CHAPTER III.
Next morning when I look out of my window, whilst shaving in front of a “trade” glass I had obtained after some trouble for the express purpose, the view charms me with its vastness, just as the night before it had depressed me with its indefinable starlight gloom. “The view,” I say to myself, “is the only big thing about Nagasaki.”
Down below lay the harbour, bathed in Japanese sunlight, which—as even Japanese advertisements are beginning to put it—is like none other. On this particular morning it was filtering through a silver haze, and the water of the harbour looked like a solid block of chrysoprase with indigo shadows. In the distance one saw flaws in it where a sampan was, and white flecks where an incoming or outgoing foreign trader sailed.
What a network of narrow streets there was down below in the town proper! Narrow streets—most of which by now I knew—with slabs of stone laid in the middle of them, and in the older quarters, rickety houses nearly meeting overhead. It was down there that Kotmasu had his office, to which, however, owing to the industry and keenness of his merchant father before him, he was not very much tied. I had made up my mind to go and see him this morning, as he was usually to be found there in the forenoon.
It is pleasant to look upon the green hills, and even to watch the higher ones, bare and brown-topped, break through the fleecy mist hanging about their summits, as I have my breakfast on the verandah in the tiny cups and tinier plates and dishes in which my servants delight.
“Surely Mousmé—Miss Hyacinth” (I have got to call her this soon, in all conscience)—“will like my house,” I speculate as I swallow beans in sugar, prunes in ditto, toy-sized cups of tea, and Huntly and Palmer’s biscuits as my solid dish. She lives down there somewhere, nearer the town. I suddenly recollect Kotmasu once pointing out her brother Otiri to me, and telling me he lived somewhere over there. This must be better up here, and I remember quite gleefully that M’Kenzie, my chum, who died last New Year’s Day, had found no difficulty in persuading a dainty little mousmé of equally good family to take him for better, for worse. I also recollect the circumstance of his having reddish hair, and an uncommon amount of freckles, even for a Scotsman, with amazing satisfaction. Because, although fair, I had neither of these things, and had even some pretensions to good looks.
I would go down and consult Kotmasu—that was the best thing to do.
I gulped down two or three tiny cups of tea, and hastily sought my hat.
Oka’s wife was under the verandah, reeling silk off the cocoons on to strangely primitive wooden wheels, fixed between two upright pieces of wood stuck into a flat stone or cake of hardened, sun-baked clay for firmness. She rose, however, with a smile, and bowing, gave me one of my gayest paper umbrellas, “to match the morning.” Strangely enough, the groundwork was of the colour of Mousmé’s dress the night before. I used not to admire it greatly; now I wondered vaguely why.
I made my way down the hillside, striking the principal street or road after I left my own garden, in which camellias, gardenias, tea-roses and mimosa bloomed with such profusion, that the very air was scented and heavy with the mingled perfume.
It was a pretty garden—strange to European eyes, perhaps—with its make-believe fountains, toy bridges over equally miniature streams, and several tiny pagodas. It was pretty enough even for Miss Hyacinth, I thought, as I thrust open the quaint little rustic gate with my toe, and stepped out upon the road.
All the way down to Kotmasu’s office I imagined, or tried to imagine, her flitting along the walks between the tea-roses and sunflowers. A dainty little figure in an elfin fairyland.
I had been down this way into the town scores of times before, of course, and the people knew me. The old man in the corner shop of the street, whose signboard was a queer mixture of Japanese and English of a sort, was painstakingly decorating the same large blue Nankin vase with sprays of chrysanthemums and the inevitable storks, as he was a week ago. But this morning I didn’t stop, as I usually did, for a chat and to express my admiration for his painstaking art, which though almost totally lacking perspective, was yet quaint and pretty.
“No! I am in a hurry”—this to him.
“Is the sir going back to England?”
“No!” scarcely stopping.
“That is well! good, good! The Nankin vases you, most illustrious sir, are so condescending as to admire are still unsold. Will you take them, honourable sir? They are” All this I hear him say in his queer, cracked, high-pitched, monotonous voice ere I turn the corner.
“Yes, Mr. Kotmasu is in,” replied San, my friend’s clerk, and I could see him.
Kotmasu’s office is a strange mixture of East and West. It is on the second floor of a warehouse, down on the Natoba near the water-side. He, with memories of English ways, has a writing-table made of mahogany, with camphor-wood and ebony inlaid work; but he still writes with a fine brush, either in Indian ink or vermilion, as the occasion requires, on dainty slips of flimsy and, to my Western mind, unbusiness-like rice paper.
