Kimono Part 13

"It looks a comfortable little place," agreed Geoffrey. They had reached the secretary's house, and the newcomer was admiring its artistic arrangement.

"Just like your rooms in London!"

Reggie prided himself on the exclusively oriental character of his habitation, and its distinction from any other dwelling place which he had ever possessed. But then Geoffrey was only a Philistine, after all.

"I suppose it's the photographs which look like old times," Geoffrey went on. "How's little Veronique?"

"Veronica married an Argentine beef magnate, a German Jew, the nastiest person I have ever avoided meeting."

"Poor old Reggie! Was that why you came to j.a.pan?"

"Partly; and partly because I had a chief in the Foreign Office who dared to say that I was lacking in practical experience of diplomacy.

He sent me to this comic country to find it."

"And you have found it right enough," said Geoffrey, inspecting a photograph of a j.a.panese girl in her dark silk kimono with a dainty flower pattern round the skirts and at the fall of the long sleeves.

She was not unlike Asako; only there was a fraction of an inch more of bridge to her nose, and in that fraction lay the secret of her birth.

"That is my latest inspiration," said Reggie. "Listen!"

He sat down at the piano and played a plaintive little air, small and sweet and shivering.

"_j.a.ponaiserie d'hiver_," he explained.

Then he changed the burden of his song into a melody rapid and winding, with curious tricklings among the ba.s.s notes.

"Lamia," said Reggie, "or Lilith."

"There's no tune in that last one; you can't whistle it," said Geoffrey, who exaggerated his Philistinism to throw Reggie's artistic nature into stronger relief. "But what has that got to do with the lady?"

"Her name is Smith," said Reggie. "I know it is almost impossible and terribly sad; but her other name is Yae. Rather wild and savage--isn't it? Like the cry of a bird in the night-time, or of a cannibal tribe on the warpath."

"And is this your oriental version of Veronique?" asked his friend.

"No," said Reggie, "it is a different chapter of experience altogether. Perhaps old Hardwick was right. I still have much to learn, thank G.o.d. Veronique was personal; Yae is symbolic. She is my model, just like a painter's model, only more platonic. She is the East to me; for I cannot understand the East pure and undiluted. She is a country-woman of mine on her father's side, and therefore easier to understand. Impersonality and fatalism, the Eastern Proteus, in the grip of self-insistence and idealism, the British Hercules. A b.u.t.terfly body with this cosmic war shaking it incessantly. Poor child! no wonder she seems always tired."

"She is a half-caste?" asked Geoffrey.

"Bad word, bad word. She isn't half-anything; and caste suggests India and suttees. She is a Eurasian, a denizen of a dream country which has a melodious name and no geographical existence. Have you ever heard anybody ask where Eurasia was? I have. A traveling Member of Parliament's wife at the Emba.s.sy here only a few months ago. I said that it was a large undiscovered country lying between the Equator and Tierra del Fuego. She seemed quite satisfied, and wondered whether it was very hot there; she remembered having heard a missionary once complain that the Eurasians wore so very few clothes! But to return to Yae, you must meet her. This evening? No? To-morrow then. You will like her because, she looks something like Asako; and she will adore you because you are utterly unlike me. She comes here to inspire me once or twice a week. She says she likes me because everything in my house smells so sweet. That is the beginning of love, I sometimes think. Love enters the soul through the nostrils. If you doubt me, observe the animals. But foreign houses in j.a.pan are haunted by a smell of dust and mildew. You cannot love in them. She likes to lie on my sofa, and smoke cigarettes, and do nothing, and listen to my playing tunes about her."

"You are very impressionable," said his friend. "If it were anybody else I should say you were in love with this girl."

"I am still the same, Geoffrey; always in love--and never."

"But what about the other people here?" Barrington asked.

"There are none, none who count. I am not impressionable. I am just short-sighted. I have to focus my weak vision on one person and neglect the rest."

A rickshaw was waiting to take Geoffrey back to the hotel. Under the saffron light of an uncanny sunset, which barred the western heavens with three broad streaks of orange and inky-blue like a gypsy girl's kerchief, the odd little vehicle rolled down the hill of Miyakezaka which overhangs the moat of the Imperial Palace.

The latent soul of Tokyo, the mystery of j.a.pan, lies within the confines of that moat, which is the only great majestic thing in an untidy rambling village of more than two million living beings.

The Palace of the Mikado--a t.i.tle by the way which is never used among j.a.panese--is hidden from sight. That is the first remarkable thing about it. The gesture of Versailles, the challenge of "_l'etat c'est moi_," the majestic vulgarity which the millionaire of the moment can mimic with a vulgarity less majestic, are here entirely absent; and one cannot mimic the invisible.

Hardly, on bare winter days, when the sheltering groves are stripped, and the saddened heart is in need of rea.s.surance, appears a green l.u.s.tre of copper roofs.

The _Gosho_ at Tokyo is not a sovereign's palace; it is the abode of a G.o.d.

The surrounding woods and gardens occupy a s.p.a.ce larger than Hyde Park in the very centre of the city. One well-groomed road crosses an extreme corner of this estate. Elsewhere only privileged feet may tread. This is a vast enc.u.mbrance in a modern commercial metropolis, but a striking tribute to the unseen.

