We had an hour to kill before dinner and we were irritably moody against the foreign windows which gave us no breeze. “It’s housely hot,” said O-Owre-san, and he sighed pathetically for the cool mats of an inn floor where there would be a pot of freshly brewed tea at his elbow and a green garden to look out upon. I was studying a map of Japan, tracing out its rivers and mountains.
I have an inordinate passion for maps. Surely Stevenson had some such passion. I venture that he first thought of the pirate’s chart of “Treasure Island” and after that first imagination the story simply wrote itself. Particularly does passion find satisfaction in one of the old Elizabethan maps, printed in full, rich colours, the margins portraying the waves of the sea with dolphins diving, and with barques straining under bellied sails. Some are headed for the Spanish Main, and others are striking out for the regions marked “Unknown.” Those old Elizabethanmaps could have been drawn only in the days of hurly-burly England when the deep-chested seamen under Raleigh and Drake sang savage sea songs in the taverns and the tingling life in a man’s veins was worth its weight in adventure. No wonder that to-day, with our pale, lithographed maps telling us the exact number of nautical miles to the farthest coral island we have become analytic and scientific. As Okakura said, “We are modern, which means that we are old.” Nevertheless, a pale, errorless, unemotional map is better than no map at all.
The particular map of Japan which I was studying had had a few mysteries added in the printing which were not to be blamed upon the geographer. The different colours had been laid on by the printer with marked independence of registration. It was difficult to trace even the old Tokaido, but imagination from practical experience told me that when it followed the coast it led through miles and miles of rice fields. Farther up on the map, in the mountain ranges above Nagoya, I saw a blurred word and turning the sheet on end I read “Nakescendo.”
The word brought a remembrance. I began trying to piece together what that memory was. At last I assembled a forgotten picture of aJapanese whom I had once met on a train. In the beginning I had thought him a modern of the moderns until he told me of his sacred pilgrimages. It was my surprise, I suppose, in his tale of his tramping, staff in hand, with the peasants that had made me so distinctly remember his earnestness as he mouthed the full word “Nakescendo.” I rolled over on the bed with my finger on the map and asked Hori if he had ever heard of the Nakescendo.
Hori looked up in surprise as if I had rudely mentioned some holy name. “All day,” said he, “I have been thinking of the Nakescendo.” Then he told us how the Nakescendo road enters the mountains through the valley of the beautiful Kiso river and, following the ranges first to the north and then to the east, takes its way to Tokyo. In the era before railroads it was a great arterial thoroughfare and in those feudal days thedaimyosof the north and their retainers journeyed the Nakescendo route with as much pomp as did their southern rivals along the Tokaido. Nevertheless the Nakescendo now exists in history as the less famous thoroughfare of the two. Hori suggested that the dimming of its fame may have come because its ancient followers had cherished its beauty with such intensitythat they did not allow their artists to paint it nor their poets to sing of it to the world, in the belief, perhaps, that all objective praise could be but supererogation.
I had most of this imagining from Hori’s understatements rather than from anything definite that he said. He is of thesamuraiand his ancestors learned the art of conversation in a court circle devoted to the graces. The incompleted phrase of the East so subtly makes one an accessory in the creation of the idea involved that we, of the West, who live in a world of overstatement, find ourselves disarmed to deny. One cannot discount words that have never been uttered.
I added to Hori’s words some definite phrases from my own imagination. These were to influence O-Owre-san if possible. I knew that it had been his long held dream to walk the Tokaido from end to end, but I had not realized until I saw his dismay at my suggestion of a change how ardent his dream had been. I had recklessly prophesied the mountains of the Nakescendo to be the abode of spring among other praises. It could not be denied that whatever the Tokaido was or was not, the rice fields that had to be crossed would not be springlike.
We slept over such argument as we had had. The next day burst in the glory of a burning sun, which was rather an argument on the side of the mountain faction. The breakfast butter melted before our eyes. O-Owre-san finished his marmalade and pushed back his chair, and then casually capitulated. “Well,” he said, “if we are going to the mountains, what are we waiting for?” What indeed? I ran upstairs to our room and pulled off my hotel-civilization clothes and stuffed them into the bag and labelled it for Yokohama. There was to be no more formal emerging into theseiyo-jin’sworld for us until we should reach that port of compulsion. O-Owre-san was less exuberant in his packing but he cheerfully whistled some air—which was indeed forgiving—and as usual was ready before I was.
