Than my heart’s casket rich and rare.”
“True, Mousmé, true,” I say, half to myself, as the song loses itself in the air. But she catches the words, and smiles.
The wet season is coming on, alas! before I can leave, and our evenings beneath the verandah will be less frequent. It is not nearly so pleasant indoors, but the damp air is bad for Mousmé. So we play Japanese draughts, and talk of England.
Sometimes Kotmasu comes in. He is convinced at last of the bona-fides of my marriage, and is as profuse in his apologies for ever having doubted the success of my experiment, as he was with his lugubrious predictions that it would never succeed.
We are always glad to see him; for since Mousmé’s illness I have been into the tea-houses, and even the town itself, very little. We hear gossip from my queer mother-in-law, but it is usually only a chronique scandaleuse of the doings of the geishas, of her friends, and last, though by no means least, of her enemies, half of whom I do not even know by name.
Kotmasu, on the other hand, has always some scrap of more or less reliable European news, which, if it does nothing else, serves as a peg on which to hang a reminiscence, or an echo to awaken old memories of Western men and things.
The evenings we spend together are far from being uninteresting; and Mousmé, who has picked up the art of conversation wonderfully, is delighted to intrude her quaint ideas upon us. She is burning with curiosity concerning the strange country called England, which Kotmasu, willing enough to shine even in the eyes of a married woman, and she my wife, pretends he knows so well.
He is really very funny in his descriptions sometimes. In a sense they are fairly correct; but they are, just like all Japanese pictures, lacking in the most elementary perspective. It is not because his perceptive faculties are lacking, but only that they follow the national groove, the worship of the minute to the exclusion of broader effects.
Mousmé, no doubt with a desire to be in the possession of two opinions, addresses a multitude of questions to him when, as is the case to-night, he is spending the evening with us.