THE GARDEN-PARTY

Within an hour of the great city of Nagasaki, in the midst of a park that was at the same time half a garden, lay the country residence of Mr. Kamamura; once a man who carried two swords, with the longer of which he would have beheaded you for two words and have done it with neatness and despatch, now a gentleman in a frock-coat and tall hat, wearing gold-rimmed glasses and a smile.

The long, low house, white as snow and surrounded by a narrow veranda, faced west, and was surrounded by a garden recalling the gardens of Dai Nichi Do: a garden filled with the music of fountains and the poetry of birds.

Alas! on the day of his garden-party Mr. Kamamura, seized with the spirit of modernity and the savagery of civilization, not content with the music of heaven, and prompted, no doubt, by the devil, had hired a brass band and placed it in a little kiosk, with orders to bray Strauss in the face of Nature from three o'clock till dusk.

There were many guests, and the gardens soon presented an animated appearance. Many of the ladles had retained the national dress, and marvelous were the fabrics to be seen in the form of the obi or flowing loose in the graceful kimono.

Some of the guests surrounded a pair of jugglers, two terrible men dressed in red, who fenced with and transfixed one another with long swords, swallowed fire, and belched it like dragons.

In another corner of the grounds fireworks were whizzing and cracking, filling the clear air above with a thin blue haze through which, just as Jane and Leslie entered the grounds, there rose a wonderful fire balloon made of colored paper and fashioned in the form of a turkey cock.

"It's like a party in the lunatic asylum," whispered Jane, as they threaded the maze of guests in search of their host and hostess. "And, Dick, you do look perfectly awful in that panama amongst all these men in tall hats—I mean they look awful beside you, but they are de rigueur; and it's better to be de rigueur and look frightful, than to be not de rigueur and look nice. How d'y' do?" and Jane extended her arm, pump-handle fashion, to the little gentleman with the sallow face to whom Leslie was introducing her.

"Much pleasure, much pleasure," said Mr. Kamamura, whose English was mixed and limited, and who, like Kiku San, had not completely mastered the letter "l." "Will the honorable rady so make equal health Nagysaki (the proper way to pronounce Nagasaki) you stay? So good. Over there Mrs. Kamamura; you make known;" and Mr. Kamamura presenting his arm Jane was led away through the crowd like some tall and graceful frigate threading a maze of painted cock-boats.

Leslie, left to himself, turned with a gloomy expression of countenance to where the jugglers were dislocating each other's necks. He did not see them; he was looking out of the side of his eyes at Jane.

She had been led across one of the willow-pattern bridges, and he could see her now standing at one of the kiosks, a tea-cup in her hand. She was talking to Mr. Kamamura and a little lady in European dress—Mrs. Kamamura, probably.

What could they be talking about? Conversation, probably, sufficient to dislocate the gravity of a Socrates.

He turned his head impatiently and tried to take an interest in the jugglers, without success. There was something deeply irritating about the scene of frivolity in which Fate had staged the last scenes of the most important act in his life.

The Empress of Japan sailed at eight on the morrow morning, and as yet he had made no movement as regards Jane. All this trifling was but a bad prelude to those words so soon to be spoken.

He little knew that Tragedy stood at his elbow in the form of James Anderson, manager to M'Cormick, the great silk dealers on the Bund.

"Why, Leslie, man! I thought I knew the nape of your neck. How are you?"

"Hullo, Anderson!" said Leslie, returning the other's hand-grip. "What are you doing here?"

"I'm just looking round," said Anderson. "I'm just looking round, and you'll admit it's worth the turning of one's head. I shouldn't mind exchanging places with Kamamura. It's not a bad life, his, by a long penny. This affair will bang a hole through a good pile of ten pun notes. They tell me those balloons made like dicky-birds cost—I forget now, but it's a good pile of dollars a-piece, for every feather is painted correct, and that's just like the Japs—make a pretty thing, and then stick it away in some hidey-hole where no one can see it, or burn it—What's agate now?"

