X
THE GUEST OF THE OTHER TOWER ROOM
Our tower wing of the inn at Kama-Suwa had required no architectural ingenuity in its design, but I do not remember ever having seen a Japanese building planned in the same way. The walls were open on the four sides and there was no takemono corner. The only approach was by a flight of stairs which belonged to it exclusively. We thus had an isolation most unusual. It mattered not the length and breadth of the space given us, our few possessions were always scattered over all the space available.
We heard steps on the stair and our hostess and a maid came up to us and bowed many times and brought many apologies. Half our space was to be taken away. This was only following the very equitable custom that a guest may have all of the extension of his floor until some other traveller must be accommodated, and then, presto! there are two rooms where one was before.
In a few minutes a double row of screens had been pushed along the grooved slides in the floor from the head of the stairs, creating two complete rooms with a hallway between. The new guest, a woman, stood waiting to take possession. From the quality of her kimono, the refinement of her face, and the arrangement of her hair, we could judge that she was of superior rank. We questioned with some wonder why she was alone, but as it was extremely unlikely that that question or any other about her would be answered, the passing query was dismissed. However, it came about that we were to know one poignant chapter in that woman’s life.
We went exploring to find the kitchen, there to deliver our gooseberries and our recipe. The maids and cooks stood and listened. We proceeded with our explanation until we reached the point where one more suppressed giggle on the part of the ne-sans might have burst forth into full hysterics. We released them in time by laughing ourselves and then left them to recover as best they could and to experiment with the stewing. Their irresponsible laughing for laughter’s sake had infected us with the mood. We went filing back to our room. The guest of the second tower room was standing on the balcony at the head of the stairs. She had changed from her street kimono. Her eyes were shaded by her hand and she was looking searchingly down the road. As we walked by she stepped a little farther out on the narrow balcony but did not take her eyes from her quest.
The maid brought our dinner. It had been fourteen hours since breakfast and we had been tramping mountain paths, but without the sauce of appetite that dinner could have justified its existence. There were fish fresh from the mountain waters of the lake, and there were grilled eels, and there were strange vegetables with strange sauces. When the rice came we poured our stewed gooseberry juice over the bowl. The maid had left the screen pushed back when she carried off the tables downstairs. At that moment of our contentment I looked up to see the lonely watcher step back from the balcony. Her expression had changed to joyful expectancy and radiant relief and trust. She went to her room, then returned to the balcony, then ran again to her room. In a moment or two the round, sleepy maid stumbled up the stairs and whispered a message. The message again brought the woman to the head of the stairs and in a moment we could hear a man’s step coming.
The greeting of affection in Japan is not a meeting of the lips. Whatever the proper cherishing expression may be, it cannot be such a casual acknowledgment as was that man’s indifferent greeting in the inn at Kama-Suwa. A glance showed that he belonged to that new type which modern Japan has produced, the mobile, keen, aggressive, calculating, successful man of business and affairs. He was about thirty-five. Men of this new stamp are seldom met with in the provinces where the old order has changed so little but in Tokyo and the port cities their ideas are the predominant influence. Their aggression and ability have taken over the business and industries which the foreigner established. When one thinks of Old Japan one can believe that the thought action of this type of man by the very virtue of his being understood by us is enigma to those who still seek their inspiration in the ideals of the order that was.
“Well, I am here,” he said. “You sent for me and I came.”
The woman stood, making no answer.
“What’s it all about?” he went on. “Your message was very mysterious. It cannot be that you have been so foolish—so unthinking—as absolutely to make a break with your husband?”
“You are tired from your trip,” she said. “Come! Sit down! Your dinner is waiting to be brought.”
He sat down and the woman clapped her hands for the maid. When the stumbling, awkward girl came the man changed the order and told the ne-san to bring sake first of all. He sat in silence until the hot rice wine came. He drank several of the small cups. Then the maid brought the lacquer tables with the dinner dishes. The man lifted up one or two covers and then suddenly jumped to his feet and declared that he was going to take a bath.
The maid led the way to the large room for baths which was just under our rooms. The woman sat before her untasted dinner. Soon there was a sound of laughing and chattering from below. There was the man’s voice and the maid’s laugh. Finally the woman arose, walked out into the hall, tentatively put a foot on the stair, then slowly walked down. She waited outside the sliding paper door. The maid had committed no breach against custom in lingering idly after carrying in towels and brushes. It was for no personal bitterness against the stupid maid that tears had gathered in the woman’s eyes. There was nothing vulgar in the words of the bantering chatter she heard. It was the fact that the man was accepting the moment so carelessly, so unfeelingly for her anguish, knowing as he must unquestionably that every word of his indifferent greeting to her had carried a torturing thrust of pain.
The dinner was brought up again, warmed over. We heard the order for another bottle of sake. We could not escape hearing through the paper wall. We had intended taking a walk but a misty rain had come down. The mosquitoes arose from the beaches of the lake. We sent for the maid and asked for the beds and mosquito netting. In the meantime Hori and I were tempted into taking another luxurious sinking into the hot baths. O-Owre-san had turned out the light before we came back. In the darkness we crawled carefully under the omnibus netting and I went to sleep immediately. I awoke in about an hour. The misty rain had been blown away and the moon was shining so clearly that when I turned over I could see that Hori’s eyes were wide open. I heard the maid, stumbling as always, come up the stairs with another bottle of sake. I asked Hori whether he had been asleep. He said that he had not, that after the woman had begun talking she had not stopped. I could hear her low, ceaseless tones. The man was smoking one pipe after another. He would knock out the ash against the brazier—four staccato raps—then there would be a pause for the three or four puffs from the refilled pipe, and then the staccato raps again.
