CHAPTER XLVIII
UNUSUAL HOSPITALITY
September 16th.
Yves has let fall his silver whistle in the ocean, the whistle so
absolutely indispensable for the manoeuvres; and we search the town all
day long, followed by Chrysantheme and Mesdemoiselles La Neige and La
Lune, her sisters, in the endeavor to find another.
It is, however, very difficult to find such a thing in Nagasaki; above
all, very difficult to explain in Japanese what is a sailor's whistle of
the traditional shape, curved, and with a little ball at the end to
modulate the trills and the various sounds of official orders. For three
hours we are sent from shop to shop; at each one they pretend to
understand perfectly what is wanted and trace on tissue-paper, with a
paint-brush, the addresses of the shops where we shall without fail meet
with what we require. Away we go, full of hope, only to encounter some
fresh mystification, till our breathless djins get quite bewildered.
They understand admirably that we want a thing that will make a noise,
music, in short; thereupon they offer us instruments of every, and of the
most unexpected, shape--squeakers for Punch-and-Judy voices, dog-
whistles, trumpets. Each time it is something more and more absurd, so
that at last we are overcome with uncontrollable fits of laughter. Last
of all, an aged Japanese optician, who assumes a most knowing air, a look
of sublime wisdom, goes off to forage in his back shop, and brings to
light a steam fog-horn, a relict from some wrecked steamer.
After dinner, the chief event of the evening is a deluge of rain, which
takes us by surprise as we leave the teahouses, on our return from our
fashionable stroll. It so happened that we were a large party, having
with us several mousme guests, and from the moment that the rain began to
fall from the skies, as if out of a watering-pot turned upside down, the
band became disorganized. The mousmes run off, with bird-like cries, and
take refuge under doorways, in the shops, under the hoods of the djins.
Then, before long--when the shops shut up in haste, when the emptied
streets are flooded, and almost black, and the paper lanterns, piteous
objects, wet through and extinguished--I find myself, I know not how it
happens, flattened against a wall, under the projecting eaves, alone in
the company of Mademoiselle Fraise, my cousin, who is crying bitterly
because her fine robe is wet through. And in the noise of the rain,
which is still falling, and splashing everything with the spouts and
gutters, which in the darkness plaintively murmur like running streams,
the town appears to me suddenly an abode of the gloomiest sadness.
The shower is soon over, and the mousmes come out of their holes like so
many mice; they look for one another, call one another, and their little
voices take the singular, melancholy, dragging inflections they assume
whenever they have to call from afar.
"Hi! Mademoiselle Lu-u-u-u-une!"
"Hi! Madame Jonqui-i-i-i-ille!"
They shout from one to another their outlandish names, prolonging them
indefinitely in the now silent night, in the reverberations of the damp
air after the great summer rain.
At length they are all collected and united again, these tiny personages
with narrow eyes and no brains, and we return to Diou-djen-dji all wet
through.
For the third time, we have Yves sleeping beside us under our blue tent.
There is a great noise shortly after midnight in the apartment beneath
us: our landlord's family have returned from a pilgrimage to a far-
distant temple of the Goddess of Grace. (Although Madame Prune is a
Shintoist, she reveres this deity, who, scandal says, watched over her
youth.) A moment after, Mademoiselle Oyouki bursts into our room like a
rocket, bringing, on a charming little tray, sweetmeats which have been
blessed and bought at the gates of the temple yonder, on purpose for us,
and which we must positively eat at once, before the virtue is gone out
of them. Hardly rousing ourselves, we absorb these little edibles
flavored with sugar and pepper, and return a great many sleepy thanks.
Yves sleeps quietly on this occasion, without dealing any blows to the
floor or the panels with either fists or feet. He has hung his watch on
one of the hands of our gilded idol in order to be more sure of seeing
the hour at any time of the night, by the light of the sacred lamps. He
gets up betimes in the morning, asking: "Well, did I behave properly?"
and dresses in haste, preoccupied about duty and the roll-call.
Outside, no doubt, it is daylight already: through the tiny holes which
time has pierced in our wooden panels, threads of morning light penetrate
our chamber, and in the atmosphere of our room where night still lingers,
they trace vague white rays. Soon, when the sun shall have risen, these
rays will lengthen and become beautifully golden. The cocks and the
cicalas make themselves heard, and now Madame Prune will begin her mystic
drone.
Nevertheless, out of politeness for Yves-San, Chrysantheme lights a
lantern and escorts him to the foot of the dark staircase. I even fancy
that, on parting, I hear a kiss exchanged. In Japan this is of no
consequence, I know; it is very usual, and quite admissible; no matter
where one goes, in houses one enters for the first time, one is quite at
liberty to kiss any mousme who may be present, without any notice being
taken of it. But with regard to Chrysantheme, Yves is in a delicate
position, and he ought to understand it better. I begin to feel uneasy
about the hours they have so often spent together alone; and I make up my
mind that this very day I will not play the spy upon them, but speak
frankly to Yves, and make a clean breast of it.
Suddenly from below, clac! clac! two dry hands are clapped together; it
is Madame Prune's warning to the Great Spirit. And immediately after her
prayer breaks forth, soars upward in a shrill nasal falsetto, like a
morning alarum when the hour for waking has come, the mechanical noise of
a spring let go and running down.
".....The richest woman in the world! Cleansed from all my sins,
O Ama-Terace-Omi-Kami! in the river of Kamo."
And this extraordinary bleating, hardly human, scatters and changes my
ideas, which were very nearly clear at the moment I awoke.
