Anthony The Absolute

A door opened, and in came a file of girls – fourteen of them. All were young; one, I thought, of not more than thirteen or fourteen years – though it is difficult for us of the West to judge accurately the age of Orientals. They shuffled along in their curious little shoes. Several seemed to me extremely pretty; all were small and dainty. Everything considered, they made a pleasing picture as they stood there, looking at us with a demure twinkling in each almond eye. I wondered what would come next. A dance, perhaps.

Crocker had hitched forward in his chair and was looking rapidly from one end of the line to the other. His face was more flushed even than usual; his eyes were eager. Finally his gaze rested on the third girl from the right end of the line. I began to feel uncomfortable.

After a moment he rose, and nodded toward that third girl. She promptly stepped forward. “See you later, old man,” he said to me bruskly, hardly looking at me, and then, laying down a gold coin and taking the girl’s arm, hurried from the room with her.

Left alone there, with the old woman and the thirteen girls, I found myself rather confused. It had not occurred to me that the business was to be 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 the immense foundation lie on which our Anglo-Saxon structure of virtue and morality rests.

I do not know why I found myself unable to stay. Perhaps in another place and at another time ‘t would have been different. Perhaps the beauty and charm of the house and the pleasant attractiveness of the little person herself had raised me too high above the ordinary sordid plane of this transaction, and emphasized the ugliness of it.

Perhaps, too, the fact (extraordinary in my lonely experience) that she had given up smiling at me, and now plainly wanted me to stay, was among the curious psychological forces that drove me away. As to why she wanted me, I can not say. I have puzzled over that part of it all the evening (it is now a quarter to midnight) without arriving at any conclusion. It may be that by unconsciously permitting her, through my deep interest in her music, to show something of her own enthusiasms and of the emotions that stirred them, I had flattered her more subtly than I knew. Who can say?

I turned right back to my boxes. She called a boy to carry them, and I went away. My last glimpse, as I closed her door, was of a quaint little slant-eyed person, whose hair had become disarranged and was tumbling about her ears, whose lips were parted in a breathless smile.

One thing is sure: I shall never let Crocker know that I came away like that. If he believed me at all, which I doubt, he would certainly think me weaker than I am. I may be a complicated, finicky person; but I do not believe I am as weak as he would think me if he knew.

As I was walking along the corridor I heard other footsteps, and looking across the dim, flower-scented court, just managed to distinguish a rather ponderous figure proceeding slowly among the shadows on the other side. We met at the top of the stairs. It was Sir Robert.

I felt myself coloring furiously; and he wore a shamefaced expression. For such is the curious hypocrisy of man when caught in his more or less constant relationship with the one completely universal and unchangeable of his institutions.

“Well,” said he, rather awkwardly, “it is a very pleasant place, the way they keep it up.”

“Very,” I replied.

“And what is all this?” He was looking at my boxes, in the arms of the boy at my elbow. “Purchases? Here?”

“That is my phonograph,” I explained, quite unnecessarily.

“Your what?” He said this much as Crocker had said it.

“My phonograph,” I repeated.

He stood looking at me, with knit brows. Then, “Ah, ha!” he said, musing. “So that was it! I could n’t explain that music – hours of it – and the repetitions. I begin to see. You are the authority on Oriental music.”

I bowed coldly.

Sir Robert began smiling – an old man’s smile. I started down the stairs, but he kept at my side.

We went on to the outer door together without a word, and waited while the boy called rickshaws for us. I looked at Sir Robert. He was still smiling.

“Let me congratulate you,” he said then, rather dryly. And his left eyelid drooped in what was grotesquely like a wink. “You have the distinction, I believe, of being quite the most practical man in the world. You will go far.”

Thank God, the rickshaw is the most unsociable of vehicles. Each of us stepped into his own and rolled away through a dim street bordered by rows of gay paper lanterns, which were lighted now.

As my rickshaw turned the corner, we nearly collided head on with another one. By the light of the lanterns I made out its occupant – the fat vaudeville manager from Cincinnati.

He waved a cheerful hand at me as we passed.

“Number Nine?” he called.

“Number Nine,” I replied. I felt depressed and ashamed; but he took it very easily.

I have, however, confirmed a conclusion tonight, so the experience has its value. I shall push on to China, where the ancient music may still be caught in its pure form, uncorrupted and unconfused by the modern touch. For my purposes, time spent in Japan would be wasted. And I shall hurry past the treaty ports to Peking. The treaty ports, they tell me, are not really Chinese at all. For that matter, how could they be?