Some Prefer Nettles Read online

  In the shade of a great purple-flowered sandalwood tree, mint and weeds were growing in the wildest profusion. The mint was left untouched for Mrs. Brent to use with roast mutton or punch, and the rims of her eyes as she stared into the garden, a white lace handkerchief pressed to her face, looked as though some of the pungence might have eaten its way into them.

  "I'm terribly sorry to hear it."

  "It's kind of you to say so."

  A tear drew a line of light down from her sagging eyelids, folded in layer after layer of wrinkles. Kaname had heard that foreign women tend to weep, but this was the first time he had actually seen one of them weeping. Somehow it struck him as intensely sad, just as a foreign song with whose melody he was still not entirely familiar could strike him with the force of its melancholy.

  "Where did your brother die?"

  "In Canada."

  "How old was he?"

  "Forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty—something like that, I think."

  "He was still young then. Will you have to go to Canada?"

  "I've decided not to. There's nothing I could do."

  "How long has it been since you last saw him?"

  "Twenty years or so—it was when I was in London in 1909. We've written letters since, but that was the last time."

  How old would the Madam herself be, then? Older than the brother, of course. Kaname had known her now for more than ten years. She had had two houses on the Bluff—the foreign quarter-before the great earthquake ruined Yokohama, and five or six girls in each; and she had had this house in Kobe too, a sort of branch villa as it were, and houses in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Traveling back and forth between China and Japan, she had for a time ruled over a rather extensive empire. But presently, as her health and energy failed, her business began to crumble away. Mrs. Brent herself said that since 1918 the Japanese had started taking over trade and forcing out foreign firms, and that the reckless tourists of the early days had stopped coming. Kaname felt, however, that those were not the only causes for her decline. When he had first known her she was not the ruin he saw now. Born in Yorkshire, she had received a fine education at some girls' school or other, she was always pleased to say. She knew not a word of Japanese, even though she had then been in Japan more than ten years, and while her girls fell into the pidgin of the foreign concessions, she persisted in using pure English—indeed, making it a point to bring in as many difficult words and idioms as she could. Her German and French too were fluent. She had the dignity that went with her position, she had a lively personality, and she still preserved something of the charm of her youth. Kaname marveled at the ability of foreign women to resist age. But the time came when her strength of character began to slacken, her memory failed, and her ability to control people quite left her, and soon it was almost as if he could see her aging before his eyes. In the old days she would buttonhole a customer and boast of some foreign count who had slipped into one of her places the evening before, or, an English-language newspaper spread in front of her, she would launch forth on the subject of England's Far Eastern policies, mystifying her customers with deep and subtle questions. The old bluff had disappeared, however, and only a propensity for lies remained. It had become a disease, almost too obvious and easily detected a disease.

  That such a forceful individual should have degenerated to this seemed to Kaname most remarkable. He suspected that drink was responsible. As her wits grew duller and her body grew puffier, her consumption of liquor climbed steadily. She had once been able to keep herself under tight control even when she was drunk, but now she wheezed untidily about the house from early in the morning, and, according to the houseboy, she drank herself into a stupor two or three times a month. A model case of high blood pressure, she might fall over dead almost any minute, one felt. It could hardly be expected, then, that her house would prosper, whatever business conditions in general might be. The cleverer of the girls ran away after piling up debts, the cook and the amah cheated on the whisky bill. In the good days she had hired only pure blonde western-European girls from the English concession, but these last two or three years the roster had narrowed down to Eurasians and White Russians, and never more than two or three of them at a time.

  "You can't help being sad, of course, but won't you make yourself sick if you go on crying this way? It's not like you. Pull yourself together, have a drink. People have to accept these things."

  "Thank you. You are most kind. But he was my only brother. Everyone has to die, I know. Everyone has to die some time. But still..."

  "Exactly right. The only thing to do is accept it."

