"'Kara-ko, kara-ko, kara-ko!'"
"'Kara-ko, kara-ko, kara-ko!'"
The notes she gave were the notes I had heard on the stone platforms of every station between Tokio and Yokohama, and going straightway to the piano I found those notes to be F and D in the scale of F Minor. Let the laugh proceed. The Happy Exile possibly might say that those notes were the prominent ones in some old national song, and that the geta-makers had been unconsciously reproducing them ever since.
It was raining. Alack and alas! the Little Maid carried an American umbrella—impious trail of the Saxon! while the Other Man and I bore picturesque Japanese ones that wouldhave given the crowning touch to her, but looked simply ridiculous over us. Thus we went to meet the exquisite courtesy and genuine kindness of a real Japanese home.
Two kotos were played for us, while the players sang "Wind Among the Pines," and the tale of the fairies who fell in love with the fisherman.
"Do you like Japanese music?" said the Little Maid to the Other Man.
"Yes," he said promptly, lying like a gentleman.
"Don't you think it is rather monotonous?" she asked.
"Well—um—um. Don't you like Japanese music?" he said, taking refuge.
"Well," she said, "I like your music better, I think. It is more lively and has more variety."
Then we had tea, and after tea of the kind usually served in Japan, the husband, a fierce Samurai in the pictures he showed us, but now a genial, broad-smiling doctor of the old Japanese school, insisted that we should take bowlsof powdered tea which he prepared with his own hands. In the drinking of this the Little Maid instructed us. We were to take the bowl, the left hand underneath, the fingers of the right hand clasped about it, lift it to the forehead, a movement of unspoken thanks, and very gently, so as not to suggest that the tea needed to be dissolved, were to roll the tea around in the bowl three times and then take one drink—making much noise, meanwhile, with the lips to show how much we enjoyed it.
"That is very vulgar in your country," interrupted the Little Maid, "is it not so?"
"Well," I said, "lots of people do it, but not for the reason of courtesy."
We were to roll it around three times more, and then drink again; three times more, and a third drink, leaving this time but a little, which, without being rolled around again, was to be drunk at a swallow—three drinks and one swallow to the bowl. O-kin-san says that this last swallow should be only the foam, which must be drunk to show that the tea is so good that the guest must have even thefoam; and that not until then does the noise of appreciation come, and then only because the foam cannot be drunk without noise. It was well. We exchanged autographs and cards. With the kind permission of the Little Maid's aunt we took pictures of the interior, and then with much bowing and many "sayonaras" we passed out under the cherry trees.
"We say 'Good-morning,'" said the Little Maid, explaining the courtesies of Japanese greeting and good-by, "and we bow; and we say 'It is a long while since I have seen you,' or 'It is a fine day,' and we bow again. At the end of each sentence you must bow, and it is the same when you say good-by."
Before I learned that the Mikado had sent a general edict through the land that all foreigners in Japan were to be treated with particular consideration while this war is going on—thus making it safer for the tourist now in this country than it ever has been or will be, perhaps, for a long time—I had been greatlyimpressed by the absence of all signs of disorder, street quarrels, loud talking, and by the fact that in Tokio, one of the largest cities in the world, one could go about day or night in perfect safety. I told this to the Maid of Miyanoshita.
"So desuka," she said without surprise, and that means "Indeed." And when she said later that there were many Japanese novelists, but they did not write love stories, I was reminded further that I had seen no man in Japan turn his head to look at a woman who had passed him—no exchange of glances, no street gallantry at all.
"The song of the 'Goo-goo Eyes,'" I said, "would never have been written in Japan."
"What iss 'Goo-goo Eyes'?" said the Little Maid, mystified.
Then had I trouble—but I must have made it clear at last.
"Perhaps the Japanese girl does not want to be seen—looking."
"Oh, you mean that she may look, but the foreigner doesn't see it?"
"Well, we are all human. That is very frank, is it not?"
It was frank—very frank—and of an innocence not to be misunderstood save by a fool. Then I got a degree.
"But I am always frank with you, for if you are what you say 'guilty,' I think you must understand. I call you to myself a Doctor of Humanity."
Wallah, but the life is hard!
By and by this remarkable Little Maid went on:
"The Japanese may be what you call in love, but they must not tell it—must not even show it."
"Not even the men?"
"No, not even the men. Is it not so in your country?"
I laughed.
"No, it is not so in my country." I found myself suddenly imitating her own slow speech. "That's the first thing the man in my countrydoes. Sometimes he tells it, even when he can't ask the girl to marry him, and sometimes they even tell it over there when they don't mean it."
"So desuka!"
"They call that 'flirting.'"
"Yes, I know 'flirting,'" said the Little Maid.
"It is not a very nice word," I said. "There is no flirting in Japan?"
"There is no chance. Parents and friends make marriage in Japan."
"They don't marry for love?"
"It is as in France—not for love. And in America?"
"Well, we don't think it nice for people to marry unless they are in love."
"So desuka," she said, which still means "Indeed." And then she went on:
"Japanese girls obey their parents." And then she added, rather sadly, I thought, "and sometimes they are very unhappy."
"And what then?"
"Oh, deevorces—are very common amongthe lower classes, but among the middle and upper classes it is verry difficult."
"So desuka!" I said, for I was surprised.
"So desu," said the Little Maid, which is the proper answer.
The Maid of Miyanoshita loves flowers, and at sunset this afternoon I saw her coming down from her garden, where she had been at work. She had a great round straw hat on her black hair. I got her to draw it about her face with both hands, and with a camera she was caught as she laughed. We went down the steps and stopped above the cascade which shook the water where the goldfishes were playing.
