Asako rang up Reggie; and on the next afternoon the young diplomat called for the Barringtons in a motor-car, where Miss Yae Smith was already installed. They drove through Tokyo. It was like crossing London for the space of distance covered; an immense city—yet is it a city, or merely a village preposterously overgrown?

There is no dignity in the Japanese capital, nothing secular or permanent, except that mysterious forest-land in the midst of the moats and the grey walls, where dwell the Emperor and the Spirit of the Race. It is a mongrel city, a vast congeries of native wooden huts, hastily equipped with a few modern conveniences. Drunken poles stagger down the streets, waving their cobwebs of electric wires. Rickety trams jolt past, crowded to overflowing, so crowded that humanity clings to the steps and platforms in clots, like flies clinging to some sweet surface. Thousands of little shops glitter, wink or frown at the passer-by. Many of them have western plate-glass windows and stucco fronts, hiding their savagery, like a native woman tricked out in ridiculous pomp. Some, still grimly conservative, receive the customer in their cavernous interior, and cheat his eyes in their perpetual twilight. Many of these little shops are so small that their stock-in-trade flows over on to the pavement. The toy shops, the china shops, the cake shops, the shops for women's ribbons and hairpins seem to be trying to turn themselves inside out. Others are so reticent that nothing appears save a stretch of clean straw mats, where sulky clerks sit smoking round the hibachi (fireboxes). Then, when the eye gets accustomed to the darkness, one can see behind them the ranks of the tea-jars of Uji, or layers of dark kimono stuff.

The character of the shops changed as the Barringtons and their party approached their destination. The native element predominated more and more. The wares became more and more inexplicable. There were shops in which gold Buddhas shone and brass lamps for temple use, shops displaying queer utensils and mysterious little bits of things, whose secret was hidden in the cabalistic signs of Chinese script. There were stalls of curios, and second-hand goods spread out on the pavement, under the custody of wizened, inattentive old men, who squatted and smoked.

Red-faced maids stared at the foreigners from the balconies of lofty inns and eating-houses near Uyeno station. Further on, they passed the silence of old temple walls, the spaciousness of pigeon-haunted cloisters, and the huge high-pitched roofs of the shrines, with their twisted horn-like points. Then, down a narrow alley appeared the garish banners of the Asakusa theatres and cinema palaces. They heard the yelling of the door-touts, and the bray of discordant music. They caught a glimpse of hideous placards whose crude illustrations showed the quality of the performance to be seen within, girls falling from aeroplanes, demon ghosts with bloody daggers, melodrama unleashed.

Everywhere the same crowds loitered along the pavements. No hustle, no appearance of business save where a messenger-boy threaded the maze on a break-neck bicycle, or where a dull-faced coolie pulled at an overloaded barrow. Grey and brown, the crowd clattered by on their wooden shoes. Grey and black, passed the haikara young men with their yellow side-spring shoes. Black and sabre-dragging, the policeman went to and fro, invisibly moored to his wooden sentry-box.

The only bright notes among all these drab multitudes were the little girls in their variegated kimonos, who fluttered in and out of the entrances, and who played unscolded on the footpaths. These too were the only notes of happiness; for their grown-up relatives, especially the women, carried an air, if not an actual expression, of animal melancholy, the melancholy of driven sheep or of cows ruminant.

The crowds were growing denser. Their faces were all set in one direction. At last the whole roadway was filled with the slow-moving tide. The Harringtons and their friends had to alight from their car and continue the rest of the way on foot.

"They are all going to see the show," Reggie explained to his party, and he pointed to a line of high houses, which stood out above the low native huts. It was a square block of building some hundreds of yards long, quite foreign in character, having the appearance of factory buildings, or of a barracks or workhouse.

"What a dismal-looking place!" said Asako.

"Yes," agreed Reggie, "but at night it is much brighter. It is all lit up from top to bottom. It is called the Nightless City."

"What bad faces these people have!" said Asako, who was romantically set on seeing evil everywhere, "Is it quite safe?"

"Oh yes," said their guide, "Japanese crowds are very orderly."

Indeed they suffered no inconvenience from the crowd beyond much staring, an ordeal which awaits the foreigner in all corners of Tokyo.

They had reached a very narrow street, where raffish beer-shops were doing a roaring trade. They caught a glimpse of dirty tablecloths and powdered waitresses wearing skirts, aprons and lumpy shoes—all very haikara. On the right hand they passed a little temple from whose exiguous courtyard two stone foxes grinned maliciously, the temple of the god Inari, who brings rich lovers to the girls who pray to him.

They passed through iron gates, like the gates of a park, where two policemen were posted to regulate the traffic. Beyond was a single line of cherry-trees in full bloom, a single wave of pinkish spray, a hanging curtain of vapourous beauty, the subject of a thousand poems, of a thousand allusions, licentious, delicate and trite,—the cherry-blossoms of the Yoshiwara.

At a street corner stood a high white building plastered with golden letters in Japanese and English—"Asahi Beer Hall."

"That is the place," said Yae, "let us get out of this crowd."

They found refuge among more dirty tablecloths, Europeanised mousmes, and gaping guests. When Yae spoke to the girls in Japanese, there was much bowing and hissing of the breath; and they were invited upstairs on to the first floor where was another beer-hall, slightly more exclusive-looking than the downstair Gambrinus. Here a table and chairs were set for them in the embrasure of a bow-window, which, protruding over the cross-roads, commanded an admirable view of the converging streets.

"The procession won't be here for two hours more," said Yae, pouting her displeasure.

"One always has to wait in Japan," said Reggie. "Nobody ever knows exactly when anything is going to happen; and so the Japanese just wait and wait. They seem to like it rather. Anyhow they don't get impatient. Life is so uneventful here that I think they must like prolonging an incident as much as possible, like sucking a sweet slowly."

Meanwhile there was plenty to look at. Asako could not get over her shock at the sea of wicked faces which surged below.

"What class of people are these?" Geoffrey asked.

"Oh, shop-people, I think, most of them," said Yae, "and people who work in factories."

"Good class Japanese don't come here, then?" Geoffrey asked again.

"Oh no, only low class people and students. Japanese people say it is a shameful thing to go to the Yoshiwara. And, if they go, they go very secretly."

"Do you know any one who goes?" asked Reggie, with a directness which shocked his friend's sense of Good Form.

"Oh, my brothers," said Yae, "but they go everywhere; or they say they do."

* * * * *

It certainly was an ill-favoured crowd. The Japanese are not an ugly race. The young aristocrat who has grown up with fresh air and healthy exercise is often good-looking, and sometimes distinguished and refined. But the lower classes, those who keep company with poverty, dirt and pawnshops, with the pleasures of the sake barrel and the Yoshiwara, are the ugliest beings that were ever created in the image of their misshapen gods. Their small stature and ape-like attitudes, the colour and discolour of their skin, the flat Mongolian nose, their gaping mouths and bad teeth, the coarse fibre of their lustreless black hair, give them an elvish and a goblin look, as though this country were a nursery for fairy changelings, a land of the Nibelungen, where bad thoughts have found their incarnation. Yet the faces have not got that character for good and evil as we find them among the Aryan peoples, the deep lines and the firm profiles.

"It is the absence of something rather than its presence which appals and depresses us," Reggie Forsyth observed, "an absence of happiness perhaps, or of a promise of happiness."

The crowd which filled the four roads with its slow grey tide was peaceable enough; and it was strangely silent. The drag and clatter of the clogs made more sound than the human voices. The great majority were men, though there were women among them, quiet and demure. If ever a voice was lifted, one could see by the rolling walk and the fatuous smile that its owner had been drinking. Such a person would be removed out of sight by his friends. The Japanese generally go sight-seeing and merry-making in friendships and companies; and the Verein, which in Japan is called the Kwai, flourishes here as in Germany.

Two coolies started quarreling under the Barringtons' window. They too had been drinking. They did not hit out at each other like Englishmen, but started an interchange of abuse in gruff monosyllables and indistinguishable grunts and snorts.

"Baka! Chikushome! Kuso! (Fool! Beast! Dung!)"

These amenities exasperating their ill humour, they began to pull at each other's coats and to jostle each other like quarrelsome curs. This was a sign that affairs were growing serious; and the police intervened. Again each combatant was pushed away by his companions into opposite byways.

With these exceptions, all tramplings, squeezings, pushings and pokings were received with conventional grins or apathetic staring. Yet in the paper next day it was said that so great had been the crowd that six deaths had occurred, and numerous persons had fainted.

"But where is the Yoshiwara?" Geoffrey asked at last. "Where are these wretched women kept?"

Reggie waved his hand in the direction of the three roads facing them.

"Inside the iron gates, that is all the Yoshiwara, and those high houses and the low ones too. That is where the girls are. There are two or three thousand of them within sight, as it were, from here. But, of course, the night time is the time to see them."

