Kimono Part 30

Reggie hated playing in public. He said that it was like stripping naked before a mult.i.tude, or like having to read one's own love letters aloud in a divorce court. But there is nothing more soothing than to play to one attentive listener, especially if that listener be feminine and if the interest shown be that personal interest, which with so many women takes the place of true appreciation, and which looks over the art to the artist.

Yae came with the girl friend, a lean and skinny half-caste girl like a gipsy, whom Yae patronized. She came once again with the girl friend; and then she came alone.

Reggie was relieved, and said so. Yae laughed and replied:

"But I brought her for your own sake; I always go everywhere by myself."

"Then please don't take me into consideration ever again," answered Reggie.

So those afternoons began which so soon darkened into evenings, while Reggie sat at the piano playing his thoughts aloud, and the girl lay on the sofa or squatted on the big cus.h.i.+on by the fire, with cigarettes within reach and a gla.s.s of liqueur, wrapped in an atmosphere of laziness and well-being such as she had never known before. Then Reggie would stop playing. He would sit down beside her, or he would take her on his knee; and they would talk.

He talked as poets talk, weaving stories out of nothing, finding laughter and tears in what she would have pa.s.sed by unnoticed. She talked to him about herself, about the daily doings of her home, its sadness and isolation since her father died. He had been the playfellow of her childhood. He had never grudged his time or his money for her amus.e.m.e.nt. She had been brought up like a little princess. She had been utterly spoiled. He had transferred to her precocious mind his love of excitement, his inquisitiveness, his courage and his lack of scruple; and then, when she was sixteen, he had died, leaving as his last command to the j.a.panese wife who would obey him in death as she had obeyed him living, the strict injunction that Yae was to have her own way always and in everything.

He left a respectable fortune, a j.a.panese widow and two worthless sons.

Poor Yae! Surrounded by the friends and amus.e.m.e.nts of an English girl's life, the qualities of her happy disposition might have borne their natural fruit. But at her father's death she found herself isolated, without friends and without amus.e.m.e.nts. She found herself marooned on the island of Eurasia, a flat and barren land of narrow confines and stunted vegetation. The j.a.panese have no use for the half-castes; and the Europeans look down upon them. They dwell apart in a limbo of which Baroness Miyazaki is the acknowledged queen.

Baroness Miyazaki is a stupendous old lady, whose figure might be drawn from some eighteenth-century comedy. Her late husband--and gossip says that she was his landlady during a period of study in England--held a high position in the Imperial Court. His wife, by a pomposity of manner and an a.s.sumption of superior knowledge, succeeded, where no other white woman has succeeded, in acquiring the respect and intimacy of the great ladies of j.a.pan. She has inculcated the accents of Pentonville, with its aitches dropped and recovered again, among the high j.a.panese aristocracy.

But first her husband died; and then the old Imperial Court of the Emperor Meiji pa.s.sed away. So Baroness Miyazaki had to retire from the society of princesses. She pa.s.sed not without dignity, like an old monarch _en disponibilite_, to the vacant throne of the Eurasian limbo, where her rule is undisputed.

Every Friday afternoon you may see her presiding over her little court in the Miyazaki mansion, with its mixture of tinsel and dust. The Bourbonian features, the lofty white wig, the elephantine form, the rustling taffeta, and the ebony stick with its ivory handle, leads one's thoughts backwards to the days of Richardson and Sterne.

But her loyal subjects who surround her--it is impossible to place them. They are poor, they are untidy, they are restless. Their black hair is straggling, their brown eyes are soft, their clothes are desperately European, but ill-fitting and tired. They chatter together ceaselessly and rapidly like starlings, with curious inflections in their English speech, and phrases s.n.a.t.c.hed up from the vernacular.

They are forever glancing and whispering, bursting at times into wild peals of laughter which lack the authentic ring of gladness. They are a people of shadows blown by the harsh winds of destiny across the face of a land where they can find no permanent resting place. They are the children of Eurasia, the unhappiest people on earth.

It was among these people that Yae's lot was cast. She stepped into an immediate ascendancy over them, thanks to her beauty, her personality and, above all, to her money. Baroness Miyazaki saw at once that she had a rival in Eurasia. She hated her, but waited calmly for the opportunity to a.s.sist in her inevitable collapse, a woman of wide experience watching the antics of a girl innocent and giddy, the Baroness playing the part of Elizabeth of England to Yae's Mary Queen of Scots.

