The bare thought drives the blood away from my heart. I know what Kotmasu would say, for he still disbelieves, or at least pretends to disbelieve, in my marriage.
“There are velly plenty more mousmés.”
“Yes, very well,” something inside my mind replies, “but only one Mousmé.”
Whilst we wait the coming of Han Sen, the doctor, I am driven almost frantic by the noises which one can never shut out of a Japanese house. The droning hum of the bees at work on the roses outside, the unceasing chirruping whirr of the cicalas, all the sounds of a garden in summer-time, are magnified tenfold because I fear that Mousmé will be disturbed.
She uncloses her eyes once when the doctor’s steps are heard coming up the garden-path. But she says nothing, and only takes my large brown hand in her small one.
I have not much faith in the doctor. His phials are so finikin and toy-like, and I have heard something, too, about their drugs, and my memory of their fantastic and extraordinary nature does not tend to reassure me.
He is a little, oldish man with gimlet eyes in a face full of wrinkles, which seem to serve no other purpose than to disguise his emotions if he has any. He treads softly across the matting floor, with Oka’s wife hovering, anxious-faced, in the rear.
“Madame the most honourable lady has been unwell some time?” he inquires in a high-pitched key, with an insinuating inflection on the first word, which many people annoy me with when referring to Mousmé.
“No.”
“No!” and his eyebrows depart upward from overhanging his narrow, beady black eyes.