Part 4

It was the interpreter of the tea-house that made me permanently hopeless. The interpreter was soft-voiced, gentle, and spoke excellent English. She had lived several years with an American missionary--a woman whom she had loved, she said, very tenderly. The interpreter had been a widow for several years, and had a little girl. She would never marry again, she said, because she would have to give up her child. So she spoke English in the tea-house and taught the children of the master for a pitiful salary. I cannot recall ever having met such frankness in Japan, and this is what she said:

"If you have 750 yen to spare, give it to the poor families of Tokio whose sons have gone to war. You buy Kamura-san from the tea-house and you go away to Manchuria; you will not know whether she goes to school. Most likely her house-mother will sell her again. Anyhow it is useless. She really does not want to go to school. She likes the tea-house, the music, the lights and gossip, and the coming and going of strangers. You cannot change her, and it is no use. Give your money to poor people in Tokio."

* * * * *

After this Kamura-san's instincts told her that something was wrong, and she began to take perceptibly more notice of the young officer. Once, as I was told, she said to him:

"I always liked you best--you are so pretty."

I charged her with this statement.

"Who told you that?"

"Never mind."

"He is a liar," said Kamura-san calmly.

And once I caught her making eyes at him behind my back--something that she had never done with me. With this, too, I charged her.

"No," she said in denial, "he is your brother. He will be my best friend. He will be godfather to our child."

I staggered half-way across the room--that infant talking of a child!

"In heaven's good name," I said, "what do you want with a child?"

"That I may not be lonely when I old," said little Kamura-san.

* * * * *

Still, out of curiosity now, I went to see the house-mother of Kamura-san. Her head was poised on her shoulders like a snake's, and her eyes were the eyes of a snake--black, beady, and glittering. A face more hard, cunning, cruel, and smilingly crafty I never saw, and it took her but a little while to discover that I was an unsatisfactory customer, and I couldn't help wondering what that Austrian father would have thought and felt had he seen that snake-like hag trying to barter with me for his own flesh and blood. I left the young officer there and naturally the house-mother tried to sell the child to him.

Kamura-san I never saw again. When I came back from Manchuria I heard that she was gone--whither I don't know, but I'm hoping that the Austrian father by some chance may some day see these lines.

* * * * *

But no more now of temples, blossoms, pictures, _netsuke_, tea-houses, wrestling-matches, theatres, and the what-not that everybody with a pen has so wearisomely done to death. News of the battle of Nanshan has come in. Next week we leave again.

An explanation has occurred to me. You know the Japanese does nearly everything but his fighting--backward. Of course he reads and writes backward. At the theatre you find the dressing-room in the lobby. Keys turn from left to right, boring-tools and screws, I understand, turn from right to left, and a Japanese carpenter draws his plane toward him instead of pushing it away. Sometimes even the Japanese thinks and talks backward. For instance, suppose he says:

"I think I will go wash my hands." That, in Japanese, is:

"Te-wo aratte kimasho." Now, what he really has said is literally:

"Hands having washed I think I will _come back_."

Perhaps then our trouble is that the Japanese tells the truth backward and we can't understand. He might even be fighting that way--say, for an alliance with Russia--and we still should not understand--at least, not yet.

IV

MAKING FOR MANCHURIA

It came at last--that order for the front. On the 18th day of July, the Empress of China swung out of Yokohama Harbor, with eighteen men on board, who had been waiting four months for that order, almost to the very day. During those four months there was hardly a day that some one of those men was not led to believe by the authorities in Tokio that in the next ten days the order would come, and never would the authorities say that during any ten days the order would not come; so that they had perforce to stay waiting in Tokio from the freezing rains of March until the sweltering days of midsummer. Many of those men had been in Japan for five months and more, and yet knew absolutely nothing of the land save of Tokio and Yokohama, which, tourists tell me, are not Japan at all.

The matter has been passing strange. We did not come over here at the invitation of the Japanese Government, but in simple kindness the authorities might have said, with justice:

"This is the business of Japan and of Russia alone. Over here we do not recognize the Occidental God-given right of the newspapers to divulge the private purposes of anybody. We believe that War Correspondents are harmful to the proper conduct of a war. Frankly, we don't want you, and to the front you can never go."

No just complaint could have been made to this. We should have seen beautiful Japan and, our occupation gone for this war, at least, we could have struck the backward trail of the Saxon--the correspondent for some trade of peace, the artist to "drawing fruits and flowers at home." And all would have been well.

Or:

"You gentlemen came over here at your own risk. You create a new and serious problem for us and we don't know how we are going to solve it. If you wish to stay on at your own risk until we have made up our minds--you are quite welcome."