Meanwhile, Yae was learning what the Eurasian girls were whispering about so continually--love affairs, intrigues with secretaries of South American legations, secret engagements, disguised messages.

This seed fell upon soil well-prepared. Her father had been a reprobate till the day of his death, when he had sent for his favourite j.a.panese girl to come and ma.s.sage the pain out of his wasted body. Her brothers had one staple topic of conversation which they did not hesitate to discuss before their sister--_geisha_, a.s.signation houses, and the licensed quarters. Yae's mind was formed to the idea that for grown-up people there is one absorbing distraction, which is to be found in the company of the opposite s.e.x.

There was no talk in the Smith's home of the romance of marriage, of the love of parents and children, which might have turned this precocious preoccupation in a healthy direction. The talk was of women all the time, of women as instruments of pleasure. Nor could Mrs.

Smith, the j.a.panese mother, guide her daughter's steps. She was a creature of duty, dry-featured and self-effaced. She did her utmost for her children's physical wants, she nursed them devotedly in sickness, she attended to their clothes and to their comforts. But she did not attempt to influence their moral ideas. She had given up any hope of understanding her husband. She schooled herself to accept everything without surprise. Poor man! He was a foreigner and had a fox (i.e. he was possessed); and unfortunately his children had inherited this incorrigible animal.

To please her daughter she opened up her house for hospitality with unseemly prompt.i.tude after her husband's death. The Smiths gave frequent dances, well-attended by young people of the Tokyo foreign community. At the first of these series, Yae listened to the pa.s.sionate pleadings of a young man called Hoskin, a clerk in an English firm. On the second opportunity she became engaged to him. On the third, she was struck with admiration and awe by a South American diplomat with the green ribbon of a Bolivian order tied across his false s.h.i.+rt front. Don Quebrado d'Acunha was a practiced hand at seduction and Yae became one of his victims soon after her seventeenth birthday, and just ten days before her admirer sailed away to rejoin his legitimate spouse in Guayaquil. The engagement with Hoskin still lingered on; but the young man, who adored her was haggard and pale.

Yae had a new follower, a teacher of English in a j.a.panese school, who recited beautifully and wrote poetry about her.

Then Baroness Miyazaki judged that her time was ripe. She summoned young Hoskin into her dowager presence, and, with a manner heavily maternal, she warned him against the lightness of his fiancee. When he refused to believe evil of her she produced a pathetic letter full of half-confessions, which the girl herself had written to her in a moment of expansion. A week later the young man's body was washed ash.o.r.e near Yokohama.

Yae was sorry to hear of the accident; but she had long ceased to be interested in Hoskin, the reticence of whose pa.s.sion had seemed like a touch of ice to her fevered nerves. But this was Baroness Miyazaki's opportunity to discredit Yae, to crush her rival out of serious compet.i.tion, and to degrade her to the _demi-monde_. It was done promptly and ruthlessly; for the Baroness's gossip carried weight throughout the diplomatic, professional and missionary circles, even where her person was held in ridicule. The facts of Hoskin's suicide became known. Nice women dropped Yae entirely; and bad men ran after her with redoubled zest. Yae did not realize her ostracism.

The Smith's dances next winter became so many compet.i.tions for the daughter's corruption, and were rendered brilliant by the presence of several of the young officers attached to the British Emba.s.sy, who made the running, and finally monopolized the prize.

Next year the Smiths acquired a motor-car which soon became Yae's special perquisite. She would disappear for whole days and nights.

None of her family could restrain her. Her answer to all remonstrances was:

"You do what you want; I do what I want."

That summer two English officers whom she especially favoured fought a duel with pistols--for her beauty or for her honour. The exact motive remained unknown. One was seriously wounded; and both of them had to leave the country.

Yae was grieved by this sudden loss of both her lovers. It left her in a condition of double widowhood from which she was most anxious to escape. But now she was becoming more fastidious. The school teachers and the dagos fascinated her no longer. Her soldier friends had introduced her into Emba.s.sy circles, and she wished to remain there.

She fixed on Aubrey Laking for her next attempt, but from him she received her first rebuff. Having lured him into a _tete-a-tete_, as her method was, she asked him for counsel in the conduct of her life.

"If I were you," he said dryly, "I should go to Paris or New York. You will find much more scope there."

