Next morning I awoke early, roused by the twittering of grass sparrows and the weakened croak of a frog, hoarse from its vocal efforts of the night.

It was New Year’s day, and the sun was streaming through the open windows. Mousmé had already crept from her white mattress beneath the smoke-blue mosquito curtains, and was doubtless sunning herself, after a hasty toilet, in the wonderful garden which we had fashioned out of the rocks and red-brown soil.

I stretched sleepily, and wondered vaguely what they were doing in England, and whether my estimable, though trying, sister Lou (fashionable to her finger-tips) had cajoled my unfortunate brother-in-law into changing her last year’s set of furs for “something a little more the thing, don’t you know, Stanmere.”

[126]

Mousmé requires no furs. Her wants are few. A piece of silk with wonderful patterns over it—birds which seem to fly, irises whose vivid tints almost make unaccustomed eyes ache, and chrysanthemums which one could swear nod upon their slender, almost leafless stalks—which she fashions into a robe of delight. A few jade and lacquer pins for her wonderful jet-black hair. Some new tabi. Long white digitated stockings reaching above her dimpled knees. A sash to make her girl acquaintances and married brother’s wife jealous. And so you have the costume in which she is prepared to receive her visitors and to glide with a soothing shish-shish over the white matting of the floor and through the comically narrow passages.

The mail arrived yesterday week, and down at Kotmasu’s office I found Lou’s usual parcel of New Year’s gifts. For[127] me there were several new novels—the pictures in which will cause Mousmé to wonder and open her almond eyes wide, with the little trick of quivering the lids which she has—some papers, tobacco—five pounds of it in a sealed tin (a good soul is Stanmere)—a shaving tidy worked by Irene in some mysterious stitch which seems to have come into fashion since I scorned crewel-work anti-macassars with lace frills that hung on the back buttons of one’s coat, turning one at afternoon tea into an object of interest and amusement.

For Mousmé there was a Paris hat (Lou will never, I fear, realise that Paris fashions have as yet little interest for Nagasaki belles), in which Mousmé’s piquant face would be smothered and turned to no account, a silk tea-gown which she will wear with the dignity becoming five feet one inch and a half of really married Japanese womanhood.

[128]

There was also something more.

My present, which I have had sent out from the Compagnie des Fondants Parisiens—a huge box of the best confectionery that money could buy. I knew that Mousmé would like this better than anything else, and that for the time the native teriyaki and such-like sugar-coated joys would be nowhere.

All the presents are in the little room I use as a study—a room into which Mousmé creeps with awe. It is (to her untutored mind) so full of books and mysterious writings.

I had risen and was gazing out over the harbour, which lay below me veiled in a gauze-like, opalescent haze, when the farther paper-panelled door was slid softly back in its groove, and Mousmé entered.

A quaint little figure with the flush of dawn transferred to her porcelain cheeks and eyes bright with the early morning[129] air of the scented garden; her elaborate coiffure, with its many pins, a striking contrast to the négligée of her plum-coloured kimono with its sprays of bamboo in gold thread. Against her bare little throat and dimpled shoulders she pressed a wealth of iris and lotus blooms and tender green shoots of the slenderest bamboo, her face peeping out elfish and smiling from the midst.

“These are for you, Cy-reel,” she said, laughing and casting the brilliant blossoms on to the floor in a patch of sunlight at my feet. “Now den what have you for me?”

It is difficult to resist Mousmé when she pulls one’s face down to her own smiling one, and throws slender but wonderfully tenacious little arms round one’s neck.

Mousmé, since she married, has lost some of the shyness for the “velly much rich Englishman” who had so strange a fancy[130] as to marry her right away, and in its place has come the knowledge of certain privileges of her sex (for she knows little as yet of the “advanced” woman), and she exacts them with a pretty persistence which I find charming.

We went along the passage to the room in which are all the presents. They have been taken out of their case, and piled with masculine breadth of effect upon two low lacquer-and-bamboo settees in a corner near one of the windows.

“Oh! Oh!” exclaimed Mousmé, and then she fell down before this wonderful collection of gifts, her tiny hands fluttering over them like those of a child uncertain which thing to touch first.

