Kimono by John Paris

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KIMONO

by

JOHN PARIS

1922

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I AN ANGLO-JAPANESE MARRIAGE

II HONEYMOON

III EASTWARDS

IV NAGASAKI

V CHONKINA

VI ACROSS JAPAN

VII THE EMBASSY

VIII THE HALF-CASTE GIRL

IX ITO SAN

X THE YOSHIWARA WOMEN

XI A GEISHA DINNER

XII FALLEN CHERRY-BLOSSOMS

XIII THE FAMILY ALTAR

XIV THE DWARF TREES

XV EURASIA

XVI THE GREAT BUDDHA

XVII THE RAINY SEASON

XVIII AMONG THE NIKKO MOUNTAINS

XIX YAE SMITH

XX THE KIMONO

XXI SAYONARA (GOOD-BYE)

XXII FUJINAMI ASAKO

XXIII THE REAL SHINTO

XXIV THE AUTUMN FESTIVAL

XXV JAPANESE COURTSHIP

XXVI ALONE IN TOKYO

XXVII LADY BRANDAN

_Utsutsu wo mo
Utsutsu to sara ni
Omowaneba,
Yume wo mo yume to
Nani ka omowamu?

Since I am convinced
That Reality is in no way
Real,
How am I to admit
That dreams are dreams?_

The verses and translation above are taken from A. Waley's "JAPANESE
POETRY: THE UTA" (Clarendon Press), as are many of the classical
poems placed at the head of the chapters.

CHAPTER I

AN ANGLO-JAPANESE MARRIAGE

_Shibukaro ka
Shiranedo kaki no
Hatsu-chigiri_.

Whether the fruit be bitter
Or whether it be sweet,
The first bite tells.

The marriage of Captain the Honourable Geoffrey Barrington and Miss
Asako Fujinami was an outstanding event in the season of 1913. It
was bizarre, it was picturesque, it was charming, it was socially
and politically important, it was everything that could appeal to
the taste of London society, which, as the season advances, is apt to
become jaded by the monotonous process of Hymen in High Life and by
the continued demand for costly wedding presents.

Once again Society paid for its seat at St. George's and for its
glass of champagne and crumb of cake with gifts of gold and silver and
precious stones enough to smother the tiny bride; but for once in a
way it paid with a good heart, not merely in obedience to convention,
but for the sake of participating in a unique and delightful scene, a
touching ceremony, the plighting of East and West.

Would the Japanese heiress be married in a kimono with flowers and
fans fixed in an elaborate _coiffure_? Thus the ladies were wondering
as they craned their necks to catch a glimpse of the bride's
procession up the aisle; but, though some even stood on hassocks and
pew seats, few were able to distinguish for certain. She was so very
tiny. At any rate, her six tall bridesmaids were arrayed in Japanese
dress, lovely white creations embroidered with birds and foliage.

It is hard to distinguish anything in the perennial twilight of St.
George's; a twilight symbolic of the new lives which emerge from its
Corinthian portico into that married world about which so much has
been guessed and so little is known.

One thing, however, was visible to all as the pair moved together
up to the altar rails, and that was the size of the bridegroom as
contrasted with the smallness of his bride. He looked like a great
rough bear and she like a silver fairy. There was something intensely
pathetic in the curve of his broad shoulders as he bent over the
little hand to place in its proud position the diminutive golden
circlet which was to unite their two lives.

As they left the church, the organ was playing _Kimi-ga-ya_, the
Japanese national hymn. Nobody recognized it, except the few Japanese
who were present; but Lady Everington, with that exaggeration of the
suitable which is so typical of her, had insisted on its choice as a
voluntary. Those who had heard the tune before and half remembered
it decided that it must come from the "Mikado"; and one stern dowager
went so far as to protest to the rector for permitting such a tune to
desecrate the sacred edifice.

Outside the church stood the bridegroom's brother officers. Through
the gleaming passage of sword-blades, smiling and happy, the strangely
assorted couple entered upon the way of wedlock, as Mr. and Mrs.
Geoffrey Barrington--the shoot of the Fujinami grafted on to one of
the oldest of our noble families.

"Are her parents here?" one lady was asking her neighbour.

"Oh, no; they are both dead, I believe."

"What kind of people are they, do you know? Do Japs have an
aristocracy and society and all that kind of thing?"

"I'm sure I don't know. I shouldn't think so. They don't look real
enough."

"She is very rich, anyhow," a third lady intervened, "I've heard they
are big landowners in Tokyo, and cousins of Admiral Togo's."

