THE EMBASSY
_Tsuyu no yo no
Tsuyu no yo nagara
Sari nagara!_
While this dewdrop world
Is but a dewdrop world,
Yet--all the same!--
The fabric of our lives is like a piece of knitting, terribly botched
and bungled in most cases. There are stitches which are dropped,
sometimes to be swallowed up and forgotten in the superstructure,
sometimes to be picked up again after a lapse of years. These stitches
are old friendships.
The first stitch from Geoffrey's bachelor days to be worked back into
the scheme of his married life was his friendship for Reggie Forsyth,
who had been best man at his wedding and who had since then been
appointed Secretary to the Embassy at Tokyo.
Reggie had received a telegram saying that Geoffrey was coming. He was
very pleased. He had reached that stage in the progress of exile
where one is inordinately happy to see any old friend. In fact, he
was beginning to be "fed up" with Japan, with its very limited
distractions, and with the monotony of his diplomatic colleagues.
Instead of going to the tennis court, which was his usual afternoon
occupation, he had spent the time in arranging his rooms, shifting
the furniture, rehanging the pictures, paying especial care to the
disposition of his Oriental curios, his recent purchases, his last
enthusiasms in this land of languor. Reggie collected Buddhas, Chinese
snuff-bottles and lacquered medicine cases--called _inro_ in Japanese.
"Caviare to the general!" murmured Reggie, as he gloated over a
chaste design of fishes in mother-of-pearl, a pseudo-Korin. "Poor old
Geoffrey! He's only a barbarian; but perhaps she will be interested.
Here, T[=o]!" he called out to an impassive Japanese man-servant, "have
the flowers come yet, and the little trees?"
T[=o] produced from the back regions of the house a quantity of dwarf
trees, planted as miniature landscapes in shallow porcelain dishes,
and big fronds of budding cherry blossom.
Reggie arranged the blossom in a triumphal arch over the corner table,
where stood the silent company of the Buddhas. From among the trees
he chose his favourite, a kind of dwarf cedar, to place between the
window, opening on to a sunny veranda, and an old gold screen, across
whose tender glory wound the variegated comicality of an Emperor's
traveling procession, painted by a Kano artist of three centuries ago.
He removed the books which were lying about the room--grim Japanese
grammars, and forbidding works on International Law; and in
their place he left volumes of poetry and memoirs, and English
picture-papers strewn about in artistic disorder. Then he gave the
silver frames of his photographs to To to be polished, the photographs
of fair women signed with Christian names, of diplomats in grand
uniforms, and of handsome foreigners.
Having reduced the serious atmosphere of his study so as to give an
impression of amiable indolence, Reggie Forsyth lit a cigarette and
strolled out into the garden, amused at his own impatience. In London
he would never have bestirred himself for old Geoffrey Barrington, who
was only a Philistine, after all, with no sense of the inwardness of
things.
Reggie was a slim and graceful young man, with thin fair hair brushed
flat back from his forehead. A certain projection of bones under the
face gave him an almost haggard look; and his dancing blue eyes seemed
to be never still. He wore a suit of navy serge fitting close to his
figure, black tie, and grey spats. In fact, he was as immaculate as a
young diplomat should always be.
Outside his broad veranda was a gravel path, and beyond that a
Japanese garden, the hobby of one of his predecessors, a miniature
domain of hillocks and shrubs, with the inevitable pebbly water
course, in which a bronze crane was perpetually fishing. Over the
red-brick wall which encircles the Embassy compound the reddish buds
of a cherry avenue were bursting in white stars.
The compound of the Embassy is a fragment of British soil. The British
flag floats over it; and the Japanese authorities have no power
within its walls. Its large population of Japanese servants, about one
hundred and fifty in all, are free from the burden of Japanese taxes;
and, since the police may not enter, gambling, forbidden throughout
the Empire, flourishes there; and the rambling servants' quarters
behind the Ambassador's house are the Monte Carlo of the Tokyo _betto_
(coachman) and _kurumaya_ (rickshaw runner). However, since the
alarming discovery that a professional burglar had, Diogenes-like,
been occupying an old tub in a corner of the wide grounds, a policeman
has been allowed to patrol the garden; but he has to drop that
omnipotent swagger which marks his presence outside the walls.
