EASTWARDS
_Nagaki yo no
To no nemuri no
Miname-zame,
Nami nori fune no
Oto no yoki kana_.
From the deep sleep
Of a long night
Waking,
Sweet is the sound
Of the ship as it rides the waves.
When August snow fell upon St. Moritz, the Barringtons descended to
Milan, Florence, Venice and Rome. Towards Christmas they found their
way to the Riviera, where they met Lady Everington at Monte Carlo,
very indignant, or pretending to be so, at the neglect with which she
had been treated.
"Fairy godmothers are important people," she said, "and very easily
offended. Then, they turn you into wild animals, or send you to sleep
for a hundred years. Why didn't you write to me, child?"
They were sitting on the terrace with the Casino behind them,
overlooking the blue Mediterranean. A few yards farther on, a tall,
young Englishman was chatting and laughing with a couple of girls too
elaborately beautiful and too dazzlingly gowned for any world but the
half-world. Suddenly he turned, and noticed Lady Everington. With a
courteous farewell to his companions, he advanced to greet her.
"Aubrey Laking," she exclaimed, "you never answered the letter I wrote
to you at Tokyo."
"Dear Lady Georgie, I left Tokyo ages ago. It followed me back to
England; and I am now second secretary at Christiania. That is why I
am in Monte Carlo!"
"Then let me introduce you to Asako Fujinami, who is now Mrs.
Barrington. You must tell her all about Tokyo. It is her native city;
but she has not seen it since she was in long clothes, if Japanese
babies wear such things."
Aubrey Laking and Barrington had been at Eton together. They were old
friends, and were delighted to meet once more. Barrington, especially,
was pleased to have this opportunity to hear about Japan from one who
had but lately left the country, and who was moreover a fluent and
agreeable talker. Laking had not resided in Japan long enough to get
tired of orientalism. He described the quaint, the picturesque, the
amusing side of life in the East. He was full of enthusiasm for the
land of soft voices and smiling faces, where countless little shops
spread their wares under the light of the evening lanterns, where the
twang of the _samisen_ and the _geisha's_ song are heard coming from
the lighted tea-house, and the shadow of her helmet-like _coiffure_
is seen appearing and disappearing in silhouette against the paper
_shoji_.
* * * * *
The East was drawing the Barringtons towards its perilous coasts.
Laking's position at the Tokyo Embassy had been taken by Reggie
Forsyth, one of Geoffrey's oldest friends, his best man at his wedding
and a light of Lady Everington's circle. Already, Geoffrey had sent
him a post-card, saying, "Warm up the _saké_ bottle," (Geoffrey
was becoming quite learned in things Japanese), "and expect friends
shortly."
However, when the Barringtons did at last tear themselves from the
Riviera, they announced rather disingenuously that they were going to
Egypt.
"They are too happy," Lady Everington said to Laking a few days later,
"and they know nothing. I am afraid there will be trouble."
"Oh, Lady Georgie," he replied, "I have never known you to be a
prophetess of gloom. I would have thought the auspices were most
fortunate."
"They ought to quarrel more than they do," Lady Everington complained.
"She ought to contradict him more than she does. There must be a
volcanic element in marriage. It is a sign of trouble coming when the
fires are quiet."
"But they have got plenty of money," expostulated Aubrey, whose
troubles were invariably connected with his banking account, "and they
are very fond of each other. Where is the trouble to come from?"
"Trouble is on the lookout for all of us, Aubrey," said his companion,
"it is no good flying from it, even. The only thing to do is to look
it in the face and laugh at it; then it gets annoyed sometimes, and
goes away. But those two poor dears are sailing into the middle of it,
and they don't even know how to laugh yet."
"You think that Egypt is hopelessly demoralising. Thousands of people
go there and come safely home, almost all, in fact, except Robert
Hichens's heroines."
"Oh no, not in Egypt," said Lady Everington; "Egypt is only a
stepping-stone. They are going to Japan."
"Well, certainly Japan is harmless enough. There is nobody there worth
flirting with except us at the Embassies, and we generally have our
hands full. As for the visitors, they are always under the influence
of Cook's tickets and Japanese guides."
"Aubrey dear, you think that trouble can only come from flirting or
money."
"I know that those two preoccupations are an abundant source of
trouble."
"What do you think of Mrs. Barrington?" asked her Ladyship, appearing
to change the subject.
"Oh, a very sweet little thing."
"Like your lady friends in Tokyo, the Japanese ones, I mean?"
"Not in the least. Japanese ladies look very picturesque, but they are
as dull as dolls. They sidle along in the wake of their husbands, and
don't expect to be spoken to."
"And have you no more intimate experience?" asked Lady Everington.
