Kimono

CHAPTER XV

EURASIA

  Mono-sugo ya
  Ara omoshiro no
  Kaeri-bana.

  Queer—
  Yes, but attractive
  Are the flowers which bloom out of season.

Although he felt a decreasing interest in the Japanese people, Geoffrey was enjoying his stay in Tokyo. He was tired of traveling, and was glad to settle down in the semblance of a home life.

He was very keen on his tennis. It was also a great pleasure to see so much of Reggie Forsyth. Besides, he was conscious of the mission assigned to him by Lady Cynthia Cairns to save his friend from the dangerous connection with Yaé Smith.

Reggie and he had been at Eton together. Geoffrey, four years the senior, a member of "Pop," and an athlete of many colours, found himself one day the object of an almost idolatrous worship on the part of a skinny little being, discreditably clever at Latin verses, and given over to the degrading habit of solitary piano practicing on half-holidays. He was embarrassed but touched by a devotion which was quite incomprehensible to him; and he encouraged it furtively. When Geoffrey left Eton the friends did not see each other again for some years, though they watched each other's careers from a distance, mutually appreciative. Their next meeting took place in Lady Everington's drawing-room, where Barrington had already heard fair ladies praising the gifts and graces of the young diplomat. He heard him play the piano; and he also heard the appreciation of discerning judgment. He heard him talking with arabesque agility. It was Geoffrey's turn to feel on the wrong side of a vast superiority, and in his turn he repaid the old debt of admiration; generosity filled the gulf and the two became firm friends. Reggie's intelligence flicked the inertia of Geoffrey's mind, quickened his powers of observation, and developed his sense of interest in the world around him. Geoffrey's prudence and stolidity had more than once saved the young man from the brink of sentimental precipices.

For Reggie's unquestionable musical talent found its nourishment in love affairs dangerously unsophisticated. He refused to consider marriage with any of the sweet young things, who would gladly have risked his lukewarm interest for the chance of becoming an Ambassador's wife. He equally avoided pawning his youth to any of the maturer married ladies, whose status and character, together with those of their husbands, license them to practice as certificated Egerias. His dangerous penchant was for highly spiced adventuresses, and for pastoral amourettes, wistful and obscure. But he never gave away his heart; he lent it out at interest. He received it again intact, with the profit of his musical inspiration. Thus his liaison with Véronique Gerson produced the publication of Les demi-jours, a series of musical poems which placed him at once in the forefront of young composers; but it also alarmed the Foreign Office, which was paternally interested in Reggie's career. This brought about his banishment to Japan. The Attente d'hiver, now famous, is his candid musical confession that the coma inflicted upon him by Véronique's unconcern was merely the drowsiness of the waiting earth before the New Year brought back the old story.

Reggie would never be attracted to native women; and he had not the dry inquisitiveness of his predecessor, Aubrey Laking, which might induce him to buy and keep a woman for whom he felt no affection. The love which can exchange no thoughts in speech was altogether too crude for him. It was his emotions, rather than his senses, which were always craving for amorous excitement. His frail body claimed merely its right to follow their lead, as a little boat follows the strong wind which fills its sails. But ever since he had loved Geoffrey Barrington at Eton it was a necessity for his nature to love some one; and as the haze of his young conceptions cleared, that some one became necessarily a woman.

He soon recognized the wisdom of the Foreign Office in choosing Japan. It was a starvation diet which had been prescribed for him. So he settled down to his memories and to L'attente d'hiver, thinking that it would be two long years or more before his Spring blossomed again.

* * * * *

Then he heard the story of the duel fought for Yaé Smith by two young English officers, both of them her lovers, so people said, and the vaguer tale of a fiancé's suicide. Some weeks later, he met her for the first time at a dance. She was the only woman present in Japanese dress, and Reggie thought at once of Asako Barrington. How wise of these small women to wear the kimono which drapes so gracefully their stumpy figures. He danced with her, his right hand lodged somewhere in the folds of the huge bow with the embroidered peacock, which covered her back. Under this stiff brocade he could feel no sensation of a living body. She seemed to have no bones in her, and she was as light as a feather. It was then that he imagined her as Lilith, the snake-girl. She danced with ease, so much better than he, that at the end of a series of cannons she suggested that they might sit out the dance. She guided him into the garden, and they took possession of a rustic seat. In the ballroom she had seemed timid, and had spoken in undertones only; but in this shadowy tête-à-tête beneath the stars, she began to talk frankly about her own life.

She told him about her one visit to England with her father; how she had loved the country, and how dull it was for her here in Japan. She asked him about his music. She would so like to hear him play. There was an old piano at her home. She did not think he would like it very much—indeed, Reggie was already shuddering in anticipation—or else? Would she come to tea with him at the Embassy? That would be nice! She could bring her mother or one of her brothers? She would rather come with a girl friend. Very well, to-morrow?

On the morrow she came.

Reggie hated playing in public. He said that it was like stripping naked before a multitude, or like having to read one's own love letters aloud in a divorce court. But there is nothing more soothing than to play to one attentive listener, especially if that listener be feminine and if the interest shown be that personal interest, which with so many women takes the place of true appreciation, and which looks over the art to the artist.

Yaé came with the girl friend, a lean and skinny half-caste girl like a gipsy, whom Yaé patronized. She came once again with the girl friend; and then she came alone.

Reggie was relieved, and said so. Yaé laughed and replied:

"But I brought her for your own sake; I always go everywhere by myself."

"Then please don't take me into consideration ever again," answered
Reggie.

So those afternoons began which so soon darkened into evenings, while Reggie sat at the piano playing his thoughts aloud, and the girl lay on the sofa or squatted on the big cushion by the fire, with cigarettes within reach and a glass of liqueur, wrapped in an atmosphere of laziness and well-being such as she had never known before. Then Reggie would stop playing. He would sit down beside her, or he would take her on his knee; and they would talk.

He talked as poets talk, weaving stories out of nothing, finding laughter and tears in what she would have passed by unnoticed. She talked to him about herself, about the daily doings of her home, its sadness and isolation since her father died. He had been the playfellow of her childhood. He had never grudged his time or his money for her amusement. She had been brought up like a little princess. She had been utterly spoiled. He had transferred to her precocious mind his love of excitement, his inquisitiveness, his courage and his lack of scruple; and then, when she was sixteen, he had died, leaving as his last command to the Japanese wife who would obey him in death as she had obeyed him living, the strict injunction that Yaé was to have her own way always and in everything.