"I suppose so," said Geoffrey vaguely.

"They sit in shop windows, one might say," Reggie went on, "only with bars in front like cages in the Zoo. And they wear gorgeous kimonos, red and gold and blue, and embroidered with flowers and dragons. It is like nothing I can think of, except aviaries full of wonderful parrakeets and humming-birds."

"Are they pretty?" Asako asked.

"No, I can't say they are pretty; and they all seem very much alike to the mere Westerner. I can't imagine any body picking out one of them and saying, 'I love her'—'she is the loveliest.' There is a fat, impassive type like Buddha. There is a foxy animated type which exchanges badinage with the young nuts through the bars of her cage; and there is a merely ugly lumpy type, a kind of cloddish country-girl who exists in all countries. But the more exclusive houses don't display their women. One can only see a row of photographs. No doubt they are very flattering to their originals."

Asako was staring at the buildings now, at the high square prison houses, and at the low native roofs. These had each its little platform, its monohoshi, where much white washing was drying in the sun.

At the farther end of one street a large stucco building, with a Grecian portico, stood athwart the thoroughfare.

"What is that?" said Asako; "it looks like a church."

"That is the hospital," answered Reggie.

"But why is there a hospital here?" she asked again.

Yae Smith smiled ever so little at her new friend's ignorance of the wages of sin. But nobody answered the question.

* * * * *

There was a movement in the crowd, a pushing back from some unseen locality, like the jolting of railway trucks. At the same time there was a craning of necks and a murmur of interest.

In the street opposite, the crowd was opening down the centre. The police, who had sprung up everywhere like the crop of the dragons' teeth, were dividing the people. And then, down the path so formed, came the strangest procession which Geoffrey Barrington had ever seen on or off the stage.

High above the heads of the crowd appeared what seemed to be a life-size automaton, a moving waxwork magnificently garbed in white brocade with red and gold embroidery of phenixes, and a huge red sash tied in a bow in front. The hem of the skirt, turned up with red and thickly wadded, revealed a series of these garments fitting beneath each other, like the leaves of an artichoke. Under a monumental edifice of hair, bristling like a hedgehog with amber-coloured pins and with silver spangles and rosettes, a blank, impassive little face was staring straight in front of it, utterly expressionless, utterly unnatural, hidden beneath the glaze of enamel—the china face of a doll.

It parted the grey multitude like a pillar of light. It tottered forward slowly, for it was lifted above the crowd on a pair of black-lacquered clogs as high as stilts, dangerous and difficult to manipulate. On each side were two little figures, similarly painted, similarly bedizened, similarly expressionless, children of nine or ten years only, the komuro, the little waiting-women. They served to support the reigning beauty and at the same time to display her long embroidered sleeves, outstretched on either side like wings.

The brilliant figure and her two attendants moved forward under the shade of a huge ceremonial umbrella of yellow oiled paper, which looked like a membrane or like old vellum, and upon which were written in Chinese characters the personal name of the lady chosen for the honour and the name of the house in which she was an inmate. The shaft of this umbrella, some eight or nine feet long, was carried by a sinister being, clothed in the blue livery of the Japanese artisan, a kind of tabard with close-fitting trousers. He kept twisting the umbrella-shaft all the time with a gyrating movement to and fro, which imparted to the disc of the umbrella the hesitation of a wave. He followed the Queen with a strange slow stride. For long seconds he would pause with one foot held aloft in the attitude of a high-stepping horse, which distorted his dwarfish body into a diabolic convulsion, like Durer's angel of horror. He seemed a familiar spirit, a mocking devil, the wicked Spielmann of the "Miracle" play, whose harsh laughter echoes through the empty room when the last cup is emptied, the last shilling gone, and the dreamer awakes from his dream.

Behind him followed five or six men carrying large oval lanterns, also inscribed with the name of the house; and after them came a representative collection of the officials of the proud establishment, a few foxy old women and a crowd of swaggering men, spotty and vicious-looking. The Orian (Chief Courtesan) reached the cross-roads. There, as if moved by machinery or magnetism, she slowly turned to the left. She made her way towards one of a row of small, old-fashioned native houses, on the road down which the Barringtons had come. Here the umbrella was lowered. The beauty bowed her monumental head to pass under the low doorway, and settled herself on a pile of cushions prepared to receive her.

Almost at once the popular interest was diverted to the appearance of another procession, precisely similar, which was debouching from the opposite road. The new Orian garbed in blue, with a sash of gold and a design of cherry-blossom, supported by her two little attendants, wobbled towards another of the little houses. On her disappearing a third procession came into sight.

"Ah!" sighed Asako, "what lovely kimonos! Where do they get them from?"

"I don't know," said Yae, "some of them are quite old. They come out fresh year after year for a different girl."

Yae, with her distorted little soul, was thinking that it must be worth the years of slavery and the humiliation of disease to have that one day of complete triumph, to be the representative of Beauty upon earth, to feel the admiration and the desire of that vast concourse of men rising round one's body like a warm flood.

Geoffrey stared fascinated, wondering to see the fact of prostitution advertised so unblushingly as a public spectacle, his hatred and contempt breaking over the heads of the swine-faced men who followed the harlot, and picked their livelihood out of her shame.

Reggie was wondering what might be the thoughts of those little creatures muffled in such splendour that their personality, like that of infant queens, was entirely hidden by the significance of what they symbolized. Not a smile, not a glance of recognition passed over the unnatural whiteness of their faces. Yet they could not be, as they appeared to be, sleep-walkers. Were they proud to wear such finery? Were they happy to be so acclaimed? Did their heart beat for one man, or did their vanity drink in the homage of all? Did their mind turn back to the mortgaged farm and the work in the paddy-fields, to the thriftless shop and the chatter of the little town, to the sake-sodden father who had sold them in the days of their innocence, to the first numbing shock of that new life? Perhaps; or perhaps they were too taken up with maintaining their equilibrium on their high shoes, or perhaps they thought of nothing at all. Reggie, who had a poor opinion of the intellectual brightness of uneducated Japanese women, thought that the last alternative was highly probable.

"I wonder what those little houses are where they pay their visits," Reggie said.

"Oh, those are the hikite chaya" said Yae glibly, "the Yoshiwara tea-houses."

"Do they live there?" asked Asako.

"Oh, no; rich men who come to the Yoshiwara do not go to the big houses where the oiran live. They go to the tea-houses; and they order food and geisha to sing, and the oiran to be brought from the big house. It is more private. So the tea-houses are called hikite chaya, 'tea-houses which lead by the hand.'"

"Yae," said Reggie, "you know a lot about it."

"Yes," said Miss Smith, "my brothers have told me. They tell me lots of things."

After a stay of about half an hour, the oiran left their tea-houses. The processions reformed; and they slowly tottered back to the places whence they had come. Across their path the cherry petals were already falling like snowflakes; for the cherry-blossom is the Japanese symbol of the impermanence of earthly beauty, and of all sweet things and pleasant.

"By Jove!" said Geoffrey Harrington to the world in general, "that was an extraordinary sight. East is East and West is West, eh? I never felt that so strongly before. How often does this performance take place?"

"This performance," said Reggie, "has taken place for three days every Spring for the last three hundred years. But it is more than doubtful whether it will ever happen again. It is called Oiran Dochu, the procession of the courtesans. Geoffrey, what you have seen to-day is nothing more or less than the Passing of Old Japan!"

"But whom do these women belong to?" asked Geoffrey. "And who is making money out of all this filth?"

"Various people and companies, I suppose, who own the different houses," answered Reggie. "A fellow once offered to sell me his whole establishment, bedding and six girls for L50 down. But he must have been having a run of bad luck. In most countries it is a most profitable form of investment. Do you remember 'Mrs. Warren's Profession'? Thirty-five per cent I think was the exact figure. I don't suppose Japan is any exception."

"By Jove!" said Geoffrey, "The women, poor wretches, they can't help themselves; and the men who buy what they sell, one can't blame them either. But the creatures who make fortunes out of all this beastiness and cruelty, I say, they ought to be flogged round the place with a cat-o'-nine-tails till the life is beaten out of them. Let's get away from here!"

As they left the beer-house a small round Japanese man bobbed up from the crowd, raised his hat, bowed and smiled. It was Tanaka. Geoffrey had left him behind on purpose, that his servants, at least, might not know where he was going.

"I think—I meet Ladyship here," said the little man, "but for long time I do not spy her. I am very sorry."

"Is anything wrong? Why did you come?" asked Geoffrey.

"Good samurai never leave Lordship's side. Of course, I come," was the reply.

"Well, hurry up and get back," said his master, "or we shall be home before you."

With renewed bowings he disappeared.

Asako was laughing.

"We can never get rid of Tanaka," she said, "can we? He follows us like a detective."

