Part 7

Even the inn possessed something of her grace: the matting was whiter, the woodwork smoother, the steep stairway--set like a ladder between the walls--more polished than elsewhere. The tiny medallions set deep in the _shōji_, which are as the handles to our doors, were works of art. The miniature garden of the courtyard, with its hills and trees and swift grey stream, was a living landscape, perfect in form and colouring. Even the shallow brass pans in which we washed, the commonest of hotel furniture, had an elegance of their own. And in the refined and beautiful inn our graceful, courtly landlady knelt and offered us platefuls of “mixed biscuits.” They were certainly cheap ones, but never did the utter vulgarity of their shapes, or the crudeness of their colouring, strike so sharply on my senses. If they had tasted like manna from the wilderness I could not have eaten one. They were too ugly.

It is vivid still, the bliss of that hot bath in fresh mountain water pumped from a stream which comes from Fuji’s sacred slopes, and the joy of that long dreamless sleep under the green mosquito curtain in our white matted room. Vivid still, the breakfast cooked over the _hibachi_, with our aristocratic landlady, every line of her graceful form looking purer and more refined as she stooped to hold the handle of the frying-pan, while her stolid husband on his knees before his office desk in the corner looked on good-naturedly, and the stout little maid watched the foreign cooking of our ham as though it had been a sacred rite.

* * * * *

We were to return by the lakes which encircle Fuji, and we set out that morning along a dull dusty road between dull dusty banks.

It was but a little way to the first lake, but hot beyond believing, and when we reached it, and pushed out in our boat beyond the narrow inlet which ran deep into the road, the heat settled down like a roof above our heads.

The sky was one superb arch of azure blue; the earth in front of us a wide, bare flat, glittering with heat. And from out of that gleaming, quivering mist which hid the level land Great Fuji rose dark blue on blue. Naked and superb he stood against the background of the sky secure in his strength, perfect in his beauty, beyond words, beyond praise, in sober truth--divine.

It took an hour and a half to cross the lake, and all the time Fuji San, set in the framework of the turquoise sky, with the gleaming, glittering mist of light sweeping like an iridescent cloud to the edge of his dark blue slope, stayed with us. For an hour and a half we looked, and the form and the soul of the mountain sank deep within our hearts.

* * * * *

The second lake is divided from the first by a natural wall of hill over which we climbed, the sun striking fiercely on the pathway where one small patch of shade lay black on the thick white dust.

The second lake was set deep within the circle of the hills, and we crossed it in company with three men who had drunk much _saké_, and another who stuck fuses into a row of dynamite cartridges and then, leaving them under a corner of the matting in the bottom of the boat, apparently forgot their existence. These four passengers and the two boatmen were continually stumbling up and down the boat to row in turns, and always within a few inches of the dynamite.

It was a somewhat agitating row, although we were assured the cartridges were “only for fishing.”

It ended at last, after a long two hours of suspense, among the quiet grey boulders which stretched for a hundred yards between the water and the wood.

Down the little valley beyond the stones, a winding river of rice-fields ran like a grass-green stream, and we followed it, as one follows up a mountain brook, till it dwindled and disappeared. Then the wood closed in above it, and we were in the middle of a weird uncanny forest, all grey and wrinkled, where multitudes of thick-set pole-like trees, covered with a powdery dust, ranged ghost-like out of sight.

And here we walked, the only living things in a spell-bound world, walked until the earth grew thin beneath our feet and the rough grey boulders came up through the soil.

Then for a long, long while we went beside a grey lava-river flowing between the grey tree-stems, a wide and furious river arrested as it swept in angry tumult through the wood, stopped dead, and each breaking wave turned into stone. We looked at this still, dead river and saw how the years had covered the waves with a thick white crust of dust. Buried deep lay that tempest of passion which once had swept burning from Fuji’s sides, buried deep beneath blocks of grey lava and the drifting ash-grey dust.

Yet the very stones that buried it were carved in its image. And the face of that passion, petrified and deadly, looked up from the river. And all around the grey wood stood dead too, and very still, coated deep with a powdery dust, ash-grey. For the spell of the river was over the wood, and it was the death of Destruction.

For miles we walked beside that Medusa river, sometimes we left it, sometimes we crossed it, then losing it between the trees we wandered where the ghostly pole-like trunks grew thickest. But always the river came back with the dead passion that made it staring rigid beneath the stones.

Miles and miles of lava, wide, and long, and deep. The ghostly trees were rooted in it, the very lakes lay cradled in it, the world for far around was made of it. Verily the fires of Fuji San were mighty in those days.

* * * * *

The third lake was black, ink-black, black as strong-cast shadows in the moonlight. Tarnished and still it lay, without a glitter or a gleam; yet the washing wavelets, as they poured over the stone at our feet, were pure and clear, and the high steep hills that half encircled it were dense with the greenest trees.

