H. De Vere Stacpoole

“ He came up the hill-path, and as he came the wind, blowing against him, brought a perfume with it, the perfume of rain-wet azaleas. During the day and the previous night dozens of blossoms had broken forth, filling the garden with their fragrance and beauty; dozens more would be born ere the morrow under the light of the silvery moon now gliding up over the hill-tops behind a tracery of flying, fleecy clouds.
As he approached the house, he saw through the open panel space the silhouettes of Pine-breeze and Cherry-blossom. ”

“ They passed up a by-street and then up a steep path, till they came to a gate shadowed by lilac trees. The gate led to a tiny demesne, a long, white, two-storied house, before which lay a grass plot, at the far end of the house some cherry trees, and a space that might be used as a garden.
From the veranda of the House of the Clouds one could look down on Nagasaki and the harbor that pierces the land like a crooked sword. The hum of Jinrikisha Street came up, mixed with the eternal song of the cicalas. ”

“ Here in the shop of Danjuro, in a semi-twilight, glimmer demons and beasts in porcelain and bronze. The frightful face of Akudogi shouts at you from the wall, the lotus expands over pools in the silent land of lacquer, and the hundred guinea ivory Mousmé, ten inches high, trips beneath her ivory umbrella, ever on the way to some fanciful pageant that had once existed in her creator’s dreams.
Here is a Jap baby, about as big and as round as a tangerine orange, feeding ducks. Here a little box a size larger than a walnut. Open it; inside are seated a man and boy playing some game with dice. ”

“ Passion, when it rises to this dimension in the mind of a man, has beautiful attributes as well as vile, it holds in its hands pictures of perfect innocence, besides the others.
The devil takes care of that!
He saw Jane not only as she was, but as she had been, fair, and fresh, and innocent, against the background of the beeches round Glenbruach, and the sea lochs, and the purple hills.
What he did with his body that day in Arita, or where he wandered, he could never tell, for his mind was fighting a battle so fierce that all intelligent perception of outward things was blurred. ”

“ In the shop of Danjuro you are gazing, not upon bronzes and lacquers, but upon the mind of Japan, partly made visible. There is here evidence of patience and labor sufficient to conquer the world, beauty enough to charm the world, and ferocity enough to terrify it.
There is nothing so strange on earth as this art that reveals in glimpses the exquisite and the awful, where the lily blossoms and the dragon tramples it under foot. ”

“ Mac sighed as if with regret at the impossibility of such a delightful deal as that.
“It’s rather jolly going into business,” continued Leslie, dreamily gazing at the azaleas. “Only crime I’ve never committed, except murder and a few others. Good God! when I started in life I never thought I’d end my days peddling paper lanterns, and cheating people into buying penny-a-dozen kakemonos for a shilling a-piece. Don’t talk to me; all trade is cheating.” ”

“ Between the cypress trees, beyond the azaleas, beyond country broken by sunlight and cloud shadows, lay the sea hills of Tanagura in the dimmest bluest distance.
“If I could get that into a gold frame,” said Leslie, as he inhaled the delicious perfume of the azaleas and bathed his naked foot in the tiny cascade breaking from the bank on which they sat, “I’d take it to London and send it to the Academy—and they’d reject it.”
“Vara likely,” replied Mac. “It is no fit for a peecture. Who ever saw the like of yon out of Japan? It’s nought but a fakement.” ”

“ Look there!”
“Whaur?”
“There!” cried Leslie, turning from the direction of Fubasami and the beginning of the great Nikko valley before them, and pointing backwards away towards Kureise over an expanse of distant country where the clouds were drawing soft shadows across the rice fields and the sinuous hills; over little woods of fir and cryptomeria trees, lakes where the lotus flowers spread in summer, and the king-fisher flashed like a jewel; over occasional fields of flowers, flowers that grew by the million and the million. ”

“ He was so full of mystery that she never had even dreamt of eating him, and she still possessed him. He was upstairs in the drawer of a lacquered cabinet, cracked, it is true, by changes of temperature and warped in the back, for age touched all things, even sugar-candy dragons.
Then there was her life at the House of the Clouds, the mission school; rainy days when she splashed through the mud under a broad paper umbrella; fine days when she flew kites with M’Gourley San, played hop-scotch with Kiku San and Kitsune Ken, with all sorts of other Sans, mostly with shaved heads. ”