"Sometimes I think he is deliberately spying on us," said her husband.

"Cheer up," said Reggie, "they all do that."

The party dispersed at the Imperial Hotel. Asako was laughing and happy. She had enjoyed herself immensely as usual; and her innocence had realized little or nothing of the grim significance of what she had seen.

But Geoffrey was gloomy and distrait. He had taken it much to heart. That night he had a horrible dream. The procession of the oiran was passing once more before his eyes; but he could not see the face of the gorgeous doll whom all these crowds had come out to admire. He felt strangely apprehensive, however. Then at a corner of the street the figure turned and faced him. It was Asako, his wife. He struggled to reach her and save her. But the crowds of Japanese closed in upon him; he struggled in vain.



CHAPTER XI

A GEISHA DINNER

Inishi toshi Ne-kojite uyeshi Waga yodo no Wakaki no ume wa Hana saki ni keri.

The young plum tree Of my house Which in bygone years I dug up by the roots and transplanted Has at last bloomed with flowers.

Next morning Geoffrey rose earlier than was his wont; and arrayed in one of his many kimonos, entered his sitting-room. There he found Tanaka, wrapped in contemplation of a letter. He was scrutinizing it with an attention which seemed to pierce the envelope.

"Who is it from, Tanaka?" asked Geoffrey; he had become mildly ironical in his dealings with the inquisitive guide.

"I think perhaps invitation to pleasure party from Ladyship's noble relatives," Tanaka replied, unabashed.

Geoffrey took the note to his wife, and she read aloud:

"DEAR MR. AND MRS. BARRINGTON—It is now the bright Spring weather. I hope you to enjoy good health. I have been rude thus to absent myself during your polite visit. Much pressing business has hampered me, also stomach trouble, but indeed there is no excuse. Please not to be angry. This time I hope you to attend a poor feast, Maple Club Hotel, next Tuesday, six p.m. Hoping to esteemed favor and even friend,

"Yours obedient,

"G. FUJINAMI."

"What exactly does he mean?"

"As Tanaka says, it is an invitation to a pleasure party at the beginning of next week."

"Answer it, sweetheart," said Geoffrey; "tell them that we are not angry, and that we shall be delighted to accept."

Tanaka explained that the Maple Club Restaurant or Koyokwan, which more strictly should be translated Hall of the Red Leaf, is the largest and most famous of Tokyo "tea-houses"—to use a comprehensive term which applies equally to a shack by the roadside, and to a dainty pleasure resort where entertainments run easily into four or five pounds per head. There are restaurants more secretive and more elite, where the aesthetic gourmet may feel more at ease and where the bohemian spirit can loose its wit. But for public functions of all kinds, for anything on a really big scale, the Maple Club stands alone. It is the "Princes" of Tokyo with a flavour of the Guildhall steaming richly through its corridors. Here the great municipal dinners take place, the great political entertainments. Here famous foreigners are officially introduced to the mysteries of Japanese cuisine and the charms of Japanese geisha. Here hangs a picture of Lord Kitchener himself, scrambled over by laughing mousmes, who seem to be peeping out of his pockets and buttonholes, a Gulliver in Lilliput.

Both Geoffrey and Asako had treated the invitation as a joke; but at the last moment, while they were threading the mysterious streets of the still unfamiliar city, they both confessed to a certain nervousness. They were on the brink of a plunge into depths unknown. They knew nothing whatever about the customs, tastes and prejudices of the people with whom they were to mix—not even their names and their language.

"Well, we're in for it," said Geoffrey, "we must see it through now."

They drove up a steep gravel drive and stopped before a broad Japanese entrance, three wide steps like altar stairs leading up to a dark cavernous hall full of bowing women and men in black clothes, similar, silent and ghostlike. The first impression was lugubrious, like a feast of mutes.

Boots off! Geoffrey knew at least this rule number one in Japanese etiquette. But who were these fluttering women, so attentive in removing their cloaks and hats? Were they relatives or waitresses? And the silent groups beyond? Were they Fujinami or waiters? The two guests had friendly smiles for all; but they gazed helplessly for a familiar face.

An apparition in evening dress with a long frock coat and a purple tie emerged from that grim chorus of spectators. It was Ito, the lawyer. The free and easy American manner was checked by the responsibility of those flapping coat-tails. He looked and behaved just like a shop-walker. After a stiff bow and handshake he said:

"Very pleased to see you, Sir, and Mrs. Barrington, also. The Fujinami family is proud to make your entertainment."

Geoffrey expected further introductions; but the time had not yet come. With a wave of the arm Mr. Ito added:

"Please step this way, Sir and Lady."

The Barringtons with Ito led the procession; and the mutes closed in behind them. Down endless polished corridors they passed with noiseless steps over the spotless boards. The only sound was the rustling of silk garments. To closed eyes they might have seemed like the arrival of a company of dowagers. The women, who had at first received them, were still fluttering around them like humming-birds escorting a flight of crows. To one of them Geoffrey owed his preservation. He would have struck his forehead against a low doorway in the darkness; but she touched the lintel with her finger and then laid her tiny hand on Barrington's tall shoulder, laughing and saying in infantile English:

"English danna san very high!"

They came to a sudden opening between paper walls. In a little room behind a table stood a middle-aged Japanese couple as stiff as waxworks. For an instant Geoffrey thought they must be the cloakroom attendants. Then, to his surprise, Ito announced:

"Mr. and Mrs. Fujinami Gentaro, the head of the Fujinami family. Please walk in and shake hands."

Geoffrey and his wife did as they were directed. Three mutual bowings took place in absolute silence, followed by a handshake. Then Ito said:

"Mr. and Mrs. Fujinami Gentaro wish to say they are very pleased you both come to-night. It is very poor food and very poor feast, they say. Japanese food is very simple sort of thing. But they ask you please excuse them, for what they have done they have done from a good heart."

Geoffrey was mumbling incoherently, and wondering whether he was expected to reply to this oration, when Ito again exclaimed, "Please step this way."

They passed into a large room like a concert hall with a stage at one end. There were several men squatting on the floor round hibachi smoking and drinking beer. They looked like black sheep browsing.

These were joined by the mutes who followed the Barringtons. All of these people were dressed exactly alike. They wore white socks, a dark kimono almost hidden by the black cloak upon which the family crest—a wreath of wisteria (fuji) foliage—shone like a star on sleeves and neck, and by the fluted yellowish skirt of heavy rustling silk. This dress, though gloomy and sacerdotal, was dignified and becoming; but the similarity was absurd. It looked like a studied effect at a fancy dress ball. It was particularly exasperating to the guests of honour who were anxious to distinguish their relatives and to know them apart; but Ito alone, with his European clothes and his purple tie, was conspicuous and unmistakable.

"He is like Mrs. Jarley," thought Geoffrey, "he explains the waxworks."

In the middle of the room was a little group of chairs of the weary beast of burden type, which are requisitioned for public meetings. Two of them were dignified by cushions of crimson plush. These were for Geoffrey and Asako.

Among the black sheep there was no movement beyond the steady staring of some thirty pairs of eyes. When the Harringtons had been enthroned, the host and hostess approached them with silent dragging steps and downcast faces. They might have been the bearers of evil tidings. A tall girl followed behind her parents.

Mrs. Fujinami Shidzuye and her daughter, Sadako, were the only women present. This was a compromise, and a consideration for Asako's feelings. Mr. Ito had proposed that since a lady was the chief guest of honour, therefore all the Fujinami ladies ought to be invited to meet her. To Mr. Fujinami's strict conservative mind such an idea was anathema. What! Wives at a banquet! In a public restaurant! With geisha present! Absurd—and disgusting! O tempora! O mores!

Then, argued the lawyer, Asako must not be invited. But Asako was the clou of the evening; and besides, an English gentleman would be insulted if his wife were not invited too. And—as Mr. Ito went on to urge—any woman, Japanese or foreign, would be ill-at-ease in a company composed entirely of men. Besides Sadako could speak English so well; it was so convenient that she should come; and under her mother's care her morals would not be contaminated by the propinquity of geisha. So Mr. Fujinami gave in so far as concerned his own wife and daughter.

Shidzuye San, as befitted a matron of sober years, wore a plain black kimono; but Sadako's dress was of pale mauve color, with a bronze sash tied in an enormous bow. Her hair was parted on one side and caught up in a bun behind—the latest haikara fashion and a tribute to the foreign guests. Hers was a graceful figure; but her expression was spoiled by the blue-tinted spectacles which completely hid her features.

"Miss Sadako Fujinami, daughter of Mr. Fujinami Gentaro," said Ito. "She has been University undergraduate, and she speaks English quite well."

Miss Sadako bowed three times. Then she said, "How do you do" in a high unnatural voice.

The room was filling up with the little humming-bird women who had been present at the entrance. They were handing cigarettes and tea cups to the guests. They looked bright and pleasant; and they interested Geoffrey.

