THE COMPLETE GEOGRAPHER

On the way, she stopped at the shop of Mr. Initogo to pay a visit to her friend Kiku.

Campanula in her school-days had shown both qualities and defects of mind. At languages, at least in learning the English language, she was a success; a very moderate success where mathematics were concerned, though she knew enough to do long division, and to keep household accounts. They teach a lot of useful things at the mission schools—needlework, and so forth, and in some of these branches Campanula shone, but at geography she was a dismal failure. She had been always lacking in the power of location. Witness her first statements as to the whereabouts of the house with the plum tree in front of it.

The long sea voyage from Tokyo, or rather from Yokohama, had brought into her mind the impression that she had traveled to the end of things, yet they told her there were things beyond.

They showed her maps and globes. The maps were flat, and the globes were round, yet they said they were the same thing, or were pictures of the same thing. How a flat thing could be round or the converse, she could not say, but Howard San, the missionary, said they were. Was it for her to contradict him? So, instead of setting up her own wits against Howard San, and questioning him, she accepted his words just as you or I accept the words of mathematicians or physiologists concerning subjects on which we are ignorant. And thus on geography she got hopelessly muddled, and remained so.

This morning she was lamenting her want of geography, and casting about for some friend learned in the art. Of course she might have gone to Howard San, but she would have to wait till school was over, and, besides she felt a certain diffidence in approaching him on the subject, so she turned to the shop of Mr. Initogo.

Mr. Initogo was sitting on his heels on the floor of his shop, engaged in the gentle art of making tea; it was one of his fads that he always made his own tea with his own hands. Beside him stood an hibachi, on which a kettle was coming to the boil; before him, a tea-cup without a handle on a tray, and a microscopic tea-pot.

He warmed the tea-cup with a few drops of hot water; then, from a cylindrical tea-canister, with a thing like a snuff-scoop, he took a small quantity of green tea—tea of the color that an old black coat turns after years of sun and rain—this he popped into the tea-pot.

Then the honorable hot water being ready, he poured it into a porcelain dish to let it cool slightly, which it did, becoming converted during the act into the honorable old hot water.

The honorable old hot water being now ready, he poured it into the tea-pot, popped on the lid, looked up, and saw Campanula.

So immersed in his darling employment had he been, that he had not observed her entrance.

She wished to see Kiku? She was upstairs; this with a thousand apologies for his own blindness, and comparisons of himself with worms and other sightless things.

Campanula knew the way up; she had been up often enough before, and up she went.

Kiku San, since we hinted at her as a playmate of Campanula, had grown. The tumbling tot that Leslie had once caught by the "scruff" of her obi and held out at arm's length wriggling, for the amusement of M'Gourley, had become a MousmÈ with a face at once heavy and flighty-looking; a broad face, pretty enough, but with a maddeningly irresponsible expression.

Pine-breeze was bad enough in the irresponsible line, but she could have learnt much from Kiku.

She was the dunce, or, rather, had been the dunce at the mission school; this is not saying very much against her, for Japanese girls are amazingly quick in the "uptake," learning coming to them as easily as ignorance to English girls; all the same she had been the dunce. She had never been able to conquer the letter "l" in English; and would say "raidy" for "lady;" yet she had a memory of sorts, blocks of facts swam in the ocean of her unintelligence like those houses that float about after an inundation of the Mississippi.

But the place left vacant in her skull by want of learning was by no means devoid of a tenant; therein dwelt a colossal impudence, a supreme self-assurance that sheltered and helped to hide the nakedness of her mind, and even obtained for her, amongst her girl friends, a sort of fungoid reputation for cleverness.

For when Kiku San said a thing, she said it with such assurance that it seemed true—the assurance of the absolutely untrustworthy intellect, which of all assurances is the greatest.

She was sitting now on her heels in a bare room on the upper floor, a tobacco-mono at her side, and in her hands a round flat box with a glass lid. She was playing at Pigs-in-Clover.

The two MousmÈs bowed to one another with great ceremony, enquiring after each other's honorific health, and then Campanula came to rest upon the matting opposite to her friend.

They formed a pretty picture in the bare room with its chess-board matting, against the bare walls, whose only ornament was a kakemono representing Fuji San crested with snow.

Kiku was soon to be married—married to a government clerk to whom she had been engaged nearly since birth; and she entertained Campanula with long and uninteresting descriptions of her husband-to-be, his mother, his father, his grandfather, who lived at Nagoya, his brothers and sisters, how old they were and all about them.

Kiku was a bore, a female bore of the first water, and in this respect she could have given any old member of the Rag or Carlton points, and beaten him.

She told all these things looking up from under her thick eyelids, and with a half-smile, and Campanula listened, half mesmerized, wholly weary, but with all her courteous soul awake to do honor to the tale.

At last an hiatus occurred of which Campanula took advantage to ask the question in her mind.

Did Kiku, so learned on all subjects, know of any land where the snow lay for half the year?

Oh, certainly Kiku did, and she told about it.

Describing her future husband and his relations she had been vague and uninteresting, lacking, as she did, the gifts of perception and narration. But now, plunging into the empire of pure lies, she spoke with an assurance that made her words sound like gospel.

Such a country existed; as a matter of fact, she had it all in a book somewhere, but she did not need the book, as she never forgot anything. It lay in the sea beyond Nankin two hundred and sixty-seven ri beyond, and the snow lay there half a year, sometimes more.

"Is it a country where blue flowers grow, and roses—sometimes?" said Campanula.

"Just so, sometimes;" and Kiku, searching in the capacious bag of her ignorance, began to produce old broken-up facts that had been lying there like rubbish in the basket of a chiffonier.

The sea all round that place was frozen most of the year, and the sun shone once a month or so.

Then she painted a graphic picture of this desolate land which she declared to be divided into four parts, Unster, Munster, Rinster and Comit; and Campanula sat listening and receiving it all as truth.

Liars, somehow, are always sure of an audience; you and I, who speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, languish in conversation and are not heard, whilst your mendacity-monger holds the floor and absorbs the interest.

So Kiku San went on spinning her tale, and Campanula San sat opposite to her and listened, shivering at the dismal pictures being raised before her.

Then, all at once, from below came the irate voice of Mr. Initogo calling Kiku the "Heedless One." If he could have used a stronger expression he would have used it, for the dinner ought to be cooking at this moment, and the fish and seaweed had not arrived. The Heedless One had been, as a matter of fact, playing at Pigs-in-Clover all the morning instead of marketing.

The Complete Geographer rose to her feet in a hurry, for filial obedience resided in her breast, not so much as a virtue, but rather as a sort of mainspring put in by nature—or rather, I should say, heredity.

They went out together, and Kiku bought the fish and the seaweed and a few other important items, and then they parted, Kiku returned home laden with marketings, and Campanula to the House of the Clouds.