Then we ran through a succession of second–rate streets and houses till we reached the city wall on the west by a long flight of steps. It was clean here. The wall had a drop of thirty or forty feet to paddy fields. Beyond these were a semicircle of hills, every square yard of which is planted out with graves. Her dead watch Canton the abominable, and the dead are more than the myriads living. On the grass–grown top of the wall were rusty English guns spiked and abandoned after the war. They ought not to be there. A five–storied pagoda gave us a view of the city, but I was wearied of these rats in their pit—wearied and scared and sullen. The excellent Ah Cum led us to the Viceroy's summer garden–house on the cityward slope of an azalea–covered hill surrounded by cotton trees. The basement, was a handsome joss house: upstairs was a durbar–hall with glazed verandahs and ebony furniture ranged across the room in four straight lines. It was only an oasis of cleanliness. Ten minutes later we were back in the swarming city, cut off from light and sweet air. Once or twice we met a mandarin with thin official mustache and "little red button a–top." Ah Cum was explaining the nature and properties of a mandarin when we came to a canal spanned by an English bridge and closed by an iron gate, which was in charge of a Hong–Kong policeman. We were in an Indian station with Europe shops and Parsee shops and everything else to match. This was English Canton, with two hundred and fifty sahibs in it. 'Twould have been better for a Gatling behind the bridge gate. The guide–books tell you that it was taken from the Chinese by the treaty of 1860, the French getting a similar slice of territory. Owing to the binding power of French officialism, "La concession Française" has never been let or sold to private individuals, and now a Chinese regiment squats on it. The men who travel tell you somewhat similar tales about land in Saigon and Cambodia. Something seems to attack a Frenchman as soon as he dons a colonial uniform. Let us call it the red–tape–worm.
"Now where did you go and what did you see?" said the Professor, in the style of the pedagogue, when we were once more on the Ho–nam and returning as fast as steam could carry us to Hong–Kong.
"A big blue sink of a city full of tunnels, all dark and inhabited by yellow devils, a city that Doré ought to have seen. I'm devoutly thankful that I'm never going back there. The Mongol will begin to march in his own good time. I intend to wait until he marches up to me. Let us go away to Japan by the next boat."
The Professor says that I have completely spoiled the foregoing account by what he calls "intemperate libels on a hard–working nation." He did not see Canton as I saw it—through the medium of a fevered imagination.
Once, before I got away, I climbed to the civil station of Hong–Kong, which overlooks the town. There in sumptuous stone villas built on the edge of the cliff and facing shaded roads, in a wilderness of beautiful flowers and a hushed calm unvexed even by the roar of the traffic below, the residents do their best to imitate the life of an India up–country station. They are better off than we are. At the bandstand the ladies dress all in one piece—shoes, gloves, and umbrellas come out from England with the dress, and every memsahib knows what that means—but the mechanism of their life is much the same. In one point they are superior. The ladies have a club of their very own to which, I believe, men are only allowed to come on sufferance. At a dance there are about twenty men to one lady, and there are practically no spinsters in the island. The inhabitants complain of being cooped in and shut up. They look at the sea below them and they long to get away. They have their "At Homes" on regular days of the week, and everybody meets everybody else again and again. They have amateur theatricals and they quarrel and all the men and women take sides, and the station is cleaved asunder from the top to the bottom. Then they become reconciled and write to the local papers condemning the local critic's criticism. Isn't it touching? A lady told me these things one afternoon, and I nearly wept from sheer home–sickness.
"And then, you know, after she had said that he was obliged to give the part to the other, and that made them furious, and the races were so near that nothing could be done, and Mrs. ― said that it was altogether impossible. You understand how very unpleasant it must have been, do you not?"
"Madam," said I, "I do. I have been there before. My heart goes out to Hong–Kong. In the name of the great Indian Mofussil I salute you. Henceforward Hong–Kong is one of Us, ranking before Meerut, but after Allahabad, at all public ceremonies and parades."
I think she fancied I had sunstroke; but you at any rate will know what I mean.
We do not laugh any more on the P. and O. S. S. Ancona on the way to Japan. We are deathly sick, because there is a cross–sea beneath us and a wet sail above. The sail is to steady the ship who refuses to be steadied. She is full of Globe–trotters who also refuse to be steadied. A Globe–trotter is extreme cosmopolitan. He will be sick anywhere.
No. XI
Of Japan at Ten Hours' Sight, Containing a Complete Account of the Manners and Customs of Its People, a History of Its Constitution, Products, Art, and Civilisation, and Omitting a Meal in a Tea-house With O-toyo - "Thou Canst Not Wave Thy Staff in Air or Dip Thy Paddle in the Lake, but It Carves the Bow of Beauty There, and Ripples in Rhyme the Oar Forsake."--emerson.
This morning, after the sorrows of the rolling night, my cabin porthole showed me two great grey rocks studded and streaked with green and crowned by two stunted blue–black pines. Below the rocks a boat, that might have been carved sandal wood for colour and delicacy, was shaking out an ivory–white frilled sail to the wind of the morning. An indigo–blue boy with an old ivory face hauled on a rope. Rock and tree and boat made a panel from a Japanese screen, and I saw that the land was not a lie. This "good brown earth" of ours has many pleasures to offer her children, but there be few in her gift comparable to the joy of touching a new country, a completely strange race, and manners contrary. Though libraries may have been written aforetime, each new beholder is to himself another Cortez. And I was in Japan—the Japan of cabinets and joinery, gracious folk and fair manners. Japan, whence the camphor and the lacquer and the shark–skin swords come: among what was it the books said?—a nation of artists. To be sure, we should only stop at Nagasaki for twelve hours ere going on to Kobé, but in twelve hours one can pack away a very fair collection of new experiences.
An execrable man met me on the deck, with a pale–blue pamphlet fifty pages thick. "Have you," said he, "seen the Constitution of Japan? The Emperor made it himself only the other day. It is on entirely European lines."
I took the pamphlet and found a complete paper Constitution stamped with the Imperial Chrysanthemum—an excellent little scheme of representation, reforms, payment of members, budget estimates, and legislation. It is a terrible thing to study at close quarters, because it is so pitifully English.
There was a yellow–shot greenness upon the hills round Nagasaki different, so my willing mind was disposed to believe, from the green of other lands. It was the green of a Japanese screen, and the pines were screen pines. The city itself hardly showed from the crowded harbour. It lay low among the hills, and its business face—a grimy bund—was sloppy and deserted. Business, I was rejoiced to learn, was at a low ebb in Nagasaki. The Japanese should have no concern with business. Close to one of the still wharves lay a ship of the Bad People; a Russian steamer down from Vladivostok. Her decks were cumbered with raffle of all kinds; her rigging was as frowsy and draggled as the hair of a lodging–house slavey, and her sides were filthy.