Now I have been a month in Japan; I have seen the opening of the Diet, heard the Emperor chant the fact that he was at peace with all the world save Russia, and observed that he must show origin from the gods in other ways than in his stride. I have dined with the gracious representative of the Stars and Stripes and his staff, who seem to have taken on an Oriental suavity that bodes well for our interestsin this Far East, and have seen an Imperial Highness play the delicate and difficult double rôle of hand-shaking Democrat to Americans and God-head to his own people—while both looked on. I have eaten a Japanese dinner at the Maple Club, while Geishas and dancing-girls held fast the wondering Occidental eye; have heard, there, American college songs sung by Japanese statesmen, and have joined hands with them in a swaying performance of "Auld Lang Syne." I have seen wrestling matches that looked at first sight like two fat ladies trying to push each other out of a ring—but which was much more. I have been to the theatre, to find the laugh checked at my lips and to sit thereafter in silence, mystification, and wonder. I have tossed pennies to children—the "babies" who here "are kings"—while wandering through blossoming parks and among people whom I cannot yet realize as real. I have visited shrines, temples; have heard the wail of kite and the croak of raven over the tombs of the Shoguns, and have seen a Holy Father beating a drum and prayinga day-long prayer with a cigarette-stub behind one ear. I have learned that this is the land of the seductive "chit" and the deceptive yen which doubles your gold when you arrive and makes you think that when you have spent fifty cents you still have a dollar of it left. Moreover, I have seen the glory of cherry-blossoms. But of all these trifles and more—more, perhaps, anon. I pulled a little red guide-book out of my pocket.
"That word," I asked, pointing to the proper one, "would you use that word to your—well, your mother?"
"No," she said very slowly, and with straight eyes, again answering impersonal inquiry with response even more impersonal, "I—don'—don't—think—you—would—use—that word—to your—mother."
The sunlight lay only on the great white crest of Fuji. Everywhere else the swift dusk of Japan was falling. In it the cherry-tree was fast taking on the light of a great white star. In the grove above us a nightingale sang.
Truly 'tis hard.
LINGERING IN TOKIO
I might as well confess, I suppose, that these "Hardships of the Campaign," pleasant as they are, ecstatic as they might be to an untroubled mind, constitute a bluff pure and simple. Here goes another, but it shall be my last, and I shall write no more until the needle of my compass points to Manchuria. A month ago the first column got away when the land was lit with the glory of cherry-blossoms. We have been leaving every week since—next week we leave again. One man among us now calls himself a cherry-blossom correspondent. He was lucky to say it first. Clear across the Pacific we can hear the chuckle at home over our plight even from the dear ones who sent us to Japan. If it were not such a tragedy it would be very funny indeed.
The stars float high in the sky of Japan, so that when the moon rises, a vaster dome is litup than I have ever seen anywhere else in the world. The first moon I saw in Japan was rising over the Bluff where the foreigners live in Yokohama, and climbing slowly toward those distant stars. The Happy Exile and I had climbed a narrow, winding, bush-bordered alley, broken here and there with short flights of stone steps, and we sat on mats in his Japanese home. Somewhere outside a nightingale was singing and the fine needle-point of the first cicada was jabbing vibrations into the night air. To the left of the Happy Exile was a beautiful box of lacquer, and he reached out a caressing hand for it. That was hisnetsukebox, and he pulled out little lacquer trays in which lay his diminutive treasures.
"I have only about forty here," he said, "but they are all good. The dealers can't fool me now, and if ever a newnetsukeis brought in from any part of Japan, the owner directly or indirectly lets me know it is here. Sometimes I will strike one in some far interior town, but I know it has been sent on there ahead of me, that I may think I have stumbledon a treasure. My big collection is at home—and do you know that a man in Boston has perhaps the best set in the world? They have risen in value enormously, and are rising all the time. There are not so many imitations as people suppose, for the reason that the carvers can't afford to spend the time that is necessary to make even a good deception. You see, in the old days each daimio had his carvers who did nothing but makenetsukes, and all time was theirs."
Then he began taking them out. Each one represented a myth, a tradition, or a proverb.
"I love these things not only for their exquisite carving and their color and age, but because they are so significant in reflecting Japanese life and character. You have no idea how much you can learn about Japan from studying these curios."
Whiskey and soda were brought in. We watched the moon, listened to the nightingale, and the Happy Exile's talk drifted to old Japanese poetry—to the little seventeen-syllable form in which the Japanese has caught a picture,a mood, one swift impression, or a sorrow. Here are three that he gave me—but inaccurately he said: "A mother is sitting on a mat, perhaps alone. The wind rattles the fragile wall and she turns:
"The east wind blowing;Oh, the little finger-holesThrough the shogis!"
"The east wind blowing;Oh, the little finger-holesThrough the shogis!"
Now,shogisare the little squares of latticed paper that make the fragile wall, and mischievous children delight in thrusting their fingers through them. Those little finger-holes were made by the vanished hand of a dead child.
This is a picture in three strokes:
Moonlight;Across the matThe shadow of a pine.
Moonlight;Across the matThe shadow of a pine.
Think of that for a while.
And here is another mother-cry for a dead child. There are summer days in which every Japanese child that can toddle is chasing dragon-flies, and the children who die must pass through a hundred worlds. So this mother's thought runs thus:
Oh, little catcher of dragon-flies,I wonder how farYou've gone.
Oh, little catcher of dragon-flies,I wonder how farYou've gone.
But I like best the first:
The east wind blowing;Oh, the little finger-holesThrough the shogis!
The east wind blowing;Oh, the little finger-holesThrough the shogis!
We drifted out into the night air. Every house was dark and quiet. The Happy Exile stopped once to pat a yellow cur on the head.
"All these people know me," he said, "and I can step into any house without a word and sleep the night." But we followed that narrow alley up long flights of narrow, winding steps, under thick bushes that arched above us and shattered the moonbeams about our feet. There was not a cloud in the sky when we reached the top of the bluff, and I felt for the first time what the magic of this land was to the Happy Exile. The moon was soaring on toward those stars—the stars that float high in this sky of Japan.