* * * * *

The opportunity for closer inspection of this curiosity was afforded
by the reception given at Lady Everington's mansion in Carlton House
Terrace. Of course, everybody was there. The great ballroom was draped
with hangings of red and white, the national colours of Japan. Favours
of the same bright hues were distributed among the guests. Trophies
of Union Jacks and Rising Suns were grouped in corners and festooned
above windows and doorways.

Lady Everington was bent upon giving an international importance to
her protegee's marriage. Her original plan had been to invite the
whole Japanese community in London, and so to promote the popularity
of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance by making the most of this opportunity
for social fraternising. But where was the Japanese community in
London? Nobody knew. Perhaps there was none. There was the Embassy, of
course, which arrived smiling, fluent, and almost too well-mannered.
But Lady Everington had been unable to push very far her programme for
international amenities. There were strange little yellow men from
the City, who had charge of ships and banking interests; there were
strange little yellow men from beyond the West End, who studied the
Fine Arts, and lived, it appeared, on nothing. But the hostess could
find no ladies at all, except Countess Saito and the Embassy dames.

Monsieur and Madame Murata from Paris, the bride's guardians, were
also present. But the Orient was submerged beneath the flood of our
rank and fashion, which, as one lady put it, had to take care how it
stepped for fear of crushing the little creatures.

"Why _did_ you let him do it?" said Mrs. Markham to her sister.

"It was a mistake, my dear," whispered Lady Everington, "I meant her
for somebody quite different."

"And you're sorry now?"

"No, I have no time to be sorry--ever," replied that eternally
graceful and youthful Egeria, who is one of London's most powerful
social influences. "It will be interesting to see what becomes of
them."

Lady Everington has been criticised for stony-heartedness, for
opportunism, and for selfish abuse of her husband's vast wealth. She
has been likened to an experimental chemist, who mixes discordant
elements together in order to watch the results, chilling them in ice
or heating them over the fire, until the lives burst in fragments or
the colour slowly fades out of them. She has been called an artist in
_mesalliances_, a mismatch-maker of dangerous cunning, a dangler of
picturesque beggar-maids before romantic-eyed Cophetuas, a daring
promoter of ambitious American girls and a champion of musical comedy
peeresses. Her house has been named the Junior Bachelors Club. The
charming young men who seem to be bound to its hospitable board by
invisible chains are the material for her dashing improvisations and
the _dramatis personae_ of the scores of little domestic comedies
which she likes to keep floating around her in different stages of
development.

Geoffrey Barrington had been the secretary of this club, and a
favourite with the divinity who presided over it. We had all supposed
that he would remain a bachelor; and the advent of Asako Fujinami into
London society gave us at first no reason to change our opinion. But
she was certainly attractive.

* * * * *

She ought to have been married in a kimono. There was no doubt about
it now, when there was more liberty to inspect her, as she stood there
shaking hands with hundreds of guests and murmuring her "Thank you
very much" to the reiterated congratulations.

The white gown was perfectly cut and of a shade to give its full
value to her complexion, a waxen complexion like old ivory or like
a magnolia petal, in which the Mongolian yellow was ever so faintly
discernible. It was a sweet little face, oval and smooth; but it might
have been called expressionless if it had not been for a dimple which
peeped and vanished around a corner of the small compressed mouth, and
for the great deep brown eyes, like the eyes of deer or like pools of
forest water, eyes full of warmth and affection. This was the feature
which struck most of us as we took the opportunity to watch her in
European dress with the glamour of her kimono stripped from her. They
were the eyes of the Oriental girl, a creature closer to the animals
than we are, lit by instinct more often than by reason, and hiding
a soul in its infancy, a repressed, timorous, uncertain thing,
spasmodically violent and habitually secretive and aloof.

Sir Ralph Cairns, the famous diplomat, was talking on this subject to
Professor Ironside.

"The Japanese are extraordinarily quick," he was saying, "the most
adaptable people since the ancient Greeks, whom they resemble in some
ways. But they are more superficial. The intellect races on ahead, but
the heart lingers in the Dark Ages."

"Perhaps intermarriage is the solution of the great racial problem,"
suggested the Professor.

"Never," said the old administrator. "Keep the breed pure, be it
white, black, or yellow. Bastard races cannot flourish. They are waste
of Nature."

The Professor glanced towards the bridal pair.

"And these also?" he asked.

"Perhaps," said Sir Ralph, "but in her case her education has been so
entirely European."