"Really, Aubrey, you have not been living up to your reputation."
"Well, Lady Georgie," the young man proceeded, gazing at his polished
boots with a well-assumed air of embarrassment, "since I know that you
are one of the enlightened ones, I will confess to you that I did keep
a little establishment _à la_ Pierre Loti. My Japanese teacher thought
it would be a good way of improving my knowledge of the local
idiom; and this knowledge meant an extra hundred pounds to me for
interpreter's allowance, as it is called. I thought, too, that it
would be a relief after diplomatic dinner parties to be able to swear
for an hour or so, big round oaths in the company of a dear beloved
one who would not understand me. So my teacher undertook to provide me
with a suitable female companion. He did. In fact, he introduced me
to his sister; and the suitability was based on the fact that she
held the same position under my predecessor, a man whom I dislike
exceedingly. But this I only found out later on. She was dull, deadly
dull. I couldn't even make her jealous. She was as dull as my Japanese
grammar; and when I had passed my examination and burnt my books, I
dismissed her."
"Aubrey, what a very wicked story!"
"No, Lady Georgie, it was not even wicked. She was not real enough to
sin with. The affair had not even the excitement of badness to keep it
going."
"Do you know the Japanese well?" Lady Everington returned to the
highroad of her inquiry.
"No, nobody does; they are a most secretive people."
"Do you think that, if the Barringtons go to Japan, there is any
danger of Asako being drawn back into the bosom of her family?"
"No, I shouldn't think so," Laking replied, "Japanese life is so very
uncomfortable, you know, even to the Japs themselves, when once they
have got used to living in Europe or America. They sleep on the floor,
their clothes are inconvenient, and their food is nasty, even in the
houses of the rich ones."
"Yes, it must be a peculiar country. What do you think is the greatest
shock for the average traveller who goes there?"
"Lady Georgie, you are asking me very searching questions to-day. I
don't think I will answer any more."
"Just this one," she pleaded.
He considered his boots again for a moment, and then, raising his face
to hers with that humorous challenging look which he assumes when on
the verge of some indiscretion, he replied,--
"The _Yoshiwara_."
"Yes," said her Ladyship, "I have heard of such a place. It is a kind
of Vanity Fair, isn't it, for all the _cocottes_ Of Tokyo?"
"It's more than that," Laking answered; "it is a market of
human flesh, with nothing to disguise the crude fact except the
picturesqueness of the place. It is a square enclosure as large as a
small town. In this enclosure are shops, and in the shop windows
women are displayed just like goods, or like animals in cages; for the
windows have wooden bars. Some of the girls sit there stolidly like
stuffed images, some of them come to the bars and try to catch hold of
the passers-by, just like monkeys, and joke with them and shout after
them. But I could not understand what they said--fortunately, perhaps.
The girls,--there must be several thousands--are all dressed up in
bright kimonos. It really is a very pretty sight, until one begins to
think. They have their price tickets hung up in the shop windows, one
shilling up to one pound. That is the greatest shock which Japan has
in store for the ordinary tourist."
Lady Everington was silent for a moment; her flippant companion had
become quite serious.
"After all," she said, "is it any worse than Piccadilly Circus at
night?"
"It is not a question of better or worse," argued Laking. "Such a
purely mercenary system is a terrible offence to our most cherished
belief. We may be hypocrites, but our hypocrisy itself is an admission
of guilt and an act of worship. To us, even to the readiest sinners
among us, woman is always something divine. The lowest assignation
of the streets has at least a disguise of romance. It symbolises
the words and the ways of Love, even if it parodies them. But to the
Japanese, woman must be merely animal. You buy a girl as you buy a
cow."
Lady Everington shivered, but she tried to live up to her reputation
of being shocked by nothing.
"Well, that is true, after all, whether in Piccadilly or in the
Yoshiwara. All prostitution is just a commercial transaction."
"Perhaps," said the young diplomat, "but what about the Ideal at the
back of our minds? Passion is often a grotesque incarnation of the
Ideal, like a savage's rude image of his god. A glimpse of the ideal
is possible in Piccadilly, and impossible in the Yoshiwara. The divine
something was visible in Marguérite Gautier; little Hugh saw it even
in Nana. For one thing, here in London, in the dirtiest of sordid
dramas, it is still the woman who gives, but in Japan it is always the
man who takes."
"Aubrey," said his friend, "I had no idea that you were a poet, or in
other words that you ever talked nonsense without laughing. You think
such a shock is strong enough to upset the Barrington _ménage_?"
"It will give furiously to think," he answered, "to poor old Geoffrey,
who is a very straight, clean and honest fellow, not overused to
furious thinking. I suppose if one married a monkey, one might
persuade oneself of her humanity, until one saw her kindred in cages."
