Divorce!

Kent read the letter over again, carefully, laboriously, for his thoughts would not concentrate on the sentences. He had to force himself to bring his mind on them. The letters from Isabel had shown indifference, every evidence of having been written as a matter of duty in their painstaking regularity, one a month; they had been cold even; but he had never for a moment suspected that she would, suddenly, without leaving room for discussion, thus make the end bluntly, finally.

She wrote that the petition had been filed in court. The grounds were desertion. The summons would probably be in the same mail. Desertion. It struck him as wantonly malicious treachery. He had been careful always to send her the regular allowance which they had agreed upon before he left for Japan, and even more. He could certainly show in court—— Still, what was the use? He would not contest the case. If she wanted divorce, well, let her have it. A man was a fool who would try to hold a woman against her desire. And then, after all, why should he care? His affection for her had long since dissipated. The adage that absence makes the heart grow fonder—he had more than halfway believed that it might work out—but it had not in his case, nor, evidently, in hers either. He had no cause to object. On the contrary, she was giving him his freedom. It was the logical thing, after all.

Now, if that had come a year ago, before Sylvia had left Tokyo? Isabel must even then have considered divorce. She had probably done so even before he left America. Why could she not have done it then, when he and Sylvia—— Would she have married him? Plainly, she had liked him, but this other? Still, there would have been a chance. And now, now when opportunity had finally come, it was so absurdly futile. He had no means of reaching Sylvia. She had disappeared utterly, had gone as if she had vanished into space. No one appeared to know where she might be. Evidently she had wished to disassociate herself entirely from Tokyo, to sever every thread that might connect her with Japan. He had written a couple of times on chance clews. She had been seen by some one somewhere along the upper Yangtze. A note in the personal column of a Hongkong paper showed that she had gone from that place to Macao. Report had it that she had visited Singapore. He had written each time, but nothing had ever come of it. So he had given up thought of her, forced himself to blot that chapter out of his life, to consider it a definitely closed incident. Now, it was too late. Even if he knew where to find her, what would she say should he gallop up to her the moment he was free. One could never know how a woman might take things. And then she would by this time undoubtedly have found new friends, might be engaged, married, for all he might know. No, even if he might find her, should she have been placed out of his reach through some other man, that, he knew, must hurt him like the devil. It would reopen, grievously lacerate the old wound which seemed now to have all but healed. After all, he had come to appreciate, enjoy in recent months his safety from emotional turmoil. One risked too much, paid too heavily for the raptures of infatuation. He would remain safe.

So that phase of the situation was disposed of. He would allow himself to consider it no more. Now for the other phases.

He lit his pipe and leaned back to think it over, to reason it out. Logically he should be pleased; but he could not make himself feel so. It was an ugly word, "desertion"; smacked of being a scoundrel. Still, of course, divorces were common things, and every one knew that the law required, for some obscure reason, that the grounds must always be clothed in terms implying disgrace of some kind. Well, let it go.

Still, he was oddly dissatisfied. He tried to analyze his feelings. Gradually, as he smoked, it came to him that what he resented was the suddenness of entire change in his status of life, the necessity for making new adjustments. He would now be alone, under a changed moral code, a different mode of life. Still, he was being made free. What he lost was, of course, only obligations. To blazes with the entire business!

He crumpled the letter and threw it out of the window impulsively. He would be rid of the whole thing, like that; would write her to go ahead. It was the end. Undoubtedly he would soon find himself pleased, as he should be, that a relation had been severed which there could be no possible reason to continue.

"Kent-san."

It was a woman's voice, low, clear. He looked about, startled out of his thoughts. There she was, across the alley, in her window, his geisha neighbor. Through the bamboo bars she was holding out to him something white. He recognized the crumpled letter. What a perverse grotesquery of fate that his divorce announcement should, eccentrically, cause his acquaintance with this woman, this professional in the arts of affection, whom he had heretofore known only mutely, through her formal courtesy of a smile when she had happened to meet his eye from her window.

"It came right in through the window. It frightened me. It hit me right on the head." She was laughing, but her eyes asked for explanation. Of course—one did not throw things through windows, even at geisha.

"Pardon me. I was angry. It was bad news. My wife in America is seeking divorce." He caught himself. It was stupid to plump it out to an utter stranger; but the idea had filled his mind, had dominated him so entirely that the words had slipped without thinking.

