Kimono Part 28

"j.a.panese poem," he said, "meaning very difficult: very many meanings: I think perhaps it means, having travelled all over the world, he feels very sad."

"Yes, but word for word, Tanaka, what does it mean?"

"This writing means, World is really not the same it says: all the world very many tell lies."

"And this?"

"This means, Travelling everywhere."

"And this at the end?"

"It means, Eveything always the same thing. Very bad translation I make. Very sad poem."

"And this writing here?"

"That is j.a.panese name--Fujinami Katsundo--and the date, twenty-fifth year of Meiji, twelfth month."

Tanaka had turned over the photograph and was looking attentively at the portrait.

"The honoured father of Ladyship, I think," he said.

"Yes," said Asako.

Then she thought she heard her husband's step away down the corridor.

Hurriedly she thrust _obi_ and photograph into a drawer.

Now, why did she do that? wondered Tanaka.

CHAPTER XIV

THE DWARF TREES

_Iwa-yado ni Tateru maisu no ki, Na wo mireba, Mukashi no hito wo Ai-miru gotashi._

O pine-tree standing At the (side of) the stone house, When I look at you, It is like seeing face to face The men of old time.

For the first time during the journey of their married lives, Geoffrey and Asako were pursuing different paths. It is the normal thing, no doubt, for the man to go out to his work and to his play, while the wife attends to her social and domestic duties. The evening brings reunion with new impressions and new interests to discuss. Such a life with its brief restorative separations prevents love growing stale, and soothes the irritation of nerves which, by the strain of petty repet.i.tions, are exasperated sometimes into blasphemy of the heart's true creed. But the Barrington _menage_ was an unusual one. By adopting a life of travel, they had devoted themselves to a protracted honeymoon, a relentless _tete-a-tete_. So long as they were continually on the move, constantly refreshed by new scenes, they did not feel the difficulty of their self-imposed task. But directly their stay in Tokyo seemed likely to become permanent, their ways separated as naturally as two branches, which have been tightly bound together, spread apart with the loosening of the string.

This separation was so inevitable that they were neither of them conscious of it. Geoffrey had all his life been devoted to exercise and games of all kinds. They were as necessary as food for his big body. At Tokyo he had found, most unexpectedly, excellent tennis-courts and first-cla.s.s players.

They still spent the mornings together, driving round the city, and inspecting curios. So what could be more reasonable than that Asako should prefer to spend her afternoons with her cousin, who was so anxious to please her and to initiate her into that intimate j.a.panese life, which of course must appeal to her more strongly than to her husband?

Personally, Geoffrey found the company of his j.a.panese relatives exceedingly slow.

In return for the hospitalities of the Maple Club the Barringtons invited a representative gathering of the Fujinami clan to dinner at the Imperial Hotel, to be followed by a general adjournment to the theatre.

It was a most depressing meal. n.o.body spoke. All of the guests were nervous; some of them about their clothes, some about their knives and forks, all of them about their English. They were too nervous even to drink wine, which would have been the only remedy for such a "frost."

Only Ito, the lawyer, talked, talked noisily, talked with his mouth full. But Geoffrey disliked Ito. He mistrusted the man; but, because of his wife's growing intimacy with her cousins, he felt loath to start subterranean inquiries as to the whereabouts of her fortune. It was Ito who, foreseeing embarra.s.sment, had suggested the theatre party after dinner. For this at least Geoffrey was grateful to him. It saved him the pain of trying to make conversation with his cousins.

"Talking to these j.a.ps," he said to Reggie Forsyth, "is like trying to play tennis all by yourself."

Later on, at his wife's insistence, he attended an informal garden-party at the Fujinami house. Again he suffered acutely from those cruel silences and portentous waitings, to which he noticed that even the j.a.panese among themselves were liable, but which apparently they did not mind.

Tea and ice-creams were served by _geisha_ girls who danced afterwards upon the lawn. When this performance was over the guests were conducted to an open s.p.a.ce behind the cherry-grove, where a little shooting-range had been set up, with a target, air-guns and boxes of lead lugs. Geoffrey, of course, joined in the shooting-compet.i.tion, and won a handsome cigarette case inlaid with Damascene work. But he thought that it was a poor game; nor did he ever realize that this entertainment had been specially organized with a view to flattering his military and sporting tastes.

But the greatest disillusionment was the Akasaka garden. Geoffrey was resigned to be bored by everything else. But his wife had grown so enthusiastic about the beauties of the Fujinami domain, that he had expected to walk straight into a paradise. What did he see? A dirty pond and some shrubs, not one single flower to break the monotony of green and drab, and everything so small. Why, he could walk round the whole enclosure in ten minutes. Geoffrey Barrington was accustomed to country houses in England, with their broad acres and their lavish luxuriance of scent and blossom. This niggling landscape art of the j.a.panese seemed to him mean and insignificant.

He much preferred the garden at Count Saito's home. Count Saito, the late Amba.s.sador at the Court of St. James, with his stooping shoulders, his grizzled hair, and his deep eyes peering under the gold-rimmed spectacles, had proposed the health of Captain and Mrs.

