FAREWELL
It was seven o’clock; the birds were taking their nests in the cherry
orchard with one final burst of chattering. The sky in the west,
wave-green melting into vaguest blue, held one solitary cloud floating
like a rose-leaf beneath the evening star. Leslie stood at his gate,
looking for the last time at the twilight stealing over Nagasaki. He had
just arrived.
M’Gourley’s words were still ringing in his ears, and his mind was in a
turmoil.
He was in exactly the position of the man who has cheated unwittingly at
cards, who has found out his mistake, and who has still time to save his
honor.
If the Bombay and Benares bank was safe, it was his plain duty to go at
once to Jane du Telle and inform her of the fact. She was laboring under
the impression that he was a ruined man. Half of her sympathy, the whole
of the present situation, had arisen from that misconception. To leave
her under this delusion would amount to fraud—the meanest of all
frauds.
He was feeling this keenly, but unfortunately his mind, instead of
grappling with the situation, and forcing his body to act, was engaged
in cursing Fate, and the tangled net in which he found himself taken.
Was it his fault that the false news had come just at the psychological
moment, the news that had actually thrown Jane into his arms? He kept
asking himself this, as he gazed across the dusk-eyed harbor to the
hills now becoming dimmed by the twilight.
This last touch of Fate would, if he accepted it without resistance, rob
him of the last remnants of honor and all self-respect.
His hand was upon the stakes, he had a moment to decide whether to take
them or leave them: to be a thief or an honest man.
Suddenly, as if silence had placed her finger upon their throats, the
birds in the orchard ceased their chatter.
The warm day dying seemed to have called all the spirits of beauty from
air and earth and sea, to stain the skies above its death-bed with the
tints of the ocean and the dawn. Over the tomb of light Color, Light’s
firstborn child hovered like some exquisite ephemera whose wings change
from beauty to beauty before dissolving for ever in darkness and death.
The silence that had come over the orchard was broken occasionally by
little outbursts of squabbling from over-full nests, sounds like the
flirting of a fan amongst the leaves, chirrupings that told of
differences made up. Then final and complete silence that would last
till night woke the owls.
Leslie at the gate suddenly made a gesture as if he were flinging
something away, turned on his heel, and came towards the house.
He entered just as Cherry-blossom, with a white flower in her hair, her
amber sleeves fallen back and exposing her fore-arms, her body stretched
to its fullest height on the tips of her tabis, was in the act of
lighting the big hall-lamp. She looked like a little cat stretching
herself.
A pang went through his heart. He would never see Cherry-blossom light
the big hall-lamp again, never again see Pine-breeze bring in the
tea-cups, nor Lotus-bud carrying off Sweetbriar San to his box in the
kitchen.
You cannot possibly live in Japan without loving your maid-servants. I
mean by love that sort of passion which was inspired in Matthew Prior by
the lady of fashion aged five.
It was a feature of the House of the Clouds that sometimes on the lower
floor you would find a hall with two rooms on either side of it, and
sometimes two rooms and no hall, and sometimes, in very hot weather, one
huge room. The sliding paper partitions made this possible; nay, very
easy, for Mr. Initogo had improved upon the ordinary Japanese method,
being of an inventive turn of mind.
He looked into the room on the right of the hall. A _chamécen_ lay on
the floor, an hibachi showed a crimson spark, and a dwarf maple in a pot
of Arita ware displayed its pretty form vaguely in the twilight.
He looked into the room on the left: no one.
Where was Campanula? She must have returned by this, surely. Perhaps she
was upstairs.
He went up, making little noise in his stocking-feet. At the door of his
room he peeped in.
There was Campanula. Oh, desolate sight! She was sitting on his big
portmanteau all alone in the dusk. Her head was bent.
She looked so forlorn and so small, and the sash of her obi so huge in
comparison with the wearer, that he could not but recall how she sat
that morning in the Tea House of the Tortoise. That morning, when she
had likened herself to a lump of mud; the morning he had proposed to
adopt her, and care for her, and make her a chattel of his own.
A moment later, he had caught her up in his arms. She did not resist,
but he seemed to have taken up a lifeless thing.
As he carried her downstairs, had he known, it might have seemed strange
to him that so great a grief should be so light a burden.
He brought her to the room on the right, where Cherry-blossom had just
lit the lamp, and sat down beside her on the matting.
He took a cigarette from his pocket, and approached the tobacco-mono
with it. Then, without lighting it, he flung the cigarette away.
“Campanula, I am going on a journey. I did not tell you last night, for
I had not made up my mind.”
“I have heard it,” she replied. She sat there beside him, a small figure
with head bowed and hands folded in her lap; and the sadness and
sorrowful sweetness of those four words pierced his heart.
To get this terrible interview over, to tear himself away at once, he
would have sold years of his life. But it had to be gone through with.
Whether she loved him as a woman loves a man, or a child loves a father,
she loved him, loved him as no person had ever loved him before—and he
knew it.
Then he talked to her, telling her that he would come back.
“I have been away before, Campanula, and I have returned. Will you not
believe me that I will return?”
“Ah yes,” she answered, “but you did not go with her.”
He said nothing for a moment. There was a sound outside; it was the
coolie he had ordered to take his portmanteau to the hotel. He heard
Pine-breeze accosting him, he heard him go upstairs and come down again,
walking heavily. It was like the sound of a man carrying out a coffin.
He heard his steps on the garden walk dying towards the gate.
How had she discovered with whom he was going?
If she would only weep or cry out, or move, or break in some way this
terrible stillness. If she would only reproach him. But she said
nothing, nor even sighed. She seemed like a person stricken not by
grief, but death. Then he began to talk again, telling her of the
arrangements he had made. How M’Gourley San would look after her, just
as he had done before, till he came back. And he would write every
week—till he came back. And they would all be happy together again, as
happy as ever they had been—when he came back.
To which she replied:
“If you are going away to find happiness, my happiness is great.”
Fancy a white house, lantern-lit, and steeped in dusk, a tall man
walking away from it rapidly, three Mousmés on their knees on the
veranda crying after the vanishing form: “Come again, oh, condescend to
come again quickly!”
The sound of their voices rings in his ears as he passes through the
little gate. He hears it pursuing him like the faint murmur of bees,
until a puff of wind blows it away and replaces it by the faint sound of
the city below.
Come again! He will never come again to lie in the hammock beneath the
cherry trees. Never more shall Lotus-bud hand him the night lantern to
light him to his bed, nor thy small hands, O Pine-breeze, bear him the
brown leather cigar-case that thy small nose loved to smell!
As he came down hill towards Nagasaki he felt as though he were leaving
spring for ever behind him.
Thrice he stopped as if to return, and stood gazing into the darkness of
the uphill path, listening to the wind in the branches of the lilac
trees.
The last of these pauses ended more abruptly than the others, and he
plunged on again down hill through the gloom.