My Japanese Wife/Chapter 7
CHAPTER VII.
Next morning I awoke early, roused by the twittering of grass sparrows and the weakened croak of a frog, hoarse from its vocal efforts of the night.
It was New Year’s day, and the sun was streaming through the open windows. Mousmé had already crept from her white mattress beneath the smoke-blue mosquito curtains, and was doubtless sunning herself, after a hasty toilet, in the wonderful garden which we had fashioned out of the rocks and red-brown soil.
I stretched sleepily, and wondered vaguely what they were doing in England, and whether my estimable, though trying, sister Lou (fashionable to her finger-tips) had cajoled my unfortunate brother-in-law into changing her last year’s set of furs for “something a little more the thing, don’t you know, Stanmere.”
Mousmé requires no furs. Her wants are few. A piece of silk with wonderful patterns over it—birds which seem to fly, irises whose vivid tints almost make unaccustomed eyes ache, and chrysanthemums which one could swear nod upon their slender, almost leafless stalks—which she fashions into a robe of delight. A few jade and lacquer pins for her wonderful jet-black hair. Some new tabi. Long white digitated stockings reaching above her dimpled knees. A sash to make her girl acquaintances and married brother’s wife jealous. And so you have the costume in which she is prepared to receive her visitors and to glide with a soothing shish-shish over the white matting of the floor and through the comically narrow passages.
The mail arrived yesterday week, and down at Kotmasu’s office I found Lou’s usual parcel of New Year’s gifts. For me there were several new novels—the pictures in which will cause Mousmé to wonder and open her almond eyes wide, with the little trick of quivering the lids which she has—some papers, tobacco—five pounds of it in a sealed tin (a good soul is Stanmere)—a shaving tidy worked by Irene in some mysterious stitch which seems to have come into fashion since I scorned crewel-work anti-macassars with lace frills that hung on the back buttons of one’s coat, turning one at afternoon tea into an object of interest and amusement.
For Mousmé there was a Paris hat (Lou will never, I fear, realise that Paris fashions have as yet little interest for Nagasaki belles), in which Mousmé’s piquant face would be smothered and turned to no account, a silk tea-gown which she will wear with the dignity becoming five feet one inch and a half of really married Japanese womanhood.
There was also something more.
My present, which I have had sent out from the Compagnie des Fondants Parisiens—a huge box of the best confectionery that money could buy. I knew that Mousmé would like this better than anything else, and that for the time the native teriyaki and such-like sugar-coated joys would be nowhere.
All the presents are in the little room I use as a study—a room into which Mousmé creeps with awe. It is (to her untutored mind) so full of books and mysterious writings.
I had risen and was gazing out over the harbour, which lay below me veiled in a gauze-like, opalescent haze, when the farther paper-panelled door was slid softly back in its groove, and Mousmé entered.
A quaint little figure with the flush of lawn transferred to her porcelain cheeks and eyes bright with the early morning air of the scented garden; her elaborate coiffure, with its many pins, a striking contrast to the négligée of her plum-coloured kimono with its sprays of bamboo in gold thread. Against her bare little throat and dimpled shoulders she pressed a wealth of iris and lotus blooms and tender green shoots of the slenderest bamboo, her face peeping out elfish and smiling from the midst.
“These are for you, Cy-reel,” she said, laughing and casting the brilliant blossoms on to the floor in a patch of sunlight at my feet. “Now den what have you for me?”
It is difficult to resist Mousmé when she pulls one’s face down to her own smiling one, and throws slender but wonderfully tenacious little arms round one’s neck.
Mousmé, since she married, has lost some of the shyness for the “velly much rich Englishman” who had so strange a fancy as to marry her right away, and in its place has come the knowledge of certain privileges of her sex (for she knows little as yet of the “advanced” woman), and she exacts them with a pretty persistence which I find charming.
We went along the passage to the room in which are all the presents. They have been taken out of their case, and piled with masculine breadth of effect upon two low lacquer-and-bamboo settees in a corner near one of the windows.
“Oh! Oh!” exclaimed Mousmé, and then she fell down before this wonderful collection of gifts, her tiny hands fluttering over them like those of a child uncertain which thing to touch first.
