OUR LANDLORD THE BUDDHIST PRIEST.
Beyond, the white wall and steps of the temple inclosure are crowned with white stone palings and a red lacquer wall behind them, and the red lacquer and bronzed-roofed gateway. Here and there gold glitters on the carvings and on the ends of its many roof-beams. Near it the great gray tree-trunks are spaced, and out of the green branches shows the corner of the stable of the Sacred Horses. Its gray walls are spotted in places with gold and color. Beyond it are the red walls of one of the treasure houses, made of beams with slanting edges; and in the gable under its black eaves two symbolic animals, the elephant and the tapir, are carved and painted gray and white on the gilded wall. At this distance the bands of many-colored ornament make a glimmering of nameless color. Farther back in the trees spots of heavy black and shining gold mark the roofs of other buildings. The great trees near me almost hide the great pagoda, and I can see of it only a little red, and the green under its many eaves, which melts like a haze into the green of the trees.
All these effects of color and shape seem but as a decoration of the trees, and as modes of enhancing their height and their stillness. The great court becomes nothing but a basin with highly-finished edges, sunk into the mass of mountain greenery. The Torii, alone, stands lonely and mysterious. On the space between its upper stone beams is placed a great blue tablet with gold letters that designate the sacred posthumous name of Iyéyasŭ.
It is late in the year, and the place is no longer filled with pilgrims. I look down, occasionally, on a few stragglers who come up the steps below me—a few pilgrims in white dresses; peasants, sometimes with their children; Japanese tourists, who, even here, at home, seem out of place. This afternoon a couple of women, earnestly whispering, sailed across the court and turned the corner of the avenue of Iyémitsŭ—with toes turned in, as is the proper thing in this land of inversion. Their dresses of gray and brown and black had all the accentuated refinement of simplicity in color which is the character of good taste here, and which gives one the gentle thrill of new solutions of harmony. Our own absurdities were not unknown to them, for their velvet slits of eyes were partly hid under eye-glasses, in emulation of Boston or Germany. They might have been ladies: I am not sufficiently clear yet as to limits: perhaps they were gei-shas, who now, I understand, learn German and affect the intellectual look of nearsightedness. If they were, they were far above the two little creatures that posed for me yesterday—with all the impatience of girls who, knowing what it was all about, still could not put up with the slow ways of European work, when their own artists would have been as agile and rapid and sketchy as themselves.
The gei-shas are one of the institutions of Japan,—a reminder of old, complete civilizations like that of Greece. They are, voluntarily, exiles from regular society and family, if one can speak of consent when they are usually brought up to their profession of the "gay science" from early girlhood. They cultivate singing and dancing, and often poetry, and all the accomplishments and most of the exquisite politeness of their country. They are the ideals of the elegant side of woman. To them is intrusted the entertainment of guests and the solace of idle hours. They are the hetairai of the old Greeks—and sometimes they are all that that name implies. But no one has the right to assume it from their profession, any more than that all liberties are bordered by possible license.
The two who consented to pose for me, at the same price and no more than I should have paid them had I called them in to entertain me and my guests with singing and dancing, were, the one a town, the other a country girl; and little by little they showed the difference, at first very slight to a foreigner, by all the many little things which obtain everywhere. It was a source of quiet amusement for me to see them posture, in what they call their dances, in the very room of our landlord the priest's house, where I have so often watched him sitting while his pupil bent over his writing, an antique picture, like so many Eastern scenes of the ideal of contemplative monastic study. But our little priest is away, on service at the temple of Iyémitsŭ, and his house is kept for him in his absence by some devout lady parishioner, who lent us the apartment more convenient than ours, and who undoubtedly shared in the amusement herself. And I asked myself if there had been a secret ceremony of purification afterwards.
I saw, too, lingering at the corner of Iyémitsŭ, the litter of a great lady, said to be the beauty of the court; but I was content to have her remain mysterious to me, and tried not to regret my indolence, when my companion twitted me with his presentation to her, and to associate her only with the clear porcelains that bear her princely name. And then, again, the priests of the temple of Iyéyasŭ came down to meet some prince, looking like great butterflies in green and yellow, and capped with their shining black hats. The youngest waved his fan at me in recognition, and gaily floated back up the high white steps and into the sunny inclosures beyond, more and more like some winged essence.
Then the temple attendants brushed with brooms the mosses of the pavement about the Torii, and the gates were closed. And I listened, until the blaze of the sun passed under the green film of the trees, to the fluting of the priests in the sanctuary on the hill. It was like a hymn to nature. The noise of the locusts had stopped for a time; and this floating wail, rising and falling in unknown and incomprehensible modulations, seemed to belong to the forest as completely as their cry. The shrill and liquid song brought back the indefinite melancholy that one has felt with the distant sound of children's voices, singing of Sundays in drowsy rhythms. But these sounds belonged to the place, to its own peculiar genius—of a lonely beauty, associated with an indefinite past, little understood; with death, and primeval nature, and final rest.