Then Followed On Shore The Sound Of An
Eastern Tongue, That Is Beautiful Or Not As You Happen To Know It.
The
Western races have many languages, but a crowd of Europeans heard
through closed doors talk with the Western pitch and cadence.
So it is
with the East. A line of jinrickshaw coolies sat in the sun discoursing
to each other, and it was as though they were welcoming a return in
speech that the listener must know as well as English. They talked and
they talked, but the ghosts of familiar words would not grow any clearer
till presently the Smell came down the open streets again, saying that
this was the East where nothing matters, and trifles old as the Tower of
Babel mattered less than nothing, and that there were old acquaintances
waiting at every corner beyond the township. Great is the Smell of the
East! Railways, telegraphs, docks, and gunboats cannot banish it, and it
will endure till the railways are dead. He who has not smelt that smell
has never lived.
Three years ago Yokohama was sufficiently Europeanised in its shops to
suit the worst and wickedest taste. To-day it is still worse if you keep
to the town limits. Ten steps beyond into the fields all the
civilisation stops exactly as it does in another land a few thousand
miles further West. The globe-trotting, millionaires anxious to spend
money, with a hose on whatever caught their libertine fancies, had
explained to us aboard-ship that they came to Japan in haste, advised by
their guide-books to do so, lest the land should be suddenly civilised
between steamer-sailing and steamer-sailing.
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