Part 10

The view from the temple itself was superb. One stood on a level with the topmost branches of the giant trees, and looking through them saw all round stretch after stretch of green valleys, and crest after crest of darkly wooded hills. The trunks of the trees near by were covered with epiphytes and creepers, and in the valleys grew ferns and violets.

In a little tea-house I made myself some cocoa in my saucepan, and the people wanted to taste it, and seemed highly amused with me, particularly with my folding knife and spoon, and the metal cup that fitted on so neatly. Thus fortified I retraced my steps to Chōnan, and towards Mobara. I expected to find an inn on the way, but none appeared, and I had to walk right back to Mobara. Then troubles began, and after walking these 27 miles I was tossed from inn to inn, no room anywhere! Not that there were so many inns, for it is a small town, and at last, in despair, I decided to go to the station and take a train to Chiba, the provincial capital, where there would surely be room, but I was tired and hungry, and had two hours to wait for the train. In Japanese inns it is very different from ours; if you have no room you cannot get a meal, as there is no such thing as a dining-room.

However, I found a charming little tea-house, where I got a rest and a meal, and they arranged with a hotel by the station to put me up, or shall I say “take me in”? for certainly I would not have gone to the place under other conditions.

=April 8.=--Came back by the 8.15 train and reached Tokio early in the afternoon. After calling on Miss B---- I went to the P----s to dinner and to make the finishing touches to the arrangements about my removal, which is planned for two days hence. The blow that awaited me should not have been unexpected in this land, where no one seems to consider a promise more binding than a compliment is true. Well! though I had taken it before I went to Boshu on certain understandings, I found my house _sold_ to some one else when I returned! As I had arranged with my present people to leave directly on my return from Boshu, I was not a little vexed, particularly as the house suited me so perfectly in every way.

The new owner was willing to let it at a rent of 40% higher than I had taken it for, and he further refused to do any of the necessary papering and plastering that I had had guaranteed me, so that instead of ordering the removal carts, I have to sit down and argue with the landlord, and it may take three weeks to settle. I really grieve that it is so utterly impossible to trust the Japanese; I had loved them so before I had suffered so much of this sort of thing.

=April 9.=--The cherry flowers yesterday were like great clouds touched rosy by the setting sun, and to-morrow is the garden party of Professor _S----’s_ ambitions, and to-day! nearly a foot of snow on my window ledge--everything buried and broken, as none have seen them before. There is more snow to-day than there was through all the winter put together, and the pink cherry flowers are cloaked so as to conceal their very existence; they do not lend the snow even a flush of pink.

There was no way of getting to the Botanical Institute but by walking, and I am very glad indeed that I did choose to venture out, instead of listening to the counsels of the Japanese and remaining at home. The streets were almost deserted, and I trod unspoiled snow, which sometimes reached half-way to my knees. It still snowed heavily, and the weight of the umbrella became a burden, as well as being a useless encumbrance, as I was always putting it to one side or the other to gaze at some new delight, while the gusts whirled in and under it from every side. Devastation and ruin lay on every side; great boughs were blown off the cherry trees and lay across the road. The magnolias which yesterday sent up glittering white chalices to heaven, to-day hung limp yellow rags beneath the snow-laden boughs; even the glow of the flaring crimson plum was quenched. In front of a temple I daily pass, a great cryptomeria was shattered across the road, its main shaft broken into three pieces, so that the whole tree shut down like a concertina.

Every telegraph and telephone wire was broken, the ends lying like traps curled under the snow ready for one’s legs, and the rest looped from pole to pole in festoons of white rope, for the snow stuck to the wires till they were as thick as my arm. On the tram lines a few snowed-up and deserted trams stood helpless, and not even a _kuruma_ passed to jeer at them.

