THE SONG OF THE MUSHI
“It almost makes one wish one were dead,” sighed Jane. They were sitting
on a moss-grown tussock near a grave adorned with a fresh spray of
cherry-blossom, contained in a joint of bamboo. Beneath them the hill
stretched downwards, terrace after terrace, casting before their eyes
the cold color of marble, and the mournful green of cryptomeria trees,
the delicate tracery of ferns, and the glory of the wild camellias.
Beyond lay the blue of the harbor, black-blue where the wooded cliffs
met the water; from the water the hills led the eye past camphor woods
and the green of the young bamboo, up and away to where the brown of
their summits cut the dazzling azure of the sky. “I have never seen
anything so beautiful, so peaceful. What are you thinking of, Dick?”
“I was thinking,” said Leslie, rousing himself, “that we might have
luncheon at my place.”
“You are perfectly disgusting!” said Jane. “I’ll never go to a cemetery
with you again. Luncheon! Who wants luncheon here?”
“Very few,” said he grimly, gazing over the tombs.
“Now you’re trying to be smart—at the expense of these poor things. Ah!
look at that tiny grave with the white flower in the little vase.”
“Some child.”
“Yes; a thing with a great sash that was flying its kite or spinning its
top the other day, and now it’s here.”
“Or hitting shuttlecocks about the street.”
“Yes,” wiping her cheek where the shuttlecock had hit her—then
suddenly: “I think men are beasts,” addressing the distant hills.
“I’m with you there.”
“No, you’re not; all men are just the same.”
“I suppose you mean to infer in a roundabout way that I’m a beast.
Thanks.”
“There’s nothing to be thankful for, only—they don’t understand.”
He took her hand in his as if to make friends, and she let him hold it
for a moment, then she suddenly drew it away.
“Had not we better be going? What’s the time?”
“Twelve.”
“Will you come and have luncheon at the hotel?”
“No, thanks; why not come and lunch at my place? I’ll give you all sorts
of funny Japanese things to eat. Luncheon won’t be till half-past one,
but you can have a talk with Campanula. It will only take us ten minutes
or so to get there from here.”
They came down to where the rikshas were waiting; he helped her in,
tucked the linen apron round her, and gave the men their direction.
Campanula San had not yet returned, declared Pine-breeze, as she
kow-towed before them on the matting.
“Well, she won’t be long,” said Leslie. “Shall we go into the house or
the garden?”
“The house,” replied Jane. “I’m tired of the sunlight; let’s go in, and
sit on the floor and talk.”
“Right. But do you mind—”
“What?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, there’s a clause in the lease that no one is
to go in with their boots on.”
“Why, for goodness sake?”
“They say it spoils the matting.”
“All right,” said Jane, holding up a small foot, and trying to unbutton
the shoe on it.
“Let me,” said Leslie, going down on his knees.
The shoe came off, and the little foot in its bronze silk stocking lay
in his hands for half a second—half a second during which he was seized
with a wild desire to kiss it. Next moment it was out of his hands, and
the other was presented to him.
“You are all thumbs!” said Jane. “Do be quick! I’m not a stork to stand
on one leg for an hour. There, you’ve burst a button off! I knew you
would. Stupid!”
“Pine-breeze will sew it on,” said he, hunting for the button on his
knees.
“No, she won’t. It doesn’t in the least matter. Gracious, Dick! when I
see you just like that, crawling about on your knees—”
“What?”
“I can’t help remembering—Do you remember the rainy day at Glenbruach,
when you and I were playing marbles in the pistol gallery, and I said
you cheated, and you said you didn’t, and I said you did, and you called
me a liar?”
“And you hacked my shins?”
“Yes; and old Mrs. Johnstone, the housekeeper, came in and saw me and
said I was an ‘awfu’ lassie!’ Can it be that all that really happened,
and that we are the same people? Imagine me hacking your shins now!
Imagine us both playing marbles on the veranda!”
“And we didn’t speak to each other for a day,” said he, following her
into the house. “And you looked so stiff and sour, and all of a sudden
you came up from behind and flung your arms round my neck.”
“And you shouted: ‘Oh, get away, you little brute!’”
“Yes; because I thought you were making another attack on me, and all
the time you only wanted to k—”
“I didn’t. I only wanted to apologize.”
“Well, apologize, then!” said he, arranging the cushions on the floor,
and placing the rose tree and the parcel containing the sword in a
corner.
“It is sad to look so far away,” said she, taking as comfortable a
position as she could upon the cushions. “Life was so jolly then. Oh! a
good old day’s trout-fishing is worth all the money in the world. Money
is no use; what’s the good of it? It just makes one not care for the
simple pleasures of life. Do you remember the picnic you and I and those
American children, who were staying at Callander, had, when the
soda-water bottle burst, and we found we’d left everything behind but
the jam and the eggs? Dick, I—I—want to ask you something.”
It was one of the peculiarities of Jane’s mind that a question
formulating there would work its way along like a worm, under, maybe,
ten minutes of conversation, and then come out at the end of a
paragraph, rise for air, so to speak, in a manner irrelevant and
sometimes startling.
“Yes?”
“What became of you all those three years before you came here to
Japan?—you vanished. You told me the other day you were in Australia;
were you?”
“I was in prison.”
