THE GARDEN-PARTY
Within an hour of the great city of Nagasaki, in the midst of a park
that was at the same time half a garden, lay the country residence of
Mr. Kamamura; once a man who carried two swords, with the longer of
which he would have beheaded you for two words and have done it with
neatness and despatch, now a gentleman in a frock-coat and tall hat,
wearing gold-rimmed glasses and a smile.
The long, low house, white as snow and surrounded by a narrow veranda,
faced west, and was surrounded by a garden recalling the gardens of Dai
Nichi Do: a garden filled with the music of fountains and the poetry of
birds.
Alas! on the day of his garden-party Mr. Kamamura, seized with the
spirit of modernity and the savagery of civilization, not content with
the music of heaven, and prompted, no doubt, by the devil, had hired a
brass band and placed it in a little kiosk, with orders to bray Strauss
in the face of Nature from three o’clock till dusk.
There were many guests, and the gardens soon presented an animated
appearance. Many of the ladles had retained the national dress, and
marvelous were the fabrics to be seen in the form of the obi or flowing
loose in the graceful kimono.
Some of the guests surrounded a pair of jugglers, two terrible men
dressed in red, who fenced with and transfixed one another with long
swords, swallowed fire, and belched it like dragons.
In another corner of the grounds fireworks were whizzing and cracking,
filling the clear air above with a thin blue haze through which, just as
Jane and Leslie entered the grounds, there rose a wonderful fire balloon
made of colored paper and fashioned in the form of a turkey cock.
“It’s like a party in the lunatic asylum,” whispered Jane, as they
threaded the maze of guests in search of their host and hostess. “And,
Dick, you _do_ look perfectly awful in that panama amongst all these men
in tall hats—I mean they look awful beside you, but they are _de
rigueur_; and it’s better to be _de rigueur_ and look frightful, than to
be not _de rigueur_ and look nice. How d’y’ do?” and Jane extended her
arm, pump-handle fashion, to the little gentleman with the sallow face
to whom Leslie was introducing her.
“Much pleasure, much pleasure,” said Mr. Kamamura, whose English was
mixed and limited, and who, like Kiku San, had not completely mastered
the letter “l.” “Will the honorable rady so make equal health Nagysaki
(the proper way to pronounce Nagasaki) you stay? So good. Over there
Mrs. Kamamura; you make known;” and Mr. Kamamura presenting his arm Jane
was led away through the crowd like some tall and graceful frigate
threading a maze of painted cock-boats.
Leslie, left to himself, turned with a gloomy expression of countenance
to where the jugglers were dislocating each other’s necks. He did not
see them; he was looking out of the side of his eyes at Jane.
She had been led across one of the willow-pattern bridges, and he could
see her now standing at one of the kiosks, a tea-cup in her hand. She
was talking to Mr. Kamamura and a little lady in European dress—Mrs.
Kamamura, probably.
What could they be talking about? Conversation, probably, sufficient to
dislocate the gravity of a Socrates.
He turned his head impatiently and tried to take an interest in the
jugglers, without success. There was something deeply irritating about
the scene of frivolity in which Fate had staged the last scenes of the
most important act in his life.
The _Empress of Japan_ sailed at eight on the morrow morning, and as yet
he had made no movement as regards Jane. All this trifling was but a bad
prelude to those words so soon to be spoken.
He little knew that Tragedy stood at his elbow in the form of James
Anderson, manager to M’Cormick, the great silk dealers on the Bund.
“Why, Leslie, man! I thought I knew the nape of your neck. How are you?”
“Hullo, Anderson!” said Leslie, returning the other’s hand-grip. “What
are you doing here?”
“I’m just looking round,” said Anderson. “I’m just looking round, and
you’ll admit it’s worth the turning of one’s head. I shouldn’t mind
exchanging places with Kamamura. It’s not a bad life, his, by a long
penny. This affair will bang a hole through a good pile of ten pun
notes. They tell me those balloons made like dicky-birds cost—I forget
now, but it’s a good pile of dollars a-piece, for every feather is
painted correct, and that’s just like the Japs—make a pretty thing, and
then stick it away in some hidey-hole where no one can see it, or burn
it—What’s agate now?”