“ Babies, temples, tea-houses, streets upon streets of houses that look as if you could flatten them out with the blows of a shovel, bursts of cherry-blossoms, tripping Mousmés, stone monsters, awful, yet pathetic with the gray of lichen and the green of moss, a courtyard with a twisted fir tree leaning across it, laughter, and the tune of a chamécen running through it all, that is the impression that a riksha ride through Nagasaki in [pg 110] spring would leave on the mind, were not the picture blurred by the European element. ”

“ M’Gourley sat down on the veranda, and Campanula sat down beside him on a little fur rug made from the skin of an Ounce, or some such small animal. She looked sad and depressed, and her eyes wandered about the landscape garden as if questioning its hills, its streams, its old, old forests.
“Campanula,” said Mac, taking her little hand between his great rough, red paws, “what ails you, child? You look sad and fashed, what’s been worrying you?”
“I have been to see O Toku San,” replied Campanula, speaking in Japanese. “She is dying. ”

“ Liars, somehow, are always sure of an audience; you and I, who speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, languish in conversation and are not heard, whilst your mendacity-monger holds the floor and absorbs the interest.
So Kiku San went on spinning her tale, and Campanula San sat opposite to her and listened, shivering at the dismal pictures being raised before her.
Then, all at once, from below came the irate voice of Mr. Initogo calling Kiku the “Heedless One.” ”

“ He saw the sunlit Nikko road, the valley of the crimson azaleas, the Lost One who had loved him as no other being had loved him—the one he had lost for ever.
She was dead, yet it was denied to him to find her, and clasp her in his arms, and die with her.
[pg 305] Death was nothing, but never to find her again, never to see her again, or touch her small body, that was an agony far beyond death. ”

“ Jinrikisha Street, and for Jinrikisha Street read nearly every other street in sea-board Japan, is a picture, as I have said, spoiled as if by a meddlesome English child.
Danjuro’s shop was all open in front so that you could come right in past the bronze stork on the tortoise, past the leaping dragon made of jointed steel, a dragon hard as adamant yet flexible as india-rubber. Then you met Danjuro, and he sank towards the floor and hissed at you by way of welcome. ”

“ They were not alone here on the utmost heights; women, gayly dressed, were passing into the temple behind them to pray and clap their hands before their gods. Women surrounded them, laughing, chattering, dispelling quaint perfumes on the air from large incessantly-waving [pg 243] fans. From the tea houses behind the temple came the thready music of chamécens and sounds of unseen festivity; and from the great park beyond, through the hot night, the perfume of azaleas and the odor of the dew-wet cryptomeria trees.
“Come,” said Jane, “let us go and take the picture with us before it gets dulled. ”

“ That a woman might be pure in mind, even if married to a “red-headed runt” like George du Telle. That if that was so she was a happy woman, and that if a man loved her, loved he never so madly, it would be a strange expression of that love to blast her happiness, and soil her soul.
It would not be love, but lust—the passion of those devils which Mr. Channing had hinted at that evening, those people of the night who slumber not nor sleep. ”

“ You cannot imagine the size of Nagasaki till you drive through it in a swift-running riksha, nor the quaintness, nor the terror that causes your heart to fly upwards as your riksha man shaves a baby, not with a razor, but with the off wheel.
Boy babies fighting tops, girls bouncing colored balls, flights of children whose clogs clatter like the dominoes in an Italian restaurant as they pursue each other in some mysterious game—everywhere children, a shifting, colored maze in which the eye gets tangled and lost. ”

“ He will never come again to lie in the hammock beneath the cherry trees. Never more shall Lotus-bud hand him the night lantern to light him to his bed, nor thy small hands, O Pine-breeze, bear him the brown leather cigar-case that thy small nose loved to smell! ”

“ Leslie, notwithstanding the years that had passed since their last meeting, saw in her mentally little change. She was the same Jane who had once hacked his shins, when they were boy and girl together, up in Scotland, and then flung herself on his neck in a burst of repentance and tears. Emotional, good-hearted, selfish—giving herself away one moment, but always saved the next by a latent discretion that was to her flighty [pg 103] nature as a gyroscope. ”

