THE “EMPRESS OF JAPAN”
If Mr. Kamamura had sent a special messenger to Paradise to pick from
the aviary there a blue-winged and bright-eyed day for his garden-party,
he would not have obtained a better one than that which came by chance.
A haze hid its coming. Just after sunrise, looking from Leslie’s garden
one could scarcely see Nagasaki down below—a toy town, seen through
faint blue gauze, it seemed. The wind came in puffs, hot from the
Pacific, shaking the cherry branches.
The great double cherry-blossoms were falling. The close, even moss
under the trees was white, like ground after a mild snowstorm.
There was something in the atmosphere which loosened the petals this
morning. At each puff of wind a fresh shower fell, sifting through the
air to scatter softly on the ground. It was a ghostly sight in the gray
and silent dawn; the trees seemed despoiling themselves, casting their
blossoms from them in sorrow or fear.
In the veranda stood the crimson garden umbrella, all damp with dew, and
four pairs of clogs in a row. The house was deathly still; and one might
have likened it to a tomb, had it not possessed so much the appearance
of a bandbox, looped and latticed.
Presently a faint sound might have been heard. A panel slid back, and a
figure appeared, holding in its hand a lighted paper lantern.
It was Campanula, clad in blue, her feet peeping from beneath her skirt
like two white mice.
She put out the lantern, and hung it on a hook. Then she put on a pair
of clogs, and clicked down the steps. She went down the path, through
the little gate, and vanished from sight; and as her footsteps died
away, silence returned to the house and the garden.
Then in a few minutes a glorious transformation scene took place. The
haze turned to a golden mist; it became sundered by rivers of clear air,
and from it leaped the sun, like Helios from the sea.
Instantly the silence of the orchard became broken by the bickering of
birds; a cock crowed somewhere in the back premises, and he was answered
by the cock that lived half-way down the hill at the cooper’s shop—who
was answered, a minute later, by all the roosters in Nagasaki.
The mist vanished entirely now, the sun began steadily to mount into the
vault of perfect blue; his slanting rays shot through the cherry
orchard, striking here the bole of a tree glistening with great tears of
fragrant gum, and there on the ground besnowed with blossom, even the
fierce old hills of the landscape garden lost something of their
ruggedness in the warm and mellow light.
Then the house began to awaken. Pine-breeze appeared on the veranda, and
after Pine-breeze the other Mousmés all busy, or appearing so, dragging
out futon to air for a moment in the morning brightness, and lacquer
screens to be dusted.
“Summer has come in the night,” said Lotus-bud, pointing out the fallen
cherry-blossoms.
“Yes,” chimed in Pine-breeze, “but spring has gone.”
“I dreamt last night of frost.” This from Cherry-blossom, who was busily
engaged watching the others at work.
Frost is a bad dream in Japan, and the Mousmés conferred in murmurs as
to what it might mean.
“I know,” said Lotus-bud suddenly, with an air of conviction.
“What?”
“The riksha man will die.”
“Which?” asked Pine-breeze.
Then the two Mousmés began to “guy” Cherry-blossom as to the number of
the riksha man destined to die.
“Ichi-ban, Ni-ban, San-ban,”[3] murmured Lotus-bud.
[3] Number one, number two, number three.
“Shi-ban, Go-ban, Roku-ban,” rippled Pine-breeze.
“Hachi-ban!” suddenly cried Lotus-bud, with an air of inspiration.
“Ku-ban!” replied Pine-breeze, with the air of going one better.
“Leslie San!” said Cherry-blossom: and Pine-breeze got up and scuttered
into the house, where Leslie San was calling for his bath to be heated.
An hour later he appeared on the veranda, fully dressed.
He noticed the promise of heat in the air; he noted the great fall of
cherry-blossoms that had occurred during the night; he noted the lantern
that Campanula had hung on the hook.
Then he left the veranda, came down into the garden path, and through
the gate.
Outside the gate there was a little by-path that led upwards and to the
left, between a double bank of bushes to an open space like a natural
platform, from which a splendid view of the harbor and hills could be
obtained, A great camellia tree forty feet high grew here, alone in its
splendor, and beneath it he stood gazing at the harbor.
He could hear the faint monosyllabic cry of the brown hawks ever
circling above the blue water, and the distant sound of a drum from the
_Rurik_ where she lay at anchor. He could see the sampans shooting
hither and thither, carrying fruit and what not to the ships in the
anchorage, and the Junks floating like brown phantoms past the shadow of
the opposite cliffs.
But his eye was searching for something that was not there.
He looked at his watch, put it back in his pocket with an impatient
gesture, and continued to gaze.
Suddenly—Hrr-’mph!—Haa-aar!—the blast of a syren came shouting up the
harbor, and chasing the echoes through the hills. The brown hawks rose
and circled in wild flight, and past a bend came a great, white,
double-funneled steamer.
