Lafcadio Hearn Part 15

On his own initiative he undertook the task of approaching his foreign friend. Finding him favourably inclined, he suggested the marriage as a suitable one to Setsu's parents.

It is supposed that marriage in j.a.pan must be solemnised by a priest, but this is not so. A j.a.panese marriage is simply a legal pledge, and is not invested with any of the solemnity and importance cast around it in occidental society. A union between an Englishman and a j.a.panese woman can be dissolved with the greatest facility; in fact, it is seldom looked upon as an obligatory engagement. It is doubtful if Nis.h.i.+da, when he undertook to act as intermediary, or _Nakodo_, as they call it in j.a.pan, looked upon the contract entered into by Lafcadio Hearn and Setsu Koizumi as a permanent affair. Hearn from the first took it seriously, but it was certainly not until after the birth of his first child that the marriage was absolutely legalised according to English notions, and then only by his nationalising himself a j.a.panese citizen.

One of Hearn's saving qualities was compa.s.sion for the weak and suffering. The young girl's surroundings were calculated to inspire the deepest pity in the hearts of those admitted--as he was--behind the closely drawn veil of pride and reserve that the Samurai aristocrats drew between their poverty and public observation.

What the Samurai maiden,--brought up in the seclusion of Matsue--may have thought of the grey-haired, odd-looking little Irishman of forty-four (a patriarchal age in j.a.pan), who was offered to her as a husband, we know not. She accepted her fate, j.a.panese fas.h.i.+on, and as the years went by and she began to appreciate his gentlemanly breeding and chivalry, inherited as was hers from generations of well-bred ancestors, the fear and bewilderment with which he filled her during these first years of marriage, changed to a profound and true affection, indeed, to an almost reverential respect for the _Gakusha_ (learned person) who kept the pot boiling so handsomely, and was run after by all the American and English tourists at Tokyo.

So far as we can judge now, Setsu Koizumi can never have had any of the exotic charm of the b.u.t.terfly maidens of Kunisada, or the irresistible fascination ascribed to her countrywomen by foreign male visitors to j.a.pan. The Izumo type is not a good-looking one,--the complexion darker and less fresh than that of the Tokyo women--but comely, with the comeliness of truth, common-sense and goodness she always must have been.

Tender and true, as her _Yerbina_, or personal, name, "Setsu,"

signifies, she had learned in self-denial and poverty the virtues of patience and self-restraint--a daughter of j.a.pan--one of a type fast becoming extinct--who deemed it a fault to allow her personal trials to wound other hearts.

She may not have been obliged to submit to the trials of most j.a.panese wives, the whims and tyranny, for instance, of her father- and mother-in-law, or the drudgery to provide for, or wait upon a numerous j.a.panese household; but from many indications we know that her life sometimes was not by any means a bed of roses. Humorous, and at the same time pathetic, are her reminiscences of these first days of marriage, as related in later life.

"He was such an intense nature," she says, "and so completely absorbed in his work of writing that it made him appear strange and even outlandish in ordinary life. He even acknowledged himself that he must look like a madman."

During the course of his life, when undergoing any severe mental or physical strain, Hearn was subject to periods of hysterical trance, during which he lost consciousness of surrounding objects. There is a host of superst.i.tions amongst the j.a.panese connected with trances or fainting fits. Each human being is supposed to possess two souls. When a person faints they believe that one soul is withdrawn from the body, and goes on all sorts of unknown and mysterious errands, while the other remains with the envelope to which it belongs; but when this takes place a man goes mad; mad people are those who have lost one of their souls.

On first seeing her husband in this condition, the little woman was so terrified that she hastened to Nis.h.i.+da Sentaro to seek advice. "He always acted for us as middle-man in those Matsue days, and I confess I was afraid my husband might have gone crazy. However, I found soon afterwards that it was only the time of enthusiasm in thought and writing; and I began to admire him more on that account."

The calm and material comforts of domestic life gave Hearn, for a time, a more a.s.sured equilibrium, but these trances returned again with considerable frequency in later days.

Amenomori, his secretary at Tokyo, tells a story of waking one night and seeing a light in Hearn's study. He was afraid Hearn might be ill, and cautiously opened the door and peeped in. There he saw the little genius, absorbed in his work, standing at his high desk, his nose almost touching the paper on which he wrote. Leaf after leaf was covered with his small, delicate handwriting. After a while, Amenomori goes on, he held up his head, "and what did I see? It was not the Hearn I was familiar with; his face was mysteriously white; his eyes gleamed. He appeared like one in touch with some unearthly presence."