It continued snowing all day, and as the roads were so unspeakably and unusually bad, I decided to go calling and see the town thoroughly when I was about it. So I walked to the Embassy, about 2½ miles or so, and saw the streets, one after the other, in the same condition of ruin. The traffic was still almost _nil_, but some people had been up and down the big main street by the Kudan, and a certain amount of snow had melted. That Kudan hill was a bog on the surface and a river below, and as there were no footpaths, I was through it nearly to my knees. After paying several calls in the neighbourhood, I decided to go and see what Azabu looked like, and walked over there; the P----s would not let me away again, the roads were too terrible, and so I stopped the night there.

Obviously the garden party is postponed.

=April 10.=--The snow is still lying thickly everywhere, but on the road the foot tracks are nearly knee-deep in slush. The papers are full of accounts of yesterday’s storm. It appears that all the railways, as well as trams and telegraphs, were cut off. There was no possibility of getting to Yokohama even, and the Kobe express was snowed up for the day 10 miles from Tokio. A few trams are running this morning--they are repairing wires as quickly as possible. By the end of the day nearly all the cars were in working order; I think they have been quite remarkably quick over them, but the telegraph wires are still hanging in festoons or tripping one up.

It is quite a good thing the snow put the party off, for it is the funeral day of the young Prince Arusigawa, and also we were not nearly ready with the cutting-machine--the automatic carborundum apparatus is still far from complete.

=April 11.=--I removed from Yakuojimaimachi to my own little house. After there was the bother of them having sold it while I was away, there was so much talk and bother about rent, cleaning, papering, and everything, that I got cross and said I would move on the 11th, as I originally said I would, and when I was in the house I would discuss all these points! That soon settled matters; my goods were put on two man-carts with great care by the entire family, and plants and all were safely brought to my little Azabu house. I began to pack this morning at 8.30, and was ready for the carts at 10.30! That is the outcome of the Japanese _feruské_ (a square ornamental cloth in which goods are tied), it is so easy to tie up quilts, cushions, and looking-glasses all together in one huge coloured pocket-handkerchief. The placing of my few goods on the little carts took till 12.30, but they were in Azabu, unpacked and paid, by 2.30. Some things are cheap in Japan. Fortunately it was a lovely bright day, so nothing got wet.

I found the house being cleaned by my bright little maid, whose name is O Fuji-san, and who seems to like to have me for a mistress and to live next to the P----s, whose cook is her great friend, and trained her. She is rather a better-class girl than most servants, and was early left an orphan, and her guardian is glad for her to be with people who will look after her. She is quite pretty, and unusually bright and intelligent-looking. I expect it will seem to you a preposterous thing to do, to take a house and go in for “furnishing” and all the worries and expense of a household. But in Japan it is very different from in England--the houses need practically no furniture, the huge cupboards in every room hold all one’s goods, and so wardrobes, etc. etc. are superfluous (and, besides, they utterly ruin the look of a Japanese room), while the soft _tatami_ (special thick mats in every house) serve as carpets, bedstead, and mattress, and all one needs is a thick quilt to lie on, another to cover one, with a couple of sheets and a pillow. I have the few chairs and the table and cabinet I had for the last house, and with a lovely brilliant blue cloisonné vase on an ebony stand, a dwarf pine tree, and a bunch of white cherry flowers in the tokonomo, my room looks an aesthetic dream, with its cream walls, cream floors, and wooden trellis-work with white paper windows. If I could but carry it as it is to London! Yet here people prefer Brussels carpets and rooms packed with knick-knacks. They are living in the realisation of the dream of our aesthetes and “simple livers,” and they prefer the things we are trying to escape. I speak of the foreigners, but even the richer Japanese are casting aside the exquisite refinement, the studied and cultured beauty of simplicity, to add a mêlée of “foreign” additions and “luxuries” to their rooms. The soothing harmonies of form and tone are broken, and there is a strife of shrieking colour, of glaring inharmonies.

