Kimono Part 12

"How old do you think Tanaka is?" he asked her one day.

"Oh, about eighteen or nineteen," she answered. She was not yet used to the deceptiveness of j.a.panese appearances.

"He does not look more sometimes," said her husband; "but he has the ways and the experience of a very old hand. I wouldn't mind betting you that he is thirty."

"All right," said Asako, "give me the jade Buddha if you are wrong."

"And what will you give me if I am right?" said Geoffrey.

"Kisses," replied his wife.

Geoffrey went out to look for Tanaka. In a quarter of an hour he came back, triumphant.

"My kisses, sweetheart," he demanded.

"Wait," said Asako; "how old is he?"

"I went out of the front door and there was Master Tanaka, telling the rickshaw-men the latest gossip about us. I said to him, 'Tanaka, are you married?' 'Yes, Lordship,' he answered, 'I am widower.' 'Any children?' I asked again. 'I have two progenies,' he said; 'they are soldiers of His Majesty the Emperor.' 'Why, how old are you?' I asked.

'Forty-three years,' he answered. 'You are very well preserved for a man of your age,' I said, and I have come back for my kisses."

After this monstrous deception Geoffrey had declared that he would dismiss Tanaka.

"A man who goes about like that," he said, "is a living lie."

Two days later, early in the morning, they left Kyoto by the great metal high road of j.a.pan, which has replaced the famous way known as the _Tokaido_, sacred in history, legend and art. Every stone has its message for j.a.panese eyes, every tree its a.s.sociation with poetry or romance. Even among Western connoisseurs of j.a.panese wood engraving, its fifty-two resting places are as familiar as the Stations of the Cross. Such is the _Tokaido_, the road between the two capitals of Kyoto and Tokyo, still haunted by the ghosts of the Emperor's ox-drawn wagons, the _Shoguns'_ lacquered palanquins, by feudal warriors in their death-like armour, and by the swinging strides of the _samurai_.

"Look, look, Fujiyama!"

There was a movement in the observation-car, where Geoffrey and his wife were watching the unfolding of their new country. The sea was away to the right beyond the tea-fields and the pine-woods. To the left was the base of a mountain. Its summit was wrapped in cloud. From the fragment visible, it was possible to appreciate the architecture of the whole--_ex pede Herculem_. It took the train quite one hour to travel over that arc of the circuit of Fuji, which it must pa.s.s on its way to Tokyo. During this time, the curtained presence of the great mountain dominated the landscape. Everything seemed to lead up to that mantle of cloud. The terraced rice fields rose towards it, the trees slanted towards it, the moorland seemed to be pulled upwards, and the skin of the earth was stretched taut over some giant limb which had pushed itself up from below, the calm sea was waiting for its reflection, and even the microscopic train seemed to swing in its...o...b..t round the mountain like an unwilling satellite.

"It's a pity we can't see it," said Geoffrey.

"Yes; it's the only big thing in the whole darned country," said a saturnine American, sitting opposite; "and then, when you get on to it, it's just a heap of cinders."

Asako was not worrying about the landscape. Her thoughts were directed to a family of well-to-do j.a.panese, first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers, who had settled in the observation car for half an hour or so, and had then withdrawn. There was a father, his wife and two daughters, wax-like figures who did not utter a word but glided shadow-like in and out of the compartment. Were they relations of hers?

Then, when she and her husband pa.s.sed down the corridor train to lunch, and through the swarming second-cla.s.s carriages, she wondered once more, as she saw male j.a.pan sprawling its length over the seats in the ugliest att.i.tudes of repose, and female j.a.pan squatting monkey-like and cleaning ears and nostrils with sc.r.a.ps of paper or wiping stolid babies. The carriages swarmed with children, with luggage and litter. The floors were a mess of spilled tea, broken earthenware cups and splintered wooden boxes. Cheap baggage was piled up everywhere, with wicker baskets, paper parcels, bundles of drab-coloured wraps, and cases of imitation leather. Among this debris children were playing unchecked, smearing their faces with rice cakes, and squashing the flies on the window pane.

Were any of these her relatives? Asako shuddered. How much did she actually know about these far-away cousins? She could just remember her father. She could recall great brown shining eyes, and a thin face wasted by the consumption which killed him, and a tenderness of voice and manner quite apart from anything which she had ever experienced since. This soon came to an end. After that she had known only the conscientiously chilly care of the Muratas. They had told her that her mother had died when she was born, and that her father was so unhappy that he had left j.a.pan forever. Her father was a very clever man.

He had read all the English and French and German books. He had left special word when he was dying that Asako was not to go back to j.a.pan, that j.a.panese men were bad to women, that she was to be brought up among French girls and was to marry a European or an American. But the Muratas could not tell her any intimate details about her father, whom they had not known very well. Again, although they were aware that she had rich cousins living in Tokyo, they did not know them personally and could tell her nothing.

Her father had left no papers, only his photograph, the picture of a delicate, good-looking, sad-faced man in black cloak and kimono, and a little French book called _Pensees de Pascal_, at the end of which was written the address of Mr. Ito, the lawyer in Tokyo through whom the dividends were paid, and that of "my cousin Fujinami Gentaro."

CHAPTER VII

THE EMBa.s.sY

_Tsuyu no yo no Tsuyu no yo nagara Sari nagara!_

While this dewdrop world Is but a dewdrop world, Yet--all the same!--

The fabric of our lives is like a piece of knitting, terribly botched and bungled in most cases. There are st.i.tches which are dropped, sometimes to be swallowed up and forgotten in the superstructure, sometimes to be picked up again after a lapse of years. These st.i.tches are old friendships.