Hori’s travelling kit had evidently bothered him not at all. A half-dozen collars, two or three books, one or two supplementary garments, and a straw hat were tied up in a blue and orange handkerchief and thisfuroshikiwas tied to the handlebars of a bicycle. Until we met the bicycle we had talked of the problems and plans of the three of us, but from the instant of production there was no gainsaying that there werefour of us. Further, the really colourful and unique personality among the four partners of the vagabondage was that diabolical, mechanical contraption.
In making that machine, the manufacturer, without possibility of dispute, had achieved the supremacy of turning out the most consistently jerry-built affair since the beginning of time. He merits first immortality both in any memorialization by the shades of jerry-builders who have gone before and in the future from the tribe as it expands and multiplies upon the earth. The loose, and often parting, chain hung from sprocket wheels that marvellously revolved at nearly right angles to each other. When Hori mounted into the saddle the wheels fearsomely bent under his weight until their circumferences advanced along the road in ellipses strange and unknown to the plotting of calculus. The rims scraped the mudguards in continuous rattle as if there were not enough other grinding sounds of despair coming from every gear and bearing. In some way those abnormalities worked together, acting in compensation. Any one of the single errors without such correspondingly outrageous offset would have been prohibitive to locomotion.
The indomitable spirit of the machine to keepgoing should perhaps be praised, but its general character was steeped in malevolency against all human kind. It hated Hori no less violently than it did us or strangers. It hated and was hated and continued to leave a trail of hatred in its path until a certain memorable day when we came to a mountain climb. While we were discussing what best could be done for its transport the proud spirit overheard that it would have to submit to being tied upon a coolie’s back. It rebelled into heroic suicide at that prospect. It committedhara-kiri. The entire mechanism collapsed suddenly into an almost unrecognizable wreck.
“When the flower fades,” says Okakura Kakuzo, “the master tenderly consigns it to the river or carefully buries it in the ground. Monuments are even sometimes erected to their memory.” Hori gave a piece of money to the coolie for a reverent burial of the demon wheel.
Our breakfast had really been luncheon and after our energy of packing and getting started we so indulged our time in the shops on the way out of the city that we finally decided that if we were to get into the mountains before night we should have to take the train over the paddy fields. The bicycle, the rucksacks, and theblue and orange handkerchief, together with the owners, were crowded into an accommodation train. The small engine puffed with the temperament of a nervous pomeranian, throwing a volcanic spume into the air which condensed into a fine diamond ash to come back to earth and to stream into the windows and then to drift, eddy, and scurry about the seats and floor.
An accommodation train has the verve of life which the conventions of a through express stifle; but whether it be a New England local with bird cages, or the Italianmistiwith priests and snuff boxes, nursing madonnas, garlic sandwiches, and chianti bottles, or the stifling wooden boxes of Northern India crowded with Afridi and Babus, no train in all the world is as domestic as the Japanesekisha. Friends and the friends of friends come to rejoice in the dramatic formalities of farewell. If perchance any individual on the platform is neither the friend nor the friend of a friend of some departing one he takes an altruistic pleasure in smiling upon the opportunities of others.
We bought our pots of tea with tiny earthenware cups attached and put them on the floor as did everyone else; and we also bought ourbentoboxes, of rice, raw fish, pickles, seaweed,and bamboo shoots, from the criers of “Bento! Bento!! Bento!!!” The train started. No one was bored; the children were not restless; and we of our carriage stayed awake or went to sleep in every posture possible to the flexibility of human limbs matched against the rigidity of wooden seats. The babies came along and became acquainted and we sent them back to their parents carrying gifts of cigarettes.
Curled up on the seat across from ours, with her head resting on her luggage, was a girl about twenty years of age. She was a Eurasian and was beautiful rather than pretty. Now and again her graceful arm raised her fan but otherwise she did not move. Her dark eyes returned no curious glances. Her mood of mind and soul seemed as frozen and hard as the blue ice of a mountain glacier. It was a passionate negativity, her defence against the instinct of society, which eternally wages war upon the hybrid. It is instinctive, this struggle of the race mass mind against the disintegration of its integrity. She had learned the meaning of glances. The Eurasian must expiate a guiltless guilt. She did not ask for quarter in the battle; far back of that cold, defensive gaze was the strength of two proud races. Character makes fate, said the Greeks. Inevitabilitymay make tragedy. We were to pick up the threads of old tales of love and tragedy along the valley of the Kiso, but in the life of that strange, fearless, beautiful Eurasian girl was the web and woof of a yet uncompleted story. When we at last passed our bundles out of the window at Agematsu she had not stirred.
