Madame Chrysantheme Part 17

It is, however, very difficult to find such a thing in Nagasaki; above all, very difficult to explain in j.a.panese what is a sailor's whistle of the traditional shape, curved and with a little ball at the end to modulate the trills and the various sounds of official orders. For three hours we are sent from shop to shop; at each one they pretend to understand perfectly what is wanted and trace on tissue-paper, with a paint-brush, the addresses of the shops where we shall without fail meet with what we require,--away we go, full of hope, only to encounter some fresh mystification, till our breathless djins get quite bewildered.

They understand admirably that we want a thing that will make a noise, music in short; thereupon they offer us instruments of every and the most unexpected shape,--squeakers for Punch-and-Judy voices, dog-whistles, trumpets. Each time it is something more and more absurd, so that at last we are overcome with uncontrollable fits of laughter. Last of all, an aged j.a.panese optician, who a.s.sumes a most knowing air, a look of sublime wisdom, goes off to forage in his back shop, and brings to light a steam fog-horn, a relic from some wrecked steamer.

After dinner, the chief event of the evening is a deluge of rain which takes us by surprise as we leave the tea-houses, on our return from our fashionable stroll. It so happened that we were a large party, having with us several mousme guests, and from the moment that the rain began to fall from the skies, as if out of a watering-pot turned upside down, the band became disorganized. The mousmes run off, with birdlike cries, and take refuge under door-ways, in the shops, under the hoods of the djins.

Then, before long,--when the shops shut up in haste, when the emptied streets are flooded, and almost black, and the paper lanterns, piteous objects, wet through and extinguished,--I find myself, I know not how it happens, flattened against a wall, under the projecting eaves, alone in the company of Mdlle. Fraise, my cousin, who is crying bitterly because her fine dress is wet through. And in the noise of the rain, which is still falling and splashing everything; with the spouts and gutters, which in the darkness plaintively murmur like running streams, the town appears to me suddenly an abode of the gloomiest sadness.

The shower is soon over, and the mousmes come out of their holes like so many mice; they look for each other, call each other, and their little voices take the singular melancholy, dragging inflections they a.s.sume whenever they have to call from afar.

"Hi! Mdlle. Lu-u-u-u une!!"

"Hi! Madame Jonqui-i-i-i ille!!"

They shout from one to the other their outlandish names, prolonging them indefinitely in the now silent night, in the reverberations of the damp air after the great summer rain.

At length they are all collected and united again, these tiny personages with narrow eyes and no brains, and we return to Diou-djen-dji all wet through.

For the third time, we have Yves sleeping beside us under our blue tent.

There is a great row soon after midnight in the apartment beneath us: our landlord's family returning from a pilgrimage to a far-distant temple of the G.o.ddess of Grace. (Although Madame Prune is a Shintoist, she reveres this deity, who, scandal says, watched over her youth.) A moment after, Mdlle. Oyouki bursts into our room like a rocket, bringing, on a charming little tray, sweetmeats which have been blessed and bought at the gates of the temple yonder, on purpose for us, and which we must positively eat at once, before the virtue is gone out of them. Scarcely rousing ourselves, we absorb these little edibles flavored with sugar and pepper, and return a great many sleepy thanks.

Yves sleeps quietly on this occasion, without dealing any blows to the floor or the panels either with fists or feet. He has hung his watch on one of the hands of our gilded idol in order to be more sure of seeing the hour at any time of the night, by the light of the sacred lamps. He gets up betimes in the morning, asking: "Well, did I behave properly?" and dresses in haste, preoccupied about duty and the roll-call.

Outside, no doubt, it is daylight already: through the tiny holes which time has pierced in our wooden panels, threads of morning light penetrate our chamber, and in the atmosphere of our room where night still lingers, they trace vague white rays. Soon, when the sun shall have risen, these rays will lengthen and become beautifully golden.

The c.o.c.ks and the cicalas make themselves heard, and now Madame Prune will begin her mystic drone.

Nevertheless, out of politeness for Yves-San, Chrysantheme lights a lantern and escorts him to the foot of the dark staircase. I even fancy that, on parting, I hear a kiss exchanged. In j.a.pan this is of no consequence, that I know; it is very usual, and quite admissible; no matter where one goes, in houses one enters for the first time, one is quite at liberty to kiss any mousme who may be present, without any notice being taken of it. But with regard to Chrysantheme, Yves is in a delicate position, and he ought to understand it better. I begin to feel uneasy about the hours they have so often spent together alone; and I make up my mind, that this very day I will not play the spy upon them, but speak frankly to Yves, and make a clear breast of it.

