Читать книгу The Garden of Vision - Elizabeth Louisa Moresby - Страница 6

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This is the story of certain things which befell in that strange and little-known country Japan—known indeed to many Western people, but only as one may know a beautiful woman passed in the street. A moment one looks and speculates on what may underlie the heart-hiding smile, the mysterious sweetness of the eyes which brush yours and are gone. But the meeting brings no knowledge. She has taken her own way and you remember but do not understand.

Indeed, it is true that one may be a long time in her presence and yet fail to understand. That man, Lafcadio Hearn, who of all Western men drew nearest to her, proclaimed her manifold charms in exquisite words, studied her, besought her grace with longing, was yet compelled to own when he left her forever that her mysteries were more inscrutable at the end of many years spent at her feet than at the beginning. Perhaps it was because one may recognize a beautiful body, a crystalline keen brain, and yet miss all in missing the secret of the spirit that is the life of both. Therefore this book is an attempt to give what I know of the third of that strange trinity, and since I myself 2 share the deepest faith of Japan it may give wind-driven glimpses of the moon of thought which shines on a world so lovely that it is easier to dwell on what is illumined than on the remote splendor by which it is seen. But glimpses only. What is there that can be wholly loved unless the essence of its being is shared?

This story is strange in its beginning, its present and future, and yet must be told because its bright light may illumine devious ways for others as it did for those happy lovers whom the world might count unhappy because it could not pluck out the heart of their mystery.

It began in London, in a flat in Camborne Road, large and sunny, overlooking the trees of Kensington Gardens, where many Asiatic people felt themselves at home, English though it was. Its mistress knew not only Japan but many countries of Asia, and her knowledge and sympathy gave her a position apart from that of other Europeans. It was said of her that her windows opened to all the lands of the sunrise, and that was certainly her desire. Her name was Eleanor Ascham.

Many Japanese came, Indians, many Chinese and others, glad of a friend who could understand them, who knew their philosophies, faiths, and the influences which had shaped them into what they were, however strange their shaping might seem to Western minds. Strange indeed, as the Western mind must seem to them. She was one who could calculate the exact width of the gulf, wide or narrow, where the dangerous leap must be made before East and West can join hands.

They called her the Builder of Bridges, because each of the Asiatic countries knows that gulf well, and knows how in the attempt to overleap it many 3 explorers, Eastern and Western, have either shied or missed step and fallen into the boiling torrent of misunderstanding beneath.

A bridge, however slender, however quivering in the wind, is better than a leap in the dark, and though no one had less opinion of her own importance than herself she knew that she held hands on either side. This story does not concern her, however, except that many of its flying tints and rainbows were reflected through her mind and could not have been caught without it.

Japanese men and women from diplomatic circles, students of scientific and literary subjects, artists, business men, all came and went in that drawing-room where the ends of the earth met as surely as the mapped Equator girdles it.

But this story turns upon one who came there oftener than others, profoundly needing at the moment the atmosphere of comprehension it offered. His name, reversed Western fashion, was Yasujiro Ito. A man with powers restrained and chastened in the Japanese manner, which insists that with well-bred persons unseen qualifications should be more sensitively beautiful and valuable than those inevitably displayed for general notice.

A deep-eyed, black-browed man of thirty whose face had a masked beauty and fire hidden under reserve so intense, covered with such skill in listening, that his reputation as a delightful talker was great among English people unqualified to recognize “the perfect artist who plays impeccably upon the wide and subtle registers of Japanese silence.” Tributes to his charm often reached Eleanor Ascham. As thus:

“I don’t like the Japanese. All surface. No real feeling. But I always except that nice Ito. The most sympathetic talker and always says the right thing. 4 He really might be an English gentleman. But of course he’s been here for years, and they know what to pick up.”

Eleanor Ascham smiled and let it pass. London likes to consider itself a University of Manners, and how could people whose horizon was bounded by London and its fashionable resorts understand the aristocratic type dear to great Japanese artists or the intellectual value of Ito’s black-browed beauty smooth as a polished sword and ready also to glitter into swordplay at a moment’s notice? How could these people understand his life-deep passion for loveliness, worn as silently as a man hides a woman’s face in his heart, an unchanging inspiration working behind all he says and does, unconsciously swaying every word, thought and deed, whether spiritual or material?

