refreshing, and the delight of growing trees and green fresh leaves
after _waraji_ and cinders, an enchantment. But Fuji had not finished
his surprises or his trials. Soon the pathway disappeared from under
our feet, and only the roots of the trees remained. On these we had
to walk, and they were slippery, knotted, and far apart, and full of
tangled holes that caught and tripped the feet.
A polite Japanese student came and walked with us a little way “to
improve his English,” but his feet in their _waraji_ stepped over the
tree-roots faster than ours in our boots, and we were soon left alone
again.
Gradually, as we went downwards, the forest altered from the austere
wood of the mountain to the rich luxuriant wood of the plains, green
with moss, covered with creepers, dripping with big juicy drops of
water as though rich sap were oozing from every vein.
All through the wood there were tiny tea-houses, set under a tree and
lost among the branches. We passed No. 1 at least seven times, each
time certain that it really must be the real original No. 1, and that
the “horse-turn-back” station, where we could get a _basha_ to carry us
to Yoshida, was necessarily “the next.” After the weary sliding down
that abrupt slope, the muscles of one’s legs were all trembling with
the strain, and the tree-roots, slippery and uncertain, became doubly
difficult. We were still going down so steeply that the hollow of the
pathway lay like a green chimney below us. Slowly up through this
living funnel came the pilgrim’s chant.
“We are going,” and the little bells clashed out triumphant--“we are
going to the top.”
Then the deep sing-song of the chorus, coming nearer with each
syllable, grew louder:
“Top ... the top ... to the top.”
We waited while the chant coming up from the green depths below came
nearer, came past us, went on.
From the green heights above it sounded down.
“We are going,” and the tiny cymbals clashed--“we are going to the
top.”
And faintly echoing from above came the answer: “To the top ... the top
... top.”
* * * * *
And still the first stations succeeded one another, and the tired feet
and the aching muscles grew more weary. The wood was dense as ever, but
less steep, and at last there came earth as well as tree-roots for a
pathway.
We passed through another station, half tea-house, half temple, where
a man sat behind a tray of thin irons stamped with the temple’s crest,
and where gods and tea-bowls filled the shelves. The path went through
it and out again, under the trees, a path of good stamped earth. Then
twisting suddenly it ended in four smooth green steps that led down
into a natural amphitheatre, with tea-houses on each side. This was the
_Mma gaeshi_--“horse-turn-back” station--Yoshida side. Away to the left
were several square boxes on wheels, otherwise the stage was empty. It
was, indeed, exactly like a “set” in an opera.
We hobbled, it was so difficult to walk on _flat_ earth, to a tea-house
and sat down demanding _basha_. Slowly a man entered right front, and
crossing left centre tipped up a square box and waited. Then another
man, entering left front, harnessed a horse to it. This took them half
an hour, because they wanted four times too much for the drive to
Yoshida, and at each refusal, at each expostulation, at each rebate,
the one man dropped the square box down on the ground and the other
gave up harnessing the horse. Meanwhile we drank tea and monotonously
repeated our price. After half an hour the _basha_ was finally
harnessed, and crossing left front we got in.
This _basha_ was simply a square box without a lid, mounted on wheels.
You sat on a piece of matting spread at the bottom, leant against
the wooden back and clutched hard at the sides to keep yourself in.
The driver sat on the shaft and used his feet as a brake. The reins
consisted of one length of straw rope attached to the left side of the
horse’s head.
For the first half-hour the relief of stretching out one’s miserable,
trembling legs was pure bliss, after that, _basha_-driving was
pleasant but jolty, and after that it became renewed torture to endure
the jolting, and the aches in one’s back and arms were vigorous and
persistent. Road there was none, only two large ruts, in, over and
among which we wandered.
The trees stopped as abruptly above the natural amphitheatre of _Mma
gaeshi_ as they had begun below the platform of No. 4. And for the
whole two hours of our journey to Yoshida we travelled over an immense
far-reaching common, one of the soft ripples at Fuji’s base. There was
not a house or a village to be seen, nothing but the wide stretch of
green common.
It was half-past five when the _basha_ started out among the ruts,
and the clear, colourless light of a northern evening--we were 3000
feet up--which is not cold, yet is so colourless, enclosed the earth.