Irene’s shaving tidy, the tin of tobacco sent by Stanmere, Lou’s gift of books—all these things are brushed aside, and the wonderful pale blue tea-gown is at last taken up. It is absurdly long for her, of course, and as she slipped into it she laughed softly at the comical figure she presented.
“It is velly nice, I like it. But it must be cut off. You cannot come near me with all this on the floor.”
She glided once or twice across the room, like a big-winged moth, with the soft sound of silk frou-frou on the matting, and then the gown was laid aside, so that she might more easily find the other presents.
Then the box of fondants was discovered. What rapture! Smiles stole over her face. Her little fingers trembled when she at last made up her mind to undo the satin ribbon, which, crossing from corner to corner, is tied in a great bow in the centre of the lid. There are wonderful sweets of all sorts, things which Mousmé almost fears to taste, and which when once tasted encourage her to further depredations and experiments.
“Mousmé, you’ll be ill.”
“No, Cy-reel, not nearly so sweet and ill-producing as teriyaki.”
I laughed at the gentle sophistry and suggested that we should go to breakfast.
After the meal a huge bullock-cart came along the road which runs at the foot of our sloping garden. It is laden with New Year’s gifts to tempt those who have put off the inevitable spending of sen and yen till the last possible moment.
Mousmé drew me along the garden path, past the iris pond, in the shade of which gold-fish are keeping New Year’s day on a fly-and-mosquito diet, to the side of the cart. The proprietors in new suits are explaining the merits of their wares, which are cheapened enormously as at Western “sale” times. A light air stirred the paper lanterns with which the cart was decked.
One represented a huge gold-fish with a gold and vermilion body and fins boldly sketched in black. It took Mousmé’s fancy. We purchased it, and earned the absurdly exaggerated thanks of the smiling vendors, knowing the while that we did not require it, and that it would be placed with a score of others, hung on their slight bamboo rods, in the cupboard at the end of the passage.
Some night, perhaps, unless another lantern comes more easily to hand, we might take it out to guide us on our way down to the chaya at which the best geishas dance.
During the whole of the morning we were expectant. Before sunset many of Mousmé’s numerous relations will have called to wish us New Year joys: and my respected, if too effusive, mother-in-law will have once more asked me if I am satisfied with her daughter.
She even yet seems to think that her daughter is on approval, and liable at any time to be returned with liquidated damages in the form of an extra handsome kimono from Nara-Ya’s famous store on the Bund. Everyone calls on everyone, and after mid-day we are not long left without visitors.
Kotmasu turned up in good time. He brought Mousmé the tiny dog she has been longing for. A charming present, which she will almost want to wear round her neck with a chain, lest it be lost.
It was only when our little home almost trembled and our garden seemed to swarm with the incursion of Mousmé’s relatives that I realised how throughly I was married. By the time the sun had commenced its downward flight into the sea behind the hills, many had arrived, and little moon-faced Aki had taken the usual and seemingly inevitable plunge into the water-lily pond in search of the sprites who are supposed to dwell therein.
These obsequious relatives by marriage amuse me immensely. They all take so much au sérieux. But how truly polite they all are. Even the sampanman (a cousin of whom Mousmé is not quite sure) is a polished gentleman, and the new suit with which he has managed to start the year, with the manners thrown in, gave him quite a distinguished air. I noticed that the box of sweets was reserved by Mousmé for those who were drinking tea, surrounded by many plates and cups—the favoured few, mostly girl friends.
If only I might have believed the charming prevarications of my relatives, how beautiful everything belonging to me must have been.
At length the last of them disappeared down the road. And the paper lanterns, whose dull white surfaces challenge the moon swinging in the sky above the amethyst hills, swung round the corner. Mousmé waved her hand sympathetically, and then we sat down together on the veranda to watch the last hours of a New Year’s Day glide into the æons of the past. ****** One day is so very much like another to me in this strange land, where I have the lightest of business duties to perform, few friends other than Kotmasu, and no great desire to gain any more, though I find the natives I know vastly more interesting than the few English who are settled more or less permanently in Nagasaki for business or other purposes.
