The Father-Fisher
Has It By The Pink Hind Leg, And This Time It Is Tucked Away, All But
The Top-Knot, Out Of Sight Among Umber Nets And Sepia Cordage.
Being an
Oriental it makes no protest, and the boat scuds out to join the little
fleet in the offing.
Then two sailors of a man-of-war come along the sea face, lean over the
canal below the garden, spit, and roll away. The sailor in port is the
only superior man. To him all matters rare and curious are either 'them
things' or 'them other things.' He does not hurry himself, he does not
seek Adjectives other than those which custom puts into his mouth for
all occasions; but the beauty of life penetrates his being insensibly
till he gets drunk, falls foul of the local policeman, smites him into
the nearest canal, and disposes of the question of treaty revision with
a hiccup. All the same, Jack says that he has a grievance against the
policeman, who is paid a dollar for every strayed seaman he brings up to
the Consular Courts for overstaying his leave, and so forth. Jack says
that the little fellows deliberately hinder him from getting back to his
ship, and then with devilish art and craft of wrestling tricks - 'there
are about a hundred of 'em, and they can throw you with every qualified
one' - carry him to justice. Now when Jack is softened with drink he does
not tell lies. This is his grievance, and he says that them blanketed
consuls ought to know. 'They plays into each other's hands, and stops
you at the Hatoba' - the policemen do. The visitor who is neither a
seaman nor drunk, cannot swear to the truth of this, or indeed anything
else. He moves not only among fascinating scenes and a lovely people
but, as he is sure to find out before he has been a day ashore, between
stormy questions. Three years ago there were no questions that were not
going to be settled off-hand in a blaze of paper lanterns. The
Constitution was new. It has a gray, pale cover with a chrysanthemum at
the back, and a Japanese told me then, 'Now we have Constitution same as
other countries, and so it is all right. Now we are quite civilised
because of Constitution.'
[A perfectly irrelevant story comes to mind here. Do you know that in
Madeira once they had a revolution which lasted just long enough for the
national poet to compose a national anthem, and then was put down? All
that is left of the revolt now is the song that you hear on the
twangling nachettes, the baby-banjoes, of a moonlight night under the
banana fronds at the back of Funchal. And the high-pitched nasal refrain
of it is 'Consti-tuci-oun!']
Since that auspicious date it seems that the questions have
impertinently come up, and the first and the last of them is that of
Treaty Revision.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 19 of 138
Words from 9396 to 9902
of 71314