"O kinodoku sama, I am so sorry." The smiling face became a mask of polite regret. "Do you love her?"

The amazing frankness of the Orient in intimately personal matters in contrast to its reticence where the West is frank!

"No, I don't care a bit." As he spoke he felt with surprised satisfaction that he really did not care, that his resentment was fading. Evidently it did him good to get this thing out of his system, to speak out about it, even to this new-found geisha friend. It was not so incongruous, after all. Was she not supposed to be an expert in matters of the heart.

Her serious expression vanished instantly. She laughed. They did really laugh like "tinkling silver bells," some of these Japanese girls. "Then you will find another woman. Ah, but here in Japan, what will you do? Here we have only the kitanai Japanese girls."

"Kitanai," literally "unclean," used in the sense of "unworthy" as the Japanese always speaks, perfunctorily, of what is his own. The unjustness of the phrase bewildered him for the moment, as he thought for words to express indignant refutation, protest that the Japanese girl was, of course, the very opposite of "kitanai."

He started to answer. The murmur of a voice came to him from the unseen background of the girl's room. The face of an old woman appeared behind her.

"I was just calling at the shaved-ice man," said the girl, over her shoulder. "But he didn't hear me. He has gone." Evidently the elder woman, probably a sort of duenna, had asked her what she was doing. He admired her instant wit. She smiled at him hurriedly, surreptitiously. He caught the odd charm of the wink of her long almond eye. Then the shoji closed.

Well! A bizarre episode. But a charming one. He was in a happy frame of mind. It was a good augury. Evidently he was not so badly hurt, when a pretty face could so easily dispel his resentment. Divorce; it was only proper that his marriage be ended, an unsatisfactory chapter. Let the thing take its course.

He decided to place the letter in a drawer where he kept things which he wished to remain unseen by the unknown one who periodically ransacked his desk. He had left it open purposely, and at the top he had placed a layer of old papers, which must have been seen often by the intruder, and which could no longer tempt his curiosity. Below the papers he kept the other things, his wife's letters mainly, and then Kimiko-san's slippers. He had been surprised to receive them in the mail, a few days after their first dance in Tsurumi. It had amused him that she had taken him thus literally. It was dangerous to be jocose with Japanese girls; they were likely to take things to the letter. But he had been pleased at the possession, at having this dainty, unique souvenir of a delightful incident of his life in Japan.

He was surprised to find that the investigator had evidently been there. The ruse had not worked. The slippers were not in the position where he had left them. Still, it made little difference. He would take them home. The trophy would amuse Jun-san.

Jun-san was intensely interested, pleaded that he tell her from whom he had obtained them. He always enjoyed seeing her in her gay moods; she was generally so serious, almost melancholy. He had planned to bring about this air of gayety, that he might, as had been the case when he was chatting with his geisha neighbor, forget unpleasant thoughts. But it failed. The humor dissipated. The serious thoughts recurred insistently. He could see that Karsten noticed his preoccupation. The idea came to him to tell Karsten all about it, talk it out with him. It would do him good; one always reasoned more clearly when one placed one's thoughts in words to another; and then Karsten had been known in San Francisco as a man with unusual experience with women, had had the reputation of being an expert, in those days, in such matters.

So after dinner, when they were sitting upstairs, as usual, looking over the blaze of the geisha quarter below, he told him. "It is not so much that I care," he concluded. "There was no longer such a thing as affection—on either side. But I can't help feeling a vague sense of trouble, of unrest. I am fairly commonplace. I don't give much thought to self-analysis and that sort of thing. I was married; it was a state of affairs, a condition. I had become used to it. It governed my relations to women. I followed the traditional moral code of marriage, gave no thought to such matters. It was plain sailing; I played the game with my wife; there could be no other women; it was an easy frame of mind. And now it seems as if suddenly I am at sea without sailing orders, as if I were captain of a ship in mid-ocean and suddenly find that I have no compass course, no destination. And, of course, one must have one, must decide where one is going. You would say that it makes no difference, that as I have not seen my wife for a year or more, the thing is essentially the same. But it isn't. I am bewildered by a feeling that my status is utterly different, cataclysmically changed. I am like a life prisoner who has without warning been taken out of a cell where he has lain for years, passively, without need of thought of what he should do with life, and who is then suddenly placed in the midst of the sunlit city. He feels he is free, must do something, wants to do something, but somehow, oddly, misses the quiet impassivity, the lack of responsibility of his cell. I know that there is no reason why I shouldn't live to-morrow as I did yesterday, but the fact is that for some reason it seems impossible. There is the sense of an entirely new condition of life which overwhelms me, and I want to, I feel I must respond to it, in some way, but—I know I talk like a fool. I am hanged if I can explain coherently—but I wish I knew what I want to do."

