Kimono Part 10

The dance was more expressive now, not of art but of mere animalism.

The bodies shook and squirmed. The faces were screwed up to express an ecstacy of sensual delight. The little fingers twitched into immodest gestures.

_Chonkina! Chonkina! Hoi!_

Geoffrey had never gazed on a naked woman except idealised in marble or on canvas. The secret of Venus had been for him, as for many men, an inviolate Mecca towards which he worshipped. Glimpses he had seen, visions of soft curves, mica glistenings of creamy skin, but never the crude anatomical fact.

An overgrown embryo she seemed, a gawkish ill-moulded thing.

Woman, thought Geoffrey, should be supple and pliant, with a suggestion of swiftness galvanising the delicacy of the lines.

Atalanta was his ideal woman.

But this creature had apparently no bones or sinews. She looked like a sawdust dummy. She seemed to have been poured into a bag of brown tissue. There was no waist line. The chest appeared to fit down upon the thighs like a lid. The legs hung from the hips like trouser-legs, and seemed to fit into the feet like poles into their sockets. The turned-in toes were ridiculous and exasperating. There was no shaping of b.r.e.a.s.t.s, stomach, knees and ankles. There was nothing in this image of clay to show the loving caress of the Creator's hand. It had been modelled by a wretched bungler in a moment of inattention.

Yet it stood there, erect and challenging, this miserable human tadpole, usurping the throne of Lais and crowned with the worship of such devotees as Patterson and Wigram.

Are all women ugly? The query flashed through Geoffrey's brain. Is the vision of Aphrodite Anadyomene an artist's lie? Then he thought of Asako. Stripped of her gauzy nightdresses, was she like this? A shame on such imagining!

Patterson was hugging a girl on his knee. Wigram had caught hold of another. Geoffrey said--but n.o.body heard him,--

"It's getting too hot for me here. I'm going."

So he went.

His little wife was awake, and disposed to be tearful.

"Where have you been?" she asked, "You said you would only be half an hour."

"I met Wigram," said Geoffrey, "and I went with him to see some _geisha_ dancing."

"You might have taken me. Was it very pretty?"

"No, it was very ugly; you would not have cared for it at all."

He had a hot bath, before he lay down by her side.

CHAPTER VI

ACROSS j.a.pAN

_Momo-shiki no Omiya-bito wa Okaredo Kokoro ni norite Omoyuru imo!_

Though the people of the Great City With its hundred towers Be many, Riding on my heart-- (Only) my beloved Sister!

The traveller in j.a.pan is restricted to a hard-worn road, dictated to him by Messrs. Thos. Cook and Son, and by the Tourists' Information Bureau. This _via sacra_ is marked by European-style hotels of varying quality, by insidious curio-shops, and by native guides, serious and profane, who cla.s.sify foreigners under the two headings of Temples and Tea-houses. The lonely men-travellers are naturally supposed to have a _penchant_ for the spurious _geisha_, who haunt the native restaurants; the married couples are taken to the temples, and to those merchants of antiquities, who offer the highest commission to the guides. There is always an air of petty conspiracy in the wake of every foreigner who visits the country. If he is a j.a.pan enthusiast, he is amused by the naive ways, and accepts the conventional smile as the reflection of the heart of "the happy, little j.a.ps." If he hates the country, he takes it for granted that extortion and villainy will accompany his steps.

Geoffrey and Asako enjoyed immensely their introduction to j.a.pan. The unpleasant experiences of Nagasaki were soon forgotten after their arrival at Kyoto, the ancient capital of the Mikado, where the charm of old j.a.pan still lingers. They were happy, innocent people, devoted to each other, easily pleased, and having heaps of money to spend.

They were amused with everything, with the people, with the houses, with the shops, with being stared at, with being cheated, with being dragged to the ends of the vast city only to see flowerless gardens and temples in decay.

Asako especially was entranced. The feel of the j.a.panese silk and the sight of bright colours and pretty patterns awoke in her a kind of ancestral memory, the craving of generations of j.a.panese women. She bought kimonos by the dozen, and spent hours trying them on amid a chorus of admiring chambermaids and waitresses, a chorus specially trained by the hotel management in the difficult art of admiring foreigners' purchases.

Then to the curio-shops! The antique shops of Kyoto give to the simple foreigner the impression that he is being received in a private home by a j.a.panese gentleman of leisure whose hobby is collecting. The unsuspecting prey is welcomed with cigarettes and specially honourable tea, the thick green kind like pea-soup. An autograph book is produced in which are written the names of rich and distinguished people who have visited the collection. You are asked to add your own insignificant signature. A few glazed earthenware pots appear, Tibetan temple pottery of the Han Period. They are on their way to the Winckler collection in New York, a trifle of a hundred thousand dollars.

Having pulverised the will-power of his guest, the merchant of antiquities hands him over to his myrmidons who conduct him round the shop--for it is only a shop after all. Taking accurate measurement of his purse and tastes, they force him to buy what pleases them, just as a conjurer can force a card upon his audience.

The Barringtons' rooms at the Miyako Hotel soon became like an annex to the show-rooms in Messrs. Yamanaka's store. Brocades and kimonos were draped over chairs and bedsteads. Tables were crowded with porcelain, _cloisonne_ and statues of G.o.ds. Lanterns hung from the roof; and in a corner of the room stood an enormous bowl-shaped bell as big as a bath, resting on a tripod of red lacquer. When struck with a thick leather baton like a drum-stick it uttered a deep sob, a wonderful, round, perfect sound, full of the melancholy of the wind and the pine-forests, of the austere dignity of a vanishing civilisation, and the loneliness of the Buddhist Law.