Irene’s shaving tidy, the tin of tobacco sent by Stanmere, Lou’s gift of books—all these things are brushed aside, and the wonderful pale blue tea-gown is at last taken up. It is absurdly long for her, of[131] course, and as she slipped into it she laughed softly at the comical figure she presented.

“It is velly nice, I like it. But it must be cut off. You cannot come near me with all this on the floor.”

She glided once or twice across the room, like a big-winged moth, with the soft sound of silk frou-frou on the matting, and then the gown was laid aside, so that she might more easily find the other presents.

Then the box of fondants was discovered. What rapture! Smiles stole over her face. Her little fingers trembled when she at last made up her mind to undo the satin ribbon, which, crossing from corner to corner, is tied in a great bow in the centre of the lid. There are wonderful sweets of all sorts, things which Mousmé almost fears to taste, and which when once tasted encourage her to further depredations and experiments.

[132]

“Mousmé, you’ll be ill.”

“No, Cy-reel, not nearly so sweet and ill-producing as teriyaki.”

I laughed at the gentle sophistry and suggested that we should go to breakfast.

After the meal a huge bullock-cart came along the road which runs at the foot of our sloping garden. It is laden with New Year’s gifts to tempt those who have put off the inevitable spending of sen and yen till the last possible moment.

Mousmé drew me along the garden path, past the iris pond, in the shade of which gold-fish are keeping New Year’s day on a fly-and-mosquito diet, to the side of the cart. The proprietors in new suits are explaining the merits of their wares, which are cheapened enormously as at Western “sale” times. A light air stirred the paper lanterns with which the cart was decked.

One represented a huge gold-fish with a gold and vermilion body and fins boldly[133] sketched in black. It took Mousmé’s fancy. We purchased it, and earned the absurdly exaggerated thanks of the smiling vendors, knowing the while that we did not require it, and that it would be placed with a score of others, hung on their slight bamboo rods, in the cupboard at the end of the passage.

Some night, perhaps, unless another lantern comes more easily to hand, we might take it out to guide us on our way down to the chaya at which the best geishas dance.

During the whole of the morning we were expectant. Before sunset many of Mousmé’s numerous relations will have called to wish us New Year joys: and my respected, if too effusive, mother-in-law will have once more asked me if I am satisfied with her daughter.

She even yet seems to think that her daughter is on approval, and liable at any[134] time to be returned with liquidated damages in the form of an extra handsome kimono from Nara-Ya’s famous store on the Bund. Everyone calls on everyone, and after mid-day we are not long left without visitors.

Kotmasu turned up in good time. He brought Mousmé the tiny dog she has been longing for. A charming present, which she will almost want to wear round her neck with a chain, lest it be lost.

It was only when our little home almost trembled and our garden seemed to swarm with the incursion of Mousmé’s relatives that I realised how throughly I was married. By the time the sun had commenced its downward flight into the sea behind the hills, many had arrived, and little moon-faced Aki had taken the usual and seemingly inevitable plunge into the water-lily pond in search of the sprites who are supposed to dwell therein.

[135]

These obsequious relatives by marriage amuse me immensely. They all take so much au sérieux. But how truly polite they all are. Even the sampanman (a cousin of whom Mousmé is not quite sure) is a polished gentleman, and the new suit with which he has managed to start the year, with the manners thrown in, gave him quite a distinguished air. I noticed that the box of sweets was reserved by Mousmé for those who were drinking tea, surrounded by many plates and cups—the favoured few, mostly girl friends.

If only I might have believed the charming prevarications of my relatives, how beautiful everything belonging to me must have been.

At length the last of them disappeared down the road. And the paper lanterns, whose dull white surfaces challenge the moon swinging in the sky above the amethyst hills, swung round the corner.[136] Mousmé waved her hand sympathetically, and then we sat down together on the veranda to watch the last hours of a New Year’s Day glide into the ?ons of the past.

One day is so very much like another to me in this strange land, where I have the lightest of business duties to perform, few friends other than Kotmasu, and no great desire to gain any more, though I find the natives I know vastly more interesting than the few English who are settled more or less permanently in Nagasaki for business or other purposes.