We had been carried out of the plains and night was coming down. Hori voiced an inquiry about our landing spot. It was indeed high time to be located some place for dinner and the night. Our indifference to particularization about our landing had begun to harass him. In Kobe and Nagoya when our surpassing indefiniteness had come out he had nodded and said, “yes,” evidently putting his faith in the belief that there would surely be an eventual limit to such casualness. I was slow to realize his worry but when I did some primitive idea of justice told me that his breaking into the inefficiency of our methods ought to be more gentle and gradual. I whispered this intuition to O-Owre-san and thus, when the train halted at the next platform, out went our luggage and we were left standing to watch the fiery cloud of cinders disappear into the blue-grey mist.
It had grown cold. The rain was curiouslylike snow, drifting through the air, seemingly without weight. There was the beginning of a path up a slippery clay hill, the upper reaches of which were lost in fog and darkness. Even the short distances of vision, which until then had endured, succumbed before we had scrambled up the hill. We made a careful reconnaissance with hands and feet and found that the mountain path at the top branched in several directions. The town might lie in any direction. For more meditative cogitation Hori carefully lowered the bicycle to its side but unfortunately there was no ground beneath and off it slid. We heard it painfully scraping down the rocks. In Alpine fashion we had to go after it. We crawled back again to stand in a circle on the road, drenched and mud covered.
Dinner, bed, and bath might be within a hundred yards but to take the wrong path might mean to wander until sunrise. At least so we thought. Such a variety of adventure is much more interesting in retrospect than prospect. However, it was worse to stand still. We started on an exploration, craftily putting the bicycle next to the precipice. On peaceful days the gears often meshed in moderate quietness but at any time when its companions failed in omnipotentjudgment they would grind out a wailing reiteration of: “I told you so. I told you so.” We were shuffling along to the measure of that lamentation when suddenly there was a sparkle of light ahead. It was from a lantern. The bearer was a peasant bundled up in a rush grass cape. He lifted the light into our faces and then gave a single sharp cry of fear. Next he shut his eyes tightly and was speechless.
A well-balanced consideration for the rights of one’s brothers is intended for normal times. Now that a guide had offered himself to us out of the darkness we purposed to keep him, although for a few minutes he seemed a rather useless discovery. Hori managed at length to pry the man’s eyes open with wet fingers and, then with fair words sought to persuade him that if we were not ghosts we obviously needed his help, but that if we were, then any sense left in him should tell him that it would be far better to listen to our request to guide us to an inn and to leave us there than to risk our trailing him to his own home. He grasped Hori’s point. We followed after our guide and, as we had suspected, the distance to the village was only a few steps. At the threshold of the inn our guide bolted. If he had been cherishing a grudge heshould have waited to see our reception. It was not pleasing to us.
Hori advanced into the courtyard to engage in Homeric debate. The fog sweeping in struggled with the lights of the lanterns and candles. The picture was a theatrical composition. There were the three rain-soaked, laden intruders facing the maid-servants. The maids’kimonosleeves were pinned back to their shoulders and their skirts were gathered up through their girdles. Their faces and limbs gleamed in the coppery light. The door to the steaming kitchen opened on to the courtyard and within its shadows the pots and kettles hanging on the walls caught the glowing flame of the charcoal. I suppose there was not a more honest inn in all the land but the wild, picaresque picture suggested an imagining by Don Quixote painted by Rembrandt or Hogarth or Goya. It was a point of immediate reality, however, which concerned us, and that point was that we were so far in the inn but no farther, and no farther did we get.
They gave a reason. They said that the inn was full. It seemed so ridiculous to have had such trouble in finding an inn and then to lose it that O-Owre-san and I began laughing. We laughed inordinately, but our barbarous merrimentbrought our listeners no nearer to changing their conviction that the inn was full. There was another inn farther down the street, they said, and we borrowed a lantern and a coolie from them and started. The coolie ran ahead and when we arrived at the second inn the mistress and all her maid-servants were at the door. From the length of Hori’s argument I became suspicious that we again were not considered desirable, but after a time he turned and said: “It’s all right.”
