An English Man-Of-War Showed
Blue-White On Then Haze, So New Was The Daylight, And All The Water Lay
Out As Smooth As The Inside Of An Oyster Shell.
Two children in blue and
white, their tanned limbs pink in the fresh air, sculled a marvellous
boat of lemon-hued wood, and that was our fairy craft to the shore
across the stillness and the mother o' pearl levels.
There are ways and ways of entering Japan. The best is to descend upon
it from America and the Pacific - from the barbarians and the deep sea.
Coming from the East, the blaze of India and the insolent tropical
vegetation of Singapore dull the eye to half-colours and little tones.
It is at Bombay that the smell of All Asia boards the ship miles off
shore, and holds the passenger's nose till he is clear of Asia again.
That is a violent, and aggressive smell, apt to prejudice the stranger,
but kin none the less to the gentle and insinuating flavour that stole
across the light airs of the daybreak when the fairy boat went to
shore - a smell of very clean new wood; split bamboo, wood-smoke, damp
earth, and the things that people who are not white people eat - a
homelike and comforting smell. Then followed on shore the sound of an
Eastern tongue, that is beautiful or not as you happen to know it. The
Western races have many languages, but a crowd of Europeans heard
through closed doors talk with the Western pitch and cadence. So it is
with the East. A line of jinrickshaw coolies sat in the sun discoursing
to each other, and it was as though they were welcoming a return in
speech that the listener must know as well as English. They talked and
they talked, but the ghosts of familiar words would not grow any clearer
till presently the Smell came down the open streets again, saying that
this was the East where nothing matters, and trifles old as the Tower of
Babel mattered less than nothing, and that there were old acquaintances
waiting at every corner beyond the township. Great is the Smell of the
East! Railways, telegraphs, docks, and gunboats cannot banish it, and it
will endure till the railways are dead. He who has not smelt that smell
has never lived.
Three years ago Yokohama was sufficiently Europeanised in its shops to
suit the worst and wickedest taste. To-day it is still worse if you keep
to the town limits. Ten steps beyond into the fields all the
civilisation stops exactly as it does in another land a few thousand
miles further West. The globe-trotting, millionaires anxious to spend
money, with a hose on whatever caught their libertine fancies, had
explained to us aboard-ship that they came to Japan in haste, advised by
their guide-books to do so, lest the land should be suddenly civilised
between steamer-sailing and steamer-sailing. When they touched land they
ran away to the curio shops to buy things which are prepared for
them - mauve and magenta and blue-vitriol things. By this time they have
a 'Murray' under one arm and an electric-blue eagle with a copperas beak
and a yellow 'E pluribus unum' embroidered on apple-green silk, under
the other.
We, being wise, sit in a garden that is not ours, but belongs to a
gentleman in slate-coloured silk, who, solely for the sake of the
picture, condescends to work as a gardener, in which employ he is
sweeping delicately a welt of fallen cherry blossoms from under an
azalea aching to burst into bloom. Steep stone steps, of the colour that
nature ripens through long winters, lead up to this garden by way of
clumps of bamboo grass. You see the Smell was right when it talked of
meeting old friends. Half-a-dozen blue-black pines are standing akimbo
against a real sky - not a fog-blur nor a cloud-bank, nor a gray
dish-clout wrapped round the sun - but a blue sky. A cherry tree on a
slope below them throws up a wave of blossom that breaks all creamy
white against their feet, and a clump of willows trail their palest
green shoots in front of all. The sun sends for an ambassador through
the azalea bushes a lordly swallow-tailed butterfly, and his squire
very like the flitting 'chalk-blue' of the English downs. The warmth of
the East, that goes through, not over, the lazy body, is added to the
light of the East - the splendid lavish light that clears but does not
bewilder the eye. Then the new leaves of the spring wink like fat
emeralds and the loaded branches of cherry-bloom grow transparent and
glow as a hand glows held up against flame. Little, warm sighs come up
from the moist, warm earth, and the fallen petals stir on the ground,
turn over, and go to sleep again. Outside, beyond the foliage, where the
sunlight lies on the slate-coloured roofs, the ridged rice-fields beyond
the roofs, and the hills beyond the rice-fields, is all Japan - only all
Japan; and this that they call the old French Legation is the Garden of
Eden that most naturally dropped down here after the Fall. For some
small hint of the beauties to be shown later there is the roof of a
temple, ridged and fluted with dark tiles, flung out casually beyond the
corner of the bluff on which the garden stands. Any other curve of the
eaves would not have consorted with the sweep of the pine branches;
therefore, this curve was made, and being made, was perfect. The
congregation of the globe-trotters are in the hotel, scuffling for
guides, in order that they may be shown the sights of Japan, which is
all one sight. They must go to Tokio, they must go to Nikko; they must
surely see all that is to be seen and then write home to their barbarian
families that they are getting used to the sight of bare, brown legs.
Before this day is ended, they will all, thank goodness, have splitting
headaches and burnt-out eyes.
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