"What nonsense!" exclaimed Geoffrey, taken aback by this sudden reproof: "they are dear little things like you, darling, and they bring you tea and wave fans behind your head, and I would like to have twenty of them--to wait upon you!"

He would tease her about a supposed fondness for rice, for chop-sticks, for paper umbrellas and _jiujitsu._ She liked him to tease her, just as a child likes to be teased, while all the time on the verge of tears. With Asako, tears and laughter were never far apart.

"Why do you tease me because I am j.a.panese?" she would sob; "besides, I'm not really. I can't help it. I can't help it!"

"But, sweetheart," her Captain Geoffrey would say, suddenly ashamed of his elephantine humour, "there's nothing to cry about. I would be proud to be a j.a.panese. They are jolly brave people. They gave the Russians a jolly good hiding."

It made her feel well to hear him praise her people, but she would say:

"No, no, they're not. I don't want to be a j.a.p. I don't like them.

They're ugly and spiteful. Why can't we choose what we are? I would be an English girl--or perhaps French," she added, thinking of the Rue de la Paix.

They left Paris and went to Deauville; and here it was that the serpent first crawled into Eden, whispering of forbidden fruit.

These serpents were charming people, amusing men and smart women, all anxious to make the acquaintance of the latest sensation, the j.a.panese millionairess and her good-looking husband.

Asako lunched with them and dined with them and sat with them near the sea in wonderful bathing costumes which it would be a shame to wet.

Conscious of the shortcomings of her figure as compared with those of the lissom mermaids who surrounded her, Asako returned to kimonos, much to her husband's surprise; and the mermaids had to confess themselves beaten.

She listened to their talk and learned a hundred things, but another hundred at least remained hidden from her.

Geoffrey left his wife to amuse herself in the cosmopolitan society of the French watering-place. He wanted this. All the wives whom he had ever known seemed to enjoy themselves best when away from their husbands' company. He did not quite trust the spirit of mutual adoration, which the G.o.ds had given to him and his bride. Perhaps it was an unhealthy symptom. Worse still, it might be Bad Form. He wanted Asako to be natural and to enjoy herself, and not to make their love into a prison house.

But he felt a bit lonely when he was away from her. Occupation did not seem to come easily to him as it did when she was there to suggest it.

Sometimes he would loaf up and down on the esplanade; and sometimes he would take strenuous swims in the sea. He became the prey of the bores who haunt every seaside place at home and abroad, lurking for lonely and polite people upon whom they may unload their conversation.

All these people seemed either to have been in j.a.pan themselves or to have friends and relations who knew the country thoroughly.

A wonderful land, they a.s.sured him. The nation of the future, the Garden of the East, but of course Captain Barrington knew j.a.pan well. No, he had never been there? Ah, but Mrs. Barrington must have described it all to him. Impossible! Really? Not since she was a baby?

How very extraordinary! A charming country, so quaint, so original, so picturesque, such a place to relax in; and then the j.a.panese girls, the little _mousmes_, in their bright kimonos, who came fluttering round like little b.u.t.terflies, who were so gentle and soft and grateful; but there! Captain Barrington was a married man, that was no affair of his. Ha! Ha!

The elderly _roues_, who buzzed like February flies in the sunshine of Deauville, seemed to have particularly fruity memories of tea-house sprees and oriental philanderings under the cherry-blossoms of Yokohama. Evidently, j.a.pan was just like the musical comedies.

Geoffrey began to be ashamed of his ignorance concerning his wife's native country. Somebody had asked him, what exactly _bushido_ was. He had answered at random that it was made of rice and curry powder. By the hilarious reception given to this explanation he knew that he must have made a _gaffe_. So he asked one of the more erudite bores to give him the names of the best books about j.a.pan. He would "mug it up,"

and get some answers off pat to the leading questions. The erudite one promptly lent him some volumes by Lafcadio Hearn and Pierre Loti's _Madame Chrysantheme_. He read the novel first of all. Rather spicy, wasn't it?

Asako found the book. It was an ill.u.s.trated edition; and the little drawings of j.a.panese scenes pleased her immensely, so that she began to read the letter press.

"It is the story of a bad man and a bad woman," she said; "Geoffrey, why do you read bad things? They bring bad conditions."

Geoffrey smiled. He was wondering whether the company of the fict.i.tious _Chrysantheme_ was more demoralizing than that of the actual Mme. Laroche Meyerbeer, with whom his wife had been that day for a picnic lunch.

"Besides, it isn't fair," his wife continued. "People read that book and then they think that all j.a.panese girls are bad like that."