Hereupon, Lady Everington approaching, Sir Ralph turned to her and
said,--

"Dear lady, let me congratulate you: this is your masterpiece."

"Sir Ralph," said the hostess, already looking to see which of her
guests she would next pounce upon, "You know the East so well. Give
me one little piece of advice to hand over to the children before they
start on their honeymoon."

Sir Ralph smiled benignly.

"Where are they going?" he asked.

"Everywhere," replied Lady Everington, "they are going to travel."

"Then let them travel all over the world," he answered, "only not to
Japan. That is their Bluebeard's cupboard; and into that they must not
look."

There was more discussion of bridegroom and bride than is usual at
society weddings, which are apt to become mere reunions of fashionable
people, only vaguely conscious of the identity of those in whose
honour they have been gathered together.

"Geoffrey Barrington is such a healthy barbarian," said a pale young
man with a monocle; "if it had been a high-browed child of culture
like you, Reggie, with a taste for exotic sensations, I should hardly
have been surprised."

"And if it had been you, Arthur," replied Reggie Forsyth of the
Foreign Office, who was Barrington's best man, "I should have known
at once that it was the twenty thousand a year which was the supreme
attraction."

There was a certain amount of Anglo-Indian sentiment afloat among
the company, which condemned the marriage entirely as an outrage on
decency.

"What was Brandan dreaming of," snorted General Haslam, "to allow his
son to marry a yellow native?"

"Dreaming of the mortgage on the Brandan property, I expect, General,"
answered Lady Rushworth.

"It's scandalous," foamed the General, "a fine young fellow, a fine
officer, too! His career ruined for an undersized _geisha_!"

"But think of the millions of _yens_ or _sens_ or whatever they are,
with which she is going to re-gild the Brandan coronet!"

"That wouldn't console me for a yellow baby with slit eyes," continued
the General, his voice rising in debate as his custom was at the
Senior.

"Hush, General!" said his interlocutor, "we don't discuss such
possibilities."

"But everybody here must be thinking of them, except that unfortunate
young man."

"We never say what we are thinking, General; it would be too
upsetting."

"And we are to have a Japanese Lord Brandan, sitting in the House of
Lords?" the General went on.

"Yes, among the Jews, Turks, and Armenians, who are there already,"
Lady Rushworth answered, "an extra Oriental will never be noticed. It
will only be another instance of the course of Empire taking its way
Eastward."

* * * * *

In the Everington dining-room the wedding presents were displayed. It
looked more like the interior of a Bond Street shop where every kind
of _article de luxe_, useful and useless, was heaped in plenty.

Perhaps the only gift which had cost less than twenty pounds was Lady
Everington's own offering, a photograph of herself in a plain silver
frame, her customary present when one of her protegees was married
under her immediate auspices.

"My dear," she would say, "I have enriched you by several thousands of
pounds. I have introduced you to the right people for present-giving
at precisely the right moment previous to your wedding, when they know
you neither too little nor too much. By long experience I have
learnt to fix it to a day. But I am not going to compete with this
undistinguished lavishness. I give you my picture to stand in
your drawing-room as an artist puts his signature to a completed
masterpiece, so that when you look around upon the furniture, the
silver, the cut glass, the clocks, the engagement tablets, and the
tantalus stands, the offerings of the rich whose names you have
long ago forgotten, then you will confess to yourself in a burst of
thankfulness to your fairy godmother that all this would never have
been yours if it had not been for her!"

In a corner of the room and apart from the more ostentatious homage,
stood on a small table a large market-basket, in which was lying a
huge red fish, a roguish, rollicking mullet with a roving eye, all
made out of a soft crinkly silk. In the basket beneath it were rolls
and rolls of plain silk, red and white. This was an offering from
the Japanese community in London, the conventional wedding present of
every Japanese home from the richest to the poorest, varying only
in size and splendour. On another small table lay a bundle of brown
objects like prehistoric axe heads, bound round with red and white
string, and vaguely odorous of bloater-paste. These were dried flesh
of the fish called _katsuobushi_ by the Japanese, whose absence also
would have brought misfortune to the newly married. Behind them, on
a little tray, stood a miniature landscape representing an aged
pine-tree by the sea-shore and a little cottage with a couple of old,
old people standing at its door, two exquisite little dolls dressed
in rough, poor kimonos, brown and white. The old man holds a rake,
and the old woman holds a broom. They have very kindly faces and white
silken hair. Any Japanese would recognise them at once as the Old
People of Takasago, the personification of the Perfect Marriage.
They are staring with wonder and alarm at the Brandan sapphires,
a monumental _parure_ designed for the massive state of some
Early-Victorian Lady Brandan.