There was a temple on the hill behind the hotel whence such a note reached the visitors at dawn and again at sunset. The spirit of everything lovely in the country sang in its tones; and Asako and Geoffrey had agreed, that, whatever else they might buy or not buy, they must take an echo of that imprisoned music home with them to England.

So they bought the cyclopean voice, engraved with cabalistic writing, which might be, as it professed to be, a temple bell of Yamato over five hundred years old, or else the last year's product of an Osaka foundry for antique bra.s.s ware. Geoffrey called it "Big Ben."

"What are you going to do with all these things?" he asked his wife.

"Oh, for our home in London," she answered, clapping her hands and gazing with ecstatic pride at all her treasures. "It will be wonderful. Oh, Geoffrey, Geoffrey, you are so good to give all this to me!"

"But it is your own money, little sweetheart!"

Never did Asako seem further from her parents' race than during the first weeks of her sojourn in her native country. She was so unconscious of her relationship that she liked to play at imitating native life, as something utterly peculiar and absurd. Meals in j.a.panese eating-houses amused her immensely. The squatting on bare floors, the exaggerated obeisance of the waiting-girls, the queer food, the clumsy use of chop-sticks, the numbness of her feet after being sat upon for half an hour, all would set her off in peals of unchecked laughter, so as to astonish her compatriots who naturally enough mistook her for one of themselves.

Once, with the aid of the girls of the hotel, she arrayed herself in the garments of a j.a.panese lady of position with her hair dressed in the shiny black helmet-shape, and her waist encased in the broad, tight _obi_ or sash, which after all was no more uncomfortable than a corset. Thus attired she came down to dinner one evening, trotting behind her husband as a well-trained j.a.panese wife should do. In foreign dress she appeared _pet.i.te_ and exotic, but one would have hesitated to name the land of her birth. It was a shock to Geoffrey to see her again in her native costume. In Europe, it had been a distinction, but here, in j.a.pan, it was like a sudden fading into the landscape. He had never realised quite how entirely his wife was one of these people. The short stature and the shuffling gait, the tiny delicate hands, the grooved slit of the eyelids, and the oval of the face were pure j.a.panese. The only incongruous elements were the white ivory skin which, however, is a beauty not unknown among home-reared j.a.panese women also, and, above all, the expression which looked out of the dancing eyes and the red mouth ripe for kisses, an expression of freedom, happiness, and natural high spirits, which is not to be seen in a land where the women are hardly free, never natural, and seldom happy. The j.a.panese woman's face develops a compressed look which leaves the features a mere mask, and acquires very often a furtive glance, as of a sharp-fanged animal half-tamed by fear, something weasel-like or vixenish.

Flaunting her native costume, Asako came down to dinner at the Miyako Hotel, laughing, chattering, and imitating the mincing steps of her country-women and their exaggerated politeness. Geoffrey tried to play his part in the little comedy; but his good spirits were forced and gradually silence fell between them, the silence which falls on masqueraders in fancy dress, who have tried to play up to the spirit of their costume, but whose imagination flags. Had Geoffrey been able to think a little more deeply he would have realized that this play-acting was a very visible sign of the gulf which yawned between his wife and the yellow women of j.a.pan. She was acting as a white woman might have done, certain of the impossibility of confusion. But Geoffrey for the first time felt his wife's exoticism, not from the romantic and charming side, but from the ugly, sinister, and--horrible word--inferior side of it. Had he married a coloured woman? Was he a squaw's man? A sickening vision of _chonkina_ at Nagasaki rose before his imagination.

When dinner was over, and after Asako had received the congratulations of the other guests, she retired upstairs to put on her _neglige_.

Geoffrey liked a cigar after dinner, but Asako objected to the heavy aroma hanging about her bedroom. They therefore parted generally for this brief half hour; and afterwards they would read and talk together in their sitting-room. Like other people, they soon got into the habit of going to bed early in a country where there were no theatres playing in a comprehensible tongue, and no supper restaurants to turn night into day.

Geoffrey lit his cigar and made his way to the smoking-room. Two elderly men, merchants from Kobe, were already sitting there over whiskies and sodas, discussing a mutual acquaintance.

"No, I don't see much of him," one of them, an American, was saying, "n.o.body does nowadays. But take my word, when he came out here as a young man he was one of the smartest young fellows in the East."

"Yes, I can quite believe you," said the other, a stolid Englishman with a briar pipe, "he struck me as an exceptionally well-educated man."

"He was more than that, I tell you. He was a financial genius. He was a man with a great future."

"Poor fellow!" said the other. "Well, he has only got himself to thank."

Geoffrey was not an eavesdropper by nature, but he found himself getting interested in the fate of this anonymous failure, and wondered if he was going to hear the cause of the man's downfall.

"When these j.a.panese women get hold of a man," the American went on, "they seem to drain the brightness out of him. Why, you have only got to stroll around to the Kobe Club and look at the faces. You can tell the ones that have j.a.panese wives or housekeepers right away.

Something seems to have gone right out of their expression."

"It's worry," said the Englishman. "A fellow marries a j.a.panese girl, and he finds he has to keep all her lazy relatives as well; and then a crowd of half-caste brats come along, and he doesn't know whether they are his own or not."