My Japanese Wife/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX.
Mousmé is better.
At last, after weary and anxious days of waiting and watching, the crisis is past. From that mysterious land, whose borders so often touch ours in sleep and illness, in which Mousmé had almost set foot, my little wife has returned. A frail ghost of her former bright self. One who looks as though she had seen visions.
She seems more fairy-like than ever, sitting out under the verandah, wrapped up in an elaborate dressing-gown of silver-grey silk with a delicate rose-pink lining. She doesn't look a whit older—Japanese women never appear so till they are quite old—only more like some toy woman taken bodily from off a screen or jar dec decorated by an artist drawing his inspiration from models of the highest types.
There seems something almost unreal in the slight figure in its quaint Eastern dress, and the dainty ways that are returning to her one by one with the strength which comes back so slowly.
Oka’s wife is delighted. She is very fond of the little mistress, who is so gay and childlike and amiable. I shall be sorry when the time comes for us to leave old Oka, with his ugly, amiable, yellow face, and his wife, who is, as are many of the lower-class women, really more than passably good-looking, though verging upon forty.
We sit out almost all day long; and when I am obliged to leave Mousmé to attend to business in the town, Oka’s wife sits within call, and Mousmé looks at the pictures in the illustrated papers and magazines Lou has from time to time sent me; or pores over a tattered copy of a rudimentary English spelling-book and grammar combined, which Chen Yo, the publisher of the principal paper, put aside for me as a great curiosity which he had bought one day.
Mousmé is learning English well. Her accent is still peculiar, of course, though her vocabulary is greatly extended. I talk to her as much as I can, for soon English will be the only language she will hear.
These are ever-to-be-remembered days, spent in my Japanese home overlooking the wonderful garden, full of brilliance of flower, earth, life and sky. I smoke, and Mousmé plays her guitar; and she sings in a voice into which love and patience have translated greater harmony and sweetness than any other woman’s voice that I have heard during the last four years—
“What shall I sing to thee, my love?
In the garden where the moonbeams play,
And pipe the nightingale and dove,
And plash the fountain’s silver spray.
“What shall I bring to thee, my own?
Visions of heaven’s mansions fair;
Never had king a truer throne
Than my heart’s casket rich and rare.”
“Sing on, little Mousmé; there are other verses of your little love-song,” I say.
But she is tired, and, unconsciously like a European prima donna, only sings the last two lines over again—
“Never had king a truer throne
Than my heart's casket rich and rare.”
“True, Mousmé, true,” I say, half to myself, as the song loses itself in the air. But she catches the words, and smiles.
The wet season is coming on, alas! before I can leave, and our evenings beneath the verandah will be less frequent. It is not nearly so pleasant indoors, but the damp air is bad for Mousmé. So we play Japanese draughts, and talk of England.
Sometimes Kotmasu comes in. He is convinced at last of the bona-fides of my marriage, and is as profuse in his apologies for ever having doubted the success of my experiment, as he was with his lugubrious predictions that it would never succeed.
We are always glad to see him; for since Mousmé’s illness I have been into the tea-houses, and even the town itself, very little. We hear gossip from my queer mother-in-law, but it is usually only a chronique scandaleuse of the doings of the geishas, of her friends, and last, though by no means least, of her enemies, half of whom I do not even know by name.
Kotmasu, on the other hand, has always some scrap of more or less reliable European news, which, if it does nothing else, serves as a peg on which to hang a reminiscence, or an echo to awaken old memories of Western men and things.
The evenings we spend together are far from being uninteresting; and Mousmé, who has picked up the art of conversation wonderfully, is delighted to intrude her quaint ideas upon us. She is burning with curiosity concerning the strange country called England, which Kotmasu, willing enough to shine even in the eyes of a married woman, and she my wife, pretends he knows so well.
He is really very funny in his descriptions sometimes. In a sense they are fairly correct; but they are, just like all Japanese pictures, lacking in the most elementary perspective. It is not because his perceptive faculties are lacking, but only that they follow the national groove, the worship of the minute to the exclusion of broader effects.
Mousmé, no doubt with a desire to be in the possession of two opinions, addresses a multitude of questions to him when, as is the case to-night, he is spending the evening with us.
“What do the women wear? How do they dress? Are their obis as handsome as mine?” and so on.
Kotmasu endeavors to describe the attire of my fellow-countrymen, blundering magnificently over its hidden intricacies.
“It is dull, very dull indeed,” he explains, with an apologetic glance in my direction, as if fearful that I should seek to upset his statement. “There are no colours worn—at least,” he hastens to add, with another glance over in my direction through the tiny cloud of bluish-grey smoke his absurd tobacco-pipe permits him to eject, “not colours like ours. Not like you are wearing, Mousmé.”
I laugh to myself, partially at the perplexed expression on Mousmé’s face, and partially at the idea of her promenading in England in all the glory of a canary-coloured obi, plum-coloured gown embroidered in gold thread, and a bifurcated garment of ivory satin.
“The women wear no obis,” continues Kotmasu, complacently.
“No obis!” ejaculates Mousmé, evidently incredulous.
“No. Sometimes the children do.”
“It is velly stlange,” says Mousmé, “and they not look velly large here. See!” she continues, placing her tiny hands as though to span her waist. “What do they wear, then?”
