II.

Off and On.

It was on the day but one before the festival of the fifth moon that

we set out, or, in English, the third of May; and those emblems of

good luck, the festival fishes, were already swimming in the air

above the house eaves, as we scurried through the streets in

jinrikisha toward the Uyeno railway station. We had been a little

behindhand in starting, but by extra exertions on the part of the

runners we succeeded in reaching the station just in time to be shut

out by the gatekeeper. Time having been the one thing worthless in

old Japan, it was truly sarcastic of fate that we should reach our

first goal too late. As if to point chagrin, the train still stood

in waiting. Remonstrances with the wicket man about the imported

five-minute regulation, or whatever it was, proved of no avail.

Not one jot or tittle of the rule would he yield, which perhaps was

natural, inasmuch as, however we might have managed alone, our

companions the baskets never could have boarded the train without

offical help. The intrinsic merits of the baggage failed, alas,

to affect its mobility. Then the train slowly drew out.

To be stopped on the road is the common lot of travelers; but to be

stopped before one has fairly started is nothing less than to be

mocked at. It is best, however, to take such gibes in good part.

Viewing the situation in this light, the ludicrousness of the

disconnection struck me so forcibly as very nearly to console me for

my loss, which was not trifling, since the next train did not leave

for above three hours; too late to push on beyond Takasaki that night,

a thing I had most firmly purposed to do. Here I was, the miserable

victim of a punctuality my own people had foisted on a land only too

happy without it! There was poetic justice in the situation, after all.

Besides, the course of one's true love should not run too smooth.

Judicious difficulty whets desire.

There was nothing to turn to on the spot, and I was ashamed to go home.

Then I opportunely remembered something.

I have always thought we limited our pharmacopoeia. We prescribe

pills enough for the body, while we leave the mind to look after itself.

Why should not the spirit also have its draughts and mixtures,

properly labeled and dispensed! For example, angling appears to be a

strong mental opiate. I have seen otherwise normal people stupefied

beyond expression when at the butt of a rod and line. Happening to

recall this effect, I instantly prescribed for my perturbed state of

mind a good dose of fishing, to be taken as suited the day. So I

betook me down a by-street, where the aerial carp promised the

thickest, and, selecting a house well placed for a view, asked

permission to mount upon the roof. It chanced to be a cast-off

clothing shop, along whose front some fine, if aged, garments were

hung to catch the public eye. The camera and I were inducted up the

ascent by the owner, while my boots, of course, waited dog-like in

the porch below.

The city made a spectacle from above. On all sides superb paper carp

floated to the breeze, tugging at the strings that held them to the

poles quite after the manner of the real fish. One felt as though,

by accident, he had stepped into some mammoth globe of goldfish.

The whole sky was alive with them. Eighty square miles of finny folk

inside the city, and an untold company without. The counterfeit

presentments were from five to ten feet long, and painted to mimic

life. The breeze entered at the mouth and passed out somewhat less

freely at the tail, thus keeping them well bellied and constantly in

motion. The way they rose and dove and turned and wriggled was

worthy of free will. Indeed, they had every look of spontaneity,

and lacked only the thing itself to turn the sky into an ocean,

and Tokyo into a sea bottom with a rockery of roof. Each fish

commemorates the birth of a boy during the year. It would thus be

possible to take a census of the increase of the male population

yearly, at the trifling cost of scaling a housetop,--a set of

statistics not without an eventual value.

While we were strolling back, Yejiro and I, we came, in the way,

upon another species of fish. The bait, which was well designed to

captivate, bade for the moment to exceed even the angler's

anticipations. It was a sort of un-Christmas tree with fishing-pole

branches, from which dangled articulated figures, bodied like men,

but with heads of foxes, tortoises, and other less likelybeasts,

--bewitching objects in impossible evolution to a bald-pated

urchin who stood gazing at it with all his soul. The peddler sat with

his eyes riveted on the boy, visions of a possible catch chasing

themselves through his brain. I watched him, while the crowd behind

stared at me. We made quite a tail of curiosity. The opiate was

having its effect; I began to feel soporifically calm. Then I went

up to the restaurant in the park and had lunch as quietly as

possible, in fear of friendly discovery.

Sufficiently punctual passengers being now permitted to board the

next train, I ensconced myself in a kind of parlor compartment, which,

fortunately, I continued to have all to myself, and was soon being

rolled westward across the great Musashi plain, ruminating. My chief

quarrel with railway rules is, I am inclined to think, that they

preach to the public what they fail to practice themselves. After

having denied me a paltry five minutes' grace at the station, the

officials proceeded to lose half an hour on the road in a most

exasperating manner. Of course the delay was quite exceptional.

