Frederick was greatly relieved when the festivity at Lilienfeld's house
was at last a thing of the past. With Willy Snyders' help, he had
succeeded in getting together a few effects, and he spent part of the
afternoon arranging them. In the evening the artists, who had grown very
fond of their guest and were sorry to lose him, gave him a farewell
dinner at the round table.
For a long time Frederick had not felt so serene and at peace with
himself and the world as that afternoon. After he had got his baggage
ready, Willy Snyders, who had been waiting ever since Frederick's
arrival to show him his collection of Japanese art objects, invited him
to his room. It was a small room on the top floor, cluttered up with a
mass of antiques. He first placed before Frederick a number of Japanese
sword-guards, tsubas, as the Japanese call them, small elliptical pieces
of metal, about which a man's hand can easily reach. They are decorated
with figures in slight relief, partly of the same metal as the ground,
partly damascened, or inlaid with copper, gold, or silver.
"A tiny object, tremendous labour," Frederick observed, after more than
an hour spent in admiring the wonderful workmanship of pieces in the
Kamakura and Namban styles, pieces by members of the Goto family
extending over centuries, of the Jakushi family, and the Kinai family;
pieces of the Akasaka school and the Nara school; pieces from Fushimi in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from Gokinai and Kagonami;
glorious sword-guards in the maru-bori, maru-bori-zogan, and hikone-bori
styles; pieces of the Hamano family, and so on. Who can boast a prouder
aristocracy than Goto Mitsunori, who lived at the end of the nineteenth
century and could trace his descent back through a line of sixteen
ancestors, all great masters in the art of sword-decorating, a glorious
race of craftsmen, inheriting not only the life, but also the skill of
their fore-fathers.
And all the things portrayed on those small oval tsubas! The cloven
turnip of Daikoku, god of fortune. The god Sennin creating a man by his
breath. A shining full moon and flying geese. Wild geese flying over
reeds. The moon rising from between snow-clad mountains, an oval of iron,
gold and silver, no larger than a man's palm, yet suggesting the vast
reaches of a moonlit night.
Frederick and Willy both marvelled at the lapidary style of this metal
work, in which the artist with the finest understanding of his art
displayed a wealth of composition within the smallest space.
One of the tsubas represented a tea pavilion behind a hedge. In the
spacious landscape was a waterfall, sky and air, perfectly depicted by
holes in the iron, that is, by nothing. Others represented the hero
Hidesato vanquishing a monster on the bridge of Seta; the sage Lao Tsze
on his ox; Senno Kinko, a pious man, riding on his golden-eyed carp,
absorbed in a book; the god Idaten, pursuing an oni, or devil, who had
stolen Buddha's pearl; a bird prying open a Venus's shell with his bill;
a golden-eyed octopus or cuttlefish; the sage Kiko leaning from the
window of his house, reading a scroll by moonlight.
Willy, endlessly resourceful and allowing nothing to daunt him, had
ferreted this collection out of a restaurant in the Five Points district,
a restaurant of viler repute than even the neighbourhood it was in. A
Japanese had left the tsubas with the proprietor of the den as pledge of
the payment of his bill, but had disappeared without ever returning to
redeem his pledge. Scarcely a day passed that Willy did not visit a junk
shop on the Bowery, or in the Jewish quarter. Peering with his fearless,
fiery eyes, which always wore an expression of mingled astonishment and
indignation, he ventured into the worst sections of the city, even into
the obscurest opium hells of Chinatown. His confident manner and round
spectacles, he told Frederick, caused him to be mistaken for a detective;
which stood him in good stead in making his purchases.
In one shop in Chinatown, belonging to a fat Chinese usurer, Willy for
very little money came into possession of a quantity of Japanese prints.
These were the next things he showed Frederick. There were most of
Hiroshige's views of Lake Biwa; there were the thirty-six views of
Fujiyama by Hokusai. One of the most exquisite showed remnants of snow
left on the mountain and a brownish red sun setting in a cold sky with
fleecy clouds. There were Shunsho's and Shigemasa's illustrations of the
book, "Mirror of the Beauties of the Green Houses," Yedo, 1776, and
Shunsho's illustrations of "The Book of Sprouting Weeds." Frederick
called one of Hokusai's prints "the golden poem of summer." It was a
deep-blue heaven with Fujiyama to the left and golden grain beneath,
persons sitting on benches, heat, radiance, joy! One of Hiroshige's
prints he dubbed "the great poem of the moon." On wide, moist, melancholy
meadows, scant-leaved trees, like weeping willows, their branches
drooping in the mirror of an idly flowing stream, barges loaded with turf
passing by, a floating bridge propelled by Japanese raftsmen, the water
blue in the evening twilight, a great, pale moon, veiled by pale, bloody
tints, rising above the distant edge of the melancholy plain.
In addition to his tsubas and prints, Willy had a collection of so-called
netsuke, some in boxwood, some in ivory, small, dice-like carvings,
representing with remarkable animation all sorts of real and fantastic
scenes.
Among the finest of Willy's possessions was a Japanese figure carved in
wood not more than a foot high, a woman selling oysters. Each least
detail was most precisely rendered. It was the attempt of a more recent
Japanese master to portray feminine beauty. In this one rare instance he
had succeeded, having produced one of those precious objects adapted to
make thieves of their lovers.
Willy, who mingled in American sporting circles, had also found occasion
to collect a few Indian curiosities. He showed Frederick the feather
adornment of an Apache chief, a wampum belt, Indian knives and bows and
arrows. He had made the acquaintance of Buffalo Bill, the famous hunter,
and some Indian chief and cowboys in his troupe, men in whom natural
instincts are combined with a Barnum and Bailey business sense, and real
excellence with the actor's vanity. Willy's especial friend, whom he had
been very eager for Frederick to meet, was a well-known acrobat who had
jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge into the East River.
"Willy," said Frederick, "since you have so profitably employed your time
in America, you won't be going back to Europe empty-handed."
"The devil!" replied Willy. "What else is to be got out of this damned
country?"