She herself knew a very different man in him—one of grave thought and introspection, contemplating the Western World through very calm and disillusioned eyes, the Buddhist indifference to the Mirror of the Passing Show strong upon him. She knew and sympathized with that attitude, but even to her his purpose remained uncertain. Then he had gone suddenly to Japan and had returned a few months ago. She felt sure that that visit had crystallized some resolve; but though he came to see her as often and with the most trustful friendship, nothing definite had been said. To her he talked freely,—good talk embracing all interests, iridescent with romance and poetry held in check by ironic humor—but behind all she recognized a deep slowly maturing purpose, silent as a taut harp-string waiting the sweeping finger.

They came nearer and nearer to it on those happy evenings when the fire burned bright in the lamp-lit room and two chairs only were drawn up beside it. Then, in his beautiful almost overeducated English, 5 he would hover on the edge of revelation, his face pale in shifting lights and glooms. That was the time he counted upon, and then, too often, just as the good minute dawned, the door would open and another guest set up a new chemical combination that spoiled his hopes.

Yet he always felt his was the first claim. He had known her for some years—ever since his mother, dying with the silent heroism of a Japanese lady, had sent him first to an English tutor and then to Oxford, depriving herself of precious years together because she believed it would be for his good. Eleanor understood as he did the agony of that sacrifice, and this and another deep mutual understanding of shared faith made them friends.

But it had grown much less easy to find her alone since he had come back from his last visit to Japan. A girl—repellent to him from every point of view except that of good looks which no one could deny—had established a kind of right to come and go as she pleased in that happy haven where so much of his life and thought in England had developed. He could never reckon on her absence, and under the strain even his iron Japanese courtesy had shown a tendency to—let us say—rust! Eleanor was quick to observe the signs of disintegration.

“You don’t like Yasoma Brandon. You would like her better if you knew her story. Ask me to tell it some day.”

“I would not waste one of your words on it,” he answered with brevity. “She is the sort of modern young woman—But, no. Why should I criticize your friend? I beg your pardon for what I have said.”

“Certainly my friends mustn’t be criticized to me. Do you suppose I would let anyone criticize you?”

A transfiguring smile lit his eyes and mouth with 6 sunshine. At once he looked a boy and a happy one, full of trust and gaiety.

“If you order it I shall be her knight and defend her always against all comers. But she has so many friends that she has no need of the samurai sword, and I shall only say ‘Mrs. Ascham’s friend’ . . . That is sufficient.”

Eleanor laughed:

“I won’t go so far as to ask you not to quarrel with her when you meet her here, because I know you can’t help it, and I can leash you both when the cut and thrust is too dangerous. But I wish you’d tell me what you said about us in Japan this time. Things move so quickly here and I have often wanted to ask you. Sometimes I’ve seen in your face—”

Now he was grave and on his guard again. He looked much older; between his knitted black brows was a line of thought.

“Then it is my ill manners if you have,” he said seriously. “Shall a guest criticize a host?”

“But if the host said, ‘The house I live in is imperfect. It could be made better. Help me to think how’—what would you say?”

“That his welcome had made it so pleasant that all else escaped me.” Ito answered with serenity.

“Yes—and when you returned to your own home you would speak freely! Is that quite honest?”

He was silent a moment. Then:

“No, not quite honest. We must criticize. But you are you and I would not wound you. Though indeed nothing I could say would have any effect in comparison with an ironically honest letter I have just had from a Frenchman—a friend of my two years in Paris who has fled to Saigon from Europe. The West may criticize the West.”

“May I see it? Can honesty harm anyone?”

“Perhaps not. I shall mark certain passages for you to read. Parts are foolish and prejudiced. In some I think he is right. In any case the whole world depends upon the relations between men and women.”

“Thank you. Describe him, please. I want to understand. Then read the beginning as far as you will.”

“A good man,” he said reflectively, “and wise—in patches. But injured by an unworthy wife.”

He began reading the French with the same ease as English. His voice was delightful, a male sonority with the shifting quality of music and indescribable sensitiveness to the meanings of words—an expressive instrument indeed for thought! Eleanor had always been able to detach it by its beauty from the voices of any group of people who were speaking.

“My life here would be called dull by many, but to me its inexpressive peace is the first repose I have known since I realized the truth of the life to which I was chained in France. Will you think it strange if I say that much of this is due to my observation of the women here as contrasted with those of Europe and America? Of yours I dare not speak, since Japan is an unknown country for me. What do these Western women give us? Never repose. Stimulation rooted in cold hearts and therefore the freer to practice all the lures, driven to excess which goads the senses to the apathy in which Delilah may ask and take all from Samson. Puerilities of intellect, which we admire because the ages have taught us how little is to be expected and which we dare not confront with an empty flourish and compliment such as our wiser ancestors used. The instincts of the vulgar shown in their prodigality of luxury, their violence of jealousy, the ape-like avidity and cruelty with which women snatch from each other and from man the commodities that alone satisfy their petty souls.