All at once from below, _clac! clac!_ two dry hands clapped together; it is Madame Prune's warning to the Great Spirit. And immediately after her prayer breaks forth, soars upwards in a shrill nasal falsetto, like a morning alarm when the hour for waking has come, the mechanical noise of a spring let go and running down.

_"The richest woman in the world. Cleansed from all my sins, O Ama-Terace-Omi-Kami, in the river of Kamo."_

And this extraordinary bleating, scarcely human, scatters and changes my ideas, which were very nearly clear at the moment I awoke.

XLIX.

_September 15th_.

There is a rumor of departure in the air. Since yesterday there has been vague talk of our being sent to China, to the gulf of Pekin; one of those rumors which spread, no one knows how, from one end of the ship to the other, two or three days before the official orders arrive, and which generally turn out tolerably correct. What will the last act of my little j.a.panese comedy be like? the denouement, the separation? Will there be any touch of sadness on the part of my mousme, or on my own, just a tightening of the heart-strings at the moment of our final farewell? At this moment I can imagine nothing of the sort. And then the adieux of Yves and Chrysantheme, what will they be? This question preoccupies me more than all.

There is nothing very precise as yet, but it is certain that one way or another, our stay in j.a.pan is coming to an end. It is this perhaps which disposes me this evening, to throw a more friendly glance on my surroundings. It is about six o'clock, after a day spent on duty, when I reach Diou-djen-dji. The evening sun, low in the sky, on the point of setting, pours into my room, and floods it with rays of red gold, lighting up the Buddhas and the great sheaves of quaintly arranged flowers in the antique vases. Here are a.s.sembled five or six little dolls, my neighbors, amusing themselves by dancing to the sound of Chrysantheme's guitar. And this evening I experience a real charm in feeling that this dwelling and the woman who leads the dance, are mine. On the whole I have perhaps been unjust to this country; it seems to me that my eyes are at last opened to see it in its true light, that all my senses are undergoing a strange and abrupt transition; I suddenly have a better perception and appreciation of all the infinity of dainty trifles amongst which I live; of the fragile and studied grace of their forms, the oddity of their drawings, the refined choice of their colors.

I stretch myself upon the white mats; Chrysantheme, always eagerly attentive, brings me my pillow of serpent's skin; and the smiling mousmes, with the interrupted rhythm of a while ago still running in their heads, move round me with measured steps.

Their irreproachable socks with the separate great toes, make no noise; nothing is heard, as they glide by, but a froufrou of silken stuffs. I find them all pleasant to look upon; their dollish air has the gift of pleasing me now, and I fancy I have discovered what it is that gives it to them: it is not only their round inexpressive faces with eyebrows far removed from the eyelids, but the excessive amplitude of their dress. With those huge sleeves, it might be supposed they have neither back nor shoulders; their delicate figures are lost in these wide robes, which float around what might be little marionnettes without bodies at all, and which would slip to the ground of themselves were they not kept together midway, about where a waist should be, by the wide silken sashes,--a very different comprehension of the art of dressing to ours, which endeavors as much as possible to bring into relief the curves, real or false, of the figure.

And then, how much I admire the flowers arranged by Chrysantheme in our vases, with her j.a.panese taste: lotus flowers, great sacred flowers of a tender, veined rose-color, the milky rose-color seen on porcelain; they resemble, when in full bloom, great water-lilies, and when only in bud, might be taken for long pale tulips. Their soft but rather cloying scent is added to that other indefinable odor of mousmes, of yellow race, of j.a.pan, which is always and everywhere in the air. The late flowers of September, at this season very rare and expensive, grow on longer stems than the summer blooms; Chrysantheme has left them their immense aquatic leaves of a melancholy seaweed-green, and mingled with them tall slight rushes. I look at them, and recall with some irony those great round bunches in the shape of cauliflowers, which our florists sell in France, wrapt in their white lace-paper.

Still no letters from Europe, from any one. How things change, become effaced and forgotten. Here I am accommodating myself to this finical j.a.pan and dwindling down to its affected mannerism; I feel that my thoughts run in smaller grooves, my tastes incline to smaller things,--things which suggest nothing greater than a smile. I am becoming used to tiny and ingenious furniture, to doll-like desks, to miniature bowls with which to play at dinner, to the immaculate monotony of the mats, to the finely finished simplicity of the white woodwork. I am even losing my Western prejudices; all my preconceived ideas are this evening evaporating and vanishing; crossing the garden I have courteously saluted M. Sucre, who was watering his dwarf shrubs and his deformed flowers; and Madame Prune appears to me a highly respectable old lady, in whose past there is nothing to criticise.