The ghostly wood was ended, the petrified river gone; on the banks of this sombre lake living trees were growing. Tangled and thick and high, they walled in three sides of the lake, and, sweeping round in a long thin promontory, divided the ink-black waters with a sword of green.

Along the hill there ran no pathway, the trees stood too thick, the hill too steep. There was no boat upon the lake nor any road around it. The black waters washed to the foot of the trees, the trees stretched green to the top of the hills, and lake and wood were still as undiscovered country.

And behind us lay all the long silence of the ghostly wood.

On the very edge of the promontory a white house rested, poised like a gull on the water, but the dead-black lake gave back no reflection, and the dark-green hills caught no colour from the sun, nor stirred a leaf. Silent as the waters the house poised white beneath the evening sky.

On three sides the high hills shut in the lake, but on the fourth the lava-stones met the marsh, the marsh the common, and wide and flat the common stretched away to the beyond.

A little while and the setting sun was down behind the hills, and all the sky was darkening into night. Far over the common, and purple as a king’s raiment, rose Fuji San. Grand and lonely he stood between dark earth and darkening sky; far off on the edge of the world, and all the solemn stillness of the evening wrapt him round.

Gently fell the twilight on lake and hill. The grey spaces of the common stretched more vast and wide. The night was coming fast.

Beneath my feet the blackness of the waters opened as the deep abyss. Behind, the horror of the spell-bound wood waited wide-eyed. Sweeping onwards in the twilight the indistinctness of the common passed out of sight, the pathless hills closed round me.

Then the spell of the ghostly wood reached out to clutch. I looked towards the light.... Dim as Life’s hope it lay, far off beyond the horizon, while all the blackness of the lake and hill surrounded me.

I strained my eyes across the indistinctness, and from that far-off heaven a lofty Presence leaned.

It was the Great God Fuji.

III

EPILOGUE

The blue sea lies sleeping warm and still; the sky, another sea, sleeps too; only the green headlands standing between blue and blue watch, their feet in the water. And the heat is the heat of a summer’s noon.

So still the sea, so quiet the sky, so calm the earth that the soft breath of the sleeping ocean comes as a rippling sigh towards the land, while the blue sea above floats lazy.

From their low hill Tesshuji’s forsaken Gods look out. The temple walls are bare, its altars dumb, and the grass-grown court has shod even silence with a velvet shoe. Dreaming, the Gods sit undisturbed, and the hush of the noonday’s heat is deepened.

It is long since the clang of the praying-bell overhead called them to listen. Still they sit, and look.

In the shadow of the doorway at the still Gods’ feet, I, too, sit and look.

Over the sleeping sea, blue and still, beyond the watching headlands, out into the liquid sky above, where in utter majesty great Fuji rises one sheer line of beauty in the blue. The rounded curve of his snow-crest shimmers white as a sun-caught sail, and the long slope of his perfect form is a deep blue line on blue. Fuji rises as a tower, he floats in that limpid sea above a mist-clad iceberg. And the glimmer of his snow-crest is a shining crown of glory in the sky. So real, so simple, so beautiful. Just a crescent of white snow floating thirteen thousand feet above the world, and two long lines of blue sloping gently downwards, outwards to the earth. So simple, so beautiful, is it real?

A faint stir in the sleeping sea and I drop my eyes to the blue below.

Beauty, said the Greeks, was born of the waves and the foam. Once in that clear sea above, a great blue wave came leaping with a crest of foam. It was Beauty’s self, all-perfect, and they called it Fujiyama. Beauty content to be but beauty.

* * * * *

Tesshuji’s Gods look out over the sea, beyond the green headlands into the blue. They dream undisturbed. They have looked so long.

The noonday heat has spread the land with a quivering haze of blue. It sleeps. The softly breathing sea sleeps too. No prayer has roused the Gods, they too are sleeping.

The whole world, says the Scriptures, is but a dream of the great Lord Buddha. Tesshuji’s Gods are dreaming, and Fuji is.

Dream Gods for ever.

THE ART OF THE NATION

“All that is superfluous is displeasing to God and Nature; all that is displeasing to God and Nature is bad.” DANTE, “De Monarchia,” bk. i. chap. xiv.

I

GRACE BEFORE MEAT

The _kuruma_ running quickly through the narrow opening in the high bamboo fence curved into a tiny garden set with dark green shrubs, and stopped abruptly.

In front of us, where a square recess broke the long line of wooden wall, a pile of _gheta_ lay heaped on a grey stone block. At the sound of our coming the wooden wall opened, and a Japanese in _kimono_ and _hakama_ stood bowing before us. He came with pairs of soft woolly night-socks to cover English feet, and, sitting down on the narrow knee-high platform of polished black wood, we took off our boots. Two giant curb-stones at right angles made a solitary step to reach the platform, and leaving our leather boots, looking caricatures of feet among the wooden sandals, we followed the waiting _kimono_ along the three-foot-wide platform.