Except for Reggie Forsyth's exotic shrubbery, there is nothing
Japanese within the solid red walls. The Embassy itself is the house
of a prosperous city gentleman and might be transplanted to Bromley or
Wimbledon. The smaller houses of the secretaries and the interpreters
also wear a smug, suburban appearance, with their red brick and their
black-and-white gabling. Only the broad verandas betray the intrusion
of a warmer sun than ours.
The lawns were laid out as a miniature golf-links, the thick masses
of Japanese shrubs forming deadly bunkers, and Reggie was trying some
mashie shots when one of the rare Tokyo taxi-cabs, carrying Geoffrey
Barrington inside it, came slowly round a corner of the drive, as
though it were feeling its way for its destination among such a
cluster of houses.
Geoffrey was alone.
"Hello, old chap!" cried Reggie, running up and shaking his friend's
big paw in his small nervous grip, "I'm so awfully glad to see you;
but where's Mrs. Barrington?"
Geoffrey had not brought his wife. He explained that they had been
to pay their first call on Japanese relations, and that they had been
honourably out; but even so the strain had been a severe one, and
Asako had retired to rest at the hotel.
"But why not come and stay here with me?" suggested Reggie. "I have
got plenty of spare rooms; and there is such a gulf fixed between
people who inhabit hotels and people with houses of their own. They
see life from an entirely different point of view; their spirits
hardly ever meet."
"Have you room for eight large boxes of dresses and kimonos, several
cases of curios, a French maid, a Japanese guide, two Japanese dogs
and a monkey from Singapore?"
Reggie whistled.
"No really, is it as bad as all that? I was thinking that marriage
meant just one extra person. It would have been fun having you both
here, and this is the only place in Tokyo fit to live in."
"It looks a comfortable little place," agreed Geoffrey. They had
reached the secretary's house, and the newcomer was admiring its
artistic arrangement.
"Just like your rooms in London!"
Reggie prided himself on the exclusively oriental character of his
habitation, and its distinction from any other dwelling place which
he had ever possessed. But then Geoffrey was only a Philistine, after
all.
"I suppose it's the photographs which look like old times," Geoffrey
went on. "How's little Véronique?"
"Veronica married an Argentine beef magnate, a German Jew, the
nastiest person I have ever avoided meeting."
"Poor old Reggie! Was that why you came to Japan?"
"Partly; and partly because I had a chief in the Foreign Office who
dared to say that I was lacking in practical experience of diplomacy.
He sent me to this comic country to find it."
"And you have found it right enough," said Geoffrey, inspecting a
photograph of a Japanese girl in her dark silk kimono with a dainty
flower pattern round the skirts and at the fall of the long sleeves.
She was not unlike Asako; only there was a fraction of an inch more of
bridge to her nose, and in that fraction lay the secret of her birth.
"That is my latest inspiration," said Reggie. "Listen!"
He sat down at the piano and played a plaintive little air, small and
sweet and shivering.
"_Japonaiserie d'hiver_," he explained.
Then he changed the burden of his song into a melody rapid and
winding, with curious tricklings among the bass notes.
"Lamia," said Reggie, "or Lilith."
"There's no tune in that last one; you can't whistle it," said
Geoffrey, who exaggerated his Philistinism to throw Reggie's artistic
nature into stronger relief. "But what has that got to do with the
lady?"
"Her name is Smith," said Reggie. "I know it is almost impossible and
terribly sad; but her other name is Yaé. Rather wild and savage--isn't
it? Like the cry of a bird in the night-time, or of a cannibal tribe
on the warpath."
"And is this your oriental version of Véronique?" asked his friend.
"No," said Reggie, "it is a different chapter of experience
altogether. Perhaps old Hardwick was right. I still have much to
learn, thank God. Véronique was personal; Yaé is symbolic. She is my
model, just like a painter's model, only more platonic. She is the
East to me; for I cannot understand the East pure and undiluted. She
is a country-woman of mine on her father's side, and therefore easier
to understand. Impersonality and fatalism, the Eastern Proteus, in
the grip of self-insistence and idealism, the British Hercules. A
butterfly body with this cosmic war shaking it incessantly. Poor
child! no wonder she seems always tired."
"She is a half-caste?" asked Geoffrey.
