THE COMPLETE GEOGRAPHER
On the way, she stopped at the shop of Mr. Initogo to pay a visit to her
friend Kiku.
Campanula in her school-days had shown both qualities and defects of
mind. At languages, at least in learning the English language, she was a
success; a very moderate success where mathematics were concerned,
though she knew enough to do long division, and to keep household
accounts. They teach a lot of useful things at the mission
schools—needlework, and so forth, and in some of these branches
Campanula shone, but at geography she was a dismal failure. She had been
always lacking in the power of location. Witness her first statements as
to the whereabouts of the house with the plum tree in front of it.
The long sea voyage from Tokyo, or rather from Yokohama, had brought
into her mind the impression that she had traveled to the end of things,
yet they told her there were things beyond.
They showed her maps and globes. The maps were flat, and the globes were
round, yet they said they were the same thing, or were pictures of the
same thing. How a flat thing could be round or the converse, she could
not say, but Howard San, the missionary, said they were. Was it for her
to contradict him? So, instead of setting up her own wits against Howard
San, and questioning him, she accepted his words just as you or I accept
the words of mathematicians or physiologists concerning subjects on
which we are ignorant. And thus on geography she got hopelessly muddled,
and remained so.
This morning she was lamenting her want of geography, and casting about
for some friend learned in the art. Of course she might have gone to
Howard San, but she would have to wait till school was over, and,
besides she felt a certain diffidence in approaching him on the subject,
so she turned to the shop of Mr. Initogo.
Mr. Initogo was sitting on his heels on the floor of his shop, engaged
in the gentle art of making tea; it was one of his fads that he always
made his own tea with his own hands. Beside him stood an hibachi, on
which a kettle was coming to the boil; before him, a tea-cup without a
handle on a tray, and a microscopic tea-pot.
He warmed the tea-cup with a few drops of hot water; then, from a
cylindrical tea-canister, with a thing like a snuff-scoop, he took a
small quantity of green tea—tea of the color that an old black coat
turns after years of sun and rain—this he popped into the tea-pot.
Then the honorable hot water being ready, he poured it into a porcelain
dish to let it cool slightly, which it did, becoming converted during
the act into the honorable old hot water.
The honorable old hot water being now ready, he poured it into the
tea-pot, popped on the lid, looked up, and saw Campanula.
So immersed in his darling employment had he been, that he had not
observed her entrance.
She wished to see Kiku? She was upstairs; this with a thousand apologies
for his own blindness, and comparisons of himself with worms and other
sightless things.
Campanula knew the way up; she had been up often enough before, and up
she went.
Kiku San, since we hinted at her as a playmate of Campanula, had grown.
The tumbling tot that Leslie had once caught by the “scruff” of her obi
and held out at arm’s length wriggling, for the amusement of M’Gourley,
had become a Mousmé with a face at once heavy and flighty-looking; a
broad face, pretty enough, but with a maddeningly irresponsible
expression.
Pine-breeze was bad enough in the irresponsible line, but she could have
learnt much from Kiku.
She was the dunce, or, rather, had been the dunce at the mission school;
this is not saying very much against her, for Japanese girls are
amazingly quick in the “uptake,” learning coming to them as easily as
ignorance to English girls; all the same she had been the dunce. She had
never been able to conquer the letter “l” in English; and would say
“raidy” for “lady;” yet she had a memory of sorts, blocks of facts swam
in the ocean of her unintelligence like those houses that float about
after an inundation of the Mississippi.
But the place left vacant in her skull by want of learning was by no
means devoid of a tenant; therein dwelt a colossal impudence, a supreme
self-assurance that sheltered and helped to hide the nakedness of her
mind, and even obtained for her, amongst her girl friends, a sort of
fungoid reputation for cleverness.
For when Kiku San said a thing, she said it with such assurance that it
seemed true—the assurance of the absolutely untrustworthy intellect,
which of all assurances is the greatest.
She was sitting now on her heels in a bare room on the upper floor, a
tobacco-mono at her side, and in her hands a round flat box with a glass
lid. She was playing at Pigs-in-Clover.
The two Mousmés bowed to one another with great ceremony, enquiring
after each other’s honorific health, and then Campanula came to rest
upon the matting opposite to her friend.
They formed a pretty picture in the bare room with its chess-board
matting, against the bare walls, whose only ornament was a kakemono
representing Fuji San crested with snow.
Kiku was soon to be married—married to a government clerk to whom she
had been engaged nearly since birth; and she entertained Campanula with
long and uninteresting descriptions of her husband-to-be, his mother,
his father, his grandfather, who lived at Nagoya, his brothers and
sisters, how old they were and all about them.
Kiku was a bore, a female bore of the first water, and in this respect
she could have given any old member of the Rag or Carlton points, and
beaten him.
She told all these things looking up from under her thick eyelids, and
with a half-smile, and Campanula listened, half mesmerized, wholly
weary, but with all her courteous soul awake to do honor to the tale.
At last an hiatus occurred of which Campanula took advantage to ask the
question in her mind.
Did Kiku, so learned on all subjects, know of any land where the snow
lay for half the year?
Oh, certainly Kiku did, and she told about it.
Describing her future husband and his relations she had been vague and
uninteresting, lacking, as she did, the gifts of perception and
narration. But now, plunging into the empire of pure lies, she spoke
with an assurance that made her words sound like gospel.
Such a country existed; as a matter of fact, she had it all in a book
somewhere, but she did not need the book, as she never forgot anything.
It lay in the sea beyond Nankin two hundred and sixty-seven ri beyond,
and the snow lay there half a year, sometimes more.
“Is it a country where blue flowers grow, and roses—sometimes?” said
Campanula.
“Just so, sometimes;” and Kiku, searching in the capacious bag of her
ignorance, began to produce old broken-up facts that had been lying
there like rubbish in the basket of a chiffonier.
The sea all round that place was frozen most of the year, and the sun
shone once a month or so.
Then she painted a graphic picture of this desolate land which she
declared to be divided into four parts, Unster, Munster, Rinster and
Comit; and Campanula sat listening and receiving it all as truth.
Liars, somehow, are always sure of an audience; you and I, who speak the
truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, languish in
conversation and are not heard, whilst your mendacity-monger holds the
floor and absorbs the interest.
So Kiku San went on spinning her tale, and Campanula San sat opposite to
her and listened, shivering at the dismal pictures being raised before
her.
Then, all at once, from below came the irate voice of Mr. Initogo
calling Kiku the “Heedless One.” If he could have used a stronger
expression he would have used it, for the dinner ought to be cooking at
this moment, and the fish and seaweed had not arrived. The Heedless One
had been, as a matter of fact, playing at Pigs-in-Clover all the morning
instead of marketing.
The Complete Geographer rose to her feet in a hurry, for filial
obedience resided in her breast, not so much as a virtue, but rather as
a sort of mainspring put in by nature—or rather, I should say,
heredity.
They went out together, and Kiku bought the fish and the seaweed and a
few other important items, and then they parted, Kiku returned home
laden with marketings, and Campanula to the House of the Clouds.