THE HOUSE BY NIGHT
It was late when Leslie left the hotel. The moon was rising over
Nagasaki, and he required no lamp to light him up the hill path leading
to the house.
In the veranda he sat down to rest a moment and pull off his boots. The
landscape garden, looking very antique in the moonlight, lay before him,
the moon lighting its tiny hills and melancholy groves with the same
particular care that presently he would bestow on the forests of Scindia
and the Himalayas. On one of its verdurous swards lay a mark. It was the
mark of Jane du Telle’s footstep imprinted on Campanula’s garden.
He sat for a while in thought, then he unlatched a panel with a sort of
gridiron-shaped key, then he searched in his pocket for matches, and
found he had none.
Determining to grope his way up and go to bed by moonlight, he closed
and fastened the panel, leaving himself in darkness, caught his toe
against an hibachi, left as if on purpose for him to tumble over, swore,
knocked himself against a screen, which fell crash on Sweetbriar San,
the household cat, who had once made part of the Fir-cone, Plum-blossom,
Moon, and Snow ministry, and the intelligent animal, conceiving that
robbers had entered, rushed wildly round and round in the dark till a
panel slid back revealing Pine-breeze with a wan and weary smile on her
face, and an andon or night lantern in her hand. She handed Leslie a
candle and box of matches, and, still smiling, slid back, closing the
panel as she went, like a figure in a trick toy, Sweetbriar San
bristling and glowering on her shoulder like a fiend.
The upper part of the House of the Clouds was divided by panels into a
passage and three rooms. One for Leslie, one for the Mousmés, and the
third for Campanula.
Pine-breeze, with her arm full of towels, or what not, would often come
into Leslie’s bedroom through the wall. He might be in his bath, he
might be—anything, it was all the same to Pine-Breeze, she was thinking
of her duties, not of him.
One night, long ago, he had awakened in the arms of Mother Fir-cone, who
was jibbering with fright. There was a mosquito-net between them, for
she had rushed through the wall, and literally flung herself upon him,
tearing the mosquito-net from its attachments. I do not wonder at her
fright. Also San was in eruption, and a fearful earthquake was roaring
and billowing under Nagasaki.
Several times had the Mousmés rushed into his room all clinging
together, and crying “Dorobo!” (Robbers). Robbers had tried to burgle
the house twice, in fact. He had shot one the second time, and they
never came again. Yet he always slept with a Smith and Wesson
convenient, for a Japanese robber is a business man, without a heart,
but with a desire for plunder keen as the edge of a sword.
Leslie’s bedroom was a very bare apartment, furnished mostly with a
nothing. A futon and pile of pillows—he had tried the makura or
Japanese pillow, but given it up in disgust—under a mosquito-net, a
wash-stand, a stick-rack, and some pegs to hang clothes on, constituted
the remainder of the furniture. The window was a wide open space crossed
by lattice slats, through which the moon was now shining, her light
partly intercepted by the dance of a cherry bough waving in the wind.
Leslie undressed and got into bed. Seen through the blue gauze of a
mosquito-net, the room had a character all its own.
The House of the Clouds by night was not the place for a person
afflicted with insomnia. There were so many noises only waiting to tell
strange tales to the strained ear. Tales of mystery and exaggeration.
Lying awake you would hear some one leaning close against the attenuated
house wall; it was the wind. And now, a scratching sound as of a panther
trying to commit a burglary; it was the wind; and now a whisper like the
whisper of a lover to his mistress—or maybe of a robber to his mate; it
was the wind.
Then the owl sitting on the roof, staring with saucer eyes at the moon,
would give one low, whistling cry, and his mate beyond somewhere, would
make cautious answer.
Then “tap, tap, tap.” It would be the wind—making the skeleton finger
of a dead Samurai out of a loose lattice.
Then a thunder of cats and a yell on the veranda roof, and the drowsy
one, just off to goblin land with the dead Samurai, would be brought up
all standing, and half rise for a boot, or a boot-jack, or anything
hurlable, and sink back with a sigh, remembering that he was in Japan.
The wind played upon the House of the Clouds just as a maestro plays on
a fiddle, but with a more distressing result. Sometimes of an autumn or
winter night you might have sworn the place was surrounded by a company
of old Japanese ghosts escaped from the clutches of Emma O[1] and
requestful of succor and safety.
[1] The Guardian of the Buddhistic hells.
Leslie could not sleep. This eruption of his past into the present
disturbed him deeply.
He had been getting acclimatized, losing little by little that horrible
sense of exile and home-sickness that had driven him once across half
the world to London, and now it was all coming back.
And she was married to that little beast, and, worst of all, she seemed
content.