"Are these ladies relatives of the Fujinami family?" he asked Ito.

"Oh, no, not at all," the lawyer gasped; "you have made great mistake, Mr. Barrington. Japanese ladies all left at home, never go to restaurant. These girls are no ladies, they're geisha girls. Geisha girls very famous to foreign persons."

Geoffrey knew that he had made his first faux pas.

"Now," said Mr. Ito, "please step this way; we go upstairs to the feast room."

The dining-room seemed larger still than the reception room. Down each side of it were arranged two rows of red lacquer tables, each about eighteen inches high and eighteen inches square. Mysterious little dishes were placed on each side of these tables; the most conspicuous was a flat reddish fish with a large eye, artistically served in a rollicking attitude, which in itself was an invitation to eat.

The English guests were escorted to two seats at the extreme end of the room, where two tables were laid in isolated glory. They were to sit there like king and queen, with two rows of their subjects in long aisles to the right and to the left of them.

The seats were cushions merely; but those placed for Geoffrey and Asako were raised on low hassocks. After them the files of the Fujinami streamed in and took up their appointed positions along the sides of the room. They were followed by the geisha, each girl carrying a little white china bottle shaped like a vegetable marrow, and a tiny cup like the bath which hygienic old maids provide for their canary birds.

"Japanese sake" said Sadako to her cousin, "you do not like?"

"Oh, yes, I do," replied Asako, who was intent on enjoying everything. But on this occasion she had chosen the wrong answer; for real ladies in Japan are not supposed to drink the warm rice wine.

The geisha certainly looked most charming as they slowly advanced in a kind of ritualistic procession. Their feet like little white mice, the dragging skirts of their spotless kimonos, their exaggerated care and precision, and their stiff conventional attitudes presented a picture from a Satsuma vase. Their dresses were of all shades, black, blue, purple, grey and mauve. The corner of the skirt folded back above the instep revealed a glimpse of gaudy underwear provoking to men's eyes, and displayed the intricate stenciled flower patterns, which in the case of the younger women seemed to be catching hold of the long sleeves and straying upwards. Little dancing girls, thirteen and fourteen years old—the so-called hangyoku or half jewels—accompanied their elder sisters of the profession. They wore very bright dresses just like the dolls; and their massive coiffure was bedizened with silver spangles and elaborately artificial flowers.

"Oh!" gasped the admiring Asako, "I must get one of those geisha girls to show me how to wear my kimonos properly; they do look smart."

"I do not think," answered Sadako. "These are vulgar women, bad style; I will teach you the noble way."

But all the geisha had a grave and dignified look, quite different from the sprightly butterflies of musical comedy from whom Geoffrey had accepted his knowledge of Japan.

They knelt down before the guests and poured a little of the sake into the shallow saucer held out for their ministrations. Then they folded their hands in their laps and appeared to slumber.

A sucking sound ran round the room as the first cup was drained. Then a complete silence fell, broken only by the shuffle of the girls' feet on the matting as they went to fetch more bottles.

Mr. Fujinami Gentaro spoke to the guests assembled, bidding them commence their meal, and not to stand upon ceremony.

"It is like the one—two—three—go! at a race," thought Geoffrey.

All the guests were manipulating their chop-sticks. Geoffrey raised his own pair. The two slender rods of wood were unparted at one end to show that they had never been used. It was therefore necessary to pull them in two. As he did so a tiny splinter of wood like a match fell from between them.

Asako laughed.

"That is the toothpick," cousin Sadako explained. "We call such chop-sticks komochi-hashi, chopstick with baby, because the toothpick inside the chopstick like the baby inside the mother. Very funny, I think."

There were two kinds of soup—excellent; there was cooked fish and raw fish in red and white slices, chastely served with ice; there were vegetables known and unknown, such as sweet potatoes, French beans, lotus stems and bamboo shoots. These had to be eaten with the aid of the chop-sticks—a difficult task when it came to cutting up the wing of a chicken or balancing a soft poached egg.

The guests did not eat with gusto. They toyed with the food, sipping wine all the time, smoking cigarettes and picking their teeth.

Geoffrey, according to his own description, was just getting his eye in, when Mr. Fujinami Gentaro rose from his humble place at the far end of the room. In a speech full of poetical quotations, which must have cost his tame students considerable trouble in the composition, he welcomed Asako Barrington, who, he said, had been restored to Japan like a family jewel which has been lost and is found. He compared her visit to the sudden flowering of an ancient tree. This did not seem very complimentary; however, it referred not to the lady's age but to the elder branch of the family which she represented. After many apologies for the tastelessness of the food and the stupidity of the entertainment, he proposed the health of Mr. and Mrs. Harrington, which was drunk by the whole company standing.

Ito produced from his pocket a translation of this oration.

"Now please say a few words in reply," he directed.

Geoffrey, feeling acutely ridiculous, scrambled to his feet and thanked everybody for giving his wife and himself such a jolly good time. Ito translated.

"Now please command to drink health of the Fujinami family," said the lawyer, consulting his agenda. So the health of Mr. and Mrs. Fujinami Gentaro was drunk with relish by everybody, including the lady and gentleman honoured.

"In this country," thought Geoffrey, "one gets the speechmaking over before the dinner. Not a bad idea. It saves that nervous feeling which spoils the appetite."

An old gentleman, with a restless jaw, tottered to his feet and approached Geoffrey's table. He bowed twice before him, and held out a claw-like hand.

"Mr. Fujinami Gennosuke, the father of Mr. Fujinami Gentaro," announced Ito. "He has retired from life. He wishes to drink wine with you. Please wash your cup and give it to him."

There was a kind of finger-bowl standing in front of Geoffrey, which he had imagined might be a spittoon. He was directed to rinse his cup in this vessel, and to hand it to the old gentleman. Mr. Fujinami Gennosuke received it in both hands as if it had been a sacrament. The attendant geisha poured out a little of the greenish liquid, which was drunk with much hissing and sucking. Then followed another obeisance; the cup was returned, and the old gentleman retired.

He was succeeded by Mr. Fujinami Gentaro himself, with whom the same ceremony of the sake drinking was repeated; and then all the family passed by, one after another, each taking the cup and drinking. It was like a visiting figure in the lancers' quadrille.

As each relative bent and bowed, Ito announced his name and quality. These names seemed all alike, alike as their faces and as their garments were. Geoffrey could only remember vaguely that he had been introduced to a Member of Parliament, a gross man with a terrible wen like an apple under his ear, and to two army officers, tall clean-looking men, who pleased him more than the others. There were several Government functionaries; but the majority were business men. Geoffrey could only distinguish for certain his host and his host's father.

"They look just like two old vultures," he thought.

Then there was Mr. Fujinami Takeshi, the son of the host and the hope of the family, a livid youth with a thin moustache and unhealthy marks on his face like raspberries under the skin.

Still the geisha kept bringing more and more food in a desultory way quite unlike our system of fixed and regular courses. Still Ito kept pressing Geoffrey to eat, while at the same time apologizing for the quality of the food with exasperating repetition. Geoffrey had fallen into the error of thinking that the fish and its accompanying dishes which had been laid before him at first comprised the whole of the repast. He had polished them off with gusto; and had then discovered to his alarm that they were merely hors d'oeuvres. Nor did he observe until too late how little the other guests were eating. There was no discourtesy apparently in leaving the whole of a dish untasted, or in merely picking at it from time to time. Rudeness consisted in refusing any dish.

Plates of broiled meat and sandwiches arrived, bowls of soup, grilled eels on skewers—that most famous of Tokyo delicacies; finally, the inevitable rice with whose adhesive substance the Japanese epicure fills up the final crannies in his well-lined stomach. It made its appearance in a round drum-like tub of clean white wood, as big as a bandbox, and bound round with shining brass. The girls served the sticky grains into the china rice-bowl with a flat wooden ladle.

"Japanese people always take two bowls of rice at least," observed Ito. "One bowl very unlucky; at the funeral we only eat one bowl."

This to Geoffrey was the coup de grace. He had only managed to stuff down his bowl through a desperate sense of duty.

"If I do have a second," he gasped, "it will be my own funeral."

But this joke did not run in the well-worn lines of Japanese humour. Mr. Ito merely thought that the big Englishman, having drunk much sake, was talking nonsense.

All the guests were beginning to circulate now; the quadrille was becoming more and more elaborate. They were each calling on each other and taking wine. The talk was becoming more animated. A few bold spirits began to laugh and joke with the geisha. Some had laid aside their cloaks; and some even had loosened their kimonos at the neck, displaying hairy chests. The stiff symmetry of the dinner party was quite broken up. The guests were scattered like rooks, bobbing, scratching and pecking about on the yellow mats. The bright plumage of the geisha stood out against their sombre monotony.

