MOSTLY ABOUT FLOWERS
O Japan! Spring! Dawn! what an exquisite and roseate mystery surrounds
the meeting of ye three!
Night, and the owls, and the ghosts, have vanished, day and the sparrows
have come.
Up from Nagasaki rise the murmurs of life, mists are vanishing from the
hills across the harbor, where the lateen sails of junks are rising to
find the wind, and the sampans dart about like attenuated water-beetles.
The far, faint sound of a bugle from the man-of-war anchorage crosses
the far, shrill crowing of a cock owned by Mr. Pinecape, the cobbler of
Jinriksha Street—two rapiers of sound crossing each other in the now
brilliant air. Then the noises of the day deepen, and the whirr of the
cicala mixes with all sorts of faint domestic noises, a _mélange_ from
which the ear can pick out notes just as the eye points in an
impressionist’s picture: the clatter of a pair of clogs, the call of a
watercress seller, the clash of a tin pan dropped somewhere, and then
cock-crow after cock-crow from far and near, some loud and defiant,
others defiant enough but faint, as if coming through a pin-pole half a
mile away.
The kitchen of the House of the Clouds is a square apartment, with no
matting on the floor, and just now flooded with sunshine.
Leslie, in the early days, had caused to be constructed by a stranded
ship’s carpenter, a solid English kitchen-table of white pine. He wanted
to give the man a job, and he thought the thing would prove useful; and
it did.
To begin with, it smelt deliciously, and Mother Fir-cone amidst her
avocations would take a sniff at it now and then, just as a snufftaker
takes a pinch of snuff; she would also sit under it preparing sweet
potatoes, stringing beans or what not; but as for using it as a table,
such an idea never occurred to her. In fact, she had no ideas at all
about a table, and was quite convinced that this gift of Leslie San’s
was a sort of pine-wood temple, constructed for the purpose of being sat
under.
It was also a place of refuge in time of earthquakes, when the whole
household, saving Leslie and Campanula, got under it for fear of the
roof falling. It received the title of “Honorable,” and was altogether a
thing very much respected, and even vaguely beloved.
Under it this morning sat Lotus-bud, preparing fish for breakfast; on it
(these new Mousmés used it as a shelf) reposed various paper boxes
containing eggs and groceries, weird-looking boxes suggesting that a
conjurer was about to commence operations, not a cook.
The sun laid a great square of light like a burning mat upon the floor
near the table, and on her knees in the center of this mat of light sat
Pine-breeze cleaning an hibachi. Cherry-blossom, the third Mousmé,
squatted right before Pine-breeze doing nothing.
From under the table was escaping a faint blue haze of smoke. Lotus-bud
had just taken a few whiffs from a tiny pipe.
They all smoked, these Mousmés, pinches of stuff like chopped hay in
pipe bowls the size of a child’s thimble; but Campanula had never
acquired the art, though all her friends were ardent tobacco lovers.
Leslie San had said “No,” and that was enough.
As Pine-breeze cleaned the hibachi and made it spick and span, she was
telling the others a yarn, mostly to do with her doings when down the
town marketing last evening. How she had bought this or that, what had
been said to her, and so forth—a tale simple enough, but a miracle of
genius considering the tongue in which it was told. For in the Japanese
there are but two parts of speech, the noun and the verb; these, and
splinters and scraps of broken-up nouns and verbs, which, in the form of
particles and suffixes, help to shore up the meaning and pin together
the common sense, have to do all the talking.
The learner of Japanese feels at first like a person condemned to eat
gravy soup with chop-sticks. Oh, for even a pronoun! Imagine talking to
a person without being able to use the word “You,” without being able to
use the word “I”! Imagine the horrible tortures of a Japanese egoist on
his death-bed making, or attempting to make, his dying speech!
But there are no egoists in Japan—can’t be with such a language—and
there are no purse-proud snobs, or if there are, they hide themselves
very closely.
For self-depreciation is the key-note of Japanese conversation and
manners.
So she goes on with her story, in a voice sweet to listen to as the
ripple of a mountain brook, and Lotus-bud listens under the table,
fish-knife held in air, for the tale is reaching an interesting point.
