Mousmé is leaning over me as I write. Mousmé, a butterfly from a far Eastern land, her dress of apricot silk, with a magenta satin obi (sash), a blot of bright colour in the dulness of my English study. My Mousmé! with Dresden-china tinted cheeks, and tiny ways; playing at life, as it always seems to me, with the dainty grace of Japan, that idealised doll’s-house land. Mousmé, who goes with me everywhere, whose bizarre clothing attracts notice to her even when the delicately pretty face of a child-woman with innocent, soft eyes and finely arched brows is[4] hidden behind the ever-present fan, which she draws from the ample folds of her obi.

My friends at Nagasaki told me that I was foolish to marry a mousmé, especially as I was to return to England so soon.

“Why not hire one for the remaining period of your stay?” suggested Kotmasu, who dined with me at my little toy-like villa so often that he began to offer advice as a matter of course. “Misawa would find you a mousmé,” he continued, “whom you could put off as easily as an old glove. A real mousmé, not a geisha girl with a past, an ambiguous present, and a who-knows-what future.”

Others of my friends laughed till they made the paper partitions of my house shiver like the strings and parchment of the samisen. “You will tire of her,” said they.

Yet others with a knowing smile, “She will tire of you. They are all the same.[5] Butterflies that change with the day. Moths which the night-air of reality blows to pieces.”

But I would not be advised.

Advice is so cheap one seldom values it. Besides, had I not lived in Japan long enough to know what I was doing?

The only soul on earth who could have deterred me was Lou, that terrible sister who, before I had come out East, had formulated so many plans for my “settling down!” Who had selected—much as she would have a bonnet or a dress, and with almost as much care—several nice girls, any one of whom she had thought would make me a good wife. But Lou was thousands of miles away—how I revelled in that fact!—and would only be made wise after the event. Now as Mousmé is looking over me as I write—she knows as much English as I Japanese—I must set down how I met her.

[6]

It was one night at the Tea-house (chaya) of the Plum Grove. I had come up there with Kotmasu. The djins, bare-legged, panting runners, had rushed us along in the inevitable rikishas to this suburban resort up the hillside.

The town, illuminated with thousands of lanterns hung outside even the smallest of the houses, became, as we climbed upwards to our destination, a fairyland of colour and delight, as it always did at nightfall. In the silent waters of the harbour this gay scene was repeated by reflection in the glassy surface.

Upwards we went, Kotmasu and I; he calling to me every now and then, as his rikisha, spider-like phantom of a vehicle, was momentarily lost in the gloom to reappear just as suddenly in the patch of light thrown by some paper lantern swinging to mark the gateway of a villa retired from the road.

[7]

A Japanese night! Balmy, delicious; intoxicating with the odour of the flowers which came sweeping down on us in the breath of the mountain air, or creeping in varied scents over the hedges or toy-like fences of the gardens we passed; so soothing that Kotmasu, more used to the jolting of the rikisha than I, felt drowsy, and left off talking.

The sounds of the town, the music of guitars or samisens being played in the tea-houses or gaming-houses, had grown gradually indistinct and distant. Now scarcely any noise save the whirring chirp of the cicalas broke the still, sweet-scented air.

Soon we reached our goal, where I was fated to meet and be enslaved by the charms of Hyacinth—for so Mousmé was called. Above us, an inky mass against an indigo sky starred with points of light, rose the mountain, tree-clad, as I knew, on[8] whose sides gleamed here and there the beams of light emanating from paper lanterns or paper-shuttered casements, marking the presence of houses or huts deep-set among the fantastic greenery of the woods.

“Will the sir get out?” exclaimed my djin respectfully, panting with the exertion of the ascent. I climbed down into the darkness, almost falling over Kotmasu, who had already alighted, laughing at our adventure.

Beside us, just where our rikishas had drawn up, was the ghostly gateway marking the entrance to the tea-garden, which lay at the top of a narrow path sloping upward; this wooden gateway painted Indian red and white, the white timbers showing like some spectral skeleton in the dusky gloom.

“Up there, sir,” pointed my djin, who bowed low whilst acting as spokesman.

Telling them not to wait, because we[9] should, as Kotmasu put it, “be many hours,” we two entered the gateway, which marked the line of the palings of bamboo, and made our way up the narrow flower-bordered path to the chaya.