The first st.i.tch from Geoffrey's bachelor days to be worked back into the scheme of his married life was his friendship for Reggie Forsyth, who had been best man at his wedding and who had since then been appointed Secretary to the Emba.s.sy at Tokyo.

Reggie had received a telegram saying that Geoffrey was coming. He was very pleased. He had reached that stage in the progress of exile where one is inordinately happy to see any old friend. In fact, he was beginning to be "fed up" with j.a.pan, with its very limited distractions, and with the monotony of his diplomatic colleagues.

Instead of going to the tennis court, which was his usual afternoon occupation, he had spent the time in arranging his rooms, shifting the furniture, rehanging the pictures, paying especial care to the disposition of his Oriental curios, his recent purchases, his last enthusiasms in this land of languor. Reggie collected Buddhas, Chinese snuff-bottles and lacquered medicine cases--called _inro_ in j.a.panese.

"Caviare to the general!" murmured Reggie, as he gloated over a chaste design of fishes in mother-of-pearl, a pseudo-Korin. "Poor old Geoffrey! He's only a barbarian; but perhaps she will be interested.

Here, T[=o]!" he called out to an impa.s.sive j.a.panese man-servant, "have the flowers come yet, and the little trees?"

T[=o] produced from the back regions of the house a quant.i.ty of dwarf trees, planted as miniature landscapes in shallow porcelain dishes, and big fronds of budding cherry blossom.

Reggie arranged the blossom in a triumphal arch over the corner table, where stood the silent company of the Buddhas. From among the trees he chose his favourite, a kind of dwarf cedar, to place between the window, opening on to a sunny veranda, and an old gold screen, across whose tender glory wound the variegated comicality of an Emperor's traveling procession, painted by a Kano artist of three centuries ago.

He removed the books which were lying about the room--grim j.a.panese grammars, and forbidding works on International Law; and in their place he left volumes of poetry and memoirs, and English picture-papers strewn about in artistic disorder. Then he gave the silver frames of his photographs to To to be polished, the photographs of fair women signed with Christian names, of diplomats in grand uniforms, and of handsome foreigners.

Having reduced the serious atmosphere of his study so as to give an impression of amiable indolence, Reggie Forsyth lit a cigarette and strolled out into the garden, amused at his own impatience. In London he would never have bestirred himself for old Geoffrey Barrington, who was only a Philistine, after all, with no sense of the inwardness of things.

Reggie was a slim and graceful young man, with thin fair hair brushed flat back from his forehead. A certain projection of bones under the face gave him an almost haggard look; and his dancing blue eyes seemed to be never still. He wore a suit of navy serge fitting close to his figure, black tie, and grey spats. In fact, he was as immaculate as a young diplomat should always be.

Outside his broad veranda was a gravel path, and beyond that a j.a.panese garden, the hobby of one of his predecessors, a miniature domain of hillocks and shrubs, with the inevitable pebbly water course, in which a bronze crane was perpetually fishing. Over the red-brick wall which encircles the Emba.s.sy compound the reddish buds of a cherry avenue were bursting in white stars.

The compound of the Emba.s.sy is a fragment of British soil. The British flag floats over it; and the j.a.panese authorities have no power within its walls. Its large population of j.a.panese servants, about one hundred and fifty in all, are free from the burden of j.a.panese taxes; and, since the police may not enter, gambling, forbidden throughout the Empire, flourishes there; and the rambling servants' quarters behind the Amba.s.sador's house are the Monte Carlo of the Tokyo _betto_ (coachman) and _kurumaya_ (rickshaw runner). However, since the alarming discovery that a professional burglar had, Diogenes-like, been occupying an old tub in a corner of the wide grounds, a policeman has been allowed to patrol the garden; but he has to drop that omnipotent swagger which marks his presence outside the walls.

Except for Reggie Forsyth's exotic shrubbery, there is nothing j.a.panese within the solid red walls. The Emba.s.sy itself is the house of a prosperous city gentleman and might be transplanted to Bromley or Wimbledon. The smaller houses of the secretaries and the interpreters also wear a smug, suburban appearance, with their red brick and their black-and-white gabling. Only the broad verandas betray the intrusion of a warmer sun than ours.

The lawns were laid out as a miniature golf-links, the thick ma.s.ses of j.a.panese shrubs forming deadly bunkers, and Reggie was trying some mashie shots when one of the rare Tokyo taxi-cabs, carrying Geoffrey Barrington inside it, came slowly round a corner of the drive, as though it were feeling its way for its destination among such a cl.u.s.ter of houses.

Geoffrey was alone.

"h.e.l.lo, old chap!" cried Reggie, running up and shaking his friend's big paw in his small nervous grip, "I'm so awfully glad to see you; but where's Mrs. Barrington?"

Geoffrey had not brought his wife. He explained that they had been to pay their first call on j.a.panese relations, and that they had been honourably out; but even so the strain had been a severe one, and Asako had retired to rest at the hotel.

"But why not come and stay here with me?" suggested Reggie. "I have got plenty of spare rooms; and there is such a gulf fixed between people who inhabit hotels and people with houses of their own. They see life from an entirely different point of view; their spirits hardly ever meet."

"Have you room for eight large boxes of dresses and kimonos, several cases of curios, a French maid, a j.a.panese guide, two j.a.panese dogs and a monkey from Singapore?"

Reggie whistled.

"No really, is it as bad as all that? I was thinking that marriage meant just one extra person. It would have been fun having you both here, and this is the only place in Tokyo fit to live in."