II
Many features of that voyage supplied “atmosphere” which Nathan will never forget. Laughing forenoons swashing through shimmering waves; schools of flying fish winging low above the whitecaps like dragon flies, to flip from sight as one watched them; children playing on the after-deck and a kiddie-car always left for peripatetics to stumble over; soft sea breezes wafting through velvet-covered saloons; a wisp of smoke on the far horizon where another steamer passed; the sun going aslant down the sky and making a shadow ship that sailed into flaming carmine with them; nights of laughter and music; dancing under Japanese lanterns; the close, hot confines of narrow white stateroom passages faintly scented with bilge,—one grows to love a ship which has carried one in safety over thousands of watery miles.
And his father had known all this, three years before.
His first sight of Japan came about eleven o’clock the morning of the seventeenth day at sea. A hatless young missionary in white duck, China bound, came around the southern side of the promenade deck with field-glass case swinging from one shoulder.
“Japan ahead!” he cried. “Just sighted Fujiyama!” Then Nathan noted that the deck where he had been reading was deserted.
On the opposite side of the ship, up forward, passengers were telescoped against the rail. It was some time before Nathan discerned the great, weird, snow-white cone, high and vague in the clouds, guarding the portals of the East, though no shore was visible yet. But the shore loomed quickly after that, though the mountain outline faded.
During lunch he glanced through the dining-room port-holes to see low, sandy coast slipping past on the north, as though the liner had entered an inland river. A chalk-white lighthouse on which the sun dazzled—gray, jagged cliffs against the northern horizon—boats hugging the beach; they were at the mouth of Tokio Bay. They would dock at Yokohama late that afternoon.
And when the vessel veered sharply northward, in the ensuing two-hour ride up that bay, with the smoke pall of Yokohama hanging in the sky ahead and weird, thatched-cottage, dwarf-pine, deep-bowered shores gliding away on east and west, the man’s heart beat with pardonable excitement. In a handful of hours he might meet his father.
It would be a dramatic meeting, not without a trace of pride on the part of the son.
It was a wonderful ride up to Yokohama. The sunshine was dazzling. The mazarine water was a-shimmer with whitecaps and spectrums. A bizarre touch was given that seascape by scores of sampans, native fishing boats, with long rudders and leg-o’-mutton sails, that worked so close to the incoming leviathan as to disclose their contents,—fish poles, nets, discarded clothing, coils of rope.
Yokohama’s smoke drew closer. It was ten minutes of five and the sun was beginning to sink over the city’s western hills, when the mighty engines stopped at last and the soul of the ship delivered her bulk to fretty little tugs that finally worked her up against her dock. The pilings creaked with the shock. The hawsers tightened.
The voyage was ended. Nathan had reached Japan!
As a dozen half-naked coolies pulled and groaned and jabbered and cried, getting the high gang-plank raised, handkerchiefs waved on the dock. Friends recognized friends. Relatives called joyously to relatives.
The bulk of the crowd on shore were Japanese,—ludicrous old men in black nightshirts and wooden sandals, heads shaded with cheap straw hats, baggy umbrellas clutched by their middles; somber-clad, high-coiffured Japanese women surrounded by slathers of babies; here and there the figure of a “foreigner” in pongee, a white face anxiously seeking the lines of humans high above, along the rail.
Nathan looked for his father. At any moment he might meet him.
He eventually descended the gang-plank stairs, down into the seething, joyous, jabbering, gesticulating mob, in through the long, shadowed dock-house, out into a circular front yard where bowler-hatted rickshaw men sat on the shafts of their vehicles and waited for fares, beckoning and honking now frantically.
Nathan stored his bags in one vehicle and stepped up into another. The lean, sweating, diminutive draysters received instructions; shafts were raised; the high-wheeled, rubber-tired little carriages crunched away over powdered trap-rock, out into a hard gravel street, fresh sprinkled, off toward the hotel in the cool of that wonderful afternoon.
Japan! Spotless streets flanked by high stucco walls or buildings with shuttered windows—a bit of old London, somehow—a group of boys in gingham playing ball—half a dozen in “bathing suits” riding bicycles, despite clumsy wooden sandals—rickshaws trotting noiselessly in groups of two or three, the sinking sun glinting on bright steel-wire wheel spokes—a street corner with a far vista of tiny dragon-scrolled shops—three nude men washing after their day’s labors at a public horse trough.
Southward along The Bund the rickshaws rolled along the side of quiet Tokio Bay, in the sunset; then came the long, low, red front and cool porticos of The Grand Hotel—much confusion about procuring Japanese money to pay the kuruma men. The sea trip was ended.
Nathan looked around the big lobby. Any one might suddenly turn out to be his father. But he saw no Johnathan.
Nathan followed the Japanese boy upstairs to his room,—a great airy chamber facing the east and—home!
He forgot his father temporarily in the ensuing irritations of Chinese tradesmen continually knocking at his door,—pongee suit-makers, boot-makers, guides for the city in the day and week following. He liked Japan.