"I think you are doing the best thing just now," said Karsten. "Talk it out of your system. After all, it is a thing you will eventually decide for yourself, gradually. You need be in no hurry. I know just how you feel. You know I was divorced, too. Only in my case another woman, whom I cared for, threw me over at the same time. I went through the same thing. I don't pretend to be able to give advice. In such matters a man must act on his own. But, since we have come to the intimate things in our lives, I don't mind telling you how I fared. One may profit from the foolishness of others."

He smoked silently for a while, evidently gathering his thoughts. "My marriage turned out just like yours," he began suddenly. "There was no reason why it shouldn't have turned out well, only it didn't. We simply grew tired of each other, for the usual reason, too much intimate daily contact. When one sees every day, morning after morning, a woman in a dressing gown, with her hair down, going through the process of elaborating her attractions, careless of one's presence, it takes the glamor out of the illusion. A man shaving, seen every morning, can hardly be an inspiring spectacle. Crudely put, that was about all there was to it. Came the divorce. It was the only reasonable thing. I felt that I should be pleased, but, just like you, I felt bewildered, that I had lost my bearings.

"I drifted for a while, but I was agitated, nervous, febrile; felt that I should have done with women, but the very fact that I had my liberty, that I could do as I pleased, kept running in my mind. It gave me no rest. I had no moral scruples. You know I am a Dane. The family is one of these old tradition-ridden clans that you find in Europe. Everything must be governed by precedent set by people who have been dead for ages. In my tribe the woman element has always been predominant. When I was still in school my uncles impressed on me the family code—never touch a friend's wife or his daughter, and never cause a woman regret. Simple, isn't it? If such things worked, it would probably be as good, at least for those whom it fitted, as any other, but such things are not nostrums.

"Anyway, I felt then that as long as I lived up to that, I was all right. Then Sanford, of the San Francisco Herald, you know, gave me a piece of advice. He quoted Lawrence Hope's verse recommending to 'love only lightly,' to pluck the pleasant, superficial flowers of love and to avoid the thorns by not allowing yourself to become too devoted to any one woman. I took the advice too seriously. You remember that during my last years in San Francisco I was just a rouÉ, a libertine, a swine. Instead of giving me rest, peace of mind, I became worse off than ever. Then accident brought me to Japan. It did me good. What had bothered me was, I discovered, not lust for women, but only desire for excitement; but, of course, as you know, in our well-ordered civilization a man can get excitement, change, new impressions and experiences out of few things, politics, sports, gambling, business perhaps, but, if he is cursed with an imagination, mainly women. When I came here, all the new life, the new sights, interested me so much that after awhile I found myself rational again. I played a bit with the geisha, down there, but temperately, sensibly. Then, finally, accident brought me a woman, a Japanese woman, for whom I felt real affection, whom I really cared for. I found that I wanted no others. I was absolutely faithful to her, not because I had to be, nor because I felt that I ought to be, but because I wanted to be. That is where the relation without benefit of clergy works better than the institution of marriage. It is more likely to last because of the absence of the feeling that one must be faithful as a matter of obligation. I had come to the conclusion that monogamy is the only rational, natural thing, one man for one woman, one woman for one man. I would like to see some kind of marriage invented that would work effectively. In my case, I was happier than I had ever been. I had peace, content, I thought I had solved my life.—Then my—my best friend seduced the woman."

As he talked, Karsten had been pacing up and down the narrow veranda which, now the shoji had been removed on account of the heat, formed part of the room. Now he stopped and stood staring out over the city, smoking silently. Suddenly he turned, faced Kent.

