Part 23 (1/2)

CHAPTER XII

FALLEN CHERRY-BLOSSOM

_Iro wa nioedo Chirinuru wo-- Woga yo tore zo Tsune naran?

Ui no okuyama Kyo koete, Asaki yume miji Ei mo sezu._

The colours are bright, but The petals fall!

In this world of ours who Shall remain forever?

To-day crossing The high mountains of mutability, We shall see no fleeting dreams, Being inebriate no longer.

”_O hay[=o] gazaimas!_” (Respectfully early!)

Twitterings of maid-servants salute the lady of the house with the conventional morning greeting. Mrs. Fujinami s.h.i.+dzuye replies in the high, fluty, unnatural voice which is considered refined in her social set.

The servants glide into the room which she has just left, moving noiselessly so as not to wake the master who is still sleeping. They remove from his side the thick warm mattresses upon which his wife has been lying, the hard wooden pillow like the block of history, the white sheets and the heavy padded coverlet with sleeves like an enormous kimono. They roil up all these _yagu_ (night implements), fold them and put them away into an unsuspected cupboard in the architecture of the veranda.

Mr. Fujinami Gentaro still snores.

After a while his wife returns. She is dressed for the morning in a plain grey silk kimono with a broad olive-green _obi_ (sash). Her hair is arranged in a formidable helmet-like _coiffure_--all j.a.panese matrons with their hair done properly bear a remote resemblance to Pallas Athene and Britannia. This will need the attention of the hairdresser so as to wax into obedience a few hairs left wayward by the night in spite of that severe wooden pillow, whose hard, high discomfort was invented by female vanity to preserve from disarray the rigid order of their locks. Her feet are encased in little white _tabi_ like gloves, for the big toe has a compartment all to itself.

She walks with her toes turned in, and with the heels hardly touching the ground. This movement produces a bend of the knees and hips so as to maintain the equilibrium of the body, and a sinuous appearance which is considered the height of elegance in j.a.pan, so that the grace of a beautiful woman is likened to ”a willow-tree blown by the wind,” and the shuffle of her feet on the floor-matting to the wind's whisper.

Mrs. Fujinami carries a red lacquer tray. On the tray is a tiny teapot and a tiny cup and a tiny dish, in which are three little salted damsons, with a toothpick fixed in one of them. It is the _pet.i.t dejeuner_ of her lord. She put down the tray beside the head of the pillow, and makes a low obeisance, touching the floor with her forehead.

”_O hay[=o] gazaimas_'!”

Mr. Fujinami stirs, gapes, stretches, yawns, rubs his lean fist in his hollow eyes, and stares at the rude incursion of daylight. He takes no notice of his wife's presence. She pours out tea for him with studied pose of hands and wrists, conventional and graceful. She respectfully requests him to condescend to partake. Then she makes obeisance again.

Mr. Fujinami yawns once more, after which he condescends. He sucks down the thin, green tea with a whistling noise. Then he places in his mouth the damson balanced on the point of the toothpick. He turns it over and over with his tongue as though he was chewing a cud. Finally he decides to eat it, and to remove the stone.

Then he rises from his couch. He is a very small wizened man. Dressed in his night kimono of light blue silk, he pa.s.ses along the veranda in the direction of the morning ablutions. Soon the rending sounds of throat-clearing show that he has begun his wash. Three maids appear as by magic in the vacated room. The bed is rolled away, the matting swept, and the master's morning clothes are laid out ready for him on his return.

Mrs. Fujinami a.s.sists her husband to dress, holding each garment ready for him to slip into, like a well-trained valet. Mr. Fujinami does not speak to her. When his belt has been adjusted, and a watch with a gold fob thrust into its interstice, he steps down from the veranda, slides his feet into a pair of _geta_, and strolls out into the garden.

Mr. Fujinami's garden is a famous one. It is a temple garden many centuries old; and the eyes of the initiated may read in the miniature landscape, in the grouping of shrubs and rocks, in the sudden glimpses of water, and in the bare pebbly beaches, a whole system of philosophic and religious thought worked out by the patient priests of the As.h.i.+kaga period, just as the Gothic masons wrote their version of the Bible history in the architecture of their cathedrals.

But for the ignorant, including its present master, it was just a perfect little park, with lawns six feet square and ancient pine trees, with impenetrable forests which one could clear at a bound, with gorges, waterfalls, arbours for lilliputian philanderings and a lake round whose tiny sh.o.r.es were represented the Eight Beautiful Views of the Lake of Biwa near Kyoto.

The bungalow mansion of the family lies on a knoll overlooking the lake and the garden valley, a rambling construction of brown wood with grey scale-like tiles, resembling a domesticated dragon stretching itself in the sun.

Indeed, it is not one house but many, linked together by a number of corridors and spare rooms. For Mr. and Mrs. Fujinami live in one wing, their son and his wife in another, and also Mr. Ito, the lawyer, who is a distant relative and a partner in the Fujinami business. Then, on the farther side of the house, near the pebble drive and the great gate, are the swarming quarters of the servants, the rickshaw men, and Mr. Fujinami's secretaries. Various poor relations exist un.o.bserved in unfrequented corners; and there is the following of University students and professional swashbucklers which every important j.a.panese is bound to keep, as an advertis.e.m.e.nt of his generosity, and to do his dirty work for him. A j.a.panese family mansion is very like a hive--of drones.

Nor is this the entire population of the Fujinami _yas.h.i.+ki_. Across the garden and beyond the bamboo grove is the little house of Mr.

Fujinami's stepbrother and his wife; and in the opposite corner, below the cherry-orchard, is the _inkyo_, the dower house, where old Mr. Fujinami Gennosuke, the retired Lord--who is the present Mr.

Fujinami's father by adoption only--watches the progress of the family fortunes with the vigilance of Charles the Fifth in the cloister of Juste.