CHAPTER XVIII

THE KATCHIU-YASHIKI

"The real charm of woman in herself is that which comes after the first emotion of passionate love has died away, when all illusions fade to reveal a reality lovelier than any illusion which has been evolved behind the phantom curtain of them. And again marriage seems to me a certain destruction of all emotion and suffering. So that afterwards one looks back at the old times with wonder. One cannot dream or desire anything more after love is transmuted into marriage. It is like a haven from which you can see currents rushing like violet bands beyond you out of sight. It seems to me (though I am a poor judge of such matters) that it does not make a man any happier to have an intellectual wife, unless he marries for society. The less intellectual, the more capable, so long as there is neither coarseness nor foolishness; for intellectual converse a man can't really have with women. Woman is antagonistic to it. An emotional truth is quite as plain to the childish mind, as to the mind of Herbert Spencer or of Clifford. The child and the God come equally near to the Eternal truth. But then marriage in a complex civilisation is really a terrible problem; there are so many questions involved."

As summer advanced Hearn found his little two-storeyed house by the Ohasigawa--although dainty as a birdcage--too cramped for comfort, the rooms being scarcely higher than steamship cabins, and so narrow that ordinary mosquito nets could not be suspended across them.

On the summit of the hill above Matsue stood the ancient castle of the former daimyo of the province. In feudal days, when the city was under military sway, the finest homesteads of the Samurai clustered round its Cyclopean granite walls; now owing to changed conditions and the straitened means of their owners, many of these _Katchiu-yashiki_ were untenanted. Hearn and his wife were lucky enough to secure one. Though he no longer had his outlook over the lake, with the daily coming and going of fishing-boats and sampans, he had an extended view of the city and was close to the university. But above all he found compensation in the spacious Japanese garden, outcome of centuries of cultivation and care.

The summer passed in this Japanese _Yashiki_ was as happy as any in Hearn's life, and one to which he perpetually looked back with longing regret. Wandering from room to room, sitting in sunned spaces where leaf shadows trembled on the matting, or gazing into the soft green, dreamy peace of the landscape garden, he found a sanctuary where the soul stopped elbowing and trampling, and being elbowed and trampled--a free, clear space, where he could see clearly, breathe serenely, fully. Discussions with publishers, differences of opinion with friends were soothed and forgotten; his domestic arrangements seemed all that he could have expected, and, as he was receiving a good salary, and life was not expensive in the old city, money difficulties for the moment receded into the back-ground. His health improved. He weighed, he said, twenty pounds more than he did when he first arrived ... but, he adds, this is perhaps because I am eating three full meals a day instead of two.

Echoes from the outer world reached him at intervals, such as the announcement of the marriage of Miss Elizabeth Bisland.

He describes himself as dancing an Indian war-dance of exultation in his Japanese robes, to the unspeakable astonishment of his placid household. After which he passed two hours in a discourse in "the Hearnian dialect." Subject of exultation and discourse--the marriage of Miss Elizabeth Bisland.

Hearn's description of the old _Yashiki_ garden is done with all the descriptive charm of which he was a master. Many others have described Japanese gardens, but none have imparted the mental "atmosphere," the special peculiarities that make them so characteristic of the genius of the people that have originated them. It is impossible to find space to follow him into all the details of his "garden folk lore" as he calls it; of _Hijo_, things without desire, such as stones and trees, and _Ujo_, things having desire, such as men and animals, the miniature hills clothed with old trees, the long slopes of green, shadowed by flowering shrubs, like river banks, verdant elevations rising from spaces of pale yellow sand, smooth as a surface of silk, miming the curves and meanderings of a river course. Much too beautiful, these sanded spaces, to be trodden on; the least speck of dirt would mar their effect, and it required the trained skill of an experienced native gardener--a delightful old man--to keep them in perfect form.

Lightly and daintily as the shadows of the tremulous leaves of the bamboo-grove and the summer light that touches the grey stone lanterns, and the lotus flowers on the pond, so does his genius flit from subject to subject, conjuring up and idealising ancient tradition and superstitions. The whole of his work seems transfused with mystic light.

We can hear him talking with Kinjuro, the venerable gardener; we can catch the song of the caged _Uguisu_, an inmate of the establishment, presented to him by one of the sweetest ladies in Japan, the daughter of the Governor of Izumo.

