Madame Chrysantheme Part 15

I really make a sad abuse of the adjective _little_, I am quite aware of it, but how can I do otherwise? In describing this country, the temptation is great to use it ten times in every written line. Little, finical, affected,--all j.a.pan is contained, both physically and morally, in these three words.

My purchases are acc.u.mulating up there, in my little wood and paper house; but how much more j.a.panese it really was, in its bare emptiness, such as M. Sucre and Madame Prune had conceived it. There are now many lamps of a religious shape hanging from the ceiling; many stools and many vases, as many G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses as in a paG.o.da.

There is even a little Shintoist altar, before which Madame Prune has not been able to restrain her feelings, and before which she has fallen down and chanted her prayers in her bleating old nanny-goat voice:

"Wash me clean from all my impurity, oh Ama-Terace-Omi-Kami, as one washes away uncleanness in the river of Kamo."

Alas for poor Ama-Terace-Omi-Kami to have to wash away the impurities of Madame Prune! What a tedious and ungrateful task!!

Chrysantheme, who is a Buddhist, prays sometimes in the evening before lying down; although overcome with sleep, she prays clapping her hands before the largest of our gilded idols. But she smiles with a childish disrespect for her Buddha, directly her prayer is ended. I know that she has also a certain veneration for her _Ottokes_ (the Spirits of her ancestors), whose rather sumptuous altar is set up at her mother's, Madame Renoncule's. She asks for their blessings, for fortune and wisdom.

Who can make out her ideas about the G.o.ds, or about death? Does she possess a soul? Does she think she has one? Her religion is an obscure chaos of theogonies as old as the world, treasured up out of respect for ancient customs; and of more recent ideas about the blessed final annihilation, imported from India at the epoch of our middle ages by saintly Chinese missionaries. The bonzes themselves are puzzled; what a muddle, therefore, must not all this become, when jumbled together in the childish brain of a sleepy mousme?

Two very insignificant episodes have somewhat attached me to her--(bonds of this kind seldom fail to draw closer in the end). The first occasion was as follows:--

Madame Prune one day brought forth a relic of her gay youth, a tortoisesh.e.l.l comb of rare transparency, one of those combs that it is good style to place on the summit of the head, lightly poised, scarcely stuck at all in the air, with all the teeth showing. Taking it out of a pretty little lacquered box, she held it up in the air and blinked her eyes, looking through it at the sky--a bright summer sky--as one does to examine the quality of a precious stone.

"Here is," she said, "an object of great value that you should offer to your little wife."

My mousme, very much taken by it, admired the clearness of the comb and its graceful shape.

The lacquered box, however, pleased me most. On the cover was a wonderful painting in gold on gold, representing a field of rice, seen very close, on a windy day: a tangle of ears and gra.s.s beaten down and twisted by a terrible squall; here and there, between the distorted stalks, the muddy earth of the rice-swamp was visible; there were even little pools of water, produced by bits of the transparent lacquer on which tiny particles of gold seemed to float about like chaff in a thick liquid; two or three insects, which required a microscope to be well seen, were clinging in a terrified manner to the rushes, and the whole picture was no larger than a woman's hand.

As for Madame Prune's comb, I confess it left me indifferent, and I turned a deaf ear, thinking it very insignificant and expensive. Then Chrysantheme answered mournfully:

"No, thank you, I don't want it; take it away, dear Madame Prune."

And at the same time she heaved a deep sigh, full of meaning, which plainly said:

"He is not so fond of me as all that.--Useless to bother him."

I immediately made the wished-for purchase.

Later on, when Chrysantheme will have become an old monkey like Madame Prune, with her black teeth and long orisons, she, in her turn, will retail that comb to some fine lady of a fresh generation.

On another occasion the sun had given me a headache; I lay on the floor resting my head on my snake-skin pillow. My eyes were dim, and everything appeared to turn round: the open verandah, the big expanse of luminous evening sky, and a variety of kites hovering against its background; I felt myself vibrating painfully to the rhythmical sound of the cicalas which filled the atmosphere.

She, crouching down by my side, strove to relieve me by a j.a.panese process, pressing with all her might on my temples with her little thumbs and turning them rapidly round, as though she were boring a hole with a gimlet. She had become quite hot and red over this hard work, which procured me real comfort, something similar to the dreamy intoxication of opium.

Then, anxious and fearful lest I should have an attack of fever, she rolled into a pellet and thrust into my mouth a very efficacious prayer written on rice-paper, which she carefully kept in the lining of one of her sleeves.

Well, I swallowed that prayer without a smile, anxious not to hurt her feelings or shake her funny little faith.

XLV.

