Lafcadio Hearn Part 16

She tells us how he took even the most trivial tale to heart, murmuring, "How interesting," his face sometimes even turning pale while he looked fixedly in front of him.

Under these conditions of tranquillity and well-being his genius seemed to expand and develop. The "Shirabyoshi,"[22] or "Dancing Girl," the finest piece of imaginative work he ever did, was conceived and written during the course of the summer pa.s.sed in the old _Yashiki_. Its first inception is indicated in a letter to Basil Hall Chamberlain, in 1891.

"There was a story some time ago in the _Asahi-shimbun_[23] about a 'Shirabyoshi,' that brought tears to my eyes, as slowly and painfully translated by a friend."

[22] "Glimpses of Unfamiliar j.a.pan," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

[23] The _Asahi-shimbun_ was one of the princ.i.p.al j.a.panese ill.u.s.trated daily papers, printed and published at Osaka.

The "Dancing Girl" has been translated into four foreign languages--German, Swedish, French and Italian--a writer in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ declares it to be one of the love-stories of the world.

The only remarkable fact is, that it has not made more of a stir in England.

The hero is the well-known j.a.panese painter Buncho; the heroine a Geisha. There is something simple, natural, tragic and yet intangible and ethereal in the manner in which Hearn tells it; the presence of a vital spirit, the essential element of pa.s.sion and regret, the throb of warm human emotion, in spite of its exotic setting, brings it into kinship with the human experience of all times and countries. There is no attempt at scenery, only a woman hidden away in the heart of nature, in a lonely cottage amongst the hills, with her love, her memory, her regret. Into this solitary life enters youth, attractive, beautiful, the possibility of further romance; but no romance other than the one she cherishes is for her.

Unfortunately it is only possible to give the merest sketch of the story that Hearn unfolds with consummate artistic skill. He begins with an account of dancing-girls, of the education they have to undergo, how they use their accomplishments to cast a web of enchantment over men.

It is one of these apparently soulless creatures, a dancing-girl, a woman of the town, wearing clothes belonging neither to maid nor wife, that he makes the central figure of his story; and by her constancy to ideal things, her pure and simple pa.s.sion, he thrills us through with the sense of the impermanence of humanity and beauty, and the strength of love overcoming and conquering the tragedy of life.

How different the manner in which he treats the scenes between the young man and the beautiful dancing-girl, compared to the manner in which his French prototypes--in which Pierre Loti, for instance, whom Hearn declares to be one of the greatest living artists--would have treated it. Far ahead has he pa.s.sed beyond them; the moral, the life of the soul, is never lost sight of, in not one line does he play on the lower emotions of his readers.

A young artist was travelling on foot over the mountains from Kyoto to Yeddo, and lost his way.... He had almost resigned himself to pa.s.sing the night under the stars, when, down the farther slope of the hill, a single thin yellow ray of light fell upon the darkness. Making his way towards it, he found that it was a small cottage, apparently a peasant's house.... Not until he had knocked and called several times, did he hear any stir. At last, however, a feminine voice asked what he wanted. He told her, and after a brief delay the storm doors were pushed open and a woman appeared with a paper lantern. She scrutinised him in silence, and then said briefly, "Wait, I will bring water." Having washed from his feet the dust of travel, he was shown into a neat room, and a brazier was set before him, and a cotton _zabuton_ for him to kneel upon. He was struck by the beauty of his hostess, as well as by her goodness, when she told him that he might stay there that night.... "I will have no time to sleep to-night," she said, "therefore you can have my bed and paper mosquito curtain."

After he had slept a while, the mysterious sound of feet moving rapidly fell upon his ears; he slipped out of bed, and creeping to the edge of the screen, peeped through. There before her illuminated _Butsudan_, he saw the young woman dancing. Turning suddenly she met his eyes, but before he had time to speak, she smiled: "You must have thought me mad when you saw me dancing, and I am not angry with you for trying to find out what I was doing." Then she went on to tell him how a youth and she had fallen in love with one another, and how they had gone away and built the cottage in the mountains, and each evening she had danced to please him. One cold winter he fell sick and died; since then she had lived alone with nothing to console her but the memory of her lover, laying daily before his tablet the customary offerings, and nightly dancing to please his spirit.

After she had told her tale, she begged the young man to go back and try again to sleep.

On leaving next morning, he wanted to pay for the hospitality he had received. "What I did was done for kindness alone, and it certainly was not worth money," she said, as she dismissed him. Then, pointing out the path he had to follow, she watched him until he pa.s.sed from sight, his heart, as he went, full of the charm and beauty of the woman he had left behind.

Many years pa.s.sed by; the painter had become old, and rich, and famous.

One day there came to his house an old woman, who asked to speak with him. The servants, thinking her a common beggar, turned her away, but she came so persistently that at last they had to tell their master.

When, at his orders, the old woman was admitted, she began untying the knots of a bundle she had brought with her; inside were quaint garments of silk, a wonderful costume, the attire of a _Shirabyoshi_.