As soon as we were in our room, hurriedly getting ready for the bath, I tried to find out from Hori what the long debate was about, but English is evidently much more laconic than Japanese. He summed it all up by saying that they feared the inn was unworthy of foreigners. Admirablebushido! What inn in the wide world could have been worthy of such bedraggled wanderers? However, once we were allowed within the walls and recognized as guests the spirit of hospitality welled solicitously.
Listen, O dogmatists! The joy of the finding is not always less than the joy of the pursuit. If there are doubters let them seek the Nakescendo trail and find the second inn of Agematsu, there to learn that no dinner that they have everimagined can equal the realization they will discover inside the lacquer bowls and porcelain dishes which will be brought to them.
The maid who had been assigned to administer to our comfort accepted her duty as a trust. She was unbelievably short, but was very sturdy. Her broad face and the strength of her round, unshaped limbs proclaimed the hardy bloom of the peasantry. The physical, mental, and emotional unity which comes as the heritage of such unmixed rustic blood is in itself a prepossessing charm. Our daughter of Mother Earth was as maternal as she was diminutive. She might think of a thousand services, her bare feet might start of an instant across the mats to respond to any requests, but never did she surrender one iota of her instinctive belief that we, merely being men, were only luxurious accessories for the world to possess. She was so primordially feminine that she inspired a terrifying thought of the possibility of society being sometime modelled after the queendom of the bees.
She had never seen a foreigner but she had heard much gossip of our strange customs. Her inquiring mind was intent upon verifying this gossip as far as possible. She was also very curious about our possessions. She taught us howto hold our chopsticks and how to drink our soup. She told us that we drank too silently. A little more noise from our lips, she said, would show that we were appreciating the flavour. She did acknowledge in us some aptitude to learn, implying that if a more advanced state of culture had existed in the feminine family group of our homes over the seas we might have been mothered into some respectability. So saying, she arose sturdily to her full height and bore away the dinner tables. Then she returned to make the beds, struggling with the mattresses as might an ant dragging oak leaves.
When the beds were finally laid she brought a fresh brewing of tea and replenished the charcoal in thehibachi. She lighted our after dinner cigarettes for us by pressing them against the embers. She sat waiting until we had dropped the last stub into the ashes. Then guardian midget rolled back the quilts, ordered us to bed, tucked us in carefully, giving to each impartially a good-night pat. Her day’s work finished, assuredly her efforts entitled her to a quiet enjoyment of one of the cigarettes! She sat down on the foot of my bed and deeply drawing in the smoke, blew it into the air with a sigh of contentment.
“I have been told,” she said, “that foreigners marry for love. Can that be true?”
We assured her that that custom existed.
“Um-m-m,” she pondered. Our examination was evidently of import. She took another step in questioning.
“But if you married for love how can you be happy to travel so far away from your wives?”
She gasped at our claim of non-possession.
We made a second insistence regarding our unsocial state. She did not put aside her good nature but she berated us roundly for our unkindness, our lack of taste, in thinking that we could joke in such a way just because she was a peasant girl in a country inn, but when we further insisted upon repeating our tale she was really hurt. There is a time, she said, for joking to come to an end. If it were always thus our custom to insist upon a joke long after it had been laughed at and appreciated, then she did not believe that she had excessive pity for our wives and children in their being left behind while we wandered.
She then dismissed us from her questioning and appealed exclusively to Hori. She could understand that if we had been forced to marry by parental social regulation and had been unitedto wives whom we did not and could not love, perhaps it would be quite within reason that we should wish to have vacations in singleness, but to have had the privilege of marrying for love and then to be wandering alone—oh, it was un-understandable.
“Well,” said Hori mysteriously, “I think that what they have said is the truth but it may not be all the truth. In their country certain desperately wicked criminals are not allowed the privilege of marrying.”
There is a glamour which hangs over the notoriously wicked. The maid’s glances were now modified by appropriate awe into distinct respect. She got up, and endeavouring for dignity built a tower out of the scattered cushions. She climbed upon this shaky height and turned out the light. Then she hurried away to the backstairs regions with her tale.
