My Japanese Wife/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V.
I have only seen Kotmasu once since our marriage, now five days ago; and then it was quite by accident, down near the quay, where I had gone to discover whether my quarterly parcel of magazines and books had arrived, which Lou with commendable regularity despatches “to that brother of mine who is out in Japan, living at one of those towns with a heathenish and unpronounceable name.”
Kotmasu seemed somewhat surprised to see me.
“Where is Madame?” he asks with a smile, as though—as no doubt he did—he half suspected she had returned to her mother already.
I must have shown that I read the undercurrent of suggestion somewhat plainly. “At home,” I answered. “You wouldn’t surely expect me to bring her out at this part of the day, in all this heat, and down here, too!”
“No! no! Of course not,” he hastened to reply.
I was somewhat mollified by his evident anxiety to put matters straight again between us. He can scarcely, I thought, be expected to have the same faith in my experiment as I have. To him my marriage, until it has existed for some time, can, I realize, only appear in the light of a temporary arrangement.
“Why do you not come up as you used?” I inquire in a friendly tone.
“It is your—what you call it?—something to do with the bees and the moon. I did not care to intrude,” he replies deprecatingly.
“How ridiculous! We shall be always glad to see you, my good fellow,” I reply, laughing as naturally as I can.
Kotmasu is so terribly English.
Even his attire this morning is that odd mixture of Anglo–Japanese garments he so much affects, consisting of a straw hat and tennis flannels, worn in conjunction with the flowered dressing-gown-like garment of a well-to-do merchant.
He looks a strange figure as he stands talking to me, in the sun, at the corner of the little narrow alley leading from the water-side into one of the newer streets, the incongruities of his garments thrown up into strong relief by a background formed by the sail of a large trading-junk alongside the quay, which a swarm of Japanese coolies, all dressed alike in tight hose and dark butcher’s-blue cotton tunics, with some bizarre device in a different colour on the back, were unloading with extraordinary rapidity.
“I must go back to the warehouse,” he says, after considering my remark. “I will come to see you to-night.”
He shakes hands; and a coolie who has been staring at my “strange white face,” as I overheard him call it, for at least five minutes, to the neglect of his work, appears much mystified by the supposed rite.
I am glad Kotmasu is coming, as I wish him to believe in my experiment as thoroughly as I do myself.
The books have come, and I return to the warehouse of my parcels-agent to see if they are unpacked.
Mr. Karu’s office is always a source of wonder to me.
The amount of business transacted there, in a building of toy-like dimensions and fragile structure, was little less than marvellous. Whenever a parcel heavier than usual was dropped on the floor by a careless coolie, I expected that the room, with its ink-stained, paper-panelled walls, on which were pasted or fixed with quaint-headed pins the steamship bills and those of several of the theatre tea-houses, would collapse forthwith with no more warning than the crack of its slight, dry timbers.
The parcel was ready.
Mr. Kara was all smiles. He was a little, short man with extremely beady eyes, quick movements, and a yellow skin deeply pitted by small-pox.
“It is very big to-day!” he exclaimed in Japanese, referring to the package. “Very much larger; half a yen more, please, most honourable gentleman,” as I put down the usual amount.
The smiles were explained; and there was no doubt some truth, I thought, in what the little chief-clerk at the bank, who is so anxiously cultivating a beard, said, namely, “That most excellent friend, Kara, is in great much hurry to get much rich man.”
I pay what I know to be in great part an imposition, with an indulgent grin—I am in a hurry to get back to Mousmé, or might have argued the matter even in this heat—accept the offer of a coolie to carry my parcel for the equivalent of three-halfpence, and start to climb up the shady side of the rough-paved street to my home.
Mousmé was waiting for me at the little gate in the toy fence of bamboo—a fence the like of which in no country save Japan would have been deemed sufficient for the purpose intended.
She came forward to be kissed (I had had to give her a few lessons in this custom) with her chin—which in the sunlight was as if carved out of ivory, so fine is the texture of her skin—tilted up, and the red rosebud mouth wreathed in a smile. Mousmé is learning European ways rapidly. My experiment seems very promising; and she is evidently growing very fond of me. She is learning English, and even the English alphabet, so books are becoming of interest to her, especially those with pictures in them.
“What is there?” she inquires eagerly in Japanese, pointing to the parcel which the coolie carries on ahead of us up the garden-walk.
“Books.”
“Books? More books!”
My slender library, contained on shelves about five feet high and three feet six broad, appears illimitable to her.
“Yes,” I replied, smiling.
“Are there pictures in them?”
“I expect so.”
“Hi!” to the coolie staggering under the weight of the parcel. “Hayaku! Walk faster! Run!”
And then, almost before I know she has left my side, she is gone, hurrying with short steps up the moss-bordered walk after the coolie, who has quickened his pace into a shambling run.