Once I took refuge in a wrestling-match. I found a great pagoda-like, circus-like tentmade of bamboo with matting for a roof. Outside long streamers of various colors floated from the tops of long poles. High above and on a little platform supported by four bamboos a man was beating a drum. He had started beating that drum at daybreak. About the entrance and around the big, fragile structure was the same crowd of men and boys that you would find at an American circus. To get in I paid two yen. Had my skin been yellow and my eyes slant I would have dropped but one. The arena inside was amphitheatrical in shape with three broad tiers of benches on which squatted the spectators. In the centre and under a bamboo roof was a hummock of dirt about two feet high. Four pillars swathed with red and blue supported this roof, and from each pillar was stretched a streamer from which dangled little banners covered with Chinese ideographs. A ring some twelve feet in diameter was dug into the dirt hummock and in the centre of this ring were two huge fat men, stark naked except for a breech-clout. As I came in, they rose and took hold. To the Saxon itlooked at first glance like two fat ladies simply trying to push each other out of the ring, and I came near laughing aloud. Before I had approached ten steps one of the two fat men touched one foot outside of the ring. He had lost and the bout was over. Now two more came walking in with great dignity. They mounted the arena and turned their backs upon each other. Then each stretched out his right leg with his right hand on the knee, raised it high in the air and brought it down on the earth with a mighty stamp. The same performance with the left leg, and then they strained downward until their buttocks almost touched the earth. Turning, they squatted on their heels opposite each other at the edge of the ring, and each man slapped his hands together gently, stretched them out at full length and turned the palms over. This was a salute—the Japanese equivalent of the Saxon pugilist's handshake. Each walked then to one of the posts from which hung a little box of salt, and his second handed him there water in asakecup. He rinsed his mouth, spurted the water out, tooka pinch of salt and threw it into the ring. One of them stooped and plucked a few blades of grass from the sod and threw them also into the ring. Both these acts were meant to drive the spirits of evil away, and it was all so serious that I was aroused at once. Four times they squatted like two huge game-cocks, and four times they got up slowly, strolled leisurely to the salt-box and thesakecup. At last they got together, and there was a mighty tussle, and to my astonishment, one of those giants threw the other over his head and landed him some eight feet outside the ring. Apparently there was more in it than was evident to the casual eye, and it was very serious business indeed. The fact is, wrestling is an ancient and honorable calling in Japan, and goes back to the sun goddess. She had a brother once who used to annoy her by killing wild animals and tossing them into her backyard. One day she got angry and ran away to a cave, leaving the earth in total darkness. Her retainers, and the brother and his retainers tried to get her out, but she refused to come out—having blocked the cave with agreat stone. So they performed antics and made strange cries until, tempted by curiosity, she pushed the stone slightly away and looked out, and thereupon one Taji Karac, stamping the earth, rushed forward and tore the bowlder away, and that is why the wrestlers stamp the earth to-day. This is myth—what follows is historical.
"Once upon a time," said an American correspondent, as he leaned over the bar that night at the Imperial Hotel, "a chesty noble got gay, and remarked that he was about the best on earth. The emperor heard of this, and sent a challenge broadcast. A big chap took it up, kicked in the chesty noble's ribs, and brake his bones so that he died. This was twenty-four years before celestial peace was proclaimed on earth. About nine hundred years later, two brothers claimed the throne and they agreed to wrassle for it. They did it by proxy, though, and one Korishito got the throne through his champion. In the same century there was a wrestling-match at the autumn festival of the Five Grains. The harvest wasgood that year, and the emperor argued thereupon that the coincident wrestling must be good, and so wrestling became a permanent national custom. When the champion Kiobashi became referee the emperor gave him a fan which proclaimed that he was the Prince of Lions. The wrestlers were divided into east and west, and that's why they come into the arena from the east and west to-day. Hollyhock is the flower of the east, the gourd-flower is symbol of the west, and the path to the stage is called the flower-path to-day. The pillars indicate the points of the compass. The next champion the emperor called the Driving Wind, and the family of the Driving Wind alone can hold the symbol of the referee to-day."
These wrestlers are exempt from military service, and they constitute, I understand, a very close corporation. When an unusually large child is born in Japan, the father and mother say: "He shall be a wrestler."
The wrestlers are enormous men, and average over six feet in height. Some of them are magnificent in shape, but as weight counts in thescience, they encourage fat. The present champion weighs over three hundred pounds. Certainly, as a class, the wrestlers show what Japan can do in the way of producing big men. Constantly I have been surprised not only at the thick-set sturdiness, but at the average height of the Japanese soldier as I see him in Tokio on his way to the front. Moreover, I am told that the height of Japanese school-children has increased three inches within the last ten years in the schools where the students sit in chairs instead of squatting on the floor. And, among the new types one sees in Tokio to-day, the dapper men in European clothes about the clubs and hotels, the statesmen in high hats and frock-suits, the half-modernized class, who wear derby hats and mackintoshes with fur collars and show their legs naked to the knee when they step from a rickshaw—the most interesting and significant is the Tokio University student you see lilting on his getas through the public gardens. He has an intelligent face, looks you straight in the eye, is agile as a panther, and as tall, I believe, as the average college student.I suppose the emperor issued an edict that his people should grow taller and if he did—they will. But these students—one can't help wondering what, when they grow up, they will do for Japan and to the rest of the East.
With bird-like cries the rickshaw men turn under an arched gateway into a little court-yard paved with stones. The wheels rattle as in a hollow vault and come to a sudden halt. Straightway there is an answering bustle and the shuffling of many little feet along the polished floors to the entrance of the tea-house, and many little brown maidens kneel there and smile and gurgle a welcome. There the shoes of the visitor come off, and if any man has forgotten the first instruction Kipling gave, that the visitor to Japan should take with him at least one beautiful pair of socks, there is considerable embarrassment for him. You are led up a narrow stairway, each step of polished wood, and into a big chamber covered with mats—the wall toward the interior made of beautiful screens, the other wall opening on theouter air to a balcony. At the other end of the room from the entrance a single beautiful vase stands on a little platform, and in that vase is one single beautiful flower. In front of that vase is the seat of honor, and the guests are arranged in front of it seated on thin cushions on the floor. Straightway little nesan—serving-girls—carry in little trays, a box filled with ashes in which glow tiny bars of charcoal, a little ash-receiver of bamboo, a bottle ofsake, and dainty little bowls without handles for drinking-cups. Now one by one the brilliant little stars of the drama appear. A geisha girl glides in at the entrance, another and another, and in a row sink to their knees and bow their foreheads to the mat. Rising, they approach ten steps and kneel again. Once more they approach shuffling along the floor in their socks of spotless white (the big toe in a separate pocket) walking modestly pigeon-toed that the flaps of their brilliant kimonos may part not at all, and then they are bowing in front of the little trays where they sit smiling and ready to serve you with food and drink.