The sky was as bare of clouds as the common of landmarks; the one lay
palely blue above, the other stretched subduedly green below. Here and
there the green was crossed by long flushes of colour, with the red of
tiny tiger-lilies, and the pale yellow of the evening primrose. Behind,
Lord Fuji rose majestic. At first a line of fleecy cloud had lain above
the deep green of the forest, and Fuji’s head was lost in mist, but at
the sunset the clouds fell away lower and lower, until the whole long
sweep of Fuji rose up triumphant into the blue.
It was but slowly that the _basha_ jolted among the deep-cut ruts of
the common, and but slowly that we travelled on, downwards.
Looking out across the wide flat land we saw that the whole world was
slightly rounded, slightly tilted. It was like journeying over a large
green apple. The globe in fact palpable, visibly rounded. Away on
the left the sun was setting in straight streamers of pale red edged
with shining gold. And the green common, with its pools of little red
lilies, and its bands of pale yellow primroses, grew greyer and greyer.
Fuji San, perfect in long smooth curves, stood purple-blue behind.
Clear-cut as a jewel in a setting he rose up, rose up, until the
rounded strength of his summit lay bright sapphire on the azure sky.
* * * * *
Over the ruts the _basha_ stumbled, endlessly jolting.
The sun set slowly, and slowly the colours died. Grey lay the common in
front of us, on each side. Lord Fuji was but a dark, still shadow. And
over the ruts the _basha_ stumbled in long, slow jolts.
We were very tired, our backs ached with the jolting, and our arms were
numb with pain. All around us the grey spaces of the common stretched
uninterruptedly, without house or village. Where was Yoshida?
Still the _basha_ lumbered and stumbled, and we looked for lights and
houses.
Nothing. Only in front of us the grey level of the common grew tall
and black.... In a few more jolts the deep black had engulfed us, grey
common and all, and we were wandering among dark shadows that were
trees.
In the very pitch of the blackness the cart suddenly stopped. We were
asked to get out. The _basha_ went no further.
“But Yoshida?”
“_Yoshida yoroshī!_--all right,” replied the man, unconcerned, as
though every traveller to every town arrived in a dark wood without
sight or sound of houses; and he drove off.
Our guide picked up the luggage, and we followed stumbling, straining
our eyes to tell the deeper shadows that were trees from the paler dark
that meant pathway.
Slowly the deeper shadows receded, and in their place came the dim
forms of houses. Then a sharp turn and we were walking along a real
road with the familiar knitting-needles of the Japanese tramway shining
in the twilight. After a while the houses grew denser, and some of
them had lights; but the contrast only made the pale dark of the open
roadway seem still blacker.
Large trucks, like kitchen-tables with their legs cut short, came
sliding past us as we stumbled on, gliding slowly down the road alone
and unattached.
Parties of pilgrims in white, with white staves in their hands, came
unexpectedly out of the darkness, and the lighted paper lanterns in
their hands warmed their white clothes into a rich cream-yellow,
precipitating them into solid bodies from the waist downward, while
their heads and shoulders drifted slowly on through the pale night like
impalpable ghosts.
We had reached the top of the hill, and the road, in a sudden turn,
ran sharply away from us. The houses were on both sides now in one
continuous line, and the shock of meeting trucks jarred through the
street. There was a flare of orange light where the knitting-needles
became a shunting-yard.
This was Yoshida.
Our landlady was aristocratic to her finger-tips. She had the long
slim neck, the long thin face, with its pure outlines, the long
narrow eyes, the long graceful body, and the delicate poise which is
the ideal type of the aristocrat--and rare even among them. When she
knelt on the matting to receive us, she did it with the distinction
of a queen, and all her movements showed that clean-cut grace, that
courtesy without effort, that refinement of pose and gesture which
only the continued culture of long generations can produce, and which
is to mere politeness or mere beauty as the subtle music of the poet
to Monsieur Jourdain’s prose. Her husband was a bullet-headed man
of the people, stubby and plebeian. His manners, like his Japanese,
were polite of course, but undistinguished, while our hostess spoke a
language as courtly as her ways. When she glided over the matting, her
long sleeves swaying, or stretched out her thin slim-fingered hand to
take our tea-cups, we felt like beings of a lower evolution, and this
higher product, evolved by centuries of self-control and a living love
of beauty, was the human form made perfect, to which we might, perhaps,
one day attain.