He left a respectable fortune, a Japanese widow and two worthless sons.

Poor Yaé! Surrounded by the friends and amusements of an English girl's life, the qualities of her happy disposition might have borne their natural fruit. But at her father's death she found herself isolated, without friends and without amusements. She found herself marooned on the island of Eurasia, a flat and barren land of narrow confines and stunted vegetation. The Japanese have no use for the half-castes; and the Europeans look down upon them. They dwell apart in a limbo of which Baroness Miyazaki is the acknowledged queen.

Baroness Miyazaki is a stupendous old lady, whose figure might be drawn from some eighteenth-century comedy. Her late husband—and gossip says that she was his landlady during a period of study in England—held a high position in the Imperial Court. His wife, by a pomposity of manner and an assumption of superior knowledge, succeeded, where no other white woman has succeeded, in acquiring the respect and intimacy of the great ladies of Japan. She has inculcated the accents of Pentonville, with its aitches dropped and recovered again, among the high Japanese aristocracy.

But first her husband died; and then the old Imperial Court of the Emperor Meiji passed away. So Baroness Miyazaki had to retire from the society of princesses. She passed not without dignity, like an old monarch en disponibilité, to the vacant throne of the Eurasian limbo, where her rule is undisputed.

Every Friday afternoon you may see her presiding over her little court in the Miyazaki mansion, with its mixture of tinsel and dust. The Bourbonian features, the lofty white wig, the elephantine form, the rustling taffeta, and the ebony stick with its ivory handle, leads one's thoughts backwards to the days of Richardson and Sterne.

But her loyal subjects who surround her—it is impossible to place them. They are poor, they are untidy, they are restless. Their black hair is straggling, their brown eyes are soft, their clothes are desperately European, but ill-fitting and tired. They chatter together ceaselessly and rapidly like starlings, with curious inflections in their English speech, and phrases snatched up from the vernacular. They are forever glancing and whispering, bursting at times into wild peals of laughter which lack the authentic ring of gladness. They are a people of shadows blown by the harsh winds of destiny across the face of a land where they can find no permanent resting place. They are the children of Eurasia, the unhappiest people on earth.

It was among these people that Yaé's lot was cast. She stepped into an immediate ascendancy over them, thanks to her beauty, her personality and, above all, to her money. Baroness Miyazaki saw at once that she had a rival in Eurasia. She hated her, but waited calmly for the opportunity to assist in her inevitable collapse, a woman of wide experience watching the antics of a girl innocent and giddy, the Baroness playing the part of Elizabeth of England to Yaé's Mary Queen of Scots.

Meanwhile, Yaé was learning what the Eurasian girls were whispering about so continually—love affairs, intrigues with secretaries of South American legations, secret engagements, disguised messages.

This seed fell upon soil well-prepared. Her father had been a reprobate till the day of his death, when he had sent for his favourite Japanese girl to come and massage the pain out of his wasted body. Her brothers had one staple topic of conversation which they did not hesitate to discuss before their sister—geisha, assignation houses, and the licensed quarters. Yaé's mind was formed to the idea that for grown-up people there is one absorbing distraction, which is to be found in the company of the opposite sex.

There was no talk in the Smith's home of the romance of marriage, of the love of parents and children, which might have turned this precocious preoccupation in a healthy direction. The talk was of women all the time, of women as instruments of pleasure. Nor could Mrs. Smith, the Japanese mother, guide her daughter's steps. She was a creature of duty, dry-featured and self-effaced. She did her utmost for her children's physical wants, she nursed them devotedly in sickness, she attended to their clothes and to their comforts. But she did not attempt to influence their moral ideas. She had given up any hope of understanding her husband. She schooled herself to accept everything without surprise. Poor man! He was a foreigner and had a fox (i.e. he was possessed); and unfortunately his children had inherited this incorrigible animal.

To please her daughter she opened up her house for hospitality with unseemly promptitude after her husband's death. The Smiths gave frequent dances, well-attended by young people of the Tokyo foreign community. At the first of these series, Yaé listened to the passionate pleadings of a young man called Hoskin, a clerk in an English firm. On the second opportunity she became engaged to him. On the third, she was struck with admiration and awe by a South American diplomat with the green ribbon of a Bolivian order tied across his false shirt front. Don Quebrado d'Acunha was a practiced hand at seduction and Yaé became one of his victims soon after her seventeenth birthday, and just ten days before her admirer sailed away to rejoin his legitimate spouse in Guayaquil. The engagement with Hoskin still lingered on; but the young man, who adored her was haggard and pale. Yaé had a new follower, a teacher of English in a Japanese school, who recited beautifully and wrote poetry about her.

Then Baroness Miyazaki judged that her time was ripe. She summoned young Hoskin into her dowager presence, and, with a manner heavily maternal, she warned him against the lightness of his fiancée. When he refused to believe evil of her she produced a pathetic letter full of half-confessions, which the girl herself had written to her in a moment of expansion. A week later the young man's body was washed ashore near Yokohama.

Yaé was sorry to hear of the accident; but she had long ceased to be interested in Hoskin, the reticence of whose passion had seemed like a touch of ice to her fevered nerves. But this was Baroness Miyazaki's opportunity to discredit Yaé, to crush her rival out of serious competition, and to degrade her to the demi-monde. It was done promptly and ruthlessly; for the Baroness's gossip carried weight throughout the diplomatic, professional and missionary circles, even where her person was held in ridicule. The facts of Hoskin's suicide became known. Nice women dropped Yaé entirely; and bad men ran after her with redoubled zest. Yaé did not realize her ostracism.

The Smith's dances next winter became so many competitions for the daughter's corruption, and were rendered brilliant by the presence of several of the young officers attached to the British Embassy, who made the running, and finally monopolized the prize.

Next year the Smiths acquired a motor-car which soon became Yaé's special perquisite. She would disappear for whole days and nights. None of her family could restrain her. Her answer to all remonstrances was:

"You do what you want; I do what I want."

That summer two English officers whom she especially favoured fought a duel with pistols—for her beauty or for her honour. The exact motive remained unknown. One was seriously wounded; and both of them had to leave the country.

