OF MOUSMÉS AND OTHER THINGS
Plum-blossom was a Mousmé with a broad face, ever lit by a half smile. Moon was a girl with a serious expression, but gorgeous of dress as any girl of Kioto. Snow looked shrunk—not withered, you understand, fresh as a daisy, in fact; but something had happened in her development: she was preternaturally small, and looked like a Mousmé seen through a diminishing glass.
The three Mousmés and old mother Fir-cone took almost entire possession of Campanula San when she arrived, and Campanula San seemed quite content.
Mixed with her charming childishness there was a philosophical calm that would have done honour to a sage of the Stoic school. Riding on Leslie’s shoulder through Nikko, under examination at the Tea House of the Tortoise, playing with Plum-blossom in the veranda of the House of the Clouds, she was just the same. Life was a pageant at which she was an humble spectator, whose duty was to be amiable and submissive, and accept things just as they came.
She did not say this, but she acted it, or rather expressed it in her actions and ways.
Down on the Bund an office had been rented by M’Gourley. He slept there and lived there, ascending occasionally at night to the House of the Clouds to smoke a pipe with his partner and talk business, and give advice on things Japanese, advice often needful enough to the uninitiated Leslie.
House-keeping in Japan is full of surprises. One day, for instance, Leslie met a figure coming from the back part of the premises—a figure like a rag-doll that had spent its life in a coal-scuttle. Interrogated, the figure turned out to be the mother of Moon, and by profession—well, her profession was helping to coal the Canadian Pacific boats.
“But,” said Leslie, “it is impossible, for Moon already has a mother whose name is Fir-cone.”
He was just going to send for the police when the whole truth came out on the veranda, in the form of Moon herself.
She explained in indifferent English, kneeling as she spoke with the backs of her little hands held upwards to her face, that the comprador had lied; that there was no particular connection between her and her fellow-servants; that the comprador had made a bunch of them just as he might make a bunch of weeds, picking one up here and the other there, and pretending they were all the one family. Why had he done this thing? Who could say? For some dark reason of his own. She said also that her mother was not always as dirty as that, but was going home now to wash. Would Leslie San like to see her washed so that Moon’s words might be proved to him true? Leslie San would not.