How a London merchant would laugh at the idea of grinding up one’s ink in a tiny saucer as one required it! And yet this is just what my good friend was doing when I entered—in a tiny jade saucer inlaid with threads of gold, with a minute bronze frog, just ready for a dive, upon the edge.
I sat down in a revolving chair, which had once graced the saloon of an English steamer lost along the coast, and opened fire upon Kotmasu concerning Miss Hyacinth.
I felt so miserably sure, with the pessimism of an ardent lover, that he must be in love with my darling. But it proved that he had no intentions. So much was evident to me after five minutes’ talk in the cool room. He didn’t want to chatter about her, but began instead to tell me untellable things about the new geisha. He didn’t even seem to think Miss Hyacinth pretty. How strange, I thought! And then he went on again to sing the praises of the geisha, who was called Silver-Moon Face. His taste was evidently vitiated; he preferred art to nature, tricks to charms, a whitened face with two hectic spots of rouge, and the gold-lined lip, to the damask skin and smiles of my mousmé. But all this was very satisfactory to me, nevertheless.
I must have kept returning to the subject of Miss Hyacinth, for all at once he makes a discovery, and says without preamble, and as if certain in his own mind that he has “hit the right nail on the head”—
“Her people are rich, but still they might be induced to sell her.”
“Man alive,” I say, without remembering that Kotmasu’s English does not extend to a knowledge of such a phrase, “what do you think I want?”
He is laconic, and smiles. “Hyacinth—the mousmé.”
“Yes! but it is not for a temporary marriage”—I dress the phrase almost instinctively—“I want to marry her. Marry her as a wife, before the consul, or any one else, for that matter. Do you understand?”
Kotmasu’s face is a study of simulated obtuseness.
At last, however, I make him understand, show him that I am in earnest.
Then he argues the matter in the politest Japanese, so as to magnify my “honourable position and name” as much as possible, and without detracting from that of Miss Hyacinth, show me my error.
But it is no use. I may be mad. We shall see, I tell him with an indwelling confidence; and he nods his head and remarks stolidly, “Yes, we shall see.”
I should be angry with Kotuiasu if I did not know that his opposition, like all the disagreeables of childhood, was intended “for my good.”
In the end he promises to introduce me to my inamorata’s family, and let circumstances rule the rest.
I go out into the sunlight, down the creaking outside stairs, quite light-hearted, and only haggle for ten minutes with Yenkow the jeweller for a prospective engagement ring with a magnificent pink pearl.
I am sure as I leave the shop with the ring in my pocket that my weakness over the bargaining has lowered me fifty per cent. in the eyes of the stout little jeweller.
I go and buy some hyacinths, and then transact some of my business.
Kotmasu is coming to take me to see Mousmé at sundown.
I am at home again early in the afternoon, and, with a view to my proposed marriage, I begin to take stock of my surroundings.
I have lived long enough in Japan to see nothing exceptional in a marriage which will probably be concluded in a space of time that would be considered extremely short to a Western mind. The worst of it is, I am returning to England for good in less than nine months’ time, and what will my people say to my choice?
I have neither mother nor father to reckon with. But I have a sister Lou, who, alas, is a dragon of propriety (and I am no St. George), who will, I fear, never realise that my wife is not an abstraction off a paper screen or a lacquer tray.
But then, after all, she will be my wife, and because she is pretty and “strange”—I fancy that’s what Lou will call her—she may succeed in a society which, like the Athenians, is always running after some new thing. The latest “craze” is to my mind like a glass of sherbet. It creates the greatest amount of stir for the least space of time.
Not even thoughts of Lou, who is the pink of propriety—why isn’t impropriety dubbed pink?—can terrify me from my purpose, because I am in love. I never felt so unafraid of Lou, her tongue and her smile, in all my life, even at the distance of many thousand miles, and I conclude therefrom that I must be terribly in earnest. As for the others, I don’t care.
They have pleased themselves, have married as they wished, and surely may be reasonably expected to let me do the same, I argue.
My house, which seemed complete enough before, now appears only to require Miss Hyacinth’s presence to make it all it should be.
I am very critical, but I can scarcely find anything to alter in my little home. My rooms at Cambridge, ere every one went in for Art—with a big A—talked Art, dreamed Art, abused Art, and outraged Art—were considered artistic, and my chambers in St. James’ Street the same. It is in me, and has cropped out in many of the little details of my Japanese home. Clever and appreciative workmen ind artificers have enabled me to see my desires carried into effect.
I play at having tea—imagining the while how the little white room, which is rather bare for European taste perhaps, but so clean, airy and spotless, will look with Mousmé in it; and then I go out on the verandah to wait till Kotmasu comes.
