He was surprised to find that the investigator had evidently been there. The ruse had not worked. The slippers were not in the position where he had left them. Still, it made little difference. He would take them home. The trophy would amuse Jun-san.
Jun-san was intensely interested, pleaded that he tell her from whom he had obtained them. He always enjoyed seeing her in her gay moods; she was generally so serious, almost melancholy. He had planned to bring about this air of gayety, that he might, as had been the case when he was chatting with his geisha neighbor, forget unpleasant thoughts. But it failed. The humor dissipated. The serious thoughts recurred insistently. He could see that Karsten noticed his preoccupation. The idea came to him to tell Karsten all about it, talk it out with him. It would do him good; one always reasoned more clearly when one placed one's thoughts in words to another; and then Karsten had been known in San Francisco as a man with unusual experience with women, had had the reputation of being an expert, in those days, in such matters.
So after dinner, when they were sitting upstairs, as usual, looking over the blaze of the geisha quarter below, he told him. "It is not so much that I care," he concluded. "There was no longer such a thing as affection—on either side. But I can't help feeling a vague sense of trouble, of unrest. I am fairly commonplace. I don't give much thought to self-analysis and that sort of thing. I was married; it was a state of affairs, a condition. I had become used to it. It governed my relations to women. I followed the traditional moral code of marriage, gave no thought to such matters. It was plain sailing; I played the game with my wife; there could be no other women; it was an easy frame of mind. And now it seems as if suddenly I am at sea without sailing orders, as if I were captain of a ship in mid-ocean and suddenly find that I have no compass course, no destination. And, of course, one must have one, must decide where one is going. You would say that it makes no difference, that as I have not seen my wife for a year or more, the thing is essentially the same. But it isn't. I am bewildered by a feeling that my status is utterly different, cataclysmically changed. I am like a life prisoner who has without warning been taken out of a cell where he has lain for years, passively, without need of thought of what he should do with life, and who is then suddenly placed in the midst of the sunlit city. He feels he is free, must do something, wants to do something, but somehow, oddly, misses the quiet impassivity, the lack of responsibility of his cell. I know that there is no reason why I shouldn't live to-morrow as I did yesterday, but the fact is that for some reason it seems impossible. There is the sense of an entirely new condition of life which overwhelms me, and I want to, I feel I must respond to it, in some way, but—I know I talk like a fool. I am hanged if I can explain coherently—but I wish I knew what I want to do."
"I think you are doing the best thing just now," said Karsten. "Talk it out of your system. After all, it is a thing you will eventually decide for yourself, gradually. You need be in no hurry. I know just how you feel. You know I was divorced, too. Only in my case another woman, whom I cared for, threw me over at the same time. I went through the same thing. I don't pretend to be able to give advice. In such matters a man must act on his own. But, since we have come to the intimate things in our lives, I don't mind telling you how I fared. One may profit from the foolishness of others."
He smoked silently for a while, evidently gathering his thoughts. "My marriage turned out just like yours," he began suddenly. "There was no reason why it shouldn't have turned out well, only it didn't. We simply grew tired of each other, for the usual reason, too much intimate daily contact. When one sees every day, morning after morning, a woman in a dressing gown, with her hair down, going through the process of elaborating her attractions, careless of one's presence, it takes the glamor out of the illusion. A man shaving, seen every morning, can hardly be an inspiring spectacle. Crudely put, that was about all there was to it. Came the divorce. It was the only reasonable thing. I felt that I should be pleased, but, just like you, I felt bewildered, that I had lost my bearings.
"I drifted for a while, but I was agitated, nervous, febrile; felt that I should have done with women, but the very fact that I had my liberty, that I could do as I pleased, kept running in my mind. It gave me no rest. I had no moral scruples. You know I am a Dane. The family is one of these old tradition-ridden clans that you find in Europe. Everything must be governed by precedent set by people who have been dead for ages. In my tribe the woman element has always been predominant. When I was still in school my uncles impressed on me the family code—never touch a friend's wife or his daughter, and never cause a woman regret. Simple, isn't it? If such things worked, it would probably be as good, at least for those whom it fitted, as any other, but such things are not nostrums.
