She gives a funny picture of herself and Lafcadio, in a dry-goods store, when clothes had to be bought "at the changing of the season," he selecting some gaudy garment with a large design of sea-waves or spider-nests, declaring the design was superb and the colour beautiful.
"I often suspected him," the simple woman adds, "of having an unmistakable streak of passion for gay things—however, his quiet conscience held him back from giving way to it."
His incurable dislike, too, to conform to any of the rules of etiquette—looked upon as all-important in Japan, especially for people in official positions—was a continued source of trouble to the little woman. She could hardly, she says, induce him to wear his "polite garments," which were de rigueur at any official ceremony. On one occasion, indeed, he refused to appear when the Emperor visited the Tokyo College because he would not put on his frock coat and top hat.
The difficulty of language was at first insuperable. After a time they instituted the "Hearn San Kotoba," or Hearnian language, as they called it, but in these Matsue days an interpreter had to be employed. The "race problem," however, was the real complication that beset these two. That comradeship such as we comprehend it in England could exist between two nationalities, so fundamentally different as Setsu Koizumi's and Lafcadio Hearn's, is improbable if not impossible. "Even my own little wife," Hearn writes years afterwards, "is somewhat mysterious still to me, though always in a lovable way—of course a man and a woman know each other's hearts; but outside of personal knowledge, there are race tendencies difficult to understand."
CHAPTER XVIII
THE KATCHIU-YASHIKI
"The real charm of woman in herself is that which comes after the first emotion of passionate love has died away, when all illusions fade to reveal a reality lovelier than any illusion which has been evolved behind the phantom curtain of them. And again marriage seems to me a certain destruction of all emotion and suffering. So that afterwards one looks back at the old times with wonder. One cannot dream or desire anything more after love is transmuted into marriage. It is like a haven from which you can see currents rushing like violet bands beyond you out of sight. It seems to me (though I am a poor judge of such matters) that it does not make a man any happier to have an intellectual wife, unless he marries for society. The less intellectual, the more capable, so long as there is neither coarseness nor foolishness; for intellectual converse a man can't really have with women. Woman is antagonistic to it. An emotional truth is quite as plain to the childish mind, as to the mind of Herbert Spencer or of Clifford. The child and the God come equally near to the Eternal truth. But then marriage in a complex civilisation is really a terrible problem; there are so many questions involved."
As summer advanced Hearn found his little two-storeyed house by the Ohasigawa—although dainty as a birdcage—too cramped for comfort, the rooms being scarcely higher than steamship cabins, and so narrow that ordinary mosquito nets could not be suspended across them.
On the summit of the hill above Matsue stood the ancient castle of the former daimyo of the province. In feudal days, when the city was under military sway, the finest homesteads of the Samurai clustered round its Cyclopean granite walls; now owing to changed conditions and the straitened means of their owners, many of these Katchiu-yashiki were untenanted. Hearn and his wife were lucky enough to secure one. Though he no longer had his outlook over the lake, with the daily coming and going of fishing-boats and sampans, he had an extended view of the city and was close to the university. But above all he found compensation in the spacious Japanese garden, outcome of centuries of cultivation and care.