Through an avenue of sweet odours we walked, the mingled scent of tea-roses, gardenias and the soil making the atmosphere almost cloying with sweetness.

This wonderful garden of the tea-house, with its miniature ponds, bridges and grottoes, now all hidden in the darkness, was mysterious and even uncanny as all Eastern gardens are at dusk.

Set back a little from the path were serried ranks of sentinel-like sunflowers, of whose black, vacant faces, yellow-fringed, I felt conscious, staring at me out of the gloom.

A turn of the path and we were in a fairyland, whose existence none a hundred yards off would have suspected. Light[10] for darkness; sounds in the place of silence.

We made our way beneath the paper lanterns of many hues, suspended in mid-air by slender, undistinguishable cords: dragons, green, yellow or red, as their bellying background of variegated paper demanded or the taste of the artist dictated, are there; and cats, monstrous and eccentric-limbed, such as provoke memories of such things drawn on slates in childhood’s days.

There is a flood of yellow, orange, white and blue light on the paths and flower-beds stocked thick with asters, zinnias, strange fringed-edged ragged carnations and chrysanthemums, whilst bushes clipped and trained into fantastic shapes form climbing stations, so to speak, for huge and lesser convolvuli.

Through the paper shutters of the house itself stream more light and sounds of music played upon the samisen.

[11]

Kotmasu, an habitué, knocks upon the lacquer panel of the big door, which is speedily drawn back in its grooved-way. The wife of Takeakira the proprietor appears at the opening, a queer little old woman, silhouetted, with all the ugliness which so often comes with age, against a background of light; behind her a pretty attendant mousmé, just as if she was a figure taken from a vase. Both bow so low on recognising visitors that their faces touch the floor, and then they take off our shoes.

The mousmé conducts us upstairs, along a narrow passage, over the floor of which is stretched, stainless and wrinkleless, a matting of bamboo fibre, into a room which is bare and clean-looking almost to desperation and chilliness.

“Shibaraku,” says the mousmé, addressing us both with a smile of welcome, as she leads the way, which speech Kotmasu[12] tells me is meant for him, as well as the smile and show of white teeth between pretty red lips. Perhaps it is, “What a long time since you have been here!” being obviously inapplicable to me on a first visit.

The paper walls of the room—spotlessly clean—into which we are eventually ushered with a great amount of ceremonious bowing, are just like those in my own little doll’s-house of a villa down in the outskirts of Nagasaki—mere sliding panels, each one in its own ingenious groove. And these by some wonderful process all fit into one another and mysteriously disappear. It is here we have to wait; in this bare room, with its long verandah running in front of it, from which “The Garden of a Thousand Lights,” as its proprietor loved to call it, can be seen; and in the daytime the harbour, an irregular segment of the ocean beyond, calm, green,[13] but animated by the presence of sampans—gondola-like, graceful, with indigo beaks and queer odd-shaped cabins—junks with sails of matting, traders of all nations, hulking colliers, and here and there a man-of-war belonging to a friendly or unfriendly Power.

We are given squares of matting on which to squat, in lieu of chairs, by the ever-smiling mousmé, who then stands mute, awaiting our orders.

“Are there no other guests?” asks Kotmasu, with a quick glance at the little standing figure.

“Yes, several,” replies the mousmé, smiling. And, as though to verify her words, and dispel Kotmasu’s enigmatic and somewhat incredulous smile, we hear unmistakable sounds of hilarity arising from the room beneath our feet, and from a distant chamber on our right.

“But,” continued our mousmé, glancing[14] curiously at me, and adjusting her obi of some flower-sprinkled material with minute care, “the English sirs mostly like to feast alone.” Such was, at all events, Kotmasu’s translation of the remark.

Kotmasu orders our repast; it is to be ultra-Japanese.

Sometimes at my own villa I regale him and seek to revive my own gastronomic memories with pseudo-European fare, which he pretends to like, but in reality loathes because of its immense portions—in the estimation of my Japanese chef; at these I always laugh because the meal seems so grotesquely disproportionate to one’s needs—in Japan.

