Читать книгу The Kingdom of Slender Swords - Hallie Erminie Rives - Страница 8

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The slowing of the train awoke Barbara from her reverie. The three boy students got out, casting sidelong glances at her. More Japanese entered, and two foreigners—a bright-faced girl on the arm of a keen-eyed, soldierly man with bristling white hair, a mustache like a walrus, and a military button. The girl's hands were full of cherry-branches, whose bunches of double blossoms, incredibly thick and heavy, filled the car with a delicate fragrance. The bishop folded his newspaper and put it into his pocket.

As he did so the owner of the expansive waistcoat leaned across the aisle and addressed him.

"Say, my friend," he said, "you've lived out here some time, I understand."

"Yes," the bishop replied. "Twenty-five years."

"Well, I take it, then, you ought to know this country right down to the ground; and if you don't mind, I'd like to ask a question or two."

"Do," said the bishop. "I'll be glad to answer if I can."

The other got up and took a seat opposite. "You see," he pursued confidentially, "I came on this trip just for a rest and to settle the bills for the curios my wife"—he indicated the lady, who had now moved up beside him—"thinks she'd like to look at back home. But I've been getting interested by the minute. It's quite some time since I went to school, and I guess there hadn't so much happened then to Japan. I wish you'd run down the scale for me—just to hit the high places. Now there was a big rumpus here, I remember, at the time of our Civil War. They chose a new Emperor, didn't they?"

"No. The dynasty has been unbroken for two thousand years."

"Two thousand years!" cried the lady. "Why, that's before Christ!"

"When our ancestors, Martha, were painting themselves up in yellow ochre and carrying clubs—what was the row about, then?"

"It was something like this. To go back a little, the Emperor was always the nominal ruler and spiritual head, but the temporal power was administered by a self-decreed Viceroy called the shogun. Japan was a closed country and only a little trading was allowed in certain ports."

His questioner nodded. The girl beside the white-haired old soldier had touched the latter's sleeve, and both were listening attentively. "Then Perry came along and kicked open the gate. Bombarded 'em, didn't he?"

The bishop's eyes twinkled. "Only with gifts. He brought a small printing-press, a toy telegraph line and a miniature locomotive and railroad track. He set up these on the beach and showed the officials whom the shogun's government sent to treat with him, how they worked. In the end he made them understand the immense value of the scientific advancement of the western world. The visit was an eye-opener, and the wiser Japanese realized that the nation couldn't exist under the old régime any longer. It must make general treaties and adopt new ideas. Some, on the other hand, wanted things to stay as they were."

"Pulling both ways, eh?"

"Yes. At length the progressists decided on a sweeping measure. Under the shogunate, the daimyos (they were the great landed nobles) had been in a continual state of suppressed insurrection."

"Some wouldn't knuckle down to the shogun, I suppose."

"Exactly. There was no national rallying-point. But they all alike revered their Emperor. In all the bloody civil wars of a thousand years—and the Japanese were always fighting, like Europe in the Middle Ages—no shogun ever laid violent hands on the Emperor. He was half divine, you see, descended from the ancient gods, a living link between them and modern men. So now they proposed to give him complete temporal power, make him ruler in fact, and abolish the shogunate entirely."

"Phew! And the big daimyos came into line on the proposition?"

"They poured out their blood and their money like water for the new cause. The shogun himself voluntarily relinquished his power and retired to private life."

"Splendid!" said the stranger, and the girl clapped her gloved hands. "So that was the 'Restoration,' the beginning of Meiji, whatever that may mean?"

"The 'Era of Enlightenment.' The present Emperor, Mutsuhito, was a boy of sixteen then. They brought him here to Yedo, and renamed it Tokyo——"

"And proceeded to get reeling drunk on western notions," said the man with the military button, smiling grimly. "I was out here in the Seventies."

"True, sir," assented the bishop. "It was so, for a time. And the opposition took refuge in riot, assassination, and suicide. But gradually Japan worked the modernization scheme out. She sent her young statesmen to Europe and America to study western systems of education, jurisprudence and art. She hired an army of experts from all over the world. She sent her cleverest lads to foreign universities. In the end she chose what seemed to her the best from all. Her military ideas come from Germany and her railroad cars from the town of Pullman, Illinois. When the best didn't suit her, she invented a system of her own, as she has done with wireless telegraphy."

"So!" said the other. "I'm greatly obliged to you, sir. I've read plenty in the newspapers, but I never had it put so plain. It strikes me," he added to the old soldier, "that a nation plucky enough to do this in fifty years, in fifty more will make some other nations get a move on." He brought a big fist smashing down in an open palm. "And, by gad! the Japanese deserve all they get! When we go back I guess me and Martha won't march in any anti-Jap torch-light processions, anyway!"

The fields were gone now. The train was rumbling along a canal teeming with laden sampan, level with the paper shoji of frail-looking houses on its opposite bank. Beyond lay a sea of roofs, swelling gray billows of tiling spotted with green foam, from which steel factory chimneys lifted like the black masts of sunken ships. A leafy hill of cryptomeria rose near-by, and an octagonal stone tower peeped above its foliage. Crows were circling about it, black dots against the bronze. The train was entering Tokyo.