"Poor little Asako, my latest god-daughter!" cried Lady Everington.
"Really, Aubrey, you are very rude!"
"I did not mean to be," said Laking penitently. "She is a most
ingratiating little creature, like a lazy kitten; but I think it is
unwise for him to take her to Japan. All kinds of latent orientalisms
may develop."
* * * * *
The spring was at hand, the season of impulse, when we obey most
readily the sudden stirrings of our hearts. Even in the torrid climate
of Egypt, squalls of rain passed over like stray birds of passage.
Asako Barrington felt the fresh influence and the desire to do new
things in new places. Hitherto she had evinced very little inclination
to revisit the home of her ancestors. But on their return from the
temples of Luxor, she said quite unexpectedly to Geoffrey,--
"If we go to Japan now, we shall be in time to see the
cherry-blossoms."
"Why, little Yum Yum," cried her husband, delighted, "are you tired of
Pharaohs?"
"Egypt is very interesting," said Asako, correctly; "it is wonderful
to think of these great places standing here for thousands and
thousands of years. But it makes one sad, don't you think? Everybody
here seems to have died long, long ago. It would be nice to see green
fields again, wouldn't it, Geoffrey dearest?"
The voice of the Spring was speaking clearly.
"And you really want to go to Japan, sweetheart? It's the first time
I've heard you say you want to go."
"Uncle and Aunt Murata in Paris used always to say about now, 'If we
go back to Japan we shall be in time to see the cherry-blossoms.'"
"Why," asked Geoffrey, "do the Japanese make such a fuss about their
cherry-blossoms?"
"They must be very pretty," answered his wife, "like great clouds of
snow. Besides, the cherry-flowers are supposed to be like the Japanese
spirit."
"So you are my little cherry-blossom--is that right?"
"Oh no, not the women," she replied, "the men are the
cherry-blossoms."
Geoffrey laughed. It seemed absurd to him to compare a man to the
frail and transient beauty of a flower.
"Then what about the Japanese ladies," he asked, "if the men are
blossoms?"
Asako did not think they had any special flower to symbolise their
charms. She suggested,--
"The bamboo, they say, because the wives have to bend under the storms
when their husbands are angry. But, Geoffrey, you are never angry. You
do not give me a chance to be like the bamboo."
Next day, he boldly booked their tickets for Tokyo.
The long sea voyage was a pleasant experience, broken by fleeting
visits to startled friends in Ceylon and at Singapore, and enlivened
by the close ephemeral intimacies of life on board ship.
There was a motley company on board _S.S. Sumatra_; a company
whose most obvious elements, the noisy and bibulous pests in the
smoking-room and the ladies of mysterious destination with whom
they dallied, were dismissed by Geoffrey at once as being terrible
bounders. Beneath this scum more congenial spirits came to light,
officers and Government officials returning to their posts, and a few
globe-trotters of leisure. Everybody seemed anxious to pay attention
to the charming Japanese lady; and from such incessant attention it
is difficult to escape within the narrow bounds of ship life. The
only way to keep off the impossibles was to form a bodyguard of the
possibles. The seclusion of the honeymoon paradise had to be opened up
for once in a way.
Of course, there was much talk about the East; but it was a different
point of view, from that of the enthusiasts of Deauville and the
Riviera. These men and women had many of them lived in India, the
Malay States, Japan, or the open ports of China, lived there to earn
their bread and butter, not to dream about the Magic of the Orient.
For such as these the romance had faded. The pages of their busy lives
were written within a mourning border of discontent, of longing for
that home land, to which on the occasion of their rare holidays they
returned so readily, and which seemed to have no particular place or
use for them when they did return. They were members of the British
Dispersion; but their Zion was of more comfort to them as a sweet
memory than as an actual home.
"Yes," they would say about the land of their exile, "it is very
picturesque."
But their faces, lined or pale, their bitterness and their reticence,
told of years of strain, laboriously money-earning, in lands where
relaxations are few and forced, where climatic conditions are adverse,
where fevers lurk, and where the white minority are posted like
soldiers in a lonely fort, ever suspicious, ever on the watch.
* * * * *
The most faithful of Asako's bodyguard was a countryman of her own,
Viscount Kamimura, the son of a celebrated Japanese statesman and
diplomat, who, after completing his course at Cambridge, was returning
to his own country for the first time after many years.
He was a shy gentle youth, very quiet and refined, a little
effeminate, even, in his exaggerated gracefulness and in his
meticulous care for his clothes and his person. He avoided all company
except that of the Barringtons, probably because a similarity in
circumstances formed a bond between him and his country-woman.
