Part 23 (2/2)

Mr. Fujinami Gentaro shuffled his way towards a little room like a kind of summer-house, detached from the main building and overlooking the lake and garden from the most favourable point of vantage.

This is Mr. Fujinami's study--like all j.a.panese rooms, a square box with wooden framework, wooden ceiling, sliding paper _shoji_, pale golden _tatami_ and double alcove. All j.a.panese rooms are just the same, from the Emperor's to the rickshaw-man's; only in the quality of the wood, in the workmans.h.i.+p of the fittings, in the newness and freshness of paper and matting, and by the ornaments placed in the alcove, may the prosperity of the house be known.

In Mr. Fujinami's study, one niche of the alcove was fitted up as a bookcase; and that bookcase was made of a wonderful honey-coloured satinwood brought from the hinterland of China. The lock and the handles were inlaid with dainty designs in gold wrought by a celebrated Kyoto artist. In the open alcove the hanging scroll of Lao Tze's paradise had cost many hundreds of pounds, as had also the Sung dish below it, an intricacy of lotus leaves caved out of a single amethyst.

On a table in the middle of this chaste apartment lay a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles and a yellow book. The room was open to the early morning sunlight; the paper walls were pushed back. Mr. Fujinami moved a square silk cus.h.i.+on to the edge of the matting near the outside veranda. There he could rest his back against a post in the framework of the building--for even j.a.panese get wearied by the interminable squatting which life on the floor level entails--and acquire that condition of bodily repose which is essential for meditation.

Mr. Fujinami was in the habit of meditating for one hour every morning. It was a tradition of his house; his father and his grandfather had done so before him. The guide of his meditations was the yellow book, the _Rongo_ (Maxims) of Confucius, that Bible of the Far East which has moulded oriental morality to the shape of the Three Obediences, the obedience of the child to his parents, of the wife to her husband, and of the servant to his lord.

Mr. Fujinami sat on the sill of his study, and meditated. Around him was the stillness of early morning. From the house could be heard the swish of the maids' brooms brus.h.i.+ng the _tatami_, and the flip-flap of their paper flickers, like horses' tails, with which they dislodged the dust from the walls and cornices.

A big black crow had been perched on one of the cherry-trees in the garden. He rose with a shaking of branches and a flapping of broad black wings. He crossed the lake, croaking as he flew with a note more harsh, rasping and cynical than the consequential caw of English rooks. His was a malevolent presence ”from the night's Plutonian sh.o.r.e,” the symbol of something unclean and sinister lurking behind this dainty beauty and this elaboration of cleanliness.

Mr. Fujinami's meditations were deep and grave. Soon he put down the book. The spectacles glided along his nose. His chest rose and fell quickly under the weight of his resting chin. To the ignorant observer Mr. Fujinami would have appeared to be asleep.

However, when his wife appeared about an hour and a half afterwards, bringing her lord's breakfast on another red lacquer table she besought him kindly to condescend to eat, and added that he must be very tired after so much study. To this Mr. Fujinami replied by pa.s.sing his hand over his forehead and saying, ”_D[=o]m[=o]! So des' ne!_ (Indeed, it is so!) I have tired myself with toil.”

This little farce repeated itself every morning. All the household knew that the master's hour of meditation was merely an excuse for an after-sleep. But it was a tradition in the family that the master should study thus; and Mr. Fujinami's grandfather had been a great scholar in his generation. To maintain the tradition Mr. Fujinami had hired a starveling journalist to write a series of random essays of a sentimental nature, which he had published under his own name, with the t.i.tle, _Fallen Cherry-Blossoms_.

Such is the hold of humbug in j.a.pan that n.o.body in the whole household, including the students who respected nothing, ever allowed themselves the relief of smiling at the sacred hour of study, even when the master's back was turned.

”_O hay[=o] gozaimas_'!”

”For honourable feast of yesterday evening indeed very much obliged!”

The oily forehead of Mr. Ito touched the matting floor with the exaggerated humility of conventional grat.i.tude. The lawyer wore a plain kimono of slate-grey silk. His American manners and his pomposity had both been laid aside with the tweed suit and the swallow-tail. He was now a plain j.a.panese business man, servile and adulatory in his patron's presence. Mr. Fujinami Gentaro bowed slightly in acknowledgment across the remnants of his meal.

”It is no matter,” he said, with a few waves of his fan; ”please sit at your ease.”

The two gentlemen arranged themselves squatting cross-legged for the morning's confidential talk.

”The cherry-flowers,” Ito began, with a sweep of the arm towards the garden grove, ”how quickly they fall, alas!”

”Indeed, human life also,” agreed Mr. Fujinami. ”But the guests of last evening, what is one to think?”

”_Ma_! In truth, _sensei_ (master or teacher), it would be impossible not to call that Asa San a beauty.”

”Ito Kun,” said his relative in a tone of mild censure, ”it is foolish always to think of women's looks. This foreigner, what of him?”

”For a foreigner, that person seems to be honourable and grave,”

answered the retainer, ”but one fears that it is a misfortune for the house of Fujinami.”

”To have a son who is no son,” said the head of the family, sighing.

”_D[=o]m[=o]!_ It is terrible!” was the reply; ”besides, as the _sensei_ so eloquently said last night, there are so few blossoms on the old tree.”

The better to aid his thoughts, Mr. Fujinami drew from about his person a case which contained a thin bamboo pipe, called _kiseru_ in j.a.panese, having a metal bowl of the size and shape of the socket of an acorn. He filled this diminutive bowl with a little wad of tobacco, which looked like coa.r.s.e brown hair. He kindled it from the charcoal ember in the _hibachi_. He took three sucks of smoke, breathing them slowly out of his mouth again in thick grey whorls. Then with three hard raps against the wooden edge of the firebox, he knocked out again the glowing ball of weed. When this ritual was over, he replaced the pipe in its sheath of old brocade.

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