Fortunately fate soon exchanged Aubrey Laking for Reggie Forsyth. He was just what suited her--for a time. But a certain impersonality in his admiration, his fits of reverie, the ascendancy of music over his mind, made her come to regret her more masculine lovers. And it was just at this moment of dissatisfaction that she first saw Geoffrey Barrington, and thought how lovely he would look in his uniform. From that moment desire entered her heart. Not that she wanted to lose Reggie; the peace and harmony of his surroundings soothed her like a warm and scented bath. But she wanted both. She had had two before, and had found them complimentary to one another and agreeable to her.

She wanted to sit on Geoffrey's knee and to feel his strong arms round her. But she must not be too sudden in her advances, or she would lose him as she had lost Laking.

It is easy to condemn Yae as a bad girl, a born _cocotte_. Yet such a judgment would not be entirely equitable. She was a laughter-loving little creature, a child of the sun. She never sought to do harm to anybody. Rather was she over-amiable. She wished above all to make her men friends happy and to be pleasing in their eyes. She was never swayed by mercenary motives. She was to be won by admiration, by good looks, and by personal distinction, but never by money. If she tired of her lovers somewhat rapidly, it was as a child tires of a game or of a book, and leaves it forgotten to start another.

She was a child with bad habits, rather than a mature sinner. It never occurred to her that, because Geoffrey Harrington was married, he at least ought to be immune from her attack. In her dreams of an earthly paradise there was no marrying or giving in marriage, only the sweet mingling of breath, the quickening of the heart-beats like the pulsation of her beloved motor-car, the sound as of violin arpeggios rising higher and ever higher, the pause of the ecstatic moment when the sense of time is lost--and then the return to earth on lazy languorous wings like a sea-gull floating motionless on a sh.o.r.eward breeze. Such was Yae's ideal of Love and of Life too. It is not for us to condemn Yae, but rather should we censure the blasphemy of mixed marriages which has brought into existence these thistledown children of a realm which has no kings or priests or laws or Parliaments or duty or tradition or hope for the future, which has not even an acre of dry ground for its heritage or any concrete symbol of its soul--the Cimmerian land of Eurasia.

Reggie Forsyth understood the pathos of the girl's position; and being a rebel and an anarchist at heart, he readily condoned the faults which she confided to him frankly. Gradually Pity, most dangerous of all counsellors, revealed her to him as a girl romantically unfortunate, who never had a fair chance in life, who had been the sport of bad men and fools, who needed only a measure of true friends.h.i.+p and affection for the natural suns.h.i.+ne of her disposition to scatter the rank vapours of her soul's night. What Reggie grasped only in that one enlightened moment when he had christened her Lamia, was the tragic fact that she had no soul.

CHAPTER XVI

THE GREAT BUDDHA

_Tsuki-yo yos.h.i.+ Tachitsu itsu netsu Mitsu-no-hama._

The sea-sh.o.r.e of Mitsu!

Standing, sitting or lying down, How lovely is the moonlight night!

Before the iris had quite faded, and before the azaleas of Hibiya were set ablaze--in j.a.pan they count the months by the blossoming of the flowers--Reggie Forsyth had deserted Tokyo for the joys of sea bathing at Kamakura. He attended at the Emba.s.sy for office hours during the morning, but returned to the seaside directly after lunch. This departure disarranged Geoffrey's scheme for his friend's salvation; for he was not prepared to go the length of sacrificing his daily game of tennis.

"What do you want to leave us for?" he remonstrated.

"The bathing," said Reggie, "is heavenly. Besides, next month I have to go into _villegiatura_ with my chief. I must prepare myself for the strain with prayer and fasting. But why don't you come down and join us?"

"Is there any tennis?" asked Geoffrey.

"There is a court, a gra.s.s court with holes in it; but I've never seen anybody playing."

"Then what is there to do?"

"Oh, bathing and sleeping and digging in the sand and looking at temples and bathing again; and next week there is a dance."

"Well, we might come down for that if her Ladys.h.i.+p agrees. How is Lamia?"

"Don't call her that, please. She has got a soul after all. But it is rather a disobedient one. It runs away like a little dog, and goes rabbit-hunting for days on end. She is in great form. We motor in the moonlight."

"Then I think it is quite time I did come," said Geoffrey.

So the Harringtons arrived in their sumptuous car on the afternoon before the dance of which Reggie Forsyth had spoken.