Yaé was grieved by this sudden loss of both her lovers. It left her in a condition of double widowhood from which she was most anxious to escape. But now she was becoming more fastidious. The school teachers and the dagos fascinated her no longer. Her soldier friends had introduced her into Embassy circles, and she wished to remain there. She fixed on Aubrey Laking for her next attempt, but from him she received her first rebuff. Having lured him into a tête-à-tête, as her method was, she asked him for counsel in the conduct of her life.

"If I were you," he said dryly, "I should go to Paris or New York. You will find much more scope there."

Fortunately fate soon exchanged Aubrey Laking for Reggie Forsyth. He was just what suited her—for a time. But a certain impersonality in his admiration, his fits of reverie, the ascendancy of music over his mind, made her come to regret her more masculine lovers. And it was just at this moment of dissatisfaction that she first saw Geoffrey Barrington, and thought how lovely he would look in his uniform. From that moment desire entered her heart. Not that she wanted to lose Reggie; the peace and harmony of his surroundings soothed her like a warm and scented bath. But she wanted both. She had had two before, and had found them complimentary to one another and agreeable to her. She wanted to sit on Geoffrey's knee and to feel his strong arms round her. But she must not be too sudden in her advances, or she would lose him as she had lost Laking.

It is easy to condemn Yaé as a bad girl, a born cocotte. Yet such a judgment would not be entirely equitable. She was a laughter-loving little creature, a child of the sun. She never sought to do harm to anybody. Rather was she over-amiable. She wished above all to make her men friends happy and to be pleasing in their eyes. She was never swayed by mercenary motives. She was to be won by admiration, by good looks, and by personal distinction, but never by money. If she tired of her lovers somewhat rapidly, it was as a child tires of a game or of a book, and leaves it forgotten to start another.

She was a child with bad habits, rather than a mature sinner. It never occurred to her that, because Geoffrey Harrington was married, he at least ought to be immune from her attack. In her dreams of an earthly paradise there was no marrying or giving in marriage, only the sweet mingling of breath, the quickening of the heart-beats like the pulsation of her beloved motor-car, the sound as of violin arpeggios rising higher and ever higher, the pause of the ecstatic moment when the sense of time is lost—and then the return to earth on lazy languorous wings like a sea-gull floating motionless on a shoreward breeze. Such was Yaé's ideal of Love and of Life too. It is not for us to condemn Yaé, but rather should we censure the blasphemy of mixed marriages which has brought into existence these thistledown children of a realm which has no kings or priests or laws or Parliaments or duty or tradition or hope for the future, which has not even an acre of dry ground for its heritage or any concrete symbol of its soul—the Cimmerian land of Eurasia.

Reggie Forsyth understood the pathos of the girl's position; and being a rebel and an anarchist at heart, he readily condoned the faults which she confided to him frankly. Gradually Pity, most dangerous of all counsellors, revealed her to him as a girl romantically unfortunate, who never had a fair chance in life, who had been the sport of bad men and fools, who needed only a measure of true friendship and affection for the natural sunshine of her disposition to scatter the rank vapours of her soul's night. What Reggie grasped only in that one enlightened moment when he had christened her Lamia, was the tragic fact that she had no soul.

CHAPTER XVI

THE GREAT BUDDHA

  Tsuki-yo yoshi
  Tachitsu itsu netsu
  Mitsu-no-hama.

  The sea-shore of Mitsu!
  Standing, sitting or lying
  down,
  How lovely is the moonlight
  night!

Before the iris had quite faded, and before the azaleas of Hibiya were set ablaze—in Japan they count the months by the blossoming of the flowers—Reggie Forsyth had deserted Tokyo for the joys of sea bathing at Kamakura. He attended at the Embassy for office hours during the morning, but returned to the seaside directly after lunch. This departure disarranged Geoffrey's scheme for his friend's salvation; for he was not prepared to go the length of sacrificing his daily game of tennis.

"What do you want to leave us for?" he remonstrated.

"The bathing," said Reggie, "is heavenly. Besides, next month I have to go into villegiatura with my chief. I must prepare myself for the strain with prayer and fasting. But why don't you come down and join us?"

"Is there any tennis?" asked Geoffrey.

"There is a court, a grass court with holes in it; but I've never seen anybody playing."

"Then what is there to do?"

"Oh, bathing and sleeping and digging in the sand and looking at temples and bathing again; and next week there is a dance."

"Well, we might come down for that if her Ladyship agrees. How is
Lamia?"

"Don't call her that, please. She has got a soul after all. But it is rather a disobedient one. It runs away like a little dog, and goes rabbit-hunting for days on end. She is in great form. We motor in the moonlight."

"Then I think it is quite time I did come," said Geoffrey.

So the Harringtons arrived in their sumptuous car on the afternoon before the dance of which Reggie Forsyth had spoken.

On the beach they found him in a blue bathing-costume sitting under an enormous paper umbrella with Miss Smith and the gipsy half-caste girl. Yaé wore a cotton kimono of blue and white, and she looked like a figurine from a Nanking vase.

"Geoffrey," said the young diplomat, "come into the sea at once. You look thoroughly dirty. Do you like sea-bathing, Mrs. Harrington?"

"I have only paddled," said Asako, "when I was a little girl."

Geoffrey could not resist the temptation of the blue water and the lazy curling waves. In a few minutes the two men were walking down to the sea's edge, Geoffrey laughing at Reggie's chatter. His arms were akimbo, with hands on the hips, hips which looked like the boles of a mighty oak-tree. He touched the ground with the elasticity of Mercury; he pushed through the air with the shoulders of Hercules. The line of his back was pliant as a steel blade. In his hair the sun's reflection shone like wires of gold. The Gods were come down in the semblance of men.

Yaé did not repress a sharp intake of her breath; and she squeezed the hand of the gipsy girl as if pain had gripped her.

"How big your husband is!" she said to Asako. "What a splendid man!"

Asako thought of her husband as "dear old Geoffrey." She never criticized his points; nor did she think that Yaé's admiration was in very good taste. However, she accepted it as a clumsy compliment from an uneducated girl who knew no better. The gipsy companion watched with a peculiar smile. She understood the range of Yaé's admiration.

"Isn't it a pity they have to wear bathing dress?" Miss Smith went on.
"It's so ugly. Look at the Japanese."