“ As for Cherry-blossom, she told her, missionary fashion, that she would certainly go to hell and be burnt like Lotus-bud’s loaves if she did not stop vanishing down town with riksha men; and Cherry-blossom ground her nose on the matting and wept, and promised reformation, and went out two nights afterwards with No. 173 to a grand blaze up at the O Suwa temple, where she devoured candied beans and comfits, and bowed before graven images, and had a general good time with a host of “heathen” people like herself. ”

“ Yet he always slept with a Smith and Wesson convenient, for a Japanese robber is a business man, without a heart, but with a desire for plunder keen as the edge of a sword.
Leslie’s bedroom was a very bare apartment, furnished mostly with a nothing. A futon and pile of pillows—he had tried the makura or Japanese pillow, but given it up in disgust—under a mosquito-net, a wash-stand, a stick-rack, and some pegs to hang clothes on, constituted the remainder of the furniture. ”

“ This blind man was nothing but an ordinary blind man of Japan such as one might see any day. The broken lath that had troubled him all night was but a broken lath; the song of the mushi that had started that infernal sound in his head was but the sound of an insect buzzing; the azalea that had caused that frightful dream was but a flower.
These slight things, he told himself, acting on a brain [pg 260] made over-sensitive by opium, were not warnings, but simple causes of complex effects. And he passed on his way, cursing himself for a fool, till he reached the shop of Mr. Initogo. ”

“ Taro cried out to the Daimiyo to take him to the little girl, but the Daimiyo did not heed, for to him the lantern had shown Osaka Castle stormed by knights in armor, and the spears of the Samurai all bent towards its walls under a roof of flying arrows. Towards this sight he ran, and Taro dropping the lantern, it went out, and the Daimiyo awoke in his palace and Taro awoke in the tea house upon the futon, where he slept beside his father. ”

“ Leslie, with newly acquired interest in life, had grown five years younger in mind, and as for Mac, he had grown ten degrees more human. His withered fatherly instincts were awakened—at least they opened one eye—and it was pretty to see him with his gnarled, horny hands and intent, weather-beaten face making chickens for the Lost One out of orange pips. ”

“ Women are curious creatures, as the philosophic Mac once said. But on the whole, in their way, I think men are just as strange.
Kite-flying had now been put aside with other childish things, and the tiny hands that had grasped the sugar-candy dragon were now preparing to grasp the real business of life: a business whose main objective was the happiness and comfort of “He who is taller than the tallest of trees.”
Pine-breeze, Lotus-bud, and Cherry-blossom. ”

“ Pine-breeze appeared on the veranda, and after Pine-breeze the other Mousmés all busy, or appearing so, dragging out futon to air for a moment in the morning brightness, and lacquer screens to be dusted.
“Summer has come in the night,” said Lotus-bud, pointing out the fallen cherry-blossoms. ”

“ He must leave Japan, leave Campanula, for, deep in his heart, something told him that Campanula could have no place in that new life. It meant the social ruin of Jane du Telle.
Here, alone, away from the object of his passion, all this was very clear.
Then that same old Scotch ancestor, with the long upper lip, and the crude common sense, and the rigid [pg 216] belief in God and the law, came out of his cell and spoke to this effect. There is no excuse before God or man for adultery. Love, the child of God, has no part therein, but Lust, the child of the devil, and the end of Lust is Hell. ”

“ His share in M’Gourley’s business was to be left for Campanula.
It is true he knew little about farming, but—love can do anything.
Viewed from a natural standpoint the whole arrangement was not only natural but praiseworthy. That a woman, fond of a natural life in the open air, should leave a creature like George du Telle, and cast herself into the arms of a man like Leslie. ”

“ To fight with a Japanese you must come to blows, for you can’t possibly do it in words properly. The old Japanese who made the language had no use for terms of abuse: swords were good enough for them.
“I’ll have that,” said Jane, suddenly seizing the fat baby, the size of a tangerine orange, done in ivory and engaged in feeding ivory ducks on top of a lacquer cabinet, “and the ducks. Tell him to send them to the hotel; you can fight with him about the price afterwards—and those two vases; and oh, that ivory Mousmé with the umbrella—isn’t she sweet! ”