Personally, Geoffrey found the company of his Japanese relatives exceedingly slow.
In return for the hospitalities of the Maple Club the Barringtons invited a representative gathering of the Fujinami clan to dinner at the Imperial Hotel, to be followed by a general adjournment to the theatre.
It was a most depressing meal. Nobody spoke. All of the guests were nervous; some of them about their clothes, some about their knives and forks, all of them about their English. They were too nervous even to drink wine, which would have been the only remedy for such a "frost."
Only Ito, the lawyer, talked, talked noisily, talked with his mouth full. But Geoffrey disliked Ito. He mistrusted the man; but, because of his wife's growing intimacy with her cousins, he felt loath to start subterranean inquiries as to the whereabouts of her fortune. It was Ito who, foreseeing embarrassment, had suggested the theatre party after dinner. For this at least Geoffrey was grateful to him. It saved him the pain of trying to make conversation with his cousins.
"Talking to these Japs," he said to Reggie Forsyth, "is like trying to play tennis all by yourself."
Later on, at his wife's insistence, he attended an informal garden-party at the Fujinami house. Again he suffered acutely from those cruel silences and portentous waitings, to which he noticed that even the Japanese among themselves were liable, but which apparently they did not mind.
Tea and ice-creams were served by geisha girls who danced afterwards upon the lawn. When this performance was over the guests were conducted to an open space behind the cherry-grove, where a little shooting-range had been set up, with a target, air-guns and boxes of lead lugs. Geoffrey, of course, joined in the shooting-competition, and won a handsome cigarette case inlaid with Damascene work. But he thought that it was a poor game; nor did he ever realize that this entertainment had been specially organized with a view to flattering his military and sporting tastes.
But the greatest disillusionment was the Akasaka garden. Geoffrey was resigned to be bored by everything else. But his wife had grown so enthusiastic about the beauties of the Fujinami domain, that he had expected to walk straight into a paradise. What did he see? A dirty pond and some shrubs, not one single flower to break the monotony of green and drab, and everything so small. Why, he could walk round the whole enclosure in ten minutes. Geoffrey Barrington was accustomed to country houses in England, with their broad acres and their lavish luxuriance of scent and blossom. This niggling landscape art of the Japanese seemed to him mean and insignificant.
* * * * *
He much preferred the garden at Count Saito's home. Count Saito, the late Ambassador at the Court of St. James, with his stooping shoulders, his grizzled hair, and his deep eyes peering under the gold-rimmed spectacles, had proposed the health of Captain and Mrs. Barrington at their wedding breakfast. Since then, he had returned to Japan, where he was soon to play a leading political rôle. Meeting Geoffrey one day at the Embassy, he had invited him and his wife to visit his famous garden.