Books: Madame Chrysantheme, v4
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Pierre Loti >> Madame Chrysantheme, v4
Poor little gipsy!
I mount the steps on tiptoe, and stop at the sound of singing that I hear
in my room.
It is undoubtedly Chrysantheme's voice, and the song is quite cheerful!
This chills me and changes the current of my thoughts. I am almost sorry
I have taken the trouble to come.
Mingled with the song is a noise I can not understand: Chink! chink! a
clear metallic ring as of coins flung vigorously on the floor. I am well
aware that this vibrating house exaggerates every sound during the
silence of night; but all the same, I am puzzled to know what my mousme
can be doing. Chink! chink! is she amusing herself with quoits, or the
'jeu du crapaud', or pitch-and-toss?
Nothing of the kind! I fancy I have guessed, and I continue my upward
progress still more gently, on all fours, with the precautions of a red
Indian, to give myself for the last time the pleasure of surprising her.
She has not heard me come in. In our great white room, emptied and swept
out, where the clear sunshine pours in, and the soft wind, and the
yellowed leaves of the garden, she is sitting all alone, her back turned
to the door; she is dressed for walking, ready to go to her mother's, her
rose-colored parasol beside her.
On the floor are spread out all the fine silver dollars which, according
to our agreement, I had given her the evening before. With the competent
dexterity of an old money-changer she fingers them, turns them over,
throws them on the floor, and, armed with a little mallet ad hoc, rings
them vigorously against her ear, singing the while I know not what little
pensive bird-like song which I daresay she improvises as she goes along.
Well, after all, it is even more completely Japanese than I could
possibly have imagined it--this last scene of my married life! I feel
inclined to laugh. How simple I have been, to allow myself to be taken
in by the few clever words she whispered yesterday, as she walked beside
me, by a tolerably pretty little phrase embellished as it was by the
silence of two o'clock in the morning, and all the wonderful enchantments
of night.
Ah! not more for Yves than for me, not more for me than for Yves, has any
feeling passed through that little brain, that little heart.
When I have looked at her long enough, I call:
"Hi! Chrysantheme!"
She turns confused, and reddening even to her ears at having been caught
at this work.
She is quite wrong, however, to be so much troubled, for I am, on the
contrary, delighted. The fear that I might be leaving her in some
sadness had almost given me a pang, and I infinitely prefer that this
marriage should end as it had begun, in a joke.
"That is a good idea of yours," I say; "a precaution which should always
be taken in this country of yours, where so many evil-minded people are
clever in forging money. Make haste and get through it before I start,
and if any false pieces have found their way into the number, I will
willingly replace them."
However, she refuses to continue before me, and I expected as much; to do
so would have been contrary to all her notions of politeness, hereditary
and acquired, all her conventionality, all her Japanesery. With a
disdainful little foot, clothed as usual in exquisite socks, with a
special hood for the great toe, she pushes away the piles of white
dollars and scatters them on the mats.
"We have hired a large, covered sampan," she says to change the
conversation, "and we are all going together--Campanule, Jonquille,
Touki, all your mousmes--to watch your vessel set sail. Pray sit down
and stay a few minutes."
"No, I really can not stay. I have several things to do in the town,
you see, and the order was given for every one to be on board by three
o'clock in time for muster before starting. Moreover, I would prefer to
escape, as you can imagine, while Madame Prune is still enjoying her
siesta; I should be afraid of being drawn into some corner, or of
provoking some heartrending parting scene."
Chrysantheme bows her head and says no more, but seeing that I am really
going, rises to escort me.
Without speaking, without the slightest noise, she follows me as we
descend the staircase and cross the garden full of sunshine, where the
dwarf shrubs and the deformed flowers seem, like the rest of the
household, plunged in warm somnolence.
At the outer gate I stop for the last adieu: the little sad pout has
reappeared, more accentuated than ever, on Chrysantheme's face; it is the
right thing, it is correct, and I should feel offended now were it
absent.
Well, little mousme, let us part good friends; one last kiss even, if you
like. I took you to amuse me; you have not perhaps succeeded very well,
but after all you have done what you could: given me your little face,
your little curtseys, your little music; in short, you have been pleasant
enough in your Japanese way. And who knows, perchance I may yet think of
you sometimes when I recall this glorious summer, these pretty, quaint
gardens, and the ceaseless concert of the cicalas.
She prostrates herself on the threshold of the door, her forehead against
the ground, and remains in this attitude of superlatively polite salute
as long as I am in sight, while I go down the pathway by which I am to
disappear for ever.
As the distance between us increases, I turn once or twice to look at her
again; but it is a mere civility, and meant to return as it deserves her
grand final salutation.
CHAPTER LIII
OFF FOR CHINA
When I entered the town, at the turn of the principal street, I had the
good luck to meet Number 415, my poor relative. I was just at that
moment in want of a speedy djin, and I at once got into his vehicle;
besides, it was an alleviation to my feelings, in this hour of departure,
to take my last drive in company with a member of my family.
Unaccustomed as I was to be out of doors during the hours of siesta,
I had never yet seen the streets of the town thus overwhelmed by the
sunshine, thus deserted in the silence and solitary brilliancy peculiar
to all hot countries.
In front of all the shops hang white shades, adorned here and there with
slight designs in black, in the quaintness of which lurks I know not
what--something mysterious: dragons, emblems, symbolical figures.
The sky is too glaring; the light crude, implacable; never has this
old town of Nagasaki appeared to me so old, so worm-eaten, so bald,
notwithstanding all its veneer of new papers and gaudy paintings.
