The hundred and fifth dream

ANJURO, the curio dealer of Jinriksha Street, Nagasaki, gave me a cigarette.

He had just concluded a bargain over an ivory Musmée ten inches high, an ivory Musmée with a smile on her lips and an open ivory umbrella over her dainty head.

She was a dream!

I had been courting her for weeks, undecided as to whether I could make her my own; the price was terrific, but that frightened me less than the umbrella. How could I get that umbrella to England unbroken? It was paper-thin and traced with storks; it was, perhaps, the most beautiful thing about her, so beautiful that at last it seemed to me more beautifulthan the Musmée herself. It grew in my mind like a mushroom, became a fixed idea. I dreamed of it at night, and woke to it in the morning.

I am perhaps the only man, except Bibi La Purée, who has fallen in love with an umbrella.

Ah, that umbrella! It haunts me still, and when the weather changes I feel it still—just as an old soldier feels his wounds.

But to return.

Danjuro, the curio dealer of Jinriksha Street, Nagasaki, gave me a cigarette.

He is a gentleman who gives very little away, but after a satisfactory deal his soul expands, and it is his custom to throw something in—a tiny rose tree in a pot, a ticket of admission to the Chinese theater, a trick fan, a grasshopper in a cage or something else equally valueless. A gift like this is not so much a gift as a certificate that he has swindled you.

I had come that morning armed with a cheque book. I had made up my mind the night before that she was to be mine; the umbrella difficulty had, from brooding over, become an added attraction. To get it to England intact would be a feat to be proud of and it would add an interest to the voyage.

I had arrived at eight, and the bargaining began at the very door of Danjuro’s shop, where the stork standing on the tortoise faces the dragon of flexible steel. He saw I was keen on the business and, by his manner, you would have imagined that he did not want to sell. An American lady had fallen in love with the “Tripping Musmée”; the American lady was due at any moment to call. He would not like to disappoint her; she was rich, very rich, like all Americans, and he, Danjuro, was poor. What could he do? Rents had to be paid; living, since the war, had become almost an impossibility. Look at the taxes!

Then we had tea, sitting on sea-green mats, and he placed the Musmée just where a golden shaft of sunlight struck the umbrella, so that it became a honey colored halo suffusing the rosebud face with its glow; so that my heart yearned and, taking my cheque book on my knee, I waved a stylographic pen.

No, it was no use writing out a cheque for that amount. Why waste a cheque? If the thing was beyond my means, it would be a wickedness for him, Danjuro, to urge me to buy it; besides, there were other things in the shop dirt cheap that would make a better show. Let us understand one another, for we were both honest men.

He rose and put the Musmée away in a cupboard, and set in her place an Owari vase.

That was something I could be proud of, and there would be no difficulty in getting it to Europe unbroken. It was worth a hundred dollars, but, on account of a slight flaw, I could have it for fifty.

“Take it away,” I said, with a sigh, and, with the cheque book on my knee, I wrote out a cheque for the sum he had asked, and the Musmée, umbrella and all, was mine.

Danjuro dried the writing, folded the cheque, placed it in the sleeve of his kimono and rose to his feet.

He hunted here and there, and at last, from a shelf filled with tiny gods and ivory netsukes, reached down with his clawlike hand a packet of cigarettes, and, taking a cigarette from the packet, handed it to me.

“There is haschish in it,” said Danjuro. “They cost me five American dollars a packet; there are only twenty in a packet, and I am a poor man. But don’t smoke it here.”

“Thanks,” I replied, and put it in my cigarette case. “‘And why, may I ask, do you object to my smoking it here?”

He waved his hand, indicating the demons and the dragons and the odd hobgoblin gods, the tortoises and the storks, the masks and the daggers, and Akudoji’s frightful face shouting at me from the wall.

“Smoke it in a flower garden, and you will have pleasanter dreams than here.”

I bowed, and, bowing with his hands on his knees, he saluted me and I departed. I passed down ’Riksha Street, which was gay as a scarf, and, humming like a chamécen string, kites shaped like fish floated in the blue air above the houses, for it was the Little Boys’ Fête, a day of great rejoicing.

The festival had spread itself like a gaily colored carpet over the town, the fringes extending even to the bund, where the grave-faced merchants come and go, and even to the harbor, where the hawks wheel over the blue water and perch on the spars of the deep sea ships, tramps and traders, tank steamers of the great oil company, and white Canadian Pacific boats from Vancouver, a thousand miles away across the blue.

