I don't see much of him," one of them, an American, was saying,
"nobody does nowadays. But take my word, when he came out here as a
young man he was one of the smartest young fellows in the East."

"Yes, I can quite believe you," said the other, a stolid Englishman
with a briar pipe, "he struck me as an exceptionally well-educated
man."

"He was more than that, I tell you. He was a financial genius. He was
a man with a great future."

"Poor fellow!" said the other. "Well, he has only got himself to
thank."

Geoffrey was not an eavesdropper by nature, but he found himself
getting interested in the fate of this anonymous failure, and wondered
if he was going to hear the cause of the man's downfall.

"When these Japanese women get hold of a man," the American went on,
"they seem to drain the brightness out of him. Why, you have only got
to stroll around to the Kobe Club and look at the faces. You can
tell the ones that have Japanese wives or housekeepers right away.
Something seems to have gone right out of their expression."

"It's worry," said the Englishman. "A fellow marries a Japanese girl,
and he finds he has to keep all her lazy relatives as well; and then a
crowd of half-caste brats come along, and he doesn't know whether they
are his own or not."

"It is more than that," was the emphatic answer. "Men with white wives
have worry enough; and a man can go gay in the tea-houses, and none
the worse. But when once they marry them it is like signing a bond
with the devil. That man's damned."

Geoffrey rose and left the room. He thought on the whole it was better
to withdraw than to hit that harsh-voiced Yankee hard in the eye. He
felt that his wife had been insulted. But the speaker could not
have known by whom he had been overheard. He had merely expressed an
opinion which, as a sudden instinct told Geoffrey, must be generally
prevalent among the white people living in this yellow country. Now
that he came to think of it, he remembered curious glances cast at him
and Asako by foreigners and also, strange to say, by Japanese, glances
half contemptuous. Had he acquired it already, that expression which
marked the faces of the unfortunates at the Kobe Club? He remembered
also tactless remarks on board ship, such as, "Mrs. Barrington
has lived all her life in England; of course, that makes all the
difference."

Geoffrey looked at his reflection in the long mirror in the hall.
There were no signs as yet of premature damnation on the honest,
healthy British face. There were signs, perhaps, of ripened thought
and experience, of less superficial appreciation. The eyes seemed to
have withdrawn deeper into their sockets, like the figurines in toy
barometers when they feel wet weather coming.

He was beginning to appreciate the force of the advice which had urged
him to beware of Japan. Here, in the hotbed of race prejudice, evil
spirits were abroad. It was so different in broad-hearted tolerant
London. Asako was charming and rich. She was received everywhere.
To marry her was no more strange than to marry a French girl or a
Russian. They could have lived peaceably in Europe; and her distant
fatherland would have added a pathetic charm to her personality. But
here in Japan, where between the handful of whites and the myriads of
yellow men stretches a No Man's Land, serrated and desolate, marked
with bloody fights, with suspicions and treacheries, Asako's position
as the wife of a white man and Geoffrey's position as the husband of a
yellow wife were entirely different. The stranger's phrases had summed
up the situation. They were no good, these white men who had pawned
their lives to yellow girls. They were the failures, the _rates_.
Geoffrey had heard of promising young officers in India who had
married native women and who had had to leave the service. He had
done the same. Better go gay in the tea-houses with Wigram. He was the
husband of a coloured woman.

And then the crowd of half-caste brats? In England one hardly ever
thinks of the progeny of mixed races. That bitter word "half-caste" is
a distant echo of sensational novels. Geoffrey had not as yet noticed
the pale handsome children of Eurasia, Nature's latest and most
half-hearted experiment, whose seed, they say, is lost in the third
generation. But he had heard the tone of scorn which flung out the
term; and it suddenly occurred to him that his own children would be
half-castes.

He was walking on the garden terrace overlooking the starry city. He
was thinking with an intensity unfamiliar to him and terrifying, like
a machine which is developing its fullest power, and is shaking a
framework unused to such a strain. He wanted a friend's presence,
a desultory chat with an old pal about people and things which they
shared in common. Thank God, Reggie Forsyth was in Tokyo. He would
leave to-morrow. He must see Reggie, laugh at his queer clever talk
again, relax himself, and feel sane.

He was nervous of meeting his wife, lest her instinct might guess his
thoughts. Yet he must not leave her any longer or his absence would
make her anxious. Not that his love for Asako had been damaged; but
he felt that they were traveling along a narrow path over a bottomless
gulf in an unexplored country.

He returned to the rooms and found her lying disconsolate on a sofa,
wrapped in a flimsy champagne-coloured dressing-gown, one of the
spoils of Paris. Her hair had been rapidly combed out of its formal
native arrangement. It looked draggled and hard as though she had been
bathing. Titine, the French maid, was removing the rejected debris of
kimono and sash.

"Sweetheart, you've been crying," said Geoffrey, kissing her.

"You didn't like me as a Jap, and you've been thinking terrible things
about me. Look at me, and tell me what you have been thinking."

"Little Yum Yum talks great nonsense sometimes. As a matter of fact, I
was thinking of going on to Tokyo to-morrow. I think we've seen about
all there is to be seen here, don't you?"

"Geoffrey, you want to see Reggie Forsyth. You're getting bored and
homesick already."

"No, I'm not. I think it is a ripping country; in fact, I want to see
more of it. What I am wondering is whether we should take Tanaka."

