I
This is the love-story of René Beauregard and O Maru San. It does not illustrate the cynical conceit of a French dandy, æsthetically explaining and profaning love to amuse an indelicate public, nor does it demonstrate the folly of mixed marriages, in which nuptial ceremonies, high-flown speeches, adultery, and suicide are hypocritically served up to suit the British palate. It is the straightforward story of an ordinary attachment in the Far East between two rather bad and rather good friends of mine, whose notions of “good” and “bad” as translated into deeds were lax, but, in their eyes and in that region, not absolutely damnable.
M. René Beauregard had been in Tōkyō about a fortnight, when I found him one evening at a print-seller’s shop in the Ginza, surrounded by an inquisitive crowd of admirers and much embarrassed by inability to declare his meaning in Japanese. He was accompanied by an hotel-boy, who, knowing no French words but Oui, monsieur, and Bon jour, recognised me with relief and solicited assistance. I was able to extricate him from the curiosity of the bystanders and the plurality of prices to our mutual satisfaction, for we returned together to the Métropole, the richer by some rare prints and the promise of congenial companionship. Literary reminiscence furnished many bonds of common interest. We had witnessed, it seemed, simultaneously several incidents which marked the waning of old and the rising of new constellations in the firmament of French art. The première of Rodenbach’s “Le Voile” and Rostand’s “Les Romanesques,” the funeral of Paul Verlaine, the students’ repudiation of Brunetière and acclamation of Zola at the Sorbonne, the banquets to Puvis de Chavannes and Emile Verhaeren, had strangely enough united us in the same company without opportunity of introduction. But community of tastes counts for less in friendship than charm of character. What particularly pleased me in M. Beauregard was a modesty, not too common among his compatriots, and a chivalry towards women which the Quartier Latin had failed to destroy. I had known so many petits féroces (as Daudet called them), vaunting their talents and their bonnes fortunes, for whom a mistress ranked somewhere between an advertisement and an absinthe. He was not an arriviste, then; but neither was he a worker. Too self-critical to write badly, too lazy to write well, he ended by not writing at all, and, as his means permitted him to play the rôle of spectator, he followed various movements in art and letters with amiable, intelligent passivity. He had come to Japan with the object of studying on the spot the Kōrin and Shijō schools of painting, but found his progress much hindered by ignorance of the language, which he had not seriously tried to learn. As we were both anxious to see the Matushima, or Pine Islands, perhaps the most lovely of the Sankei, or Three Views, which the Japanese celebrate above all others, it was resolved to travel there together in search of grammar and scenery.
About the grammar he was rather fastidious. A personage of high rank, whom he had met at an Imperial garden-party, had said jokingly: “Why not follow the example of M. Pierre Loti and find a second ‘Madame Chrysanthème’? We call such persons in our idiom ‘pillow-dictionaries,’ and they are the most instructive manuals in the world.” The young Parisian was, of course, neither shocked nor offended by the suggestion. Not only had he no moral scruples himself about forming temporary ties such as nine Frenchmen out of ten contract before marriage, but he had come to a country, or so he had been told, where such ties were neither illegal nor dishonourable, but openly recognised, and where a mistress did not forfeit her chance of ultimate marriage when the relationship should be dissolved. But the idea of buying a mate as one buys a horse or a picture was repugnant to him, and he preferred to wait a while, in the hope that Fortune would provide an occasion of affection preceding purchase rather than of a purchase which might or might not precede affection. The geisha of the capital did not attract him: they were too openly venal or brightly conspicuous for his quiet taste, which desired gentle companionship without such publicity as the appropriation of a Tōkyō geisha would involve. So, for the moment, scenery took precedence of grammar.
The journey to Sendai on the Northern Railway is generally tedious, but was made more so by delays and uncertainties of transit owing to extensive inundations of the Tonegawa. Many passengers contemplated the advisability of quitting the train and proceeding by relays of boat and rickshaw. Happily this troublesome alternative was avoided, and we contrived to reach the dull but important capital of the Rikuzen province shortly before midnight. The next morning we travelled by a branch line to Shiogama, the little port on the bay of Sendai from which passage is taken to the hamlet of Matsushima or the more distant Ishinomaki. We chose the latter route, since it traverses the entire archipelago and gives a more complete idea of the number and disposition of the Pine Islands. Legend counts them to be precisely eight hundred and eighty-eight, and, if one disappear, eaten by the sea, another pushes up its head, conveniently severed by a sword of water from some broken peninsula. As the rocks never increase nor diminish in number, so the thousand pine-trees, which start from crag or shelf in every conceivable posture, are never more nor less than one thousand. From this banquet of volcanic tufa the ravenous Pacific had crunched odd morsels, leaving for future meals bizarre and bitten fragments, as capricious in shape as its own appetite. Unfinished bastions, wild arches, irregularly tunnelled rocks, cone and staircase and plateau, lie densely or sparsely scattered over an expanse of forty miles, like a herd of amorphous sea-monsters, badly made and willingly abandoned to the solvent action of time and tide. But then, as if to apologise for the Originator’s clumsiness and to prove that his failure may have been expressly intended to ensure their success, on the backs and in the crevices of the else uncouth stone creatures wave the thousand arms of pine, softening rough contours with their clinging green, protesting and protecting with graceful curve, or beckoning with siren gesture to passing mariners. Every island has its name, rooted in historic or legendary allusion. To the Japanese one has suggested “Buddha’s entry into Nirvana,” another “The island of question and reply,” while a third group is symbolic of “The twelve Imperial consorts.” But our Western eyes could well dispense with that strange bias of Eastern fancy which prefers to associate form with meaning: for us it was enough to glide slowly through the haunted waters, to watch the blue waves foaming at the island’s edge or leaping in the sunlight to meet the pine’s tentacular caress.