There for the first time we saw Kamura—Kamura-san you must say, if you would be polite. She was pretty, and dainty, and graceful, and her years were only fourteen, which by our computation, would be thirteen only, since the Japanese child is supposed to be a year old when born. She spoke English very well, for she had lived in Shanghai once where she had played with American children. She was an Eurasian—that is a half-caste—but that was a secret which she told a few in confidence, for you could not tell it from her face, and the fact would be no little obstacle to the success of her career as a geisha girl. Straightway little Kamura-san was the favorite of the dinner party, with the women as well as with the men, and she acted as interpreter and said many quaint, shrewd, unexpected things. The women petted and caressed her, and the men doubtless would have liked to do the same, but that is not a Japanese custom. She turned to one man of the party, and she spoke slowly and with no shading of intonation whatever:
"Who was the very young gentleman withred cheeks who was here with you the other night?"
The man told her.
"Why?" he asked.
"He came back to see me alone. He wanted to see me here alone, and he wanted the nesan to leave the room, but I would not let the nesan leave the room, and I did not understand."
That innocence aroused considerable interest in everybody and, later, the young gentleman's cheeks got redder still, when the incident was told him. Three days later I went to the tea-house again. Kamura-san, baby that she was, was to be sold soon to a Japanese.
She already spoke such excellent English and was so very intelligent that I wondered straightway if it might not be feasible to buy little Kamura-san myself and send her to school. Her mother, I was told, wanted her to go to school, and Kamura-san said that was what she wanted to do—how sincerely I was soon to learn. That mother had sold her several yearsbefore to the master of the tea-house and to get his money back the master of the tea-house must sell her again. So the price of the child, body and soul, was 750 yen or $375 in gold. For $50 a year she could be sent to school in Tokio, and I doubtless could find people to take care of her, though Kamura-san said that she would live with her mother and go to school, which was better still. So I set about negotiations, which were many and intricate. I had to see her own mother, her house-mother, with whom she and other geisha girls lived in Tokio, and who made engagements for her and them to dance at various tea-houses (she would be a female manager of chorus-girls in this country), and I would have to see the master of the tea-house. I saw them all, and not one of them believed that my purpose was what I said it was, though all of them, except Kamura-san herself, politely pretended to believe. As Kamura-san had played with American children and knew English well, I told her about America, and strove to explain. She sat with her little face downcast, her eyes dreamy and apparently takingin every word I uttered. When I got through she said simply:
"Yess, you will buy me out; you will give me a house; I will be your Japanese wife and wear European clothes." With her next breath she would be saying how much she wanted to go to school.
The mother of Kamura-san lives in Yokohama. Soon there was an amateur theatrical performance there and I got the mistress of the tea-house to let Kamura-san and a friend go down to see it. In the afternoon I went to see the mother, who was young, pretty, and very lady-like. The little girl acted as interpreter, and from her mother's lips told this story:
Kamura-san's father was an Austrian, and therefore she was a half-caste. That, however, was told me in confidence, and the fact I must not repeat, since it would interfere with her future. The mother had been his Japanese wife, and she had loved him very much. After a time the Austrian had been obliged togo home. He left the mother well provided for—gave her a house and a good deal of money. But she was, she said, young and foolish and extravagant, made bad investments, and lost it all. It was then that she sold Kamura-san to the tea-house. She would be very glad to have the little girl live with her at home, and wanted her to go to school. Her father, her mother said, would be humiliated and chagrined if he knew that Kamura-san was a geisha, and she wanted her daughter to give the life up. Before the interview was over I could see very plainly that the mother was still expecting the daughter to follow in her own footsteps.
The three went to the amateur theatrical performance that night, and from another part of the house I could see the little girl explaining it to her friend and to her mother, and the next night at the tea-house she rehearsed several features of it to her fellow-geishas, and her imitation of a barytone soloist, the way he stood, lifted his shoulders, opened his mouth and puffed out the volume of sound, was veryfunny, and made her companions squeak with laughter.
Now, there was a young American officer who was going around with me on these expeditions, who was having considerable fun over my philanthropical purpose, and was scornfully sceptical of any success. He was on hand that night and suddenly Kamura-san said:
"My mother says I must not love young and handsome gentleman."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because young and handsome gentleman changes his heart."
"Well, I suppose I fill the bill."
"Yess," she said, "you are a little handsome and a little old."
"But you aren't going to love anybody, you are going to school."
"Yess," said Kamura-san obediently.
Once more that night I tried to explain that we did not rob cradles in America, and again she looked dreamy and seemed to understand, but when I started to go, she beckoned me behind a screen:
"Did you bring the 750 yen?"
It was the interpreter of the tea-house that made me permanently hopeless. The interpreter was soft-voiced, gentle, and spoke excellent English. She had lived several years with an American missionary—a woman whom she had loved, she said, very tenderly. The interpreter had been a widow for several years, and had a little girl. She would never marry again, she said, because she would have to give up her child. So she spoke English in the tea-house and taught the children of the master for a pitiful salary. I cannot recall ever having met such frankness in Japan, and this is what she said:
"If you have 750 yen to spare, give it to the poor families of Tokio whose sons have gone to war. You buy Kamura-san from the tea-house and you go away to Manchuria; you will not know whether she goes to school. Most likely her house-mother will sell her again. Anyhow it is useless. She really does not want to go to school. She likes the tea-house, themusic, the lights and gossip, and the coming and going of strangers. You cannot change her, and it is no use. Give your money to poor people in Tokio."
After this Kamura-san's instincts told her that something was wrong, and she began to take perceptibly more notice of the young officer. Once, as I was told, she said to him:
"I always liked you best—you are so pretty."
I charged her with this statement.
"Who told you that?"
"Never mind."
"He is a liar," said Kamura-san calmly.
And once I caught her making eyes at him behind my back—something that she had never done with me. With this, too, I charged her.
"No," she said in denial, "he is your brother. He will be my best friend. He will be godfather to our child."
I staggered half-way across the room—that infant talking of a child!
"In heaven's good name," I said, "what do you want with a child?"