Round the corner of the square recess, and shut off from the tiny courtyard by a thick screen of fence and shrubs, was a white garden, sunny and still, where, under a pale blue sky, the tall shadows of the trees fell black across the pure white snow. Sliding back the paper-paned wall the waiting _kimono_ bowed us to enter.

“Come in, come in,” said our friend the professor, his familiar face looking strangely unfamiliar from out the wide-sleeved silken _kimono_ and pleated silken skirts of his _hakama_, as he laughingly bowed us a Japanese welcome.

The first sensation on coming into that low matted room, bare of all furniture, was one of intense awkwardness, all one’s limbs seemed to have swollen to ungainly proportions, and to have grown correspondingly wooden and jerky. In a flash I had slipped back to a child’s years, and was lying in my little iron bedstead in the dark, the haunting terror of the unknown upon me, as I stealthily pinched a mountainous leg with a hand twelve feet thick, and trembled to feel the bedstead giving way beneath me. That old sensation of unaccountable largeness, of bursting one’s surroundings, stayed as the unreal background to my mind until the paper-paned walls closed behind me again.

“If you would like a chair, there are just two--” began the professor.

But we had come to be really Japanese, and Japanese we intended to remain at all costs. So, getting gingerly down on our knees on the square cushions that lay on the matted floor, we tried unsuccessfully to sit on our heels with the same grace as little Miss Hayashi opposite. There she sat, demure, serene, and, above all, supremely graceful all through lunch, while we, like chestnuts on hot bricks, hopped from knee to knee, bobbed up and down, tucked our legs under us like Turks, or bunchwise like children, leaned on one arm, then on the other, enduring untold horrors of pins and needles as we became more intimately acquainted with our own anatomy than we had ever done in all the previous years of our existence. And my admiration of Miss Hayashi grew as she sat there, one line of pure grace from the curves of her slender neck, rising from the folds of mauve and white, to the thick wadded hem of her _kimono_.

As I looked I grew more and more conscious that the dress and the room were one, each the necessary complement of the other, the right frame for the right picture, and the right picture in the right frame.

“The soul of Japan,” they say, “is the sword of the _samurai_.” “Then the soul of the _uchi_,” I thought, “is the _kimono_ of the housewife.”

The simplicity of the straight-falling lines, the perfection of the embroidery on the innermost of the folds around the neck, the richness of the _obi_ at the waist, there was the same severity of design with richness of decoration which characterised the room, where two paper-paned walls, one of sliding wood and the fourth stained a subdued brown, enclosed the bare matted space. Against the one solid wall was built a slightly raised platform of polished black wood, forming with the two low pillars of wood a wide recess, the _tokonoma_. Within the _tokonoma_ hung a long silken scroll where pale storks flew across the moon, a _kakemono_ of price. On the black wood of the platform, which was raised but a few inches from the ground, were set the two swords of the _samurai_, a bronze horse of exquisite workmanship, and in the corner some long branches of white plum-blossom in a vase. In these four objects (as in the _obi_ and the embroidery of the neck-folds) lay the entire decoration of the room. And looking, one realised that great truth, almost unknown to us, but a truism in Japan--the artistic value of space. In a European drawing-room you often cannot see one ornament for its fellows: here the bronze horse and the _kakemono_ held the eyes; one looked, and one _saw_; their beauty filled the soul; next week, next month, they will go back to the store-house, and others will take their place. I could never forget the curved lines of those two swords against the polished black floor under the white fragrance of the plum-blossoms, any more than I could forget the soft half-moon curves of Miss Hayashi’s _kimono_, white below mauve, as she glided over the matted floor.

Our lunch, we had come to lunch, opened with tea, pale amber tea in little round bowls on bronze stands, and sugar chrysanthemums, rice-paste storks and dolphins, cakes and sweets as perfect in design and colouring as though they were intended to last for ever. A rosy-cheeked maid, who bumped her head so vigorously on the floor that I thought she must get a headache, presented the tea, a bump for each guest and three as a salutation, while Miss Hayashi, folding squares of white paper in double triangles with one sweep of her hand, delicately heaped them full of sugar flowers and fishes, and passed them round, one to each of us.

