Kimono Part 34

Asako had been visiting her j.a.panese cousins almost every day. Her conversation lessons were progressing rapidly; for the first stages of the language are easy. The new life appealed to Asako's love of novelty, and the strangeness of it to her child's love of make-believe. The summoning of her parents' spirits awakened in her the desire for a home, which lurks in every one of us; the love of old family things around us, the sense of an inheritance and a tradition.

She was tired of hotel life; and she turned for relaxation to playing at j.a.pan with cousin Sadako, just as her husband turned to tennis.

Her favourite haunt was the little tea-house among the reeds at the edge of the lake, which seemed so hidden from everywhere. Here the two girls practised their languages. Here they tried on each others clothes, and talked about their lives and purposes. Sadako was intellectually the cleverer of the two, but Asako had seen and heard more; so they were fairly equally matched.

Often the cousins shocked each other's sense of propriety. Asako had already observed that to the j.a.panese mind, the immediate corollary to being married is to produce children as promptly and as rapidly as possible. Already she had been questioned on the subject by Tanaka, by _boy sans_ and by shop-attendants.

"It is a great pity," said cousin Sadako, "that you have no baby. In j.a.pan if a wife have no baby, she is often divorced. But perhaps it is the fault of Mr. Barrington?"

Asako had vaguely hoped for children in the future, but on the whole she was glad that their coming had been delayed. There was so much to do and to see first of all. It had never occurred to her that her childlessness might be the _fault_ of either herself or her husband.

But her cousin went on ruthlessly,--

"Many men are like that. Because of their sickness their wives cannot have babies."

Asako shivered. This beautiful country of hers seemed to be full of bogeys like a child's dream.

Another time Sadako asked her with much diffidence and slanting of the eyes,--

"I wish to learn about--kissing."

"What is the j.a.panese for 'kiss'?" laughed Asako.

"Oh! There is no such word," expostulated Sadako, shocked at her cousin's levity, "we j.a.panese do not speak of such things."

"Then j.a.panese people don't kiss?"

"Oh, no," said the girl.

"Not ever?" asked Asako, incredulous.

"Only when they are--quite alone."

"Then when you see foreign people kissing in public, you think it is very funny?"

"We think it is disgusting," answered her cousin.

It is quite true. Foreigners kiss so recklessly. They kiss on meeting: they kiss on parting. They kiss in London: they kiss in Tokyo. They kiss indiscriminately their fathers, mothers, wives, mistresses, cousins and aunts. Every kiss sends a shiver down the spine of a j.a.panese observer of either s.e.x, as we should be shocked by the crude exhibition of an obscene gesture. For this blossoming of our buds of affection suggests to him, with immediate and detailed clearness, that other embrace of which in his mind it is the inseparable concomitant.

The j.a.panese find the excuse that foreigners know no better, just as we excuse the dirty habits of natives. But they quote the kiss as an indisputable proof of the lowness of our moral standard, and as a sign of the guilt, not of individuals so much as of our whole civilisation.

"Foreign people kiss too much," said cousin Sadako, "it is a bad thing. If I had a husband, I would always fear he kiss somebody else."

"That is why I am so happy with Geoffrey," said Asako, "I know he would never love any one but me."

"It is not safe to be so sure," said her cousin darkly, "a woman is made for one man, but a man is made for many women."

Asako, arrayed in a j.a.panese kimono, and to all appearance as j.a.panese as her cousin, was sitting in the Fujinami tea-parlour. She had not understood much of the lesson in tea-ceremony at which she had just a.s.sisted. But the exceeding propriety and dignity of the teacher, the daughter of great people fallen upon evil days, had impressed her. She longed to acquire that tranquillity of deportment, that slow graceful poise of hand and arm, that low measured speech. When the teacher had gone, she began to mimic her gestures with all the seriousness of appreciative imitation.

Sadako laughed. She supposed that her cousin was fooling. Asako thought that she was amused by her clumsiness.

"I shall never be able to do it," she sighed.

"But of course you will. I laugh because you are so like Kikuye San."

Kikuye San was their teacher.

"If only I could practise by myself!" said Asako, "but at the hotel it would be impossible."

Then they both laughed together at the incongruity of rehearsing those dainty rites of old j.a.pan in the over-furnished sitting-room at the Imperial Hotel, with Geoffrey sitting back in his arm-chair and puffing at his cigar.

"If only I had a little house like this," said Asako.