Presently the geisha began to dance at the far end of the room. Ten of the little girls did their steps, a slow dance full of posturing with coloured handkerchiefs. Three of the elder geisha in plain grey kimonos squatted behind the dancers, strumming on their samisens. But there was very little music either in the instrument or in the melody. The sound of the string's twang and the rattle of the bone plectrum drowned the sweetness of the note. The result was a kind of dry clatter or cackle which is ingenious, but not pleasing.

Reggie Forsyth used to say that there is no melody in Japanese music; but that the rhythm is marvelous. It is a kind of elaborate ragtime without any tune to it.

The guests did not pay any attention to the performance, nor did they applaud when it was over.

Mr. Ito was consulting his agenda paper and his gold watch.

"You will now drink with these gentlemen," he said. Geoffrey must have demurred.

"It is Japanese custom," he continued; "please step this way; I will guide you."

Poor Geoffrey! it was his turn now to do the visiting figure, but his head was buzzing with some thirty cups of sake which he had swallowed out of politeness, and with the unreality of the whole scene.

"Can't do it," he protested; "drunk too much already."

"In Japan we say, 'When friends meet the sake sellers laugh!'" quoted the lawyer. "It is Japanese custom to drink together, and to be happy. To be drunk in good company, it is no shame. Many of these gentlemen will presently be drunk. But if you do not wish to drink more, then just pretend to drink. You take the cup, see; you lift it to your mouth, but you throw away the sake into the basin when you wash the cup. That is geisha's trick when the boys try to make her drunk, but she is too wise!"

Armed with this advice Geoffrey started on his round of visits, first to his host and then to his host's father. The face of old Mr. Fujinami Gennosuke was as red as beet-root, and his jaw was chewing more vigorously than ever. Nothing, however, could have been more perfect than his deportment in exchanging the cup with his guest. But no sooner had Geoffrey turned away to pay another visit than he became aware of a slight commotion. He glanced round and saw Mr. Fujinami, senior, in a state of absolute collapse, being conducted out of the room by two members of the family and a cluster of geisha.

"What has happened?" he asked in some alarm.

"It is nothing," said Ito; "old gentleman tipsy very quick."

Everybody now seemed to be smiling and happy. Geoffrey felt the curse of his speechlessness. He was brimming over with good humour, and was most anxious to please. The Japanese no longer appeared so grotesque as they had on his arrival. He was sure that he would have much in common with many of these men, who talked so good-naturedly among themselves, until the chill of his approach fell upon them.

Besides Ito and Sadako Fujinami, the only person present who could talk English at all fluently was that blotchy-faced individual, Mr. Fujinami Takeshi. The young man was in a very hilarious state, and had gathered around him a bevy of geisha with whom he was cracking jokes. From the nature of his gestures they must have been far from decorous.

"Please to sit down, my dear friend," he said to Geoffrey. "Do you like geisha girl?"

"I don't think they like me," said Geoffrey. "I'm too big."

"Oh, no," said the Japanese; "very big, very good. Japanese man too small, no good at all. Why do all geisha love sumotori (professional wrestlers)? Because sumotori very big; but this English gentleman bigger than sumotori. So this girl love you, and this girl, and this girl, and this very pretty girl, I don't know?"

He added a question in Japanese. The geisha giggled, and hid her face behind her sleeve.

"She say, she wish to try first. To try the cake, you eat some? Is that right?"

He repeated his joke in Japanese. The girl wriggled with embarrassment, and finally scuttled away across the room, while the others laughed.

All the geisha now hid their faces among much tittering.

Geoffrey was becoming harassed by this badinage; but he hated to appear a prude, and said:

"I have got a wife, you know, Mr. Fujinami; she is keeping an eye on me."

"No matter, no matter," the young man answered, waving his hand to and fro; "we all have wife; wife no matter in Japan."

At last Geoffrey got back to his throne at Asako's side. He was wondering what would be the next move in the game when, to his relief and surprise, Ito, after a glance at his watch, said suddenly:

"It is now time to go home. Please say good-bye to Mr. and Mrs. Fujinami."

A sudden dismissal, but none the less welcome.

The inner circle of the Fujinami had gathered round. They and the geisha escorted their guests to the rickshaws and helped them on with their cloaks and boots. There was no pressing to remain; and as Geoffrey passed the clock in the entrance hall he noticed that it was just ten o'clock. Evidently the entertainment was run with strict adherence to the time-table.

Some of the guests were too deep in sake and flirtation to be aware of the break-up; and the last vision granted to Geoffrey of the M.P.—the fat man with the wen—was of a kind of Turkey Trot going on in a corner of the room, and the thick arms of the legislator disappearing up the lady's kimono sleeve.



CHAPTER XII

FALLEN CHERRY-BLOSSOM

Iro wa nioedo Chirinuru wo— Woga yo tore zo Tsune naran? Ui no okuyama Kyo koete, Asaki yume miji Ei mo sezu.

The colours are bright, but The petals fall! In this world of ours who Shall remain forever? To-day crossing The high mountains of mutability, We shall see no fleeting dreams, Being inebriate no longer.

"O hayō gazaimas!" (Respectfully early!)

Twitterings of maid-servants salute the lady of the house with the conventional morning greeting. Mrs. Fujinami Shidzuye replies in the high, fluty, unnatural voice which is considered refined in her social set.

The servants glide into the room which she has just left, moving noiselessly so as not to wake the master who is still sleeping. They remove from his side the thick warm mattresses upon which his wife has been lying, the hard wooden pillow like the block of history, the white sheets and the heavy padded coverlet with sleeves like an enormous kimono. They roil up all these yagu (night implements), fold them and put them away into an unsuspected cupboard in the architecture of the veranda.

Mr. Fujinami Gentaro still snores.

After a while his wife returns. She is dressed for the morning in a plain grey silk kimono with a broad olive-green obi (sash). Her hair is arranged in a formidable helmet-like coiffure—all Japanese matrons with their hair done properly bear a remote resemblance to Pallas Athene and Britannia. This will need the attention of the hairdresser so as to wax into obedience a few hairs left wayward by the night in spite of that severe wooden pillow, whose hard, high discomfort was invented by female vanity to preserve from disarray the rigid order of their locks. Her feet are encased in little white tabi like gloves, for the big toe has a compartment all to itself. She walks with her toes turned in, and with the heels hardly touching the ground. This movement produces a bend of the knees and hips so as to maintain the equilibrium of the body, and a sinuous appearance which is considered the height of elegance in Japan, so that the grace of a beautiful woman is likened to "a willow-tree blown by the wind," and the shuffle of her feet on the floor-matting to the wind's whisper.

Mrs. Fujinami carries a red lacquer tray. On the tray is a tiny teapot and a tiny cup and a tiny dish, in which are three little salted damsons, with a toothpick fixed in one of them. It is the petit dejeuner of her lord. She put down the tray beside the head of the pillow, and makes a low obeisance, touching the floor with her forehead.

"O hayō gazaimas'!"

Mr. Fujinami stirs, gapes, stretches, yawns, rubs his lean fist in his hollow eyes, and stares at the rude incursion of daylight. He takes no notice of his wife's presence. She pours out tea for him with studied pose of hands and wrists, conventional and graceful. She respectfully requests him to condescend to partake. Then she makes obeisance again.

Mr. Fujinami yawns once more, after which he condescends. He sucks down the thin, green tea with a whistling noise. Then he places in his mouth the damson balanced on the point of the toothpick. He turns it over and over with his tongue as though he was chewing a cud. Finally he decides to eat it, and to remove the stone.

Then he rises from his couch. He is a very small wizened man. Dressed in his night kimono of light blue silk, he passes along the veranda in the direction of the morning ablutions. Soon the rending sounds of throat-clearing show that he has begun his wash. Three maids appear as by magic in the vacated room. The bed is rolled away, the matting swept, and the master's morning clothes are laid out ready for him on his return.

Mrs. Fujinami assists her husband to dress, holding each garment ready for him to slip into, like a well-trained valet. Mr. Fujinami does not speak to her. When his belt has been adjusted, and a watch with a gold fob thrust into its interstice, he steps down from the veranda, slides his feet into a pair of geta, and strolls out into the garden.

Mr. Fujinami's garden is a famous one. It is a temple garden many centuries old; and the eyes of the initiated may read in the miniature landscape, in the grouping of shrubs and rocks, in the sudden glimpses of water, and in the bare pebbly beaches, a whole system of philosophic and religious thought worked out by the patient priests of the Ashikaga period, just as the Gothic masons wrote their version of the Bible history in the architecture of their cathedrals.

But for the ignorant, including its present master, it was just a perfect little park, with lawns six feet square and ancient pine trees, with impenetrable forests which one could clear at a bound, with gorges, waterfalls, arbours for lilliputian philanderings and a lake round whose tiny shores were represented the Eight Beautiful Views of the Lake of Biwa near Kyoto.