Everything has a certain charm—Mousmé always—but four long years have robbed my surroundings of that subtlest of all interests, novelty. I am eager to test my experiment, which is answering here so admirably, with a new environment.
“Mousmé in Bond Street.” Kotmasu’s phrase haunts me with a sinister purpose, but I am not to be daunted easily, for I have my own opinions. Have I not? I ask myself.
I remember the Frenchman who, with some delicacy, sums up the question of marriage in every clime where any ceremony is attached to the rite: “Given a woman and one possesses the possibility of great happiness—or its exact antithesis,” and I am thankful that my experiment so far has resulted well.
Mousmé is neither the serpent nor the eel of another French writer’s experience, but is always fresh, always charming. She is a graduate in the art of pleasing. She knows nothing further of astronomy than to suspect that the stars are really big diamonds, nor of mathematics than what generally enables her to make a good bargain for an obi, dress or hairpin. Hers are entirely applied mathematics, and of the simplest kind. All this ignorance is very stupid, no doubt, to you. I can well imagine the smile of the Girton girl or “superior person” which will reward my confession of Mousmé’s ignorance, but then you are at a disadvantage—in short, you do not know Mousmé as I do. She has lately taken to writing me love-letters whilst I am away down in the town, and when she is tired of trying to read what is printed underneath the pictures in the papers and magazines—queer narrow little strips of letters, folded ever so many times, which she places in her prettiest envelopes, and lays upon my writing-desk; then hides behind a paper screen, or in the next room, to watch me unobserved whilst I read them.
Of course, she could tell me all that they contain, and often does; but Mousmé is quite a child in some things—the blending of childishness with womanhood, which is one of her most delightful traits.
There are such quaint turns of expression in these rice-paper billets-doux, which by turns bring smiles and tears into my eyes, such naïve confessions, such strange lapses into her limited vocabulary of English words.
To-day there is one of those notes on my writing-table, in a shrimp-pink envelope, on which is depicted a dainty little geisha dancing in one corner. There is a rather strong air—I cannot call it a wind, or even breeze—stirring; and Mousmé, fearful lest the treasury of her love should be blown away, has weighed it down with the bronze frog I use for a paper-weight, which she made me buy as an ornament (!) for my table the other day.
I take the little letter up, of course, with the knowledge that Mousmé’s eye is upon me from some near retreat, from which she can steal forth silently to kiss me, English fashion; or startle me with some sudden noise, in imitation of the mice which scamper about in the basement at night, or with a mimicry of the strange han! han! of the vultures which whirl, screaming hoarsely and as if in complaint, over the water of the harbour below.
Mousmé comes out softly from her hiding-place behind the turquoise-blue paper screen in the corner, unaware that two tell-tale glasses, her big one (which she soon made me purchase for her) and my little one, have from their juxtaposition long ago betrayed to me the secret of her whereabouts.
Two soft white arms, bare to the elbows, encircle my neck suddenly from behind; a pretty, piquant face appears over my left shoulder, and—well, after a time, when we stand up and look at each other, there is a peal of gay, spontaneous laughter. And, behold! there is a tell-tale patch of white upon my cheek and coat where her face has rested.
It is several days since we have been anywhere—that is, further afield than a flying visit to my mother-in-law down the hill—and to-night we are going to the fête at the great temple away up the hillside. I have been to such before, but Mousmé is crazy to go with her real husband; and as there is certainly no valid objection to urge against her desire, we are going.
Mousmé puts the little shrimp-coloured love-letter in a box on top of the numerous others she has written me during our three months of married life, and then we sit down to a dinner of the usual perplexing dishes.
We talk gaily enough in Japanese, Mousmé describing to me all the delights she is anticipating from the proposed excursion, and telling me all that has occurred during my two hours’ absence.