Barrington at their wedding breakfast. Since then, he had returned to j.a.pan, where he was soon to play a leading political role. Meeting Geoffrey one day at the Emba.s.sy, he had invited him and his wife to visit his famous garden.

It was a hanging garden on the side of a steep hill, parted down the middle by a little stream with its string of waterfalls. Along either bank rose groups of iris, mauve and white, whispering together like long-limbed pre-Raphaelite girls. Round a sunny fountain, the source of the stream, just below the terrace of the Count's mansion, they thronged together more densely, surrounding the music of the water with the steps of a slow sarabande, or pausing at the edge of the pool to admire their own reflection.

Count Saito showed Geoffrey where the roses were coming on, new varieties of which he had brought from England with him.

"Perhaps they will not like to be turned into j.a.panese," he observed; "the rose is such an English flower."

They pa.s.sed on to where the azaleas would soon be in fiery bloom.

For with the true gardener, the hidden promise of the morrow is more stimulating to the enthusiasm than the a.s.sured success of the full flowers.

The Count wore his rustling native dress; but two black c.o.c.ker spaniels followed at his heels. This combination presented an odd mixture of English squire-archy and the _daimyo_ of feudal j.a.pan.

On the crest of the hill above him rose the house, a tall Italianate mansion of grey stucco, softened by creepers, jessamine and climbing roses. Alongside ran the low irregular roofs of the j.a.panese portion of the residence. Almost all rich j.a.panese have a double house, half foreign and half native, to meet the needs of their amphibious existence. This grotesque juxtaposition is to be seen all over Tokyo, like a tall boastful foreigner tethered to a timid j.a.panese wife.

Geoffrey inquired in which wing of this unequal bivalve his host actually lived.

"When I returned from England," said Count Saito, "I tried to live again in the j.a.panese style. But we could not, neither my wife nor I.

We took cold and rheumatism sleeping on the floor, and the food made us ill; so we had to give it up. But I was sorry. For I think it is better for a country to keep its own ways. There is a danger nowadays, when all the world is becoming cosmopolitan. A kind of international type is springing up. His language is _esperanto_, his writing is shorthand, he has no country, he fights for whoever will pay him most, like the Swiss of the Middle Ages. He is the mercenary of commerce, the ideal commercial traveler. I am much afraid of him, because I am a j.a.panese and not a world citizen. I want my country to be great and respected. Above all, I want it to be always j.a.panese. I think that loss in national character means loss of national strength."

Asako was being introduced by her hostess to the celebrated collection of dwarf trees, which had made the social fame of the Count's sojourn as Amba.s.sador in Grosvenor Square.

Countess Saito, like her husband, spoke excellent English; and her manner in greeting Asako was of London rather than of Tokyo. She took both her hands and shook them warmly.

"My dear," she said, in her curious deep hoa.r.s.e voice, "I'm so glad to see you. You are like a little bit of London come to say that you have not forgotten me."

This great j.a.panese lady was small and very plain. Her high forehead was deeply lined and her face was marked with small-pox. Her big mouth opened wide as she talked, like a nestling's. But she was immensely rich. The only child of one of the richest bankers of j.a.pan, she had brought to her husband the opportunity for his great gifts as a political leader, and the luxury in which they lived.

The little trees were in evidence everywhere, decorating the living rooms, posted like sentinels on the terrace, and staged with the honour due to statuary at points of vantage in the garden. But their chief home was in a sunny corner at the back of a shrubbery, where they were aligned on shelves in the sunlight. Three special gardeners who attended to their wants were grooming and ma.s.saging them, soothing and t.i.tivating them, for their temporary appearances in public. Here they had a green-house of their own, kept slightly warmed for a few delicate specimens, and also for the convalescence of the hardier trees; for these precious dwarfs are quite human in their ailments, their pleasures and their idiosyncracies.

Countess Saito had a hundred or more of these fashionable pets, of all varieties and shapes. There were giants of primeval forests reduced to the dimensions of a few feet, like the timbers of a lordly park seen through the wrong end of a telescope. There were graceful maple trees, whose tiny star-like leaves were particularly adapted to the process of diminution which had checked the growth of trunk and branches.

There were weeping willows with light-green feathery foliage, such as sorrowing fairies might plant on the grave of some Taliessin of Oberon's court. There was a double cherry in belated bloom; its flowers of natural size hung amid the slender branches like big birds'

nests. There was a stunted oak tree, creeping along the earth with gnarled and lumpy limbs like a miniature dinosaur; it waved in the air a clump of demensurate leaves with the truculent mien of boxing-gloves or lobsters' claws. In the centre of the rectangle formed by this audience of trees, and raised on a long table, was a tiny wisteria arbour, formed by a dozen plants arranged in quincunx. The intertwisted ropes of branches were supported on shining rods of bamboo; and the cl.u.s.ters of blossom, like bunches of grapes or like miniature chandeliers, still hung over the litter of their fallen beauty, with a few bird-like flowers clinging to them, pale and bleached.