=April 12.=--I gave my little maid _carte blanche_ to buy the _essentials_ for her kitchen. One stove, costing 5s., I had already arranged for, the rest she had to buy. At the end of the day she came with all the items written down in a bill 3 yards long. I went in fear and trembling to inspect it and the purchases, and was greatly relieved to find the sum total _under ten shillings_. Many of the items were deliciously amusing; for instance, 1 sen 5 rin (a sum equal to a farthing plus half a farthing) attracted my attention. It was a fan to fan the charcoal when it refused to burn. For one farthing she got a splendid lamp cleaner, for 8d. a lamp with white glass shade, while ¾d. more provided the chain to hang it up by. The second stove cost 5½d. and burns splendidly; it is made of red earthenware, and has a little door that opens and shuts. These items will make you think that I am either making game of you or of myself, but seriously, I set no limit to the girl’s purchases, and she has got the usual things an unsophisticated Japanese uses in her kitchen. Of course, I have a few things, and bought some expensive items like enamel saucepans and frying-pans--but I think this little house has not cost me £3 to fit up, and, as I said before, to fit up comfortably, and with a distinct beauty. I only hope the housekeeping will run as smoothly as it promises to do, and the house prove as convenient to live in as it is pretty to look at.

=April 13.=--The way that maid manages a four-course dinner, with three saucepans and half a dozen bits of charcoal in the fivepenny stove, is nothing short of miraculous--everything was very well cooked too. I wasted about an hour over the house this morning, but got off to the Institute after that. It is rather farther to go now, and takes some time even with the tram, but one can’t get everything one wants, and were I near the Institute, I should be so far from all the foreigners as to be quite isolated, and that, I find, in this climate, is not very healthy.

=April 14.=--The cherry trees are now wonderfully beautiful; contrary to the croakings of the pessimists, the snow has not ruined them, and the trees are covered with bloom. They say they are bleached, and certainly the pink is so delicate as to be entirely elusive when one looks at an individual bloom. I went to the renowned Oyeno Park, where groves of trees are laden with bloom. It was a little late, and some of the petals were falling, so that there seemed to be a whirling snowstorm of flakes that gleamed pearly white in the sunshine. The ground was covered, and all the pools of water left by the recent snows were thickly fringed with white. Tokio is everywhere a fairy-land of beauty, for cherry trees by the hundred are blooming in it. One has the impression of being in the midst of clouds that float between the branches of the pine trees, and rest over grey roofed cottages. The strip of soil in front of the Embassy is covered with a treble avenue of flowering trees, and the paths are petal-strewn between the brilliant green grass patches. The difference in the grass in the last two weeks is very noticeable--from a brown patchy covering over bare earth it has become a thick emerald cloak.

=April 15.=--My little maid’s guardian came to see me and to thank me for taking care of her. As a matter of fact it is she who is taking care of me; I couldn’t have imagined a house run more smoothly. The guardian is a nice man, good-looking, though middle-aged, and able to speak German, so we got on all right. He brought me some pots of pretty flowers, and some pansies with scent which are treasures, as the lovely pansies here are scentless. It is a very curious point, how well English flowers grow here, getting lovely large blooms, but one and all losing their scent. It makes one quite sad when great luscious roses, pansies, and even mignonette, are scentless--they seem to have lost their souls.

=April 19.=--I spent the morning gardening; in my little garden nothing much is growing yet, the last people were very careless. I have dug and planted, the chief thing I planted being stones. I have learnt their value in a garden, and I also go out with a watering-can and water my poor little stones. Alas, all the really beautiful ones were too expensive to buy. I went in to lunch with the P----s, because they were having ice-cream, and afterwards went to tea with old Mr. G---- (father of the Mr. G---- I mentioned at the Takashima coal mines, near Nagasaki). His house is surrounded by an extremely lovely garden, with masses of flowers, and a view right across to Fujis. While we were standing on the lawn a lady visitor turned down her glove and rubbed some bites on her arm. Mr. G---- bent over her, and with an air of courteous solicitude, said, “That is not one of my fleas, I hope.” No one seemed to think the remark in any way curious till I said I wished I had a snapshot of that to send to _Punch_.