The bungalow mansion of the family lies on a knoll overlooking the lake and the garden valley, a rambling construction of brown wood with grey scale-like tiles, resembling a domesticated dragon stretching itself in the sun.

Indeed, it is not one house but many, linked together by a number of corridors and spare rooms. For Mr. and Mrs. Fujinami live in one wing, their son and his wife in another, and also Mr. Ito, the lawyer, who is a distant relative and a partner in the Fujinami business. Then, on the farther side of the house, near the pebble drive and the great gate, are the swarming quarters of the servants, the rickshaw men, and Mr. Fujinami's secretaries. Various poor relations exist unobserved in unfrequented corners; and there is the following of University students and professional swashbucklers which every important Japanese is bound to keep, as an advertisement of his generosity, and to do his dirty work for him. A Japanese family mansion is very like a hive—of drones.

Nor is this the entire population of the Fujinami yashiki. Across the garden and beyond the bamboo grove is the little house of Mr. Fujinami's stepbrother and his wife; and in the opposite corner, below the cherry-orchard, is the inkyo, the dower house, where old Mr. Fujinami Gennosuke, the retired Lord—who is the present Mr. Fujinami's father by adoption only—watches the progress of the family fortunes with the vigilance of Charles the Fifth in the cloister of Juste.

* * * * *

Mr. Fujinami Gentaro shuffled his way towards a little room like a kind of summer-house, detached from the main building and overlooking the lake and garden from the most favourable point of vantage.

This is Mr. Fujinami's study—like all Japanese rooms, a square box with wooden framework, wooden ceiling, sliding paper shoji, pale golden tatami and double alcove. All Japanese rooms are just the same, from the Emperor's to the rickshaw-man's; only in the quality of the wood, in the workmanship of the fittings, in the newness and freshness of paper and matting, and by the ornaments placed in the alcove, may the prosperity of the house be known.

In Mr. Fujinami's study, one niche of the alcove was fitted up as a bookcase; and that bookcase was made of a wonderful honey-coloured satinwood brought from the hinterland of China. The lock and the handles were inlaid with dainty designs in gold wrought by a celebrated Kyoto artist. In the open alcove the hanging scroll of Lao Tze's paradise had cost many hundreds of pounds, as had also the Sung dish below it, an intricacy of lotus leaves caved out of a single amethyst.

On a table in the middle of this chaste apartment lay a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles and a yellow book. The room was open to the early morning sunlight; the paper walls were pushed back. Mr. Fujinami moved a square silk cushion to the edge of the matting near the outside veranda. There he could rest his back against a post in the framework of the building—for even Japanese get wearied by the interminable squatting which life on the floor level entails—and acquire that condition of bodily repose which is essential for meditation.

Mr. Fujinami was in the habit of meditating for one hour every morning. It was a tradition of his house; his father and his grandfather had done so before him. The guide of his meditations was the yellow book, the Rongo (Maxims) of Confucius, that Bible of the Far East which has moulded oriental morality to the shape of the Three Obediences, the obedience of the child to his parents, of the wife to her husband, and of the servant to his lord.

Mr. Fujinami sat on the sill of his study, and meditated. Around him was the stillness of early morning. From the house could be heard the swish of the maids' brooms brushing the tatami, and the flip-flap of their paper flickers, like horses' tails, with which they dislodged the dust from the walls and cornices.

A big black crow had been perched on one of the cherry-trees in the garden. He rose with a shaking of branches and a flapping of broad black wings. He crossed the lake, croaking as he flew with a note more harsh, rasping and cynical than the consequential caw of English rooks. His was a malevolent presence "from the night's Plutonian shore," the symbol of something unclean and sinister lurking behind this dainty beauty and this elaboration of cleanliness.

Mr. Fujinami's meditations were deep and grave. Soon he put down the book. The spectacles glided along his nose. His chest rose and fell quickly under the weight of his resting chin. To the ignorant observer Mr. Fujinami would have appeared to be asleep.

However, when his wife appeared about an hour and a half afterwards, bringing her lord's breakfast on another red lacquer table she besought him kindly to condescend to eat, and added that he must be very tired after so much study. To this Mr. Fujinami replied by passing his hand over his forehead and saying, "Dōmō! So des' ne! (Indeed, it is so!) I have tired myself with toil."

This little farce repeated itself every morning. All the household knew that the master's hour of meditation was merely an excuse for an after-sleep. But it was a tradition in the family that the master should study thus; and Mr. Fujinami's grandfather had been a great scholar in his generation. To maintain the tradition Mr. Fujinami had hired a starveling journalist to write a series of random essays of a sentimental nature, which he had published under his own name, with the title, Fallen Cherry-Blossoms.

Such is the hold of humbug in Japan that nobody in the whole household, including the students who respected nothing, ever allowed themselves the relief of smiling at the sacred hour of study, even when the master's back was turned.

* * * * *

"O hayō gozaimas'!"

"For honourable feast of yesterday evening indeed very much obliged!"

The oily forehead of Mr. Ito touched the matting floor with the exaggerated humility of conventional gratitude. The lawyer wore a plain kimono of slate-grey silk. His American manners and his pomposity had both been laid aside with the tweed suit and the swallow-tail. He was now a plain Japanese business man, servile and adulatory in his patron's presence. Mr. Fujinami Gentaro bowed slightly in acknowledgment across the remnants of his meal.

"It is no matter," he said, with a few waves of his fan; "please sit at your ease."

The two gentlemen arranged themselves squatting cross-legged for the morning's confidential talk.

"The cherry-flowers," Ito began, with a sweep of the arm towards the garden grove, "how quickly they fall, alas!"

"Indeed, human life also," agreed Mr. Fujinami. "But the guests of last evening, what is one to think?"

"Ma! In truth, sensei (master or teacher), it would be impossible not to call that Asa San a beauty."

"Ito Kun," said his relative in a tone of mild censure, "it is foolish always to think of women's looks. This foreigner, what of him?"

"For a foreigner, that person seems to be honourable and grave," answered the retainer, "but one fears that it is a misfortune for the house of Fujinami."

"To have a son who is no son," said the head of the family, sighing.

"Dōmō! It is terrible!" was the reply; "besides, as the sensei so eloquently said last night, there are so few blossoms on the old tree."

The better to aid his thoughts, Mr. Fujinami drew from about his person a case which contained a thin bamboo pipe, called kiseru in Japanese, having a metal bowl of the size and shape of the socket of an acorn. He filled this diminutive bowl with a little wad of tobacco, which looked like coarse brown hair. He kindled it from the charcoal ember in the hibachi. He took three sucks of smoke, breathing them slowly out of his mouth again in thick grey whorls. Then with three hard raps against the wooden edge of the firebox, he knocked out again the glowing ball of weed. When this ritual was over, he replaced the pipe in its sheath of old brocade.

The lawyer sucked in his breath, and bowed his head.

"In family matters," he said, "it is rude for an outside person to advise the master. But last night I saw a dream. I saw the Englishman had been sent back to England; and that this Asa San with all her money was again in the Fujinami family. Indeed, a foolish dream, but a good thing, I think!"

Mr. Fujinami pondered with his face inclined and his eyes shut.

"Ito Kun," he said at last, "you are indeed a great schemer. Every month you make one hundred schemes. Ninety of them are impracticable, eight of them are foolish, and two of them are masterpieces!"

"And this one?" asked Ito.

"I think it is impracticable," said his patron, "but it would be worth while to try. It would without doubt be an advantage to send away this foreigner. He is a great trouble, and may even become a danger. Besides, the house of Fujinami has few children. Where there are no sons even daughters are welcome. If we had this Asa, we could marry her to some influential person. She is very beautiful, she is rich, and she speaks foreign languages. There would be no difficulty. Now, as to the present, how about this Osaka business?"

"I have heard from my friend this morning," answered Ito; "it is good news. The Governor will sanction the establishment of the new licensed quarter at Tobita, if the Home Minister approves."

"But that is easy. The Minister has always protected us. Besides, did I not give fifty thousand yen to the funds of the Seiyukwai?" said Mr. Fujinami, naming the political party then in the majority in Parliament.

"Yes, but it must be done quickly; for opposition is being organised. First, there was the Salvation Army and the missionaries. Now, there are Japanese people, too, people who make a cry and say this licensed prostitute system is not suitable to a civilised country, and it is a shame to Japan. Also, there may be a political change very soon, and a new Minister."

"Then we would have to begin all over again, another fifty thousand yen to the other side."

"If it is worth it?"

"My father says that Osaka is the gold mine of Japan. It is worth all that we can pay."

"Yes, but Mr. Fujinami Gennosuke is an old man now, and the times are changing."

The master laughed.

"Times change," he said, "but men and women never change."