Asako Fujinami had spent days rejoicing over the arrival of her
presents, little interested in the identity of the givers but
fascinated by the things themselves. She had taken hours to arrange
them in harmonious groups. Then a new gift would arrive which would
upset the balance, and she would have to begin all over again.

Besides this treasury in the dining-room, there were all her
clothes, packed now for the honeymoon, a whole wardrobe of fairy-like
disguises, wonderful gowns of all colours and shapes and materials.
These, it is true, she had bought herself. She had always been
surrounded by money; but it was only since she had lived with Lady
Everington that she had begun to learn something about the thousand
different ways of spending it, and all the lovely things for which it
can be exchanged. So all her new things, whatever their source, seemed
to her like presents, like unexpected enrichments. She had basked
among her new acquisitions, silent as was her wont when she was happy,
sunning herself in the warmth of her prosperity. Best of all, she
never need wear kimonos again in public. Her fiance had acceded to
this, her most immediate wish. She could dress now like the girls
around her. She would no longer be stared at like a curio in a shop
window. Inquisitive fingers would no longer clutch at the long sleeves
of, crinkled silk, or try to probe the secret of the huge butterfly
bow on her back. She could step out fearlessly now like English women.
She could give up the mincing walk and the timid manner which she felt
was somehow inseparable from her native dress.

When she told her protectress that Geoffrey had consented to its
abandonment, Lady Everington had heaved a sigh.

"Poor Kimono!" she said, "it has served you well. But I suppose a
soldier is glad to put his uniform away when the fighting is over.
Only, never forget the mysterious power of the uniform over the other
sex."

Another day when her Ladyship had been in a bad mood, she had
snapped,--

"Put those things away, child, and keep to your kimono. It is your
natural plumage. In those borrowed plumes you look undistinguished and
underfed."

* * * * *

The Japanese Ambassador to the Court of St. James proposed the health
of the bride and bridegroom. Count Saito was a small, wise man, whom
long sojourn in European countries had to some extent de-orientalised.
His hair was grizzled, his face was seamed, and he had a peering way
of gazing through his gold-rimmed spectacles with head thrust forward
like a man half blind, which he certainly was not.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "it is a great pleasure for me to
be present on this occasion, for I think this wedding is a personal
compliment to myself and to my work in this splendid country. Mr. and
Mrs. Geoffrey Barrington are the living symbols of the Anglo-Japanese
Alliance; and I hope they will always remember the responsibility
resting on their shoulders. The bride and bridegroom of to-day must
feel that the relations of Great Britain and Japan depend upon the
perfect harmony of their married life. Ladies and gentlemen, let us
drink long life and happiness to Mr. and Mrs. Geoffrey Barrington, to
the Union Jack and to the Rising Sun!"

The toast, was drunk and three cheers were given, with an extra cheer
for Mrs. Geoffrey. The husband, who was no hand at speechmaking,
replied--and his good-natured voice was quite thick with emotion--that
it was awfully good of them all to give his wife and himself such a
ripping send-off, and awfully good of Sir George and Lady Everington
especially, and awfully good of Count Saito; and that he was the
happiest man in the world and the luckiest, and that his wife had told
him to tell them all that she was the happiest woman, though he really
did not see why she should be. Anyhow, he would do his best to give
her a jolly good time. He thanked his friends for their good wishes
and for their beautiful presents. They had had jolly good times
together, and, in return for all their kindness, he and his wife
wanted to wish them all a jolly good time.

So spoke Geoffrey Barrington; and at that moment many people present
must have felt a pang of regret that this fine specimen of England's
young manhood should marry an oriental. He was over six feet high. His
broad shoulders seemed to stoop a little with the lazy strength of a
good-tempered carnivore, of Una's lion, and his face, which was almost
round, was set off by a mane of the real lion colour. He wore his
moustache rather longer than was the fashion. It was a face which
seemed ready to laugh at any moment--or else to yawn. For there
was about the man's character and appearance something indolent and
half-awakened and much of the schoolboy. Yet he was over thirty. But
there is always a tendency for Army life to be merely a continuation
of public-school existence. Eton merges into Sandhurst, and Sandhurst
merges into the regiment. One's companions are all the time men of
the same class and of the same ideas. The discipline is the same,
the conventionality and the presiding fetish of Good and Bad Form. So
many, generals are perennial school boys. They lose their freshness,
that is all.