He had a high, intellectual forehead, the beautiful deep brown eyes of
Asako, curling, sarcastic lips, a nose almost aquiline but starting a
fraction of an inch too low between his eyes. He had read everything,
he remembered everything, and he had played lawn tennis for his
university.
He was returning to Japan to be married. When Geoffrey asked him who
his fiancée was, he replied that he did not know yet, but that his
relatives would tell him as soon as ever he arrived in Japan.
"Haven't you got any say in the matter?" asked the Englishman.
"Oh yes," he answered, "If I actually dislike her, I need not marry
her; but, of course, the choice is limited, so I must try not to be
too hard to please."
Geoffrey thought that it must be because of his extreme aristocracy
that so few maidens in Japan were worthy of his hand. But Asako asked
the question,--
"Why is the choice so small?"
"You see," he said, "there are not many girls in Japan who can speak
both English and French, and as I am going into the Diplomatic Service
and shall leave Japan again shortly, that is an absolute necessity;
besides, she must have a very good degree from her school."
Geoffrey could hardly restrain himself from laughing. This idea of
choosing a wife like a governess for her linguistic accomplishments
seemed to him exceedingly comic.
"You don't mind trusting other people," he said, "to arrange your
marriage for you?"
"Certainly not," said the young Japanese, "they are my own relatives,
and they will do their best for me. They are all older than I am, and
they have had the experience of their own marriages."
"But," said Geoffrey, "when you saw your friends in England choosing
for themselves, and falling in love and marrying for love's sake--?"
"Some of them chose for themselves and married barmaids and divorced
persons, just for the reason that they were in love and uncontrolled.
So they brought shame on their families, and are probably now very
unhappy. I think they would have done better if they had let their
relatives choose for them."
"Yes; but the others who marry girls of their own set?"
"I think their choice is not really free at all. I do not think it is
so much the girl who attracts them. It is the plans and intentions of
those around them which urge them on. It is a kind of mesmerism. The
parents of the young man and the parents of the young girl make the
marriage by force of will. That also is a good way. It is not so very
different from our system in Japan."
"Don't you think that people in England marry because they love each
other?" asked Asako.
"Perhaps so," replied Kamimura, "but in our Japanese language we have
no word which is quite the same as your word Love. So they say we
do not know what this Love is. It may be so, perhaps. Anyhow Mr.
Barrington will not wish to learn Japanese, I think."
Geoffrey liked the young man. He was a good athlete, he was unassuming
and well-bred, he clearly knew the difference between Good and Bad
Form. Geoffrey's chief misgiving with regard to Japan had been a doubt
as to the wisdom of making the acquaintance of his wife's kindred. How
dreadful if they turned out to be a collection of oriental curios with
whom he would not have one idea in common!
The company of this young aristocrat, in no way distinguishable from
an Englishman except for a certain grace and maturity, reassured him.
No doubt his wife would have cousins like this; clean, manly fellows
who would take him shooting and with whom he could enjoy a game of
golf. He thought that Kamimura must be typical of the young Japanese
of the upper classes. He did not realize that he was an official
product, chosen by his Government and carefully moulded and polished,
not to be a Japanese at home, but to be a Japanese abroad, the
qualified representative of a First Class Power.
Kamimura left the boat with them at Colombo and joined them in their
visit to some tea-planting relatives. He was ready to do the same at
Singapore, but he received an urgent cable from Japan recalling him at
once.
"I must not be too late for my own wedding," he said, during their
last lunch together at Raffles's Hotel. "It would be a terrible sin
against the laws of Filial Piety."
"Whatever is that?" asked Asako.
"Dear Mrs. Barrington, are you a daughter of Japan, and have never
heard of the Twenty-four Children?"
"No; who are they?"
"They are model children, the paragons of goodness, celebrated because
of their love for their fathers and mothers. One of them walked miles
and miles every day to get water from a certain spring for his sick
mother; another, when a tiger was going to eat his father, rushed to
the animal and cried, 'No, eat me instead!' Little boys and girls in
Japan are always being told to be like the Twenty-four Children."
"Oh, how I'd hate them!" cried Asako.
"That is because you are a rebellious, individualistic Englishwoman.
You have lost that sense of family union, which makes good Japanese,
brothers and cousins and uncles and aunts, all love each other
publicly, however much they may hate each other in private."
"That is very hypocritical!"
"It is the social law," replied Kamimura. "In Japan the family is the
important thing. You and I are nothing. If you want to get on in the
world you must always be subject to your family. Then you are sure
to get on however stupid you may be. In England you seem to use your
families chiefly to quarrel with."
"I think our relatives ought to be just our best friends," said Asako.
"They are that too in a way," the young man answered. "In Japan it
would be better to be born without hands and feet than to be born
without relatives."