To-day, Yves, my mousme and myself went to the best photographer in Nagasaki, to be taken in a group together.

We shall send the photograph to France. Yves already smiles as he thinks of his wife's astonishment when she sees Chrysantheme's little face between us two, and he wonders what explanation he will give her.

"Well, I will just say it is one of your friends, that's all!"

There are, in j.a.pan, photographers in the style of our own, with this one difference, that they are j.a.panese, and inhabit j.a.panese houses.

The one we design to honor to-day carries on his profession in the suburbs, in that ancient quarter of big trees and gloomy paG.o.das where, the other day, I met the pretty little mousme. His signboard, written in several languages, is stuck up against a wall on the edge of the little torrent which, rushing down from the green mountain above, is crossed by many a curved bridge of old granite and lined on either side by light bamboos or oleanders in full bloom.

It is astonishing and puzzling to find a photographer perched there, in the very heart of old j.a.pan.

We have come at the wrong moment; there is a file of people at the door. Long rows of djins' cars are stationed there, awaiting the customers they have brought, who will all have their turn before us.

The runners, naked and tatooed, carefully combed in sleek bands and shiny chignons, are chatting together, smoking little pipes, or bathing their muscular legs in the fresh water of the torrent.

The courtyard is irreproachably j.a.panese, with its lanterns and dwarf trees. But the studio where one sits might be in Paris or Pontoise; the self-same chair in "old oak," the same faded "poufs," plaster columns and pasteboard rocks.

The people who are being _taken_ at this moment are two ladies of quality, evidently mother and daughter, who are sitting together for a cabinet-sized portrait, with accessories of Louis XV. time. A strange group this, the first great ladies of this country I have seen so near, with their long aristocratic faces, dull, lifeless, almost gray by dint of rice-powder, and their mouths painted heart-shape in vivid carmine. Withal an undeniable look of good breeding that strongly impresses us, notwithstanding the intrinsic differences of races and acquired notions.

They scanned Chrysantheme with an obvious look of scorn, although her costume was as ladylike as their own. For my part, I could not take my eyes off these two creatures; they captivated me like incomprehensible things that one had never seen before. Their fragile bodies, outlandishly graceful in posture, are lost in stiff materials and redundant sashes, of which the ends droop like tired wings. They make me think, I know not why, of great rare insects; the extraordinary patterns on their garments have something of the dark motley of night-moths. Above all, the mystery of their tiny slits of eyes, drawn back and up so far that the tight-drawn lids can scarcely open; the mystery of their expression, which seems to denote inner thoughts of a silly, vague, complacent absurdity, a world of ideas absolutely closed to ourselves. And I think as I gaze at them: "How far we are from this j.a.panese people! how utterly dissimilar are our races!"

Then we have to let several English sailors pa.s.s before us, decked out in their white drill clothes, fresh, fat and pink like little sugar figures, who att.i.tudinize in a sheepish manner round the shafts of the columns.

At last it is our turn; Chrysantheme slowly settles herself in a very affected style, turning in the points of her toes as much as possible, according to the fashion.

And on the negative we are shown we look like a supremely ridiculous little family drawn up in a line by a common photographer at a fair.

XLVI.

_September 13th_.

This evening Yves is off duty three hours earlier than myself; from time to time this is the case, according to the arrangement of the watches. On those occasions he lands the first, and goes up to wait for me at Diou-djen-dji.

From the deck I can see him through the gla.s.ses, climbing up the green mountain path; he walks with a brisk, rapid step, almost running; what a hurry he seems in to rejoin little Chrysantheme.

When I arrive, at about nine o'clock, I find him seated on the floor, in the middle of my rooms, with naked torso (this is here a sufficiently proper costume for private life, I admit). Around him are grouped Chrysantheme, Oyouki, and Mdlle. Dede the maid, all eagerly rubbing his back with little blue towels decorated with storks and humorous subjects.

Good heavens, what can he have been doing to be so hot, and have put himself in such a state?

He tells me that near our house, a little higher up the mountain, he has discovered a fencing gallery: that till nightfall he had been engaged in a fencing bout against j.a.panese, who fought with two-handed swords, springing like cats, as is the custom of their country. With his French method of fencing he had given them a thorough good drubbing. Upon which, with many a low bow, they had shown him their admiration by bringing him a quant.i.ty of nice little iced things to drink. All this combined had thrown him into a fearful perspiration.

Ah, very well. Nevertheless this did not quite explain to me.

He is delighted with his evening; intends to go and amuse himself every day by beating them; he even thinks of taking pupils.

Once his back dried, they all together, the three mousmes and himself, play at j.a.panese "_pigeon vole_." Really I could not wish for anything more innocent, or more correct in every respect.