The Japanese Lantern (9 page)

“I thought I caught a glimpse of her, but I may easily have been mistaken. I didn’t actually speak to her.”

She had a suspicion that Mrs. Tate was enjoying herself. Once again she wondered if the whole thing was a hum, something to keep the old lady entertained. Why wouldn’t she tell her exactly what her suspicions were? Why did she leave her to work completely in the dark?

“Yoshiko wants us all to go to Kyoto with her today,” she mentioned, broaching the subject lightly in case Mrs. Tate should be against the plan.

“That would suit us very nicely,” the old lady said comfortably. “You can’t keep an eye on Edward from here!”

“N-no, but Mitchi Boko will still be in Tokyo.”

“I’ll look after her.”

“You?” Try as she would, Jonquil could not conceal her surprise.

Mrs. Tate chuckled.

“I’m not so helpless as you think,” she retorted. “Go and make a start on the packing.”

That was easier said than done. Her own packing presented no difficulties, she had merely to repack the things that she had unpacked a day or so earlier, but Alexander’s was a very different
.

‘
‘Why are we going to Kyoto?” he asked indignantly. “Un
cl
e Jason didn't say we were going.”

“Don’t you want to go?” Jonquil asked mildly.

“No.”

Devastated by this simple but quite firm negative, Jonquil stared helplessly at him.

“Why not?” she asked at last.

“The amah at Kyoto won’t make jelly
,
” he explained. “And we
always
have jelly on Sunday in Tokyo.”

“But I can make jelly,” Jonquil assured him hopefully.
“And
mushrooms in the grass.”

“What’s that?” Alexander asked cautiously.

“It’s green jelly, with banana stalks holding up meringue mushrooms.”

An intense, joyful look came into his eyes.

“Really? Can we have them next Sunday? And, Jonquil, don’t take those vests. They
scratch
me!
”

By the time the packing had really started the room was chaotic, and it was into this scene that Jason came, without bothering to knock, and looking as though he had had no sleep at all the night before.

“What’s all the activity?” he demanded.

Jonquil regarded him with dismay.

“I—I thought you knew. At least I thought Mrs. Tate was going to tell you. D-didn’t Yoshika say anything?”

Surprisingly he looked amused.

“Were they all supposed to have told me?” he asked.

She nodded, feeling slightly ridiculous.

“Yoshiko heard from her father and she has to go back to Kyoto today to get the house ready for him. She wanted all of us to go with her, and Mrs. Tate seemed agreeable.”

“It seems a good idea,” he agreed. “At least it will get you all out of my hair for a few days. Which train are you catching?”

“I don’t know.” It was unreasonable to feel hurt. He probably did feel responsible for them all, but, deep down, she hadn’t thought that he would have been quite so anxious to get rid of them. “W-won’t you be coming?” she asked.

His eyes narrowed.

“No, Miss Kennedy, but you can tell Yoshiko that I’ll telephone her father as soon as I can.” He grinned suddenly. “It’ll be quite a relief to have you and Edward in different cities. At least he can’t do you any harm while you’re in Kyoto!”

Jonquil never knew whether she would have disillusioned him or not, but at that moment Yoshiko came running into the room, her eyes alight with pleasure at seeing Jason.

“Have you heard my father comes home?” she questioned him gaily. “I must catch the twelve-fifteen to Osaka. You don’t mind my taking Jonquil and Alexander? I thought they could stay at your house.” She looked up at him with her head slightly on one side. “You will come too, Jason?” she asked.

His face softened.

“Perhaps, later on,” he said gently. “I have business here first.”

“But not too much later on,” Yoshiko pleaded.

He smiled at her.

“As soon as possible,” he agreed. “Will that suit you?”

Yoshiko nodded, well satisfied.

“You see
,
Jonquil,” she said happily, “he spoils me. He must be very fond of me, don’t you think?”