"I am afraid that there has not been as much as I thought in all this for you to draw a moral from. I'll be more specific. What I was trying to drive at was this: why don't you, in a tentative way, try the 'love lightly.' That I made a mess of it, at first, in San Francisco, was my own fault. One may take an overdose of any remedy. But here in Japan it is somewhat different. First of all, there is no sense in deliberately going out stalking such adventure. The kind you find that way, picking up with the first woman who crosses your path, doesn't pan out. But keep your mind open, ready to seize upon opportunity—it will come. In fact, I have rather wondered that you have not come to it, in spite of your principle, though, by the way, I rather admire the fact that you have stuck to it. But I have been watching you—one can't help watching a man whom one likes when living together as we do—and I think that it is with you as with Kipling's Tomlinson—if you will forgive the paraphrase—that 'the roots of sin are there.' You take too much interest in the life, and color, and movement that you see all about you. The unique charm of these Japanese women has gotten its insidious white fingers on you. That principle of yours was all that held you back, wasn't it? Now that's gone—le deluge! No, maybe not quite that, but I expect to see you soon studying Japanese life and character by the only means through which it can be studied with something resembling complete understanding—through some woman. As a matter of fact, there is no reason why you shouldn't, and there is every reason why you should. It is your business as a newspaperman to get inside the Japanese mind as intimately as you can. You know that it cannot be done through the men; the bar of nationality, race, is constantly between you and perfect frankness. But with women sex is bigger than race. When a woman cares for you, she looks upon you as a man, not as an alien. She gives you her heart, her innermost mind, without thought of nationality. You understand me, don't you. I don't mean that you should deliberately, cold-bloodedly stalk a woman for the purpose of dissecting her soul and using the results for calculated, mercenary purposes, just to reduce them to copy. What I mean is that you are now free to follow when inclination in the form of a woman beckons you; only be careful that you go into it only as a game, and let the woman understand that it is only a game. At least part of the old family code is good—that to the effect that one must not cause a woman to suffer. So be careful how you play. You have heard, as I have heard a thousand times, that these women are cold, passionless. It is a lie. I know it. Their capacity for affection, devotion, sacrifice, is as great as that of our women; sometimes I think it is even greater. And their poor little souls are delicate, sensitive. They are like children, who brood over and magnify sorrows which we might consider fairly trivial. And then they have their heads still filled with feudal romance. They read their paper-covered novels seeking with noble sacrifice for love and all that, shinju, double suicide, you know, where the lovers kill themselves together. We had a case last year right here in the quarter below, where a geisha and a student threw themselves into the Kegon waterfall, at Nikko, which is the most fashionable thing. One reads of cases where friends who get wind of the intention of the lovers insist on joining the party, and then there is a triple suicide. They get their heads filled with this kind of romance, picture themselves as heroes and heroines in the high lights of melodrama, imagine how the papers will sound their names from one end of Japan to the other. It may be a bit hard for the practical American mind to understand, but the Japanese have an odd, introspective, often a bit hysterical psychology, something like the Russians, I often think, like characters out of Dostoievsky.

"So, to sum it all up, I think it will be a good thing for you to leave the latchstring of your heart hanging out a bit that some little hand may take a pull at it by chance. It will be good for your present state of mind, and it will be good for your work. I am not joking. Not only will it give you insight into Japanese character such as you may get in no other way, but, if you are at all like me, you may find in some girl, if not exactly inspiration, whatever that is, at least some kind of subtle sympathy that helps and pushes you along. I myself, in my time, under just such circumstances, did some mighty good work, or came near accomplishing it, but now, damn it!"

He snapped his fingers, flung out in impatient gesture. The pause was so sudden it produced, conflictingly, the effect of an abrupt sound, a trumpet blare in hushed stillness. Kent looked up. Jun-san had noticed it, too. Squatting on her silk zabuton in the background, her sewing had dropped to her lap, and she was looking at Karsten wonderingly, solicitously. She never spoke in English; it was generally accepted that she did not understand it, but Kent wondered whether she did not really understand more than they thought, whether she might not intuitively, from intonation, gesture, aided by such words as she must have picked up, gain at least some idea of the drift of their conversation.

The silence became uncomfortable, exasperating. "But why don't you take it up again? You are no man to mope about. You are not doing anything, just killing time reading magazines and novels. How can that satisfy you in the long run. Why, then, don't you take some of the advice that you have just given me?"

