Part 14

The boy children were naked, with smooth glowing copper limbs like sun-burned clay--as indeed they were. The girl children had usually some floating robe of a dressing-gown nature, open to show the whole body, or caught at the waist and turned down to leave the upper part free. Bright-eyed they were and muddy-cheeked, but neither pretty nor attractive. The women were naked to below the waist, the kimono being turned down over the girdle to form a kind of double skirt. No one wore any ornament of any kind, save a few coloured beads to tie their hair, but few of them had even that. The men wore 3 inches of cloth round their waists and sometimes a band round their heads made of a small Japanese towel. All were perfectly quiet, and the remarks were made one at a time by the older women; the children stood open-mouthed. I know that the blue of the sea-water makes one gleam like white ivory, and as all my clothes were white, I suppose the effect must have seemed novel to them. The deep colour of the Japanese is chiefly due to sunburn, but as they are exposed to it from their earliest days it gets so ingrained that they may not realise it is an attempt at clothing on the part of a body otherwise so unprotected.

=July 27.=--I rode back again to the starting-point of the steamer, and got there twenty minutes too soon, and so went along the shore and had a bathe. The steamer was very crowded and hot--I wonder who it was that started the fiction that a Japanese crowd does not possess an odour? Why, the detestable smell of the rancid oil in the women’s hair is enough for one alone, without any of the other items, which include a peculiarly virulent pickle, _daikon_, and an odour of decayed fish that hangs over a good many in a poor crowd.

The heat is now upon us, and as I returned on my cycle through the Tokio streets I met gentlemen with fans, schoolboys with fans, errand-boys with big baskets and fans, _kuruma_ men with fans, even the men dragging heavy carts fanned themselves as they struggled along. Yet very few women had fans, only the ladies riding in _kurumas_.

=July 28.=--I had to go up to the University and to several places and get ready for my start to-morrow. Fearfully hot.

=July 29.=--Started for Hakone. After the railway journey there was a tram ride for several miles along the old Tokkaido road; a beautiful avenue of Cryptomerias shaded it most of the way, and on one side gleams of the blue sea shone between the tree trunks. After reaching the foot of the hills there was a four-hours’ walk up the pass, by a steep and very rough path, with beautiful views of a clear river rushing over big rocks, and blue hills rising peak by peak behind the trees.

My luggage was carried by the quaintest human being to whom I have ever spoken--a dwarf. He hardly reached up to my elbow, and had bent legs and long arms, yet he was very strong and very genial, though so hideous. His back view was like this sketch, and his short stick, about 18 inches long, was very thick and used as a walking-stick or a support to prop up the saddle-like luggage-holder when he rested.

Going with him quite alone through the narrow paths in the woods I felt as though I had been transported into the Middle Ages, where damsels were served by strange dwarfs who led them to witches’ haunts and fairies’ palaces. I walked slowly in this dreamland, and he pattered along, half in a run, for his legs were so short that my slow pace was haste for him. But I need not have felt that his burden was too heavy, I met several charcoal-burners carrying six and seven times more than his load. It is wonderful what the natives can carry here.

We passed a mountain hamlet, a double row of houses built along a path. There was a runnel of clear water rushing down the middle of the road, and a tributary stream brought between each of the houses to join it. In its building the village must be very old, and is not so “Japanese” looking as the buildings of the plain. There seemed to be no gardens, but in the space between the houses grew banks of blue hydrangeas, crimson phlox, and great white lilies.

After a long and rather weary pull up the hills, where the road was bad and very stony, we crested them, and looked down on the lake of Hakone, girt with Cryptomerias.

In the evening I was housed in an old dwelling where daimios used to sleep when they travelled along the Tokkaido--by the lake whose farther shore was cut off by driving clouds. One could imagine it an ocean, and cool fresh breezes made me forget the stifling heat of Tokio.

