Madame Chrysantheme Part 3

"How do I like her?" And I reply in a low voice, but with great resolution:

"Not at all! I won't have that one. Never!"

I believe that this remark was almost understood in the circle around me. Consternation was depicted on every face, the jaws dropped, the pipes went out. And now I address my reproaches to Kangourou: "Why had he brought her to me in such pomp, before friends and neighbors of both s.e.xes, instead of showing her to me discreetly as if by chance, as I had wished? What an affront he will compel me now to put upon all these polite persons!"

The old ladies (the mamma no doubt and aunts), p.r.i.c.k up their ears, and M. Kangourou translates to them, softening as much as possible, my heartrending decision. I feel really almost sorry for them; the fact is, that for women who, not to put too fine a point upon it, have come to sell a child, they have an air I was not prepared for: I can hardly say an air of _respectability_ (a word in use with us, which is absolutely without meaning in j.a.pan), but an air of unconscious and good-natured simplicity; they are only accomplis.h.i.+ng an act perfectly admissible in their world, and really it all resembles, more than I could have thought possible, a _bona fide_ marriage.

"But what fault do I find with the little girl?" asks M. Kangourou, in consternation.

I endeavor to present the matter in the most flattering light:

"She is very young," I say; "and then she is too white, too much like our own women. I wished for a yellow one just as a change."

"But that is only the paint they have put on her, sir! Beneath it, I a.s.sure you, she is yellow."

Yves leans towards me and whispers:

"Look over there, brother, in that corner by the last panel; have you noticed the one who is sitting down?"

Not I. In my annoyance I had not observed her; she had her back to the light, was dressed in dark colors, and sat in the careless att.i.tude of one who keeps in the background. The fact is this one pleased me much better. Eyes with long lashes, rather narrow, but which would have been called good in any country in the world; almost an expression, almost a thought. A coppery tint on her rounded cheeks; a straight nose; slightly thick lips, but well modeled and with pretty corners.

Less young than Mdlle. Jasmin, about eighteen years of age perhaps, already more of a woman. She wore an expression of ennui, also of a little contempt, as if she regretted her attendance at a spectacle which dragged so much, and was so little amusing.

"M. Kangourou, who is that young lady over there, in dark blue?"

"Over there, sir? A young lady called Mdlle. Chrysantheme. She came with the others you see here; she is only here as a spectator. She pleases you?" said he with eager suddenness, espying a way out of his difficulty. Then, forgetting all his politeness, all his ceremoniousness, all his j.a.panesery, he takes her by the hand, forces her to rise, to stand in the dying daylight, to let herself be seen.

And she, who has followed our eyes and begins to guess what is on foot, lowers her head in confusion, with a more decided but more charming pout, and tries to step back, half sulky, half smiling.

"It makes no difference," continues M. Kangourou, "it can be arranged just as well with this one; she is not married either, sir!"

She is not married! Then why didn't the idiot propose her to me at once instead of the other, for whom I have a feeling of the greatest pity, poor little soul, with her pearly gray dress, her sprig of flowers, her expression which grows sadder, and her eyes which twinkle like those of a child about to cry.

"It can be arranged, sir!" repeats Kangourou again, who at this moment appears to me a go-between of the lowest type, a rascal of the meanest kind.

Only, he adds, we, Yves and I, are in the way during the negotiations.

And, while Mdlle. Chrysantheme remains with her eyelids lowered, as befits the occasion, while the various families, on whose countenances may be read every degree of astonishment, every phase of expectation, remain seated in a circle on my white mats, he sends us two into the verandah, and we gaze down into the depths below us, upon a misty and vague Nagasaki, a Nagasaki melting into a blue haze of darkness.

Then ensue long discourses in j.a.panese, arguments without end. M.

Kangourou, who is washerman and low scamp in French only, has returned for these discussions to the long formulas of his country. From time to time I express impatience, I ask this worthy creature whom I am less and less able to consider in a serious light:

"Come now, tell us frankly, Kangourou, are we any nearer coming to some arrangement? is all this ever going to end?"

"In a moment, sir, in a moment;" and he resumes his air of political economist seriously debating social problems.

Well, one must submit to the slowness of this people. And, while the darkness falls like a veil over the j.a.panese town, I have leisure to reflect, with as much melancholy as I please, upon the bargain that is being concluded behind me.