Then Campanula’s voice is heard speaking to Sweetbriar San. She is
coming to the kitchen to superintend things and—crack! the fish’s head
is cut off, and three Mousmés are working like one.
Campanula San is younger than any of these Mousmés, and she treats them
like sisters, yet strangely enough, they do not encroach, but treat her
as their mistress—a condition of things impossible in Europe, and
presently, perhaps, impossible in Japan.
The sun has leapt now over the hills, and Leslie is heard moving
upstairs. Pine-breeze claps her hands with horror, and rises to her
feet: she has forgotten to fill his bath.
She goes to do so, and Campanula wanders out the front way to the
balcony, where she pauses to gaze at the azaleas, shading her eyes with
her hand.
The fire is spreading; another crimson blossom is almost unfolded, and
others are soon to be born. Every spring the coming of the azaleas is an
event in Campanula’s life.
A wealth of crimson azaleas is one of her first recollections. Away
beyond that crimson fire of flowers lies the land of her earliest
childhood. The house with the plum tree, very vague indeed; the father
who hit things with a hammer, still vaguer; the sugar-candy dragon lost,
and so miraculously recovered; the little boy who went to sleep in the
snow—or was it in a field of lilies?
Her real life, it seemed to her, began as she was reaching for a crimson
blossom one day in a field of crimson blossoms, and was suddenly caught
up sky-high by a thing taller than a tree, who did something to the side
of her neck, just under her left ear, that was not hurtful or
particularly unpleasant, but which, nevertheless, made her scream.
Then, behold, she saw that the thing was a man, though in strange
clothes, but he did not frighten her in the least, and she gave him her
hand at once, and with confidence, whereupon he took her in his arms and
carried her to a road where stood another man, all black, even to his
hands, but his face was white, and he had a red beard.
Then this man, who was also unfrightful, began to make her remember
things that she had for the moment forgotten. To remember her father,
and the fact that she had lost her way, and other things too, including
the errant dragon. He made her remember that she wished to get back to
her father, but she did not remember this so very clearly. In fact she
was quite content to go with these two men over the hills and far away,
feeling sure she was safe with them, went they where they would.
The scenes on the road to Nikko she remembered: a funny man away in the
distance dancing amongst trees, and the entry into Nikko borne sky-high
above all the other children, the Tea House of the Tortoise,
and—grandest remembrance of all!—the miraculous awakening with the
long-lost dragon in her hand. He was so full of mystery that she never
had even dreamt of eating him, and she still possessed him. He was
upstairs in the drawer of a lacquered cabinet, cracked, it is true, by
changes of temperature and warped in the back, for age touched all
things, even sugar-candy dragons.
Then there was her life at the House of the Clouds, the mission school;
rainy days when she splashed through the mud under a broad paper
umbrella; fine days when she flew kites with M’Gourley San, played
hop-scotch with Kiku San and Kitsune Ken, with all sorts of other Sans,
mostly with shaved heads.
This was Campanula’s childhood as she remembered it. But as you cannot
remember your childhood till you have stepped over the line where the
child becomes a boy or girl, Campanula had not begun remembering it till
about six months ago.
Up till then M’Gourley San, and Leslie San, and Sweetbriar San, and a
host of other honorable people surrounded her, one as important as the
other, Mac perhaps more important than any.
Then all at once—in a week or so, to be more precise—a host of new
ideas came to her, bothersome, formless ideas, as ungraspable yet as
insistent as the great Boyg himself.
Then the ideas began to take form. It was in the garden one day. Her
eyes fell on one of the flowerless azalea bushes, and she remembered how
it had been covered with crimson flowers last year, and how beautiful
they were, beautiful above every other flower, even the lordly peony,
who seems to hold the whole glory and mystery of summer in the gloom of
his splendid heart. And her mind wandered back from spring to spring,
led by the crimson blossoms, till she called to mind the valley where
Leslie had found her.
It was he who had found her wandering alone there, and he had picked her
up.
She had never forgotten the valley; it had lain in the distance in her
mind, but she had no use for it till now. Now it came to her in all its
splendor, and explained to her why the azalea was the flower she loved
above the peony, the lotus, or even that glorious mystery, the
dragon-spume chrysanthemum.
