Anthony The Absolute. Merwin Samuel
rushed through with so mechanically, so brutally. The beauty of the building and the charm of these quaint little girls in soft-colored costumes had up to this moment held a strong lure for me. But suddenly the situation rang hard and metallic. It was, after all, just the problematic, age-old business in a new dress.
And then I began to feel ashamed. After all, most men are direct and practical in these puzzling matters. They do not theorize, they do not shrink from rough facts. They take life as they find it, and pass on. Here am I (so ran my thoughts) drawing hack, refusing life, and that not in any firmness of purpose, but in a sort of fright!
“I should like to see the geishas dance,” I managed to say.
“No can do,” replied the old woman, with a gesture of her skinny hands. “One day – three day – must tell.” And she held up three fingers.
“I don’t understand you,” said I.
“Geisha girls no have got – must go catchee two, three, four piecee girl; two, three, four piecee music. Two – three day you tell. No can do.”
She evidently meant that it was necessary to give notice if one wished the geisha dance. And she was grinning at me now and pointing to the girls. I was being swept along in this brutal business. Otherwise, they would feel, why had I come to take up their time?
I felt the color rushing into my face as I raised my hand and pointed at random. One of the girls came forward. The old woman held out her hand. I found a gold coin and dropped it on her palm; then turned for my apparatus, which the boy had set on a chair by the door. I made a rather awkward matter of picking it up, dropping the horn with a clatter. The other girls and the old woman were leaving the room and seemed not to observe my confusion. The girl whom I had selected picked up the horn; then led the way out the door and along the corridor overlooking the wide court where the flowers were.
We entered a room, and she closed the door. My heart was palpitating, and I knew that my face was red; so I busied myself setting down the two boxes on the table and opening them.
I felt her brush against my arm, and looked at her. She was rather older than I had thought, though still young enough, God knows, for the pitiful trade she plies. And she was smiling, with what appeared to be genuine good humor. Probably I amused her. Worldly-wise women, when they observe me at all, usually look amused; so I make it a rule to avoid them when I can.
“Wha’ ees eet?” she asked, nodding toward the instrument. She spoke in quite understandable English, though with a strong accent.
I told her it was a phonograph, and asked if she would sing into it. She seemed pleased.
I had her sing all the native songs she was able to think of at the moment, making notes of the title of each, as nearly as I could catch the sound of the words. To make sure that I bad each correctly identified, I repeated it to her. She laughed a good deal over my attempts to pronounce these titles. The seven songs that interested me I then requested her to sing into the phonograph. This she did, with only fair satisfaction to me; for she laughed a good deal, and would occasionally turn her head to look up at me, thus directing the tone away from the horn. I had to make her sing four of them twice. I regretted this, as four cylinders were thereby wasted, and I can not replace these specially made cylinders on this side the Pacific. I began to see that the twenty-two hundred I have brought with me will be used up pretty rapidly when my investigation gets under full headway on the farther side of the Yellow Sea.
I have, later to-night, played over these seven records here in my room at the hotel, with some sense of disappointment. One of them I think will prove, on careful analysis, to have for its basis the ancient pentatonic scale. The intervals of two are very nearly those of the oldest known Greek scales of a tone and two conjunct tetra-chords. But in the case of the other four I shall be greatly surprised if they employ any other intervals than those of our own equal temperament scale of twelve semitones to the octave.
That, of course, is really the trouble with Japan as a field of research; these marvelous little people pick up and assimilate Western ideas with such rapidity that their ancient traditions become hopelessly confused.
The girl seemed to tire after a while. Her voice became hoarse and she fell to coughing. I realized then that I had been holding her pretty closely to this work, and told her that she could rest a little while.
At this, she sat on the edge of the European ted, and looked at me, half smiling.
“You lig hear the koto?” she asked suddenly.
I nodded eagerly. The koto, as I have long known, is closely related to the ancient Chinese instrument, the ch’in, beloved of Confucius. Many investigators hold, indeed, that it is the same instrument, transplanted in the earliest times and changed a little in its new environment.
She slipped out of the room, and shortly returned with the instrument, which remotely resembles a modern zither – at least, in the fact that it has a number of strings (thirteen in this instance) stretched over a board and played by plucking with the fingers. It was a beautiful object, the koto of this nameless little inmate of the Yoshiwara, highly lacquered, with fine inlays of polished woods, tortoise-shell, ivory, and silver; and I could see by her smiling breathlessness and the engaging, almost shy glances she gave me as she curled up on the bed to play it, that she was inordinately proud of it.
“You lig hear me pray?” she murmured.
The word “pray” came to me with a curious shock in this place. Then I remembered the Japanese confusion of our r and l sounds, and knew that she meant “play.”
I nodded.
She drew from a fold of her dress a pitch-pipe contrived of six little bamboo tubes bound together by means of a copper wire, and tuned all the thirteen strings. Then she played for quite a long time, characteristic melodies of the Orient that floated vaguely and hauntingly between the major and the minor. I was able to get a fairly clear idea of the scale she used before I decided upon the nature of the records I wished to make of it. I moved a table over to the phonograph, and, by resting the koto on small boxes that I found on the bureau, I contrived to place it almost against the horn of the phonograph. Then I had her play, first the scale of the open strings, followed by those two or three of the melodies that had particularly interested me.
It had grown dark some time before this, and she had lighted a lamp. Now, feeling on the whole well satisfied with the ten records I had made, I looked at my watch, and was astonished to learn that it was half-past eight in the evening. I at once set about packing up my apparatus.
She stood close to me, watching the process. Occasionally she put out her small hand and stroked my hair. When I had done, she came still closer and, with momentary hesitation, placed her arms about my neck.
“You go ‘way?” she whispered.
“Yes,” said I, “I must go now.”
“You doan’ lig me?”
“Why, yes, certainly,” I replied, “I like you very much. And you have sung and played very prettily for me.”
“Oh,” said she, looking somewhat puzzled, “you lig that?”
I nodded. My hands had dropped naturally upon her shoulders. But I was conscious then – and indeed, am to-night, as I write it down – of some confusion of thought.
Then she raised her face – by stretching up on tiptoe and pulling with tight little arms about my neck. I did not know what to do. To draw my lips away from hers would be something more than absurd. There is a limit even to what I suppose I must sooner or later admit as my own unmanliness. So I kissed her, white man fashion. And, to my complete surprise, she clung to me with what seemed, for the moment, to be genuine emotion.
I will not attempt to explain either my nature in general or my actions at this particular time. What would be the use? I am writing this journal for my own eyes alone; and, God knows, hours enough of my life have been wasted in the pale avenues of introspection. I am not a wholly bloodless being. And I know well enough that the average man buys women now and then, here and there, whatever obligation he may think himself under to conceal the fact and thereby contribute his support to