We shall take no walk to-night; my only wish is to remain stretched out where I am, listening to the music of my mousme's _chamecen_.

Till now, I have always used the word _guitar_, to avoid exotic terms, for the abuse of which I have been so reproached. But neither the word _guitar_ nor _mandolin_ suffices to designate this slender instrument with its long neck, the high notes of which are shriller than the voice of the gra.s.shopper; henceforth, I will write _chamecen_.

I will also call my mousme _Kikou, Kikou-San_; this name suits her better than Chrysantheme, which though translating the sense exactly, does not preserve the strange-sounding euphony of the original.

I therefore say to Kikou, my wife:

"Play, play on for me; I shall remain here all the evening and listen to you."

Astonished to find me in so amiable a mood, she requires pressing a little, and with almost a bitter curve of triumph and disdain about her lips, she seats herself in the att.i.tude of an idol, raises her long, dark-colored sleeves, and begins. The first hesitating notes are murmured faintly and mingle with the music of the insects humming outside, in the quiet air of the warm and golden twilight. First she plays slowly, a confused medley of fragments which she does not seem to remember perfectly, of which one waits for the finish and waits in vain; while the other girls giggle, inattentive, and regretful of their interrupted dance. She herself is absent, sulky, as though she were performing a duty only.

Then by degrees, little by little, it becomes more animated, and the mousmes begin to listen. Now, tremblingly it grows into a feverish rapidity, and her gaze has no longer the vacant stare of a doll. Then the music changes again; in it there is the sighing of the wind, the hideous laughter of ghouls; tears, heartrending plaints, and her dilated pupils seem to be directed inwardly in settled gaze on some indescribable _j.a.panesery_ within her own soul.

I listen, lying there with eyes half shut, looking out between my drooping eyelids which are gradually lowering, in involuntary heaviness, upon the enormous red sun dying away over Nagasaki. I have a somewhat melancholy feeling that my past life and all other places in the world are receding from my view and fading away. At this moment of nightfall I feel almost at home in this corner of j.a.pan, amidst the gardens of this suburb; I have never had such an impression before.

L.

_September 16th_.

Seven o'clock in the evening. We shall not go down into the town to-day; but, like good j.a.panese citizens, remain in our loftly suburb.

In undress uniform we shall go, Yves and I, in a neighborly way, as far as the fencing gallery, which is only two steps off, just above our villa, and almost ab.u.t.ting on our fresh and scented garden.

The gallery is closed already and a little mousko seated at the door, explains with many low bows that we come too late, all the amateurs are gone; we must come again to-morrow.

The evening is so mild and so fine, that we remain out of doors, following without any definite purpose the pathway which rises ever higher and higher, and loses itself at length in the solitary regions of the mountain among the upper peaks.

For an hour at least we wander on,--an unintended walk,--and finally find ourselves at a great height commanding an endless perspective lighted by the last gleams of daylight; we are in a desolate and mournful spot, in the midst of the little Buddhist cemeteries, which are scattered over the country in every direction.

We meet a few belated laborers, who are returning from the fields with bundles of tea upon their shoulders. These peasants have a half savage air, half naked too, or clothed only in long robes of blue cotton; as they pa.s.s, they salute us with humble bows.

No trees in this elevated region. Fields of tea alternate with tombs: old granite statues which represent Buddha in his lotus, or else old monumental stones on which gleam remains of inscriptions in golden letters. Rocks, brushwood, uncultivated s.p.a.ces, surround us on all sides.

There are no more pa.s.sers-by, and the light is failing. We will halt for a moment, and then it will be time to turn our steps downwards.

But, close to the spot where we stand, a box in white wood provided with handles, a sort of sedan-chair, rests on the freshly disturbed earth, with its lotus of silvered paper, and the little incense-sticks burning yet, by its side; clearly someone has been buried here this very evening.

I cannot picture this personage to myself; the j.a.panese are so grotesque in life, that it is almost impossible to imagine them in the calm majesty of death. Nevertheless, let us move further on, we might disturb him; he is too recently dead, his presence unnerves us. We will go and seat ourselves on one of these other tombs, so unutterably ancient that there can no longer be anything within it but dust. And there, seated yet in the dying sunlight, while the valleys and plains of the earth below are already lost in shadow, we will talk together.

I wish to speak to Yves about Chrysantheme; it is indeed somewhat in view of this that I have persuaded him to sit down; but how to set about it without hurting his feelings, and without making myself ridiculous, I hardly know. However, the pure air playing round me up here, and the magnificent landscape spread beneath my feet, impart a certain serenity to my thoughts which makes me feel a contemptuous pity, both for my suspicions and the cause of them.