With many beautiful and pathetic touches, Hearn tells how, as he watched her smooth out the garments with her trembling fingers, a memory stirred in the master's brain; again in the soft shock of recollection, he saw the lonely mountain dwelling in which he had received unremunerated hospitality, the faintly burning light before the Buddhist shrine, the strange beauty of a woman dancing there alone in the dead of the night.

"Pardon my rudeness for having forgotten your face for the moment," he said, as he rose and bowed before her, "but it is more than forty years since we last saw each other; you received me at your house. You gave up to me the only bed you had. I saw you dance and you told me all your story."

The old woman, quite overcome, told him that, in the course of years, she had been obliged, through poverty, to part with her little house, and, becoming weak and old, could no longer dance each evening before the _Butsudan_. Therefore, she had sought out the master, since she desired for the sake of the dead a picture of herself in the costume and att.i.tude of the dance that she might hang it up before the _Butsudan_.

"I am not now as I was then," she added. "But, oh, master, make me young again. Make me beautiful that I may seem beautiful to him, for whose sake I, the unworthy, beseech this!"

He told her to come next day, and that he only would be too delighted to thus repay the debt he had owed her for so many years. So he painted her, as she had been forty years before. When she saw the picture, she clasped her hands in delight, but how was she ever to repay the master?

She had nothing to offer but her _Shirabyoshi_ garments. He took them, saying he would keep them as a memory, but that she must allow him to place her beyond the reach of want.

No money would she accept, but thanking him again and again, she went away with her treasure. The master had her followed, and on the next day took his way to the district indicated amidst the abodes of the poor and outcast. He tapped on the door of the old woman's dwelling, and receiving no answer pushed open the shutter, and peered through the aperture. As he stood there the sensation of the moment when, as a tired lad, forty years before, he had stood, pleading for admission to the lonesome little cottage amongst the hills, thrilled back to him.

Entering softly, he saw the woman lying on the floor seemingly asleep.

On a rude shelf he recognised the ancient _Butsudan_ with its tablet, and now, as then, a tiny lamp was burning; in front of it stood the portrait he had painted.

"The master called the sleeper's name once or twice. Then, suddenly, as she did not answer, he saw that she was dead, and he wondered while he gazed upon her face, for it seemed less old. A vague sweetness, like the ghost of youth, had returned to it; the wrinkles and the lines of sorrow had been strangely smoothed by the touch of a phantom Master mightier than he."

CHAPTER XIX k.u.mAMOTO

"Of course Urashima was bewildered by the G.o.ds. But who is not bewildered by the G.o.ds? What is Life itself but a bewilderment? And Urashima in his bewilderment doubted the purpose of the G.o.ds, and opened the box. Then he died without any trouble, and the people built a shrine to him as Urashima Mio-jin....

"These are quite differently managed in the West. After disobeying Western G.o.ds, we have still to remain alive and to learn the height and the breadth and the depth of superlative sorrow. We are not allowed to die quite comfortably just at the best possible time: much less are we suffered to become after death small G.o.ds in our own right. How can we pity the folly of Urashima after he had lived so long alone with visible G.o.ds?

"Perhaps the fact that we do may answer the riddle. This pity must be self-pity; wherefore the legend may be the legend of a myriad souls. The thought of it comes just at a particular time of blue light and soft wind,--and always like an old reproach. It has too intimate relation to a season and the feeling of a season not to be also related to something real in one's life, or in the lives of one's ancestors."

Only for a year did Hearn's sojourn in Fairyland last. The winter following his arrival was a very severe one. The northern coast of j.a.pan lies open to the Arctic winds blowing over the snow-covered plains of Siberia. Heavy falls of snow left drifts five feet high round the _Yashiki_ on the hill. The large rooms, so delightful in the summer with their verandah opening on the garden, were cold as "cattle barns" in winter, with nothing but charcoal braziers to heat them. He dare not face another such experience, and asked, if possible, to be transferred to warmer quarters. Aided again by his friend, Professor Chamberlain, the authorities at Tokyo were induced to give him the professorship of English at the Imperial University at k.u.mamoto.

k.u.mamoto is situated in Kyushu, facing Formosa and the Chinese coast; the climate, therefore, is much milder than that of Matsue. Here, however, began Hearn's first disillusionment; like Urashima Taro, having dwelt within the precincts of Fairyland he felt the shock of returning to Earth again. The city struck him as being ugly and commonplace, a half-Europeanised garrison town, resounding to the sounds of bugles and the drilling of soldiers, instead of pilgrim songs and temple bells.

"But Lord! I must try to make money; for nothing is sure in j.a.pan and I am now so tied down to the country that I can't quit it, except for a trip, whether the Government employs me or not."

He began to look back with regret to the days pa.s.sed at Matsue. "You must travel out of Izumo," he said, "after a long residence, and find out how unutterably different it is from other places,--for instance, this country ... the charming simplicity of the Izumo folk does not here exist."

All his Izumo servants had accompanied him to his new quarters, and apparently all his wife's family, for he mentions the fact that he has nine lives dependent upon him: wife, wife's mother, wife's father, wife's adopted mother, wife's father's father, then servants, and a Buddhist student.