Farther along the beach some Japanese men were bathing. They threw their clothes down on the sand and ran into the water with nothing on their bodies except a strip of white cotton knotted round the loins. They dashed into the sea with their arms lifted above their head, shouting wildly like savage devotees calling upon their gods. The sea sparkled like silver round their tawny skin. Their torsos were well formed and hardy; their dwarfed and ill-shaped legs were hidden by the waves. Certainly they presented an artistic contrast with the sodden blue of the foreigners' bathing suits. But Asako, brought up to the strict ideals of convent modesty, said:

"I think it's disgusting; the police ought to stop those people bathing with no clothes on."

The dust and sun of the motor ride, the constant anxiety lest they might run over some doddering old woman or some heedless child, had given her a headache. As soon as Geoffrey returned from his dip, she announced that she would go back to her room.

As the headache continued, she abandoned the idea of dancing. She would go to bed, and listen to the music in the distance. Geoffrey wished to stay with her, but she would not hear of it. She knew that her husband was fond of dancing; she thought that the change and the brightness would be good for him.

"Don't flirt with Yaé Smith," she smiled, as he gave her the last kiss, "or Reggie will be jealous."

At first Geoffrey was bored. He did not know many of the dancers, business people from Yokohama, most of them, or strangers stopping at the hotel. Their appearance depressed him. The women had hard faces, the lustre was gone from their hair, they wore ill-fitting dresses without style or charm. The men were gross, heavy-limbed and plethoric. The music was appalling. It was produced out of a piano, a cello, and a violin driven by three Japanese who cared nothing for time or tune. Each dance, evidently, was timed to last ten minutes. At the end of the ten minutes the music stopped without finishing the phrase or even the bar; and the movement of the dancers was jerked into stability.

Reggie entered the room with Yaé Smith. His manner was unusually excited and elate.

"Hello, Geoffrey, enjoying yourself?"

"No," said Geoffrey, "my wife has got a headache; and that music is simply awful."

"Come and have a drink," proposed Reggie.

He took them aside into the bar and ordered champagne.

"This is to drink our own healths," he announced, "and many years of happiness to all of us. It is also, Geoffrey, to drive away your English spleen, and to make you into an agreeable grass-widower into whose hands I may commend this young lady, because you can dance and I cannot. My evening is complete. This is my Nunc Dimittis."

He led them back to the ballroom. Then, with a low bow and a flourish of an imaginary cocked-hat, he disappeared.

Geoffrey and Yaé danced together. Then they sat out a dance; and then they danced again. Yaé was tiny, but she danced well; and Geoffrey was used to a small partner. For Yaé it was sheer delight to feel the size and strength of this giant man bending over her like a sheltering tree; and then to be lifted almost in his arms and to float on tiptoe over the floor with the delightful airiness of dreams.

What strange orgies our dances are! To the critical mind what a strange contradiction to our sheepish passion-hiding conventions! A survival of the corroboree, of the immolation of the tribal virgins, a ritual handed down from darkest antiquity like the cult of the Christmas Tree and the Easter Egg; only their significance is lost, while that of the dance is transparently evident.

Maidens as chaste as Artemis, wives as loyal as Lucretia pass into the arms of men who are scarcely known to them with touchings of hands and legs, with crossings of breath, to the sound of music aphrodisiac or fescennine.

The Japanese consider, not unreasonably, that our dancing is disgusting.

A nice girl no doubt, and a nice man too, thinks of a dance as a graceful exercise or as a game like tennis or hockey. But Yaé was not a nice girl; and when the music stopped with its hideous abruptness, it awoke her from a kind of trance in which she had been lost to all sensations except the grip of Geoffrey's hand and arm, the stooping of his shadow above her, and the tingling of her own desire.

Geoffrey left his partner at the end of their second dance. He went upstairs to see his wife. He found her sleeping peacefully; so he returned to the ballroom again. He looked in at the bar, and drank another glass of champagne. He was beginning to enjoy himself.

He could not find Yaé, so he danced with the gipsy girl, who had a stride like a kangaroo. Then Yaé reappeared. They had two more dances together, and another glass of champagne. The night was fine. There was a bright moonlight. Geoffrey remarked that it was jolly hot for dancing. Yaé suggested a stroll along the sea-shore; and in a few minutes they were standing together on the beach.

"Oh! Look at the bonfires," cried Yaé.

A few hundred yards down the sea-front, where the black shadows of the native houses overhung the beach, the lighted windows gleamed softly like flakes of mica. The fishermen were burning seaweed and jetsam for ashes which would be used as fertilizer. Tongues of fire were flickering skywards. It was a blue night. The sky was deep blue, and the sea an oily greenish blue. Blue flames of salt danced and vanished over the blazing heaps. The savage figures squatting round the fires were dressed in tunics of dark blue cloth. Their legs were bare. Their healthy faces lit up by the blaze were the color of ripe apricots. Their attitudes and movements were those of apes. The elder men were chattering together; the younger ones were gazing into the fire with an expression of healthy stupor. A boat was coming in from the sea. A ruby light hung at the prow. It was rowed by four men standing and yulohing, two in the stern and two at the bow. They were intoning a rhythmic chant to which their bodies moved. The boat was slim and pointed; and the rowers looked like Vikings.

The shadows cast by the moonlight were inky black, the shadows of the beaked ships, the shadows of the savage huts, of the ape-like men, of the huge round fish-baskets like immense amphorae.

Far out from land, where the wide floating nets were spread, lights were scattered like constellations. The foreland was clearly visible, with the high woods which clothed its summit. But the farther end of the beach faded into an uneven string of lights, soft and spectral as will-o'-the-wisps. Warmth rose from the sleeping earth; and a breeze blew in from the sea, making a strange metallic rustling, which to Japanese ears is the sweetest natural music, in the gaunt sloping pine-trees, whose height in the semi-darkness was exaggerated to monstrous and threatening proportions.

Geoffrey felt a little hand in his, warm and moist.

"Shall we go and see Dai-Butsu?" said Yaé.

Geoffrey had no idea who Dai-Butsu might be, but he gladly agreed. She fluttered on beside him with her long kimono sleeves like a big moth. Geoffrey's head was full of wine and waltz tunes.

They dived into a narrow street with dwellings on each side. Some of the houses were shuttered and silent. Others were open to the street with a completeness of detail denied by our stingy window-casements—women sitting up late over their needlework, men talking round the firebox, shopkeepers adding up their accounts, fishermen mending their tackle.

