The kitchen of the House of the Clouds is a square apartment, with no matting on the floor, and just now flooded with sunshine.
Leslie, in the early days, had caused to be constructed by a stranded ship’s carpenter, a solid English kitchen-table of white pine. He wanted to give the man a job, and he thought the thing would prove useful; and it did.
To begin with, it smelt deliciously, and Mother Fir-cone amidst her avocations would take a sniff at it now and then, just as a snufftaker takes a pinch of snuff; she would also sit under it preparing sweet potatoes, stringing beans or what not; but as for using it as a table, such an idea never occurred to her. In fact, she had no ideas at all about a table, and was quite convinced that this gift of Leslie San’s was a sort of pine-wood temple, constructed for the purpose of being sat under.
It was also a place of refuge in time of earthquakes, when the whole household, saving Leslie and Campanula, got under it for fear of the roof falling. It received the title of “Honorable,” and was altogether a thing very much respected, and even vaguely beloved.
Under it this morning sat Lotus-bud, preparing fish for breakfast; on it (these new Mousmés used it as a shelf) reposed various paper boxes containing eggs and groceries, weird-looking boxes suggesting that a conjurer was about to commence operations, not a cook.
The sun laid a great square of light like a burning mat upon the floor near the table, and on her knees in the center of this mat of light sat Pine-breeze cleaning an hibachi. Cherry-blossom, the third Mousmé, squatted right before Pine-breeze doing nothing.
From under the table was escaping a faint blue haze of smoke. Lotus-bud had just taken a few whiffs from a tiny pipe.
They all smoked, these Mousmés, pinches of stuff like chopped hay in pipe bowls the size of a child’s thimble; but Campanula had never acquired the art, though all her friends were ardent tobacco lovers. Leslie San had said “No,” and that was enough.
As Pine-breeze cleaned the hibachi and made it spick and span, she was telling the others a yarn, mostly to do with her doings when down the town marketing last evening. How she had bought this or that, what had been said to her, and so forth—a tale simple enough, but a miracle of genius considering the tongue in which it was told. For in the Japanese there are but two parts of speech, the noun and the verb; these, and splinters and scraps of broken-up nouns and verbs, which, in the form of particles and suffixes, help to shore up the meaning and pin together the common sense, have to do all the talking.
The learner of Japanese feels at first like a person condemned to eat gravy soup with chop-sticks. Oh, for even a pronoun! Imagine talking to a person without being able to use the word “You,” without being able to use the word “I”! Imagine the horrible tortures of a Japanese egoist on his death-bed making, or attempting to make, his dying speech!