Flowers are so bound up with the lives of the children of Japan that
they have a meaning and speak a language to them almost unknown to us.
So Campanula sat immersed in her dream, and Leslie, who had swung a
hammock between two cherry trees and was lying in it, little knew what
was going on in the small head of the person seated near him on the
square of matting. She had been doing some needlework, but her work had
dropped in her lap, her hands were folded, and her eyes were fixed on
the azalea bush.
Next day, or perhaps the day after, for a man’s perceptions in these
matters are sometimes dull, he noticed a change in her. He could not say
what it was, but the submissive and humble person, the very fact of
whose existence was a theme for perpetual self-excuse, had somehow
changed. She was just as submissive and humble, but there was a subdued
joyousness in her manner when excusing her existence as though she
thought that somehow it might not be such a frightful crime after all,
and perhaps capable of condonation some day.
Then, when he called for his cigar-case Pine-breeze did not appear with
it, though Pine-breeze loved to be the carrier of it, because it was a
foreign thing, and the leather smelt deliciously.
Campanula brought it _and_ a match-box, a thing that Pine-breeze’s
flighty little mind nearly always forgot.
A few days before, Leslie had possessed three servants and what he
called an adoptive daughter. Then he suddenly found himself in the
possession of four servants, one of them more attentive than the other
three put together. He put it down to the fact that her housewifely
instincts were awakening, and as the change in her wrought for his
comfort and ease he did not speculate on the cause as he would have done
had the reverse been the case.
Women are curious creatures, as the philosophic Mac once said. But on
the whole, in their way, I think men are just as strange.
Kite-flying had now been put aside with other childish things, and the
tiny hands that had grasped the sugar-candy dragon were now preparing to
grasp the real business of life: a business whose main objective was the
happiness and comfort of “He who is taller than the tallest of trees.”
Pine-breeze, Lotus-bud, and Cherry-blossom. Looking at them in a row,
you might have thought them pretty much alike, as far as mind and spirit
were concerned, just as three sleek, well-groomed ponies may seem
identical—until you try to drive them.
It was not till Campanula took the reins that she found the three
underlings were each afflicted with a special infirmity, or rather
special infirmities.
Pine-breeze was such a scatterbrain that if you sent her down town in a
hurry for eggs she would, as likely as not, dawdle home in an hour with
tomatoes and some wild tale picked up on the way, pleasant and
interesting enough, no doubt, but useless for the purpose of making an
omelette. She would leave Leslie’s bath unprepared, and then, sitting in
her own tub, would clap her hands with horror at the remembrance of her
own forgetfulness, and as likely as not attempt to rectify her error
attired in a bath towel; and she would smash things—crockery ware
understood—with almost the facility of your Western parlor-maid. To
make up for these bad points, she was literary above her class; had a
passion for flowers above her fellows, and had composed a poem about a
grasshopper.
Lotus-bud was the cook; her infirmity was weakness. She would sit and
listen to Pine-breeze’s idle chatter and let the bread burn. Pine-breeze
could work and talk, but Lotus-bud could not even work and listen. So
she would sit with her hands in her lap, listening. She made a splendid
audience but a somewhat indifferent cook.
As for Cherry-blossom, she was purely and simply an idler, a
lotus-eater, a hobboe in the guise of a butterfly. A thing so fragile
and pretty, so perfectly dressed and so seemingly boneless, that you
felt to expect work from her would be absurd; which, indeed, it would
have been.
For she never worked, she dreamed.
She was enamored of a riksha man, and she would go out and meet him
under the lilacs at the gate, and then vanish with him to goodness knows
where for the evening.
He was the strangest natural phenomenon, this lover of Cherry-blossom’s,
for he was always changing in size, and his face was never scarcely
twice alike, and his number—rikshas are numbered just like hansom
cabs—was
255.
66.
7.
103.
and 42.
At least Pine-breeze, who was an observant body, got that far in her
notation, and then gave it up as a bad job.
All these things, and more, Campanula had to cope with, and she did so
with more or less success, gaining in her experience much that a girl of
her age is supposed not to know, but losing nothing either in gentleness
or modesty.