Many other peculiarities and idiosyncrasies used to cause his wife much perturbation of soul. "He had a rare sensibility of feeling,"[21] she says, "also peculiar tastes." One of his peculiar tastes, apparently, was his love of cemeteries. She could not find out what he found so interesting in ancient epitaphs and verses. When at k.u.mamoto he told her that he had "found a pleasant place." When he offered to take her there, she found that it was through a dark path leading to a cemetery. He said, "Stop and listen. Do you hear the voices of the frogs and the Uguisu singing?" The poor little woman could only tremble at the dark and the eerieness.

[21] It is well to remember that Mrs. Hearn cannot speak or write a word of English; all her "Reminiscences" are transcribed for her by the j.a.panese poet, Yone Noguchi.

She gives a funny picture of herself and Lafcadio, in a dry-goods store, when clothes had to be bought "at the changing of the season," he selecting some gaudy garment with a large design of sea-waves or spider-nests, declaring the design was superb and the colour beautiful.

"I often suspected him," the simple woman adds, "of having an unmistakable streak of pa.s.sion for gay things--however, his quiet conscience held him back from giving way to it."

His incurable dislike, too, to conform to any of the rules of etiquette--looked upon as all-important in j.a.pan, especially for people in official positions--was a continued source of trouble to the little woman. She could hardly, she says, induce him to wear his "polite garments," which were _de rigueur_ at any official ceremony. On one occasion, indeed, he refused to appear when the Emperor visited the Tokyo College because he would not put on his frock coat and top hat.

The difficulty of language was at first insuperable. After a time they inst.i.tuted the "Hearn San Kotoba," or Hearnian language, as they called it, but in these Matsue days an interpreter had to be employed. The "race problem," however, was the real complication that beset these two.

That comrades.h.i.+p such as we comprehend it in England could exist between two nationalities, so fundamentally different as Setsu Koizumi's and Lafcadio Hearn's, is improbable if not impossible. "Even my own little wife," Hearn writes years afterwards, "is somewhat mysterious still to me, though always in a lovable way--of course a man and a woman know each other's hearts; but outside of personal knowledge, there are race tendencies difficult to understand."

CHAPTER XVIII THE KATCHIU-YAs.h.i.+KI

"The real charm of woman in herself is that which comes after the first emotion of pa.s.sionate love has died away, when all illusions fade to reveal a reality lovelier than any illusion which has been evolved behind the phantom curtain of them.

And again marriage seems to me a certain destruction of all emotion and suffering. So that afterwards one looks back at the old times with wonder. One cannot dream or desire anything more after love is trans.m.u.ted into marriage. It is like a haven from which you can see currents rus.h.i.+ng like violet bands beyond you out of sight. It seems to me (though I am a poor judge of such matters) that it does not make a man any happier to have an intellectual wife, unless he marries for society. The less intellectual, the more capable, so long as there is neither coa.r.s.eness nor foolishness; for intellectual converse a man can't really have with women.

Woman is antagonistic to it. An emotional truth is quite as plain to the childish mind, as to the mind of Herbert Spencer or of Clifford. The child and the G.o.d come equally near to the Eternal truth. But then marriage in a complex civilisation is really a terrible problem; there are so many questions involved."

As summer advanced Hearn found his little two-storeyed house by the Ohasigawa--although dainty as a birdcage--too cramped for comfort, the rooms being scarcely higher than steams.h.i.+p cabins, and so narrow that ordinary mosquito nets could not be suspended across them.

On the summit of the hill above Matsue stood the ancient castle of the former daimyo of the province. In feudal days, when the city was under military sway, the finest homesteads of the Samurai cl.u.s.tered round its Cyclopean granite walls; now owing to changed conditions and the straitened means of their owners, many of these _Katchiu-yas.h.i.+ki_ were untenanted. Hearn and his wife were lucky enough to secure one. Though he no longer had his outlook over the lake, with the daily coming and going of fis.h.i.+ng-boats and sampans, he had an extended view of the city and was close to the university. But above all he found compensation in the s.p.a.cious j.a.panese garden, outcome of centuries of cultivation and care.