"That I may not be lonely when I old," said little Kamura-san.
Still, out of curiosity now, I went to see the house-mother of Kamura-san. Her head was poised on her shoulders like a snake's, and her eyes were the eyes of a snake—black, beady, and glittering. A face more hard, cunning, cruel, and smilingly crafty I never saw, and it took her but a little while to discover that I was an unsatisfactory customer, and I couldn't help wondering what that Austrian father would have thought and felt had he seen that snake-like hag trying to barter with me for his own flesh and blood. I left the young officer there and naturally the house-mother tried to sell the child to him.
Kamura-san I never saw again. When I came back from Manchuria I heard that she was gone—whither I don't know, but I'm hoping that the Austrian father by some chance may some day see these lines.
But no more now of temples, blossoms, pictures,netsuke, tea-houses, wrestling-matches, theatres, and the what-not that everybody with a pen has so wearisomely done to death. News of the battle of Nanshan has come in. Next week we leave again.
An explanation has occurred to me. You know the Japanese does nearly everything but his fighting—backward. Of course he reads and writes backward. At the theatre you find the dressing-room in the lobby. Keys turn from left to right, boring-tools and screws, I understand, turn from right to left, and a Japanese carpenter draws his plane toward him instead of pushing it away. Sometimes even the Japanese thinks and talks backward. For instance, suppose he says:
"I think I will go wash my hands." That, in Japanese, is:
"Te-wo aratte kimasho." Now, what he really has said is literally:
"Hands having washed I think I willcome back."
Perhaps then our trouble is that the Japanesetells the truth backward and we can't understand. He might even be fighting that way—say, for an alliance with Russia—and we still should not understand—at least, not yet.
MAKING FOR MANCHURIA
It came at last—that order for the front. On the 18th day of July, the Empress of China swung out of Yokohama Harbor, with eighteen men on board, who had been waiting four months for that order, almost to the very day. During those four months there was hardly a day that some one of those men was not led to believe by the authorities in Tokio that in the next ten days the order would come, and never would the authorities say that during any ten days the order would not come; so that they had perforce to stay waiting in Tokio from the freezing rains of March until the sweltering days of midsummer. Many of those men had been in Japan for five months and more, and yet knew absolutely nothing of the land save of Tokio and Yokohama, which, tourists tell me, are not Japan at all.
The matter has been passing strange. We did not come over here at the invitation of the Japanese Government, but in simple kindness the authorities might have said, with justice:
"This is the business of Japan and of Russia alone. Over here we do not recognize the Occidental God-given right of the newspapers to divulge the private purposes of anybody. We believe that War Correspondents are harmful to the proper conduct of a war. Frankly, we don't want you, and to the front you can never go."
No just complaint could have been made to this. We should have seen beautiful Japan and, our occupation gone for this war, at least, we could have struck the backward trail of the Saxon—the correspondent for some trade of peace, the artist to "drawing fruits and flowers at home." And all would have been well.
Or:
"You gentlemen came over here at your own risk. You create a new and serious problem for us and we don't know how we are going to solve it. If you wish to stay on at your ownrisk until we have made up our minds—you are quite welcome."
For some this would have made an early homeward flight easy. Or again:
"Yes, we do mean to let you go to the front, but when we cannot say. While you are here, however, we shall be glad to have you see our country. Just now we are quite sure that you will not go for at least ten days: so you can travel around and come back. If we are sure that you can't go for another ten days, you may go away again and come back—and so on until you do leave."
Even this they might have said:
"You English are our allies. We are in trouble, and we may draw you as allies into it. We, therefore, grant your right to know how we behave on the battle-field, where we may possibly have to fight, shoulder to shoulder. Therefore, you English correspondents, you English attachés, can go to the front, the rest of you cannot."
Nothing in all this could have given offence. All or any of it would have had at least thecombined merits of frankness, consideration, honesty, and it is very hard for this Saxon to understand how any or all could possibly have any bearing on anybody's advantage or disadvantage, as far as this war is concerned.
The Japanese gave no open hint of unwillingness to have us go—no hint that we were not to go very soon. We were urged to get passes for ourselves, interpreters and servants at once. Most of the men obeyed at once, bought horses, outfits, provisions and wrote farewell letters—wrote them many times. This was the middle of March. Ever since we have stayed at the Imperial Tomb in Tokio—the Imperial Hotel is the name it calls itself—under heavy expense to ourselves here and to the dear ones at home who sent us here; unable to go away; told every ten days that in the next ten days we would most likely go, and told on no day that within the next ten we should not go. Now it was soon—"very soon"—in English, and then it was "tadaima"—in Japanese.
Tadaima! That, too, meant "soon," whenI first put stumbling feet on the tortuous path of Japanese thought and speech. The unwary stranger will be told to-day that it does mean "soon," and as such in dictionaries he shall find it. But I have tracked "tadaima" to its lair and dragged it, naked and ashamed, into the white light of truth. And I know "tadaima" at any time refers only to the season next to come. Early in March, for instance, it means literally—"next summer about two o'clock."
All this was something of a strain in the way of expectation, disappointment, worry, wasted energy—idleness. And so with a worried conscience over the expense to the above-mentioned dear ones at home, and the hope that some return might yet be made to them; through a good deal of weakness and a good deal of reluctance to go home and get "guyed," we stayed on and on. In May came the battle of Nanshan and the advance on Port Arthur. In June followed Tehlitzu. Both battles any man would have gladly risked his life to see, and I really think it would have been well forthe Japanese, granting their accounts of the two battles as accurate—Russian atrocities in one, undoubted Japanese gallantry in both—if impartial observers had been there to confirm. As it stands, the Japanese say "you did"—the Russians say "we didn't"—and there the matter will end.
But we swung out of Yokohama Harbor at last—the Tokio slate for the time wiped clean and all forgiven. We were going to the front and that was balm to any wound. O-kin-san of the Tea House of the Hundred Steps—bless her!—had me turn my back while she struck sparks with flint and steel behind me and made prayers for my safety, and from her kind hand I carried away a little ideographed block of wood in a wicker case which would preserve me from all bodily harm. Whither we were bound we knew not for sure, since by the same token you know nothing in this land for sure. But there were three men among us who had been guaranteed, they said, by the word of a Major-General's mouth, that they should see the fall of Port Arthur. So sure were theythat they had made less important representatives of their papers stay behind in Tokio to await the going of the third column. Two others had got the same assurance indirectly, but from high authority, and the rest of us knew that where they went, there went we.