She brought Pine-breeze to a vague sense of the wrongfulness of flighty
ways, and with her own little hands she made new bread to replace a
batch of loaves burnt to cinders by Lotus-bud (bread that gave Leslie
indigestion for a week).
As for Cherry-blossom, she told her, missionary fashion, that she would
certainly go to hell and be burnt like Lotus-bud’s loaves if she did not
stop vanishing down town with riksha men; and Cherry-blossom ground her
nose on the matting and wept, and promised reformation, and went out two
nights afterwards with No. 173 to a grand blaze up at the O Suwa temple,
where she devoured candied beans and comfits, and bowed before graven
images, and had a general good time with a host of “heathen” people like
herself.
Cherry-blossom’s rikshas never cost her anything. Love lent them to her.
Leslie’s socks up to this had always been vanishing, and the ones that
remained, were always, or generally, in holes. The Mousmés said it must
be the mice. Campanula, however, found Pine-breeze one morning cleaning
a kettle with a silk dress-sock. It seemed silk socks at half a guinea a
pair gave a polish nothing else would give.
The kettles were duller after that, but the depredations of the mice
ceased.
Having looked at the promise of the azaleas, she went in to see how
things were getting on.
Presently she and Leslie were seated at breakfast opposite to one
another on the floor. Leslie, attired in a suit of faultlessly fitting
pale gray tweed, looked much more like an Indian cavalry officer on
leave than an umbrella merchant, as he called himself. He had arranged
to call for Jane du Telle at ten o’clock to take her out shopping; the
gloomy thoughts of the night before, the effect of the opium, and the
effect of the dream, had vanished.
He was sipping his tea, and glancing over the _Japan Mail_, when
Campanula interrupted him.
“What iss Dick?” she suddenly asked; she prolonged her s’s in the
faintest degree, difficult to reproduce in print, for there is no type
capable of representing an s and a quarter.
“What is what?” asked Leslie, lowering the _Japan Mail_, and staring at
his pretty _vis-â-vis_.
“Dick—she called you Dick.”
“Who?”
“She who gave you the flower,” said Campanula, lowering ever so little
her head.
“Which flower?”
“The one in your coat—yesterday.”
“Oh,” said Leslie, remembering a bluebell that Jane had plucked and
given him as they went down hill the day before, and remembering also
that George du Telle and Campanula had been walking behind and must have
seen the transaction. “She calls me Dick because that is short for my
name.”
“Dick,” murmured she, in a meditative voice.
She seemed turning the name over in her mind. Tasting it mentally, so to
speak.
“She is an old friend of mine,” continued Leslie. “I knew her,
Campanula, before you were born, away over in another part of the world,
where half the year it snows and where the wind blows just as hard as it
does in Nippon, but the wind never brings flowers as it does here.”
“No flowers,” she murmured, incapable of imagining such a land.
“Only flowers like that blue one, and wild roses and a few others, but
you never see camellia trees growing by the roads, nor lotus flowers on
the ponds.”
“Nor azaleas?”
“Nor azaleas—at least, as they grow here.”
A shadow crossed the open doorway.
“M’Gourley San,” said Campanula, who was seated facing the door.
“Dinna rise,” said M’Gourley. “I’ve had ma breakfast, and I’ll juist tak
a seat on the verandy till y’ve done.”
“I’m done,” said Leslie, forgetful of grammar, and rising up, he came
out, the _Japan Mail_ under his arm, and a briar root in his hand.
They talked business a while, and then Leslie said:
“I say.”
“Weel?”
“You remember that woman I told you of on the Nikko road?”
“Which wumman?” asked Mac, taking up a pebble from the path just by the
veranda, and shying it at one of the hills of the landscape garden.
“Girl, I meant; you remember the girl I told you of?”
“Oh ay; the lass that flung you ower board—what of her?”
“She’s here with her husband.”
“Whaur?” said Mac, turning his head as though he fancied Jane and her
spouse were camping out in the garden.
“She’s staying at the Nagasaki Hotel with her husband.”
“Whoat’s their names?”
“Du Telle.”
Mac doubled himself up for a moment, alleging for reason a touch of the
stomach-ache, as a matter of fact it was a touch of internal laughter.
