THE STORK AND THE TORTOISE
They were in the street running parallel with Jinrikisha Street, a
street truly of the old time, narrow with the house-tops, when the
houses had upper stories over-leaning the way.
Jane seemed fascinated by the contents of the little shops, that sold
everything from cuttle-fish to paper lanterns. Shops that were, most of
them, simply raised platforms, matted and roofed.
Here abounded the tortoise-shell carvers, and the men who can make a
netsuké to charm the eye out of anything: a knot of wood, a shark’s
tooth, a useless bit of ivory.
“I’m going to buy things,” said Jane, looking with a lustful eye on the
cheap, or seemingly cheap, curios exposed for sale in some of the shops:
old bronze gongs, kettles, sword guards, broken crockery were carefully
mended, lamps, such as the Chinese magician might have hawked at the
back entrance of the palace of Aladdin, fans, trick toys, and tiny boxes
for holding rouge; tobacco-monos and opium pipes, broken-down English
umbrellas, lacquer trays, and a heap of other dust-traps utterly
useless, and some of them not very ornamental.
“If you _will_ waste your money,” said Leslie, “I’d advise you to come
to Danjuro’s. We can get to it by this lane, and I won’t let him swindle
you beyond the ordinary tourist pitch.”
“Very well,” said Jane, turning from a booth bearing this cabalistic
inscription on its front, “Come rightin!”[2] “The things look pretty
dusty, and I don’t see anything I very much want—I’d like to buy
_that_, though.” She pointed to a mite in the colored kimono, playing
battledore and shuttlecock in the gutter with another mite of its own
size. “They seem so happy and jolly, these Japanese children, and clean,
and I read somewhere they never give any trouble, or break things, or
annoy people—Bless the child!”
[2] I presume “Come right in!” was the artist’s intention.
A shuttlecock hit her a slap in the face, and the shuttlecock hitter
laughed, and trotted after it, without any semblance of apology to his
target.
“There’s another illusion shattered,” said Jane, wiping her face with
her handkerchief.
“Have you—” began Leslie.
“What?”
“Any children?”
“No,” said Jane; “I have not.”
The stork on the tortoise, emblem of eternal life, and a “supposed”
masterpiece of the great Miochin family of metal-workers, still stood on
guard in the fore-front of Danjuro’s wares. It was the same stork that
Leslie had seen five years ago—at least, in appearance. In reality it
had been sold five or six times during the last five years.
The selling of the thing always brought forth Danjuro’s latent sense of
humor, and could Danjuro the actor have seen his namesake at these
supreme moments of trade, he would certainly have claimed him as a
brother in art.
It would be an American woman, perhaps, in a blue veil, and with a
smattering of knowledge picked up from artistic books about Japan. Mac
would be the go-between, translating the desires of the female into
Japanese for the edification of Dan, who spoke English, by the way, as
well as Mac, and even, perhaps, better.
“Sell it!” Danjuro would cry. “I would as soon think of selling my own
mother. Tell her Augustness to ask of me anything else. It is a piece of
true Miochin, owned by my father, and his father before him. It has
always brought my family luck, etc.”
All of which M’Gourley would faithfully translate with the addition:
“He’s the greatest auld scamp in the waurld; he’s only puttin’ up the
price. Bide a wee, and let him simmer doon. It is not a true Miochin,
but it’s a vara excellent imitation, made, mayhap, by some pupil of the
Miochins. Would y’ be wullin’ to pay twanty poonds?”
The Blue-veiled One assenting, Mac and Danjuro would go for each other
in Japanese, and after five minutes’ ferocious wrangling, and five
minutes more of interpretations, the thing would change hands at
twenty-five pounds, to be replaced next day, or, at least, the day after
the departure of the Blue-veiled One from Nagasaki, by its twin image. A
man at Osaka made them by the gross, and he charged two pounds ten
a-piece for them to the trade.
Fortunately, the dead know not the doings of the living, else would the
artistic Miochin family be turning eternally in their uneasy graves,
with the rapidity of spinning bobbins.
Danjuro came out with his usual profound salute and low hiss.
Hiss is perhaps not the proper word, for the sound is made by the intake
of air between closed teeth, and is intended to represent delight beyond
words.
And, indeed, when Danjuro beheld M’Gourley entering with a client ready
to be shorn, the sound came from him as no empty compliment, but as a
natural expression of his true feelings.
It was different as regards Leslie. Danjuro looked on Leslie with the
nervous dread with which you or I might look upon a mischievous lunatic.
Leslie had once nearly spoiled a bargain—a delightful bargain from the
dealer’s point of view, a disgraceful swindle viewed by the cold light
of English ethics.
An English Member of Parliament had been trepanned into paying two
hundred pounds for a pair of vases worth, maybe, twenty. Mac in his
jubilation boasted before Leslie, and Leslie had “put the stopper on,”
caused the money to be returned, with a note to the effect that the jars
were now discovered (from some documents connected with them) to be
imitation, and not as represented when bought.
The Member of Parliament, instantly concluding that _this_ was a
swindle, and that he had obtained priceless articles by accident,
refused to accept the money, or return the jars.
And thus was he done brown on his own spit, and basted by his own right
hand, for in his book of travels, “Amongst the Japs,” he mentioned the
transaction, and, worse still, sent a copy of the book to Danjuro, with
the passage marked with blue pencil.