For some this would have made an early homeward flight easy. Or again:

"Yes, we do mean to let you go to the front, but when we cannot say. While you are here, however, we shall be glad to have you see our country. Just now we are quite sure that you will not go for at least ten days: so you can travel around and come back. If we are sure that you can't go for another ten days, you may go away again and come back--and so on until you do leave."

Even this they might have said:

"You English are our allies. We are in trouble, and we may draw you as allies into it. We, therefore, grant your right to know how we behave on the battle-field, where we may possibly have to fight, shoulder to shoulder. Therefore, you English correspondents, you English attachés, can go to the front, the rest of you cannot."

Nothing in all this could have given offence. All or any of it would have had at least the combined merits of frankness, consideration, honesty, and it is very hard for this Saxon to understand how any or all could possibly have any bearing on anybody's advantage or disadvantage, as far as this war is concerned.

The Japanese gave no open hint of unwillingness to have us go--no hint that we were not to go very soon. We were urged to get passes for ourselves, interpreters and servants at once. Most of the men obeyed at once, bought horses, outfits, provisions and wrote farewell letters--wrote them many times. This was the middle of March. Ever since we have stayed at the Imperial Tomb in Tokio--the Imperial Hotel is the name it calls itself--under heavy expense to ourselves here and to the dear ones at home who sent us here; unable to go away; told every ten days that in the next ten days we would most likely go, and told on no day that within the next ten we should not go. Now it was soon--"very soon"--in English, and then it was "tadaima"--in Japanese.

Tadaima! That, too, meant "soon," when I first put stumbling feet on the tortuous path of Japanese thought and speech. The unwary stranger will be told to-day that it does mean "soon," and as such in dictionaries he shall find it. But I have tracked "tadaima" to its lair and dragged it, naked and ashamed, into the white light of truth. And I know "tadaima" at any time refers only to the season next to come. Early in March, for instance, it means literally--"next summer about two o'clock."

All this was something of a strain in the way of expectation, disappointment, worry, wasted energy--idleness. And so with a worried conscience over the expense to the above-mentioned dear ones at home, and the hope that some return might yet be made to them; through a good deal of weakness and a good deal of reluctance to go home and get "guyed," we stayed on and on. In May came the battle of Nanshan and the advance on Port Arthur. In June followed Tehlitzu. Both battles any man would have gladly risked his life to see, and I really think it would have been well for the Japanese, granting their accounts of the two battles as accurate--Russian atrocities in one, undoubted Japanese gallantry in both--if impartial observers had been there to confirm. As it stands, the Japanese say "you did"--the Russians say "we didn't"--and there the matter will end.

But we swung out of Yokohama Harbor at last--the Tokio slate for the time wiped clean and all forgiven. We were going to the front and that was balm to any wound. O-kin-san of the Tea House of the Hundred Steps--bless her!--had me turn my back while she struck sparks with flint and steel behind me and made prayers for my safety, and from her kind hand I carried away a little ideographed block of wood in a wicker case which would preserve me from all bodily harm. Whither we were bound we knew not for sure, since by the same token you know nothing in this land for sure. But there were three men among us who had been guaranteed, they said, by the word of a Major-General's mouth, that they should see the fall of Port Arthur. So sure were they that they had made less important representatives of their papers stay behind in Tokio to await the going of the third column. Two others had got the same assurance indirectly, but from high authority, and the rest of us knew that where they went, there went we.

That day and that night and next day we had quiet seas and sunlight. The second night we were dining in Kobbe at a hotel to which Kipling once sang a just pæan of praise--Kobbe, which he knew at once, he said, was Portland, Maine, though his feet had not then touched American soil. He was quite right. Kobbe might be any town anywhere. The next daybreak was of shattered silver, and it found us sailing through a still sea of silver from which volcanic islands leaped everywhere toward a silver sky. We were in the Inland Sea. To the eye, it was an opal dream--that Inland Sea--and the memory of it now is the memory of a dream--a dream of magic waters, silvery light and forlorn islands--bleak and many-peaked above, and slashed with gloomy ravines that race each other down to goblin-haunted water-caves, where the voice of the sea is never still. This sea narrowed by and by into the Shimonoseki Straits, which turn and twist through rocks, islands, and high green hills. Through them we went into the open ocean once more. In the middle of the next afternoon we passed for a while through other mountain-bordered straits, and by and by there sat before the uplifted eye Nagasaki, with its sleepy green terraces, rising from water-level to low mountain-top--where the Madame Chrysanthème of Loti's fiction is a living fact to-day. Who was it that said, after reading that book, he or she would like to read Pierre Loti by Madame Chrysanthème? It must have been a woman--and justly a woman--sure. There is an English colony at Nagasaki and an American or two who cling together and talk about going home some day--all exiles, all most hospitable to the stranger, and all unconsciously touched with the pathos of the exile wherever on earth you find him.

