The families having lighted their many-colored lanterns
swinging at the ends of slight sticks, prepare to
beat a retreat with many compliments, bows and curtsies.
When it is a question of descending the stairs, no
one is willing to go first, and at a given moment,
the whole party are again on all fours, motionless
and murmuring polite phrases in undertones.
"Haul back there!" said Yves, laughing and
employing a nautical term used when there is a stoppage
of any kind.
At length they all melt away, descend the stairs with
a last buzzing accompaniment of civilities and polite
phrases finished from one step to another in voices
which gradually die away. He and I remain alone
in the unfriendly empty apartment, where the mats are
still littered with the little cups of tea, the absurd
little pipes, and the miniature trays.
“Let us watch them go away!” said Yves,
leaning out. At the door of the garden is a renewal
of the same salutations and curtsies, and then the
two groups of women separate, their bedaubed paper
lanterns fade away trembling in the distance, balanced
at the extremity of flexible canes which they hold
in their finger-tips, as one would hold a fishing-rod
in the dark to catch night-birds. The procession
of the unfortunate Mdlle. Jasmin mounts upwards,
towards the mountain, while that of Mdlle. Chrysantheme
winds downwards by a narrow old street, half stairway,
half goat-path, which leads to the town.
Then we also depart. The night is fresh, silent,
exquisite, the eternal song of the cicalas fills the
air. We can still see the red lanterns of my
new family, dwindling away in the distance, as they
descend and gradually become lost in that yawning abyss,
at the bottom of which lies Nagasaki.
Our way, too, lies downwards, but on an opposite slope
by steep paths leading to the sea.
And when I find myself once more on board, when the
scene enacted on the hill up above recurs to my mind,
it seems to me that my betrothal is a joke, and my
new family a set of puppets.
July 10th, 1885.
It is three days now since my marriage was an accomplished
fact.
In the lower part of the town, in the middle of one
of the new cosmopolitan districts, in the ugly pretentious
building which is a kind of register office, the deed
has been signed and countersigned, with marvelous
hieroglyphics, in a large book, in the presence of
those ridiculous little creatures, formerly silken-robed
Samourai, but now called policemen, and dressed
up in tight jackets and Russian caps.
The ceremony took place in the full heat of mid-day;
Chrysantheme and her mother arrived there together,
and I went alone. We seemed to have met for the
purpose of ratifying some discreditable contract, and
the two women trembled in the presence of these ugly
little individuals, who, in their eyes, were the personification
of the law.