Dan read the passage with the aid of a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles,
and with a face mirthless as a shovel.
But the soul in him bubbled. He could quite understand the Member of
Parliament’s point of view, but Leslie’s was quite beyond his power to
grasp.
Honesty for the sake of honesty, and without any ulterior reason, even
Art for Art’s sake was more understandable than that.
So he hissed without pleasure as he bowed before Leslie and Jane,
imploring them to condescend to make the honorable entrance, and
intimating that everything in the place was theirs.
Jane nodded to him, and looked round.
“There’s one of the monstrosities I told you of that George bought the
other day,” said she, pointing to a bronze frog half as big as an
ordinary coal-box. “Oh, look at _that_!”
She pointed to a furious struggle in bronze between a man and a monster.
The monster had opened its mouth to devour the man, and the man had
caught it by the tongue, which he was tearing out.
It was the climax of the fight, and the conclusion one could read in the
triumphant ferocity of the man’s face—a thing to make one shudder.
“Danjuro San,” said Leslie grimly, speaking in Japanese, whilst Jane
gazed at the fighting group, “this is the lady whose husband you and
M’Gourley San entertained the other day—the Red-headed One. She is a
friend of mine, and I pray you to entertain her differently.”
This is a vague interpretation of the Japanese for “This is the lady
whose husband you swindled the other day, but if you play any of your
tricks with _her_, I’ll make you sit up—see?”
To fight with a Japanese you must come to blows, for you can’t possibly
do it in words properly. The old Japanese who made the language had no
use for terms of abuse: swords were good enough for them.
“I’ll have that,” said Jane, suddenly seizing the fat baby, the size of
a tangerine orange, done in ivory and engaged in feeding ivory ducks on
top of a lacquer cabinet, “and the ducks. Tell him to send them to the
hotel; you can fight with him about the price afterwards—and those two
vases; and oh, that ivory Mousmé with the umbrella—isn’t she sweet! I
don’t see anything else I want. _You_ have something, I want to make you
a present.”
“I don’t want anything, I’m tired of curios.”
“Well, you’ll just have to want something, for I’m going to make you a
present. I’ll give you this.”
She took up a short sword in a carved ivory scabbard. On the ivory
handle of it was figured a grimacing god, dancing apparently. She drew
the blade, polished and razor-sharp, and then returned it to its sheath.
“Take it; it will come in handy when those robbers you told us of last
night at dinner come again.”
“I don’t want the thing; it’s unlucky to give knives.”
“It’s not a knife, it’s a sword!”
“All right,” said Leslie, “anything for peace;” and he took a great
sheet of rice paper from Danjuro and wrapped the thing carefully up.
“Now,” said Jane, “I want something for langn-yappe, as they say in New
Orleans—something thrown in.”
Danjuro declared that the whole shop was hers to do what she liked with.
“I don’t want the whole shop,” said Jane, “but I’ll have that.” She took
possession of a tiny rose tree in the pot, a rose tree with blossoms the
size of farthings.
“Now come.”
“One moment,” said Leslie.
His ear had caught a familiar sound. It came from the cellar where many
of Danjuro’s goods were stowed; it was the voice of Mac, and it came up
like the voice of the Hidden One in Campanula’s story. Mac evidently had
a victim in the cellar. Leslie went to the cellar stairs and listened.
“I would not let him see you’re wanting it. Juist assume a casual
expreesion as if ye were na so vary carin’ whether ye got it or no’.
He’ll be sure to tell ye it’s a piece o’ Miochin—it is _not_.”
“How much do you think it’s worth?” (A burly English voice, suggestive
of shepherd’s plaid trousers, a corporation, gold albert, and double
chin.)
“All of fifty pounds, but not a penny more, not a penny more. Show him
the money; there’s not a Jap in Nagasaki can withstaund the sight of
goud—or notes.”
“Look here, if you get it for forty, I’ll give you a ten per cent.
commission.”
“Am no so very carin’ about commeesions; stull, as you offer it, I’ll
not say ‘No.’”
The stork and tortoise were being sold again.
Leslie turned away in disgust.
“Come,” he said to Jane, “let’s go.” And they passed out into the sunlit
street, he carrying the parcel containing the sword, she the rose tree
done up in rice paper pictured vaguely with the forms of storks.
“She has given him a wakizashi,” murmured Danjuro, and he retired into a
corner to smoke a whiff or two of hay-colored tobacco, and think
inscrutable thoughts, before addressing himself to the victim that Mac
was preparing down in the cellar.
“What shall we do now?” asked Jane when they were in the street.
Leslie thought for a moment.
“I’ll tell you,” said he. “We’ll get rikshas and go to the cemetery—”
“I’ll do no such thing,” said Jane promptly.
“If you will allow me one moment—I’m not proposing to take you to a
place like Kensal Green. A Japanese cemetery is worth seeing, just as
much worth seeing as a Japanese town. Then we can go and have luncheon.”
“Where?”
“Would you like to go to an eel-house?”
“Gracious, no! I hate eels. First a cemetery, and then an eel-house! I
have half a mind to go back to the hotel.”
“Well, a tea house, then; we can go to the Tea House of a Thousand
Joys.”
“Oh, that quite decides the matter,” said she, assuming an outraged air,
and hailing one of two rikshas that were passing.
Leslie hailed the other, and quietly directed the riksha boys to the
cemetery.