The crowd was in motion, flooding towards a part of the grounds where a
little stage had been erected, backed and half surrounded by cypress
trees. On the stage, against the dark-green background, could be seen
the graceful figure of a girl.
She was dancing. It was a dance that at first insipid, became after a
few moments fascinating, lulling, exquisite to watch as the movements of
a flower blown by the wind.
They drew close and stood to look. The girl was dressed in amber and
scarlet, with a scarlet flower in the night of her hair—a _bijou rose
et noir_, recalling Baudelaire’s Lola de Vallence.
Her supple body seemed inspired by the mysterious music we hear
wandering through the land of spring, and expressing itself in the
voices of the wind and the birds and the streams.
She seemed to have learned her art in the academy where the daffodils
are taught to dance and the bluebells to make their bow.
“It’s the Geisha Kamamura has hired—paid her something like two hundred
to dance that fan-dance, or whatever they call it. She was a Tokyo girl,
and had left the business to get married, but she couldn’t withstand the
two hundred; the best Geisha in Japan, they say. What’s this her name? O
something San. Hoots! but my memory is gone fishing to-day. Listen!
she’s talking.”
The dance had ceased, and the girl, in the silence that followed the
tinkling of the three accompanying _chamécens_, had commenced one of
those poetical recitals in favor with an intellectual Japanese audience.
Her recitation was sad; it bemoaned the thing we call change. The
cherry-blossom is fair, ran this untranslatable poem, but it must die
and give place to the lotus.
“I cannot understand this depression in trade,” murmured the muted voice
of Anderson, as he stood beside Leslie. “It’s been spreading and
spreading, and there’s nothing it hasn’t spread into.”
And the lotus parts with its petals to give place to the chrysanthemum,
the Royal chrysanthemum.
“We’ve had a good year till now, ourselves, but hech! man, there’s a
matter of fifteen thousand gone over the breaking of the Bombay and
Benares bank—clean gone, never to come back—and that takes the sugar
off the cake—ay, the devil himself won’t whistle it home again.”
And the gray winter sky and the snowflakes, like ghosts of flowers,
finished the poem of the Geisha, whilst Leslie stood transfixed for a
second, frozen by the news he had just heard, and unable to turn. He
turned round full on Anderson.
“The breaking of _what_?”
“The Bombay and Benares. Have you not heard the news? It came by cable
to-day at one o’clock. Good God! man, you hadn’t much money in it, had
you?”
“Everything—everything,” said Leslie in a stammering voice. “I’m
smashed.”
He linked his arm in Anderson’s, and dragged him along hurriedly. He
wanted to go, nowhere in particular, but just get away from the spot
where Anderson had sentenced his future to death.
“Man, I’m sorry! Man, I’m sorry!” said his companion. “I should not have
told you so sudden, but how was I to know?”
“Smashed—smashed—smashed!” said the other, talking as a man talks in
his sleep.
He held Anderson by the arm as he spoke. All around spread the
many-colored crowd; fans were fluttering, umbrellas bobbing, tongues
chattering, soft women’s voices inlaid like music of gold on the silvery
music of the fountains and cascades.
“Anderson, man, are you sure they’ve broken—sure?”
“Ay, ay, sure. Better to tell you straight. Sure as my name’s James
Anderson.”
Boom! Boom! Boom! the band broke into a march by Gungl, and Leslie,
releasing Anderson, ran after a figure in the crowd some twenty paces
distant.
“Jane! I must speak to you at once.”
Jane looked up from the little Japanese gentleman who was escorting her,
saw the distress in her countryman’s face, and dismissed Asia with a
bow.
“I have just had frightful news. Come with me to some quiet place till I
tell you about it. Anywhere. No matter where. See! there are no people
across that bridge where the trees are; let us go there.”
Jane spoke not a word, but he saw that she was very pale and trembling.
That weakness of Jane’s gave him a strange sensation. It said something
that her lips had never uttered.
They passed over the little bridge. They passed over another bridge;
there were no people here, only trees; they went no further.
They were in a small forest. The garden was lost to sight; only the
music of the band, muted by distance, told of the festivity so near, yet
apparently so far away.
The trunk of a felled tree lay in the path; they sat down upon it by
common consent. Leslie took out his watch, and looked at it attentively.