The crowd was in motion, flooding towards a part of the grounds where a little stage had been erected, backed and half surrounded by cypress trees. On the stage, against the dark-green background, could be seen the graceful figure of a girl.

She was dancing. It was a dance that at first insipid, became after a few moments fascinating, lulling, exquisite to watch as the movements of a flower blown by the wind.

They drew close and stood to look. The girl was dressed in amber and scarlet, with a scarlet flower in the night of her hair—a bijou rose et noir, recalling Baudelaire's Lola de Vallence.

Her supple body seemed inspired by the mysterious music we hear wandering through the land of spring, and expressing itself in the voices of the wind and the birds and the streams.

She seemed to have learned her art in the academy where the daffodils are taught to dance and the bluebells to make their bow.

"It's the Geisha Kamamura has hired—paid her something like two hundred to dance that fan-dance, or whatever they call it. She was a Tokyo girl, and had left the business to get married, but she couldn't withstand the two hundred; the best Geisha in Japan, they say. What's this her name? O something San. Hoots! but my memory is gone fishing to-day. Listen! she's talking."

The dance had ceased, and the girl, in the silence that followed the tinkling of the three accompanying chamÈcens, had commenced one of those poetical recitals in favor with an intellectual Japanese audience.

Her recitation was sad; it bemoaned the thing we call change. The cherry-blossom is fair, ran this untranslatable poem, but it must die and give place to the lotus.

"I cannot understand this depression in trade," murmured the muted voice of Anderson, as he stood beside Leslie. "It's been spreading and spreading, and there's nothing it hasn't spread into."

And the lotus parts with its petals to give place to the chrysanthemum, the Royal chrysanthemum.

"We've had a good year till now, ourselves, but hech! man, there's a matter of fifteen thousand gone over the breaking of the Bombay and Benares bank—clean gone, never to come back—and that takes the sugar off the cake—ay, the devil himself won't whistle it home again."

And the gray winter sky and the snowflakes, like ghosts of flowers, finished the poem of the Geisha, whilst Leslie stood transfixed for a second, frozen by the news he had just heard, and unable to turn. He turned round full on Anderson.

"The breaking of what?"

"The Bombay and Benares. Have you not heard the news? It came by cable to-day at one o'clock. Good God! man, you hadn't much money in it, had you?"

"Everything—everything," said Leslie in a stammering voice. "I'm smashed."

He linked his arm in Anderson's, and dragged him along hurriedly. He wanted to go, nowhere in particular, but just get away from the spot where Anderson had sentenced his future to death.

"Man, I'm sorry! Man, I'm sorry!" said his companion. "I should not have told you so sudden, but how was I to know?"

"Smashed—smashed—smashed!" said the other, talking as a man talks in his sleep.

He held Anderson by the arm as he spoke. All around spread the many-colored crowd; fans were fluttering, umbrellas bobbing, tongues chattering, soft women's voices inlaid like music of gold on the silvery music of the fountains and cascades.

"Anderson, man, are you sure they've broken—sure?"

"Ay, ay, sure. Better to tell you straight. Sure as my name's James Anderson."

Boom! Boom! Boom! the band broke into a march by Gungl, and Leslie, releasing Anderson, ran after a figure in the crowd some twenty paces distant.

"Jane! I must speak to you at once."

Jane looked up from the little Japanese gentleman who was escorting her, saw the distress in her countryman's face, and dismissed Asia with a bow.

"I have just had frightful news. Come with me to some quiet place till I tell you about it. Anywhere. No matter where. See! there are no people across that bridge where the trees are; let us go there."

Jane spoke not a word, but he saw that she was very pale and trembling. That weakness of Jane's gave him a strange sensation. It said something that her lips had never uttered.

They passed over the little bridge. They passed over another bridge; there were no people here, only trees; they went no further.

They were in a small forest. The garden was lost to sight; only the music of the band, muted by distance, told of the festivity so near, yet apparently so far away.

The trunk of a felled tree lay in the path; they sat down upon it by common consent. Leslie took out his watch, and looked at it attentively. Then, still holding it open in his hand, he spoke.