This wouldn't do in America, he says to Ellwood Hendrik, but it is nothing in j.a.pan. The moral burden, however, was heavy enough; he indulged in the luxury of filial piety, and it was impossible to let a little world grow up round him, to depend on him, and then break it all up--the good and evil results of "filial piety" are only known to orientals, and an oriental he had now become. His people felt like fish out of water, everything surrounding them was so different from their primitive home in Izumo. A goat in the next yard, "_mezurashii kedamono_," filled his little wife with an amused wonder. Some geese and a pig also filled her with surprise, such animals did not exist in the highlands of j.a.pan.

The k.u.mamoto Government College was one of the largest in j.a.pan,--came next, indeed, to the Imperial University in Tokyo in importance. It was run on the most approved occidental lines. A few of the boys still adhered to their j.a.panese dress, but most of them adopted the military uniform now, as a rule, worn in j.a.panese colleges. There were three cla.s.ses, corresponding with three higher cla.s.ses of the _Jinjo Chugakko_--and two higher cla.s.ses. He did not now teach on Sat.u.r.days.

There were no stoves--only _hibachi_. The library was small, and the English books were not good. There was a building in which Jiu-jitsu was taught; and separate buildings for sleeping, eating, and bathing. The bath-room was a surprise. Thirty or forty students could bathe at the same time; and four hundred could sit down to meals in the great dining-hall. There was a separate building, also, for the teaching of chemistry, natural history, etc.; and a small museum.

Hearn apparently foregathered with none of the masters of the college, except the old teacher of Chinese. The others he simply saluted morning and evening, and in the intervals between cla.s.ses sat in a corner to himself smoking his pipe.

"You talk of being without intellectual companionship!" he writes to Hendrik. "OH YE EIGHT HUNDRED MYRIADS OF G.o.dS! What would you do if you were me? Lo! The illusion is gone! j.a.pan in Kyushu is like Europe--except I have no friend. The differences in ways of thinking, and the difficulties of language, render it impossible for an _educated_ j.a.panese to find pleasure in the society of a European. My scholars in this great Government school are not boys, but men. They speak to me only in cla.s.s. The teachers never speak to me at all. I go to the college and return after cla.s.s,--always alone, no mental company but books. But at home everything is sweet."

In consequence of this isolation, or because of the softening influence of matrimony, here at k.u.mamoto he seemed for the first time to awake to the fact of having relations in that distant western land he had left so many years before. "Our soul, or souls, ever wanders back to its own kindred," he says to his sister.

His father, Charles Bush Hearn, had left three children by his second wife (daughters), all born in India. Invalided home, Charles Hearn had died, in the Red Sea, of Indian fever; the three orphan children and his widow continued their journey to Ireland.

At their mother's death, which occurred a few years later, the girls were placed under the guardianship of various members of the family; two of them ultimately married; one of them a Mr. Brown, the other a Mr.

Buckley Atkinson. The unmarried one, Miss Lillah Hearn, went out to Michigan in America, to stop with Lafcadio's brother, and her own half-brother, Daniel James Hearn, or Jim, as he was usually called.

Public interest was gradually awakening with regard to j.a.panese affairs.

Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain's and Satow's books were looked upon as standard works to refer to for information concerning the political and social affairs of the extraordinary little people who were working their way to the van in the Far East. But, above all, Lafcadio Hearn's articles contributed to the _Atlantic Monthly_, afterwards published under the t.i.tle of "Glimpses of Unfamiliar j.a.pan," had claimed public attention.

Miss Lillah Hearn was the first member of the family to write to this half-brother, who was becoming so famous, but received no answer. Then Mrs. Brown, the other sister, approached him, silence greeted her efforts as well. On hearing of his marriage to a j.a.panese lady, Mrs.

Atkinson, the youngest sister, wrote. Whether it was that she softened the exile's heart in his expatriation by that sympathy and innate tact which are two of her distinguished qualities, it is impossible to say, but her letter was answered.

This strange relative of theirs who had gone to j.a.pan, adopted j.a.panese dress and habits, and married a j.a.panese lady, had become somewhat of a legendary character to his quiet-going Irish kindred. The arrival of the first letter, therefore, was looked upon as quite an event and was pa.s.sed from house to house, and hand to hand, becoming considerably mutilated in its journeyings to and fro. The first page is entirely gone, and the second page so erased and torn that it is only decipherable here and there. We are enabled to put an approximate date to it by his reference to Miss Bisland's marriage, of which he had heard towards the end of his stay at Matsue.

"I have written other things, but am rather ashamed of them," he adds.

"So Miss Bisland has married and become Mrs. Wetmore. She is as rich at least as she could wish to be, but I have not heard from her for more than a year. I suppose friendship ends with marriage. If my sister was not married, I think--I only think--I would feel more brotherly.

"Well, I will say _au revoir_. Many thanks for the letter you wrote me.

I would like Please give me you can. Don't think busy to write--much I teach for a week--English and Elementary Latin: the time I study and write for pleasure, not for profit. There isn't much profit in literature unless, as a novelist, one happens to please a popular taste,--which isn't good taste. Some exceptions there are, like Rudyard Kipling; but your brother has not his inborn genius for knowing, seizing and painting human nature. Love to you and yours--from

"LAFCADIO HEARN.