  There is a type of old and unwanted geisha, found often at country teahouses, who will seize a customer she barely knows and pour out all her misfortunes for him, who intoxicates herself with the cheapest sentimentality. The Madam here, one had to admit, was of the type. Undoubtedly she was sad, but in her desire for attention she was striking too many poses. Still, for all its artificiality, Kaname could not but be moved at the sorrow of the massive foreign woman. Her tears were the tears of the country geisha, and yet he felt his own eyes misting over.

  "Please forgive me. Here I've upset you with all this weeping, when I really should wait till I'm alone."

  "Nothing of the sort. But do be careful. There's no point in making yourself sick just because your brother is dead."

  Kaname felt a little ashamed of himself. He knew that he would never be so forward with a Japanese woman. What could account for it? Perhaps he had come expecting to see Louise and had been caught off guard by this encounter? Perhaps the fine weather had got the better of him? The scent of the mint and the radiance of the spring leaves had gone to his head? Or possibly English was especially suited for sad occasions? In Japanese he had never spoken half so sweetly and softly to his wife or his dead mother.

  "What happened? Did the Madam get hold of you?" Louise asked when she received him on the second floor.

  "It was a little embarrassing. I don't like tearful conversations, but I couldn't run off with her crying right in my face."

  Louise giggled. "I thought so. She isn't satisfied until she's wept a little for everyone who comes in."

  "But it can't be entirely an act."

  "Well, after all, her brother did die, and she must feel sad about it. You've been to Awaji?"

  "Yes."

  "And who was with you?"

  "My father-in-law and his lady friend."

  "Whose lady friend did you say? Not that I don't know."

  "My father-in-law's, I said. I do like her a little, though."

  "Then why did you come here?"

  "I need someone to cheer me up now that I've seen how well other people get on together."

  "How flattering!"

  Had someone who did not know the two been listening from the next room, he could hardly have guessed from the woman's speech that she had bobbed chestnut hair and brown eyes. Her Japanese was excellent. Even now, when Kaname closed his eyes, he could imagine from her tone and accent and choice of words that he was in a country restaurant with a barmaid beside him serving sake. A trace of something exotic gave her speech a little the rising accent of northern Japan, and with her frightful glibness she sounded like a too knowing wench who has worked her way around the provinces. She would never have suspected it, of course.

  And when, after closing his eyes and letting Louise's chattering create what moods it would, Kaname opened them again and looked about him, he found the scene quite startling. There was Louise on the chair in front of the dressing-table, a brocade pajama top, patterned after a mandarin robe, coming barely to her hips, below that only her carefully powdered legs and a pair of pale-yellow high-heeled French slippers, their toes pointed like the prows of two little submarines. Indeed, almost her whole body was covered with a delicate coating of white powder—Kaname had had to wait more than a half-hour for her to finish powdering herself after her bath. She said that her mother had some Turkish blood, and that she felt she had to hide
the darkness of her complexion. As a matter of fact, though, it had been the dark glow of her skin, with its faint suggestion of impurity, that had attracted Kaname. Once he had brought a friend here, and the friend, just back from France, had said: "You would have a hard time finding a woman like her even in Paris. Who would expect to see one wandering around Kobe?"

  Kaname had first come to the house in Kobe two or three years before, quite on the impulse of a moment, because he had been received in Mrs. Brent's Yokohama houses in spite of his being Japanese. Louise on that first visit came out with a couple of other girls to greet him and to have a glass of champagne at his expense. She had been in Kobe only three months, she said. She was born in Poland, had been driven from her home by the war, and had lived in Russia, Manchuria, and Korea, picking up new languages along the way. She talked to the other two girls with no difficulty in Russian. "If I ever went to Paris I would be talking like a Frenchman in a month," she boasted. Apparently she had something of a genius for languages, and she alone of the girls was able to handle Mrs. Brent or a drunken American in English. But that she should have mastered Japanese in such a short time —one minute she would be singing Slavic songs to the balalaika or the guitar, the next she would be at "Song of the Yalu River" or "Song of the Ya-suki Boatman," almost with the skill of a professional minstrel. Kaname, who had always spoken to her in English, had discovered this sinister talent only recently.