But Geoffrey Barrington had not lost his freshness. This was his great
charm, for he certainly was not quick or witty. Lady Everington said
that she kept him as a disinfectant to purify the atmosphere.

"This house," she declared, "sometimes gets over-scented with
tuberoses. Then I open the window and let Geoffrey Barrington in!"

He was the only son of Lord Brandan and heir to that ancient but
impoverished title. He had been brought up to the idea that he must
marry a rich wife. He neither jibbed foolishly at the proposal, nor
did he surrender lightly to any of the willing heiresses who threw
themselves at his head. He accepted his destiny with the fatalism
which every soldier must carry in his knapsack, and took up his post
as Mars in attendance in Lady Everington's drawing-room, recognising
that there lay the strategic point for achieving his purpose. He was
not without hope, too, that besides obtaining the moneybags he might
be so fortunate as to fall in love with the possessor of them.

Asako Fujinami, whom he had first met at dinner, at Lady Everington's,
had crossed his mind just like an exquisite bar of melody. He made no
comments at the time, but he could not forget her. The haunting tune
came back to him again and again. By the time that she had floated in
his arms through three or four dances, the spell had worked. _La belle
dame sans merci_, the enchantress who lurks in every woman, had him
in thrall. Her simplest observations seemed to him to be pearls of
wisdom, her every movement a triumph of grace.

"Reggie," he said to his friend Forsyth, "what do you think of that
little Japanese girl?"

Reggie, who was a diplomat by profession and a musician by the grace
of God, and whose intuition was almost feminine especially where
Geoffrey was concerned, answered,--

"Why, Geoffrey, are you thinking of marrying her?"

"By Jove!" exclaimed his friend, starting at the thought as at a
discovery; "but I, don't think she'd have me. I'm not her sort."

"You never can tell," suggested Reggie mischievously; "She is quite
unspoilt, and she has twenty thousand a year. She is unique. You could
not possibly get her confused with somebody else's wife, as so many
people seem to do when they get married. Why not try?"

Reggie thought that such a mating was impossible, but it amused him
to play with the idea. As for Lady Everington, who knew every one so
well, and who thought that she knew them perfectly, she never guessed.

"I think, Geoffrey, that you like to be seen with Asako," she said,
"just to point the contrast."

Her confession to her sister, Mrs. Markham, was the truth. She had
made a mistake; she had destined Asako for somebody quite different.
It was the girl herself who had been the first to enlighten her. She
came to her hostess's boudoir one evening before the labours of the
night began.

"Lady Georgie," she had said--Lady Everington is Lady Georgie to
all who know her even a little. "_Il faut que je vous dise quelque
chose_." The girl's face glanced downward and sideways, as her habit
was when embarrassed.

When Asako spoke in French it meant that something grave was afoot.
She was afraid that her unsteady English might muddle what she
intended to say. Lady Everington knew that it must be another
proposal; she had already dealt with three.

"_Eh bien, cette fois qui est-il?_" she asked.

"_Le capitaine Geoffroi_" answered Asako. Then her friend knew that it
was serious.

"What did you say to him?" she demanded.

"I tell him he must ask you."

"But why drag me into it? It's your own affair."

"In France and in Japan," said Asako, "a girl do not say Yes and No
herself. It is her father and her mother who decide. I have no father
or mother; so I think he must ask you."

"And what do you want me to say?"

For answer Asako gently squeezed the elder woman's hand, but Lady
Georgie was in no mood to return the pressure. The girl at once felt
the absence of the response, and said,--

"What, you do not like the _capitaine Geoffroi_?"

But her fairy godmother answered bitterly,--

"On the contrary, I have a considerable affection for Geoffrey."

"Then," cried Asako, starting up, "you think I am not good enough for
him. It's because I'm--not English."

She began to cry. In spite of her superficial hardness, Lady
Everington has a very tender heart. She took the girl in her arms.

"Dearest child," she said, raising the little, moist face to hers,
"don't cry. In England we answer this great question ourselves. Our
fathers and mothers and fairy godmothers have to concur. If Geoffrey
Barrington has asked you to marry him, it is because he loves you. He
does not scatter proposals like calling-cards, as some young men do.
In fact, I have never heard of him proposing to anyone before. He does
not want you to say 'No', of course. But are you quite ready to say
'Yes'? Very well, wait a fortnight, and don't see more of him than you
can help in the meantime. Now, let them send for my _masseuse_. There
is nothing so exhausting to the aged as the emotions of young people."

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