"Why don't you hire one?" suggested her cousin.

Why not? The idea was an inspiration. So Asako thought; and she broached the matter to Geoffrey that very evening.

"Wouldn't it be sweet to have a ducky little j.a.panese house all our very own?" she urged.

"Oh yes," her husband agreed, wearily, "that would be great sport."

Mr. Fujinami Gentaro was delighted at the success of his daughter's diplomacy. He saw that this plan for a j.a.panese house meant a further separation of husband and wife, a further step towards recovery of his errant child. For he was beginning to regard Asako with parental sentiment, and to pity her condition as the wife of this coa.r.s.e stranger.

Miss Sadako was under no such altruistic delusions. She envied her cousin. She envied her money, her freedom, and her frank happiness.

She had often pondered about the ways of j.a.panese husbands and wives; and the more she thought over the subject, the more she envied Asako her happy married life. She envied her with a woman's envy, which seeks to hurt and spoil. She was smarting from her own disappointment; and by making her cousin suffer, she thought that she could a.s.suage her own grief. Besides, the intrigue in itself interested her, and provided employment for her idolent existence and her restless mind.

Of affection for Asako she had none at all, but then she had no affection for anybody. She was typical of a modern j.a.panese womanhood, which is the result of long repression, loveless marriages and sudden intellectual licence.

Asako thought her charming, because she had not yet learned to discern. She confided to her all her ideas about the new house; and together the two girls explored Tokyo in the motor-car which Ito provided for them, inspecting properties.

Asako had already decided that her home was to be on the bank of the river, where she could see the boats pa.s.sing, something like the house in which her father and mother had lived. The desired abode was found at last on the river-bank at Mukojima just on the fringe of the city?

where the cherry-trees are so bright in Springtime, where she could see the broad Sumida river washing her garden steps, the fussy little river boats puffing by, the portly junks, the crews of students training for their regattas, and, away on the opposite bank, the trees of Asakusa, the garish river restaurants so noisy at nightfall, the tall peaceful paG.o.da, the grey roofs and the red plinths of the temple of the G.o.ddess of Mercy.

Just when the new home was ready for occupation, just when Asako's enthusiasm was at its height and the purchases of silken bedding and dainty trays were almost complete, Geoffrey suddenly announced his intention of leaving j.a.pan.

"I can't stick it any longer," he said fretfully, "I don't know what's coming over me."

"Leave j.a.pan?" cried his wife, aghast.

"Well, I don't know," grunted her husband, "it's no good stopping here and going all to seed."

The rainy season was just over, the hot season of steaming rain which the j.a.panese call _nyubai_. It had played havoc with Geoffrey's nerves. He had never known anything so unpleasant as this damp, relaxing heat. It made the walls of the room sweat. It impregnated paper and blotting-paper. It rotted leather; and spread mould on boots and clothes. It made matches unstrikeable. It drenched Geoffrey's bed with perspiration, and drove away sleep. It sent him out on long midnight walks through the silent city in an atmosphere as stifling as that of a green-house. It beat down upon Tokyo its fetid exhalations, the smell of cooking, of sewage and of humanity, and the queer sickly scent of a powerful evergreen tree aflower throughout the city, which resembled the reek of that Nagasaki brothel, and recalled the dancing of the _Chonkina_.

It bred swarms of bloodthirsty mosquitoes from every drop of stagnant water. They found their way through the musty mosquito-net which separated his bed from Asako's. They eluded his blow in the evening light; and he could only wreak his vengeance in the morning, when they were heavy with his gore.

The colour faded from the Englishman's cheeks. His appet.i.te failed.

He was becoming, what he had never been before, cross and irritable.

Reggie Forsyth wrote to him from Chuzenji,--

"Yae is here, and we go in for yachting in a kind of winged punt, called a 'lark.' For five pounds you can become a ship-owner. I fancy myself as a skipper, and I have already won two races. But more often we escape from the burble of the diplomats, and take our sandwiches and _thermata_--or is _thermoi_ the plural?--to the untenanted sh.o.r.es of the lake, and picnic _a deux_. Then, if the wind does not fall we are lucky; but if it does, I have to row home. Yae laughs at my oarsmanship; and says that, if you were here, you would do it so much better. You are a dangerous rival, but for this once I challenge you.

I have a spare pen in my rabbit-hutch. There is just room for you and Mrs. Barrington. You must be quite melted by now."