Mousmé is better.
At last, after weary and anxious days of waiting and watching, the crisis
is past. From that mysterious land, whose borders so often touch ours in
sleep and illness, in which Mousmé had almost set foot, my little wife
has returned. A frail ghost of her former bright self. One who looks as
though she had seen visions.
She seems more fairy-like than ever, sitting out under the verandah,
wrapped up in an elaborate dressing-gown of silver-grey silk with a
delicate rose-pink lining. She doesn’t look a whit older—Japanese women
never appear so till they are quite old—only more like some toy woman
taken bodily from off a screen or jar decorated by an artist drawing his
inspiration from models of the highest types.
There seems something almost unreal in the slight figure in its quaint
Eastern dress, and the dainty ways that are returning to her one by one
with the strength which comes back so slowly.
Oka’s wife is delighted. She is very fond of the little mistress, who is
so gay and childlike and amiable. I shall be sorry when the time comes
for us to leave old Oka, with his ugly, amiable, yellow face, and his
wife, who is, as are many of the lower-class women, really more than
passably good-looking, though verging upon forty.
We sit out almost all day long; and when I am obliged to leave Mousmé
to attend to business in the town, Oka’s wife sits within call, and
Mousmé looks at the pictures in the illustrated papers and magazines
Lou has from time to time sent me; or pores over a tattered copy of
a rudimentary English spelling-book and grammar combined, which Chen
Yo, the publisher of the principal paper, put aside for me as a great
curiosity which he had bought one day.
Mousmé is learning English well. Her accent is still peculiar, of course,
though her vocabulary is greatly extended. I talk to her as much as I
can, for soon English will be the only language she will hear.
These are ever-to-be-remembered days, spent in my Japanese home
overlooking the wonderful garden, full of brilliance of flower, earth,
life and sky. I smoke, and Mousmé plays her guitar; and she sings in a
voice into which love and patience have translated greater harmony and
sweetness than any other woman’s voice that I have heard during the last
four years—
“What shall I sing to thee, my love?
In the garden where the moonbeams play,
And pipe the nightingale and dove,
And plash the fountain’s silver spray.
“What shall I bring to thee, my own?
Visions of heaven’s mansions fair;
Never had king a truer throne
Than my heart’s casket rich and rare.”
“Sing on, little Mousmé; there are other verses of your little
love-song,” I say.
But she is tired, and, unconsciously like a European _prima donna_, only
sings the last two lines over again—
“Never had king a truer throne
Than my heart’s casket rich and rare.”
“True, Mousmé, true,” I say, half to myself, as the song loses itself in
the air. But she catches the words, and smiles.
The wet season is coming on, alas! before I can leave, and our evenings
beneath the verandah will be less frequent. It is not nearly so pleasant
indoors, but the damp air is bad for Mousmé. So we play Japanese
draughts, and talk of England.
Sometimes Kotmasu comes in. He is convinced at last of the _bona-fides_
of my marriage, and is as profuse in his apologies for ever having
doubted the success of my experiment, as he was with his lugubrious
predictions that it would never succeed.
We are always glad to see him; for since Mousmé’s illness I have been
into the tea-houses, and even the town itself, very little. We hear
gossip from my queer mother-in-law, but it is usually only a _chronique
scandaleuse_ of the doings of the _geishas_, of her friends, and last,
though by no means least, of her enemies, half of whom I do not even know
by name.
Kotmasu, on the other hand, has always some scrap of more or less
reliable European news, which, if it does nothing else, serves as a peg
on which to hang a reminiscence, or an echo to awaken old memories of
Western men and things.
The evenings we spend together are far from being uninteresting; and
Mousmé, who has picked up the art of conversation wonderfully, is
delighted to intrude her quaint ideas upon us. She is burning with
curiosity concerning the strange country called England, which Kotmasu,
willing enough to shine even in the eyes of a married woman, and she my
wife, pretends he knows so well.
He is really very funny in his descriptions sometimes. In a sense they
are fairly correct; but they are, just like all Japanese pictures,
lacking in the most elementary perspective. It is not because his
perceptive faculties are lacking, but only that they follow the national
groove, the worship of the minute to the exclusion of broader effects.
Mousmé, no doubt with a desire to be in the possession of two opinions,
addresses a multitude of questions to him when, as is the case to-night,
he is spending the evening with us.
“What do the women wear? How do they dress? Are their _obis_ as handsome
as mine?” and so on.
Kotmasu endeavors to describe the attire of my fellow-countrymen,
blundering magnificently over its hidden intricacies.
“It is dull, very dull indeed,” he explains, with an apologetic glance in
my direction, as if fearful that I should seek to upset his statement.
“There are no colours worn—at least,” he hastens to add, with another
glance over in my direction through the tiny cloud of bluish-grey smoke
his absurd tobacco-pipe permits him to eject, “not colours like ours. Not
like you are wearing, Mousmé.”
I laugh to myself, partially at the perplexed expression on Mousmé’s
face, and partially at the idea of her promenading in England in all the
glory of a canary-coloured _obi_, plum-coloured gown embroidered in gold
thread, and a bifurcated garment of ivory satin.
“The women wear no _obis_,” continues Kotmasu, complacently.
“No _obis_!” ejaculates Mousmé, evidently incredulous.
“No. Sometimes the children do.”
“It is velly stlange,” says Mousmé, “and they not look velly large here.
See!” she continues, placing her tiny hands as though to span her waist.
“What do they wear then?”
