第 三 章 · A STREET SINGER

. A STREET SINGER

A woman carrying a samisen, and accompanied by a little boy seven

or eight years old, came to my house to sing. She wore the dress

of a peasant, and a blue towel tied round her head. She was ugly;

and her natural ugliness had been increased by a cruel attack of

smallpox. The child carried a bundle of printed ballads.

Neighbors then began to crowd into my front yard,--mostly young

mothers and nurse girls with babies on their backs, but old women

and men likewise--the inkyo of the vicinity. Also the

jinrikisha-men came from their stand at the next street-corner;

and presently there was no more room within the gate.

The woman sat down on my doorstep, tuned her samisen, played a

bar of accompaniment,--and a spell descended upon the people; and

they stared at each other in smiling amazement.

For out of those ugly disfigured lips there gushed and rippled a

miracle of a voice--young, deep, unutterably touching in its

penetrating sweetness. "Woman or wood-fairy?" queried a

bystander. Woman only,--but a very, very great artist. The way

she handled her instrument might have astounded the most skillful

geisha; but no such voice had ever been heard from any geisha,

and no such song. She sang as only a peasant can sing,--with

vocal rhythms learned, perhaps, from the cicada and the wild

nightingales,--and with fractions and semi-fractions and

demi-semi-fractions of tones never written down in the musical

language of the West.

And as she sang, those who listened began to weep silently. I did

not distinguish the words; but I felt the sorrow and the

sweetness and the patience of the life of Japan pass with her

voice into my heart,--plaintively seeking for something never

there. A tenderness invisible seemed to gather and quiver about

us; and sensations of places and of times forgotten came softly

back, mingled with feelings ghostlier,--feelings not of any place

or time in living memory.

Then I saw that the singer was blind.

When the song was finished, we coaxed the woman into the house,

and questioned her. Once she had been fairly well to do, and had

learned the samisen when a girl. The little boy was her son. Her

husband was paralyzed. Her eyes had been destroyed by smallpox.

But she was strong, and able to walk great distances. When the

child became tired, she would carry him on her back. She could

support the little one, as well as the bed-ridden husband,

because whenever she sang the people cried, and gave her coppers

and food.... Such was her story. We gave her some money and a

meal; and she went away, guided by her boy.

I bought a copy of the ballad, which was about a recent double

suicide: "_The sorrowful ditty of Tamayone and Takejiro,--

composed by Tabenaka Yone of Number Fourteen of the Fourth Ward

of Nippon-bashi in the South District of the City of Osaka_." It

had evidently been printed from a wooden block; and there were

two little pictures. One showed a girl and boy sorrowing

together. The other--a sort of tail-piece--represented a

writing-stand, a dying lamp, an open letter, incense burning in a cup,

and a vase containing shikimi,--that sacred plant used in the

Buddhist ceremony of making offerings to the dead. The queer

cursive text, looking like shorthand written perpendicularly,

yielded to translation only lines like these:--

"In the First Ward of Nichi-Hommachi, in far-famed Osaka--

_O the sorrow of this tale of shinju!_

"Tamayone, aged nineteen,--to see her was to love her, for

Takejiro, the young workman.

"For the time of two lives they exchange mutual vows--

_O the sorrow of loving a courtesan!_

"On their arms they tattoo a Raindragon, and the character

'Bamboo'--thinking never of the troubles of life....

"But he cannot pay the fifty-five yen for her freedom--

_O the anguish of Takejiro's heart!_

"Both then vow to pass away together, since never in this world

can they become husband and wife....

"Trusting to her comrades for incense and for flowers--

_O the pity of their passing like the dew!_

"Tamayone takes the wine-cup filled with water only, in which

those about to die pledge each other....

"_O the tumult of the lovers' suicide!--O the pity of their lives

thrown away!_"

In short, there was nothing very unusual in the story, and

nothing at all remarkable in the verse. All the wonder of the

performance had been in the voice of the woman. But long after

the singer had gone that voice seemed still to stay,--making

within me a sense of sweetness and of sadness so strange that I

could not but try to explain to myself the secret of those

magical tones.

And I thought that which is hereafter set down:--

All song, all melody, all music, means only some evolution of the

primitive natural utterance of feeling,--of that untaught speech

of sorrow, joy, or passion, whose words are tones. Even as other

tongues vary, so varies this language of tone combinations.

Wherefore melodies which move us deeply have no significance to

Japanese ears; and melodies that touch us not at all make

powerful appeal to the emotion of a race whose soul-life differs

from our own as blue differs from yellow....Still, what is the

reason of the deeper feelings evoked in me--an alien--by this

Oriental chant that I could never even learn,--by this common

song of a blind woman of the people? Surely that in the voice of

the singer there were qualities able to make appeal to something

larger than the sum of the experience of one race,--to something

wide as human life, and ancient as the knowledge of good and

evil.

One summer evening, twenty-five years ago, in a London park, I

heard a girl say "Good-night" to somebody passing by. Nothing but

those two little words,--"Good-night." Who she was I do not know:

I never even saw her face; and I never heard that voice again.

But still, after the passing of one hundred seasons, the memory

of her "Good-night" brings a double thrill incomprehensible of

pleasure and pain,--pain and pleasure, doubtless, not of me, not

of my own existence, but of pre-existences and dead suns.

For that which makes the charm of a voice thus heard but once

cannot be of this life. It is of lives innumerable and forgotten.

Certainly there never have been two voices having precisely the

same quality. But in the utterance of affection there is a

tenderness of timbre common to the myriad million voices of all

humanity. Inherited memory makes familiar to even the newly-born

the meaning of the tone of caress. Inherited, no doubt,

likewise, our knowledge of the tones of sympathy, of grief, of

pity. And so the chant of a blind woman in this city of the Far

East may revive in even a Western mind emotion deeper than

individual being,--vague dumb pathos of forgotten sorrows,--dim

loving impulses of generations unremembered. The dead die never

utterly. They sleep in the darkest cells of tired hearts and busy

brains,--to be startled at rarest moments only by the echo of

some voice that recalls their past.

IV