=July 30.=--We are living in the clouds; below, above, and around us they swirl and writhe in the wind, sometimes breaking a little to show us the edge of the lake, but then directly driving together again and shutting us out from all but our own garden. Below us in the plain the sun will be shining and the people sweltering, but we are cool--and damp.

=July 31.=--Still the mist and clouds dance past and wreathe round the trees in such enchanting wise that they make poems and pictures and mysteries of the swift visions they are allowed to reveal.

Sad that I am ill--terrible pain in the night, so that I had to rouse the house; and all day I have done nothing--but grin sometimes when it returned.

August 1.--Clouds still there; and I am a little better though not well. The household in which I am staying is unconsciously amusing. It is to join J---- that I came; the other inmates are missionaries of uncertain age,--very high church, with prayers night and morning, grace before and after meat, with devout crossings and bows, till I long to tell them they are popish idolaters, but refrain, for J----’s sake. The first night I felt too crushed to venture a remark at meals; the book I brought (a clever light thing by Barry Pain) was said to be “such weak rubbish it seemed a pity to read it” by the lady who told us all one evening that she “had read a _very_ great deal--and among it no rubbish!”

J---- begs me not to catch her eye at meals, and I refrain. The Pan-Anglican Congress and the Bishops attending it are the staple articles of interest at present.

While we are not supposed to be seen in a kimono “because the Japanese think us ridiculous in them” (with which I quite agree in one way), the Japanese servants are brought into prayers, and I wonder whether prayers said in Japanese by an English woman escape the ridiculous!

The village street was illuminated last night and to-night with square paper lanterns, for to-day is a great festival at the temple by the lake; and there will be a week’s _matsuri_, during which time the carpenter cannot mend the boat because he wishes to play with his children. Sunshine came for a couple of hours and we went in a boat to the temple. The boat was beached at the end of a little path, leading straight up from the water to the temple, by a flight of grey stone steps, moss-grown and decked with ferns. On either side were great Cryptomerias and bamboo, a cool deep wood in which the greyness and the greenness were set off by huge white lilies and their visitors, black butterflies with blue-tipped wings. Our path was solitary, but by another meeting it trooped gaily dressed villagers, brilliant in blue, red, and pink--sometimes whole families, father, mother, sons, and daughters in blue kimonos all alike.

The temple service was already well begun before we got there, but we came in time to see the presentation of the first-fruits. In the outer part of the temple the congregation sat on the floor,--the front rows all occupied by elderly gentlemen clad in their black _haori_ with white _mons_, behind them sat the small boys, and at the back the young girls. By accident, or for some reason I do not understand, there were no women at all in the temple, though a few old ones with babies stood outside. They made no difficulty about us entering, so perhaps it was the preparations for the feasts to follow which kept (as it so often does at home) the women from worship. While the solemnity of presentation went on a man with a ridiculously flat face, dressed in semi-foreign style, played a harmonium, like the ones missionaries use on the seashore in the summer holidays. It was only given the chance of droning half a dozen notes with no tune audible to Western ears, but it was solemn enough, and had a certain fitness for the occasion. Three priests officiated, one in white and one in yellow over-dress with baggy trousers, just like a Turkish lady’s, beneath, and one in a lovely peach-coloured satin dress, an exquisite “Liberty” colour, and a great contrast to the harsh yellow one. The other brought the lacquer trays of offerings to him, with many slow reverences, and he walked up the altar steps and presented them. The walking up the steps was quite a feat--he turned his body sideways, at right angles to the steps, and brought both his feet together on each step. I noticed that his toes were moved up and down in the way prescribed in the ceremonial walk of the _Nō_.

One of the missionary ladies amused me as we were coming away. She dropped behind with another missionary and said in a tragical stage whisper, “Did you see that English lady in a red-striped dress? She was buying charms and mementoes of the priest! Oh, I _hope_ she is not _one of them_! It is so horrible to think of----” This dear lady takes all things very seriously, and is as devoid of humour as any one I have met. I marked the lady in a red-striped dress, and discovered that she was carrying a quite new scarlet Kelly & Walsh (a little phrase-book used by all tourists). We all buy little odds and ends when we are touristing.

