_September 14th_.
Yves has dropped his silver whistle in the sea, the whistle so
absolutely indispensable for the maneuvers; and we search the town
through all day long, followed by Chrysanthème and Mdlles. La Neige
and La Lune, her sisters, in the endeavor to procure another.
It is, however, very difficult to find such a thing in Nagasaki; above
all, very difficult to explain in Japanese what is a sailor's whistle
of the traditional shape, curved and with a little ball at the end to
modulate the trills and the various sounds of official orders. For
three hours we are sent from shop to shop; at each one they pretend to
understand perfectly what is wanted and trace on tissue-paper, with a
paint-brush, the addresses of the shops where we shall without fail
meet with what we require,--away we go, full of hope, only to
encounter some fresh mystification, till our breathless djins get
quite bewildered.
They understand admirably that we want a thing that will make a noise,
music in short; thereupon they offer us instruments of every and the
most unexpected shape,--squeakers for Punch-and-Judy voices,
dog-whistles, trumpets. Each time it is something more and more
absurd, so that at last we are overcome with uncontrollable fits of
laughter. Last of all, an aged Japanese optician, who assumes a most
knowing air, a look of sublime wisdom, goes off to forage in his back
shop, and brings to light a steam fog-horn, a relic from some wrecked
steamer.
After dinner, the chief event of the evening is a deluge of rain which
takes us by surprise as we leave the tea-houses, on our return from
our fashionable stroll. It so happened that we were a large party,
having with us several mousmé guests, and from the moment that the
rain began to fall from the skies, as if out of a watering-pot turned
upside down, the band became disorganized. The mousmés run off, with
birdlike cries, and take refuge under door-ways, in the shops, under
the hoods of the djins.
Then, before long,--when the shops shut up in haste, when the emptied
streets are flooded, and almost black, and the paper lanterns, piteous
objects, wet through and extinguished,--I find myself, I know not how
it happens, flattened against a wall, under the projecting eaves,
alone in the company of Mdlle. Fraise, my cousin, who is crying
bitterly because her fine dress is wet through. And in the noise of
the rain, which is still falling and splashing everything; with the
spouts and gutters, which in the darkness plaintively murmur like
running streams, the town appears to me suddenly an abode of the
gloomiest sadness.
The shower is soon over, and the mousmés come out of their holes like
so many mice; they look for each other, call each other, and their
little voices take the singular melancholy, dragging inflections they
assume whenever they have to call from afar.
"Hi! Mdlle. Lu-u-u-u une!!"
"Hi! Madame Jonqui-i-i-i ille!!"
They shout from one to the other their outlandish names, prolonging
them indefinitely in the now silent night, in the reverberations of
the damp air after the great summer rain.
At length they are all collected and united again, these tiny
personages with narrow eyes and no brains, and we return to
Diou-djen-dji all wet through.
For the third time, we have Yves sleeping beside us under our blue
tent.
There is a great row soon after midnight in the apartment beneath us:
our landlord's family returning from a pilgrimage to a far-distant
temple of the Goddess of Grace. (Although Madame Prune is a Shintoist,
she reveres this deity, who, scandal says, watched over her youth.) A
moment after, Mdlle. Oyouki bursts into our room like a rocket,
bringing, on a charming little tray, sweetmeats which have been
blessed and bought at the gates of the temple yonder, on purpose for
us, and which we must positively eat at once, before the virtue is
gone out of them. Scarcely rousing ourselves, we absorb these little
edibles flavored with sugar and pepper, and return a great many sleepy
thanks.
Yves sleeps quietly on this occasion, without dealing any blows to the
floor or the panels either with fists or feet. He has hung his watch
on one of the hands of our gilded idol in order to be more sure of
seeing the hour at any time of the night, by the light of the sacred
lamps. He gets up betimes in the morning, asking: "Well, did I behave
properly?" and dresses in haste, preoccupied about duty and the
roll-call.
Outside, no doubt, it is daylight already: through the tiny holes
which time has pierced in our wooden panels, threads of morning light
penetrate our chamber, and in the atmosphere of our room where night
still lingers, they trace vague white rays. Soon, when the sun shall
have risen, these rays will lengthen and become beautifully golden.
The cocks and the cicalas make themselves heard, and now Madame Prune
will begin her mystic drone.
Nevertheless, out of politeness for Yves-San, Chrysanthème lights a
lantern and escorts him to the foot of the dark staircase. I even
fancy that, on parting, I hear a kiss exchanged. In Japan this is of
no consequence, that I know; it is very usual, and quite admissible;
no matter where one goes, in houses one enters for the first time, one
is quite at liberty to kiss any mousmé who may be present, without any
notice being taken of it. But with regard to Chrysanthème, Yves is in
a delicate position, and he ought to understand it better. I begin to
feel uneasy about the hours they have so often spent together alone;
and I make up my mind, that this very day I will not play the spy
upon them, but speak frankly to Yves, and make a clear breast of it.
All at once from below, _clac! clac!_ two dry hands clapped together;
it is Madame Prune's warning to the Great Spirit. And immediately
after her prayer breaks forth, soars upwards in a shrill nasal
falsetto, like a morning alarm when the hour for waking has come, the
mechanical noise of a spring let go and running down.
_"The richest woman in the world. Cleansed from all my sins, O
Ama-Térace-Omi-Kami, in the river of Kamo."_
And this extraordinary bleating, scarcely human, scatters and changes
my ideas, which were very nearly clear at the moment I awoke.