The street led inland towards abrupt hills, which looked like a wall of darkness. It was lit by the round street lamps, the luminous globules with Chinese letters on them which had pleased Geoffrey first at Nagasaki. The road entered a gorge between two precipices, the kind of cleft into which the children of Hamlin had followed the Pied Piper.

"I would not like to come here alone," said Yaé, clinging tighter.

"It looks peaceful enough," said Geoffrey.

"There is a little temple just to the left, where a nun was murdered by a priest only last year. He chopped her with a kitchen knife."

"What did he do it for?" asked Geoffrey.

"He loved her, and she would not listen to him; so he killed her. I think I would feel like that if I were a man."

They passed under an enormous gateway, like a huge barn door with no barn behind it. Two threatening gods stood sentinel on either hand. Under the influence of the moonlight the carved figures seemed to move.

Yaé led her big companion along a broad-flagged path between a pollarded avenue. Geoffrey still did not know what they had come so far to see. Nor did he care. Everything was so dreamy and so sweet.

The path turned; and suddenly, straight in front of them, they saw the God—the Great Buddha—the immense bronze statue which has survived from the days of Kamakura's sovereignty. The bowed head and the broad shoulders were outlined against the blue and starry sky; against the shadow of the woods the body, almost invisible, could be dimly divined. The moonlight fell on the calm smile and on the hands palm upwards in the lap, with finger-tips and thumb-tips touching in the attitude of meditation. That ineffably peaceful, smiling face seemed to look down from the very height of heaven upon Geoffrey Barrington and Yaé Smith. The presence of the God filled the valley, patient and powerful, the Creator of the Universe and the Maintainer of Life.

Geoffrey had never seen anything so impressive. He Stooped down towards his little companion, listening for a response to his own emotion. It came. Before he could realize what was happening he felt the soft kimono sleeves like wings round his neck, and the girl's burning mouth pressing his lips.

"Oh, Geoffrey," she whispered.

He sat down on a low table in front of a shuttered refreshment bar with Yaé on his knee, his strong arm round her, even as she had dreamed. The Buddha of Infinite Understanding smiled down upon them.

Geoffrey was too little of a prig to scold the girl, and too much of a man not to be touched and flattered by the sincerity of her embrace. He was too much of an Englishman to ascribe it to its real passionate motive, and to profit by the opportunity.

Instead, he told himself that she was only a child excited by the beauty and the romance of the night even as he was. He did not begin to realize that he or she were making love. So he took her on his knee and stroked her hand.

"Isn't he fine?" he said, looking up at the God.

She started at the sound of his voice, and put her arms round his neck again.

"Oh, Geoffrey," she murmured, "how strong you are!"

He stood up laughing, with the girl in his arms.

"If it wasn't for your big obi" he said, "you would weigh nothing at all. Now hold tight; for I am going to carry you home."

He started down the avenue with a swinging stride. Yaé could watch almost within range of her lips the powerful profile of his big face, a soldier's face trained to command strong men and to be gentle to women and children. There was a delicious fragrance about him, the dry heathery smell of clean men. He did not look down at her. He was staring into the black shadows ahead, his mind still full of that sudden vision of Buddha Amitabha. He was scarcely thinking of the half-caste girl who clung tightly to his neck.

Yaé had no interest in the Dai-Butsu except as a grand background for love-making, a good excuse for hand squeezings and ecstatic movements. She had tried it once before with her school-master lover. It never occurred to her that Geoffrey was in any way different from her other admirers. She thought that she herself was the sole cause of his emotion and that his fixed expression as he strode in the darkness was an indication of his passion and a compliment to her charms. She was too tactful to say anything, or to try to force the situation; but she felt disappointed when at the approach of lighted houses he put her down without further caresses. In silence they returned to the hotel, where a few tired couples were still revolving to a spasmodic music.

Geoffrey was weary now; and the enchantment of the wine had passed away.

"Good-night, Yaé," he said.

She was holding the lapels of his coat, and she would have dearly loved to kiss him again. But he stood like a tower without any sign of bending down to her; and she would have had to jump for the forbidden fruit.

"Good-night, Geoffrey," she purred, "I will never forget to-night."

"It was lovely," said the Englishman, thinking of the Great Buddha.

* * * * *

Geoffrey retired to his room, where Asako was sleeping peacefully. He was very English. Only the first surprise of the girl's kiss had startled his loyalty. With the ostrich-like obtuseness, which our continental neighbours call our hypocrisy, he buried his head in his principles. As Asako's husband, he could not flirt with another woman. As Reggie's friend, he would not flirt with Reggie's sweetheart. As an honourable man, he would not trifle with the affections of a girl who meant nothing whatever to him. Therefore the incident of the Great Buddha had no significance. Therefore he could lie down and sleep with a light heart.

Geoffrey had been sleeping for half an hour or so when he was awakened by a sudden jolt, as though the whole building had met with a violent collision, or as though a gigantic fist had struck it. Everything in the room was in vibration. The hanging lamp was swinging like a pendulum. The pictures were shaking on the walls. A china ornament on the mantelpiece reeled, and fell with a crash.

Geoffrey leapt out of bed to cross to where his wife was sleeping.
Even the floor was unsteady like a ship's deck.

"Geoffrey! Geoffrey!" Asako called out.

"It must be an earthquake," her husband gasped, "Reggie told me to expect one."

"It has made me feel so sick," said Asako.

The disturbance was subsiding. Only the lamp was still oscillating slightly to prove that the earthquake was not merely a nightmare.

"Is any one about?" asked Asako.

Geoffrey went out on to the veranda. The hotel having survived many hundreds of earthquake shocks, seemed unaware of what had happened. Far out to sea puffs of fire were dimly seen like the flashes of a battleship in action, where the island volcano of Oshima was emptying its wrath against the sky.

There were hidden and unfamiliar powers in this strange country, of which Geoffrey and Asako had not yet taken account.

Beneath a tall lamp-post on the lawn, round whose smooth waxy light scores of moths were flitting, stood the short stout figure of a Japanese, staring up at the hotel.

"It looks like Tanaka," thought Geoffrey, "by Jove, it is Tanaka!"