Between four and five o'clock these exiles take launches for a beach five miles away, since the Japanese regulations now forbid bathing at any nearer point. They carry out cakes and tea and other things to drink and I took one trip with them through one beautifully radiant late afternoon, but even in that way there was no evading the Japanese. Two of them, whether fishermen, sailors, officers, or what not, calmly fixed their boat-hooks to the launch and there they hung. The fact that the ladies of the launch were undressing and dressing in one end did not seem to disturb them at all, and to this day I am wondering what possible harm a man or a woman in a bathing-dress among waves can do in time of war in a place that is impregnable and five hundred miles from the firing-line. I found the Japanese as different in Nagasaki as is their speech. There they say "Nagasaki" with a hard g. In Tokio, where the classics are supreme, they pronounce it "Nangasaki," almost--just as the rickshaw men in the one place lose something of the samurai haughtiness that characterizes them in the other. It is the difference between the flat and the broad "a" in our own land, and between the people who use the one and the people who use the other. Everybody left next morning, but I clung to Nagasaki as long as I could, and in consequence took an all-night ride on a wooden seat. Early next morning I was crossing the Shimonoseki Straits from Moji in a sampan. It was before sunrise. The mist on the sea was still asleep, but on the mountains it was starting its upward flight. Through it fishing-boats were slipping like ghosts, and here and there the dim shape of a transport or a little torpedo-boat was visible. The flush in the East was hardly as deep as a pale rose before I was noiselessly oared to the stone quay of the little village whence we were to take transport at last for the front. The foreign hotel was full. Richard Harding Davis had gone to a Japanese hotel and had left word for me to follow. So in a rickety rickshaw I rattled after him through the empty street. I found him in a Japanese room as big as the dining-room of an American hotel, covered with eighty mats, full of magic woodwork, and looking out where there were no walls (the walls in a Japanese house are taken out by day) for full fifty feet on mountain and sea and passing transports and sampans. Davis was unpacking. Hanging over the balcony was a yellow moth of a girl some fourteen years old, who smiled me welcome. On another balcony at the other end of the hotel, three other sister moths were lighted, and among them I saw a correspondent beating a typewriter vigorously--they watching him with amazement and brushing him with their wing-like sleeves as they hovered about. Others still were fluttering fairy-like anywhere, everywhere. The latest occupant of our room had been the Marquis Ito--we found it quite big enough for two of us. Li Hung Chang had the same room when he came over to make peace terms after the Japanese-Chinese War. We could see the corner of the street near by where a Japanese tried then to assassinate that eminent Chinaman, and in that very room the great Shimonoseki treaty was signed. We had it two nights and a day, and we learned, when we went away, that we were not told the history of that room for nothing. First, our interpreters hinted that great men like Ito and Li Hung Chang and Our Honorable Selves were always expected to make a present to the hotel. It was the custom. We followed the custom to the extent of ten yen each, and an old lady came in and prostrated herself before each of us in turn. Now, when you are clothed only in pajamas, are seated in a chair, and have your bare feet on a balcony in order to miss no vagrant wind, it is somewhat embarrassing to have a woman steal in without warning, smite her forehead to the mat several times, and make many signs and much speech of gratitude. You won't smite yours in turn; you can't bow as you sit, and if you rise, it looks as though you were going to put foot on the neck of a slave. We looked very red and felt very foolish, but we did not exchange confidences. If there was any slumbering supposition in our minds that this was a polite Oriental method of dealing with guests who have doubtful luggage, or a slumbering hope that the "present" might have a dwindling effect on our bill, there needn't have been. We had to pay in addition for that room and those eighty mats and that Fuji landscape of delicate woodwork; we had to pay for all the brilliant moths that fluttered incessantly about, for the chamber-maids and the smiling bronze scullery-girl who looked in on us from the hallway; for the bath-boy and the cook or cooks. Every junk and sampan that passed had apparently sent a toll for collection to that hotel. The gold of the one sunset and the silver of the one dawn were included in the turkey-tracked, serpent-long bill that was unrolled before our wondering eyes. In fact, if Marquis Ito's breakfast and the biggest dinner that Li Hung Chang had there nine years before were not put down therein, it was a strange oversight on the part of the all-seeing eye that had swept the horizon of all creation during the itemization of that bill. That was business--that bill. The present had been custom. I cheerfully recommend the method to highway robbers that captain other palaces of extortion in other parts of the world. Get the present first--it's a pretty custom--and the rest is just as easy as it would have been anyway.