From my position I can overlook the road which runs away up alongside my boundary fence, higher and higher, till at last it vanishes amid the greenery and the tea-gardens. Down below, the older quarters of the town lie huddled together like a flock of sheep crushing each other in the endeavour to avoid some danger, swarming with people of the poorer class. It is not quite so fine an evening as last night was, and the hill-tops are hidden in the woolly masses of threatening clouds. The twilight is gloomy, and not orange-hued as before, and darkness comes more quickly upon its heels.
I light my treasured briar, and wait as patiently as may be for my friend.
When first I came here, how all my acquaintances used to laugh at the immense bowl of my pipe, which would, I should think, hold nearly ten times as much light-hued tobacco as theirs!
“Ah! Here he is at last!” I exclaim, discerning a dark mass approaching in the gloom, up the little narrow path.
“We will go at once?” I say questioningly.
“Yes,” he replies. “They will be at home now.”
We start off down the hillside, Kotmasu evidently from his remarks regarding the matter as a huge joke. If only he realized how sincere is my admiration for Miss Hyacinth. At last we reach our destination, and turn down a short road, which shuts the gaily-lit town still further below us from our view.
Miss Hyacinth is more charming than ever. Or is it the coming in from the gloom of the dark road, along which we have picked our way by the light of paper lanterns? She is quite delightful. She even knows a little English, which she learned at the school, so she tells me; and we talk together, I smiling inwardly at her funny phrasing.
“You speakee Japanese good,” she says, with a glance from her sparkling eyes, and red lips wide open in her struggle with the last word.
I, of course, compliment her equally upon her English, which I assert is “wonderful,” “charming.”
This is all very interesting, and I more decidedly—most decidedly—wish to marry her.
I do not altogether like my mamma-in-law. But no doubt matters can be so arranged that my domestic peace will not be too frequently broken in upon, nor my artistic sense too often shocked by her puffy cheeks, inane smile and gimlet-hole eyes. To see her salute me—to witness the elevation of the immense bow of her dove-coloured silk obi as she bent to the floor—was too comical.
Mousmé gets nothing from her mother, I am glad to notice, except, perhaps, a certain almost indefinable womanliness, which all Japanese women seem to possess. It is almost as intangible as some of their perfumes.
I am offered tea in dainty doll’s-house cups of blue egg-shell china, and smoke a ridiculous little pipe, because Miss Hyacinth prepared it for me, stuffing the tobacco into the tiny bowl with the tip of her small finger. She smoked, too, a little silver-mounted pipe, with a great deal of useless ornamentation on it; but refused my offer of a service like that rendered to me. She let me light it, however, with a bit of glowing charcoal, held in a pair of tongs which were formed by bronze lizards placed in the necessary acrobatic pose; and seemed pleased with the attention I paid her.
Mousmé, for so I begin to call her, has, it appears, several brothers and sisters; but I reflect placidly that if a man mustn’t marry his grandmother, neither is he obliged, so to speak, to marry his wife’s relations. Her little brother, Aki, a scrap of yellow humanity, with wonderful black eyes, and equally dark hair, is the only member of the family besides her mother present. And he—not yet at the enfant terrible stage of existence—regards me with curious but, I flatter myself, not unfriendly gaze, between bouts of playing with several minute bronze frogs and a box of dominoes.
Kotmasu keeps up an uninterrupted conversation in a rather grating undertone, whilst Miss Hyacinth and I chatter, and gradually get upon most friendly terms.
I am quite sure that she already thinks I wish to marry her. And possibly the only question now agitating her mind is, “For how long?”
Permanent marriages between Europeans and Japanese women are as infrequent as temporary ones are the reverse.
I am more than ever in love with Mousmé by the time of our departure, and am beginning to feel pained that I cannot relieve her mind as to my intentions being permanent. To do so will be quite possible without any breach of decorum in two or three days.
Kotmasu is full of the marriage, and as we walk homeward he tells me that Mousmé’s mother will be delighted. He has at least commenced to arrange things, I think, with the celerity of a professed matrimonial broker.
“But,” he said, “she is nevertheless surprised that you should not require Miss Hyacinth on trial.”
“Did you say anything to her, then?” I ask in my surprise.
“It is all arranged, if you are willing,” he answered, with some amount of pride at his successful diplomacy.
“But what about Miss Hyacinth herself?”
“She! Oh, she will be only too honoured to wed with the English sir.”
How strange Mousmé’s easy compliance with my wishes appears to me. But I accept Kotmasu’s statement gratefully, for at least it relieves my anxiety.
I laugh quite light-heartedly; it is all so delightfully easy. And when I have had a smoke, after Kotmasu has drunk my health comically thrice over in whiskey saké and departed, I turn in and fall asleep, thinking that he is really a very good fellow.