It was the Canadian Pacific boat, the _Empress of Japan_, touching at
Nagasaki, and due to leave the morning following for Yokohama and
Vancouver.
He watched her for a moment as she swam to her berth, beautiful and
graceful as a swan. Then he turned to the house.
To-morrow morning he and Jane would be on board that boat, bound
northward up the Inland Sea, past Tsu-shima, past Osaka, past Yokohama,
and away across the blue Pacific to Vancouver.
The whole plan was cut and dried. Jane had given no consent; that did
not matter. She would consent; he felt the power in himself to _make_
her consent.
Men of his stamp, lazy, neurotic, yet strong-willed, stung into action
by love or hate, sometimes assume momentary but terrible command over
events; they infect with their passion, infuriate with their hate, or
paralyze with their love.
He entered the house, ordered breakfast, and enquired for Campanula.
She had gone down at dawn, said Pine-breeze, to see O Toku San, the poor
girl who was so ill, and was now dying. He was glad Campanula was out,
and determined if possible to get his preparations over before her
return. Jane and he would return from Mr. Kamamura’s about six that
evening. It would be time enough then to tell Campanula of his journey.
As he breakfasted, he completed that part of his plans which had
reference to Campanula.
She would be safe and well looked after by M’Gourley, till—he came
back. He told himself he would come back some day; perhaps in six months
or so he would come back.
And why should he worry about leaving Campanula for a time? He had often
gone away before, once as far as London; he had always come back.
Why should Campanula mind his going away again?
Why, indeed!
He tried to forget how her little hand had stolen into his on the
evening before as if for protection. How, when he had kissed her, she
had suddenly flung aside her timid reserve, and with her arms around his
neck, but without a word, had told him what only a woman can tell
without speech.
Perhaps it was because he loved her far more than he knew, that his mind
was filled with gloom and apprehension.
But it was the time for action, not for thought; only a few hours lay
before him in which to prepare for this journey—the journey from which
he would return quite soon perhaps.
He would leave the house just as it was to Campanula and the Mousmés
till he came back and made other arrangements. M’Gourley, as his agent,
would supply them with all the money needful just as he had done before.
Then he called Pine-breeze and told her to get his portmanteau up to his
room, as he was going on a journey.
He packed hurriedly, whilst Lotus-bud handed him things. He wanted to
get the packing over and done with.
The strong sunlight reflected from the matting lit up the room with a
golden glow. Pine-breeze in the kitchen below was singing a song about a
lilac bough—the same song he had heard in the orchard that day when
Campanula had cried: “Hist, some one at the gate!”
He leaned back sitting on his heels to listen. He heard the end of the
song now. He did not hear it that day, for Jane, knocking at the
veranda, had cut it short.
This was the gist of the last verse:
“_The bee comes no more
When the lilac’s white blossom is dead_.”
Then he went on with his packing at a furious rate, stuffing in shirts,
collars, handkerchiefs, his mind wandering over all sorts of subjects.
His packing finished, he went to the window, took out his pocketbook,
and examined its contents. Three hundred and ten pounds, half in
circular notes, half in notes of the Bank of England.
Then he took out a check-book and a stylograph pen, and wrote a check
for five hundred, payable to himself.
Ten minutes later he was in a riksha making for the Bund, where he
stopped at Holme & Ringers, the shipping agents, bought two first-class
tickets for Vancouver, and changed his check, receiving part in cash,
and part in a check upon the National Specie Bank of Yokohama.
It was now eleven o’clock, and he had practically completed his
preparations. He had now to see Mac, and he turned his steps to the
office, which was only a stone’s throw from the shipping agents. Mac was
writing letters.
“Morning,” said he, glancing up, and seeming surprised to see his
partner at that hour.
“What’s agate?”
“I am,” said Leslie, trying to assume a jovial manner. “I’m off for a
holiday, and I want you to look after things same as you’ve done
before.”
“This is sudden,” said Mac, going on with his correspondence without
looking up.
“Oh, it’s never too sudden for a holiday. And see here, I’d better leave
you some ready cash: here’s a check for two fifty. I want you to look
after the bairn whilst I’m away.”
“Keep the money,” said Mac, “and pay me—when y’ come back. Ay, ay,
it’ll be soon enough then—soon enough then.”
“I’d sooner leave you the money.”
“Weel, put it in that drawer.”
“Well, you _are_ a bear this morning. See here, I’ve put it in the
drawer, but I’ll see you again before I go: I’m not off till to-morrow.”
“Imphim!” replied the Dour One, and Leslie went off.
Your true Scot has a very nasty habit of expressing his bad opinion of a
man. He does it in a round-about way, using hints and innuendoes,
instead of coming to the matter by a direct route.
What Mac suspected or what he knew, Leslie could not tell; judging from
his manner, however, he knew or suspected a lot.