Even the inn possessed something of her grace: the matting was whiter,
the woodwork smoother, the steep stairway--set like a ladder between
the walls--more polished than elsewhere. The tiny medallions set deep
in the _shōji_, which are as the handles to our doors, were works
of art. The miniature garden of the courtyard, with its hills and
trees and swift grey stream, was a living landscape, perfect in form
and colouring. Even the shallow brass pans in which we washed, the
commonest of hotel furniture, had an elegance of their own. And in
the refined and beautiful inn our graceful, courtly landlady knelt
and offered us platefuls of “mixed biscuits.” They were certainly
cheap ones, but never did the utter vulgarity of their shapes, or the
crudeness of their colouring, strike so sharply on my senses. If they
had tasted like manna from the wilderness I could not have eaten one.
They were too ugly.
It is vivid still, the bliss of that hot bath in fresh mountain water
pumped from a stream which comes from Fuji’s sacred slopes, and the
joy of that long dreamless sleep under the green mosquito curtain in
our white matted room. Vivid still, the breakfast cooked over the
_hibachi_, with our aristocratic landlady, every line of her graceful
form looking purer and more refined as she stooped to hold the handle
of the frying-pan, while her stolid husband on his knees before his
office desk in the corner looked on good-naturedly, and the stout
little maid watched the foreign cooking of our ham as though it had
been a sacred rite.
* * * * *
We were to return by the lakes which encircle Fuji, and we set out that
morning along a dull dusty road between dull dusty banks.
It was but a little way to the first lake, but hot beyond believing,
and when we reached it, and pushed out in our boat beyond the narrow
inlet which ran deep into the road, the heat settled down like a roof
above our heads.
The sky was one superb arch of azure blue; the earth in front of us a
wide, bare flat, glittering with heat. And from out of that gleaming,
quivering mist which hid the level land Great Fuji rose dark blue on
blue. Naked and superb he stood against the background of the sky
secure in his strength, perfect in his beauty, beyond words, beyond
praise, in sober truth--divine.
It took an hour and a half to cross the lake, and all the time Fuji
San, set in the framework of the turquoise sky, with the gleaming,
glittering mist of light sweeping like an iridescent cloud to the edge
of his dark blue slope, stayed with us. For an hour and a half we
looked, and the form and the soul of the mountain sank deep within our
hearts.
* * * * *
The second lake is divided from the first by a natural wall of hill
over which we climbed, the sun striking fiercely on the pathway where
one small patch of shade lay black on the thick white dust.
The second lake was set deep within the circle of the hills, and we
crossed it in company with three men who had drunk much _saké_, and
another who stuck fuses into a row of dynamite cartridges and then,
leaving them under a corner of the matting in the bottom of the boat,
apparently forgot their existence. These four passengers and the two
boatmen were continually stumbling up and down the boat to row in
turns, and always within a few inches of the dynamite.
It was a somewhat agitating row, although we were assured the
cartridges were “only for fishing.”
It ended at last, after a long two hours of suspense, among the quiet
grey boulders which stretched for a hundred yards between the water and
the wood.
Down the little valley beyond the stones, a winding river of
rice-fields ran like a grass-green stream, and we followed it, as one
follows up a mountain brook, till it dwindled and disappeared. Then the
wood closed in above it, and we were in the middle of a weird uncanny
forest, all grey and wrinkled, where multitudes of thick-set pole-like
trees, covered with a powdery dust, ranged ghost-like out of sight.
And here we walked, the only living things in a spell-bound world,
walked until the earth grew thin beneath our feet and the rough grey
boulders came up through the soil.
Then for a long, long while we went beside a grey lava-river flowing
between the grey tree-stems, a wide and furious river arrested as it
swept in angry tumult through the wood, stopped dead, and each breaking
wave turned into stone. We looked at this still, dead river and saw
how the years had covered the waves with a thick white crust of dust.
Buried deep lay that tempest of passion which once had swept burning
from Fuji’s sides, buried deep beneath blocks of grey lava and the
drifting ash-grey dust.