=August 2.=--I feel still ill. I expect it was the relative cold and the constant wet, for all the time the clouds were driving through us. So I walked down the pass and went back to Tokio--a long hot journey. Last summer I described all the varieties of undress one can study in the railway carriage, and as the Kobe express cars are as big as big Pullmans and crowded, you can imagine I did not lack entertainment.

=August 3.=--I went up to the University and the Bank in the morning, and in the afternoon Professor B---- came to tea. He is as talkative as ever, but is now thoroughly disgusted with the Japanese. Their “futility,” their “absurd waste of time,” their “indirectness” irritate him, as they must irritate any one; and he sees no deeper to the things one loves, and which in some degree compensate. He proclaims, infuriated, that all the mysticism that was ever in Japan was brought there by Lafcadio Hearn himself.

=August 4.=--I set off with my bicycle, carrying all my luggage, for a fossil-insect hunt in Shiobara. The train takes five hours, according to the time-table, to go to the nearest station, and after that I had about 16 miles to ride to the haunt of the fossil insects. Fossil insects are shy and scarce, and I am the first to stalk them here, so I came with a double lot of patience; and I believe I remarked half a year ago, I have been so battered and worn in this country, where my impetuous spirit tugs at Oriental passivity in vain, that I have now normally the patience of two Jobs.

The train journey was remarkable only for the small quantity of clothing the passengers in the cushioned second class (pauper as I am, I only once travelled third) considered essential. Then the bicycle began, and as I spun past the jolting _kurumas_ the other travellers engaged, my heart rejoiced, for not only was I safe from their horrors, but I should reach the hotel first and get the pick of what rooms there might be; for it is a hot-spring place, and much frequented in August.

The first half of the journey was nearly flat, and I have described it before, when I came to this place hunting plants; and then the hills began, but the road was splendidly graded, and I rode up all but one with great ease. The road followed the winding valley, and sometimes seemed to hang over the roaring flood of the river beneath, so precipitous was the slope. At each curve of the road a broiling sun shone on me, and at each convex bend there was a waterfall, which seemed to emanate the coolness of hidden ice, and as the road curved and wound in and out like a Chinese dragon’s tail, I did not lack sensations. The beauty of the solitude of a million trees whispering together, of the silvery blue water and the grey rocks, shone with a clearness and brilliance that is so rare in England, and that is one of the chief charms of this country.

When I arrived and settled into my rooms, I had a bath. It was a big hotel, built for the hot springs which ran directly into the baths, and I was ushered into a bath-room where a man and woman were disporting themselves after the manner of Adam and Eve before the Fall. I felt like the serpent; but refused, with more tact than he showed, to form a third. This surprised the bath-attendant, who, however, allowed me to wait, and then stood outside the door all the time I was bathing to keep others out, and only peeped through the broken glass in the door now and then just to see whether I was ready to come out. After the bath he escorted me across the road (I had to sleep in the annexe), holding the umbrella over me, as I trotted along in a kimono and a pair of stilt-like gheta. In the luxury of idleness after supper I watched a woman in the house opposite. She was clad in a brilliant blue kimono, just the right old china blue--open at the throat, and her face and neck were the colour of warm sun-tanned unstained wood. “Olive,” I suppose people call the complexion, but it was warmer, and more beautiful than that, while her hair was smooth and black as polished ebony, arranged with a series of rich curves in it. The old abused word “chaste” expressed her more exactly than any other I know. The tawdry fluffiness of most of our women’s dress and hair seemed like flannelette beside rich satin as compared with her. Yet a curl may bewitch one and entangle one’s soul, I know--a curl, but not the frippery and broken lines that are so rife in Europe. I wonder till I verge on lunacy how it is that the West has not yet discovered the glory that lies in smooth curves and gleaming surfaces, and in lines of cloth, unbroken by frilling and tucking and ruching and pleating.