“And these are the creatures that some great countries have enfranchised and entrusted with a voice in the deliberation of their affairs! On them we stake our future as empires and nations. To their verdict we commit the future of the arts—at the very portals of whose temples they are unworthy to enter! Yes, they paint—and not only their faces. They write, and not only their love-letters. You are aware that I read English as my own tongue. I have studied the literary expression of the English-speaking exponents of this situation with profound amazement. The genius of the French language debars us from the obscenities commingled with sentiment in which the Anglo-Saxon genius is preeminent, though I admit that certain continental stocks grafted into an Anglo-Saxon setting across the water run them close.”

Ito paused and took out a pencil, drawing it lightly down certain pages, and gave the letter to Eleanor. She took it and read on.

“As a result of reading many of these writers, male and female, I declare that only woman has the power to corrupt the heart and pen of man and that if she had not led the way he would never have followed. I own his occasional brutalities in former ages, but they were neither decadent nor diseased. Nor did men and women gesticulate together in public over their emotions to urge a jaded passion. Now all is changed. Woman, alone of animals, had made pursuit dull, for we were never able to convince her that enough surpassed any feast—but it has now been reserved to her to make it supremely ridiculous. Permit me to offer a few modern instances.”

“I think,” said Ito with a gravity very grateful to Eleanor’s sense of humor, “that here you will pass on and begin lower down where it is unmarked.”

She agreed with a Mona Lisa smile imperceptible 9 in flickering firelight and the glimmer of a little silver lamp at his elbow and resumed:

“Could fatuity go further? Dear friend, let us vomit and pass on relieved. To what? To those books where male writers also, having eaten the apple tendered by Eve and rendered incoherent by passion, seize the dictionary in quivering fingers and scatter its golden showers Jove-like to impregnate their panting pages with the energies of a god worshiped in all nations. One remarkable sign I observe is a literary interest in the internal organs reserved until lately for the inspection of the medical press. Others spare us no single intimacy of obstetrics and all the collateral issues. I am told that in the West intelligent men do not read novels though many write them. Is this true? If so, we have the measure of feminine appreciation. In the West none have the courage to affront the Bacchæ in their orgies and to meet the fate of the man who dared. My flight declares my own terrors.

“My friend, you will return before long from the senile follies of the West—I congratulate you! The male spirit of Europe has resolved itself into the type of the dotard who concedes all to the scornful hands of women who even in taking his gifts despise him for yielding them. Its habit of mind is incurably amorous. I believe this type is known in America as the sugar daddy; correct me if I err. I see the manhood of Europe and America as the sugar daddy, too senile to contest the domination of the feminine ferment of destruction in their midst. Women and democracy—in both cases organized ignorance and therefore correlated—have already written the doom of the proud civilizations of the West. If the Far Eastern nations can profit by this lesson the future is their own.”

“Will you read more?” asked Ito. “I think better not!”

“A little.” She continued to read:

“And owing to the senile sexuality of the Western man, women are set apart everywhere as a favored caste. No longer are they human—even justice bows before them. Lately in my own country four atrocious murderesses—more than one a murderess of children—were condemned to the guillotine. All were reprieved and will doubtless return in a few years to bless the world and propagate their species. No, my friend, I exaggerate not at all when I say it is not India but the West which is the devotee of the ancient sex worships, untroubled by any of the spiritualities which attend them east of Suez.

“I shall not speak of the gentle unspoiled women among whom I live. You know them as I do. Nor of the need of calm and balanced mothers for the next generation, unlike the neurotic feminine products of the war with ill-functioning glands, hurrying from business to pleasure and pleasure to business. Nor of the hard undersexed young women who experiment curiously, half carelessly, devoid alike of modesty and wisdom.”

“I think that is enough,” said Eleanor, returning the letter. “Thank you so much.”

“Sex?” said a clear assertive voice which startled them. “So that rising tide has covered your abode at last, Eleanor! After all, what is so interesting? I suppose you’ve given her the latest news from Japan, Mr. Ito. I hear things are moving there.”

They had not noticed that the door had opened softly a few minutes before, and the firelight had hidden in its shadows a girl who listened intently, her hand lightly laid on the back of a chair.

“Do you allow a hard undersexed young woman devoid alike of modesty and wisdom to get a word in edgeways?” she asked sardonically.