They had definitely left their guide behind in Tokyo. Had Asako yielded at the last moment unable to dispense with her faithful squire? Or had he come of his own accord? and if so, why? These Japs were an unfathomable and exasperating people.

Sure enough next morning it was Tanaka who brought the early tea.

"Hello," said Geoffrey, "I thought you were in Tokyo."

"Indeed," grinned the guide, "I am sorry for you. Perhaps I have commit great crime so to come. But I think and I think Ladyship not so well. Heart very anxious. Go to theatre, wish to make merry, but all the time heart very sad. I think I will take last train. I will turn like bad penny. Perhaps Lordship is angry."

"No, not angry, Tanaka, just helpless. There was an earthquake last night?"

"Not so bad jishin (earth-shaking). Every twenty, thirty years one very big jishin come. Last big jishin Gifu jishin twenty years before. Many thousand people killed. Japanese people say that beneath the earth is one big fish. When the fish move, the earth shake. Silly fabulous myth! Tanaka say, 'It is the will of God!'"

The little man crossed himself devoutly.

* * * * *

A few minutes later there was a loud banging at the door, followed by
Reggie's voice, shouting,—

"Are you coming down for a bath?"

"Earthquakes are horrible things," commented Reggie, on their way to the sea. "Foreigners are supposed always to sleep through their first one. Their second they find an interesting experience; but the third and the fourth and the rest are a series of nervous shocks in increasing progression. It is like feeling God—but a wicked, cruel God! No wonder the Japanese are so fatalistic and so desperate. It is a case of 'Eat and drink, for to-morrow ye die.'"

The morning sea was cold and bracing. The two friends did not remain in for long. When they were dried and dressed again, and when Geoffrey was for returning to breakfast, Reggie held him back.

"Come and walk by the sea," he said, "I have something to tell you."

They turned in the direction of the fishing village, where Geoffrey and Yaé had walked together only a few hours ago. But the fires were quenched. Black circles of charred ashes remained; and the magic world of the moonlight had become a cluster of sordid hovels, where dirty women were sweeping their frowsty floors, and scrofulous children were playing among stale bedding.

"Did you notice anything unusual in my manner last night?" Reggie began very seriously.

"No," laughed Geoffrey, "you seemed rather excited. But why did you leave so early?"

"For various reasons," said his friend. "First, I hate dancing, but I feel rather envious of people who like it. Secondly, I wanted to be alone with my own sensations. Thirdly, I wanted you, my best friend, to have every opportunity of observing Yaé and forming an opinion about her."

"But why?" Geoffrey began.

"Because it would now be too late for me to take your advice," said
Reggie mysteriously.

"What do you mean?" Barrington asked.

"Last night I asked Yaé to marry me; and I understand that she accepted."

Geoffrey sat in the sunlight on the gunwale of a fishing-boat.

"You can't do that," he said.

"Oh, Geoffrey, I was afraid you'd say it, and you have," said his friend, half laughing. "Why not?"

"Your career, old chap."

"My career," snorted Reggie, "protocol, protocol and protocol. I am fed up with that, anyway. Can you imagine me a be-ribboned Excellency, worked by wires from London, babbling platitudes over teacups to other old Excellencies, and giving out a lot of gas for the F.O. every morning. No, in the old days there was charm and power and splendour, when an Ambassador was really plenipotentiary, and peace and war turned upon a court intrigue. All that is as dead as Louis Quatorze. Personality has faded out of politics. Everything is business, now, concessions, vested interests, dividends and bond-holders. These diplomats are not real people at all. They are shadowy survivals of the grand siècle, wraiths of Talleyrand; or else just restless bagmen. I don't call that a career."

Geoffrey had listened to these tirades before. It was Reggie's froth.

"But what do you propose doing?" he asked.

"Doing? Why, my music of course. Before I left England some music-hall people offered me seventy pounds a week to do stunts for them. Their first offer was two hundred and fifty, because they were under the illusion that I had a title. My official salary at this moment is two hundred per annum. So you see there would be no financial loss."

"Then are you giving up diplomacy because you are fed up with it? or for Yaé Smith's sake? I don't quite understand," said Geoffrey.

He was still pondering over the scene of last evening, and he found considerable comfort in ascribing Yaé's behaviour to excitement caused by her engagement.

"Yaé is the immediate reason: utter fed-upness is the original cause," replied Reggie.

"Do you feel that you are very much in love with her?" asked his friend.

The young man considered for a moment, and then answered,—

"No, not in love exactly. But she represents what I have come to desire. I get so terribly lonely, Geoffrey, and I must have some one, some woman, of course; and I hate intrigue and adultery. Yaé never grates upon me. I hate the twaddling activities of our modern women, their little sports, their little sciences, their little earnestnesses, their little philanthropies, their little imitations of men's ways. I like the seraglio type of woman, lazy and vain, a little more than a lovely animal. I can play with her, and hear her purring. She must have no father or mother or brothers or sisters or any social scheme to entangle me in. She must have no claim on my secret mind, she must not be jealous of my music, or expect explanations. Still less explain me to others,—a wife who shows one round like a monkey, what horror!"

"But Reggie! old chap, does she love you?"

Geoffrey's ideas were stereotyped. To his mind, only great love on both sides could excuse so bizarre a marriage.

"Love!" cried Reggie. "What is Love? I can feel Love in music. I can feel it in poetry. I can see it in sunshine, in the wet woods, and in the phosphorescent sea. But in actual life! I think of things in too abstract a way ever to feel in love with anybody. So I don't think anybody could really fall in love with me. It is like religious faith. I have no faith, and yet I believe in faith. I have no love, and yet I have a great love for love. Blessed are they who have not seen, and yet have believed!"

When Reggie was in this mood Geoffrey despaired of getting any sense out of him, and he felt that the occasion was too serious for smiles.

They were walking back to the hotel in the direction of breakfast.

"Reggie, are you quite sure?" said his friend, solemnly.

"No, of course I'm not, I never could be."

"And are you intending to get married soon?"

"Not immediately, no: and all this is quite in confidence, please."

"I'm glad there's no hurry," grunted Geoffrey. He knew that the girl was light and worthless; but to have shown Reggie his proofs would have been to admit his own complicity; and to give a woman away so callously would be a greater offence against Good Form than his momentary and meaningless trespass.

"But there is one thing you have forgotten," said. Reggie, rather bitterly.

"What's that, old chap?"