It pursued me up the hill to my house with the sound of moon fiddles; it pursued me through the garden, where all the flowers of spring were blowing their colored trumpets to the sun and waving their painted banners to the wind; it pursued me across the veranda into my sitting room, where I sat down on the matting and clapped my hands for Plum Blossom to bring me an hibachi and some tea.

“Hai Tadaima,” came a response from somewhere in the mysterious depths of the house. Then I waited, listening to the sound of the Little Boys’ Fête that still pursued me, faint and thin like the music from a festival of the gnats,and thinking of the Musmée I had just bought and of her umbrella.

Mr. Initogo is my landlord. I live in his house, occupying a ground floor sitting room and a bedroom. Each month he presents me with a document which looks more like a Japanese poem than a bill; I hand him in return so many dollars, which, never counting and seeming utterly to disdain, he puts in the sleeve of his kimono. Then we smoke cigarettes and drink saki.

He was a coal merchant once, I believe, but he has long retired from business, and now, at the House of Crimson Shadows, up here beyond the fuss and worry of the town, he spends his days in poetical contemplation and the consumption of cigarettes and tea.

He writes poems about gnats and grasshoppers—four-lined productions that buzz and chirrup; he writes poems about chrysanthemums and cherry blossoms—eight-lined odes filled with the breath of autumn and the spring, and on the day of which I write he was engaged upon a poem of two hundred lines which had for subject “the dew of early morning seen upon the wistaria flowers in May.”

I clapped my hands again. A shuffling and tinkling sound came in response, a panel slid back and Plum Blossom, bearing the hibachi, framed herself in the open space.

Plum Blossom is scarcely sixty inches from the soles of her tabis to the tip of her glossy black camellia oil-scented head. She smells of verbena and moves with the noiselessness of a mouse.

I took my cigarette case from my pocket, lit a cigarette at the hibachi and smoked and gazed at the sunlit garden, a vista of bells and blossoms framed in the opening of the shoji.

On the path Mr. Initogo was promenading, an umbrella pictured with storks shading his head from the sun.

As I smoked and watched, my soul expanded. An extraordinary sensation possessed me. I felt light and large and luminous. I felt like a great and beautiful soap bubble on the surface of which Mr. Initogo, the garden and the sunlit veranda were reflected in prismatic colors; a bubble all mind, light as air, covered with beautiful pictures, inflated with ecstasy.

Tea!

Plum Blossom was kowtowing before me on the mat. She was pictured upon my surface crouching like a little panther before the outspread tea things.

She had brought in the okimono, the ivory Musmée with the umbrella, which had just arrived from Danjuro’s, unpacked it and placed it on the floor. Then she withdrew and I found myself with the okimono, alone.

Mr. Initogo was still promenading the garden. He and his blue kimono and his stork-painted sunshade still made prismatic pictures upon me, but I heeded him not. The voice of the Little Boys’ Fête, faint and far away, had become articulate, and its voice was the voice of my thoughts as I rose and floated about the room, now approach- ing, now retreating from the okimono.

“You are a bubble,” said the voice. “You are fated to burst on the top of that ivory umbrella. Beware of it!” Then I floated for safety’s sake out into the garden.

Ah, that haschish cigarette! It held in its rice paper cover more than one warning.

A soap bubble is the most beautiful thing in the whole world; if it were sentient, it would be the happiest.

Out in the garden a wind took me unsteadily toward Mr. Initogo. He saw me coming, and he fled—why, I could not imagine, for I did not feel in any way terrific; but his flight with his colored sunshade and blue kimono made a beautiful picture upon me, and I pursued him, to prolong the effect. Thrice round the little garden I followed him, and the third time, as I passed the opening in the shoji, some wind blew me into the room I had just left, and again I found myself alone with the okimono.

She stood there with her skirts caught up, simpering and tripping to some fête beyond the ivory gates, and, like a moth about the flame of a candle, I circled around her.

The umbrella that had haunted my mind for weeks had now become the object of a furious desire and overmastering passion. Fragile almost as myself, it seemed my counterpart in beauty. To burst on it seemed the sum of a soap bubble’s bliss; yet I held off and on, delaying the delicious moment, till, craning round the corner of the shoji, Mr. Initogo’s frightened face precipitated the impending catastrophe.

She was worth a hundred and ten pounds, beautiful as a vision and fragile as a flower, all but the umbrella stem, which was a little spear of solid ivory.

And “Ah, but I told you to smoke in a garden!” was all I could get out of Danjuro, that dealer in dragons and dreams, coupled with the platitude that ivory Musmées were not made to be sat upon.

That I know. And also that, according to Ali Akbar, haschish has for its worshiper one hundred and five dreams, of which the dream of essential lightness, the “soap bubble dream,” is the best and most beautiful.