Defenseless in the presence of a feminine attack, though half despising the convention that tied him, he stood up and, bowing Japanese fashion, drew a chair for Yasoma Brandon to the fire. In her presence he always and instantly assumed his nationality like an armor of steel, and was impenetrable and even more silent than usual.

Eleanor looked up with an unruffled smile:

“Sit down and behave yourself! Listeners deserve what they get, but no one attacked you and you have nothing to defend. Mr. Ito was reading a Frenchman’s letter which doesn’t concern you at all.”

“Yes, and agreeing with every word! Why shouldn’t I say what I think? If he thinks so little of England I think just as little of Japan. All the world says of Japan—‘Little in great things, great in little things.’ We, at all events, don’t take life with a giggle, and live on a reputation for arranging flowers. We’re tremendously big in everything we do—good or bad.”

“Even in the colossal scale of our bad manners! That really needed no demonstration!” Eleanor said laughing. Her eyes met Ito’s. “Laugh at her. It’s worth no more!” they said gaily. But he was silent, and the torrent flowed on unabated:

“Bad manners? Surely to borrow everything from another nation and then abuse it is not exactly polite? Oh, not only this time! Whenever we meet he says or looks something that makes one furious! If Japan did not like our civilization, why not have let it alone?”

“But then we should have remained uncivilized,” said Ito seriously. “Consider our loss! At a dinner in Paris some years ago one of the guests spoke of us before the Japanese Ambassador as having been uncivilized before 1868 and then hurriedly apologized. The ambassador agreed with you, Miss Brandon. He said: ‘Pray don’t apologize. You are quite right. Before 12 1868 we produced great painters and craftsmen. Now we make cannon and battleships like you. We are civilized!’—How true!”

Eleanor clapped her hands. There was a menacing silence from Yasoma Brandon. She knew too much of Japanese art to miss the point of that story. Her dead father’s collection of old Chinese and Japanese pictures as well as screens was famous all over Europe and in the Far East, and its beauty had shaped her mind in more ways than as yet she herself understood. Ito had seen it and knew exactly where to drive his dart.

She lifted her head at last.

“One to you! Still, yours is a cramped, borrowed tradition. What about great plays, great literature? Plenty of pretty things, I grant you, but—”

It was grossly unfair and she knew it, but would not withdraw.

“‘Great in little things and little in great ones,’” Ito repeated meditatively. Then lifted his head with flashing eyes. “I accept that. It is true, but—according to Europe’s standard of values. The things you think great are little to those of us who think in our own fashion. Money, success, position, to be asked to the best houses! We are little indeed in our care of these. We are great in the things you think little—beauty, joy, a little laughter, and an eternal faith. Yes—in these little things we are great. Trifles, I own, but—we like them. Idle, perhaps, as carving a walnut-sized bit of ivory into a work of eternal beauty. Yet, possibly worth consideration.”

“That isn’t fair. That’s a quibble!” said the other.

An angry jet of flame broke from the crumbling log on the andirons and lit her face. A girl of twenty-four with the broad half-moon-shaped forehead of the Artemis of the Louvre, brows straight and black as Ito’s own, clear-featured, with a scornful red mouth 13 and great dark gray eyes clear as sea-water and alive with possibilities of storm in broken weather—and a rain-cloud of black hair framing all. She sat up straight and arrogantly defiant in her chair. Her figure, shaped for strength and energy, more like a boy’s than a woman’s, was the extreme of fashion and suited her attitude. Nothing clinging, submissive, or imploring about that young woman, thought Ito, with some answering defiance born of his oriental blood. And then the light flickered and dwindled, and her beauty was something seen in dusky shadows, receding and vanishing, only the eyes left bright and living, the rest secreted in a spiritual loveliness.

They knew each other little as yet, but there was an attraction of repulsion between them which led to skirmishings detested by Ito and amusing to the girl. Courtesy forbade flight, manhood obliged him to defend his positions, with the result that they always parted bitterly and drew together again, much against his liking, to renew some discussion which he could not avoid and hated to renew in Eleanor Ascham’s presence.

“And why is it a quibble?” he asked coldly. His years in Europe had not used him to this kind of self-assertion in a young woman. She divined all this and more in his indifferent voice and answered sharply:

“Because you’re answering a thing we didn’t say and evading what we did say. After all, your great things ought to be the same as other nations’ patriotism, decency, honor. These are the same for everybody.”