"It is true," argued Ito, "that rich and noble persons no longer frequent the yukwaku (pleasure enclosure). My friend, Suzuki, has seen the Chief of the Metropolitan Police. He says that he will not be able to permit Oiran Dochu another year. He says too that it will soon be forbidden to show the jorō in their windows. It will be photograph-system for all houses. It is all a sign of the change. Therefore, the Fujinami ought not to sink any more capital in the yukwaku."

"But men will still be men, they will still need a laundry for their spirits." Mr. Fujinami used a phrase which in Japan is a common excuse for those who frequent the demi-monde.

"That is true, sensei," said the counsellor; "but our Japan must take on a show of Western civilisation. It is the thing called progress. It is part of Western civilisation that men will become more hypocritical. These foreigners say our Yoshiwara is a shame; but, in their own cities, immoral women walk in the best streets, and offer themselves to men quite openly. These virtuous foreigners are worse than we are. I myself have seen. They say, 'We have no Yoshiwara system, therefore we are good.' They pretend not to see like a geisha who squints through a fan. We Japanese, we now become more hypocritical, because this is necessary law of civilisation. The two swords of the samurai have gone; but honour and hatred and revenge will never go. The kanzashi (hair ornaments) of the oiran will go too; but what the oiran lose, the geisha will gain. Therefore, if I were Fujinami San, I would buy up the geisha, and also perhaps the inbai (unregistered women)."

"But that is a low trade," objected the Yoshiwara magnate.

"It is very secret; your name need never be spoken."

"And it is too scattered, too disorganised, it would be impossible to control."

"I do not think it would be so difficult. What might be proposed is a geisha trust."

"But even the Fujinami have not got enough money."

"Within one month I guarantee to find the right men, with the money and the experience and the influence."

"Then the business would no longer be the Fujinami only—"

"It would be as in America, a combine, something on a big scale. In Japan one is content with such small business. Indeed, we Japanese are a very small people."

"In America, perhaps, there is more confidence," said the elder man; "but in Japan we say, 'Beware of friends who are not also relatives,' There is, as you know, the temple of Inari Daimyōjin in Asakusa. They say that if a man worships at that temple he becomes the owner of his friend's wealth. I fear that too many of us Japanese make pilgrimage to that temple after nightfall."

With those words, Mr. Fujinami picked up a newspaper to indicate that the audience was terminated; and Mr. Ito, after a series of prostrations, withdrew.

* * * * *

As soon as he was out of sight, Mr. Fujinami Gentaro selected from the pile in front of him a number of letters and newspapers. With these in his hand, he left the study, and followed a path of broad, flat stepping-stones across the garden towards the cherry-orchard. Here the way sloped rapidly downward under a drift of fallen petals. On the black naked twigs of the cherry-trees one or two sturdy blossoms still clung pathetically, like weather-beaten butterflies. Beyond a green shrubbery, on a little knoll, a clean newly-built Japanese house, like a large rabbit hutch, rested in a patch of sunlight. It was the inkyo, the "shadow dwelling" or dower house. Here dwelt Mr. Fujinami, senior, and his wife—his fourth matrimonial experiment.

The old gentleman was squatting on the balcony of the front corner room, the one which commanded the best view of the cherry-grove. He looked as if he had just been unpacked; for he was surrounded by reams and reams of paper, some white, and some with Chinese letters scrawled over them. He was busy writing these letters with a kind of thick paint-brush; and he was so deep in his task that he appeared not to notice his son's approach. His restless jaw was still imperturbably chewing.

"O hayō gozaimas'!"

"Tarō, yo! O hayō!" cried the old gentleman, calling his son by his short boy's name, and cutting off all honorifics from his speech. He always affected surprise at this visit, which had been a daily occurrence for many years.

"The cherry-flowers are fallen and finished," said the younger man. "Ah, human life, how short a thing!"

"Yes, one year more I have seen the flowers," said Mr. Fujinami Gennosuke, nodding his head and taking his son's generalisation as a personal reference. He had laid his brush aside; and he was really wondering what would be Gentaro's comment on last night's feast and its guests of honour.

"Father is practising handwriting again?"

The old man's mania was penmanship, just as his son's was literature. Among Japanese it is considered the pastime becoming to his age.

"My wrist has become stiff. I cannot write as I used to. It is always so. Youth has the strength but not the knowledge; age has the knowledge, but no strength."

As a matter of fact, Mr. Gennosuke was immensely satisfied with his calligraphy, and was waiting for compliments.

"But this, this is beautifully written. It is worthy of Kobo Daishi!" said the younger man, naming a famous scholar priest of the Middle Ages. He was admiring a scroll on which four characters were written in a perpendicular row. They signified, "From the midst of tranquillity I survey the world."

"No," said the artist; "you see the ten (point) there is wrong. It is ill-formed. It should be written thus."

Shaking back his kimono sleeve—he wore a sea-blue cotton kimono, as befitted his years—and with a little flourish of his wrist, like a golfer about to make his stroke, he traced off the new version of the character on the white paper.

Perched on his veranda, with his head on one side he looked very like the marabout stork, as you may see him at the Zoo, that raffish bird with the folds in his neck, the stained glaucous complexion, the bald head and the brown human eye. He had the same look of respectable rascality. The younger Fujinami showed signs of becoming exactly like him, although the parentage was by adoption only. He was not yet so bald. His black hair was patched with grey in a piebald design. The skin of the throat was at present merely loose, it did not yet hang in bags.

"And this Asa San?" remarked the elder after a pause; "what is to be thought of her? Last night I became drunk, as my habit is, and I could not see those people well."

"She is not loud-voiced and bold like foreign women. Indeed, her voice and her eyes are soft. Her heart is very good, I think. She is timid, and in everything she puts her husband first. She does not understand the world at all; and she knows nothing about money. Indeed, she is like a perfect Japanese wife."

"Hm! A good thing, and the husband?"

"He is a soldier, an honourable man. He seemed foolish, or else he is very cunning. The English people are like that. They say a thing. Of course, you think it is a lie. But no, it is the truth; and so they deceive."

"Ma, mendo-kusai (indeed, smelly-troublesome!) And why has this foreigner come to Japan?"

"Ito says he has come to learn about the money. That means, when he knows he will want more."

"How much do we pay to Asa San?"

"Ten per cent."

"And the profits last year on all our business came to thirty seven and a half per cent. Ah! A fine gain. We could not borrow from the banks at ten per cent. They would want at least fifteen, and many gifts for silence. It is better to fool the husband, and to let them go back to England. After all, ten per cent is a good rate. And we want all our money now for the new brothels in Osaka. If we make much money there, then afterwards we can give them more."

"Ito says that if the Englishman knows that the money is made in brothels, he will throw it all away and finish. Ito thinks it would be not impossible to send the Englishman back to England, and to keep Asa here in Japan."

The old man looked up suddenly, and for once his jaw stopped chewing.

"That would be best of all," he exclaimed. "Then indeed he is honourable and a great fool. Being an Englishman, it is possible. Let him go back to England. We will keep Asa. She too is a Fujinami; and, even though she is a woman, she can be useful to the family. She will stay with us. She would not like to be poor. She has not borne a baby to this foreigner, and she is young. I think also our Sada can teach her many things."

"It is of Sada that I came to speak to father," said Mr. Gentaro. "The marriage of our Sada is a great question for the Fujinami family. Here is a letter from Mr. Osumi, a friend of the Governor of Osaka. The Governor has been of much help to us in getting the concession for the new brothels. He is a widower with no children. He is a man with a future. He is protected by the military clan. He is wishful to marry a woman who can assist his career, and who would be able to take the place of a Minister's wife. Mr. Osumi, who writes, had heard of the accomplishments of our Sada. He mentioned her name to the Governor; and His Excellency was quite willing that Mr. Osumi should write something in a letter to Ito."

"Hm!" grunted the old gentleman, squinting sidelong at his son; "this Governor, has he a private fortune?"

"No, he is a self-made man."

"Then it will not be with him, as it was with that Viscount Kamimura. He will not be too proud to take our money."

The truth of the allusion to Viscount Kamimura was that the name of Sadako Fujinami had figured on the list of possible brides submitted to that young aristocrat on his return from England. At first, it seemed likely that the choice would fall upon her, because of her undisputed cleverness; and the Fujinami family were radiant at the prospect of so brilliant a match. For although nothing had been formally mentioned between the two families, yet Sadako and her mother had learned from their hairdresser that there was talk of such a possibility in the servants' quarter of the Kamimura mansion, and that old Dowager Viscountess Kamimura was undoubtedly making inquiries which could only point to that one object.

The young Viscount, however, on ascertaining the origin of the family wealth, eliminated poor Sadako from the competition for his hand.