Then came a long pause, while we asked all the questions that occurred to us about _kimono_ and _hakama_, and swords and etiquette; and then our lunch, a whole lacquered trayful of bowls for each one of us, with all the courses served together, and all irretrievably and, to us, inexplicably mixed. I pass the hot soup in a lacquered bowl, and the hot rice in a china one, but the rest--a golden bream on a pale blue plate set round with oranges in jelly; slices of pink raw fish, and a design in brown seaweed and green roots; a deep bowl of pale yellow custard, its surface ruffled with silver fishes, oriental whitebait, and its depths filled with bamboo shoots and lily bulbs and other surprises; and one dish, a triumph of design and colour, where an oval slab of pounded fish, white as snow, rested against a green mound of preserved chestnuts, while in front, arranged in a curving crescent like the tail of a comet, were purple roots, brown ginger, and slices of a red radish. And all this you eat as you please, a bit here, and a bit there, now a drink of salt soup, then a mouthful of sweet chestnut; custard, vegetables, fish, sweets, with relays of rice for bread, and _saké_ for wine, paper napkins, and withal two penholders to eat with, and your Japanese dinner is complete.

Having tried everything with the greatest perseverance, and wriggled our chopsticks until our hands were as tired as our toes, we gave in and rested from our labours. The little maid, rosier than ever, removed the trays of food, and brought in bowls of oranges and dried persimmon.

At this moment there was a rustling of screens, and a dear, little old lady with shaven eyebrows and blackened teeth slid into the room, and instantly went down on her knees, and putting out her hands bowed her head right down on to them.

“This is my aunt,” said the professor, “a real old-fashioned woman--there are not many left nowadays--who blackens her teeth and shaves her eyebrows.”

The little old lady laughed, and made many polite speeches, asking after our “honourable healths” and our “august appetites.” At every word she made another bow, until I felt as if I really must get down on my knees and hit my forehead against the ground as well. Luckily the professor, after a moment’s consultation, suggested we should see the house, and we all got up. The little old lady was on her feet in a twinkling, but our half-dead limbs sent pins and needles up our legs, as we stumbled on to them and awkwardly walked away.

The sliding paper wall of our room hid another absolutely bare, no _tokonoma_ here, only a poem painted on a long narrow board fastened against the door-post, and in the further wall, shut off by sliding screens, a large cupboard, full of the household linen, which means the silk-wadded quilts or _futon_, on and under which one sleeps. Sliding aside the door-panel we found ourselves on another three-foot-wide platform, looking out through more paper-paned walls into another garden. This house was just a long series of rooms with a platform and a garden on each side, and a little square bunch of rooms at one end. In one of these we cuddled down under a silk quilt thrown over a square hole in the middle of the room, and felt the heat coming up from the glowing charcoal sunk in a sort of pit beneath the floor.

Then we peeped into the bathroom, containing a high wooden wash-tub with a stove-pipe running down one end. The wash-tub is filled with cold water, and lighted charcoal put down the stove-pipe, and in a few minutes the water is hot, and you get in, and the longer you stay the hotter grows the water, until having boiled yourself in the approved Japanese way you step out and wipe yourself dry with a yard of white cotton adorned with blue storks.

Then we invaded the kitchen, bare of everything like the other rooms, and with only a two-fold brazier to cook over; one brazier has permanently fixed above it a coppered wooden tub, dedicated to rice-boiling, the other brazier cooked everything else. That was all. Wooden pots, pans and dippers were hung up inside the sliding cupboards, or were washing in the yard outside. A tiny shrine, like a mantelshelf over the sliding door, held minute gods in a dim light; a paper-framed bamboo lantern, like an afternoon-tea cake-table, with shelves between the legs for plates, stood in a corner. This is the _andon_, and inside the paper panes a floating wick in a saucer of oil burns all night.

Our advent into these regions was attended with much excitement punctuated with peals of laughter, it striking the dear old lady as irresistibly funny, that it was all funny to us.

In the midst of our hilarity came the summons of the _kurumaya_, and out we had to go, take our boots from the friendly company of the wooden _gheta_, and laden with mysterious boxes neatly tied with red and white strings, and bunches of plum-blossom, say stiff English “Good-byes,” while the little old lady, the rosy-cheeked maid, and the rest of the household bowed us graceful Japanese _sayonara_ and _mata irasshai_ (Come again).

The _kuruma_ curved out through the tiny snow-covered garden set with dark shrubs, the paper-paned walls shut with a soft thud; the picture was gone, but the memory of it will remain with me always.

II

IN A CLOISONNÉ FACTORY

Nagoya is a manufacturing town with a quarter of a million of inhabitants. It is full of porcelain and fan factories, cloisonné works and cotton mills. It is the centre of the celebrated potteries of Seto, and is famous for its embroideries and its silks. It is bigger than Nottingham or Hull, and is almost as large as Dublin. Nagoya is both Staffordshire and Bradford--and yet a city clean and still. A town of sunny streets and pure fresh air, whose sky is blue and clear, whose trees are green. Its 250,000 inhabitants are mostly factory hands--and there is neither dirt nor din. The golden dolphins on its castle’s roof are three hundred years old, and they glitter in the sunshine like new-fired gold.

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