What a charming little vis-a-vis she proves as we, seated on our squares of spotless matting, pretend to make a good meal off impossible dishes, as to the constituents of which, even now, after some years of experience, I am frequently in mysterious doubt! Oka, our cook, is of an inventive turn of mind, and to-day he serves on the tiny blue plates wee potatoes à la marrons glacés, and cherries in vinegar! But Mousmé pronounces them a success, and insists on leaning across the elaborate square of magenta silk worked with white cranes fishing, which she has instituted as a tribute to European ideas of a table-cloth, to put the larger of the cherries in my mouth on the end of a chopstick. All this is very frivolous, doubtless; but very charming. To be anything but gay with such make-believe surroundings, and Mousmé sitting opposite playful and smiling, would be out of place. I assert this to myself whenever the thought of Lou crosses my mind. I am compelled to do so to lay the ghost of Lou’s outraged sense of propriety, for, truth to tell, she is very proper over some things, a somewhat hide-bound devotee of society etiquette with the responsibilities of a rapidly up-growing daughter.
What a child Mousmé is! And yet there is an indefinable charm inseparable from womanhood about her. She was pouting just now because the camellia she had stuck in the front of her gown had fallen in a shower of scarlet petals into a tiny cup of tea on her knees. Now she is smiling again, and giving herself a lesson in English.
“Cy-reel! Cy-reel!” She always seems to practise this first; and then, “I luv yew. I luv yew velly much.” This over and over again, till we both burst out laughing, and the scene ends in the usual way.
At present our life is a dainty comédie à deux, and is nothing approaching the farce with its underlying tragic note which timorous Kotmasu feared and predicted.
Soon after sunset we start out—Mousmé and I—to make our way to the temple. The moon swims up rapidly into the cloud-clear vault of heaven, and floods our scented garden with a pure silver radiance. We have our paper lanterns all the same, although in competition with the strong white moonbeams they look almost trumpery.
Our garden, with its narrow paths and tangled vegetation, is full of exquisite perfumes released by the blossoming flowers, scents wafted under one’s nostrils by the faintest breath of air, which causes the full-blown tea-roses to shiver and then shatter in a hail of falling petals.
As we turn the corner of the path near the largest of our several fountains, we look back (as we always do) at our home. The door-panels of the rooms leading on to the verandah are open, and I can see right into our bed-chamber. On its bracket a little lamp is burning, and near it Mousmé has placed a tiny image of Buddha—an ivory-god with a fixed smile. She does not pray to it now, however. I am vaguely conscious that I have ousted the ivory Buddha from its temple. Why Mousmé keeps it there I have been as yet unable to discover. How strange it seems to leave the whole side of one’s house open after dark! Ere we step out on to the road through the bamboo wicket with its quaintly chased brass hinges, I take one more look back, and see Oka’s wife with her funny little squat figure pass along the verandah on her way to tidy the rooms.
Mousmé is charmingly dressed to-night in a peach-coloured silk gown, so stiff and rich, and an amber-yellow sash. Her hair is done into a marvellous butterfly, and her head is full of half a score of the most handsome of her many pins. The moonlight gives a silver sheen to her ebon locks; and did I not know how black they are, I might have a chill come to my heart because of Mousmé’s getting grey.
We make our way as rapidly as we can down into the town.
Long before we arrive at the commencement of the town proper we are made aware that the fête is in full swing by the sounds of gaiety, the blaze of lanterns which is reflected above the town as if there were a conflagration, and the softened, confused roar of the thronging multitudes in the streets.
We reach the end of the street at last, and Mousmé is almost torn from my arm by the crowd by which we are immediately absorbed.
Every one is gay and good-humoured. I tread upon some one’s heels, but he only smiles, and assures me that my “ honourable feet” have not hurt his humble heel. My toes are trodden on in turn, Mousmé laughs, and even I, the injured party, do not remonstrate. Indeed, I almost say, “Gomen navai,” as though I were the offender and do murmur politely—“It is no matter”—that is all I reply to the polite speech with which the offender asks pardon.
Mousmé is used to this, and she pilots me amid this bewildering blaze of ambulatory lanterns, swaying recklessly on the ends of their quivering sticks.
The moving crowds of women and girls diffuse a subtle perfume from the flowers they wear in their dresses and hair. Mousmés in the brilliant colours of their gayest holiday attire jostle one another good-humouredly—laughing, thoughtless little souls. The men are seemingly suffering from a bad attack of “European fever,” as is indicated by the frequent presence of the top-bat or “bowler” above their amiable though unbeautiful faces, and the occasional presence of trousers beneath their skirt-like robes.