"Bad word, bad word. She isn't half-anything; and caste suggests India
and suttees. She is a Eurasian, a denizen of a dream country which has
a melodious name and no geographical existence. Have you ever
heard anybody ask where Eurasia was? I have. A traveling Member of
Parliament's wife at the Embassy here only a few months ago. I said
that it was a large undiscovered country lying between the Equator and
Tierra del Fuego. She seemed quite satisfied, and wondered whether
it was very hot there; she remembered having heard a missionary once
complain that the Eurasians wore so very few clothes! But to return
to Yaé, you must meet her. This evening? No? To-morrow then. You will
like her because, she looks something like Asako; and she will adore
you because you are utterly unlike me. She comes here to inspire me
once or twice a week. She says she likes me because everything in
my house smells so sweet. That is the beginning of love, I sometimes
think. Love enters the soul through the nostrils. If you doubt me,
observe the animals. But foreign houses in Japan are haunted by a
smell of dust and mildew. You cannot love in them. She likes to lie
on my sofa, and smoke cigarettes, and do nothing, and listen to my
playing tunes about her."
"You are very impressionable," said his friend. "If it were anybody
else I should say you were in love with this girl."
"I am still the same, Geoffrey; always in love--and never."
"But what about the other people here?" Barrington asked.
"There are none, none who count. I am not impressionable. I am just
short-sighted. I have to focus my weak vision on one person and
neglect the rest."
* * * * *
A rickshaw was waiting to take Geoffrey back to the hotel. Under the
saffron light of an uncanny sunset, which barred the western heavens
with three broad streaks of orange and inky-blue like a gypsy girl's
kerchief, the odd little vehicle rolled down the hill of Miyakezaka
which overhangs the moat of the Imperial Palace.
The latent soul of Tokyo, the mystery of Japan, lies within the
confines of that moat, which is the only great majestic thing in an
untidy rambling village of more than two million living beings.
The Palace of the Mikado--a title by the way which is never used among
Japanese--is hidden from sight. That is the first remarkable thing
about it. The gesture of Versailles, the challenge of "_l'etat c'est
moi_," the majestic vulgarity which the millionaire of the moment can
mimic with a vulgarity less majestic, are here entirely absent; and
one cannot mimic the invisible.
Hardly, on bare winter days, when the sheltering groves are stripped,
and the saddened heart is in need of reassurance, appears a green
lustre of copper roofs.
The _Goshö_ at Tokyo is not a sovereign's palace; it is the abode of a
God.
The surrounding woods and gardens occupy a space larger than Hyde
Park in the very centre of the city. One well-groomed road crosses
an extreme corner of this estate. Elsewhere only privileged feet may
tread. This is a vast encumbrance in a modern commercial metropolis,
but a striking tribute to the unseen.
The most noticeable feature of the Palace is its moats. These lie in
three or four concentric circles, the defences of ancient Yedo, whose
outer lines have now been filled up by modern progress and an electric
railway. They are broad sheets of water as wide as the Thames at
Oxford, where ducks are floating and fishing. Beyond is a _glacis_
of vivid grass, a hundred feet high at some points, topped by vast
iron-grey walls of cyclopean boulder-work, with the sudden angles of
a Vauban fortress. Above these walls the weird pine-trees of Japan
extend their lean tormented boughs. Within is the Emperor's domain.
Geoffrey was hurrying homeward along the banks of the moat. The
stagnant, viscous water was yellow under the sunset, and a yellow
light hung over the green slopes, the grey walls and the dark tree
tops. An echelon of geese passed high overhead in the region of the
pale moon. Within the mysterious _enclave_ of the "Son of Heaven" the
crows were uttering their harsh sarcastic croak.
Witchery is abroad in Tokyo during this brief sunset hour. The
mongrel nature of the city is less evident. The pretentious Government
buildings of the New Japan assume dignity with the deep shadows and
the heightening effect of the darkness. The untidy network of tangled
wires fades into the coming obscurity. The rickety trams, packed to
overflowing with the city crowds returning homeward, become creeping
caterpillars of light. Lights spring up along the banks of the moat.
