It Is Better To Lie Still And Hear The
Grass Grow - To Soak In The Heat And The Smell And The Sounds And The
Sights That Come Unasked.
Our garden overhangs the harbour, and by pushing aside one branch we
look down upon a heavy-sterned fishing-boat, the straw-gold mats of the
deck-house pushed back to show the perfect order and propriety of the
housekeeping that is going forward.
The father-fisher, sitting
frog-fashion, is poking at a tiny box full of charcoal, and the light,
white ash is blown back into the face of a largish Japanese doll, price
two shillings and threepence in Bayswater. The doll wakes, turns into a
Japanese baby something more valuable than money could buy - a baby with
a shaven head and aimless legs. It crawls to the thing in the polished
brown box, is picked up just as it is ready to eat live coals, and is
set down behind a thwart, where it drums upon a bucket, addressing the
firebox from afar. Half-a-dozen cherry blossoms slide off a bough, and
waver down to the water close to the Japanese doll, who in another
minute will be overside in pursuit of these miracles. The father-fisher
has it by the pink hind leg, and this time it is tucked away, all but
the top-knot, out of sight among umber nets and sepia cordage. Being an
Oriental it makes no protest, and the boat scuds out to join the little
fleet in the offing.
Then two sailors of a man-of-war come along the sea face, lean over the
canal below the garden, spit, and roll away. The sailor in port is the
only superior man. To him all matters rare and curious are either 'them
things' or 'them other things.' He does not hurry himself, he does not
seek Adjectives other than those which custom puts into his mouth for
all occasions; but the beauty of life penetrates his being insensibly
till he gets drunk, falls foul of the local policeman, smites him into
the nearest canal, and disposes of the question of treaty revision with
a hiccup. All the same, Jack says that he has a grievance against the
policeman, who is paid a dollar for every strayed seaman he brings up to
the Consular Courts for overstaying his leave, and so forth. Jack says
that the little fellows deliberately hinder him from getting back to his
ship, and then with devilish art and craft of wrestling tricks - 'there
are about a hundred of 'em, and they can throw you with every qualified
one' - carry him to justice. Now when Jack is softened with drink he does
not tell lies. This is his grievance, and he says that them blanketed
consuls ought to know. 'They plays into each other's hands, and stops
you at the Hatoba' - the policemen do. The visitor who is neither a
seaman nor drunk, cannot swear to the truth of this, or indeed anything
else. He moves not only among fascinating scenes and a lovely people
but, as he is sure to find out before he has been a day ashore, between
stormy questions. Three years ago there were no questions that were not
going to be settled off-hand in a blaze of paper lanterns. The
Constitution was new. It has a gray, pale cover with a chrysanthemum at
the back, and a Japanese told me then, 'Now we have Constitution same as
other countries, and so it is all right. Now we are quite civilised
because of Constitution.'
[A perfectly irrelevant story comes to mind here. Do you know that in
Madeira once they had a revolution which lasted just long enough for the
national poet to compose a national anthem, and then was put down? All
that is left of the revolt now is the song that you hear on the
twangling nachettes, the baby-banjoes, of a moonlight night under the
banana fronds at the back of Funchal. And the high-pitched nasal refrain
of it is 'Consti-tuci-oun!']
Since that auspicious date it seems that the questions have
impertinently come up, and the first and the last of them is that of
Treaty Revision. Says the Japanese Government, 'Only obey our laws, our
new laws that we have carefully compiled from all the wisdom of the
West, and you shall go up country as you please and trade where you
will, instead of living cooped up in concessions and being judged by
consuls. Treat us as you would treat France or Germany, and we will
treat you as our own subjects.'
Here, as you know, the matter rests between the two thousand foreigners
and the forty million Japanese - a God-send to all editors of Tokio and
Yokohama, and the despair of the newly arrived in whose nose, remember,
is the smell of the East, One and Indivisible, Immemorial, Eternal, and,
above all, Instructive.
Indeed, it is only by walking out at least half a mile that you escape
from the aggressive evidences of civilisation, and come out into the
rice-fields at the back of the town. Here men with twists of blue and
white cloth round their heads are working knee deep in the thick black
mud. The largest field may be something less than two tablecloths, while
the smallest is, say, a speck of undercliff, on to which it were hard to
back a 'rickshaw, wrested from the beach and growing its clump of barley
within spray-shot of the waves. The field paths are the trodden tops of
the irrigating cuts, and the main roads as wide as two perambulators
abreast. From the uplands - the beautiful uplands planted in exactly the
proper places with pine and maple - the ground comes down in terraced
pocket on pocket of rich earth to the levels again, and it would seem
that every heavily-thatched farmhouse was chosen with special regard to
the view.
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