=August 5.=--I hunted fossil insects morning and afternoon, and got a haul, better than I might have expected, if not so good as I had hoped. I left the bicycle at a primitive little saw-mill, turned by the river one has to cross to get the fossil quarry. The people are all greatly interested in it, never having seen a woman’s bicycle before. The hotel is about a couple of miles from the fossil place, so I go on it as far as I can get, for it is hot to walk, and stones are heavy to carry.

=August 6.=--Another quiet day. I took a walk over the stream up a branch valley. How gloriously limpid and clear the water is. The solitude is complete, and yet there are footpaths where one can wander without battling with _sasa_. It is a particularly charming place.

=August 7.=--I got very wet while getting fossils, indeed, it was like fishing rather than anything else. After I got back there was a terrible storm, really a small typhoon; one realised then why the houses are built with such greatly projecting roofs. The rain washed over them in a torrent, a white cascade, and streamed off the sides and swirled up into the air like a great waterfall. I have never seen anything like it; the whole building was like a giant fountain of dashing white water, and the wind blew till I feared for our roof.

=August 8.=--I had great luck cycling back to the station in excellent weather, but found the train was two hours late, owing to the destruction of last night’s storm; and before we got back to Tokio it was three hours late, so that instead of getting home just in time for dinner, I arrived, famished, at nearly 10. A kind Japanese lady gave me some biscuits in the train, for which I was grateful indeed; they were Huntley and Palmers’ “Osborne,” and M’Vitie and Price’s Shortbread! The joy of meeting these dear old friends in such an unexpected place was even greater than the relief my internal economy felt. They must have been wealthy people to have such biscuits, as, indeed, I had previously suspected, for the girls’ blue and white kimonos, that would naturally have been of cotton, were made of silk--poor children! for it is really much hotter than the plebeian cotton.

=August 9.=--A quiet day of rest. It is very hot, and I expect I am the only foreigner fool enough to be in Tokio.

=August 10–12.=--I spent a short time at the Institute and the rest at home, writing in my garden, and battling with mosquitoes and mould, but really having a restful time, for I ran away (thinking it the better part of valour) from the former, and write inside a mosquito net.

=August 13.=--I set off with my bicycle to Yejiri to see the cycads again. As it is 7½ hours’ journey by slow train, I went to the farther station of Shizuoka, at which the express stops, and got there in five hours, to bicycle 7 miles back to the temple. The wicked old sinner of a priest had written to me, in answer to my requests, to say that there were no cones this year, and I had believed him till I heard by chance it was false. And I found quantities of cones--twenty-six huge things, a foot and a half long, on one tree!

The smell of these cones is very strong, like pineapple and cake fermented together; it is a very thick smell, and in a room one of the cones was very persistent and penetrating, though it did not seem to attract any insects at all.

I had difficulty with the females, for the trees are awfully tall and shaky, but by tying two ladders together I got at them, and clung for my life to the sturdy leaves. The temple is as sweet as ever, but the evening was wet. As I sat over my supper in the house, which is all opened up so as to look very big, the priest unconcernedly took off his only garment and had his bath without closing the bath-room partition, while his wife went about all the time with about a yard of cotton round her hips.

Clothes, you will say, fill a large part of this journal, but Japan is one great exhibition in the art, mistakes, or want of clothes. Everything from perfection to nothingness is to be seen nearly every day. Everything from a soul-thrilling beauty and dignity to a side-aching farce of incongruity.

=August 14.=--I set off at half-past six to get back to Shizuoka, as I expected Professor B---- to tea in the afternoon in Tokio. Well, first they put me on the sea road, which at the start seems more direct than the one I came by, but actually follows the bays and hills, and adds several up and down miles to the journey. Then, even when I started, it was steadily pouring with rain. Then both my tyres went flat with punctures, quite unmendable in those wilds. Then the road was bad and narrow, and made of stones the size of marbles up to the size of a doubled fist. Then the streams flooded, and I had to go through thirty or forty of them which had decided to go _over_ instead of under or beside the road. Then the roar of a landslip added a fillip of excitement. Then the growl of thunder and the brilliance of lightning, which I fancied might be attracted by my spokes. Then, not torrents of rain, but cataracts, waterspouts, Niagara falls!