From the last of the islands to the mouth of the Kitakami River, on which Ishinomaki stands, is a rough stretch of sea exposed to the full force of the Pacific rollers. Our tiny steamer was buffeted by wind and rain, and my companion suffered such agonies of sea-sickness that it took him two days to recover health and spirits. By good luck we found in the Asano-ya one of those cosy and coquettish hostelries which only Japan can boast, where the eye is as constantly charmed by good taste as the body is comforted by good cheer. The sliding doors which divided our apartment from others had panels of white paper, flecked with clouds of gold-dust and framed in black lacquer. In the tokonoma or alcove stood a pink-flowered shrub and a peacock of bronze beneath a beautiful painting by Kano Tan-yu. In vain we offered to buy this kakemono from the landlord, or the screen, which displayed fighting dragons on one side and a noble tiger on the other. They were heirlooms, which his children must inherit. Nearly everything was pretty in the Asano-ya, except O Maru San. She was the landlord’s niece, an orphan Cinderella, condemned by destiny to wait on her uncle’s guests. While her better-looking sisters had found husbands, she trotted contentedly about her work, laughing a great deal and singing snatches of song. She was about four feet ten inches in height; her face was too large and too round, though this fault was somewhat redeemed by fine teeth and soft eyes. She tried to atone for plainness of feature by elaborate coiffure and punctilious toilette; but, do what she would, she could not escape from the category of ordinary squat village girls, who remain at home while their prettier neighbours fill the tea-houses and geisha-houses of Tōkyō. Her parents must have had excellent judgment, for instead of calling her Lily or Chrysanthemum or some other flower-name whose irony must have pursued her to the grave, they hit upon O Maru (Miss Round), an unromantic but felicitous description of her person and character. She had no angularities, moral or physical, but was just an elastic, docile ball of Japanese womanhood, both useful and playful; one of those domestic conveniences which Confucian moralists regard as admirably adapted to promote the peace and happiness of man.
From the moment of René Beauregard’s entrance until his departure from Ishinomaki, O Maru devoted herself to his service. While his illness lasted she sat beside him, bathing his forehead and anticipating his desires. When he grew well enough to take part in the expeditions which I proposed to neighbouring temples or islands, she was waiting with his shoes and hat on the threshold, bowing low as he went out; and, when he returned for the evening bath, she attended him with towel and soap, as assiduously and with as little false shame as Nausicaa attended Odysseus. Observing that he seemed anxious to learn the language, which she was quite incompetent to teach, she managed, with much laughter and many misunderstandings, to increase his vocabulary. She was particularly proud of having interpreted two inscriptions which hung framed in the vestibule of the hotel. One, equivalent to “Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest,” was thus worded:
“Asa okuri yu mukai.”
More literally it reads, “At morning, honourably send on his way; at hot-water time, honourably receive.” The other was more difficult to render. We disputed two versions, of which I commended the first to M. Beauregard’s notice, while preferring the second in our common interest. Like many maxims, it was plausibly vague:
“Omoi yokoshima nashi.”
Could it mean “Love without naughtiness”? Or had it the particular application of “Hospitality without fraud”? I hoped the latter.
We remained for seven days at Ishinomaki, charmed with the busy life of the place, which owes its prosperity to slate-quarries and salmon-fisheries, with the boats for ever passing up and down the Kitakami, with Kinkwa-zan, “the golden-flower mountain,” that sacred island on which in ancient times no women might set foot, though the deer roam freely round the pilgrim’s circuit or ascend to the shrine of Watazumi-no-Mikoto, the Shintō god of the sea. During this week two circumstances revealed to my French friend the fact that O Maru was actuated by quite as much tenderness as dutifulness in her solicitude for his welfare. One day a Norwegian captain, coasting from Sendai to the northern island of Yezo, put into harbour for a day, and proposed to the landlord that the girl should take passage with him for a couple of months in return for fifty yen (about £5), but she displayed strong repugnance to this not ungenerous proposition. On another occasion O Maru, having innocently introduced a handsome brunette, her bosom friend, to Monsieur René, who did not disguise his pleasure at the presentation, was discovered by him at the foot of his bed convulsed by tearful jealousy. At first she would only give negative replies to his questions. “Nakimasen” (“I’m not crying”), and “Shirimasen” (“I don’t know why I’m crying”), she said. But at last she gave the reason. “Because you are now tired of O Maru, and will honourably take notice of O Kiku.” I must suppose that he found a way of reassuring her, as the next day they were warmer friends than ever; and it became plain to me that a dictionary, plainly bound but a devoted pocket-companion, had been providentially deposited for M. Beauregard at the Asano-ya, Ishinomaki. Indeed, the book was more anxious to be bought than the buyer to acquire it, for as soon as the date of our return to Tōkyō was given out O Maru begged her foreign lover to take her with him, and extracted a promise that, if her family made no objection, as soon as he had made suitable arrangements he would send for her to continue the studies which had begun so pleasantly on the banks of the Kitakamigawa.