"I want you to listen to me for five minutes—only five minutes; you can hold the watch, and measure the time yourself. Jane, when a man is going to be hanged, they will give him a glass of brandy to help him along to the drop. Will you do the same by me—give me five minutes' clear speech, and let me say just what I please without interruption; will you?"

"Yes," said Jane, and she shivered as she spoke the word. She had maintained a strange silence; impulsive as she was, one might have expected her to implore him to tell her the worst, and have it over. Perhaps she understood dimly that Leslie's disaster was personal to herself, a cataclysm the effect of which would reach her future as well as his.

"You remember," he said, after a moment's pause, "how I asked you to marry me long ago, and everything that happened after? Well, when I think of all that, it seems to me that I must have passed through life in a state of insanity, and only awakened to consciousness now. Jane, I am feeling now as a man must feel when he wakes in hell, and remembers—No matter, it is all done with now; and even if you loved me as well as I love you, it's all over and done with and useless now."

He leaned forward with his face in his hands. Jane did not speak; the music of the band had ceased, and the only sound to be heard was the weary sighing of the warm wind in the pine-tops.

"I'm broken utterly, I have just heard the news. Don't think I brought you here to listen to me whining about my misfortunes. I brought you here to tell you I love you. I meant to have carried you off in the steamer that sails to-morrow morning for the north-west. With the money I had yesterday, I would have supported you, I would have torn you out of society, and made you love me. I would have made you a Paradise. Yes, by the living God, a Paradise, or there's no such thing as love. But now I'm a beggar, and I love you too well to drag you into my ruin, and it's Fate, Fate, Fate that has done it all, and cursed be its name!"

Again silence, broken only by a faint, dreary sound. Jane was weeping.

"Don't, for the love of God!" cried Leslie. "Don't cry, or you'll make me cry too. Oh, miserable life! why was I ever born into it?" And he moved his hands in the air, as blind Samson might have done amidst the pillars of the temple.

A bird piped three times in the recesses of the wood, three flute-like notes sweet as the notes of a bell-bird. They were answered by its mate in the branches above.

Leslie put his hands to his ears, as if to shut out the happy sounds.

Jane's tears had ceased, but she did not speak, she did not breathe; only a deep sigh occasionally escaped from her.

"And now, we can only say good-bye. Let us part here for ever. We will meet again in—Heaven," said Leslie, with a horrible shuddering laugh.

He stretched out his hand and took hers. She let him have it without seeming to know that he had taken it.

She was murmuring his name in a whisper, staring at him and through him, and as if her gaze was fixed on some terrible catastrophe beyond.

"Dick! Dick! Dick!" All poetry could not express the helpless, hopeless sorrow she put into those three little whispered words.

Suddenly, filtering through the wood, came a sound, a voice, a spirit, that unrolled around them a panorama of loch, moor, and sky, hills purple with heather, lakes dark with shadow. "Auld Lang Syne."

The band was playing it, villainously enough, but the distance smoothed away the defects.

It broke Jane down. She leaned against his shoulder and sobbed like a child, and then, with both hands upstretched, she drew his face down to hers and murmured—no matter what.

Then all at once—heedless of ruin, forgetting all things, carried away on the dumb tide of passion, the wave that had retreated before disaster, only to come shoreward again resistless and gigantic—all at once, and without a word, he took her in his arms.

It was the eloquence of passion and despair, the speech without tongue of a soul tormented and in extremis.

It broke Jane down utterly. Hopeless, haggard, and pale as a person in the midst of some terrible disaster, she clung to him, whispering in his ear words repeated over and over again, with that reiteration which forms the rhetoric of the dying and the lost.

She had cast everything aside, the world, her position in society, her husband, her wealth. Passion and pity, that strange combination, had for the moment blinded her eyes to everything but the man beside her—but did she love him? Fate had not yet disclosed the answer to that old fatal question, that sphinx-like question whose answer forms the plot of each man's story.