"When a fellow announces his engagement to the dearest little girl in all the world, his friends offer their congratulations. It's Good Form," he added maliciously.

CHAPTER XVII

THE RAINY SEASON

  Fugu-jiru no
  Ware ikite ir
  Ne-zame kana!

  Poisonous delicacies (last night)!
  I awake
  And I am still alive.

Geoffrey Barrington tried not to worry about Yaé Smith; and, of course, he did not mention the episode of the Great Buddha either to his wife or to Reggie Forsyth. He did not exactly feel ashamed of the incident; but he realised that it was open to misinterpretation. He certainly had no love for Yaé; and she, since she was engaged to his friend, presumably had no love for him. There are certain unnatural states of mind in which we are not altogether morally responsible beings. Among these may be numbered the ballroom mood, which drives quite sane people to act madly. The music, the wine, the giddy turning, the display of women's charms and the confusing proximity of them produce an unwonted atmosphere, of which we have most of us been aware, so bewildering that admiration of one woman will drive sane men to kiss another. Explanation is of course impossible; and circumstances must have their way. Scheming people, mothers with daughters to marry, study the effects of this psychical chemistry and profit by their knowledge. Under similar influences Geoffrey himself had been guilty of wilder indiscretions than the kissing of a half-caste girl.

But when he thought the matter over, he was sorry that it had occurred; and he was profoundly thankful that nobody had seen him.

Somebody had seen him, however.

The faithful Tanaka, who had been charged by Mr. Ito, the Fujinami lawyer, not to let his master out of his sight, had followed him at a discreet distance during the whole of that midnight stroll. He had observed the talk and the attitudes, the silences and the holding of hands, the glad exchange of kisses, the sitting of Yaé on Geoffrey's knees, and her triumphant return, carried in his arms.

To the Japanese mind such conduct could only mean one thing. The Japanese male is frankly animal where women are concerned. He does not understand our fine shades of self-deception, which give to our love-making the thrill of surprise and the palliation of romance. Tanaka concluded that there could be only one termination to the scene which he had witnessed.

He also learned that Yaé Smith was Reggie Forsyth's mistress, that he visited her room at night, that she was a girl of no character at all, that she had frequently stopped at the Kamakura hotel with other men, all of them her lovers.

All this information Tanaka collected with a wealth and precision of detail which is only possible in Japan, where the espionage habit is so deeply implanted in the every-day life of the people.

* * * * *

Mr. Ito could scarcely believe such welcome tidings. The Barrington ménage had seemed to him so devoted that he had often despaired of his boast to his patron that he would divide the wife from her husband, and restore her to her family. Now, if Tanaka's story were true, his task would be child's play. A woman charged with jealousy becomes like a weapon primed and cocked. If Ito could succeed in making Asako jealous, then he knew that any stray spark of misunderstanding would blast a black gulf between husband and wife, and might even blow the importunate Englishman back to his own country—alone.

The lawyer explained his plan to the head of the family, who appreciated its classic simplicity. Sadako was given to understand the part which she was to play in alienating her cousin's affections from the foreigner. She was to harp on the faithlessness of men in general, and on husbands in particular, and on the importance of money values in matrimonial considerations.

She was to suggest that a foreign man would never choose a Japanese bride merely for love of her. Then when the psychological moment had struck, the name of Yaé Smith was to be flashed into Asako's mind with a blinding glare.

Asako had been visiting her Japanese cousins almost every day. Her conversation lessons were progressing rapidly; for the first stages of the language are easy. The new life appealed to Asako's love of novelty, and the strangeness of it to her child's love of make-believe. The summoning of her parents' spirits awakened in her the desire for a home, which lurks in every one of us; the love of old family things around us, the sense of an inheritance and a tradition. She was tired of hotel life; and she turned for relaxation to playing at Japan with cousin Sadako, just as her husband turned to tennis.

Her favourite haunt was the little tea-house among the reeds at the edge of the lake, which seemed so hidden from everywhere. Here the two girls practised their languages. Here they tried on each others clothes, and talked about their lives and purposes. Sadako was intellectually the cleverer of the two, but Asako had seen and heard more; so they were fairly equally matched.

Often the cousins shocked each other's sense of propriety. Asako had already observed that to the Japanese mind, the immediate corollary to being married is to produce children as promptly and as rapidly as possible. Already she had been questioned on the subject by Tanaka, by boy sans and by shop-attendants.

"It is a great pity," said cousin Sadako, "that you have no baby. In Japan if a wife have no baby, she is often divorced. But perhaps it is the fault of Mr. Barrington?"

Asako had vaguely hoped for children in the future, but on the whole she was glad that their coming had been delayed. There was so much to do and to see first of all. It had never occurred to her that her childlessness might be the fault of either herself or her husband. But her cousin went on ruthlessly,—

"Many men are like that. Because of their sickness their wives cannot have babies."

Asako shivered. This beautiful country of hers seemed to be full of bogeys like a child's dream.

Another time Sadako asked her with much diffidence and slanting of the eyes,—

"I wish to learn about—kissing."

"What is the Japanese for 'kiss'?" laughed Asako.

"Oh! There is no such word," expostulated Sadako, shocked at her cousin's levity, "we Japanese do not speak of such things."

"Then Japanese people don't kiss?"

"Oh, no," said the girl.

"Not ever?" asked Asako, incredulous.

"Only when they are—quite alone."

"Then when you see foreign people kissing in public, you think it is very funny?"

"We think it is disgusting," answered her cousin.

It is quite true. Foreigners kiss so recklessly. They kiss on meeting: they kiss on parting. They kiss in London: they kiss in Tokyo. They kiss indiscriminately their fathers, mothers, wives, mistresses, cousins and aunts. Every kiss sends a shiver down the spine of a Japanese observer of either sex, as we should be shocked by the crude exhibition of an obscene gesture. For this blossoming of our buds of affection suggests to him, with immediate and detailed clearness, that other embrace of which in his mind it is the inseparable concomitant.

The Japanese find the excuse that foreigners know no better, just as we excuse the dirty habits of natives. But they quote the kiss as an indisputable proof of the lowness of our moral standard, and as a sign of the guilt, not of individuals so much as of our whole civilisation.

"Foreign people kiss too much," said cousin Sadako, "it is a bad thing. If I had a husband, I would always fear he kiss somebody else."

