I lie awake for some time thinking over all this, and watching the big night-moths come in through the open panel of the window, and then flutter round the idol’s head for a moment ere singeing their poor soft wings at the flame of the lamp burning before its placid features. Some of them are so big that they make quite an appreciable noise on the white matting floor when they fall headlong on to it. I fall asleep watching—
“the deadly gyrations of the poor fascinated things, on suicide intent,”
and dream that I am pursued by huge monsters of moths with heads like the awful masks I see every day in the curio shops. And I frighten little Mousmé nearly out of her wits, just as it is getting light, by my frantic attempts to escape from my dream-bred horrors, and the environment of the mosquito-curtain.
When I am fully awake we sit bolt upright on our mattress bed, and laugh just like children; I because Mousmé, with face screwed up in half-laughter, half-tears, looks so comical with her eyes blinking at the light; and she because it is such a relief for her to find that “Cy-reel is not gone mad after all.”
Mousmé and I spent the first part of the day shopping, buying Japanese curios and native silks and embroideries for those at home, a very expensive cabinet with whole nests of tiny drawers for Lou—frankly, to propitiate her—and European articles when and where we could get them for the “handsome presents” of which my mother-in-law and Mousmé’s numerous brothers and sisters are so fond.
Mousmé’s dress is an ideal one for such an amusement as shopping. It is simply astounding how much she can stow away mysteriously in the many pockets of her wide sleeves alone.
Down at Ako San’s, the jeweller, near the quay, whose shop is a general dépôt for things European, she packs away, I can scarce conceive where, half the numerous little purchases we make. I take the rest; and then loaded, both of us, arms, pockets and all, we slowly climb the hill to our home, which is already partially dismantled in view of our departure.
It has that terrible, painful vacancy of a house half-deserted. It seems no longer to belong to us, as though the ghosts of possible future tenants already possessed it. Poor tiny house, which will probably know Mousmé’s laugh no more!
Whilst Mousmé is wrapping up our presents in soft, silky textured rice-paper ready for their recipients, I get together some of my things.