For eight years he had looked upon her as a thing dead to him, and now
she had returned with sevenfold power, for she brought the past with
her. The golden past, golden despite that dour father, Colonel Leslie of
Glenbruach, that just man unacquainted with folly. She brought the river
in spate and the leaping salmon, the heather-scented wind from the
purple hills, Glenbruach in the midst of a world of snow, the ripple of
the mountain burn and the faint reek of peat.
Worse than all these, she brought herself. She was the same spiritually
and mentally as the slim girl of long ago—a slip of a girl straight as
a wand and as full of laughter and movement and brightness as a mountain
brook.
But materially she had vastly altered. She was now a woman, divinely
formed, a creature appealing to every sensual fiber in a man’s nature.
And George du Telle owned all this!
Leslie, I daresay you have perceived, was a man who did not take what
one may call a dry-light view of things, past or present, when they had
relation to himself; as a matter of fact, he saw the shortcomings of
others tremendously clearly. The shortcomings of his father, of
Bloomfield the lawyer, of the Sydney bar loafers, of Danjuro the curio
dealer, and of poor old sinful, grubbing M’Gourley—too clearly, in
fact.
His own shortcomings he acknowledged by word of mouth. He knew they were
there, just as a merchant knows a bale of damaged and unsaleable goods
is in his cellar, but he did not go down and rake them out and examine
them carefully.
No one ever had cared for him, he said, but he never asked himself if he
ever had permitted any one to care for him. With this outlook on life, a
semi-poetical nature, and passions that slept long and deeply only to
awake rejuvenated and with the strength of demons, he might before this
have gone entirely to the devil, only for a lodger he had.
An old Scotch ancestor lived with him. This “pairson,” who had
once worn a long upper lip and had been a writer to the signet, a
just, hard, God-fearing, and straight man, had a chamber in a
convolution of Leslie’s brain, where he sat—he, or his attenuated
personality—twiddling his thumbs like a night watchman and waiting for
alarms.
It was this gentleman who had saved his descendant from the weak man’s
form of suicide—drink.
He now came out in his old carpet slippers and read his descendant a
lecture on the text: “Thou shalt not lust after another man’s wife.”
And he spoke hard and strong, taking almost entirely the “wumman’s” side
of the question; pointing out that society, as we know it, imperfect as
it may be, is ruled by a number of laws whose aim is the common weal and
the individual’s comfort and happiness.
He pointed out that the life of a “wumman” is composed, not of grand
passions and Italian opera scenes, but of a hundred thousand trifles,
each one insignificant enough, yet each helping to form that grand
masterpiece, a pure woman’s life.
That a woman might be pure in mind, even if married to a “red-headed
runt” like George du Telle. That if that was so she was a happy woman,
and that if a man loved her, loved he never so madly, it would be a
strange expression of that love to blast her happiness, and soil her
soul.
It would not be love, but lust—the passion of those devils which Mr.
Channing had hinted at that evening, those people of the night who
slumber not nor sleep.
Having finished, he went into his chamber and shut the door.
And Leslie lay reflecting on his words, also on the words of Channing.
Evil made manifest. The face of the creature on the Nikko road came
before his mental eye. That was evil made manifest. He had seen the
thing. He had known the devil by hearsay since a child. He had heard the
“Deevil” thundered at from Scotch pulpits, tracts about the devil had
been put into his hand; he had heard people make laughing remarks about
him: he was so familiar with the vague personality called Satan that he
felt no interest in him, neither interest nor aversion. Never a shudder.
But that thing in the sky of the opium dream, the music that had brought
it—that, indeed, was evil painted by the hand of an artist; worth all
the sermons ever thundered from pulpits, all the tracts ever printed.
Then his weary brain grew drowsy, and there strayed across it the fair
figure of the Lost One, the very antithesis of all things evil.
Only last night before going to bed she had murmured a story half to
herself, half to him, with her eyes fixed on the glowing embers of the
hibachi, and he retold it to himself now to put himself to sleep.
It was about the great battle between the beasts and the birds—the real
reason why the owl was reduced to shame and forced to cover himself with
night.
“And they came from the North and the South and the East and the West in
flight, oh, many ri broad. The quails from the millet, the stork from
the river, and from the pond the king-fisher, flashing like a blue jewel
in the sunlight.
“Then said the stork, who led all these people of the air:
“‘Behold! we are all assembled but where tarries Sir Owl?’”
“Then a sparrow made answer and said:
“‘As I paused to rest on a cherry bough, for my wings be little though
my heart is big, I heard Sir Owl in treasonable conversation with a rat.
And said he, “Come forth from thy burrow, O Rat, that I may feast my
eyes upon thee; and the empire of the beasts shall be thine, and also
the empire of the birds.”’”
“And the voice of the Hidden One replied—”
But what the Hidden One made answer, Leslie did not remember, for the
artless story had lulled him to sleep.