=April 22.=--Cutting fossils till 3.30, and then I went to Professor _M----_, and then on to the _S----s_ to pay my party call. Professor _S----_ was out, but Mrs. _S----_ at home, and as nice and talkative as could be expected in Japanese, when the concrete bounds the realm of my speech. When I got home I found Professor _S----_ had just been to see me! and we had each travelled 6 miles to visit each other, and crossed. I was very sorry. He had brought some butter, made by the agricultural students, hoping I should like it. I had once mentioned how difficult it was to get butter fit to eat in Tokio.

To-day I saw the first bewitchingly pretty child I have seen in this country--with great round black eyes, with a look of heaven in them. She was dressed in a scarlet flowered kimono that showed the outlines of her little limbs, and her hair was tied with scarlet ribbon in a little tuft at either side. She was dancing along with a parasol held high over her head, but she would not even smile at me, and I would gladly have taken her in my arms and kissed her, she looked so perfectly in tune with the dancing cherry clusters and the blue heavens.

=April 23.=--I feel that I can never go into a tram again. The horror of my last ride! A leper came and sat down beside me, almost on top of me, and the cars are so crowded I could not get away. He was not in the worst stages, of course, but some of his finger-tips were eaten away and one eye was blinded--there is none of the “white as snow” business about lepers, it is an eating away of the digits, and finally the limbs. I was only near him for five minutes, till the first stopping-place--but----. I have said before, I think, that the Japanese don’t think it really contagious; there was perhaps not the least danger, but we are accustomed to think mere contact with a leper fatal.

The single cherries are now over, and the long double ones beginning. They are rose pink and really as big as small rambler roses, each head hanging down on its long stalk. The rich clusters on the branches are quite unimaginably beautiful; could one suppose the kisses of tiny children materialised and hung by fairies against the blue sky, one might well believe the cherry flowers to be the kisses of all the golden-haired pink-cheeked babies.

=April 24.=--Friday again--how fast and furious fly the weeks, and there are only four in a month, four and a few days ōmaki. When they give you a one-sen present after a five-dollar purchase, they call it ōmaki here, and many a sen have I received that way. I wish Nature would give me a few years ōmaki here and now, I want to stay here longer. I went to lunch at the Faculty, the first of the term. Professor _S----_ very nice; afterwards I went to inquire how Professor _F----_ was, but he was too ill to see me.

=April 25.=--Saturday. Fossil-cutting all morning. The double cherries are now beginning and are showing masses of colour between the trees of single cherry, which are quite green. Pansies are everywhere in the little shops, and so are gold-fish. Many small shops have suddenly added glass globes of gold-fish to their wares; the white glass sparkles in the sun, and the fish are very bright and pretty. They are very clever at grafting gold-fish. One may get them with two or more tails so neatly grafted on that the creatures live very happily, and look quite as though they had been born so, and were rather proud of it than otherwise.

=April 26.=--A very beautiful sunny day. I dried my hair in my little garden--it will break my heart to leave this house and garden, there is no doubt about it. It isn’t more than 20 yards square, but it is full of features--two ponds, a river, stepping-stones, woodland glades, pansy beds, and tiny grass plots. As I sit in it and look over the roof of my tiny house I see the blue sky through a group of tall cryptomerias, with a tall silver ash stem, a maple and chestnut clothed in vivid green to throw up their blackness in strong relief. I picked the dead flowers off the blooming plants, and then set out with sandwiches and some writing to the woods, which I was optimistic enough to expect to find in Tokio! And I found them! Within half an hour of my house I came upon a sudden steep track off the high road, and followed it into a wood on a hill, where I lay all day, with a vast panorama of green valleys below my feet, violets and wild wistaria around me, and pine trees over my head, and no human being near me all the time. Thank God for the quiet woods. It is the best source of strength and comfort I know, to lie on a hill alone all day.

This little wood is the first quite solitary comfortable place I have found in Tokio’s immediate neighbourhood--one could hardly have expected to get so sweet a place so near a big city. But I trust to my feet to lead me to woods wherever I am, even in London’s suburbs, and they generally do.