Next day we went back again to Moji, where a polite and dapper little officer examined us and our passes and asked us many questions. Why he did I know not, since he seemed to know about us in advance, and every now and then he would look up from a pass and say: "Oh, you are so-and-so"--whereat "so-and-so" would look a bit uneasy. At two o'clock that day we set sail--correspondents, interpreters, servants, horses, a few soldiers, and much ammunition--on the transport Heijo Maru. Every ship has that "Maru" after its name, and I have never been able to find out just what it means--except that literally it is "round in shape." We steamed slowly past a long, bleak, hump-backed little island that had been the funeral pyre for the Japanese dead in the war with China. For ordinarily the Japanese, after taking a lock of hair, a finger-nail, or the _inkobo_ (a bone in the throat), which they send back to relatives, burn their dead. But this funeral pyre was for those who died in the hospital, and the wounded and sick therein could see by the flames at night where next day their own ashes might lie. Thence we turned northward toward the goal of five months' hope on the part of those hitherto unhappy but now most cheerful eighteen men.

Fuji was on board. Fuji is my horse, and he had come down by rail. He is Japanese and a stallion--as most Japanese horses are. He has a bushy, wayward mane, by the strands of which you can box the compass with great accuracy, and a bushy forelock that is just as wayward. His head, physiognomy, and general traits will come in better when later they get an opportunity for display. All I knew then of Fuji was that he had nearly pulled the arms out of the sockets of several men, and had broken one man's leg back in Tokio. I was soon to learn that this was very little to know about Fuji.

Takeuchi also was aboard. Takeuchi is my interpreter and servant. He is tall and slender, and has a narrow, intelligent face and general proportions that an American girl characterized as Greek. I call him the ever-faithful or the ever-faithless--just as his mood for the day happens to be. He keeps me guessing all the time. When I make up my mind that I am going to say harsh things next day, I find Takeuchi tucking a blanket around me at three o'clock in the morning. He knows they are coming, and when I do say them Takeuchi answers, "I beg you my pardon," in a way that leads me to doubt which of us is the real offender after all. Sometimes my watch and money disappear, but Takeuchi turns up with them the next morning, shaking his head and with one wave of his hand toward the table.

"Not safe," he says, smiting his waistband, where both were concealed. "I keep him." He has both now all the time. His first account overran, to be sure, the exact amount of his salary for one month and for that amount I had him sign a receipt. Two hours later he said, in perplexity:

"I do not understand the receipt I give you."

I pointed out my willingness to be proven wrong. He worked for an hour on the account and sighed:

"You are right," he said. "I mistake. I beg you my pardon."

He had overlooked among other things one item--the funeral expenses of some relative, which he had charged to me. I made it clear that such an item was hardly legitimate and since then we have had less trouble. However, when he wishes anything, he says:

"I want you, etc., etc., etc.," and at the end of the sentence he will say "please," with great humility; but until that "please" comes I am not always sure which is servant and which is master. From Takeuchi I have learned much about Japanese character, especially about the Buschido spirit--the fealty of Samurai to Daimio, of retainer to Samurai, of servant to master. It is useless to be harsh with or to scold a Japanese servant. Just make your appeal to that traditional spirit of loyalty and all will be better--if not well. He may rob you himself in the way of traditional commissions, but you can be sure that he will allow the same privilege to nobody else. But of Takeuchi--as of Fuji--more anon.

We sailed along at slow speed until we came to the Elliott Group of Islands. We paid a yen apiece for each meal, and the captain and the purser--a nice little fellow who got autographs from all who could write and pictures from all who could draw--were the only officers with whom we came in contact. We had poker o' nights, and sometimes o' days, and now and then we "played the horses." Thus we reached the Elliott Group of Islands.

There we had company, transports coming in until there was a fleet of ten; other transports going back to Japan, and an occasional gun-boat hovering on the horizon. There we stayed three wearing days--told each day that we should start on the next at daybreak. But there came one matchless sunset as a comfort--a sunset that hung for a while over a low jagged coast--a seething mass of flaming gold and vivid, quivering green; that smote the sea into sympathy, lent its colors to the mists that rose therefrom, and sank slowly to one luminous band of yellow, above which one motionless cloud of silver was, by some miracle, the last to deepen into ashes and darkness. And as it darkened in the West, some white clouds in the East pushed tumbling crests of foam over another range of hills, and above them the full moon soared. Thus, all my life I had waited to see at last, on a heathen coast, Turner doing the sunset, while Whistler was arranging colors in the place where the next dawn was to come.