All Along The Sea Face Is
An Inspiring Smell Of The Finest New-Mown Hay, And Canals Are Full Of
Boats Loaded Up With The Boxes Jostling Down To The Harbour.
At the club
men say rude things about the arrivals of the mail.
There never was a
post-office yet that did not rejoice in knocking a man's Sabbath into
flinders. A fair office day's work may begin at eight and end at six,
or, if the mail comes in, at midnight. There is no overtime or
eight-hours' baby-talk in tea. Yonder are the ships; here is the stuff,
and behind all is the American market. The rest is your own affair.
The narrow streets are blocked with the wains bringing down, in boxes of
every shape and size, the up-country rough leaf. Some one must take
delivery of these things, find room for them in the packed warehouse,
and sample them before they are blended and go to the firing.
More than half the elaborate processes are 'lost work' so far as the
quality of the stuff goes; but the markets insist on a good-looking
leaf, with polish, face and curl to it, and in this, as in other
businesses, the call of the markets is the law. The factory floors are
made slippery with the tread of bare-footed coolies, who shout as the
tea whirls through its transformations. The over-note to the clamour - an
uncanny thing too - is the soft rustle-down of the tea itself - stacked in
heaps, carried in baskets, dumped through chutes, rising and falling in
the long troughs where it is polished, and disappearing at last into the
heart of the firing-machine - always this insistent whisper of moving
dead leaves. Steam-sieves sift it into grades, with jarrings and
thumpings that make the floor quiver, and the thunder of steam-gear is
always at its heels; but it continues to mutter unabashed till it is
riddled down into the big, foil-lined boxes and lies at peace.
A few days ago the industry suffered a check which, lasting not more
than two minutes, lost several hundred pounds of hand-fired tea. It was
something after this way. Into the stillness of a hot, stuffy morning
came an unpleasant noise as of batteries of artillery charging up all
the roads together, and at least one bewildered sleeper waking saw his
empty boots where they 'sat and played toccatas stately at the
clavicord.' It was the washstand really but the effect was awful. Then a
clock fell and a wall cracked, and heavy hands caught the house by the
roof-pole and shook it furiously. To preserve an equal mind when things
are hard is good, but he who has not fumbled desperately at bolted
jalousies that will not open while a whole room is being tossed in a
blanket does not know how hard it is to find any sort of mind at all.
The end of the terror was inadequate - a rush into the still, heavy
outside air, only to find the' servants in the garden giggling (the
Japanese would giggle through the Day of Judgment) and to learn that the
earthquake was over. Then came the news, swift borne from the business
quarters below the hill, that the coolies of certain factories had fled
shrieking at the first shock, and that all the tea in the pans was
burned to a crisp. That, certainly, was some consolation for undignified
panic; and there remained the hope that a few tall chimneys up the line
at Tokio would have collapsed. They stood firm, however, and the local
papers, used to this kind of thing, merely spoke of the shock as
'severe.' Earthquakes are demoralising; but they bring out all the
weaknesses of human nature. First is downright dread; the stage
of - 'only let me get into the open and I'll reform,' then the impulse to
send news of the most terrible shock of modern times flying east and
west among the cables. (Did not your own hair stand straight on end,
and, therefore, must not everybody else's have done likewise?) Last, as
fallen humanity picks itself together, comes the cry of the mean little
soul: 'What! Was that all? I wasn't frightened from the beginning.'
It is wholesome and tonic to realise the powerlessness of man in the
face of these little accidents. The heir of all the ages, the
annihilator of time and space, who politely doubts the existence of his
Maker, hears the roof-beams crack and strain above him, and scuttles
about like a rabbit in a stoppered warren. If the shock endures for
twenty minutes, the annihilator of time and space must camp out under
the blue and hunt for his dead among the rubbish. Given a violent
convulsion (only just such a slipping of strata as carelessly piled
volumes will accomplish in a book-case) and behold, the heir of all the
ages is stark, raving mad - a brute among the dishevelled hills. Set a
hundred of the world's greatest spirits, men of fixed principles, high
aims, resolute endeavour, enormous experience, and the modesty that
these attributes bring - set them to live through such a catastrophe as
that which wiped out Nagoya last October, and at the end of three days
there would remain few whose souls might be called their own.
So much for yesterday's shock. To-day there has come another; and a most
comprehensive affair it is. It has broken nothing, unless maybe an old
heart or two cracks later on; and the wise people in the settlement are
saying that they predicted it from the first. None the less as an
earthquake it deserves recording.
It was a very rainy afternoon; all the streets were full of gruelly mud,
and all the business men were at work in their offices when it began. A
knot of Chinamen were studying a closed door from whose further side
came a most unpleasant sound of bolting and locking up.
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