Alas! just as we near the temple, the pressure of the throng drives us into the proximity of my mother-in-law, and little Aki, who is carrying high above his queer shaven head, with its one tuft of hair or rather fringe—which is like nothing so much as the traditional chimney-sweep’s circular broom—a lantern, like the banner in “Excelsior,” “with a strange device”—a most quaintly hideous imp.
Mother-in-law is too busy protecting one of my “handsome presents,” a ruby-coloured silken obi, from contamination with the crowd, to notice us. But I quickly perceive that Aki’s narrow slots of eyes have spied us out, for the imp-like lantern sways violently upon its stick as he pushes his way through the dense crowd towards us.
We are so hedged in that escape is impossible even if we wished; but Mousmé has a penchant for this queer little brother with his intelligent monkey-face and ever-present smile.
She, too, has caught sight of the struggling Aki, who at times seems swallowed up in the crowd, as though never to reappear. But he does. And we can see him working an eel-like course towards the fluttering banner under which he doubtless noticed we were standing.
He reaches us at last, and advertises the fact by unconsciously swinging his imp lantern into my face.
Mousmé bursts out laughing, and so do I—merriment is so infectious; and in a moment the people near us are laughing too.
Aki is delighted, and seizes hold of a hand of mine and one of Mousmé’s, and we advance along the street a little further.
The shops we pass are simply blazing with lights. They have stall-like extensions, encroaching upon the roadway, all of them piled up with astonishing sweetmeats of brilliant hues, toys, flowers, and hideously grotesque masks.
Aki is so attracted by the latter that we make scarcely any progress. Mousmé, who is getting impatient, makes a brilliant suggestion.
“Cy-reel, buy Aki a mask. He will never cease gazing at them or come along if you don’t. And we shall never reach the temple. No one can see my obi and dress here.”
I laugh quietly to myself at this last remark. The woman had popped out unwittingly.
I buy my little brother-in-law a most monstrous head. He is in raptures, and Mousmé and I are in convulsions of laughter at the hideous god into which little Aki is at once transformed. We get on famously now, till his acquisitive eyes light upon a pile of crystal trumpets.
“Ah!” exclaims Mousmé, as she sees him pause, “he must have one.”
It is obvious that queer little Aki’s heart is set upon possessing one of these weirdly articulate instruments, so another quarter of a yen changes hands, and Aki adds his quota to the unearthly, gobbling sounds which dozens of these strange instruments produce, blown by other equally lusty-lunged boys.
The houses we pass by are all thrown open, and decorated exquisitely with flowers and foliage. It is a scene of fairy-like beauty, and Mousmé at my side, upon whom I have to look down to admire, is a fairy.
She is getting tired; Aki is dragging on her arm, and I am glad when the climb up is done, and we are at last at the bottom of the first flight of the temple steps.
Below us once more, as from our verandah (only from a different and almost opposite point) we see the town and the land-locked bay flooded in a silver haze of moonlight, which fails, however, to make the crimson and golden reflection from the thousands of lanterns less apparent.
The scene is like nothing that can be imagined in beauty, and all around us appears to be enveloped in a veil of impalpable light.
We are close to the portico of the temple, and we pass underneath it and enter the courtyard, carried onward by the pressure of the multitude from behind.
We pass two enormous white-and-blue porcelain lanterns with encircling serpents of mythological type, and then we are in fairyland again.
Mousmé heaves a little sigh of delight; her colour is deepened by the crimson of excitement, and her eyes are dancing like fire-flies. Aki is lost, and we forget all about him. He will be all right. There are scores of other children straying about, and no one seems to take any notice. Besides, they mostly wear masks, and blow intermittently upon crystal horns, the noise of which reminds me of the irate gobble-gobble of turkeys engaged in a farmyard fracas.
“Cy-reel, is England like this?” Mousmé asks in an excited whisper.
“No,” I am forced to admit, though foreseeing the inevitable rejoinder.
“Then I don’t think I shall like England,” says Mousmé the child.
“We shall see.”
We make our way to the terrace, bordered by tea-houses, now thronged by the beauties and golden youths of Nagasaki and the country round. At every turn we seem to meet some acquaintance of Mousmé’s, who keeps up a continuous series of bows and nods and smiles.
