Part 19 (1/2)

They had reached a very narrow street, where raffish beer-shops were doing a roaring trade. They caught a glimpse of dirty tablecloths and powdered waitresses wearing skirts, ap.r.o.ns and lumpy shoes--all very _haikara_. On the right hand they pa.s.sed a little temple from whose exiguous courtyard two stone foxes grinned maliciously, the temple of the G.o.d Inari, who brings rich lovers to the girls who pray to him.

They pa.s.sed through iron gates, like the gates of a park, where two policemen were posted to regulate the traffic. Beyond was a single line of cherry-trees in full bloom, a single wave of pinkish spray, a hanging curtain of vapourous beauty, the subject of a thousand poems, of a thousand allusions, licentious, delicate and trite,--the cherry-blossoms of the Yos.h.i.+wara.

At a street corner stood a high white building plastered with golden letters in j.a.panese and English--”Asahi Beer Hall.”

”That is the place,” said Yae, ”let us get out of this crowd.”

They found refuge among more dirty tablecloths, Europeanised _mousmes_, and gaping guests. When Yae spoke to the girls in j.a.panese, there was much bowing and hissing of the breath; and they were invited upstairs on to the first floor where was another beer-hall, slightly more exclusive-looking than the downstair Gambrinus. Here a table and chairs were set for them in the embrasure of a bow-window, which, protruding over the cross-roads, commanded an admirable view of the converging streets.

”The procession won't be here for two hours more,” said Yae, pouting her displeasure.

”One always has to wait in j.a.pan,” said Reggie. ”n.o.body ever knows exactly when anything is going to happen; and so the j.a.panese just wait and wait. They seem to like it rather. Anyhow they don't get impatient. Life is so uneventful here that I think they must like prolonging an incident as much as possible, like sucking a sweet slowly.”

Meanwhile there was plenty to look at. Asako could not get over her shock at the sea of wicked faces which surged below.

”What cla.s.s of people are these?” Geoffrey asked.

”Oh, shop-people, I think, most of them,” said Yae, ”and people who work in factories.”

”Good cla.s.s j.a.panese don't come here, then?” Geoffrey asked again.

”Oh no, only low cla.s.s people and students. j.a.panese people say it is a shameful thing to go to the Yos.h.i.+wara. And, if they go, they go very secretly.”

”Do you know any one who goes?” asked Reggie, with a directness which shocked his friend's sense of Good Form.

”Oh, my brothers,” said Yae, ”but they go everywhere; or they say they do.”

It certainly was an ill-favoured crowd. The j.a.panese are not an ugly race. The young aristocrat who has grown up with fresh air and healthy exercise is often good-looking, and sometimes distinguished and refined. But the lower cla.s.ses, those who keep company with poverty, dirt and p.a.w.nshops, with the pleasures of the _sake_ barrel and the Yos.h.i.+wara, are the ugliest beings that were ever created in the image of their misshapen G.o.ds. Their small stature and ape-like att.i.tudes, the colour and discolour of their skin, the flat Mongolian nose, their gaping mouths and bad teeth, the coa.r.s.e fibre of their l.u.s.treless black hair, give them an elvish and a goblin look, as though this country were a nursery for fairy changelings, a land of the Nibelungen, where bad thoughts have found their incarnation. Yet the faces have not got that character for good and evil as we find them among the Aryan peoples, the deep lines and the firm profiles.

”It is the absence of something rather than its presence which appals and depresses us,” Reggie Forsyth observed, ”an absence of happiness perhaps, or of a promise of happiness.”

The crowd which filled the four roads with its slow grey tide was peaceable enough; and it was strangely silent. The drag and clatter of the clogs made more sound than the human voices. The great majority were men, though there were women among them, quiet and demure. If ever a voice was lifted, one could see by the rolling walk and the fatuous smile that its owner had been drinking. Such a person would be removed out of sight by his friends. The j.a.panese generally go sight-seeing and merry-making in friends.h.i.+ps and companies; and the _Verein_, which in j.a.pan is called the _Kwai_, flourishes here as in Germany.

Two coolies started quarreling under the Barringtons' window. They too had been drinking. They did not hit out at each other like Englishmen, but started an interchange of abuse in gruff monosyllables and indistinguishable grunts and snorts.

”_Baka! Chikushome! Kuso_! (Fool! Beast! Dung!)”

These amenities exasperating their ill humour, they began to pull at each other's coats and to jostle each other like quarrelsome curs.

This was a sign that affairs were growing serious; and the police intervened. Again each combatant was pushed away by his companions into opposite byways.

With these exceptions, all tramplings, squeezings, pus.h.i.+ngs and pokings were received with conventional grins or apathetic staring.

Yet in the paper next day it was said that so great had been the crowd that six deaths had occurred, and numerous persons had fainted.

”But where is the Yos.h.i.+wara?” Geoffrey asked at last. ”Where are these wretched women kept?”

Reggie waved his hand in the direction of the three roads facing them.

”Inside the iron gates, that is all the Yos.h.i.+wara, and those high houses and the low ones too. That is where the girls are. There are two or three thousand of them within sight, as it were, from here.