The day before yesterday he had found the newly-arrived George du Telle
in the smoke-room of the Nagasaki Hotel, stood him drinks, and conducted
him to Danjuro.
There they had saki and pipes, and George du Telle had bought a
Pickford’s van-full of rubbish, and parted with a fat green check on
Cox’s. An exceedingly fat check written with one eye shut, it is true,
but quite in order.
“I dined with them.”
“Ye whoat!” cried Mac, coming back from a vision of the victorious
Danjuro doing the cake-walk amidst his bronzes and lacquers, kimono
pinched up on either side between finger and thumb, his nose in the air,
and on his face an assumption of stiff and haughty pride enough to kill
one with laughter.
“Weel! weel!” said Mac, addressing the hills of the landscape garden.
“What are you weel-weeling about?” asked Leslie irritably.
“I am not a puncteelious man,” said Mac, still addressing the hills, “in
the small concairns of life, but if a lassie had treated me same’s she
you, _I’d a seen her dammit before I’d ha’ dined wi’ her_.” He shouted
the last words, and brought his big fist down on his knee with a bang.
“Don’t shout,” said Leslie, “and make an ass of yourself. We didn’t
quarrel when we parted; we parted good friends. She didn’t want to marry
me—well, that was her look-out.”
“I wish they hadna’ come,” said Mac gloomily.
“What on earth is the matter with you _now_?”
“I’ve seen the waurld,” said the Gloomy One, “and I’ve seen wummen. And
I’ve seen _her_—saw her in the smoke-room—” He stopped.
“What smoke-room?”
“Of the hotel. I was havin’ a crack wi’ her husband day-fore yesterday,
and in she come to speak a word to him; and I know wummen—and, weel, I
know, fixed between that chap with a head like a blazin’ whin-bush and
you, which way she’ll run.”
“I wish you wouldn’t be such a fool,” said Leslie, now really annoyed
and therefore keeping himself in check; “she’s nothing to me.”
Mac turned, and under his bushy, half-grizzled eyebrows stared in
Leslie’s face, and Leslie did not support his gaze, but turned away
irritably, and flung stones at a brown hawk that was circling in the air
before them.
Mac got up, tapped the ashes out of his pipe, and made off.
“See ye the morn?” he called back as he got to the gate.
“Maybe,” said Leslie, looking at his watch and rising to go into the
house.
He went down at ten, and shortly after his departure, out came
Campanula, a basket in her hand and sandals on her feet, for the weather
was dry. She came along the path towards the cherry trees, examining the
ground and the interstices of the bushes.
At last she saw what she wanted, a bluebell.
She plucked it with tender care and put it in her basket, then she saw
another and treated it the same, and another; so went she on till it
became perfectly plain that her object was not gardening, or the
gathering of a bunch of flowers, but the extermination of every bluebell
on the premises.
When the place had been cleared and the basket was half full of victims,
the question came how to dispose of them. Impossible to throw them away
or burn them; she would as soon, almost, have treated children so.
She stood at the gate undecided, till suddenly there came the solution
of the problem, and opening the gate she passed down the lilac-shaded
path to Nagasaki. On the way she saw more bluebells and stopped to pluck
them, so that when the lane at the bottom was reached the basket was
nearly full.
In a rabbit-hutch of a house off the lane lay a tragedy, or the remains
of one, in the form of O Toku San, a poor work-girl. She had loved a
man, and he had not even betrayed her in the ordinary way. He had simply
changed his mind, and gone off with another girl.
She tried to kill herself, not in the native way, but with some
abominable sort of foreign poison—Oxalic acid, most likely; but they
saved her life, and she lay in the hospital nearly a month with her
hands tied, to prevent her trying to kill herself again.
When she came out of the hospital she made no more attempts to obtain
peace. She was in the clutches of pernicious anæmia, and she now lay
dying, a despairing shadow, the ghost of what had once been a pretty and
happy girl.
Campanula turned to the tiny house, and that day O Toku San had a whole
silver yen to give to her mother on her return, and a bunch of
freshly-gathered blue flowers to charm her eye: things to the dying
better than all music and poetry, and far above the greatest
masterpieces of art.