The grove of giant camellias, camphor-wood trees, and cryptomerias stretch out like a vast roof, the camellias covered with a wealth of blood-red blossoms which, falling in continuous showers in the vibrating air, form a crimson carpet under the feet. Even the dark recesses are luminous with the flood of light which streams from the lanterns and brilliantly illuminated interiors of the tea-houses. We find seats at last.
In an instant a mousmé with huge pins in her hair, a humble smile, and gaily rouged and whitened cheeks, brings us tiny cups of tea.
Beyond and below us we can hear noises which tell of the presence of side-shows, wrestlers, mountebanks; and the roar of approving audiences makes Mousmé hasten to drink her tea and eat her beans in sugar with the greatest possible speed.
When she has finished, we make our way along a terrace and take up our position to form a part of the audience outside a miniature theatre.
There is not much to see. What there is would scarcely amuse any one less unsophisticated in the Thespian art than the Japanese. It is something like a shadow=show. Only the horrible puppets which appear and go through almost incomprehensible antics are realities, which, in truly terrifying masks, cause Mousmé what are known as delightful “creeps,” and send her hand clutching at my arm. The noises from an orchestra of four or five which accompany the doings of the characters, some of which are a mixture of man and beast, ghoul-like and given to sudden and unlooked-for appearances and disappearances, are weird and disquieting; of harmony the musicians know nothing. Their colour tones are all blues, greens, grays, and bilious yellows; their merits, that they are in accord with the impressions of the puppets.
We remain watching these human puppets for some time, surrounded by a dense crowd craning their necks, and on tip-toe as each new shadow appears upon the scene. Some of the antics of these shadow-like forms are so monstrous that I begin to think that Mousmé is getting really frightened, and so I propose moving on to where some clever tumblers, contortionists and conjurers are to be seen.
“No,” says Mousmé, “let us go home.”
Then, seeing I do not quite understand her desire, she explains with charming naïveté that she is afraid of bad dreams.
How queer, little Mousmé! and how childlike, to be sure!
Mousmé’s words have made me notice that the crowd is lessening in density, and the lanterns are going out. Or is it they are paling before the coming dawn?
I look into the face of Mousmé, and then into the faces of the people near us. Yes, that is it. The moon is gone down into the sea, and the sun will be climbing up the first steps of another day’s journey ere we arrive home.
We leave the terrace, with its lingering crowds of tired-faced holiday-makers, and fading light of lanterns and tea-houses, and by a short cut gain a mountain-path leading close home.
The sound of the trumpets is less and less distinct, and that of the ever-chirping cicalas more so, as we wend our way—Mousmé and I—along the narrow, rough, unpaved path in the rapidly growing dawn of a Japanese morning.
Below us to the left lies the town as yet indistinct in the slowly increasing light, a mysterious mass of shadows and projections which mark the places of streets and roofs of houses. Here and there twinkle yellowish red points of light which grow dimmer each moment in the quickening dawn. The harbour stretches a mist-obscured expanse, with gaps here and there like chrysoprases laid in cotton wool. Soon the shipping will become visible, and the mist roll off the face of the tranquil water, like a gauze curtain lifted by unseen hands.
The path runs between fields of flowers, and is edged with dewy grass. The perfume of the blossoms and the keen freshness of the morning air arouse Mousmé’s almost slumbering senses. Through the indescribable fragrance and glamour of an Eastern dawn we wend our way homewards slowly and with tired feet.
The women, in blue cotton garments, are already coming up to work in the fields. Good-looking children accompanying them chase each other across the dew-spangled grass, trampling under foot flowers which would have graced a palace.
At last we have walked up the little garden path, slippery now with the morning exhalations. Indoors all are asleep. Everywhere is quiet.
But no matter. When Mousmé has drowsily mounted the verandah steps we have only to enter our little house, which looks so lonely and mysterious at this early hour, by pushing aside one of those sliding paper panels; to cross the creaking floor covered with spotlessly clean matting; and then fall asleep in two minutes on the soft, mosquito-guarded mattress, lulled, if we need a lullaby, by Oka’s muffled snores down below.