That day and that night and next day we had quiet seas and sunlight. The second night we were dining in Kobbe at a hotel to which Kipling once sang a just pæan of praise—Kobbe, which he knew at once, he said, was Portland, Maine, though his feet had not then touched American soil. He was quite right. Kobbe might be any town anywhere. The next daybreak was of shattered silver, and it found us sailing through a still sea of silver from which volcanic islands leaped everywhere toward a silver sky. We were in the Inland Sea. To the eye, it was an opal dream—that Inland Sea—and the memory of it now is the memory of a dream—a dream of magic waters, silvery light and forlorn islands—bleak and many-peaked above, and slashed with gloomy ravines that race each other down to goblin-hauntedwater-caves, where the voice of the sea is never still. This sea narrowed by and by into the Shimonoseki Straits, which turn and twist through rocks, islands, and high green hills. Through them we went into the open ocean once more. In the middle of the next afternoon we passed for a while through other mountain-bordered straits, and by and by there sat before the uplifted eye Nagasaki, with its sleepy green terraces, rising from water-level to low mountain-top—where the Madame Chrysanthème of Loti's fiction is a living fact to-day. Who was it that said, after reading that book, he or she would like to read Pierre Loti by Madame Chrysanthème? It must have been a woman—and justly a woman—sure. There is an English colony at Nagasaki and an American or two who cling together and talk about going home some day—all exiles, all most hospitable to the stranger, and all unconsciously touched with the pathos of the exile wherever on earth you find him.
Between four and five o'clock these exiles take launches for a beach five miles away, sincethe Japanese regulations now forbid bathing at any nearer point. They carry out cakes and tea and other things to drink and I took one trip with them through one beautifully radiant late afternoon, but even in that way there was no evading the Japanese. Two of them, whether fishermen, sailors, officers, or what not, calmly fixed their boat-hooks to the launch and there they hung. The fact that the ladies of the launch were undressing and dressing in one end did not seem to disturb them at all, and to this day I am wondering what possible harm a man or a woman in a bathing-dress among waves can do in time of war in a place that is impregnable and five hundred miles from the firing-line. I found the Japanese as different in Nagasaki as is their speech. There they say "Nagasaki" with a hard g. In Tokio, where the classics are supreme, they pronounce it "Nangasaki," almost—just as the rickshaw men in the one place lose something of the samurai haughtiness that characterizes them in the other. It is the difference between the flat and the broad "a" in our own land, and betweenthe people who use the one and the people who use the other. Everybody left next morning, but I clung to Nagasaki as long as I could, and in consequence took an all-night ride on a wooden seat. Early next morning I was crossing the Shimonoseki Straits from Moji in a sampan. It was before sunrise. The mist on the sea was still asleep, but on the mountains it was starting its upward flight. Through it fishing-boats were slipping like ghosts, and here and there the dim shape of a transport or a little torpedo-boat was visible. The flush in the East was hardly as deep as a pale rose before I was noiselessly oared to the stone quay of the little village whence we were to take transport at last for the front. The foreign hotel was full. Richard Harding Davis had gone to a Japanese hotel and had left word for me to follow. So in a rickety rickshaw I rattled after him through the empty street. I found him in a Japanese room as big as the dining-room of an American hotel, covered with eighty mats, full of magic woodwork, and looking out where there were nowalls (the walls in a Japanese house are taken out by day) for full fifty feet on mountain and sea and passing transports and sampans. Davis was unpacking. Hanging over the balcony was a yellow moth of a girl some fourteen years old, who smiled me welcome. On another balcony at the other end of the hotel, three other sister moths were lighted, and among them I saw a correspondent beating a typewriter vigorously—they watching him with amazement and brushing him with their wing-like sleeves as they hovered about. Others still were fluttering fairy-like anywhere, everywhere. The latest occupant of our room had been the Marquis Ito—we found it quite big enough for two of us. Li Hung Chang had the same room when he came over to make peace terms after the Japanese-Chinese War. We could see the corner of the street near by where a Japanese tried then to assassinate that eminent Chinaman, and in that very room the great Shimonoseki treaty was signed. We had it two nights and a day, and we learned, when we went away, that we were not told the historyof that room for nothing. First, our interpreters hinted that great men like Ito and Li Hung Chang and Our Honorable Selves were always expected to make a present to the hotel. It was the custom. We followed the custom to the extent of ten yen each, and an old lady came in and prostrated herself before each of us in turn. Now, when you are clothed only in pajamas, are seated in a chair, and have your bare feet on a balcony in order to miss no vagrant wind, it is somewhat embarrassing to have a woman steal in without warning, smite her forehead to the mat several times, and make many signs and much speech of gratitude. You won't smite yours in turn; you can't bow as you sit, and if you rise, it looks as though you were going to put foot on the neck of a slave. We looked very red and felt very foolish, but we did not exchange confidences. If there was any slumbering supposition in our minds that this was a polite Oriental method of dealing with guests who have doubtful luggage, or a slumbering hope that the "present" might have a dwindling effect onour bill, there needn't have been. We had to pay in addition for that room and those eighty mats and that Fuji landscape of delicate woodwork; we had to pay for all the brilliant moths that fluttered incessantly about, for the chamber-maids and the smiling bronze scullery-girl who looked in on us from the hallway; for the bath-boy and the cook or cooks. Every junk and sampan that passed had apparently sent a toll for collection to that hotel. The gold of the one sunset and the silver of the one dawn were included in the turkey-tracked, serpent-long bill that was unrolled before our wondering eyes. In fact, if Marquis Ito's breakfast and the biggest dinner that Li Hung Chang had there nine years before were not put down therein, it was a strange oversight on the part of the all-seeing eye that had swept the horizon of all creation during the itemization of that bill. That was business—that bill. The present had been custom. I cheerfully recommend the method to highway robbers that captain other palaces of extortion in other parts of the world. Get the present first—it's a pretty custom—andthe rest is just as easy as it would have been anyway.