"That is why I am so happy with Geoffrey," said Asako, "I know he would never love any one but me."

"It is not safe to be so sure," said her cousin darkly, "a woman is made for one man, but a man is made for many women."

Asako, arrayed in a Japanese kimono, and to all appearance as Japanese as her cousin, was sitting in the Fujinami tea-parlour. She had not understood much of the lesson in tea-ceremony at which she had just assisted. But the exceeding propriety and dignity of the teacher, the daughter of great people fallen upon evil days, had impressed her. She longed to acquire that tranquillity of deportment, that slow graceful poise of hand and arm, that low measured speech. When the teacher had gone, she began to mimic her gestures with all the seriousness of appreciative imitation.

Sadako laughed. She supposed that her cousin was fooling. Asako thought that she was amused by her clumsiness.

"I shall never be able to do it," she sighed.

"But of course you will. I laugh because you are so like Kikuyé San."

Kikuyé San was their teacher.

"If only I could practise by myself!" said Asako, "but at the hotel it would be impossible."

Then they both laughed together at the incongruity of rehearsing those dainty rites of old Japan in the over-furnished sitting-room at the Imperial Hotel, with Geoffrey sitting back in his arm-chair and puffing at his cigar.

"If only I had a little house like this," said Asako.

"Why don't you hire one?" suggested her cousin.

Why not? The idea was an inspiration. So Asako thought; and she broached the matter to Geoffrey that very evening.

"Wouldn't it be sweet to have a ducky little Japanese house all our very own?" she urged.

"Oh yes," her husband agreed, wearily, "that would be great sport."

Mr. Fujinami Gentaro was delighted at the success of his daughter's diplomacy. He saw that this plan for a Japanese house meant a further separation of husband and wife, a further step towards recovery of his errant child. For he was beginning to regard Asako with parental sentiment, and to pity her condition as the wife of this coarse stranger.

Miss Sadako was under no such altruistic delusions. She envied her cousin. She envied her money, her freedom, and her frank happiness. She had often pondered about the ways of Japanese husbands and wives; and the more she thought over the subject, the more she envied Asako her happy married life. She envied her with a woman's envy, which seeks to hurt and spoil. She was smarting from her own disappointment; and by making her cousin suffer, she thought that she could assuage her own grief. Besides, the intrigue in itself interested her, and provided employment for her idolent existence and her restless mind. Of affection for Asako she had none at all, but then she had no affection for anybody. She was typical of a modern Japanese womanhood, which is the result of long repression, loveless marriages and sudden intellectual licence.

Asako thought her charming, because she had not yet learned to discern. She confided to her all her ideas about the new house; and together the two girls explored Tokyo in the motor-car which Ito provided for them, inspecting properties.

Asako had already decided that her home was to be on the bank of the river, where she could see the boats passing, something like the house in which her father and mother had lived. The desired abode was found at last on the river-bank at Mukojima just on the fringe of the city? where the cherry-trees are so bright in Springtime, where she could see the broad Sumida river washing her garden steps, the fussy little river boats puffing by, the portly junks, the crews of students training for their regattas, and, away on the opposite bank, the trees of Asakusa, the garish river restaurants so noisy at nightfall, the tall peaceful pagoda, the grey roofs and the red plinths of the temple of the Goddess of Mercy.

Just when the new home was ready for occupation, just when Asako's enthusiasm was at its height and the purchases of silken bedding and dainty trays were almost complete, Geoffrey suddenly announced his intention of leaving Japan.

"I can't stick it any longer," he said fretfully, "I don't know what's coming over me."

"Leave Japan?" cried his wife, aghast.

"Well, I don't know," grunted her husband, "it's no good stopping here and going all to seed."

The rainy season was just over, the hot season of steaming rain which the Japanese call nyubai. It had played havoc with Geoffrey's nerves. He had never known anything so unpleasant as this damp, relaxing heat. It made the walls of the room sweat. It impregnated paper and blotting-paper. It rotted leather; and spread mould on boots and clothes. It made matches unstrikeable. It drenched Geoffrey's bed with perspiration, and drove away sleep. It sent him out on long midnight walks through the silent city in an atmosphere as stifling as that of a green-house. It beat down upon Tokyo its fetid exhalations, the smell of cooking, of sewage and of humanity, and the queer sickly scent of a powerful evergreen tree aflower throughout the city, which resembled the reek of that Nagasaki brothel, and recalled the dancing of the Chonkina.

It bred swarms of bloodthirsty mosquitoes from every drop of stagnant water. They found their way through the musty mosquito-net which separated his bed from Asako's. They eluded his blow in the evening light; and he could only wreak his vengeance in the morning, when they were heavy with his gore.

The colour faded from the Englishman's cheeks. His appetite failed.
He was becoming, what he had never been before, cross and irritable.
Reggie Forsyth wrote to him from Chuzenji,—

"Yaé is here, and we go in for yachting in a kind of winged punt, called a 'lark.' For five pounds you can become a ship-owner. I fancy myself as a skipper, and I have already won two races. But more often we escape from the burble of the diplomats, and take our sandwiches and thermata—or is thermoi the plural?—to the untenanted shores of the lake, and picnic à deux. Then, if the wind does not fall we are lucky; but if it does, I have to row home. Yaé laughs at my oarsmanship; and says that, if you were here, you would do it so much better. You are a dangerous rival, but for this once I challenge you. I have a spare pen in my rabbit-hutch. There is just room for you and Mrs. Barrington. You must be quite melted by now."

But Asako did not want to go to Chuzenji. All her thoughts were centred on the little house by the river.

"Geoffrey darling," she said, stroking his hair with her tiny waxen fingers, "it is the hot weather which is making you feel cross. Why don't you go up to the mountains for a week or so, and stop with Reggie?"

"Will you come?" asked her husband, brightening.

"I can't very well. You see they are just laying down the tatami: and when that is done the house will be ready. Besides, I feel so well here. I like the heat."

"But I've never been away without you!" objected Geoffrey, "I think it would be beastly."

This side of the question had not struck Asako. She was so taken up
with her project. Now, however, she felt a momentary thrill of relief.
She would be able to give all her time to her beloved Japanese home.
Geoffrey was a darling, but he was so uninterested in everything.

"It will only be for a few days," she said, "you want the change; and when you come back it will be like being married again."