The most noticeable feature of the Palace is its moats. These lie in three or four concentric circles, the defences of ancient Yedo, whose outer lines have now been filled up by modern progress and an electric railway. They are broad sheets of water as wide as the Thames at Oxford, where ducks are floating and fishing. Beyond is a _glacis_ of vivid gra.s.s, a hundred feet high at some points, topped by vast iron-grey walls of cyclopean boulder-work, with the sudden angles of a Vauban fortress. Above these walls the weird pine-trees of j.a.pan extend their lean tormented boughs. Within is the Emperor's domain.

Geoffrey was hurrying homeward along the banks of the moat. The stagnant, viscous water was yellow under the sunset, and a yellow light hung over the green slopes, the grey walls and the dark tree tops. An echelon of geese pa.s.sed high overhead in the region of the pale moon. Within the mysterious _enclave_ of the "Son of Heaven" the crows were uttering their harsh sarcastic croak.

Witchery is abroad in Tokyo during this brief sunset hour. The mongrel nature of the city is less evident. The pretentious Government buildings of the New j.a.pan a.s.sume dignity with the deep shadows and the heightening effect of the darkness. The untidy network of tangled wires fades into the coming obscurity. The rickety trams, packed to overflowing with the city crowds returning homeward, become creeping caterpillars of light. Lights spring up along the banks of the moat.

More lights are reflected from its depth. Dark shadows gather like a frown round the Gate of the Cherry Field, where Ii Kamon no Kami's blood stained the winter snow-drifts some sixty years ago, because he dared to open the Country of the G.o.ds to the contemptible foreigners; and in the cry of the _tofu_-seller echoes the voice of old j.a.pan, a long-drawn wail, drowned at last by the grinding of the tram wheels and the lash and crackle of the connecting-rods against the overhead lines.

Geoffrey, sitting back in his rickshaw, turned up his coat-collar, and watched the gathering pall of cloud extinguishing the sunset.

"Looks like snow," he said to himself; "but it is impossible!"

At the entrance to the Imperial Hotel--a Government inst.i.tution, as almost everything in j.a.pan ultimately turns out to be--Tanaka was standing in his characteristic att.i.tude of a dog who waits for his master's return. Characteristically also, he was talking to a man, a j.a.panese, a showy person with spectacles and oily buffalo-horn moustaches, dressed in a vivid pea-green suit. However, at Geoffrey's approach, this individual raised his bowler-hat, bobbed and vanished; and Tanaka a.s.sisted his patron to descend from his rickshaw.

As he approached the door of his suite, a little cloud of hotel _boys_ scattered like sparrows. This phenomenon did not as yet mean anything to Geoffrey. The native servants were not very real to him. But he was soon to realize that the _boy san_--Mister Boy, as his dignity now insists on being called--is more than an amusing contribution to the local atmosphere. When his smiles, his bows, and his peculiar English begin to pall, he reveals himself in his true light as a constant annoyance and a possible danger. h.e.l.l knows no fury like the untipped "_boy san_" He refuses to answer the bell. He suddenly understands no English at all. He bangs all the doors. He spends his spare moments in devising all kinds of petty annoyances, damp and dirty sheets, accidental damage to property, surrept.i.tious draughts. And to vex one _boy san_ is to antagonize the whole caste; it is a boycott. At last the tip is given. Sudden sunshine, obsequious manners, attention of all kinds--for ever dwindling periods, until at last the _boy san_ attains his end, a fat retaining fee, extorted at regular intervals.

But even more exasperating, since no largesse can cure it, is his national bent towards espionage. What does he do with his spare time, of which he has so much? He spends it in watching and listening to the hotel guests. He has heard legends of large sums paid for silence or for speech. There may be money in it, therefore, and there is always amus.e.m.e.nt. So the only housework which the _boy san_ does really willingly, is to dust the door, polish the handle, wipe the threshold;--anything in fact which brings him into the propinquity of the keyhole. What he observes or overhears, he exchanges with another _boy san_; and the hall porter or the head waiter generally serves as Chief Intelligence Bureau, and is always in touch with the Police.

The arrival of guests so remarkable as the Barringtons became, therefore, at once a focus for the curiosity the ambition of the _boy sans_. And a rickshaw-man had told the lodgekeeper, whose wife told the wife of one of the cooks, who told the head waiter, that there was some connection between these visitors and the rich Fujinami. All the _boy sans_ knew what the Fujinami meant; so here was a cornucopia of unwholesome secrets. It was the most likely game which had arrived at the Imperial Hotel for years, ever since the American millionaire's wife who ran away with a San Francisco Chinaman.

But to Geoffrey, when he broke up the gathering, the _boy sans_ were just a lot of queer little j.a.ps.

Asako was lying on her sofa, reading. t.i.tine was brushing her hair.

Asako, when she read, which was not often, preferred literature of the sentimental school, books like _The Rosary_, with stained gla.s.s in them, and tragedy overcome by n.o.bleness of character.

"I've been lonely without you and nervous," she said, "and I've had a visitor already."

She pointed to a card lying on a small round table, a flimsy card printed--not engraved--on cream-coloured pasteboard. Geoffrey picked it up with a smile.

"Curio dealers?" he asked.

j.a.panese letters were printed on one side and English on the other.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _S. ITO_ _Attorney of Law_]

"Ito, that's the lawyer fellow, who pays the dividends. Did you see him."

"Oh, no, I was much too weary. But he has only just gone. You probably pa.s.sed him on the stairs."