  It was foolish, however, to have expected that a woman in her profession would tell the truth about her past. Later he learned from the houseboy that she was really the Eurasian daughter of a Russian and a Korean, and that she occasionally had letters from her mother in Seoul. Her linguistic accomplishments and her facility with "Song of the Yalu River" thus became a little more understandable. Among all the lies she had told, though, he wondered if her statement the first time they met that she was eighteen years old might not have been near the truth. Even now she looked no more than twenty. Her speech and her actions were precocious out of all proportion to her physical development, almost inevitably the case with young girls of her exotic origins.

  Kaname, who had never really established himself with a mistress but had made it a practice to shift his attentions about, had, in the two or three years since he met her, come only to Louise for relief from the barrenness of his life with Misako. Of all the women he had known, Louise was the most skillful at satisfying the particular need that his unhappy marriage created. Had anyone asked about the attachment, he would have said that he found it safest for secret debauchery to go to a house that rarely admitted Japanese, that Mrs. Brent's was cheaper and less time-consuming than a Japanese teahouse, that after he and a woman had been behaving like animals it was somehow easier for them to forget, less damaging to their pride, when they were foreigners to each other. Indeed, he had almost convinced himself that those were his reasons.

  But, for all that he tried to think of her as no more significant than a beautiful, furry, four-legged beast, Kaname felt in her something that suggested the gladness and exuberance of certain Lamaist statues. He knew with painful sureness that he would not find her easy to give up. She was far more considerate, more painstaking, than those self-styled geisha who, surrounded by pink walls and pinned-up photographs of Hollywood stars and perhaps of Suzuki Demmei and Okada Yoshiko,1 sought to delight the senses of their customers with pedicures and perfumed feet. Frequently, though never out of spite, Kaname would start off in comfortable sports clothes on "errands" in Kobe after Misako had left for Suma, and toward evening he would come back with a few packages in Kobe wrappings. He followed the teachings of Kaibara Ekiken, the seventeenth-century wise man—though for reasons quite opposite to those advanced by Ekiken—and chose the early afternoon for his pleasures. Going home in the daylight took away the unpleasantness of the aftertaste and made it possible to pass the adventure off in the spirit of an afternoon walk.

  Only one thing bothered him: the smell of Louise's powder, a particularly strong and stubborn smell. It seemed to sink deep into his skin, it permeated his clothes, it even spread through the taxi when he left and overwhelmed the room when he got home. Aside from the question of whether Misako knew about his flirtation or not, it seemed to Kaname somehow a breach of etiquette to bring another woman's scent home to his wife, granted that she was hardly his wife any more. He sometimes suspected, as a matter of fact, that Misako was not going to Suma at all but had found a convenient nest somewhere nearer. Although he did feel a certain curiosity, it was never aggressive enough to make him investigate. Rather he made it a point to leave things in doubt, and he wanted his own movements left in doubt. Before he put on his clothes in Louise's room, therefore, he always had the boy draw a bath. The powder had the tenaciousness of a strong hair-oil, and he had to scrub himself raw to get rid of it. Sometimes he felt that her skin had enveloped him like an acrobat's tights. He rather wished he could leave it on—and this he had to accept as evidence that he was fonder of her than he would admit.

  "Prosit! A votre santé," said Louise, raising a bright amber-colored glass to her lips. She always said there was no decent champagne in the place, and overcharged him thirty per cent or so on the Dry Monopole she secretly stored for herself. "Have you thought about what I asked you?"

  "I haven't quite got around to it."

  "But what are you going to do? Tell me now."

  "I can't yet. That's what I haven't got around to."

  "I do get tired of it, honestly, saying you haven't got around to it. Remember what I said the other day? A thousand yen will be enough."