Kotmasu is launched forthwith into a veritable catalogue, the garments comprised in which must be individually explained for Mousmé’s enlightenment. Kotmasu, plunging innocently into the sea of impropriety, at last succeeds in satisfying her curiosity.
As we rise and step out upon the verandah to get a breath of cooler air, she comes close to me, and taking my hand in her pretty I-wish-to-be-protected way, whispers in Japanese, “How strange it will be! Cy-reel, I am a little frightened; I feel like the other night when I was awoke by the nidzoumi scampering across the floor, and squeak, squeaking in the walls.”
Mousmé is like her Western sisters in her fear of mice.
“But I shall be there, Mousmé,” I reply, as she squeezes my hand.
“Yes, Cy-reel;” then with a coquettish smile, which I can see ere we pass out into the gloom of the verandah, “perhaps, perhaps it may be all right.”
It had been raining. Such torrents of rain! Kotmasu had come up to see us through it all. A queer figure in an out-of-date English mackintosh, the rubber as well as the style of which, he had admitted under pressure of my chaff, had perished, and a wonderful umbrella-like hat of huge diameter.
Down all the mountain-paths, and the steep roads leading into the town, the miniature torrents ran, as if they must sweep away the very foundations of the frail, queer-looking houses.
The harbour was blotted out, the town obscured by the vast grey masses of cloud, which, topping the hills they hid, seemed to fall down their sides into the hollow of the town.
Mousmé and I, till Kotmasu came, had watched the scene from the verandah, waiting for the rifts in the watery veil which, sure to come sooner or later, would give us exquisite peeps of indescribable loveliness.
Now all three of us are standing there in all the silver glory of Japanese moonlight.
Kotmasu even is silent, and makes no further attempt to explain English ways and customs to Mousmé.
The hillside, with its drenched foliage and grassy slopes, is like a sheet of frosted silver. In the foreground lies our garden set thick with Nature’s flashing, gem-like rain-drops. The harbour can be seen again, as usual, an immense black pearl of irregular shape, with here and there a streak of moonlight pencilled on its tranquil surface. The cemeteries and tea-fields stretched below us to the right and left are but darker oxidised silver; the temples and tea-houses but embossed figures.
Down quite below us is the still darker patch of colouring, immense, far-spreading, which marks the town; the lights and the gleam of lanterns look in the damp air like angry eyes seen in tears.
Few sounds reach us, and even the cicala’s chirp is far less noisy than usual. Mousmé still has hold of my hand, and I can see her face glancing upward now and then.
We might have remained there on the verandah with the light of the room behind us streaming out, a warm yellow patch, for another hour or two, so impressive was the view, and the silence which all three of us seemed so reluctant to break. But suddenly we are startled by the Boom! Boom—m—m! of the immense gong belonging to the Shinto monastery far below us down the mountain side. Such a noise!—awe-inspiring, terrific (if there be tone colours, then red, purple and orange), invading every hillside cranny, seeming positively to engulf us in its ever-widening air circles of sound.
“It has spoiled all,” whispers Mousmé, heaving a sigh.
“Yes, little Mousmé. See, it has even frightened the moonbeams.”
A dense cloud drags its edge across the face of the moon, and now all—except the lights of the town and the few twinkling, feeble lamps of the ships out in the harbour, which appear brighter suddenly for lack of their celestial rival—is dark.
Kotmasu knocks the ashes out of his tiny pipe bowl with a sharp, metallic tap upon the bamboo verandah rail, and says:
“There will be another storm soon. I must be going.”
He says good-night somewhat reluctantly after all; and when we have watched him go away down the path, over the edges of which our poor rain-beaten tea-roses are straggling, with his big hat, paper umbrella on which a grinning and intelligent-looking red dragon is fearlessly daubed, and an orange paper lantern with bars and lozenges of vermilion, which the rising wind threatens every moment to overturn or extinguish, we go in.
Oka’s wife is playing her samisen in the basement, its twanging strains ascending to us through the thin floor. She is singing now in a shrill, squeaky voice, perhaps to amuse Oka, or to lull one of the numerous little Okas to sleep. The song goes on to some accompaniment which is too irregular to be anything save an improvisation, all the time Mousmé is taking a few of the most valuable and elaborate pins out of her hair, preparatory to sleep. My toilet is a simple one compared to that of Mousmé, which indeed is so elaborate that I have frequently caught myself idly wondering why she ever gets up or goes to bed to go through such a process. There are her garments to be carefully stowed away in her little cupboards, curiously contrived behind the panelling. The proper folding of her obi is in itself a matter of some considerable importance, to judge from the serious, rapt expression of her face. Then there are the wonderful pins with which her pretty head, set so well on her sloping shoulders, is adorned.
There is no light to put out, because I always keep the lamp with its glowworm flame burning throughout the night. It permits, for one thing, Mousmé properly to arrange her head in the little hollow of her camphor-wood pillow; for another, it allows me to watch her fall asleep, and the antics of the moths outside our slate-blue gauze mosquito curtain when I cannot sleep myself.
To-night, however, I am lulled to rest by the sheer monotony of Oka’s wife’s song; and the last thing I remember is the twang, twing, twang of her samisen, which is quite loud now, I have my ear so close to the floor.