Such a thing had never happened before, and would not happen

again--till the next time. But the phenomenal character of the

occurrence failed to console me, as it should no doubt have done.

My delay, too, was exceptional--on this line. Nor was I properly

mollified by repeated offers of hard-boiled eggs, cakes, and oranges,

which certain enterprising peddlers hawked up and down the platforms,

when we stopped, to a rhythmic chant of their own invention.

The only consolation lay in the memory of what travel over the

Musashi plain used to be before trains hurried one, or otherwise,

into the heart of the land. In those days the journey was done in

jinrikisha, and a question of days, not hours, it was in the doing,

--two days' worth of baby carriage, of which the tediousness lay

neither in the vehicles nor in the way, but in the amount of both.

Or, if one put comparative speed above comparative comfort, he rose

before the lark, to be tortured through a summer's day in a basha,

or horse vehicle, suitable only for disembodied spirits. My joints

ached again at the thought. Clearly, to grumble now was to sin

against proportion.

Besides, the weather was perfect: argosies of fleecy cloud sailing

slowly across a deep blue sky; a broad plain in all its spring

freshness of color, picked out here and there with fruit trees

smothered in blossom, and bearing on its bosom the passing shadows of

the clouds above; in the distance the gradually growing forms of the

mountains, each at first starting into life only as a faint wash of

color, barely to be parted from the sky itself, pricking up from out

the horizon of field. Then, slowly, timed to our advance, the tint

gathered substance, grew into contrasts that, deepening minute by

minute, resolved into detail, until at last the whole stood revealed

in all its majesty, foothill, shoulder, peak, one grand chromatic

rise from green to blue.

One after the other the points came out thus along the southern sky:

first the summits behind Ome; then Bukosan, like some sentinel,

half-way up the plain's long side; and then range beyond range

stretching toward the west. Behind Bukosan peeped Cloud's Rest, the

very same outline in fainter tint, so like the double reflection

from a pane of glass that I had to shift to an open window to make

sure it was no illusion. Then the Nikko group began to show on the

right, and the Haruna mass took form in front; and as they rose

higher and the sunbeams slanted more, gilding the motes in the heavy

afternoon air, they rimmed the plain in front into one great bowl

of fairy eau de vie de Dantzic. Slowly above them the sun dipped to

his setting, straight ahead, burnishing our path as we pursued in

two long lines of flashing rail into the west-northwest. Lower he

sank, luring us on, and lower yet, and then suddenly disappeared

beyond the barrier of peaks.

The train drew up, panting. It was Takasaki, now steeped in saffron

afterglow. The guards passed along, calling out the name and

unfastening the doors. Everybody got out and shuffled off on their

clogs. The baskets, Yejiro, and I followed, after a little, through

the gloaming.

It was not far to the inn. It was just far enough, at that hour, to

put us in heart for a housing. Indeed, twilight is the time of

times to arrive anywhere. Any spot, be it ever so homely, seems

homelike then. The dusk has snatched from you the silent

companionship of nature, to leave you poignantly alone. It is the

hour when a man draws closer to the one he loves, and the hour when

most he shrinks from himself, though he want another near. It is

then the rays of the house lights wander abroad and appear to beckon

the houseless in; and that must be, in truth, a sorry hostelry to

seem such to him.

Even Takasaki bore a look of welcome alike to the foreign and the

native stranger, which was certainly wonderful for Takasaki. The

place used not to fancy foreigners, and its inns bandied the European

traveler about like a bale of undesirable merchandise with the duties

still due. But now, what a change! The innkeeper not only received

us, but led the way at once to the best room,--a room in the second

story of the fireproof storehouse at the back, which he hoped would

be comfortable. Comfortable! The room actually proffered us a table

and chairs. No one who has not, after a long day's tramp, sought in

vain to rest his weary body propped up against a side beam in a

Japanese inn can enter into the feeling a chair inspires, even long

afterward, by recollection.

I cannot say I loved Takasaki in former days. Was it my reception or

was it sentiment that made me see it all now through a mist of glamour?

Unsuspected by us, that atmosphere of time tints everything. Few

things but look lovelier seen down the vista of the years. Indeed,

sentiment is a kind of religion; or is it religion that is a kind of

sentiment? Both are so subtly busy canonizing the past, and crowning

with aureoles very every-day things as well as very ordinary people.

Not men alone take on a sanctity when they are no more.