He answered slowly and still indifferently:

“And in all those you assert that the Japanese people are little? Well—have it so! Believe if you will that my people know little of patriotism, decency, and honor. I grant you that in my religious certainties I 14 place neither a jeweled heaven nor a personal God. . . . But—”

She cut across his words abruptly and unreasonably. “I never said that. I wasn’t talking of such things. I was talking of art, and you know it. You don’t fight fair.”

It was time for intervention. Eleanor felt the undertone of contempt in Ito’s thought at this foolish fencing. Certainly Yasoma and her like missed many opportunities of the empire they apparently set first of earthly joys. Women should have perfect self-possession and audacity, but it remains unwise to brandish them. A man may wear a sword with grace but not a woman. She who hides them under the modesty of the odalisque is omnipotent, with the only omnipotence she is likely to desire.

“You have never seen Japan. Mr. Ito is the only Japanese you know. He and I are overwhelmed by the unfortunate impression he has made, but why generalize from it when you can run out to Japan for a month and then come back and hurl destruction all about you with really leisured criticism? Be fashionable as well as brilliant!”

Irony always brought Yasoma into the open, striking wild:

“I?” Her brows were stormy. “I certainly don’t feel inclined to waste my time like that! Life is short enough already. No, thank you! All I mean—and I stick to it—is that Europe has scored success in all the things worth living for, and what right has Asia to preach her stale old moralities about women to us?”

Eleanor measured her sword and thrust.

“You, a university woman ask that? I thought you took honors in history! For one reason, because Asia has studied psychic science for thousands of years and knows more about women than all the psychoanalysts from here to Vienna. That is why Woman 15 never dominates in the East, but the woman of power enough to fight her way to the front is always accepted, because they can’t keep her out. Here we push the whole mass of them into the fighting line and crowd out the men and dominate the situation by numbers. No, in the East they don’t talk of woman; they know Woman is about as misleading as all the other goddesses. They deal with women, and when one that is strong enough comes along she deals with them! You can’t keep back the right people.”

Ito listened with quiet enjoyment. Now was the moment for a word to the weakening enemy.

“That is very true. If Europe is the brain of the world—which I cannot really accept—the East at least represents its soul. From the East have come all the faiths and psychics and the roots of all the philosophies. You would not be the ardent Christian you are, Miss Brandon”—his voice was edged with laughter—“if a Jewish young man had not what the Americans call ‘put it over’ on you!”

Silence. Yasoma Brandon resented the ascription of ardent Christianity so warmly that for a moment wrath strangled her. But no answer occurred to her, and she found Ito’s challenge so irritating that the best way of dealing with the situation was evidently to end it. She rose.

“We always quarrel when we meet, so I’m putting off the pleasure until the next time to give you time to think up your thrusts. After all what does it matter?—I must be getting on to the Twelve Arts’ Ball. May I switch on, Eleanor?”

She did it, and light poured upon a most brilliant figure. She wore a stiff belted coat, like that of a Russian moujik, of shoaling sea-blues and greens playing into each other with living light. It was embroidered at the edges in great Russian designs in pearls and many-colored jewels which had the appearance 16 of gorgeous reality and barbaric splendor. Beneath it, showing when she moved, was a dress of thinnest Eastern transparency covered with peacocks in their pride. Her black hair knotted on her neck was bound with a wide trellis-band of small diamonds, from which at each side sprang a long slender diamond feather, bending and swaying fantastically, like the antennæ of some tropic butterfly. Her very shoes were extravagantly jeweled.

He had not a notion what the dress was meant to represent, but to him it conveyed the idea of stiff Byzantine splendor—a young empress seen through pre-Renaissance eyes, so loaded with riches that all free movement of the body was inhibited, even the fingers and thumbs stiffened with great rings from which shone, like watchful eyes, smooth polished emeralds, rubies, and ocean-blue sapphires.

His austere Japanese taste revolted at the overdone display. To him it suggested ill breeding, impossible to the most despised class in Japan. Nakedness would have seemed chaster. Beautiful, yes—but beauty dashed with defiance and challenge, which shrieked for admiration, unsexed itself and inspired repulsion instead of desire.

She brushed Eleanor’s cheek with a kiss and said coolly to Ito:

“I don’t shake hands for two reasons. First, it isn’t your custom. Secondly, I never shake hands with an enemy until the battle is over and one of us down. Good night.”

He bowed and escorted her to the lift, closed the doors, and returned to the drawing-room smiling at some thought of his own. He turned off the bright lights at a sign from Eleanor, leaving only one shaded glimmer to aid the firelight in its struggle with brimming shadows.