In the morning it was raining. When we got up we could hear no sounds below and when we went to the bath there were no maids to fill the brass basins. Hori wandered off to the kitchen to find hot water and we did not see him again until after our maid, very heavy-eyed, had brought the breakfast tables to our room. He came as the bearer of two items of information which hehad gleaned from the mistress. The first was that there had been a council sitting on our morals, presided over by our maid, which had lasted through the hours of the night. The second item was the truthful reason why we had been turned away from the first inn and the confirmation of our suspicions that we had gained admittance where we were only by an extremely narrow margin.
Once upon a time two foreigners had passed through Agematsu and had been received as guests in one of the inns. That advent had been so many years before that a new generation of mistresses and maids had succeeded the victims of the marvellous invasion, but the legend of that night of terror had been handed down undimmed. “And what do you think was their unspeakable atrocity?” Hori asked dramatically. “They made snowballs from the rice of the rice box at dinner and threw them at each other and at the maids!”
From time to time, through the mountains, we heard again the legend of those two remarkableseiyo-jins. We grew to have an admiration for knaves so lusty in their revels that they could leave behind such a never fading flower of memory. They must have gone forth to their travels minutely familiar with the code of Japaneseetiquette, so thoroughly were they skilled in fracturing it. A riot might have been forgiven, and forgotten, but not the throwing of rice on the floor. The one constant forbidding under which a child is brought up finally leaves no process of thought in the brain that anyone could ever intentionally offend against the cleanness of the matting. It is less agaucherieto set fire to a friend’s house and burn it to the ground than to spill a bowl of soup.
We waited for the rain to clear away, but as it did not we borrowed huge paper umbrellas and wandered off down the valley. We were in the midst of a silk spinning district and in almost every doorway sat some woman of the household busily capturing the silken threads from the cocoons. We asked permission to rest in the door of a carpenter’s shop which overhung the rocky Kiso and was shaded by the tops of great pines which grew from the sides of the valley bed. The carpenter brought us tea and stopped for a moment to point the view through the trees which had been the companion of his life.
Sometimes poverty seems to be an absolute and unarguable condition; at other times one’s ideas as to the what and when of poverty are so shifting as merely to be interrogations. Therewas the poverty in that valley of the struggle for some slight margin above dire want; the silk workers were speeding their machines for their pittance; the carpenter was busy through every hour of daylight. Economics and efficiency are everyday words but what is their ultimate meaning not in dollars but in life? What are the real wishes of the leaders in Tokyo, the statesmen who are planning policies and at the same time must strive to please the great banking houses of the world?—do they look forward to the time when factories will fill the land and the spinners will not be sitting in their own doorways but the children of to-day’s workers will be standing in long rows before machines? “We are taught,” explained a Japanese, “to pay our heavy taxes cheerfully so that the empire may expand and develop. Wealth will be thus created and then taxes can be reduced.”
Hori had remembrance of a traveller’s tale which he had heard long before of an ancient tea-house along the Kiso famous both for its noodle soup and its view of the spot locally believed to have been the awakening place of Urashima when he returned from the Island of the Dragon King. Considering that the story explicitly states that Urashima awoke on the seashore,the faith of the inland believers is really more marvellously imaginative than the story itself. The trudging coolies whom we stopped had never heard of the tea-house. Therefore we knocked at the first gate we came to in the bamboo wall along the road to find that our footsteps had magically led us to the famed spot itself. We left our muddy boots at the door and a maid showed us the way to the balcony of the room of honour from which we could see the tumbling river. The view is called “The Awakening.” An islet emerges from the foam of the waters and its rocks have been made to serve as a miniature temple garden. There is another view farther down the bank, from which the dwarfed pines and stone lanterns of the island may be seen to better advantage. Cicerones lie in wait there for the sightseer. In delightful contrast to the urgings generally experienced from the tribe, these guides were quite shy in the presence of foreigners.
The daughter of the house, in akimonoof silk and brocade, herself brought the tray of tea andsakeand a pyramid dish of noodles. The porcelain was old and of tempting beauty. The tea was fragrant. Hori insisted that we should extemporize poetry to express our appreciation of thebeauty of the Kiso, but O-Owre-san and I were rather self-conscious in our rhymes. We had been nurtured in a land of specialization where poetry is entrusted to professionals. The sun came out. We paid our reckoning, folded up our paper umbrellas, and walked back to our inn for a long night’s sleep.