Part 2 (2/2)
”Oh no,” Count Saito rea.s.sured her, ”I do not think Mademoiselle Asako talks j.a.panese language, so she cannot drop her aitches.”
”I never thought of that,” his hostess continued, ”I thought that if a j.a.panese had money, he must be a _daimyo_, or something.”
The Amba.s.sador smiled.
”English people,” he said, ”do not know very well the true condition of j.a.pan. Of course we have our rich new families and our poor old families just as you have in England. In some aspects our society is just the same as yours. In others, it is so, different, that you would lose your way at once in a maze of ideas which would seem to you quite upside down.”
Lady Everington interrupted his reflections in a desperate attempt to get something out of him by a surprise attack.
”How interesting,” she said, ”it will be for Geoffrey Harrington and his wife to visit j.a.pan and find out all about it.”
The Amba.s.sador's manner changed.
”No, I do not think,” he said, ”I do not think that is a good thing at all. They must not do that. You must not let them.”
”But why not?”
”I say to all j.a.panese men and women who live a long time in foreign countries or who marry foreign people, 'Do not go back to j.a.pan,'
j.a.pan is like a little pot and the foreign world is like a big garden.
If you plant a tree from the pot into the garden and let it grow, you cannot put it back into the pot again.”
”But, in this case, that is not the only reason,” objected Lady Everington.
”No, there are many other reasons too,” the Amba.s.sador admitted; and he rose from his sofa, indicating that the interview was at an end.
The bridal pair left in a motor-car for Folkestone tinder a hailstorm of rice, and with the propitious white slipper dangling from the number-plate behind.
When all her guests were gone, Lady Everington fled to her boudoir and collapsed in a little heap of sobbing finery on the broad divan. She was overtired, no doubt; but the sense of her mistake lay heavy upon her, and the feeling that she had sacrificed to it her best friend, the most humanly valuable of all the people who resorted to her house.
An evil cloud of mystery hung over the young marriage, one of those sinister unfamiliar forces which travellers bring home from the East, the curse of a G.o.d or a secret poison or a hideous disease.
It would be so natural for those two to want to visit j.a.pan and to know their second home. Yet both Sir Ralph Cairns and Count Saito, the only two men that day who knew anything about the real conditions, had insisted that such a visit would be fatal. And who were these Fujinamis whom Count Saito knew, but did not know? Why had she, who was so socially careful, taken so much for granted just because Asako was a j.a.panese?
CHAPTER II
HONEYMOON
_Asa no kami Ware wa kezuraji Utsukus.h.i.+ki Kimi ga ta-makura Furetes.h.i.+ mono wo._
(My) morning sleep hair I will not comb; For it has been in contact with The pillowing hand of My beautiful Lord!
The Barringtons left England for a prolonged honeymoon, for Geoffrey was now free to realise his favourite project of travelling abroad.
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