Night has closed in, deep night; it has been necessary to light the lamps.

It is ten o'clock when all is finally settled, and M. Kangourou comes to tell me:

"All is arranged, sir: her parents will give her up for twenty dollars a month,--the same price as Mdlle. Jasmin."

On hearing this, I am possessed suddenly with extreme vexation that I should have made up my mind so quickly to link myself in ever so fleeting and transient a manner with this little creature, and dwell with her in this isolated house.

We come back into the room; she is the center of the circle and seated; and they have placed the aigrette of flowers in her hair.

There is actually some expression in her glance, and I am almost persuaded that she--this one--- thinks.

Yves is astonished at her modest att.i.tude, at her little timid airs of a young girl on the verge of matrimony; he had imagined nothing like it in such a marriage as this, nor I either, I must confess.

"She is really very pretty, brother," said he; "very pretty, take my word for it!"

These good folks, their customs, this scene, strike him dumb with astonishment; he cannot get over it, and remains in a maze. "Oh! this is too much," and the idea of writing a long letter to his wife at Toulven, describing it all, diverts him greatly.

Chrysantheme and I join hands. Yves too advances and touches the dainty little paw;--after all, if I wed her, it is chiefly his fault; I should never have remarked her without his observation that she was pretty. Who can tell how this strange arrangement will turn out? Is it a woman or a doll? Well, time will show.

The families having lighted their many-colored lanterns swinging at the ends of slight sticks, prepare to beat a retreat with many compliments, bows and curtsies. When it is a question of descending the stairs, no one is willing to go first, and at a given moment, the whole party are again on all fours, motionless and murmuring polite phrases in undertones.

_"Haul back there!"_ said Yves, laughing and employing a nautical term used when there is a stoppage of any kind.

At length they all melt away, descend the stairs with a last buzzing accompaniment of civilities and polite phrases finished from one step to another in voices which gradually die away. He and I remain alone in the unfriendly empty apartment, where the mats are still littered with the little cups of tea, the absurd little pipes, and the miniature trays.

"Let us watch them go away!" said Yves, leaning out. At the door of the garden is a renewal of the same salutations and curtsies, and then the two groups of women separate, their bedaubed paper lanterns fade away trembling in the distance, balanced at the extremity of flexible canes which they hold in their finger-tips, as one would hold a fis.h.i.+ng-rod in the dark to catch night-birds. The procession of the unfortunate Mdlle. Jasmin mounts upwards, towards the mountain, while that of Mdlle. Chrysantheme winds downwards by a narrow old street, half stairway, half goat-path, which leads to the town.

Then we also depart. The night is fresh, silent, exquisite, the eternal song of the cicalas fills the air. We can still see the red lanterns of my new family, dwindling away in the distance, as they descend and gradually become lost in that yawning abyss, at the bottom of which lies Nagasaki.

Our way, too, lies downwards, but on an opposite slope by steep paths leading to the sea.

And when I find myself once more on board, when the scene enacted on the hill up above recurs to my mind, it seems to me that my betrothal is a joke, and my new family a set of puppets.

V.

_July 10th, 1885_.

It is three days now since my marriage was an accomplished fact.

In the lower part of the town, in the middle of one of the new cosmopolitan districts, in the ugly pretentious building which is a kind of register office, the deed has been signed and countersigned, with marvelous hieroglyphics, in a large book, in the presence of those ridiculous little creatures, formerly silken-robed _Samoura_, but now called policemen, and dressed up in tight jackets and Russian caps.

The ceremony took place in the full heat of mid-day; Chrysantheme and her mother arrived there together, and I went alone. We seemed to have met for the purpose of ratifying some discreditable contract, and the two women trembled in the presence of these ugly little individuals, who, in their eyes, were the personification of the law.

In the middle of their official scrawl, they made me write in French my name, Christian name, and profession. Then they gave me an extraordinary doc.u.ment on a sheet of rice-paper, which set forth the permission granted me by the civilian Authorities of the Island of Kiu-Siu, to inhabit a house situated in the suburb of Diou-djen-dji, with a person called Chrysantheme, the said permission being available under protection of the police, during the whole of my stay in j.a.pan.

In the evening, however, up there in our own quarter, our little marriage became a very pretty affair,--a procession carrying lanterns, a festive tea and some music. It was indeed high time.

Now we are almost an old married couple, and we are gently settling down into every-day habits.