[14]. Glad to see you.
They enticed me to a tea-room festival, where I had a large bowl of tea, the national beverage. I sat cross-legged on a little mat by Sarawana, whose bright eyes sparkled and whose red lips often parted in a cheery laugh, revealing her pearly teeth. Geisha girls played samisens and biwas, and danced in Oriental curves round us. They were mostly pretty maidens, with small white teeth and eyes that peeped beneath their pencilled brows like the frightened eyes of squirrels. They had beautiful hair too, with a bit of the national cherry blossom stuck into it. As they sang and strummed on their stringed, lyre-like instruments they seemed perfectly oblivious of all around them; their oblique eyes seemed to gaze on something miles away.
Sarawana had been a Geisha girl and played for her living as I had, and so we became comrades. Next day I took her and her sister down by the river. It was a beautiful spot; the banks were smothered with cherry and plum trees, camphor woods and bamboos. “Why are you so sad, Sarawana?” I said as I sat by her side. Her sister sat with a Japanese lad among the bamboos just by. “Me litee Samaro, and he dead”; and then she sang a little Japanese song, after wiping her eyes with the big sleeve of her blue kimono. We were quite alone, only the little yellow birds twittered in the plum boughs overhead. “What does that song mean, Sarawana?” I said, and then she told me, in pidgin-English, its meaning.
“Unblown the cherry blossom blooms
Are hid in the cold of dead lips, weeping to blossom,
And crescent moons of coming springs
Are pale for ever in thine eyes—O my love,
Kwannon sits on her throne, Samaro,
Pale as chrysanthemums waiting thee
As camphor trees sigh over thy grave,