The _Uguisu_, or Japanese nightingale, is supposed to repeat over and over again the sacred name of the Sutras, "Ho-ke-kyo," or Buddhist confession of faith. First the warble; then a pause of about five seconds, then a slow, sweet, solemn utterance of the holy name.

They planted, his wife tells us, some morning glories in summer. He watched them with the greatest delight, until they bloomed, and then was equally wretched when he saw them withering.

One early winter morning he noticed one tiny bloom, in spite of the sharp frost; he was delighted and surprised, and exclaimed in Japanese, "Utsukushii yuki, anata, nanbo shojik" (What a lovely courage, what a serious intention).

When, the next morning, the old gardener picked it, Hearn was in despair. "That old man may be good and innocent, but he was brutal to my flower," he said. He was depressed all day after this incident.

He had already, he declared, become a little too fond of his dwelling-place; each day after returning from his college duties and exchanging his teacher's uniform for the infinitely more comfortable Japanese robe, he found more than compensation for the weariness of five class-hours in the simple pleasure of squatting on the shady verandah overlooking the gardens. The antique garden walls, high mossed below their ruined coping of tiles, seemed to shut out even the murmur of the city's life. There were no sounds but the voices of birds, the shrilling of _semi_, or, at intervals, the solitary splash of a diving frog, and those walls secluded him from much more than city streets; outside them hummed the changed Japan telegraphs, and newspapers, and steam-ships. Within dwelt the all-reposing peace of nature, and the dreams of the sixteenth century; there was a charm of quaintness in the very air, a faint sense of something viewless and sweet; perhaps the gentle beauty of dead ladies who lived when all the surroundings were new. For they were the gardens of the past. The future would know them only as dreams, creations of a forgotten art, whose charm no genius could produce.

The working of Hearn's heart and mind at this time is an interesting psychological study. He had been wont to declare that his vocation was a monastic one. He now initiated an asceticism as severe in its discipline as that of St. Francis of Assisi on the Umbrian hills. The code on which he moulded his life was formulated according to the teaching of the great Gautama. If the soul is to attain life and effect progress, continual struggle against temptation is necessary. Appetites must be restrained. Indulgence means retrogression.

It is not without a sense of amusement that we observe the complex personality, Lafcadio Hearn, in the Matsue phase of self-suppression and discipline. Well might Kinjuro, the old gardener, tell him that he had seven souls. A dignified university professor had taken the place of the erratic Bohemian who frequented the levee at Cincinnati, and of the starving little journalist who, arrayed in reefer coats, flannel shirt, and outlandish hat, used to appear in the streets of New Orleans. Now clad in official robes, he passed out through a line of prostrate servants on his way to college, each article of clothing having been handed to him, as he dressed, with endless bows of humility and submission by the daughter of a line of feudal nobles.

He gives to his sister the same account of his austere, simple day, as to Basil Hall Chamberlain: the early morning prayer and greeting of the sun, his meals eaten alone before the others, the prayers again at eventide, some of them said for him as head of the house. Then the little lamps of the _kami_ before the shrine were left to burn until they went out; while all the household waited for him to give the signal for bedtime, unless, as sometimes, he became so absorbed in writing as to forget the hour.

Sometimes, however, in spite of severe discipline and mortification of the flesh, ghostly reminders returned to prove that the old self was very real indeed.

The "Markham Girl" is certainly well done. "I asked myself: 'If it was I?' and conscience answered: 'If it was you, in spite of love, and duty, and honour, and Hell fire staring you in the face, you would have gone after her....'" Then he adds a tirade as to his being a liar and quibbler when he attempts to contradict the statement, "and that's why I am poor and unsuccessful, void of mental balance, and an exile in Japan."

Or a sinister note is struck, as in a letter to Basil Hall Chamberlain, alluding to a story in Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister," "The New Melusine," of which the application is apparent. A man was loved by a fairy; and she told him she must either say good-bye, or that he must become little like herself and go to dwell with her in her father's kingdom. She put a gold ring on his finger that made him small, and they entered into their tiny world. The man was greatly petted by the fairy folk, and had everything given to him which he could desire. In spite of it all, however, although he had a pretty child too, he became ungrateful and selfish and got tired, and dreamed of being a giant. He filed the ring off his finger, and became big again, and ran away to spend the gold in riotous living. "The fairy was altogether Japanese--don't you think so? And the man was certainly a detestable fellow."