       *       *       *       *       *

This made Asako laugh. Any mention of Tanaka's name acted as a
talisman of mirth. Tanaka was the Japanese guide who had fixed himself
on to their company remora-like, with a fine flair for docile and
profitable travelers.

He was a very small man, small even for a Japanese, but plump
withal. His back view looked like that of a little boy, an illusion
accentuated by the shortness of his coat and his small straw boater
with its colored ribbon. Even when he turned the illusion was not
quite dispelled; for his was a round, ruddy, chubby face with dimples,
a face with big cheeks ripe for smacking, and little sunken pig-like
eyes.

He had stalked the Barringtons during their first excursion on foot
through the ancient city, knowing that sooner or later they would lose
their way. When the opportunity offered itself and he saw them gazing
vaguely round at cross-roads, he bore down upon them, raising his hat
and saying:

"Can I assist you, sir?"

"Yes; would you kindly tell me the way to the Miyako Hotel?" asked
Geoffrey.

"I am myself _en route_," answered Tanaka. "Indeed we meet very _a
propos_."

On the way he had discoursed about all there was to be seen in Kyoto.
Only, visitors must know their way about, or must have the service
of an experienced guide who was _au fait_ and who knew the "open
sesames." He pronounced this phrase "open sessums," and it was not
until late that night that its meaning dawned upon Geoffrey.

Tanaka had a rich collection of foreign and idiomatic phrases, which
he must have learned by heart from a book and with which he adorned
his conversation.

On his own initiative he had appeared next morning to conduct the two
visitors to the Emperor's palace, which he gave them to understand
was open for that day only, and as a special privilege due to Tanaka's
influence. While expatiating on the wonders to be seen, he brushed
Geoffrey's clothes and arranged them with the care of a trained valet.
In the evening, when they returned to the hotel and Asako complained
of pains in her shoulder, Tanaka showed himself to be an adept at
massage.

Next morning he was again at his post; and Geoffrey realized that
another member had been added to his household. He acted as their
_cicerone_ or "siseroan," as he pronounced it, to temple treasuries
and old palace gardens, to curio-shops and to little native
eating-houses. The Barringtons submitted, not because they liked
Tanaka, but because they were good-natured, and rather lost in this
new country. Besides, Tanaka clung like a leech and was useful in many
ways.

Only on Sunday morning it was the hotel boy who brought their early
morning tea. Tanaka was absent. When he made his appearance he wore a
grave expression which hardly suited his round face; and he carried a
large black prayer-book. He explained that he had been to church. He
was a Christian, Greek Orthodox. At least so he said, but afterwards
Geoffrey was inclined to think that this was only one of his
mystifications to gain the sympathy of his victims and to create a
bond between him and them.

His method was one of observation, imitation and concealed
interrogation. The long visits to the Barringtons' rooms, the time
spent in clothes-brushing and in massage, were so much opportunity
gained for inspecting the room and its inhabitants, for gauging
their habits and their income, and for scheming out how to derive the
greatest possible advantage for himself.

The first results of this process were almost unconscious. The wide
collar, in which his face had wobbled Micawber-like, disappeared; and
a small double collar, like the kind Geoffrey wore, took its place.
The garish neck-tie and hatband were replaced by discreet black. He
acquired the attitudes and gestures of his employer in a few days.

As for the cross-examination, it took place in the evening, when
Geoffrey was tired, and Tanaka was taking off his boots.

"Previous to the _fiancee_," Tanaka began, "did Lady Barrington live
long time in Japan?"

He was lavish with titles, considering that money and nobility in such
people must be inseparable; besides, experience had taught him that
the use of such honorifics never came amiss.

"No; she left when she was quite a little baby."

"Ladyship has Japanese name?"

"Asako Fujinami. Do you know the name, Tanaka?"

The Japanese set his head on one side to indicate an attitude of
reflection.

"Tokyo?" he suggested.

"Yes, from Tokyo."

"Does Lordship pay his _devoir_ to relatives of Ladyship?"

"Yes, I suppose so, when we go to Tokyo."

"Ladyship's relatives have noble residence?" asked Tanaka; it was his
way of inquiring if they were rich.

"I really don't know at all," answered Geoffrey.

"Then I will detect for Lordship. It will be better. A man can do
great foolishness if he does not detect."

After this Geoffrey discouraged Tanaka. But Asako thought him a huge
joke. He made himself very useful and agreeable, fetching and carrying
for her, and amusing her with his wonderful English. He almost
succeeded in dislodging Titine from her cares for her mistress's
person. Geoffrey had once objected, on being expelled from his wife's
bedroom during a change of raiment:

"But Tanaka was there. You don't mind him seeing you apparently."

Asako had burst out laughing.

"Oh, he isn't a man. He isn't real at all. He says that I am like a
flower, and that I am very beautiful in '_deshabeel_.'"

"That sounds real enough," grunted Geoffrey, "and very like a man."

Perhaps, innocent as she was, Asako enjoyed playing off Tanaka against
her husband, just as it certainly amused her to watch the jealousy
between Titine and the Japanese. It gave her a pleasant sense of power
to see her big husband look so indignant.

"How old do you think Tanaka is?" he asked her one day.

"Oh, about eighteen or nineteen," she answered. She was not yet used
to the deceptiveness of Japanese appearances.

"He does not look more sometimes," said her husband; "but he has the
ways and the experience of a very old hand. I wouldn't mind betting
you that he is thirty."

"All right," said Asako, "give me the jade Buddha if you are wrong."

"And what will you give me if I am right?" said Geoffrey.

"Kisses," replied