There is another reason than that so na?vely given—“the English sirs mostly care to feast alone”—by the almond-eyed mousmé; and Kotmasu explains it when the dainty little figure has disappeared through a sliding door to execute our[15] orders. I must not set it down here. What is common and picturesque in Japan, is so unspeakable in English. Kotmasu sits silent, thinking of the meal to come, perhaps, in which “teal duck,” raw spinach, raw shrimps, and even dog, were to find a place—all save the first, thank goodness, in minute proportions.

The sounds of revelry by night went on all the while that Kotmasu and I waited, coming to us softened and indistinct through chinks in the floor and through the paper panels forming the walls of the room—the voices of women and the accompanying music of the samisen, with its note of sadness. Then we heard the muffled sounds of the feet of geishas dancing, in their shoeless, gliding motions.

The strains of the monotonous music, punctuated with Japanese phrases, echoed in the bare passage outside.

[16]

Kotmasu got up and opened the door of grey paper leading on to the verandah, which had black and vermilion storks in flight across its two long panels.

We stepped out.

I for the first time; for Kotmasu I cannot answer. The sounds of the music became clearer, because the others had also slid back their paper doors, perhaps so that the sweet-scented air of the garden might enter, or a whiff of fresh night-wind from off the mountain come in to cool the breathless geishas.

The garden of a thousand lights, with its fountain of doll-like dimensions, in the lower and larger basin of which swim gold, silver and copper-hued fish, lies just beneath our verandah, and, after an artificial plateau, runs away down-hill into the darkness, following each side of the narrow, flower-edged path.

The paper lanterns with painted, bulging[17] sides, some round, some like two mortar-boards of college days which had taken each other into partnership, some like elongated helmets of a Uhlan, and others like monstrous fishes, birds, or reptiles swimming and floating in ether, diffuse a soft, subdued light. A puff of air makes the whole lot swing to and fro so wildly, with a rustle of their paper emptiness, that Kotmasu and I are set wondering idly whether an immense lantern, meant to represent a gold-fish with vermilion fins and black vertebra, which is obviously troubled in its interior, will not flare up and hang, a blackened skeleton, amidst its gay companions.

A white cat flits ghost-like and silent-footed across the path and vanishes down it in answer to a dissonant call of its fellow, and in that moment the disaster happens. The gold-fish, which has regarded us with vacant vermilion-rimmed[18] eyes, is instantly a mass of flame, and then, in another instant, a blackened travesty of a fish.

There are trees in the garden, also fantastic; green grotesques tended and trained with the minute care of a singular taste. There are little nooks, little rockeries in which strange toads and reptiles hide in the fresh moss and darkened crannies, coming out occasionally, sometimes to slip unawares or through ungainliness into miniature lakes—toy ponds—frightening the lazy gold-fish and making the water-lily buds and blossoms nod and curtsey in the ripples caused by their immersion.

The moon is rising, and the wall of blackness which begins where the lights of the garden end becomes gradually less inky, till at last, as the moon tops the mountain ridge, like some laborious and persistent climber, and floods the harbour with her pale, silver light, the vastness of the scene is disclosed.

[19]

Down below in the streets of the town the lights of art are paling in that of Nature’s lantern. The harbour is a huge replica of the glass of frosted silver I bought last week in a curio-shop for twenty yen. The ships at anchor are mere spectres, narrow lines of ink, some of them with dots of light along their sides; the shadow of the hills, over which the moon peeps with cold, white face, just the breath on the glass as when a woman looks too closely into it.

The sounds of singing and dancing appear fewer now it is less sombre. Why does darkness exaggerate noise?

A steamer is going out; it is the mail, a thin thing like the match P. and O. boats I often swam in a bowl when a boy—the lights of her saloon mere glow-worms at this distance. But my companion must have seen all this many times before. Of course he has. And being more interested[20] just now in “teal-duck” than the night side of Nature, he vanishes through the opened doorway, and I hear him drumming with his stockinged heel upon the floor to summon the mousmé.

“Ayakou!” sings out Kotmasu, who has sung “Hi! hi!” till there came an answering voice from below.

I leave my post on the verandah and enter the room, and along the passage at the back comes the sound of a mousmé pattering barefoot, her quick, short steps making a gentle thud, thud on the matting.

The panel door is thrust aside, and our attendant enters with a bow, and many ingenious excuses for the delay.