An Artist's Letters from Japan. John La Farge

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СКАЧАТЬ floor; the girl repeated some prayer, with clapping hands outstretched; the lights were put out, all but the square "ando," or floor night-lantern, and they drew their screens. I fell asleep, to be waked with a start by the watchman, who, every hour, paced through the garden, striking a wooden clapper, and impertinently assured us of the hour.

      This weary noise marked the intervals of a night of illness, made worse by nightmares of the cholera, from which we were flying. The earliest dawn was made hideous by the unbarring and rolling of the heavy amados,[2] the drawing back of the inside screens (shojis), and the clattering of clogs over pavement, through other parts of the house. Our Japanese family across the way I could hear at their ablutions, and, later, tumultuously departing for early trains; and at last I slept in broad daylight.

      Late in the morning we entered our friend the basha. In the daylight I noticed that the horses wore something like a Dutch collar, and were harnessed with ropes. Two men, one the driver, the other the running groom, sat on the low front seat. Our trunks and bags and Japanese baskets encumbered the omnibus seats, on which we stretched our sick and wearied bodies, for the Doctor himself was ill, and smiled mechanically when I tortured him with questions. We left town at a full gallop, and at risk of life for every one in the streets; one of our drivers meanwhile blowing wildly through a horn, to the inspiriting of the horses and the frightening of the Japanese small-boy. Soon one of our men plunged off his seat and began running by the horses in the old Japanese way—hereditary with him, for they follow the calling from generation to generation. Running without pause and without sweating, he threw his body back as if restraining his pace to that of the horses. At the limits of the town, in full run, he stripped his upper garments and showed himself tattooed at every visible point. Above the double strip of his breech-clout, a waterfall, a dragon, and a noble hero made a fine network of blue and pink on the moving muscles.

Now the road became heavy, wet, and full of deep ruts, and our miserable ponies came to a standstill—and balked. The Japanese mildness of our driver disappeared. He took to beating their poor backs with a heavy bamboo cane, while we remonstrated feebly, regretting that we had not sufficient strength to beat him too. Then he explained, deferentially, that confusion seized him at being unable to keep his promise of delivering us to Imaichi for the appointed hour, and I felt as if we had been put in the wrong. Imagine the difference had he been—any one but a Japanese. We turned aside from the main way into a little dry side-path, which led us into the hills and moors. As we got among them we left the annoying odors of the rice-fields and smelled for the first time the fragrance of wild roses, looking like ours, but a little paler. This was the first thing which reminded me of home—the roses that the Japanese do not seem to care for, do not seem to understand. With them the rose has no records, no associations, as with us; for, once on this farther side of the garden of Iran, the peony and the chrysanthemum, the lotus and the iris, the peach, the cherry, and the plum, make up the flower-poetry of the extreme East.

       IN THE GREAT AVENUE OF CRYPTOMERIA.

      Then, leaving the dry and sunny uplands, we entered a famous avenue, shaded for twenty miles by gigantic cryptomeria trees 60 to 120 feet high. They were planted, as an act of homage, some two centuries ago, by some mighty noble, when it was decided to place at Nikko the tomb of the great shogun Iyéyasŭ. They rise on each side of the sunken road, from banks and mounds, over which steps lead, from time to time, to plantations and rice-fields beyond, and to shrines peeping out among the trees. In side-roads above, on either hand, passed occasionally peasants and pack-horses laden with forage, or the bright shine of a peasant woman's red skirt. Where an occasional habitation, or two or three, are niched in some opening, the tall columns of the great trees are interrupted by spaces filled with crossed branches of the wilder pine; and behind these, outside, sometimes the light-green feathery mass of a bamboo grove. Against the bank stood low, thatched buildings; near them the great trees were often down, or sometimes dying; an occasional haystack, sliced off below by use, was fastened, in thick projection, around some smaller tree. Once, at a turn of the road, near a building with wide roof, pushed against the corner bank out of a basin fringed with iris, sprang into the air a little jet of water. Near by, a solitary ditcher had placed in a bamboo fence some bright red blossom, with its stem and leaves, apparently to cheer him at his work.

      The heavy road was being ditched on each side to carry off the soaking waters, and our weary, miserable horses broke down again. A—— and I rested by going in advance, and I experienced the new sensation of walking among the bamboo stems, like an insect among the knotted stalks of a gigantic grass. The still heat of the sun burned in great smoky streaks across our way, spotted by the flight of many yellow butterflies. There was no sound of birds in the high spaces above; the few peasants that we met slipped past on their straw sandals, their noiseless horses also shod with straw; occasionally a shiver of the great spruces overhead, and far behind us the cries of our grooms to their horses.

      It was two o'clock when we galloped bravely, as if with fresh horses, into the single long street which is Imaichi village. We were now on high ground, some two thousand feet above our point of departure, and could feel, but not see clearly, in the blaze of sunlight, great mountains lost in great wet clouds.

      We stopped at the village inn; drivers and runners were sitting on the stone bench in front, drinking tea, when we drove up. We sat down on the straw-matted porch inside, the whole front of the building open, and drank miserable, herby tea, and tasted the usual sweet balls of sugary stuff.

Alongside the tea-house, in one of the recesses between the buildings, we could see the runners of kurumas being washed off and rubbed down, just as if they were horses in a livery stable. As they stood naked, their companions poured pails of water over them, its brown spread covering the stone slabs. Some of them, in the porch, lay on their backs, others prone, others on the side, all near a kettle, which hung over a charcoal fire, in which, perhaps, they were heating sakè. One on his back, his neck on the wooden pillow, was smoking. The village itself lay in hot, clean repose,—not dusty,—the rows of buildings on each side of the street irregular, but all of the same appearance. Most of the fronts were open, the goods all displayed outside of the walls, or on the floors, innumerable pieces of paper hanging about everywhere. A few men sat about on the porches, their naked feet hanging off, their sandals on the ground below them, the inevitable umbrella by their side. Most of the village was asleep in nakedness. The color of flesh glowed in the hot shade; brown and sallow in the men, ruddy on the breasts of the women and the entirely nude bodies of the children.

       NIKKO-SAN.

And here, now, we said good-by to the basha, and got into the two-wheeled baby wagon, which they call a kuruma. One man ran between the shafts, and another, in front, was fastened to the cross-bar by a long strip of cloth tied about him. The file of our five wagons started off at a rapid trot—we had two for our baggage—with the Doctor ahead, his white helmet dancing before us in the sun. From under my umbrella I tried to study and occasionally to draw the motions of the muscles of our runners, for most of them were naked, except for the complicated strip around the loins—a slight development of the early fig-leaf. The vague recall of the antique that is dear to artists—the distinctly rigid muscles of the legs and thighs, the rippling swellings of the backs—revived the excitement of professional study and seemed a god-send to a painter. The broad, curved hat, lifted by a pad over the head, was but an Eastern variation, not so far removed from the Greek πέτασος of Athenian riders. Some heads were bare; that is to say, their thick black thatch was bound with a long handkerchief, which otherwise hung on the shoulders or danced around their necks. Not all were naked. The youngest, a handsome fellow, had his tunic pulled up above the thighs, and the slope of his drapery and his wide sleeves gave him all the elegance of a medieval page. I found it easier now to struggle against heat and indolence, and to make my studies as our runners ran along, for we had entered again the avenue of the great СКАЧАТЬ