“Very,” Jonquil agreed. It was not her fault if
her voice sounded a little tight, or that Jason seemed to find the whole situation rather amusing.

The taxi swept past the Imperial Palace and into Z Avenue, going so fast that the neon lights blurred into one another in a mass of colour.

“It is exciting to be going home,”! Yoshiko giggled. “Kyoto is as different from
Tokyo
as the old from the new.”

“How different?” Jonquil asked.

“Kyoto is the dream, Tokyo the reality,” Yoshiko explained. “In the old days the Emperor lived in Kyoto with his court. They walked beneath the cherry blossom and they wrote pretty poems, but they had no power. The power was with the Shogun, and he lived in Tokyo. For centuries this was so.”

“But isn’t
Kyoto
a
modern
city today, like Tokyo?”

“In parts,” Yoshiko admitted, “but it is Japanese.”

She sat up impatiently in her seat waiting for the taxi to draw up outside the station. At the first possible moment she swung open the door and jumped down on to the ground, pulling Alexander after her.

“Are you excited, Alexander?” she asked. “Going to Kyoto?”

Alexander was. His eyes shone and he held tightly on to Jonquil’s hand while Yoshiko found a porter and arranged with him to take the baggage to the platform.

“If Yoshiko makes so much noise everyone will think she is gaijin too!” he whispered.

Yoshiko
heard him.

“
Do I look so foreign?” she demanded.
“
Don
’
t
I look Japanese?”

Alexander studied her carefully.

“Yes, you do,” he admitted. “Except for your eyes. I never saw a Japanese with green eyes!” He laughed, the idea striking him as funny, and the porter smiled at him, making him laugh all the more.

Glancing round the station, it seemed to Jonquil that the hoardings were taken up entirely with fire-fighting instructions. Everywhere she looked the flames looked back at her. All over Tokyo there were these same warnings, but never had she seen so many grouped together as here. One single advertisement for Mikimoto’s Pearls broke up the range, looking cool and unexpectedly sophisticated in the middle of such a welter of heat. She wondered if she would be able to afford any before she returned to Australia and thought, with a sigh, that it was not the original price that would forbid her but the Customs duty when she returned home.

“You are dreaming, Jonquil,” Yoshiko accused her. “That is the danger of Japan. We have too much beauty!”

That that beauty was not exactly evident at that precise moment, Jonquil thought it would be tactless to point out. Instead she hurried after the fast disappearing porter towards the barrier of the platform.

“Will you buy the tickets?” she asked Yoshiko. The Japanese girl nodded and wandered off towards the booking office, returning with train tickets, express tickets and sleeping accommodation tickets, all of which were checked ponderously before they were allowed on to the platform.

It was fun standing watching the other passengers arrive to board the express, the men leading with their laden womenfolk following two paces behind, all of them hurrying to get as good a seat as possible for the overnight journey.

“We must hurry,” Yoshiko adjured her. “In
Japan all
trains leave and arrive exactly on time!” This it seem
e
d was a matter for pride for the
whole nation, for nearly everyone checked their watches by the station clock with a pleased smile, before they stepped up into the wagon.

Two minutes to go, and then one moment, and only the late passengers hurried along the platform now. Jonquil’s eyes picked out a European by his extra height and she watched him tip the porter and turn to his companion. He looked familiar and she thought pleasurably that it just might possibly be Edward. There was a slight argument as to who should board the train first and Jonquil was amused to see that the man lost, stepping angrily up into the corridor. His companion followed demurely behind him, clutching two suitcases, making it difficult for her to get in behind
him.
She looked up for an instant to reply to something he had said, and Jonquil heard herself gasp. For the girl who was with him was Mitchi Boko.

CHAPTER
V
I

The
train pulled slowly out of the station, gathering speed with every second. Jonquil turned away from the window and went back to her seat. Her thoughts were chaotic, and more than ever she wished that Mrs. Tate had been more open with her. Impossible theories crowded into her mind as to why Mitchi Boko and Edward were travelling together. Surely he couldn’t be attracted to her? Instinctively she knew that that couldn’t be so. It was not only that she had come to like Edward and that he had told her he was attracted to herself. Or was it? Could she be quite sure?