I said naughty things ever so many times, but stuck on my bicycle and wouldn’t get off for the stony-bedded little torrents that impertinently crossed the roads, and just went through them. What matter if I couldn’t see the bottom upon my bicycle, I couldn’t see it any better if I waded them. I folded up the sheets (I always travel with sheets for sleeping), put them in a pad under my cloak to try and keep my back dry, but soon they were saturated and merely added to the general weight of water. I never felt more depressed and more weary; what with the road as it was, the floods, and the punctures, I couldn’t go much more than 5 miles an hour, and that with jolting like an Irish cart, and at an expense of effort that would have taken me 20 miles an hour the day before. All the time I ploughed along I remembered the part I was to act by 4 o’clock in Tokio, clad in white samite (I mean muslin), gracefully dispensing tea and small talk to a distinguished visitor.

There was nothing to do to counterbalance the leg-aching pedalling or to lend a little warmth to the clammy, dripping mass that I was. I got to the station and missed the train! There was two hours’ interval to the next, and I was so drowned I couldn’t go to a hotel, for the abominable sun had come out as I got to the station and the sky was blue and innocent-looking, and every one was dry, and supercilious to a creature who left pools at every step. A little sweet-shop provided hot water and peppermint, and things drained off a little as I rode slowly back, and then walked round and round and round the waiting-room reading Thackeray’s _Pendennis_, as the crowd entertained itself with speechless staring, and the porters volubly sympathised as I took a towel out of my bag, which was less saturated than the rest of me, and dried my hair a little.

When the next train came it was mercifully the Nagasaki express, with a dining-car attached, so I left my car and went along and had coffee. The waiters were so sympathetic, that as I was the only customer, one offered to lend me a nice dry kimono of his own while I took everything off, and they dried them over the train fire. As every other passenger was in a kimono I felt less shy than the situation warranted, till I saw the stuck-up nose of an English lady tourist at the far end of the passenger car as I returned in my Japanese rig-out.

However, it was better than sitting five hours in a super-saturated condition. They dried my things very quickly, for fortunately they had nothing else to do (the weather was now glorious), and except that all the colours from belts, books, and cases had got on to the garments I was normal again, and got back to Tokio in time to have just changed my dress, when the cheery voice of Professor B---- hailed me in the garden.

=August 17.=--What a thunder-storm! I never could have imagined anything like it. One peal lasted eleven minutes, and another began again after a couple of seconds’ interval, and so they kept it up for an hour and a half, rolling round and round the heavens, as though the gods played nine-pins with Mount Fuji. The lightning was almost continuous, too, and filled the heavens with broad sheets of flame. Yet with all the terrific massiveness and grandeur of the storm, it lacked the point of sharp concentration that would have added terror. I always enjoy a storm, unless it is centred and concentrated just above me. And this stupendous storm was the finest display I have ever imagined, let alone experienced, and I did not grudge the hours of sleep of which it robbed me.

The morning dawned clear and still, but the garden was full of wrecked things.

=August 19.=--Are the gods never going to have mercy and stop their cruel play of battering Professor _F----_, and through him me and our fossil work? Instead of coming early in the morning, as we arranged, he came very late, with the horrible news that he had just heard that the people who lived in his house before him (he moved last year) had a _leper_ in the family! Consequently he and his household have stood grave danger of getting this ghastly disease, and may actually have it now, the latent period is so uncertain and often so long that the doctor cannot tell for some time to come. It sometimes lies dormant for years. Of course, he must move at once, and in the meantime take every possible precaution. A nice waste of time, even if there were not the horror hanging over it all!