These little wooden houses, of such marvellous cleanly whiteness
inside, are black outside, timeworn, disjointed and grimacing. When one
looks closely, this grimace is to be found everywhere: in the hideous
masks laughing in the shop-fronts of the innumerable curio-shops; in the
grotesque figures, the playthings, the idols, cruel, suspicious, mad;
it is even found in the buildings: in the friezes of the religious
porticoes, in the roofs of the thousand pagodas, of which the angles and
cable-ends writhe and twist like the yet dangerous remains of ancient and
malignant beasts.
And the disturbing intensity of expression reigning over inanimate
nature, contrasts with the almost absolute blank of the human
countenance, with the smiling foolishness of the simple little folk who
meet one's gaze, as they patiently carry on their minute trades in the
gloom of their tiny open-fronted houses. Workmen squatted on their
heels, carving with their imperceptible tools the droll or odiously
obscene ivory ornaments, marvellous cabinet curiosities which have made
Japan so famous with the European amateurs who have never seen it.
Unconscious artists tracing with steady hand on a background of lacquer
or of porcelain traditional designs learned by heart, or transmitted to
their brains by a process of heredity through thousands of years;
automatic painters, whose storks are similar to those of M. Sucre, with
the inevitable little rocks, or little butterflies eternally the same.
The least of these illuminators, with his insignificant, eyeless face,
possesses at his fingers' ends the maximum of dexterity in this art of
decoration, light and wittily incongruous, which threatens to invade us
in France, in this epoch of imitative decadence, and which has become the
great resource of our manufacturers of cheap "objects of art."
Is it because I am about to leave this country, because I have no longer
any link to bind me to it, any resting-place on its soil, that my spirit
is ready on the wing? I know not, but it seems to me I have never as
clearly seen and comprehended it as to-day. And more even than ever do
I find it little, aged, with wornout blood and worn-out sap; I feel more
fully its antediluvian antiquity, its centuries of mummification, which
will soon degenerate into hopeless and grotesque buffoonery, as it comes
into contact with Western novelties.
It is getting late; little by little, the siestas are everywhere coming
to an end; the queer little streets brighten up and begin to swarm in the
sunshine with manycolored parasols. Now begins the procession of
ugliness of the most impossible description--a procession of long-robed,
grotesque figures capped with pot-hats or sailors' headgear. Business
transactions begin again, and the struggle for existence, close and
bitter here as in one of our own artisan quarters, but meaner and
smaller.
At the moment of my departure, I find within myself only a smile of
careless mockery for the swarming crowd of this Lilliputian curtseying
people--laborious, industrious, greedy of gain, tainted with a
constitutional affectation, hereditary insignificance, and incurable
monkeyishness.
Poor cousin Number 415! how right I was to have held him in good esteem!
He was by far the best and most disinterested of my Japanese family.
When all my commissions are finished, he puts up his little vehicle under
a tree, and, much touched by my departure, insists upon escorting me on
board the 'Triomphante', to watch over my final purchases in the sampan
which conveys me to the ship, and to see them himself safely into my
cabin.
His, indeed, is the only hand I clasp with a really friendly feeling,
without a suppressed smile, on quitting Japan.
No doubt in this country, as in many others, there is more honest
friendship and less ugliness among the simple beings devoted to purely
physical work.
At five o'clock in the afternoon we set sail.
Along the line of the shore are two or three sampans; in them the
mousmes, shut up in the narrow cabins, peep at us through the tiny
windows, half hiding their faces on account of the sailors; these are
our wives, who have wished, out of politeness, to look upon us once more.
There are other sampans as well, in which other Japanese women are also
watching our departure. These stand upright, under great parasols
decorated with big black letters and daubed over with clouds of varied
and startling colors.
CHAPTER LIV
A FADING PICTURE
We move slowly out of the wide green bay. The groups of women grow
smaller in the distance. The country of round umbrellas with a thousand
ribs fades gradually from our sight.
Now the vast ocean opens before us, immense, colorless, solitary; a
solemn repose after so much that is too ingenious and too small.
The wooded mountains, the flowery capes disappear. And Japan remains
faithful to itself, with its picturesque rocks, its quaint islands on
which the trees tastefully arrange themselves in groups--studied,
perhaps, but charmingly pretty.
CHAPTER LV
A WITHERED LOTUS-FLOWER
One evening, in my cabin, in the midst of the Yellow Sea, my eyes fall
upon the lotus-blossoms brought from Diou-djen-dji; they had lasted
several days; but now they are withered, and strew my carpet pathetically
with their pale pink petals.
I, who have carefully kept so many faded flowers, fallen, alas! into
dust, stolen here and there, at moments of parting in different parts of
the world; I, who have kept so many that the collection is now an absurd,
an indistinguishable herbarium--I try hard, but without success,
to awaken some sentiment for these lotus--and yet they are the last
living souvenirs of my summer at Nagasaki.
I pick them up, however, with a certain amount of consideration, and I
open my port-hole.
From the gray misty sky a strange light falls upon the waters; a dim and
gloomy twilight descends, yellowish upon this Yellow Sea. We feel that
we are moving northward, that autumn is approaching.
I throw the poor lotus into the boundless waste of waters, making them my
best excuses for consigning them, natives of Japan, to a grave so solemn
and so vast.
An Appeal to the Gods
Oama-Terace-Omi-Kami, wash me clean
from this little marriage of mine,
in the waters of the river of Kamo!
ETEXT EDITORS BOOKMARKS:
Japanese habit of expressing myself with excessive politeness
Contemptuous pity, both for my suspicions and the cause of them