=April 27.=--A quiet day at work at the University; some new delight in the way of flowers appears every day and charms me. I put a new plant into my garden most evenings.

=April 28.=--After this week of glorious weather that to-day should be wet--cruel! _The_ day when the Emperor and Empress had invited me (as well as a few hundred other people!) to the Imperial garden party. All the morning it literally streamed with rain, but I hoped against hope, uselessly, of course, for the early morning decides whether the Emperor will be there or not. However, about half-past one my hope was rewarded, for the rain stopped, though it was not bright, and that meant we would be allowed to see the gardens, which, of course, is a thing in itself well worth doing. So I decided to set off, not, of course, in my best bib and tucker, and Mrs. P---- went with me, a little against her will. The others would not come, though J---- had bought a new frock and a four-guinea hat for the occasion, which is _the_ event of the summer season. Right glad I was that I went--the gardens were lovely, and there were a lot of people in semi-garden-party state. We ate the chicken and ice-cream, fruit and champagne intended for the whole party, and had really a much more enjoyable, if less distinguished, time than if the official party had taken place and the Emperor been present. A number of the diplomats were there.

By far the most striking individual was an Indian prince, in a glorious pale-blue and gold uniform, with turban and a delicious gold pompon. He was extremely tall and thin, and held himself erect as a young pine.

The cherry petals were falling, and whitened the pines and floated on the lake in wind-blown drifts. The wistarias were covered with buds just clouded with a purple haze, and every one of the many pines and other gymnosperms gleamed brilliant green among trees, the young shoots’ vividness giving an effect of bloom, where the maple leaves were crimson. The maple, which has crimson leaves in spring, does not get the brilliant colouring in the autumn, like the other species, but is equally highly prized for its spring beauty. The garden slopes down to the sea, which runs along one wall of stone, and in the trees were hundreds of sea-gulls. The benevolent despot has fenced off a part of the garden; here no one is allowed to enter, and here the wild-birds nest--the sea-gulls building and rearing their young on branches of trees covered with luxuriant epiphytes! Some of the trees are very old, and in one I found a big tufted bamboo growing as an epiphyte in the ancient stem of a flowering cherry tree. Something disturbed the nesting birds--was it the smell of champagne and cigars in the neighbourhood, or the clanking of spurs and swords?--and they rose in hundreds and wheeled in the sky, such a flight of them I have never seen. Some were pure white and gleamed like cherry petals in the grey sky, but most were grey, like the drifting clouds.

=April 29.=--A quiet day’s work, the weather was bright, lovely, out of sheer perversity. My maid gave me some fritters for dinner, of a kind I had not ordered, and when I asked her what they were, she said _hassu_, that is, the lotus. The sacred flower makes delicious fritters! I daresay if one could capture the rosy-tinted evening clouds they would make good ice-cream.

=May 2.=--I went to Professor _Fw----’s_: he was kindly taking me as his guest to an afternoon luncheon-party at the Admiralty gardens. At his house I met an interesting Japanese who spoke excellent English, and who is said to be one of the greatest Japanese musicians. He invented an organ of some sort, and has had a special audience with the Kaiser Wilhelm. We drove to the Admiralty, passing safely the fierce bayoneted sentries, and across a yard hideous with brick buildings and smoky chimneys--through a gate in a high wall, and were--in a deep forest glade, under shade of palm trees and ferns, back in time three hundred years! The gardens were those of a very famous Daimio, and were laid out with the greatest care and at a boundless expense. In them are all the stages of the Tokkaido,--scenes from China, wild mountain views and iris gardens, falls of water and lakes. In fact a series of scenes of wonderful beauty, of peace and suggestion, of dreamland poetry--only the tallest of the cryptomerias and pines were standing as dead skeletons, killed by the smoky chimneys on the other side of the boundary wall. These great gardens are entirely closed, and it is very difficult even to get permission to see them, the authorities of the Admiralty are so afraid of spies.