GEORGE DU TELLE
He was awakened by voices. Sunlight was streaming into the room, the
sparrows were bickering round the trees, and from below came the voice
of Pine-breeze crying, “Irashi, condescend to enter!”
Then Jane’s voice: “I don’t understand what you say. Stop rubbing the
matting with your nose. I want your master.” Then an octave higher,
“Richard!”
“Hullo!” cried Leslie, leaning on his elbow, and scarcely able to credit
his ears.
“Oh, you are there! Come down at once, I must speak to you. Quick!”
“What on earth has happened?”
“All sorts of things.”
“I’ll be down in two minutes, but for goodness sake tell me what _is_
the matter.”
“Can I speak without any one understanding?”
“Oh, that’s all right.”
“Well, then, George has bolted.”
“George has _what_?”
“Gone away.”
“Where has he gone to?”
“Oh! come down and I’ll tell you everything. Dick! Dick! is that a bath
I hear you dragging over the floor? Dick, if you dare to have the
impudence to keep me waiting whilst you take a bath, I’ll—I’ll come up
and pull you out of it. Do come on!”
“Directly!”
“Well, don’t be long,” grumbled Jane; and she apparently took her seat
on the cushions upon the matting, for he could hear her grumbling about
the absence of chairs.
This was a new development of affairs. George bolted! It was just what
one might have expected of the man, to insult a girl and then fly from
the wrath to come.
It was rather a relief, too, viewed by the light of morning. No man
likes the task of thrashing a dog that has misbehaved: the thing has to
be done, but it is unpleasant, and if the creature runs away and hides,
so much the better. And the thrashing of a fat, wheezy pug without teeth
or means of defense was what the punishment of George du Telle would
amount to.
He dressed rapidly and came down to the room where Jane was sitting on a
cushion, trying to read the _Japan Mail_.
“Oh, there you are! Come and sit down. No, not beside me; right
opposite, if you please.”
“Tell me all about it.”
“Oh, there’s not much to tell. I was in bed nearly all yesterday with a
headache, and George went off for a walk in the afternoon; said he was
going to call on _you_. I told him you had gone to Nagoya.”
“Arita.”
“It’s all the same—then he went out, I don’t know where, and that is
the last I’ve seen of him. At nine yesterday evening they brought me a
note saying he had gone to Osaka, and to follow with our luggage.”
Leslie whistled.
“What are you whistling about?”
“Osaka! Why, that’s over three hundred miles away!”
“Where is it?”
“On the Inland Sea.”
“Where’s that?”
“Oh, it runs from here up to—well, practically to Osaka. At least, it
doesn’t exactly reach from here, you have to go through the Straits of
Tsu-shima.”
“Well, I don’t care what Straits you have to go through; he’s gone to
Osaka on important business the note said. Now, what business can have
taken him there. What do they do at Osaka?”
“Make all sorts of things, from machinery to tea-pots, and so on.”
“Well, he can’t have gone to buy machinery or tea-pots—what can it
_mean_? He was so good, too, yesterday; brought me up some antipyrine,
and wanted to fetch a doctor, and plumped up my pillows, and then went
out and off to Osaka without a word, and how did he get there? He says
follow by next boat to-morrow. I was going to ask the hotel people, but
I didn’t like to. I just told them I knew he was going, and I was going
to follow him to-morrow.”
“There’s no railway to Osaka,” said Leslie, “for this bit of Japan is an
island. He must have gone by a Holt liner; one started last evening. The
Canadian Pacific boats don’t stop at Osaka, they go right on to
Yokohama. I suppose he means for you to follow by the Messagerie boat
that leaves to-morrow evening.”
“I’ll give him tea-pots,” said Jane gloomily, “when I catch him! The
idea of his leaving me like that! In a strange country, too. I wonder
_what_ is the meaning of it all!”
“Perhaps he went away—because of a girl.”
“You mean he’s run away with some girl!” flashed Jane. “Why don’t you
say so if you mean it?”
“Because I don’t mean it. I said ‘because of a girl,’ not ‘with a
girl.’”
“Dick, you know something!”
“Yes, I do.”
Jane turned pale, and he hated to see her like that, but he had suddenly
made up his mind to tell her all.
“He met Campanula yesterday afternoon, and, not to put too fine a point
upon it, insulted her.”
“Oh, Dick!” said Jane, turning, if possible, paler than before. She
stared at him in a frightened way, then she recovered herself. “There
must be some mistake; she must have misunderstood him. He couldn’t have
done such a thing; however foolish he may be, he’s a gentleman.”
