THE FOREIGN DEVILS
The female Foreign Devil having failed to uproot the oak, which clung to
its native soil with a tenacity highly Japanese, returned to the garden
path. And then came the voice of Pine-breeze kow-towing to the
strangers, bidding them welcome, and imploring them to make the
honorable entrance.
They passed from view into the house, and Leslie rose from his chair.
“Wait here awhile, Campanula,” he said, “and then follow me in. I think
I know them, but I will go and see.”
“Yes,” said Campanula.
He walked to the house and kicked his garden shoes off in the veranda,
noting the fact that the Foreign Devils had committed the unspeakable
outrage of entering with their shoes on.
“_Richard!_” cried the tall woman, advancing to him with outstretched
hand as he entered the room where they were. “Why, you’ve grown!” She
spoke as though they had parted yesterday, but her voice had an
hysterical quaver, then she presented her cheek to him for a cousinly
kiss.
“This is Richard Leslie,” said the woman, turning to the little stout
man in tweed. “We grew up together; that’s why I’m so tall, I suppose.
Dick—my husband George. Gracious, Dick, where are your chairs and
things? Have you nothing to sit down on?”
“Only the floor,” said Leslie, fetching some square cushions and placing
them on the matting. “See, this is how it’s done,” and he sat down on
one of the cushions, whilst his companions followed suit.
Jane du Telle, once Jane Deering, was, despite her vivacity and
carelessness of manner, evidently in a state of high nervous tension.
Leslie, notwithstanding the years that had passed since their last
meeting, saw in her mentally little change. She was the same Jane who
had once hacked his shins, when they were boy and girl together, up in
Scotland, and then flung herself on his neck in a burst of repentance
and tears. Emotional, good-hearted, selfish—giving herself away one
moment, but always saved the next by a latent discretion that was to her
flighty nature as a gyroscope. The same Jane with whom he had fished for
salmon and played at tennis in the past, seated before him now on a
floor in Japan, chattering of everything and nothing just in the old
familiar way.
“And that’s the fellow she has married!” thought he, as he glanced
across at George du Telle, a podgy, red-headed little man, a
globe-trotting Briton of the most blatant description.
“How did you know I was here?” asked he, after Jane had somewhat talked
her hysterical feelings off.
“Mr. Channing told us last night at the hotel. He’s a friend of yours.
He told us he knew an Englishman named Richard Leslie living in the
native fashion, and I asked him if he was good-looking and tall and
dark, and he said, ‘Yes.’ He said you lived at the House of the
Clouds—sounds like an address in a dream, doesn’t it?—so we took
rikshas and came.”
She put her hand to her back, where the “floor stitch” had seized her.
The floor may be a convenient enough resting-place for a Mousmé who
sinks down upon it quite naturally in the likeness of a compressed and
joyously colored Z, but for an English woman of five feet eight or more,
dressed in a tailor-made gown, and laced in a _corset parfait_ it is at
first rather difficult.
“I would have got chairs,” said Leslie, “if I had known you were coming;
but of all the people of the world, you were the last I expected to see.
Where did you come from? I mean, how did you strike Nagasaki?”
“We came from Colombo.”
“Beastly hole,” put in her husband, who was stroking Sweetbriar San, the
cat of the establishment, who had just come in to inspect the strangers.
“We stayed at the Beach Hotel two nights, and d’you know what they
charged us? Just think.”
“Don’t think,” said Jane, who had wriggled into a more comfortable
attitude. “Give me that cat, George; and I wish you would try to repress
your hotel bills. Dick, I was so sorry to hear the news about your
father.”
“What news?”
“About his death.”
“Well, you were sorrier than I was.”
“Oh, Dick! but don’t let us talk about it, it’s all so sad. And have you
been living here in Japan ever since?”
“Ever since.”
“Just like this on the floor?”
“Just like this on the floor.”
“You must find it rather flat, I should think,” said the carroty-headed
George.
“Richard,” said Jane suddenly, ignoring her husband, “you’re not married
to a Japanese—or anything—are you?”
“No.”
“Do you live here alone?”
“Well, I have three servant girls, and a daughter, if you call that
‘alone.’”
“A daughter!” said Jane.
“Yes; and she’s Japanese, too.”
“Japanese!”
“Yes; I adopted her.”
George du Telle snorted, and fortunately at that moment a panel slid
back, and Pine-breeze appeared with the tea, followed by Lotus-bud with
an hibachi and Cherry-blossom with a heap of tiny plates.
“Are these your—I mean is one of these your—”
“Daughter? No. Turn round, and you will see her,”
Jane was seated with her back to the drawn-back panel that made a
doorway on to the veranda. She turned, and there in the sunlit space
stood Campanula in her blue kimono, broad scarlet obi, and with a
scarlet flower in her hair. Behind her, as a background, lay the picture
garden, antique hills, spun-glass torrents, and tiny, twisted fir trees,
that looked, oh, so old, and tired of the world, and tormented by the
wind.
Campanula went right down on her knees upon the matting, and murmured
the usual Japanese welcome.
Now this was a practice that Leslie disliked. He had tried to break her
of it, and in the attempt he had come across a strange fact.
Campanula in her heart of hearts was a real child of Old Japan. She
might have been a sister to the seven-and-forty Ronins in the time
before Osaka was defiled by factory chimneys, and the monastery of
Kotoku-in by the presence of Cook’s tourists.
She tried honestly to be modern, as it was the wish of Leslie, but in
times of emotion, back her intellect would go to Old Japan, and she
would act as her ancestors had acted in who knows what lotus-strewn and
blossom-scented ages.
“What does she say?” asked Jane, as George du Telle rose to his feet.
“Tell me, and ask her to excuse me for not getting up, for when I get
up, I’ll have to be _pulled_ up.”
“She is bidding you welcome and at the same time apologizing for the
fact of her own miserable existence.”
“I accept the apology,” said Jane, as Campanula, her devotions over,
sank down before the tea-service, and prepared to act as hostess.
“Freely and frankly, Dick, I must congratulate you on your taste—she is
lovely.”
Campanula looked up with a faint, apologetic smile.
“I speak English,” she said.