The summer pa.s.sed in this j.a.panese _Yas.h.i.+ki_ was as happy as any in Hearn's life, and one to which he perpetually looked back with longing regret. Wandering from room to room, sitting in sunned s.p.a.ces where leaf shadows trembled on the matting, or gazing into the soft green, dreamy peace of the landscape garden, he found a sanctuary where the soul stopped elbowing and trampling, and being elbowed and trampled--a free, clear s.p.a.ce, where he could see clearly, breathe serenely, fully.

Discussions with publishers, differences of opinion with friends were soothed and forgotten; his domestic arrangements seemed all that he could have expected, and, as he was receiving a good salary, and life was not expensive in the old city, money difficulties for the moment receded into the back-ground. His health improved. He weighed, he said, twenty pounds more than he did when he first arrived ... but, he adds, this is perhaps because I am eating three full meals a day instead of two.

Echoes from the outer world reached him at intervals, such as the announcement of the marriage of Miss Elizabeth Bisland.

He describes himself as dancing an Indian war-dance of exultation in his j.a.panese robes, to the unspeakable astonishment of his placid household.

After which he pa.s.sed two hours in a discourse in "the Hearnian dialect." Subject of exultation and discourse--the marriage of Miss Elizabeth Bisland.

Hearn's description of the old _Yas.h.i.+ki_ garden is done with all the descriptive charm of which he was a master. Many others have described j.a.panese gardens, but none have imparted the mental "atmosphere," the special peculiarities that make them so characteristic of the genius of the people that have originated them. It is impossible to find s.p.a.ce to follow him into all the details of his "garden folk lore" as he calls it; of _Hijo_, things without desire, such as stones and trees, and _Ujo_, things having desire, such as men and animals, the miniature hills clothed with old trees, the long slopes of green, shadowed by flowering shrubs, like river banks, verdant elevations rising from s.p.a.ces of pale yellow sand, smooth as a surface of silk, miming the curves and meanderings of a river course. Much too beautiful, these sanded s.p.a.ces, to be trodden on; the least speck of dirt would mar their effect, and it required the trained skill of an experienced native gardener--a delightful old man--to keep them in perfect form.

Lightly and daintily as the shadows of the tremulous leaves of the bamboo-grove and the summer light that touches the grey stone lanterns, and the lotus flowers on the pond, so does his genius flit from subject to subject, conjuring up and idealising ancient tradition and superst.i.tions. The whole of his work seems transfused with mystic light.

We can hear him talking with Kinjuro, the venerable gardener; we can catch the song of the caged _Uguisu_, an inmate of the establishment, presented to him by one of the sweetest ladies in j.a.pan, the daughter of the Governor of Izumo.

The _Uguisu_, or j.a.panese nightingale, is supposed to repeat over and over again the sacred name of the Sutras, "Ho-ke-kyo," or Buddhist confession of faith. First the warble; then a pause of about five seconds, then a slow, sweet, solemn utterance of the holy name.

They planted, his wife tells us, some morning glories in summer. He watched them with the greatest delight, until they bloomed, and then was equally wretched when he saw them withering.

One early winter morning he noticed one tiny bloom, in spite of the sharp frost; he was delighted and surprised, and exclaimed in j.a.panese, "Utsukus.h.i.+ yuki, anata, nanbo shojik" (What a lovely courage, what a serious intention).

When, the next morning, the old gardener picked it, Hearn was in despair. "That old man may be good and innocent, but he was brutal to my flower," he said. He was depressed all day after this incident.

He had already, he declared, become a little too fond of his dwelling-place; each day after returning from his college duties and exchanging his teacher's uniform for the infinitely more comfortable j.a.panese robe, he found more than compensation for the weariness of five cla.s.s-hours in the simple pleasure of squatting on the shady verandah overlooking the gardens. The antique garden walls, high mossed below their ruined coping of tiles, seemed to shut out even the murmur of the city's life. There were no sounds but the voices of birds, the shrilling of _semi_, or, at intervals, the solitary splash of a diving frog, and those walls secluded him from much more than city streets; outside them hummed the changed j.a.pan telegraphs, and newspapers, and steam-s.h.i.+ps.

Within dwelt the all-reposing peace of nature, and the dreams of the sixteenth century; there was a charm of quaintness in the very air, a faint sense of something viewless and sweet; perhaps the gentle beauty of dead ladies who lived when all the surroundings were new. For they were the gardens of the past. The future would know them only as dreams, creations of a forgotten art, whose charm no genius could produce.

