Kimono Part 23

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 hay[=o] gazaimas!_" (Respectfully early!)

Twitterings of maid-servants salute the lady of the house with the conventional morning greeting. Mrs. Fujinami s.h.i.+dzuye 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.pan, 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 _pet.i.t 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 hay[=o] 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 pa.s.ses 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 a.s.sists 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 As.h.i.+kaga 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 sh.o.r.es 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 un.o.bserved in unfrequented corners; and there is the following of University students and professional swashbucklers which every important j.a.panese is bound to keep, as an advertis.e.m.e.nt of his generosity, and to do his dirty work for him. A j.a.panese family mansion is very like a hive--of drones.

Nor is this the entire population of the Fujinami _yas.h.i.+ki_. 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 j.a.panese rooms, a square box with wooden framework, wooden ceiling, sliding paper _shoji_, pale golden _tatami_ and double alcove. All j.a.panese rooms are just the same, from the Emperor's to the rickshaw-man's; only in the quality of the wood, in the workmans.h.i.+p 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 cus.h.i.+on 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 j.a.panese 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 brus.h.i.+ng 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 sh.o.r.e," 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 pa.s.sing his hand over his forehead and saying, "_D[=o]m[=o]! 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 t.i.tle, _Fallen Cherry-Blossoms_.

Such is the hold of humbug in j.a.pan that n.o.body 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 hay[=o] 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 grat.i.tude. 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 j.a.panese 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.

"_D[=o]m[=o]!_ 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 j.a.panese, 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 coa.r.s.e 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.