I remember that we all went to church on Sunday. During the service, the Queen of Tahiti suddenly clapped her hands, whereupon the clergyman desisted from his ministrations, while her Majesty distributed tobacco among the congregation. When it was well alight the Queen again clapped her hands, and the clergyman went on with the service.
We left Tahiti with profound regret, receiving and giving many presents on parting. From Tahiti we proceeded to the Sandwich Islands, where I met many old friends, made during my sojourn four years previously. The American population had quite forgiven and forgotten my boyish freak, which had so agitated them at the time. Our old friend Queen Emma, whom we had taken to Panama on her way to England to see the Queen, had returned. I went to call upon her, driving tandem, as already related. Turning in at the gate, I took the corner too sharply, the wheels locked, and the buggy capsized. In the meantime the Queen, having heard the jingling of the Canadian sleigh bells attached to the harness, came out to find her visitor sitting on the grass at her feet. The horses galloped on and wrecked the vehicle and also themselves. Altogether it was a very expensive drive.
CHAPTER X
THE CRUISE OF H.M.S. GALATEA
IV. OLD JAPAN
NOTE
When Lord Charles Beresford visited Nippon (from the Chinese Jih Pun, the place or rising of the sun, changed by English pronunciation to Japan), it was the old Japan that he saw; the Japan of centuries of isolation, inviolate save for the intrusion of the Jesuit missionaries in the sixteenth century, and the little wedge of Dutch traders. It had been the Japan of the Mikado, who was as a god; of the Tycoon, his temporal representative, who, like a man walking the tight-rope above a wood of transfixing swords, maintained a delicate equipoise of power among the feudal seigneuralty, the great Daimios, each lord of his domain and master of life and death over thousands of retainers. It was the Japan of the Samurai, the two-sworded rufflers; of the Ronins, the masterless men, the outlaws, who roved the country in bands, patriotic, ferocious and pitiless. It was still the Japan in which the common people, men and women and maidens, walked naked and unashamed; in which the warriors went to battle clad in armour wrought of tortoise-shell and silk, girt with swords and carrying bows and arrows; in which the life of a barbarian foreigner was never safe from hour to hour, so that he must be guarded by the two-sworded Yaconins, the Government officers, who, knowing the hatred of the Government towards their charges, seldom drew sword in their defence until it was just one blood-stained second too late; in which a fault in honour was instantly expiated by hara-kiri, the fatal cross-cut upon the belly, performed in the public eye, which was justly offended if the incision were so clumsily executed that the entrails protruded. Such, at least, is the ceremonial theory. In practice, the dagger is driven in below the ribs, drawn horizontally across the belly, and up the other side; an operation requiring inconceivable courage.
It is the land of tea-houses and temples, of running footmen and palanquins; where houses and string and handkerchiefs are made of paper; where the people wash themselves every day and their clothes never; where the oldest profession in the world is counted honourable service, and the pictures of courtesans adorn the temples in which the bonzes intone prayers in the midst of games and dances: where the writing is done from top to bottom, from right to left, and keys are turned from left to right, and carpenters draw their planes towards them, and the houses are built from the roof downwards, and horses are mounted on the off-side, and ladies black their teeth. It was a land of immense processional pageants: the processions of the high Daimios, who once a year quitted their ancestral homes with a great train to dwell in Yedo, the capital of the Tycoon, for six months; and returned again, leaving as hostages for their loyalty their wives and children for another six months. The two-sworded Samurai march in front, crying "Shitanirio!" and all the spectators drop upon their knees and hide behind their legs while the long procession ambles by, spearmen and banners and baggage-carriers and palanquins; the norimons, which are the palanquins of the notable, and the cangos, which are the palanquins of the humble.
When the foreigner rode abroad in state, he was attended by the Ward-guards, who marched in front, striking the earth at every step with their long staves whereon loose iron rings were strung, so that their jingling warned the populace to make way.