She turned deathly pale, and stared at him as if he had struck her.
“Oh, you need not be so alarmed; it was not a criminal but a social
prison. My father allowed me a hundred and fifty a year, paid quarterly,
as long as I lived in Sydney, and as I had no trade and no money I lived
in Sydney for three years—tied by the leg.”
“I think you take a pleasure in frightening me; first you told me you
were a shopman, now a prisoner. Dick, why do you _always_ make your own
case out worse than it really is? Tell me, what was the last quarrel
with your father about?”
“Debts.”
“And, Dick—you know you used to—”
“I know I used to drink, but I don’t drink now.”
They were silent for a while, then he began to speak and tell her the
story of his life as a remittance man, and he did not spare black in the
composition of his picture.
She listened at first interested and amused by the thought of Dick tied
by the leg in Sydney, hobbled, so to speak, and made to behave.
Then her amusement gave way to compassion. She saw him wandering in the
Domain, by the sea-shore, in the streets, a lonely figure, a man with no
interest in life, an exile banned by society.
She thought of all the men she knew and the number of them who were just
as wicked and foolish as Dick had ever been, yet who by keeping on the
right side of their bank balance retained their social position and the
respect of all men.
And thinking of all this the heart in her was moved. A most dangerous
condition just now, for Jane, Bessemer steel in her everyday laughing
mood, became wax when her compassion was aroused.
“Why didn’t you write and tell me?” said she. “I’d have gone and seen
your father. Oh, it was wicked to send you off like that, away from
every one. _How_ could a father treat his child so!”
They were silent again for a moment.
“Poor Dick!” said Jane suddenly, and she took his hand in both hers and
stroked it. A little shiver went through him.
Then, all at once, she felt an arm around her waist and his breath upon
her cheek, and she did not try to take her hand from his or struggle,
nor, after the first second of troubled alarm, did she feel the wish to
struggle.
She had ceased for the moment to be Jane du Telle, a married woman, a
person with a stainless reputation. All these facts were swept away by
nature, just as shrubs and fir trees are swept away by the rush of the
avalanche.
A great faintness came over her. She clung to him, and sinking
backwards, fell upon the matting; his arms were around her, his breath
on her cheek, her lips were returning his kisses, yet all the time her
lips were murmuring: “Don’t—don’t—don’t!”
* * * * *
At this supreme moment came a sound strangely alien to the
situation—the jingling of tea-cups no less—and through the wall, or at
least the opening of a panel, entered Pine-breeze, followed by
Cherry-blossom, with the luncheon.
* * * * *
“Dick!” she cried, sitting up with her cheeks raging red, “tell them to
go away.”
But Dick was not heeding her. He was sitting up with his hands to the
side of his head, and an expression on his face that made her almost
forget her own position before the Mousmés.
“Do you hear it?” said he.
“What?”
“That noise, my God, that noise.”
A tiny cage was hanging from a hook on the wall. In it was a thing much
beloved by Campanula—an insect like a grasshopper that sang a buzzing
and tremulous sort of song. The mushi was a creature that only sang by
night as a rule, but some spirit had moved its poetic soul, for it was
singing now.
“It’s that thing in the cage,” said Jane, pointing to it tremulously,
thankful for any excuse to escape the glances of the Mousmés.
He looked up, sprang to his feet, went to the cage, and tore it from its
hook.
The Mousmés screamed out, for from his furious manner and the expression
of his face they felt he was about to dash cage and mushi on the
matting, and trample them underfoot.
And he was, for one horrible moment. Then something in him
prevailed—the something that had made him pick the Lost One up and kiss
her, and carry her all the way to Nikko; the spirit of good that had
made him always not so bad as he might have been.
He rehung the little cage on the hook, and the thing in it became dumb;
the sound in his head that troubled him had died away, and he returned
to where Jane was sitting, and resumed his position on the cushions near
her.
Then he told the Mousmés to leave what they had brought on the floor,
and to go away till he called them.
“Oh,” said Jane, when they were alone again, “to think they should have
seen me like that. Oh, _Dick_! How could we—how could I—”
“_They_ don’t matter,” said he gloomily.
“Oh, don’t _talk_ to me!” She wrung her hands.
“For goodness sake,” said Leslie, “don’t make mountains out of
molehills. They saw me kiss you, well, what of that? and they don’t talk
English—at least, English that any one can understand.”
“But like that on the floor,” murmured Jane, comforted somewhat by the
last statement.
“Well, what of that? We are in Japan, where people live on the floor. I
admit if a servant in England came in and saw—”
“_Don’t!_” screamed she; “don’t speak about it again. It was a moment of
weakness; let us forget it. I mean, let us _remember_ it as a
warning.”
“Do you feel like eating luncheon?” he asked, looking at the pathetic
little dishes and tea-cups, each on its sea-green mat.
“No; I feel like nothing. I only want to go and bury myself.”
He poured her out some tea and took some himself.
“You frightened me,” she said in a tremulous voice after they had sat
for a moment in silence. “I thought you were going to do something
dreadful.”
“When?”
“When you took that cage down with the buzzing thing in it that annoyed
you—poor atom!”
“It didn’t annoy me; that was not the sound I heard. It was the sound I
heard in the dream I told you of—that devil—”
A figure stood in the doorway: it was Campanula returned.