It was a great disappointment to the Fujinami, and most of all to the ambitious Sadako. For a moment she had seen opening the doorway into that marvellous world of high diplomacy, of European capitals, of diamonds, duchesses and intrigue, of which she had read in foreign novels, where everybody is rich, brilliant, immoral and distinguished, and where to women are given the roles to play even more important than those of the men. This was the only world, she felt, worthy of her talents; but few, very few, just one in a million Japanese women, ever gets the remotest chance of entering it. This chance presented itself to Sadako—but for a moment only. The doorway shut to again; and Sadako was left feeling more acutely than before the emptiness of life, and the bitterness of woman's lot in a land where men are supreme.

Her cousin, Asako, by the mere luck of having had an eccentric parent and a European upbringing, possessed all the advantages and all the experience which the Japanese girl knew only through the glamorous medium of books. But this Asa San was a fool. Sadako had found that out at once in the course of a few minutes talk at the Maple Club dinner. She was sweet, gentle and innocent; far more Japanese, indeed, than her sophisticated cousin. Her obvious respect and affection for her big rough husband, her pathetic solicitude for the father whose face she could hardly remember and for the mother who was nothing but a name; these traits of character belong to the meek Japanese girl of Onna Daigaku (Woman's Great Learning), that famous classic of Japanese girlhood which teaches the submission of women and the superiority of men. It was a type which was becoming rare in her own country. Little Asako had nothing in common with the argumentative heroines of Bernard Shaw or with the desperate viragos of Ibsen, to whom Sadako felt herself spiritually akin. Asako must be a fool. She exasperated her Japanese cousin, who at the same time was envious of her, envious above all of her independent wealth. As she observed to her own mother, it was most improper that a woman, and a young woman too, should have so much money of her own. It would be sure to spoil her character.

Meanwhile Asako was a way of access to first-hand knowledge of that world of European womanhood which so strongly attracted Sadako's intelligence, that almost incredible world in which men and women were equal, had equal rights to property, and equal rights to love. Asako must have seen enough to explain something about it; if only she were not a fool. But it appeared that she had never heard of Strindberg, Sudermann, or d'Annunzio; and even Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde were unfamiliar names.



CHAPTER XIII

THE FAMILY ALTAR

Yume no ai wa Kurushikari keri? Odorokite Kaki-saguredomo Te ni mo fureneba.

(These) meetings in dreams How sad they are! When, waking up startled One gropes about— And there is no contact to the hand.

Miss Fujinami made up her mind to cultivate Asako's friendship, and to learn all that she could from her. So she at once invited her cousin to the mysterious house in Akasaka, and Asako at once accepted.

The doors seemed to fly open at the magic of the wanderer's return. Behind each partition were family retainers, bowing and smiling. Three maids assisted her to remove her boots. There was a sense of expectation and hospitality, which calmed Asako's fluttering shyness.

"Welcome! Welcome!" chanted the chorus of maids, "O agari nasaimashi! (pray step up into the house!)"

The visitor was shown into a beautiful airy room overlooking the landscape garden. She could not repress an Ah! of wonder, when first this fairy pleasance came in sight. It was all so green, so tiny, and so perfect,—the undulating lawn, the sheet of silver water, the pigmy forests which clothed its shores, its disappearance round a shoulder of rock into that hinterland of high trees which closed the vista and shut out the intrusion of the squalid city.

The Japanese understand better than we do the mesmeric effects of sights and sounds. It was to give her time to assimilate her surroundings that Asako was left alone for half an hour or so, while Sadako and her mother were combing their hair and putting their kimonos straight. Tea and biscuits were brought for her, but her fancy was astray in the garden. Already to her imagination a little town had sprung up along the shingles of the tiny bay which faced her; the sails of white ships were glimpsing where the sunlight struck the water; and from round the rock promontory she could catch the shimmer of the Prince's galleon with its high poop and stern covered with solid gold. He was on his way to rescue the lady who was immured in the top of the red pagoda on the opposite hill.

Asako's legs were getting numb. She had been sitting on them in correct Japanese fashion all this time. She was proud of the accomplishment, which she considered must be hereditary, but she could not keep it up for much longer than half an hour. Sadako's mother entered.

"Asa San is welcome."

Much bowing began, in which Asako felt her disadvantage. The long lines of the kimono, with the big sash tied behind, lend themselves with peculiar grace to the squatting bow of Japanese intercourse. But Asako, in the short blue jacket of her tailor-made serge, felt that her attitude was that of the naughty little boys in English picture books, bending over for castigation.

Mrs. Fujinami wore a perfectly plain kimono, blackish-brown in colour, with a plain gold sash. It is considered correct for middle-aged ladies in Japan to dress with modesty and reserve. She was tall for a Japanese woman and big-boned, with a long lantern-face, and an almost Jewish nose. The daughter was of her mother's build. But her face was a perfect oval, the melon-seed shape which is so highly esteemed in her country. The severity of her appearance was increased, by her blue-tinted spectacles; and like so many Japanese women, her teeth were full of gold stopping. She was resplendent in blue, the blue of the Mediterranean, with fronds of cherry-blossom and floating pink petals designed round her skirts and at the bottom of the long exaggerated sleeves. The sash of broad stiff brocade shone with light blue and silver in a kind of conventional wave pattern. This was tied at the back with a huge bow, which seemed perched upon its wearer like a gigantic butterfly alighting on a cornflower. Her straight black hair was parted on one side in "foreign" style. But her mother wore the helmet-like marumage, the edifice of conservative taste in married women, which looks more like a wig than like natural hair.

Rings sparkled on Sadako's fingers, and she wore a diamond ornament across her sash; but neither their taste nor their quality impressed her cousin. Her face was of the same ivory tint as Asako's, but it was hidden under a lavish coating of liquid powder. This hideous embellishment covers not only the Mongolian yellow, which every Japanese woman seems anxious to hide, but also the natural and charming nuances of young skin, under a white monotonous surface like a mask of clay. Painted roses bloomed on the girl's cheeks. The eyebrows were artificially darkened as well as the lines round the eyes. The face and its expression, in fact, were quite obscured by cosmetics; and Miss Fujinami was wrapped in a cloud of cheap scent like a servant-girl on her evening out.

She spoke English well. In fact, at school she had achieved a really brilliant career, and she had even attended a University for a time with the intention of reading for a degree, an attainment rare among Japanese girls. But overwork brought on its inevitable result. Books had to be banished, and glasses interposed to save the tired eyes from the light. It was a bitter disappointment for Sadako, who was a proud and ambitious girl, and it had not improved her disposition.

After the first formalities Asako was shown round the house. The sameness of the rooms surprised her. There was nothing to distinguish them except the different woods used in their ceilings and walls, a distinction which betrayed its costliness and its taste only to the practised eye. Each room was spotless and absolutely bare, with golden tatami, rice-straw mats with edgings of black braid, fixed into the flooring, by whose number the size of a Japanese room is measured. Asako admired the pale white shoji, the sliding windows of opaque glowing paper along the side of the room open to the outdoor light, the fusuma or sliding partitions between room and room, set in the framework of the house, some of them charmingly painted with sketches of scenery, flowers, or people, some of them plain cream-coloured boards flecked with tiny specks of gold.

Nothing broke the sameness of these rooms except the double alcove, or tokonoma with its inevitable hanging picture, its inevitable ornament, and its spray of blossom. Between the double niche stood that pillar of wood which Sadako explained as being the soul of the room, the leading feature from which its character was taken, being either plain and firm, or twisted and ornate, or else still unshaped, with the bosses of amputated branches seared and black protesting against confinement. The tokonoma, as the word suggests, must originally have been the sleeping-place of the owner of the room, for it certainly is the only corner in a Japanese house which is secured from draughts. But perhaps it was respect for invisible spirits which drove the sleeper eventually to abandon his coign of vantage to the service of aesthetic beauty, and to stretch himself on the open floor.

To Asako the rooms seemed all the same. Each gave the same impression of spotlessness and nudity. Each was stiffly rectangular like the honey squares fitted into a hive. Above all, there was nothing about any of them to indicate their individual use, or the character of the person to whom they were specially assigned. No dining-room, or drawing-room, or library.

"Where is your bedroom?" asked Asako, with a frank demand for that sign of sisterhood among Western girls; "I should so like to see it."

"I generally sleep," answered the Japanese girl, "in that room at the corner where we have been already, where the bamboo pictures are. This is the room where father and mother sleep."

They were standing on the balcony outside the apartment where Asako had first been received.

"But where are the beds?" she asked.

Sadako went to the end of the balcony, and threw open a big cupboard concealed in the outside of the house. It was full of layers of rugs, thick, dark and wadded.

"These are the beds," smiled the Japanese cousin. "My brother Takeshi has a foreign bed in his room; but my father does not like them, or foreign clothes, or foreign food, or anything foreign. He says the Japanese things are best for the Japanese. But he is very old-fashioned."