Yet the very stones that buried it were carved in its image. And the
face of that passion, petrified and deadly, looked up from the river.
And all around the grey wood stood dead too, and very still, coated
deep with a powdery dust, ash-grey. For the spell of the river was over
the wood, and it was the death of Destruction.
For miles we walked beside that Medusa river, sometimes we left it,
sometimes we crossed it, then losing it between the trees we wandered
where the ghostly pole-like trunks grew thickest. But always the river
came back with the dead passion that made it staring rigid beneath the
stones.
Miles and miles of lava, wide, and long, and deep. The ghostly trees
were rooted in it, the very lakes lay cradled in it, the world for far
around was made of it. Verily the fires of Fuji San were mighty in
those days.
* * * * *
The third lake was black, ink-black, black as strong-cast shadows in
the moonlight. Tarnished and still it lay, without a glitter or a
gleam; yet the washing wavelets, as they poured over the stone at our
feet, were pure and clear, and the high steep hills that half encircled
it were dense with the greenest trees.
The ghostly wood was ended, the petrified river gone; on the banks of
this sombre lake living trees were growing. Tangled and thick and high,
they walled in three sides of the lake, and, sweeping round in a long
thin promontory, divided the ink-black waters with a sword of green.
Along the hill there ran no pathway, the trees stood too thick, the
hill too steep. There was no boat upon the lake nor any road around
it. The black waters washed to the foot of the trees, the trees
stretched green to the top of the hills, and lake and wood were still
as undiscovered country.
And behind us lay all the long silence of the ghostly wood.
On the very edge of the promontory a white house rested, poised like a
gull on the water, but the dead-black lake gave back no reflection, and
the dark-green hills caught no colour from the sun, nor stirred a leaf.
Silent as the waters the house poised white beneath the evening sky.
On three sides the high hills shut in the lake, but on the fourth the
lava-stones met the marsh, the marsh the common, and wide and flat the
common stretched away to the beyond.
A little while and the setting sun was down behind the hills, and all
the sky was darkening into night. Far over the common, and purple as a
king’s raiment, rose Fuji San. Grand and lonely he stood between dark
earth and darkening sky; far off on the edge of the world, and all the
solemn stillness of the evening wrapt him round.
Gently fell the twilight on lake and hill. The grey spaces of the
common stretched more vast and wide. The night was coming fast.
Beneath my feet the blackness of the waters opened as the deep abyss.
Behind, the horror of the spell-bound wood waited wide-eyed. Sweeping
onwards in the twilight the indistinctness of the common passed out of
sight, the pathless hills closed round me.
Then the spell of the ghostly wood reached out to clutch. I looked
towards the light.... Dim as Life’s hope it lay, far off beyond the
horizon, while all the blackness of the lake and hill surrounded me.
I strained my eyes across the indistinctness, and from that far-off
heaven a lofty Presence leaned.
It was the Great God Fuji.
III
EPILOGUE
The blue sea lies sleeping warm and still; the sky, another sea, sleeps
too; only the green headlands standing between blue and blue watch,
their feet in the water. And the heat is the heat of a summer’s noon.
So still the sea, so quiet the sky, so calm the earth that the soft
breath of the sleeping ocean comes as a rippling sigh towards the land,
while the blue sea above floats lazy.
From their low hill Tesshuji’s forsaken Gods look out. The temple walls
are bare, its altars dumb, and the grass-grown court has shod even
silence with a velvet shoe. Dreaming, the Gods sit undisturbed, and the
hush of the noonday’s heat is deepened.
It is long since the clang of the praying-bell overhead called them to
listen. Still they sit, and look.
In the shadow of the doorway at the still Gods’ feet, I, too, sit and
look.
Over the sleeping sea, blue and still, beyond the watching headlands,
out into the liquid sky above, where in utter majesty great Fuji
rises one sheer line of beauty in the blue. The rounded curve of his
snow-crest shimmers white as a sun-caught sail, and the long slope of
his perfect form is a deep blue line on blue. Fuji rises as a tower, he
floats in that limpid sea above a mist-clad iceberg. And the glimmer
of his snow-crest is a shining crown of glory in the sky. So real, so
simple, so beautiful. Just a crescent of white snow floating thirteen
thousand feet above the world, and two long lines of blue sloping
gently downwards, outwards to the earth. So simple, so beautiful, is it
real?