"Anyway, I felt then that as long as I lived up to that, I was all right. Then Sanford, of the San Francisco Herald, you know, gave me a piece of advice. He quoted Lawrence Hope's verse recommending to 'love only lightly,' to pluck the pleasant, superficial flowers of love and to avoid the thorns by not allowing yourself to become too devoted to any one woman. I took the advice too seriously. You remember that during my last years in San Francisco I was just a roué, a libertine, a swine. Instead of giving me rest, peace of mind, I became worse off than ever. Then accident brought me to Japan. It did me good. What had bothered me was, I discovered, not lust for women, but only desire for excitement; but, of course, as you know, in our well-ordered civilization a man can get excitement, change, new impressions and experiences out of few things, politics, sports, gambling, business perhaps, but, if he is cursed with an imagination, mainly women. When I came here, all the new life, the new sights, interested me so much that after awhile I found myself rational again. I played a bit with the geisha, down there, but temperately, sensibly. Then, finally, accident brought me a woman, a Japanese woman, for whom I felt real affection, whom I really cared for. I found that I wanted no others. I was absolutely faithful to her, not because I had to be, nor because I felt that I ought to be, but because I wanted to be. That is where the relation without benefit of clergy works better than the institution of marriage. It is more likely to last because of the absence of the feeling that one must be faithful as a matter of obligation. I had come to the conclusion that monogamy is the only rational, natural thing, one man for one woman, one woman for one man. I would like to see some kind of marriage invented that would work effectively. In my case, I was happier than I had ever been. I had peace, content, I thought I had solved my life.—Then my—my best friend seduced the woman."
As he talked, Karsten had been pacing up and down the narrow veranda which, now the shoji had been removed on account of the heat, formed part of the room. Now he stopped and stood staring out over the city, smoking silently. Suddenly he turned, faced Kent.
"I am afraid that there has not been as much as I thought in all this for you to draw a moral from. I'll be more specific. What I was trying to drive at was this: why don't you, in a tentative way, try the 'love lightly.' That I made a mess of it, at first, in San Francisco, was my own fault. One may take an overdose of any remedy. But here in Japan it is somewhat different. First of all, there is no sense in deliberately going out stalking such adventure. The kind you find that way, picking up with the first woman who crosses your path, doesn't pan out. But keep your mind open, ready to seize upon opportunity—it will come. In fact, I have rather wondered that you have not come to it, in spite of your principle, though, by the way, I rather admire the fact that you have stuck to it. But I have been watching you—one can't help watching a man whom one likes when living together as we do—and I think that it is with you as with Kipling's Tomlinson—if you will forgive the paraphrase—that 'the roots of sin are there.' You take too much interest in the life, and color, and movement that you see all about you. The unique charm of these Japanese women has gotten its insidious white fingers on you. That principle of yours was all that held you back, wasn't it? Now that's gone—le deluge! No, maybe not quite that, but I expect to see you soon studying Japanese life and character by the only means through which it can be studied with something resembling complete understanding—through some woman. As a matter of fact, there is no reason why you shouldn't, and there is every reason why you should. It is your business as a newspaperman to get inside the Japanese mind as intimately as you can. You know that it cannot be done through the men; the bar of nationality, race, is constantly between you and perfect frankness. But with women sex is bigger than race. When a woman cares for you, she looks upon you as a man, not as an alien. She gives you her heart, her innermost mind, without thought of nationality. You understand me, don't you. I don't mean that you should deliberately, cold-bloodedly stalk a woman for the purpose of dissecting her soul and using the results for calculated, mercenary purposes, just to reduce them to copy. What I mean is that you are now free to follow when inclination in the form of a woman beckons you; only be careful that you go into it only as a game, and let the woman understand that it is only a game. At least part of the old family code is good—that to the effect that one must not cause a woman to suffer. So be careful how you play. You have heard, as I have heard a thousand times, that these women are cold, passionless. It is a lie. I know it. Their capacity for affection, devotion, sacrifice, is as great as that of our women; sometimes I think it is even greater. And their poor little souls are delicate, sensitive. They are like children, who brood over and magnify sorrows which we might consider fairly trivial. And then they have their heads still filled with feudal romance. They read their paper-covered novels seeking with noble sacrifice for love and all that, shinju, double suicide, you know, where the lovers kill themselves together. We had a case last year right here in the quarter below, where a geisha and a student threw themselves into the Kegon waterfall, at Nikko, which is the most fashionable thing. One reads of cases where friends who get wind of the intention of the lovers insist on joining the party, and then there is a triple suicide. They get their heads filled with this kind of romance, picture themselves as heroes and heroines in the high lights of melodrama, imagine how the papers will sound their names from one end of Japan to the other. It may be a bit hard for the practical American mind to understand, but the Japanese have an odd, introspective, often a bit hysterical psychology, something like the Russians, I often think, like characters out of Dostoievsky.
"So, to sum it all up, I think it will be a good thing for you to leave the latchstring of your heart hanging out a bit that some little hand may take a pull at it by chance. It will be good for your present state of mind, and it will be good for your work. I am not joking. Not only will it give you insight into Japanese character such as you may get in no other way, but, if you are at all like me, you may find in some girl, if not exactly inspiration, whatever that is, at least some kind of subtle sympathy that helps and pushes you along. I myself, in my time, under just such circumstances, did some mighty good work, or came near accomplishing it, but now, damn it!"