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
ground-work 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 Kotmasu 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 Yen-kow 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 and 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.
[Illustration: CHAPTER FOUR]