Though the little man permitted himself such outbursts as this on paper, he soon crept back to the grim reality of a wooden pillow and Japanese food; back to a kingdom undisturbed by electrical storms of passion, to interviews with college students and communion with a wife whose knowledge was circumscribed by Kanbara's "Greater Knowledge for Women."

"Never be frightened at anything but your own heart," he writes to one of these Matsue pupils, when giving him good advice some years later. Poor Lafcadio! Good reason had he to be frightened of that wild, wayward, undisciplined heart that so often had betrayed him in days gone by.

When in Japan we heard whispers of Hearn having fallen a victim to the wiles of the accomplished ladies who abide in the street of the Geisha. After his marriage to Setsu Koizumi, however, not even from his enemies, and their name was legion, at Kumamoto, Kobe, or Tokyo, did we ever hear the faintest suggestion of scandal connected with his name. In Japan, where there is no privacy of any sort in everyday life, where, if a man is faithless to his wife, all the quarter where he lives knows of it, and the wife accepts it as her _Ingwa_--or sin in a former state of existence--it would have been impossible for Hearn to have stepped over the line, however tentatively, without its being known and talked about.

A pleasant vision is the one we conjure up of him on the verandah of the old _Yashiki_, squatted, Buddha-wise, smoking a tiny long-stemmed Japanese pipe, his little wife seated near him, relating, by the aid of the interpreter, the superstitions and legends of the ancient Province of the Gods.

She tells us how he took even the most trivial tale to heart, murmuring, "How interesting," his face sometimes even turning pale while he looked fixedly in front of him.

Under these conditions of tranquillity and well-being his genius seemed to expand and develop. The "Shirabyoshi,"[22] or "Dancing Girl," the finest piece of imaginative work he ever did, was conceived and written during the course of the summer passed in the old _Yashiki_. Its first inception is indicated in a letter to Basil Hall Chamberlain, in 1891. "There was a story some time ago in the _Asahi-shimbun_[23] about a 'Shirabyoshi,' that brought tears to my eyes, as slowly and painfully translated by a friend."

[22] "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

[23] The _Asahi-shimbun_ was one of the principal Japanese illustrated daily papers, printed and published at Osaka.

The "Dancing Girl" has been translated into four foreign languages--German, Swedish, French and Italian--a writer in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ declares it to be one of the love-stories of the world. The only remarkable fact is, that it has not made more of a stir in England.

The hero is the well-known Japanese painter Buncho; the heroine a Geisha. There is something simple, natural, tragic and yet intangible and ethereal in the manner in which Hearn tells it; the presence of a vital spirit, the essential element of passion and regret, the throb of warm human emotion, in spite of its exotic setting, brings it into kinship with the human experience of all times and countries. There is no attempt at scenery, only a woman hidden away in the heart of nature, in a lonely cottage amongst the hills, with her love, her memory, her regret. Into this solitary life enters youth, attractive, beautiful, the possibility of further romance; but no romance other than the one she cherishes is for her.

Unfortunately it is only possible to give the merest sketch of the story that Hearn unfolds with consummate artistic skill. He begins with an account of dancing-girls, of the education they have to undergo, how they use their accomplishments to cast a web of enchantment over men.

It is one of these apparently soulless creatures, a dancing-girl, a woman of the town, wearing clothes belonging neither to maid nor wife, that he makes the central figure of his story; and by her constancy to ideal things, her pure and simple passion, he thrills us through with the sense of the impermanence of humanity and beauty, and the strength of love overcoming and conquering the tragedy of life.

How different the manner in which he treats the scenes between the young man and the beautiful dancing-girl, compared to the manner in which his French prototypes--in which Pierre Loti, for instance, whom Hearn declares to be one of the greatest living artists--would have treated it. Far ahead has he passed beyond them; the moral, the life of the soul, is never lost sight of, in not one line does he play on the lower emotions of his readers.