Then, still holding it open in his hand, he spoke.
“I want you to listen to me for five minutes—only five minutes; you can
hold the watch, and measure the time yourself. Jane, when a man is going
to be hanged, they will give him a glass of brandy to help him along to
the drop. Will you do the same by me—give me five minutes’ clear
speech, and let me say just what I please without interruption; will
you?”
“Yes,” said Jane, and she shivered as she spoke the word. She had
maintained a strange silence; impulsive as she was, one might have
expected her to implore him to tell her the worst, and have it over.
Perhaps she understood dimly that Leslie’s disaster was personal to
herself, a cataclysm the effect of which would reach her future as well
as his.
“You remember,” he said, after a moment’s pause, “how I asked you to
marry me long ago, and everything that happened after? Well, when I
think of all that, it seems to me that I must have passed through life
in a state of insanity, and only awakened to consciousness now. Jane, I
am feeling now as a man must feel when he wakes in hell, and
remembers—No matter, it is all done with now; and even if you loved me
as well as I love you, it’s all over and done with and useless now.”
He leaned forward with his face in his hands. Jane did not speak; the
music of the band had ceased, and the only sound to be heard was the
weary sighing of the warm wind in the pine-tops.
“I’m broken utterly, I have just heard the news. Don’t think I brought
you here to listen to me whining about my misfortunes. I brought you
here to tell you I love you. I meant to have carried you off in the
steamer that sails to-morrow morning for the north-west. With the money
I had yesterday, I would have supported you, I would have torn you out
of society, and made you love me. I would have made you a Paradise. Yes,
by the living God, a Paradise, or there’s no such thing as love. But now
I’m a beggar, and I love you too well to drag you into my ruin, and it’s
Fate, Fate, Fate that has done it all, and cursed be its name!”
Again silence, broken only by a faint, dreary sound. Jane was weeping.
“Don’t, for the love of God!” cried Leslie. “Don’t cry, or you’ll make
me cry too. Oh, miserable life! why was I ever born into it?” And he
moved his hands in the air, as blind Samson might have done amidst the
pillars of the temple.
A bird piped three times in the recesses of the wood, three flute-like
notes sweet as the notes of a bell-bird. They were answered by its mate
in the branches above.
Leslie put his hands to his ears, as if to shut out the happy sounds.
Jane’s tears had ceased, but she did not speak, she did not breathe;
only a deep sigh occasionally escaped from her.
“And now, we can only say good-bye. Let us part here for ever. We will
meet again in—Heaven,” said Leslie, with a horrible shuddering laugh.
He stretched out his hand and took hers. She let him have it without
seeming to know that he had taken it.
She was murmuring his name in a whisper, staring at him and through him,
and as if her gaze was fixed on some terrible catastrophe beyond.
“Dick! Dick! Dick!” All poetry could not express the helpless, hopeless
sorrow she put into those three little whispered words.
Suddenly, filtering through the wood, came a sound, a voice, a spirit,
that unrolled around them a panorama of loch, moor, and sky, hills
purple with heather, lakes dark with shadow. “Auld Lang Syne.”
The band was playing it, villainously enough, but the distance smoothed
away the defects.
It broke Jane down. She leaned against his shoulder and sobbed like a
child, and then, with both hands upstretched, she drew his face down to
hers and murmured—no matter what.
Then all at once—heedless of ruin, forgetting all things, carried away
on the dumb tide of passion, the wave that had retreated before
disaster, only to come shoreward again resistless and gigantic—all at
once, and without a word, he took her in his arms.
It was the eloquence of passion and despair, the speech without tongue
of a soul tormented and _in extremis_.
It broke Jane down utterly. Hopeless, haggard, and pale as a person in
the midst of some terrible disaster, she clung to him, whispering in his
ear words repeated over and over again, with that reiteration which
forms the rhetoric of the dying and the lost.
She had cast everything aside, the world, her position in society, her
husband, her wealth. Passion and pity, that strange combination, had for
the moment blinded her eyes to everything but the man beside her—but
did she love him? Fate had not yet disclosed the answer to that old
fatal question, that sphinx-like question whose answer forms the plot of
each man’s story.