_September 11th_.
A week has passed by peacefully enough, during which I have written
down nothing.
Little by little I am becoming accustomed to my Japanese household, to
the strangeness of the language, costumes, and faces. For the last
three weeks, no letters have arrived from Europe; they have no doubt
miscarried, and their absence contributes, as is usually the case, to
throw a veil of oblivion over the past.
Every day, therefore, I faithfully climb up to my villa, sometimes by
beautiful star-lit nights, sometimes through stormy downpours of rain.
Every morning as the sound of Madame Prune's chanted prayer rises
through the reverberating air, I awake and go down towards the sea, by
the grassy pathways full of dew.
The chief occupation of this Japanese country, seems to be a perpetual
hunt after curios. We sit down on the mattings, in the
antique-sellers' little booths, take a cup of tea with the salesmen,
and rummage with our own hands in the cupboards and chests, where many
a fantastic piece of old rubbish is huddled away. The bargaining,
much discussed, is laughingly carried on for several days, as though
we were trying to play off some excellent little practical joke upon
each other.
I really make a sad abuse of the adjective _little_, I am quite aware
of it, but how can I do otherwise? In describing this country, the
temptation is great to use it ten times in every written line. Little,
finical, affected,--all Japan is contained, both physically and
morally, in these three words.
My purchases are accumulating up there, in my little wood and paper
house; but how much more Japanese it really was, in its bare
emptiness, such as M. Sucre and Madame Prune had conceived it. There
are now many lamps of a religious shape hanging from the ceiling; many
stools and many vases, as many gods and goddesses as in a pagoda.
There is even a little Shintoist altar, before which Madame Prune has
not been able to restrain her feelings, and before which she has
fallen down and chanted her prayers in her bleating old nanny-goat
voice:
"Wash me clean from all my impurity, oh Ama-Térace-Omi-Kami, as one
washes away uncleanness in the river of Kamo."
Alas for poor Ama-Térace-Omi-Kami to have to wash away the impurities
of Madame Prune! What a tedious and ungrateful task!!
Chrysanthème, who is a Buddhist, prays sometimes in the evening before
lying down; although overcome with sleep, she prays clapping her hands
before the largest of our gilded idols. But she smiles with a childish
disrespect for her Buddha, directly her prayer is ended. I know that
she has also a certain veneration for her _Ottokés_ (the Spirits of
her ancestors), whose rather sumptuous altar is set up at her
mother's, Madame Renoncule's. She asks for their blessings, for
fortune and wisdom.
Who can make out her ideas about the gods, or about death? Does she
possess a soul? Does she think she has one? Her religion is an obscure
chaos of theogonies as old as the world, treasured up out of respect
for ancient customs; and of more recent ideas about the blessed final
annihilation, imported from India at the epoch of our middle ages by
saintly Chinese missionaries. The bonzes themselves are puzzled; what
a muddle, therefore, must not all this become, when jumbled together
in the childish brain of a sleepy mousmé?
Two very insignificant episodes have somewhat attached me to
her--(bonds of this kind seldom fail to draw closer in the end). The
first occasion was as follows:--
Madame Prune one day brought forth a relic of her gay youth, a
tortoiseshell comb of rare transparency, one of those combs that it is
good style to place on the summit of the head, lightly poised,
scarcely stuck at all in the air, with all the teeth showing. Taking
it out of a pretty little lacquered box, she held it up in the air and
blinked her eyes, looking through it at the sky--a bright summer
sky--as one does to examine the quality of a precious stone.
"Here is," she said, "an object of great value that you should offer
to your little wife."
My mousmé, very much taken by it, admired the clearness of the comb
and its graceful shape.
The lacquered box, however, pleased me most. On the cover was a
wonderful painting in gold on gold, representing a field of rice, seen
very close, on a windy day: a tangle of ears and grass beaten down and
twisted by a terrible squall; here and there, between the distorted
stalks, the muddy earth of the rice-swamp was visible; there were even
little pools of water, produced by bits of the transparent lacquer on
which tiny particles of gold seemed to float about like chaff in a
thick liquid; two or three insects, which required a microscope to be
well seen, were clinging in a terrified manner to the rushes, and the
whole picture was no larger than a woman's hand.
As for Madame Prune's comb, I confess it left me indifferent, and I
turned a deaf ear, thinking it very insignificant and expensive. Then
Chrysanthème answered mournfully:
"No, thank you, I don't want it; take it away, dear Madame Prune."
And at the same time she heaved a deep sigh, full of meaning, which
plainly said:
"He is not so fond of me as all that.--Useless to bother him."