A door slammed sharply. From the forward smoking carriage a man had entered. He was an European and Barbara was struck at once by his great size and the absence of color in his leaden face. The bored-looking diplomatist in the corner gathered himself hastily into a bow, which the other acknowledged abstractedly. Seemingly he had been occupied in some intent speculation which spread a kind of glaze over his sharp features. A book drooped carelessly from his heavy fingers.

"That is Doctor Bersonin," said the bishop, as the girls collected their wraps. "He came just before I left, last fall. He is the government expert, and is supposed to be one of the greatest living authorities on explosives."

"Oh, yes," said Patricia, "I know. He invented a dynamo or a torpedo, or something. I saw him once at a reception; he had a foreign decoration as big as a dinner-plate."

The big man made his way slowly along the aisle and, still absorbed, took a dust-coat from a rack. As he ponderously drew it on, the daylight was suddenly eclipsed, and the rumbling reëchoed from metal roofing. They were in Shimbashi Station.

"Isn't he simply odious!" whispered Patricia, as the expert stepped before them on to the long, dusky, asphalt platform. "His eyes are like a cat's and his hands look as if they wanted to crawl, like big white spiders! There is the Embassy betto," she said suddenly, pointing over the turnstile, where stood a Japanese boy in a wide-winged kimono of tea-colored pongee with crimson facings and a crimson mushroom hat. "The carriage is just outside. You'll come, too, of course, Bishop," she added. "Father will expect you."

He shook his head and motioned toward a dense assemblage comprising a half dozen of his own race in clerical black, and a half hundred kimono'd Japanese, whose faces seemed one composite smile of welcome. "There is a part of my flock," he said. "There will be a jubilation at my bachelor palace to-night. I shall see you to-morrow, I hope."

They watched him for a moment, the center of a ceremonious ring of bowing figures, then passed through the station to the steps where the carriage waited.

The station debouched on to a broad open square bordered with canals and lined with ranks of rick'sha, some of which had small red flags with the name of a hotel in white letters, in English. The space was gray and dusty; pedestrians dotted it and across it a bent and sweating street-sprinkler hauled his ugly trickling cart, chanting in a half-tone as he went. A little distance away Barbara caught a glimpse of a busy paved street, lined with ambitious glass shop-fronts and with a double line of clanging trolley-cars passing to and fro beneath a maze of telegraph wires seemingly as fine as pack-thread. Her nostrils twitched with strange odors—from stagnant moats of sticky, black mud, from panniers of dressed fish, from the rice-powder and pomade of women's toilets—all the scents bred in swarming streets by a glowing tropic sun.

At one side waited a handful of foreign carriages. All the drivers of these wore the loose, flapping liveries and the round hats of green or crimson or blue. "They are Embassy turn-outs," explained Patricia. "Each one has its color, you see. Ours is red and you can see it farthest." As they took their seats an open victoria rolled up, with cobalt-blue wheels, and a betto with a kimono of dark cloth trimmed with wide strips of the same hue ran ahead, clearing the way with raucous cries. "There goes the Bulgarian Minister's wife," said Patricia. "She's got the finest pearls in Tokyo."

A hundred yards from the entrance the Embassy carriage halted abruptly and Barbara caught her companion's arm with a low exclamation. At the side of the square, seated or reclining on the ground was a body of perhaps eighty men dressed in a deadly brownish-yellow, the hue of iron-rust, with coarse hats and rough straw sandals. They were disposed in lines, a handcuff was on each left wrist, and a thin, rattling iron chain linked all together.

"They are convicts," said Patricia; "on their way to the copper mines, I imagine. They will move presently and we can pass."

At the head of the melancholy platoon stood an officer in dark blue cloth uniform and clumsy shoes, a sword by his side. He stood motionless as an idol, his sparse mustaches waxed, his visored cap set square on his crisp, black hair, his bronze face impassive. The prisoners looked on stolidly at the stir of the station, the flying rick'sha, the crowded sampan in the canal, and the noisy trolley-cars passing near-by. Some talked in low tones and pointed here and there, with furtive glances at the officer. Barbara noted their different expressions, some stolid, low-browed and featureless, some with side-looks of sharper cunning, all touched with oriental apathy.

A bell now began to clamor in the train-shed and there came the rasping hoot of an engine. The officer turned, gave a sharp order, and the prisoners rose, with light clanking of their chains. Another order, and they moved, in double lines of single file, into the station.

Patricia heaved a sigh of relief as the halted traffic started. "Hyaku, Tucker," she called to the driver. "Hyaku means quickly," she explained aside. "His name is Taka, but I call him Tucker because it's easier to remember."

As they rolled swiftly on, through the wondrous panorama of teeming Tokyo streets, the sun hung, an elongated globe of deep orange-crimson, streaked with little whips of rosy cloud. Beneath it the mountains lay like coiled, purple dragons, indolent and surfeited. One star twinkled palely in the lemon-colored sky. Yet now to Barbara the splendor of color seemed tragic, the poured-out beauty but a veil, behind which moved, old and apish and gray, the familiar passions of the world. Before her eyes were flowing and mingling a thousand strands of orient life, yet she saw only the red light glowing on the stone entrance of Shimbashi, with those hideous saffron jackets filing perpetually into its yawning mouth, like unholy spectres in a dream.