"Why, darling, I didn't think you had read it," Geoffrey expostulated, "who has been telling you about it?"

"The Vicomte de Brie," Asako answered. "He called me _Chrysantheme_ and I asked him why."

"Oh, did he?" said Geoffrey. Really it was time to put an end to lunch picnics and mermaidism. But Asako was so happy and so shiningly innocent.

She returned to her circle of admirers, and Geoffrey to his studies of the Far East. He read the Lafcadio Hearn books, and did not perceive that he was taking opium. The wonderful sentences of that master of prose poetry rise before the eyes in whorls of narcotic smoke. They lull the brain as in a dream, and form themselves gradually into visions of a land more beautiful than any land that has ever existed anywhere, a country of vivid rice plains and sudden hills, of gracious forests and red temple gateways, of wise priests and folk-lore imagery, of a simple-hearted smiling people with children bright as flowers laughing and playing in unfailing sunlight, a country where everything is kind, gentle, small, neat, artistic, and spotlessly clean, where men become G.o.ds not by sudden apotheosis but by the easy processes of nature, a country, in short, which is the reverse of our own poor vexed continent where the monstrous and the hideous multiply daily.

One afternoon Geoffrey was lounging on the terrace of the hotel reading _Kokoro_, when his attention was attracted by the arrival of Mme. Laroche Meyerbeer's motor-car with Asako, her hostess and another woman embedded in its depths. Asako was the first to leap out. She went up to her apartment without looking to right or left, and before her husband had time to reach her. Mme. Meyerbeer watched this arrow flight and shrugged her shoulders before lazily alighting.

"Is all well?" asked Geoffrey.

"No serious damage," smiled the lady, who is known in Deauville as _Madame Cythere_, "but you had better go and console her. I think she has seen the devil for the first time."

He opened the door of their sunny bedroom, and found Asako packing feverishly, and sobbing in spasms.

"My poor little darling," he said, lifting her in his arms, "whatever is the matter?"

He laid her on the sofa, took off her hat, and loosened her dress, until gradually she became coherent.

"He tried to kiss me," she sobbed.

"Who did?" her husband asked.

"The Vicomte de Brie."

"d.a.m.ned little monkey," cried Geoffrey, "I'll break every miserable bone in his pretence of a body."

"Oh, no, no," protested Asako, "let us go away from here at once. Let us go to Switzerland, anywhere."

The serpent had got into the garden, but he had not been a very adroit reptile. He had shown his fangs; and the woman had promptly bruised his head and had given him an eye like an Impressionist sunset, which for several days he had to hide from the ridicule of his friends.

But Asako too had been grievously injured in the innocence of her heart; and it took all the snow winds of the Engadine to blow away from her face the hot defilement of the man's breath. She clung closely to her husband's protection. She, who had hitherto abandoned herself to excessive amiability, barbed the walls of their violated paradise with the broken gla.s.s of bare civility. Every man became suspect, the German professors culling Alpine plants, the mountain maniacs with their eyes fixed on peaks to conquer. She had no word for any of them. Even the manlike womenfolk, who golfed and rowed and clambered, were to her indignant eyes dangerous panders to the l.u.s.ts of men, disguised allies of _Madame Cythere_.

"Are they all bad?" she asked Geoffrey.

"No, little girl, I don't suppose so. They look too dismal to be bad."

Geoffrey was grateful for the turn of events which had delivered up his wife again into his sole company. He had missed her society more than he dared confess; for uxoriousness is a pitiful att.i.tude. In fact, it is Bad Form.

At this period he wanted her as a kind of mirror for his own mind and for his own person. She saw to it that his clothes were spotless and that his tie was straight. Of course, he always dressed for dinner even when they dined in their room. She too would dress herself up in her new finery for his eyes alone. She would listen to him laying down the law on subjects which he would not dare broach were he talking to any one else. She flattered him in that silent way which is so soothing to a man of his character. Her mind seemed to absorb his thoughts with the readiness of blotting paper; and he did not pause to observe whether the impression had come out backwards or forwards. He who had been so mute among Lady Everington's geniuses fell all of a sudden into a loquaciousness which was merely the reaction of his love for his wife, the instinct which makes the male bird sing. He just went on talking; and every day he became in his own estimation and in that of Asako, a more intelligent, a more original and a more eloquent man.

CHAPTER III

EASTWARDS

_Nagaki yo no To no nemuri no Miname-zame, Nami nori fune no Oto no yoki kana_.

From the deep sleep Of a long night Waking, Sweet is the sound Of the ship as it rides the waves.