The working of Hearn's heart and mind at this time is an interesting psychological study. He had been wont to declare that his vocation was a monastic one. He now initiated an asceticism as severe in its discipline as that of St. Francis of a.s.sisi on the Umbrian hills. The code on which he moulded his life was formulated according to the teaching of the great Gautama. If the soul is to attain life and effect progress, continual struggle against temptation is necessary. Appet.i.tes must be restrained. Indulgence means retrogression.

It is not without a sense of amus.e.m.e.nt that we observe the complex personality, Lafcadio Hearn, in the Matsue phase of self-suppression and discipline. Well might Kinjuro, the old gardener, tell him that he had seven souls. A dignified university professor had taken the place of the erratic Bohemian who frequented the levee at Cincinnati, and of the starving little journalist who, arrayed in reefer coats, flannel s.h.i.+rt, and outlandish hat, used to appear in the streets of New Orleans. Now clad in official robes, he pa.s.sed out through a line of prostrate servants on his way to college, each article of clothing having been handed to him, as he dressed, with endless bows of humility and submission by the daughter of a line of feudal n.o.bles.

He gives to his sister the same account of his austere, simple day, as to Basil Hall Chamberlain: the early morning prayer and greeting of the sun, his meals eaten alone before the others, the prayers again at eventide, some of them said for him as head of the house. Then the little lamps of the _kami_ before the shrine were left to burn until they went out; while all the household waited for him to give the signal for bedtime, unless, as sometimes, he became so absorbed in writing as to forget the hour.

Sometimes, however, in spite of severe discipline and mortification of the flesh, ghostly reminders returned to prove that the old self was very real indeed.

The "Markham Girl" is certainly well done. "I asked myself: 'If it was I?' and conscience answered: 'If it was you, in spite of love, and duty, and honour, and h.e.l.l fire staring you in the face, you would have gone after her....'" Then he adds a tirade as to his being a liar and quibbler when he attempts to contradict the statement, "and that's why I am poor and unsuccessful, void of mental balance, and an exile in j.a.pan."

Or a sinister note is struck, as in a letter to Basil Hall Chamberlain, alluding to a story in Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister," "The New Melusine,"

of which the application is apparent. A man was loved by a fairy; and she told him she must either say good-bye, or that he must become little like herself and go to dwell with her in her father's kingdom. She put a gold ring on his finger that made him small, and they entered into their tiny world. The man was greatly petted by the fairy folk, and had everything given to him which he could desire. In spite of it all, however, although he had a pretty child too, he became ungrateful and selfish and got tired, and dreamed of being a giant. He filed the ring off his finger, and became big again, and ran away to spend the gold in riotous living. "The fairy was altogether j.a.panese--don't you think so?

And the man was certainly a detestable fellow."

Though the little man permitted himself such outbursts as this on paper, he soon crept back to the grim reality of a wooden pillow and j.a.panese food; back to a kingdom undisturbed by electrical storms of pa.s.sion, to interviews with college students and communion with a wife whose knowledge was circ.u.mscribed by Kanbara's "Greater Knowledge for Women."

"Never be frightened at anything but your own heart," he writes to one of these Matsue pupils, when giving him good advice some years later.

Poor Lafcadio! Good reason had he to be frightened of that wild, wayward, undisciplined heart that so often had betrayed him in days gone by.

When in j.a.pan we heard whispers of Hearn having fallen a victim to the wiles of the accomplished ladies who abide in the street of the Geisha.

After his marriage to Setsu Koizumi, however, not even from his enemies, and their name was legion, at k.u.mamoto, Kobe, or Tokyo, did we ever hear the faintest suggestion of scandal connected with his name. In j.a.pan, where there is no privacy of any sort in everyday life, where, if a man is faithless to his wife, all the quarter where he lives knows of it, and the wife accepts it as her _Ingwa_--or sin in a former state of existence--it would have been impossible for Hearn to have stepped over the line, however tentatively, without its being known and talked about.

A pleasant vision is the one we conjure up of him on the verandah of the old _Yas.h.i.+ki_, squatted, Buddha-wise, smoking a tiny long-stemmed j.a.panese pipe, his little wife seated near him, relating, by the aid of the interpreter, the superst.i.tions and legends of the ancient Province of the G.o.ds.