Kakemono

We sat opposite each other on the matting, and she laughed. The polite, audible smile of the Japanese. All around us lay cut branches of fir; and on the long wooden footstool they call a table stood a shallow bronze dish and a wonderful cleft stick of bamboo.

She was a little bent old lady, with the courtly politeness of a thousand Grandisons refined to a subtle essence, and she gave lessons in flower arrangement. The close-cropped grey hair gathered into a slide behind told its own tale of widowhood, and the withered careworn face its story of work and want.

The shōji were shut, and the light through the rice-paper panes sent a warmed white light into the room that knew no colour, a light as though one sat inside a luminous mist, or in the heart of the plum-blossoms. A passionless, lifeless light which was simply light.

And the little old lady laughed again.

“There is much to learn,” I said, stopping to watch her bending the warmed fir branches over the hibachi always to the exact curve, never too near or too far, and mine snapped at the first touch.

She handed me another branch in place of the one I had broken, and watched while I wedged it into the cleft bamboo stick with little chips of wood.

“Very much,” she said. “It takes three years of learning for the pupil and seven for the teacher. And the Ijin San has had four lessons.”

The fifth and last branch being successfully wedged into line, I got on to my knees to admire the effect, while Arabella, from her camp-stool in the corner—she considered it lowering to sit on the floor—bridled.

“Oh, the Japanese,” she said; “but any European could learn in half a dozen lessons.”

The little old lady bowed, letting her forehead almost touch the ground, as she sat on her heels on the kneeling-cushion.

“The august stranger——” she began, when I interrupted.

The contemplation of my five branches of fir, two curving to the left and three to the right, had not filled me with any satisfaction. They wobbled. All their curves were wrong, and the five stems, instead of being hidden one behind the other, so that the illusion of a single branch growing out of the bronze dish was created and kept, were all distinctly and decidedly visible.

“It doesn’t look a bit right,” I said; “but what is the matter?”

The task of sticking five branches of fir, already bent to the prescribed curves for me, into a cleft stick had not seemed difficult, especially with three lessons behind me, and I had worked hard and been very confident that morning.

With a thousand apologies the little old lady pulled the bronze dish towards her, while Arabella cleared her throat.

“In Europe,” she said, in the tone of voice adapted to a kindergarten class—her Japanese voice, “we do not learn such a simple thing, we do it naturally. Every European woman can arrange flowers, and they are flowers” (with a glance at the fir branches in the little old lady’s hand—she was busy correcting) “not trees.”

The little old lady was putting back the five fir branches into the cleft stick with the deftest of deft fingers. Arabella unclasped the brooch at her neck and pulled out what she called a “nosegay.” A bamboo vase, just a piece of the stem hollowed out, in which the fir had come from the florist that morning, lay on the floor. She picked it up.

“It should be of glass,” she said forgivingly, “but I will make it do.”

And then with her own hand she proceeded to arrange the Yokohama nosegay in the slender bamboo stem. There was a bit of spiræa, one fat red rose, and some miscellaneous leaves, which Arabella referred to grandiloquently as “green.” These she crammed tightly into the bamboo stem, and then placed it, with a “who-shall-deny-me” air, upon the table.

I looked at it. No, it was not a good specimen even of Western flower arrangement, but in how many buttonholes, on how many tables, had I seen something like it.

Flower arrangement is taught in the schools in Japan, and every Japanese girl learns. If she did not, she would not “arrange” anymore than we should paint or play.

The little old lady had finished, and she pushed the bronze dish along the table beside the bamboo vase. Then, with many compliments and much bowing, she thanked the Ijin San for her “august kindness” and her “honourable condescension.” And the smooth phrases ran on and on, while I sat back on my heels and looked.

East and West, they stood there before me. At the best, what we aimed at was a scheme of colour, and at our worst no scheme at all. And what they strove after was line, whether in fir branches or lily leaves, in plum-blossom or iris flowers, line, and a coherent whole. Each branch, each twig, each flower, nay, each curve of the branch, each petal of the flower, each leaf of the twig, were parts, essential parts of the whole; for in Japan they draw with flowers and fir branches as we only draw for “design.” And line is beyond colour as sculpture is beyond painting.

The sun through the walls of rice-paned shōji spread a warmed white light through the room, a limpid, liquid light in which there was no shadow.

The little old lady had been busy tidying up. The room was one clear sheet of pale yellow matting. On the low empty tokonoma stood the bronze dish and its pure line drawing in fir. Arabella was offering the bamboo vase and its mixed contents “as a model,” and the little old lady bowed to the ground.

Once more I looked at the bronze vase and the pure outlines of the fir branches, at the bare room perfectly proportioned, at the rice-paned shōji, and the snowflake whiteness of that light which knew no colour and no shadow struck on my consciousness.

I think I understood. Colour, as colour, in that luminous, shadowless room, whose beauty was its line and its proportion, would have been not colour but a blot. Outside the rice-paned shōji lay life and colour enough. Here was but light and line.

Arabella was removing the white night-socks from her boots, she always refused to take them off, on the veranda. The little old lady, down on her knees with her forehead to the ground, was saying sweet Japanese sayonara.

I looked back one last time—and Arabella’s nosegay vanished.