Kimono | Page 3

pure, be it white, black, or yellow. Bastard races cannot flourish. They are waste of Nature."
The Professor glanced towards the bridal pair.
"And these also?" he asked.
"Perhaps," said Sir Ralph, "but in her case her education has been so entirely European."
Hereupon, Lady Everington approaching, Sir Ralph turned to her and said,--
"Dear lady, let me congratulate you: this is your masterpiece."
"Sir Ralph," said the hostess, already looking to see which of her guests she would next pounce upon, "You know the East so well. Give me one little piece of advice to hand over to the children before they start on their honeymoon."
Sir Ralph smiled benignly.
"Where are they going?" he asked.
"Everywhere," replied Lady Everington, "they are going to travel."
"Then let them travel all over the world," he answered, "only not to Japan. That is their Bluebeard's cupboard; and into that they must not look."
There was more discussion of bridegroom and bride than is usual at society weddings, which are apt to become mere reunions of fashionable people, only vaguely conscious of the identity of those in whose honour they have been gathered together.
"Geoffrey Barrington is such a healthy barbarian," said a pale young man with a monocle; "if it had been a high-browed child of culture like you, Reggie, with a taste for exotic sensations, I should hardly have been surprised."
"And if it had been you, Arthur," replied Reggie Forsyth of the Foreign Office, who was Barrington's best man, "I should have known at once that it was the twenty thousand a year which was the supreme attraction."
There was a certain amount of Anglo-Indian sentiment afloat among the company, which condemned the marriage entirely as an outrage on decency.
"What was Brandan dreaming of," snorted General Haslam, "to allow his son to marry a yellow native?"
"Dreaming of the mortgage on the Brandan property, I expect, General," answered Lady Rushworth.
"It's scandalous," foamed the General, "a fine young fellow, a fine officer, too! His career ruined for an undersized geisha!"
"But think of the millions of yens or sens or whatever they are, with which she is going to re-gild the Brandan coronet!"
"That wouldn't console me for a yellow baby with slit eyes," continued the General, his voice rising in debate as his custom was at the Senior.
"Hush, General!" said his interlocutor, "we don't discuss such possibilities."
"But everybody here must be thinking of them, except that unfortunate young man."
"We never say what we are thinking, General; it would be too upsetting."
"And we are to have a Japanese Lord Brandan, sitting in the House of Lords?" the General went on.
"Yes, among the Jews, Turks, and Armenians, who are there already," Lady Rushworth answered, "an extra Oriental will never be noticed. It will only be another instance of the course of Empire taking its way Eastward."
* * * * *
In the Everington dining-room the wedding presents were displayed. It looked more like the interior of a Bond Street shop where every kind of article de luxe, useful and useless, was heaped in plenty.
Perhaps the only gift which had cost less than twenty pounds was Lady Everington's own offering, a photograph of herself in a plain silver frame, her customary present when one of her prot��g��es was married under her immediate auspices.
"My dear," she would say, "I have enriched you by several thousands of pounds. I have introduced you to the right people for present-giving at precisely the right moment previous to your wedding, when they know you neither too little nor too much. By long experience I have learnt to fix it to a day. But I am not going to compete with this undistinguished lavishness. I give you my picture to stand in your drawing-room as an artist puts his signature to a completed masterpiece, so that when you look around upon the furniture, the silver, the cut glass, the clocks, the engagement tablets, and the tantalus stands, the offerings of the rich whose names you have long ago forgotten, then you will confess to yourself in a burst of thankfulness to your fairy godmother that all this would never have been yours if it had not been for her!"
In a corner of the room and apart from the more ostentatious homage, stood on a small table a large market-basket, in which was lying a huge red fish, a roguish, rollicking mullet with a roving eye, all made out of a soft crinkly silk. In the basket beneath it were rolls and rolls of plain silk, red and white. This was an offering from the Japanese community in London, the conventional wedding present of every Japanese home from the richest to the poorest, varying only in size and splendour. On another small table lay a bundle of brown objects like prehistoric axe heads, bound round with red and white string, and vaguely odorous of bloater-paste. These were