A faint stir in the sleeping sea and I drop my eyes to the blue below.
Beauty, said the Greeks, was born of the waves and the foam. Once in
that clear sea above, a great blue wave came leaping with a crest of
foam. It was Beauty’s self, all-perfect, and they called it Fujiyama.
Beauty content to be but beauty.
* * * * *
Tesshuji’s Gods look out over the sea, beyond the green headlands into
the blue. They dream undisturbed. They have looked so long.
The noonday heat has spread the land with a quivering haze of blue. It
sleeps. The softly breathing sea sleeps too. No prayer has roused the
Gods, they too are sleeping.
The whole world, says the Scriptures, is but a dream of the great Lord
Buddha. Tesshuji’s Gods are dreaming, and Fuji is.
Dream Gods for ever.
THE ART OF THE NATION
“All that is superfluous is displeasing to God and Nature;
all that is displeasing to God and Nature is bad.”
DANTE, “De Monarchia,” bk. i. chap. xiv.
I
GRACE BEFORE MEAT
The _kuruma_ running quickly through the narrow opening in the high
bamboo fence curved into a tiny garden set with dark green shrubs, and
stopped abruptly.
In front of us, where a square recess broke the long line of wooden
wall, a pile of _gheta_ lay heaped on a grey stone block. At the sound
of our coming the wooden wall opened, and a Japanese in _kimono_ and
_hakama_ stood bowing before us. He came with pairs of soft woolly
night-socks to cover English feet, and, sitting down on the narrow
knee-high platform of polished black wood, we took off our boots. Two
giant curb-stones at right angles made a solitary step to reach the
platform, and leaving our leather boots, looking caricatures of feet
among the wooden sandals, we followed the waiting _kimono_ along the
three-foot-wide platform.
Round the corner of the square recess, and shut off from the tiny
courtyard by a thick screen of fence and shrubs, was a white garden,
sunny and still, where, under a pale blue sky, the tall shadows of
the trees fell black across the pure white snow. Sliding back the
paper-paned wall the waiting _kimono_ bowed us to enter.
“Come in, come in,” said our friend the professor, his familiar face
looking strangely unfamiliar from out the wide-sleeved silken _kimono_
and pleated silken skirts of his _hakama_, as he laughingly bowed us a
Japanese welcome.
The first sensation on coming into that low matted room, bare of all
furniture, was one of intense awkwardness, all one’s limbs seemed to
have swollen to ungainly proportions, and to have grown correspondingly
wooden and jerky. In a flash I had slipped back to a child’s years, and
was lying in my little iron bedstead in the dark, the haunting terror
of the unknown upon me, as I stealthily pinched a mountainous leg with
a hand twelve feet thick, and trembled to feel the bedstead giving way
beneath me. That old sensation of unaccountable largeness, of bursting
one’s surroundings, stayed as the unreal background to my mind until
the paper-paned walls closed behind me again.
“If you would like a chair, there are just two--” began the professor.
But we had come to be really Japanese, and Japanese we intended to
remain at all costs. So, getting gingerly down on our knees on the
square cushions that lay on the matted floor, we tried unsuccessfully
to sit on our heels with the same grace as little Miss Hayashi
opposite. There she sat, demure, serene, and, above all, supremely
graceful all through lunch, while we, like chestnuts on hot bricks,
hopped from knee to knee, bobbed up and down, tucked our legs under us
like Turks, or bunchwise like children, leaned on one arm, then on the
other, enduring untold horrors of pins and needles as we became more
intimately acquainted with our own anatomy than we had ever done in all
the previous years of our existence. And my admiration of Miss Hayashi
grew as she sat there, one line of pure grace from the curves of her
slender neck, rising from the folds of mauve and white, to the thick
wadded hem of her _kimono_.
As I looked I grew more and more conscious that the dress and the room
were one, each the necessary complement of the other, the right frame
for the right picture, and the right picture in the right frame.
“The soul of Japan,” they say, “is the sword of the _samurai_.” “Then
the soul of the _uchi_,” I thought, “is the _kimono_ of the housewife.”