She
waited for the other passengers to settle and then took Alexander down the train to the sleeping compartments to put him to bed. Unfortunately the girl calorie callers chose that same moment to push their trays down the aisles, wailing their wares in incomprehensible Japanese and mowing down anyone who happened to get in their way. As the lesser of two evils, Jonquil meekly handed over a few yen and was given in return some American packaged sandwiches, filled, as she later discovered, with raw fish.

“Are we going to eat those now?” Alexander asked, with the perennial hunger of a six-year-old.

“If you like,” Jonquil agreed.

She found the right sleepers and undressed the little boy, helping him into his bunk.

“Shall I stay with you?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“I want to go to sleep,” he told her solemnly, “and I never sleep if someone is watching me.”

She didn’t really like to leave him, but Yoshiko had assured her that no possible harm could come to him, and that he was quite accustomed to being left, so she pulled the doors shut and started back up the train.

The Japanese, she noticed, seemed to regard the train journey as an excuse for a picnic. In every seat there was someone munching away, usually talking at the top of his, or her, voice at the same time. The noise was terrific. The trip was a thrilling departure from their everyday lives and each one was determined to make the most of it. Here and there a more sophisticated group of business men sat in little huddles, mostly drinking beer, for even they, it seemed, needed sustaining while they travelled. The passengers had settled down to enjoying themselves.

Coming towards her was a Japanese girl, dressed beautifully in Western clothes. Jonquil paid no attention to her at first, but the girl waved to her and quickened her steps.

“It is Miss Kennedy, no?” she cried out, apparently delighted. “We meet in aeroplane. Remember?”

“Mitchi-san,” Jonquil breathed.

“That me! I horiday now. Go home to Kyoto!” Without any apparent difficulty she adjusted her voice to the scream that was necessary to make herself heard above the noise all round them.

Jonquil nodded and smiled, not feeling equal to reply in kind.

“You go to Kyoto too?” the Japanese girl asked. “That is great
!
Yoshiko is with you?”

Jonquil nodded again and immediately Mitchi Boko stopped smiling.

“You come with me,” she said urgently. “We
talk.”

She led the way quickly to an almost deserted car where she gestured to Jonquil to sit down beside her. Apparently she could manage her
Western high heels as easily as she did her geta, for Jonquil was hard put to it to keep up with her and subsided into the seat with something akin to relief, after struggling against the motion of the train.

“Yoshiko ask you go to Kyoto?” Mitchi Boko asked.

“Yes, she did,” Jonquil agreed.

“You go to her wedding, perhaps?”

Jonquil looked at her in astonishment.

“Why, no, I don’t think so,” she said.

Mitchi Boko shrugged her shoulders in a pretty little movement.

“Such a pity,” she said easily. “Everyone should see a Japanese wedding. Very lovely
!
With traditional kimonas. The only time we wear a scarlet one, you understand—underneath, of course! We wear many for such auspicious occasion!” She laughed, showing her even, white teeth. “You think me silly? But in Japan we say that in October the gods are away. No gods on earth, you understand. For they all meet in heaven to match
-
make. So-and-so will be very happy wed to so-and
-
so. Then in November everyone gets married!”

Jonquil smiled. The idea appealed to her imagination.

“I wonder if they’re busy on my account,” she said laughingly.

Mitchi Boko took her seriously.

“But of course!” she insisted. “Mr. Keeving I think has told them all about you, is not so?”

Jonquil blushed.

“I hardly think so,” she said hastily. “I thought I saw him getting on the train.”

“So?” Mitchi Boko smiled. “You look for him too? It is very happy for you both.” She nodded wisely. ‘Mr. Keeving soon be very rich man and you live happily ever afterwards! know. First I thought Jason-san, but not so. Mr. Keeving he explain.”