  "I heard you."

  "Then why don't you do something? You said if it was only a thousand yen you might be able to."

  "Did I say that?"

  "Liar! You know you did. That's why I don't like Japanese."

  "I'm so sorry. You must forgive me for being Japanese. What ever happened to the rich American you went to Nikko with?"

  "That's not what we're talking about. You're even stingier than I thought. And you would give almost anything to one of those geisha girls."

  "Really, if you think I'm that rich, you're wrong. A thousand yen is a lot of money."

  This sort of thing took the place with Louise of the more common varieties of bedroom playfulness. At first she had said that she owed the Madam two thousand yen and that she wanted him to pay that off and set her up in a house of her own. Recently, however, she had changed her story, and now she needed only a thousand and could give her note for the rest.

  "You do like me, don't you? You do, don't you?"

  "Mmm."

  "You could be a little more enthusiastic. You really are fond of me, aren't you?"

  "I really am."

  "Then you should be willing to give me a thousand. If you don't, I'll stop being nice to you. Now, then. Will you or won't you?"

  "I will, I will. You needn't work yourself into a rage."

  "When will you?"

  "I'll bring the money next time I come."

  "You really will this time? You aren't lying?"

  "Well, you never can tell about us Japanese."

  "Damn! Just you remember to bring the money. If you don't, no more. You get nothing more from me. I don't want to be in this dirty business all my life, and I'm only asking you to help me. There aren't many who've had it as hard as I have."

  Louise took on the manner of a melodramatic actress of the new school. With wide, tragic, tear-laden eyes, she told how insufferable this life was for a person of her quality; she described her unhappy mother, waiting day after day for her to be free; she cursed heaven and damned man. She had had stage experience, and as a dancer she could rival Pavlova. She was different from the other girls, and it was really shameful to waste her talents in a place like this. If she could only get to Paris or Los Angeles she could take care of herself splendidly. Or if one had in mind a more staid way of earning a living, surely someone with her linguistic genius would be useful as a secretary or stenographer to an exec
utive somewhere. Would he help her? Would he introduce her to a movie producer or to a foreign businessman? That and say a hundred or a hundred fifty a month to fill out her earnings would be quite enough. She would need no more.

  "It costs you fifty or sixty yen every time you come here, doesn't it? You would really be saving money."

  "They say it takes a thousand a month to keep a foreign wife. Do you really think you could get by on a hundred and fifty with your expensive tastes?"

  "I could. I'm not like most foreign women. I could earn a hundred, and all together I'd have two hundred and fifty, wouldn't I? Just try me. I'll show you how well I can manage. I won't come coaxing for spending-money and new clothes like other women. It's this business that gives you wrong ideas about me. If you think I have expensive tastes you're very, very wrong. I don't like to brag, but really I do think if I had a house of my own there isn't a woman in the world who could touch me when it came to saving money."

  "And supposing after I pay all your debts you whisk yourself off to Siberia?"

  Louise made a face and beat her feet against the mattress in her chagrin. Kaname rather enjoyed putting her off, but he could not deny that her proposal interested him. She was not the sort of girl who would want to stay long in one place, and he was quite sure, joking aside, that one day she would run away, to Harbin perhaps. That, however, might be rather a relief. What bothered him more was the thought of how complicated it would be to set up a mistress. Louise said that she would be satisfied with a rented Japanese house as long as it had Western furniture, but somehow, even assuming that she could to outward appearances give up her luxuries and take to minding her accounts like an admirable housewife, the picture of her coming into a narrow little room through an ill-fitting door and walking across the puffy insubstantiality of badly made floor matting, her bobbed head emerging from a wifely cotton kimono—somehow the picture had its disenchanting aspects. Kaname at first treated her advances as of no more consequence than those pleasantries a man will embark on when he is trying to be attractive to women, but presently it began to seem that Louise took them more seriously. Her earnestness might well carry him farther than he wanted to go.