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My wife has heard one side of a story which is unfair and untrue. She must hear from me what really happened." "I think, some other day, it would be better," cousin Sadako intervened. "You see, Mrs. Barrington cannot speak to-day. She is too unhappy." It was quite true. Asako stood like a dummy, neither seeing nor hearing apparently, neither assenting nor contradicting.
Surely Geoffrey would come back to her, and take her away! But he had no money now, and it would cost much money to travel to Japan. And then, this terrible war! Geoffrey was a soldier. He would be sure to be there, leading his men. Supposing he were killed? One night in a dream she saw his body carried past her, limp and bleeding. She screamed in her sleep. Sadako awoke, terrified.
Sadako was intellectually the cleverer of the two, but Asako had seen and heard more; so they were fairly equally matched. Often the cousins shocked each other's sense of propriety. Asako had already observed that to the Japanese mind, the immediate corollary to being married is to produce children as promptly and as rapidly as possible.
Every day two or three of the Yoshiwara women died of disease and neglect, so Sadako said and therefore every day the invisible population of the Fujinami garden must be increasing, and the volume of their curses must be gathering in intensity. The ghosts hissed like snakes in the bamboo grove. They sighed in the pine branches. They nourished the dwarf shrubs with their pollution.
He found Asako in a room which overlooked the garden where he had been received on former occasions. Her cousin Sadako was with her and Ito, the lawyer. To his surprise and disgust, his wife was dressed in the Japanese kimono and obi which had once been so pleasing to his eyes. Her change of nationality seemed to be already complete. This was an Asako whom he had never known before.
"How long have you been learning?" Asako wanted to know. "Oh, since I was ten years old about." "Is it so difficult then?" said Asako, who had found it comparatively easy to pour out a cup of drawing-room tea without clumsiness. Sadako smiled tolerantly at her cousin's naive ignorance of things aesthetic and intellectual.
The Japanese have an instinctive knowledge of the influence of inanimate things, and use this knowledge with an unscrupulousness, which the crude foreigner only realises if ever after it is too late. Geoffrey's wife appeared hand in hand with cousin Sadako. There was nothing English in her looks.
Besides Sadako could speak English so well; it was so convenient that she should come; and under her mother's care her morals would not be contaminated by the propinquity of geisha. So Mr. Fujinami gave in so far as concerned his own wife and daughter.
A cold wind was blowing in from some aperture in the amado. This was unusual, for a Japanese house in its night attire is hermetically sealed. Suddenly Sadako appeared from the direction of the wind. Her hair was disheveled. She wore a dark cloak over her parti-coloured night kimono. "I have been to benjo," said Sadako nervously. "You have been out in the rain," contradicted her cousin.
More often, this refined and innocent ideal degenerates into a poor trickle of an existence, enlivened only by scrappy magazine reading, servants' gossip, empty chatter about clothes, neighbours and children, backbiting, envying and malice. Once Sadako took her cousin to a charity entertainment given for the Red Cross at the house of a rich nobleman.
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