By the time I reach the house at my slower rate, and enter my room by way of the balcony, she has already got the parcel in front of her on a square of white matting in a patch of brilliant sunshine.
The only fault I am able to find with Mousmé’s face is that it is somewhat apathetic at times, a trifle expressionless. It is animated enough now, however. A look of eager curiosity suffuses it. She is like some gay-coloured humming-bird in her brilliant-hued dress, squatting there in the patch of sunlight, already at work with nimble, painstaking fingers upon the knots of the string around the parcel, coaxing loose the more stubborn ones with the point of one of her immense jade-topped hairpins.
Lou has sent some magazines this quarter which delight Mousmé immensely—The Strand, English Illustrated, and a copy of the Universal Review. This last is a veritable El Dorado of pictures, and provokes exclamations of delight when Mousmé turns the pages over. Only there is so much she cannot understand.
One particular picture in a number of the English Illustrated, a group of ladies at an evening party, mystifies her immensely.
“Why are all these women cut out in the middle?” she asks with a puzzled expression. “Are they all born like that?”
“No,” I reply.
“Then do they make themselves like that?” glancing at her own slender though by no means exaggerated figure.
“Yes; they make themselves so, I suppose. It is a custom of our nation, and other European nations,” I explain as best I can.
“Oh!” with another look at the ultra-fashionably slender figure of the woman in the foreground of the picture. “How very uncomfortable!”
We both laugh; I because Mousmé makes this last remark in such a finite voice, and without any real idea of its naïve truthfulness, and she because to her loose-robed little body such a fashion appears highly ridiculous.
There is evidently something mysterious about this funny custom, which, as Mousmé says, “makes women look as if a dog had bitten a great piece out of them, both sides;” for she says, ere turning over the page:
“Shall I do that when I go with you to England?”
“No, certainly not.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re much prettier as you are.”
Mousmé smiles contentedly, and pats my big hand, which looks so very large beside hers, and rambles off to tell me of a lizard she found in our bed just before I came back from the town; whilst I, glancing over the pages of one of the magazines, divide my attention between her story and a critique of Robert Elsmere.
The time passes very quickly with Mousmé; she is soon tired of looking at books and papers which, at present, she only half understands; and lest she should interrupt me, she gets up, and goes with a hushed pad, pad of her shoeless feet into our bedroom, to fetch a strange little lacquer box which contains her writing materials. A flat shell, with lovely mother-of-pearl tints on its nacre hollow, in which she grinds her Indian ink; the fine paintbrush, which plays the part of pen; the flimsy rice-paper, in long, thin strips, and envelopes to match, are among her belongings, and are decorated with tiny pictures of trees and strangely grotesque animals, birds and fishes. She is going to write to her mother, to ask her to send up a sash of turquoise-blue silk which was left behind when she was married, and which she has found out I admired.
I watch her as she writes, her head bent over her paper, and the lower half of her face in shadow—such a scrap of daintily dressed femininity.
I wonder what else she is saying—women’s inter-confidences are always so distressing and perplexing to a man—for she has already covered one long strip with delicately minute writing, which at a little distance looks like the ground-plan of an intricate maze; and surely even a turquoise silk obi cannot call for such a lengthy description, except, perhaps, in a Parisian fashion-journal.
She has finished by the time I have cut the pages of one of the novels Lou has included in the parcel; and, with a solemnity worthy of the best traditions of the Japanese official, she seals it up securely in an envelope of whitey-blue rice-paper—so small, that it necessitates the folding of the letter half a dozen times.
One of the ever-amiable Oka’s almost innumerable children, a quaint toddler of five, with a queer, shaven head, with its little ebon queue, and small, bright, black beads of eyes, is easily persuaded to take it down to Mousmé’s mother for a couple of sen.
Then we have tea.
Really it is a sort of dinner, a nondescript meal best conveyed to the mind by that equally nondescript English phrase, “high tea”—a strange meal indulged in by people who are too hungry to have tea, and too modest to have a second dinner.
How Mousmé can tackle plums still green, though coated in sugar, without paying the penalty for her seeming indiscretion, is a mystery. But she does; and I sit and watch her in genuine though unexpressed admiration. The shrimps, really large prawns, with their intricately stuffed interiors, I can venture upon; and seaweed, with sweet sauce, I take with resignation. She does not care for the latter to-night, and so she goes to a panel cupboard, where we keep our priceless English biscuits cunningly hidden from the possible depredations of Oka’s somewhat inquisitive children, and eats some of these instead, nibbling off first the pink-and-white sugar decorations, which are such a source of delight.
We have scarcely finished our meal, and Mousmé is still nibbling a biscuit, when we hear the sound of Kotmasu’s expected footsteps coming up the garden-path.