Next day we went back again to Moji, where a polite and dapper little officer examined us and our passes and asked us many questions. Why he did I know not, since he seemed to know about us in advance, and every now and then he would look up from a pass and say: "Oh, you are so-and-so"—whereat "so-and-so" would look a bit uneasy. At two o'clock that day we set sail—correspondents, interpreters, servants, horses, a few soldiers, and much ammunition—on the transport Heijo Maru. Every ship has that "Maru" after its name, and I have never been able to find out just what it means—except that literally it is "round in shape." We steamed slowly past a long, bleak, hump-backed little island that had been the funeral pyre for the Japanese dead in the war with China. For ordinarily the Japanese, after taking a lock of hair, a finger-nail, or theinkobo(a bone in the throat), which they send back to relatives, burn their dead. But this funeral pyre was for those whodied in the hospital, and the wounded and sick therein could see by the flames at night where next day their own ashes might lie. Thence we turned northward toward the goal of five months' hope on the part of those hitherto unhappy but now most cheerful eighteen men.
Fuji was on board. Fuji is my horse, and he had come down by rail. He is Japanese and a stallion—as most Japanese horses are. He has a bushy, wayward mane, by the strands of which you can box the compass with great accuracy, and a bushy forelock that is just as wayward. His head, physiognomy, and general traits will come in better when later they get an opportunity for display. All I knew then of Fuji was that he had nearly pulled the arms out of the sockets of several men, and had broken one man's leg back in Tokio. I was soon to learn that this was very little to know about Fuji.
Takeuchi also was aboard. Takeuchi is my interpreter and servant. He is tall and slender, and has a narrow, intelligent face and general proportions that an American girl characterizedas Greek. I call him the ever-faithful or the ever-faithless—just as his mood for the day happens to be. He keeps me guessing all the time. When I make up my mind that I am going to say harsh things next day, I find Takeuchi tucking a blanket around me at three o'clock in the morning. He knows they are coming, and when I do say them Takeuchi answers, "I beg you my pardon," in a way that leads me to doubt which of us is the real offender after all. Sometimes my watch and money disappear, but Takeuchi turns up with them the next morning, shaking his head and with one wave of his hand toward the table.
"Not safe," he says, smiting his waistband, where both were concealed. "I keep him." He has both now all the time. His first account overran, to be sure, the exact amount of his salary for one month and for that amount I had him sign a receipt. Two hours later he said, in perplexity:
"I do not understand the receipt I give you."
I pointed out my willingness to be provenwrong. He worked for an hour on the account and sighed:
"You are right," he said. "I mistake. I beg you my pardon."
He had overlooked among other things one item—the funeral expenses of some relative, which he had charged to me. I made it clear that such an item was hardly legitimate and since then we have had less trouble. However, when he wishes anything, he says:
"I want you, etc., etc., etc.," and at the end of the sentence he will say "please," with great humility; but until that "please" comes I am not always sure which is servant and which is master. From Takeuchi I have learned much about Japanese character, especially about the Buschido spirit—the fealty of Samurai to Daimio, of retainer to Samurai, of servant to master. It is useless to be harsh with or to scold a Japanese servant. Just make your appeal to that traditional spirit of loyalty and all will be better—if not well. He may rob you himself in the way of traditional commissions, but you can be sure that he will allow the sameprivilege to nobody else. But of Takeuchi—as of Fuji—more anon.
We sailed along at slow speed until we came to the Elliott Group of Islands. We paid a yen apiece for each meal, and the captain and the purser—a nice little fellow who got autographs from all who could write and pictures from all who could draw—were the only officers with whom we came in contact. We had poker o' nights, and sometimes o' days, and now and then we "played the horses." Thus we reached the Elliott Group of Islands.
There we had company, transports coming in until there was a fleet of ten; other transports going back to Japan, and an occasional gun-boat hovering on the horizon. There we stayed three wearing days—told each day that we should start on the next at daybreak. But there came one matchless sunset as a comfort—a sunset that hung for a while over a low jagged coast—a seething mass of flaming gold and vivid, quivering green; that smote the sea into sympathy, lent its colors to the mists that rose therefrom, and sank slowly to one luminousband of yellow, above which one motionless cloud of silver was, by some miracle, the last to deepen into ashes and darkness. And as it darkened in the West, some white clouds in the East pushed tumbling crests of foam over another range of hills, and above them the full moon soared. Thus, all my life I had waited to see at last, on a heathen coast, Turner doing the sunset, while Whistler was arranging colors in the place where the next dawn was to come.