"I can't, or at least I won't, on account of—— That is, the woman is still here, in Tokyo, and I want to show her. It may seem to you contradictory, absurd, perverse. It doesn't sound logical, except, possibly, as a sort of heaping of coals on her head, to show her that I, at least, am faithful. I never told her what I knew, never blamed her. I think that in this way she is getting punishment far more subtle than anything I could inflict by abusing her, or by running after other women. Something must be going on in her mind. Still, who am I that I should have a right to punish any woman for turning to another man, after my sort of life? I only got what I deserved, after all. Anyway, my position happened to be such that I couldn't speak out, couldn't jump on the man or the woman. That rather governed my course. For, of course, one doesn't in that way, in such a case, when one is still agitated, shattered by anger, jealousy, disappointment, in all that whirl of emotions, just sit down and deliberately shape out a definite course of procedure, I shall do this, and I shall do that. No, one stews about, waits to figure it out, to decide what to do when one has become calmer, and then, if one has done nothing at the moment of crisis, at the impulse of sudden discovery, consternation, passion, then one gradually drifts into accepting the course which things naturally take, the path of least resistance. Yes, that's undoubtedly it, the path of least resistance."

He shook out his pipe into a huge brass bowl which was kept in the room for that purpose; took out his knife, began with over-careful deliberation to carve out the lava-like incrustations from the bowl.

"But the work you were doing?" Kent wanted to bring the conversation into a smoother channel. He was nervous, uncomfortable, with a sense of something undefinably grievous, tragic, as if it were, hovering, indefinitely threatening, closing about them from the darkness outside.

"The work!" Karsten kept scraping at the pipe bowl, methodically held it to the light, inspected it. "It took the heart out of me, this revelation, the sudden shock of it. It had been too perfect, this working away, always in festival spirits, in the atmosphere of affection, devotion, love, damn it, to use the banal old word. I thought I had the rest of my life all well ordered, that peace had come at last. I am too old to start again, and then, anyway, as I told you, there were other reasons. So the work—I have never looked at it since. But," he seemed struck by a sudden thought. "Jun-san," he was still intent with his pipe and did not look up. "Jun-san. Bring out the kodomo."

"Kodomo," child. The word puzzled Kent. What the devil——?

He looked past Karsten, as he sat there doggedly scraping at his pipe, to Jun-san. She had risen from her zabuton, was looking at the man with wonder. It grew into consternation; was it apprehension, fear? But she had turned and was going to the todana, wall closet, was drawing from it papers, loose and in bundles, reaching into the depth of the recess, pulling out still more. Then she turned and came towards them, arms filled, held in front of her. She advanced hesitatingly. By God, she was trembling; her eyes were misty with tears. Kent jumped up, but she did not look at him. In front of Karsten she stopped, held her burden towards him, silent, trembling. He laid away his pipe finally, looked up at her, stretched out his hands. She moved still nearer, as if to pass the papers over to him. Then her hands fell away, bundles dropping, loose papers fluttering to the floor, into the brass bowl. Karsten had risen, patted the woman on the shoulder tenderly, as one would a child. It was the first time Kent had seen him caress her. "Oh, you poor little girl, you poor little girl," the man's voice was hoarse, broken. "Come, you had better go to your house." She was weeping openly now, shaking. "Forgive me, Jun-san. Come."

The sliding door closed behind her. Karsten turned to Kent. "I might as well tell you now, of course. The woman was Jun-san." He turned abruptly to the papers, began gathering them. "These are nothing much, after all, Kent. Only notes of various kinds for a great Japanese drama that I thought I might construct. The Danes have a proverb that every sow thinks that her own pigs are the best. Probably I did the same." He carried the papers to the todana, put them out of sight. "We have had a melodramatic evening, haven't we, Kent-san, with your troubles and mine. It seems as if women must ever be the cause of our sorrows, yes, and our joys. Shikataganai. It can't be helped. Now let us have a drink and go to bed."

They had their drink. Karsten went to the adjoining room where he slept. Kent started downstairs to his room. At the head of the stairway he noticed something dark, bulky in the half-light, moving a little; his ear caught a sharp indrawn breath. It was Jun-san. A wave of intense pity swept over him. He wanted to say something to her, to comfort her, but what could he say. Undoubtedly she wished to be undisturbed by such crude, stupid consolation as he might contrive. He descended slowly and went to bed. But he could not sleep. He lay tossing, it seemed for hours. What, after all, did love of women, relations with women, ever bring but regret; swift, passionate, heart-swelling joy for the moment, even for days or years, but in the end weariness, sorrow, pangs of tragedy, irreparable, regretful remorse?

In the stillness of the night he could hear the shrill twitter of the cicadas in the garden, and faintly, softly, the sobbing, interminable, unconsolable, of Jun-san.