However, he had no time to trouble about Mac. He had one thing more to
do before meeting Jane, Mr. Initogo the landlord had to be interviewed,
and the rent paid.
There was a fair of a sort on in the street that formed the shortest cut
to Mr. Initogo’s. It was filled with a many-colored crowd, flags were
fluttering, awnings flapping in the wind; every shop had some extra
advertisement to attract customers, and during the past night, like
mushrooms, extra booths had sprung into being.
A roaring trade was going forward; here, all kinds of fruit, there all
kinds of fish, some with bunches of violets in their mouths; cakes
reposing on branches of cherry or myrtle; cakes in the form of donkeys
and monkeys and goats; cakes shaped like spinning-tops; cakes in the
shape of suns, moons and stars; candied beans, beans mixed with comfits,
kites, masks, and paper dragons. Paper fish shaped like carp for the
Little-boys’ Festival of the 5th of May.
The noise and bustle somehow pleased Leslie, and soothed him; and he
drifted along with the chattering stream of men, women, Mousmés, little
boys and mere babies. Some of the children had long, curved trumpets of
glass, from which they blew the most horrible of hobgoblin sounds. Here
a man was frying pancakes, wrapping them in rice paper, and flinging
them to unseen customers in the crowd, who flung him back the money.
Here a person in spectacles, who looked like a professor of chemistry
gone mad, was blowing from a glass-blower’s tube dragons and fish in
sugar-candy. Apothecaries, with great golden eyes painted on their
booths, were selling little rice paper charms, one to be taken dissolved
in water for the stomach-ache, two for lumbago, three for migraine. Here
stood a man who would pull your teeth out with his fingers, three sen a
tooth.
The cheap curio dealers were in evidence with their wares cheap and bad;
those quaint perambulating curio dealers, who, as a rule, only start
business at sundown, and whose stock-in-trade include old top hats, old
boots, old—anything—European. “Caw—caw—caw!” You look up, and see a
great kite straining at its strings.
And then the umbrellas! Leslie had a good view of them, for he was head
and shoulders taller than any one in the crowd. Red, pink, gray,
gray-green, pink-and-white, blossom-bestrewn, stork-bestrewn, a shifting
mass of color reflecting the sunlight.
But though he saw all this, and though the noise and bustle and laughter
and general atmosphere of festivity fell in with his humor, his thoughts
were far away at Osaka; he was wondering what George du Telle was doing,
and what George du Telle would say in a day or so, and how he would
look. He had never hated George du Telle really till now that he had
determined to rob him of his wife.
Now that he was about to commit, or attempt to commit, a vile and
abominable act against George du Telle, that person seemed to him the
acme of all things vile and abominable.
Suddenly, through an opening in the crowd, Leslie caught a glimpse of a
face, the face of a blind man, stolid, stony, with a flattened nose and
wearing an indescribable expression of eld, weariness, and misfortune.
It was only a momentary glimpse, but revealed just for a moment, and
contrasted with the shifting colored mass around him, with the noise and
laughter, the sunlight and the movement of life, it was like a vision of
death.
Leslie stood for a moment startled and chilled; the joyous exaltation in
his mind a moment ago had vanished: it was as if a cloud had come
between him and the sun.
Why were these things always occurring to fret his soul and trouble his
imagination? This blind man was nothing but an ordinary blind man of
Japan such as one might see any day. The broken lath that had troubled
him all night was but a broken lath; the song of the mushi that had
started that infernal sound in his head was but the sound of an insect
buzzing; the azalea that had caused that frightful dream was but a
flower.
These slight things, he told himself, acting on a brain made
over-sensitive by opium, were not warnings, but simple causes of complex
effects. And he passed on his way, cursing himself for a fool, till he
reached the shop of Mr. Initogo.
That gentleman, for a wonder, was not making tea, but the sight of
Leslie San instantly inspired the desire for his favorite beverage,
caused him to clap his hands, and the tea-tray to appear in the hands of
his wife almost instantly upon the sound.
He received his rent, which he put away with an appearance of
indifference, expressed sorrow on hearing that Leslie was going away for
even a short time, but joy at the thought that the journey might benefit
his honorable health.
He was really fond of Leslie, this old Japanese gentleman; but the worst
of the flowery Japanese language is that it remains always, so to speak,
at boiling point, and towards friend or perfect stranger is the same.
You can’t cool it, and you can’t warm it.
Whilst they were talking Kiku came in; her eyes were red and she had a
snuffle in her voice.
She had been, it seems, to see the poor girl who was dying, O Toku San;
Campanula was with her.
“Ah, yes,” said Mr. Initogo, as his daughter retired upstairs. “Most
sad, poor girl. A man whom she loved left her, and she is dying of it,
just as a flower dies from want of water.”
Leslie looked at his watch: it was after twelve. He hastened from the
shop of Mr. Initogo, and securing a riksha drove to the Nagasaki Hotel
on the Bund.