More lights are reflected from its depth. Dark shadows gather like
a frown round the Gate of the Cherry Field, where Ii Kamon no Kami's
blood stained the winter snow-drifts some sixty years ago, because he
dared to open the Country of the Gods to the contemptible foreigners;
and in the cry of the _tofu_-seller echoes the voice of old Japan, a
long-drawn wail, drowned at last by the grinding of the tram wheels
and the lash and crackle of the connecting-rods against the overhead
lines.
Geoffrey, sitting back in his rickshaw, turned up his coat-collar, and
watched the gathering pall of cloud extinguishing the sunset.
"Looks like snow," he said to himself; "but it is impossible!"
At the entrance to the Imperial Hotel--a Government institution, as
almost everything in Japan ultimately turns out to be--Tanaka was
standing in his characteristic attitude of a dog who waits for his
master's return. Characteristically also, he was talking to a man,
a Japanese, a showy person with spectacles and oily buffalo-horn
moustaches, dressed in a vivid pea-green suit. However, at Geoffrey's
approach, this individual raised his bowler-hat, bobbed and vanished;
and Tanaka assisted his patron to descend from his rickshaw.
As he approached the door of his suite, a little cloud of hotel _boys_
scattered like sparrows. This phenomenon did not as yet mean anything
to Geoffrey. The native servants were not very real to him. But he
was soon to realize that the _boy san_--Mister Boy, as his dignity now
insists on being called--is more than an amusing contribution to the
local atmosphere. When his smiles, his bows, and his peculiar English
begin to pall, he reveals himself in his true light as a constant
annoyance and a possible danger. Hell knows no fury like the untipped
"_boy san_" He refuses to answer the bell. He suddenly understands no
English at all. He bangs all the doors. He spends his spare moments
in devising all kinds of petty annoyances, damp and dirty sheets,
accidental damage to property, surreptitious draughts. And to vex one
_boy san_ is to antagonize the whole caste; it is a boycott. At last
the tip is given. Sudden sunshine, obsequious manners, attention of
all kinds--for ever dwindling periods, until at last the _boy san_
attains his end, a fat retaining fee, extorted at regular intervals.
But even more exasperating, since no largesse can cure it, is his
national bent towards espionage. What does he do with his spare time,
of which he has so much? He spends it in watching and listening to the
hotel guests. He has heard legends of large sums paid for silence or
for speech. There may be money in it, therefore, and there is always
amusement. So the only housework which the _boy san_ does really
willingly, is to dust the door, polish the handle, wipe the
threshold;--anything in fact which brings him into the propinquity of
the keyhole. What he observes or overhears, he exchanges with another
_boy san_; and the hall porter or the head waiter generally serves as
Chief Intelligence Bureau, and is always in touch with the Police.
The arrival of guests so remarkable as the Barringtons became,
therefore, at once a focus for the curiosity the ambition of the _boy
sans_. And a rickshaw-man had told the lodgekeeper, whose wife told
the wife of one of the cooks, who told the head waiter, that there was
some connection between these visitors and the rich Fujinami. All the
_boy sans_ knew what the Fujinami meant; so here was a cornucopia of
unwholesome secrets. It was the most likely game which had arrived at
the Imperial Hotel for years, ever since the American millionaire's
wife who ran away with a San Francisco Chinaman.
But to Geoffrey, when he broke up the gathering, the _boy sans_ were
just a lot of queer little Japs.
Asako was lying on her sofa, reading. Titine was brushing her hair.
Asako, when she read, which was not often, preferred literature of
the sentimental school, books like _The Rosary_, with stained glass in
them, and tragedy overcome by nobleness of character.
"I've been lonely without you and nervous," she said, "and I've had a
visitor already."
She pointed to a card lying on a small round table, a flimsy card
printed--not engraved--on cream-coloured pasteboard. Geoffrey picked
it up with a smile.
"Curio dealers?" he asked.
Japanese letters were printed on one side and English on the other.
[Illustration: _S. ITO_ _Attorney of Law_]
"Ito, that's the lawyer fellow, who pays the dividends. Did you see
him."
"Oh, no, I was much too weary. But he has only just gone. You probably
passed him on the stairs."
Geoffrey could only think of the vivid gentleman, who had been talking
with Tanaka. The guide was sent for and questioned, but he knew
nothing. The gentleman in green had merely stopped to ask him the
time.