A dog?—a spirit? A wonderful dog then, and surely a spirit such as one only meets in the haunts of medieval religions.
September 7.—A simple day—bathing and walking and emptying my mind of thought as much as possible. Fuji mountain, alas, I cannot see, as the rain clouds cloak her, but on the horizon lies, dimly, Oshima, the burning island, and round the points of the rocky shore are countless islets crowned with a twisted pine or girt with white-fringed waves. From the hills one looks down on a long series of bays with brilliant blue horizon and solid white line at the shore—the Japanese artists are much truer to nature than we think.
September 9.—I went early to the Institute, where there is grand excitement over Ginkgo; the sperms are just swimming out, and they only do it for a day or two each year. It is no such easy business to catch them, in 100 seeds you can only get five with sperms at the best of times, and may get one and be thankful. I spent pretty well the whole day over them, and got three, and several in the pollen tube, not yet quite ripe. It is most entertaining to watch them swimming, their spiral of cilia wave energetically.
September 10 and 11.—Hunting Ginkgo sperms nearly all the time; but about 3 on Friday I began to feel so queer and feverish that I went home and took my temperature; it was 103°, so I went to bed.
September 12.—Still so feverish and queer feeling that I stopped in bed, though the temperature is down a little; but this is usually the case with fever, and I have been almost delirious in the night with the most absurd ideas.
All this long quiet day I lay and enjoyed the beauty of my room. I had the quilts which make a Japanese bed laid in the drawing-room, as several people came to see me, and for my own pleasure; it is nicer in the room with one’s favourite vase and kakemono. How funny this mixture of bedroom and drawing-room will sound in England! But there is nothing “bedroomy” in a Japanese house.
People who have seen my rooms may wonder where the beauty was that could keep me occupied a whole day in its contemplation, because most people seem to judge rooms by the number of beautiful things massed into them, and to think that twenty beautiful vases massed together on a stand counteract the clashing effects of three discordant antimacassars (this word is so old-fashioned, I never learnt how to spell it!)
As I lay I faced a wall of pale, warm, creamy distemper, with a band of cream unpainted wood about two feet from the unpainted beams of the ceiling, which show so beautifully their graining and the curving designs of their natural growth. In one side of the wall is a window, with wooden bars crossing and re-crossing till it looks like a diamond-paned window, only the glass is replaced by semi-transparent paper. This is taken down though, and I look out on to the smooth grey bark of a tree whose leaves are like the shining laurel leaves in a Burne-Jones design, and interlaid against the vivid blue of the sky. The window-ledge is inside the room (not outside in our mad Western way), and on it stands a low grey-green dish in which is growing a graceful spraying plant beside a gnarled grey stone that looks like a piece of a forest rock. Beside the window are short grey-green curtains, edged with a broad band of Chinese embroidery in which blue, pink, and coral run riot with half the other colours on the palette of a Watts. The other half of the wall is occupied with a bamboo settee, covered with the same cloth as the curtains, above which is a square of Japanese embroidery—a great golden flower (a richer tone of the colour of the walls) on a grey-green ground, with butterflies hovering over it—framed in dark brocade with a thread of gold. Above the band of wood is a picture, yellow, brown, and grey, a river scene at dusk. At right angles to this wall I can see the Tokonoma recess—a yard deep and two yards long and nearly as high as the room. It is dark brown, with one long kakemono—a grey-brown bird on a withered, gnarled branch, the work of an old and valued Chinese artist (lent me by Professor S——); below it to one side a stand of ebony, with a brilliant blue cloisonné vase round the slender stem of which curls a fiery dragon, and its colour is living and gleams against the brown. Then on the other side grows a little bent and twisted tree, in a flat earthenware bowl, and in the corner stands my sword. The left side of the house as I lie is open to the garden; there is no wall, and I look out over my own little green plot, with its Thuya trees and glowing “morning glories,” to the tree tops of the land around. In the verandah hangs a square black lamp which I had lit as the swift night fell, and from whose opaque white sides shines a light so soft that it does not frighten the moon or the fire-flies. Then the floor of my room is covered with tatami—straw mats closely fitted and edged with black, and the sliding walls of the cupboard recesses that make the room solid are also straw-coloured, with a narrow border of black. The wooden fretwork of the soji supports the white paper through which light shines so radiantly and softly; then there are a few straw-coloured chairs, a dark wood table and grey-green cushions—and that is all.
September 14.—As my temperature rose to 104° last night I felt I ought to have a doctor—the first doctor I have called in in my whole life! I felt it a serious and terrible event. But I am not seriously ill, an internal chill (probably the cold bathing at Hayama, one gets chills here so easily) and a temperature which runs up very soon in this country. He is taking the temperature down with drugs. I told him I must go to the Institute to-morrow, but he laughs.
September 22–24.—Quiet uneventful days at the Institute, working at fossils hard. What a lot of results you will expect! But to get one line of result often means days of labour over petty detail that does not show.