“But
—
” Jonquil began uncomfortably, but
Mitchi Boko only laughed at her.

“We change subject,” she suggested amiably. “Does Jason travel with you? Or his aunt, Mrs. Tate?”

Jonquil shook her head. She wondered whether she ought to be firmer in saying that she had no interest in Edward Keeving, but that horrid tag about seeming to protest too much kept her silent. Mitchi Boko would surely have sufficient tact to keep her thoughts to herself! And even if she didn’t, Edward knew that she was not in love with him. But the thought nagged at her until she took it out and looked at it properly. It was not Edward that she was worried about, but Jason. That, of course, was ridiculous! She had firmly dismissed him from having any romantic meaning for her the minute they had arrived in Japan. There had been his relationship to her charge, Alexander, and—and his interest in Yoshiko. Jonquil forced herself to remember the way he had given in to her about coming to Kyoto. The gentleness on his face that was never there for her. It was abundant folly to allow herself even to think of him. But her thoughts, it seemed, were not in the least interested in being ruled by common sense.

“But Yoshiko go home because her father arrive
back from India?”

“Yes,” Jonquil agreed abstractedly.

“She will be very happy to have him home again. Kagami-san will join the firm and all will be well.”

“Who is Kagami-san?” Jonquil asked bewildered.

“He betrothed Yoshiko,” Mitchi Boko told her, laughing at herself for finding the words difficult
to say. “You not know?”

“I didn’t know his name,” Jonquil said wearily. It was dreadful to her, this calm acceptance that
Yoshiko should fall in with her father’s plans for a husband for her. “Yoshiko doesn’t seem to know him very well,” she added diffidently.

Mitchi Boko laughed softly.

“Time enough after they marry,” she said. “Who can know before?”

Jonquil didn’t answer. The whole idea was foreign to her way of thinking and repugnant to her.

“I must return to my seat, otherwise it taken,” Mi
t
chi Boko said regretfully. “Very happy to see you
.
See you many times in Kyoto? Show you many things you not see otherwise, yes?”

“Thank you very much,” Jonquil said automatically. It was dreadful, but she was quite glad the conversation was ending. She smiled as warmly as she could at the Japanese girl and watched her make her way up the aisle before she got up to go back to Yoshiko.

“You were gone forever!” Yoshiko greeted her as she slid back into her seat. “Didn’t Alex want to sleep?”

“I met Mitchi Boko,” Jonquil told her. “She’s on holiday and is going home to Kyoto.”

Yoshiko smiled, her eyes veiled.

“Oh, yes.
Very beautiful girl. We have all told her many times that she ought to be a film star. Perhaps she would even get to Hollywood.”

“It was the first time I have seen her in Western clothes,” Jonquil went on. “They haven’t the same romance about them that the kimona has.”

Immediately Yoshiko was herself again.

“
But they are so much more comfortable!” she giggled. “Boko only wears the kimono because it is so good for her restaurant. She changes whenever she is free. So do most of us now.”

“Edward Keeving is with her,” Jonquil found herself saying.

Yoshiko looked at her enigmatically.

“Shall we go to bed now,” she suggested, as though she had not heard. “It is only seven and a
half hours to Osaka and we shall not get much sleep later.”

They went down the train together and it didn’t seem nearly such a long way as it had before. It was pleasant slipping into the made-up bunk, relaxing against the movement of the train rushing through the night, with the sounds of their fellow passengers muted in the distance. Jonquil’s eyes drooped drowsily as she wondered what lay before her at Kyoto. It would be fun staying in Jason’s own house, exploring the place where he lived. She turned over and settled herself down to sleep, just as the calorie callers shrieked their way once more down the length of the train.

The train drew into Osaka Central Station exactly on time. The passengers nodded happily to one another. The split-second schedule had been maintained and the pride of Japan was vindicated.