OF MOUSMÉS AND OTHER THINGS
Plum-blossom was a Mousmé with a broad face, ever lit by a half smile.
Moon was a girl with a serious expression, but gorgeous of dress as any
girl of Kioto. Snow looked shrunk—not withered, you understand, fresh
as a daisy, in fact; but something had happened in her development: she
was preternaturally small, and looked like a Mousmé seen through a
diminishing glass.
The three Mousmés and old mother Fir-cone took almost entire possession
of Campanula San when she arrived, and Campanula San seemed quite
content.
Mixed with her charming childishness there was a philosophical calm that
would have done honour to a sage of the Stoic school. Riding on
Leslie’s shoulder through Nikko, under examination at the Tea House of
the Tortoise, playing with Plum-blossom in the veranda of the House of
the Clouds, she was just the same. Life was a pageant at which she was
an humble spectator, whose duty was to be amiable and submissive, and
accept things just as they came.
She did not say this, but she acted it, or rather expressed it in her
actions and ways.
Down on the Bund an office had been rented by M’Gourley. He slept there
and lived there, ascending occasionally at night to the House of the
Clouds to smoke a pipe with his partner and talk business, and give
advice on things Japanese, advice often needful enough to the
uninitiated Leslie.
House-keeping in Japan is full of surprises. One day, for instance,
Leslie met a figure coming from the back part of the premises—a figure
like a rag-doll that had spent its life in a coal-scuttle. Interrogated,
the figure turned out to be the mother of Moon, and by profession—well,
her profession was helping to coal the Canadian Pacific boats.
“But,” said Leslie, “it is impossible, for Moon already has a mother
whose name is Fir-cone.”
He was just going to send for the police when the whole truth came out
on the veranda, in the form of Moon herself.
She explained in indifferent English, kneeling as she spoke with the
backs of her little hands held upwards to her face, that the comprador
had lied; that there was no particular connection between her and her
fellow-servants; that the comprador had made a bunch of them just as he
might make a bunch of weeds, picking one up here and the other there,
and pretending they were all the one family. Why had he done this thing?
Who could say? For some dark reason of his own. She said also that her
mother was not always as dirty as that, but was going home now to wash.
Would Leslie San like to see her washed so that Moon’s words might be
proved to him true? Leslie San would not.
M’Gourley was had up, and managed to arrange matters without the
disruption of the household, which seemed imminent.
M’Gourley mixed a good deal in the affairs of the House of the Clouds.
Six months had not passed before the member of the Wee Kirk declared
that Campanula should be sent to the missionary day school near the
Bund, and brought up a Christian.
Leslie at first demurred. The state of Campanula’s mind, as revealed by
her in conversations mostly translated by Mac, but often conducted
limpingly by Leslie himself (he was beginning to pick up the native),
did not argue a good foundation for a structure like the Christian
religion.
Her mind, as far as he could get at it, was the mind of a sensitive and
cultured lady who was slightly mad—mad on the subject of demons and
strange beasts.
Tortoises who talked, storks whose language was the acme of politeness,
and toads of polished speech, seemed as real to her as ordinary folk.
Whether the tin-smith, her supposed father, had filled her head with
these things, no one can say, but the fact remained that she was a
perfect Uncle Remus as far as animal-tale construction was concerned,
and had a Mrs. Radcliffe touch in the weird, so that it was a not
uncommon thing for her to be marched off to bed, the triumvirate of
Mousmés—Moon, Plum-blossom, and Snow—acting as a body-guard to protect
her from her own extraordinary fancies.
Then the self-abasement, the absolute self-abasement with which she
would kow-tow with both tiny hands backs upward before your august self,
and next minute she would be spinning a top on the veranda, or playing
just like an ordinary child with Kiku San, a dot about her own size, and
only daughter of Mr. Initogo, the landlord.
She had a whole host of baldheaded Pagan friends, male and female, and
Leslie, taking a siesta of an afternoon, would hear their clogs rattling
on the veranda, or their naked feet pattering in the kitchen, and half
fancy himself the proprietor of a kindergarten.
Quaint kites were often to be seen flying above the House of the Clouds,
kites shaped like hawks and butterflies, and M’Gourley down in the
street below would sometimes glance up and see these evidences of
Campanula’s existence, and nod his head and say, “A’weel!” and hurry on
to Danjuro’s to meet him about some perhaps questionable transaction,
revolving in his mind the while the question of Campanula’s conversion
to Christianity.
He was a strange mixture. He would spend a whole morning in trade. That
is to say, he would get to the office on the Bund early, do his
correspondence and what not with regard to the export of cheap curios,
go to the hotel and have a cocktail, and fish round for victims; find
some well-to-do stranger and lead him into Danjuro’s shop, deliver him
up as a dripping roast into Danjuro’s hands, receive his commission, and
go off and have tiffin. Then as likely as not he would go up to the
House of the Clouds and fetch Campanula out for a walk, and buy her
toys, or sweets, or flowers.
And once a week or so he would tackle Leslie about the Christianity
business, till Leslie at last gave in.
Campanula went to the missionary day school, the prettiest school child
in the world under her scarlet umbrella pictured with flying storks.
Leslie went away sometimes for weeks, leaving her in charge of the
Mousmés and leaving Mac with instructions to keep an eye on her welfare.
For the first eight months or so of this new life he was amused and
interested, the beauty of the country, the quaintness of the people, the
new conditions of life, kept him from thinking much about the past or
troubling about the future.
Then came reaction. A craving came on him to see England once again, a
veritable home-sickness that was not to be denied.
He made a journey to London. He only spent a fortnight there; every one
he had known in the past was either gone or dead. He belonged to no
club. It was a miserable fortnight, and every day of it Japan called him
back.
When he returned, he told himself that he had done with the West for
ever. Just as men sometimes tell themselves they have done for ever with
sin, folly, or love.
PART TWO
THE MASSACRE OF THE BLUE-BELLS