A young artist was travelling on foot over the mountains from Kyoto to Yeddo, and lost his way.... He had almost resigned himself to passing the night under the stars, when, down the farther slope of the hill, a single thin yellow ray of light fell upon the darkness. Making his way towards it, he found that it was a small cottage, apparently a peasant's house.... Not until he had knocked and called several times, did he hear any stir. At last, however, a feminine voice asked what he wanted. He told her, and after a brief delay the storm doors were pushed open and a woman appeared with a paper lantern. She scrutinised him in silence, and then said briefly, "Wait, I will bring water." Having washed from his feet the dust of travel, he was shown into a neat room, and a brazier was set before him, and a cotton _zabuton_ for him to kneel upon. He was struck by the beauty of his hostess, as well as by her goodness, when she told him that he might stay there that night.... "I will have no time to sleep to-night," she said, "therefore you can have my bed and paper mosquito curtain."

After he had slept a while, the mysterious sound of feet moving rapidly fell upon his ears; he slipped out of bed, and creeping to the edge of the screen, peeped through. There before her illuminated _Butsudan_, he saw the young woman dancing. Turning suddenly she met his eyes, but before he had time to speak, she smiled: "You must have thought me mad when you saw me dancing, and I am not angry with you for trying to find out what I was doing." Then she went on to tell him how a youth and she had fallen in love with one another, and how they had gone away and built the cottage in the mountains, and each evening she had danced to please him. One cold winter he fell sick and died; since then she had lived alone with nothing to console her but the memory of her lover, laying daily before his tablet the customary offerings, and nightly dancing to please his spirit.

After she had told her tale, she begged the young man to go back and try again to sleep.

On leaving next morning, he wanted to pay for the hospitality he had received. "What I did was done for kindness alone, and it certainly was not worth money," she said, as she dismissed him. Then, pointing out the path he had to follow, she watched him until he passed from sight, his heart, as he went, full of the charm and beauty of the woman he had left behind.

Many years passed by; the painter had become old, and rich, and famous. One day there came to his house an old woman, who asked to speak with him. The servants, thinking her a common beggar, turned her away, but she came so persistently that at last they had to tell their master. When, at his orders, the old woman was admitted, she began untying the knots of a bundle she had brought with her; inside were quaint garments of silk, a wonderful costume, the attire of a _Shirabyoshi_.

With many beautiful and pathetic touches, Hearn tells how, as he watched her smooth out the garments with her trembling fingers, a memory stirred in the master's brain; again in the soft shock of recollection, he saw the lonely mountain dwelling in which he had received unremunerated hospitality, the faintly burning light before the Buddhist shrine, the strange beauty of a woman dancing there alone in the dead of the night. "Pardon my rudeness for having forgotten your face for the moment," he said, as he rose and bowed before her, "but it is more than forty years since we last saw each other; you received me at your house. You gave up to me the only bed you had. I saw you dance and you told me all your story."

The old woman, quite overcome, told him that, in the course of years, she had been obliged, through poverty, to part with her little house, and, becoming weak and old, could no longer dance each evening before the _Butsudan_. Therefore, she had sought out the master, since she desired for the sake of the dead a picture of herself in the costume and attitude of the dance that she might hang it up before the _Butsudan_. "I am not now as I was then," she added. "But, oh, master, make me young again. Make me beautiful that I may seem beautiful to him, for whose sake I, the unworthy, beseech this!"

He told her to come next day, and that he only would be too delighted to thus repay the debt he had owed her for so many years. So he painted her, as she had been forty years before. When she saw the picture, she clasped her hands in delight, but how was she ever to repay the master? She had nothing to offer but her _Shirabyoshi_ garments. He took them, saying he would keep them as a memory, but that she must allow him to place her beyond the reach of want.

No money would she accept, but thanking him again and again, she went away with her treasure. The master had her followed, and on the next day took his way to the district indicated amidst the abodes of the poor and outcast. He tapped on the door of the old woman's dwelling, and receiving no answer pushed open the shutter, and peered through the aperture. As he stood there the sensation of the moment when, as a tired lad, forty years before, he had stood, pleading for admission to the lonesome little cottage amongst the hills, thrilled back to him.

Entering softly, he saw the woman lying on the floor seemingly asleep. On a rude shelf he recognised the ancient _Butsudan_ with its tablet, and now, as then, a tiny lamp was burning; in front of it stood the portrait he had painted.

"The master called the sleeper's name once or twice. Then, suddenly, as she did not answer, he saw that she was dead, and he wondered while he gazed upon her face, for it seemed less old. A vague sweetness, like the ghost of youth, had returned to it; the wrinkles and the lines of sorrow had been strangely smoothed by the touch of a phantom Master mightier than he."