Here we saw Chinamen for the first time on native heath. They came out to us in sampans, always with one or two children in the bow, to get scraps to eat at the port-holes aft, or empty bottles, which they much prized; or drifted past us on the swift tide, watching like birds of prey for anything that might be thrown overboard. And we saw the attitude of Japanese toward Chinamen for the first time, as well, and all the time one memory, incongruous and unjust though it was, hung in my mind—the memory of a town-bred mulatto in a high hat with his thumbs in the arm-holes ofa white waistcoat, and loftily talking to a country brother of deeper shade in the market-place of a certain Southern town. One day a sampan, with a very old man and a young one aboard, made fast to the gangway. They had fish to sell, and during the haggling that followed, a Japanese sprang aboard, dropped a coin or two, picked up the fish, and tried to cast the sampan away—the Chinamen sputtering voluble but feeble protests meanwhile. In the confusion, the stern of the sampan struck a ship's boat that was swinging on a long hawser from the same gangway, the bow of it struck the ship's side, and the racing tide did the rest. The boat was overturned, old man and young one disappeared and all under water shot away. We thought they were gone, but there were two lean, yellow arms fastened by yellow talons to the keel, and in a moment the young man was dragging the old man to safety on the bottom of the boat. The ship's boat was cast away, the Japanese who had caused the trouble sprang aboard with the crew, gave chase to the bobbing wreck, caught it several hundredyards away, righted it, and later we saw the young Chinaman working it, half submerged, toward the distant shore, and the shivering, bedraggled old one being brought back to the ship. We were all indignant, for the officers of the ship, far from interfering, laughed during the whole affair, and, laughing, watched the old man and the young one sweep away. But no sooner was the old man aboard than the servants and interpreters gave him rice, saki, empty bottles, and clothes, and took up a subscription for him; and when the young one got to the ship an hour later the old man climbed into the sampan, mellow and happy. It seemed a heartless piece of cruelty at first, but it was perhaps, after all, only the cruelty of children, for which they were at once sorry and at once tried to make amends. To me, its significance was in the loftily superior, contemptuously patronizing attitude of the Japanese toward the yellow brother from whom he got civilization, art, classical models, and a written speech. Later, I found the same bearing raised to the ninth degree in Manchuria. Knowing the grotesqueresults in the efforts of one imitative race to adopt another civilization in my own country, the parallelism has struck me forcibly over here in dress, Occidental manners, the love of interpreters for ponderous phraseology and quotations, rigid insistence on form and red tape and the letter thereof. Give a Japanese a rule and he knows no exception on his part, understands no variation therefrom on yours. For instance, every afternoon we went into the sea from that gangway, and Guy Scull diving from the railing of the upper deck and Richard Harding Davis diving for coins thrown from the same deck into the water (and getting them, too) created no little diversion for everybody on board. On the third afternoon, Davis, in his kimono and nothing else, was halted by the first officer at the gangway. The captain had found a transport rule to the effect that nobody should be allowed to go in bathing—the good reason being, of course, that some of several hundred soldiers in bathing might drown. Therefore, we eighteen men, though we were in a way the guests of the captain's Government—inspite of the fact that we were paying for our own meals—and though for this reason a distinction might have been made, the rule was there, and, like Japanese soldiers, we had to obey. It looked a trifle ominous.
We were only ten hours' sail now from Port Arthur, and one morning we did get away just before sunrise. The start was mysterious, almost majestic at that hour. For three days those transports had lain around us—filled, I was told, with soldiers, and yet not one soldier had I seen. Blacker and more mysterious than ever they looked in that dark hour before dawn—only the first flush in the east showing sign of something human in the column of black smoke that was drifting from the funnel of each. It showed, too, a gray mass lying low on the water, and near a big black rock that jutted from the sea. That gray mass gave forth one unearthly shriek and that was all. Instantly thereafterward it floated slowly around that jutting rock; one by one the silent black ships moved ghostlike after it, and when the red sunburst came, that gave birth, I suppose,to the flag of Japan, all in single file were moving in a great circle out to sea—the prow of each ship turning toward one red star that looked down with impartial eyes where the brown children of the sun were in a death-struggle with the cubs of the Great White Bear. By noon there was great cheer. The Japanese word was good at last—we were bound for Port Arthur. The rocky shore of Manchuria was close at hand. A Japanese torpedo-boat slipped by, its nose plunging through every wave and playful as a dolphin, tossing green water and white foam back over its whole black length. A signal-station became visible on one gray peak, and then there was a thrill that took the soreness of five months from the hearts of eighteen men. The sullen thunder of a big gun moaned its way to us from Port Arthur. There was not a man who had not long dreamed of that grim easternmost symbol of Russian aggression, and each man knew that no matter what might happen on land, Port Arthur held place and would hold place for dramatic interest in the eyes of the world. PortArthur we should see—stubborn siege and fierce assaults—and gather stories by the handful when it fell. Dalny was to our left, and it was rather curious that we did not turn toward Dalny. But no matter—we were going into Talienwan Bay, which was only a few miles farther away, and we could hear big guns: so we were happy. Talienwan—a thin curve of low gray stone buildings, hugging the sweep of the bay, spread the welcome that the officer of that port came to speak in English—and we landed among carts, Chinese coolies, Japanese soldiers, Chinese wagons, mules, donkeys, horses, ponies, squealing stallions, ammunition, a medley of human cries. The bustle was terrific. A man must look out for himself in that apparent confusion. As it was an ever-faithful day for Takeuchi that day, I was serene and trustful. Davis was not, and beckoned to a coolie with a cart. The man came and Davis's baggage was piled on the cart. Along came a Japanese officer who, without a word, threw the baggage to the ground—including a camera and other things as fragileand hardly less precious. Davis turned to the Post Officer:
"Can I have one of these carts?"
"Certainly," he said.
Davis got another, but while his interpreter was loading his things again, the same officer came by and tossed them again to the ground. The interpreter protested and tried to explain that he had permission to use the carts, but he hadn't time. That officer turned on him. Now I had been told that there are no oaths and vile epithets in the Japanese tongue, but I know no English vile enough to report what the man said, and if I did I couldn't use it without blistering my tongue and blackening my soul more black than the hair of the blackguard who used it. But let me do the Colonel in command justice to say that when the outraged interpreter, taken to him by us afterward, repeated the insult, the courteous old gentleman looked shocked and deeply hurt, and said he would deal harshly with the man. I hope he did.
This was ominous, but we were still cheerful.Yokoyama appeared and Yokoyama was ominous. He was to handle our canteen and charge us twice the prices that we had known at the Imperial Hotel, on the ground that he would transport our baggage for us. That meant that he was to charge us for the transport service that the Government was to give us—not to him—and furnish us chiefly with canned stuff that each man could have bought for himself for a dollar per day. We did not know this just then, but wily Yokoyama had gathered in 500 yen from each of us in Tokio, and he was ominous before we left Japan. I am putting this in because Yokoyama, too, is woven into the network that fate was casting about us that day. Still we were cheerful. Cannon were making the music we had waited five months to hear. Port Arthur would fall, doubtless, within ten days, and then—Home! The dream was shattered before we went to sleep. No officer came to tell us where we were bound—to explain the shattered word of a Major-General of his own army. It was Yokoyama who dealt the blow—Yokoyama who, inanother land, would have been branded as a traitor by his own people and could have been put behind the bars in ours. The truth was that we were not to go to Port Arthur at all. Next day we travelled—whither God only knew—with every boom of a big gun at the Russian fortress behind us sounding the knell of a hope in the heart of each and every man. But we were on the trail of Oku's army into the heart of Manchuria, though nobody knew it for sure, and there was yet before us another tragedy—Liao-Yang.