“If we are ever going to get to sleep,” said Hori, “we’ll have to complain to the mistress. Guests haven’t any right to keep other guests awake.”
“Why wouldn’t it be better to make some such suggestion to them without calling in the mistress?” I asked.
Hori shook his head. That was not the way. However, we delayed sending for the inn mistress. Hori translated some of the conversation that he had heard before I woke up. The woman had that morning left her home and her husband. She had sent a message to the man now in the room with her, but her news had evidently been one of his least desired wishes. Before he sank into the silence of tobacco and sake he had said his disapproval.
“I thought you had more sense than to do anything so absurd, so almost final. Don’t you see that it will be almost impossible for you to go back now? How will you make any explanation that he can accept?”
“But,” she interrupted, “I came to you as you have so often said that you wished I could. That was the only way I could be even a little bit fair to him—to leave his house.”
“Everything was all right as it was.”
“No! No! I could not live that way.”
“I can’t see why. I don’t see it. Now you’ve pretty nearly ruined both of us. However, we’ve got to think of some way for you to go back.”
“But I can’t. I’ve lost the possibility of that. If I had not thought you wished me, I might not have come to you, but I could not stay there.”
“That’s foolishness. Anyhow, you can go to your own family, and when he finds that is where you are, he’ll want you to come back.”
Her mind was dully grasping that here, with this man, she had no refuge, but her heart would not believe.
“I wished to make it complete,” she repeated. “I wanted to give up everything for you.”
What folly, what sheer childish folly, he told her, that she had listened seriously to his idle, passing phrases. Why, always, she must have known that he was merely answering her vanity. Any woman should have known and accepted that.
The ceaseless words and the staccato rapping of the pipe continued. We dismissed from our minds any intention of sending for the mistress, but not from prying curiosity. Our sleeping, or our not sleeping, was not of importance. In merciful pity (at least as we thought) for the woman, we knew that that contest must be settled as it was being settled. “But,” Hori whispered, “it would be a mighty big satisfaction to mix in a little physical argument.”
“No one at this inn knows who I am,” the man continued. “No one has any idea that you have more than the slightest acquaintanceship with me. No one would ever be convinced that you ran away to meet me.”
She ceased the argument that she had come to him in willing sacrifice of all else—the supreme gift of her love for him. She began to plead. He did not answer. His pipe struck against the brazier and now and again the maid brought sake. Once she began to weep hysterically but this surrender to her agony was only for a short moment.
It was now almost morning. The rapping of the pipe stopped. The man got to his feet somewhat noisily. Passionately and despairingly the woman begged him not to leave her. Then as suddenly she ceased all words and said nothing as he made his preparations for going, nor did she call after him when he left her. Her unbeating breast imprisoned her breath through one last moment of hope. The spark of faith died but the torture of life remained, and her breath was released in a long, low moan. Until morning broke she sobbed, lying there on the floor.
She had not pushed back the wall panel which the man had left open. When we went below to our baths she drew in her outstretched arm which still reached gropingly into the narrow passageway. She dressed before we returned. We met her on the stairs. She started to cover her face with her kimono sleeve, and then, listlessly, dropped her arm.
“Where will she go?” I asked Hori.
Hori did not know. In the old régime, he explained, when a woman of the aristocracy left her husband she went to her family, but it had been only under extreme duress that a woman would leave her husband. There is much talk to-day in Japan that the social institutions are crumbling. One is told that the “new woman” movement is a result of the crumbling of the old order; and again one is told that the crumbling has come from the new woman movement. These latter critics say that so many women are leaving their homes that if any proper discipline is to be retained and maintained, the tradition that a woman’s own family may receive her into their house must be uncompromisingly discouraged as a declaration of warning to others.
Hori, himself, now that the tragedy had ceased to be so present, was somewhat inclined to look upon the history of the night in its relation to collective society rather than as the drama of two individuals. A Japanese instinctively regards a family as a family, and not as a collection of units. Loyalty is the basic idea of that philosophy and not the importance of the individual soul.
“There is one thing quite sure,” he added, “she was obviously from a sheltered home and Japanese ladies know precious little about the realities of the outside world. I don’t believe you could understand. Why, they don’t even go shopping like American women. The shopkeepers bring everything to them. If she hasn’t some place to go—well, you can guess what will happen to her. She could never earn her own living any more than a baby.”
“It may end with suicide,” I suggested.
Hori doubted that. Suicide is an escape often appealed to in Japan, but he thought that if her temperament had been impulsively capable of seeking such release, she would have made the attempt immediately.
“But,” I objected, “isn’t your other alternative impossible? Isn’t there a rigid law that no woman of the samurai class can enter the yoshiwara?”
“Oh, yes,” said he, “but an agent can easily arrange to have her adopted into some family of a lower order and then she loses her rank and its protection.”
O-Owre-san came up from his bath and asked us what we were talking about. He had slept through the night.