In
another world we shall see certain gentlemen set to tickle the backs of
Circe's swine through all eternity.
Also, they will have to tickle with
their bare hands.
The Japanese rooms, visited and set in order for the second time, hold
more pictures than could be described in a month; but most of them are
small and, excepting always the light, within human compass. One,
however, might be difficult. It was an unexpected gift, picked up in a
Tokio bye-street after dark. Half the town was out for a walk, and all
the people's clothes were indigo, and so were the shadows, and most of
the paper-lanterns were drops of blood red. By the light of smoking
oil-lamps people were selling flowers and shrubs - wicked little dwarf
pines, stunted peach and plum trees, wisteria bushes clipped and twisted
out of all likeness to wholesome plants, leaning and leering out of
green-glaze pots. In the flickering of the yellow flames, these forced
cripples and the yellow faces above them reeled to and fro fantastically
all together. As the light steadied they would return to the pretence of
being green things till a puff of the warm night wind among the flares
set the whole line off again in a crazy dance of dwergs, their shadows
capering on the house fronts behind them.
At a corner of a street, some rich men had got together and left
unguarded all the gold, diamonds, and rubies of the East; but when you
came near you saw that this treasure was only a gathering of goldfish in
glass globes - yellow, white, and red fish, with from three to five
forked tails apiece and eyes that bulged far beyond their heads. There
were wooden pans full of tiny ruby fish, and little children with nets
dabbled and shrieked in chase of some special beauty, and the frightened
fish kicked up showers of little pearls with their tails. The children
carried lanterns in the shape of small red paper fish bobbing at the end
of slivers of bamboo, and these drifted through the crowd like a strayed
constellation of baby stars. When the children stood at the edge of a
canal and called down to unseen friends in boats the pink lights were
all reflected orderly below. The light of the thousand small lights in
the street went straight up into the darkness among the interlacing
telegraph wires, and just at the edge of the shining haze, on a sort of
pigeon-trap, forty feet above ground, sat a Japanese fireman, wrapped up
in his cloak, keeping watch against fires. He looked unpleasantly like a
Bulgarian atrocity or a Burmese 'deviation from the laws of humanity,'
being very still and all huddled up in his roost. That was a superb
picture and it arranged itself to admiration. Now, disregarding these
things and others - wonders and miracles all - men are content to sit in
studios and, by light that is not light, to fake subjects from pots and
pans and rags and bricks that are called 'pieces of colour.' Their
collection of rubbish costs in the end quite as much as a ticket, a
first-class one, to new worlds where the 'props' are given away with the
sunshine. To do anything because it is, or may not be, new on the market
is wickedness that carries its own punishment; but surely there must be
things in this world paintable other and beyond those that lie between
the North Cape, say, and Algiers. For the sake of the pictures, putting
aside the dear delight of the gamble, it might be worth while to
venture out a little beyond the regular circle of subjects and - see what
happens. If a man can draw one thing, it has been said, he can draw
anything. At the most he can but fail, and there are several matters in
the world worse than failure. Betting on a certainty, for instance, or
playing with nicked cards is immoral, and secures expulsion from clubs.
Keeping deliberately to one set line of work because you know you can do
it and are certain to get money by so doing is, on the other hand,
counted a virtue, and secures admission to clubs. There must be a middle
way somewhere, as there must be somewhere an unmarried man with no
position, reputation, or other vanity to lose, who most keenly wants to
find out what his palette is set for in this life. He will pack his
steamer-trunk and get into the open to wrestle with effects that he can
never reproduce. All the same his will be a superb failure.
'CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS'
From Yokohama to Montreal is a long day's journey, and the forepart is
uninviting. In three voyages out of five, the North Pacific, too big to
lie altogether idle, too idle to get hands about the business of a
storm, sulks and smokes like a chimney; the passengers fresh from Japan
heat wither in the chill, and a clammy dew distils from the rigging.
That gray monotony of sea is not at all homelike, being as yet new and
not used to the procession of keels. It holds a very few pictures and
the best of its stories - those relating to seal-poaching among the
Kuriles and the Russian rookeries - are not exactly fit for publication.
There is a man in Yokohama who in a previous life burned galleons with
Drake. He is a gentleman adventurer of the largest and most
resourceful - by instinct a carver of kingdoms, a ruler of men on the
high seas, and an inveterate gambler against Death. Because he supplies
nothing more than sealskins to the wholesale dealers at home, the fame
of his deeds, his brilliant fights, his more brilliant escapes, and his
most brilliant strategy will be lost among sixty-ton schooners, or told
only in the mouths of drunken seamen whom none believe. Now there sits
a great spirit under the palm trees of the Navigator Group, a thousand
leagues to the south, and he, crowned with roses and laurels, strings
together the pearls of those parts.
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