Kotmasu is launched forthwith into a veritable catalogue. The garments
comprised in which must be individually explained for Mousmé’s
enlightenment. Kotmasu, plunging innocently into the sea of impropriety,
at last succeeds in satisfying her curiosity.
As we rise and step out upon the verandah to get a breath of
cooler air, she comes close to me, and taking my hand in her pretty
I-wish-to-be-protected way, whispers in Japanese, “How strange it will
be! Cy-reel, I am a little frightened; I feel like the other night when
I was awoke by the _nidzoumi_ scampering across the floor, and squeak,
squeaking in the walls.”
Mousmé is like her Western sisters in her fear of mice.
“But I shall be there, Mousmé,” I reply, as she squeezes my hand.
“Yes, Cy-reel;” then with a coquettish smile, which I can see ere we
pass out into the gloom of the verandah, “perhaps, perhaps it may be all
right.”
It had been raining. Such torrents of rain! Kotmasu had come up to see
us through it all. A queer figure in an out-of-date English mackintosh,
the rubber as well as the style of which, he had admitted under pressure
of my chaff, had perished, and a wonderful umbrella-like hat of huge
diameter.
Down all the mountain-paths, and the steep roads leading into the
town, the miniature torrents ran, as if they must sweep away the very
foundations of the frail, queer-looking houses.
The harbour was blotted out, the town obscured by the vast grey masses of
cloud, which, topping the hills they hid, seemed to fall down their sides
into the hollow of the town.
Mousmé and I, till Kotmasu came, had watched the scene from the verandah,
waiting for the rifts in the watery veil which, sure to come sooner or
later, would give us exquisite peeps of indescribable loveliness.
Now all three of us are standing there in all the silver glory of
Japanese moonlight.
Kotmasu even is silent, and makes no further attempt to explain English
ways and customs to Mousmé.
The hillside, with its drenched foliage and grassy slopes, is like a
sheet of frosted silver. In the foreground lies our garden set thick with
Nature’s flashing, gem-like rain-drops. The harbour can be seen again,
as usual, an immense black pearl of irregular shape, with here and there
a streak of moonlight pencilled on its tranquil surface. The cemeteries
and tea-fields stretched below us to the right and left are but darker
oxidised silver; the temples and tea-houses but embossed figures.
Down quite below us is the still darker patch of colouring, immense,
far-spreading, which marks the town; the lights and the gleam of lanterns
look in the damp air like angry eyes seen in tears.
Few sounds reach us, and even the cicala’s chirp is far less noisy than
usual. Mousmé still has hold of my hand, and I can see her face glancing
upward now and then.
We might have remained there on the verandah with the light of the room
behind us streaming out, a warm yellow patch, for another hour or two, so
impressive was the view, and the silence which all three of us seemed so
reluctant to break. But suddenly we are startled by the _Boom! Boom—m—m!_
of the immense gong belonging to the Shinto monastery far below us down
the mountain side. Such a noise!—awe-inspiring, terrific (if there be
tone colours, then red, purple and orange), invading every hillside
cranny, seeming positively to engulf us in its ever-widening air circles
of sound.
“It has spoiled all,” whispers Mousmé, heaving a sigh.
“Yes, little Mousmé. See, it has even frightened the moonbeams.”
A dense cloud drags its edge across the face of the moon, and now
all—except the lights of the town and the few twinkling, feeble lamps of
the ships out in the harbour, which appear brighter suddenly for lack of
their celestial rival—is dark.
Kotmasu knocks the ashes out of his tiny pipe bowl with a sharp, metallic
tap upon the bamboo verandah rail, and says:
“There will be another storm soon. I must be going.”
He says good-night somewhat reluctantly after all; and when we have
watched him go away down the path, over the edges of which our poor
rain-beaten tea-roses are straggling, with his big hat, paper umbrella on
which a grinning and intelligent-looking red dragon is fearlessly daubed,
and an orange paper lantern with bars and lozenges of vermilion, which
the rising wind threatens every moment to overturn or extinguish, we go
in.
Oka’s wife is playing her _samisen_ in the basement, its twanging strains
ascending to us through the thin floor. She is singing now in a shrill,
squeaky voice, perhaps to amuse Oka, or to lull one of the numerous
little Okas to sleep. The song goes on to some accompaniment which is
too irregular to be anything save an improvisation, all the time Mousmé
is taking a few of the most valuable and elaborate pins out of her hair,
preparatory to sleep. My toilet is a simple one compared to that of
Mousmé, which indeed is so elaborate that I have frequently caught myself
idly wondering why she ever gets up or goes to bed to go through such a
process. There are her garments to be carefully stowed away in her little
cupboards, curiously contrived behind the panelling. The proper folding
of her _obi_ is in itself a matter of some considerable importance, to
judge from the serious, rapt expression of her face. Then there are the
wonderful pins with which her pretty head, set so well on her sloping
shoulders, is adorned.
There is no light to put out, because I always keep the lamp with
its glowworm flame burning throughout the night. It permits, for one
thing, Mousmé properly to arrange her head in the little hollow of her
camphor-wood pillow; for another, it allows me to watch her fall asleep,
and the antics of the moths outside our slate-blue gauze mosquito curtain
when I cannot sleep myself.
To-night, however, I am lulled to rest by the sheer monotony of Oka’s
wife’s song; and the last thing I remember is the twang, twing, twang of
her _samisen_, which is quite loud now, I have my ear so close to the
floor.
[Illustration: CHAPTER TEN]