Everything has a certain charm—Mousmé always—but four long years have robbed my surroundings of that subtlest of all interests, novelty. I am eager to test my experiment, which is answering here so admirably, with a new environment.

“Mousmé in Bond Street.” Kotmasu’s phrase haunts me with a sinister purpose, but I am not to be daunted easily, for I have[137] my own opinions. Have I not? I ask myself.

I remember the Frenchman who, with some delicacy, sums up the question of marriage in every clime where any ceremony is attached to the rite: “Given a woman and one possesses the possibility of great happiness—or its exact antithesis,” and I am thankful that my experiment so far has resulted well.

Mousmé is neither the serpent nor the eel of another French writer’s experience, but is always fresh, always charming. She is a graduate in the art of pleasing. She knows nothing further of astronomy than to suspect that the stars are really big diamonds, nor of mathematics than what generally enables her to make a good bargain for an obi, dress or hairpin. Hers are entirely applied mathematics, and of the simplest kind. All this ignorance is very stupid, no doubt, to you. I can well imagine the[138] smile of the Girton girl or “superior person” which will reward my confession of Mousmé’s ignorance, but then you are at a disadvantage—in short, you do not know Mousmé as I do. She has lately taken to writing me love-letters whilst I am away down in the town, and when she is tired of trying to read what is printed underneath the pictures in the papers and magazines—queer narrow little strips of letters, folded ever so many times, which she places in her prettiest envelopes, and lays upon my writing-desk; then hides behind a paper screen, or in the next room, to watch me unobserved whilst I read them.

Of course, she could tell me all that they contain, and often does; but Mousmé is quite a child in some things—the blending of childishness with womanhood, which is one of her most delightful traits.

There are such quaint turns of expression[139] in these rice-paper billets-doux, which by turns bring smiles and tears into my eyes, such na?ve confessions, such strange lapses into her limited vocabulary of English words.

To-day there is one of those notes on my writing-table, in a shrimp-pink envelope, on which is depicted a dainty little geisha dancing in one corner. There is a rather strong air—I cannot call it a wind, or even breeze—stirring; and Mousmé, fearful lest the treasury of her love should be blown away, has weighed it down with the bronze frog I use for a paper-weight, which she made me buy as an ornament (!) for my table the other day.

I take the little letter up, of course, with the knowledge that Mousmé’s eye is upon me from some near retreat, from which she can steal forth silently to kiss me, English fashion; or startle me with some sudden noise, in imitation of the mice which scamper[140] about in the basement at night, or with a mimicry of the strange han! han! of the vultures which whirl, screaming hoarsely and as if in complaint, over the water of the harbour below.

Mousmé comes out softly from her hiding-place behind the turquoise-blue paper screen in the corner, unaware that two tell-tale glasses, her big one (which she soon made me purchase for her) and my little one, have from their juxtaposition long ago betrayed to me the secret of her whereabouts.

Two soft white arms, bare to the elbows, encircle my neck suddenly from behind; a pretty, piquant face appears over my left shoulder, and—well, after a time, when we stand up and look at each other, there is a peal of gay, spontaneous laughter. And, behold! there is a tell-tale patch of white upon my cheek and coat where her face has rested.

[141]

It is several days since we have been anywhere—that is, further afield than a flying visit to my mother-in-law down the hill—and to-night we are going to the fête at the great temple away up the hillside. I have been to such before, but Mousmé is crazy to go with her real husband; and as there is certainly no valid objection to urge against her desire, we are going.

Mousmé puts the little shrimp-coloured love-letter in a box on top of the numerous others she has written me during our three months of married life, and then we sit down to a dinner of the usual perplexing dishes.

We talk gaily enough in Japanese, Mousmé describing to me all the delights she is anticipating from the proposed excursion, and telling me all that has occurred during my two hours’ absence.

What a charming little vis-a-vis she proves as we, seated on our squares of[142] spotless matting, pretend to make a good meal off impossible dishes, as to the constituents of which, even now, after some years of experience, I am frequently in mysterious doubt! Oka, our cook, is of an inventive turn of mind, and to-day he serves on the tiny blue plates wee potatoes à la marrons glacés, and cherries in vinegar! But Mousmé pronounces them ............