“Yes, a gentleman in England, but not a gentleman in Japan. He—God damn
it!” blazed out Leslie suddenly, bringing his fist down with a bang on
the matting—“he offered her money.”
“I must go to him at once,” said Jane, making as if to rise, “and ask
him if this thing is true.”
“Sit down for a while; you can’t possibly get to Osaka to-day. Oh, it’s
true enough. I was in a boiling rage last night when I came home and
heard it all. I was going down to the hotel with a stick to have it out,
and then I thought of you, and the disgrace and uproar there would be,
so I just bit on the bullet and went to bed. Honestly, I was going to
have got him somewhere by himself to-day, and have it out with him, but
it seems he prefers insulting women to facing men. Forgive me, Jane, for
all this; I feel bitter about it, but I hate to have to say these things
to you.”
“It was good of you to think of me last night,” said Jane in a broken
voice, gazing at the matting as she spoke, then looking up full in his
face, “very good of you.”
“Oh, I suppose it’s really nothing, after all,” he said. “Those
confounded fools that write books about Japan have got it into English
people’s heads that every ‘Jap-girl,’ as they call them, is a
what’s-its-name at heart. Let’s say no more on the matter, the affair is
closed. Have some breakfast?”
“No, thanks; I’m too much troubled and worried,” said Jane, sighing and
folding her hands in her lap.
“Oh, don’t trouble about it. I told you because—well, I thought you
ought to know.”
“Richard,” said she, looking up, “if you meet George again—”
“Don’t be a bit alarmed. I will do nothing to him except to cut him. He
has run away; that closes the affair entirely. A man can only be really
angry with a man.”
“Richard,” said she, now half tearfully, “I’m going to say something I
want to say. Men don’t understand women. I’m fond of George. Men are
always talking about love, and so are novels. I never loved George that
way. I don’t think I ever loved any one really in that way, but I have
an affection for George; I suppose that is the best name to give it. I
know he’s ugly, I know he’s a lot of things he ought not to be, yet I
feel he belongs to me.
“It’s the sort of feeling one has for an—for an animal. I’m just
telling you what I feel. An animal may be terribly ugly, yet one may
love it. George has been very good to me, and he has grown into my life;
that is the only way I can express it.
“Do you know, Dick, when you have your face very close to another
person’s face you cannot tell what they are like. Well, it’s just the
same with marriage. After people have been married some time they don’t
see each other as they saw each other before; they have lost their
identity—each is part of the other. And, Dick, I know George has been
wicked, but ought we not to remember, the day before yesterday—”
“Yes,” he said; “the day before yesterday I kissed you.”
“It was a moment of weakness on my part,” continued Jane. “We are all
very weak and wicked, but I have always been faithful to my husband—I
should say, to myself. It is strange to talk like this.”
“The whole affair is closed,” he said. “Let us wipe the slate clean and
begin again.”
Sitting opposite to her here in the morning light he was a very
different person from the man wandering about Arita yesterday, pursued
by her image.
The course of a great passion like his is not a high level line. If a
man were to live through such a phase of existence at Italian opera
heights he would be mad or dead in a very few days.
Its course is most like the temperature chart of a typhoid fever case:
tremendous ups and downs, fever point now, a few hours later almost
normal.
He clapped his hands, and Pine-breeze appeared.
“Breakfast,” he said. “You’ll stay to breakfast,” turning to Jane. “And
there is something I forgot day before yesterday. You have come to see
Japan—well, look here—”
He went to a big lacquer cabinet where he kept his papers, and returned
with a large, square, cream-colored card covered with Chinese
ideographs.
“What is it?” said Jane, turning it over.
“An invitation to a garden-party. A man named Kamamura is giving it
to-morrow at O-Mura.”
“A Japanese garden-party!” said Jane, with interest in her voice.
“Yes, very Japanese. He told me to bring any of my friends.”
“But to-morrow,” said Jane—“I am going away to-morrow.”
The words went through him like a pang.
“Never mind,” he said. “Your boat does not start till evening; you will
have plenty of time to get back.”
“I’d love to go,” she said; “but—are you sure it’s all right for me to
go without an invitation?”
“Perfectly, or I would not bring you.”
Pine-breeze entered with a tray.
“Where,” enquired Leslie, “is Campanula San?” Campanula San had not
risen yet; she had a headache.