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.
Here we saw Chinamen for the first time on native heath. They came out
to us in sampans, always with one or two children in the bow, to get
scraps to eat at the port-holes aft, or empty bottles, which they much
prized; or drifted past us on the swift tide, watching like birds of
prey for anything that might be thrown overboard. And we saw the
attitude of Japanese toward Chinamen for the first time, as well, and
all the time one memory, incongruous and unjust though it was, hung in
my mind--the memory of a town-bred mulatto in a high hat with his thumbs
in the arm-holes of a white waistcoat, and loftily talking to a country
brother of deeper shade in the market-place of a certain Southern town.
One day a sampan, with a very old man and a young one aboard, made fast
to the gangway. They had fish to sell, and during the haggling that
followed, a Japanese sprang aboard, dropped a coin or two, picked up the
fish, and tried to cast the sampan away--the Chinamen sputtering voluble
but feeble protests meanwhile. In the confusion, the stern of the sampan
struck a ship's boat that was swinging on a long hawser from the same
gangway, the bow of it struck the ship's side, and the racing tide did
the rest. The boat was overturned, old man and young one disappeared and
all under water shot away. We thought they were gone, but there were two
lean, yellow arms fastened by yellow talons to the keel, and in a moment
the young man was dragging the old man to safety on the bottom of the
boat. The ship's boat was cast away, the Japanese who had caused the
trouble sprang aboard with the crew, gave chase to the bobbing wreck,
caught it several hundred yards away, righted it, and later we saw the
young Chinaman working it, half submerged, toward the distant shore, and
the shivering, bedraggled old one being brought back to the ship. We
were all indignant, for the officers of the ship, far from interfering,
laughed during the whole affair, and, laughing, watched the old man and
the young one sweep away. But no sooner was the old man aboard than the
servants and interpreters gave him rice, saki, empty bottles, and
clothes, and took up a subscription for him; and when the young one got
to the ship an hour later the old man climbed into the sampan, mellow
and happy. It seemed a heartless piece of cruelty at first, but it was
perhaps, after all, only the cruelty of children, for which they were at
once sorry and at once tried to make amends. To me, its significance was
in the loftily superior, contemptuously patronizing attitude of the
Japanese toward the yellow brother from whom he got civilization, art,
classical models, and a written speech. Later, I found the same bearing
raised to the ninth degree in Manchuria. Knowing the grotesque results
in the efforts of one imitative race to adopt another civilization in my
own country, the parallelism has struck me forcibly over here in dress,
Occidental manners, the love of interpreters for ponderous phraseology
and quotations, rigid insistence on form and red tape and the letter
thereof. Give a Japanese a rule and he knows no exception on his part,
understands no variation therefrom on yours. For instance, every
afternoon we went into the sea from that gangway, and Guy Scull diving
from the railing of the upper deck and Richard Harding Davis diving for
coins thrown from the same deck into the water (and getting them, too)
created no little diversion for everybody on board. On the third
afternoon, Davis, in his kimono and nothing else, was halted by the
first officer at the gangway. The captain had found a transport rule to
the effect that nobody should be allowed to go in bathing--the good
reason being, of course, that some of several hundred soldiers in
bathing might drown. Therefore, we eighteen men, though we were in a way
the guests of the captain's Government--in spite of the fact that we
were paying for our own meals--and though for this reason a distinction
might have been made, the rule was there, and, like Japanese soldiers,
we had to obey. It looked a trifle ominous.